As I made my journey from the ER to this exit door, every few steps carried me past a portrait of a chief of staff gone by. The most recent twenty or so hang in the lobby, but my father was chief back in 1972, so his portrait resides in this forgotten corridor. I wonder if the other visages I passed concealed secrets like my father’s behind their dignified masks. Some did, perhaps. But most of those faces probably hid the usual small-town sins shared by men across America, regardless of race, religion, or section of the country.
My father was different. He couldn’t live blindly amid the ruins of a gilded empire where the lost children of Africa worked with false smiles among their former masters. So he thrust himself into the troubled borderland between black and white, and in his passion to do good, he did also what other passionate men had done who trod this deep soil made rich by sweat and blood. He strayed from his own kind, mingled his blood with the blood of Africa. That was common on this dark bend of the river, as it was across the South before Thomas Jefferson ever became a founding father. But my father’s offense was that he cared for the woman he bedded, and for her people, and in this atavistic corner of the New World he learned that the fearful, clannish Anglo-Saxons who’d settled it always exacted a price for such betrayal.
And blood and death followed.
I’m still staring at the old call panel when my phone pings with a text message. Rusty is waiting for me outside in his car. As I raise my arm to press the wide steel bar on the exit door, time slips, and I see my father walking through ahead of me, leaning into the steel to keep his frail body erect while he forces it open. When I was five years old, he could throw out one hand and swat this door open as though it were made of cardboard. Now . . .
Of course, Dad will never open this door again. At this moment, he is sitting in a jail cell, waiting to be transferred to a state prison in the Mississippi Delta that I’m told is close to hell on earth.
And he’s chosen to go there.
The visiting cubicle of the Adams County jail is no luxury accommodation, and I’ve occupied it as both visitor and prisoner. But never did I imagine that I would enter it to speak to a man who put himself here on purpose. Dad is supposedly being escorted to this depressing box, but I’ve been waiting ten minutes already.
I’d hoped to make my way here without crossing Sheriff Billy Byrd’s path, but word quickly spread of my arrival at the ACSO, and he made sure he was standing at the duty desk when I logged myself in. Byrd tried as hard as he could to bait me, but I refused to be goaded, and I left his gloating face behind me with the laughter of his deputies.
“Don’t pay ’em no mind, Mayor,” said the big black deputy who escorted me to the visiting room. “They don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’.”
“Thank you, Deputy . . . ?”
“McQuarters. Larry McQuarters. I been looking out for your daddy for Mr. Quentin.”
“I appreciate it, Larry. My whole family does.”
“I’ll have Doc in there soon as I can.”
The door beyond the metal screen opens, and my father edges into the cubicle with Larry McQuarters behind him. His hands are cuffed, his wrists bright red, but after he sits, his knees creaking in protest, Larry bends and unlocks the cuffs.
“You be good now, Doc. Sheriff Byrd be on my ass if he finds out I took these off.”
“Don’t worry, Larry,” Dad says with gratitude. “Thank you.”
The crappy fluorescent lights in this place don’t do the complexion any favors, and Dad’s prison pallor, which was masked by good clothes and light in the courtroom, is painfully obvious here. He looks through the metal screen without any obvious emotion I can read, except perhaps a dread of being asked things he would prefer not to speak about. If I’m going to get him to tell me about the night Viola died, I need to establish some kind of rapport with him.
“I’ve just come from the hospital.”
“How’s your mother doing?”
“Drew’s still evaluating her. He thinks she’s had a stroke.”
Dad must have heard this already, but he bows his head and murmurs something I can’t make out. Then he says, “Ask Drew to let me know as soon as he knows for sure.”
“You know he will. But I’ll remind him.”
“Thank you.”
Before the silence can swell into a suffocating blanket, I say, “When I left the hospital, I passed through that wing they’re redoing. They still have the old call panel on the wall. Disconnected, of course.”
He looks surprised by my choice of topic. “Is my name still on it? I can’t lean down there to read it anymore.”
“It’s still there. Do you remember your call number?”
“I was sixty-two for a long time. Not anymore, of course.”
He waves a hand like this doesn’t matter, and I notice the once-straight finger now curled with arthritis, its nail pitted and opaque.
“I still think of that place as ‘the Jeff,’” he says, a wistful look in his eyes. “You know? It’s a good thing they changed the name, of course. Though a lot of my patients don’t even know who Jefferson Davis was.”
This makes me think of our maid, who died in St. Catherine’s Hospital seven years ago. “Ruby didn’t know who Colin Powell was, the year he considered running for president.”
“Christ. I can’t bear to think of that.”
This time the silence stretches out, and Dad looks as though he’s afraid I’m going to start berating him about his plea decision.
“I’m not here to talk about your plea.”
Once more his eyes register surprise. “Thank you.”
“I’m here as your lawyer, to give you legal counsel.”
My formal tone takes him aback, but I need to establish that fact before mentioning anything that could be used against either of us.
“I’m here because I know Mom was in Cora’s house on the night Viola died. I know she injected her with morphine.”
His face loses what little color it had. “Jesus, Penn.” He looks around as though someone is listening. “Can this room be bugged?”
“In theory? Yes. In practice, no. Now they couldn’t use what they recorded anyway. Because I’m your attorney, this is a privileged conversation.”
“I see.”
I wait for him to continue. When he does, his voice barely registers above a whisper.
“Did Peggy tell you she was there?”
“Who else could have told me that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Jenny suspected it first, but she doesn’t really know. She just started chattering about calling the house the night Viola died, and Mom not answering the phone. When I pressed Mom about it, she finally cracked.”
“Was anybody in the room with you and Jenny? A nurse? Drew, even?”
“No. Now, come on. The trial is over. I’ve got to know what happened.”
Dad leans back in the plastic chair, then brings his hands together in front of him. “Things happened exactly the way I described on the stand, only I left out everything to do with your mother.”
“Obviously. So?”
“Just the facts, ma’am?”
“Please.”
He nods again, and flecks of dandruff fall onto the metal tray below the screen. “I’d gone there to fulfill the pact Viola and I made. But once I was there, and she told me about Lincoln, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. Not without thinking about it a lot more first. So I diluted some morphine to look like a big dose and injected her in the inguinal vein. She went to sleep, and I left.”