Swan eventually got over her anger, and things continued as before, but most of what came after had been blurred by the passing years. What Henry remembered most was how tense that summer had been, how the sky would pile up each afternoon with slate-gray clouds that looked full of rain but brought only dry thunder. People on the street were grouchy. The white people were tense, the blacks scared or angry. The air felt so still that noises sounded different than usual. To make things worse, Henry’s father came home and stayed for three straight weeks. All he talked about was “nigger trouble” all over the South, and the “goddamn Kennedys twistin’ up LBJ.” Henry’s only escape was the hours he got to spend at school or with Swan.
One August afternoon, while he and Swan sat on the store steps, Albert walked out, looked at the sky, and said, “This drought done turned the ground into a drum.” Swan poked a stick in the dust and said, “What you talkin’ ’bout, Daddy?” Albert sat down and illustrated his words with his flattened hands. “The ground is the top head, the bedrock the bottom, and precious little water between. Every time a truck goes by, I hear the earth echo. Everybody’s prayin’ for God to send rain. White and black, they prayin’ the same words.”
Henry liked it when Albert talked this way, and he wondered why he seemed more in tune with these thoughts than Swan. Swan lived so instinctively that she seemed to care nothing about codifying feelings into language. If it rained, it rained. If it didn’t, she’d make do with the heat.
“Is it ever going to rain again?” Henry asked.
Albert did something then that he’d never done in public: he laid a comforting hand on Henry’s shoulder and squeezed. “Son,” he said softly, “I think maybe a storm’s comin’ that could wash away everything we know.”
Recognizing the anxiety in her father’s voice, Swan finally looked up.
“You chil’ren be careful from now on,” Albert said. “Don’t let nobody see you together. There’s good folks and bad in this town, same as everywhere else. But right now the bad ones got the power. You hear me?”
Swan locked eyes with Henry, and they knew then that nothing ever got past her father.
Henry’s ringing cell phone startled him so profoundly that his arms flew up defensively. He felt as though he had awakened from a deep, feverish sleep. Shaking his head, he took his phone out of his pocket. The caller was a female FBI agent who often checked in to pick his brain for clues. He wondered if she’d heard about the death of Viola Turner. Henry couldn’t let himself think about Viola yet. If he did, he’d lose the objectivity he would so desperately need when he faced Glenn Morehouse. He muted the ringer of his phone and climbed out of his Explorer into the cold wind. Leaving the door open, he walked to the edge of the lot. One of the concrete pyramids that had supported Albert’s pickin’ porch still stuck up out of the mud. Henry planted his right foot on it. In spite of the coming Morehouse interview, his heart felt as empty as the lot before him.
He looked down the deserted street. A three-legged dog was pissing on a fence, while farther on, a black boy rode a rusted banana bicycle with what appeared to be grim purpose. Forty years ago, this street would have been jumping with the sounds of Albert’s piano. People would have been laughing and dancing on their porches, looking forward to the evening, when they would head over to Haney’s Big House to hear a name band. Now the druggies Albert used to pity ruled the streets.
The fire that killed Albert Norris had killed more than a man, Henry reflected. It had killed the store, and with the store had passed the magic that flourished there, the living hope of black and white interacting with trust and respect rather than fear and hatred. Henry often wondered why no one had ever built a new business on this site. Some people believed that an evil lingered in this earth after the murderous fire, like a dissonant chord that never faded. The tragic truth, Henry knew, was that bad feelings didn’t linger any more than good ones did. There was no feeling here. The land itself retained neither Albert’s magic nor the horror of his death. All that remained was the memory of an aging reporter and those few survivors who had shared the magic with him.
And the killers, he thought. The Double Eagles who had burned Albert Norris to death—and either flayed or crucified Pooky Wilson—were still walking the streets of Ferriday, Vidalia, and Natchez. Henry was not a vengeful man, but the knowledge that those men lived while their victims lay in the earth ate at him like battery acid. While the Double Eagles watched their grandkids play Little League baseball, the families of their victims mourned grandchildren who had never been born. Worst of all, Henry thought, worse than the goddamned rednecks who had set the fires and wielded the knives and fired the guns, was the privileged millionaire who had ordered many of those murders. But if Glenn Morehouse lived up to his promise this morning, he might just give Henry what he’d craved more than anything else in his life: a weapon to take down an untouchable foe.
Henry wiped tears from his face. Why was he the only pilgrim standing at this place? There wasn’t even a memorial marker to commemorate Albert Norris. The man had been buried in his church cemetery, two miles from this spot, and Henry had never found flowers on the grave when he went to visit. Swan lived in Irvine, California. Despite some modest musical success, she’d been married three times and had lost both perfect breasts to cancer. She had a grandson who played in a band with a recording contract. He was the light of her life. After Swan read one of Henry’s stories about the fire (sent to her by a local girl she’d gone to school with), she’d sent Henry a picture of her grandson. The boy had Swan’s face but Albert’s wise eyes. Enclosed with the photo was a note: “I learned more about my father’s murder from your stories than I did in forty years of pestering the FBI. Thank you. Please add my name to your subscription list. P.S. You were a good student. XOXO Swan.”
That solitary note would have been sufficient to sustain Henry through his battles with the angry Klansmen, indifferent government bureaucracy, and reluctant or hostile witnesses that waited in his future. But he’d received many more letters like Swan’s. That was why the best-intentioned warnings of friends always fell on deaf ears. Swan and Albert Norris had transformed Henry from a timid boy into a man. After being adopted by them, he’d no longer cared whether his biological father loved him or not.