gave in, I took a leave of absence from my print and TV gigs, packed up my essentials, and made a white-knuckled drive south to test Thomas Wolfe’s most famous dictum.
Of course you can go home again, answered my pride. At least for a little while. You can do your filial duty. For what man who thinks of himself as a gentleman would not? And once that duty is discharged, and Himself is dead, perhaps you can persuade your mother to return with you to Washington. Truth be told, I probably knew this was a forlorn hope, but it gave me something to tell myself, rather than think too deeply about the unsolvable problem. No, not my father’s situation. The girl. She’s a woman now, of course, a woman with a husband, who is probably my best friend from childhood. She also has a son, who is twelve years old. And while this knot may not seem particularly Gordian in our age of universal divorce, other factors ensure that it is. My father’s plight, on the other hand … will inevitably resolve itself.
I sound cold, I suppose.
I don’t say that Dad bears all the blame for his situation. He endured his share of suffering, God knows—enough to cure him of religion for life. Two years before he married my mother, he lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash. As if that weren’t enough, when I was in the ninth grade my eighteen-year-old brother also died in an accident, a tragedy that struck our town like a bomb dropped from an invisible height. Perhaps losing two children in succession broke my father. I could understand that. When my brother, Adam, died, it was as though God reached out and switched off the lights of the world, leaving me to stumble through the next two years like a blind man unable to adapt to his new affliction.
But “God” wasn’t done with me yet. Twenty years after Adam’s death, I lost my two-year-old son—my only child—in the most domestic of accidents. I know what it means to be broken by fate.
I do, however, still function.
I work sources, write stories, go on CNN and MSNBC to comment on the issues of the day. I even make speeches for $35,000 a pop (or I used to, before I moved back to my third-world state and sent my market quote into irreversible decline). The point is I suffered, but I got on with it. That’s what I was taught to do—by my mother, of course, not my father. Also by Buck Ferris, the archaeologist and scoutmaster who stepped in after my father opted out of his paternal duty and did what he could to make a man of me. After all my success, Buck figured he’d accomplished that. I’ve never been sure. If I do prove it to myself one day, he’ll never know. Because sometime last night, Buck Ferris was murdered.
Buck’s passing seems a natural place to begin this story, because that’s the way these things generally start. A death provides a convenient line of demarcation, kicking off the familiar tableau of investigation, the assigning of guilt, the determining of punishment. But beginnings are complex things. It can take decades to determine the exact chain of cause and effect that led to any single outcome. My degree in history taught me that, if little else. But I can’t wait twenty years to address these events. For while I’m healthy at this moment—and I’ve done what I can to protect myself—there are people who would prefer me otherwise. Best to get it on paper now.
But as we dance these familiar steps together, please remember that nothing is what it seems. While Buck’s murder provides a natural jumping-off point, this story really began when I was fourteen years old. The people whose lives would intertwine with fatal consequences were alive then, and some were already lovers. To understand this story, you must swim between two times like a person moving from wakefulness to sleep and then back again. Given the nature of the mind, we’ll consider the dreams of sleep to be the past, never quite accurate in recollection, always made to serve our desires (except when haunting us for our sins). And the wakeful present … well, it, too, holds its dangers.
When I was thirteen, I came upon a bobwhite quail perched upon a log in the woods. Another quail lay at its feet. It appeared to be dead, but I knelt very near and watched them both for half a minute, one motionless, the other making inquisitive movements, as though waiting impatiently for its partner to rise. Only after my eyes lost focus, perhaps from strain, did I notice the rattlesnake coiled two feet away, tensing to strike. The heavy eastern diamondback was four feet long, and focused on me, not the bird.
I lived that day, and I learned: Close enough to see is close enough to kill.
BY THE TIME I got word that there was a body in the Mississippi River, the sheriff had already deployed the county rescue boat to recover the corpse. Normally, I would dispatch a staff reporter to document this, but because my source sounded pretty sure the dead man was Buck Ferris, I know I have to go myself. Which presents difficulties. For me, water and death are inextricably entwined. I never go down to the river—or even drive across it on the high bridge—unless I have no other choice. That can make living in a river town pretty inconvenient.
Today I have no choice.
Before I leave the Watchman offices, I call Quinn Ferris, Buck’s wife. Quinn treated me like a son when I was at her house, which was often and for long periods. Despite my having been absent from Bienville for twenty-eight years (excepting the last five months), we’re close enough that I know she would rather get tragic news from me than from the police or the coroner. As I feared, word has already reached her—the curse of a small town. She’s running around her house, trying to find her keys so that she can get down to the river. Because she lives fifteen miles out in the county, Quinn desperately wants to start toward town, but I somehow persuade her to wait at home until I call with confirmation of what is still only a rumor.
My SUV is parked in the employee lot behind the newspaper building. We’re only four blocks from the bluff, where Front Street slices down the two-hundred-foot drop to the river at a forty-degree angle. Pulling out onto Buchanan Street, I go over what my source told me on the phone. About 8:40 A.M. a retired kayaker discovered a man he believed to be Buck Ferris wedged in the fork of a cottonwood snag in the Mississippi River, four hundred yards south of the Bienville landing. The kayaker didn’t know Buck well, but he’d attended a couple of his archaeological presentations at the Indian Village. Anyone who knows the Mississippi River recognizes this story as a miracle. If Buck hadn’t floated by chance into the fork of that tree, he might have drifted all the way to Baton Rouge or New Orleans before being discovered, if he was found at all. A lot of people drown in the Mississippi, and while most are eventually recovered, there are times when the river god refuses to give up his dead.
Dread settles in my stomach as I drive down the steep incline of Front Street to what locals call Lower’ville—short for Lower Bienville—but which the Chamber of Commerce calls the Riverfront. The Mississippi is already high, even for spring, and a brisk breeze is kicking up whitecaps on its broad, muddy surface. Pulling my eyes from the water, I focus on the cars parked along the timber guardrail blocking the precipitous drop to the river, but this does little to calm my anxiety. I’ve tried for more than thirty years to rid myself of what is surely a phobia about this river, but I’ve failed.
I’m going to have to gut it out.
TWO NARROW STREETS ARE all that remain of Lower’ville, the den of the demimonde who lived in the shadow of the Bienville bluff in the nineteenth century. Two hundred years ago, this infamous river landing offered flatboatmen and steamboat crews everything from gambling and fancy women to prime whiskey and rentable dueling pistols. Through Lower’ville moved a brisk trade in everything from long-staple cotton to African slaves, enriching the nabobs who lived in the glittering palaces atop the bluff and whose money flowed back into the district as payment for exclusive
