He’s right about this, at least. “Of course not. What’s the second way?”
After watching me in silence for several seconds, he rolls his chair back from the desk and gets slowly to his feet. “I’ve already forgotten what I was thinking.” He gives me a forced smile. “I’m exhausted, son. It’s time for bed.”
I feel a miserably familiar emotion, one that parents have felt since time immemorial when trying to help a stubborn child. The reverse, I find, is even more excruciating. Fighting my father all day has left me spent.
“I’ll walk you out,” he says, taking his cigar from the edge of the desk and getting to his feet with a cartilaginous creak. Then he leads me up the hall with a shuffling gait that’s painful to watch. When we reach the door to the garage, he squeezes my arm.
“I know you don’t understand my actions, but that’s only natural. More of my friends are dead than alive. You’re in a different stage of life. Don’t forget what I said about Royal and the Knoxes. That’s not your war.”
“How much danger do you think there is?”
“That depends on what you do over the next few days. If you’re really going to drag the Jericho Hole, maybe you ought to get some protection. Have you thought about calling in Daniel Kelly on this?”
“I tried to reach him earlier. He hired on with another security firm, and he’s back in Afghanistan.”
“Well … then arm yourself and keep your eyes open. I’d put a guard on Henry, too. They say the Lord watches over little children and fools, but I think Henry’s about used up his allotment of grace.”
Without quite meaning to, I reach out and hug my father, tight. “Good night, Dad.”
“Good night. I hope I haven’t disappointed you too much.”
I want to tell him I love him, but the lump in my throat prevents it. My mind spins with memories of Will Percy, a Mississippian of legendary accomplishments. A hero of the Great War, a Princeton-educated poet, a graduate of Harvard Law School and founder of the Yale Younger Poets, Will Percy represented everything that was best in an educated southerner. Yet in the crucible of the Great Flood of 1927, after being placed in charge of flood relief for Washington County, this man of honor had utterly failed the black population he hoped to save and done irreparable damage to race relations in Mississippi. Does my father see himself in Will Percy? Were the 1960s my father’s Great Flood? I seem to remember that Will Percy’s greatest mistake was failing to stand up to his own father when it mattered most. I can’t afford to make the same mistake.
As I turn away from him and make my way back to my car, I realize that I don’t know much more than I did before I arrived. But I do know this: today Shadrach Johnson, Sheriff Billy Byrd, and Lincoln Turner declared war on my family.
The first casualty of that war will be Shad Johnson.
CHAPTER 31
TOM LAY IN bed beside his wife, who until a few minutes ago had been reading a novel whose plot she would forget in a week. Peggy Cage read more than two hundred books a year, her way of coping with the troubling transition from wakefulness to sleep, an insomnia that worsened a little each year. Now she snored softly beside him as she had for more than fifty years.
After Penn left, Tom had stood in the darkness for several minutes, smoking silently. He suspected that Partagas might be the last he would smoke for a long time, maybe forever. Strangely, this didn’t concern him much. Lying to his son had altered something inside him, and not for the better. The moment he’d denied being Viola’s lover, he’d felt as though some deep part of him had generated malignant cells that would proliferate until they killed him. Yet how could he answer such questions? Did he have a duty to confess to his son every last sin of his life? He didn’t think so. Penn would learn the most painful of laws in his own time: If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.
Tom stuffed a pillow between his arthritic knees, then turned on his side and listened to Peggy snore. Her regular breathing comforted him. Viola’s death had shaken him so profoundly that he felt detached from the material world, like an astronaut drifting away from his mother ship. This sense of dislocation reminded him of those sleepless weeks forty years ago, when he and Viola had stolen every private moment they could. But he was no longer the man he’d been then. A quarter century ago, surgeons had cut vessels from his legs and grafted them into his coronary arteries, allowing him to survive into his late fifties. Since then, various stents had been inserted to keep him alive, and they’d held up pretty well. But now his heart itself was failing. He sometimes had to take seven or eight nitroglycerine tablets simply to get through the day. If tomorrow morning brought the sheriff to his door … what then?