Natchez Burning (27 page)

His righteous passion silences me, but only for a few moments. “I’m sorry if I sounded glib. But I’d understand your position a lot better if you only had yourself to worry about. What about Mom? Do you think she can stand waiting at home while you die slowly in Parchman Prison? Hell, in the shape you’re in, you might not even make it to Parchman. You could die in the county lockup awaiting trial. Think about the reality of that for Mom.”

“I
am
thinking of your mother,” Dad says in a tone somewhere between reverence and shame.

I shake my head. “I don’t believe it. You’re wracked with guilt about something. Fine. We’ve all done things we regret. But I don’t care what you might have done, and neither does Mom. Nothing on this earth could push us away from you.”

He slowly shakes his head. “You don’t know that. You can’t.”

“You think you’ve committed a sin so terrible that you could never be forgiven?”

“No. But there are some things so—so
complicated
that it’s a man’s duty to work them out for himself. Not to depend on others to do it for him.”

“Dad … I’d never say this to a client. But you’re not going to be my client beyond tomorrow, not if you’re going to trial, and—”

“You won’t defend me if this goes to trial?”

“A lawyer who represents himself or his family has a fool for a client.”

He seems to take this philosophically. “Go on, then.”

“Tell me what happened at Cora Revels’s house last night. Just the facts, in sequence, as best you can remember them.” I hold up my right hand. “Before you say no, let me tell you why you should confide in me. Maybe what happened was assisted suicide. Or maybe it
was
murder. But it might have been manslaughter, or even plain suicide. We won’t know until I hear the facts. Because even though laymen use those terms, each one has a strict legal definition.”

For a moment I think I’ve convinced him. Then he says, “I’m not sure I know myself what happened last night.”

“What do you mean? Can you prove you weren’t there? Or what time you left? With an alibi, this whole mess can magically go away. According to the clock-radio beside Viola’s bed, she died at five thirty-eight
A.M.
”

He lifts a small, desert-colored replica of a Tiger tank from a shelf behind him and toys with its scaled-down 88 mm gun. After slowly turning the turret a few times, he sets the tank back on the shelf. “That’s not what I meant. I
was
there. But I’m still not sure what happened. Or why.”

“Did you do anything to assist Viola to die? Did you inject her?
Was
there some kind of unexpected drug interaction?”

Dad blinks twice, then seems to shake himself out of a trance. “We’ve come full circle, Penn. I’ve told you I can’t discuss what happened last night. Let that be an end of it.”

“You mean you
won’t
discuss it.”

He turns up his palms, exposing his arthritically deformed fingers. “Semantics.”

“I know you didn’t murder Viola. I
know
that. You’re trying to protect somebody. Nothing else makes sense. You can’t be trying to protect yourself, because you’re about to destroy yourself. So it must be someone else. Tell me who you’re trying to save, and I’ll do all in my power to protect them. I swear it. Your life is on the line, Dad.”

“I’ve been on borrowed time for quite a while, son. You know that.”

At last my frustration boils over, and I get to my feet. “Why won’t you let me help you?”

“Because you can’t,” he says calmly. He picks up his dead cigar from the ashtray, puts it in his mouth, and relights it with a high-pressure butane lighter that roars like a miniature welding torch. “Penn, let me tell you something: I thought I knew
my
father. He lived to be eighty-six, remember? Died of colon cancer. Do you remember how religious he was?”

“He never missed a Sunday at church. Or a Wednesday night.”

“That’s right.” Dad exhales a raft of blue smoke. “Well, near the end, I found him staring out the front window of his house, crying.
Crying
. Can you see Percy Cage doing that?”

My grandfather was as hard as a Salem judge. “No, I can’t.”

“When I asked why he was crying, Dad told me he was afraid. Afraid of dying. I can’t tell you how shocked I was. I asked whether his religious faith didn’t give him some comfort—his belief in the afterlife. He turned to me with a stare that made me shudder, and he said, ‘There’s nothing after this life, Tom. This world. Nothing.’ Then he looked back out the window.”

Dad studies the glowing tip of his cigar. “I felt like the earth had cracked open at my feet. Even though I believed basically the same thing. Dad had been going to church his whole life, professing faith, teaching Sunday school, saying and doing all the right things. But when it came to actually staring into the void, all that went out the window. All those years, he’d never been the person I thought I knew. Never. I’m not judging him. I’m just saying that I had no idea who my own father really was.”

My palms tingle as I stare back into my father’s eyes. Do I have similar blind spots when I look at him? Is that what he’s telling me? I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what’s around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep, invisible forces within my own father? Could Viola’s flight from Natchez in 1968 have been one of those events? What about my sister’s decision to leave America and live in England? Or Dad’s decision to help my wife die peacefully rather than in agony?
You may be right,
says a voice in my head,
but this isn’t the time or place for speculation
. Gathering myself as best I can, I sit back on the sofa and try to punch through his defenses.

“I’ve been thinking back to the day of your last heart attack. I was on the river with Caitlin, spreading that waitress’s ashes. When Mom called me, she said you were in terrible pain, but you were asking to see me, that you were desperate to tell me something very important.”

He stares at his cigar like a primitive tribesman entranced by fire.

“Mom said you were afraid you would die before you could tell me whatever it was. Then, when I got to the hospital, you acted like you had no memory of that.”

“Wasn’t I unconscious when you got to the hospital?”

“Pretty much.”

“You asked me about this last month. My answer is the same. When I woke up, I had no memory of what you’re talking about.”

“But Mom confirmed that you said those things.”

He shrugs. “I was out of my head. Obtunded, we say in medicine.”

“Uh-huh. Or maybe once you woke up, you realized you were going to survive, so you didn’t feel compelled to confess whatever it was.”

He suddenly looks too exhausted to argue further. If Mom were here, she would tell me to stop warting him. But I can’t. He’s risking his life by forcing Shad to proceed with an arrest. The last time Dad was involved in a trial was during my senior year in high school—a malpractice case. That stress caused his first heart attack, and he was only forty-six. Tonight he’s thirty years and several surgeries down the road.

“Let’s back up a second,” I say. “When you were telling me about Viola, you skimmed over why she left town.”

He shrugs. “That’s no mystery. The KKK had kidnapped and murdered her brother. Also a friend of his. The bodies were never found, but I never had any doubt that the Klan killed those boys. How could Viola stay here after that?”

“Which Klan guys? Do you have any idea?”

“Probably the same bastards behind the rest of the killings around here. The rednecks who worked out at Triton and Armstrong and IP. Or those Double Eagles that Henry Sexton writes about.”

I don’t want to reveal my contact with Henry yet. “Do you know that for sure?”

“Who else could it have been? Everybody knew who’d done it, in a general way. But nobody knew
exactly
. That’s how it was all over the South. That’s why the violence continued. Nobody was willing to look too deeply into it, for fear of being targeted themselves.”

Dad takes another pull on his cigar, then sets it in the ashtray. “Did you ever hear about the Heffner family in McComb?”

“No.” McComb, Mississippi, is only sixty miles east of Natchez.

“Red Heffner was an insurance man. Ex–air force. He invited a northern civil rights worker and a liberal preacher to his house for dinner. Next thing you know, the men in his neighborhood formed a vigilante association and started terrorizing his family. Red had to move them out of town. And his wife’s daughter by her first husband—who’d been killed in the Battle of the Bulge—had been elected Miss Mississippi that year. Can you imagine? Miss Mississippi was like
royalty
back then. Compared to the Heffners, we were nobody, in the social scheme of things. I wish I’d had his moral courage, the courage to get involved, but I was fresh out the army, and you were only four years old.”

I sense that Dad is leading me away from the central subject—cleverly, but doing it all the same. My patience has almost evaporated when my cell phone rings in my pocket. The screen reads
HENRY SEXTON.

“I need to take this, Dad. Hello?”

“Penn, it’s Henry. We need to talk.” The reporter’s voice quavers with fear. “I’ve learned a lot since this morning. You need to know about it, and the sooner the better.”

My pulse picks up. “What is it?”

“Not on a cell phone. It’s too easy to eavesdrop on these things, or so my FBI friends tell me.”

“Where are you?”

“At the
Beacon
office. Is there any way you can drive over here? I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it could help your father.”

My heart thuds in my chest. “My father?”

Dad looks up with interest.

“That’s all I can say on the phone. I know Dr. Cage is in trouble, and this can help him. But you’ve got to come here to hear it.”

I look at my watch. Annie has a basketball game in half an hour. If I drive to Ferriday, I’ll miss it. But what choice do I have? At least her grandmother will make the game. “I’m on my way, Henry. Give me twenty minutes.”

“Call my cell when you get here. The door’s locked.”

“Was that Henry Sexton?” Dad asks as I pocket my phone.

“Yes. He says he may be able to help you. I’m glad somebody wants to, since you refuse to help yourself.”

Dad gives me an unpleasant look. “How could Henry possibly help me? What does he know about any of this?”

“I don’t know. But he interviewed Viola a couple of times in the weeks before she died. By the way, do you have any idea what happened to the videotape that was in Henry’s camera?”

Dad just stares back at me, saying nothing.

Oh, Christ
…
this is bad.
After rubbing my temples for a few seconds, I stand and reach for the doorknob. “Don’t kid yourself about this. If you don’t give me more than you have, Sheriff Byrd is going to arrest you for murder in the morning.”

“Nothing can stop that, son. I’ve already accepted it.”

“Are you telling me Shad would arrest you even if he knew all that you know?”

“I didn’t say that.” Dad sighs wearily. “Is there any chance that Johnson would ask for the death penalty?”

“I don’t see how Shad could stretch this into capital murder. Even if you killed Viola, it wasn’t during the commission of a separate felony, so the felony murder rule doesn’t apply.”

Dad exhales with relief. “I just don’t want your mother to have to contemplate that.”

“Have you told Mom about
any
of this?”

He gives me a sheepish look. “Not yet.”

I drop my hand from the doorknob. “Dad, for God’s sake. If you’re charged with assisted suicide, we can almost certainly plead it down to probation. Even if a jury found you guilty, we’d have a shot at a suspended sentence, or maybe just losing your license. So far as I can discover, no physician in Mississippi has gone to prison for assisted suicide. But several have gone to Parchman for murder.”

“Penn … we’re going in circles again.”

My impassioned argument has made no impression. “I suppose so. Well … the sheriff’s deputies could come as early as six
A.M.
Hopefully, they’ll wait until eight or nine, but you never know. I’ll be ready to bail you out. That’s
if
the judge sets bail, of course.”

“I can’t control the district attorney or the sheriff,” Dad says with the resignation of Mohandas Gandhi. “What I told you this morning is what I’ll tell the judge tomorrow. What happened between Viola and me happened between doctor and patient, and that’s where it’s going to stay. I owe her that much. At
least
that much. Shad Johnson and his ilk can go spit. They’re dogs barking at a passing hearse.”

My face colors. “And Viola’s son? Is Lincoln Turner a dog barking at a hearse?”

“I’m sure that boy is grieving. But time can work wonders with grief. I’ve seen it ten thousand times. A night’s sleep just might change his mind.”

I doubt it.

“Will you call me if Henry Sexton has new information?” he asks.

“I will, if you’ll tell me what you’re hiding from me.”

He looks away like a caged animal turning from a door it knows is locked. Then he picks up the medical record he was reading when I walked in and lifts the phone to resume his dictation.

MELBA PRICE IS LEANING
against the wall by the back door, her big purse slung over the shoulder of her white uniform, her dark eyes watching me for clues. She looks like a middle-aged version of Esther Ford, and again I wish the old nurse were alive for me to question about Viola.

“Is the word out yet?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” Melba is playing dumb, which she most assuredly is not.

“About what Dad might have done. Is it spreading in the black community?”

“There’s a little talk. Nothing bad yet.”