He’d come to the Low Country for simple reasons for a man who lived a complex life. He’d read Pat Conroy’s tales of the land while at the Military Academy and he thought it was about as far as one could get from the mountains and the deserts of the world he’d spent the previous decades fighting in. And before that the streets of New York where he’d spent his childhood. He particularly enjoyed the mornings, watching the sun come up out of the ocean. It made him feel small and insignificant, as if his actions mattered little. That gave him comfort.
He’d also come to the south because he’d always been fascinated by the Civil War, and he’d already walked all the battlefields of the North — Gettysburg, Antietam and the others— and most of the rest were south of the Mason-Dixon line. The previous month he’d gone to the site of Andersonville Prison in Georgia, not exactly a battlefield, but a place of significance in that war and he still hadn’t shaken off the depression and despair still emanating from that small patch of South Georgia despite the years that had passed since it had been home to so many Yankee prisoners.
While the occasional students and professors knew nothing of the long time visitor to their island, there were those who had known of his presence within a few days of his arrival. The Gullah, the descendants of freed slaves who’d lived on these islands for generations, had noticed him almost immediately but left him in peace. He’d returned the courtesy, only gradually getting to know these people with their own language as he met them hunting and fishing around the island. It took six months of passing nods across the water and marsh before one of them pulled close enough to speak to him and then it was only a brief greeting and a warning of a storm coming despite the deceptive blue sky.
He’d always found that there were those who had their senses attuned to the pulse of the land and saw more than most. In Germany, the local forest-meister always knew when a Special Forces team had parachuted into their woodlands to conduct training exercises. In the desert the Bedouins could also sense a sand-storm on the clearest day and were aware of who traversed their lands. In Afghanistan the mountain villagers knew who walked the high trails and when. As a child in the Bronx he’d seen the men in white undershirts who sat in front of the small store on the street corner watching with half-lidded eyes whenever unknown cars turned into the block. Territoriality seemed to be genetic in men, but he must have missed out on that particular chromosome. He had no yearning to return to the Bronx from the day he escaped there to go fifty miles up the Hudson to West Point at seventeen. He considered wherever he currently slept to be his home.
He’d been told by an old Gullah man named Goodwine that a house had once stood at this spot, built by pirates in the late eighteenth century. And that the pirates had been caught by the fledgling American Navy and massacred to a man, refusing to give up the location of their treasure even under the painful incentive of the blade. Goodwine said the sailors burned the house and then dug through the ashes searching for the gold and, finding none, filled the hole with the bodies of the pirates. It was not a place of bad spirits Goodwine insisted, but of discontented spirits. The man liked that story. He didn’t share with Goodwine his own belief that the pirates had not had any treasure, which explained why they couldn’t point out where it was buried. The man knew the difference between fact and fiction and the fact was, in his experience, that everyone talked under enough pain and in fear of death.
The Coast Guard station had been built on the spot during the early days of World War II when German submarines had hunted the coast, sinking ships within sight of the shore, the flames observed by a civilian populace who thought themselves safe. It had been abandoned after the war and slowly gave in to the weather and vegetation. The man had constructed a cozy shelter inside, one that kept the rain off in winter and gave him shade in summer.
There was no bed. He had forsaken beds years ago as they were a place where one could be expected to be found, usually in a vulnerable state. He had a thin therm-a-rest pad that he rolled out when he was tired. Sometimes he slept on the beach above the high water mark, sometimes in the dunes, and if the weather threatened, in the station. He had a small battery powered radio with which he listened to National Public Radio twice a day. The portal to the station had been made for smaller men, set at an even six feet, so he had to duck slightly to come and go.
The biggest issue was fresh water. He made a run in his kayak over to Parris Island once a week and filled up two five-gallon cans at the dock. He had a solar shower, simply a clear bladder of water resting on top of a shelf, under which he quickly bathed when needed. The green-colored kayak he kept hidden up one of the waterways, tucked behind a cluster of thick palmetto bushes.
He knew what time it was very accurately according to some inner coding he’d never bothered to examine. In the same manner he’d never used an alarm clock. Even at the Academy during Beast Barracks. He always rose when he determined he needed to wake before he went to sleep.
Done with that exercise, he walked onto the beach and began his katas, the ritualized movements that were part of martial arts training. His specific form would not have been recognized in any dojo as it was an amalgamation of various techniques from a spectrum of disciplines. The moves were focused on those that incapacitated and killed as quickly as possible.
He heard the tinny murmur of a small outboard and came to a halt in mid-kata. He walked down to the beach as a small flatboat came around the headland.
Goodwine saw the strange white man waiting on the beach. He was always up. Goodwine had passed by the island late at night or hours before dawn and it seemed the man was always around, like a ghost, often simply sitting in his strange way on one hand, or moving slowly along the beach or through the swamp. The first time he’d spotted the buckra—white man — Goodwine had thought he was a lost hunter or fisherman as few came to Pritchards, but the man had shown no sign of distress nor did he seem interested in what Goodwine was up to, so the two had noted each other with a simple nod but said nothing.
So it went for months before one day Goodwine saw the man out on the sand-bar a hundred yards from the shore, simply walking, paralleling the shore at low tide, the water up to his waist. It was February and the water was cold, but the man had not seemed to notice. It wasn’t until he got home that Goodwine realized that the man had been working his body against the water, building up his legs.
Goodwine had paused to tell the man a storm was coming and the tide would be up higher than had been seen for a while. The man had simply thanked Goodwine and continued on his way. What had impressed Goodwine more than the man’s taciturn manner was his skin. He was a buckra, but the sun had burned him brown, except the lines and craters that marked the impact of violence on his flesh. There were dark tales written in those scars but the man said nothing of it, not even after they spent more time together. Goodwine had a similar crater on his right thigh where a North Vietnamese bullet had punched a hole many years ago. He didn’t like talking of that so he respected the man’s silence. It had been Goodwine’s only time away from the Low Country and he had been glad to return, even though the leg had never quite been the same.