“I do, too.”
“I like the British navy burial service.”
This conversation is surreal, but I suppose I should have expected something like it. “I think I remember some of that from Patrick O’Brian’s books.”
“Master and Commander,” he says. “Think of it. Wrapped in your hammock and weighted with cannonballs. That’s the way to go.”
“Do you remember the words? I think they’re from the Book of Common Prayer.”
“Nothing’s perfect,” Dad grumbles. “I remember some—leaving out that nonsense about Christ.”
“Say them,” I tell him, feeling butterflies in my stomach. “This can be Adam’s real funeral. For you, me, and him.”
“The McEwan men, eh? Why not?”
He raises a trembling hand to his mouth and clears his throat. Then, in the strongest voice I’ve heard him use since I returned home, he recites, “We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption . . . looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.”
In the silence that follows, I hear the cry of a far-off bird, the groan of a truck’s engine down on Cemetery Road. “I like that,” I tell him. “It’s fitting.”
Driving out here, I intended to repeat the explicit apology I made to Dad while he was sleeping in the ICU. But this doesn't seem the proper moment. He’s staring fixedly at Adam’s statue. “After I’m gone,” he intones, “I want to be cremated. No worms for me. Blythe can keep some ashes. But the rest I want you to take out in a boat and cast over the river. I know you don’t like going out there, but I’m asking you to do it. I’ll follow Adam to wherever he went.”
My God. He’s still haunted by the loss of his eldest son. But then . . . am I not also?
“All right,” I tell him. “I’ll do it.”
Dad raises his left hand a couple of inches in acknowledgment but says no more. Looking at the back of his head, the brittle white hair and frail shoulders, it strikes me how awful it must be to wither and die while your mind is clear. It’s a terrible paradox, sufficient to kill religious faith in a thinking man. Of course, the reverse is also a paradox: to live for years with a ruined mind in a healthy body. Some might argue that’s worse, but only from the outside. At least the victim suffering that fate remains unaware of the true horror of his plight.
Dad looks out over the river for a while, and I leave him be. At length he says, “I wish I had more time. To make up for some things. This body of mine’s about used up. I haven’t done it any favors with my drinking. But once I got Parkinson’s . . . I just couldn’t abide it. My vanity. I hate to confess that.”
“You always had a lot of pride.”
“It’s vanity, not pride. And vanity’s a low thing. That’s one thing the Christians got right. Vanity’s a weakness. That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. There’s nothing wrong with being sick.”
“No. But it’s human to feel the way you do about it.”
His eyes find mine, and I see despondency in them. “I don’t recognize the world anymore, Marshall. Maybe when you stop feeling at home in the world, it’s time to leave it.”
Before he can go further down this road, an urge to confession takes hold of me. “Dad, back at the hospital, you asked if I’d agreed to bury anything in exchange for getting the paper back.”
“Did I?” he asks, still looking toward the river.
“Yes. And I avoided the question. But I did agree to bury something. Probably the biggest story of my life. I sold out. And I’m not sure why.”
“Something to do with the Poker Club? Burying their sins?”
“Yeah. Some big ones.”
He takes a few shallow breaths. “I used to be a zealot about ethics. So damn self-righteous. But let me tell you something: I know of cases where guys buried stories—big stories—and I’m talking about legends. I’ll carry that to my grave, but I know.”
“You can’t tell me more than that? Why they did it?”
He shrugs, still watching the Mississippi roll below us. “In one case, a president asked him to. Didn’t think the country could handle it. In another, the story would have destroyed a friend. I also knew a couple of guys who took money not to print something. We’re all human.”
“These Poker Club guys. They basically sold a Senate seat. To a foreign country.”
Dad cuts his eyes at me. “To get Avery Sumner in? Huh. Are they going to make it right?”
“Sumner’s going to resign.”
“What did you get in exchange for your silence? The newspaper? Our house back?”
“A lot more than that. A new public school, built by next year. Thirty years of full taxes for the city from the paper mill. Money for Buck’s widow. A lot more besides.”
Dad shifts in his seat, as though forced to by pain. Then he growls, “Here’s what I think. If that’s the deal you made, you probably accomplished more good than you could in twenty years of reporting from your high horse. That may sound facile, but I believe it. If you can hold their feet to the fire and make them do what they promised . . . then sleep with a clear conscience.”
I feel as though a killing weight has been lifted from my shoulders.
“It’s a business of whores now anyway,” he says. “Access whores. Everybody talks about the renaissance of journalism. Renaissance, hell. Reporters trade favorable coverage for access every day. I guess you can’t blame them, since any day on the job could be their last. The bean counters are stripping our newsrooms bare. TV anchors recruited at beauty contests and modeling agencies chase ratings like hounds in heat . . . The politico-media complex is as bad as anything Eisenhower warned us about. At least you made a clean deal. In exchange for burying one story, a whole corner of this impoverished state gets a new lease on life. Thousands of kids get a better education? That’s a fair trade, in my book.”
Dad stops speaking, his chest heaving from the effort of speech. He coughs from deep in his lungs, a ragged sound that finally trails off into a worrisome wheeze. I mean to sit quietly with him, but another confession rises unbidden from my heart.
“I did that one other time in my career,” I say softly. “I buried part of a story, betrayed my calling.”
“When?”
“My Pulitzer book. That night Paul saved me in Iraq . . . he killed some civilians. While escaping the house, we got trapped in an alley with a car blocking us in. A Honda Accord. Paul riddled it with bullets, and we scrambled over the top. It turned out there was a family inside.”
Dad looks out the window at Adam’s statue. “War’s full of horrors like that. You know that. What if Paul hadn’t fired?”
“We might not have made it. There could have been insurgents in that car. But that’s not my point. As we clambered over that Honda, I heard a child cry out from the backseat. A whimper, really. The parents were dead in the front, but this child had lived. I started to go back, but Paul jerked me to the ground. Seconds later, a heavy machine gun chewed the car to pieces.”
Dad looks back at me but says nothing. He knows more is coming.