by Pat Conroy
On the day before Thanksgiving, we heard a car coming across the causeway on the other side of the island and ten minutes later it pulled up in our yard and four immaculately dressed women approached our house. I opened the door to Bettina Potts, Martha Randall, Thelma Wright, and Isabel Newbury, the four officers of the Colleton League, and Mrs. Newbury asked if she could speak to my mother.
My mother came to the door and something died in her eyes the moment she saw them. She dried her hands on her apron and asked them to come inside the house.
“We can’t stay long, Lila. We have three other turkeys to deliver by dark,” Isabel Newbury said sweetly.
“I don’t understand,” my mother said as the four ladies seated themselves uncomfortably around the living room, their eyes glancing about the room.
“You must have heard that one of the functions of the League is to distribute turkeys at Thanksgiving to less fortunate families in the county, Lila. We wanted to make sure that you and your family did not go without during the holiday season,” said Bettina Potts.
“There must be some mistake, Bettina. My family is doing just fine.”
“Could you put on a light in here, Lila?” Mrs. Newbury said. “It’s rather difficult to see in this gloom.”
“I thank you for thinking of us, ladies,” my mother said, controlling her temper with difficulty, “but there are many families in the county who are in need of your charity far more than this one.”
“Please don’t think of this as charity, Lila,” Thelma Wright said. “Think of it as a gesture of good will among friends who are worried about you.”
“Please, don’t do this to me,” I heard my mother say. “Please, I beg of you.”
“Think of your children and their Thanksgiving, Lila,” Mrs. Potts said. “Don’t just think of yourself.”
Then I heard Luke’s voice speak and it quivered with a murderous rage. He came roaring out of the kitchen, saying, “Get out of my mother’s house.”
“What a rude young man,” Martha Randall said as Savannah and I emerged from the bedroom we had retreated to.
“I can’t see your children’s faces in this light, Lila,” Isabel Newbury said again. “Please switch on a lamp for us.”
“My son asked you to leave, Isabel.”
“We will as soon as we give you the turkey,” Bettina Potts insisted.
“Then leave it out in the yard when you go. I’ll send one of the boys out for it later,” my mother said, regaining her composure with some difficulty.
“You made this very hard for us, Lila,” Mrs. Randall said.
“Not as hard as you made it for me, Martha,” my mother answered as the women got up to leave.
They left the frozen turkey on the grass and we listened as their car pulled out of the yard.
There were tears of rage in her eyes as my mother walked to the gun rack in the living room and took down her shotgun. She grabbed a handful of shells, loaded the gun, and placed the other shells in the pocket of her apron. She went out into the yard and stood staring at the turkey she had been granted as an act of charity and debasement by the Colleton League.
“They were waiting for this to happen. They were biding their time and waiting,” she said as she put that shotgun to her. shoulder. The first shot bounced the turkey across the lawn; the second dismembered it into a thousand pieces.
“I want you to remember this one, children. This is what they’re all like. Every one of them.”
She lowered her gun and walked back into the house. I do not remember Thanksgiving dinner that year.
In late December, after my father had returned from Florida, a loggerhead turtle washed up on the marsh near our dock. The turtle was already dead when we found it. Dad ordered that Luke and I remove it before it began to decompose and stink up the yard. At breakfast that morning, Savannah had read to us from the social columns that Reese and Isabel Newbury and their son, Todd, were in Barbados for their annual winter vacation. It was Luke who made the connection between the turtle and Barbados. Luke and I lifted the loggerhead and put it into the Boston Whaler, and that night before we went to sleep, Luke revealed his plan to me and Savannah.
We awoke at three in the morning and slipped out of the house through our bedroom window. Soundlessly, we made our way down to the dock, and Luke did not start the motor until we had drifted a quarter of a mile from our house. He turned the boat into the main channel and he headed for the lights of Colleton across the river. He opened up the throttle and we flew through a light, choppy sea on a full tide. We were laughing as we passed under the bridge, but grew silent as we approached the landing at the end of the Street of Tides. Luke cut the motor and we drifted a hundred feet up to the shore where I jumped out and tied the boat to the community dock. We lifted the turtle out of the boat, and stopping often to rest, we moved through the dark abandoned streets of our town toward the Newbury house. We passed beneath the oaks that formed the green canopy along the most distinguished row of houses between Savannah and Charleston. Dogs barked far off in the town. I cut my hand on one of the barnacles that had adhered to the loggerhead’s back. The air was cold and Christmas tree lights winked in some of the windows.
When we reached the Newbury house, we set the turtle down in the back yard and Luke went around to try the windows. He shinnied up one of the columns and found a bathroom window open on the second floor. Savannah and I heard the back door open and saw Luke motion to us. We lifted the turtle again and moved as quickly as we could up the back stairs. We went directly to the master bedroom, where Luke had thoughtfully pulled back the covers on the immense four-poster bed of Reese and Isabel Newbury. We laid the turtle between the sheets and propped its head on a pillow, then covered it with the blankets. Savannah twisted the valve on the radiator full blast. Luke found one of Mrs. Newbury’s sleeping bonnets and placed it rakishly on the turtle’s great head. The room smelled like the hold of a shrimp boat. The loggerhead had already started to turn. We were back in our beds when our mother called us to breakfast.
The Newburys could not live in their home for six months after they returned from their annual trip to Barbados, nor did they ever go to Barbados again. The turtle’s decomposition had been ghastly and hideous in the extreme heat of the bedroom. The four-poster bed and the mattresses were burned. For a month, no maid could enter the room without vomiting. Reese Newbury promised a thousand dollars to anyone who could provide information leading to the conviction of the person who had left the turtle in his bed. There was an editorial in the Colleton Gazette denouncing the crime. I have never seen my mother happier than when she was reading that editorial.
On her next birthday, Savannah bought my mother a copy of the Colleton League cookbook. It was a gift from the three of us. I could see the old look of hurt and disappointment in my mother’s eyes as she held the book in her hands. The gift troubled her and I could tell she was wondering if we were making fun of her.
“Open it to the back page, Mama,” Savannah said. “Luke, Tom, and I wrote you a recipe.”
On the last page, Savannah had written out the entire recipe for Canard Sauvage Chez Wingo. On the facing page was a recipe of our own invention:
LOGGERHEAD TURTLE CHEZ NEWBURY
Take one loggerhead turtle, preferably ripe. Choose a dark night and take the turtle across the river when your parents are sleeping. Be careful that no one sees you. Find an open window. Unlock the back door. Place the turtle on a four-poster bed and turn the heat on high. Simmer the turtle until done, usually two weeks. Serve with toast points and a strong red wine. Wish your mother Happy Birthday. Tell her you love her. Remember the turkey.
Love,
Savannah, Luke, and Tom
I will always believe that recipe was my sister’s first authentic poem. At first, my mother scolded us, screamed out that she was raising us to be decent, law-abiding citizens and not cat burglars, threatened to talk to Reese Newbury and collect the thousand-dollar reward, told us that we had to
turn ourselves in to the sheriff, that once again we had disgraced the family and would make her the laughingstock of Colleton. She stopped scolding us and read the recipe again. Then she giggled like a schoolgirl and could not help herself. She grabbed the three of us together and hugged us in a rare physical embrace. Then she whispered, and there was both fury and exaltation in that whisper, “My kids are something. Lila Wingo may be nothing, but by God, her kids are hell.”
12
In the dead center of a troubled adolescence, Bernard Woodruff made the game of football a pleasure to coach. He was one of those unconfident, hurting boys who needed just a brief opening to win the admiration of his peers. He lusted to be an athlete, and no matter how hard I drove him, he learned to ask for more. Part of his training was to master the hard curriculum of endearing himself to coaches and winning their respect with his unquenchable enthusiasm. Coaches were simple creatures, I told Bernard, who wanted all their boys to behave like rabid animals on the field and perfect gentlemen in the school hallways. On the field, coaches prized the willed aura of fearlessness; off the field they rewarded the quiet virtue of courtesy. Coaches wanted you to hurt the man carrying the football, but help carry him from the field, then write him a get-well letter in the hospital with all the grammar correct. If you are not a great athlete, pretend you are, I instructed Bernard. The great athletes do not need to be actors, but the rest of us do, I said during the first week I met with Bernard as I showed him how to carry himself and to think like an athlete.
I instructed him in the fundamentals of the game, took him from the very beginning and, working slowly, proceeded to teach the boy everything I knew about football. On the first day we began with the three-point stance and worked on firing out low from that stance for an hour. I showed him how to throw a football properly, how to cock the arm, how many steps to retreat into the protection of the pocket, how to step toward the receiver when passing, and how to cover the ball when the pass protection broke down. I began the long process of teaching Bernard how to play every position on the field, offensive and defensive. My sister still refused to see me and I had plenty of time on my hands. It felt good to coach again and it pleased me to discover that Bernard had good foot speed, could throw a nice pass, and needed a coach as badly as I needed a team.
I taught him how to run a pass pattern against a quicker defensive back and how to pass block against a charging defensive lineman. We took things slowly, by the number, and we repeated them daily until Bernard’s movements on the field seemed instinctual instead of learned.
Each morning he met me at eight; he was always there waiting when I jogged into the park from the Village. We ended our practice sessions in a series of wind sprints where I would race Bernard in the forty-yard dash. On the first day, we ran ten dashes and I won six of them. On Friday of the same week, Bernard won seven of them. After practice I would buy him a Coke and send him home to shower before he began his violin lessons. As his coach, I was making him obedient to a cold and wearying discipline. Because of his desire, he found, to his happy surprise, that he loved it. At the end of the first week, Bernard began to think of himself as a football player. I had transformed him into something he was never supposed to be. He returned the favor by making me feel like a coach again. His mouth still bothered me and he asked too many questions. It took him far too long to learn the basics of the game. But he kept trying and he burned with a love of the sport. He thrilled me and made me understand again the mystery of why I loved to teach boys the rudiments of a game I had played as a child. If a boy came to me in good faith and wanted to learn the game of football, I could make him better than he ever thought he could be. I could light a fire in that boy and other boys would hate to see him on the same field. Already, I could tell that there were boys from Phillips Exeter now asleep in Newport and Westchester who would hurt in the coming autumn because Bernard Woodruff spent his summer learning the fine points of his game in Central Park.
For ten days I worked hard to get Bernard and myself into shape. Then I went to talk to his mother about buying her son a uniform.
Now, whenever I went to Susan Lowenstein’s office, I would try to decide which of her features she had given to her son. Bernard had inherited his mother’s long legs, her full lips, those dark expressive eyes, and a complexion as smooth as new fruit. Except for a constant scowl, he was an exceptionally handsome boy. Our first drill each morning was to have Bernard practice smiling at me. He acted as though smiling was an unendurable callisthenic; it was the only part of our sessions together he hated.
I was entering my fourth week in New York and Sallie had not called or written me once. I was making elaborate plans to paint Savannah’s apartment, and I had filled up one of my journals and started on another. Each week I would write Savannah a letter at Bellevue and stick it in a package with the other mail she received at her apartment. In the morning, I exercised and coached Bernard; in the late afternoon I walked uptown to his mother’s office and continued to relate my sister’s screams on the tapes to her life as a child. I read wonderful books from my sister’s library of three thousand books. I was putting my damaged life in order. For the first time in a year, I started to have dreams of teaching again. I was in a classroom and the subject was Tolstoy and I was telling a class composed of all those students who had ever loved me as a teacher that the reason Tolstoy was great was because he was passionate. Why was it, I wondered, that I was most passionate talking about books I had loved? In the dream it was easy. Those books honored me; those books changed me. Alone, the greatest writers would sit with me and, in their own voices, tell me everything there was to know about the world. When I woke from the dream, I realized that I had no classroom to enter whenever a new book took possession of me. I needed students to complete myself. I began to write letters of application to all the high schools in Charleston again. As a teacher, I had been a happy man. Now, I was only a diminished one.
After I had told Susan about my mother’s fruitless effort to get selected for the Colleton League, she had glanced at her watch.
“I believe our time’s up for today, Tom,” she said, then paused. “Do you know what strikes me as the strangest detail in that whole story?” she asked. “The fact that your family had a subscription to Gourmet magazine.”
“You’ve always got to remember that my grandmother took off on that three-year world cruise and picked up a lot of strange notions,” I said. “It was far stranger to me when she got Savannah a subscription to The New Yorker. Who would have ever thought that Savannah would one day spend much of her adult life in some of New York’s most notorious wacko wards.”
“You’ve been writing letters to Savannah, Tom,” Susan said.
“That’s right, Lowenstein,” I said, angry at her admonishing tone. “You see, she’s my sister and we have a long tradition in my family of writing letters when we want to tell someone that we love them and wish them well.”
“The letters are upsetting her,” she said. “She received one from your mother yesterday. They had to sedate her.”
“That’s understandable,” I said. “Guilt just leaks off on your fingers when you read one of my mother’s letters. My letters, on the other hand, are models of decorum. I’ve had long experience in not offending the sensibilities of lunatics, even when they’re related to me.”
“Savannah is not a lunatic, Tom. She’s a very disturbed woman.”
“That was meant to be a joke, Lowenstein.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
“I admit, it wasn’t world-class humor, Lowenstein, but Jesus Christ, it’s difficult to be funny with someone who’s had her sense of humor surgically removed.”
“Most things don’t amuse me,” she said. “I can’t help that.”
“Yes you can, Susan,” I disagreed. “Since we have found ourselves sitting together every day, you could take this opportunity to improve your personality.”
“And you, Tom Wingo of South Carolina, think that you
could improve my personality?” she answered, her voice crackling with irony.
“Notice that I choose to ignore the slur on my home state and stick to the point. See, Lowenstein, I’m a very funny man. There are times when I tell a joke or come roaring out with some startling and hilarious bon mot that you could respond to with something as simple as a smile. I’m not asking for a horse laugh. Otherwise, I consider you to be a perfect human being.”
“Bernard tells me that you make him practice smiling every day, Tom,” she said, and she smiled.
“Why are you smiling now?” I asked.
“Because he complains about it,” she said. “Because it makes him feel like an idiot grinning twenty-five times before you let him near a football.”
“He’s handsome when he smiles,” I said. “He’s got the face of a killer mugger when he wears that scowl.”
“Would you like me to smile twenty-five times before we begin our sessions together?” she asked, teasing me.
“You look great when you smile, Lowenstein,” I said.
“How do I look when I don’t smile?” she asked.
“Absolutely sensational,” I said. “But I’d love for you and Bernard to enjoy yourselves a little more. By the way, Susan, could you invite me to your house for dinner some night when Herbert’s out of town?”
“Why?” she said, and I could tell she thought my presumption troubling.
“Because Herbert doesn’t know about his son the quarterback. Nor, I presume, do you want him to know.”
“He’s giving a concert in Boston tomorrow night. Could you come then?”
“Let me cook a fabulous meal,” I said. “We’ll eat like royalty.”
“Could I ask you a question, Tom?” she said.
“About the meal?”
“No, about my son,” she said. “Is he gifted in football at all?”
“Yes,” I said. “To my great surprise. Bernard isn’t bad at all.”
