After the initial shock, Mom had to give Dad a nitroglycerine tablet for his heart, extra meds for his tremors, and a Xanax to try to blunt his anxiety. Yet still he remained distraught. His hands trembled constantly, and his extremities jerked in ways my mother had never seen before. Worst of all, he was crying, something I couldn’t remember seeing him do since the day Adam drowned.
“Have you called Dr. Kirby?” I asked Mom.
“He’s going to come by after he finishes at his office.”
What emerged after Mom and I were able to question Dad in detail was simple and heartbreaking. After I moved home and started running the paper in earnest, Dad began to believe that if I stayed in Bienville, I might be able to turn the business around. His time had passed, he knew, but he thought my passion and experience might be enough to succeed where his had failed. If only the paper could stay open another year, he thought, I might get the Watchman back on its feet. What greater legacy could he leave than his family’s newspaper back on solid footing, free from the tyranny of any media group? To that end, he’d taken out one more major loan, securing it with the equity in his house and some securities he’d held back for my mother. Marty Denis helped him with all this; Mom had known nothing. Dad hadn’t told me, he said, because he didn’t want me burdened with financial worries. Of course it was that very attitude that had prevented me from working to save the paper from the day I got back.
Mom couldn’t imagine that Marty Denis had betrayed Dad by selling the loans to Claude Buckman, but I told her they’d probably gotten their way with Marty the same way they did with everyone else. Pine told me Denis had “imperiled his position at the bank.” The Poker Club would have been happy to bail him out of his trouble. All he had to do to save his own ass was burn Duncan McEwan.
“It’s my fault, all of it,” Dad whispered, staring dully at the switched-off television. “I wanted the paper to be there for you. I thought you were enjoying the work. I thought . . . you’d come around and want to stay and take it over.”
“It’s all right,” I told him.
“How much could I have gotten?” he kept asking. “Back when you pressed me to sell? That last time, seven or eight years ago.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“Nine million. Maybe ten.”
At some point after this he became hysterical, but thankfully the drugs kicked in, and he transitioned into a sort of muted daze. He reminded me of schizophrenia patients I’d seen in a Maryland hospital while writing a story on mental illness. He must have mumbled “I’m sorry” a hundred times, like a meaningless mantra he couldn’t stop repeating.
My mother kept looking from him to me, then back again. I was afraid she might break, as Dr. Kirby had predicted she would after Dad passed away. The specter of poverty had to be working on her, even though she knew that I’d never allow her to go without. But she didn’t break. She merely rubbed Dad’s neck and shoulders, as she always did when he became upset. Time passed in near silence, and the afternoon sun moved across the sky, sending a shadow slowly across the den floor. Nadine called and texted me several times, as did Ben Tate and others, but I didn’t want to break the calm by answering or returning calls. I was hoping for some word from Jet, but my burner phone remained silent. I texted Nadine that I would get back to her when I could, then muted my iPhone and sat with my parents while the new reality settled over and into us.
After all that’s happened, it’s strange to sit quietly in the house where I grew up. In the five months I’ve been back, I’ve hardly done this. Despite Mom’s efforts to reconcile Dad and me, most of my time has been spent helping her do household chores, while my main method of assistance has been paying for professional sitters and taking care of errands outside the house so that she can remain at his side. To see Dad sitting motionless like this is a new and disquieting experience.
In the silent den, I get up and walk along the shelves of the built-in entertainment center, perusing the spines of the book overflow from his study. Propped on one shelf is a photo of Dad and Hazel Brannon Smith, publisher of the Lexington Advertiser, in the newsroom of the Watchman. Another shelf contains personally inscribed volumes, an alphabetical treasure trove comprising a who’s who of twentieth-century journalism: Agee, Arendt, James Baldwin . . . Jimmy Breslin, Bob Capa, Rachel Carson, Cronkite, Walker Evans, Martha Gellhorn . . . Halberstam, Hersey, Sy Hersh, Langston Hughes, Stanley Karnow, Walter Lippmann . . . Murrow, Gordon Parks, Eric Sevareid, Bill Shirer, I. F. Stone, Curtis Wilkie. Some of these writers were friends of my father’s, others mentors. A few simply admired his stand during the civil rights movement so much that they sent him their own work with a thoughtful inscription.
As I walk along the shelf, tapping the spines with my fingers, I find myself recalling some of his fiery editorials from the 1960s. My father’s voice on the page was reminiscent of the one Ted Sorensen gave John Kennedy in his greatest speeches. In his prime, Duncan McEwan could summon power and moral authority from sentences in a way that still eludes me after decades of writing.
“You can’t let them silence you,” says a faint voice.
I whirl from the shelves and see that my mother is as startled as I am.
“Duncan?” she says, rubbing his arm. “Are you all right?”
“Do you have more to print?” Dad asks, not quite focusing on me. “More on those Poker Club bastards?”
I walk back and sit in the dining chair I pulled up next to his two hours ago. “I’ve got a photo of Beau Holland at the murder scene. And I’m sitting on some data Sally Matheson put together that could hit them pretty hard. There’s a lead in there that could hole them under the waterline. If I print, it might just inspire my source to send me even more damning evidence. But we’ll pay a price. A heavy one. War with the Poker Club means casualties.”
Dad’s hand shoots out and grips my wrist. Then his head tilts so that he’s staring at me from the corner of his eye. “Get it out there!” he croaks. “I let those guys have their way for too long. Buckman and Donnelly and the rest. You can’t let them shut us down.”
Dad never speaks of “us” when discussing the Watchman. Not since I was a boy, anyway. He’s always treated my running the paper as a temporary stewardship until he can get back on his feet. The obligation of a son to his father. Mom is clearly shocked by the intensity of his words, but she nods at me, which I take to mean that I should engage him in conversation, despite the risk of upsetting him further.
“I know how you feel, Dad. But they own the paper now. They’ve won, at least in the material sense.”
“No, no, no, no,” he drones. “That’s a battle, not the war. Find a way.”
“A way to what?”
“Print.”
I haven’t even considered trying to print anything. “I was thinking of posting a story to the web,” I tell him, “just under my own name. If I use our existing social media accounts, they’ll probably sue—”
“Screw ’em!” Dad shakes his head violently. “That’s not good enough! This town’s full of old people, poor people with no internet. You’ve got to give them what they’re used to. A newspaper.”