Beach Music by Pat Conroy

Author:Pat Conroy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-09T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-five

I drove my grandfather, Silas McCall, over to Waterford to pick up Ginny Penn from the nursing home. I left my brothers at my grandparents’ house as they finished off a ramp for Ginny Penn’s wheelchair. My grandfather was a compact, cigarette-smoking Southerner, observant, but a man of few words.

“Be glad to get Ginny Penn home?” I asked.

“Don’t have much choice,” Silas said. “She likes to drive the nurses crazy.”

“Dad all right?”

“Slept it off. Then caught a ride to town.”

We put my grandmother in the backseat, exhausted by the effort and emotion caused by the mechanics of checking out of the home. Bureaucracy always requires an expenditure of energy that is too much to ask, especially of the very old and very sick. Ginny Penn did not even wave back at the nurses who lined the porch to bid her farewell.

“Monsters,” she said as Silas and I waved to them. “Leeches. Bed-pan emptiers. Disease-spreaders. Penicillin-fungi. They should not be allowed to touch genuine ladies or women of pure refinement.”

“I thought they were nice,” Silas said quietly, almost an aside.

“You never came to see me once,” Ginny Penn hissed. “Better had I married Ulysses S. Grant than the traitorous wretch Silas McCall.”

“Could you stop off at the feed store?” my grandfather asked me. “I’d like to buy a muzzle.”

“Grandpa came to see you every day, Ginny Penn,” I said.

“My grandchildren deserted me. The whole town was on a death watch. It would’ve exploded with joy at the news of my demise.”

“I’d have led the parade down Main Street,” Silas muttered.

“Don’t egg her on,” I warned, touching his wrist. “Ginny Penn, my brothers are all down. We spent the day building you a wheelchair ramp.”

“That’s what you call a homecoming gift? A wheelchair ramp?”

“I oversaw the preliminaries,” I said. “It’ll be great.”

My four brothers were gathered at their grandparents’ house when I drove up into the yard. The house had aged well and looked distinguished among the modern beach houses that had sprung up around it. Behind it, the fourteenth hole of a golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones made a dogleg away from the backyard. A golf cart bearing two sedate and dignified retirees drifted as soundlessly as a sailing ship toward the distant green. Four female white-tailed deer, beautiful in their streamlined thinness, fed on the high grasses in the rough. When I was a boy, I thought, the island was wild and you could look forever and never find a golf ball, but everything’s different from when I was a boy.

Except, I thought, my grandparents were the same. Always they had seemed peculiar and unsuitable. They had also appeared conjoined by habit and not by love. It hurt Ginny Penn that we, her grandsons, preferred Silas to her and that we loved him with a fierce attachment that she would never know. But we would disagree with that assessment and tell her with clarity and accuracy that we loved her exactly as much as she would allow us to and that was always dependent on the ungovernable valences of her moods.

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