by Pat Conroy
“Save one shell for yourself, Leah,” Lucy ordered. “Now, you take these turtles down and release them twenty yards from the surf line. We want them to imprint this island’s sand.”
“Let’s release them together, Grandma,” Leah said, and she and Lucy began the slow walk down toward the breakers as the crowd parted to let them pass. It took all of Lucy’s strength to make that walk, but no one could deter her, so Tee brought down a lawn chair for her to sit in at the spot where the turtles would begin their long, perilous voyage out into the Atlantic. Their claws scratched against the side of the bucket.
Lucy handed Leah the broken golf club, and Leah began to draw a vast semicircle in the sand that the observers could not cross. Inside this line was the free zone of the infant turtles. The people on the beach toed the line with their bare feet and flip-flops, but did not cross it.
Setting the bucket on the ground, Lucy nodded to Leah, who turned the bucket gently on its side against the sand and the baby turtles began their four-flippered journey across their birthing ground to the sea. They rushed out toward the brightness of the water with all the fury of pure instinct ignited. Though their gait was comical, it was purposeful and resolute. Theirs was an ancient, frantic march. But these turtles would not meet an army of raccoons or an overflight of seagulls or the ominous gathering of ghost crabs, positioned like a tank battalion, waiting to cut off their dash to the waves. These turtles were cheered and urged on by those who had come to see them safely launched from the Isle of Orion.
The first turtle to reach the wet sand was five yards ahead of any of his competitors when the wave hit him and sent him somersaulting backward as it always did. But the small loggerhead recovered quickly, righted itself, and was a swimmer by the time the next wave hit. Each turtle tumbled when the first surf rushed over it, but each swam with great economy and beauty on the second wave. A single ghost crab moved out of its hole and seized one of the turtles by its neck, and moved in a flash to its lair beneath the sand. I noticed that Lucy too saw this encounter between hunter and prey, but she said not a word. The ghost crab was being true to its own nature and felt no animosity toward the turtle at all.
Soon the first waves were brimming with the shining backs of turtles, glinting like ebony among the snow-white spume. One turtle, confused, got turned around and started back toward the nest, but Leah took it and turned it in the right direction. She looked at her grandmother for approval and Lucy nodded her appreciation of a job well done. When all the turtles had reached the water, we tried to follow their trail by watching their tiny, eel-like heads come up for breath every six or seven strokes.
A seagull, scanning the beach, as it retired from the day’s foraging, came up from the south, and the crowd moaned as it hung still as laundry over the surf line, then plunged down and came up with a loggerhead in its beak. The gull bit the head off the turtle, then dropped the rest of its body back into the ocean.
“I hate seagulls,” Leah said.
“No, you don’t. They do a good job at what they do,” Lucy said. “You just love loggerheads.”
In the week that followed I cooked fabulous meals for anyone who came to the house to say good-bye to my mother. Hundreds came and it moved us greatly that Lucy’s life had not gone unnoticed by her townsmen. As her children, we knew all about Lucy’s strangeness and insecurity, but we also knew about the unstinting nature of her sweetness. She had camouflaged the vinegar factory in her character with a great honeycomb along the sills and porches of her public self. The black leaders came, dressed in strict formality, to let her know that they remembered the extraordinary courage of the wife of the “Nigger Judge.” I learned that week that my mother possessed a small genius for the right gesture. She had done thousands of things she did not have to do only because they felt comfortable to her. She had been prodigal with unnoticed, artless moments of making people happy to be alive.
Lucy could not eat a single thing that I cooked for her, yet she bragged that her friends had claimed they had never eaten so well, not even when they went to watch the Braves play in Atlanta. No one entered the house whom I did not feed, and I stayed at my command post in the kitchen because I was having difficulty controlling my helplessness. I could not get over the fact that I was facing a motherless world for the first time and it made me look at Leah with new eyes as she played hostess, greeting people at the door and asking them to sign the guest book. Leah had informed me that school was not as important as helping her grandmother die and I wondered that such wisdom had issued forth in a girl so young.
One day, very late, Dr. Pitts picked up the telephone in the living room and dialed a number with all the rest of us present. We heard him say, “Hello, Judge,” and I listened as he invited my father to come out. Still uncomfortable around the boisterousness of my brothers and me, Dr. Pitts had made certain that we understood that he needed our help in the days to come.
Those days came swiftly. I found that, though I had prepared myself for my mother’s death, I had not readied myself for the details and what death would require of me. I watched the slow process of my mother becoming a complete stranger, a woman devoid of energy and animation who never left her bed, a hostess who could not rise to greet her guests. Her eyes grew dull with painkillers and she would ask Leah to lie down with her for a nap, then be asleep before Leah could even respond. Her bloodstream ripened its betrayal of her and grew dangerous as pitchblende to her health. Her decline steepened its angle hourly. What had been a slow, invisible process for so long began to show itself on the surface and accelerate the pace. Then the terrible galloping began.
There was the occasional evening when she seemed better, but they were rare. We swarmed about her, desperate for a task to perform, a heroic deed to pull off in exchange for Lucy’s life. Our source was flickering out. We had grown out of this departing body. We were natives of the body now killing her. We poured each other drinks, clung to each other, and burst into tears while walking on the beach at night when the claustrophobia of death became too much for us. I thought my mother needed the ministrations and the laying on of hands that a daughter could do so much better than her roughhousing, excitable sons who waited around wishing Lucy would ask us to move a refrigerator or paint the garage. As a group, we were useless, disquieted, and in the way. The nurses were interchangeable, sweet, and efficient. We wanted to hold her in our collective arms, pass her around from son to son, but we were shy about touch, deficient in all displays of physical affection, and afraid we would break something as the withering began its work and her skin took on the pallor of writing paper.
Lucy seemed to rally one day and the spirits of the entire house rose with her like some flood tide cleansing the marshes after a hard winter. That morning when I brought in the breakfast that I knew she would not touch, I found Lucy sitting up with Leah, teaching her how to apply makeup. Leah had apparently made a mess of putting lipstick on her own and Lucy’s lips, but she was doing better the second time around. I laid the tray down and watched as my mother passed on the mysterious rites of cosmetics to my daughter.
“Close your eye when you put the eyeshadow on. Then open it ever so slightly. You want the eyeshadow to coat both lids evenly. That’s right. That’s good. Now, let’s go on to perfume. Remember, less is more when it comes to perfume. The reason a skunk’s a skunk is he doesn’t understand moderation. I’m leaving you all my makeup and perfume. I want you to think about me when you use it. Let’s redo your foundation. What do you say?”
“Sure,” Leah said. “But do you feel up to it?”
“Leah’s too young to wear makeup,” I said, aware of my echoing Lucy’s criticism in Rome, and how prissy and parental I sounded.
“Maybe,” Lucy agreed, “but not too young to learn how to put it on. Besides, I’m not going to be around to teach her the tricks of the trade. I’m ignorant about a lot of things, but I’m Leonardo da Vinci when it comes to makeup. Leah, this is part of my legacy to you. You’re collecting
your inheritance, honey.”
Later in the morning I found Leah reading a children’s book to Lucy in her clear, musical voice. I could hear Italy sneaking into Leah’s pronunciation of English and it always pleased me. I sat down listening to Leah read Charlotte’s Web aloud. I had read the book so many times to her that I could almost speak along with her, word for pretty word.
Lucy smiled at me and said, “No one ever told me these stories when I was little. What a nice way to go to sleep.”
“Why didn’t your parents read to you, Grandma?” Leah asked.
“They couldn’t read, darling,” she said. “Neither could I until your daddy taught me. He ever tell you that?”
“It was our secret, Mama,” I said.
“But ain’t it a sweet thing for Leah to know about her daddy? He wasn’t just my boy. He was my teacher too,” Lucy said, and fell into a deep sleep.
Father Jude arrived from the monastery that night and Dupree picked up John Hardin at the state hospital. Esther and the Great Jew were coming out of the bedroom with Silas and Ginny Penn when John Hardin entered the house where the fresh flowers were beginning to die in the vases and a low tide made the sea riper and more aromatic as a wind blew in from the east. Ledare was fixing drinks for the adults and I was fixing enough pasta carbonara to feed a rugby team. In a guest bedroom, Jude went to prepare himself for the administration of the last rites. For a solid week he had prayed and fasted for his sister. His faith was unshakable and he believed that any of Lucy’s sins were lightweight to the God who had wept his way through this unendurable century. The entire monastery had stockpiled prayers for Lucy. She would enter paradise buoyed up on a field of praise, well recommended, and extremely well regarded by a small platoon of holy men in the service of the Lord.
That night Father Jude said Mass and Lucy asked that he say it in Latin and that Dupree and I serve as altar boys. The French windows were thrown wide open and the sea air entered the room like an extra communicant. Lucy asked her brother to add a prayer for all her loggerheads now swimming toward the kelp-draped sluices of the Sargasso Sea. After she received Communion, we bowed our heads, then each of us, her sons, took the hosts on our tongues and I prayed for her with all the fierceness that had come to me in this moment. Tears got in the way of my prayers. Now my prayers did not float like wood smoke toward the heights of the world, but were set adrift, stained and waterlogged with tears. The air tasted like salt and so did the faces of friends and relatives when they kissed me.
Late that night, Lucy called for just me and my brothers to come to her alone. We went reluctantly as though the colonel in charge of a firing squad had just sent for us. The summons had come at last, the inexorable violation. It seemed as though these last days were the only moments I had ever lived life to its fullest, when we gathered in agony to say good-bye to our mother. But Tee hesitated on the threshold of her room and would not move.
“I can’t do it,” Tee said tearfully. “I don’t have it in me.”
When he finished weeping, he got control of himself and followed us into the room. By this time, we, too, were exhausted and knew that dying was a full-time job, more hard labor than some palmy, soft surrender to the night. It took enormous concentration for us to look toward our mother. Lesions had formed on her gums and lips as her body no longer fought infections. She had given death all it could handle but her hard, unyielding body had now been tested to its limits. Her rosy complexion had yellowed and something dark was moving close to her eyes. Her stillness began its silent walk as we waited for her to speak. Dallas handed her a glass of water and she grimaced in pain as she drank. The water glass was stained with blood when he set the glass down.
As she tried to speak, John Hardin, fidgety in the solemn atmosphere, started: “Mama, you wouldn’t believe what just happened. The doctor came in and said, ‘Lucy’s gonna be her old self by tomorrow morning.’ The doc was laughing and said he’d just run a few more tests and found out it wasn’t leukemia after all. Hell, he screwed up the original diagnosis. It’s just a head cold, or psoriasis at the very worst. Said you’ll be playing thirty-six holes of golf a day by next week. Come on, you guys. Put smiles back on your faces.”
Dupree shrugged and said, “I made a bad mistake springing him on a pass.”
“Hush,” Lucy whispered. “I got something to say to you.”
We grew still as the ocean spoke to the night a single wave at a time.
“I did the best I could for you boys,” she said. “I wish I had done better by you. You should’ve been born in the house of a queen.”
“We were,” Dupree said in a barely audible voice.
“Damn right we were,” said Dallas.
“Shhh,” Lucy said, and we had to lean forward to hear her. “I should’ve loved you more and needed you less. You were the only things I ever got for free.”
“Mama, Mama, Mama,” John Hardin said, sinking on his knees beside her, and sobbing, Lucy lapsed into her final coma hearing the first word that all of us spoke in the English language. Into that night, my mother slipped away from me.
It took Lucy forty hours to die and we hardly left her side. Doctors and nurses came and went, checking her vital signs and making her comfortable. Her breathing became an agonized, desperate noise. It was a ragged and hydraulic sound, and for me it became the only sound on earth.
We spent those last hours kissing her frequently and telling her how deeply we loved her. Then I began to read Leah’s children’s books out loud to her. She had lived a storyless childhood, so I read in the last day of her life the books she had missed. I told her about Winnie the Pooh and Yertle the Turtle, took her Where the Wild Things Are, introduced her to Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland. Each of us took turns reading to her out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and, at the very last, Leah insisted that I tell all the Great Dog Chippie stories I had told her during our years of exile from the family in Rome.
I told Leah’s favorite Great Dog Chippie stories to my brothers’ amusement, but then I saw the moment they got hooked by the power of the stories themselves. I watched as Leah took turns sitting in my brothers’ laps and I thought how wonderful it must be to have an excess of adoring uncles to choose from.
Then, an hour before Lucy died, I told one last story of that splendid dog who had died before John Hardin or Tee ever got to know her well.
“In a pretty house, on a pretty island, in the pretty state of South Carolina, a woman named Lucy was getting ready to make her last journey. She had already said her good-byes and gotten her affairs straight. She had kissed her granddaughter Leah farewell and had taught her how to do her nails and apply makeup to her face. Her sons had gathered around her and she had made all of them feel good by choosing the right words to make them remember her fondly forever. Even though her favorite son, by far, was Jack, she was equally nice to all of them at this moment of departure.”
Even John Hardin laughed good-naturedly at this aside.
“It took her a long time to die because she loved the earth and her town and her family so much. But when she left she was amazed to lift out of her body and rise above the house and the ocean. She looked down on the moon and the stars and the Milky Way, free of her body, and she felt winged and floating and beautiful as she spun around in the sweet light of stars she passed.
“Then she came to the place she had heard about. It was in a field of wildflowers surrounded by mountains, prettier than the Blue Ridge, higher than the Alps. Lucy had never felt as at home before. This was the place, she knew that, but did not know it by name.
“Lucy heard a voice thunder out above her. She knew it was the voice of God. It was stern, but lovely. She awaited his judgment with confidence, with ardor. Her granddaughter Leah had applied her makeup for this long trip home and Lucy knew she was going to look pretty to the God who had created her.
“But another voice sounded behind her and it terrified her. Lucy turned to see Satan and his armies of demons crossing the field
to claim her as their own. Satan was puce-colored and hideous and he danced up behind Lucy where she could feel his hot breath on her neck.
“Satan roared, ‘She is mine. I claim her for the underearth. She has earned her portion of fire honestly. You have no business with this one and I claim for hell what is mine.’
“ ‘Slowly, Satan,’ the voice of the Lord rang out. ‘This is Lucy McCall from Waterford. You have no claim on this woman at all. Though you want every soul that comes this way, you did not earn this one.’
“ ‘I claim her anyway, Lord. She has suffered much on earth and she is well accustomed to pain. Pain is what she knows best. Without suffering, she would never feel at home.’
“Though Lucy struggled mightily, she felt Satan’s hand tighten around her throat and when she tried to speak she could not form the words and found herself being dragged out of the field so fragrant with wildflowers. Lucy thought she was doomed to hell for all eternity when she heard something …”
“I know what she heard,” Leah squealed.
“What’s that?” her uncles asked.
“She heard, ‘Grrrr–grrrr.’ ”
“Where was that sound coming from?” Dallas asked.
“It’s the Great Dog Chippie,” Leah said. “Just in the nick of time. She’ll save the day. Even if God can’t. Right, Daddy?”
“The fangs of the Great Dog Chippie were white and wolflike. Her lips were curled and her black, muscled body looked like a panther’s walking toward Satan. The other demons shrank back in terror, but not Satan. But Chippie had never approached an enemy with such ferocity. Her eyes were yellow and she moved in for the kill. She crouched, ready to spring at the source of all evil. The dog had come to greet the woman who had found her as a stray, taken her into a house full of children, fed her, stroked her fur, loved her as a dog needed to be loved.