Part 5 (1/2)
”Sam Pancoast and Ollie Oliver are stationed in Ravenel. Rocky Green's in El Toro. His wife left him six months ago to run away with a twenty-two-year-old corporal in his squadron. Rocky's got the kids.”
”Poor kids.”
The conversation centered around the Marine Corps, moving from one old friend to another, men and women they had been stationed with, whose destinies had crossed again and again. The fraternity of Marine fighter pilots was small, intimate, and exceedingly close. The year's absence from the military had put Lillian somewhat behind in following the lives of some of her friends. Transfers were constant among all of them, and with both Lillian and Bull it was a peremptory requirement of their nomadism that they keep a vigilant eye on the travels of their peers. The two of them talked very little of politics, literature, or the arts. Most of their conversation was of the Corps or of their own family.
Ben s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably on the other side of the car. The sun was pouring in the car directly on his face. He heard his father say that they had been out of Georgia for a half hour. Out of Georgia, Ben thought. ”Into South Carolina.”
Georgia born, Ben felt a strong kins.h.i.+p to the blood red earth his father hated, loved the fragrant land he saw mostly in night pa.s.sages, whose air was filled with country music and the virile smells of crops and farm machinery possessing the miles between towns. It was the one place he could hold to, fix upon, identify as belonging to him. He was rooted in Georgia because of the seal on his birth certificate. He lived there only when his father went overseas, but that made no difference to him. No matter how hard he tried, he never developed any imperishable allegiances to the washed-out, bloodless Marine bases where he had lived for most of his seventeen years. It was difficult to engender fealty for any geographical point when he had dwelt in four apartments, six houses, two trailers, and one quonset hut in his forced enlistment in the family of a Marine officer. Every house was a temporary watering place where warriors gathered for training and the perfection of their grim art before the tents were struck again. He longed for a sense of place, of belonging, and of permanence. He wanted to live in one house, grow old in one neighborhood, and wanted friends whose faces did not change yearly. He renewed his tenuous claim on Georgia with every visit to his grandmother's house and with each dash through the countryside following the necklace of Marine bases strung through the swamplands of the Carolinas and Virginia.
Rising on one elbow, Ben addressed a question to the front seat. ”When do ya'll think we'll get there?”
”Ya'll?” Bull roared. ”Ya'll isn't a d.a.m.n word. What's this 'ya'll' stuff? I go overseas for twelve months and I come back to my boys all talking like grits.”
”Ya'll is perfect grammar, Ben darling,” Lillian objected. ”It's perfect and it's precise.”
”Don't use that word when you're addressing me. You got to realize, Lillian, that a southern accent sounds dumb anywhere outside of the Mason-Dixon grit line.”
”I think it sounds cultivated. Anyway, you've managed to make sure none of the children have a southern accent.”
It was true. None of Bull Meecham's children had accents. Their speech was not flavored with the cadences of the South, the slurred rhythms of the region where they had spent their entire lives. Every time one of his children made a sound that was recognizably southern, Bull would expurgate that sound from his child's tongue on the spot. Though the Marine Corps put its bases in the South, he could never accustom himself to the sad fact that he was inevitably raising southern children. He could exorcise the language of the South, but he could not purify his children of the experience that tied them forever to the South, to the strange separateness, the private ident.i.ty of the land which nourished and enriched their childhoods.
”Let's see what else has gone to pot since the Big Dad has been gone,” Bull announced. ”What is the capital of Montana, Karen?”
”I just woke up, Daddy,” Karen protested.
”I didn't ask you for a speech. I just asked a question.”
”Bismarck,” she answered after thinking for a moment.
”Wrong. You're supposed to know them all.”
”Helena,” Matt said.
”Right, Matt.”
”Here's another one, Karen. This will be a chance to redeem yourself.”
”It's too early in the morning, Daddy. I don't feel like playing 'Capitals.' ”
”Too bad,” he answered. ”What's the capital of Idaho?”
”Just a minute. Don't tell me. Let me think about that one.”
”You ought to know it right off the bat, girlsey,” he said.
”Boise,” she screamed.
”Yeah, but I gave you a hint.”
”Mary Anne,” Bull said, ”what's the capital of Uruguay?”
”Montevideo.”
”Ben, the capital of Afghanistan.”
”Kabul.”
”Good, good. I'll tell you kids something right now. You are lucky to be part of a Marine Corps family. There are no kids in America as well trained in geography as you. You've been to more places than civilian kids even know about. Travel is the best education in the world.”
”Sugah,” Lillian cooed, ”the reason the children know all those capitals is because you threatened to kill them if they didn't learn them.”
”It's called motivation, Lillian,” Bull answered, grinning.
Ben sat back against his pillow thinking about what his father had just said. Then he said, ”We sure have lived in some of the great cities of the world, Dad. Triangle, Virginia. Jacksonville, Havelock, and New Bern, North Carolina. Meridian, Pensacola, and now Ravenel, South Carolina. You can't get much luckier than that.”
”I met some Air Force brats in Atlanta. Now they do some good traveling. They'd lived in London, Hamburg, Rome, all over Europe. They'd skied in the Alps. They'd seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa. One of the boys spoke three languages. All of them had been to operas and gone to symphonies. I wonder how the Ravenel symphony measures up to the London Philharmonic,” Mary Anne said.
”I can tell you all you need to know about Europa,” Bull said. ”I just spent a whole year inspecting the continent.”
”Did you go to the Louvre, Daddy?” Mary Anne asked.
”Sure, I went in to check out the Mona Lisa. You can stand anywhere in the room where that picture is and the Mona Lisa's eyes will follow you. Leonardo Da Vinci did a commendable job with that portrait.”
”You really think so, Dad?” Ben said, winking at Mary Anne.
”The old Dad soaked up quite a bit of culture while he was sportin' around the capitals of Europe.”
”You're just too modest to flaunt it, aren't you, dear?” Lillian said softly.
”That's right. Modesty is one of my worst faults,” Bull shouted, laughing, enjoying himself in the last fifty miles of his journey.
”Hey, Dad,” Matt said, ”why doesn't the Marine Corps send its families overseas sometimes?”
”They're probably afraid that Marine kids would whip up on Air Force kids.”
”Could you imagine living in Gay Paree, speaking French like natives,” Ben wondered aloud.
”I can say h.e.l.lo, good-bye, and kiss my f.a.n.n.y in eight languages,” Bull boasted.
”Why, Bull,” Lillian said, ”I didn't know you were multilingual.”
”I pick up languages real fast,” he replied, missing the irony in her voice.
”If you'd only work a little harder on your native tongue,” she said.
”Very funny.”
Mary Anne spoke out brightly, extravagantly. ”Let's talk some more about how lucky we are to be military brats.”
”I'm so lucky that I get to go to four high schools instead of just one,” Ben declared with feigned enthusiasm.