The Death of Santini

by Pat Conroy

  CHAPTER 9 •

  Piedmont

  Stanny was mountain-born and broken by the eclipsed imaginings parceled out to the Southern girls of her time. Few women escaped the lunar pull of those hard mountains in Alabama, where she was born to a family that had gone off half-cocked, thumbing their noses at the law, and already famous for being infamous in a town that didn’t have much use for any of them. But the Wife of Bath can make her presence felt in any family. Stanny walked through her childhood with a bruised but valiant heart. My meek and God-fearing grandfather Jasper Peek had hitched his fate to the wings of a firebird, and Stanny left her talon tracks everywhere she took flight. No one in her family lay untouched by her flaunting of the boldest form that womanhood could assume in her day and time. She was born to a mountain range not large enough to stifle an insurrectionary spirit. In her misshapen youth, Stanny found herself in full possession of woman’s sorrowful complaint against the fate she was born to burn down in her leisure. Even though Piedmont, Alabama, had locked her away in the prison of its town limits, the cutoff geography of her birth had created a girl who lit freedom’s torch for herself and anyone who cared to go along with her on the ride. When she first abandoned her four children and husband to their tearful lives in west Georgia, she was lighting hill fires for the gathering tempest of feminism that would soon move through the land, as well as planting her own flag of liberation in downtown Atlanta as she began to arrange the brand-new words she would need to fashion herself for all time as an American original.

  My grandmother was passionate and radical, and she helped to bring the New South screaming against its will into the twentieth century. I’d have it no other way. I wouldn’t change a thing about Stanny. Instead, I thrilled to see her work her sorcerer’s gift on my family and friends.

  Stanny developed a deep and affectionate friendship with Bernie Schein, one of the necessary friends of my life, whom I met my junior year at Beaufort High School. Bernie struck me as hilarious, profane, openhearted, curious, mischievous, and again, a very strong emphasis on the word “profane.” When I first introduced my grandmother to Bernie, he shocked me by saying, “Hello, Mrs. Conroy. It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I guess Pat told you that I’ve got the biggest dick in Beaufort.”

  I was stepping forward to break Bernie’s jaw when my grandmother answered: “No, Bernie. Pat told me just the opposite.”

  Whenever I threw a party or went out to some new Atlanta restaurant, I would issue a Bernie proviso, a small caution sign to men and women whose tender sensibilities were easily offended. With Bernie anything can happen, and something always does. My grandmother was putty in his hands, and Bernie was a devotee and an adopted grandson to her for the rest of her life. The more profane he became, the more Stanny snickered and urged him to even lower depths of the unspeakable. One could not appeal to Bernie’s sense of decency, because he never considered decency to be a praiseworthy goal.

  Even so, I tried to incorporate Stanny into the lives and times of my Atlanta friends. Anne Rivers Siddons had her over for dinner at her house on Vermont Road on several occasions. I took her to parties at friends’ homes all over Atlanta, where Stanny would sit back with a cocktail that Bernie always rushed to fix her when she flashed some arcane signal they’d developed between them. Stanny would coo with pleasure at what she called “high-class discussion among the literati,” although I can’t remember her having a single discussion with the literati or anyone else. Jim Townsend, the founder of Atlanta magazine, fell hard for Stanny and would entertain her with lewd jokes from his endless repertoire. Other friends, like Terry Kay, Frank Smith, and Clifford Graubart, invited Stanny into their lives and fussed and joked and flirted with her. I think my grandmother thought she was traveling on a world cruise, with hostesses and suitors bringing her hors d’oeuvres and filling up her dance card in her role of a lifetime as belle of the ball restored to her once and future glory. But her friendship with Bernie Schein eventually brought about Stanny’s exile from Atlanta to her daughters’ homes in Florida.

  My mother’s family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, “He was named after the prophet—Jerry Mire.”

  Stanny was the most fanatical grave visitor I ever encountered, and I drove her out to the Greenlawn Cemetery three times the first week she was living in Atlanta. In the center of the cemetery sat a mausoleum where we visited the vault that contained the mortal remains of Papa Jack. We would lower our heads and pray for the repose of his good Greek soul. Then Stanny would begin a long, free-flowing monologue with Papa Jack that went on for long, excruciating minutes. “We miss you, Jack. You remember Pat here. He’s Don and Peg’s oldest. He and Carol Ann used to love to hear you tell stories. I had to sell the house on Rosedale Road a while back. It was getting too much for me to handle. But I’m living in Atlanta again, and my grandson Pat has promised to bring me out here to visit you every week.”

  “I’ll be damned if that’s so, Papa Jack,” I said.

  “Please, Pat, I’m praying.”

  “You ain’t praying. You’re talking to a dead man.”

  “I’m communing with the soul of my husband.”

  “You’ve had eight husbands.”

  “Not eight. I never had eight. I don’t think,” she said, then giggled. “The number’s in dispute.”

  “Let’s clear it up. How many were there?”

  “You know I’ll be buried here when I go to be with Jack,” she said, “The worms’ll never feed on this flesh. Eight’s a workable figure.”

  During the following years, relatives from the Alabama mountains began drifting down to Atlanta to pay their respects to the matriarch, especially after she suffered a heart attack when her only son, James, died. Distant cousins, all of them carrying worn copies of their family Bibles to read passages of uplifting quotations, came to speed along the salvation of Stanny’s immortal soul. I used to call this noncontact sparring “dueling Bibles.” My aunt Helen and cousin Carolyn could play it with the best of them. But these second- and third-string cousins were also adept at quoting citations from both the Old and New Testaments. The fact that they were wielding their Bibles against the most notorious sinner our family had produced stimulated them into an ecstatic zone of sanctimony. In a wheelchair, with her head bent against her chest, Stanny endured the incoming fire of scripture with admirable forbearance. But the lichen of boredom made her eyes filmy and fogged in.

  A Nolen cousin from Piedmont read, “You’ve got to get right with the Lord, Margaret. It says here in Deuteronomy 32:22, ‘For a fire is kindled in my anger, and shall burn into the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase and set on fire the foundations of the mountains.’ ”

  In a fierce turning of pages, another older cousin said, “You must turn your ear toward God’s words, Margaret. It says right here in Psalms 16:50, ‘For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer this Holy One to see corruption.’ ”

  An uncle on Stanny’s mother’s side trumped the first two. “Margaret, raise your arms and pray for Jesus’s divine forgiveness, for it says in Revelations 1:18, ‘I am he that liveth … and was dead: and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen; and I have the keys of hell and death.’ ”

  Through my living room window, I watched horrified as Bernie Schein made his way up my driveway from Briarcliff Road. I sprang to my feet and met him halfway up the drive and put both my hands around his throat. I said, “I don’t have time to explain it to you. But my Alabama relatives are visiting Stanny. They’re country people and they never met a profane, foulmouthed Jew who spends most of his time making fun of the baby Jesus. If you say one wor
d that pisses me off, I will cut your pecker off and feed it to the rottweiler next door. You understand me?”

  Bernie grinned and said, “Pat, if you can’t trust your best friend on earth, then who can you trust?”

  When my wife, Barbara, saw Bernie, she removed herself from the room like a plume of smoke. Bernie went over to greet Stanny. He kissed Stanny gently on the lips—then he kissed her with exaggerated passion and much moaning.

  “Stanny,” Bernie said, his voice loud and boisterous, “I’ve been so worried since I learned about your heart attack. But here’s the good news—I still get horny when I see you.”

  “Thorny!” I shouted. “Bernie and Stanny have a very thorny relationship.”

  “I know just the thing that can make you better, Stanny,” Bernie said. “I’ve got just what the doctor ordered.”

  In her weakened, feeble voice, Stanny said. “What is it, Bernie?”

  Bernie Schein then became infamous in the history of my Southern family by telling my wheelchair-bound grandmother, “Stanny, let’s me and you go out and fuck.”

  I have a vague memory of Bibles slamming shut all around me, but the room started to empty with none of the small courtesies usually observed in leavetaking. Stanny said, “Where we going to do it, Bernie?” And both of them collapsed in laughter.

  From the kitchen, I watched the flight of primitive Baptists hurrying toward their cars and away from my ungodly house. My reputation among my mother’s family took a solid hit after Stanny and Bernie’s mating ritual was disseminated into another sordid family legend.

  A few years earlier, when my uncle Cicero died, I had driven Stanny to Piedmont for the funeral. Uncle Cicero was the brother of my grandfather Jasper Catlett, and he was as God-possessed as my granddad. Once, he sent us a photograph of himself carrying a wooden cross on his shoulders on Good Friday to atone for the sins of backsliding Christians. (Eventually, I stole this story and handed it over to Grandpa Wingo in The Prince of Tides.) After an extraordinary Southern feast served by the churchwomen, I went home with my cousins Clyde and Pluma Baker, whom I’d adored since childhood because they comforted me with stories. Clyde rode me around the county in his pickup truck showing me the last shack Grandpa Peek lived in before dementia struck him, and his children had to put him away in a nursing home. He drove me to Aunt Ruby and Uncle Howard’s farm, where I had stayed overnight with my mother and Carol Ann during our two visits to Piedmont as kids. Then he took me riding through the countryside. I’d never realized that the land around the town was marvelous in its lushness, in the profligacy of its own contained beauty. I could see how people could become enchanted with such a landscape, numerous with creeks and the patient feeding of herds. Though my grandfather Peek was known as “Jasper-blooded” because of his restlessness and the sheer scale of his wandering about the South, I noticed he always returned to the place of his birth and talked of little else during the duration of his visits with us.

  Passing a hill not far from Howard’s farm, Clyde pulled the truck to a stop and walked over to a creek that looked as if its banks were covered by an evergreen prayer rug. Leaning over, he cut off a large portion of greenery with his pocketknife and handed me my share. It was watercress so cool and fresh, it was like eating the plant for the first time. The watercress felt like something growing new in the Garden of Eden.

  “Best patch of watercress in the county,” Clyde said. “Your grandfather Jasper told me about this place.”

  “I never tasted anything so good.”

  “You know what they call that hill in front of us, Pat?” he asked. “It’s named Nolen Hill—in honor of your family.”

  “Stanny’s family?”

  “The same one,” Clyde said, and I could see a mischievous glint to his eye. “You’re a Nolen, Pat. Up here that means you’re gonna die with your boots on.”

  “Please explain that, Clyde.”

  “Nolens don’t hurt other folks,” Clyde said. “They just got a bad habit of killing each other.”

  As Clyde began to tell his history of the Nolens, I realized that I had never heard Stanny say a word about her own parents. I didn’t even know their names. According to Clyde, both her mother and father were famous for their explosive tempers and foul mouths. One night a terrible argument broke out between Stanny’s parents in their upstairs bedroom, he told me. Old Man Nolen was keeping his wife from running downstairs by blocking the stairway with his wheelchair. Both were slapping each other and cursing with profanity-laden vigor. The argument ended when their oldest son ran out of his upstairs bedroom with a shotgun and blew his father down the stairs, sending the man and his wheelchair airborne in a long tumble toward the entryway. The son was arrested for murdering his father and sent to prison to serve hard time.

  “My uncle killed Stanny’s father?” I said, aghast.

  “No,” Clyde said. “He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “You just told me he went to prison.”

  “He did, but he didn’t kill the old man,” Clyde said, and like all good storytellers he was playing this out.

  “Who killed him?”

  “His wife, your great-grandmother. Her son took the rap for it. He went to jail for his mama. Every good ol’ boy in the mountains would’ve done the same thing.”

  I said, “I wouldn’t do it.”

  “You tell me your mama kill your daddy, you wouldn’t take the heat for her?” Clyde said.

  In a brief reverie, my childhood passed in review before my eyes. “Yeah, I’d’ve been happy to do it for Mom.”

  “You just like us, son,” Clyde said. “You can do all the college you want, but Nolen blood don’t change. You know your uncle Joe, Stanny’s brother?”

  “I used to visit him in the Atlanta penitentiary when I first got to the city.”

  “He tell you why he was in the big house?”

  “Said it had to do with shoplifting,” I said. “Uncle Joe said it was a bad habit.”

  Clyde laughed out loud. “He shot and killed one of Stanny’s other brothers.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I think he got pissed off,” Clyde said. “You Nolens got a short fuse.”

  “Stanny’s a sweetheart. So are Aunt Faye and Aunt Nellie.”

  “Good mountain girls. Strong girls. Course, Stanny’s got quite a reputation up here. You ever hear about her putting on her track shoes during the middle of the Depression and hauling ass to Atlanta? Left her kids and everything.”

  “Yeah, I heard that one, Clyde,” I said.

  “Didn’t set too well with the people up here.”

  “Didn’t set real well with her kids, either,” I answered.

  “Your uncle Joe wants to see you,” Clyde said. “He lives in a school bus with twenty-six dogs.”

  “Why?”

  “He likes dogs, I reckon,” said Clyde, “or school buses.”

  On the way back to Atlanta, I tried to engage Stanny in some accurate recounting of her family’s history. Her relationship with truth was scant and fugitive—her talent for subterfuge inventive and slippery by nature. Her parents were people of the finest type, pillars of their church community life. Her brothers were the handsomest boys who ever lived—a little on the wild side, but men of high breeding and quality. When she admitted that her brother had dabbled in moonshining, it was an act of rebellion against the revenuers and federal agents who interfered with the stern code of the hills. Their land was sovereign property, and not even the king of England or the U.S. president could cross their threshold to tell them how to use their God-given land. Besides, the Nolen boys were artists in the moonshine they made in their copper-kettled stills around Piedmont. Stanny had brought a mason jar full of it on a world cruise, and the ship captain himself declared it the equal of French cognac.

  “Did Uncle Joe kill his own brother?” I asked Stanny. “Everyone in Piedmont says he did.”

  “You’re talking to the Peeks. They’re nothing but religious fana
tics,” Stanny said.

  “Did Joe do it?”

  “He was framed,” Stanny said.

  “Who framed him?”

  “The Mafia.”

  “I didn’t know they had branches in Piedmont, Alabama. There isn’t even a pizza parlor in town.”

  “The Peeks love running my family name into the ground.”

  “Let’s tell them about the Mafia.”

  “That’d only make it worse,” Stanny said. “Then they’d spread the word that the Nolens were associating with Eye-talians and Roman Catholics.”

  “Roman Catholics?” I said. “A fate worse than death.”

  “They think it is. Those lying, no-’count, mouthy Peeks! They can’t stand it that I’ve always been a good ol’ Southern girl, but one with style and class.”

  What I was looking for, Stanny couldn’t tell me. In both my mother and Stanny, Piedmont was a branding iron of shame, a starry-blooded omen, an underbelly of the Deep South, and a place to fly away from. Piedmont lit fires of the deepest shame in their bloodstreams.

  Because she was dressed in her funeral best, I took Stanny to dinner at Gene and Gabe’s restaurant when we returned to Atlanta. Gene and Gabe’s was a Northern Italian restaurant that represented the elegance, sophistication, and refinement of the big city to me. Its clientele was urbane and its decor was muted and made larger by an interplay of artwork and long mirrors on its crimson-washed walls. It was the anti-Piedmont to me and the anti-Piedmont to my grandmother.

  “It’s like the stateroom on a cruise ship,” Stanny said the first time I brought her there. “You know you’ve made it … just walking in the door.”

  “The sky’s the limit, Stanny,” I said as the waiter handed us menus.