Beach Music

Jack and Ledare begin working on Mike’s TV script in earnest, conducting research and writing. Jack decides that he and Leah will stay in South Carolina until his mother passes away.

One night, Jack and Leah are visiting Lucy and Dr. Pitts when Jack’s father Johnson Hagood arrives drunk and uninvited. He’s desperate to speak with Lucy, but when Jack holds him off, Johnson Hagood says cruel things about Lucy and about Shyla.

Chapter 24 details how Max and Esther Rusoff brought Ruth Fox (nee Graubart) to Waterford. During World War II, Max and Esther were worried about their Jewish relatives in Eastern Europe and used their political connections to search for their families. They discovered that their families in Poland had been killed. They heard about a young woman named Ruth Graubart, who was being sheltered by the Polish Resistance. Even though she is not family, they paid for Ruth to come to the US and raised her as their daughter.

Jack’s brothers teach Leah how to do the shag, a popular dance from the 1960s. When Jack and Shyla’s song, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” comes on, Jack dances with Leah and cries, something he hasn’t done for years.

It is May, one month after Jack and Leah arrived in South Carolina. Jack drives Lucy to Mepkin Abbey to see Father Jude. On the way, Lucy tells Jack that her marriage to Johnson Hagood has been annulled by the pope. After Jack questions her about her close relationship with Father Jude, Lucy reveals that Jude is her brother. Jack is shocked and upset, so Lucy decides to tell him about her childhood, a history she has never shared before.

Chapter 27 is Lucy’s story.

Lucy's maiden name is Dillard. Lucy’s parents were poor and illiterate and lived in the mountains of North Carolina. Her mother was 12 years old when Lucy was born. Her father was abusive. When Lucy was five, her father got a job as a seasonal farmer worker, keeping him away from the home for months at a time.

One year, when Lucy was ten or so, her father came home unexpectedly during harvest season and discovered his wife having sex with the local preacher. Lucy’s father killed the preacher with an axe, and then brutally beat Lucy’s mother. Lucy wrapped a venomous Copperhead snake around her father’s neck to save her mother’s life. Later, after Lucy’s father had gotten drunk and passed out, Lucy’s mother tied him up and hit him with a rock. Then, she lit the house on fire, driving away in a mule-pulled wagon with her children and their few belongings.

For a month or so, the mother and children wandered from place to place. Then, their mule died. At the next town, Lucy’s mother made sure her children knew where the orphanage was before hanging herself while they slept.

The orphanage was run by Reverend Willis Bedenbaugh, who took advantage of his position of authority to rape and abuse the girls under his care. Jude witnessed his older sister being raped many times. One night, Jude snuck into the reverend’s room while he slept and lit the man’s bedding on fire. In his panic, the reverend spread the fire to the drapes and the building burned down.

After this, Jude did not speak for two years. His silence unnerved the adults caring for him. When Lucy overheard a conversation about committing Jude to the state mental hospital, she decided they must run away. The children fled the orphanage and roamed the countryside, starving, until they were taken in by a Black woman named Lotus. At the time, it was illegal for Black and white people to live together, so the children were forced to leave when the sheriff saw them with Lotus.

They were sent to a Catholic orphanage in Charleston, where Jude found comfort in Catholicism and began a life-long dedication to this religion. The siblings lost touch for a few years when Lucy ran away from the orphanage and ended up in Atlanta.

On an evening walk on the beach, Leah and Jack run into a college kid harassing a loggerhead turtle. Jack intervenes.

The following morning, Leah and Jack join Lucy to search for the nest of eggs that the turtle had been trying to lay. They find them and dig them up, part of Lucy’s conservation program to protect the loggerheads. They meet Jane, an officer from the Wildlife Department. She and Lucy debate the merits of breaking the law to protect the turtle nests. Jane threatens to arrest Lucy, but doesn’t.

Leah and Jack visit John Hardin’s home, an elaborate tree house. Then, Ledare picks them up for a boat ride and teaches Leah how to waterski.

Jack reflects on memories of Shyla, realizing belatedly that she was embarrassed by her parents’ foreignness, wanting to fit in with the other children. Jack recalls one of Shyla’s birthday parties, when Ruth had prepared unfamiliar foods like borscht and pickled herring for the young party guests.

Jack recalls the sadness that filled Shyla’s childhood home. This sadness is due to the trauma that George and Ruth experienced as Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. As a child, Jack noticed some of the Foxes’ darkness, worry, and paranoia. It is only now as an adult that he is beginning to grasp the depths of their trauma.

Shyla experienced a few mental breakdowns in her pre-teen and early teen years as she grappled with the stories that her mother told her about the Holocaust. She became obsessed with playing the piano, often skipping meals and avoiding socializing. Shyla was hospitalized for depression. She had visions or hallucinations, one witnessed by Jack and his mother. On that occasion, Shyla described her vision and Lucy deduced that she was seeing the Virgin Mary. Shyla called the apparition “the Lady,” and only later did Jack connect that vision with Ruth’s story about the Lady of the Coins, the statue of the Virgin Mary in the Catholic church where Ruth was sheltered during the war.

Leah and George go to a music concert in Charleston, and Ruth takes advantage of the quiet time with Jack to tell him her whole story. Jack listens carefully, recognizing that Ruth is telling her story because she desires to have closure on the past and because she thinks it might help Jack understand Shyla’s suicide.

Ruth’s father was a Polish rabbi. She was 13 when World War II broke out. Ruth’s family did not flee Poland because her father felt a duty to stay and help their community. To prepare for the worst, Ruth’s mother sewed a dress for each of her daughters, wrapping coins in fabric and concealing them as buttons. Those coins would help Ruth survive once she was separated from her family.

When Nazi soldiers arrived and forced everyone in the Jewish Ghetto onto trucks, Ruth’s family hid in a secret attic that her grandfather had prepared with some friends. One of the friends had a baby, who gave away their hiding spot when she began to cry. The Nazis shot everyone except the girls, whom they raped before shooting. The soldier who raped Ruth only pretended to shoot her, and instead left her hiding amongst the dead bodies of her family.

Eventually, Ruth made it to Warsaw to find a friend of her mother’s, a Catholic nun. The nuns were part of the Polish resistance, and they protected Ruth by disguising her as a nun. Ruth hid her dress with the coin buttons behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. This statue is what Ruth and Shyla will later call the Lady of the Coins. While Ruth sheltered at the convent, she heard that the Rusoffs in South Carolina arranged for her to travel to the US.

Ruth had three coins left in her dress when she arrived in America. She made them into three necklaces, one of which she later gave to Shyla and another to Shyla’s sister.

After hearing Ruth’s story, Jack reluctantly agrees to listen to George’s story as well.

Jack recalls their high school history teacher, Delia Seignious, who celebrated Capers and Jordan because they were “two descendants of some of the most distinguished names in South Carolina” (513). Capers was fascinated by and proud of his connection to South Carolina history. He was especially fond of a book by his great-great-uncle (and Jordan’s great-great-grandfather), called Carolina Sports by Land and Water, which recounted pre-Civil War hunting and fishing expeditions.

In the summer of 1964, the four best friends planned a fishing expedition out to the Gulf Stream, into rougher waters and further away from the coast than they had ever been. They told no one, knowing that their parents would never permit such a dangerous trip.

At one point, the boys realized their boat was directly on top of a huge manta ray, just feet beneath the surface. Capers, wanting to emulate his heroic great-great-uncle, harpooned the giant fish. The manta ray’s responding lurch ripped the motor off the boat with the harpoon rope. The rope also tore the windshield off the boat. Capers and Mike were knocked unconscious. Jack and Jordan watched in terror as the manta ray, still connected to the harpoon rope, pulled them far out to sea.

Finally, the manta ray shook off the rope, stranding the boys miles from shore without a working motor or a radio. They were adrift for 15 days before washing up on an island in Georgia. They only stayed alive due to Jordan’s survival training with his militaristic father.