The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son

by Pat Conroy

  “I love this man for making me want to be a writer,” I said.

  “You’ll never be in his league, son,” Dad said. “As far as I can tell, you’re eating his jock.”

  “I don’t care. He brought me to the dance, Dad,” I said, happy that I had led him to this sacred ground to see the fountainhead of my career.

  “I bet nobody builds a museum in a house you lived in,” Dad said.

  “You’re right, Dad. I lived in twenty houses before I got to Beaufort.”

  In the spring of 1996, I received a phone call from my sister Kathy informing me that Dad was in the naval hospital in Beaufort in danger of dying from heart congestion. Though I was dating a wonderful woman in Asheville, Irene Jurzyk, whom I’d known as a writer in Atlanta, my life was moving me south and homeward. Several days before, I’d received a phone call from the son of the late, nonpareil poet James Dickey, who had once taught me in a poetry workshop at the University of South Carolina. I had read Mr. Dickey’s obituary with obsessive interest. I realized that his death was going to establish a backlash against his life and work. His machismo was of an in-your-face variety mostly found in sumo wrestlers or inside linebackers. He made no adjustments for the rise of feminism or even the civil rights movement. There was something Southern as well as a tricky refusal to adjust his beliefs to fit the fashions of his day. He was a natural conservative who fought a lifelong rearguard battle against that most imposing foe—the future. He was more like my father than any man I’ve ever met, and, like Dad, I’d come to view him as part of my destiny in my love-hate relationship with the fraught, hardscrabble world of men.

  “Pat, my dad’s family and I would love you to do the eulogy for my father,” Chris Dickey said when he called.

  Though it caused me some pain, I said, “I’ve got to be honest with you, Chris. I didn’t like your father very much. I avoided him like the plague after I left his classes.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily rule you out, Pat,” Chris said. I was not expecting such honesty in such a situation. “But from what I hear, you loved his writing,” he added.

  “I revered his writing. I always will,” I said.

  “Then we’ve got a deal,” Chris said. “I’ve had my own problems with Dad.”

  So I found myself on the exquisite horseshoe-shaped arena that is the pride of the University of South Carolina, with a bright pool of writers in attendance and a decent crowd for the best Southern poet who ever lived—hell, let me be not shy; in my opinion James Dickey is the greatest American poet who ever lived, and that poetry sprang from a bloodstream made by God, and his language changed the way I thought about art itself. I tried to give him a rip-roaring farewell and honor the man with a missing plane formation of fighter planes, like I’d done for my father at the end of The Great Santini.

  When I reached the podium above the manicured grass, the sun was shining so bright I could not read the eulogy I had prepared for my great teacher. I tried to adjust the yellow legal sheets and shift them out of the sunlight when I looked up and heard a building call out to me. I was looking at the shadow of the Cornell Arms for the first time in my life, the building my brother had plunged off on the night he died. One of my first acts after hearing about Tom was to read Dickey’s poem “The Leap,” which is written in perfect pitch and wonder at the suicide of a girl Dickey knew in elementary school who leaped to her death from a skyscraper after her life had proved impossible to live. Though I’ve many flaws as a writer, some egregious, I’ve no trouble with the language of praise. I thanked the poet for all the things he told the hurt heart of a young man who came to his class for enlightenment. As I told Chris and Kevin and Bronwen Dickey, I considered delivering James Dickey’s eulogy one of the highest honors of my lifetime. I got to fall in love with his children as an unasked-for bonus of the ceremony.

  Two hours later, I was sitting in front of my bloated father, who lay on a hospital bed with his feet and legs swollen beyond all recognition. His heart was endangered by a rising tide inside him. In the workup for his treatment of the congestive heart failure, they had also performed a colonoscopy, though Dad had fought the doctors at the very idea of such an invasion of privacy.

  “They took a Roto-Rooter up the sacred wazoo,” Dad said. “I’d have fought them with my fists, but I didn’t have the strength.”

  “What did they find?” I asked.

  “Colon cancer,” Dad stated. “Seems like I’ve had it for a long time. They’re trying to set up some chemotherapy as soon as I’m strong enough to survive it.”

  “Survive it!” I yelled. “Has the goddamn military ever given you a colonoscopy before?”

  “Negative. It’s not required on the annual physical, and I sure didn’t want to bring the subject up.”

  Putting my head in my hands, I said, “Dad, because military medicine is such a joke and a ripoff, you may die because your doctors were idiots.”

  “Your job is to pep me up, lift my spirit, sports fans. Hell, you’re making me feel a little boo-hoo about my situation. I’m going to tell Kath on you.”

  “Tell Kathy anything you like,” I said. “They can cure colon cancer, Dad, you goddamn idiot, if they get it in time. Yours sounds like it’s spread all over the place.”

  “Hey, I need some happy time,” Dad said. “You aren’t making me happy. I’m going to tell Kath.”

  For the next several days, I stayed with Dad at the naval hospital and watched as his gargantuan feet and legs began to respond to the medication, and the swelling began to subside all through his body. What gave me great hope was that the cancer was attacking one of the strongest men I’ve ever known, who brought an indomitable spirit to the gruff task of survival. In the next two years, the fires of life itself lit up his eyes, the eyes of a night fighter. It was an honor to watch such a man die and to know that I was that man’s oldest son. Both of my parents died with exemplary courage and resolve, and in so doing, they proffered their children the finest of gifts—they taught us how to die.

  When my father left the hospital, we took off on the first of many road trips we made during the last two years of his life. First, we went through Florida to see the Harper boys. We decided to keep off the interstates and take only the back roads down Highway 301 and through an almost deserted road along the eastern rim of the Okefenokee swamp and across the Florida state line. We never passed by an orange juice stand without picking up bags of oranges from the Indian River; nor did we ever pass an alligator farm where we didn’t feed fish to the leaping gators. At Alexander Springs, we stopped for a long, delicious swim and dog-paddled over and above the gloomy caverns that served as a fountainhead for the creek that headed out into the forest toward the St. Johns River. The springs were too cold for the alligators, which Dad and I took as a sign from a loving God. As we drove into the pretty town of Ashton, Florida, we headed down an unpaved road toward Bobby Harper’s house on the St. Johns River.

  “What’s unique about the St. Johns River?” Dad asked, as he used to when I was a boy and we’d get near the magical river.

  “It flows north,” I said.

  “Good boy,” Dad said. “I taught you kids about geography if nothing else.”

  Yes, he did, and I can still tell you all of the capital cities in the United States.

  “What’s the only other major river to flow north?” he asked.

  “The Nile.”

  “Hey, talk about advantages. You bellyache all the time about what a horseshit life a military brat is forced to live. But show me a civilian kid who knows about the Nile. You ain’t gonna find it. The military brat knows the world.”

  “It was worth it all because the Nile flows north,” I said.

  When we pulled up in front of cousin Bobby’s house, the four Harper boys—Bobby, John, Mike, Russ—were waiting for us with their families, and they engulfed Dad with their country-boy love that always flowed north when it came to honoring my Chicago-born father. Though I never quite understood the gra
nd relationship my father enjoyed with the Harper boys, it always moved me and caused me some slight agitation when I witnessed any gathering of the Harper tribe with my father at its dead center. They acted like some outlawed circus had arrived in town, with my Dad well rehearsed in his role as flashy, whip-happy ringmaster. For the next twenty-four hours, Dad would spin elaborate tales, and the Harper boys would answer him with applause and appreciation and a powerful surge of family solidarity that I found difficult to believe.

  • • •

  When I was a boy, I envied the Harper boys and the life they were leading more than anyone on earth. Since Uncle Russ was a dentist and a respected member of the community in Orlando and never planned to move, I wanted that kind of steadfastness in my own road-weary life. Aunt Helen was a beauty and soft-spoken, with a silky, accented Southern voice, who was incapable of any surprises or shocking eye-openers that would alter your view of her. The primitive Baptists of Sand Mountain, Alabama, had shaped her spiritual life out of the limestone and quarries of Piedmont. She was a pious and evangelical woman for her entire life. Whenever I spent the night with the Harper boys, Aunt Helen would send us to bed after a long reading from the King James Version of the Bible. The inflection of her voice was lovely, and the God of the Old Testament found one of his female soldiers passing His word on to her sons and nephews. The gorgeousness of language floated around her living room like tufts of cotton candy. I grew up believing that she was one of the great women of my life, and my sisters took me by surprise when they admitted to me later in life that they found Helen a priggish busybody who had tortured my mother about her divorce from Dad. Helen and Russ had swallowed my Father’s Kool-Aid and took his side during those ruinous days when Mom and Dad went their separate ways. I decided to forgive Helen and Russ for this lapse. I needed a perfect aunt and uncle to fill in for the crestfallen days of my youth, and they fit the bill admirably.

  The Harper boys had prepared a large barbecue in honor of Dad’s getting out of the hospital. Picnic tables overflowed with slow-cooked pork, and there were beautiful piles of blue crabs and shrimp taken from the St. Johns River. My father could not say a word without gales of appreciative laughter rising out of the semicircle of nephews surrounding him. The Harper boys had inoculated their own families with this bizarre form of Santini worship, and I saw my cousins of a new generation, Rusty, Benjamin, Robby, and Priscilla, all fall under Dad’s spell. As I listened to him regale the Harper family with his bright compendium of stories, the Harper wives kept the table overflowing with coleslaw and potato salad and biscuits hot from the oven. I don’t remember another soul speaking for the first two hours. It was a celebration of my father’s victory over congestive heart failure. Then Cousin John asked, “Uncle Don, tell us about the chemotherapy and what’s going to happen next.”

  “That’s it, Johnny, break the spell. Make us get back to the subject of my untimely demise,” Dad said.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” John said. “Honest, Uncle Don.”

  “You know how to make a fellow feel good,” Dad said. “Why don’t you get the undertaker on the phone and order me up a coffin while we’re at it?”

  “I just want to know how they’re gonna cure you,” John said.

  I interrupted: “I’d love to hear it too, Johnny.” Dad hadn’t mentioned a word of his treatment to his kids.

  Dad told them about his hospitalization. “They sent over a little guy whose name I can’t remember or pronounce. [It was Dr. Majd Chahin.] He’s this Iranian dude who seemed like he knew what he was doing. Course, how would I know what he was doing? It’s all Greek to me, if you get my meaning. But he’s the one they sent to repair the plumbing and all the other stuff.”

  “What’s the other stuff, Uncle Don?” Cousin Russ asked.

  “The stuff. The bad stuff. The stuff that’s causing all the problems,” Dad said.

  “The cancer, Uncle Don?” John said.

  “Yeah, that stuff. That’s the bad stuff. Dr. Sinbad explained it to me.”

  “Who’s Sinbad?” my cousin Mike Harper asked.

  “My doctor. The Iranian whose name I can’t pronounce. Since I can’t pronounce his name, I’ve nicknamed him Sinbad. He seems to like it,” Dad explained.

  “Better make sure, Uncle Don,” Russ warned.

  “Well, he explained the process to me. I go in and he hooks me up with those jumper cables to the veins in my arms. Then he takes bags of stuff, hangs them up, then goes away for a couple of hours while I watch a ball game. The bag’s got the good stuff. It gets inside of me and sends out a search party for the bad stuff. When the good stuff meets the bad stuff, they duke it out, and the good stuff beats the living stew out of the bad stuff. If it does its job right, the good stuff cuts down the nets and the bad stuff goes home to sulk. But that don’t mean I’m out of the woods just yet. The bad stuff’s going to make a comeback. I’ll go out of commission …”

  “Remission, Dad,” I corrected.

  “Whatever the wordsmith says, but when the bad stuff makes its comeback, Sinbad will be there waiting with a couple more sacks of the good stuff. Again, the good stuff goes looking for the bad and they duke it out again. We hope the good stuff kicks ass again—pardon the French, ladies. I’ll do whatever Sinbad says. Hell, I’ll fly a magic carpet for that guy. He seems to know his stuff and he talks a good game. But the bottom line is, the good stuff dukes it out with the bad stuff and that’s the end of the tale. Over and out. Could we bring up a happier story?”

  Over the last years of my father’s life, I heard many versions of the same story, and it all devolved into a sacred crusade of good and evil played on a game board of mortality. Dad could get you rooting for the good stuff and giving a unanimous thumbs-down to the bad. I believe it had formed because of my father’s inability to contemplate his own death, but his was as clear an explanation of chemotherapy that I’ve heard anywhere.

  At five the next morning, Dad woke me up and said, “Reveille has sounded, soldier. I’ve got something to show you that you ain’t going to believe, jocko.”

  “I’ll believe it at ten in the morning, thanks,” I said, turning my head in the darkness. “I haven’t seen five in the morning since I left The Citadel.”

  “You’re going to see this,” Dad said, as he turned on the flashlight and we walked down the dock. Bobby’s wife Lonnie handed us mugs of hot coffee as we went out to meet Bobby, who was waiting for us on the dock.

  “Uncle Don wanted you to see this, Pat,” Bobby said as he turned a huge flashlight into the deep-currented St. Johns River. When man-made light swept across a river or a swamp in the marsh-haunted waters of the Deep South, I knew that an alligator’s eyes would glow like the light from Japanese lanterns. Over the years Dad and I had often seen the fiery witness of alligators to our passages on fishing trips with Uncle Russ. But in this moonless darkness we were stunned to see hundreds of gators regarding us with the carmine eyes of cold-blooded predators.

  “Want to go for a morning swim, Dad?” I asked.

  “That’s a good idea, Uncle Don.” Bobby grinned. “I’ll come in after you give the okay signal.”

  “I wouldn’t go into that water after a squadron had strafed that water clean of reptiles. I wouldn’t put a single piggy of my left foot in that mess. Hell, I wouldn’t live within five hundred miles of the St. Johns,” Dad told him.

  “Stay and hunt with us today,” Cousin Rusty said. “We’ll fry you guys up some gator tail. I guarantee that you and Pat’ll love it.”

  “I made a pact with all the wild shit in the world,” Dad said. “If it don’t eat me, I won’t eat it. I used to see packs of sharks following in the wake of aircraft carriers, and they really helped me concentrate on my landings. I’m proud of the fact that I never got my feet wet when I fought in the Pacific.”

  When we left the Harpers, we drove down back roads toward the Atlantic, where we made stops at Daytona Beach and Sanlando Springs and Rock Springs, places that the Con
roy children had come to revere whenever Dad was waging war overseas. In Florida you are always near a bright-eyed source of water that flows with a quartzlike purity from a plunging hole in the dark Florida earth. We were especially fond of Rock Springs, which was undiscovered and often deserted and seemed to boil out of the rock like the birth of a powerful river. All of us felt disappointment when we returned as adults and Rock Springs seemed like a waterway that was barely larger than a creek. We had grown up and the springs had not.

  Cousins Mike and John met us over at the assisted-living facility where Aunt Helen had been a resident for two years, suffering from dementia. Though I knew my father was disconcerted by the milieu of hospitals, he had spent a lifetime teasing and poking fun at Helen, who carried no weapon to resist his insistence on mocking every word out of her mouth. It was an Irish street urchin going after a backward Southern girl who was defenseless to ward off his aggression. But they had somehow managed to discover a way to love each other, and Dad was the only person I knew who could make Aunt Helen laugh.

  Using two canes that he now needed to walk because of his bad hips, my dad passed a hundred beds of people in various stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. There were vases full of roses and jasmine and every other blossom that gave off a delicious scent, fitting the state of Florida—the place of flowers in our national dream. The sweetness of the arrangements cut through the odors of antiseptics and bedpans as thunderstricken relatives sat around their loved ones in agony about what to do or say to comfort such lifeless vessels of silence, where souls had passed on to the next dimension, but their hearts still beat in time and one could only guess whether they could still dream.