Once Tom had established that objective, John McCrae bent his will toward it, and within one hour he’d made it happen. McCrae was the kind of southerner who had only left the parish of his birth to serve his country in wartime or to carry bulls across the state for mating purposes. Enlisting his son’s help, he’d ditched Tom’s stolen pickup in a ravine already littered with junk cars and trucks. Then he’d concealed Tom himself beneath a carpet of hay in a horse trailer (along with one gentle horse standing over it), spirited him through a state police roadblock, and driven him across the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. McCrae’s son had followed a mile back in a different vehicle—the old Chevy Nova Tom was driving now. Once they were safely across the river, they’d given Tom the Nova and promised to pass a message to Peggy through Tom’s brother in California. Tom remembered his brother-in-law’s face as he shut the Nova’s door and bade him farewell. John McCrae had clearly believed he was looking at a doomed man.
The trip from Vicksburg to Jefferson County was a blur. A fever had begun rising in Tom, and perhaps that was the culprit where his memory was concerned. All he could focus on was his goal: eighty acres of wooded land in a corner of the county that had elected Charles Evers the first black mayor in Mississippi. As Tom drove, lines from Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” ran through his overheated brain: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. . . .
The land and house he made for now were not his home in any legal sense, but he felt sure that the owner would take him in. There were other places he could go: the homes of patients whose lives he had saved, whose babies he’d delivered, whose families he had treated for three generations. But wherever he went, he would carry danger with him, and maybe even death. In his mind’s eye Tom saw helicopters circling suburban houses like birds of prey, shining spotlights into the windows. That was why he’d refused shelter from his brother-in-law. He’d never have been able to forgive himself if he got John McCrae hurt or killed.
The place he was running to now was different. The man who owned this sanctuary was a soldier of sorts, though he’d never worn a uniform. But during his own years at war, he’d called upon Tom when he needed help, and Tom had answered. Now the tables had turned, and Tom believed that his old friend would return the favor.
Yanking the steering wheel right to avoid a scuttling armadillo, he centered the Nova as best he could on the narrow road. A fresh sheen of sweat had broken out on his face, and he clumsily wiped his forehead to keep it out of his eyes. His need for sleep was like a dark tide swelling around him. He felt as though he were treading water, barely keeping his eyes above the surface.
Home, he thought again, trying to remember what the word meant. The house he considered his real home—the one that contained his treasured library—had been destroyed seven years ago, burned to the ground by the man who’d once helped him save the life of Viola Turner. The houses Tom had known before that one flared in his mind like cars on a passing train: the clapboard army box at Fort Leonard Wood, the married officers’ quarters in Germany, the French Quarter apartment he and Peggy had shared while he was in medical school, the dorm of the little college he’d attended in northwestern Louisiana. Somewhere back behind all those lay the tiny house where he’d been raised with his brothers, just up the road from the stinking creosote plant where he’d worked as a boy, sweating alongside the local Negroes until he’d managed to get hired on as an usher at the local movie theater—a job not open to his fellow creosote workers. He’d made good friends among those men, and he credited them with teaching him that human beings were pretty much the same, no matter what color they were.
The gate Tom was searching for rose out of the darkness like a mirage, then vanished behind him. Braking carefully, he stopped, reversed direction for a few yards, then drove slowly back to the metal obstruction and parked. He didn’t know what he’d do if the gate was locked. He would never be able to walk the half-mile-long driveway that led to the house. And calling the owner was not an option, since under the circumstances his phone might well be tapped.
Climbing carefully out of the Nova, Tom trudged up to the gate and grabbed the upper crossbar to keep himself erect. He nearly cried from joy when he saw a simple chain loop holding the gate to the timber post. After lifting the chain with great difficulty, he pushed open the gate, then returned to the Nova and drove through. He considered simply driving on to the house, but he forced himself to get back out and close the gate, knowing that even the smallest lapse could kill him at this point.
Tom drove slowly up the gently curving driveway, through the bare woods, toward the winter home of Quentin Avery, his lawyer and, more important, one of his oldest living friends. Though Quentin was an attorney of national reputation, and a hero to many who remembered his role in the civil rights movement, Tom knew him best as a patient. Quentin suffered from severe diabetes, and Tom had shepherded him through progressive peripheral neuropathy, two leg amputations, retinal problems, dangerous hypertension, and a half-dozen other maladies that came along with age and African-American genes. Through most of these battles, Quentin had fought valiantly, maintaining his good humor and acute intellect. But losing his second leg had nearly done him in. The loss of mobility, combined with sexual issues and a much younger wife, had pushed him into clinical depression. There were times Tom had feared the old lion would end his life rather than struggle on with diminished capacity. But so far, Quentin’s survival instinct had prevailed.
At last Tom’s headlights washed over the front of Avery’s Tudor-style manor. Like so many of the newer homes in Jefferson County, it had been financed by settlement money from the famous fen-phen diet pill lawsuits. Quentin had represented more than a few of the plaintiffs, and he’d profited handsomely from its stunning resolution. After one of his clients squandered every cent of his settlement, the man had been forced to sell this house at a near-panic discount. With the most sympathetic face he could muster, Quentin had consented to take the showpiece off its desperate owner’s hands.