Dad looks out over the crowd, and recognition is the dominant expression on his face. His eyes pause as they take in Annie and my mother, but they slip right over me and move on. He can’t bear to look at me, I realize. When he speaks again, his voice seems to have gained strength.
“This morning, I told Henry’s mother that he had given the last full measure of devotion to his cause, which was justice. I was quoting Abraham Lincoln describing the fallen at Gettysburg. But Henry’s bravery wasn’t the kind I saw demonstrated by my fellow soldiers in Korea, charging into bullets and dying in a foreign land. Henry proved his courage alone, in the face of apathy, resentment, and open hostility. Having experienced battle myself, I wonder whether Henry’s bravery isn’t a higher form of courage. There’s nothing harder than fighting alone, with no one to keep you company in your foxhole. There ought to be a special medal for that. But like most soldiers I knew during my service, Henry wasn’t looking for medals.”
“Amen,” says a soft voice behind me.
In the pew reserved for family, I see an old woman who must be Henry’s mother nod and wipe her eyes.
“It says in the Good Book,” Dad goes on, “‘No greater love hath any man than he who lays down his life for his friends.’”
“That’s right,” says a bass voice from the rear of the church.
Dad bows his head as though paying homage to this principle. “Henry laid down his life to save my future daughter-in-law, Caitlin Masters, who I’ve thought of as a daughter for years now. As Reverend Baldwin told you, Caitlin was murdered yesterday, despite Henry’s sacrifice. She died following a trail that Henry blazed, and her greatest hope was to complete his work. If she hadn’t managed to discover that Bone Tree, I wouldn’t be standing before you now, but lying on a cold slab somewhere. Instead, that brave young girl is the one awaiting burial.”
Dad pauses to catch his breath, and I can tell this speech is costing him dearly in physical terms. Then I see his chin quivering with emotion, and a knife of pain goes through me.
“To paraphrase what President Lincoln said in 1863: We here cannot consecrate or hallow the ground in which those honored dead will lie, for their actions stand far above our power to add or detract. The world will not remember what we say here today. But it will remember the battles that Henry and Caitlin fought. What remains for us is to rededicate ourselves to the task for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We must resolve that they shall not have died in vain.”
All the whispered conversations have ended. Everyone in the church sits with rapt attention. Something is coming, and the congregation senses it like a flood swelling one bend up the river.
Dad looks around the church, taking in each face in its turn. “How can we do that, you ask?”
“Tell us, Doc.”
My father raises his right hand, his finger pointed skyward, and the spirit of the crowd rises with it. As angry as I am at him, he somehow radiates the conviction of a prophet when he continues.
“Hear me now,” he rumbles. “For the hour of justice has come.”
Excitement sweeps through the church like a strong wind.
“That I, a white man, stand here and speak to you, the descendants of slaves, about justice is almost absurd. Yet speak I will. Because someone must. The wound that slavery dealt this country has never healed. Speaking as a physician, the efforts to heal it have been pathetic. Four months ago, a hurricane swept through New Orleans and revealed just how broken this country is, how deep the divide between black and white. The scenes we saw play out after that storm would not—could not—have happened in a white city in the North.”
“You’re damn right,” murmurs a voice from the crowd, and Reverend Baldwin glares at his congregation.
“Some people argue that your community is destroying itself,” Dad goes on. “Your children are killing each other, accomplishing a genocide that the Ku Klux Klan never could. The terrible truth is, all that death is a legacy of the great crime that came before, that shattered families and stained these rich fields red for generations. But nothing is simple. I wish I could tell you that the enemy is all of one tribe, but I’d be a liar if I did. It seems that the young man who killed my daughter was black, a drug user manipulated by white men to do their dirty work for them.”
A few sharp inhalations cause me to start.
“We in the South know just how complex and porous the boundary between black and white truly is. Our communities touch each other in a thousand ways, but not always in the light. We try to bridge the great gulf between us at our peril. In my life, I came to know and love people on your side, but I don’t know whether I helped or hurt them.”
Dad pauses to wipe sweat from his brow. I suppose this is as far as he will go toward acknowledging his relationship with Viola. After gathering himself again, he continues, speaking as intimately as he would to his own family.
“Some of you here today, I delivered into the world. Others watched me hold the hands of your parents or brothers or sisters, or even your children, as they passed out of it. I relieved pain where I could. But in the last analysis, I’ve been nothing but a conductor on the train of life. I took people’s tickets as they boarded, attended to a few needs while they rode, then punched their tickets as they got off. In my own life, I did things I should not have done, and I left undone things that will haunt me to my grave. For the most part, other people paid the price for my sins. Henry Sexton was one of them, and I can’t change that.
“But the lesson of Henry’s life is that you don’t cure the great ills of the world by grand gestures. You start small. Like all great men, Henry began in his own backyard. He saw injustice and tried to remedy it. He knew that murder—especially the murder of those who had no voice, no champion—could not be allowed to stand. So he took up the work that his government had failed to do. He lit the lamp for the rest of us. Henry pointed the way.”