The Death Factory (10 page)

Before I can answer, her eyes light on Jack. “Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

Jack smiles. “I’m Papa’s little brother,” he says, reaching out to shake her hand.

“You don’t look very little,” Annie says, her eyes still wide with curiosity. “What’s going on?” Her mouth tightens with anxiety. “Has something happened?”

By this time Caitlin has walked up behind Annie. She leans down and smiles at Jack. “So what’s going on?” she asks in a casual voice that belies the concern in her green eyes.

“We’ve got good news,” I tell her. “Get in.”

Her eyelids close with relief at this promise of deliverance. We’ve both seen enough death recently to last us quite some time. After a moment, Caitlin wipes her eyes with her sleeve and then opens the back door for Annie, whose sudden laughter fills the backseat like warm light. “Let’s go see Papa!” she cries. “I made a one hundred on my history test, and I want to show him.”

Jack turns and smiles, then gives her a thumbs-up. “Sounds like a plan, kid.” He winks at me. “Let’s go, Dad. Show us what this baby can do.”

E
xcerpt
F
rom
N
ATCHEZ
B
URNING

P
ROLOGUE

“IF A MAN is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.” A great writer said that, and for a long time I agreed with him. But put into practice, this adage could cloak almost any sin. My mother would agree with it, but I doubt my older sister would, and my fiancée would scoff at the idea. Perhaps we expect too much of our fathers. Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughter’s eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors I’ve most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in their façades, and tired feet of clay—or worse.

But not my father.

A child of the Great Depression, Tom Cage knew hunger. At eighteen, he was drafted and served as a combat medic during the worst fighting in Korea. After surviving that war, he went to medical school, then paid off his loans by serving in the army in West Germany. When he returned home to Mississippi, he practiced family medicine for more than forty years, treating some of the most underprivileged in our community with little thought of financial reward. The
Natchez Examiner
has named him an “Unsung Hero” more times than I can remember. If small towns still have saints, then he is surely one of them.

And yet . . .

As the cynical governor created by my distant relation, Robert Penn Warren, once said: “
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption
and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is
always something.
” My younger self sometimes wondered whether this might be true about my father, but time slowly reassured me that he was the exception to Willie Stark’s cynical rule. Like poor Jack Burden, my hopeful heart answered: “
Maybe not on the Judge.
” But Robert Penn Warren had the kind of courage I’ve only begun to discover: the will to dig to the bottom of the mine, to shine his pitiless light downward, and to stare unflinchingly at what he found there. And what I found by following his example was proof of Willie Stark’s eternal rule:
There is always something
.

It’s tempting to think that I might never have learned any of this—that my mother, my sister, and I might mercifully have escaped the consequences of acts committed deep in the haze of history (a time before cell phones and digital cameras and reporters who honor no bounds of propriety, when
N-word
meant nothing to anybody and
nigger
was as common in the vernacular as
tractor
)—but to yearn for ignorance is to embrace the wishful thinking of a child. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop. The waves diminish, and all seems to return to its previous state, but that’s an illusion. Disturbed fish change their patterns, a snake slides off the muddy bank into the water, a deer bolts into the open to be shot. And the stone remains on the slimy bottom, out of sight but inarguably there, dense and permanent, sediment settling over it, turtles and catfish prodding it, the sun heating it through all the layers of water until that far-off day when, whether lifted by the fingers of a curious boy diving fifty years after it was cast or uncovered by a bone-dumb farmer draining the pond to plant another half acre of cotton, that stone finds its way back up to the light.

And the man who cast it trembles. Or if he is dead, his sons tremble. They tremble by an unwritten law, one that a fellow Mississippian understood long before I was born and casually revealed to a reporter in a French hotel room in 1956, dispensing eternal truths as effortlessly as a man tossing coins to beggars in the road. He said, “
The past is never dead;
it’s not even past. If it were, there would be no grief or sorrow.
” And ten years before him, my distant relation wrote, “
There is always something
.” And six decades after that, I thought:
Please, no, let me remain in my carefully constructed
cocoon of Not-Knowing.
Let me keep my untarnished idol, my humble
war hero, the one healer who has not killed, the one husband who has not lied,
the one father who has not betrayed the faith of his children
. But as I know now, and hate the knowing . . . Willie was right: there
is
always something. So let us begin in 1964, with three murders. Three stones cast into a pond no one had cared about since the siege of Vicksburg, but which was soon to become the center of the world’s attention. A place most people in the United States liked to think was somehow different from the rest of the country, but which was in fact the very incarnation of America’s tortured soul.

Mississippi
.

P
ART
O
NE

1964–1968

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

—Aristotle

C
HAPTER 1

ALBERT NORRI S SANG a few bars of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Natchez Burnin’” to cover the sounds of the couple making love in the back of his shop. The front door was locked. It was after seven, the streets deserted. But today had been a bad day. Albert had tried to cancel the rendezvous by switching on the light in the side room where he taught piano during the week—he’d even sent a boy to warn the man to stay away from the shop—but the two lovers had ignored his warnings and come anyway. He’d set up their rendezvous a week ago, by sending out a coded message during his gospel radio show, which was his usual method. But lovers who saw each other only twice a month—if they were lucky—weren’t going to be deterred by a warning light in a window, not even if their lives were at risk.

The white woman had arrived first, rapping lightly at the alley door. Albert had tried to run her off—whites were supposed to use the front—but she’d refused to budge. Terrified that a passerby might see her, Albert had let her in. Mary Shivers was a skinny white schoolteacher with more hormones than sense. Even before he could chastise her, he heard his side door open. Moments later, six-foot-three-inch Willie Hooks barged into the store. The big carpenter stuffed five dollars into Albert’s hand, ran to the woman, seized her up in one arm, and carried her to the back of the shop. Albert had followed, desperately trying to explain about the visit he’d gotten from the furious white men that afternoon, but Hooks and the schoolteacher were deaf to all appeals. Three seconds after the door slammed in his face, Albert heard the sounds of people shedding clothes. A moment later, the woman yelped, and then the springs in the old sofa in the back room went to singing.

“Five minutes!” Albert had shouted through the door. “I’m kicking open this door in five minutes. I ain’t dying for you two!”

The couple took no notice.

Albert cursed and walked toward his display window. Third Street looked blessedly empty, but within five seconds Deputy John DeLillo’s cruiser rolled into view, moving at walking speed. Acid flooded Albert’s stomach. He wondered where the schoolteacher had parked her car. Deputy DeLillo was even bigger than Willie Hooks, and he had a fearsome temper. He’d killed at least four black men Albert knew about, and he’d beaten countless others with rods, phone books, and a leather strap spiked with roofing tacks.

Big John’s cruiser stopped in the middle of the street. His big head leaned out of the car to gaze into Albert’s shop window. Albert couldn’t see the deputy’s eyes, thanks to the mirrored sunglasses he wore, but he knew what DeLillo was looking for. Pooky Wilson was the most wanted man in Concordia Parish tonight. Just eighteen, Pooky had gained that dubious distinction by bedding the eighteen-year-old daughter of one of the richest men in the parish. Since he’d worked at Albert’s store for nearly a year, Pooky had naturally run to Albert when he learned that the Klan and the police—often one and the same—were combing the parish for him. Knowing that local “justice” for Pooky would mean a tall tree and a short rope, Albert had hidden the boy in the safe box he’d constructed for illegal whiskey, which he sold on a seasonal basis. For the past two hours, Pooky had been sitting cramped in the shell of a Hammond spinet organ in Albert’s workshop. Positioned against a wall, the A-105 looked like it weighed five hundred pounds, but the hollow housing could hold a full load of moonshine, and even a man in a pinch. There was a trapdoor beneath it for dumping contraband during emergencies (and a hidey-hole dug in the earth below), but since the music store sat up on blocks, Pooky couldn’t use that for escape until after dark.

Albert raised his hand and gave Deputy DeLillo an exaggerated shake of his head, indicating that he’d seen neither hide nor hair of his employee. For a few paralyzed seconds, Albert worried that DeLillo would come inside to question him again, which would lead to the big deputy kicking open the door that separated him from the loudly copulating couple, and then to death for either DeLillo or Willie Hooks. The violent repercussions of Willie killing the deputy were almost unthinkable. Thankfully, after a few awful seconds, Big John waved his mitt and drove on. An invisible band around Albert’s chest loosened, and he remembered to breathe.

He wondered how Pooky was doing. The fool of a boy had been hiding in the Hammond when his girlfriend’s father and a Klansman named Frank Knox had burst into the store, cursing Albert for “fomenting miscegenation” and threatening to kill him if he didn’t produce Pooky Wilson. Albert had summoned all his courage and lied with the sincerity of Lucifer himself; if he hadn’t, both he and Pooky would already be dead.

As the bedsprings sang in the back of the store, Albert prayed as he never had before. He prayed that the Klan hadn’t stationed anybody outside to watch his store. He prayed that Willie and the schoolteacher would finish soon, would get away clean, and that darkness would fall. Anything less meant the end for all of them, except maybe the white woman.

The sofa springs groaned at about E above middle C, so Albert tuned his voice to their accompaniment.
“There was two hundred folks
a-dancin’,”
he belted as he negotiated his way through the pianos in the display room,
“laughin’, singin’ to beat the band.”
He’d already run out of verses, so he’d taken to making up his own, describing the tragic fire that would likely have killed him, had he not been away in the navy.
“Yeah, there was two hundred souls a-dancin’, lawd—laughin’, singin’ to beat
the band.”
Entering his workshop, he sat beside the Hammond organ, picked up a tonewheel, and pretended to work on it.
“Two hundred souls
on fire, locked indoors by the devil’s hand.”

After a quick look back at the display window, he tapped on the Hammond and said, “How you doin’ in there, Pook?”

“Not good. I’m ’bout to pee in my pants, Mr. Albert.”

“You got to hold it, boy. And don’t even think about lifting that trapdoor. Somebody outside might see your water hit the ground.”

“I can’t breathe, neither. I don’t like small spaces. Can’t you let me out for a minute? It feels like a coffin in here.”

“There’s plenty of air in there. That small space is the only thing that’s gonna keep you
out
of a coffin tonight.”

Albert heard a ripping sound. Then part of the grille cover beneath the organ’s keyboard was pulled back, and an eye appeared in the hole. It looked like the eye of a catfish gasping in the bottom of a boat.

“Quit tearing that cloth!” Albert snapped.

The eye vanished, and two dark fingers took its place. “Hold my hand, Mr. Albert. Just for a minute.”

With a lump in his throat, Albert reached out and hooked his forefinger in Pooky’s. The boy hung on like Albert was the only thing still tying him to the earth.

“Is there somebody else in the store?” Pooky asked.

“Willie Hooks. He’ll be gone soon. Listen, now. When it gets dark, I’m gonna turn on the lights in the display room and start playing piano. That’ll draw any eyes watching the place. Once I get goin’ good, open that trapdoor and drop down to the hole. If the coast looks clear, make your way two blocks over to Widow Nichols’s house. She’ll hide you in her attic till tomorrow. When I think the time is right, I’ll pick you up in my panel truck and carry you to the train station at Brookhaven. From there, it’s the Illinois Central straight up to Chicago. You got that?”

“I guess so. What I’m ’posed to use for money? Man can’t ride the train for free.”

Albert leaned over and slid five twenty-dollar bills under the bottom of the organ.

“Tuck that in your pants. That foldin’ money’s gonna get you started in Chi-town.”