“Even better! She’s as smart as Jet Talal was, but not as . . . complicated.”
“Mom, that’s enough.”
“All right.” She’s actually chuckling now. “You can’t blame me for trying.”
Without meaning to, I’ve followed her to their bedroom. Before I can make my escape to my own room, she opens the door, revealing my father lying asleep in his hospital bed. The bed has been tilted up at the middle, putting him at a forty-degree angle. He’s lying with his mouth open, his white hair sticking out in all directions. A faint, irregular wheeze comes from his nose or mouth, and his blotchy hands, folded on his stomach, jerk without rhyme or reason.
“I thought his tremors were under control,” I think aloud.
“They are, for the most part. But during REM sleep he can jerk violently. That’s part of what causes his insomnia.”
“I see.” I’ve stood in the room long enough to smell feces. It reminds me a little of when my son was an infant, but it’s not really the same. With a baby, caretakers know that they’re progressing toward a day of continence and control. Whereas here . . . entropy reigns cruel and supreme. This is a world of constipation, fecal impactions, enemas, and agonizing manual evacuation—
“Watch him just a minute while I brush my teeth,” Mom says. “He’s asleep. Just stay with him till I get back.”
“Mom—”
“I’ll be right back,” she says, and then she’s gone.
Though I’ve been back in Bienville for five months, I’ve hardly been alone with my father. Neither of us handles it well. Any discussions inevitably turn to politics and journalism, and while in theory we are of the same mind about the present insanity, our approaches to dealing with it are quite different.
Watching my mother care for this failing shell that was once her proud husband, performing years of menial tasks—and now doing those things that wound and ultimately destroy personal dignity—humbles and even shames me. To do those things and not complain, to stand by your partner come what may . . . that is love. My mother and father endured what my wife and I could not: the death of a son. They didn’t survive it whole, perhaps, but they stayed together. I’ve kept that in mind while Jet and I have fallen ever deeper into what surely feels like love. But where Jet and I are concerned, I know only one thing beyond doubt—
We have not been tested like this.
Looking down at Dad now, trapped in the grim spiral of life’s last unwinding, I’m confronted by the essential fact of our relationship. Were it not for this man, I would not exist. Surely he and I must have shared happy experiences before my fourteenth year, when Adam drowned and nearly took the rest of us down with him. A few times over the years I’ve had flashes of memory, déjà vu while doing something with a friend or acquaintance, and wondered if I’d done it before with my father. But somehow, the bitterness that followed Adam’s death ruined all that preceded it, like quinine poured into Coca-Cola. Eventually I came to believe that if my father’s love for me couldn’t survive the loss of my brother, then it wasn’t ever love. I’ve applied the same ruthless logic to my own life. My love for my wife didn’t survive the death of our son, ergo I must not have truly loved her. Whereas my son . . .
“I’m back,” Mom says, laying her hand on my forearm. “I’ll take over now. You get some sleep. I think we have a difficult few days ahead.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I look down at this woman who bore me—worn down to 120 pounds and standing a head and a half shorter than I—and know without doubt that her courage dwarfs my own. Despite Dr. Kirby’s caution to the contrary, her strength seems immeasurable. I pull her close and hug tight, feel her shaking against me.
Then I leave her to face the night alone.
Chapter 29
If publishing yesterday’s edition of the Watchman was like kicking over a hornet’s nest, then publishing today’s was like detonating a bomb. Above the fold we printed the trail camera photo of convicted felon Dave Cowart facing Buck Ferris on the night he died. Beneath the photo we reported that the county coroner had detected blood on a piece of brick taken from a spot where Buck was known to have been digging for relics on that night. We also reported that fragments of human bone had been excavated from a trench on the paper mill site, a trench clearly marked as a digging location in Buck’s personal notebook. We got these facts into the paper only because, twenty minutes after I lay down in the bed of my childhood, Byron Ellis called and told me that after consulting his attorney and two black activists he trusted, he was ready to tell the truth about how Buck died, regardless of the consequences.
The obvious implication is that the Tenisaw County sheriff has been lying about Buck’s death and that deputies fabricated or tampered with evidence by moving a brick from the paper mill site to Lafitte’s Den. As a deterrent to further police misconduct, we revealed that some bone fragments and teeth were on their way to a lab at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. We also pointed out that the discovery of human remains requires that the sheriff halt construction while the Department of Archives and History decides whether to declare a preservation easement on the mill site. In the hope of avoiding being charged with felony trespass by an angry sheriff, I held back the identity of the “amateur archaeologist” who had recovered those bone fragments. I had hoped to announce that the artifacts bolstered Buck’s theory of the mill site, but the archaeologist that Quinn Ferris trusts most at LSU has been out of town and won’t be able to examine what I dug up until this afternoon.
Nevertheless, our story resulted in a flood of obscene email to the newspaper, much of it to my inbox. But at 8:40 a.m. I received a different kind of message. The heading read: personal for marshall mcewan, not troll mail. The sender was listed as “Mark Felt.” Mark Felt was the real identity of “Deep Throat” during the Watergate investigation. Intrigued, I opened the email, even though it had a file attached. The file turned out to be a lengthy PDF containing more than fifty different documents. A ten-minute perusal told me either I had been sent part of Sally Matheson’s data cache, or a member of the Bienville Poker Club had gifted me priceless evidence. The former explanation seemed far more likely. Had the person Sally entrusted with her most dangerous bequest finally decided to make a move? If so, why?
I stored the PDF in my personal Dropbox folder, which moved a copy of the file to a server farm somewhere in the cloud. Then I used my personal office printer to produce a hard copy, which covered several different matters that would certainly result in scandals, if not legal indictments. Finally, I called in our IT guy—a twenty-four-year-old Texan named David Garcia—and asked him to trace the source of the email that had delivered the PDF.
While Garcia worked at my computer, I sat in the corner and read through the hard copy. The first twenty-six documents detail a scam that exploited advance knowledge of Bienville’s site selection for the new paper mill to defraud more than three dozen homeowners of their property. These citizens of Bienville and Tenisaw County had lived in three areas: on land contiguous to the industrial park, along a secondary road that leads to the industrial park, and along the proposed corridor of Interstate 14. On the day the governor announced that Bienville had won the Azure Dragon mill site competition, all that land tripled in value.