by Pat Conroy
After midnight, everyone had gone to bed somewhere in the sprawling house but Jordan, Capers, Mike, and me. We found ourselves walking along the beach of Sullivan’s Island as a ship passed out of the harbor, Asia bound. The harbor pilot’s boat met the ship when it reached the open sea and we walked in silence as we saw the smaller boat return toward the city.
“What now?” Mike asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.”
“What about Hollywood?” Capers said. “You have the pick of the starlets. You live like a king. That sounds better than eating burgers on a South Carolina beach with a bunch of high school assholes.”
“Not to me,” Mike said.
“Me neither,” Jordan agreed.
“What about you?” Mike asked me.
“I hate to ruin the evening here,” I said, “but I still think Capers is something of a scumbag.”
“Oh that,” Mike said. “You’ll get over it.”
“Time passing,” Jordan said, his eyes casting upward toward the stars. “It’s the big surprise in life. It might be the only one. It feels like we’ve been on this beach forever. Like we never lost each other.”
“That reminds me,” Capers said, snapping his fingers, and running suddenly back toward his house. When he returned he was carrying a surfboard over his head and we cheered when we saw it. We stripped down to our underwear and plunged into the warmblooded, air-cooled Atlantic. The waves were calm and halfhearted as we swam out toward deep water.
“You call these waves?” Jordan said. “You call this an ocean?”
“The Jordan summer,” Mike said, remembering.
“Never forgot it,” I said.
“Remember my long hair?” the clean-cut monk said, laughing.
“Waterford’s first hippie,” Capers said. “My God. You were the first omen of the sixties. We should’ve tarred and feathered you and sent you back to where you belonged.”
“Have sons, have sons,” Mike cried happily.
“Where are the porpoises?” I asked. “We need porpoises, Mike.”
“Get me special effects,” Mike called out. “Call Warner Brothers.”
“It comes back to this then,” said Capers.
“Life doubles back. It takes you by surprise,” Jordan said.
“Like a good movie,” Mike said.
“Where were you going to send me, Capers?” Jordan asked. “Where is it you think I belonged?”
We were floating in the Atlantic, holding on to the surfboard, with another summer ending and the warm wind soft against the surface and the taste of salt in our mouths. We drifted in the deep currents on a moonless night and because we were low country boys we were not afraid. Then Capers summed it up by reaching out and rumpling Jordan’s hair, saying, “Here. You belong here. With us. Always.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Every son will have his time in a room like this, I thought, as I joined my brothers in our watch over our mother’s bed. The smell of chemotherapy was familiar, the metallic scent leaving its trace on the membranes of my tongue. Its business was to slaughter the white blood cells that had multiplied in Lucy’s bloodstream, those white cells that moved with the thrift of herds, crowding the red cells to the point of extinction. In my mind’s eye, I saw my mother’s blood turning into a deadly snow. And when I looked at her, I saw for the first time terror in her pretty blue eyes. Every cell in her body was lit up with the unnamable fear.
“If you really loved Mama, Jack,” Dupree said, “you’d be out in your workshop finding a cure for cancer.”
“That’s what I hate about my brothers,” John Hardin said, walking to Lucy’s side. “You heard that, Mama. We should all be trying to make you feel like a million bucks and stupid Dupree starts in with his jokes.”
“Tell us how we go about making Mom feel like a million bucks, “ Dallas said. “We seem to lack your genius for bedside manners.”
“Go ahead. Mock me, Dallas,” John Hardin said. “I realize I’m an easy target. I know you laugh behind my back. Make fun of me. Write about me in the latrine while you’re taking a piss. I see those things you write about me. I recognize your ugly, repulsive handwriting.”
Dallas shook his head and answered, “I’ve never written a word on a bathroom wall in my whole life.”
“You don’t even have the guts to admit it,” John Hardin said. “You and your kind are so despicable.”
“I agree,” Tee said. “Dallas and his kind’re beneath contempt. What can you say about a man who won’t own up to his own graffiti?”
“You write worse things about me than Dallas does,” John Hardin said to Tee. “But I’ve got you boys back good. I told Mom all about it. I told her everything. Mom knows, assholes. Mom’s gonna take care of business as soon as she’s on her feet. Right, Mom?”
“That’s right, John Hardin,” Lucy said weakly.
“You’re dreaming, John Hardin,” Tee said, puzzled. “What did I write about you?”
“You wrote ‘Call J. for the best blow job in town,’ ” he said. “Then you wrote down my telephone number.”
“You don’t have a phone,” Dallas said. “You live in a tree, same as a sparrow.”
“I’m too sharp for you guys,” John Hardin said. “I’m always thinking way ahead of you guys.”
“Quit picking on John Hardin,” Lucy said. “I read about Jordan’s arrest. It was in the morning paper, honey.”
“He should’ve stayed put,” I said.
“The past is the hardest thing to run from,” Lucy said. “I think Jordan got tired of running from a person he never really was.”
“Look, Mom still loves Jack the most,” John Hardin observed. “It’s not fair to prefer him just because of the stupid birth order.”
“I was a child myself when Jack was born, John Hardin,” said Lucy, touching my face with her left hand. “I never had a baby doll to play with as a girl. So I pretended that Jack was a doll baby some stranger had left under a Christmas tree. I had no right to be raising up a child being so young myself, but Jack couldn’t know that. When I breast-fed him for the first time, I didn’t know the first thing about what I was doing. But Jack seemed to go along with everything I did. He made it easy for me. Jack and I grew up together. He was the first best friend I ever had and I knew he’d never leave me.”
“I guess living in Italy was Jack’s way of staying close,” Dallas said.
“I wouldn’t go to Italy if the Pope himself invited me to eat a Ragú dinner with him,” John Hardin said. “Italians’re the scariest people in the world. They’re always taking blood oaths and selling drugs to black people and killing each other with shotguns. The men comb their hair with pig fat and the women all have big tits and say the rosary constantly and eat food that ends with vowels. The Mafia’s been there so long it surprises me there’s a single Italian left alive.”
“I got an idea,” Tee said. “John Hardin just proved what Hollywood has done to the image of Italians. Why doesn’t the Mafia quit killing police informers and concentrate on murdering Hollywood directors and producers?”
“Mama’s getting tired,” Dupree said. “Why don’t we come back into her room later.”
“She’s just tired of your sorry ass, Dupree,” John Hardin said. “But who isn’t?”
Dupree shook his head and whispered to no one in particular, “I can’t believe I’m taking abuse from a psychotic.”
“You hear that, Mom?” John Hardin said, pointing an accusatory finger at Dupree. “That should get you at least a month’s restriction and no allowance at all. Ha! That’ll teach you to make fun of a helpless schizophrenic. All my problems stem from a toxic gene pool that tadpoles couldn’t grow in and a flock of shitbird brothers who’ve got no empathy for the disadvantaged among them. You assholes all picked on me when I was a little kid. Guess you hate me spilling the beans in front of Mom, huh, losers?”
“John Hardin,” I said. “Did you notice that this is a hospital? That Mom’s a bit unde
r the weather?”
“Mr. Goddamn Big. Mr. I-live-in-Europe and fuck-anyone-who-lives-in-America. Mr. Chef Boyardee, don’t-faggots-have-more-fun-wearing-aprons. Mr. Bullshit-on-rice trying to tell the little fella what to do. It’s always open season on the mentally ill, Mom. You heard it from me first and now you’re getting a live demonstration from your worthless sons.”
“You’re my sweetest boy, John Hardin,” Lucy said, taking him by the hands and drawing him toward her. “They don’t understand my baby boy, do they?”
“They don’t know a thing,” John Hardin said, his voice breaking. “They represent the normal world and that’s so scary, Mom. It’s always frightened me.”
“I’ll make them be nice to you, honey,” Lucy said, winking at the rest of us, holding John Hardin close.
“We’re the only kids in America punished for not being schizophrenics,” Dallas said.
“The Dark One is jealous,” Tee said.
“Green grows the Dark One,” Dupree agreed.
“Let’s clear out of here,” I said. “Mom needs to rest.”
“One of us’ll be here at all times, Mama,” Dupree said. “We’re working out the shifts right now.”
“They’re leaving me out, Mom,” John Hardin said. “Me, the one who loves you the most. I don’t get to sit with you in your time of greatest need.”
“The nurses’re scared to death of John Hardin, Mama,” Dallas said. “Everybody in town remembers the standoff at the bridge.”
“I was hearing voices then,” John Hardin explained. “That wasn’t the real me.”
“It sure looked like the real you, bro,” Tee said. “Sounded like you too when you forced all your poor brothers to leap naked into the river.”
“I’m a victim of a dysfunctional family,” John Hardin said. “I’m not responsible for the actions I commit when the voices are in control.”
“So, if you barbecue poor Mom one night,” Dupree said, “carve her up like a Christmas hog, and serve her up at the homeless shelter in Savannah, we can’t get pissed at you.”
“I have a mental illness,” John Hardin said proudly. “It’s documented.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Family life’s too exhausting for any American to bear.”
“Put John Hardin on the night shift,” Tee suggested. “The boy has problems sleeping.”
“Midnight to seven,” Dupree said to John Hardin. “Think you can handle that, John Hardin, or do you want one of us to stay with you for company?”
“You guys aren’t company,” John Hardin said. “You’re just birthmarks I’ve got to put up with.”
“This won’t be pretty twenty-four hours from now,” Lucy said weakly. “This stuff may kill the cancer cells, but it’ll come pretty close to killing me too.”
John Hardin studied the ominous plastic bag filled with the foul-smelling liquid now being released into Lucy’s bloodstream. “This shit don’t work. It makes the doctors rich, the drug companies rich, and it’ll kill our poor wonderful mother. Vitamin C is the only thing that’ll cure leukemia. I read it in Parade magazine.”
“Thank God, we’ve got Mr. Wizard on our side,” Dallas said.
We gathered around Lucy’s bed and the five of us kissed her until she begged us to leave. Tee began to cry and said, “I love you with my body and soul, Mom. Even though all of us recognize you did all you could to totally fuck my life up.”
In the laughter that followed, Lucy sent us away before Tee took up the first watch. We had begun our vigil, and we timed our lives from that moment on around the cycles of her chemotherapy. I looked at my boisterous, free-spirited brothers and knew not one of us had done the hard work needed to face the next thirty or forty years without Lucy. In our own ways each of us had come to terms with life’s impassivity and cruelty, but now we faced head-on the prospect of arising one morning to a sunrise not only impersonal, but one that was Lucy-less as well.
Outside in the waiting room, within its haze of tired cigarette smoke, we lingered for a final roundup of fears and thoughts. We all had seen the fear in Lucy’s eyes.
“I’m the only one here who thinks Mom’s gonna be alive ten years from now,” John Hardin said. “The rest of you boys have given up, haven’t you?”
After a few minutes of forced banter and reassurance, Tee said, “I’ve got the first shift. Relieve me at midnight, John Hardin. The rest of you country boys get some sleep.”
“Did you know that leukemia’s the only cancer directly affected by the human emotions?” John Hardin asked us, his voice faintly disapproving. “I’m the only optimist in this dark bunch. Mom needs us to be sunny, not surly.”
“If I go nuts and beat John Hardin’s brains out with a tire tool, how long would I spend in the big house?” Dupree asked Dallas.
“First offender? You’d be iced for four years max with time off for good behavior.”
“Can you do this?” I asked John Hardin, my arm across his shoulder. “We can’t afford any screw-ups. You’ve got to earn our trust.”
“Why? No one’s ever trusted me before. With anything,” John Hardin said. “That’s why I’ve got such a bone to pick with the whole universe.”
At midnight, while Waterford slept and the tide was moving out of the marshes and estuaries, John Hardin relieved Tee. Half-asleep himself, Tee gave John Hardin a quick hug then shuffled down the long shiny linoleum floor, forgetting to tie his shoelaces.
When a nurse came in at half past midnight to hook up a full bag of chemotherapy, she reported that John Hardin was tense but friendly as she checked Lucy’s temperature and took her blood pressure. When Dupree arrived at the hospital at seven the next morning, he discovered that John Hardin and Lucy were missing. At a side entrance to the hospital, Dupree found the wheelchair that John Hardin had used to transport Lucy out of harm’s way. He had left a note beneath her pillow that read, “I refuse to let them kill my poor mother with their poisons. This will also prove to my mother that I’ve always loved her a lot more than my asshole brothers. Some may call me a madman, but my mother will know, at last, that I put her número uno over all the mothers of the world.”
When we heard the news, we gathered at the judge’s to discuss strategies and apportion blame. Dallas scowled at Dupree and seemed more prickly than usual while Tee opened a beer and threw his cup of freshly brewed coffee down the sink.
“In a time of stress, alcohol is the drug of choice and caffeine is what you turn to when you’ve got to sober up,” Tee said.
“Once again, I’m the laughingstock of this town because of my damn family,” Dallas said. “You guys don’t get it. People seek legal advice from pillars of the community. I look like the fire hydrant where the neighborhood Chihuahuas mark their territory. I shouldn’t’ve listened to you guys.”
“Mom insisted that we include John Hardin,” Tee said. “It was a slight error of calculation. Next time Mom’s dying, we’ll do it a bit differently.”
“Her doctor went apeshit,” Dupree reported. “He screamed at me for a half-hour. Dr. Pitts wasn’t overjoyed either.”
Dallas said, “She got enough chemotherapy in her to make her sick as hell, but not do her a single bit of good.”
“He took Mom’s car,” I said. “When he calmed down, Dr. Pitts told me all the food’s missing from Mom’s pantry. No liquor in sight. Blankets, sheets, and towels gone from the linen closet. I checked the tree house when Dupree called this morning and they’re not there.”
Dupree said, “He doesn’t have a credit card or much money to speak of. Everything was still in Mom’s purse. There’s no place for him to go. The highway patrol’s been alerted and they should spot Mom’s car soon enough and bring her back.”
“John Hardin’s got a few screws loose,” Tee said. “But he’s smart as hell. The boy’s got a plan. That I’ll guarantee you.”
“You know why we’re in this mess,” Dallas said. “Easy. Because our parents raised us up to be liberals in the South. They taug
ht us to trust in our fellow man and to believe in his basic goodness. No one else in the world would let a psycho like John Hardin watch over their dying mother except us. If we’d been raised conservative like every other decent white Southerner, we’d never’ve let this nutbag near our mother.”
“I would be a conservative if I’d never met any,” I said. “They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.”
“Yeh,” Dallas nodded. “That’s exactly what I aspire to.”
“Guilt,” Tee said. “I see Haiti, I feel guilty. Somalia, total guilt. El Salvador, bone-chilling guilt. Guatemala, guilt on the half-shell. The teeming streets of India, guilt.”
“Losing Mom,” Dupree said.
“Guilt,” the four of us cried out as one.
“We should’ve seen it coming, bros,” said Tee.
Dallas countered by saying, “How’re you supposed to tell what a madman’s gonna do?”
“He’s not a madman,” Dupree said. “He’s our brother and we’ve got to find him before Mom dies. We can’t let her die out there with him. John Hardin couldn’t handle that.”
“I’ll search the back roads,” I said.
“I know he still hangs out at Yesterday’s in Columbia,” Dupree said. “Tee and I’ll talk to them. Why don’t you go to Charleston and see if he’s been spotted up there, Dallas?”
“Yoo-hoo, boys. Real job here. Real clients who need me to be in the office. Secretary to pay. Overhead. This ring any bells for you folks?” Dallas asked.
“Mom’s Cadillac is rose red,” I said. “John Hardin’ll look like a pimp on holiday rolling down a South Carolina back road.”
“Bet you miss Italy, don’t you, bro?” Tee asked.
“Chi, io?” I said.
“I wish I’d been born Italian,” Dallas said. “Then I couldn’t speak a word of English. I’d be completely in the dark. In this family, it’s the only safe place to be.”