My quest through Concordia Parish and the outlying neighborhoods of Adams County was like a journey through my distant childhood. I’d played Dixie Youth baseball with kids from those neighborhoods: freckle-faced, pale-skinned, buck-toothed, bruised-and-scabbed-over kids who could have sprung fully formed from a Norman Rockwell painting. Most had lived the first decade of their lives with big grins; too many had lived the remainder with a confused scowl and a diminishing sense of control over their futures.
Those kids were in their midforties now, and I hardly got a sympathetic echo at a single house. Children of Double Eagle members had picked up the code of silence by osmosis, and they observed it faithfully. Suspicion was the order of the day. A couple threatened me, but most were simply uncomfortable or resentful—uncertain how to behave when torn between the southern compulsion to be hospitable and the instinct to push away all inquiry about their families. I took someone along on every visit, even to see the women. Usually Tim Weathers, but sometimes Kirk Boisseau. Kirk didn’t have the training the Vulcan guys did, but my old school buddy had an asset they did not—intimate knowledge of the local population. As a former marine working in the landscaping business, Kirk had become familiar with this segment of society that I hardly knew anymore, if I ever really had.
I didn’t question Will Devine—the probable owner of the Darlington Academy truck—right away. But the day after visiting my father, I called Keisha Harvin and begged for everything she could tell me about Devine and his family. The young reporter came through for me within hours. Like most original Double Eagles, Devine had spent his working life employed by the Triton Battery Corporation, just south of Natchez, on the Mississippi River. In age, Devine fell between Frank and Snake Knox. For the past five years he’d been suffering from a chronic lung disease and didn’t leave the house much. According to Keisha, Henry Sexton’s journals didn’t supply much detail on Devine regarding the Eagles’ modern-day criminal activities, but Henry had believed the man played a major role in some of the 1960s murders.
According to Dad, Walt Garrity had visited Devine at home. A retired Texas Ranger, Walt can be pretty persuasive with white guys from his own generation, but Devine had slammed the door in Walt’s face more than once. John Kaiser’s FBI agents must have gotten the same treatment, because if Devine came close to turning state’s evidence back in December, John wouldn’t have let up the pressure on the old Double Eagle.
I first tried Devine at his house on a Sunday morning, thinking maybe he’d be in a Christian frame of mind. From behind a screen door, he told me that if I didn’t get off his property, he’d give me a blast from the double-barreled shotgun he was aiming at my belly. The fat old bastard was huffing while he threatened me, and he looked like he could barely hold himself on his feet. But he also looked like he would shoot if I provoked him further. The bug eyes behind big plastic glasses held a mixture of outrage and fear. It was then I realized that to Will Devine I probably appeared to be an incarnation of the retribution he had dreaded since his violent youth.
An old woman was talking low in the shadows behind him. I couldn’t make out her words, but her tone seemed less bellicose than that of her husband. I considered asking Devine about the pickup truck with the Darlington Academy sticker—which was parked in a driveway thirty feet to my left—but then I thought better of it. As I drove away from the house, I started going down the list of the man’s children and grandchildren.
Will Devine’s sons proved to be less combative than their father, but they also claimed to know nothing substantive about his involvement with the Double Eagles. They knew I would happily jail their father if I could, but they seemed to accept this as simply the way of things. Like most Double Eagle kids, they remembered the barbecues where the fathers had drunk beer and blown up stumps and junk cars, but claimed they’d believed the men were just horsing around. If they had known that their churchgoing father had been rehearsing bomb attacks on local blacks, they said, naturally they would have . . . well, they didn’t know what they would have done, but you know . . . something.
I didn’t mention that the mothers had obviously known what those exercises were for, yet not one ever called the FBI to warn anybody. The longer I spent with Will Devine’s boys, the more I saw guilt in their eyes. Not personal guilt—not the shame of conscious collusion or conspiracy—but a knowledge that they had heard and seen enough to know that Daddy meant to harm somebody with those “big fireworks,” and that “somebody” was a different color than they were.
When I left those grown-up boys, I had the feeling that if I’d met them a little earlier in life—before so many people died—they might have been glad for the chance to confide to me the secret fears of their childhoods. Both Devine sons revealed that their father had beaten them ruthlessly for the slightest misbehavior. But that, they insisted, was common among their friends’ families. “It was a different time,” they said. “Tougher. Children were there to be seen, not heard. That was just the way it was, and maybe ought to be again.”
When they spoke of their mother, Nita Devine, both men got soft looks in their eyes. One even wept as he spoke of her selfless devotion. Nita was, it turned out, the woman I had heard speaking from the shadows behind old Will. When I asked if the sons thought they could get me some time alone with their mother, both clammed up instantly—obviously equating my suggestion with betrayal.
The younger son, Deke Devine—named for an astronaut—gave me a lot of information about other children of Double Eagles. Most had settled within ten miles of their childhood homes. A few had gone into the military, but most worked in the oil fields, plus a smattering of small-engine mechanics, arc welders, electricians, taxidermists, or farm chemical salesmen. I wrote down as much information as I could before a feeling of betrayal shut Deke Devine up again, and I left on relatively good terms. As I drove out to Highway 65, I made a mental note to return and delve deeper into the younger son’s conflicted mind.
For twenty days I crisscrossed the parish with my list, moving from houses to trailers to apartments in the hope of persuading a living Double Eagle or one of their children to talk to me. I wasn’t even sure what I most wanted to know; I simply had to poke at the hornet’s nest until something came swarming out. But nothing did. Going through the motions of my former career as an assistant district attorney partially restored my sense of order, and with it my connection to the world. But by the time the morning of the VK’s retaliation rolled around, I was still suffering from a fundamental sense of dislocation.
I awakened to the scent of coffee coming from the kitchen, which told me that Mia was up, and probably Annie, too. Most mornings I find Mia at the kitchen table, reading a novel or working at her MacBook while Annie takes her shower. That morning, Annie poked her mother’s face through my door and said, “Eggs and toast or oatmeal and blueberries?”
“You pick.”
“Both. You need to get some weight back.”