Greg Iles - Blood Memory

Everyone seems content to pretend that my grandfather’s death was an accident. That he drove off the edge of the bridge to DeSalle Island in bright sunlight at midday seems to escape everyone’s attention. A few people have mentioned his “recent” stroke-which happened a year ago-and recalled his doctor forbidding him to drive. In fact, they say, it was the untimely death of his driver-Billy Neal-that caused my grandfather to drive down to the island alone to deal with some urgent business matters.

The truth is much simpler.

My grandfather killed himself. He knew that his life’s foul secret was about to be exposed. That all of his power and money would be insufficient to stop one of his victims-me-from finally revealing his depravity to the world. And his pride could not abide that. He probably saw himself as choosing a manly death, even a noble one. But I know him for what he was. He was what he once called my father in front of me when I was a little girl. Yellow. When all was said and done, William Kirkland, MD, was a stinking coward.

I’m here today because I want to see him lowered into the ground. I need that closure. When you’ve lived with a demon all your life, and you somehow escape him, it’s important to see him buried. If old Mr. McDonough would have let me, I’d have walked into the prep room and driven a stake through my grandfather’s heart.

And yet…he didn’t begin life as a monster. He began it as an innocent little boy who lost his parents in a car wreck on the way to his baptism. It was only later-I’ll never know when-that the poison with which he infected me was passed into him. Decades ago, on some dark and silent country night, his innocence was stolen, and a transformation began that would transform the lives of countless others, including mine.

One mystery that will probably remain unsolved is why Grandpapa was buying up my father’s sculptures. Was he driven by guilt over the life he had stolen so long ago? Or was he on some half-mad quest to understand the creative spark that he had snuffed out, creativity being the one talent he had never really possessed? Perhaps time or some as-yet-undiscovered document will give me an answer someday.

The burial service is mercifully brief, as the sky is threatening rain. The mourners quickly return to their cars, and the long line begins to leave the cemetery.

When all of them have gone, a solitary figure remains beside the grave.

Pearlie Washington.

She’s wearing a black dress and a huge black hat, but I know her bony figure as well as I know my mother’s. Probably better. Has she stayed behind to mourn my grandfather alone? Or Ann? Or has she stayed because she knows what’s about to happen in the DeSalle family plot?

As Michael wheels me down the hill, Pearlie stands motionless, looking down at Grandpapa’s grave. As we near her, a white Dodge Caravan with ornate silver trim appears in the lane and rolls slowly to a stop near the low wall. Two men in dark suits get out, walk to the back of the van, and unload a bronze casket. They settle it onto a collapsible gurney, then work the gurney across the grass to the corner of the plot, where a green tarp is staked out over a long hole in the ground.

The headstone above the tarp reads LUKE FERRY, 1951–1981.

As Michael rolls me through the gate, Pearlie walks over to me and touches my hand. “They doing what I think they’re doing?”

“Yes.”

I see pain in her eyes. “Why you didn’t tell me about it? I loved that boy, too.”

“I wanted to be alone with him. I’m sorry, Pearlie.”

“You want me to go?”

“No.”

The old woman watches the men strip the tarp from the ground. As they fold it up, soft rain begins to fall.

“Where’s your mama?” Pearlie asks.

“She said she couldn’t stand to bury her husband a second time.”

Pearlie sighs heavily. “She’s probably right.”

Michael touches my elbow and leans down to my ear. “I’m going to give you a few minutes.”

I take his hand and squeeze it. “Thanks. I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.”

As he walks away, Pearlie turns and watches him leave the family plot. “He seems like a good man.”

“He is.”

“Does he know you carrying another man’s child?”

I look up at the curious brown eyes. “Yes.”

“And he still wants to see you?”

“Yes.”

She shakes her head as though at some rare and wonderful sight. “That’s a man you need to stick with, right there.”

I feel my mouth smile. “I think you’re right.”

Pearlie takes my hand in hers and squeezes tight. “Lord, it’s about time you settled down. We been needing some babies around that old place.”

I take a deep breath and look toward Grandpapa’s grave. “I think I was waiting for him to go first.”

Pearlie nods. “Lord knows that’s right.”

Daddy’s casket lies beside the open grave now, the rain pattering against its burnished lid. Strangely, the sound doesn’t bother me at all.

“Could you open it for me now, please?” I ask.

One of the men from the funeral home takes a hex key from his pocket and begins unsealing the casket.

“What?” Pearlie gasps, her eyes filled with horror. “What you doing, girl? That’s bad luck, doing something like that!”

I shake my head. “No, it’s not.”

As the man from the funeral home lifts the coffin lid, I reach beneath my wheelchair to the luggage pocket beneath. I feel soft fur in my palm. Using all my strength, I stand and walk slowly to the coffin. My father looks just as he did the other day, like a young man sleeping on the couch after a Sunday dinner. Gritting my teeth against pain, I bend at the waist and lay Lena the Leopardess in the crook of Daddy’s elbow. Then I straighten up again.

“So you won’t be lonely,” I say softly.

Before I turn away, I take a folded piece of paper from my pocket and drop it in the casket near my father’s knee. It’s one of the drawings from the sketchbook he kept in the green bag in the barn. A charcoal rendering of Louise Butler, smiling at him with unbounded love in her eyes. Perhaps I should feel guilty for this, but I don’t. Louise probably relieved Luke Ferry of more pain than any of us in those last years. She accepted him for what he was…a profoundly wounded man.

“Good-bye, Daddy,” I murmur. “Thank you for trying.”

I turn from the casket and walk back to the wheelchair, signaling Michael as I go. He comes quickly.

“I want to see the river,” I tell him. “Will you wheel me up to Jewish Hill?”

Towering three hundred feet above the Mississippi, Jewish Hill offers the most commanding view of the river I’ve ever seen.

Michael can’t hide his dismay. “It’s raining, Cat.”

“I know. I like it. Will you come with me, Pearlie?”

“All right, baby.”

“Can you make it?” Michael asks her.

Pearlie snorts indignantly. “I may be over seventy years old, but I can still walk from Red Lick to Rodney and have strength left over for a day’s work.”

Michael laughs, apparently recognizing the names of two tiny Mississippi towns over twenty miles apart. He pushes me up the hill at a steady pace, and before long, we are staring over the mile-wide tide of river at the vast plains of the Louisiana delta.

“That’s too big to look at,” Pearlie says.

“I love it,” I say softly. “I used to come here whenever I felt trapped in this town.”

“I think you always been trapped here, until your granddaddy died.”

“You know he killed himself,” I murmur.

There’s a long silence. Then Pearlie says, “I don’t know any such thing.”

I look up at her. “Come on. You don’t really think he went off that bridge by accident?”