I also grew fond of the Stones that week. Each time I came to their dock, I tied the boat on the run despite fingers as supple as fence posts. I then sprinted for their house as quickly as my booted, frozen feet would carry me. I would have struck a stranger watching this ludicrous, quasi-athletic event dumb. At full tilt, arms pumping like crooked pistons, my breath steaming like an old engine, my face masked in orange and brown, I would charge up the ramp and race over the broken, rotted boards of the Stones’ dock. Ted would see me coming and throw extra logs into the stove. Lou would have a cup of hot coffee steaming and ready for me as I broke through the door. It is moments such as these that my belief in man’s basic worth and goodness comes forth. I have cursed Ted Stone a thousand times before and since, but I will never forget how kind and concerned he was during those five January days. I would nearly embrace the stove in gratitude for its warmth, while Ted would discourse rather wistfully about the last time in his memory the edge of the river froze solid.
On one of these five days I cut my engine as I knifed toward the dock, grabbed the stern line, and jumped from the boat to the dock. I did not see the ice that glazed the dock in a thin, transparent sheet until I was in midair. I hit the dock and immediately went sliding across it toward the water on the other side. I grabbed for a piling, but could not prevent my legs from dipping into the water. Ted Stone clothed me in his son’s leftovers when he saw what had happened.
I grew closer to my students that week. They huddled around the windows waiting for my car to pull into view. When they saw me, Fred would go to the woodpile and stuff small logs into the stove until he could stuff no more. I would come into the room and head immediately to the stove to warm up. I would pull my boots off and hang the wet socks near the stove to dry.
Then Richard would ask, “You cold, Conroy?”
“No, man. Went swimmin’ on the trip over. Just like taking a hot bath.”
“No.”
“You get wet up?” Mary would ask.
“You always get wet up when you go swimmin’.”
“You no swim, Conroy.”
Then I would spot Samuel and Sidney slapping their knees and giggling uncontrollably. “White man got the blue feet,” Sam would cry.
The class would laugh and I would move my feet nearer the fire and admire their magnificent blueness. Blue feet were an occupational hazard of Caucasians. Blue feet remained with me until Friday afternoon. But when Friday came, Conrack also knew that he could take the river. And that seemed very important.
The river remained temperamental and full of surprises. When I was certain that the cold was my most formidable enemy, I was challenged one morning by a prowling, spectral nemesis that crept along the lowcountry as silent as an egret’s flight—the fog. Fog caused no pain; it simply induced blindness and required one to navigate by faith instead of sight. It transformed the land into a terrible sameness; north became south and east became south and west became north. I had no compass and hoped that the routine of the daily commute would be enough to deliver me to the island. But the deeper I went into the soul of the fog, the more hopelessly lost I became, the more confused, and the more panicked.
I went from bank to bank, blind as a shorn Samson, searching for landmarks that would set my course aright. I felt the presence of Yamacraw for a moment, then lost it. I looked at my watch and saw that I had been circling and searching for the island for over an hour and a half. My eyelashes were sodden and flooded with moisture condensed from this earthbound cloud, this ghost born of warm air and cold water. Then I was paralyzed by the booming voice of an ocean freighter somewhere in the fog, though I could not tell if the foghorn had sounded miles or feet away. I thought for a moment that I had ventured into the shipping lanes of the Savannah River or, even worse, into the Atlantic. But I saw land again and I drove the boat almost onto the shore, lit a fire, and waited till the fog lifted and Yamacraw revealed itself. When the fog did lift, I found myself five miles away from the island and very near the Savannah River. In the contest of the elements, fog was more frightening than the cold. Later, in the spring of course, I was introduced to the winds and thunderstorms and the fog seemed almost maternal in comparison.
In early spring Bennington finally chose a contractor to come to Yamacraw to install the air conditioners for which the board of education had appropriated money the previous summer. Piedmont evidently wanted the air conditioners installed quickly, for the coming of warm weather brought with it an influx of the concerned and the committed who journeyed to Yamacraw to see firsthand the victims of southern society. Piedmont shrewdly moved at the end of February to insure the credibility of his boast that Yamacraw Island was “one of the two climate-controlled schools in the county.” Since I no longer trusted any of these people, and no longer believed in them as educators or as human beings, it delighted me to see the intensity involved in their efforts to glamorize the two-room schoolhouse on the island. They were dressing up their most obvious wart. After the air-conditioning unit was in place, Piedmont and Bennington could say with utter conviction that they had done their best and had offered the island buckets of sweat and an ulcer’s worth of concern to make sure those little nigras had air conditioning.
Zeke was ordered to go out to the island with the contractor and do whatever he could to help them. My boat was loaded with tools, wire, and insulation. Zeke rode with me across the river. The sun had risen completely and its white light coming off the perfectly smooth water blinded both of us as I rounded the first sandbar and headed directly into the sun. I was talking distractedly to Zeke about something, when both of us felt the motor bouncing off solid land.
“It’s the goddam sandbar,” Zeke cried. Zeke was absolutely correct. The sandbar I had passed safely and without error one hundred times in a moment of carelessness claimed me for its own. We were not on the edge of the sandbar, we were squarely in the middle of it. There was no way Zeke and I could rock the boat into deeper water. She was weighed down with equipment and too firmly entrenched in the sand to offer any hope, except for the coming of the high tide.
I was furious with myself and embarrassed as hell. The electricians, following us in another boat, sniggered convulsively as they circled around the bar. They tried to pull us off with a rope but to no avail. I finally put Zeke on my back, carried him across the sandbar a la St. Christopher, and deposited him with the electricians. He offered to stay with the boat, but unsullied guilt forbade me to do anything but suffer in the early morning cold with my wet, frozen feet, and wait for the water’s coming. The giggling electricians soon disappeared down the creek.
My feet felt like the definition of frostbite. The bitter cold of winter was over for the most part, but the water still had not accepted the coming of spring. I removed my tennis shoes and the heavy wool socks Barbara had bought me at the beginning of winter. My feet were blue, and somehow pathetic and vulnerable, as I tried, first, to wrap them in old newspaper. That did not work, so I took off my insulated green jacket and wrapped it tightly around my feet. This was the best I could do under the existing circumstances. The tide inched outward, slowly, imperceptibly, outward toward the sea, the eternal rendezvous, inexorably flowing with the tilt of the earth. For about thirty seconds it was nice reflecting on the ebb and flow of the tide over centuries, and how its progress had been marked and studied by Nelson at Trafalgar, Drake, and Leif Ericson. Soon the sandbar exposed its presence completely, and as Zeke and I both suspected, I had driven to the very middle of it before I cut the motor. The bar extended for a quarter of a mile down the right flank of the river. The salt marsh was still winter-brown, although if you looked carefully, you could spot a promise of green flavoring the dead, crisp grasses along the shore.
The spring tides had not come in full force, the great flood tides that would inundate the marshes completely, washing away tons of the Spartina grasses that had finished the life cycle, bringing the dead grasses in clumps from the inner marsh, and carrying it out to sea. A
lready clumps of grass had become a minor irritant while driving to the island, and often I had to weave between these tiny, floating islands like a downhill racer weaves between slalom poles. Once I hit one of these piles, and the propeller was instantly clogged and overwhelmed. I had to lift the propeller and clear it.
So I had time to study the swamp in transition. I even wavered on the edge of thinking deeper thoughts, of time and timelessness, of now and eternity, of my own impermanence as compared to the marshes, the river, and the tides. In fifty years I would be seventy-four, an old curmudgeon with a hairless, toothless head; the geriatric remnant of the forties, whose blood had dried, whose youth had withered, whose dreams had died like the grasses and washed out on a spring tide.
But the deeper thoughts became vestigial as my feet once more started to ache from the cold. I looked to the Bluffton shore and saw a man with a blue coat standing beside his car looking at me in the boat. I looked for something to read—the backs of oil cans, the instructions for starting the motor manually, the ingredients used in the composition of the stale potato chips I had bought a few days before. Heavy stuff. After I had exhausted all reading matter and had tended to the defrosting of my feet once again, I decided that the most prudent and intelligent thing to do at this particular moment of time would simply be to drop off in a deep sleep; no, a coma, a state of suspension that would eliminate the tedium of waiting for the earth to tilt the other way and the waters to reverse their flow and race inland toward the fresher waters and the brighter rivers upstate. So I rewrapped my mummified feet, hung my socks on the windshield to dry, lay down among the oil cans, and used one of the boat cushions as a pillow. At first I thought I would never sleep because of the cold, but as soon as I started thinking that and consciously worrying about it, I slept.
I awoke some time later, alarmed at an engine roar above me. I had slept soundly and perhaps for a fairly long time, for I could hear a slight rhythm of water against the bottom of the boat. The roar grew louder, until I saw a helicopter hovering just above me, then circling in a long arc over the boat. The pilot’s head craned over the edge of the cockpit, and he tilted his craft as he swerved by the boat again. He looked worried.
It must have been boredom, or some unforgivable streak of black humor that took over from there. I knew that this pilot was probably a young warrant officer being trained in nearby Savannah, was on maneuvers, and had spotted my prone, seemingly lifeless body in the boat below. I had often waved to these guys as I went to work and on occasion they had come low enough for me to see them waving back. Anyway, I did not move from the bottom of the boat but lay there squinting maliciously through slitted eyes, contorting my body into a grotesque posture of death. The helicopter came lower and lower: the concern of the pilot grew, the closer he drew to my beleaguered craft. I chortled to myself that this was a mighty fine joke, but that I had better rise from the dead and wave to the pilot that I was alive and well, though stranded and helpless. As this thought was being bandied about in my head, the pilot headed his helicopter to the west. I heard the great propeller turning, but it was now a distant sound, and the pilot no longer was sweeping low for a firsthand look at my body. Yet he had not left the scene. I could hear him. My curiosity finally bested whatever impulses I had to remain horizontal, and very slowly, snaking my way across the bottom of the boat, I lifted my head just over the side of the boat. I could hear the helicopter. My eyes glanced first to the right, then my eyes met the eyes of the helicopter pilot who had landed on the far shore and was looking straight at me.
It shocked both of us. I immediately rose and stretched like I had been asleep in a back-yard hammock. I beat on my chest a couple of times and exulted in the crisp, cool air of late morning. I waved to the pilot. He had not shut down his engine, and the prop whirred above him. He was pissed. He shouted something at me that was lost in the tumult of the rotating blades. He then shot me the universal American symbol of derision and contempt—his middle finger stood isolated and defiantly raised on his right hand. He shouted something again, then clambered back aboard his craft and took off angrily, sort of like a teen-age dragster laying rubber in front of his girlfriend’s house after a spat. I quickly checked the water level and decided that, with luck, I could extricate myself from this throne of sand. I took my paddle, drove it into the sand, and pushed according to Newton’s law. The boat moved. In a couple of minutes I had paddled into deep water, pulled the rope, started the engine, and headed barefoot for Yamacraw. The helicopter followed me for a while, buzzing over my head like an angry mosquito, then roared off toward Savannah. I waved cheerfully.
It is hard to pinpoint accurately the precise moment when I lost favor with the administrative juggernaut of Beaufort County. This disintegration was a gradual, progressive awareness on both sides that gained momentum every time we dealt with each other on a professional or personal basis. I have mentioned the letter of fire I sent to Piedmont after a couple of days on the island. I learned later that Piedmont liked his subordinates to grovel a bit before they presented a proposal, shuffle a bit before they offered a suggestion, and lie prone on their faces before they dared proffer a bit of advice. Therefore, my first letter, written with the sap and arrogance of youth offended, put Piedmont on the defensive. Piedmont had told me that his first job as a boss man in an upstate mill had imparted to him a virulent distaste for labor problems. With my first letter I was instantaneously transformed from a number on a teacher-ratio chart to a labor problem. It was many months later before I learned how Piedmont had probably handled vexing problems with the semiliterate though obstinate workers who greased looms on the midnight shift and rocked the vessel of obedience in defiance of the invisible capitalists who ruled the mills from far away. These same capitalists hired the gravelly voiced, production-conscious Piedmont to keep the occasional sparks of resentment extinguished. I learned this much later, this was still the period of innocence.
And my innocence continued ad nauseam during the year. Piedmont had told me in that first meeting that he worshiped truth and “dealt in facts.” I took his word for this and each time I saw him during the year, hunched behind his desk, peering at me over the thin horizon of his half-glasses, I told him firmly, forcefully, and with conviction that I considered the Yamacraw School a tragedy, a mockery of education, a condemnation of our county, and a situation that called for desperate, radical ideas and methods. Almost always he nodded his head affirmatively, delivered an oily, ingratiating, and hollow sermon about the good job I was doing and how much he appreciated the letters I was writing him and how I reminded him of the young Henry Piedmont—idealistic, capable of sacrifice, and sweating for the improvement of mankind. Yet his office was filled with ghosts and unnamed spirits of resentment. His name struck fear in the soul of all his employees and his hand ruled the passages of his carpeted bailiwick with the subtlety of a sword. Bennington quivered when Piedmont’s name was mentioned. I was warned again and again that he did not tolerate criticism under any guise; woe to him who entered Piedmont’s tabernacle with the bitter tongue. Yet each time I spoke with him during the year, the good Dr. Piedmont told me, “I have the most democratic school system in the country.”
Our initial dispute was fought over the boat’s gasoline bill for the month of October. By this time, I had relinquished the principalship to Mrs. Brown and the figure-shufflers at the county office had discovered that Mrs. Brown was incapable of shuffling figures to their satisfaction. So Piedmont had appointed an administrative head to supervise the questionable reports submitted by Mrs. Brown and to act as a buffer between Piedmont and me. By November Piedmont had evidently tired of my carping and unrelenting bitching about conditions at the school. The man appointed administrative head of the Yamacraw School, like Piedmont, had never set eyes on the Yamacraw School. His name was Howard Sedgwick and he was the principal of Bluffton High School. He had recently moved to Bluffton to assume dominion over the high school. I had once heard him talk about blacks to a gr
oup of white teachers; ideologically he was somewhere between a backwoods Baptist and a Klansman. Every time I saw him, he was yelling about something or at somebody. Piedmont had appointed him as the titular head of a school he had never seen. I now had to deal with a principal who acted as though she wanted to be white and an administrative head who was sorry there were blacks.
The gas bill for October was the first shot fired in a long embittering war. Piedmont addressed his letter to Sedgwick, following the prescribed rungs of the ladder of command, and asked him to look into an “exorbitant” gas bill and to make recommendations and regulations binding the use of the boat. Sedgwick dutifully composed a letter that ruled that I could use the boat on Mondays and Fridays only and that I must incur the expense of any additional trips. In his letter his sycophantic inclinations bubbled to the surface a couple of times, as did his complete ignorance about the island. Mrs. Brown by this time was concerned about the dilution of her authority by an unseen white man and told me so. I agreed that the positioning of Sedgwick over her had “strange symbolic value” and I promised to lodge a complaint. I began my second letter to Piedmont in prototypical Conrack style—self-righteous, angry, undiplomatic, unapologetic, and flaming. Colonel Conroy, the chieftain of my clan, issued a hard-shell rule in my youth that the most unforgivable of sins was for a Conroy to beat around the bush, put garlands of roses around his thoughts or ideas, or—horror of horrors—for a Conroy to drop to his knees, pucker his potato-famined lips, and kiss somebody’s rosy red behind. Dad did not admire the ass-kissers of the world and he passed this prejudice on to his offspring. So I will quote the first paragraphs of my second letter to Piedmont. Notice the youth, naiveté, and indignation of the young Conrack enraged. Dressed in green, insulated boots, and a torn, red sweater, eyes afire with self-righteous piety and wrath, I wrote Piedmont a letter with his epigram “I deal in truth” lighting my path.