The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

I got a brief respite when I took a Trailways bus on a two-day trip to Columbia, South Carolina, to play in the North-South all-star game. I’d not touched a basketball since February, was out of shape, and played a lackluster game when I needed to have a superlative one. After the game, Coach Hank Witt, an assistant football coach at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, came up to tell me that I had just become part of The Citadel family, and he wished to welcome me. Coach Witt handed me a Citadel sweatshirt and I delivered him a full, sweaty body hug that he extricated himself from with some difficulty. In my enthusiasm, I was practically jumping out of my socks. By then, I’d given up hope of going to any college that fall and had thought about entering the Marine Corps as a recruit at Parris Island because all other avenues had been closed off to me. My father never told me nor my mother that he had filled out an application for me to attend The Citadel. I danced my way back into the locker room below the university field house and practically did a soft-shoe as I soaped myself down in the shower. In my mind I’d struggled over the final obstacles, and there were scores of books and hundreds of papers written into my future. Because I’d been accepted at The Citadel, I could feel the launching of all the books inside me like artillery placements I’d camouflaged in the hills. The possibilities seemed limitless as I dressed in the afterglow of that message. In my imagination, getting a college degree was as lucky as a miner stumbling across the Comstock Lode, except that it could never be taken away from me or given to someone else. I could walk down the streets for the rest of my life, hearing people say, “That boy went to college.” And then it dawned on me that the military college of South Carolina did not preen about being a crucible for novelists or poets. Hell, I thought in both bravado and innocence, I’ll make it safe for both.
    I returned to our exile on the Mississippi with great reluctance andthought Mom looked even more haggard and spent. She looked like a sleepwalker going through her morning chores. I was still disturbed by her appearance when Dad rang the house for his weekly phone call.
    “I’m worried about Mom,” I said, trying to sound every inch the adult. “She doesn’t seem to be herself. She’s totally exhausted.”
    “Worry about something you can do something about, pal. Give your mother the phone. You’re wasting my time and money.”
    “Hey, Mom,” I yelled to her in the grassless yard. “Dad’s on the phone.”
    It was the summer I tackled some of the great Russian novelists, such as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. I entered the soul of Russia while swinging in a hammock with the Mississippi River visible in the distance. Mom and Carol Ann read
The Brothers Karamazov
after I did and I remember discussing the book and what it meant to us. We were breaking camp and moving into our new quarters in the middle of August. Not one of us looked back at that miserable cottage when we left it; nor did any of us ever see it again. We had been banished there for two months, and none of us remembers having a good day there in rural Illinois during the summer that never seemed to end.
    It was two weeks before I left for The Citadel when we moved into our new house on Offutt Air Force Base. Mom took me to the PX to buy the socks, underwear, T-shirts, and military shoes The Citadel required. Dad had given me his trunk, which he had taken with him to World War II. Before my grand departure, my mother took me out to the officers’ club for lunch, which she had never done before. It was the first time I ever considered how a mother must feel when her oldest child goes off to college. It seemed like some essential rite of passage that moved me more than I could express to her. I don’t think I would have survived my trial by father had she not been there every step of the way. I