Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  Dr. Pitts joined us on the deck and I could tell that my mother had already shared the news with him. He walked over to her, fresh-shaven, dapper, and I could smell the sharp scent of his cologne in the air as he lifted my mother out of her chair and she collapsed into him. Her husband held her and I learned something about the quiet strength of men as he whispered something to her I could not hear. Enveloped in his arms, I saw the comfort that he conferred upon my mother by merely opening himself up to her. Not one of the men in my family could have performed this vital yet very simple function. My mother buried her face against his chest and I turned my own face away, realizing how much of an intruder I was at this moment of bittersweet intimacy.

  “I think we should call off the party for Lucy,” Dr. Pitts said. “You can break the news to your brothers, Jack.”

  “No,” my mother said, drawing back from him. “That’s my party. It’s still going to go on.”

  “They wanted to celebrate your remission,” Dr. Pitts said.

  “No one has to know I’m out of remission,” she said. “It’ll be our secret. No law that you have to tell your brothers everything. Is there, son?”

  “No law,” I agreed.

  “I’ll buy the prettiest dress in Atlanta,” she said, kissing Dr. Pitts on the cheek. Then chilled me by saying, “It’ll be the one I’m buried in.”

  And so my brothers and I began planning the party in honor of our mother that would take place on Labor Day and that we had announced to the world would celebrate the fact that her leukemia had stayed in remission for over a year. As we meted out each of our assigned tasks I was strangely comforted by the fact that none of my brothers yet knew that the white cells in her blood were on the march again. Her bloodstream had frightened all of us with its capacity for jeopardy and betrayal, and although we knew about mortality and accepted it on both an intellectual and primitive level, we had never focused on the fact that our mother might die, that she might one day leave us. Because she was so young when we were born, our mother seemed more like an older sister and confidante than she did a parent. Her complexity continued to surprise us all as we grew older, and it would have been impossible for any of us to describe her in a couple of glib, tossed-off sentences. If each of us had been compelled to do so, no doubt descriptions of five different women from various latitudes, or even solar systems, would have been the result. Lucy took pride in being mysterious, unplaceable, night-shaped. She had wept when we had told her about the party we planned to give her. While my brothers interpreted these tears as tears of gratitude, I knew she was weeping at her sons’ fierce refusal to acknowledge that she was dying. Mike Hess offered to host the party and provide all the liquor at his plantation house. Dallas, Dupree, Tee, and I spent the week before gathering the food. What we had in mind was a day of ecstasy and jubilee celebrating Lucy’s triumph over insurmountable odds.

  When Dr. Peyton had called from the hospital with the results of her recent blood tests, he confirmed that she had gone out of remission. He told her she must come in to start more chemotherapy treatments the very next day.

  “No way, little doctor,” she said. “I know my chemo now. It put a lot bigger hurting on me than leukemia ever did. My boys are planning a party for me and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Your choice. But while you’re eating fried shrimp, those white cells are going to have an open season.”

  “I looked up my kind of leukemia in my husband’s medical textbooks. According to them, my cancer is particularly ornery and I don’t have a chance in hell of surviving, whether I get that chemo or not.”

  “There’s always a chance, Lucy,” the young doctor said.

  “That same chance’ll still be there after my party,” Lucy said. “My boys have been planning this all summer.”

  “Why is this party so important to you?”

  “Because it’ll be the last party I’ll ever attend on this good earth,” she said. “And I plan to enjoy every minute of it. Please come; my boys know how to feed a crowd.”

  Tee had come up with the idea of throwing a huge, unforgettable party in praise of Lucy. Once he fastened his attention to this party in the abstract, he drove us to distraction to attend to the details that would make it a reality.

  “I’m the idea man in this outfit,” Tee told us. “It’s up to you guys to bring the party favors and buy the swizzle sticks.”

  “How many people you thinking about inviting, idea man?” Dallas asked.

  “The sky’s the limit,” Tee said.

  We then told Lucy that there were no limits to the number of the people she could invite, and she took us at our word. Her heart softened even toward her enemies and her eyes would grow dim as she told us about why she had quit speaking to certain women in the town. She pitied anyone who had not gotten to know her since she finally summoned up the courage to kick the judge out of her life. She was a harder version of herself when she spent every waking moment trying to cover up for the havoc he left in the trail of his binges and blackouts. It was not fair that her life was ending just when she had it all figured out and was moving in a straight line, at last. She loved it that we had insisted on giving her the party and was moved that so many people had called to say they were coming.

  In the last week of August my brothers and I got up early and went fishing for the party. Tee and Dupree went out on a boat in Lake Moultrie and caught the landlocked bass that grew to be huge in those chilly, man-made depths of the lake near Columbia. Silas McCall and Max Rusoff bought a license and spent the week trolling for shrimp even though both men had passed their eightieth birthdays. They headed the shrimp themselves and iced them in seawater in quart containers. The gathering of food for Lucy’s party was ceremonious, valedictory. Only Dr. Pitts and I were weighted down by the awful knowledge that the cancer would soon steal the vitality and bloom from Lucy’s famously rosy complexion. We knew that she was drying up from the inside.

  The night before the party, on the Isle of Orion, Lucy led us down to the designated nesting grounds in front of her beach house. Here, marked with flat rectangular stakes, and rimmed with wire fencing, she and her volunteers had reburied the eggs of the mother loggerheads that had begun to lay their eggs in the warm, inert sand on May 15. The beach erosion had been furious, with great storms devouring the sand. Four nests had washed away before Lucy informed the South Carolina Wildlife Department that she was ignoring their directive to let the nests stay where the loggerheads had laid them in the sand. The sight of turtles’ eggs soaked with seawater and torn open by crabs and sea birds sickened Lucy. Each gold yolk she found drying out against the shells represented another notch on the belt of extinction to her. There had been thirty-seven nests that summer and she and her co-workers had removed two thousand seventy-four eggs to the nursery that she could watch over from her front porch on the beach.

  The incubation period in the hot sands was two months and even in the release of the baby loggerheads, Lucy did not see fit to obey the law to its letter. According to department rulings, if someone was granted permission to move a loggerhead’s nest (which Lucy had not been granted), that individual could not touch that nest once the eggs had been reburied. The department agreed with Darwin that the laws of natural selection were paramount and should be allowed to make their own severe covenants of choice when the turtles burst from their nests and made their race for the sea.

  But over the years Lucy had seen too much attrition among the ranks of the baby loggerheads that she considered wasteful and unnecessary. Once she had found ten baby turtles stacked like tin cans in the den of a ghost crab, most of them still alive and helpless, waiting for the crab to decapitate them and dine on their heads. She had watched as raccoons moved among the turtles, fighting with the seagulls who swept down on the babies from above, biting off their small heads and dropping their shells into the shallow breakwaters. Lucy had also witnessed the turtles making it to the waterline only to be snatched up by the wickedly swift
blue crabs that waited for them in the surf or to be devoured by small sharks and blues who waited in deeper water.

  Though she could do nothing about the enemies they encountered in the ocean, she devised a plan that at least gave them all a chance to make it into the sea. Every time that Lucy Pitts moved an egg that summer, she broke a South Carolina law. But almost every baby loggerhead under her protection knew the taste of seawater before it began on its journey out toward the Sargasso Sea.

  At sunset, the night before her party, my mother marched out of her house holding Leah’s hand and my brothers and I lined up behind her in single file. She carried a bucket and a large clam shell to dig into the undermined nest. Betty and Al Sobol, her chief assistants, were already waiting with the usual congregation of tourists and their overexcited children. The news of the turtle release program had already made it the leading tourist attraction on the island after golf. Lucy had a strict code of rules and instilled discipline into the tourists, who were careful to stay behind the demarcated area that Lucy had fenced off.

  “Is the nest ripe?” Lucy asked Betty Sobol.

  “See for yourself,” Betty answered. “They’re ready to go.”

  Lucy waited for us to gather around her and for the tourists to arrange themselves comfortably within earshot. She took her role of teacher with great seriousness and she had no comic side when it came to her turtles.

  She brought the same sense of style to the turtle program that she had brought to the story of Sherman and Elizabeth during the Spring Tour of homes. What she said could not be written on placards, but there was a sincerity in her voice that was authentic, bankable. Before the development of the Isle of Orion, hundreds of loggerheads once made their nests on this same beach. The story was the same for many species of animal all over the world before the great, slow-footed dance of extinction gathered speed as man continued to poison and lay waste to everything he loved the best. She pointed to the nest they would uncover that night and told the children to note that the sand had fallen into a soft funnel, which meant the turtles had broken their shells and had begun to dig themselves out. They were interfering with this process, Lucy explained, because she wanted to give the most turtles the greatest possibility to survive the dangerous voyage ahead. The children groaned when Lucy told them that only one of these turtles would survive long enough to come back to this same beach to lay her eggs.

  “Many of us will be dead when that lone turtle returns,” Lucy said. “I want some of you children to promise me that you’ll come back each summer to help make sure these turtles will continue to survive. Promise me. Raise your hands.”

  Leah’s hand shot up first, followed by those of every child who stood attentive in that quasi-military semicircle. Noting the unanimity, Lucy nodded, then sank to her knees and studied the contours of the nest they would excavate that night.

  “Dig with your hand tonight, darling,” she said to Leah, who began to take handfuls of sand from the deepest point of the inverted V. When she took out her fourth handful of sand, she was holding a wriggling, electric body of a small turtle.

  “Keep a strict count,” Lucy warned. “One hundred nineteen eggs were in this nest.” Lucy took the first turtle, examined it to see if it still had egg yolk attached to its abdomen, then placed it in her bucket.

  “One,” Leah said, and then she brought out two more turtles and handed them to her grandmother as children squealed and pressed forward.

  Lucy studied each turtle for signs of the egg yolk which would drown them if it were still on their shells when they were placed in the ocean. A little blond girl broke lose from her mother and asked Lucy if she could hold one. Lucy placed it in the five-year-old hand and asked, “What’s your name, sweet roll?”

  “Rachel,” the child answered.

  “Put it in the bucket. This turtle’s named Rachel.”

  “Is it mine?” the girl asked.

  “That’s your turtle,” Lucy answered. “Yours forever and ever.”

  Leah brought up ninety-six turtles that were ready to make their walks to the sea that evening. Twenty-three were still weighted down with yolk they would need to absorb before they tested their strength against the Atlantic. Leah buried those turtles again in the same sand she had removed. She smoothed it flat with the palm of her hand and covered it with wire to prevent the raccoons from making a mid-morning raid.

  The crowd followed Lucy and Leah down to the beach fifty yards away. With the shaft of a damaged, headless five-iron, Lucy drew a large semicircle in the sand that she told the crowd they could not pass beyond. The tourists spread out along that drawn perimeter and watched closely as Leah tipped over the bucket and those ninety-six turtles boiled out and made their first struggling efforts to reach the sea. The tide was coming in and running strong to the north as those tiny loggerheads, afire with sudden life, each the size of a silver dollar and the color of unshined military shoes, fanned out in careless disorder, each one enclosed in the sudden responsibility of its own destiny. The crowd began to cheer, urging the turtles onward as they made their halting, unskilled way toward the roaring surf. One turtle led the way, breaking far ahead of the pack. But all of them moved in the same direction.

  “How do they know to go toward the ocean?” a young mother asked.

  “Scientists say the light,” Lucy explained.

  “What do you think?” the mother asked.

  “These are South Carolina turtles like my boys here,” Lucy said, smiling at us. “I think they listen to the waves. I think they just love beach music.”

  When the first turtle hit the first wave it tumbled upside down and righted itself quickly, undeterred. It had felt the element it was destined to join and when the second wave hit that turtle was swimming. Pure instinct drove those tiny turtles toward the surf as the topography and smell of that beachhead imprinted themselves forever in their newly hatched primitive brains. Once they had made this walk to the sea, you could take those loggerheads on a spaceflight to Mars, return them to the Lido of Venice, and they would still make their way back to the Isle of Orion to lay their eggs. In them, the homing instinct was a form of genius.

  As each turtle reached the water, I could see the joy in Lucy’s face. She never tired of watching the little creatures struggling over the sands until they reached the sea. Once in the water, they took off like young buntings in first flight. She watched as their tiny, snakelike heads appeared on the surface of the wind-driven sea, to take in a pinch of air, then resume their glorious and perilous journey. Her happiness was an earned pleasure that she could share with strangers.

  “Leah,” she said, reaching for Leah’s hand again, “every time I see this, I feel like I’ve discovered God all over again.”

  A young mother who had red hair approached Lucy and said, “This is against the law, isn’t it? I read an article recently that said that man should let nature work in its own way.”

  “Then nature wants the loggerhead turtle to die out,” Lucy said.

  “Then that is God’s will,” the woman said.

  “It might be. But I sure as hell don’t agree,” Lucy said.

  “You’d go against God’s will?” the woman, who wore a gold cross on her necklace, said.

  Lucy answered, “It won’t be the first time the two of us’ve disagreed. This is the third night you’ve been with us for a turtle release.”

  “No, it’s my fourth,” the redheaded woman said, looking away from the beach toward the line of houses.

  “Stay for Labor Day,” John Hardin said to the woman. “We’re giving my mother a big party. Everyone’s invited.”

  “I won’t be here that long,” the woman said, as Lucy saw revolving blue lights reflected in the woman’s pupil. “In fact, I’ve got to leave now.”

  “You shouldn’t’ve called the cops,” Lucy said. “I try to help the turtles have a fighting chance.”

  “You break the law,” the woman said. “I have a degree in biology. You’re interfering
with the natural process.”

  “Lady, you called the cops on my mother,” John Hardin said, blocking the woman’s escape route.

  “Kill her, John Hardin,” Tee said.

  “Shut up, Tee,” Dupree warned, moving between John Hardin and the woman. “Easy now. This can all be explained.”

  “My mother’s got leukemia, lady,” John Hardin said, his anger growing as the police drew closer. “You think going to jail’s going to help my mother fight cancer?”

  “No one’s above the law,” the woman said.

  “How many years in prison’ll I get after I kill this woman, Dallas?” John Hardin asked, and now some of the other tourists began to murmur among themselves and one woman shouted for the police to hurry.

  “It wouldn’t count as premeditated murder,” Dallas said. “You went wild after the lady arrested your mama, who was dying of cancer. I think you’d probably serve three years with time off for good behavior.”

  “My boys are big pranksters, honey,” Lucy said to the terrified woman.

  “But I’ve spent half my life in the insane asylum up in Columbia,” John Hardin said. “Surely, a jury’d have pity on a poor schizophrenic.”

  “Cut it out, John Hardin. Quit egging him on, Dallas. Relax, honey. Go on up to my house and fix yourself a drink,” Lucy said, and she waved a finger of warning at the rest of us as the sheriff approached accompanied by the young woman who worked for the Wildlife Department.

  “My, my, Sheriff,” Lucy said. “What are you doing out here on a pretty night like this when hunters are out killing deer out of season and good ol’ boys are staked out all over these creeks baiting for shrimp?”