Some of what followed I can’t bear to think about even now. What I do remember is the search for Adam’s body. It will be remembered as long as men live and work along the Lower Mississippi. Everyone took part: the Coast Guard, twelve sheriff’s departments, four tugboat companies, a hundred private boaters, professional salvage divers, and even the Boy Scouts in a dozen counties and parishes lining the Mississippi River.
Nobody found him.
My father borrowed a Boston Whaler from a friend and went up and down the river for months, searching the banks and islands for his lost son. I would have gone with him, but Dad didn’t want me in that boat. Though my eyes were far sharper than his, he couldn’t bear my presence during his search.
That’s how it began. Not so much his withdrawal into himself, which my mother also went through, but his erasure of me, the guilty survivor. That was not Duncan McEwan’s first voyage into grief, of course. He had lost a child once before. I knew about that, but I’d never really thought deeply about it. That before he married my mother, he’d had another family. Sure, my father had always been older than my friends’ dads, but it never seemed like an issue. Yet in the wake of my brother’s loss—while I sat alone at home and my father plied the river in the vain hope of a miracle—his first wife and daughter seemed suddenly relevant.
Eloise and Emily. Emmie was the daughter. Two years old. My mother told me that they’d died in a one-car accident on Cemetery Road in 1966, taking a shortcut home after visiting Dad at the newspaper. I’d ridden over that exact spot a thousand times. It’s a dogleg turn where three sets of railroad tracks cross through the asphalt. Deep gullies gape on both sides of the road. At night, in a blinding rain, their car—Dad’s car, actually, an Oldsmobile Delta 88—spun off the road and tumbled into one of the ravines, coming to rest upside down in three feet of runoff water. Mother and child drowned in less than a minute. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for my father, to have endured that and then have built another life—to have been gifted a son like Adam—and then be told that he’d been taken by the river during a stupid teenage dare. It was more than my father could bear. And without a corpse to mourn, he simply refused to believe that Adam was dead. Who could blame him? When you’re blessed with a god for a son, it’s tough to accept mortality.
Thinking of my father like that, boarding that Boston Whaler down below Front Street every day, on a hopeless quest for his dead son, I suddenly realize that I’ve come to the low stone wall that borders the Bienville Cemetery. Hallam Avenue has intersected Cemetery Road. The bluff and the river aren’t quite visible from here, but I see Laurel Hill, the westernmost hill in the Bienville necropolis, where the monument to Adam stands. The statue—of an athletic young man who appears to mournfully stand watch over the river—was sculpted in Italy, by an artist my father met while working in Rome as an army reporter for Stars and Stripes. Another story for another day. The statue is famous among barge crews, who call it “the Watchman.” Poised 240 feet above the river, it’s the first thing the crews look for as they pass north of Bienville. Despite the tragedy behind the statue’s existence, it reassures them somehow, like a life-size St. Christopher medal.
Its effect on the town was impossible to foresee. Within hours after being erected on the hill, Adam’s statue became a shrine for local teenagers. By that time I was in a pit of despair, suffering from what doctors would later diagnose as PTSD. But I still went to school, and I heard the stories. On any given weekend, you could find kids leaning against its pedestal, watching the sunset. At dawn you’d find different kids watching the sunrise from the same spot. Since coming back home, I’ve been told this still happens, thirty-one years later, even though the present generation knows nothing about Adam beyond what their parents have told them. Pilgrims have prayed to Adam’s statue, conceived children under it, left rafts of flowers and poems at its feet. But I haven’t stood before it in twenty-eight years. I can’t bear to. The last time I did, the experience hurled me back to that terrible morning in the river—just as seeing Buck’s body did today. But the worst hour of that morning, worse even than abandoning my brother to his death under that barge, was the soul-scalding act of walking into my family’s home with the sheriff and telling my parents that their oldest son wouldn’t be coming home ever again.
And then explaining why.
Parked beside the cemetery wall, only two hundred yards from Adam’s statue, I decide I’m still not ready to confront his marble doppelgänger from any closer proximity. Not yet, at least. Better to drive back to town and have a cup of coffee at Nadine’s, settle my nerves, then ride out to the groundbreaking and try to figure out which of my fine fellow citizens acted on the nearly universal desire to silence Buck Ferris.
Chapter 8
My daily sanctuary is a bookstore/coffee shop called Constant Reader, which is nestled between two large buildings on Second Street near the bluff. Bienville has had five bookstores during the modern era, none of which survived more than fifteen years. A big chain store in the mall hung on until a couple of years ago but finally gave up the ghost. After this grim record, Nadine Sullivan wisely opened Constant Reader only two blocks from Battery Row and one block from the Aurora Hotel, the art deco grande dame of Bienville, which serves as the primary downtown landmark of the postbellum era. While the Aurora is currently shut down for renovations, nearly every tourist coming up from the riverboats or walking the bluff still passes Nadine’s door, and most step inside for coffee and a muffin, if not to buy books, those musty relics of the twentieth century.
Nadine is eight years younger than I, but like me, she attended St. Mark’s Episcopal. She was far enough behind me that I barely knew she existed, but she graduated knowing a fair bit about me. Neither of us could have known that decades after high school, a common experience would make us close friends. The daughter of a traveling pharmaceutical rep who left town permanently when she was nine, Nadine became a highly successful personal injury lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Married at twenty-seven, she divorced at thirty-one, with no children to fight over. After winning a huge settlement against a drug company, she was planning to open an indie bookstore in Charleston, South Carolina, when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nadine moved home for what she thought would be a brief nursing period, but her mother rallied under her care and lived two more years. (Though my father has not rallied, this similar experience made Nadine and me natural confidants.) During the period that Mrs. Sullivan was ill, Nadine ran a weekly book club for her and a few close friends. So no one was surprised when, after her mother died, Nadine purchased a nineteenth-century pharmacy building downtown, restored it, and opened Constant Reader. Only tourists and newcomers refer to the store by its official name. Natives call it “Nadine’s place” or simply “Nadine’s.”
In the five months since I’ve been back, Nadine has hosted book signings by some of the finest writers in the South. She was one of the first to recognize the genius of Jesmyn Ward and Angie Thomas, and she’s also hosted small concerts by famous musicians she came to know while living in the Carolinas. Nadine is the kind of person who effortlessly pulls people into her orbit. Her gift for dealing with people can’t be attributed to any identifiable personal style, but rather to the vibe she radiates. Nadine Sullivan simply settles your soul, the way being around a baby does. Not that she has any childish quality; I know for a fact that she was a shark in the courtroom. But that’s difficult to imagine now. There is a purity about Nadine, a clarity in her eyes that—combined with a lack of any detectable tendency to judge people—invites the world in on its own terms. That said, her store is not merely a shelter for those in need of sympathy or conversation. Her author parties and musical events are webcast live to tens of thousands of followers, and she does good business mailing autographed books and CDs all over the world.