Beach Music (103 page)

On October 10, the last turtle nest of the season was to be
opened, and Lucy demanded to be present. The cool weather had already come to the low country of South Carolina, but the ducks and geese had not yet made their way this far south on the eastern flyway. We still went swimming out in front of her house twice a day and she liked to sit out on her deck holding Dr. Pitts’ hand as I walked out into deep water with Leah standing on my shoulders or as Dallas swam out past the breakers.

Over a hundred people had gathered for the release of the turtles when Lucy walked with our help to the wire-protected nest harboring the turtle eggs that had been moved in August. Lucy’s volunteers had monitored the emptying of forty-one nests on the Isle of Orion that season. Four thousand six hundred and thirty-three baby loggerheads had made it into the water.

Lucy stood before this final nest and asked Leah, “How many eggs were moved to this spot?”

Leah had her notebook and read out, “One hundred twenty-one eggs, Grandma.”

“Who found the nest?”

“Betty Sobol, Grandma.”

“Ah, Betty,” Lucy said. “I’ve asked Betty to take over the program next year. I think it’s time someone else took care of these turtles for a while. I’d like to sleep in with that good-looking husband of mine instead of traipsing all over these beaches at sunrise.”

There was a brief outburst of applause when the task was passed to Betty Sobol, then the gravity of Lucy’s condition quieted the crowd again.

“Does anyone object if Leah takes the turtles out of this nest? I’d do it myself, but I’m feeling a bit peaked. Can you do it once more, girl?”

“I was born to do it, Grandma,” Leah said, and she knelt down in the sand and began digging as a hundred people leaned forward to watch.

Leah dug down into the caved-in sand, overcautious at first. Then she smiled, looked at her grandmother, and came up with a black, struggling miniature loggerhead. The crowd cheered when Leah handed it to Lucy. Lucy inspected it and put it in the sand-lined bucket. Leah came up with three turtles in the next scoop of
her hand. Within the nest, the scrimmage of shells clicking made it sound like a hundred dice rolling across velvet. When Leah was done, she gathered all the eggshells and began to cover them with sand.

“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.”

I
n 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.