Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  Celestine Elliott took up the narrative from there, slipping elegantly into the witness chair and speaking in the direction of Jordan, Ledare, and myself. She said that General Elliott had caught a hop back to the air station when he heard of the catastrophe. She drove directly from Highlands to their quarters on Pollock Island. By the time her husband arrived home after long hours of organizing the scene and talking to news agencies, she had rid the house of any sign of Jordan’s presence. She had scrubbed out his name, which he had written in her lipstick on her husband’s shaving kit. She had followed her son’s footsteps from the maid’s quarters to her husband’s workshop to the letter he had written and carefully hidden in her jewel box. She had read Jordan’s letter confessing to the crime of blowing up the plane in which he explained that he had done this to show his father that he had inherited the general’s fine, martial spirit, a spirit that understood the nature of military strategy, bold offensive, and the element of surprise. Jordan wanted the destroyed plane to end his father’s career as a Marine officer. He wanted to bring disgrace and ruin to his father’s house. This act was his reply to his father’s humiliation of him on the courthouse steps. His father’s spit would be answered with fire and his own blood.

  In sentences that she had found almost unbearable to read, Celestine said, holding back her tears, Jordan described how he’d reserved the boat under another Marine’s son’s name and stolen the packet of Gillette razors. He wrote that he would head the boat out to sea at night. He would cut his wrists and throat, and when he felt weak would lower himself over the sides of the boat after tying an anchor to his waist. The last sentences were incoherent, she said, and far from characteristic of Jordan.

  She burnt her son’s last letter because she did not think her husband could survive it. She burnt it and washed the ashes down her kitchen drain. She fixed herself a drink and waited for her husband to come home. When the general arrived, a new wife awaited him, one far more broken and tamed than the one he had left on a golf course at Highlands.

  Celestine began to drift into a twilight region where she seemed to be either sleepwalking or drinking far too much. Her husband thought the drinking was due to the death of Jordan. It had started after his boat was found drifting in the Atlantic with traces of his type-O blood soaking the seat cushions and staining the woodwork. The shrimper who found the boat said it looked as if someone had slaughtered a buck in the boat’s gunwale.

  It was then that the Elliotts consulted with the chaplain and planned the small private memorial service for Jordan. After the service, General Elliott confronted Shyla, Mike, and me outside the base church.

  “I want you to know I think that his friends are responsible for my son’s death,” General Elliott said as Celestine tried to pull him away.

  Shyla flashed with anger. “Funny, none of us raised him or hit him. We just loved Jordan. We didn’t spit on him or put him into an insane asylum.”

  “He was the best friend we ever had,” I said, pulling Shyla out of harm’s way. “We adored him.”

  “We know you did, Jack,” Celestine said, and only when she spoke did we realize that Jordan’s mother was drunk. For three years she stayed drunk and mourned her son and loathed her husband, yet hated herself for still loving the general. By her husband’s side, Celestine did not feel a thing. Bourbon was a brown distraction and she drank until her husband was forced to retire out of embarrassment for her. On the day he retired at Pollock Island three years after Jordan’s memorial service, she passed out on the reviewing stand and awoke in a detoxification center in Florida. Twice General Elliott had learned the hard way that enemies within a city’s walls are ten times more dangerous than armies in the field and on the move. Many in the Corps had thought that the general would one day receive a presidential appointment as Commandant, but his troubles within his own family pointed to a lack of judgment and discipline on the home front.

  • • •

  Mike Hess stood up from his seat near my father and said, “So what is this day about? All this happened over fifteen years ago. It’s terrible about the young girl and her Marine. No one denies that. But the important thing is to go on. Right or wrong? Those of us here all suffered because this war touched us in ways that we still don’t know. Shyla never was the same after protesting that war. Jordan, we lost. He’s been dead to most of us until now. We watched our generation turn against one another, hate one another, not speak to one another, and for what? Is this day about forgiveness?”

  General Elliott stood and said, “No, it’s about justice.”

  “Justice for whom, General?” The abbot of Mepkin Abbey stood on the stage, his cowl thrusting his face in shadow. “For you or for God? Are you seeking military justice or divine justice?”

  “I am seeking both, Father,” the general answered. “And I believe you and your entire order have stood in the way of justice of any kind.”

  “We know your son as a good priest and servant of God,” Father Jude said quietly.

  “He blew up two innocent people,” the general said. “That’s all that even God needs to know about my son.” Judge McCall tapped his gavel, and checked his watch. “Let’s figure out what we’re doing. Let’s bring this thing to a close.”

  “How did you get out of the country, son?” the general asked. “They found your boat out at sea.”

  “My surfboard,” Jordan said. “It took me over two days to get back to land. I stayed a week on the Isle of Orion, at the McCalls’ fish camp. I got my bearings. I fished and crabbed at night. When I felt rested and strong enough, I took Jack’s johnboat and made my way to his house in the middle of the night.”

  I rose and said, “I can take the story from here.”

  Grief, that spring, lay immobile in me. After Jordan’s memorial service I went to bed and stayed in my room, locking my door, and tried to figure out the exact moment when everything had gone wrong in my life.

  Soon after the service Shyla left for an antiwar demonstration outside the UN building in New York, but I declined to join her. I had promised myself never again to lose all control over the circumstances that history might fling in my path. I planned to live a life of caution and restraint. I would grow my own herbs in a window box, raise a vegetable garden each year to remind myself that I was part of a grand cycle, improve my vocabulary by reading those authors happy to dance with the language, and choose my friends for their lack of oddness or flamboyance. No longer did I wish to suffer because of the furious energies of my best friends’ passions for the high wire. Jordan had died because of his willfulness and his inability to either make peace with or avoid the orbit of his father. Shyla had rejected her parents’ own passivity and thrown herself headlong into every new idea she encountered on the road that gave meaning to her life. Like some lost rabbi, her life was a constant search for a Torah yet to be written.

  Mike’s ambition burned with a bright flame, and already, he was working in the mail room of the William Morris Agency in Manhattan and had pitched his first film project to an agent he met in a steam room at the New York Athletic Club. Each night, he attended movies and off-Broadway plays that he wrote to me about, always appending his own notes and critiques, specifying how he would have improved the production had he been in charge. Mike did not suffer from the Southerner’s burden of always looking back. I discovered that I had a shut-in’s gift for paralysis.

  And then one night I woke with a rough hand covering my mouth. I tried to scream, but I heard Jordan whispering for me to keep quiet. In the darkness, I went over the contours of Jordan’s face to make sure it was him. Too surprised to speak, I put on a pair of Bermudas, old Docksiders, and a tee shirt and followed Jordan outside and down past the great oak, through the insect-shrill garden, and out to the floating dock, where we took off our shoes and let our feet dangle in the flooding tide.

  “How’s Jesus?” I asked. “I heard you’d gone to see him.”

  “The boy’s fine. Asked about you,” Jordan s
aid, then he darkened. “I’m not right. Something’s not right about me, Jack.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” I agreed. “Your blood was all over that boat.”

  “My type, but it belonged to other people,” Jordan said. “I passed my time in the crazy house planning this. What did my father say about the plane?”

  “What plane?” I asked.

  “The one I blew up,” said Jordan.

  “You didn’t do that, Jordan,” I said, praying that I was right.

  Jordan said in an eerie, disembodied voice, “I could field strip an M-1 blindfolded by the time I was eight years old. Want to know how to make a Molotov cocktail? A pipe bomb? Want me to show you how to set a punji stick dipped in human feces along a trail? I’ve walked half the sewer system in Waterford so I’d know how to escape if the Communists ever took over.”

  “Something far worse than that happened, Jordan,” I said.

  “I went too far with the plane, Jack,” Jordan said. “I knew you’d hate that.”

  “You ever heard of Willet Egglesby or Bonnie Pruitt?” I asked.

  “Naw. Who’re they?”

  “They were in the plane when it went up,” I explained. “Folks think they blew themselves up. A lovers’ pact.”

  I never understood why Jordan’s scream of anguish did not wake every single sleeper in Waterford that night. The sound of horror erupted, unbidden and undefiled, from Jordan’s throat. As he wept freely, I held him and tried to come up with a plan to hide him. Before daybreak, I managed to lead him back through the garden, up the tree, and into my bedroom. I pulled a chair under the trapdoor in my closet and led Jordan into the attic to sleep on a pile of old mattresses. The breakdown that General Elliott had manufactured now began to take hold of Jordan Elliott in earnest. He suffered grievously in the unbearable heat of that attic as the only other person in the world who knew he was alive plotted his escape in the bedroom below.

  When Shyla arrived back in the low country the next day, I was waiting for her at the train station in Yemassee. She had developed a gift for functioning in the atmosphere of a war room, and prided herself on keeping a cool head when chaos was the order of the day, and I needed her for Jordan. I brought her to the attic, where the heat was oppressive and the three of us sweated as we tried to devise a way to remove Jordan from harm’s way. We discussed going to our parents for help, but it was not the best time in the history of the republic for us to trust the counsel of our elders. We had all grown up too fast in the past few years and had experienced enough sedition among our own ranks to be able to trust anyone but ourselves. It was Shyla who came up with the cover story and I who devised the route of escape.

  I got my car ready for a long journey, bought a used canoe from a Methodist girls’ camp near Orangeburg and a tent from a hunting outfitter in Charleston. Shyla was in charge of food, which she packed in a picnic basket, placing the overflow in an ice chest. There were sausages and cheeses, bags of apples and oranges, dried fruits and cans of sardines, tuna fish, and enough bottles of wine to lend an air of festivity to every meal no matter how quickly we had to consume it during our time on the run.

  Shyla went to her doctor, complained of sleeplessness and depression, and walked away with enough Valium and sleeping pills to put a small herd of bison asleep. Jordan slept for the first time under her careful dispensing of the medicine. I went for a blood test that next day and wrote a long letter to my parents in the periodical section of the town library. The letter was difficult to master because I was unaccustomed to the shy language of love. I had not started out to write a love letter, but that was what it turned into, even though I knew it would cause my parents enormous pain. I let Shyla read my letter as I was reading hers to George and Ruth Fox. Her letter was lovely; Shyla could express her love of her parents with a simplicity I could only envy. I leaned over and kissed her as she concentrated on what I had written. She looked up and I think it was at that moment that we gave our lives to each other.

  The three of us left Waterford at two in the morning. We pushed my car far down the oak-lined street before starting the engine. Jordan lay beneath piles of blankets in the backseat. Both letters lay on the breakfast tables in the houses where Shyla and I had grown up. The letters explained that we had gone off to get married and would spend our honeymoon at Lake Lure in the North Carolina mountains. In fact we were moving toward the outskirts of Chicago less than twenty-four hours later, heading north.

  We took turns driving and stopped only for gas and to use the rest rooms and we talked endlessly about the life we had shared together. We talked about everything except those dense, prodigious events that had precipitated our headlong journey into the unknown.

  At one point, when I was studying a map, Jordan said, “It’s hard to believe South Carolina and Minnesota’re in the same country.”

  “It’s all so weird,” Shyla said. “They had to talk these people and all the people in South Carolina into going halfway across the world to shoot at Vietnamese peasants. That’s some trick.”

  “If you never mention the Vietnam War again,” I said, “I promise you’ll never be included in any wife-beating statistics.”

  “You ever touch me,” Shyla said, “you’ll be reading about yourself when they interview eunuchs.”

  “Be happy. That’s an order. You two owe me that much,” Jordan said.

  At the Gundersen Motel in Grand Marais, we spent the night under assumed names and went to the Bear Track Outfitters for a detailed map of an unpopulated borderland called the Boundary Waters. A guide worked out a route for us that would take us through pristine wilderness.

  Early the next morning, we set off in a mist so soft it felt related to dandelion seed. We took down the canoe at a lake marked on the map, and as we moved our paddles through the waters, it was like entering into some cavern hollowed out of pure turquoise. At night, we camped on the banks of lakes and bathed naked in water still cold from the runoff of snow. We chilled our bottles of wine in the rocks that lined the edges of the water. We slept together in the same tent at night as we followed a string of lakes, strung like a rosary, through the thick, humming forests where black bears hustled their cubs away from the shoreline when our canoe appeared and moose observed us as calmly as philatelists when we moved past their quiet foraging in deep water.

  On this voyage, our friendship, our unspoken love for one another, formed a mansion without pillars or supports. Drifting, we knew we were heading for a time when Jordan would disappear from our lives as precipitously as he had entered it on a skateboard, wild hair flying, so many years before. Shyla could feel the silence of glades healing Jordan of his most immediate agony. Wolves started to call to each other across the vast wilderness and we once heard a pack in full flight during a hunt. When we talked about God, we found it was easy to believe in him while moving through the medallionlike waters of these sun-swelled lakes. On pebbled beaches where we camped, Jordan would pull agates and fire opals from streambeds and present them to us as wedding gifts.

  For ten days we drifted; and only when we came to a small lakeside town and saw a Canadian Mountie walking down a dock did we realize our journey was over. For three days, we had been in Canadian waters without knowing it. In Canada, Jordan could make his way among an entire people tolerant of war resisters.

  When we ate dinner on our last night together, Shyla and I toasted Jordan, and drank to his future. We were sure we would never see him again and he told us that he would only put us in danger if he tried to communicate with us in any way.

  “What you did for me goes beyond friendship,” Jordan said, “because I know that you’re both horrified by what I did. I’ll try to make up for my actions. I’ll try to find meaning in all this. I promise.”

  “We love you, Jordan,” Shyla said. “That’s meaning enough for anybody.”

  When we woke the next day, Jordan had slipped out into the Canadian countryside to begin his life on the run. Shyla and I started ba
ck, where the memory of Jordan was imprinted on every lake we crossed. We made love for the first time in Canada and found we liked it. It took us twice as long to retrace our steps back to Grand Marais. We told ourselves we had raised the art of a honeymoon to new plateaus. One night, we made love listening to a wolf pack gathering for the hunt. We both agreed we had started our married life off right. So we were married the next day by a justice of the peace in Grand Marais, Minnesota. It took us three weeks of camping before we finally made it back to South Carolina and the lives we were meant to lead.

  The silence was passionate yet abstract in the theater when I stopped speaking and returned to my seat. We all needed to compose ourselves in the late Charleston afternoon. Like figures in a painting we looked as though we had lost ourselves in some barely glimpsed, stolen landscape where no one spoke our native tongue. Jordan had awakened a part of all of us that had long ago fallen prey to easy associations of misremembrance. The theater felt like a confessional underground. In the airlessness that followed my account, I swallowed the dust of time itself. I tried to consider the part I had played in this excruciating drama of my college years and realized I did not recognize the description of the boy I once was. Somewhere in this story I found myself missing in action in a tale of my own life. I waited for a summing up, a gathering of all the disparate and contradicting parts, a voice from the past to grant benediction for a life I did not even realize I was leading. In those heady days, I had let instinct rule my every move and thought nothing through completely. The young man who spirited Jordan through the wolf-haunted country of the Boundary Waters was dead and unmourned. I had lost the fiery, irreconcilable boy I once was on a Charleston bridge, yet realized that was the boy that everyone on this stage remembered as me. It was the same boy I feared had sent Shyla to her death, signed the marching orders that directed her to the railing overlooking Charleston and the home we shared together. Looking at Ledare, I saw her studying me and I knew that Ledare had bided her time throughout this year and had made the error of falling in love with me. She wore this love in her eyes, all over her face, and made no effort to hide it. I wanted to warn her, to tell her that my love was all fury and sharp edges. I made a sport of killing the women I loved and I did it with a guile and a softness that had all the markings of a true vocation. But everywhere I looked on that stage, I found love peeling off from a dark squadron, making strafing runs against me. I had failed to live fully because I had not come to terms with the alliances and fates of this imbalanced gathering of souls. Our pain bound us in a terrible love knot. I wanted to speak, but so did everyone else.