Greg Iles - Blood Memory

Jesse scowls and looks off into the trees.

“Was he growing dope down here?”

“He tried, but he wasn’t no good at it.”

“Did he ever deal? Drugs, I mean?”

The scarred head turns slowly left and right. “Shit, I had to get Luke’s weed for him.”

“What am I missing, then? How much time did he actually spend down here?”

“A lot. Specially in the winter. Summertime, your family was down here a lot. In deer season, Dr. Kirkland and his buddies would visit. But all the other times, Luke stayed down here.”

“What the hell did he do, if he didn’t hunt or fish?”

Jesse looks back at me, but the anger I sensed before seems to have leaked out of his pores. “He walked around a lot. Drew things in a notebook. Played a little music. Had him a guitar down here. I taught him some bottleneck stuff.”

I faintly remember a guitar in my father’s barn studio, but I don’t remember him playing it. “Was he any good?”

“He was all right, for a white boy. He could bend a note. Had some blues in him.”

“Well, did he-”

The ring of a cell phone stops me, but it’s not mine. Jesse takes a Nokia from his pocket and answers. He listens for a bit, then says he’ll get right on it and hangs up.

“I got to go,” he says.

“Right now?”

“Yep. Gotta get some supplies from the mainland in case the water covers the bridge. S’posed to rain a couple of days straight, all along the river. We better get moving.”

“But I have some more questions.”

“We can talk on the way.” He walks over to his horse, unties him, and leads him over to where I’m standing. Hardass flicks his tail at a buzzing horsefly. “I’m gonna get on, then pull you up behind me. You just stay clear of his hindquarters.”

“I will.”

Jesse puts a foot into the stirrup and expertly mounts the horse. Then he takes his foot out of the stirrup so I can get a foothold. When I do, he takes my left arm and pulls me effortlessly up behind his saddle. “You can talk, but hang on while you do.” He puts the horse into a canter on the grassy shoulder of the gravel road. His broad shoulders are wet with sweat, and pink scar tissue dots the back of his neck.

“You work for my grandfather, right?” I ask.

“That’s right.”

“What do you think about him?”

“He’s a tough old man.”

“Do you like him?”

“Dr. Kirkland pays my wages. ‘Like’ got nothing to do with it.”

I have a feeling the relationship between Jesse Billups and my grandfather isn’t simple at all. “What are you not telling me, Jesse?”

I can almost feel him smile. “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, I guess.”

I want to ask more about this, but before I can, I see a woman riding toward us on a bicycle. The gravel road makes her work difficult. She looks as if she might skid and fall at any moment.

“Mother fucker, ” mutters Jesse.

“Who’s that?”

“Don’t pay her no mind. She half-crazy.”

The woman slows as she nears us, but Jesse spurs his horse as though he means to pass her without a word.

“Wait!” cries the woman.

“Stop,” I tell Jesse.

He doesn’t.

“Goddamn you, Jesse Billups!” shouts the woman. “Don’t you run from me!”

I reach around Jesse and grab for the reins. “Stop this horse!”

He curses, then stops the horse on a dime. “You gonna wish we hadn’t.”

As agitated as the woman below me looks, I expect her to start shouting accusations of battery or paternity at Jesse Billups. But now that the horse has stopped, she acts as if Jesse doesn’t exist. She has eyes only for me.

“Are you Catherine Ferry?” she asks.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Louise Butler. I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Your daddy.”

“Did you know him?”

“I surely did.”

Swinging my left leg over the horse’s flanks, I drop to the gravel beside Louise Butler. She’s about forty and very pretty, with the same milk-chocolate skin Pearlie has. She’s watching me with what looks like suspicion in her large eyes.

“If you stay here and jaw,” says Jesse, “you gonna have to get back to your car on your own. I gots to go.”

“I know where my car is. I can get back to it.”

Jesse kicks his horse and leaves us in a small cloud of dust.

I look at Louise and wait, expecting some explanation of her sudden appearance. But she only stares at the sky.

“Gonna rain soon,” she comments. “I got a place by the lake. We’d better start back that way.”

Without waiting for an answer, she turns her bike around and starts pushing it down the road. I watch her for a few seconds, noting her one-piece shift and Keds sneakers. Then I trot forward and fall in beside her, my feet scrunching the gravel as I walk.

“How did you know I was here?” I ask.

“Henry told me,” she says, not looking over at me.

“So you knew my father.”

Now she turns to me. “You might not like what I’m gonna say, Miss Catherine.”

“Please call me Cat.”

She laughs softly. “Kitty Cat.”

A chill goes through me. My father called me Kitty Cat when I was very small. He was the only one who did. “You did know him. Please tell me anything you can.”

“I don’t want to make you feel bad, honey.”

“You can’t make me feel any worse than I already do today.”

“Don’t be so sure. Did Jesse tell you anything bad about Luke?”

“Not really. He might have, but you came along.”

Louise wrinkles her nose. “You can’t trust Jesse. Not about Luke.”

“I thought they were friends.”

“They was for a while.”

“What happened?”

“Me.”

“You?”

She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Darling, Luke was my man for seven years. From 1974 right up to the night he died. And a lot of people didn’t like that.”

I stop in my tracks. This woman can’t be more than ten years older than I. And she’s telling me she was my father’s lover?

Louise walks on, then realizes I’m no longer beside her. She stops and turns back. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I just wanted to talk to you about him, see if I could see him in you.”

“Can you?”

She smiles sadly. “He’s looking out of your eyes at me right now. Every line of your face got a shadow of him in it.”

“Louise, what-”

Before I can finish my sentence, the clouds open up. Fat raindrops slap the cream-colored dust on the shoulder of the road, making dark circles of mud. The circles multiply too fast to follow, and then Louise and I are running down the road like little girls, she pushing her bike at first, then jumping onto it and riding beside me.

“You’re in good shape!” she cries as the shacks of the little village come into sight. “My house ain’t far, but it’s past this bunch here.”

We race past the gray shacks, their porches empty now, and turn down a muddy path that parallels the lake.

“There it is!” Louise shouts.

I hold my hand over my eyes to shield them from the rain. In the distance I see a shack that’s not gray like the others, but bright blue, like a shack in the Caribbean. Now that I know where I’m going, I sprint ahead of the bike. My feet have better purchase in the mud than her bicycle, and I beat Louise to her porch.

Watching her ride the last few yards, I realize that I’m about to hear things about my father that he never meant for me to know. Does this beautiful stranger know things that might explain what Grandpapa told me today? Or at least confirm it?