While I stood there in shock, Ben Tate flipped Arthur Pine the bird. Seconds later, everyone else in the newsroom followed suit.
Walking out under the harsh afternoon sun, I thought about the attorney for the Poker Club. When guys like Arthur Pine watched Frank Capra films like It’s a Wonderful Life, did they root for greedy old Mr. Potter? As a young man, did Pine dream of accruing wealth by skimming money off other men’s work? By foreclosing on anyone he could nudge or lure into financial difficulty? The further along we move in this American experiment, the more Arthur Pines we seem to produce. But Pine didn’t show up in person to be thorough. He came to rub my face in the dirt—and my father’s, too. The Poker Club doesn’t want a newspaper in Bienville; they want a PR rag, preferably a glossy one filled with promotional hyperbole. Standing on the sidewalk, I turned back to Pine, who didn’t seem the least discomfited by the mass firing he’d just carried out. In fact, he looked smugger than he had in the newsroom.
“Remember this moment, Arthur,” I said with as much restraint as I could manage. “This is the moment when I decided to destroy the Poker Club.”
The lawyer looked singularly unimpressed.
“You want to fire those kids?” I went on. “You want to send me home to tell my dying father that his family’s legacy is gone? Okay. But get ready to own it. I’m going to send you to prison. Your fat-cat buddies, too, every one. But I’m going to pay special attention to you.”
Pine waved off the deputy, then folded his arms across his chest and said, “Aren’t you forgetting Max Matheson’s video?”
“Nope. That’ll ruin several more lives. I’m willing to take the punishment for what I’ve done. But you? You’re a chickenshit. A weasel. You can’t take what’s coming your way. And you can bet your ass something is coming.”
“Knock yourself out,” Pine said with a smile. “We’ll publish a nice farewell piece when you head back to D.C.”
Sarcasm dripped from his voice, but as I turned toward the parking lot, I saw his mask slip. The smile on his lips no longer touched his eyes, which were those of an animal transitioning from predator into prey.
I won’t describe what happened after I informed my mother and father what had transpired at the Watchman. There’s a shame in witnessing a proud man broken, reduced to penury and forced to confront the fact that he has failed to provide for his wife in her old age, and not only because of his own poor management, but also his misplaced trust in a friend. When you are that man’s son, the sight shakes you to the core. I will store my father’s breakdown in the same locked vault where I keep the events of the morning that the sheriff walked me into the same house to tell my parents that my brother had drowned.
After the initial shock, Mom had to give Dad a nitroglycerine tablet for his heart, extra meds for his tremors, and a Xanax to try to blunt his anxiety. Yet still he remained distraught. His hands trembled constantly, and his extremities jerked in ways my mother had never seen before. Worst of all, he was crying, something I couldn’t remember seeing him do since the day Adam drowned.
“Have you called Dr. Kirby?” I asked Mom.
“He’s going to come by after he finishes at his office.”
What emerged after Mom and I were able to question Dad in detail was simple and heartbreaking. After I moved home and started running the paper in earnest, Dad began to believe that if I stayed in Bienville, I might be able to turn the business around. His time had passed, he knew, but he thought my passion and experience might be enough to succeed where his had failed. If only the paper could stay open another year, he thought, I might get the Watchman back on its feet. What greater legacy could he leave than his family’s newspaper back on solid footing, free from the tyranny of any media group? To that end, he’d taken out one more major loan, securing it with the equity in his house and some securities he’d held back for my mother. Marty Denis helped him with all this; Mom had known nothing. Dad hadn’t told me, he said, because he didn’t want me burdened with financial worries. Of course it was that very attitude that had prevented me from working to save the paper from the day I got back.
Mom couldn’t imagine that Marty Denis had betrayed Dad by selling the loans to Claude Buckman, but I told her they’d probably gotten their way with Marty the same way they did with everyone else. Pine told me Denis had “imperiled his position at the bank.” The Poker Club would have been happy to bail him out of his trouble. All he had to do to save his own ass was burn Duncan McEwan.
“It’s my fault, all of it,” Dad whispered, staring dully at the switched-off television. “I wanted the paper to be there for you. I thought you were enjoying the work. I thought . . . you’d come around and want to stay and take it over.”
“It’s all right,” I told him.
“How much could I have gotten?” he kept asking. “Back when you pressed me to sell? That last time, seven or eight years ago.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“Nine million. Maybe ten.”
At some point after this he became hysterical, but thankfully the drugs kicked in, and he transitioned into a sort of muted daze. He reminded me of schizophrenia patients I’d seen in a Maryland hospital while writing a story on mental illness. He must have mumbled “I’m sorry” a hundred times, like a meaningless mantra he couldn’t stop repeating.
My mother kept looking from him to me, then back again. I was afraid she might break, as Dr. Kirby had predicted she would after Dad passed away. The specter of poverty had to be working on her, even though she knew that I’d never allow her to go without. But she didn’t break. She merely rubbed Dad’s neck and shoulders, as she always did when he became upset. Time passed in near silence, and the afternoon sun moved across the sky, sending a shadow slowly across the den floor. Nadine called and texted me several times, as did Ben Tate and others, but I didn’t want to break the calm by answering or returning calls. I was hoping for some word from Jet, but my burner phone remained silent. I texted Nadine that I would get back to her when I could, then muted my iPhone and sat with my parents while the new reality settled over and into us.
After all that’s happened, it’s strange to sit quietly in the house where I grew up. In the five months I’ve been back, I’ve hardly done this. Despite Mom’s efforts to reconcile Dad and me, most of my time has been spent helping her do household chores, while my main method of assistance has been paying for professional sitters and taking care of errands outside the house so that she can remain at his side. To see Dad sitting motionless like this is a new and disquieting experience.
In the silent den, I get up and walk along the shelves of the built-in entertainment center, perusing the spines of the book overflow from his study. Propped on one shelf is a photo of Dad and Hazel Brannon Smith, publisher of the Lexington Advertiser, in the newsroom of the Watchman. Another shelf contains personally inscribed volumes, an alphabetical treasure trove comprising a who’s who of twentieth-century journalism: Agee, Arendt, James Baldwin . . . Jimmy Breslin, Bob Capa, Rachel Carson, Cronkite, Walker Evans, Martha Gellhorn . . . Halberstam, Hersey, Sy Hersh, Langston Hughes, Stanley Karnow, Walter Lippmann . . . Murrow, Gordon Parks, Eric Sevareid, Bill Shirer, I. F. Stone, Curtis Wilkie. Some of these writers were friends of my father’s, others mentors. A few simply admired his stand during the civil rights movement so much that they sent him their own work with a thoughtful inscription.