The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (78 page)

Eustace hesitated, smiled wistfully. “Only in the evenings.”

Later that night, when we were alone, Eustace told me how heartbroken he gets whenever he spends time around modern American teenagers. Yes, he can communicate with them, but people never understand that it rips him up inside to see how ignorant the kids are, how undisciplined in their personal interactions and how disrespectful of their elders, how consumed they are by material desire and how helplessly incompetent in a way that you would never see with, say,
Amish
children.

But I wasn’t listening carefully to Eustace’s lament, because I had another question on my mind. “Hey, about what happened there tonight. Do you get that kind of response everywhere you speak?”

“Yes.”

“From all age groups; from all backgrounds?”

“Yes.”

I thought this over. “So tell me specifically. Why do you think these particular teenagers were so hypnotized by you tonight?”

Eustace’s reply was so immediate, so uncompromising, and so coldly delivered that it sent a quick little chill right through me.

“Because,” he said, “they recognized right away that I was a real person. And they’ve probably never met one before.”

CHAPTER TWO

My son, my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir,
And whom my body warms.

—“My Son, My Executioner,” Donald Hall

I
n the winter of 1975, when Eustace Conway was fourteen, he began a new diary and wrote this statement, by means of an introduction:

“I, Eustace Conway, live in a fairly large house in Gastonia, North Carolina. I have a mother and a father living at this time, and I also have two brothers (Walton and Judson) and one sister (Martha). I have a very strong hobby of Indian crafts and lore. I have organized an Indian dance team of four people, including myself. The people are: me, my brother Walton, who is the older of my two brothers, Tommy Morris, who is a close friend living about two blocks away, and also Pete Morris, who is his brother. Their father killed himself about two years ago but their mother is going to remarry soon. I go to the Scheile Museum of Natural History every chance I get because I love it there and I love the people there. I have nearly become a member of the staff . . . My bedroom is itself a museum. I have covered it with Indian paintings and pictures, bear skins from my uncle in Alaska, and many Indian crafts I have made. There is no room in my room for anything else and it is really stuffed and I have many more things that I can’t put in.”

He was an unusual kid. He was busy all the time. He went to school every day, of course, but only because they made him go. After school, he would ride his bicycle over to the Scheile Museum, a small natural history museum filled with dusty World War I–era dioramas of North Carolina flora and fauna. And that was where the day’s real schooling started for Eustace; Mr. Alan Stout, the museum’s director, had taken a liking to him and always welcomed him into the marvelous inner asylum of the Scheile.

Eustace was hard to resist. The kid had a wonderful big smile, on the occasions when he’d actually crack one. Such an uncommonly focused child! So highly motivated and interested in geology, anthropology, history, biology—anything you could offer him. Mr. Stout used to let Eustace hang around in the back rooms of the museum for hours every day, to the boy’s supreme bliss. (“Mr. Stout knows more about Indians than anyone I know,” Eustace raved in his diary. “And he is a very good watercolor painter, and paints scenes of Tennessee, where he was born and raised.”) Eustace was like no child Mr. Stout had ever met; indeed, like no child he would ever meet again. If you gave him a book to look at, he’d study it, ask a dozen questions, and then request another book the next afternoon. If Mr. Warren Kimsey, the museum’s resident taxidermist, showed Eustace how to skin and flesh a rabbit, he’d do it with a fanatical perfection and ask for another rabbit so that he could try to improve on the skill.

“Warren is new,” Eustace confided to his diary, “but he has swiftly become closest to me. In fact, I like him more than any other person in this world.”

And he was a terrific helper. A regular eager beaver. Always happy to sweep out the storage rooms or take over any chore nobody else would do. Mr. Stout even let Eustace use the museum as a practice space for his Indian dance troupe. Eustace was the president of the troupe, but Mr. Stout coached the dancers, drove them to competitions, helped show the boys how to sew and bead the intricate, traditional Indian dance costumes. As Eustace got older, Mr. Stout took him on canoe trips on the Catawba South Fork River, to collect water samples for government environmental studies. He took Eustace on camping trips all alone sometimes, and watched in wordless admiration as the teenager caught, killed, skinned, cooked, and ate rattlesnakes.

Mr. Stout more than liked Eustace; he respected him. He thought he was brilliant. He carefully observed the development of Eustace Conway much as Thomas Jefferson had carefully observed the development of a young neighbor named Meriwether Lewis (a child whom the president would always recall as having been “remarkable, even in infancy, for enterprise, boldness and discretion”). And, anyway, Mr. Stout had a sense that Eustace had a desperate need for someplace to go in the afternoons, someplace other than home. He didn’t know the details of the family situation, but he had met the father, and it didn’t take any genius to recognize that life was not easy in that fairly large house on Deerwood Drive.

So Eustace would spend his afternoons at the museum and then take off and hit the little forest behind his house. Check his traps, hunt for turtles, create trails. He made notes of what he saw during those forays into the woods. He’d been keeping a diary for years, but it wasn’t so much a means of personal expression as a compulsive chronicle of everything he had accomplished that day (whether related to wildlife or to the more mundane) and a long list of what he intended to accomplish the next day.

“Today I fed worms to my baby snapping turtle. I watched a movie about a boy and a homing pigeon, practiced on the hoop dance, and started working on the feathers for my coup stick. Then I was developing my skills in table tennis. I have become quite good. I am going to read my Bible every night until I finish it. I may make a feather crest out of real turkey tail feathers.”

“Today I found a cougar track that was 3 days old. I caught a corn snake that was 51.2 feet. I also set a snare for a coon where I saw 3-day old coon tracks. I hope to catch it for the skin.”

“I began reading a book,
Fighting Indians of the West
. After a while of that, I mounted two deer feet . . . Martha told me that a squirrel had been hit on Gardner Park Drive. I skinned it, but froze it to flesh later.”

A whole page in one of his childhood diaries was headlined frogs, full of information and observation on the same. (“Today I caught 3 tree frogs and put them in my 10-gallon terrarium. The next day I found some bunches of eggs in the water bowl. I also caught a salamander and put him in there with the frogs. One of the frogs is thought to be dead, for I have not seen three of them together at the same time for a while . . .”)

It was as though Eustace were some kind of baby Thoreau. Or maybe not. Although he was attentive to his environment, Eustace didn’t have then, and never would develop, Thoreau’s languid communion with nature. (For instance: “Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath,” Thoreau mused, “I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.”) No way would Eustace Conway endure that kind of decadent repose. Even as a child, he was far too compulsive to sit for weeks on end to watch the light change. Instead, Eustace was driven to
engage
. It’s more to the point to say that he was like the young Teddy Roosevelt, another energetic and determined child, who also studied under a master taxidermist, who also zealously created a natural history museum in his bedroom, and who also wrote conscientious, academic observations in preadolescent diaries. Like Teddy Roosevelt, the young Eustace Conway could be described as having been “pure act.”

Eustace didn’t have a lot of friends. He wasn’t much like anybody else, and he already knew this, even at the age of ten. When he looked at other boys his age, he saw kids who spent hours watching television, talking about what they saw on television, and imitating characters from television. None of their references made any sense to him.

The other boys also had strange hobbies. In the cafeterias, they’d play this elaborate pencil-breaking game, trying to steal each other’s pencils and snap them in half, keeping score of how many pencils each boy broke. This was both puzzling and upsetting to Eustace. How could anyone have such disrespect for property? Pencils were made out of trees, after all, and were worth something. He also watched boys in his classroom fritter away whole semesters by drawing picture after picture of race cars in their school notebooks—and using only one side of the paper, too! Eustace, even back then, would think,
What a waste of
time . . . and what a waste of paper
. These boys just seemed so damn bored. All they could think of doing was to fight and wreck stuff. But Eustace could always think of something useful; there weren’t enough hours in the day for all he wanted to do and learn.

Many children in the neighborhood knew Eustace and were involved with his life, but they weren’t friends in the typical way of children; they were more like early versions of apprentices. Eustace used to do things like traipse down his sidewalk with a massive black rat snake draped around his neck, which naturally garnered attention. The kids would gather and ask questions and he’d tell them about the habits and nature of the snake, enlist them to gather food for the animal, or—if they demonstrated more interest—take them back into the woods and show them how to catch snakes of their own. Even the children who were older than Eustace would follow him into the woods to build forts under his supervision or wade through swamps to find food for his turtles.

But in school? Eustace had no friends. Without the conversation piece of a snake, without the backdrop of a forest as proof of his expertise, Eustace was pretty hopeless at connecting with his peers. He’d sit at the lunch table with the other outcasts—the mentally retarded children, the children with the braces on their legs, and the sad children of Gastonia’s poorest families. He wasn’t friends with these kids. They didn’t even know one another’s names. They would eat together every day but then look away in shameful relief when someone else was singled out for bullying.

There was this one boy, though. Randy Cable, who was new to Gastonia. His parents were hill people, rural Appalachian people, who had moved down from the mountains to this affluent suburban town to find work in the local mills. Randy didn’t know anybody, either. One day during seventh grade, Randy was, as usual, playing alone at recess on the periphery of the playground, where the pavement stopped and the woods began. The other kids were involved in a loud baseball game, but Randy Cable didn’t know how to play baseball. So he was kicking around near the woods and found a turtle. He was messing with it, poking at it, when Eustace Conway, a thin, dark, serious boy, came over.

“You like turtles?” asked Eustace.

“Sure,” said Randy.

“I know everything about turtles. I have more than a hundred turtles in my backyard,” Eustace said.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. If you come over to my house, I’ll show you.”

Randy Cable thought,
Yeah, right
.

But he rode his bike over there that afternoon, and found that it
was
true. In the backyard of Eustace’s house was a vast, orderly turtle community. Irrigated and shaded, it was a network of dozens of cages and crates filled with more than a hundred turtles, of different breeds, that Eustace had been feeding and tending to, on a carefully documented rotational system, since he was six years old.

Eustace loved turtles. He loved their character, their calmness, their perfect spiritual balance, and their comforting and ancient aura. Eustace had a genius for turtles. He could find turtles anywhere. He could spot a turtle hidden in dense camouflage with only one fingernail-size piece of its shell showing. Several times in his young life, Eustace had
heard
turtles. Walking silently through the woods, he could hear the almost soundless hiss of air made by a turtle quickly pulling its head and legs into its shell. Then Eustace would stop, freeze, and look around until he spotted it. Sure enough, there was a small box turtle, three feet away, hidden in the forest duff, all tucked up in itself.

Eustace had even developed a system for capturing skittish painted turtles out of ponds and lakes. He’d lurk in the woods at the edge of the water with a rod-and-reel fishing pole, baited with a large chunk of fatback bacon. He’d cast the bacon a few feet in front of the sunning turtle and then slowly drag it before the animal’s eyes until the turtle smelled the bait and eased itself into the water to follow. Inch by inch, Eustace would lure the turtle closer to the shore and then jump out of the woods, leap into the water with a net, and snag the turtle before it dove in fear.

Back home, he’d put his new find in one of his plywood pens, each custom-designed with the appropriate balance of shade, water, and grass for the species. He had mud turtles, musk turtles, box turtles, painted turtles. He fed them crawfish and vegetables and worms (harvested from under the dozens of orderly logs Eustace had arranged in the woods behind his yard), and his turtles were so content in their habitats that they bred while in captivity. And he had snakes housed back there in his yard, too, as well as an orphaned baby fox named Sputnik. (Mr. Stout had given Eustace the fox after a local Gastonian found the animal and brought it into the Scheile Museum for care.) This well-ordered empire was what he showed his new friend Randy Cable that afternoon. And all of it was, for a rural kid like Randy, something close to heaven. The two boys became good buddies.

“Today for the first time I went to Randy Cable’s house,” Eustace wrote in his diary not long after the turtle display. “He showed me his woods and a stream where we saw muskrat, coon, bird, and cat tracks. He showed me a muskrat den in a clay bank. We built a bird trap out of a basket and baited it with bread. We used a long string and a wooden pull-trigger. We had a lot of blackbirds walking around it, but we never caught one because they never went in. We made a set of deadfall trigger sticks. I skinned a cottontail rabbit for a vest.”

And so it went for months and years. Randy remembers Eustace as a strange and fascinating kid, full of knowledge and keenly sensitive to his world in a way unlike most other twelve-year-olds. His focus was intense on the smallest detail. For instance, Eustace told Randy, “Do you like chocolate? Do you want to know the best way to eat it? Just put a tiny square of it under your tongue and let it melt there. That way, you’ll get the most flavor over the longest time and never take any of it for granted.”

Eustace was crazy about Randy Cable and about Randy’s father, a mountain-raised man who knew everything about hunting and fishing and what kind of wild greens you could collect from the river banks for food. Eustace went to Randy’s house as often as he could. Randy visited the Conways’ place far less often. It wasn’t as comfortable there. Mrs. Conway was nice, but Mr. Conway was scary. Dinnertime was an especially terrifying event. The children rarely spoke during the meal and neither did their mom. Mr. Conway, seated at the head of the table, was stern and sarcastic, with a hair-trigger temper. All his attention, it seemed, was concentrated on Eustace. If the boy even started to speak, Mr. Conway would ridicule his grammar. If the boy mentioned something about his day, Mr. Conway would laugh it off as “ridiculous, childish.” If Mr. Conway asked Eustace how he’d done on a recent math test, and got an answer he didn’t like, he would release a barrage of insults and ridicule.