Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “You don’t know what a bad son I’ve been to her, Leah,” I said. “You don’t know the things I’ve said to her. Unforgivable things. I’ve looked at her with pure hate in my eyes so many times. I never understood her and I punished her for that ignorance. I’m afraid she’s going to die before I’m ever able to apologize enough times.”

  “She knows you love her, Daddy,” Leah said. “I heard her tell Dr. Peyton the other night that she doesn’t know any other son in the world who would move all the way from Italy just to be with his mama when she needed him.”

  “Did you make that up?”

  “She said something like that,” Leah said. “That’s what she meant anyhow.”

  Early that night we walked on the beach again and felt the sea underfoot as we waded through the reflections of the evening star endlessly repeating itself in the pools created by the withdrawing tide. The coming of summer was announcing itself as the water temperature grew warmer every day. The cells of each wave began to light up with the approach of June, and each field on the way to town was covered with tomato vines and green fruit pulling sunlight out of the air. The days were already beginning to be hot long before the sea got the word. An ocean was a hard thing to warm up, but Leah and I felt it happening as we splashed along the beach waiting for the moon to rise. A mist rose off the cooling sand and gulls flew north above them in the last light. A gull cried and it always made me think of heartbreak and a solitude that had no name. I hoped my own loneliness was not contagious and that it would not pass through my bloodstream and enter the pale wrist of my daughter. I loved Southern nights like these, and I wished I were a brighter, less-brooding figure as we walked hand in hand along the beach and I steered her beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky.

  For an hour we walked along the shore until the night had taken hold completely as we started back toward Lucy’s house. The stars were brilliant now and the air smelled of sargassum, mollusks, and pine. Up ahead, we heard a sudden commotion. The moon threw off a reluctant, crescent-shaped light, and in it Leah spotted the huge turtle ahead of us and let out a cry of distress when she saw a young man jump on the loggerhead’s broad-backed shell and begin slapping against the turtle’s shell and front flippers screaming like a buckeroo. We ran forward.

  “Get off the turtle, son,” I said, trying not to lose my temper.

  “Fuck you, mister,” the boy spat out and then I saw that he was showing off for his girlfriend.

  “Please get off the turtle, son,” I said. “That’s about as nice as I can say it, kid.”

  “Maybe you don’t hear too well,” the college-aged boy said. “Fuck you.”

  I grabbed the boy’s shirt and he somersaulted backward off the turtle. He was older and larger than I had first judged and he rose up ready to fight.

  “Relax. This is a female loggerhead who’s coming ashore to lay her eggs,” I said.

  “I hope you got a good lawyer, asshole,” the boy said, “because there’s a big lawsuit in all this.”

  “Daddy, she’s going back to the ocean,” Leah cried out.

  The loggerhead had slanted off to the right and was in the midst of a great heavy turn navigating her ponderous way back to the water. The boy tried to cut her off but stepped aside when I warned, “Her jaws can take your leg off, son. She can kill a full-grown shark with those jaws.”

  The boy skittered out of the way as the great beast rushed forward hissing, her breath rank and fishlike, polluting the air with an otherworldly smell. As soon as she reached deep enough water to displace her enormous weight, she transformed herself into something swift and angelic and disappeared like a seabird into the enfolding sea.

  “You let it get away,” the boy shouted.

  “What were you going to do with it, kid,” I asked, “paint its back and sell it to a five and dime?”

  “I was going to cut its throat.”

  I had not noticed the approach of a flashlight coming down the beach, but Leah had and was already running toward the approaching figure. The next thing I knew the young man held up his knife threateningly close to my face.

  “Loggerheads are on the endangered species list. It’s a crime to interfere with their nesting,” I said.

  “Put the knife down, Oggie,” the girlfriend pleaded.

  “I’ve been fishing and hunting my whole life, partner,” Oggie said, “and my father always told me how good turtle steaks tasted cooked over a driftwood fire.”

  “Your daddy’s an old-timer,” I said. “That could get you jail time now. There’s easier ways to eat seafood.”

  “Can I see the bill of sale where it says you own this beach, asshole?” Oggie said.

  “I used to swagger the same way when I was your age,” I said, “but I didn’t used to cuss. That’s what MTV does to your sorry generation, don’t you think?”

  “Who climbed on the turtle’s back?” I heard my mother say as the flashlight blinded Oggie, who turned his head away.

  “I did,” Oggie said. “I rode it for about ten yards before this jerk-off knocked me off it.”

  “What’s the knife for, son?” Lucy demanded.

  “This guy attacked me,” Oggie said. “It’s for self-defense.”

  The flashlight cracked down on the boy’s wrist bone and the knife fell to the sand. I picked it up, walked to the water’s edge where the surf was breaking cleanly, and hurled the knife as far as I could out to sea.

  “That knife’s private property,” Oggie said, massaging his wrist.

  “It still is,” I said.

  “My mother’ll report you to the cops,” he said, walking back toward the line of houses glowing with electric light.

  “Who’re your people?” Lucy asked. “Who do you belong to?”

  “I’m a Jeter. My grandfather’s Leonard Jeter.”

  “Tell Len I said hi. I’m Lucy Pitts,” she said. “Keep off the turtles, son. We want them to put their eggs in the sand.”

  “I don’t see you wearing no badge, lady.”

  “Shut up, Oggie,” his girlfriend said as they disappeared out of the flashlight beam and into the paler light of houses.

  “What’ll the turtle do now?” Leah asked her grandmother.

  “She might just dump her eggs in the ocean, darling girl,” my mother responded, directing a beam of light out toward the waves. “But the urge is pretty strong for her to put them in the sand. Maybe she’ll wait us out and come in when there’s not a soul on the beach.”

  “Especially Oggie,” Leah said.

  “He’s a Jeter,” Lucy said. “His people are nothing but trash.”

  “Mother, please,” I said.

  “I’m just stating the facts,” she said. “The whole family’s got dirty fingernails. It runs with ’em, like freckles.”

  “Daddy doesn’t like people to put labels on other people, Grandma,” Leah explained.

  “He doesn’t?” Lucy said. “You can call a loggerhead a two-headed chicken, but that don’t make it so. Same as a Jeter. You can dress that boy up in a tux, teach him the manners of a queen, and you still ain’t got no Huguenot. Call a Jeter Rockefeller and you still got a Jeter striding up your backyard. Right, Jack?”

  “Shut up, Mama,” I said. “I’m trying to raise her to think differently.”

  Lucy laughed and said, “Too bad, son. You brought her South. That’s the way the South thinks and she might as well get used to local custom.”

  The next morning Leah woke me before sunrise, telling me to hurry. She had fixed me a cup of coffee to take to the beach for the morning patrol. We rode our bicycles to Lucy’s house and parked them near the outdoor shower before removing our Docksiders and joining Lucy who was already on the beach. Lucy handed Leah three seashells, which she had gathered along the tide line.

  “Those are perfect for your collection. We’ll fill up a jar of them and make you a lamp to take back to Rome,” Lucy instructed, placing three lady slippers into Leah’s hand. Leah admire
d them, then put them carefully into my pocket, and warned me not to forget they were there.

  “Did the mother turtle come back?” Leah asked.

  “It’s your job to find out,” Lucy said. “You and your father are responsible for this next mile of beach. I’m responsible for the whole program.”

  “We’re the first people out,” Leah said, surveying the island from north to south.

  A squadron of brown pelicans flew overhead, their shape and wingspan so effortless in the morning air that their appearance seemed a quiet psalm in praise of flight itself. They passed over us like shadows stolen from the souls of other shadows.

  “Let’s go swimming,” I suggested.

  But Leah shook her head. “Not before we check the beach for loggerheads.”

  “I trust Leah with this job,” Lucy said. “I don’t trust you, Jack.”

  “A few minutes wouldn’t make any difference.”

  For three hundred yards we walked in the wet sand, our footprints of different size but related in shape and with precisely the same arch. Leah kept her eyes on the ground ahead of her and she screamed when she saw the heavy markings of the loggerhead, cutting a swathe through the sand ahead of us.

  “She came back,” Leah shouted. “She came back.”

  Leah followed the deep cut the flippers had made when the turtle had returned from the sea. Lucy and I held back, letting Leah survey the scene where the tracks ended and the turtle had dug her nest.

  I was carrying the bucket and the long silver probe, which was a nine-iron with its club face broken off during a match. Leah took the damaged club and approached the mound the loggerhead had thumped down like tobacco in a pipe before she had returned to the Atlantic.

  “She lays her eggs while facing the sea. Study her shape. The turtle fills in the hole with the same hind flippers she digs it with,” my mother said.

  Leah probed the sand as my mother had taught her to during a training season that had gone on for over two months. Leaning on the ruined club, she stuck it into the sand and looked up at Lucy when it did not give. Pulling it out, Leah tried another spot in the great round indentation where the turtle’s shape was imprinted. With quick, sound thrusts, she kept stabbing into the well-packed sand until she hit a spot where the shank of the golf club sank. Leah knelt down and probed the sand cautiously with her index finger.

  “It’s here, Grandma,” she cried out. “It feels like flour that’s been sifted. The rest of the sand is hard-packed.”

  “That mother turtle fooled a lot of raccoons,” Lucy said, “but she didn’t fool Leah McCall one minute.”

  “Should I dig them up?” Leah said, looking up at her grandmother.

  “We’re taking them all up this year,” Lucy said. “We’re going to rebury them up by my house where it’s safe.”

  “What does the South Carolina Wildlife Department say about that?” I asked.

  “They don’t like it worth a damn,” Lucy admitted. “Dig, Leah. Dig, darling.”

  For several minutes, I watched as Leah lifted handfuls of sand from a carefully crafted, hourglass-shaped hole. Her eyes were fiercely concentrated on the job as she went deeper and deeper, relying totally on her sense of touch, letting her hand follow the soft and giving sand. Then she recoiled and froze.

  “Something’s there,” Leah said.

  “Lift it carefully,” Lucy said. “Everything you bring out is precious.”

  Leah’s arm moved slowly, bringing up a round white egg slightly larger than a baby’s fist. It was ivory-colored, and leather soft. It was a capable-looking egg; it looked big enough to hatch ospreys or vultures, but not quite big enough to create something so beastly and magnificent as a loggerhead.

  “Place the egg in the bucket carefully, Leah,” Lucy said. “Make sure the egg is facing the exact same direction as it was when you took it out of the nest. Nature’s got her reason for everything. Put some sand into the bottom of the bucket first. That’s it.”

  Time after time, Leah reached into the darkness up to her shoulder and brought up from the nest a single egg like a jewel. Her movements were all reverential. Never did she hurry in her excitement and the introduction of each egg seemed like part of some elaborate dance of the seasons.

  “Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty …” Leah counted as she placed them one on top of the other and Lucy made notations in a small notebook.

  “Look, the turtle tried to climb over these rocks and didn’t make it,” Lucy said, pointing to tracks that led up to the large granite boulders that the owners had imported for erosion control. Sand was a preeminent force in the low country and no rocks were indigenous to the area. “Our houses on the beach kill more loggerheads than ghost crabs or raccoons ever thought about killing. They should never’ve allowed houses to be built in front of the sand dunes.”

  “Seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three …” Leah kept counting.

  “Was this a good place to nest?” I asked.

  “A good spring tide would’ve flooded this hole for sure,” she said. “This nest didn’t have a chance. But you can’t blame the loggerhead. What can she do about those damn rocks? She’d need a grappling hook and a long rope to get over them. Then how would the babies get back to the sea? The whole thing’s a bad business.”

  Carefully, Lucy recorded the location of the nest, the day and time of its discovery, the number of eggs laid, and the approximate time the turtle had come ashore to hollow out her nest and lay her eggs. Leah placed one hundred twenty-two eggs in the bucket, then carefully filled the hole back up and packed it down neatly with her feet.

  “Now, let’s get these babies to a safe place,” Lucy announced, handing the heavy bucket to me.

  Leah walked ahead of us at a quick pace, taking the bucket to the area my mother had staked out for the birthing ground of this year’s crop of loggerheads. My mother stopped to collect a row of clam shells that had washed up the night before. They were as prettily strewn as candy. When I turned back to the business at hand, I saw Leah being approached by a uniformed woman.

  “Who’s that?” I asked. “Up by your house?”

  Lucy groaned and said, “Trouble, with a master’s degree. Let me do the talking. She gets confused when someone’s kind to her.”

  The young woman was uniformed and pretty and was talking to Leah in quick, animated conversation about the gathering of turtle eggs. Leah gestured toward them and then bent to the sand to demonstrate how she had found and procured the pail of eggs I was carrying.

  “I’ve always loathed women named Jane,” Lucy said, preparing for battle. “It predisposes them toward mischief and indigestion.”

  “You conducted a study?”

  “A lifetime of observation, son,” she whispered, but her voice turned voluble and cheerful as they approached the straight-backed woman. “Hello, Jane, I was just telling my son what a pretty name you’ve got. Jack, meet Jane Hartley. You’ve already met my granddaughter, Leah.”

  “You allowed her to dig up a whole nest of loggerheads,” Jane said in a voice official and distant. She was wearing the uniform of the South Carolina Wildlife Department. “I bet you didn’t tell Leah it was against state law and that you spent a day in jail last summer for doing the same thing.”

  “That’s not true, is it, Grandma?” Leah said.

  “It’s technically true,” Lucy admitted, “but nothing is so unconvincing as mere technical truth. Hand me the shovel, Jack. I’m going to dig a fresh hole.”

  “I’m confiscating these eggs,” Jane said, getting up and taking a step toward me. But Lucy moved between us with resolve and intent.

  “This year I’m not losing one egg to the stupidity of you idiots in the Wildlife Department. Not one,” said Lucy.

  “You love playing God, don’t you, Lucy?” Jane said.

  “For a long time,” Lucy said, flipping through her salt-splashed notebook, “I played it by the book. Admit it, Jane. I didn’t touch one turtle’s nest. I followed all the dir
ectives of your department to the letter. Nature knows best, Jane Hartley and the State Wildlife Department said. Let the eggs lie where the mother buries them. Let nature take its course, you ordered. Nature’s cruel but nature has its reasons.”

  “Those rules still apply,” Jane said. “We find it more logical to follow God’s way of doing things than Lucy’s way.”

  “My way gets a hell of a lot more baby loggerheads in the water than God’s way and this notebook proves it,” Lucy said, waving her notebook over her head like a weapon.

  “My grandma loves the turtles,” Leah said.

  “She does love the turtles,” Jane agreed. “It’s the law she doesn’t give a damn about.”

  “My son is a world-renowned writer and author of cookbooks,” said Lucy with egregious ill-timing. “He’ll remember every slanderous word you utter. He’s got a mind like a steel trap.”

  “You are impervious to my mother’s charms, Officer Hartley,” I said.

  “Your mother’s a pain in the ass, Mr. McCall,” the woman stated. “My job is difficult enough without having to fight with someone who claims to be on the side of ecology.”

  “Listen to what her side did, Jack and Leah. They sent out a memorandum to all the turtle projects on the South Carolina coast. There’s one on every island from here to the North Carolina coast. Every island’s having erosion problems. Half the nesting habitat of the loggerheads’ve been destroyed in the past ten years. Everybody in the program’s worried sick. Those geniuses put out a new set of rules that say we can’t touch an egg or a nest once the turtle has laid. We can’t protect a nest, move a nest, guard a nest—nothing. They’ve all got nice offices in Columbia. They’re all drawing big salaries. They’re all feeding off the lifeblood of taxpayers like me.”

  “Someone’s got to pay for my Maserati,” Jane deadpanned to me.

  “Could we compromise?” I suggested. “We’ve already gone a little far according to the law.”

  “If I had my way you’d get a year in jail for each egg in that bucket,” she said briskly, but was startled when Leah began screaming.