“If there’s anything you guys need,” I said helplessly, “anything I can do—”
“You can tell us where those crackers hang out at,” Aaron said. “Ain’t nobody else done no good around here, seems like. Might as well let us try.”
So I told them what I knew. The three of us spoke softly across the sedated body of their sister, our voices barely audible amid the hum and beeping of the medical machines. After we finished, both men took hold of my hands, forming a rough circle over their sister.
“We gon’ pray now,” Roosevelt said. “Aaron, you do the talkin’.”
When I left that ICU room, I had for the first time some small inkling of the guilt my father must feel over Caitlin’s death. When I could stand the guilt no longer, I allowed a different feeling to rise and take its place. Dread. Dread, and pity for the people who committed that outrage upon Keisha Harvin. Standing joined in that prayer circle, my hands dwarfed by those of the Harvin brothers, I felt immeasurable fury seething within both men. No power on earth is going to stop Aaron and Roosevelt from making someone wish they had never taken it into their fevered brains to attack a vulnerable young woman trying to make her way in the world. Whether it’s the Knox clan or some faction of the VK motorcycle club, they should consider themselves beneficiaries of divine deliverance if they live to be arrested by the FBI.
When I got home from the hospital, I called Peter Smith and told him he could give Serenity Butler my cell number. After reading her memoir, I realized I had been an ass not to read it on the day I received it. I told Peter that Serenity could call me whenever she arrived, and we’d have coffee waiting for her at my house. Peter told me that would probably be after five, and he would update me if he learned anything more specific.
Mia and Annie overheard this call, and I thought nothing of it until Mia began to question me while Annie watched a DVD of Grey’s Anatomy in the library.
“What’s the story on Serenity Butler?” Mia asked, tapping away at her MacBook. “Google says she won the National Book Award last November.”
“She did. For a memoir.”
“Ever met her?”
“Nope.”
“She’s pretty.” Mia rotated her computer so that I could see a shot of Serenity standing in front of a huge pine tree. “Like model pretty.”
“I know. But in the book she explains how that’s been more of a liability to her than an asset. In the army, and also when she was a little girl. It drew too much attention to her.”
“This woman was in the army?”
“I know. It seems weird, doesn’t it? She grew up dirt poor outside Laurel, Mississippi. Never knew her father. Her uncles were in the pulpwood business, which is a damn tough life. She enlisted to get money for college. She was in when the first Gulf War broke out. Served in both Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Storm. She saw a lot of stuff.”
“Wow.” For once, Mia looks impressed.
“The book is structured around her search for her father in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a white man.”
“Obviously. Her mother never told her who her father was?”
“Her mother died in childbirth.”
“Man. She’s, like, out of Dickens or something.”
“Alexandre Dumas, more like. It’s an amazing story. Her mother hated Mississippi. She was ten years older than I am, born in 1950. Her name was Charity. Charity took off across the country when she was eighteen, aiming for California. She was in Kansas City during the riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated. She was in Los Angeles when Bobby Kennedy was killed. She even got involved with some Black Panther actions. She knew Bobby Hutton and Eldridge Cleaver.”
“Who’s Bobby Hutton?”
“The seventeen-year-old treasurer of the Black Panthers. He’s dead. Shot by a cop in 1968. Anyway, after all that fell apart, Charity managed to get a music scholarship to an arts college in Philadelphia. She hitchhiked across the country and stayed there two years. Then she got pregnant by somebody—Serenity was never able to discover who—and rode a Greyhound back to Mississippi during her eighth month of pregnancy. She died from preeclampsia right after giving birth to Serenity.”
“That definitely sounds worth a book. Was it more the story that won the award, or her writing?”
“Both, I’d say. Her writing’s first-rate. She has an unbelievable eye for detail, and she’s psychologically incisive as well. Ruthless, really, with both herself and others. But her life is the amazing thing. Apart from being a soldier, she’s worked as a journalist, a teacher, a dancer, and a singer. She’s been married twice, she kicked a drug problem . . . and she’s only thirty-five.”
“Any kids?”
“None mentioned in the book.”
Mia is watching me with an appraising eye. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you this impressed with anybody before.”
“It’s the military service. Combat service.”
“Why?”
“Well . . . guys in my generation got really lucky. We were too young for Vietnam, and by the time the next war rolled around, we were too old, unless you were already in the service.”
“So?”
“Military service is a rite of passage for men. A big one. My father served in Korea. My mother’s father and uncles fought in World War Two.”
“I would think you’d be glad to miss the chance of getting killed or crippled.”
“Sure—on one level. But it’s not that simple.”
A deep curiosity lights Mia’s eyes. “Why not? Not some Hemingway trip, surely?”
I wonder if I can explain this to a twenty-year-old girl without sounding like a testosterone-driven idiot.
“I remember when Desert Shield was going on, the prep operation that led up to the first Gulf War. Things seemed rational enough. But then the bombs started falling on Baghdad, and everybody knew we were going to war for real—the first large-scale war since Vietnam. One night I was watching the news, and they ran a story on a female soldier who’d been ordered to ship out to the Gulf. They showed her at home with her family—a husband and two kids. Her children were crying, and her husband didn’t know what to do. He was about to be living with two crying kids who missed their mother, and she was the one going off to fight. And . . . I don’t know. Something welled up in me that I couldn’t keep down. Tears came into my eyes, my throat closed up. Sarah grabbed my hand and asked me what was wrong. I jumped up out of my chair and said, ‘By God, if they’re shipping mothers over there to fight, something’s wrong. I need to get over there.’”
“Are you serious?” Mia asked.
“You’re damn right. When I saw that girl packing up to leave her kids behind, I was filled with shame. I felt an absolute conviction that it was time for me and every boy I’d grown up with to get a rifle and pair of boots and go take care of business.”