The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son by Pat Conroy Read Free Book Online Page B

out-of-control years, and 1970 always rears its violent head and captures a couple of votes. My contempt of him was now a wordless, unsigned agreement between us. I looked at him with loathing and he returned it with equal and passionate measure.
    All this the Conroy family had managed to hide from everybody. Barbara became the latest victim of the elaborate opera of evasion. She thought my family was hilarious and rambunctious and fun to be around. But that would come apart on the night known in the annals of my brothers and sisters as movie night with the Conroy family. Mom and Dad had taken the four kids—Kathy, Jim, Tim, and Tom (Carol Ann and Mike had gone off to college by then)—to the movies over at Parris Island. I felt the tension in the house subside when my father went out the front door and pulled his car down the street, his family silent around him. He looked mean enough to carry claymore mines in his cheeks, and I was happy to see him gone. In a week, he would leave for Vietnam, which made me like the war, because it took him off to Asia every couple of years, and I knew my mother and the kids were safe from his fists.
    I was asleep at eleven thirty when I heard the ancient, ordained noises below. Like an aroused lion, I awoke to the sound of my mother’s sobbing and of a hand slapping her face. Then I heard my brothers and sisters trying to suppress their own weeping while my father whispered for them to shut up. Here I came, a deadly young man of twenty-five, and a game one, too. I slipped into my jeans and Docksiders, and I came down the steps noiseless as a serpent. I witnessed the next slap to my mother, and something snapped in me, became unglued, and I drove my shoulder into my drunken father like a linebacker taking on afullback in a dive play. I drove him out of the foyer, through the screen door, and laid him out on the floorboards of the first-floor veranda. Rising fast, I kicked my drunken father down the steps and across the front yard. Then I lifted him up, punched his ugly face, placed him behind the wheel of his car, and said, “You ever touch my mother again and I’ll kill you. You ever touch my brothers and sisters again and I’ll beat you with a tire iron until your heart stops and my arm gets tired. You get it, you worthless son of a bitch? That’s the last time, pal. The last time in this lifetime. Got it? Now, you get your drunken, worthless ass out of my yard, and never darken the door of my house again.”
    “Kiss my ass,” my father said, slurring his words.
    I punched him in the face and said, “Get out of here, Colonel.”
    When I returned to the house, my mother, three brothers, and sister did everything but throw me a ticker-tape parade. I walked through the front door and whispered to them, “Family life. Don’t you love it?” They surrounded me and hugged me and held on to me as a gladfulness and keen elation filled me up. I knew the things David knew when he brought Goliath crashing to the ground. Then all of us were frozen when we heard Barbara screaming from where she stood, alone on the upstairs banister: “What is going on down there? Something terrible is going on!”
    I went to the stairs and said in a hearty voice, “It’s nothing, dear. Nothing at all. One of the kids tripped and got hurt. But it’s fine now. Go back to bed.”
    “You’re lying to me! Something awful is going on in my house, and I demand to know what it is.”
    “It sounded a lot worse than it was, Barbara,” I said. “It’s all been taken care of.”
    “Peg, are you there?” Barbara called out. “Your son’s a goddamn liar, Peg, but not a very good one. Please tell me!”
    It was at this moment that the Conroy family sense of humor betrayed me. My brother Jim started to laugh, and he set off Kathy, then Tim, and finally Tom. When Tom began giggling, my mother lost it. She began laughing, though she still had blood on her lips. Barbara came down the stairs in her robe and