The Great Santini Part 49

At nine o'clock, Ben saw Mr. Dacus pulling up on Eliot Street with a boat and trailer being pulled behind his car. Ben ran down to meet him.

"Let's go look for your daddy, p.i.s.sant. You'll go crazy sitting around here with all these women."

"You're supposed to be in school, Mr. Dacus," Ben said.

"So are you, p.i.s.sant. But I'm the boss and I decided to take a day off. Let's. .h.i.t the river."

They drove to the Old Jones Landing at the end of St. Catherine's Island where they were met by a man with a map and a radio who was organizing the searchers who pushed off from this landing. The landing was clogged with the cars of men who were already on the water looking for Bull Meecham.

"Hey, there, Mr. Dacus," the man called.

"Vardis. How are you, boy?"

"You looking for the pilot?"

"Sure am. Where you want us to head for?" Mr. Dacus asked.

"Do you know where Ashley Creek is?"

"About seven miles from here, isn't it? Isn't that the one that cuts into St. Catherine's Sound near Garbade's place?"

"That's the one. Check that one out."

When they were in the river, Mr. Dacus said to Ben, "That's the best duck hunter in the state. With boys like that in the search, they'll find your daddy."

They pressed close to the riverbank, avoiding the middle channel for fear they would lose all orientation in the fog. It was not a thick fog, but it had a deceptive quality about it. It was not a fog that one would normally take with any great seriousness but a clear-eyed man could not penetrate it any deeper than fifty yards. In the back of the boat, Mr. Dacus studied a compa.s.s as he guided the boat toward Ashley Creek.

Coming out of a small tributary that emptied into the sound, they spotted Jim Don and Pinkie searching a sh.o.r.eline on foot. Their boat was beached on an indentation in the marsh which provided a natural landing. Pinkie spotted them before they disappeared in the fog and shouted, "Don't you worry, Ben. We'll find your daddy. Philip and Art are up by Goat Island looking. Even Mr. Loring's in a boat looking."

"We'll probably have to send a rescue party out looking for Ogden after this, Ben. He doesn't know how to work a pencil sharpener, much less a motor."

They were two miles into the sound when they heard a helicopter pa.s.s them overhead flying in the direction of the naval hospital.

"You think they might have found Dad, Mr. Dacus?" Ben said, his eyes following the sound.

"I don't know, p.i.s.sant."

Before they went another mile, they pa.s.sed a boat bearing two men dressed in work clothes. One of the men was Ed Mills. The boats pulled alongside each other, the motors idling.

"Good morning, Dacus."

"Good morning, Ed," Mr. Dacus replied.

"Good morning, Ben," Ed Mills said.

"Good morning, Mr. Mills," Ben said.

"You become a man this morning, Ben. They found your papa."

"Yes, sir."

"He's dead, son."

Then there was the business of death, the complexity of how to deposit a badly burned corpse into the ground of a National Cemetery as quickly and with as much dignity as possible. Lillian spent a full, enervating day on the telephone notifying a staggering number of relatives on both sides of the family. She spent two hours with the legal officer from the air station straightening her affairs. An endless stream of friends, well-wishers, townsmen, Marines, the regulars at Hobie's, and teachers of her four children came to the house to offer their condolences. There was no time to dwell on the death; there was too much to do and so little time to do it. Lillian was graceful, courageous, and indefatigable. She attributed Bull's death to G.o.d's will, the inexorable will, the unrecallable will and she had no quarrel with that. They had lived together nineteen years and had produced four lovely children. There had been good times and bad times. She hoped he had not suffered in the end. The pilots a.s.sured her he did not. At times, she would break into tears at moments she seemed most in control. There was a dignity to her grief and an acceptance of the fait accompli-the fatalism that the pilot's wife must beget whenever her mate forsakes her for his aircraft. The chaplain kept referring to "the remains." Bull Meecham had become remains.

The night before the funeral they brought the body of Bull Meecham home, a reflex from Lillian's early days in rural Alabama when the coffin was always brought home, maybe not opened, but brought home to be with the family one last time. Lillian lined her children by the front door and friends cleared a path as the funeral director and his a.s.sistants bore the casket in through the front door to rest in his house the night before he would be buried.

"I want your father home with us," Lillian explained to the children. "That is how it is done in my family. Now I also want to tell y'all something very important and I want you to listen to me very carefully. Tomorrow is going to be very hard on us all, but I want you to remember that the Meecham family will conduct itself honorably at the funeral. We will not cry in public. Bull would not have liked it. He would not have allowed it. He would want us to be strong. He would be proud of our strength and we are going to make him proud tomorrow. Our grief will be a private one. If you wish to cry, cry now. Cry here at the house. Cry with each other or with our friends, but tomorrow at the funeral, there will be no tears. You will remember at all times that you are the children of a fighter pilot. You are the children of Bull Meecham and you will act accordingly. You know how to act. You have been reared to know."

"Can I sniffle a time or two?" Mary Anne had said.

"Don't you dare start this now, young lady. This is no time for your ugliness," and Mary Anne had wept in her room for an hour.

At the same time the relatives were coming from Chicago and Georgia, the Marine pilots from around America began to land in Ravenel, began to arrive in transports and jets, and private planes. The airways filled up with men who had heard about the death of Bull Meecham and they were coming to pay homage to one that had fallen. The brotherhood of aviators was coming to bury Bull Meecham. And on the night before his funeral, the Ravenel Officers' Club filled to capacity as old pilots told stories to young pilots of Bull Meecham in the Pacific and Bull Meecham in Korea. They drank to the life of Bull Meecham. They celebrated his estimable gifts as a fighter pilot and in those first days of his death the stories began to enlarge and a mythology was born that had the capacity to grow into something larger and more universal than his life was or could have been. He should have punched out sooner and the h.e.l.l with the civilians some said. But acts of small heroism are admired, not understood in all their vague complexities, but at least admired. They drank to the death of Bull Meecham and they sang. The song started in a far corner of the bar but was quickly picked up and relayed from table to table, from gla.s.s to gla.s.s, from Marine to Marine. By the last four lines of the stanza, most of the Marines were on their feet. Others had mounted the tables and two of them screamed out their song from the top of the bar. It ended not as a song but as an anthem in defiance of death and in praise of the men who wore the wings of gold. It ended as a challenge flung into the face of the rider on the wings who rode with all pilots in all lands. The song was of affirmation and of witness.

"As we stand near the ringing rafters The walls around us are bare.

As we echo our peals of laughter It seems as though the dead are still there.

So stand by your gla.s.ses ready.

Let not tear fill your eye.

Here's to the dead already And Hurrah for the next man to die!"

Lillian kept a solitary vigil beside Bull's coffin, staying the night with him as she prayed the rosary.

At two in the morning, Ben slipped downstairs to sit with his mother awhile. Images of his father danced in the havoc of a brain overstimulated by events. He had no belief in his father's death. He wished to open up the coffin, to smell the burned flesh, to put his hands in the hurt places, to feel the tongue that had once invoked the name of Santini for the world to hear. He came and sat down beside Lillian. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

"How did you meet Dad, Mom?" Ben said, for no other reason than to begin a conversation.

"At a dance."

"Did you like him right away?" Ben asked.

"Heavens no, sugah. I thought he was a barbarian. He had no idea how to conduct himself at an affair with ladies and gentlemen present. He was pushy and boorish and kept cutting in every time some poor boy wanted to dance with me. Then he would refuse to let the other boys cut in on him. He was a scandal at that first dance, an embarra.s.sment at the second, and was thrown out at the third."

"Why did you like him, Mama?"

"Because he was a charmer. Because he was persistent. Because he was romantic and sent me flowers every day for two weeks after he met me."

"He really liked you, huh?"

"Like me! Sugah, at that time in my life I thought any boy who didn't ask me to marry them was both physically and emotionally sick."

"How many boys asked you to marry them before you said 'yes' to Dad?"

"Eleven or twelve. Maybe more. Most of them went away to the war. Some of them were killed. There was a quarterback from Georgia Tech who was killed that was a charming boy. Of course, back then I thought all quarterbacks from Tech were charming. Some of the boys were just in love with love. Some were just too young."

"Did you date any Marines besides Dad?"

"Certainly, sugah. Two Marines asked me to marry them before your father. Those were good days for me. I was looking and feeling good. Your mama was a dancing, finger-snapping, riding-in-fast-cars girl, you better believe."

"Why didn't you marry the other two Marines?"

"Because that would have been bigamy, sweetheart."

"You know what I mean, Mama."

"One of them was killed at Okinawa. The other one was transferred thinking I was going to wait for him until the war was over."

"Then ol' Dad came along."

"Then ol' Dad came along," she said.

"Do you know what I came downstairs to tell you, Mama?"

"No, darling."

"Do you know that for most of my life I hated his guts?"

"No you didn't, sugah."

"Yes, I did, Mama. I really did. And I'm scared saying it now because I've always been so afraid of him. So afraid of his hurting me. I don't know how to feel about Dad being dead. I used to pray for his plane to crash. I used to pray for it all the time. I'm scared that one of those prayers was up there floating around lost and he accidentally ran into it on the way back from Key West."

"It doesn't work that way, Ben. G.o.d wanted your father with him."

"Do you know what I wanted to do for a long time, Mama? Without you or Dad knowing about it, I wanted to graduate from college and go into the Marine Corps. I wanted to sneak into OCS and not call home or tell anyone where I was. Then I would suddenly call up and ask him to come to Quantico, to ask him to pin on my second lieutenant's bars. Then I wanted to go to flight school in Pensacola. I'd become a fighter pilot, a hotshot, graduating at the top of my cla.s.s. I'd try to join Dad's squadron and we would fly together, go on hops together, and dogfight at thirty thousand feet with each other. We'd try to beat the h.e.l.l out of each other like we used to do on the basketball court. But I'd get better and better and one day I'd end up on his tail, coming in on his tail at six o'clock. I'd have beaten him in his airplane. Then I would quit the Marine Corps as soon as I could. Then I'd have been free of him. Do you understand, Mama?"

"I understand perfectly, sugah. And in his own way, I think your father would have understood."

"Now I'll never be free of him," Ben said.

"Now, sugah," Lillian said, looking toward the coffin, "you don't have to be."

Ben turned and walked toward the stairs, pausing on the landing. "Mama, who was the Marine who thought you were going to wait for him?"

"That's been a secret for a long time, Ben. But you're old enough to keep a secret too. It was Joe Varney."

"Jesus Christ!" Ben said. "That explains a lot. Good night, Mama. If you need me, let me know."

As Ben got in bed his door opened and Mary Anne stood in the opening.

"I thought of something, Ben," Mary Anne said.

"What is it, Mary Anne?"

"It makes me sad. Sad."

"What is it?"

"I was in bed thinking and it suddenly came to me," she said.

"What?"

"Santini is a dead word," Mary Anne said.

The children of Bull Meecham did not cry. They made the long walk up the aisle with every eye in the church on them. The church was overflowing with people, with friends, relatives, and men in uniform. Lillian was stunning in a black dress and even managed to smile as she acknowledged some friends whose faces she picked out from the crowd. They sat in the front row as Father Pinckney began the Ma.s.s for the Dead. The National Colors were draped over the coffin. Over the remains. In the middle of the service, Virgil Hedgepath rose to deliver the eulogy. At times, Ben forgot how handsome his G.o.dfather was, how quietly distinguished and impressively put together. His voice was strong and it rang through the church with a power that brought every head erect.

Every head but Ben's. He did not hear the first part of the eulogy. He heard the voice and admired its power. But he was remembering a walk with Toomer in the black-gum swamp of St. Catherine's Island when Toomer had come across the track of a large Eastern Diamond-back rattler. Toomer had stopped, hunted for a stick, and with great deliberation had marked a large "X" across the track of the snake.

"That snake gonna die by next sunrise, white boy," Toomer had said and Ben knew that Toomer was sharing with him one of those secrets of the lowcountry whose origins came from the myths of lost tribes; the black men of Ravenel had remedies for their daily fears. Somehow Ben felt that the snake too shared the belief of its extinction and could feel the "X" cut into the long, beautiful spine, severing the diamond at an intersection between the rattlers and the fangs the moment Toomer planted the "X." And as he tried to catch hold of Virgil's voice and focus on the praise of his father, Ben thought that maybe some angel of death had beheld Toomer's act, liked its mystery and style, and had been watching as Bull Meecham flew back from Key West, and had seen the Jetstream cut across the state of Florida in a keen and perishable track. Maybe this diamondbacked angel had picked up a stick and marked an "X" across the track of Bull Meecham. Maybe that is how death worked with all things: someone would come upon your trail, your markings, and violate them with an "X." Some friend or enemy or angel would kill you by defiling the marks you left in your pa.s.sage.

Then, fighting to return to Virgil, Ben heard the words, "Bull Meecham was a lover of flight, a pilot who took joy in the immense pleasure, the supreme and indescribable pleasure in flying an F-8 faster than the speed of sound. No one besides a fighter pilot will ever know this feeling. There is no way to explain it or to tell how it feels or how wonderful it is. Bull Meecham loved it and because he loved it, he became one of the best fighter pilots that ever stood up for Semper Fi.

"I like the fact that if Bull Meecham had to die, he died like a fighter pilot. He was lucky enough to die in his plane. If the truth were known, that is the way all of us would choose to leave this earth. Bull Meecham died as a pilot, as a Marine, as a Marine fighter pilot. I like the fact that Bull did that stupid, reckless act of turning away from the town before he punched out, an action that cost him his life. But I can see him thinking in that stubborn, mule-like way of his, 'If I punch out of this bird down there, I got kids down there. Other hogs got kids down there. I got friends down there.'

"I want to tell his kids that their father was a strange man, but all the pilots in this church are strange men and we cultivate this strangeness, this separateness that makes us a breed apart, hard to understand, hard to explain, even to ourselves. All fighter pilots are enigmas, but Marine fighter pilots are not of this world.

"I honor Bull Meecham. I honor his courage, his career, his achievement, his sense of duty, his love of flight, and his love of the Corps. I honor Lieutenant Colonel W.P. Meecham. I honor the Marine. I honor the Hero. I honor his family. I honor his death and I promise that I shall remember him. I also want to tell Ben, Mary Anne, Matthew, Karen, and Lillian that I will like the world less without Bull. It will be a duller, more colorless place. I want to cry but cannot. That is one of the things wrong with fighter pilots. I cannot cry. But I shall remember him and I shall honor that memory.

"Even now I honor it. For I can hear Bull saying now even as I speak his eulogy, 'Hey, Virge, cut your yappin'.' And that would be the voice of the real Bull Meecham. That would be the voice of the fighter pilot."

At the graveyard as the priest said the final prayers and the riflemen prepared their farewell volleys, and the bugler stood erect until the moment for taps, Ben heard the planes coming for the fly-over that was traditional for the death of a pilot. He looked up as he had looked up as a child when his father would bring the black-winged Corsair over their house in New Bern, North Carolina. Ben was seven years old and he would run outside and watch his father dip his wings, wheel like a hawk, then climb high above the Neuse River and plummet like a falling angel as Ben looked up.

The jets flew over the burial cortege in a tight formation that had an odd imbalance to it. It took Ben a moment to realize what the misalignment was, but he had forgotten about the military's allegiance to symbolism. There was one plane missing in the formation. Bull Meecham's plane. The fallen aviator was represented by his absence. As he watched, Ben wished he could be watching the man in the Corsair once again, young again, showing off in the black cold wings once more, performing for his son a last time before he had to turn from Ben, to wave once and turn away from his son, point his craft straight up and climb toward stars and suns, toward galaxies and night.

Ben appeared on the veranda of the empty house. It was three o'clock in the morning and the station wagon was packed for the night journey to Atlanta. He was wearing his father's nylon flight jacket and he was carrying the last two sleeping bags to the car. He walked down to the car and tightened the straps on the baggage carrier on top of the car. He heard his mother behind him.

"The movers left this broom, Ben."

"I can strap it on top of the car, Mama."

"Are you sure you're not too tired to drive?"

"No, I feel good. We high school graduates are often called upon to drive at night and we rise to the occasion. Is Okra in the car?"

"Ask Matthew."

"Hey, Matt!" Ben said, leaning in one of the windows. "We got Okra?"

"There he is on the front seat."

"He's got to go in the back. Did he go to the bathroom?"

"How would I know, Ben?"

"Did all of you go to the bathroom?" Ben asked.