The Lords of Discipline

by Pat Conroy

  “Why didn’t you tell me all of this when I asked you, Colonel?”

  “Because of an incident that happened after my encounter with the printer. When I went back to study the letter from General Stone to Colonel Adamson, Mr. McLean, the letter was gone. The letter had been stolen out of my files.”

  “You could have told me that,” I said. “That has nothing to do with you or with me.”

  He put a heavy arm around my shoulder and steered me against the railing of the seawall facing Sullivan’s Island across the harbor. I could not look at Sullivan’s Island.

  “I believe The Ten exists, Mr. McLean,” he said with sudden explosive passion. “I believe they exist and I am afraid of them.”

  “Even if it exists, Colonel, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a club.”

  “If it was just a club they would not censor history books. They would not enter a man’s house to steal letters. Nothing else in my study was touched. Nothing else was moved or disturbed. One single letter disappeared. I wanted to suggest to you, Mr. McLean, that if you are looking for The Ten, you must proceed with restraint and caution. I also wanted to apologize for lying to you. By nature, I am a truthful man and the truth means a great deal to me. I have tried to develop a moral vision in my life and I have tried to live by it. I deceived you, and it has been sometimes difficult to sleep since we spoke in my office.”

  “Why didn’t you tell somebody, Colonel? Breaking and entering is against the law. That’s against anybody’s moral vision.”

  “No, Mr. McLean”—he sighed—“there is no such thing as morality in these distressing times. What we are witnessing is the death of courtesy in Western civilization. I do not speak of the mincing, effete courtesy of these desperate times, but the virile, robust courtesy born in that most violent of times, the Middle Ages. I lament the passing of that form of chivalry which was the way that civilized men had agreed to treat each other during times of peace. It was a code and a hallmark of civilization, and men would rather have died by their own hand than break the code. But enough of this, I have done my duty by warning you. If they will rob an historian of his sources, there is no telling what the scoundrels will do.”

  “We need another source,” I said, half-speaking to myself.

  “Pardon me?” the Colonel asked.

  “We need one more source that The Ten really exists. That’s one of the lessons I learned from your history class.”

  “I know of no other written source, Mr. McLean. And I had access to every letter and diary of every deceased alumnus and many of the living ones who played a significant role in the development of the Institute. That was the one hint, the single breakdown of secrecy I found.”

  “Did you interview any boys or men who were run out of the Institute?” I asked.

  “Of course not, Mr. McLean,” he said scornfully. “I was writing about the men who made the Institute great, not the swine who could not bear the stern test of her ministries. There is nothing, except venomous reprisals, that cravens who fled their freshman year could cast on the history of the Institute.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, thinking of my own freshman year. “But they might be able to reflect directly on the history of The Ten.”

  “Scoundrel!” he cried out, thumping me broadly on the shoulder. “There is a very minor historian beating his way out of that thick Irish skull of yours. Very, very minor but a presence nevertheless.”

  “I think I know who can tell me all about The Ten. If I can find him and if it exists and if it has the mandate to keep the Corps pure and undefiled that you say it has.”

  “I did not say I knew that for certain.”

  “Do you know anything for certain, Colonel?”

  “That they are discourteous men. I think they are well-intentioned, but I know they are discourteous and uncivil.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No, that is not all, Mr. McLean.”

  “What else, sir?”

  “I know that I am afraid of them. That they stole the letter is unspeakable. That they eradicated their name from my historical account is unspeakable. They are scoundrels of the first order.”

  “And how should I find them, sir?” I asked, looking at him directly in the eyes.

  “You need a primary source,” he said, turning back toward Broad Street. “A primary source.”

  “I’m going to take off next weekend, Colonel. And I bet you a nickel I find one.”

  Chapter Thirty five

  Columbia, South Carolina, is a difficult city to love once you have lived in Charleston. It is a functional city, located in the dead center of the state, a hundred miles from the mountains and a hundred miles from the sea. Its summers are merciless and its winters are bitter and it has all the homeliness of America’s industrial midlands. But it is a vital, frisky city unburdened by the pretensions and the genealogical sinuosities of Charleston. Sherman had razed Columbia during the Civil War. It made you wonder how much the nature of Charleston depended on its deliverance from pillage and fire.

  As we drove into the city, Mark said, “Columbia! What an armpit of a city. The whole place looks like it caught polio, then killed Doctor Salk.”

  We parked at Five Points, a busy district of student bars and small shops near the campus. The University of South Carolina had eighteen thousand more students than the Institute and fully half of them seemed to be staring at us as we walked down the street in our uniforms. Carolina was well-known around the state for its beautiful girls and its callow fraternity boys whose IQ’s hovered around the cut-off point for morons. We passed by several college girls whom I would have married on the spot, without bloodtests or references.

  “We’re here, boys,” I said, pointing to the entrance to a bar. “We’re going to meet an old friend.”

  We walked upstairs to the Second Level, a tavern frequented by students and professors. It took a full twenty seconds for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. You needed a Seeing-Eye dog to find a seat even in midafternoon. Our uniforms attracted the curious and mildly hostile attention of the room as soon as we entered.

  A young man approached me out of the darkness. He was heavier than I had remembered him and his hair was full and luxuriantly swept back on his head. His clothes were stylish and well-kept. He wore a neatly trimmed moustache and in the terminology of the day could have been described as “collegiate.”

  “Hello, Will McLean,” he said, standing in front of me.

  We shook hands warmly.

  I said, loud enough for Pig and Mark to hear, “Hello, Bobby Bentley, of Ocilla, Georgia.”

  “Bobby, is that you?” Pig said, sweeping around me and pummeling Bobby on the back.

  “How did you find Bentley, Will?” Mark asked, clearly displeased.

  “I called his house in Ocilla. I think there’re only two or three houses in the whole town of Ocilla, Georgia, and there was only one Bentley in the phone book. His mother told me he was at Carolina.”

  “Come on over here, boys,” Bobby said, gesturing with his arm. “I’ve got a pitcher of beer and some glasses. Where’s Tradd, Will?”

  “At some young lawyers’ convention. Tradd’s a big man on campus now,” Pig said. “Wait ’til we tell him we saw you, Toecheese.”

  As we sat in the high-backed Naugahyde booth, I looked at Mark nervously. He had neither greeted Bobby nor said a single word to him. As always, Mark was measuring his response in his own good time. Bobby poured out the beers ceremoniously and as we clinked our glasses together, Pig called out a toast, “To life.”

  Mark called for another toast. He raised his glass to Bobby and said in a chilled, aggressive undertone, “To the Institute.”

  “Don’t be a pain in the ass, Mark,” I said. “Do you expect Bobby to love the goddam Institute after what they did to him there?”

  “I’ll be glad to drink to the Institute, Mark,” Bobby responded graciously, clinking Mark’s glass. “If that’s what you really want.”

&
nbsp; Then he proposed another toast.

  “To Carolina,” he said, his eyes sparkling.

  “Shit on Carolina,” Mark growled.

  “I can’t drink to Carolina,” Pig agreed.

  “To friendship,” I quickly interceded, and the four of us, agreeing at last, drank to friendship. Pig and Mark would rather have drunk to the elimination of Italy than to the health of Carolina.

  We drank in silence for a minute or two, feeling shy and alien in each other’s company.

  “How are you doing, Bobby?” I said at last. “You’re looking good, boy.”

  “I’m doing fine, Will. I’m doing fine for a guy who never will be a Whole Man,” he said with force and bitterness.

  “How are your kidneys, Bentley?” Mark said.

  “Shut up, Mark,” I snapped. “What’s got into you? I didn’t bring you up here to rack Bobby’s ass.”

  “My kidneys are fine, Mark,” Bobby said coolly. “There was never any problem with my kidneys. I just wasn’t cut out for the plebe system. My nerves wouldn’t take it.”

  “We shouldn’t be here, Will,” Mark said.

  “Why not, Mark?”

  “Because we’re not supposed to ever talk to anyone who finked out on his classmates during our knob year. As far as I’m concerned Bentley shit all over us. We stuck by him like brothers and he was gone the next fucking day. I don’t forgive as easily as you do.”

  “The kid had bad nerves, Mark,” Pig intervened. “If I’d known it was nerves I could have fortified ol’ Bobby with some vitamins. The nerves need vitamins just like the muscles do.”

  “You haven’t missed all that much, Bentley,” Mark said. “Pig’s still a dimwit.”

  “Mark,” I said, “I asked Bobby to meet with us as a favor. If he had told me to go fuck myself, I wouldn’t have blamed him a bit. This guy went through the worst plebe system any of us has ever seen. This is the guy, Mark, the goddam guy whose face you and I and Pig once spit into. Do you remember that, Mark? And you’re trying to pretend we’re bigger and tougher men than he is.”

  “They made you spit in my face,” Bobby said, staring into his glass. “None of you guys is responsible for that. They were trying to run me out and they were using you guys as vehicles to do it.”

  “I’m sorry, Bentley,” Mark said. “I forgot about the spitting. Will should have prepared us for this and I just wouldn’t have come.”

  “Why did you come, Will?” Bobby said, turning to me. “You were very mysterious on the phone.”

  “I think you can tell me something, Bobby,” I said. “I think you can clear something up for me. I didn’t think of you at first and I should have. You had all the answers all the time, and it took me a long time to remember you. I’ve tried so hard and for so long to forget our freshman year that I’ve repressed almost everything that happened.”

  “So have I,” Bobby answered. “I fill up with hatred every time I hear the name of that school mentioned. I get mad even when I see that the Institute wins a football game or when I see a car with an Institute sticker pass me on a Columbia street. I didn’t sleep well for a year after I took off. I even went to a shrink for a while.”

  I leaned across the table and said, “Bobby, I want to ask you about your last days at the Institute. I want you to tell me everything that happened to you after that night all of us pissed in our pants under the R Company stairwell.”

  Bobby lit up. “Do you remember the looks on the upperclassmen’s faces?”

  “Why did you leave us after that, Bobby?” Mark asked. “We would have gone to the moon to keep you with us after that and you left the next goddam night.”

  “You disappeared after retreat formation the following evening,” I said gently. “You withdrew from school without ever coming back to say good-bye to any of us.”

  “I didn’t disappear from the barracks,” Bobby said firmly.

  “The hell you didn’t,” Mark countered.

  “I was taken from the barracks,” he said.

  “Who took you, Bobby?” Pig asked.

  “The gentlemen did not introduce themselves. Nor did they ask me if I wanted to go along for the ride.”

  “Where did they take you?” Mark asked, his voice tense and skeptical.

  “It’s hard to see things, Santoro, when you’re blindfolded. I would have taken the blindfold off, but it’s hard to move when your hands and feet are tied and you’re put inside a mattress cover. I would have screamed but it’s hard to scream with a rag stuck in your mouth. They put me into the trunk of a car. I must have been in that trunk for at least a half-hour,” Bobby said.

  “That’s against the rules of the Blue Book, paisan,” Pig exclaimed.

  “No shit, Pig,” Mark said. “If shit were napalm, they could drop your brains on Hanoi.”

  “Easy, Mark,” I said. “Would you please relax? You’re making everybody nervous. Why don’t you wait out in the car if you don’t want to hear this?”

  “You can’t make me wait out in the car, Will,” Mark said defiantly.

  “I can make him wait out in the car,” Pig said, as my two roommates glared at each other across the table.

  “Let’s just let Bobby finish,” I pleaded. “What happened, Bobby, when the car stopped? I know you don’t know where the car stopped or who took you out of the car. But what happened when you got there, wherever it was?”

  “That’s when the fun and games began,” he said, and the memory was obviously causing him great pain. “Two of them lifted me out of the trunk and carried me up the stairs of this big house where . . .”

  “A house!” I cried out.

  “Are you sure it was a house?” Pig said.

  Mark began trembling with rage. His whole body tightened and his eyes widened with an immense, blistering anger. Then he said in a whisper, “Poteete. That poor fucking loser Poteete.”

  “Who’s Poteete?” Bentley asked.

  “Nobody, Bobby,” I said quickly. “But what happened in the house? How do you know it was a big house?”

  “Because after they carried me up these stairs, they opened the main door with a key, carried me through one room, then through three more rooms. Someone opened all the doors for the two guys carrying me. Finally, we got to a room that had a stone floor. You know, made out of flagstones or something. They dumped me out of the bag and tied me into a chair. Then they removed the blindfold.”

  “So you saw who they were,” Pig said.

  “I didn’t say that. They had black hoods down over their faces with holes cut out for their eyes and noses and mouths. They had taken off their shirts. Some of them had swagger sticks. One of them had a M-1 with a fixed bayonet. He put the point of the bayonet against my balls and screamed he was going to castrate me before the night was over. It started just like a sweat party in the barracks only much worse.”

  “How was it worse, Bobby?” Mark asked, gende now. “What did they do to you?”

  “It’s strange, Mark, how much more frightening it was outside the barracks. I knew there were no controls over them, none whatsoever. They didn’t have to stop when the bugle blew. They didn’t have to worry about the Bear discovering a sweat party. And they had all night to work on me, all of them at the same time. There were no limits to what they could do to me. They told me that they would kill me if I didn’t leave the Institute. Then they told me they would make it look like an accident or a suicide.”

  “Were they after you because you pissed in your pants?” Pig asked.

  “That’s what they said, Pig,” he answered. “They said I was a disgrace to the Corps of Cadets and a disgrace to my classmates. They started screaming as soon as we got there. It went on for hours. It was horrible. I got disoriented and dizzy. They untied me and made me hold an M-1 straight out until I dropped. You know the routine—pushups, deep knee bends, running in place. I pissed in my pants again and again until I was dry. They forced me to drink water until I almost strangled. I began vomiting and going into c
onvulsions.”

  “Is that when you decided to leave?” Pig said, putting his hand on Bobby Bentley’s arm.

  “No,” Bobby responded sadly. “Pig, I had made up my mind that no one in the world was going to run me out of that school. I had made that vow to myself just like you guys must have done during the year sometime. Then when all of you guys pissed on yourselves, I would rather have died than desert my classmates. That night you did that was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. But I wasn’t dealing just with the cadre of R Company. These people were just sick and brutal and dedicated totally to my leaving. They said they would take me to that house every night until I decided to leave, or they would take matters into their own hands.”

  “Nice guys,” Mark said. “Nice bunch of fucking guys.”

  “The sweat party went on all night,” Bobby continued, drawing in a deep breath. “I was covered with vomit and piss and I had begun hallucinating. Probably from fear and exhaustion. Then they did it.

  “They doused me with gasoline. From head to foot. At first I thought they were cleaning off the smell of vomit. But then they all gathered at a place way across the room, staring at me behind those masks. I could see them smiling through the slit. One of them began passing boxes of matches around. They began lighting the matches and flicking them across the room at me. At first they were too far away for any danger. But then they started moving closer, cheering each time a match fell closer to the chair where I was sitting. I began begging for them to stop. But they kept throwing the matches nearer and nearer. I could see myself being set on fire and burning to death in that house. I was terrified because the whole thing looked so rehearsed. They were disciplined and trained to break me. Finally, I told them they had won, that I would quit that night, that I’d never go back to the Institute. Man, I was crying and dry heaving. My body had come completely apart. The smell of gasoline and vomit and piss was horrible. Then there was another smell.”