Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“The boy’s name was Jesse?” I flash back to a black man speaking through burn-scarred lips: I knew your mama pretty well.

“Yes.”

“Jesse Billups?”

At last her eyes focus on mine. “Yes. He was in love with me.”

“My God…Mom, I talked to him the other day.”

“How did he look?”

“All right, I guess. He seemed to have a lot of anger in him.”

“I’m sure he does, after what happened to him in the war. He used to be handsome, believe it or not. I did what I could for him. He has the best job on the island now.”

Jesus. “That’s not saying much, is it?”

She shrugs as if it hardly matters now. “The day my cousin saw us, he told his father. And his father told my father.”

A chill goes through me. “What happened?”

“Daddy went down to Jesse’s parents’ house that night, dragged Jesse outside, and beat him within an inch of his life.”

Jesse Billups’s words come back to me with perfect clarity: Dr. Kirkland beat me once when I was a boy. Beat me bad. But I’d have done the same thing in his place, so we’re square enough on that…

Tears are running down my mother’s face. I grab a paper towel from the counter and hand it to her.

“Mom?”

She laughs strangely, a note of hysteria in her voice. “I thought Daddy did that because Jesse was black. You see? And I was miserable afterward. I was like you. I wouldn’t talk. And Daddy got madder and madder at me. Finally he demanded to know why I wouldn’t say anything.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That he’d beaten Jesse like the boy had raped me or something, but the truth was that I’d wanted Jesse to touch me.”

I try to imagine my grandfather hearing this from his daughter in 1966. “What happened?”

“Daddy’s face went white. We were staying in a suite at the Peabody in Memphis. He yanked me up from my chair and dragged me back to their bedroom. He took off his belt and whipped me till I bled, and then he kept on whipping me.”

“What was Grandmama doing?”

Mom shakes her head as if genuinely curious. “I don’t know. She disappeared.”

The way you disappeared when I was a girl and Grandpapa was angry. …

“The thing is,” Mom goes on, “the thing I forgot and didn’t remember until my dream last night was that he stripped me naked before he did it. He stripped me. My own father threw me on the bed and tore my clothes off. And while he hit me, he yelled things. Vile things. He called me a slut…a dirty whore. I didn’t even know what those words meant. But the worst part was his face. His eyes.”

“What about them?”

“It wasn’t just anger I saw in them, Cat.”

A rush of terrifying images flashes through my mind. Wild, unseeing eyes and a raging mouth. “What was it?”

Mom closes her eyes and shakes her head, like some primitive woman afraid to name a demon.

“Mama? What did you see in his eyes?”

Her answer is a fearful whisper. “Jealousy.”

A shudder passes through my body, leaving fear in its wake. But somewhere beneath the fear is a feeling of elation. She knows, I realize. More than that, she knows she knows. …

“Do you have any memories of Grandpapa touching you?”

She shakes her head. “But you were right about what you said about my problems. There are things I can’t do. I was such a disappointment to your father. He was very understanding. And I wanted to do the things he wanted…they were normal things. But I just couldn’t. If Luke got behind me, my throat would close up, and I’d feel like I had to go to the bathroom right that second.”

“Urinate, you mean?”

She blushes deep red. “No. And if he tried, I felt terrible pain. I don’t want to talk about that, all right? I can’t. I’m not sure what I’m actually remembering and what I might be making up. But one thing I do remember…” She crushes the paper towel into a wet ball and wipes her eyes, but it won’t stop the fresh tears. “The way Ann looked at me. In the evenings, especially, when Mom was gone to play bridge. Ann would go into Daddy’s study to keep him occupied. And I would stay in my room. I knew she hated going in there. I knew she was afraid of him. I was, too, down deep, though I wouldn’t have admitted that to anyone. Not even to myself. How could I be afraid of my daddy? He loved me and took care of me. But whenever Ann left me to spend time with him, she looked at me the way you’d look at something you were trying to protect.”

Mom’s chin is quivering like a little girl’s. I’m not sure she can endure much more of this. “And now,” she says, “now I know that’s exactly what she was doing. Protecting me from him. She was only four years older, but…dear God, I can’t stand to think about it.”

She crumples over the table, sobbing uncontrollably. I lean down over her and hug her as tight as I can. “I love you, Mom. I love you so much.”

“I don’t know how…at least Ann tried to protect me. But I didn’t protect you…my own baby.”

“You couldn’t,” I whisper. “You couldn’t even protect yourself.”

She sits up and grits her teeth, obviously furious at herself.

“Mom, you didn’t even know what had happened to you. Not consciously. I don’t think you knew until last night.”

“But how is that possible?” Her eyes implore me for an answer. “ Ann knew. Why didn’t I?”

“I think we all shut it out, because to admit what he did to us would have been admitting that he didn’t love us. That he wasn’t taking care of us for us…but for him. To use. ”

Mom takes my hand in hers and squeezes it in a clawlike grip. “What are you going to do, Cat?”

“I’m going to make him admit what he did.”

She shakes her head, her eyes filled with terror. “He’ll never do that!”

“He’ll have no choice. I’m going to prove that he did it. And then I’m going to see him punished for it.”

“He’ll kill you, Cat. He will.”

I start to deny it, but Mom is right. Grandpapa sterilized his ten-year-old daughter so that he could continue to molest her after puberty without fear of pregnancy. He murdered her future children for a few brief years of pleasure. And in the end that drove her mad.

He murdered my father to protect himself.

He wouldn’t hesitate to kill me for the same reason.

“Did he ever say anything like that to you?” I ask. “Did he threaten to harm you?”

“No,” Mom says, her voice tiny. But suddenly her eyes jerk in their sockets. “I’ll kill your mother,” she hisses. “I’ll send Mama down the river and she’ll never come back. Just like the little niggers who disappeared.”

Mom is speaking in the half whisper of a terrified child, and the sound leaves me cold. I hug her again in reassurance. “I know you’re afraid of him. But I’m not. The best protection we have is the truth. And the truth is in Daddy’s coffin.”

Her eyes flicker. “Why do you think that? What can Luke’s body tell you?”

“I’m not sure. It may be that Lena is the answer. In my dream, Daddy was trying to tell me something about Lena, and I have to find out what it is.”

“Do you really believe that? That he was trying to reach you?”

“No. I think I saw something on the night Daddy died. Saw it and then blocked it out. But I won’t know what it was until they open that coffin and I look inside. Maybe not even then. It might take a repeat autopsy. But, Mom…I can’t do any of this without your help.”

She looks down at the table, fear battling something else in her eyes. “Luke was a sweet boy,” she murmurs. “Whatever he went through overseas hurt him badly, but it was our family that finished him off.”