Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “Got a complaint about you, Lucy,” Sheriff Littlejohn said.

  “I’ve got a drawerful of complaints about you, Lucy,” the wildlife officer, Jane, said. “But Lucy insists that she knows better than any law enforcement could.”

  “If you know so damn much, explain why the loggerhead’s an endangered species,” Lucy said.

  “As your attorney of record, I advise you to remain silent, Mother,” Dallas said.

  “Mama, are they going to arrest the turtle lady?” a little girl cried out.

  “I’ve been doing this same job for years. The same damn way,” Lucy said. “They keep changing the rules on me.”

  “I’ve got a warrant for your arrest, Lucy,” Sheriff Littlejohn said.

  “Hey, Sheriff, Mom’s sick. She’s not going to spend the night in jail,” I said.

  “I went to school with you, Littlejohn,” Dupree said. “You flunked English.”

  “I got a D,” Littlejohn said.

  “Who’s got a tire iron?” John Hardin said to the crowd. “I’m gonna beat this redheaded woman down to crab bait.”

  “You heard him, Sheriff,” the woman said. “He threatened me in earshot of the law itself.”

  “He’s got more voices talking in his head than a TV set,” the sheriff said. “Pay no mind.”

  “What law was broken, Sheriff?” Dallas asked.

  “No one’s allowed to go into a turtle nest,” the sheriff said.

  Jane from Wildlife said, “She helps them get to the ocean. That’s against the rules.”

  “My mother didn’t touch a nest tonight,” I said. “You’ve got a beachful of witnesses. My daughter and I dug up that nest. Isn’t that true?”

  The crowd murmured its assent.

  “Then I’ll be pleased to arrest you, Jack.”

  “But she supervised the whole thing,” the redheaded woman said. “She was definitely in command.”

  “Cuff me, Littlejohn,” Lucy said, playing to the crowd. “It’ll be front-page news across the state.”

  A man’s voice rang out behind the sheriff. “Leave my wife alone, Littlejohn.” It was Dr. Jim Pitts, who had run down from the screened-in porch to see what the disturbance was. “They were making pancakes and waffles from these turtle’s eggs when we got to the island. Lucy changed all that.”

  “Get back to your houses, people,” the sheriff called out to the crowd, but they refused to disassemble and remained clustered and aggravated, waiting to see how the confrontation would resolve itself.

  “She sacrifices everything for these damn turtles,” Dr. Pitts said. “Everything.”

  “We’re not saying she hasn’t done good work in the past …” Jane said.

  “I dug up all the turtles, Sheriff,” Leah said. “I put them in the bucket and I carried them down here near the beach. My grandmother didn’t do one thing.”

  “That’s right,” people in the crowd said.

  “If anyone touches you, Mama, I’ll kill them with my bare hands,” John Hardin said, moving between the sheriff and his mother.

  “The arrest warrant’s got your name on it, Lucy,” Sheriff Littlejohn said.

  “Let me just go down to the jailhouse,” Lucy said. “Come with me, Dallas, and bail me out of there.”

  “Trust a goddamn lawyer in this country?” John Hardin said. “After Watergate I wouldn’t trust one of you bastards to read out a phone number from the men’s room.”

  “Shut up, John Hardin,” Dupree said. “You sound like you need a shot.”

  “A man expresses a simple opinion, Dupree, and you call for Thorazine.”

  Sheriff Littlejohn ended the discussion by cuffing Lucy’s hands together in a single, economical movement that caught everyone by surprise. Lucy took two steps toward the squad car, the sheriff firmly gripping her elbow. Then Lucy interfered with the arrest by fainting head first into the sand in front of her. Dr. Pitts lunged toward her and lifted her head out of the sand as John Hardin tackled the redheaded lady and wrestled her to the sand. My brothers pulled John Hardin off, but he punched Tee in the mouth and kicked Dallas squarely in the genitalia as the crowd began shouting so loudly that someone sitting on their deck up the beach went in and alerted Security at the Isle of Orion gate. When the sheriff fired a single shot in the air to restore calm, Dr. Pitts screamed loudly and commanded that everyone step back and allow Lucy room to breathe. Sheriff Littlejohn sighed, then bent down and unlocked the handcuffs that bound Lucy’s wrists together. Lucy looked as frail as any shell that lay strewn and storm-tossed on the beach. Dr. Pitts had tears running down his face, but they were fierce tears of anger, not sorrow. Though he tried to speak, fury disbanded any words, and he stammered over the body of his wife. This stranger who had married my mother, I thought once more, loves her far more deeply than any of us realize.

  “Rape, murder, pillage, drugs, and mayhem all over Waterford County,” Tee screamed, “and the high sheriff of the low country boldly arrests our mother, an environmentalist with leukemia. Good work, Littlejohn, you silly-ass loser of the twentieth century.”

  The crowd slowly divested itself of a shape, drifting like smoke into the gentle last light, a moon sneaking a forehead above the waterline to the east. I knelt down and lifted my mother up into my arms and began walking back to her house. Still trying to find words, Dr. Pitts trailed behind us and Dallas picked up Leah and rode her on his back, following our lead.

  In the house Dr. Pitts exploded after I had taken Lucy to her bedroom and she had recovered strength enough to take a sip of water and change into her nightclothes before she fell asleep.

  “I have something to say to you boys,” Dr. Pitts began as he poured himself a tumbler full of scotch. “I know you love your mother and I know she loves you. But you’ll kill her faster if you don’t get control of yourselves. All of you need to learn to be part of a room without filling it up. You need to learn to be in a scene without being the whole scene. You don’t need to be the funniest, the wildest, the craziest, the weirdest, or the loudest person on earth to get Lucy’s attention. She loves all of you. But there’s too much commotion around you boys. I demand that you quit turning every single thing into an event. Everything is over the top when you guys are around. Learn to relax. To muse things over. To look at things calmly and at a normal pace. Why is that impossible with you McCalls? Why must every day seem like a home movie from the Apocalypse? Your mother needs rest from all this. She needs quiet. And tomorrow, you’re giving her a party and the whole town’s invited. Everybody. I haven’t met a single soul who isn’t invited to Lucy’s party. Black, white, everybody in town has called to RSVP for tomorrow and even Lucy doesn’t know half of them. Things move from an event, then a spectacle, then an extravaganza. You attract noise and disorder. You’re all in love with what’s bad for Lucy. You’re killing her. You boys are killing what you can’t stand to say good-bye to …”

  “I agree with Dr. Pitts,” John Hardin said. “You guys are just scumbugs and shouldn’t be allowed near Mama.”

  “Why don’t you write a ‘Dear Abby’ column for fruitcakes, John Hardin?” Dupree said.

  “You had the worst grades of any of the brothers, by far,” John Hardin lashed back. “The only job you could hold down was locking up crazy people.”

  “No harm in that,” Dupree said. “I get to spend all my time round wonderful guys like you.”

  “What a low-life, criminal-type loser you are,” John Hardin said to Dupree. “Making a mockery of the mentally ill.”

  “You two are scaring Leah,” Dallas suggested quietly. “Jack’s raised her to think that life is full of teddy bears, free pizza, and photos of the tooth fairy. She’s been vaccinated to fight off the full horror of being a McCall.”

  “Listen to you, here it goes,” Dr. Pitts said. “Each one of you takes it to a higher and higher pitch. Can you shut up? Can you shut your mouths now and let my poor wife sleep?”

  “Shall we call off the party?” Tee asked Dr. Pitts.r />
  “Your mother would never speak to me again if I called off her party,” Dr. Pitts said, rising and moving toward his bedroom. “Help me make it go smoothly, boys. Please. I beg of you.”

  “Hey, Doc,” Dupree said seriously. “Thanks for loving our mom. It’s nice of you and we appreciate it.”

  “She’s had a hard life,” I said, “and she hardly got a single break. But Mom’s said that you are the best thing that ever happened to her.”

  • • •

  When Lucy rose the next morning, refreshed and vibrant, she referred with delicious irony to our party for her as “The Last Supper.” She put on a pretty dress that she had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue in Atlanta and a broad-brimmed hat that came from a boutique on the Via del Corso in Rome. She radiated the natural prettiness she had brought with her out of the North Carolina mountains, as she watched Dr. Pitts make her breakfast and fret over her. His sweetness clearly tickled her, even though there was something schoolmarmish and fastidious about it. His mouth was pursed constantly as though he had just said “harrumph” and his face looked like the old maid on the dog-eared pack of cards that we used to play with on those days that we stayed home from school with fevers. It seemed to me that their love was based on their common need for order and mannerliness in their lives. Both had endured lives of chaos and incivility in their first marriages, and they provided each other with safe harbor at last.

  The town of Waterford had finally, after forty years, grown accustomed to Lucy’s way of doing things. It knew the tenderhearted, deferential Lucy as well as it knew the vulgar, unaccommodating one. Five hundred townspeople came to her “Last Supper,” two hundred more than were invited. Lucy never stood on ceremony, and everyone in Waterford knew that her door was always open. And she always smiled in public. They all came to say good-bye to her famous smile.

  Mike Hess had suggested the whole affair be catered and done up right but we had insisted on doing all the cooking ourselves. Like all of my close friends, he had fallen in love with my mother long before he ever got around to falling in love with girls his own age. When Mike gave his first interview in Premiere magazine, he told his interrogator that he first knew that small towns were the residences of goddesses when he went to his best friend’s fifth birthday party and caught a glimpse of Lucy McCall. Mike had spent so much time at my house as much because of Lucy’s good-natured flirtatiousness with young boys as his closeness to me, and I always knew it. Lucy was one of those charismatic mothers who took the time to listen and counsel her children’s friends and by so doing influenced all of us, for better or worse, who were lucky enough to be around her.

  The Red Clay Ramblers set up on the riverbank and played their sweet music for hours at a time. Senator Ernest Hollings held court on one side of the huge expanse of grassy yard that led from the back of the house to the water, and his Republican counterpart, Strom Thurmond, kissed the hands of every lady in sight as the air filled up with the smell of a feast bad for the arteries and good for the soul. Dupree had a pot of Frogmore stew simmering near the line of picnic tables and I could smell the pork sausage, mingling with the fresh corn and shrimp, cutting the air with its special tang of barnyard, field, and saltwater creek. Opposite me stood Dallas, dressed in jeans and shirt, shoveling oysters onto tin sheets spread over cinder blocks and heated by a fierce wood fire. He would place the oysters with great precision, evening up their exposure to the heat, until they would pop open from the force of their own interior steam and spill their fragrant juices onto the tin. Then Dallas would shovel the opened oysters onto picnic tables covered with newspapers and the perfume of those washed-down mollusks gave off a silvery, slightly metallic musk of a rained-on acre of spartina. Tee and the sisters-in-law served platefuls of barbecue, which glistened in a mustard-based sauce that made the pork look like it had been painted with gold leaf. Three open bars had the crowd garrulous and ice chests full of beer were packed down and there for the taking. The women had come gussied up because they knew from experience that Lucy did not know the meaning of the word “casual” and would come dressed to kill no matter how hard they tried to wrestle the secret of the dress code for the party from her.

  Mike had been standing beside Lucy and Dr. Pitts on the veranda to form an informal receiving line that marched up the front steps, shook hands with the guest of honor beneath the shade of eight Ionic columns, then passed through to the center of the house and down the outside staircase following the music and the smell of good food. I had given Leah the job of recording the entire event for posterity on a camcorder.

  “You’re the producer, the director, the soundman, and the gaffer all rolled into one. Make like Fellini. Make us all famous,” I had told Leah.

  For the rest of the afternoon Leah wandered, in her white dress, through the immense, good-natured crowd. She was now as much a part of Waterford as anyone there and each time she aimed her camera at a strange cluster of people, someone would notice her, step back, and introduce the entire group to her. More than once I heard some man or woman she had never met say, “Lawd, child, if you aren’t the spitting image of your pretty mama. Shyla took ballet lessons with my grandchild, Bailey, and if those two just didn’t have a time. She was graceful as a lily on stage. I know, child. I was there.”

  Leah seemed relieved to have her camera between her and the lost country of memory these people claimed to see with such clarity when they stared at her features. Every time I overheard the name Shyla, I felt again the cold solitude of being motherless that was being pressed on Leah. And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

  As I kept eight pots of salted water turning out perfectly cooked pasta, it seemed as though the drama of my whole life paraded by. Mrs. Lipsitz, who had fitted my shoes during my entire boyhood, ordered spaghetti with pesto sauce from me as she stood chatting with Mr. Edwards, who sold me my first suit. He had come with Coach Small, who had taught me to throw a curve ball, and Coach Singleton, who had shared the secrets of downfield blocking with me. He stood near Miss Economy, who once made me sing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” solo on New Year’s Eve when the ice storm hit Colleton and killed an oak tree that had been growing along the river when Columbus discovered America. Over fifty black people mingled through the crowd and I thought again how lucky I was to have been raised by Southern parents who not only were not racists, but who worked with uncommon zeal to ensure that we were uninfected by the South’s virulent portable virus. Our parents represented something very fine and dangerous at a time when Southern whites stood shoulder to shoulder to demonstrate their attention to ideas both insupportable and un-American.

  In 1956, when I was just eight years old, my father, Johnson Hagood McCall, was a brilliant, if irascible, jurist. At that time, in the early apprenticeship of his drinking, lawyers dreaded his court because he did not tolerate lack of preparation or the wasting of his time. His tongue lashings of counsel were famous and withering. His court sessions were orderly and his judgments fair. Though Johnson Hagood was neither a good father nor an admirable husband, the law ennobled him and brought out aspects of character that surprised even him. But it was not a good time in South Carolina history to combine valor with a judge’s gavel.

  He was a circuit judge of the Fourteenth Judicial District, and was away from Waterford for long periods of time in that position. The case that brought him to grief was simple but controversial in the rural county where it came to trial. A high school English teacher by the name of Tony Calabrese had been fired from his job for advocating openly in his classroom the integration of the public schools. Mr. Calabrese was employed by the Reese County School Board and Reese County was known all over South Carolina for the backwardness of its citizens. My father referred to Reese County as the “incest capital of the world” and he held its lawye
rs in utter contempt. Tony Calabrese admitted that he had advocated the integration of schools, but only as a teaching tool and only to stimulate class discussion among students who he felt were brain-dead and bereft of all ideas. It did not help that Tony Calabrese, who had been born in Haddonfield, New Jersey, to immigrants from Naples, was a practicing Roman Catholic and an open Republican.

  As the trial unfolded, it became apparent to my father that the school board had not followed a single one of the procedures for due process when it fired Mr. Calabrese. On the witness stand, the teacher himself was fiery and unrepentant and gave the counsel for the school board all he could handle. Mr. Calabrese bristled with outrage and stated that the world of ideas would not be eclipsed in any classroom over which he presided and he would not be bullied by anyone for thinking whatever he saw fit to believe. As my father listened, he thought that the trial of Tony Calabrese was a good thing for every small town to go through and he found himself silently cheering for the embattled teacher as the mood of the courtroom grew testier and more hostile. He began to identify with this incandescent plaintiff who had brought suit against an ill-prepared school board.

  Toward the end of the trial my father asked Calabrese, “How did you get down here to Reese County, sir?”

  Calabrese looked up and smiled at him, then said, “Just beginner’s luck, Your Honor.”

  My father laughed, but his was the only smile in that grim-faced court. He ruled in favor of Calabrese, reinstated him with pay, then made the mistake of lecturing both the school board and the citizenry of Reese County.

  “You cannot fire a teacher for discussing in class what is contained in the daily headlines of our newspapers. One may disagree with the concept of integration, but anyone who reads can see it is inevitable. You can fire a hundred Calabreses today, but integration will still be coming tomorrow. Calabrese was simply preparing your children for the future. His firing was an act of frustration, because you want so much to hold on to the past. I’ve read Brown v. the Board of Education over and over again. It’s bad public policy, but it’s good law. You cannot fire a man for teaching about a constitutional right. Integration’s coming to South Carolina, Calabrese or not.”