The Great Santini: Chapters 1–5

In the Cordova Hotel, near the docks of Barcelona, fourteen Marine Corps fighter pilots from the aircraft carrier Forrestal were throwing an obstreperously spirited going away party for Lieutenant Colonel Bull Meecham, the executive officer of their carrier based squadron.

The commanding officer of the squadron, Ty Mullinax, had passed out in the early part of the afternoon and was resting in a beatific position on the table in the center of the room, his hands folded across his chest...

I can see them out there now mincing around...

The band was playing loudly when the Marines entered the restaurant and headed as decorously as their condition permitted for seats at the bar.

On stage, Bull was still retching and puking and burping, lost completely in the virtuosity of his performance.

As a child, Ben had not understood why he had to stare so long and hard into a sky as vast as the sea to cull the mysterious appearance of the man who had fathered him, the man who could do what angels did in the proving grounds of gods, the man who had fought unseen wars five miles above the earth.

The voices of her children joined her in an uneven chorus that lacked some of the fire and fervor of the first five prayers for their father’s safe and punctual return.

Near the lone hangar, lethargic mechanics in grease-stained uniforms poked among the entrails of decrepit jets far removed from their vintage years.

“I was joking, Mom. That was just an attempt to add a little levity.”

As they began the long walk back to their mother, the heavy languor of the afternoon soaking into them, Ben studied his mother.

Her hair was long, a dark luxuriant red, swept to one side of her head and half covering her right eye, a haughty, insouciant mane that added a touch of ingenuous naughtiness to a face that otherwise had the innocence of a Madonna.

Her hair was long, a dark luxuriant red, swept to one side of her head and half covering her right eye, a haughty, insouciant mane that added a touch of ingenuous naughtiness to a face that otherwise had the innocence of a Madonna.

She spoke with her hands, entertaining her two youngest children with fluid movements of such consummate grace that it seemed as though light music should be filtering from somewhere in the dizzying late afternoon heat.

Lillian Meecham was not a disciplinarian, but as the day of her husband’s return neared, she knew instinctively that she had to harden into a vestigial imitation of her husband, so his arrival would not be too much of a shock to her children.

His hand had traditionally been very heavy when he returned from overseas, so intent was he on re-establishing codes of discipline and ensuring that the children marched to his harsher cadences.

She was much shorter than her mother and seemed chunky and ungainly in comparison.

He pulled a rosary from the pocket of his fatigues and began to say the first decade of the rosary.

He pulled a rosary from the pocket of his fatigues and began to say the first decade of the rosary.

Orders came to some men yearly; to others, rarely. But when they came, their obdurate, elliptical prose offered no choices.

Orders came to some men yearly; to others, rarely. But when they came, their obdurate, elliptical prose offered no choices.

“Okra has too much pride to do tricks for mere human beings,” Mary Anne stated officiously.

Ben did remember the scurrilous version of the Hail Mary Mary Anne had written the year before that Lillian had overheard.

Then in the regionless drawl of a conductor, the half-intelligible patois belonging to no country that Bull had learned by imitation as a child riding free on the Rock Island Line, he began to chant, “Davenport, Ioway. Next stop. Ioway City, yes Ioway, Ioway, Ioway City. Dee Moynes. Dee Moynes. Dee Moynes, Ioway. All off for Davenport.”

Colonel Meecham reached for his aviator’s sunglasses which rested among the other paraphernalia of the journey on the dashboard.

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.

Georgia born, Ben felt a strong kinship to the blood red earth his father hated, loved the fragrant land he saw mostly in night passages, whose air was filled with country music and the virile smells of crops and farm machinery possessing the miles between towns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was an alien geography that thrust outreaching along the water’s edge; a land of a thousand creeks, brown and turgid, but rich in the smell of the sea.

The air had a fetid, tropical feel to it as it passed through the car: the land was flat, lush and brilliantly green.

“You are a lady,” Lillian said imperiously. “And ladies don’t catch their tears in spoons and hurl them at their families. A lady grieves in silence. She always has a smile on the outside. She waits until she is alone to express her sorrow.”

"Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Lillian admonished her daughter.

“Ah,” Mary Anne mocked, “the voice of sublime perfection. Was that the godly one? The sainted brother? The perfect son?”

The threshing winds of his temper buffeted the car and deep, resonant warning signals were sent out among the children.

“It’s a desecration to compare yourself to Rhett, Bull. There’s no comparison.”

It was always better when Colonel Meecham was exiled under edict from his harried wife and disappeared from the house on moving day, for long experience had taught them that the colonel’s temper shortened considerably in the chaotic milieu of unopened boxes and pictureless walls.

Wiser now, Ben had told his mother that he would disappear for the day if she did not devise a plan to keep the colonel out of the maelstrom of this ill-omened day.

“I don’t have to be careful as long as I have you around to shine ’em up,” his father retorted, not gruffly, but as a statement of irrefutable fact.

“You sure you don’t want me to supervise the hogs in putting away the ordnance?”

When the ordeal was over, when Lillian Meecham half believed that her personal riches were not reduced to dust from mishandling, and when the movers drove off griping about incipient hernias, the gears of the truck grinding against the humidity of the afternoon, the family was left with the task of getting the house into inspection order for the critical gaze of Colonel Meecham.

They began to unpack the boxes that contained the accoutrements of the living room.

Ben emptied one box that held ashtrays from Japan, four statues of Buddha in various postures and degrees of corpulence, six oriental silk screens, and two camel seats from Morocco.

She set up a card table which she covered with a filigree lace tablecloth from Florence.