“Mom, Dad’s not going to tell me any of this. I doubt he’ll even admit what you’ve already told me. And to stand even a chance of getting that plea revoked, I need the whole truth.”
She refuses to meet my eyes. “I don’t know what to do. You need to go see your father. All I can tell you now is this: I wanted to tell the truth from the beginning. It wasn’t to protect myself that I let Tom take the risk. It was for Annie, and for Jenny’s children.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your father nearly died five months ago. We’ll be lucky if he lives another year. And given that . . . I’ve had to face the fact that Tom is right. I have a duty to stay free, in case anything should happen to you. After all, you don’t live the safest life in the world. Annie’s only eleven. Somebody has to be there for her. Jenny’s kids, too. They’re older than Annie, but they’re no more independent than your sister was at their age.”
“Mom, come on—”
“What have I always told you?” she asks, gripping my arm with surprising force and shaking it. “Family. Family is all that matters in this world.”
Verbena is going to open the door again any second. As I try to think of a way to persuade Mom to tell me more, another thought strikes me, one I can scarcely credit. “Did Quentin know about this? About your part in what happened?”
“Not as far as I know. When your father said no one could know about something, he meant no one.”
Like his war years, I think bitterly. When my dad shuts the door on something, it stays shut.
“Are you going to tell Jenny this?” Mom asks, the worry in her voice making her sound more like her old self than anything she’s said since I came in. “There’s really nothing to be gained by making her think about any of it.”
In my mind I see my sister shivering in the waiting room. I don’t know whether Mom is right or wrong, but I don’t want her to worry about it now. “I’m going to tell Jenny you slept through her calls. That you took a Lorcet Plus.”
Mom nods slowly, her eyes filled with gratitude. At least in Jenny’s eyes, she thinks, her image as a perfect mother will remain intact. “I’m sorry you had to go through this in the dark,” she says. “But you always were the strong one.”
“My mother’s son, right?”
A faint, proud smile touches her lips. She never was very quick at picking up irony. “Where are you going now?” she asks. “Are you going to see your father?”
“I don’t see that I have a choice.”
“Good.” A bell dings out in the hall. “Remember what I said. Family. It’s all that matters.”
I kiss her forehead, then leave her bedside. But at the door I turn back. “Mom, you asked me why Dad changed his plea. Now I’m asking you. Is he still trying to protect you? Because I think you’re safe now.”
She looks at me over the little hump of her sheet-covered feet. “None of us is safe so long as Snake Knox is free. But that’s not why Tom pleaded guilty.”
“Then why did he do it? Guilt over Caitlin? Walt? Henry?”
“Tom did it because he chose us over Viola. He lived up to his vows and fulfilled his duty. He did what good men do. Good fathers. But Viola paid the price for his honor. A terrible price. And . . . he couldn’t live with that anymore. That’s why he put himself in prison.”
I can’t look long at the pain now revealed in my mother’s eyes.
“I’ll be back to see you later,” I tell her. “Try to get some sleep. There’ll be a guard covering you at all times.”
“Don’t be too hard on your father, Penn.”
“I’ll see you later. Try to sleep.”
And then I go.
Chapter 73
After leaving my mother’s room, I told some white lies to Jenny, then texted Rusty and asked him to pick me up at the old west entrance to the hospital in fifteen minutes. I wanted some time to gather my thoughts before heading to the jail to see Dad, and I didn’t want a bodyguard dogging my every step. After a tense conversation with Joe Russell, I managed to free myself from my own shadow.
I’m standing inside the old doctors’ entrance of St. Catherine’s Hospital, which after decades of neglect is undergoing a massive remodel. This entrance is the site of one of my clearest childhood memories, the first occasion that I realized my father was “important.” Here, just inside the big green double doors, a panel was mounted that held a hundred rectangular push buttons. Each button had a white label affixed to it, and most of the labels had names typed on them. After every name were the letters M.D. Whenever a doctor entered the hospital, he would press his personal button, and a yellow light would go on behind it, like a light in a fighter plane or a Gemini spacecraft. And somewhere upstairs, a central operator would know that specific doctor was in the hospital and available to handle patients.
I was only five years old the first time Dad took me to this hospital with him, the first time I saw that light go on at the end of his straight, strong forefinger. And my little chest filled with a pride I’ve hardly experienced since. I knew then that people needed my dad—depended on him—and because of that, he mattered. And if he mattered, then I mattered.
When I grew up, I wanted to matter just as much as he did.
That old panel is still set in the wall, but most of the labels peeled off the buttons long ago, and a harness of loose wires hangs beneath the aluminum frame. Even with all the millions spent on renovations over the years, no one ever removed this device. Since the public never sees this entrance, the bean counters probably figured the expense wasn’t justified. Now the quaint relic sits lifelessly in the wall, as outdated as an orphaned pay phone.
When that panel blinked with light, the building wasn’t called St. Catherine’s, but the Jefferson Davis Memorial Hospital, after the president of the Confederacy. Back then, there were eighty doctors in Natchez, and the city thrummed with life. But as times changed, the name of the hospital changed, too. Sometime in the 1980s, when I was practicing law in Houston, it became St. Catherine’s, named for the nearby creek that the Natchez Indians lived along before they were slaughtered by the French who settled here. Today there are less than forty doctors in Natchez, thanks to bad tort laws, medical turf wars, and a moribund oil industry. And I am the mayor of what remains.
Bending at the waist, I squint at the faded letters on the few labels that remain. To my amazement, near the bottom left corner, I see Thomas Cage, M.D.