He slowly shakes his head. “You don’t know that. You can’t.”
“You think you’ve committed a sin so terrible that you could never be forgiven?”
“No. But there are some things so—so complicated that it’s a man’s duty to work them out for himself. Not to depend on others to do it for him.”
“Dad … I’d never say this to a client. But you’re not going to be my client beyond tomorrow, not if you’re going to trial, and—”
“You won’t defend me if this goes to trial?”
“A lawyer who represents himself or his family has a fool for a client.”
He seems to take this philosophically. “Go on, then.”
“Tell me what happened at Cora Revels’s house last night. Just the facts, in sequence, as best you can remember them.” I hold up my right hand. “Before you say no, let me tell you why you should confide in me. Maybe what happened was assisted suicide. Or maybe it was murder. But it might have been manslaughter, or even plain suicide. We won’t know until I hear the facts. Because even though laymen use those terms, each one has a strict legal definition.”
For a moment I think I’ve convinced him. Then he says, “I’m not sure I know myself what happened last night.”
“What do you mean? Can you prove you weren’t there? Or what time you left? With an alibi, this whole mess can magically go away. According to the clock-radio beside Viola’s bed, she died at five thirty-eight A.M.”
He lifts a small, desert-colored replica of a Tiger tank from a shelf behind him and toys with its scaled-down 88 mm gun. After slowly turning the turret a few times, he sets the tank back on the shelf. “That’s not what I meant. I was there. But I’m still not sure what happened. Or why.”
“Did you do anything to assist Viola to die? Did you inject her? Was there some kind of unexpected drug interaction?”
Dad blinks twice, then seems to shake himself out of a trance. “We’ve come full circle, Penn. I’ve told you I can’t discuss what happened last night. Let that be an end of it.”
“You mean you won’t discuss it.”
He turns up his palms, exposing his arthritically deformed fingers. “Semantics.”
“I know you didn’t murder Viola. I know that. You’re trying to protect somebody. Nothing else makes sense. You can’t be trying to protect yourself, because you’re about to destroy yourself. So it must be someone else. Tell me who you’re trying to save, and I’ll do all in my power to protect them. I swear it. Your life is on the line, Dad.”
“I’ve been on borrowed time for quite a while, son. You know that.”
At last my frustration boils over, and I get to my feet. “Why won’t you let me help you?”
“Because you can’t,” he says calmly. He picks up his dead cigar from the ashtray, puts it in his mouth, and relights it with a high-pressure butane lighter that roars like a miniature welding torch. “Penn, let me tell you something: I thought I knew my father. He lived to be eighty-six, remember? Died of colon cancer. Do you remember how religious he was?”
“He never missed a Sunday at church. Or a Wednesday night.”
“That’s right.” Dad exhales a raft of blue smoke. “Well, near the end, I found him staring out the front window of his house, crying. Crying. Can you see Percy Cage doing that?”
My grandfather was as hard as a Salem judge. “No, I can’t.”
“When I asked why he was crying, Dad told me he was afraid. Afraid of dying. I can’t tell you how shocked I was. I asked whether his religious faith didn’t give him some comfort—his belief in the afterlife. He turned to me with a stare that made me shudder, and he said, ‘There’s nothing after this life, Tom. This world. Nothing.’ Then he looked back out the window.”
Dad studies the glowing tip of his cigar. “I felt like the earth had cracked open at my feet. Even though I believed basically the same thing. Dad had been going to church his whole life, professing faith, teaching Sunday school, saying and doing all the right things. But when it came to actually staring into the void, all that went out the window. All those years, he’d never been the person I thought I knew. Never. I’m not judging him. I’m just saying that I had no idea who my own father really was.”
My palms tingle as I stare back into my father’s eyes. Do I have similar blind spots when I look at him? Is that what he’s telling me? I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what’s around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep, invisible forces within my own father? Could Viola’s flight from Natchez in 1968 have been one of those events? What about my sister’s decision to leave America and live in England? Or Dad’s decision to help my wife die peacefully rather than in agony? You may be right, says a voice in my head, but this isn’t the time or place for speculation. Gathering myself as best I can, I sit back on the sofa and try to punch through his defenses.