But no one will protest.
The coroner also informed me that he’d found bone fragments in the soil samples I brought him from the mill site—specifically from the dirt scraped from the wall of the trench beside the factory pier. Better still, he’d detected blood on one of the brick fragments from the other area where Buck had been digging. This discovery left Byron Ellis with a dilemma: Should he make these further findings public and try to weather the political fury that will result? Or keep his head down and let the locum tenens pathologist push the party line?
“The county supervisors are already talking about trying to unseat me,” he told me on the phone. “That’s not easy, because I was elected by the people. But if the past is any guide, they’ll find a way. That damn Arthur Pine can twist the law inside out to screw anybody who bucks them.”
I assured Byron that I understood the danger and admired him for what he’d been willing to do so far.
“Whole town’s up in arms at me already,” he said. “That’s what I hear. If I go on record about the bone and the blood, and the state comes in here and stops construction, folks’ll run me out of town on a rail. Not just white folks, either.”
“I’m not going to pressure you, Byron.”
“Let me get back to you later,” he said. “I’m talking to my lawyer, and also those activists I told you about. They’re about ready to challenge that Poker Club. But they don’t want to risk stopping the mill from coming in here. Too many of my people will get jobs behind that.”
“I understand. Let’s talk later today, or tonight.”
I haven’t heard from the coroner since, but I have hope that he’ll come through. After talking to Byron, I decided to delay handing over the flash drive to law enforcement until after I publish the image it contained. Given the influence of the Poker Club over the police and sheriff’s departments, showing them the photo of Buck Ferris and Dave Cowart together on the murder night would only invite pressure not to run it in the paper. They can’t legally stop me, of course. But if the Poker Club murdered Buck, they might be willing to go to extremes to prevent my pointing a finger at one of their minions.
“Marshall?” says my mother, leaning through the kitchen door. “Jack Kirby just texted me. He’ll be here in five minutes.”
“Thanks, Mom. You need any help in there?”
She gives me a resolute smile. “No, thanks. You greet Dr. Kirby. He usually comes to the side door.”
Blythe McEwan is ten years younger than her husband. She has stood staunchly beside him through fifty years of alcoholism, fifty years of unrelieved grief, and now the long degeneration of his body. What reprieve can she be hoping for today? “Will do, Mom.”
She nods and goes back to my father.
I push all thoughts of Buck Ferris and Sally Matheson out of my mind. If Dr. Kirby has bad news, Dad will not take it well, and if the past is any guide, he might get combative. I’m not the right person to soothe him in that instance; in fact, I usually have the opposite effect. But Mom wants me here, so I will remain, to be of whatever use I can. To an outsider, my attitude toward my father and his plight might seem cold, even cruel. But that attitude would be based upon ignorance.
How deep is the rift between my father and me?
He never met my son. Not once. Adam was born in 2006, two months after one of the most embarrassing experiences our family ever endured. In April of that year, I won the Pulitzer Prize for my book on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the award ceremony was scheduled for May. My parents only flew up because the committee had specifically invited Dad. He and I were the first father and son to have won the prize for journalistic work—his for Editorial Writing forty years earlier, mine for Letters (General Nonfiction). James and Franz Wright had won for poetry in 1972 and 2004, respectively, but the story of an award-winning multimedia journalist raised by a newspaper legend had caught the interest of the media worldwide.
In the annals of Pulitzer award dinners, our ceremony became a legendary disaster. Before the great Duncan McEwan got around to presenting my award—which the committee had graciously invited him to do—he ranted for three and a half minutes, excoriating the modern press, the George W. Bush administration, and, most of all, his nemesis: television news. Dad made it plain that he’d lived through the golden age of journalism and that the lowly hacks who tarnish the art today aren’t fit to polish the boots of Robert Capa, I. F. Stone, or Stanley Karnow. He called me up to the dais only as an afterthought and handed down my Pulitzer certificate with a curt nod.
Eight weeks after that dinner, my son was born, ten days before his due date. A few hours after Adam entered the world, my mother got on a plane and flew up to D.C. alone. She told us that Dad had been too busy to leave Bienville on short notice, but even my wife knew this was a pathetic excuse. Still, we pretended it was true, for my mother’s sake. Mom later admitted to me that Dad had started drinking as soon as he heard that Molly’s water had broken, and he was in no shape to travel by air. I certainly had no desire to swallow my pride and carry Adam south to meet his grandfather, like a supplicant seeking the approval of his paterfamilias. (I’d already gathered that he wasn’t happy with our naming the baby after my lost brother.) Besides, the prospect of putting Molly—who was already suffering from postpartum depression—in a room with her alcoholic father-in-law when he was likely to act like an asshole was something not even my mother could face.
I don’t know how Dad reacted when my Adam drowned. I imagine he drank even more than usual, probably until he was comatose. By that time, I didn’t care. My father had cut the cord binding him to us, and I felt no obligation to mend it. If my son’s death gave me a better understanding of the pain he’d endured after losing two children, it did not incline me to excuse his past behavior.
A soft rapping sounds at the side door of my parents’ house. I pop up from the chair and let in Dr. Jack Kirby, a bald, deep-voiced man who always reminds me of Lloyd Nolan, the doctor on Peyton Place. Jack’s defining quality is gravitas, which you tend to find in physicians who’ve practiced nearly fifty years.
“Afternoon, Marshall,” he says, shaking my hand as the smell of cigarette smoke wafts in with him. “I’m going to tell Duncan about his tests first, but I’d like you to stick around afterward, if you would. No matter what happens. I want to tell you something about Sally Matheson.”
This takes me off guard. “Sally Matheson?”
“You’ll understand when I tell you. Let’s get this over with first.”
We find Dad sitting in his worn La-Z-Boy recliner, which is aimed at the fifty-five-inch television he uses for target practice every day. Even now, CNN is running in the background, its anchor and pundits muted. Dr. Kirby chooses a chair far enough away from Dad to avoid any thrown object that might come his way.
Dad’s face is expressionless, immobile, a classic example of what doctors call the “Parkinson’s mask.” He developed this quite early, according to my mother, and she finds it one of the most difficult manifestations of the illness to cope with. Even on the rare occasions when Dad feels pleasure or happiness, he cannot smile in a way that can be recognized by anyone but her. Thanks to expert administration and monitoring of his medications, he experiences very little in the way of tremors or jerks, and this has been a blessing to them both. I think Dad would have withdrawn completely into their house had he suffered those classic symptoms. Even so, the less visible complications have come close to breaking his will. Difficulty swallowing, sexual dysfunction, insomnia, hallucinations . . .