by Pat Conroy
“I raised my children in the Cadillac of religions,” said Lucy.
“We’re not your real children,” I said. “The marriage was annulled. You can forget about morning sickness, the pain of childbirth, messy placentas, two o’clock feedings, measles, chicken pox … none of it happened. Your kids are five little nightmares you never had.”
“The Cadillac,” she said. “The top of the line.” And she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
Lucy said, after miles of silence, “I want Father Jude to hear my confession. Nothing else will quite do.”
“Tell me why Father Jude is so important to you.”
I could tell I had asked a question my mother didn’t like and she paused for a long moment before answering.
“Later. I’m not going to let you ruin my day,” Lucy said. “You always try to make me feel bad about the way I raised you. Well, here’s the bottom line. You got a college education, a pretty child, and you have written a bunch of books with your name and picture on each one. And you try and make me feel like I did a bad job. You had a great childhood.”
“Yeh, I sure lucked out.”
“You don’t even know what bad luck looks like.”
“Tell me about my luck,” I said, trying to sound ironic, not bitter, but bitterness leaked out all over the irony.
“When you were hit, you bled just like me,” Lucy said. “But you did your bleeding in a warm bed … with a full stomach and with your mama coming in to press a cold washcloth to your face.”
“When I was a little boy, you used to tell me you grew up in Atlanta.”
“I spent some time in Atlanta,” Lucy said defensively.
“You had a photograph of your parents on your bedside table.”
“It was a good story,” Lucy said. “It fooled your father.”
I looked over at her and said, “But not Ginny Penn.”
“Heavens no. Not Ginny Penn. She knew I came from nothing the moment she laid eyes on me.”
“What’s the deal?” I said.
Lucy didn’t say anything for a few moments. “It took Ginny Penn a while to check out my story. But she got round to it by and by. By the time she discovered the truth, I’d already dropped three of her grandchildren and had another on the way. By then, your daddy was personally trying to make a success out of that Jack Daniel’s distillery operation up in Tennessee. Ginny Penn realized, no matter who was my kin, I was good enough to clean up her boy’s vomit. I paid dearly for that little white lie.”
“Who were your parents?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said. “They were less than nothing, beyond sorry. When the South does sorry, there’s nothing sorrier on earth. That’s how it was with my parents. Mama was sweet-natured, but pathetic and broken down the middle. Daddy was mean, but like Mama used to say, only when he was awake … ha ha!”
Her laugh chilled me.
“Mountain mean’s different than other kinds of mean. A harder kind of man develops in a place where the light don’t get in till late morning. Daddy never saw enough light.”
“Did you love them?”
“Him, never. Wasn’t much to love. Couldn’t get a grip on something worthwhile …” she said. “He didn’t allow himself any soft places. I never saw him smile once.”
“Are they alive?”
“No, thank God,” she said. “Jude and I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale if they were.”
“Jude and you? What do you mean?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Lucy.
“Did your father drink?”
“Ha!” Lucy snorted. “He was a worse drinker than your father ever was.”
“No one’s that bad,” I said.
“That’s what I thought too. You’re too close to the middle line. Inch over. That’s right. You think you know what to look out for in life, Jack. You think your childhood teaches you all the traps you need to worry about. But that’s not how it works. Pain doesn’t travel in straight lines. It circles back around and comes up behind you. It’s the circles that kill you.”
We came to the road leading to the abbey. The car moved through pools of undisturbed shade, giving me a lost feeling. The earth itself seemed to grow quiet as we approached the kneeling, tonsured nation of Mepkin; the forest unfurled itself in all the proud wildness of forbidden flags springing up in the outback. Hundred-year-old vines, like rigging, hung from the branches of river birch and bent oaks. As we turned into the long drive leading to the monastery, Lucy and I grew silent, as though we both were listening to secret commands. The weather itself lent a caved-in, hushed collusion to it all. I parked the car and walked over and rang the visitors’ bell in the incensed air. Far off, we could hear the singing of monks. The buildings were new and looked like they were built for hillsides in California, not the South.
Father Jude appeared at the end of a pathway, his hands folded and invisible under his sleeves, walking with his head bent slightly forward. He and Lucy embraced and held each other for a long time.
Jude looked insubstantial and vegetal, his pale flesh like the white asparagus famous in the Argenteuil region of France. The priest had a lived-in, tortured face, yet I knew the man had almost no experience in the outside world. And I wondered at the withheld intimacy between them as I watched Father Jude lead Lucy into the chapel where Mass was being said.
After the service, I excused myself and went to the library where I spent the afternoon writing letters and glancing through the odd selection of magazines that passed muster with the censorious monk responsible for ordering periodicals for the abbey. Lucy explored the grounds of the abbey with Jude and even though they had asked me to join them, I felt they preferred to spend the time alone with each other.
I envied the private, cut-off quality of contemplative life. I admired the intransigence of their discipline, and in a century that seemed more ridiculous to me with each passing year, I thought that solitude and prayer and poverty might be the most eloquent and defensible response to these absurd times where alienation was both posture and philosophy.
I loved the simplicity of monks and longed to emulate their all-consuming, uncomplicated love of God. I liked the idea of denial and silence, but doubted I could take gracefully to their practice.
On the ride back to Waterford, night moved slowly into the lowlands and Lucy’s weariness was obvious as we drove between the light-infused trees that crowded the highway. Her exhaustion worried me and I imagined the approach of the white cells massing along the contested borders of her bloodstream. Once I had nested within her, fed on the warm river that bloomed inside her, learned to love the safety of the darkness of women, come to know the serenity in the music of heartbeats, and that mother love begins in the temple of the womb, a stained-glass window that celebrates the origins and elixirs of blood-born life. The blood that fed me, I thought, is killing her. This is why people believe in gods and need them during the black hours beneath the cold light of stars, I said to myself. Nothing else could touch the lordly indifference of the world. My mother, there, I thought; it was in her I first knew of Eden and the planet I was about to enter naked and afraid.
“Quit thinking about my funeral,” Lucy said, her eyes still shut. “I’m not dead yet. Just bone-tired.”
“I was thinking how odd it was to live in a state where you can’t even get decent Chinese food.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “You had me dead and buried.”
“Why don’t I murder Dad?” I said. “We can all have a dry run to see what a parent’s death feels like. But because it’s just Dad, none of us have to be emotionally involved.”
“Don’t talk about your father like that,” my mother ordered.
“He’s not my father,” I said. “Don’t forget the annulment and the shame that is ours now that we’re bastards.”
“What do you know about shame, son?” Lucy asked, sitting up and smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress. Opening her purse, she took out an atom
izer and sprayed White Shoulders cologne on her wrist and the car carried the full story of my childhood into the airstreams of the highway.
“A lot. I know a lot about shame.”
She shook her head and rubbed the perfume into her throat and face.
“It hurts Jude that you left the Church,” she said.
“It’s none of his business,” I said.
“He baptized all my boys. Gave you First Communion,” she said.
“We used to think you two were lovers,” I said. “I told him that when he gave you the last rites.”
She laughed and said, “What did he say?”
“Not much. Personality’s not his long suit.”
“Jude told me it was time,” my mother said, closing her eyes.
“Time for what?”
“To put the cards on the table,” she said.
“Back to shame again, huh?” I said.
“Yeh. It always leads back there,” Lucy said. “Father Jude’s my brother, Jack. Your uncle.”
“Odd,” I said, after driving another mile of Carolina highway in silence. “Even for you, odd.”
“I got caught up in my own lie. Never could figure out how to backtrack and start again. I could face anything but Ginny Penn’s contempt. Know what I mean?”
“No,” I said honestly. “I’ve no idea. It’s traditional in most Southern families to introduce worthy young nephews to their blood uncles long before their thirty-seventh birthdays.”
Lucy laughed, then said, “You’re so old-fashioned.”
“Even for us, Mama, this is too screwed up. Frankly, I wish Father Jude had just been your lover. It’d be so much easier to swallow.”
“It made perfect sense to me,” she said, “once upon a time.”
“I can’t wait to hear the details,” I said, driving, then I shouted out the window, “the ghastly, fucking unbelievable details.”
“Compose yourself,” Lucy said, and she began to tell the story.
I listened.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The truth is that Lucy McCall was born a Dillard on dirty sheets in a three-room shotgun house within earshot of the Horsepasture River in the county of Pelzer, in the mountains of North Carolina. There was not a dentist or a doctor within a hundred miles of where she was born and few people over forty in the valley who still had their own teeth. Her father, A.J. Dillard, said he was a farmer, but he was neither an industrious nor a successful one. He drank when he should have been sowing and he drank all the way through harvesttime and through the first snow. His daughter never learned what the initials A.J. stood for and no one ever mentioned her mother’s maiden name. Her mother’s first name was Margaret.
Her brother, Jude, was born two years after she was on the same dirty sheets. Again, the father was passed out drunk and Margaret delivered the child by herself in silence, without making a single sound that might rouse her husband from his drunken slumber. She was always proud that she never asked for help nor asked to be beaten, the latter was something he always thought up for himself. Wife beating was both an itch and a pastime with A.J. Dillard, one that he had learned at the knee of his own father. No one in the family on either side could read or write. One had to travel to Asheville to find a copy of any book except the Bible. It was common for children to die in infancy in those parts, and broken-down women such as Margaret prayed for those merciful deaths. Later Margaret used to dream that her children were taken to see Jesus right after their deaths and fitted out with the prettiest angel’s wings made out of lace and snow. Margaret was twelve years old when Lucy was born, fourteen when Jude arrived. In her portion of Appalachia, Pelzer County, she was not looked upon as a particularly young mother. But neighbors did pity her as an unlucky one. No one ever wasted breath by saying a good word about A.J. Dillard. A Dillard was the lowest form a white man could take in that part of the world, an all-white county with an unwritten sunshine law forbidding black people inside the county line after the sun went down. When the Depression finally struck America, no one in Pelzer County noticed anything different in their economy at all.
Lucy was born hungry and Margaret’s milk flow was thin and weak and Lucy would stay hungry through most of her childhood.
Lucy never could pin down the exact moment when she understood that her father was dangerous. She grew up seeing blood and bruises on her mother’s face, and thought that it was natural for a husband and wife to beat each other with fists. The beatings altered the way her mother looked, and as the years passed, Margaret’s eyes would grow more troubled and the shape of her jaw and cheekbones would set into different angles as the bones were broken and rebroken. But Lucy always remembered her mother’s sweetness.
When she was five and Jude three, her father went down from the mountains and hired himself out as a laborer on a tobacco farm outside of Raleigh. Sometimes, he would come back for the winter and sometimes he would send back money by mail, but he became less and less a part of their lives in the next five years. Margaret blossomed in his absence and discovered that she could coax more crops from the rock-strewn field than her husband ever could. She raised chickens and quail and bees in the yard around her unpainted house. Lucy and Jude learned how to fish with cane poles and worms along the bank of the Horsepasture River and caught trout for dinner much of the year. Margaret could use a shotgun as well as any man in the valley and she traded deer and bear she had shot for supplies she needed for the farm. By the time she was ten, Lucy could use a shotgun as well as her mother and took pride in the sore place on her shoulder when she went to bed after a successful hunt. She had cut her teeth on her father’s .22 rifle and no squirrel or rabbit or possum was safe when she entered the forest. That .22 became a part of her and she would handle it as smoothly as she did a rolling pin when she was flattening out a batch of biscuit batter.
Once she killed a wild turkey after stalking it all day. It was a full-grown gobbler, a beast of such grandeur and wildness that she found herself admiring its cunning as it fled through thickets of blackberry and wild rose, moving swiftly as a racehorse as she followed its prints, large as a boy’s hand when it crossed through giveaway patches of earth.
The churches of Appalachia during Lucy’s years worshiped a severe and unforgiving God. Though illiterate, both Margaret’s and A.J.’s families were God-besotted and extreme in their beliefs. Their faith was hard-core, uncompromising, and single-minded in its intensity. At the height of their ecstasy, communion with the Lord, the Church of the Primitive God and His Saints passed poisonous snakes back and forth among the pale-throated righteous congregation who believed that the serpents would not harm them if their faith in God was sincere. Lucy could remember the Sabbath when two men failed the test and lay writhing on the floor, felled by an Eastern diamondback that was making his debut appearance. One of the men, struck in the eyeball, died within minutes. When they buried Oakie Shivers, the preacher exhorted his flock to try to live better lives and promised all of them that he had received a divine vision of Oakie writhing in hellfire for all eternity, the fangs of that serpent still attached to his eyeball. The preacher was named Boy Tommie Green and the Lord had appeared to him in a burning chariot near a field below Chimney Rock and called him in a voice like thunder to the ministry of snakes. He screamed out his sermons, which he never wrote down, nor did he ever purr out the name of Jesus. The word Jesus scissored through the air when Boy Tommie spoke and he wielded that name like a sound to frighten the mountain-broken sinners who came to his church for relief and succor. Eternal life seemed especially sweet to folk who had eaten songbirds and stray dogs for dinner and who tried to coax measly crops from fields more granite than loam.
Like most mountain men in that region, A.J. made his own liquor high above the Horsepasture River whenever the tobacco season ended and he had worn out all his welcomes everywhere else. As the years passed his homecomings became dreaded events and Lucy could never remember her father gentle or sober. Everything about him was a
s hard as an outcropping of stone. The beating of his wife and children was sport to him, one he could indulge upon waking, half-drunk and hungover, when he could run his family down, slap them for sins of which they were completely innocent, then grow morose and sorrowful as the cycle began anew when he took his first sip of clear whiskey. In midwinter, Lucy and Jude would pray for tobacco to begin blooming in central North Carolina fields. They had learned that husbands were masters of their own houses and that men held dominion over women and children and all the beasts of the field, but it was Boy Tommie who was destined to deliver all of them from the wrath and natural meanness of their father.
Boy Tommie could speak in the unknown tongues and quote the Gospel of Luke from the beginning to the end without once glancing down at the Bible. He was a wonder when it came to the things of the Lord, but could not be considered a saintly man because his eye for women was as advanced as his biblical knowledge.
Boy Tommie made his visits to the Dillard farm always during the height of tobacco season when he was sure A.J. was gone. Before he would enter the house for a Bible reading with Margaret, he would drop a copperhead onto the bare dirt ground and give long sticks to Lucy and little Jude and teach them how to race a snake around the yard, making sure you didn’t lose the snake to either the river or the woods. The snake bore the coloring of an October path, and as the children teased the snake, Boy Tommie gave spiritual encouragement to Margaret inside the three-room house.
A.J. returned in early September one year, unannounced, his arm broken and set badly, splinted by a self-taught doctor who patched up migrant workers who cut each other up in fights or were injured in the tobacco fields. A.J. possessed an illiterate’s intuition and he took the scene in quickly, as he saw his children lifting a snake high into the sunlight with a stick, unattended to in the unearthly quiet of a late afternoon. When he found Boy Tommie on top of his wife, both naked as the day they were born, he killed Boy Tommie with a single blow from an ax. The ax cleaved the preacher’s brain in half and his blood splattered against two walls and over Margaret’s face. A.J. rubbed her lover’s blood over Margaret’s face and neck, smearing pieces of his brain all over her breasts and stomach. He beat her face until her blood and Boy Tommie’s blood commingled into something love-born and sacramental. He beat her with his good hand until he knew he had broken that hand and the bones in her face. Then he dragged her and kicked her naked out into the yard before the eyes of the yard fowl and mule and two stricken, terrified children. A.J. took her to the Horsepasture River, cursing God’s name and his wife’s name and the both of them covered with a dead man’s blood, and he plunged Margaret’s face into a deep chute of water, which ran scarlet from her wounds. He held her there for a moment, then brought her up to air and light to tell her to prepare to die in water as the Lord had commanded them to be reborn in the same waters of life. The screams of his wife were nothing compared to his fury and the righteousness of his vengeance, but a mistake was made, a terrible unrecallable error that he lived long enough and in enough agony to regret. A.J. had not heeded the silence of his bitter, pretty daughter, the one who was moving toward the river with a copperhead turned around the end of a long pole, a snake she had learned to love and trust.
