Natchez Burning (61 page)

Now, forty years later, she lies in her upstairs bedroom, chained to the oxygen tank that gives only partial relief from her advanced emphysema. Facing imminent death, Pithy finally quit smoking her beloved cigarettes last year. According to Dad, it was Flora who finally cut her off, enduring repeated firings during the process. Pithy eventually rehired her, of course, being unable to subsist without Flora’s ministrations.

I remind myself not to look shocked when Flora opens the bedroom door. Pithy has a regal bearing, even in her sickbed, but she looks much thinner than when I last saw her, and her eyes are frighteningly hollow.

“It’s not
you
I want to see,” she says in a weak voice. “It’s your father. But come closer. Let’s see if you’ve aged as much as I have.”

Tensing my stomach against the sickroom smells, I move to Pithy’s bedside. Flora motions me to the chair she sits in throughout the day. Half a crocheted comforter lies draped over the table beside it, a gleaming blue needle left in the yarn. Near Pithy’s bed, a heavy funk of old urine, flatulence, and medicinal creams simmers beneath a welcome breath of fresh eucalyptus. Then I see crushed leaves scattered on her bedside tables.

“Don’t stand on ceremony!” she says. “Take a seat. You’ve always been a gentleman, even if you don’t know when to stop writing.”

“Pithy, I—”

“Water under the bridge. Tell me where my doctor is. I’ll tell you every secret I know for ten milligrams of cortisone.”

I can’t help but smile. Dad has probably injected Pithy’s arthritic joints with ten times the legal limit of steroids over the years. Today her skin—which in the oil portrait downstairs glows like fresh cream—looks as thin and fragile as rice paper. Her brilliant blue eyes are clouded, and they look wet, as though someone just administered eyedrops.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know where Dad is,” I confess. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Well, you must think I can help, or you wouldn’t be here. Start talking. I’ll need to get back on my oxygen soon.”

“Dad’s in trouble, Pithy.”

“I’ve heard some things. Enough trouble to postpone a wedding?”

I can’t help but smile again. “You heard that, too?”

She rolls her eyes. Pithy’s telephone is her lifeline to the world, and even in her present condition she doesn’t miss much. “You go on and marry that girl, even if she is half a Yankee. She’s got spunk, and you’ve dawdled long enough.”

“I’m going to. Postponing the ceremony was Caitlin’s idea.”

“Well, don’t let her get away. You’re ten years older than she is. Remember the old adage: ‘Don’t keep a girl guessing too long, or she’ll find the answer somewhere else.’”

Flora chuckles behind me. “Sho’ will.”

“Bring Penn a cold drink, Flo. I think we still have one or two cans of Tab down in the icebox. And bring me some sherry to go with this nasty ginger tea.”

“All right.”

As Flora’s steps fade, I say, “They indicted him, Pithy. For murder.”

“I heard. But darling, there’s a world of difference between that and being convicted. Some of the best people have been indicted for one thing or another. And anyone worth knowing has been arrested at
least
once.”

“Have you?”

She vouchsafes me a smile. “What Mardi Gras anecdote is complete without a night in jail?” Pithy fans her face with her hand. “Enough repartee. What do I know that you don’t?”

“Tell me about Brody Royal.”

Pithy inclines her head slightly, and I can almost see the flash of synapses behind her eyes. “What do you want to know?”

There’s no point trying to hide anything from this woman, and I haven’t got time anyway. “Brody almost certainly killed some people a while back, mostly black men. Albert Norris and Pooky Wilson to start. He also ordered the deaths of Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis. Probably Dr. Leland Robb, too, which caused the deaths of three other innocent people.”

My bald assertion has managed to impress a woman not easily shocked. “Well, well,” she trills. “You said a mouthful there. If Brody Royal did all that, why didn’t the high sheriff hang him in the courthouse square? Why is he roaming free?”

“That’s what I’ve come to find out.”

“Dear me. Sooner or later, everything comes to the surface, doesn’t it?”

“Talk to me, Pithy. Please. And don’t hold anything back.”

Without my saying it, she knows that her answers will somehow bear on my father’s fate. “Most people think Brody came from wealth,” she begins. “Nothing could be further from the truth. His father was a storekeeper and bootlegger in St. Bernard Parish. When Stanley Duchaine and his banker friends dynamited the levee in 1927 to save New Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes were wiped out. Brody’s father lost everything. He—and eventually Brody—rebuilt his business from nothing, and they didn’t worry about which side of the law they were on. They were in thick with those Italians who ended up running the city.”

“The Marcello family?”

“That’s right. The ones who put the slot machines into Concordia Parish when Huey Long was governor, then later when Noah Cross was sheriff. My husband despised Brody, for getting his mob connections to fix it so he could avoid military service during the war. Anyway, Brody did a little bit of everything until 1948, when he struck oil near Natchez. One of the biggest early fields, I believe, and it’s still producing. That staked him, and he never looked back. Before you could shake a stick at a snake, he owned a bank, an insurance company, and thousands of acres of timber.”

“You sure know a lot about him.”

She gives me a secretive smile. “Brody courted me for a while. Although
pursued
might be a better word.”

“What?”

“He and I are exactly the same age. The year I was queen of the Confederate Pageant, Brody tried everything he could to get me to marry him. But I’d just lost my husband to the war, and I was no fool. I saw what he was after.”

“What? Sex?”

“Lord, no. He got that from half the floozies on both sides of the river. Brody wanted respectability. My family was everything his wasn’t. He’d never forgotten where he came from, and he never wanted anyone to be above him again. He
hated
those haughty New Orleans bankers who’d ruined his father, and he’d made up his mind to become one of them. The biggest of them. And he’s done it, though it took decades. He got his revenge, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“One of the richest of those New Orleans moneymen was originally from Natchez. His daughter Catherine spent a lot of time here as a child. Cathy was in my court when I was queen, and once Brody found out who she was, he went after her with a vengeance—literally. She didn’t know enough to see through his charm. She married him—pregnant—and her father nearly disowned her for it.”

“That was Brody’s revenge?”

“Only the beginning, I’m afraid. Marrying Catherine opened the doors that had always been shut to him, doors no amount of money could open. The right Mardi Gras krewe, the Yacht Club, the second-best gentlemen’s club. And once he had that … Brody didn’t need her anymore.”

“What happened?”

“A lot of private suffering, I know. Some of it terrible, if rumor can be believed. In the end, Cathy drowned in her own bathtub. That was, oh … 1962. Her blood alcohol level was off the chart, so nobody looked too deeply into it. But her father was still alive, and I imagine he knew the truth. Brody had been cheating on Cathy from the beginning. That was no secret. And he’d got control of quite a bit of the family money by managing their investments. In the end, he virtually broke the father.”

“It sounds like
The Count of Monte Cristo
.”

“Not far from it. Revenge never brought Brody happiness, though. Nothing could. He’s gotten steadily richer, but his family …”

“What?”

“The sons are lazy. They’re from his second marriage. The daughter was his hope, I think. Katy was a pretty thing, and all the local beaux chased her. But something happened after her mother’s death. Katy disappeared, and everyone assumed she’d gotten pregnant. Back in those days, they sent girls to relatives to have the babies. But it turned out that Brody had committed her to an asylum in Texas. A private sanatorium—very tony, but still. A year later, Katy came back without any baby. If there ever was one, I suppose it was given up for adoption.”

“What about abortion?”

“Very difficult in those days, dear. Anyway, Brody married Katy to one of his workmen, an awful Black Irishman. A jumped-up roughneck, basically.” Pithy shook her head with poignant sadness. “I don’t know what they did to that girl in Texas, but all her spark was gone. And with that chapter closed, Brody turned his hand to making money again.”

“Until he married Dr. Robb’s wife in 1970.”

The old woman gives me a sharp look. “Something tells me that for once, you know more than I do about something.”

“I’m pretty sure Brody arranged for that plane to go down.”

“Because he wanted to marry Sue Robb?”

“That was probably half the reason,” I tell her. “But Dr. Robb also knew about earlier murders Brody had committed.”

Pithy taps her fingers on the coverlet, trying to absorb this. “You don’t think Brody killed all these people himself, surely?”

“No. Some ex-Klansmen helped him. Knoxes from across the river.”

Pithy twists her lips so angrily that I think she’s about to spit. “I curse the day the city brought in outsiders to work at those factories after the war. Most were decent working people trying to better themselves, of course. But others … that’s where the Klan recruited their rank and file. They were
trash
. Low, unadulterated white trash. Backshooters and bombers.”

Decades ago, David L. Cohn, a well-known Mississippi intellectual, made this case in the pages of the
New Yorker
(echoing Goethe from a century earlier). For all I know, Cohn used Pithy as his source. “Did you ever have any contact with the Knoxes and their cronies?”

“Why, they accosted me right on Main Street! Outside the H. F. Byrne shoe store. Some workers from that battery plant told me I was ‘messin’ in nigra business.’ Said I’d better keep in line or else there’d be trouble. I said, ‘Jody McNeely, if Major Nolan wasn’t lying at the bottom of the Pacific, he’d knock you to the curb this instant. I can’t do that, but if I see you dragging one of those timber crosses onto my property, I’ll shoot you down and sort it out with the sheriff afterwards.’” Pithy lowers her head, cold fire in her eyes. “And don’t think I wouldn’t have done it. I shot my first deer when I was ten.”

“How did they take that?”

She laughed softly. “It plumb stumped them! The ringleader nearly swallowed his Adam’s apple. Their kind always was easily intimidated. They’re peasants in their bones, and they jump at the crack of a whip.”

“Brody Royal won’t.”

Her smile vanishes. “No, he won’t.”

“What about his attorney, Claude Devereux?”

Pithy makes a sour face. “Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent.” While I try to think of how to segue into the question of my father’s past, maternal concern flows from the old woman’s eyes. “Penn, you’re your father’s son, and I love you for it. You’re a knight in shining armor, and most of the time, that’s a fine thing. But fights with men like this aren’t won in court. Snakes as old as Brody and Claude have already been trampled by most beasts of the field, and lived to tell the tale.”

I lay my hand over her cool, dry fingers and squeeze gently. “I’ve been in darker places than you know, Pithy. I can handle myself.”

She gazes back at me with unnerving intensity. “So has your father, dear. Tom was in combat, the same as my husband, and no man comes through that unscathed.”

“Pithy … do you think there’s any chance that Dad could have been friends with Brody Royal? Even a long time ago?”

She draws back her head, her opinion clear. “Absolutely not. The only man I even remember being close to Brody was Leo Marston, and Leo
hated
Tom. You know that.”

I remember Henry saying something about Brody and Judge Marston being partners. Leo was one of the cruelest sons of bitches I knew among the parents of kids I grew up with, and if he and Royal were friends, then I can’t imagine my father spending any time at all with Brody—which squares with what Dad told me.

Pithy’s face tightens with sudden urgency. “Why aren’t the two of you working together on this? Where
is
Tom? Is he hurt? Has someone kidnapped him?”

“No, no,” I reassure her. “He’s fine.”

But Pithy isn’t fooled. With oracular vision, she sees right through me, all the way down to my deepest fears. “Poor darling. Every son and daughter learns a heartbreaking truth someday. I only hope that in this case it’s something you can live with.”

“Since you were Dad’s first patient, you must have known Viola Turner.”

The old woman takes a deeper breath than she has up to now, then lets it out very slowly. “Of course I did. But don’t ask me anything you don’t want the answer to.”

Her warning chills me, but this is half the reason I’ve come. “Did Viola and Dad have an affair, Pithy?”

“I can’t speak to that. But your father loved that girl—that I do know.”

“How do you know?”

“Men are simple creatures, but they’re not all the same. Many from your father’s generation, doctors especially, went a little crazy in the 1960s. They’d grown up in the corseted thirties and forties, studied day and night, married as virgins. Then suddenly the world changed. They were making money, they were respected, and women threw themselves at their feet. A lot of them rogered everything wearing a skirt. They never considered leaving their wives, of course. They just wanted sex.”

“And Dad?”

“Your father wasn’t one of those. Tom was a fine and faithful fellow. But
that
kind of man is susceptible to a different kind of temptation. You see, the women of that period—women like your mother—grew up with the biggest dose of Calvinist guilt and shame any American women ever got. And it gave them problems in the boudoir. Even faithful husbands couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be with a woman who didn’t carry that crippling burden.”