Beach Music (62 page)

“Come here, child,” Lucy said to Leah. “Round it out on both sides now. Pretend you’re the mother and you want to dig the loveliest and safest nest in the world for your babies. The shovel is your back flipper and you want your eggs to drop in a beautiful round room where the only sound they’ll hear is the surf.”

“Like this,” Leah said, concentrating hard, as she slid the blade of the shovel along the side of the hole and brought up barely more than a half pound of sand.

“Perfect. Round that other side off. You think it’s deep enough, Jane?”

Jane came over and inspected the hole. She went down on her knees and put her arm into the hole almost up to the shoulder.

“I’d go another six inches,” she said, and Lucy nodded in agreement.

Leah dug out another six inches of sand and placed it on the small dune that rose up on one side of the nest. “What if it’s not just right, Grandma? What’ll happen?”

“Probably nothing. But since we’re flying blind here, we might as well be as careful as we can. We’ve got a hundred twenty-two baby turtles counting on us to get it right.”

“See what I mean about being too personal?” Jane said.

“Now comes the fun part,” Lucy said, instructing Leah with unusual patience. “I think this is the greatest Easter egg hunt in the world. We find the eggs, dig them up, walk them to a safe place, and now we get to bury them again.”

“You do it, Grandma,” Leah asked. “I’ll watch the first time.”

“No. I want this whole nest to be yours. You’ll help me watch over this one and all the rest. But I want you to put each one of these eggs down in the hole. So when they hatch, I’ll have you dig them up and they’ll know your smell.”

“It doesn’t happen that way, Lucy,” Jane said archly.

“How the hell do you know?” Lucy shot back.

Leah took out the first egg and studied it as it gleamed in the May sunshine. She handled it with great delicacy and made sure the
egg was facing in the same direction as it was when she removed it from its original nest. Her head almost disappeared from sight as she set the egg in its place as seriously as a priest laying a consecrated host on an altar cloth. When the first egg was put in, Leah looked to the adults for approval and received it from all three of us.

It took Leah almost a half-hour to fill up that hole with turtle eggs and the job went more quickly as she gained confidence in her handling and placement of them. When she began each egg was precious and by the time she finished the eggs felt familiar and comfortable in her hand.

Then Lucy taught her how to cover the eggs with the same sand they had taken from the hole and pack it down with the same firmness a three-hundred-pound mother would exert in her desire to camouflage the nest from the eyes of predators. They were smoothing out the sand above the nest and Jane was moving the wire cage over toward the nest when the sound of a male voice on the deck startled them all.

“Is that bitch bothering you again, Mama?” the voice said and I looked up to see my brother John Hardin staring out over the scene, shirtless behind a gate.

“I forgot to tell you, Jack. Your brother got in from Columbia late last night.”

“Hey, John Hardin,” Jane said, putting the wire fencing in place above the nest. “The bitch is only bothering your mama a little bit. Nothing to write home about.”

“Should I beat her up, Mama?” John Hardin asked.

“Hush up. They’ll be hauling you back up to Bull Street if you can’t put a brake on your tongue,” Lucy said.

“Thanks a lot for visiting me in the hospital, Jack,” John Hardin said, spotting me for the first time. “Every visiting hour I kept waiting for you to come and bring me some boiled peanuts and Heath Bars the way you used to. But no, you’ve gotten too big for John Hardin. You’re much too busy shitting on French restaurants and writing whoopey-doo pieces on sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar to ever come visit your little brother on the crazy ward.”

“Shut up, John Hardin. Your brother’s still recuperating from getting himself shot up in Rome.”

“I forgot about that, Jack,” John Hardin said. “I’m so sorry. I read all about your being hurt and I wanted to fly straight to Rome to take care of you. Isn’t that right, Mama?”

“That’s certainly right, honey,” she said, checking Jane’s handiwork in placing the wire screen over the nest. Then in a lower voice she whispered to me. “In the condition he was in, he could’ve flown all the way there and not even bothered to call Delta.”

“Who is that pretty thing?” John Hardin said, spotting Leah. “Is that the lovely Miss Leah McCall?”

“Hello, Uncle John Hardin.”

“Run up here and give your uncle a big kiss,” John Hardin said as Leah looked pleadingly at me. Then John Hardin opened the gate and I saw for the first time that he was wearing no clothes at all.

I shook my head and said, “Why don’t you put on some clothes, John Hardin? Leah’s never hugged a totally naked man before.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” Leah whispered.

Both Jane and Lucy turned away from the fencing and looked at John Hardin who stood proudly unclad and unapologetic above them.

“I became a nudist while at the state hospital, Mother,” John Hardin said. “It’s a matter of principle with me and I know you’ll support my decision. It’s an act of faith, not of folly. Of that, I assure you.”

“Get your goddamn clothes on, boy,” Lucy said, murderously. “Or I’m going to knock your unmentionables into the Atlantic with this shovel. Cover yourself up before this innocent young woman. I never heard of such carrying on in broad daylight.”

She took off Jane Hartley’s hat and shielded the young woman’s eyes from the sight of her son’s pale genitalia.

“I’m a scientist, Lucy. This doesn’t shock me.”

“I’m a mother, Jane, and this shocks the living hell out of me,” Lucy said. “Call the crazy house, Jack, and tell them they didn’t come close to fixin’ what ails the nudist here.”

“This is the way God made me, Leah,” John Hardin said. “Do you see anything revolting or disgusting in God’s work? I admit my dick’s kind of ugly, but who are we to criticize the Lord’s handiwork. Don’t you agree?”

“What’s ‘a dick,’ Daddy?” Leah asked me.

“American slang for penis,” I said.

“Thank you, Daddy.”

“You’re very welcome, sweetheart.”

“I think your dick is very pretty, John Hardin,” Leah said kindly.

“See, Mama, you uptight puritan asshole,” John Hardin screamed. “Beauty’s in the eye of the pretender.”

“You mean beholder,” Lucy corrected.

“I mean exactly what I say I mean and nothing more,” insisted John Hardin.

“Good, say anything you want. Just go put something over your elementals.”

“Elementals,” John Hardin said. “This ain’t Plymouth Rock, Mother dear. It won’t hurt you to say the word dick or hairy banana or cock or pecker …”

“Those are the words I was talking about the other day, Daddy,” Leah said. “Those are the ones I hear on the playground.”

“Once you know them all, then you’re well on your way to being an American girl.”

“I came into the world buck naked …” John Hardin said.

“I seem to remember that,” Lucy said to Jane. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Love one,” Jane said.

“And naked shall I return to my true mother, the earth, not that woman that claims to have brought me forth in vileness and unholy jeopardy.

“That dog there walking on the beach is naked. That seagull, that pelican, that porpoise offshore—all, all naked and natural as they were on the day when they first saw their mothers and sunlight. I saw sunlight, then I saw this unfeeling bitch who raised me, Jane, and turned me into a lunatic to walk the earth unloved and uninvited into any home.”

“Put your pants on and join us for coffee, son,” Lucy said, washing her feet and hands of sand.

“You spoke nicely to me, Mama,” John Hardin said. “I will join you. You catch more snakes with honey than Caesar did in Gaul.”

“What did John Hardin mean about the honey, Daddy?” asked Leah.

“He wants me to speak nicely to him,” Lucy answered. “He’s got an odd relationship with the English language.”

“Did you know that nudists commit fewer murders than any other group, Jane?” John Hardin asked.

“I never knew that,” Jane said. “But it doesn’t surprise me.”

“I scare you, don’t I?” John Hardin said to Jane Hartley. “You’ve never met a full-fledged, bona-fide schizophrenic in your life and I can see the fear in your eyes.”

“Shut up, son,” Lucy said, handing him a beach towel that he wrapped around himself as she crossed the deck and walked through the sliding glass door into her living room. “You don’t have to present your credentials. Being stark naked’s all the clue anyone needs.”

“My sister’s schizophrenic, John Hardin,” Jane said, following Lucy into the house. “Your act’s old to me.”

John Hardin watched the young woman as she crossed the deck and disappeared inside the house.

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she, Jack?”

“Very pretty.”

“Do you think she liked me, Leah?” John Hardin asked, and his voice was tender.

“She’d like you better with clothes,” Leah said.

“That’s prejudice,” he said, his voice darkening an octave.

“She’s used to boys wearing clothes, that’s all,” Leah said.

“Oh.” John Hardin seemed mollified. “I’ve never known how to talk to pretty girls. Maybe you could help me, Leah. You’re pretty. In fact, I bet you’ll be elected Miss Italy some day. Unless you come back here where you’ll be Miss America.”

“Talk to her like that, John Hardin,” Leah said. “Maybe she’d like that.”

“I know you’re supposed to say ‘hi’ to girls. I always do that. Then I know you’re supposed to say something like ‘Isn’t this a beautiful day?’ I say that when the day’s nice. But what do you say when it’s rainy or cold and what do you say after that? I mean, there’s a million things you could say. But what does a pretty girl
want to hear after a weather report? It’s a mystery to me, Leah. Does she want to know that there was an earthquake in Pakistan last night? That’s pretty important. Or would she rather know how a Jerry Lewis movie ended that I saw the other night in the hospital? Or makeup? Maybe she’d like to talk about makeup, but see, I don’t use it. I’d be glad to talk about anything, but too many things come to my mind and I end up saying nothing. Pretty girls hate me, Leah.”

“No they don’t,” Leah said. “They know just how you feel. Tell them what you just told us. Tell Miss Hartley. She’ll understand.”

“Now? Go in right now?”

“No, let everything come up naturally. Wait till it feels right,” Leah said.

“Ah, I can’t,” John Hardin said. “Nothing ever feels right to me.”

T
he next day, I drove Leah to the southwest tangent of the Isle of Orion to visit John Hardin in the tree house he had built for himself so he had a place to go whenever he felt the need to withdraw from society. The tree house was much discussed on both the island and Waterford, but seldom seen. John Hardin had built his pied-à-terre in a two-hundred-year-old live oak that hung over the tidal creek that cut a necklace of deep water through the great salt marsh. Since he was good with his hands and had enormous amounts of free time, the tree house had expanded over the years, gone through several renovations, and had five separate rooms plus a screened-in porch when I drove up beneath it and blew the horn to alert my brother. At the extreme end of the road, I pointed out to Leah the unpainted wooden building that my brothers and I had built and used as a fish camp all throughout our childhood days. It surprised me that the floating deck was in such good shape until I remembered that John Hardin lived here almost full-time when he was not locked up in the state hospital. The tree house was made from heart of pine and stained a natural color. There was both charm and eccentricity in its architecture and the rooms grew smaller and more turretlike as they spiraled up the tree, accommodating themselves to the higher and
frailer branches. Everywhere the eye looked there were bird feeders and bird baths and wind chimes. The air could not move without music moving through every leaf and acorn on the tree. Most of the wind chimes were handmade and their music was slightly off-key and eccentric. But the house seemed spacious and congruent and Leah screamed with delight.

From above, we heard John Hardin call down to us and he lowered a wooden ladder from his living area. The house had three decks ingeniously constructed. On the top deck, John Hardin had built a small bedroom for himself with a hammock and a library filled with paperback books. He lit his uncommon house with candles and kerosene lanterns and cooked his meals with a small hibachi. The ocean breeze was his only air-conditioning and John Hardin freely admitted that his tree house was unusable during the winter. But historically, the cold months had almost always coincided with his breakdowns and he had availed himself of the free lodging that always awaited him on Bull Street in Columbia. In the creek, he caught most of his own food with his cast net and his rod and reel. Proud of his self-sufficiency, he pointed out his outhouse camouflaged in a thick clump of sea myrtle.

“It’s illegal to have an outhouse on this stupid island,” John Hardin said to Leah. “Zoning laws. There’s a conspiracy afoot in America to make human beings ashamed of their waste products. I’m proud of my waste products.”

“I’ve never thought much about mine,” Leah said, smiling at me and following John Hardin into a small, bizarrely shaped room almost completely dominated by a Pawley’s Island hammock.

“This is the guest bedroom. I haven’t had any guests yet, but when I do this’ll be where they sleep. You can come here anytime you want, Leah. You don’t even need an invitation.”

“Thank you so much, John Hardin. You’re so sweet.”

“It’s strictly off-limits to the rest of my family. I better never catch your ass sneaking around my property, Jack.”

“Wouldn’t think of it,” I said, feeling overgrown and claustrophobic as I made my way from one small enclosure to another. There were tricks to getting from room to room and very little appeared solid underfoot, and I had the feeling that I was on a yacht
anchored in an open bay on a windy afternoon. John Hardin had decorated the walls of his sitting room with art given to him by fellow inmates of the state hospital. The paintings looked like stamps minted in a country where nightmares were used to lure a strange breed of tourist. It was a desperate cousin of art, disturbing in all its forms and images.