The maid tilts her head to one side and regards me with fresh suspicion. “I reckon you know who Mrs. Jet loves, don’t you?”
“Tallulah . . . I’m going to ask you one more hard question. Maybe a stupid one. But I would really appreciate an answer.”
“You done used up your time, Marshall. I need to get back to work.”
“Wait—please. I was told that Max raped Jet. That that’s how he fathered Kevin.”
Tallulah’s gaze settles on me with gentle but insistent pressure. “Who told you that?”
“Does it matter? I want to know if that’s what you believe.”
Tallulah looks down at a flower bed filled with Louisiana iris. “It’s gon’ rain this evening. These flowers need it.” When I don’t respond, she looks up and says, “I’ll tell you this. Mr. Max been with a lot of women over the years, white and black. He’s a hard-dick man. He broke a lot of hearts over the years . . . but I ain’t ever known him to force nobody. He never had to.”
How closely her words echo Nadine’s. “Maybe this time he did,” I suggest. “Maybe he had to. To get Jet to submit.”
Tallulah nods slowly. “Mayhap that’s how it was. But I ’member that time pretty good. Wasn’t but thirteen years back. Hard times in this family. Paul was takin’ pills, smokin’ that reefer. Drinkin’ every morning, passed out by dark. Mrs. Sally was having health issues. Female troubles, but worse things, too. Terrible diverticulitis. But Mr. Max? He was his same old self. Heck, he wasn’t but fifty-three back then.”
“What are you telling me, Tallulah?”
“Nothing. I don’t speak ill of nobody. All I’m saying is things had a funny feeling ’round here for a month or so.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing! I’ll swear that on the Bible. I never saw nothing untoward.”
“But you felt something.”
She shrugs her big shoulders. “Like I said . . . things just felt funny for a bit. Then they settled back down. And next thing I know, Jet had the big belly. Then she was bringin’ li’l Kev into the world. After that, it was like a rainbow coming out after a storm. Everybody got better. Whole house had a glow in it, all coming from that boy.”
The memory has lightened this woman’s heart. “And now?” I ask.
Another heavy sigh, and her lips pooch out. “This house done gone dark again. Darker than before, even, ’cause Mrs. Sally gone. Now . . . you’ve kept me too long. I need to go.” She puts her hand on the doorknob and starts to close the door.
“Did Paul ever sense anything?” I ask quickly. “This is important, Tallulah. I’m trying to avert bloodshed.”
She stops, looks back. “Paul’s smarter than people think. A lot smarter than his daddy ever give him credit for. He has a lot of Mrs. Sally in him.”
“I know that. What about my question?”
“If Paul sensed anything, he shoved it way down deep, with all the other stuff been killin’ him all these years.”
That’s the Paul Matheson I know. But what she’s suggesting about Jet goes against everything I know about her. And I know her better than anyone alive. Yet what reason could Tallulah have to lie? As I stare at the anxious maid, an answer comes to me. It’s not a pleasant one, but it’s grounded in hard reality.
“Tallulah, Max’s murder alibi rests on you. He told the police you told Sally you caught Max with Margaret Sullivan. You and I know that’s not true. If the police ask you that question . . . what will you tell them?”
She sighs heavily, then looks at my feet. “I don’t know. One thing’s for sure, nothing I say gon’ help Mrs. Sally now. She’s with Jesus. Long past these earthly travails.”
“But you’re not. Do you feel you owe it to Max to protect him?”
She looks up, and I see harsh truths written in her lined face. “Owe him? Boy, that’s like askin’ me why I still work for Mr. Max, when he coulda killed Mrs. Sally.”
I don’t even blink as I stare at her. “Will you answer me?”
Tallulah closes her eyes, then shakes her head with a sadness that has a centuries-old provenance. “This be where I stay at, Marshall. Who else gonna give me my own house to sleep in? Bills paid, water paid, ’lectric paid. Health insurance, even. I got no choice, have I? Body my age? You know that.”
There it is. Odds are, Tallulah wouldn’t tell me Max raped Jet even if she’d seen it with her own eyes.
“I’ll tell you somethin’ else for free,” the maid goes on. “You ain’t helped Paul none. I always thought you were a good boy. Your mama and daddy were good folks. But this ain’t right, what been goin’ on these past months. If Jet don’t know better, then you ought to. If you had sense, you’d marry that Nadine before somebody smarter does it first. Now, I gots to go.”
As I stand openmouthed, she shuts the door in my face, then slowly makes her way back toward the kitchen and her story.
On the road back to Bienville, the sting of Tallulah’s last words takes a long time to fade. I remember staring after her through the glass, watching her waddle across the floor of a twenty-first-century hacienda owned by a man whom she would as soon let fade into darkness, if she didn’t depend on him to support her into old age. As for myself, I don’t much feel like going to Nadine’s store just now. I need to think. Most of all, I need to talk to Jet. But not yet. Right now I need to see my father. If he comes out of his coma without brain damage, I will give him the only medicine that might yet bring him relief at this point in his life. If he doesn’t, then I will still speak the words that, after my revelation in the jail, I know must be said. For who knows what sleeping minds might register, and how deeply? Perhaps even in darkness the soul can be healed before the last warm pulse of life fades.
Chapter 47
“Marshall?” says my father, blinking his yellow eyes in the ICU bed.
They brought him out of his coma thirty minutes ago. Often patients emerge from unconsciousness in a state of confusion that can persist for hours or days, but after about ten minutes, Dad oriented himself to both recent history and his present situation. I missed his awakening, but Mom told me that what brought him fully alert was the sight of this morning’s guerrilla edition of the Watchman.
“Right here,” I tell him, touching the thin cotton bedspread over his thigh.
A soft cacophony of beeps, whirs, and pumping sounds fills the room, and voices leak in from the nurses’ station beyond the half-open sliding glass door. Dr. Kirby has come and gone, heading for the lab in search of some elusive test result, leaving my mother and me to perform the play I’ve authored with the Bienville Poker Club.
“Dad?” I say, moving closer. “I need to tell you something. It has to do with the future of the paper.”
He closes his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about that. All these years I clung to it . . . fought to keep it open . . . then I lost it right at the end, when you were making good use of it.”
“Dad—”
“Blythe showed me your special edition,” he whispers. “I haven’t read it yet, but I saw the front-page headlines. Printed on the job press, I heard.”
“Aaron and Gabriel tried hard, but they couldn’t get the folder for the old Heidelberg up to speed in time.”
Dad lifts a trembling hand and points at the paper lying across his lower legs. “That’s all right. I’m damned proud of that. Proud you did it.”
I haven’t heard him say anything like that since I was a boy. The lump in my throat stops me from going on for several seconds. “Dad, listen to me for a second, please. I’ve got a present for you.”
“Did your mother tell you Marty Denis came by this morning?” he asks in his reedy whisper. “To apologize for what he did? That took some guts. I was asleep. Seems Claude Buckman took over the debts of Marty’s bank. Poor Marty had no choice in the matter—had to do whatever Buckman told him to.”
I don’t know whether that makes me feel better or worse about Marty Denis. But it makes me feel better about the next two minutes. “Dad, stop talking. You’re about to get one of those moments that’s very rare in life.”