Blood Memory

He squeezes my hands harder. “Those aren’t nightmares, dear. Those are memories. I’ve said some bad things about Luke, I know. And God help me, I’ve lied to you as well. Hopefully for a good reason. But one thing I told you, you can take as holy writ. Your father died fighting to save your life. He probably did save your life. No man could have done more.”

I close my eyes, but the tears come anyway. I’ve always felt a certain amount of shame about my father’s war-related problems. To hear now that he died a hero…it’s almost too much. “Who did it, Grandpapa? Who killed him?”

“No one knows.”

“Did the police really look?”

“You’d better believe it. I rode them hard. But they couldn’t come up with anything.”

“I can,” I say quietly. “I can take apart that crime scene with tools that didn’t even exist about back then.”

Grandpapa is watching me with grief in his face. “I’m sure you can, Catherine. But to what end? What if you were to find DNA from an unknown person? There were never even any suspects. Are you going to take blood samples from every black man in the city of Natchez? That could be five thousand people. And the killer could easily be dead now. He could have left town years ago.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t try to find out who murdered my father?”

Grandpapa closes his eyes. Just as I decide he has fallen asleep, he opens them again and turns them on me with startling intensity. “Catherine, you’ve spent your adult life focused on death. Now you’re about to cross the line into full-blown obsession. I want my granddaughter to live. I want you to have a family, children…”

I’m shaking my head violently, not because I don’t want those things, but because I simply can’t think about them now. And because I already have a child on the way-

“That’s what Luke would want,” Grandpapa finishes. “Not some belated quest for justice with no chance for success.”

“It’s not just justice I want.”

“What, then?”

“The man who killed my father is the only person in the world who knows what happened to me in that room.”

At last my grandfather is silent.

“Something happened to me that night. Something bad. And I have to know what it was.”

Grandpapa is saying something else, but I can’t make out specific words. His voice seems to come from across a windy field. Pulling one hand loose, I yank open the door and try to climb out. He tries to hold me by my other hand, but I relax my fingers and the hand slips free. My feet hit the ground, and I start running toward the slave quarters.

Sensing something amiss, Billy Neal jumps out of the Lincoln and blocks my path.

“Get away from me, you shit!” I scream.

He grabs for my arms, but I pivot and reverse away from the buildings. Without looking back, I sprint down the hill toward the bayou, where the barn that served as my father’s studio and sleeping quarters stands in the shadow of a wall of trees. I’ll be safe there. Voices cry out behind me, one of them Pearlie’s, but I run on, wind- milling my arms like a panicked little girl.

Chapter 22

I can’t get into the barn. For the first time in my life, my father’s sanctuary is closed to me. The main entrances are padlocked, and the secret ones I used for years have been nailed shut. If I could find a ladder, I’d try the loft door, but as I begin looking for one, I hear Pearlie shouting from the direction of the house.

She’s running down the hill in her white uniform. That she’s over seventy seems not to affect her speed at all. Her bony legs move in a herky-jerky motion, giving her the appearance of a marionette being controlled by invisible strings, but she moves fast. I wait by the barn, watching Pearlie come, wondering what she has to say that’s so important. The air here smells of the bayou beyond the barn: decaying vegetation, dead fish, frogs, snakes, skunks. The mosquitoes have always been bad down here, too, but Daddy never seemed to mind them.

“What you doing here?” Pearlie calls.

“I want to look in the barn.”

She slows to a stop, panting. “Why?”

Because I want to be close to my father. Because his grave does nothing for me. Because here, where his final sculptures are stored-unsold at my request-I feel a connection with him that has never died, or even faded…

“I just do,” I snap. “Why is it locked?”

“All Mr. Luke’s metalwork be in there.”

“All? I thought there were only a couple of unsold pieces left.”

“Used to be. But your granddaddy been buying up all the others. Whenever something comes on sale, he buys it. He got at least ten of them things in there. Big ones, too.”

This seems impossible to me. “Why is he doing that? He never liked Daddy’s work.”

Pearlie shrugs. “Got to be money in it, some way. Them statues worth money, ain’t they? Some of ’em he brought all the way from Atlanta.”

“A few collectors think they’re important. But they’re not worth the kind of money that matters to Grandpapa.”

Pearlie steps closer and looks me in the eye. “What happened in that car up there? Why’d you run away like that?”

I turn back to the barn door. “Grandpapa told me where Daddy really died.”

She circles me so that she can maintain eye contact. I see fear in her eyes.

“What are you afraid of, Pearlie? What did you think he told me?”

“I ain’t afraid of nothing! You tell me what he said.”

“He told me Daddy didn’t die under the tree. He was shot in my bedroom, saving me from the intruder.”

Pearlie seems frozen in place. “What else did he say?”

“He told me that you cleaned Daddy’s blood off the walls and the floor.”

The old woman lowers her head.

“How could you do that? How could you lie to me all these years?”

Pearlie shakes her head, her eyes still downcast. “I got no regrets about cleaning that blood. Wasn’t no good going to come from you knowing any different than what we told you.”

“You don’t know that! Isn’t it always better to know the truth, no matter what?”

She looks up, her eyes brimming with emotion. “Maybe you ain’t lived long enough to learn it yet, but some things it’s better not to know. Specially if you’re a woman.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If everybody knew what everybody else was really thinking and doing all the time, there’d be a lot more people in the jailhouse. And there wouldn’t hardly be one family left together. Hardly any left together now, come to that. Especially black ones.”

“I want the truth, Pearlie. I don’t want to be protected. I don’t want to be lied to. I want the truth, however bad it is.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, girl. You think you do, but you don’t.”

I take hold of her arm. “You know everything that ever happened to this family. What else have you been keeping from me?”

“Nothing! What Dr. Kirkland done that night was right. Wasn’t no use having everybody talking ’bout you being raped. All them old white ladies would have been whispering poison every time you walked into a room. You didn’t need to carry that around with you. Not in this little town.”