Natchez Burning Read online

  Sixty-five’s not that old. “How did this even wind up in your office? She was terminal, you said. The police don’t usually get called in these situations.”

  “I know. It’s the son pushing this thing. He seems to feel your father crossed whatever line exists, and Turner’s a lawyer. He’s sitting outside my office right now.”

  “Where’s my father? He hasn’t been arrested, has he?”

  “Not yet. But that’s what Turner wants.”

  “How does he think Dad crossed the line?”

  “Turner was driving down here from Chicago when it happened. His mother died thirty minutes before he got here, so he didn’t get any last visit with her. He believes his mother could easily have lasted another day, or maybe even a few weeks. I’m hoping he’ll calm down after the reality sinks in.”

  A faint buzzing has started in my head, the kind you’re not sure belongs to a honeybee or a yellow jacket. “Are you, Shad?”

  “You’re goddamn right. I haven’t forgotten what you’ve got on me. Pushing this case has no upside whatever for me.”

  At least Shad hasn’t lost his instinct for self-preservation. “What else does the sister say?”

  “Not much. I think Cora Revels is sort of simple-minded, to tell you the truth.”

  “Well, what are you going to do? Did you say the son is talking about a murder charge?”

  “At first he was, but then he went online and checked the Mississippi statutes. We have an assisted suicide law, in case you didn’t know. Now he’s asking that your father be charged under that.”

  “What’s the penalty?”

  “Ten-year maximum.”

  “Fuck! That’s a life sentence for my father.”

  “I know, I know. Take it easy, Penn. There’s no way it’s going to come to that. I made a couple of calls before I phoned you. Cases like this hardly ever make it to trial. When they do, it’s usually nonphysicians who are charged, not doctors. Unless you have a nut like Kevorkian, which your father obviously isn’t.”

  It’s odd hearing Shad Johnson talk this way, because under normal circumstances, the DA would be thrilled to deliver any news that caused me grief. But eight weeks ago, I gained some unexpected leverage over him, and our relationship skidded far outside the bounds of normalcy.

  “Still … this doesn’t sound good.”

  “That’s why I called. You need to talk to your father fast, find out exactly what happened last night. I want to reassure you, okay? But I have to tell you, the assisted suicide statute is pretty broadly written. Technically your father could be convicted just for providing a lethal dose of narcotics, and from what little I know already, he did more than that.”

  “A minute ago you were telling me not to worry.”

  “I’m just saying take it seriously. The chance of this going to trial is small. We just need to find a way to nip it in the bud.”

  “I hear you.”

  “As far as an arrest, I honestly don’t think there’s a cop or a deputy in town who would serve a warrant on your father.”

  Shad is probably right about this.

  “Call me as soon as you talk to your dad. I can’t stall Lincoln Turner forever. Call my mobile, not my office. You still have the number?”

  “I always know how to find you, Shad.”

  The DA clicks off.

  “Viola Turner,” I murmur, setting down my telephone with a shaking hand.

  The district attorney has given me a gift, but only out of self-interest. During one of the most harrowing nightmares this town ever experienced, I discovered a digital photograph of Shadrach Johnson in the act of committing a career-ending felony. And though I gave Shad what I told him was the original SD card containing that image (in exchange for his not running for reelection), he can never be sure that I didn’t keep a copy, and that I won’t use it against him if he pushes me too far.

  I glance around my office while my heart tries to find its rhythm again. My gaze wanders over the framed photographs on the wall to my left. Most are family snaps spanning the years from 1960 through the last tumultuous months, which have been filled with work generated by Hurricane Katrina, whose fury reached Natchez two days after it slammed into the Gulf Coast. But centered among the photos of New Orleans refugees and downed trees is a more formal portrait, shot seven years ago by a Houston photographer: the last pristine photograph of my family before my own personal hurricane hit. In this photo I am thirty-eight years old; my wife, Sarah, is thirty-six and vitally, startlingly alive; seated between us is our daughter, Annie, four years old and smiling like a sprite sprung from the dewy grass. My eyes are drawn to Sarah today, for just before this photograph was taken, we’d learned that she had breast cancer, stage IV, already metastasized. Above her smiling lips I see the knowledge of mortality in her eyes, an awareness that only self-deception could suppress, and Sarah was never one for denial. My eyes, too, are freighted with the terrible knowledge that happiness, like life itself, is ineffably fragile. Only Annie’s eyes are clear in the picture, but soon even she would sense the soul-crushing weight pressing down on the adults around her.

  This portrait always triggers a flood of memories, both good and bad, but what comes clearest today is the night of Sarah’s death—an experience I rarely revisit, and one I’ve never fully recounted to a living soul. In those final weeks I saw something unfamiliar enter my wife’s eyes—fear. But on the last night it left her, washed out by peace and acceptance. Only the next day did I understand why, and I’ve never asked my father to confirm my judgment. But now my mind superimposes Viola Turner’s beautiful young face upon that of my wife. Viola probably suffered as terribly as Sarah did as death approached (I watched a strong uncle die of lung cancer, and it left me forever shaken). But what I know in this moment is simple: whatever Viola Turner’s son believes my father might have done to his mother last night, he could be right. For where assisted suicide is concerned, one thing is certain:

  Dad has done it before.

  “MOM, IS DAD HOME?”

  “No,” says Peggy Cage, her voice instantly taut with concern. “Is something the matter?”

  Instinct says not to reveal too much to my mother. “No, I just wanted to ask him something.”

  “Are you sure?” Definite stress in her voice. “You don’t sound like yourself, Penn.”

  Trying to fool my mother is a challenge akin to flying a 747 beneath NORAD coastal radar. “There’s a lot going on in City Hall. Do you know where Dad is?”

  “I think he’s at his office, working on records. Penn, the last thing you need to do is worry your father over something. His angina hasn’t let up for days, and I know he’s taken at least one nitro already this morning.”

  I’d like to ask Mom what time Dad left the house this morning, and also whether he was home last night, but my gut tells me to ask him first. “Seriously, it’s nothing major. I just need to ask him something about his retirement plan.”

  “Well, I keep up with most of that information. You know your father. I’m sure I can help you.”

  Christ. “No, I need to talk to him.”

  A long pause. “All right, then. Try the office.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  Before she can say anything else, I click off. But instead of dialing my father’s office, I set the phone on the cradle and leave my hand on it. For the past few weeks, I’ve assumed that my father, after nearly fifty years of practicing medicine, has been dealing with his traumatic but inevitable decision to retire. Seven weeks ago he suffered a myocardial infarction that he survived only by virtue of luck and heroic medical intervention. Had not my mother, one of the most compulsively prepared humans on the planet, insisted that Dad keep portable defibrillators both in their house and at his clinic, my father would probably be dead now. He always argued that defibrillators only helped in certain types of heart attacks, so keeping them around didn’t justify the cost. Thus, no one was more surprised than Dad when, after dropping to the floor in h
is office, he was brought back to life by his young partner, Drew Elliott, using the defib unit Mom had demanded be always ready to hand.

  Despite this brush with death—not his first, by far—my father has been driving to his office occasionally to catch up on charts, and making trips to the nursing homes to check on special patients during his “convalescence.” Dad and Mom have been arguing about his driving alone, but you can’t tell a doctor anything, so I decided not to intervene. His continued work has surprised no one, since despite several chronic illnesses—plus multiple heart and vascular surgeries—Dad has always soldiered on with a determination so relentless that his patients and colleagues have come to see it as normal. Chalk that up to the work ethic of a man born in 1932. I’d hoped that his desultory dabbling in medicine over these past weeks was part of the weaning process, leading slowly but surely toward full disengagement. But if Shad Johnson is right, Dad has been actively treating at least one patient during his recuperation period, and going to great lengths to do it.

  “Miss Viola,” I murmur, wondering when I last spoke that name before today. “My God.”

  According to the district attorney, my perfect vision of a nurse came back to Natchez after thirty-seven years in Chicago not to retire, as so many Natchez natives, both black and white, do—but to die. If Dad has been treating Viola, he has his reasons. And if her death was hastened a little in the name of lessening pain or maintaining dignity, he had reasons for that, too. I’d like nothing better than to leave all this between my father and his former nurse. Unfortunately, I don’t have that option today.

  Lifting the phone, I dial the private number of my dad’s office. Sometimes he answers this line (if he’s between patients, for example), but today it’s answered by a warm, alto female voice I recognize as that of Melba Price, my father’s head nurse. Much like Viola in the 1960s, Melba is my father’s right hand in the clinic, and like every other woman who’s occupied that position since 1963, she is black. I’ve never questioned the reason for this, and now that I do, I see one obvious possibility. Since more than half my father’s patients are black, perhaps he feels that black nurses make those patients more comfortable in clinical situations. Or maybe he just likes black women.

  “Melba, this is Penn.”

  “Lord, Penn, have you seen your daddy this morning?”

  “No, but I need to.”

  “He’s not here, and I haven’t seen him. Nobody has.”

  “He didn’t leave word where he’d be?”

  “No. But some of the things on his desk have been moved. I’ve wondered if he came in last night and worked on his records like he does sometimes.”

  Since Melba occupies the position that Viola herself once did, I wonder if she shares the confidence my father placed in Viola. “Melba, I’m calling about a patient. A special patient. I know about the HIPAA rules and all that, but this has to do with Dad’s personal welfare. Do you know if he’s been treating a woman named Viola Turner? She has lung cancer.”

  I hear a short inspiration, then a long sigh. “I wish I could help you, Penn. But that’s your daddy’s business. I can’t get mixed up in that. I’m not sure you should, either.”

  Oh, boy. “I don’t want to, Melba. But I don’t have any choice. Viola’s dead, and there may be legal repercussions because of it. Problems involving Dad. Do you understand?”

  “You need to talk to your father. Have you tried his cell phone?”

  “He never answers his cell, you know that.”

  “Try it anyway. He answers it sometimes.”

  I thank Melba and hang up, then dial Dad’s cell phone, a number I use so rarely I can barely remember it. The phone kicks me straight to voice mail, which hasn’t even been set up to accept messages.

  Man plans, God laughs, reads a framed cross-stitch on my wall, in both English and Yiddish. My first literary agent sent it to me. Placed around this proverb are framed advertisements from my mayoral campaign against Shadrach Johnson. If you want a mayor for black people, vote for the other fellow. If you want a mayor for white people, vote for the other fellow. If you want a mayor for all the people, vote Penn Cage. And this one: Historic Change for a Historic Town. Then my personal favorite: I don’t owe anybody in Natchez a favor. I owe everybody.

  I wrote those slogans myself, but two years after being elected mayor of my hometown by a wide margin, I have inescapably failed to deliver the changes I promised. The reasons are legion, but at bottom I blame myself. Two months ago (after two years of beating my head against a wall of indifference), I decided to resign the office and return to writing novels. Then God laughed, and a series of shattering events suggested I might not have the moral right to abdicate the responsibility I’d so blithely taken on. My parents, my daughter, a good friend, and my fiancée reinforced fate’s suggestion, and my father’s heart attack finally crystallized my resolve to serve out my term.

  In the weeks since, I have worked like a man possessed, dividing my time between cleaning up the fallout from the near sinking of a riverboat casino below the Natchez bluff and remaking our local government by forming improbable alliances, calling in favors, and raising money from the unlikeliest of sources. Working at my shoulder throughout this period has been my fiancée, Caitlin Masters, publisher of the Natchez Examiner. And pulsing beneath all this activity have been the preparations for our wedding, scheduled to take place twelve days from now, on Christmas Eve. Ever since the district attorney’s call, an itch of intuition has told me that whatever my father did last night is ultimately going to require the postponement of my wedding. I shudder to think of how my fiancée and my daughter would react to this eventuality.

  “Mr. Mayor,” says Rose, “I’ve got your father on line one.”

  Relief surges through me. “Thanks.” I press the button on the phone base. “Hello?”

  “Penn?” In a single syllable, my father’s powerful baritone inspires calming confidence. “Peggy told me you were looking for me.”

  “Dad, where are you?”

  “Just running some errands.”

  Errands! With my father, that could mean anything from shuffling through old bookstores to searching out ammunition for a Civil War–vintage musket. Before I blunder into a conversation about Viola Turner’s death, my lawyerly instincts kick in with surprising force. I spent most of my legal career as a prosecutor, but I’ve always known the first rule of defense lawyers: never ask your client if he did it. Even those who protest their innocence will be putting their lawyer in an untenable position. For if your client gives you one version of the truth, you cannot knowingly put him on the stand later and listen to him tell another. And no defense attorney wants to be bound by something as unforgiving as the truth.

  The most alarming thing about this train of thought is that I can’t remember a single occasion when my father lied to me. So why am I planning for the possibility now? Paranoia? Or is the knowledge that Shad Johnson is an unscrupulous man with no love for my family forcing me into such pragmatism? “Dad, is anybody with you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I got a call a couple of minutes ago from the district attorney. I don’t want you to say anything until I finish telling you what he said. All right?”

  He hesitates before replying. “All right.”

  As concisely as possible, I brief him on my conversation with Shad Johnson. “Viola’s son is still in Natchez,” I conclude. “He’s pressing Shad to charge you with assisted suicide. At first he asked for murder, but he’s since checked the Mississippi statutes. Now, I’m not asking you to tell me what happened at Cora Revels’s house, or even if you were there last night. But will you tell me if you have been treating Viola?”

  Dad waits a considerable time before he answers. “I have.”

  “Does anybody know that?”

  “Melba knows. And Cora Revels, of course.”

  “Mom?”

  Another pause. “No. A local pharmacist knows. Maybe some people who lived near the R
evels house. I’ve stopped by there every couple of days, sometimes once a day, for the past six weeks. People out that way know my car. Viola was in bad shape, son.”

  “Lung cancer?”

  “That’s right. It metastasized some time ago.”

  The very word metastasized brings back all the horror of my wife’s illness. Almost against my will, I ask for details. “Were you at Cora Revels’s house last night?”

  “I’d prefer not to discuss it, Penn.”

  “I understand. But with a family member pushing for criminal charges, you’re going to have to say something if you want to avert a very public mess.”

  Dad pauses again, and I can hear him breathing. “I’m not concerned about that. Whatever happened between Viola and me last night occurred between a patient and her physician. I have nothing to say to Shad Johnson about it—or to you or anybody else. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but there it is.”

  This statement leaves me speechless for several seconds. “Dad, the penalty for assisted suicide is ten years. Even without prison, you could lose your medical license.”

  “I realize that. But I still won’t talk about it. If Shad Johnson wants to arrest me, he can do it. I’m not hard to find.”

  Jesus Christ. “You and I should speak face-to-face.”

  “There’s no point, Penn. I have nothing else to say about the matter.”

  “Silence isn’t an option! Viola’s son is an attorney. If he keeps pushing the DA, and there’s corroborating evidence, you could well be tried in criminal court. Believe it or not, Shad Johnson would like to avoid that prospect. But to help him, we’re going to have to give him your side of the story.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Dad says, neatly separating his fate from my own in a tone I recognize all too well.

  “Refusal to talk about what happened is going to be viewed as an admission of guilt.”

  “Don’t American citizens have the right to remain silent?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I don’t think the Miranda rules have the word but in them, Penn. The Constitution, either, as I recall.”