The Great Santini: Chapters 11–16

“I can see him in your face. In your inflection. The way you walk. The way you gesture with your hands. He’s everywhere in you.”

It was a paradox, and Bull Meecham could take anything with more equanimity than paradox.

He was, at this very moment, behind this desk, the commander of a fighter squadron, and by some fraudulence or legerdemain of time, all the sweetness had gone out of it, the honey of triumph left his lips dry and his greatest moment with only the memory of what he thought it would taste like to sustain him.

A dark, grizzled man with a face that looked as though a war might have been fought over its craggy terrain stood at his desk a moment later.

He had descanted his theories about leadership and command, his love for the oldest traditions of the Corps, his definition of duty so often and in the tumult of so many crises that he had practically assured himself that whatever came out when he spoke on that appointed day would be the effluent of hard experience, the natural residue of his years in the Marine Corps, and his philosophy of the officer.

By their lightness of foot and jauntiness of exit, Bull Meecham knew that part of the morale problem in 367 was over.

“You must have the bones of a canary bird. Let me tell you my theory of small men, Captain, then let me hear what you think,” the colonel said, leaning back and eyeing the man who stood before him with a bemused admiration.

No matter how sedulously Ben and Mary Anne prepared for the nightmare, nothing could ameliorate their discomfort at entering a new high school for their annual pilgrimage among strangers.

No matter how sedulously Ben and Mary Anne prepared for the nightmare, nothing could ameliorate their discomfort at entering a new high school for their annual pilgrimage among strangers.

One could either brim with hidden reservoirs of counterfeit personality, walk up to mobs of inbred teenagers, say the proper things, smile the winning smile, and enter into the mainstream of high school life without experiencing the painful days of walking the school hallways like unearthed troglodytes.

Invariably, it took Ben and Mary Anne months before they could overcome their native diffidence, which actually was an obstinate refusal to make themselves vulnerable.

They were afraid of being laughed at, of being the object of derision, of isolating themselves further because of a strategic error that caused them to insinuate themselves too soon into that hostile, unforgiving world where adolescents practice the small atrocities and petty cruelties of adults.

Two wings had been added to accommodate the yearly accretions of Marine children who came into town as Ravenel Air Base expanded.

The gymnasium was contiguous to the east wing of the school, and a grassless football field with cracked baked mud harrowed by cleats formed the far boundary of the campus to the north.

She was also Ben’s American Civilization teacher during the last period and read from the textbook word for word, pausing to render editorial commentary whenever a particularly salient point was raised by the author of the text.

Her voice was getting lower and lower. But she continued to whisper her message. “Courage, Prudence, Aggressiveness, Loyalty to 4B, Charity, Faith, an ability to overcome adversity, and Hope.”

Mary Anne would try to scratch Red’s eyes out if she reached him and Ben would have a dilemma explaining to his father how he had sided with discretion and prudence while his sister defended the principles of honor and courage by fistfighting a bully at the noon break.

Mary Anne scratched Red’s face as he tried to rise and re-enter the fray, but Red shoved her down as he rose to his knees, stunned and uncomprehending.

He was beginning to feel confident in Mr. Dacus’s intrinsic sense of justice and fair play; his fine, relaxed humor prescribed the mood in the room.

The four boys were looking for possible routes of escape when Red’s brother decided that in arbitration lay his salvation from this swiftly retrograding dilemma.

The four boys were looking for possible routes of escape when Red’s brother decided that in arbitration lay his salvation from this swiftly retrograding dilemma.

By this time Ben was up and game again, his sore places numb and his temper deepening into a white heat manifested by a low, animal whine emitted as he charged the prone figure of Red.

“You too, Ben, my pugilist son whom I have failed to raise as a gentleman.”

In his bones he could feel war with Cuba an inevitability and he constantly exhorted the young pilots to hone their skills because he felt that their day of fire was very near.

He knew the mechanics of being a good commander: the tricks, procedures, requirements, and occasional gymnastics one had to employ to keep morale high and the higher echelons pleased.

It was this extra attention to detail, a supernumerary zeal to approach perfection that led him to spend part of each weekday morning at Hobie’s Grill.

He perused the menu perfunctorily and listened to a conversation resume that he had interrupted when he walked through the door.

“He’s been messin’ up people’s mail for thirty years now,” a man with a florid, hawk-nosed face said from a far booth.

As the pilot said grace, he rubbed his hands together in anticipation of the evening meal and spoke the words of the prayer so rapidly that it would take a most patient deity to find gratitude in the stream of rhetoric offered at the Meecham table.

A small, minnowless creek formed the one demarcation line of significance in the entire housing project.

The creek itself was viscous as phlegm, but its indentation marked the beginning of the brass curtain that separated the officers and their families from the enlisted men and their families.

He picked up Ansley Matthews at her house on Command Circle, charming her parents with a pleasant volubility that marked him as a blood member of the tribe.

Obsequiousness came easy to him. In fact, he enjoyed the worm’s-eye view that servility offered to him.

To his mortification, Ben could see people laughing as they spotted the squadron decals on the side of the car.

His stomach, though, felt like a ship breaking up on invisible shoals.

He stole another look and saw how achingly pretty she was, this curving, mindless nymphet who had perfected the insensate cruelties and the small meannesses of adolescence and sent them marching in snickering battalions toward Ben.

Then coldly, as he looked at her again, one final time, as he drove his car past her boy friend’s Impala, as he saw her laugh at the decal and point, it was then that he knew her for the first time and he had an urge to lean out of his window and cavalierly shout au revoir to his enemy.

When Father Pinckney opened his rectory door, bending down to duck his head beneath the doorway, the first thing the new colonel said to him was, “My name is Colonel Bull Meecham, Father. I think it’s a disgrace that this burg doesn’t have a Catholic school. And since you’re the C.O., I hold you personally responsible.”

Bull had mostly listened that first day as this stricken, energetic man paced the sitting room of his rectory speaking with a mellifluous basso profundo voice that demanded and received unwavering attention.

In my early day dreams, Colonel, in those high fantasies one deludes himself with in the first days of priesthood, I imagined myself a prince of the Church, a robed and venerated Cardinal, perhaps, enshrined in Gothic cathedrals and worshiped by flocks of sinful parishioners.

The Vampires were terrible, desiccated women who entered the convent because they hated themselves and thought that by surrendering their lives to their redeemer, this self-hatred would turn to something good and palliative.

The Vampires were terrible, desiccated women who entered the convent because they hated themselves and thought that by surrendering their lives to their redeemer, this self-hatred would turn to something good and palliative.

So when he appraised Sister Loretta Marie it was with eyes that had spent a lifetime studying the habits and peccadilloes of nuns.

It might behoove this class for me to remind them that the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ is on our tongues when the priest gives us the host.

Sister Loretta was still staring balefully at the crucified redeemer.