“Stop talking for a minute. Stop thinking, too.”
“I can’t. Penn, I think Mom was lying. She never doesn’t answer the phone in the early morning like that. I don’t think she was home. Dad, either.”
I blow out a rush of air, trying to force myself to think rationally. “Jesus. I don’t know what that means. When did you remember this?”
“It was on the plane ride over that it really started to bother me. I didn’t know what Daddy was trying to do by keeping quiet, and I was afraid to ask him. That’s why I only went to see him in jail that one time. I knew he would sense that I suspected something. I’ve been obsessing about it ever since the trial started, but I couldn’t bear to mention it to you. I was trying to trust in Daddy. For the first couple of days I was terrified, but starting yesterday it seemed like everything was going to turn out all right. But now this—”
“What about Mom, Jenny? Have you asked her about it since you got here?”
My sister nods again. “She totally blew me off again. Said she never heard the phone.”
“Maybe Dad left the TV on when he went out,” I suggest, “and that covered up the phone.”
Jenny dismisses this by closing her eyes. “You know that’s wrong. He has it blaring all the time in bed, and she still wakes up for the telephone. She’s like a mama bear sleeping through a storm, but waking up at the slightest peep from one of her cubs.” Jenny twists her neck with apparent pain, then shakes her head as though to rid herself of her thoughts.
“They’re going to call me in to see Mom in a second,” I remind her.
“I know.” Her bloodshot eyes find mine. “Was I right to tell you?”
“You had to tell me,” I assure her. “I don’t know where we’re going from here, but it’s long past time we knew the truth.”
The door opens and the reception nurse leans in. “Mayor Cage? Your mother’s waiting to see you.”
I hug Jenny, then hurry through the door.
Before it closes I hear the nurse say, “Your brother’s the mayor and your daddy’s Dr. Cage? Isn’t that something. Can I get you a Coke or some coffee, hon?”
“No, thank you.”
Chapter 72
“She’s sleeping again,” says the white-clad duty nurse who leads me into Mom’s treatment room. “She’ll come around again any minute, though.”
My mother is lying on her back beneath a thin sheet. She has an IV in her arm and monitor cables hanging off various parts of her body. The soundtrack of beeps, hums, and clicks is my least favorite in the world. She looks so small and vulnerable on the treatment table, it’s as though she is here to serve the machines lining the wall and not vice versa.
“I’m fine waiting,” I say, taking a seat in the plastic chair someone has provided for me. “Thanks.”
“Anything you need, just let me know. I’m Verbena Jackson. Dr. Cage is my favorite doctor. Has been ever since the old days.”
“Thanks, Verbena. I’ll tell him you said that.”
“Yes, indeed.” She lowers her voice. “And all this mess in the papers lately, that’s just a shame. Gettin’ up in people’s business. Lord, I’m gonna miss that cigar of his, the way he’d leave it at the nurses’ station while he made rounds in the rooms, then pick it up on his way out. They don’t make ’em like Doc anymore.” Nurse Jackson checks Mom’s monitor screens, then nods and walks to the door. “Like I said, you let me know if you need something.”
“I will.”
After she closes the door, I sit and watch my mother’s chest rise and fall in shallow breaths, like those of a restless child. After a couple of minutes, I reach out and lay my hand on her leg, which feels cold and still beneath the sheet. As the beeps and clicks mark the feeble workings of her body, I remember something Lincoln said on the witness stand the first time he was called up by Shad. Lincoln was talking about his mother lying to him about who his real father was, and how he had known she was lying. He said that because of his experience as a con man, he could always tell when people were trying to deceive him. When Shad pointed out that Viola had been successfully lying to him about his paternity since he was a child, Lincoln said: When a woman who never lies tells her first lie . . . nobody questions it. Nobody catches on, because they can’t even imagine that person trying to deceive them. It’s the Big Lie. But inside a family. And that’s why I never caught on . . .
Mom’s leg jerks under my hand, and her eyes flutter, but they remain closed. Getting to my feet, I lean down to her ear and murmur, “Mom, you’re in the hospital, but you’re fine.”
At the sound of my voice, her eyes open, and after some effort she focuses on me. I don’t see recognition in her eyes, though, only confusion.
“You recognize me, right?”
“Where’s Annie? Where’s Mia?”
“They’re safe, Mom. They’re still in Louisiana, with the FBI watching over them.”
“Oh . . . oh, yes. That’s right.”
I see pain rush in like a dark tide as her short-term memory returns to her. “Oh, Penn,” she says, her voice freighted with grief. “Why did he do it? After all that . . . why did Tom plead guilty?”
I take a deep breath before answering, and then I find that words fail me.
“Is it too late to change the plea?” she asks.
“Yes. Quentin bargained it down to a lesser charge, but—”
“But Tom still has to go to prison.”
I nod. “Three years.”
“Oh, God.” She pulls the sheet up to her neck with one hand clenched like a claw. “He’s going to die there.”
“I’m going to do everything humanly possible to get him out. But right now we need to focus on you.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter.”
“It matters, Mom. It matters to Annie. It matters to Jenny. It matters to me. And most of all, it matters to Dad.”
This time she doesn’t respond. She just lies there with tears leaking from her eyes, and she makes no effort to wipe them away. How hard do we work to blind ourselves to things we don’t want to see? I wonder. Even if they’re right in front of us?
Mom lied to me the day after Dad jumped bail—about not being in contact with him—but when she admitted it to me, I wrote off the anomaly as loyalty to her husband. How many lies have the two of them told to protect each other? Or to protect us, their children?
“Mom,” I say, reaching out and gently squeezing her shoulder, “I need to ask you something. Did you go to Cora Revels’s house the night Viola died?”
She doesn’t answer, but her eyes focus on me, and the muscles in her face almost shiver in their struggle to convey incredulity, denial, indignation, anger, and finally . . . relief.
“How did you find out?” she whispers.
“Jenny told me she called your house several times that morning, and you never answered.”
“Well, that’s not—”
“Mom, don’t.”
She takes a deep breath, then wipes her eyes and exhales very slowly.
“Dad lied on the stand, didn’t he? To protect you.”
“What is it you want to know, Penn?”
“What happened in Cora’s house that night.”
My mother’s mouth tightens into a line, and her eyes flick around the room. “What’s the use? Viola’s gone, and your father’s going to Parchman. Nothing’s going to change that, is it?”
“I need to know the truth. It’s time. Ya’ll kept it from me till now, and look how things have turned out. If I’m going to help Dad, I have to know what happened to Viola.”
She reaches up and takes hold of my arm, like someone clinging to a ship’s rail in heavy weather. “Those last weeks before she died,” she says, “I knew something strange was going on. It had been a long time since Tom had gone on so many house calls, or stayed out that late. So, one night I followed him. As soon as he turned onto that little road, the road to Cora’s house, I knew where he was going. It was the same house Viola’s parents
had lived in back in . . . before.”
“You knew about the affair back when it happened, didn’t you? In 1968.”
Mom hesitates, then nods.
“Nothing ever got by you, did it?”
“Not much. In this case, I wish it had. Today, in court, I realized that I hadn’t known about the affair until after it ended. After Viola was raped, she stopped sleeping with Tom. He was acting like himself up to that time. But when she ended it, he changed. Overnight. He couldn’t sleep, he got short with me, with everyone.”
“Did you have any idea what Viola had done to Frank Knox?”
“No. I didn’t know about the rapes at all. Not then.”
“What did you know?”
“Only that something was wrong with my husband. So I followed Tom one day, just like I would forty years later. And he drove to a little house on the colored side of town. Nellie Jackson owned it, as Tom said today. Viola was hiding there.”
A prickle of apprehension raises the hair on my neck. “What did you do, Mom?”
She shakes her head slowly, her eyes focused on a scene from the deep past. “I waited for Tom to leave. As he did, I saw Viola through a crack in the door. Just a glimpse, but in that instant I understood everything. Wives are very sensitive to that kind of threat. I was sure he was in love with her—which he was. I didn’t go inside then. I drove around for a while, scared to death. I was terrified that Tom would leave us to be with her.”
“You should have known better than that.”
“Don’t be so sure. He came closer to leaving than he’ll admit. And if Viola had wanted him to leave us, he might have. She was a good person. Remarkable, really. In most ways . . . I couldn’t compete with her.”
“Mom, that’s—”
“There’s no use lying now, son. Anyway, the next morning, I went back to that house while Tom was at work, and I knocked on the door. Viola let me in. She was a mess, Penn. Suicidal. Nellie had a man staying with her. I think she would have killed herself if he hadn’t been there. Viola was frantic. She was certain her brother was dead. She didn’t know what to do.”
“What did she do?”
“Begged me to forgive her for harming our family, first. She said the affair had been a terrible mistake. But all she could really think about was her brother, Jimmy. She knew the Ku Klux Klan was trying to find her and kill her, but she still had to be restrained from leaving that house to hunt for her brother. I don’t think she cared what Tom thought or felt by that point. Nellie Jackson was trying to convince her to leave town. Nellie had connections in Chicago, and she wanted Viola to go there.”
“Did Nellie get her out of town?”
“Not right away. The problem was money. Viola didn’t have any. While I was there, Nellie drove up in her big Cadillac. Her man had called her. Nellie and I spoke in another room while the man watched Viola. Nellie told me Viola would need money to take care of herself until she could get a job in Chicago. Nellie’s contacts were . . . in her business. Or the gambling business. She realized that Viola needed a legitimate job. Tom would have given Viola any amount of money, of course, but not to leave town.” Mom closes her eyes, and tears fall from their outer corners. “He didn’t want her to go.”
“Mom . . . you don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do. I’ve kept it in all this time, and now . . . I need to be free of it. Nellie Jackson told me something else, Penn. She told me Viola was pregnant.”
“Had Viola told her that?”
“No. But I suppose in Nellie’s business, she’d developed a sixth sense about pregnancy. Like the old midwives, I guess.” My mother shudders under the sheet. “I was sure the baby was Tom’s. I was terrified. I told Nellie that if she could arrange to get Viola to Chicago, I would supply the money.
“That afternoon, I went down to the Building and Loan and withdrew four thousand dollars from my personal savings account—all the money I had saved from teaching. That was frightening enough, since I was worried your father might leave us. But I had to take the risk. I drove back to the house with the money and gave it to Nellie’s man. I spoke to Viola before I left, as well.”
“What did you say?’
“I asked for her promise that she would never come back to Natchez. At least not for Tom. Also that she would never try to get him to come to wherever she settled. And she promised me.” Mom shakes her head, and more tears come. “She loved him, I could tell. But she’d been shattered by something. I assumed it was because no one could find her brother, but now I know it was the rapes, and . . . everything else.”
“The trial was the first time you heard about the rapes?”
“No. Tom eventually told me about the first one, the one in Viola’s house, not the machine shop. You see, he knew nothing about my contact with Viola, so I had to play the charade of asking why she no longer worked at his office. At first he tried to act like her leaving was routine, but then his voice cracked, and he broke down. I didn’t want to press him, but if I hadn’t, he would have sensed that I knew more than I should.”
“Did he tell you about their affair?”
“No, no. Only the rape. He told me the Klan had probably murdered her brother, too. In his mind, that explained his tears, you see? He could pretend to be upset over what she’d suffered at the hands of the Klan, and not their affair. And as terrible as it sounds, I was filled with hope. Hope that Viola had gotten pregnant by one of those Klansmen, and not Tom. I feel so awful for saying that . . . but that’s what I felt.” Mom closes her eyes. “My God, that girl suffered torments.”
I start as the door opens to my left, but it’s only Verbena Jackson again. “See, I told you she’d wake up. Everything okay?”
“We’re good, thanks.”
“She’s due for another scan in about five minutes. I can stretch it to ten, if you need it.”
“We’ll try to finish up.”
The nurse nods and softly closes the door.
“What about the night Viola died, Mom? Three months ago?”
Mom stares at the ceiling as she tells me the story, as though it’s playing out above her in the muted colors of an old Super 8 movie and she’s only describing what she sees.
“The first night I followed Tom to Cora’s place, I walked down to the house and peered through a window. When I saw the woman in the sickbed, I didn’t recognize her at first. But I knew who she had to be. A few nights later, Tom went out again and stayed gone for a very long time. And he’d been upset earlier in the evening, I could tell. So I waited awhile, and then I went after him. Sure enough, his car was parked at Cora’s. I parked off the road and waited for him to leave. He eventually did, around four thirty in the morning.”
A half hour before Jenny called you. “You went inside?”
“Not right away. I was very upset. I’m not sure how long I waited to go down there, but it was still dark. When I knocked, no one answered. The doorknob turned when I tried it, so I went in. I heard soft moaning. I called out to see if anyone was home, but Viola seemed to be alone in that sickroom. I couldn’t understand why she was alone. Now, of course, I know her sister had fallen asleep at the neighbor’s house.”
“What did you do, Mom?”
A shadow passes through my mother’s eyes. She works her mouth around, then licks her lips. “I wet a dishrag and wiped Viola’s face with it, and she woke up. She was groggy but lucid enough. I guess she’d built up a very high tolerance for morphine.”
“Did she recognize you?”
“Oh, yes. She said I’d hardly changed, which was a lie, of course. But she did know me. But Penn . . . she had changed beyond recognition. When she left Natchez, she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, just as her son said on the stand. But when I talked to her that night, she looked ninety years old. She was sixty-five. But only her eyes held any trace of the woman I remembered.”
I push out all thoughts of the terrible life Viola endured in Chicago. “What else passed between you?”
“She asked where Tom was. I told her I’d seen him leave. She told me then that he’d tricked her. That she’d expected to die, but that Tom must not have had the heart to go through with it.”
“And? What happened then?”
“She cried a little. She asked about our family. Whether I’d been happy. She told me a little about her life in Chicago. She was terribly sad when she talked about her son.”
“Did you know Dad was Lincoln’s father at that point?”
“No. No one had ever told me that. But I’d always feared it, of course, down deep. That’s why . . .”
“What?”
“Tom wasn’t the only one who sent Viola money all those years.”
“Tell me, Mom.”
“Didn’t you wonder where all that money they kept talking about came from? The money in Viola’s will? If you listened early on, you know that Junius Jelks spent everything she earned. But then all of a sudden she had seventy-two thousand dollars to leave to Henry Sexton and her family?”
“You sent that?”
Mom nods on the pillow. “Over the past thirty-seven years. And Viola never spent a dime of it. She cashed the checks, all right, but she put the money in a secret account to save for her son. Tom was right when he talked about Viola’s dignity. She was too proud to ever use that money for herself. She saved it for Lincoln, praying the day would come when she could trust him with it, or trust Jelks not to steal it from him some way.”
“Dad never knew you were sending that?”
“Lord, no. I took it out of the money he gave me to run the house. You and Jenny and I had to do without some things, but that was a small price to pay to keep Viola and her baby in Chicago.”
The thought that for more than three decades my mother operated in this dual reality is hard to fathom. “Good God, Mom.”
She shrugs under the sheet. “We do what we have to do. Anyway . . . Viola was well aware that my money hadn’t paid the debt I owed her. Because that night, she called in her marker.”