The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son by Pat Conroy Page A

to rise to his knees, and I helped him get to his feet. I put his left arm around my shoulder and we staggered toward the car together. I was going to tell him what I thought about him, but the words got confused in the passage, jumbled in the inexact translation as often happens in the strange world inhabited by fathers and sons. As I groped for the proper words, they formed by themselves—truth-telling words that could not be censored or slowed down, life-changing words for a bruised soul. In utter shock, I heard myself say out loud to the fighter pilot, “I love you, Dad.”
    My father looked startled, as though I held a hand grenade up to his eyes with its pin dangling between my lips. He took off running, but drunks don’t run well, and I was beside him in a flash. I whispered in his ear, “I love you, Dad.” He lunged in the opposite direction, whereI pursued and caught up with him and turned him like a steer with the taunting yet magical four words that the Great Santini, a disgraceful father, could not bear to hear. Every time I said the words, he would stagger away from them as though I were pouring acid into his eardrum.
    When I wrote
The Great Santini
, I wrote about the drama on the Green exactly as it happened, and my father hated that scene more than anything I ever wrote. He told every journalist who would listen to him that I had made the whole thing up. “My son has a bit of an overactive imagination, as the critics have pointed out,” he said.
    When they filmed the movie in Beaufort, the actors Robert Duvall and Michael O’Keefe performed the scene with such brilliance and accuracy that I would have sworn they had been eyewitnesses to the event itself. Of course, Hollywood filmed it on the Green, at the exact spot of its provenance.
    But that was all in the future. That night, after exhausting my father by chasing him around the Green, I helped him into the car and drove him back to my house and put him to bed on the living room couch. I went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. When the sun came up I was drinking a cup of coffee on the front steps of my house, every cell of my body ablaze with astonishment and wonder and the full knowledge that I had just lived through the most amazing night of my life.
    •   •   •
    When I took Dad to the Marine Corps Air Station to begin his second tour of duty in Vietnam, it was only a few days after the night I would always think of as movie night with the Conroys. Dad and I did not speak a word to each other on the way to the base, but he grabbed my arm and squeezed it until it hurt and said, “Hey, asshole, never get yourself killed in a politician’s war.”
    As I drove home that morning I realized that I would have to turn myself into a cunning translator of my father’s indirect, sclerotic use of the language. In his own rough way, I thought Dad had just taken babysteps toward some future day in the sun when he could actually say he loved his children.
    So my father went off to war for the last time in his life, and a month later, Walter Trammell, the superintendent of schools, fired me from my job on Daufuskie Island, after a scant nine months on the job. He fired me for gross neglect of duty, insubordination, being AWOL, and conduct unbecoming to a professional educator. After a recommendation like that, I would never teach again. The following day, I received my notice that I’d been drafted and was to report to Fort Jackson in ten days. I had reaped the whirlwind at last and placed my family in the most perilous situation imaginable.
    Looking back, I can see how strange I must have seemed to a town like Beaufort, a white Southern boy who was a pain-in-the-ass liberal who believed in every part of the civil rights movement, welcomed the stirrings of feminism, and protested against the Vietnam War. My own zeitgeist had ambushed me in the streets, and the sixties changed everything about how I thought. Because I was raised on Hollywood