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

still a little weak, but she’s getting there,” Dad said.
    When I burst through the door in my excitement to see my family, I did what I had done since I was a five-year-old boy and went down on one knee to receive the delirious charge of the Great Dog Chippie, who would fly into my arms. This time there was no charge; there was nothing to pet; there was no Great Dog Chippie.
    Mom came out of the kitchen to watch me and said, “I had to put the dog down. It was for the best.”
    I hugged my mother furiously and kissed her a dozen times. She pushed me back, rather brusquely, I thought, and looked at me with eyes I did not recognize and said in a voice that was not my mother’s voice, “You can sleep downstairs in the basement with Mike, Kathy, and Jimbo. You don’t have a bed now, Pat, so we borrowed one for you.”
    “What do you mean, I don’t have a bed?”
    “You don’t live here anymore,” she said.
    Somewhere during the course of that hysterectomy, in the scrimmageof blood and hormones and the great shock of estrogen shutdown that my mother suffered during her morbid ordeal, I had lost part of the mother who raised me, the sweet girl, the smiling one. She had left part of herself on that operating table and a darker Peg Conroy made her way forward in the world, an angrier one, and I think a more treacherous one. My brothers and sisters fight me on this and say that Mom always was the same mother she was in the end. Though hormonal mysteries have always been beyond the realm of my understanding, I still hold to the claim that there was a significant change in my mother’s personality after her operation. My brothers and sisters hoot in derision over this and accuse me of worshiping a mother who was my own creation or invention. My version of Peg Conroy rings hollow and untrue to them, and they’re not shy about letting me know it. To them she was vain, cheap, and had grown bone-tired with the exhaustion of motherhood.
    In despair, I flew back to The Citadel to complete my abysmal plebe year. That was my job now and I was going to do it. But I faced it with a damaged mother and a Chippie-less world I could never repair.

CHAPTER 2 •
Fun and Games at The Citadel
    After the holidays, I left the city of Omaha yet again for a two-and-a-half-day journey back to Charleston. Liberated from my father’s house at long last, I felt my adventure in life had finally begun. During the train trip, I entertained extravagant fantasies of becoming a writer. I pretended I was the young Thomas Wolfe gorging on the images of small towns and cornfields as I returned to the South. I wrote an earnest poem about two-stoplight villages. As passive as a lamb, I was traveling back to a slaughterhouse for boys, where I would have to kill the poet in me as an act of survival. I’d never encountered another college student who was as mismatched and insufficient for the test of his chosen college. Though I was heroically unprepared for my immersion into this final, unsurpassable test of manhood, The Citadel was my only chance to earn a degree, and I planned to make the most of it.
    When I entered The Citadel in the fall, I thought I was going to college. This delusion was quickly dispelled. What I entered was the plebe system. I hated it from the moment I walked into the barracks. Even my father had not prepared me for such ferocious abuse. What I hadn’t factored in was the peerless cruelty of the training cadre. That the plebe year would prove its worth as an inflammable touchstone, a worthy successor to my father’s trial by fire, came as a great surpriseto me. I thought I’d endured the great tempestuous tests of manhood by surviving my father’s fists and becoming a letterman in every sport I participated in during high school. I had forged my soul in a fire pit of cruelty and discipline and was not expecting those darkling, black winds that The Citadel threw at me for the next four years. Desperately, I wanted to be a writer