Cemetery Road

I managed to stay close to him for another five minutes, but then we got separated again. Adam called out that he was okay and I should keep going. I did, but much more slowly than I could have, and I did a voice check every twenty seconds or so. I risked going a little ahead because I wanted to sight the opposite shore as soon as possible, to correct our course if we weren’t moving aggressively enough across the current. The sun had cleared the horizon by then, but with the fog it didn’t help much. As I swam, I realized my teeth were chattering. I wondered how long I had been shivering. I also sensed a vibration in the water, a subsonic rumble that felt more like my body was generating it than some external source. When Adam cried out for help, I turned back instantly, but again it took some time to find him in the fog.

As soon as I did, I saw he was in trouble. He was doubled over in the water, struggling even to stay afloat.

“My legs cramped up,” he choked out. His face was gray, his eyes glassy, and his teeth were chattering. “My calves. I can’t get them loose!”

I knew what had happened. The past thirty-six hours—which included the state track meet, serious alcohol intake, the foot race on the levee, and the long tower climb—had depleted Adam’s potassium to the point that his skeletal muscles wouldn’t function properly. I tried diving to massage the cramps out, but it did little good. I needed to get him to shore.

“Trey!” I shouted. “Dooley! Adam’s in trouble! We need help!”

“They won’t help,” Adam said. “They’ll be lucky to make it themselves.”

“Listen, I need you to go limp. Try to relax. I’m going to put you in a buddy tow and swim you to shore.”

“You can’t tow me that far. Not in this river.”

“Bullshit. You know I can. Do what I say.”

“I can make it,” Adam insisted, trying to pull himself through the water.

“Not cramped like that, you can’t. Lie back! I’m going to tow you to Louisiana.”

“Just gotta wait for my legs to …”

He fell silent. Adam had heard what I had. The rumble I’d barely perceived before seemed suddenly upon us, around us, beneath us. Somewhere in that fog, not far away, a string of barges was being pushed by a tugboat. Pushed toward us. Panic bloomed in my chest, and Adam saw it in my eyes.

“We’ve gotta move!” I cried. “Lie back!”

I’d never seen my brother’s eyes fill with fear, nor his face look so exhausted that I doubted his ability to continue. I had never seen him helpless. I couldn’t have imagined it. No one in Bienville could. But in that river, on that morning, our golden Apollo was as helpless as a newborn baby. Worse off, actually, since I could have easily hauled a baby to shore, whereas dragging 190 pounds of muscle would be like trying to swim an anchor through the water. Nevertheless, I dove and swam behind Adam, then surfaced and got my arm around his neck, up under his chin, and my left hip beneath his lower back. Then I started the “combat stroke” I’d been taught by my swimming coach, a former navy rescue swimmer. I had long since abandoned any thought of the Mathesons. From that point on, our lives depended on me.

The tugboat was closer, I could feel it. That meant the barges, which might extend a quarter mile in front of the tug, could run us over any second. Abandoning the alternating scissor-kick-and-pull stroke, I kicked constantly, with all the power in my legs. But as I did, I realized something that took my fear to a higher pitch: I was shivering; Adam wasn’t. His core temperature had dropped. The combination of cold water, exhaustion, dehydration, and alcohol was killing him. If I let go, he could sink without even struggling.

Summoning every atom of energy in my body, I kicked with focused violence and pulled water with my right hand, vowing I could do the work of two. But after the long day’s exertion, this was akin to hauling my brother up a mountain on my back. Worse, the diesel rumble had steadily grown louder, yet the fog still prevented me from determining the exact direction of the threat. I only knew it was upstream from us.

“You’re fading!” Adam gasped in my ear. “You can’t do it, Marsh.”

“Bullshit,” I panted, worried I was hyperventilating.

“You’re gonna kill us both. That barge is coming downstream, hauling ass.”

“Shut up, why don’t you?” I snapped, kicking like a madman.

“Can you see the shore?”

“Not yet … can’t be far, though.”

Before Adam spoke again, a gray wall as tall as a house appeared out of the fog to my right. It was the flat bow of the lead barge, maybe thirty-five yards away, growing larger by the second. I couldn’t scream or speak.

“Let me go,” Adam coughed.

I suddenly realized that I’d stopped swimming. I started kicking again, searching the fog for the edge of that wall.

“Let go!” Adam screamed. “You can still make it!”

Tears streaming from my eyes, I kicked with everything I had left, but it wasn’t enough. I felt five years old. The next time I looked up, the barge was twenty yards away. In that moment Adam bit into my neck. As searing pain arced through me, my brother punched me in the face, then kicked free of me. Separated by three feet of water, we looked into each other’s eyes with desperate intensity. Then a mass of water lifted us both, shoving us several feet downstream.

“Go,” Adam said with a calmness that haunts me to this day. Then he smiled sadly and slid beneath the surface.

For some fraction of time that will always be eternal, I stared at the empty space where my brother had been. Then my brainstem took control of my body. Freed from Adam’s weight, I cut across the water in a freestyle that felt like flying. The barge’s bow crashed past my feet so closely that the wake lifted me like a surfer catching a wave. A vicious undertow grasped at my lower body, pulling me back toward the steel hulk, but terror must have granted me superhuman strength. I fought my way clear.

After twenty more strokes, I spied the low shore of Louisiana 150 yards away. White sand, gray riprap, waist-high weeds. When I reached the rocks, I didn’t have the strength to climb out of the water, only to get my head clear and rest my weight on the submerged stones.

Some of what followed I can’t bear to think about even now. What I do remember is the search for Adam’s body. It will be remembered as long as men live and work along the Lower Mississippi. Everyone took part: the Coast Guard, twelve sheriff’s departments, four tugboat companies, a hundred private boaters, professional salvage divers, and even the Boy Scouts in a dozen counties and parishes lining the Mississippi River.

Nobody found him.

My father borrowed a Boston Whaler from a friend and went up and down the river for months, searching the banks and islands for his lost son. I would have gone with him, but Dad didn’t want me in that boat. Though my eyes were far sharper than his, he couldn’t bear my presence during his search.

That’s how it began. Not so much his withdrawal into himself, which my mother also went through, but his erasure of me, the guilty survivor. That was not Duncan McEwan’s first voyage into grief, of course. He had lost a child once before. I knew about that, but I’d never really thought deeply about it. That before he married my mother, he’d had another family. Sure, my father had always been older than my friends’ dads, but it never seemed like an issue. Yet in the wake of my brother’s loss—while I sat alone at home and my father plied the river in the vain hope of a miracle—his first wife and daughter seemed suddenly relevant.

Eloise and Emily. Emmie was the daughter. Two years old. My mother told me that they’d died in a one-car accident on Cemetery Road in 1966, taking a shortcut home after visiting Dad at the newspaper. I’d ridden over that exact spot a thousand times. It’s a dogleg turn where three sets of railroad tracks cross through the asphalt. Deep gullies gape on both sides of the road. At night, in a blinding rain, their car—Dad’s car, actually, an Oldsmobile Delta 88—spun off the road and tumbled into one of the ravines, coming to rest upside down in three feet of runoff water. Mother and child drowned in less than a minute. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for my father, to have endured that and then have built another life—to have been gifted a son like Adam—and then be told that he’d been taken by the river during a stupid teenage dare. It was more than my father could bear. And without a corpse to mourn, he simply refused to believe that Adam was dead. Who could blame him? When you’re blessed with a god for a son, it’s tough to accept mortality.

Thinking of my father like that, boarding that Boston Whaler down below Front Street every day, on a hopeless quest for his dead son, I suddenly realize that I’ve come to the low stone wall that borders the Bienville Cemetery. Hallam Avenue has intersected Cemetery Road. The bluff and the river aren’t quite visible from here, but I see Laurel Hill, the westernmost hill in the Bienville necropolis, where the monument to Adam stands. The statue—of an athletic young man who appears to mournfully stand watch over the river—was sculpted in Italy, by an artist my father met while working in Rome as an army reporter for Stars and Stripes. Another story for another day. The statue is famous among barge crews, who call it “the Watchman.” Poised 240 feet above the river, it’s the first thing the crews look for as they pass north of Bienville. Despite the tragedy behind the statue’s existence, it reassures them somehow, like a life-size St. Christopher medal.

Its effect on the town was impossible to foresee. Within hours after being erected on the hill, Adam’s statue became a shrine for local teenagers. By that time I was in a pit of despair, suffering from what doctors would later diagnose as PTSD. But I still went to school, and I heard the stories. On any given weekend, you could find kids leaning against its pedestal, watching the sunset. At dawn you’d find different kids watching the sunrise from the same spot. Since coming back home, I’ve been told this still happens, thirty-one years later, even though the present generation knows nothing about Adam beyond what their parents have told them. Pilgrims have prayed to Adam’s statue, conceived children under it, left rafts of flowers and poems at its feet. But I haven’t stood before it in twenty-eight years. I can’t bear to. The last time I did, the experience hurled me back to that terrible morning in the river—just as seeing Buck’s body did today. But the worst hour of that morning, worse even than abandoning my brother to his death under that barge, was the soul-scalding act of walking into my family’s home with the sheriff and telling my parents that their oldest son wouldn’t be coming home ever again.

And then explaining why.

Parked beside the cemetery wall, only two hundred yards from Adam’s statue, I decide I’m still not ready to confront his marble doppelgänger from any closer proximity. Not yet, at least. Better to drive back to town and have a cup of coffee at Nadine’s, settle my nerves, then ride out to the groundbreaking and try to figure out which of my fine fellow citizens acted on the nearly universal desire to silence Buck Ferris.

CHAPTER 8

MY DAILY SANCTUARY is a bookstore/coffee shop called Constant Reader, which is nestled between two large buildings on Second Street near the bluff. Bienville has had five bookstores during the modern era, none of which survived more than fifteen years. A big chain store in the mall hung on until a couple of years ago but finally gave up the ghost. After this grim record, Nadine Sullivan wisely opened Constant Reader only two blocks from Battery Row and one block from the Aurora Hotel, the art deco grande dame of Bienville, which serves as the primary downtown landmark of the postbellum era. While the Aurora is currently shut down for renovations, nearly every tourist coming up from the riverboats or walking the bluff still passes Nadine’s door, and most step inside for coffee and a muffin, if not to buy books, those musty relics of the twentieth century.

Nadine is eight years younger than I, but like me, she attended St. Mark’s Episcopal. She was far enough behind me that I barely knew she existed, but she graduated knowing a fair bit about me. Neither of us could have known that decades after high school, a common experience would make us close friends. The daughter of a traveling pharmaceutical rep who left town permanently when she was nine, Nadine became a highly successful personal injury lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Married at twenty-seven, she divorced at thirty-one, with no children to fight over. After winning a huge settlement against a drug company, she was planning to open an indie bookstore in Charleston, South Carolina, when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nadine moved home for what she thought would be a brief nursing period, but her mother rallied under her care and lived two more years. (Though my father has not rallied, this similar experience made Nadine and me natural confidants.) During the period that Mrs. Sullivan was ill, Nadine ran a weekly book club for her and a few close friends. So no one was surprised when, after her mother died, Nadine purchased a nineteenth-century pharmacy building downtown, restored it, and opened Constant Reader. Only tourists and newcomers refer to the store by its official name. Natives call it “Nadine’s place” or simply “Nadine’s.”

In the five months since I’ve been back, Nadine has hosted book signings by some of the finest writers in the South. She was one of the first to recognize the genius of Jesmyn Ward and Angie Thomas, and she’s also hosted small concerts by famous musicians she came to know while living in the Carolinas. Nadine is the kind of person who effortlessly pulls people into her orbit. Her gift for dealing with people can’t be attributed to any identifiable personal style, but rather to the vibe she radiates. Nadine Sullivan simply settles your soul, the way being around a baby does. Not that she has any childish quality; I know for a fact that she was a shark in the courtroom. But that’s difficult to imagine now. There is a purity about Nadine, a clarity in her eyes that—combined with a lack of any detectable tendency to judge people—invites the world in on its own terms. That said, her store is not merely a shelter for those in need of sympathy or conversation. Her author parties and musical events are webcast live to tens of thousands of followers, and she does good business mailing autographed books and CDs all over the world.

Most mornings, I drop by the store about 10:15, after the old men have finished bitching about “libtards” and the walking ladies have scarfed down their power waters and muffins. Nadine usually brings my coffee over herself, then lingers to chat for a couple of minutes, depending on how busy she is. Most days she remains on her feet, catching me up on any local gossip worth hearing. But some days she sits and sounds me out on events she’s thinking of scheduling, or just talks about the world in general. We’ve told each other about our respective divorces, and our shared commiseration imparted an intimacy that has made some of her customers wonder if we’re sleeping together. We’re not. But were I not committed elsewhere, I would certainly have tested her feelings on the matter.

Nadine says people gossip about us because until I showed up, the word around town was that she’s gay. That rumor started after she rejected just about every single man in Bienville, plus a lot of the married strays. Her target status is no mystery. Bienville is brimming with fake blondes with fake tits. Nadine, on the other hand, is a natural blonde with a sharp wit and a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Two years shy of forty, her body remains well distributed and finely calibrated when it moves, which alone would draw men to her. She’s assured me that her constant rejections have less to do with her sexual orientation than her strict standards when it comes to men. When she wants sex, she goes out of town. I don’t know where, and I don’t ask. Nor has Nadine volunteered the information. I must admit that, despite our familiarity, I find myself intrigued by the air of mystery that surrounds that part of her life.

A brass bell clangs as I step into the shop, and the scent of hot coffee pulls me through the bookselling area like a rope around my neck. The café tables in back are empty but for a young couple who have the look of French tourists. Nadine stands behind the counter, cleaning her espresso machine. She smiles over her shoulder, then says sotto voce, “Is it true about Buck?”

I move up to the counter before answering. “What did you hear?”

“They found him in the river. Dead.”

I nod, then shiver as the air-conditioning chills my sweaty shirt. “I just watched them pull him out.”

She shakes her head, then drops her rag and turns away from the gleaming machine. “Accident?”

“Between you and me? No way.”

She sucks in her lips and looks down at her counter, absorbing the news. “Was it the Indian artifacts? The threat to the paper mill?”

“I think so. Which, if you include residents of the county, gives us about thirty-six thousand suspects.”

“That sounds about right. You want coffee? I figured you’d be out at the groundbreaking.”

“I’m going, but I needed my caffeine.”

Her eyes probe mine with almost physical thoroughness. “You need something stronger than that. Are you okay? Seriously.”

I look down at the oversized muffins under the glass. “That scene at the river … no good for me.”

She reaches over the counter and squeezes my hand, then turns to prepare my coffee. “You going to sit? Or you in too much of a hurry?”

“Do you have time to sit?”

She looks around the store and smiles again. “Be there in a sec. How’s your dad doing?”

“’Bout the same,” I lie, from habit.

As I survey the eight café tables, I hear the couple speaking French while consulting a guidebook. On the round table before them lie copies of Richard Grant’s Dispatches from Pluto and Richard Wright’s Native Son. Anticipating the conversation Nadine and I will have, I detour into the book-signing nook, a C-shaped banquette set on a large dais raised two feet above the rest of the café.

The walls above the banquette are covered with signed author photos, most black-and-white. Facing me as I take a seat are Rick Bragg, Chris Offutt, Kathryn Stockett, John Grisham, and Pat Conroy (that one signed shortly before his death). Above these, a dozen more photos climb toward the ceiling. Behind me hangs a collection of signed photos given to Nadine by loyal customers. These include Eudora Welty, James Dickey, and Donna Tartt, as well as Mississippi blues singers Sam Chatmon and Son Thomas. Placed side by side to my left are signed publicity shots of the young Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, wearing their 1950s duds. Jerry Lee is considered practically a native son, since he hails from Ferriday, Louisiana, just forty miles down the river. Rarest of all is a signed photo of Bobbie Gentry, the reclusive singer of “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Waiting for Nadine, I recall a weekend when Buck recruited a group of musician friends from around the South to play this store. Despite the superior musicianship, Buck included me both nights. We had two guitars, a mandolin, a fiddle, a bass, a harmonica, and a trap kit. After one set, the crowd got so big that people spilled out into the street, and rather than interfere, the cops closed Second Street to auto traffic and gave us a block party. Sometimes living in a small town is cool.

Nadine walks lightly up the steps to the nook and sets a heavy china mug in front of me. She joins me at the table with a cup of green tea and gives me a smile designed to buck up my spirits.

“No avoidance today,” she says. “The river, I mean. It was bad, huh?”

“Bad enough. To tell you the truth, I feel like I killed Buck.”

Her eyes darken. “Oh, come on. That’s bullshit.”

“Is it? I knew when I published that story it would make people furious. I tried to argue him out of it, but Buck wanted it in the paper. It was so unlike him to stir up controversy. All the years he lived here, he never did anything like that. He went out of his way not to. But this was like a mission for him. A life quest.”

“Why was it so important to him? I’m guessing you know a lot more than you put in the paper.”

“Some. But I hadn’t talked to him in a couple of days. I was really sort of waiting for the next shoe to drop.”

“I guess it has.” Nadine blows air across her tea. “Just not the way you were hoping.”

“I was hoping the Department of Archives and History would come in here and take over the site. They’ve got a lot of power in these situations. They appoint their own board, and in theory are immune to political pressure. They can place a preservation easement on public land—which the mill site is—and that would give them control of the site. At least while they survey and assess it.”

“That’s exactly what people are afraid of, right? It would have delayed construction?”

“No doubt.”

“Possibly even ended it?”

“If the site is what Buck believed it was.”

“Which is what? A site like Poverty Point? A potential UNESCO World Heritage site?”

“Yep. And I think it is. Poverty Point is only forty miles from here, as the crow flies. And there are remnants of that same culture down at Anna’s Bottom, north of Natchez. Buck believed that a deeper strata might hold evidence of an even older culture, like the one at Watson Brake, Louisiana. That’s only seventy miles from here, and it predates both the Giza pyramids and Stonehenge.”

Nadine is smiling with what looks like wistfulness. “My dad took me to Poverty Point when I was a little girl. I never told you that. It’s one of my few good memories of him. We had a picnic there. When you think about people living along the river before the pyramids, that’s pretty mind-blowing.”

“If only Buck had made his finds in the middle of nowhere, rather than an industrial park.”

Nadine pulls a wry face. “One that was nearly awarded Superfund status for its toxic sludge. What did you leave out of your article?”

“Mostly Buck’s persistence. About thirty years back, some small clues got him thinking there might have been an ancient civilization near here, one that vastly predated the known tribes. The Indians we’re famous for—the Natchez, mainly—were relative latecomers. They’re fascinating because they were sun-worshipping, corn-growing mound-builders, like the Maya. Buck first made his reputation by documenting their involvement with the French and English in slave trading.”

“The Indians were involved in the slave trade?”

“Big time. Anyway, the electroplating factory that used to sit on the paper mill site was built during World War Two. Buck had heard rumors that the construction workers turned over artifacts every day with their bulldozers. He tracked down a few old-timers, checked out the relics they’d given to their kids. But it was all later-era stuff—1500 to 1730. A lot of guys would have quit there, but Buck had seen descriptions of the site that predated even its agricultural use. Before that land was plowed up during the early 1800s by tobacco and cotton farmers, there were supposedly semicircular rings on the ground—raised concentric ridges facing the river, possibly built up on an older bend where the river used to flow. That’s exactly how Poverty Point is oriented.”

“I remember.” Nadine is nodding and smiling as though reliving her childhood picnic. “Buck couldn’t prove that?”

“No. Most of the acreage around the factory had been graded flat and paved over. The company refused to let him dig out there—even on the fringes—and Buck was so busy with other projects that he just let it go.”

Nadine sips her tea. “So what made him suddenly dig at the mill site this month? Finding that mysterious map?”