Beach Music (104 page)

As she tried to speak, John Hardin, fidgety in the solemn atmosphere, started: “Mama, you wouldn’t believe what just happened. The doctor came in and said, ‘Lucy’s gonna be her old self by tomorrow morning.’ The doc was laughing and said he’d just run a few more tests and found out it wasn’t leukemia after all. Hell, he screwed up the original diagnosis. It’s just a head cold, or psoriasis at the very worst. Said you’ll be playing thirty-six holes of golf a day by next week. Come on, you guys. Put smiles back on your faces.”

Dupree shrugged and said, “I made a bad mistake springing him on a pass.”

“Hush,” Lucy whispered. “I got something to say to you.”

We grew still as the ocean spoke to the night a single wave at a time.

“I did the best I could for you boys,” she said. “I wish I had done better by you. You should’ve been born in the house of a queen.”

“We were,” Dupree said in a barely audible voice.

“Damn right we were,” said Dallas.

“Shhh,” Lucy said, and we had to lean forward to hear her. “I should’ve loved you more and needed you less. You were the only things I ever got for free.”

“Mama, Mama, Mama,” John Hardin said, sinking on his knees beside her, and sobbing, Lucy lapsed into her final coma hearing the first word that all of us spoke in the English language. Into that night, my mother slipped away from me.

I
t took Lucy forty hours to die and we hardly left her side. Doctors and nurses came and went, checking her vital signs and making her comfortable. Her breathing became an agonized, desperate noise. It was a ragged and hydraulic sound, and for me it became the only sound on earth.

We spent those last hours kissing her frequently and telling her how deeply we loved her. Then I began to read Leah’s children’s books out loud to her. She had lived a storyless childhood, so I read in the last day of her life the books she had missed. I told her about Winnie the Pooh and Yertle the Turtle, took her
Where the Wild Things Are
, introduced her to
Peter Rabbit
and
Alice in Wonderland
. Each of us took turns reading to her out of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
, and, at the very last, Leah insisted that I tell all the Great Dog Chippie stories I had told her during our years of exile from the family in Rome.

I told Leah’s favorite Great Dog Chippie stories to my brothers’ amusement, but then I saw the moment they got hooked by the power of the stories themselves. I watched as Leah took turns sitting in my brothers’ laps and I thought how wonderful it must be to have an excess of adoring uncles to choose from.

Then, an hour before Lucy died, I told one last story of that splendid dog who had died before John Hardin or Tee ever got to know her well.

“In a pretty house, on a pretty island, in the pretty state of South Carolina, a woman named Lucy was getting ready to make her last journey. She had already said her good-byes and gotten her affairs straight. She had kissed her granddaughter Leah farewell and had taught her how to do her nails and apply makeup to her face. Her sons had gathered around her and she had made all of them feel good by choosing the right words to make them remember her fondly forever. Even though her favorite son, by far, was Jack, she was equally nice to all of them at this moment of departure.”

Even John Hardin laughed good-naturedly at this aside.

“It took her a long time to die because she loved the earth and her town and her family so much. But when she left she was amazed to lift out of her body and rise above the house and the ocean. She looked down on the moon and the stars and the Milky Way, free of her body, and she felt winged and floating and beautiful as she spun around in the sweet light of stars she passed.

“Then she came to the place she had heard about. It was in a field of wildflowers surrounded by mountains, prettier than the Blue Ridge, higher than the Alps. Lucy had never felt as at home before. This was the place, she knew that, but did not know it by name.

“Lucy heard a voice thunder out above her. She knew it was the voice of God. It was stern, but lovely. She awaited his judgment with confidence, with ardor. Her granddaughter Leah had applied her makeup for this long trip home and Lucy knew she was going to look pretty to the God who had created her.

“But another voice sounded behind her and it terrified her. Lucy turned to see Satan and his armies of demons crossing the field to claim her as their own. Satan was puce-colored and hideous and he danced up behind Lucy where she could feel his hot breath on her neck.

“Satan roared, ‘She is mine. I claim her for the underearth. She has earned her portion of fire honestly. You have no business with this one and I claim for hell what is mine.’

“ ‘Slowly, Satan,’ the voice of the Lord rang out. ‘This is Lucy McCall from Waterford. You have no claim on this woman at all. Though you want every soul that comes this way, you did not earn this one.’

“ ‘I claim her anyway, Lord. She has suffered much on earth and she is well accustomed to pain. Pain is what she knows best. Without suffering, she would never feel at home.’

“Though Lucy struggled mightily, she felt Satan’s hand tighten around her throat and when she tried to speak she could not form the words and found herself being dragged out of the field so fragrant with wildflowers. Lucy thought she was doomed to hell for all eternity when she heard something …”

“I know what she heard,” Leah squealed.

“What’s that?” her uncles asked.

“She heard, ‘Grrrr–grrrr.’ ”

“Where was that sound coming from?” Dallas asked.

“It’s the Great Dog Chippie,” Leah said. “Just in the nick of time. She’ll save the day. Even if God can’t. Right, Daddy?”

“The fangs of the Great Dog Chippie were white and wolflike. Her lips were curled and her black, muscled body looked like a panther’s walking toward Satan. The other demons shrank back in terror, but not Satan. But Chippie had never approached an enemy with such ferocity. Her eyes were yellow and she moved in for the kill. She crouched, ready to spring at the source of all evil. The dog had come to greet the woman who had found her as a stray, taken her into a house full of children, fed her, stroked her fur, loved her as a dog needed to be loved.

“ ‘Ha!’ Satan cried out. ‘You think I should fear a dog.’

“He was addressing God himself, still holding Lucy.

“ ‘No. You need not fear a dog,’ God answered. ‘Except for this one.’

“ ‘Why this one? Why this cur?’

“ ‘Because I sent the dog. The dog does my will,’ God answered.

“And the Prince of Darkness released Lucy and returned to his house of fire.

“Lucy went to her knees and kissed the Great Dog Chippie and accepted her kisses in return. Then the dog led the way through flowers, toward the light.”

That night Lucy died with my brothers and me around her. When the undertaker came to take her body the next morning, her
nightgown was still wet from the tears of her five sons, two husbands, one brother, and her granddaughter Leah McCall. The world seemed to stop when she stopped breathing, but a high tide was on the way into the rivers and sounds, and the sun lit a fire on the horizon, the first sunrise Lucy had ever missed since she had slept in her seaside house.

At her funeral Mass, one could hear an entire town mourning. Her five sons and her ex-husband, the judge, served as her pallbearers and they carried the beautiful, polished coffin her son John Hardin had made for her to the front of the church. It was a gray overcast day and Dr. Pitts wept during the whole service as did Dallas, Dupree, Tee, John Hardin, my father, and I. There was not a stiff upper lip among us. Lucy’s love had indentured and leveled us; her tenderness leaked out of us. She left us hurt and powerless, on our knees. At the cemetery, my brothers and I buried her, taking our time speaking with her as though she could hear us. I had lost the word “mother” forever, and I could not bear it.

After listening to the condolences of the town, which had gathered at the house on the Isle of Orion, tired of mourning and depleted from the effort of smiling, I put on my bathing suit and with Leah went out for a long swim in the ocean. The water felt warm and silken and Leah’s hair glistened like a seal’s as she dove off my shoulders and rode the huge breaking waves all the way to shore. I said little but took comfort and undiminishable pleasure in the physicality of swimming, the pull of the tide, the swell and rocking of the ocean itself. Leah had learned to swim like an otter, throw a shrimp net as well as I could, and could already slalom behind a ski boat. She was becoming a low country girl and I held her close to me as we rested in the surf twenty yards from shore.

“Look, Daddy,” Leah said. “Ledare’s calling us in.”

On the shore, still dressed from the funeral, but barefoot now with her black dress and pearls, Ledare waved to us and we both swam toward her.

When we reached the shore, Ledare held something in her hand. “Betty Sobol just brought this by. Someone found it wandering on the golf course. She thinks it’s been lost for days.”

Ledare opened her hand and in it was a tiny loggerhead turtle,
but pure white, the first albino I had ever seen. It was motionless, and Ledare said, “Betty thinks it might be dead. She was wondering if you and Leah would take it out to deep water. If it’s alive, she doesn’t think it could survive this surf.”

I took the turtle in my hand and held it like a pocket watch in my palm. “No sign of life,” I said.

“Let’s put him in the water, Daddy,” said Leah. “We’ll go as deep as we can.”

I put Leah on my shoulders and I began walking toward the strong waves, bracing myself as they broke across my chest. I handed the turtle up to Leah and told her to keep it high above her head, away from the waves.

“Even if it’s not alive, Leah, it can become part of the food chain,” I said.

“Great, Daddy. Being part of the food chain.”

The walk against the tide was a struggle, but when we were beyond the breakers, Leah handed the lifeless turtle to me. I checked it a last time, then took it and plunged it into the rich warm Atlantic waters. After a few moments, I felt the loggerhead stir once, then I felt the ignition as the turtle moved all four flippers and the life force of instinct burned through every cell in its body.

“It’s alive,” I cried out to Leah and I released the turtle at the surface. Both Leah and I then swam beside it as the albino got its bearings, drew in a breath, and disappeared from sight. Dog-paddling, we saw the tiny white head come up six feet away from us, then plunge again. We followed the turtle until we reached water over my head. Then we swam back to shore, where Ledare was waiting for us.

T
he following summer, Ledare Ansley and I got married in the city of Rome and invited everyone we loved to the wedding. When we wrote the movie that Mike Hess had hired us to write, we discovered that we could not live without each other. When I finally got around to asking her to marry me, I found out that Ledare and Leah had recently picked out her wedding dress in Charleston; she had already made up a guest list and written out the announcement for the newspaper. The only person surprised by my falling in love with Ledare was me. But I had lived a long time knowing of the hardships and perils that eat around the edges of even the strongest loves. I wanted to be absolutely sure.

I popped the question to her at a party we gave for Jordan Elliott the day before he began serving his prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth. He had received a five-year prison term for manslaughter and malicious destruction of federal property. The lead prosecutor wanted to put Jordan behind bars for twenty years for murder, but Capers Middleton worked out a deal after convincing the federal authorities that a whole monastery would testify to Jordan’s saintly attributes if the case ever came to trial. General Rembert Elliott moved to Kansas to be with his son for the entire period of his incarceration. Throughout the pretrial maneuverings, the general was fiercely protective of his son at every step. Each day, General Elliott visited Jordan in prison, and a deep affection grew between
them. To their surprise and delight, they discovered how deeply a friendship between a father and son could cut through all the hurt and refuse of a troubled past. In the ruins of their lives, they had found each other and clung to each other and became reconciled even to their amazing differences.

On the night before the wedding, Ledare and I walked up to the Janiculum with the ancient, misted city spread beneath us in a secret hive of final, rushing motion before the sun’s last light splashed along the fringes of the western hills. The last party we would ever attend without being man and wife was in preparation down there amid the pale lights that came on one by one in the many neighborhoods. I had decided that the Janiculum was the right place to give Shyla’s letter to Ledare. The letter explained some things in a clear, exact way that I knew I could never manage to express. In a courtroom long ago, it had won me the right to raise Leah after the Foxes had sued me for custody of their grandchild. It had touched me deeply, blindingly. It had let me know that I had once known a passion that very few men or women would ever know or feel or even long for in their entire lives. It was the reason I could let Shyla go, but never tell her good-bye. Now, on the night before my wedding to Ledare, I needed to break off and to let the love of Ledare perform its gentle work on my damaged, Southern heart.