Blood Memory (18 page)

“Are you saying I shouldn’t try to find out who murdered my father?”

Grandpapa closes his eyes. Just as I decide he has fallen asleep, he opens them again and turns them on me with startling intensity. “Catherine, you’ve spent your adult life focused on death. Now you’re about to cross the line into full-blown obsession. I want my granddaughter to
live
. I want you to have a family, children…”

I’m shaking my head violently, not because I don’t want those things, but because I simply can’t think about them now. And because I already have a child on the way—

“That’s what Luke would want,” Grandpapa finishes. “Not some belated quest for justice with no chance for success.”

“It’s not just justice I want.”

“What, then?”

“The man who killed my father is the only person in the world who knows what happened to me in that room.”

At last my grandfather is silent.

“
Something
happened to me that night. Something bad. And I have to know what it was.”

Grandpapa is saying something else, but I can’t make out specific words. His voice seems to come from across a windy field. Pulling one hand loose, I yank open the door and try to climb out. He tries to hold me by my other hand, but I relax my fingers and the hand slips free. My feet hit the ground, and I start running toward the slave quarters.

Sensing something amiss, Billy Neal jumps out of the Lincoln and blocks my path.

“Get away from me, you shit!” I scream.

He grabs for my arms, but I pivot and reverse away from the buildings. Without looking back, I sprint down the hill toward the bayou, where the barn that served as my father’s studio and sleeping quarters stands in the shadow of a wall of trees. I’ll be safe there. Voices cry out behind me, one of them Pearlie’s, but I run on, wind-milling my arms like a panicked little girl.

I can’t get into the barn. For the first time in my life, my father’s sanctuary is closed to me. The main entrances are padlocked, and the secret ones I used for years have been nailed shut. If I could find a ladder, I’d try the loft door, but as I begin looking for one, I hear Pearlie shouting from the direction of the house.

She’s running down the hill in her white uniform. That she’s over seventy seems not to affect her speed at all. Her bony legs move in a herky-jerky motion, giving her the appearance of a marionette being controlled by invisible strings, but she moves fast. I wait by the barn, watching Pearlie come, wondering what she has to say that’s so important. The air here smells of the bayou beyond the barn: decaying vegetation, dead fish, frogs, snakes, skunks. The mosquitoes have always been bad down here, too, but Daddy never seemed to mind them.

“What you doing here?” Pearlie calls.

“I want to look in the barn.”

She slows to a stop, panting. “Why?”

Because I want to be close to my father. Because his grave does nothing for me. Because here, where his final sculptures are stored—unsold at my request—I feel a connection with him that has never died, or even faded…

“I just do,” I snap. “Why is it locked?”

“All Mr. Luke’s metalwork be in there.”

“All? I thought there were only a couple of unsold pieces left.”

“Used to be. But your granddaddy been buying up all the others. Whenever something comes on sale, he buys it. He got at least ten of them things in there. Big ones, too.”

This seems impossible to me. “Why is he doing that? He never liked Daddy’s work.”

Pearlie shrugs. “Got to be money in it, some way. Them statues worth money, ain’t they? Some of ’em he brought all the way from Atlanta.”

“A few collectors think they’re important. But they’re not worth the kind of money that matters to Grandpapa.”

Pearlie steps closer and looks me in the eye. “What happened in that car up there? Why’d you run away like that?”

I turn back to the barn door. “Grandpapa told me where Daddy really died.”

She circles me so that she can maintain eye contact. I see fear in her eyes.

“What are you afraid of, Pearlie? What did you think he told me?”

“I ain’t afraid of nothing! You tell me what he said.”

“He told me Daddy didn’t die under the tree. He was shot in my bedroom, saving me from the intruder.”

Pearlie seems frozen in place. “What else did he say?”

“He told me that you cleaned Daddy’s blood off the walls and the floor.”

The old woman lowers her head.

“How could you do that? How could you lie to me all these years?”

Pearlie shakes her head, her eyes still downcast. “I got no regrets about cleaning that blood. Wasn’t no good going to come from you knowing any different than what we told you.”

“You don’t know that! Isn’t it always better to know the truth, no matter what?”

She looks up, her eyes brimming with emotion. “Maybe you ain’t lived long enough to learn it yet, but some things it’s better not to know. Specially if you’re a woman.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If everybody knew what everybody else was really thinking and doing all the time, there’d be a lot more people in the jailhouse. And there wouldn’t hardly be one family left together. Hardly any left together now, come to that. Especially black ones.”

“I want the truth, Pearlie. I don’t want to be protected. I don’t want to be lied to. I want the truth, however bad it is.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, girl. You think you do, but you don’t.”

I take hold of her arm. “You know everything that ever happened to this family. What else have you been keeping from me?”

“Nothing! What Dr. Kirkland done that night was right. Wasn’t no use having everybody talking ’bout you being raped. All them old white ladies would have been whispering poison every time you walked into a room. You didn’t need to carry that around with you. Not in this little town.”

“I don’t care what those people think! Not now, not then. You know that.”

Pearlie nods. “You a strong girl, all right. Always was. But you didn’t need that scandal hanging on you. Now, come back up to the house. Dr. Kirkland got the only key to this old barn. You gonna have to wait on him to get inside, and he gone to his meeting now.”

I jump as my cell phone beeps out U2. It’s Sean. My first instinct is to ignore the call, but something makes me answer.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Hold on to your socks,” Sean says, his voice raspy from an obvious hangover. “At eight o’clock this morning, Nathan Malik gave up the names of his patients.”

I can’t believe it. There’s no way a man who spent time as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge was broken by one night in the parish prison. “Is he out of jail now?”

“Yep. And we were suspicious for the same reason you are. Why would Malik go to jail on principle, then suddenly crack? It’s almost like he did it for the publicity, and once he got that, he caved. Well, Kaiser suddenly realized that without Malik’s medical records, we had no way to know whether the patient list was complete. So he got a court order authorizing us to compare the list to Malik’s computer records. Well, guess what? There
weren’t
any. The hard drives at his office were wiped clean.”

This I can believe. “The data can still be retrieved. You just—”

“You’re not listening, Cat. The data’s
gone.
All of it. The FBI technicians said it would take somebody who really knew computers to pull that off.”

“Malik could do it.”

“Hang on…. I gotta run, Cat. Things are popping down here. I miss you.”

He clicks off, leaving me feeling utterly dislocated from my old life.

“Bad news?” Pearlie asks.

“Not good,” I reply, wondering whether the list Malik gave the police has a single current patient’s name on it.

I turn reluctantly from the barn and follow Pearlie up the hill.

As we reach the parking lot, my mother and Aunt Ann walk out of the rose garden. Each is rolling one-half of a matched pair of Louis Vuitton suitcases. From a distance they could be twins, but as we near them, Ann’s age shows itself in her face. Only four years older than my mother, she’s paid the price for years of alcoholism and hard living. A friend of mine from Natchez wrote a book about her troubled family. In it, she wrote, “Beautiful women are haunted houses.” I always think of that line when I see Aunt Ann. Ann was the one that the boys always followed home. Her face had the classic proportions that transcended small-town prettiness, but beauty seemed to bring her more trouble than happiness, and by fifty it was mostly gone. Now her cheeks hang on the long-envied bone structure like ragged sails on the woodwork of a once-proud ship. Looking at the spider-work of veins in her face, I touch my own, knowing that one day my secret drinking will exact the same price from me.

“What have you two been doing down by the bayou?” my mother calls. “The mosquitoes will eat you alive down there.”

“Looking at the barn,” I answer. “I wanted to see some of Daddy’s pieces.”

The smile fades from Mom’s face. “Well, they’re all locked up now.”

Ann props up her suitcase, walks over to me, and gives me a tight, sisterly hug, not one of the side hugs my mother favors. Then she draws back and looks into my eyes. Hers are as blue as my grandfather’s, and almost as penetrating. “If I didn’t know better, Cat, I’d think you’ve been crying.”

I shake my head, wondering if Ann knows where Daddy really died.

“Good. That’s my department. How are you holding up down in New Orleans?”

“Fine. I’m good.”

She nods, though she obviously doesn’t believe me. “You seeing anybody of the male persuasion down there?”

“I have a guy, yeah.”

“Handsome?”

I force a laugh I don’t feel. “Yes.”

“Good for you. Every man’s going to wear you down eventually, so you might as well pick one who’s pretty to look at.”

Ann gives me a conspiratorial wink, but I can’t summon another laugh. There’s a glitter in her eyes that makes me wonder if she’s in a manic phase.

“Ann’s headed back to the coast soon,” says my mother. “But we’re going to have brunch at the Castle first. Why don’t you put on some decent clothes and join us?”

That’s the last thing I want to do now. But looking for some of my father’s sculptures won’t qualify as a sufficient excuse in my mother’s book. “I’d really like to. But I have some things to do.”

Mom looks put out. “For example?”

I search for an excuse—any excuse—to skip lunch. “Dr. Wells asked me to come swimming over at his house.”

Ann gives me another wink. “Sounds a lot better than lunch with us. You go on, Cat. We’ll catch up with each other soon.”

In the most casual voice I can muster, I say, “Mom, who in town has some of Dad’s work on display?”

“Well, they still have that piece at the library. And there’s the one at the Vietnam Veterans Building over at Duncan Park—the helicopter. Other than those and what’s in the barn, everything’s in private homes. Most of them are far from Natchez.”

I give Ann another hug, then glance at Pearlie—who has watched this exchange like a silent sentinel—and set off through the trees toward Michael Wells’s house.

My plan is to turn around as soon as Ann and my mother drive away, but they stand by the Acura talking to Pearlie as if they have all day. With little choice but to play out my charade, I walk deeper into the trees.

Something moves among the trunks to my right, and it startles me. Then I recognize Mose, the yardman. He’s setting mole traps in the scraggly grass beneath the trees about thirty yards away. Looking at him bent over the ground, I recall Grandpapa’s description of the prowler who ran away from the slave quarters on the night Daddy died. He was black. Could that have been Mose? He’s lived on the property for decades. He always drank quite a bit, and it strikes me now that he might have had some dealings with my father over drugs.

I veer toward the old man and walk for several yards, but something makes me stop short of him. Mose had an open window into my life from infancy to age sixteen. Is it possible that he lusted after me? To the point that he came into my room and tried to molest me? Could he have done something before that night, even? On the grounds of Malmaison, maybe? Under the tin roof of the barn? Could that something have been so traumatic that I blocked it out? Before talking to Nathan Malik, I wouldn’t have considered this. But now, thinking of the nightmares that have troubled me for years—faceless black figures breaking into my house—I wonder. The idea that a random prowler would walk all the way from the highway to Malmaison during a rainstorm has always bothered me. But if that “prowler” were Mose, he wouldn’t have had to walk more than a hundred yards. Could he be the faceless black man in my dreams? The demon fighting my father in the dark?

I’ll have to ask Pearlie that.

Mose hasn’t seen me yet. Behind Malmaison, Ann and my mother are still talking by the car. I might be able to reach Michael’s house without Mose seeing me, but Michael is bound to be at work. I could still use his pool, though. I think of the flat rock in his flower bed. Five or six minutes on the bottom of that pool might be just the thing to calm me down. I’m thinking of sprinting the rest of the way when the sound of a motor carries through the trees. Ann’s Acura is backing up. I hear her shift gears, and then the car rolls slowly down the curving driveway toward the gate.

“Miss Catherine?” croaks a voice parched by thousands of hand-rolled cigarettes.

I whip my head around. Mose is standing erect, staring at me from behind his pile of mole traps.

“That you, Miss Catherine? My eyes ain’t so good no more.”

“It’s me, Mose,” I call, already walking back toward Malmaison. “Don’t work too hard in this heat.”

“Heat don’t bother me none.” He laughs. “I’ll take it over the cold any day.”

I give him a broad wave, then turn and race back toward the house.

The Vietnam Veterans Building is closer to Malmaison than the public library, so I go there first. Situated in the city’s main public park, the small, one-story building began its life as the pro shop of the public golf course. The Vietnam vets took it over when the golf course was expanded to eighteen holes and a new pro shop built in another part of the park. They used it for support group meetings, for parties, and for a place to hang out besides home.

The dilapidated building sits on a long slope below the oak-shaded public playground that Natchez kids have used for sixty years. Overlooking the playground is Auburn, an antebellum mansion that serves as headquarters for one of the local garden clubs. Across the lane from Auburn stands an old steam locomotive, a sort of living museum for children. In the distance I see the public swimming pool, the only decent pool where black children can swim en masse in the city. It’s been closed for the past four years, due to lack of money for repairs. Down the long slope from the vets’ building, red and green tennis courts bake in the sun, surrounded by the grassy, fenced triangles of Little League ball fields.

I expected to find my father’s sculpture inside the veterans’ building—where I last saw it—but as I pull into the parking lot, I see the shining rotor blades that crown the piece jutting over the roof. Have they mounted it on some kind of pedestal? I get out and walk around the corner.

A house-size structure stands on the lawn, built of wooden poles hung with parachutes and camouflage netting. Inside the netting is a grass hut, and in front of the hut an army tent forms the centerpiece of a simulated military campsite. A steel beam rises out of the center of this scene, and mounted atop it is my father’s sculpture: a brushed-steel Huey helicopter with a wounded soldier suspended from its belly by a winch cable. It’s one of the most realistic pieces my father ever did. Most of his work—especially the later stuff—was far more abstract, like the tall tree standing between the twin staircases at the public library. But the ascending helicopter pleased everyone. What it’s doing in the middle of this thrown-together display puzzles me, though.

“Can I help you, miss?”

A heavyset man with a grizzled beard is walking toward me. He wears army fatigue pants, a black MIA T-shirt, and Harley-Davidson motorcycle boots. A gold earring decorates his left earlobe, and a braided, silver ponytail hangs over his right shoulder. He looks to be in his late fifties.

“I hope so. My dad sculpted that helicopter up there. I came by to see it.”

A smile lights up the man’s face. “You’re Luke Ferry’s kid?”

It feels good to be recognized as something besides William Kirkland’s granddaughter. “That’s right. Did you know him?”

“Sure. Not real well, of course, but he came to a few meetings here. Kept to himself quite a bit. But he did this helicopter for us. I tell you, for anybody who served in Nam, the Huey medevac is a thing of beauty. Like a guardian angel coming to pull you out of hell.”

I nod, unsure what I’ve really come for. “I thought you kept it inside the building.”

“We do, most of the year. But on July Fourth, the priest from St. Mary’s does the blessing of the fleet out at Lake St. John. There’s a boat parade out there, and contests for best float. We do one every year for the MIAs. To keep up awareness, you know? We’ve put your daddy’s chopper on there four years running.”

“It’s been sitting out here for the past month?”

The bearded man looks embarrassed. “We had tarps on it till today. I’m actually here to break down the float. We brought it back from the lake on a flatbed, and this is as far as we got. Everybody was a little drunk. But, man, people love to see that Huey coming up the lake. Gives ’em a good feeling inside. Specially these last couple years, with all the boys overseas now.”

I find myself smiling. “Daddy would have liked that.”

The vet nods, then sticks out his hand. “Jim Burley, miss. Proud to know you.”

“Cat Ferry.”

Another smile. “Cat, huh?”

“Short for Catherine.”

“Oh, I get it. Well, what can I do for you?”

Tell me my father was a good man.
…“Well, I was only eight when my dad died, so he never really told me about the war. Do you know much about what he did over there?”

Burley thinks for a bit, then scratches his thick beard. “Why don’t we sit down in the shade over here?”

I follow him to an olive-drab picnic table beneath an oak tree and sit opposite him. A bumper sticker stuck to the top of the table reads,
FOR THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR IT
,
FREEDOM HAS A FLAVOR THE PROTECTED WILL NEVER KNOW
.

“Your dad was a quiet guy,” Burley begins. “I guess you know that already. A few years younger than me, Luke was. Served his tour a couple years after mine. Lots of guys who come in here are quiet types, but they tend to open up after a while. Luke stayed quiet. He wasn’t unfriendly or anything. Just needed a little more space than most people, you know? The war did that to some of us.”

I nod, trying to picture my father inside the little building, or even sitting at this picnic table. He needed a
lot
more space than most people.

“All I really know,” Burley says, “is that Luke didn’t pull no run-of-the-mill tour. Way I heard it, he was a crack shot long before he got inducted. Hunted all his life out at Cranfield, probably. So when they took him into the Airborne, they made him a sniper.”

“A sniper?” I’ve never heard this before.

Burley nods. “That’s a tough job. One-on-one killing, you know? And not in the heat of battle, either. To do that job, you gotta be able to kill in cold blood. And unless you got a screw loose somewhere, that takes something out of you.”

I can’t believe no one in the family has told me this. But maybe they didn’t know either. “Do you remember anything else?”

Burley takes a deep breath and sighs. “Couple of the guys wangled a few facts out of Luke. The picture we got was this. Your daddy was taken into some kind of special unit. Sort of a raiding unit. The kind they used to go into places we weren’t supposed to be in.”

“Like where?”

“Like Laos and Cambodia.”

An inexplicable shudder goes through me. I close my eyes and see Nathan Malik sitting before me, telling me about his stone Buddha.
I brought it back from Cambodia….

“Do you know for sure that my father was in Cambodia?”

“I don’t know nothing for sure, honey. But it was one of those places. Anyway, there was some trouble about this unit he was in. Accusations of atrocities, that kind of thing.”

I shake my head, more from surprise than disbelief.

“The government got up an investigation for a bunch of courts-martial. Then they just dropped it all. Flushed the whole thing down the Pentagon toilet.”

“When was this?”

“Some of it during the war, I think. Soon after it happened. Then again later on. I think Luke was dead by that time, though.”

“Look, Mr. Burley, I want you to be straight with me. Do you think my dad was involved in war crimes?”

The vet thinks about this for a while. “I tell you, Cat, looking back on it now, a lot of what I done over there seems like crimes to me. But when I was
there,
I didn’t think twice about it. It was part of the job. The rules of engagement didn’t cover half the situations you ran into. It was survival. Hindsight’s a luxury we didn’t have. Now, a lot of Hollywood movies don’t show nothing but grunts cutting off ears and killing women and kids. And some of that happened, I won’t lie. That and worse. But most guys just served their tour and did the best they could to be honorable men.”

“I’m sure that’s true. But I’m not here about them. I want to know about my father.”

Burley gives me a heavyhearted smile. “I’m telling you about him, though it may not sound like it. I’m telling you that whatever Luke did, you ain’t gonna be able to understand by looking backward from the USA thirty-five years later. I’m not excusing atrocities or anything like that. I’m just saying…hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

A deep sense of frustration is building inside me. “Is there anybody I could talk to who might know more specific information? Somebody Daddy might have confided in?”

Burley shrugs. “There was a black guy Luke was pretty tight with for a while. Some of the brothers don’t come around here as much as they could. We try to make ’em welcome—a vet’s a vet, you know?—but it was the same in-country. Especially after sixty-eight, when Dr. King was assassinated.”

“Do you remember this guy’s name?”

“Jesse something. Can’t quite recall his last name.” Burley waves back toward the building. “Ought to have it inside, but I don’t. Our records are for shit right now. Computer’s busted. Jesse was in the Airborne, too, I remember that. Different unit from your daddy’s. Same unit Jimi Hendrix served in. Jesse was real proud of that.”

“Was Jesse from here?”

“No, Louisiana. Down the river a bit. St. Francisville, maybe.”

“You can’t remember his last name?”

Burley squints like man looking into bright sunlight. “I know it…I just can’t
get
it. Old-timer’s disease, you know? Wait a second. Billings? No. Billups?
Billups,
that’s it! Like the gas stations we used to have around here. Jesse Billups, Spec 4, 101st Airborne.”

I’d hoped I would recognize the name, but I don’t. Glancing down the hill toward the tennis courts, I wipe sweat from my eyes. I played tennis down there a few times. In another life, it seems now. I look up at my car but feel no inclination to drive anywhere. “Do you need help taking down the float?”

Burley laughs. “I don’t need it, but I’d sure love the company. I know you got better things to do than hang around here, though.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Hey!” He slaps the picnic table with a beefy palm. “You ought to be able to find Jesse real easy.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re Dr. Kirkland’s granddaughter, right? Grew up over in that big house, where Luke lived in the barn?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Jesse was related to the housekeeper over there. Second cousin, or nephew, something like that.”

My scalp and palms are tingling. “To the housekeeper? You mean Pearlie?”

“
Pearlie
. That’s it!” Burley laughs. “Jesse used to talk about her some, and not all of it good. His mama was related to Pearlie, some way.”

I stand so suddenly that I feel light-headed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Burley, I need to go.”

“Sure. No problem.”

“Thank you so much.” I’m already walking backward toward my car.

“Hey, listen,” Burley calls. “Don’t you worry about what your daddy done over there. He came back alive, that’s the main thing, right there.”

Is it?
I wonder, trotting toward the Audi.
I wonder.

“He made us this Huey,” Burley says. “Anybody makes something that pretty and gives it away for free, he’s gotta be all right down deep. You know?”

No, I don’t,
I think, climbing into the car.
I don’t know anything anymore.