Beach Music (61 page)

Leah followed the deep cut the flippers had made when the turtle had returned from the sea. Lucy and I held back, letting Leah survey the scene where the tracks ended and the turtle had dug her nest.

I was carrying the bucket and the long silver probe, which was a nine-iron with its club face broken off during a match. Leah took the damaged club and approached the mound the loggerhead had thumped down like tobacco in a pipe before she had returned to the Atlantic.

“She lays her eggs while facing the sea. Study her shape. The turtle fills in the hole with the same hind flippers she digs it with,” my mother said.

Leah probed the sand as my mother had taught her to during a training season that had gone on for over two months. Leaning on the ruined club, she stuck it into the sand and looked up at Lucy when it did not give. Pulling it out, Leah tried another spot in the great round indentation where the turtle’s shape was imprinted. With quick, sound thrusts, she kept stabbing into the well-packed sand until she hit a spot where the shank of the golf club sank. Leah knelt down and probed the sand cautiously with her index finger.

“It’s here, Grandma,” she cried out. “It feels like flour that’s been sifted. The rest of the sand is hard-packed.”

“That mother turtle fooled a lot of raccoons,” Lucy said, “but she didn’t fool Leah McCall one minute.”

“Should I dig them up?” Leah said, looking up at her grandmother.

“We’re taking them all up this year,” Lucy said. “We’re going to rebury them up by my house where it’s safe.”

“What does the South Carolina Wildlife Department say about that?” I asked.

“They don’t like it worth a damn,” Lucy admitted. “Dig, Leah. Dig, darling.”

For several minutes, I watched as Leah lifted handfuls of sand from a carefully crafted, hourglass-shaped hole. Her eyes were fiercely concentrated on the job as she went deeper and deeper, relying totally on her sense of touch, letting her hand follow the soft and giving sand. Then she recoiled and froze.

“Something’s there,” Leah said.

“Lift it carefully,” Lucy said. “Everything you bring out is precious.”

Leah’s arm moved slowly, bringing up a round white egg slightly larger than a baby’s fist. It was ivory-colored, and leather soft. It was a capable-looking egg; it looked big enough to hatch ospreys or vultures, but not quite big enough to create something so beastly and magnificent as a loggerhead.

“Place the egg in the bucket carefully, Leah,” Lucy said. “Make sure the egg is facing the exact same direction as it was when you took it out of the nest. Nature’s got her reason for everything. Put some sand into the bottom of the bucket first. That’s it.”

Time after time, Leah reached into the darkness up to her shoulder and brought up from the nest a single egg like a jewel. Her movements were all reverential. Never did she hurry in her excitement and the introduction of each egg seemed like part of some elaborate dance of the seasons.

“Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty …” Leah counted as she placed them one on top of the other and Lucy made notations in a small notebook.

“Look, the turtle tried to climb over these rocks and didn’t make it,” Lucy said, pointing to tracks that led up to the large granite boulders that the owners had imported for erosion control. Sand was a preeminent force in the low country and no rocks were indigenous to the area. “Our houses on the beach kill more loggerheads than ghost crabs or raccoons ever thought about killing. They should never’ve allowed houses to be built in front of the sand dunes.”

“Seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three …” Leah kept counting.

“Was this a good place to nest?” I asked.

“A good spring tide would’ve flooded this hole for sure,” she said. “This nest didn’t have a chance. But you can’t blame the loggerhead. What can she do about those damn rocks? She’d need a grappling hook and a long rope to get over them. Then how would the babies get back to the sea? The whole thing’s a bad business.”

Carefully, Lucy recorded the location of the nest, the day and time of its discovery, the number of eggs laid, and the approximate time the turtle had come ashore to hollow out her nest and lay her eggs. Leah placed one hundred twenty-two eggs in the bucket, then carefully filled the hole back up and packed it down neatly with her feet.

“Now, let’s get these babies to a safe place,” Lucy announced, handing the heavy bucket to me.

Leah walked ahead of us at a quick pace, taking the bucket to the area my mother had staked out for the birthing ground of this year’s crop of loggerheads. My mother stopped to collect a row of clam shells that had washed up the night before. They were as prettily strewn as candy. When I turned back to the business at hand, I saw Leah being approached by a uniformed woman.

“Who’s that?” I asked. “Up by your house?”

Lucy groaned and said, “Trouble, with a master’s degree. Let me do the talking. She gets confused when someone’s kind to her.”

The young woman was uniformed and pretty and was talking to Leah in quick, animated conversation about the gathering of turtle eggs. Leah gestured toward them and then bent to the sand to demonstrate how she had found and procured the pail of eggs I was carrying.

“I’ve always loathed women named Jane,” Lucy said, preparing for battle. “It predisposes them toward mischief and indigestion.”

“You conducted a study?”

“A lifetime of observation, son,” she whispered, but her voice turned voluble and cheerful as they approached the straight-backed woman. “Hello, Jane, I was just telling my son what a pretty name you’ve got. Jack, meet Jane Hartley. You’ve already met my granddaughter, Leah.”

“You allowed her to dig up a whole nest of loggerheads,” Jane said in a voice official and distant. She was wearing the uniform of the South Carolina Wildlife Department. “I bet you didn’t tell Leah it was against state law and that you spent a day in jail last summer for doing the same thing.”

“That’s not true, is it, Grandma?” Leah said.

“It’s technically true,” Lucy admitted, “but nothing is so unconvincing as mere technical truth. Hand me the shovel, Jack. I’m going to dig a fresh hole.”

“I’m confiscating these eggs,” Jane said, getting up and taking a step toward me. But Lucy moved between us with resolve and intent.

“This year I’m not losing one egg to the stupidity of you idiots in the Wildlife Department. Not one,” said Lucy.

“You love playing God, don’t you, Lucy?” Jane said.

“For a long time,” Lucy said, flipping through her salt-splashed notebook, “I played it by the book. Admit it, Jane. I didn’t touch one turtle’s nest. I followed all the directives of your department to the letter. Nature knows best, Jane Hartley and the State Wildlife Department said. Let the eggs lie where the mother buries them. Let nature take its course, you ordered. Nature’s cruel but nature has its reasons.”

“Those rules still apply,” Jane said. “We find it more logical to follow God’s way of doing things than Lucy’s way.”

“My way gets a hell of a lot more baby loggerheads in the water than God’s way and this notebook proves it,” Lucy said, waving her notebook over her head like a weapon.

“My grandma loves the turtles,” Leah said.

“She does love the turtles,” Jane agreed. “It’s the law she doesn’t give a damn about.”

“My son is a world-renowned writer and author of cookbooks,” said Lucy with egregious ill-timing. “He’ll remember every slanderous word you utter. He’s got a mind like a steel trap.”

“You are impervious to my mother’s charms, Officer Hartley,” I said.

“Your mother’s a pain in the ass, Mr. McCall,” the woman stated. “My job is difficult enough without having to fight with someone who claims to be on the side of ecology.”

“Listen to what her side did, Jack and Leah. They sent out a memorandum to all the turtle projects on the South Carolina coast. There’s one on every island from here to the North Carolina coast. Every island’s having erosion problems. Half the nesting habitat of the loggerheads’ve been destroyed in the past ten years. Everybody
in the program’s worried sick. Those geniuses put out a new set of rules that say we can’t touch an egg or a nest once the turtle has laid. We can’t protect a nest, move a nest, guard a nest—nothing. They’ve all got nice offices in Columbia. They’re all drawing big salaries. They’re all feeding off the lifeblood of taxpayers like me.”

“Someone’s got to pay for my Maserati,” Jane deadpanned to me.

“Could we compromise?” I suggested. “We’ve already gone a little far according to the law.”

“If I had my way you’d get a year in jail for each egg in that bucket,” she said briskly, but was startled when Leah began screaming.

“We could go to jail for one hundred twenty-two years, Daddy,” Leah said, running to my side and encircling my waist with her arms. “Just for helping Grandma.”

“I knew being exposed to that woman would come to no good,” I said. “Relax, Leah. We’re not going to jail.”

“Lucy might this time,” Jane said. “Looks like I caught you red-handed.”

Lucy reached out and took the bucket out of my hand, then said, “I’ve tried to be reasonable with you people. I really have. You don’t live with the problem every day, Jane. It’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s sure as hell not good for the survival of these turtles.”

“If man keeps interfering with the nests, then these turtles have no chance of surviving,” Jane countered.

“It’s a theory, Jane. Something you write down on a piece of paper. Something that looks good and sounds good and reads pretty. But it doesn’t work.”

“It’s worked for millions of years, Lucy. It’s proven effective since the age of dinosaurs.”

“Listen, Jack and Leah. Listen to what happened. We did what Jane here said. Down to the letter, we followed her directions. Because they had statistics and charts and their damn degrees. Because they had badges and guns and the weight of law behind them. Tell Leah what happened, Jane. Tell the child how well your theories worked.”

“Our theories worked perfectly,” the woman said, tightening
her gun belt. “Nature allowed a certain number of nests to yield a certain number of loggerheads. Some nests were destroyed by predators. That has to be expected.”

“Sounds reasonable, Mother,” I said.

“Son, I acknowledge your expertise when it comes to ziti or pepperoni pizza. But you’re in your rookie year with the turtle ladies,” Lucy said, staring hard at Jane Hartley and being stared at in return.

“Lucy considers herself above the laws of nature,” Jane said.

“The laws of nature are now killing me, Jane,” Lucy shot back. “I’m painfully aware how subject I am to those laws. You won’t be having this argument with me next year, but I pray to God one of the other turtle ladies’ll take my place.”

“Give me those eggs, Lucy.”

“No,” Lucy said, “I most certainly will not. What would you do with the eggs?”

“Take them back to my office,” Jane answered. “Photograph them for evidence. Examine them for damage. Then bring them back to the island and rebury them as close to the original nesting site as possible.”

“We need to get these eggs in the ground right this minute,” said Lucy, walking over and picking up a shovel that she had leaned against the supports of her deck. “I’m moving all turtle nests on this island to the dry sand right in front of my house, Jane. That way, I can protect them myself because they won’t be but twenty yards away from the pillow where I’m sleeping.”

“And that way, you get to break the law every time a turtle comes up on this beach.”

“What happened to the nests last year?” I asked.

“Nothing happened to them,” Jane said.

“Only twenty percent of them produced any hatchling turtles at all!” Lucy said, starting to dig her hole.

“The laws of nature prevailed,” said Jane, addressing herself to me now. “Lucy’s made the mistake of personalizing her relationship to all those eggs and loggerheads.”

“Last year there were a hundred-twenty nests,” Lucy countered.
“But the erosion on the south side of the beach was terrible. A lot of beachfront was lost due to a bad nor’easter in February. Everybody on the beach started putting loads of granite in front of their houses. Bulldozers moved tons of sand over the rocks. The place crawled with dump trucks. When the turtles came in that May, it was like someone had built the great wall of China over their nesting grounds. Two of them laid their eggs in a sandbar twenty yards out into the ocean. That’s how desperate they were. We moved those nests.”

“With our permission,” Jane said.

“Yes, but you refused permission to move any of the nests laid at the foot of the rocks for two miles along the south beach,” Lucy said, attacking the sand with her shovel. “The spring tides were extraordinary last year. The whole ocean seemed to rise up and try to reach out toward dry land. Some tides covered the tops of the marsh grass. Fifty-six nests were wiped out by those tides. That’s a possible six thousand turtles who didn’t make it to the water because Jane and her colleagues are stupid.”

“We made a mistake, Lucy. We admitted it.”

“They wouldn’t let me lay wire fencing to protect the nests from raccoons and dogs. Lost twenty-seven more nests that way. The goddamn coons are common as roaches on this island because they love to tip over garbage cans of fat tourists from Ohio. I found seventeen coons fighting and squalling over a nest of turtle eggs that they’d spread up and down the beach.”

“We’re on the same side in this battle,” Jane said. “You’ve never understood that, Lucy.”

“Then help me teach my granddaughter how to dig a turtle hole that’ll make these eggs feel like Mama dug it.”

“I want you to know, Mr. McCall, that your mother was like this before she got sick,” Jane said, throwing up her hands in exasperation.

“I know,” I said. “She raised me.”

Lucy handled the shovel with economy and expertise and as she lifted the sand out in small spadefuls, a rounded hole that reproduced the hourglass-shaped nest excavated by the back flippers of the loggerhead
began to emerge. It was a lovely, strange sort of mimicry and it made me realize the long patient hours of observation that she had spent studying the habits of those ungainly turtles.