The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy

be learning. He loved to talk about himself and nothing could have been more instructive to me. On a whim, he had once traveled to Florida with a group of friends, bought the boat which Humphrey Bogart captained in the film The African Queen, and brought it back to Yamacraw Island, where it survived a year then rotted slowly into oblivion. It gave me an immense thrill to think that my boat docked in the same spot which once harbored the African Queen. It fired the Irish romanticism within me, as did Mr. Stone’s accounts of the hurricane of ’59 that crushed boats and docks like playthings, that uprooted oak trees as tall as towers, that incapacitated a town thirty miles from the island and made it a national disaster area. As his house creaked ominously, Ted and Lou sipped coffee and watched the gods of storm seize the wind and river for several violent hours.
    Stone’s powers of description were excellent. He spent two hours one day relating his war experiences. He had landed on the third wave during D-Day, fought his way across France, teamed up with a sharp-shooting Texan, who together with Stone formed a murderously competent sniping team, and eventually crossed into Germany when the armistice was signed. With eyes blue and shimmering, yet serious and fatalistic, he described a German soldier’s head rising above a roof-top ledge, how he waited until he could see the German’s whole head, until he could see the face was young and unlined. He aimed carefully and put a bullet between the eyes of his enemy. It was a strange story, strangely told, and Ted Stone grew uncharacteristically reflective and philosophical as he thought of the life he snuffed out somewhere in France twenty-five years before. “Killing a man is different from killing a deer.” Yet he was intensely proud that he had killed other men in the defense of his country.
    A faded American flag flew from a wooden pole in the backyard of the Stone house. This was the symbol of the post office, yet also seemed to symbolize Stone’s allegiance to his country which was blind, uncompromising, unconditional, and though he would have fought me had he heard me express the thought, almost Third Reich in its fervor and rigidity.
    One night at the Stones’ is memorable. It was October 15, Moratorium Day, when the United States reverberated with the chants and pleadings of those discontented with the war. I wanted desperately to watch the news that night, to see how the Washington march went, and to see the reaction of people around the country to the moratorium itself. I had a pretty good idea about what Ted thought about the moratorium, but I did not realize that I would be watching the greatest show on earth in Ted’s living room. As soon as the news came on, Ted began a long monologue which continued unabated till I excused myself an hour later.
    â€œLook at those long-haired bastards. Can’t tell if they’re boys or girls. Worse than Germans or Japs. Look at that hippie with the flag sewed to his butt. I’d cut it off his ass with a butcher knife if I was there. Take half of his ass with it. Lice. All they are is lice. Huntley and Brinkley are lice, too. They aren’t supporting our boys in Vietnam. Naw. They’re lice. Just like that nigger Martin Luther King. He was a goddam Communist sure as hell. Ask J. Edgar Hoover. Now there’s a man. Finest man in America. He calls a spade a spade. Look at them lice there now. Cute, ain’t they? I wouldn’t give them a drink of piss if they were dyin’ of thirst. There are some niggers. Every time you turn on TV you see the niggers. They even got them brushin’ their teeth on TV. Hippies. Goddam Communist hippies. Dirty, don’t take baths. We got some hippies coming to this island now. Those California boys are just hippies that get their hair cut before they come here. All of ’em’s lice. Nigger-lovin’ lice. There’s the White