Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  It took Jude over a month to come up with the plan he was praying for in chapel twice a day. That night after the reverend had returned to his office and he could hear Lucy weeping quietly, Jude watched the postcoital ceremonies and ablutions take place through the lit window. Even Lucy was asleep when the young boy moved like a cat from his upper bunk and made his way to the office door of Willis Bedenbaugh. He wanted to make Reverend Bedenbaugh deeply regret the fact that he had chosen to violate the sister of Jude Dillard, who was mountain-born and carried some of the rage of the mountain folk as his birthright. He waited for the snoring to begin and once it began, Jude entered the office.

  The soft form slept and snored beneath a feather comforter. Jude went to the desk and saw the flaming eye of the pipe still lit in the ashtray, smoldering and angry. He opened the first drawer on the right as he had often seen Bedenbaugh do and he reached in and felt the tin can filled with fluid for the silver cigarette lighter. He found the cigarette lighter beside the pipe and he took that in his left hand and kept the lighter fluid in his right. His mother had done it differently, but his idea was much the same. Her strength had been in her resolution, in the fact that she had formed a plan. He wished he were older so he could understand more, but he was old enough to realize that he could not hold his sister’s hand another time without dying of shame.

  He removed the tiny red top of the lighter fluid and he began to apply it to the feather comforter that covered the reverend. The can made a squeaky sound, so he tried to time it with the man’s snoring. Jude was patient and thorough and though it took him almost a half-hour, he managed to empty the tin can without spilling a drop on himself.

  For another ten minutes, he tried to summon the courage to light the lighter. He had never lit a cigarette lighter and had only watched Reverend Bedenbaugh do it. He felt the rough wheel with his thumb. In his imagination, he spun it and it leapt with a flame that jumped to the roof of the orphanage. He flicked it once, but nothing happened except a small scratching noise like a rodent loose in a box. The sound changed the rhythm of the minister’s snoring and Jude waited a full minute before daring to try again. The second time was no better and again the minister stirred in his sleep. On the third time, Bedenbaugh woke up and smelled the lighter fluid that had leaked onto his nightshirt, soaking it. It took Jude four times to learn how to work a cigarette lighter.

  “What are you doing out of bed?” the man demanded, slurring the words.

  The lighter ignited and before the boy touched it to the comforter, he sang in a clear voice, “ ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ ”

  Then he set the man afire and Bedenbaugh exploded into light, rising out of his bed and running with his bedclothes on fire. He ran through the dormitory screaming, and with each step he became more of a torch and less of a man. He burned increasingly brighter and his tongue, untouched by fire, could only make noise, not words. At the end of the room, his hair ignited the dark cotton drapes, as his body, crisped and blackened, sank to the floor on his knees and he died full of the smell of his own ruined, black-dappled flesh.

  Jude Dillard watched the man on fire drop on the other side of the room, noticed the sleeve of fire climbing up the drapery, and realized that, at the age of eight, he had just killed his first man and felt that cleanliness of the spirit that justice always leaves as its signature. In his mind’s eye, the burning shape of that man would stay with him always. Every confession or act of contrition he ever made included his remorse over the death of Willis Bedenbaugh. In nightmare after nightmare, Bedenbaugh would blend with his father in a terrible twinship and their mutual screams would teach the sleeping priest again and again about the penalties of fire. His contemplative, buried life began as he watched his enemy fall to the pinewood floor and heard the voices of orphans screaming out the word “fire.” It also marked the beginnings of his life of silence and Jude could not utter a word for a full two years after the burning of the orphanage. Lucy led him out of the fire by the hand and he followed as obedient as prey toward whatever fate awaited him after his only murder.

  The frame building burned all night and took over half the jobs of the village into the air with it. The general consensus was that Bedenbaugh had fallen asleep after finishing his half-pint of scotch and the ashes of his pipe had set his bedclothes on fire. He was the only fatality in a disaster that he himself had caused and the villagers saw some glimmer of justice in the incident. Bedenbaugh’s remains were quickly buried and quickly forgotten, for little more than teeth and bones were raked out of the charred ruins.

  A temporary home was set up in the girls’ dormitory of Newberry College and a quick dispersal of the orphans began as a call for help went out among the farm families of the Piedmont. A tobacco farmer near Florence selected Jude from a lineup, but was dissuaded from taking him by Lucy who insisted that no one would separate brother and sister and split up what little family still existed for both of them. When the college students returned to Newberry College after their summer break, Lucy and Jude were the only two survivors of the orphanage fire who had not found homes.

  Lucy longed for softness and deliverance in the eyes of people who came to look at her and her brother with the same appraising eyes with which they judged livestock.

  But she knew that nothing was more unplaced or expendable than an orphan. By aligning herself with a speechless, damaged brother, she made herself unadoptable, unplaceable. Each day in Newberry her eyes hardened and she gained a source of interior strength as she began to understand the burden of being judged worthless. Her character formed that summer. Lucy would be living proof that you get in the way of a child savaged by fate at your own risk. By watching over her brother’s interests she transformed herself.

  In September, Lucy overheard a conversation in which the chaplain of the college spoke with the proctor of the girls’ dorm about the possibility of committing Jude to the state mental hospital on Bull Street in Columbia. She had heard of peculiar children being sent to Bull Street and never being allowed to leave that institution again. But Lucy decided that she and her brother had been born to enough sorrow. She alone knew that her brother had reduced himself to a state of contrition that overwhelmed and hamstrung his every waking moment. He was a soft boy, a songbird who had lost its music to the fear of hawks. Jude needed a strong sister and strong she became. He had made her rapist pay a horrific price for her deflowering and she would protect him from the cells that muffled the cries of the insane. For two days she stole food from the college kitchen, stockpiling it beneath her cot. From a poor box in the Anglican chapel, Lucy stuck a piece of chewing gum tossed away by a Newberry coed to a long stick and raised up eighty-six cents as if by magic. She absolved herself of all guilt by explaining to her unobjectioning brother that they were as poor as anyone who would receive comfort from the coins in that poor box.

  That night, they slipped away from the dormitory. Leading her brother by the hand, Lucy walked him through the sleeping, indrawn town to the outbound street she had heard called the Columbia highway. For eight hours, she forced-marched them both, putting miles between themselves and the town. They wandered the back roads of South Carolina for a month, sleeping in clearings in the forests, in fields of corn, in haylofts and stables. At night they moved from place to place, distrustful as all nocturnal creatures are, and they learned to relish the taste of raw eggs and warm milk fresh from a cow. They gleaned and foraged where they could around the outskirts of farms. By accident, they made their way toward the coast, avoiding Columbia because they dreaded the connotation of Bull Street and the asylum. Since they started out only after sunset, they grew comfortable with starlight and they moved down dirt roads sided by deep fields of ripening crops and under a night sky ablaze with constellations they could not name. Because neither child had spent a day in school, the world held very few names for them.

  Hand in hand, they traversed the state of South Carolina unnoticed. They left broken eggshells to
mark their trail and gorged themselves on wild fruit and crabapples. They watched a drunken farmer club a dog to death that had killed a chicken and that night, over a fire that could be seen for miles, they ate the chicken and Lucy laughed for years over the thought that Jude had also wanted to take and eat the dog. She learned on that queer odyssey through darkness that hunger expands the horizons of one’s recognized cuisines. The love they felt for each other sustained them and both would look back upon this long, adult-free journey as the happiest days of their scarred, ill-fated childhood.

  Without plan, they drifted in an aimless, sleepwalking fashion beneath trees now embroidered with long scarves of moss and palms, bringing news of the coast. The earth itself changed perceptibly beneath their feet, becoming sandier and more acidic. Invisibly, the water table rose and cypress swamps began to echo with the night colloquies of owls and the territorial cry of a bull gator alarmed by the approach of a rival on the waters inky with silt and seed and algae. They passed through the forests unnoticed by the thousands of eyes that scanned the sunless, foreclosed world where most were hunters and all were prey.

  As citizens of the night there was a fairyland quality to their sense of movement. Since Jude could still not talk, Lucy made all decisions, such as where they would hide during the daylight hours. They roamed until they started to weaken, and once they started to weaken, they quickly began to die. When she could not waken Jude from his starved-out sleep, Lucy walked directly toward the smoke rising from an unpainted farmhouse. Without hesitation, she knocked on the door and the first black woman she ever would speak to answered the door. The black woman’s name was Lotus and it was a day of deliverance for Lucy and her unconscious brother. Lucy could not have brought her brother to a home of poorer people or one more enlivened by a natural generosity of spirit.

  When Jude awoke he was sucking on the little finger of a huge black woman who had dipped it into a jar of molasses her husband had milled himself. She had spread the molasses along Jude’s gums and teeth. As a small girl Lotus had known great deprivation herself and so she set to the task of fattening up the two white children who appeared out of nowhere at her front door on the edge of the Congaree swamp.

  For three weeks, Lotus fattened her foundling white children, watching the color rise in their cheeks as she fed them with biscuits slathered with butter, bacon cooked crisp in a steel frying pan, and all the eggs she could get them to eat. At lunch and dinner, she cooked every kind of bean and vegetable she could coax from her garden and they feasted on cabbage and field peas and okra and pickled beets. Lotus made their bloodstreams electric with fat and iron and vitamins.

  But a farmer moving a load of hay toward Orangeburg saw the two white children playing in the yard of a black family and reported it to a magistrate he struck up a conversation with in a crossroads feed store four miles away. His duty done, the farmer continued with his hay toward Orangeburg and his anonymous life, but not before the lives of Lucy and Jude Dillard were once more about to be altered.

  Since it was against the law for black and white people to cohabitate, Sheriff Whittier simply took possession of Lucy and Jude, put them in the backseat of his car, and drove them to the county jail where he put the two children up for the night.

  Again, they found themselves unwanted and without value and they were moved from jail to parish house until they were put on a train to Charleston with a circuit judge who turned them over to a terrifying woman dressed in a black, hooded robe who welcomed them to St. Ursula’s Catholic Orphanage in Charleston. On a quiet street, tree-lined and moss-dappled, the children landed in a bizarre world of golden chalices and incense and splendidly cassocked priests who murmured in Latin. But they came to Catholicism without prejudice, since they had never seen a Catholic or heard of that religion in their entire lives. At first, they were amazed by its rituals and exoticism. The effigies of Jesus and the saints frightened them with their silent domination of niches and corners of the church and it seemed to Lucy one could go nowhere to escape the disapproving gazes of those lidless, all-seeing icons. The nuns and priests seemed otherworldly and were the first adults Lucy had encountered who dressed unlike the rest of humanity, but rather in imitation of the plaster of Paris statues they worshiped with folded hands and strings of black stone.

  From the beginning, Jude flowered in the greenhouse environment he encountered in the good-hearted discipline of the nuns. He loved their strictness and passion for order. His silence they took as a sign of both saintliness and discipline and they favored him from the first day. One nun, Sister John Appassionata, took a special interest in Jude and under her devoted care he found his voice again. She taught him the alphabet and before long had him reading first-grade textbooks from beginning to end and doing subtraction problems. His mind was quick and he learned things in a hurry.

  Lucy’s experience at the orphanage was not as successful. After the soft ministrations of Lotus, Lucy felt more like an inmate at St. Ursula’s than welcomed guest. The sister in charge of the girls’ ward was a tight-lipped, straight-backed woman who tolerated neither laxness nor levity among the sixteen girls assigned to her dormitory. The world frightened her and she made sure she transferred that fear to all those girls in her charge. She taught them to hate their bodies because they had committed the unforgivable crime of being born female. In the Bible, there was proof that God hated women when he highlighted their subordination and created them second from a useless rib of Adam. The menstrual cycle gave testimony to woman’s crime and her uncleanliness. Bernadine did not enjoy being a girl.

  So, the city of Charleston, a stain-windowed greenhouse of ferny richness and wall-eyed, leering perversion, became the vessel of rescue for the two wandering children who had been born unlucky in the mean South. Charleston broke its poor in the same way the mountains did, but the city camouflaged the soft emanations of evil.

  Charleston would prove to be a lucky city for Jude and a very unlucky one for Lucy. Their lives divided here and they would lose touch with each other for years. Jude would bloom under the tender gazes of nuns and priests who would glow in the presence of his natural goodness, which began to take on an otherworldly quality as he grew older. The rituals of Catholicism would nurture him from his first days in St. Ursula’s. He withdrew into a country of prayer and, for him, that withdrawal contained the seeds of vocation. The Common of the Mass was rich in both silence and language and his spirit ripened in the luxury of its forms. Under the tutelage of John Appassionata, he asked that he and his sister be baptized in the Catholic cathedral as Roman Catholics. Thoroughly battle-hardened and cynical, Lucy saw the wisdom in this move and memorized the answers to catechism texts she heard the other girls reciting in class. Already, the nuns had noticed that Lucy could not read or write a word and she was openly referred to as “retarded” by Sister Bernadine. The word seemed to fix Lucy in time and made her invisible.

  Soon she ran away from St. Ursula’s for the first time. She knew what it was like to be a runaway, but she was new at doing it alone or in a city. Lucy was thirteen years old when she crossed East Bay Street and headed for the docks. Fast lessons would accrue to her and she would learn that there was nothing more dangerous in the world than a young girl trying to make it on her own in the sad part of a city. A man bought her a train ticket to Atlanta, where she led a wanton, luckless existence until my father walked into her life. That’s what passed for a lucky day in my mother’s life.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Since the first day we had arrived in Waterford, Leah felt enormous pressure from all sides to be happy. It became almost a civic duty for her to look as though she were having a good time. People remarked about her happiness as often as they commented on the possibility of rain or the barometric pressure. Many times, she felt as closely watched as a prisoner on parole for good behavior. She did not mind being noticed, but resented being studied. The town made her far more aware of being motherless than Rome ever had. Wherever she turned, Leah
was bumping into Shyla’s past. Suddenly, her mother seemed everywhere, yet for Leah she remained elusive, untouchable in both her consciousness and life. The more Leah learned about her mother the less she was certain she knew anything about Shyla at all. In synagogue, one Saturday, Elsie Rosengarten, an elderly Jewish woman who had taught Shyla in the second grade, burst into tears when she was introduced to Leah.

  I explained later, holding my child’s hand. “It shocks people because you look so much like your mother.”

  “I look something like you too.”

  “Not enough for anyone to notice,” I said, catching a sideways glimpse of Leah, wondering if the beauty of their children humbled all parents. Since our return there was rarely a night when I didn’t get up at three in the morning to make sure Leah was still breathing.

  “Do people think I’m going to do something to myself just because Mama did?” Leah said. “Is that why they’re looking at me?”

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  “It is so,” she said. “You’re just protecting me.”

  “No, I’m not. People can’t believe I could raise a girl all by myself who’d seem so normal and well adjusted,” I explained. “Your mother was all over you when you were a baby. Nuts for you. She wouldn’t let me or anyone else near you for the first year. She made it seem as though it was a great sacrifice to let me change your diaper.”

  “How disgusting,” Leah said.

  “You’d think so,” I said. “But it’s nice when it’s your kid and it’s part of the job to be done. I liked changing your diaper.”

  “You’re worried about your mother dying, aren’t you?” Leah said, putting her cheek on my forearm. “I can tell.”

  For a moment I hesitated, but I could hear the call for intimacy in her voice, the desire for me to let her enter those grottoes where I tended my own fear of my mother’s illness.