by Pat Conroy
“Kiss my ass,” my father said, slurring his words.
I punched him in the face and said, “Get out of here, Colonel.”
When I returned to the house, my mother, three brothers, and sister did everything but throw me a ticker-tape parade. I walked through the front door and whispered to them, “Family life. Don’t you love it?” They surrounded me and hugged me and held on to me as a gladfulness and keen elation filled me up. I knew the things David knew when he brought Goliath crashing to the ground. Then all of us were frozen when we heard Barbara screaming from where she stood, alone on the upstairs banister: “What is going on down there? Something terrible is going on!”
I went to the stairs and said in a hearty voice, “It’s nothing, dear. Nothing at all. One of the kids tripped and got hurt. But it’s fine now. Go back to bed.”
“You’re lying to me! Something awful is going on in my house, and I demand to know what it is.”
“It sounded a lot worse than it was, Barbara,” I said. “It’s all been taken care of.”
“Peg, are you there?” Barbara called out. “Your son’s a goddamn liar, Peg, but not a very good one. Please tell me!”
It was at this moment that the Conroy family sense of humor betrayed me. My brother Jim started to laugh, and he set off Kathy, then Tim, and finally Tom. When Tom began giggling, my mother lost it. She began laughing, though she still had blood on her lips. Barbara came down the stairs in her robe and slippers, and by then we were all laughing uncontrollably in the vestibule beneath the stairs.
“Is this family completely nuts?” Barbara asked me, and my siblings began to sink to the floor, doubled up in laughter.
When we returned to bed, I told Barbara the whole story of my father’s long, debilitating war against his family. I had never revealed to another soul that he had been beating my mother since I was conscious of being alive, and that I remember hating him when I was in a high chair, my face burning with shame and humiliation that I could do nothing to protect my mother. My father could sense my hatred of him, and he began to beat me with some regularity when I was still in diapers. He always went for the face. Don Conroy was not the “pop you on the fanny” kind of dad. My brother Jim once told me that his first memory as a child was my father having me by the throat, beating my head against the wall. When my father laughed and denied it, I informed him that I could show him the wall.
For hours, I talked to my wife and told her of savage beatings that I had received over a lifetime. “But you’re such a nice boy, Pat,” Barbara said.
“Yes, I was,” I answered in the darkness.
“Do you think it will ever stop?” she asked.
“I think it stopped tonight.”
After Barbara drifted off to sleep, I began to worry about my father. In my last glimpse of him, he was driving down Hancock Street, weaving and out of control. He was far drunker than I had imagined.
Again, I lifted myself out of bed and dressed in the darkness. Lightly, I skipped down the stairs and went out to the front yard, where I looked down Hancock Street for any sign of Dad. I began to jog down the street, now badly shaken by my violent encounter, and guilt-ridden that I was the source of that violence. I regretted kicking him, and wished I had fought him straight up, but I had kicked him across the yard, and that’s what I had to live with the rest of my life.
Dad had not gotten far. I found his car on the Green, a park-like acre in the middle of the Point surrounded by stately antebellum homes. He’d passed out on the grass and was lying on his back six feet away from the car, its motor still running. I switched off the engine and walked over to sit down beside my father. I thought, as I studied his face, what a horrible thing it is for a boy to hate his father, how it harms that boy and damages him, how it makes him afraid and cowering every waking moment, how it debases and haunts his nightmares, and how the fighter pilot dives for his son even in his sleep. There is nowhere a boy can run to, no one who can help him. As I studied my father’s face in the moonlight, I realized I would always be serving a life sentence without parole because of the unpardonable cruelty of this one man. Now, on this night, my father had proffered his final gift to me—because I had kicked him across the lawn and beat him with my fists, I sat studying him at my leisure, deep in thought on the first night I ever thought of myself earning my natural birthright as a violent man. I was devastated. All during my childhood, I had sworn that I would never be a thing like him, and here before me, drunken and beaten, was living proof that I was the spitting image of Don Conroy.
But, in telling Barbara my story, I had felt a great lifting of the spirit, a cleansing and scouring and airy rising of the soul toward light. I felt what truth tasted like, and it rolled like honey off my tongue. I could change my life as a man if I could just quit pretending I came from a normal American family, if I could grant myself permission to hate my father with every ounce of loathing I could bring to the surface. If I was going to be truthful as a writer, I had to let the hate out into the sunshine. I owed it to myself to let my father know how much I hated every cell of the body that had brought mine to life.
I reached over and shook him. Turning over slowly, he tried to rise to his knees, and I helped him get to his feet. I put his left arm around my shoulder and we staggered toward the car together. I was going to tell him what I thought about him, but the words got confused in the passage, jumbled in the inexact translation as often happens in the strange world inhabited by fathers and sons. As I groped for the proper words, they formed by themselves—truth-telling words that could not be censored or slowed down, life-changing words for a bruised soul. In utter shock, I heard myself say out loud to the fighter pilot, “I love you, Dad.”
My father looked startled, as though I held a hand grenade up to his eyes with its pin dangling between my lips. He took off running, but drunks don’t run well, and I was beside him in a flash. I whispered in his ear, “I love you, Dad.” He lunged in the opposite direction, where I pursued and caught up with him and turned him like a steer with the taunting yet magical four words that the Great Santini, a disgraceful father, could not bear to hear. Every time I said the words, he would stagger away from them as though I were pouring acid into his eardrum.
When I wrote The Great Santini, I wrote about the drama on the Green exactly as it happened, and my father hated that scene more than anything I ever wrote. He told every journalist who would listen to him that I had made the whole thing up. “My son has a bit of an overactive imagination, as the critics have pointed out,” he said.
When they filmed the movie in Beaufort, the actors Robert Duvall and Michael O’Keefe performed the scene with such brilliance and accuracy that I would have sworn they had been eyewitnesses to the event itself. Of course, Hollywood filmed it on the Green, at the exact spot of its provenance.
But that was all in the future. That night, after exhausting my father by chasing him around the Green, I helped him into the car and drove him back to my house and put him to bed on the living room couch. I went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. When the sun came up I was drinking a cup of coffee on the front steps of my house, every cell of my body ablaze with astonishment and wonder and the full knowledge that I had just lived through the most amazing night of my life.
• • •
When I took Dad to the Marine Corps Air Station to begin his second tour of duty in Vietnam, it was only a few days after the night I would always think of as movie night with the Conroys. Dad and I did not speak a word to each other on the way to the base, but he grabbed my arm and squeezed it until it hurt and said, “Hey, asshole, never get yourself killed in a politician’s war.”
As I drove home that morning I realized that I would have to turn myself into a cunning translator of my father’s indirect, sclerotic use of the language. In his own rough way, I thought Dad had just taken baby steps toward some future day in the sun when he could actually say he loved his children.
So my father went off to w
ar for the last time in his life, and a month later, Walter Trammell, the superintendent of schools, fired me from my job on Daufuskie Island, after a scant nine months on the job. He fired me for gross neglect of duty, insubordination, being AWOL, and conduct unbecoming to a professional educator. After a recommendation like that, I would never teach again. The following day, I received my notice that I’d been drafted and was to report to Fort Jackson in ten days. I had reaped the whirlwind at last and placed my family in the most perilous situation imaginable.
Looking back, I can see how strange I must have seemed to a town like Beaufort, a white Southern boy who was a pain-in-the-ass liberal who believed in every part of the civil rights movement, welcomed the stirrings of feminism, and protested against the Vietnam War. My own zeitgeist had ambushed me in the streets, and the sixties changed everything about how I thought. Because I was raised on Hollywood movies, it wasn’t difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys when the fire hoses were turned on black people in Alabama who were singing songs about freedom. A different kind of white Southerner was forming all over the South, but we were young and our own voices had not been heard yet and would not be fully voiced until the elections of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Though I wanted to be part of this momentous change, I arrived a bit late to the dance.
My firing became a small news item across the state. When Joe Cummings of Newsweek came to file a story about the incident, it became a syndicated item in papers across the nation. Hollywood began calling, and Beau Bridges, the actor, came and spent the night at our house and fed my new daughter, Melissa, her two-o’clock bottle. A telegram to the selective service bureau in Washington slowed my induction until an inspection could be done by the South Carolina selective services director. Neighbors began writing letters to the draft board protesting that Barbara Conroy had already lost one husband to Vietnam and now was in danger of losing a second. Our house was in an uproar from morning until night, filled with friends who came up to help in whatever way they could—the scene was hip, inspirational, argumentative, and fast-talking, the nearest thing to the sixties revolution that ever happened to the white folks of Beaufort.
Then I lost the trial to get my job back, and the sixties were over for me. My first book, The Boo, was published the same week of the trial, and my mother planned an elegant party for me at her house on the Point. As my teaching life began to fade into the distance, the secret life of writing began to assert itself once more in my aggrieved psyche. I had begun to write about my year on the island and how that year had transformed me by demonstrating the shameful atrocities committed against black children in the South. “Separate but equal” is the most contemptible line ever spoken by a Southern tongue, and it was spoken a million times by a million liars all over the Southern states. With my time on Daufuskie, I thought I’d discovered some lost island made backward because of its isolation from the mainland. By accident, I’d discovered America, and the great tragedy would soon be clear to all, that America turned its hateful eye on the poor kids in the country—from sea to shining sea. I wrote The Water Is Wide in a white-hot fever, letting my rage pour out in burning funnels of lava. I wrote both day and night as I tried to re-create a magical year where I steered my boat, happy as a river otter, through weeds and rivers and vast miles of emerald marsh as I taught eighteen kids eager to learn about the world I set before them. Now my task was to tell the world about those kids, and I kept filling up page after page with words.
But I was a young man with no idea what being young meant. When I began to write The Water Is Wide, I was twenty-five years old and could not yet write about all the things I felt in my heart. I found my own voice elusive, and I harbored the melancholy dread of the amateur writer that every word I put down on paper was worthless and of no interest to anyone else. Still, I persisted, and the manuscript began to grow, and the yellow legal pages began to pile up on my desk. Somewhere in the middle of the passage, I realized that I had a story to tell, and one that had never been written by a white boy in my part of the world. Though I’m sure they were terrified doing so, Barbara and my mother were like lionesses protecting me from intrusions from the outside world.
In January, the selective service in Columbia requested my presence for a meeting at state headquarters. A friend named Zach Sklar prepared me for the meeting with exquisite care. I had met Zach because he had been one of the “California boys” who had spent a semester on Daufuskie for the sociology program. His father was a novelist and playwright; his mother had danced with Martha Graham’s troupe in New York, and years later Zach would receive an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay for JFK. A low-key intellectual, Zach possessed one of the sharpest political minds I’ve ever encountered as he prepared me for what could be a life-changing ordeal.
In my mind I’d gone over every possible scenario imaginable as I thought of the possibility of my getting drafted into the army. I thought about going to Canada, but that was the coward’s way out to me and not the way I was raised. Another option: A Marine sergeant whose family was rumored to have Mafia connections claimed that his cousin owned a judge in New Orleans. The sergeant told me to go to his hometown and refuse induction there while wearing nothing but a bra and women’s panties, and the judge would take my case from there. I also thought about signing up for Officer Candidate School, or fulfilling my natural destiny by going to Quantico and joining the Marine Corps. I thought of everything but could decide on nothing.
Before I left Beaufort, I received a Citadel haircut from Harvey’s Barber Shop on Bay Street. I spit-shined my inspection shoes from The Citadel and dressed in the blue suit I wore to my wedding. Out of nervousness, I spun my Citadel ring, which was always on my right hand. Barbara was so upset that day, I don’t even remember telling her good-bye. My mother hugged me at the back door and said, “You were raised to do your duty to your country, Pat. Never forget that.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I just don’t know what form that duty is going to take.”
In Columbia, I entered the office of a colonel who had taken temporary command of the selective services after his retirement from the armed services. He was a fine-looking, muscular man in impeccable shape, and gentlemanly to his core. I liked him the moment I saw him, and he flashed me a friendly smile as we sat down. I had spent a lifetime in the brotherhood of colonels.
His first move startled me. He was staring at a thick file of articles and letters when he looked up at me, tapped his ring on the table twice, and said, “The Citadel”; then he cited the year of his graduation.
Thinking that this could be very good news—or possibly catastrophic—overwhelmed me, but I recovered enough to tap my own ring on his desk and I said, “Citadel, 1967.”
“So, you’re the young man who’s been causing all the fuss,” he said as he waded through newspaper clippings.
“Yes, sir. I’m afraid I am.”
“Are you a conscientious objector, Mr. Conroy?”
“I most certainly am not,” I said.
“If this country was attacked by an enemy nation, what would you do?”
“Throw me a rifle, sir.”
“If I draft you today, what will you do?”
“Be a good soldier, sir.”
“When did you decide that?”
“On the trip up here,” I said.
He took out a piece of paper and studied it with great interest. He read the page again slowly; then he said to me, “The superintendent who fired you? He thinks he may have had a drink or two. He called a member of the draft board, who also admits that he too may have had a drink or two. The superintendent said he had just fired you, and a letter drafting you was sent out the next day. It’s the worst case of collusion I’ve ever encountered. Son, these people not only wanted to fire you, they wanted to kill you. It’s disgraceful.”
“I irritate people, Colonel,” I said. “I get it from my father.”
“Your father’s in Vietnam. Your wife’s first
husband died in Vietnam. How did he die?” the colonel asked.
“He was flying close air support for troops on the ground when he was shot down,” I said.
“You adopted the two children he left behind?”
“Yes, sir. Jessica and Melissa.”
“I’ve received over fifty letters from your neighbors protesting the fact that you received a draft summons.”
“They worry about Barbara, not about me,” I explained.
“These are some of the most moving letters I’ve ever received. They’re remarkable. One is by a Marine wounded at Okinawa who says he is a member of the John Birch Society. Why would he write a letter on your behalf?”
“That’s Dr. Charles Aimar. He’s always loved me. He doesn’t want to, but he just can’t help it.”
Then the colonel opened a drawer and placed a book from it on his desk. It was a copy of my first book, The Boo, which had been self-published a month earlier. I had never seen a loose copy of this book floating around anywhere. I was speechless as I stared at a photograph of the Boo’s head on the jacket of my book.