Natchez Burning Read online

  Revels had stopped talking a couple of hours ago. The only words he’d spoken during the afternoon were to ask about his sister and Luther Davis. Sonny didn’t know where Viola was, but he prayed that Luther was at the bottom of the Jericho Hole in Concordia Parish, where Sonny had ordered Morehouse to dump him.

  Sonny opened the outboard’s throttle a little and nosed the boat through a deeper channel in the cypress trees. They were thirty miles south of Natchez and twenty west of Woodville, deep into Lusahatcha County. This swamp lay mostly on land owned by the Double Eagles’ hunting club, but partly on federal land, too—a national forest. Sonny’s destination was a stand of virgin cypress that looked like something on the cover of an Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback. At the heart of this swamp, some cypress trunks were fifteen feet in diameter. Sonny and Frank had once tried to stretch a fifty-foot rope around the trunk of the one called the Bone Tree, and they’d come up three feet short. Frank claimed some of those trees were a thousand years old.

  “Shit,” Sonny muttered, watching the orange sun flare against the purple sky as it sank below the horizon. He was going to have to use a flashlight to get back to civilization. “We shoulda been there by now.”

  He put down his pistol and picked up a map Snake had drawn for him on a much earlier occasion. As he studied it, Sonny kept glancing over its edge to make sure Jimmy Revels stayed still. The kid’s T-shirt was rusty with dried blood and stained black with grease, his left arm wrapped in bloody gauze. In the fading light, Sonny could no longer tell if his eyes were open or closed.

  Stinging sweat dripped into Sonny’s eyes, and he squinted through it at the map. I gotta be almost there, he thought. Then, as though transported by his thought, he realized he was. The normal cypresses had given way to grassy islands, humped mounds of earth crowned by gargantuan trees. The cypress knees alone were larger than the trunks of most trees. Sonny saw paths worn through the grass on some tussocks, probably by hungry deer, exhausted from swimming. Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.

  Sonny hadn’t seen the Bone Tree since 1966, but he remembered it all too well. The colossal cypress reared up out of the swamp like the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. But this was no paradise. More than a dozen men Sonny knew of had died under that tree, and Frank claimed the real number was over a hundred. He’d shown Sonny hand-forged chain links embedded in the bark that dated back to slave times. Runaway slaves had supposedly been hanged or hobbled beneath this cypress. High inside the hollow trunk, Sonny had seen carvings Frank swore were Indian sign, from before the French came. Sonny didn’t need those facts to make him wary of this place. The things he’d seen done to men beneath the Bone Tree were seared into his brain. He was half tempted to carry Jimmy Revels to Baton Rouge and put him on a northbound bus rather than make the journey out of this snake-infested swamp alone.

  “Glenn don’t know how easy he’s got it,” Sonny muttered. “Compared to this, dumping Luther’s car in the Jericho Hole is nothing.”

  A heavy swish in the water to his right made Sonny’s sphincter lock up. He knew that sound. Sure enough, when he squinted, he saw the armored back of an alligator swimming alongside the boat. When his heartbeat finally slowed to normal, Sonny looked forward and saw the Bone Tree towering a hundred feet above him, its base as broad as a building blocking his path. The fibrous bark looked like the leathery skin of some great creature, not dead but only sleeping, and high above, its branches joined the crowns of other trees to form a thin canopy. Killing the motor, Sonny let the johnboat glide up onto the edge of the hummock that surrounded the massive trunk. A narrow, A-shaped crack of utter darkness offered entrance to the hollow tree, and Sonny wondered what lay inside that cavelike space on this night. Soon Jimmy Revels could tell him.

  Sonny stood and pointed his pistol down at Revels’s bloody form. “Get out,” he said, kicking Revels’s foot.

  The nigger didn’t move.

  “Come on, boy!” Sonny’s voice sounded higher and thinner than he’d intended. “I know you’re playing possum.”

  Revels remained still.

  “By God, I’ll shoot you where you lay.” Sonny was lying. The slug from his .357 Magnum would likely go through Revels and punch a hole in the bottom of the boat. He didn’t plan to spend the night surrounded by water moccasins and alligators. Hell, there were bears in this swamp.

  “What difference does it make?” Revels moaned at last.

  “Get up, damn you! Or I’ll shoot you in the pelvis. That’ll make a difference, I promise you.”

  “Tell me where my sister is. Then I’ll get up.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “But ya’ll ain’t done nothin’ else to her?”

  “No!” Sonny yelled, blocking out the memory of all they’d done to Viola Turner. He couldn’t bear to think about that. “She got away, I told you.” He squinted at his watch in the dim light. “You saw it happen. She’s probably with Dr. Cage right now, all patched up and pretty again.”

  “That’s impossible, after what ya’ll did.”

  “Move, boy!”

  Revels struggled to his knees, then crawled out of the rocking boat and collapsed in the grass. He was lying squarely in a deer path.

  Sonny picked up his flashlight, climbed out of the boat, and kicked Revels’s thigh. “Get your ass up, damn it!”

  “Why for? You just gonna shoot me and roll me into the water so the gators get me. Go on and do it.”

  “That’s not what I’m gonna do. I’m just leaving you out here for a couple of days, till things cool down.”

  “Leave me, then.”

  “Not here. Inside the tree.”

  Revels rolled over and looked at the gigantic cypress. “In the tree? What you mean?”

  “This tree is hollow. I want you to get inside it.”

  Swollen, bloodshot eyes looked up into Sonny’s flashlight beam. “You lyin’, man.”

  “I ain’t. The deer get up in there and sleep sometimes, ’cause it’s dry. See that crack there? They call this the Bone Tree, ’cause wounded deer crawl up in there to die. You’ll get up in there, too, if you want to live. This is gonna be your jail for a couple of days.”

  Revels stared at the black opening for half a minute, thinking. Then he rolled over and slowly got to his feet. Sonny prodded him in the back, pushing him up the hummock, toward the crack in the fibrous wall of wood. Only eighteen inches wide, it stretched upward for ten feet, gradually narrowing to nothing.

  “I ain’t going in there,” Jimmy said with boyish fear. “Ain’t no telling what’s up in there.”

  “Ain’t nothing in there now. The animals heard us coming from way off.” Sonny stepped forward and rapped the side of the tree with his pistol. “See? If there was a deer in there, he’d have bolted.”

  “Might be snakes in there.”

  “You’ll just have to take your chances. Go on, now. I got to get out of here.”

  “I’ll just come back out after you leave.”

  “I’m gonna nail a board up.”

  Revels stared into the yellow beam and spoke in a voice stripped of all affect. “I know you didn’t like what those others did to Viola. Or to me. I saw it in your eyes.” He held up his bandaged arm, showing the gauze Sonny had wrapped around the wound made by Snake Knox slicing off the boy’s navy tattoo. “You were raised a Christian, just like me, Mr. Thornfield. How can you do this?”

  Sonny shook his head and looked away, at the black water to his right. The kid was right about the torture, but he didn’t seem to grasp the nature of race war. Having a common faith meant nothing. Niggers weren’t true Christians, after all. As slaves, they’d simply latched on to the faith of their masters in desperation, not realizing that the master simply used religion to keep them tame.

  “Go on, now,” Sonny said, motioning toward the crack with his pistol.

  “I ain’t going,” Jimmy insisted. “I can’t.”

  Sonny gauged his chances of s
tuffing Revels through the crack if he was dead. The boy was thin enough, but Sonny didn’t relish the idea. Moving dead men was hard work. “You go on, Jimmy, or I’ll shoot you where you stand. That’s the deal.”

  “Is Luther dead?”

  “He is,” Sonny said, hoping it was true.

  Jimmy’s shoulders sank, and whatever resistance he had left went out of him. “At least you told me the truth. So maybe Viola’s really all right.”

  “She is, I swear.”

  Jimmy intoned something that sounded like a prayer. Then he turned sideways and worked his dark body through the crack in the tree. He might as well have been entering a cave.

  Thank God, Sonny thought, as the stained white T-shirt vanished. He shone his flashlight through the crack. Jimmy stood a few feet away, staring at something at the center of the hollow tree. Sonny took the beam off his back and shone it around. The hollow trunk created a round room like some turreted castle tower. The way the walls narrowed as they reached skyward gave him a sort of religious feeling. “What you looking at?” Sonny asked.

  Jimmy moved aside and pointed at the floor.

  At the center of the round room lay a yellowed skeleton. Not human, Sonny realized. “That’s just a deer,” he said, noticing a carpet of other bones beneath it. “Probably crawled up in here wounded last hunting season.”

  “You don’t have any board to nail up, do you?” Jimmy said in a fatalistic tone.

  “No,” Sonny said, almost apologetically. “That’s a fact.”

  Jimmy turned slowly and raised a hand against the beam of the flashlight. The whites of his eyes glowed in his black face. Revels was twenty-six years old, but he looked like a teenager.

  “You swear my sister’s all right?” he insisted.

  “I do,” Sonny said in a shaky voice. “And if it makes you feel any better, finishing this up out here is going to save your hero’s life.”

  Jimmy blinked in confusion. “Who do you mean?”

  “Senator Kennedy.”

  “What about him?”

  “You dying here is going to save his life.”

  The boy pondered this for several seconds. “It doesn’t matter. He’ll never be president. If not your bunch, somebody else will get him. The best men never make it. Moses, Jesus … Medgar, Malcolm. Even Dr. King. He won’t live to see the Promised Land.”

  Sonny had a feeling the boy was right, but he was glad not to be part of that business anymore.

  “Someday,” Jimmy said, dropping the hand shielding his eyes, “you tell Viola where to find me, okay? It ain’t right to leave a person not knowing about their kin. You were in the service. You know that. Even if you lie about how they died, you tell ’em where the body is. To give the family peace.”

  Sonny swallowed and raised his pistol. He didn’t enjoy killing in cold blood, but neither had he ever hesitated to do his duty. And they’d gone too far to reverse course now. Everything had to be buried. No body, no crime, Frank always said. “Maybe someday,” Sonny lied, trying to make it easier on the boy.

  Revels plainly didn’t believe him. Sweat poured off the kid’s face, and Sonny had to shake his own head to get the burning sweat out of his eyes.

  “You got any last words?” he asked, tilting his head to wipe his face on his shirt.

  Revels nodded soberly.

  “Get on with it, then.”

  “Are you listening, Mr. Thornfield?”

  Sonny prepared himself for some dreadful curse in the name of God, or perhaps some ancient African demon. “I’m listening.”

  “I forgive you.”

  PART TWO

  2005

  The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

  —Oscar Wilde

  MONDAY

  CHAPTER 4

  Natchez, Mississippi

  AS A YOUNG LAWYER, I had a recurring dream. My father stood in the dock, accused of some terrible but unknown crime, and I was charged with defending him. There were a dozen versions of this dream, all turned to nightmares by different mistakes on my part. Some were routine, such as realizing I’d failed to file a critical motion or to ask for a continuance, or being physically unable to get into the courtroom. Other variations were more alarming. Sometimes the prosecutor could speak but I was mute; other times everyone could speak but I was deaf, and thus powerless to save my own father. The strangest part of this whole experience was that I was an assistant district attorney—a prosecutor, not a defense lawyer. Stranger still, my father had led an exemplary life. He was a war hero and a beloved physician, without the slightest blemish on his character. Yet in the final episode of this troubling series of dreams, when my father was asked to enter his plea, he stood and opened his mouth, then began coughing uncontrollably. The bailiff handed him a white handkerchief, and when he took it away from his mouth, clotted black blood stained the cotton, like lung tissue coughed up by someone dying of consumption. After a few moments of paralyzed horror, I awakened in my bedroom, my heart thudding against my sternum, and sweating as though I’d run six miles.

  That was the last time I had the dream. As the years passed, I occasionally remembered it, but never again did it trouble my sleep. I came to believe that its significance had more to do with my sometimes harrowing experiences in law school and court than anything to do with my father. Other lawyers would occasionally mention similar nightmares, and this convinced me I was right. But then, at the age of forty-five … my nightmare came true.

  It began with a phone call.

  “MR. MAYOR, I HAVE the district attorney for you on line one.”

  I look up from my BlackBerry, mildly shocked by the identity of the caller. “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “What do you think, boss?” A dollop of sarcasm from Rose, my executive secretary. Shadrach Johnson, the district attorney of Adams County, only calls me when he has no way to avoid it.

  “Hello, Shad,” I say with as much goodwill as I can muster. “What’s going on?”

  “Strange days, Mayor,” he says in a surprisingly diffident voice. “You’re not going to believe this. I’ve got a man in my office demanding that I arrest your father for murder.”

  I set my BlackBerry on my desk. Surely this is some sort of joke, a prank set up by the DA to pay me back for what he perceives as my many sins against him. “Shad, I don’t have time for this. Seriously. What do you need?”

  “I wouldn’t play games about something like this, Penn. This guy isn’t a random citizen. He’s an attorney from Chicago. And he means business.”

  Chicago? “Who’s Dad supposed to have killed?”

  “A sixty-five-year-old woman named Viola Turner. Do you know that name?”

  Viola Turner. “I don’t think so.”

  “Take a minute.”

  After a disjointed moment of confusion, a Proustian rush of scents and images flashes though my brain. With the tang of rubbing alcohol in my nose, I see a tall, dark-skinned woman who looks very much like Diahann Carroll playing Julia on TV in the late 1960s, her white nurse’s cap fitted perfectly into diligently straightened black hair, her bright, intelligent eyes set in a café au lait face. Nurse Viola. I never saw Viola Turner after I was eight years old, yet this image remains startlingly true. Viola administered my tetanus and penicillin shots when I was a boy, and held my hand while my father stitched up my knees after I ripped them open on the street. During these stressful episodes, I almost never cried, and now I remember why. While Dad hooked that curved needle through my torn skin, Viola would chant or sing softly to me in a language I had never heard. My father later told me this was Creole French, which only confused me. I’d taken French in elementary school, but Nurse Viola’s songs resembled nothing I had heard within the walls of St. Stephen’s Prep. Only now do I realize that Viola’s gift for empathy and her exotic voice must have imprinted her indelibly in my young mind.

  “I don’t understand,” I say softly. “I thought she lived far off somewhere. L.A. or—”

  “C
hicago,” Shad finishes. “For the past thirty-seven years.”

  A rush of dread overpowers my initial skepticism. “Shad, what the hell’s going on?”

  “As far as I understand it, several months ago, Mrs. Turner was diagnosed with lung cancer. Terminal. Her treatment didn’t go well. A few weeks ago, she decided to come home to Natchez to die.”

  “After thirty-seven years?”

  “Happens all the time, brother. Black folk might have run from the South as fast as they could when they were young, but they miss it when they get old. Don’t you know that?”

  Shad’s down-home soul brother voice is an act; a Mississippi-born African-American, he lost his drawl a month after his parents moved him north to Chicago to attend prep school.

  “The son,” he goes on, “whose name is Lincoln Turner, says his mother worked as a nurse for your papa back in the sixties. Anyway, after Viola came back here, Dr. Cage started treating her at home. Or at her sister’s house, rather. The sister never left Natchez. Her name is Revels—Cora Revels. She never got married. So Viola started out a Revels, too. That’s a famous black surname, you know? First black man to serve in the U.S. Senate.”

  “But Dad’s not even working right now. He’s taking time off to recover from his heart attack.”

  “Well, he’s apparently been making house calls on his old nurse. For the past several weeks, at least. The victim’s sister verifies that.”

  The victim. Christ. “Keep going.”

  “According to Cora Revels—and to Viola’s son—your father and Mrs. Turner had some sort of pact between them.”

  “What kind of pact?”

  “You know what kind,” Shad says in his lawyer-to-lawyer voice. “An agreement that before things got too bad, your father would help the old lady pass without too much suffering.” Shad’s voice carries the certainty of an attorney who has seen most things in his time.