My father had two sons, and one of us was doomed to be an orphan. Looking back over our lives, I’m glad it was Lincoln. But now I understand something I did not before: that the happiness of my childhood was bought with the pain of a black boy who had hurt no one. Tonight that grown-up boy is driving northward, following the twisting river and the dark old vein of Highway 61 as far as Cairo, Illinois; there he’ll shoot straight up Interstate 55 to Chicago, where so many of his ancestors fled before him.
We are brothers, Lincoln and I—half brothers, anyway—and long after my father passes from this earth, his blood will flow through both our veins. The genes of Northern Europe are my legacy, and my destiny, but Lincoln carries the genes of both Europe and Africa within him. I hope that someday he can free himself from the lies that shrouded his youth and become what Viola must have dreamed he could when she carried him down the streets of that cold and unfamiliar city: a man who embodies the best of both his parents. With a father who chose the cruel path of duty and a mother who chose martyrdom, who deserves it more?
I’m sitting in a rocking chair on the gallery of Edelweiss, waiting for Annie to come home from school. After deciding she was ready to rejoin her classmates at St. Stephen’s, my daughter also declared that from now on we should live in the house that Caitlin had intended to share with us. I wasn’t so sure, but I’m willing to try anything that gives Annie a sense of control over her life. With my father in prison in the Mississippi Delta and my mother traveling there every week, Caitlin’s ghost is a welcome force in our lives—at least for the time being.
Annie brought a few of Caitlin’s things to the new house: a favorite coat that’s a little too big for her, Caitlin’s laptop, mementos of vacations we took together. Mounted above the fireplace in Annie’s room is Caitlin’s Pulitzer Prize, the award she won for her coverage of the Delano Payton case. John Masters sent it to Annie the week after Caitlin’s funeral, with a written note expressing the hope that she would work as hard as Caitlin had to reach her dreams. I hope the same thing; I only pray that Annie doesn’t have to pay as high a price to attain them.
Surrounded by these artifacts, I remember how happy Caitlin was that I’d bought this house, and that we would finally begin our own family, as well as make her status as Annie’s new mother official. On one mantel inside sits a photo of the three of us, taken by my father only weeks before Caitlin died. In it, Caitlin and I are swinging Annie between us: me gripping her ankles while Caitlin holds Annie’s wrists with the surprising strength in her lithe frame. The photographer captured us at the point of tossing Annie into a pile of autumn leaves. We’re all laughing, the girls’ hair flying, the moment frozen forever in the stream of time. Sometimes I look at that picture and see joy made eternal; other times I see a brutally truncated history, an amputated life.
“Hey, Penn! You’d better fill out that change-of-address form soon, or you won’t see me for a while.”
My mailman is walking up the sidewalk from the direction of State Street. Theo Driscoll is about my age; he went to the public school when I was at St. Stephen’s.
“I can’t keep giving you this special treatment,” he says with a smile, “even if you are the mayor. You need to un-ass that rocking chair, man. The main post office is only four blocks down Broadway!”
“I’ll go do it as soon as Annie gets home,” I promise.
Ignoring the copper box mounted on a brick pillar on the ground floor, Theo climbs the right-hand staircase with a sheaf of mail in his hand.
“Got another letter from Europe,” he announces. “I still can’t believe they publish your books in all those languages. How many now?”
“Twenty-six.”
“What would Mrs. Holland say about that? Too bad she didn’t live to see it.”
Mrs. Holland was a legendary English teacher who taught at both the public and private schools during her long career. “She lived to see my first one published. That’s good enough.”
I reach out for the mail, but he doesn’t hand it to me yet. Like a lot of people I went to school with, Theo likes to talk.
“Went to the clinic two days ago. Had a damn boil on my leg. Drew Elliott had to lance it. It’s so damn different without your daddy there. The nurses feel the same way. Melba said they might not even keep her on much longer.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that. Drew will probably take her over.”
Theo looks skeptical. “I don’t know. She’s old school, like Doc Cage.”
“I’ll check into it.”
“Are you making any headway on getting him out? I swear, not one person in this town thinks he was guilty.”
I’m not so sure this is true, but Theo means well. “It’s complicated, Theo. But I’m not going to quit. There’s still reason to hope.”
The mailman’s face falls as he picks up the truth in my tone. “That Parchman’s a wicked place, Penn. My cousin’s boy had to do a stretch in there on a dope charge. His parents couldn’t hardly stand to visit him.”
“All penitentiaries are grim, Theo.”
“I guess. Well, you keep at it. I know things’ll turn out right in the end. Everything happens for a reason.”
For half a second I want to smack Theo Driscoll in the face. His throwaway assertion carries such a muddle of childish faith, fatalism, and predestination that it would take me an hour to properly respond.
“That is technically true,” I say in a restrained voice, but in my mind I hear Inigo Montoya saying, I do not think that means what you think it means.
Looking confused and a little put out, Theo hands me the mail.
“Thanks,” I tell him. “I’ll see you soon.”
“If you fill out that change-of-address form, you will. Otherwise I’m sending everything back to Washington Street.”
As he descends the opposite staircase and heads toward the Parsonage, I flip through the mail. A couple of bills go through my fingers; then I see the letter Theo mentioned. The one from Europe. April is a royalty month, and the envelope is made of the ultrathin paper I associate with foreign communications. Whatever’s inside feels heavy, though, and padded. The postmark looks unfamiliar, which is surprising after years of receiving letters from readers around the world. The postmark is smeared, too, so I can’t even read the name of the country. The stamps show a coat of arms in yellow and orange, but the words beneath are printed in French. There’s no return address, either. Just my name and our old Washington Street address, above u.s.a. printed in block letters, as though by a child.
Opening my eyes wide, I hold the letter farther from my face and look down my nose at the smeared postmark. Finally the name of the country of origin comes clear: Andorre.
“Andorra,” I whisper, a chill racing along my arms. “Billy Knox?”
After a moment of paranoia, when I visualize opening the letter in a little cloud of toxic powder, I rip the end off the envelope and pull out the paper inside.