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?”
She looks at Michael, then back at me. “No, I don’t.”
A low humming has started in my head. “What is it, Pearlie? What do you know?”
She looks as serious as I’ve ever seen her. “I know everything. How much do you want to know?”
“Same as you.”
She looks doubtfully at Michael. “Some things it’s best not to know, Doctor. Why don’t you go get the car?”
Michael looks down at me, and I nod.
As he walks away, Pearlie steps in front of the wheelchair and fixes me in her gaze with an old woman’s severity. “After you left me on the island, I stayed with Louise Butler awhile. But I was nervous as a cat. I couldn’t rest. So I took me a walk. I wound up on the other side of the lake. At the big house.”
She’s talking about my grandfather’s lodge, the showplace designed by A. Hays Town.
“Before I knew what I was doing, I was tearing that place apart. I was still looking for the pictures, see? I knew they had to be somewhere.” She sighs and looks at the ground. “Well, I found ’em. They was inside a hollow book, just one out of hundreds in that library down there. And they were bad, baby. Lots worse than the two of you and Ann in the swimming pool.”
“What did they show?”
Pearlie wrinkles her nose as though smelling rotten meat. “Everything. It made me sick to look at them. I went to use the bathroom, and I was crying so bad I couldn’t stop. And then I heard something.”
“Grandpapa?”
“No. Jesse.”
“Jesse Billups? He saw the pictures?”
Pearlie nods, her face filled with anxiety. “And they wasn’t just pictures of any old children. Some of them were from the island. Jesse recognized them. Some of them belonged to people still living down there.”
“My God. What did he do?”
“He cursed me. Then he took the pictures and left with them.”
“What happened, Pearlie? What did he do with them?”
“He showed them to some other men down there. Some of the daddies of them children. See, the women had known about Dr. Kirkland, just like I guessed. Some of them, anyway. But they never let their menfolk know. But now the men
I close my eyes, almost afraid to hear the end of the story.
“You sure you want to hear this, baby?”
“Yes.”
“When Dr. Kirkland got there, Jesse and the other men put him in a truck and carried him round to Big Leon’s house.”
“Who’s Big Leon?”
“One of the men on the island. He spent twenty years on Angola Farm. Jesse showed Leon the pictures and told him what Dr. Kirkland had done. Then he told Leon, ‘You can have him for two hours. Just don’t mark him up none.’”
“Oh, my God.”
As Pearlie nods, her eyes glow with fierce knowledge. “Two hours later, they went back and got him. Then they did what that Billy Neal was gonna do to you and me.”
“What?”
“Tied him to the steering wheel of his car and ran it off the bridge.”
“After a while, one of them swum down and took the rope off Dr. Kirkland’s hands.” Pearlie is watching me closely, waiting to see my reaction. “You said you wanted to know.”
“Did you see Grandpapa at all during any of this?”
“No. All I know is what Jesse told me.”
My mind is filled with one question. “Did he beg for his life at the end?”
“No, baby. He cursed them till his head went under the water. Wasn’t nothing gentle left in that old man. He’ll curse the devil hisself when he gets to hell.”
I suddenly feel exhausted.
“What you gonna do now?” Pearlie asks.
“I don’t know. Wait for my wound to heal, I guess. The bullet wound, I mean. The other could take my whole life.”
“I meant about the house. Malmaison.”
