The Devils Punchbowl - Greg Iles

didn't move back to Natchez with the intention of staying, but rather to give Annie and me a safe haven to grieve over Sarah. I certainly didn't come back to save the town.

And I have not saved it.

In fact, I have conspicuously failed to do so. Since I was twelve years old, I’'ve known that the key to renewing this city is leading the white population back to the public schools, yet I have proved unequal to the task. The reasons are complex and deeply rooted in the history of the state, but also of the nation as a whole. Sitting with my old classmates, I see that more clearly now. For despite living in suburbs in the north or west, most of their children do not attend public schools. Before the funeral I heard one mother complain (brag) about how long she’d had to camp out to get her youngest child admitted to kindergarten at the most exclusive private school in Portland, Oregon. The petrified truth is that throughout history the affluent have always sent their children to exclusive schools. What makes Natchez’s problem seem special is that the poor and lower-middle-class populations are predominantly black. This results in a system that appears to be racist but which is actually segregated by economics—as are the schools in most other states. Racism may contribute to this economic reality, but that’s a national problem. To imagine that I could solve in four years a problem that the best minds in government have been unable to solve in five decades was pure hubris—as Caitlin pointed out before I ran for office.

Father Mullen is preparing to conduct Communion. As ushers begin escorting the Catholics down the outer aisles, I ponder what my old schoolmates said outside the cathedral. The pipe organ fills the foot-shuffling silence, but when the cantor’s voice joins in, I block out both and focus on my memory of the voices I heard on the cathedral steps. At last I recognize the unfamiliar timbre I heard there. It was the tone one uses when speaking to a martyr, or to a fool. Though they don'’t verbalize this feeling, the men and women I grew up with are amazed that I’'ve been willing to pay the costs of returning home to try to change things. First among those is the education of my child—not because we have a racist school system, but because the first-class education I received at St. Stephen’s is no longer to be had here at any price—

not even at St. Stephen’s.

This

realization steals my breath for a few moments, and to fully accept it is almost more than I can bear.

The only thing that could have prevented the present crisis was foresight during the boom years of my childhood. If community leaders had worked

then

to diversify the local economy away from oil production, and if white citizens had supported the public schools, Natchez would be a different city today. Political and economic opportunities were squandered that may never present themselves again. But short of a time machine, what I need to save this town is the people who have flown in for this funeral. Natchez needs the bright young citizens who benefited during her prime to return the favor. She needs their intelligence and energy, their desire to remake the city into the image of their dreams, a place where their children can experience the kind of childhood they enjoyed, but where those kids can also return and raise their own families if they choose to. But that is a pipe dream. The conversations I had a half hour ago told me that. Tomorrow, my old classmates will say good-bye to their aging parents and fly back to their own families. Other towns and cities will be the beneficiaries of their energy and intelligence; other schools will receive the fruits of their labor. They will always speak wistfully of Natchez, and many may retire here after their children leave for college, but with a few exceptions, that’s it. The same is true of most young black people who leave Natchez after high school.

So,

I wonder, with a wretched emptiness that borders on despair,

what the hell am I doing here?

What does it mean to “save” a town anyway? American towns have been growing and withering since the 1600s. The idea that a city that has survived for almost three hundred years needs me to save it is more than a little egotistical. Natchez will always be here in one form or another. It stands on high ground, well watered and fertile, with a mild climate hospitable to crops. Even in 1927, when the Mississippi swelled to a terrifying seventy miles

wide

at Natchez, the city stood high and dry above the closest thing to Armageddon the Mississippi valley has ever known. In my messianic zeal to resurrect what I saw as the best part of the city’s past, I simply lost sight of the fact that no matter what I do, Penn Cage will be but a footnote in the long history of this once great river town.

As the Communion service proceeds, and Father Mullen drones about the body and blood of Christ, my thoughts turn to my own family. For the past two years, I’'ve tried not to think about what my political crusade has cost, but the price has been high. I lost Caitlin at the outset, because she didn't share my vision. I deprived Annie of the culturally rich experience she might have had in a larger city. I put my writing career on hold, giving up an absurdly large amount of money in exchange for a public servant’s salary. And for this I got the privilege of beating my head against a wall of stubborn provincialism and hidebound tradition for two dispiriting years. Ironically, my actions have actually exacerbated some problems. The magic I worked on Mrs. Pierce opened the gates to the

Magnolia Queen

and all its depredations. Tim Jessup lies dead twenty feet away from me, and despite my national reputation as a prosecutor, I’'ve been unable to bring his killer to justice.

Pathetic.

That'’s my verdict on the Penn Cage administration.

While I waited for Tim in the cemetery that first night, I reflected that I’d rarely failed at anything, and that I’d never quit. True Southerners, I was always taught, surrender only when the means to fight no longer exist. But the Southern mythos of noble defeat gives me no comfort today. Am I to sacrifice the education of my child in a vain quest to “save” something that is merely changing, as all things do?

“Penn?” whispers Sam Jacobs, nudging me in the side. “It’s time to do our thing.”

The Communion service has ended. Father Mullen is walking around Tim’s casket, sprinkling holy water. Rising like a sleepwalker, I take my place beside the casket and help roll it down the long aisle to the cathedral doors.

I recognize almost every face in the pews. As I pass, dozens of eyes seek mine with a beseeching look. What are they asking? How did Tim die? Why did he die? Or do they have deeper questions? In their puzzled faces, I sense a longing to know why the feeling of unity they experience on occasions like this cannot be sustained throughout the year, as it once was in this town. But the answer is sitting among them. A town that cannot sustain its children through adulthood cannot survive, except as a shadow of itself.

When the ushers open the cathedral doors, the sunlight blinds me

for several seconds. Luckily, my pupils adapt by the time we reach the head of the broad steps, where we lift the heavy casket from the gurney and carry Tim down the ten steps that have brought older pallbearers to grief. Without quite admitting it to myself, I had hoped to find Caitlin waiting outside, but one scan of the intersecting streets tells me she’s not here. As we slide the casket along the rollers inside the waiting hearse, Sam Jacobs, a Jew, pats the side of the coffin and says, “See you at the cemetery, Timmy.” In that moment I recall two thoughts I had the last time I saw Tim alive, which was at the cemetery, on Jewish Hill.

One is the lesson my father learned in Korea:

Heroism is sacrifice.

The second is that most of the heroes I know are dead. Tim was one of those heroes. He chose a martyr’s death as surely as some deluded saint from the Middle Ages. Looking down Union Street, lined with the rental cars of everyone but Caitlin Masters, the selfish voice that I usually suppress speaks loud and clear in my mind:

Are you going to live a martyr’s life? Will you sacrifice your daughter’s education and the second love of your life to fight a battle you no longer believe is winnable?

“Penn?” says a man’s voice. “Are you okay?”

Turning away from the hearse, I find Paul Labry standing beside me. Paul is Catholic, but he did not attend St. Stephen’s with Tim and me, and so was not asked to be a pallbearer. Despite this, he’s stayed close to me today, knowing that I'm working under great strain, even if he doesn’'t fully understand the reasons for it.

“I'm fine, Paul. Thanks for asking.”

“Are you riding with Drew and the other guys?”

Looking past Labry, I see Drew Elliott beckoning me to a black BMW a few cars behind the hearse. “I guess so. You’re going to the burial, right?”

“Of course. Unless you need me to do something else.”

“No, I want you to come. I want to speak to you afterward.”

Paul’s face takes on a worried cast, but he knows this isn’t the place to ask for details. The congregation is spilling down the steps now, and car engines are starting all along Union and Main. “Is anything wrong?” he asks softly.

“No, no. I just want to ask you something. Something I should have asked you two years ago.”

Intrigued, Labry takes my elbow and starts leading me away from the crowd, but I pull free and quietly assure him that nothing is wrong. “I'm just upset by Tim’s death,” I tell him. “We’ll talk after the burial, okay?”

“Sure. I'’ll see you at the cemetery.”

While Paul heads up Main Street, presumably to get his car, I tread slowly toward Drew Elliot’s BMW like a man crossing the last mile of a desert. The flicker of an impulse to search for Caitlin’s face among those on the sidewalk goes through my mind, but I don'’t raise my head. She’s not here. She made that decision this morning. Squinting against the glare coming off the concrete, I suddenly realize that I know the answer to my silent questions. Some people have chosen to see me as a hero in the past. I traded on that reputation to gain the mayor’s office. But I'm no hero, not by my father’s measure. I'm certainly no martyr. My work here is not finished, not by a long shot. But I am. This time, when my old friends leave Natchez to return to their families, I will follow them with mine. This time I choose the future, not the past.

My crusade is over.

CHAPTER

39

Caitlin crosses the Mississippi River Bridge with her heart pounding. She is sure she has found the girl who passed Linda Church’s note to Penn at the Ramada, and she did it with two phone calls. The trick was figuring out whom to call. Caitlin had only caught a glimpse of the girl at the hotel, and mostly walking away, at that. But she’d seen enough. The giveaway was the hair. At first glance the girl’s hair had looked short, but as she walked away, Caitlin had seen the telltale mane hanging out from the tail of the jacket. Caitlin hardly ever saw waist-length hair anymore, and when she did, it usually meant one thing—in the Deep South, anyway. The other thing was the girl’s eye makeup. Not only had she worn twice as much as she needed, but it looked as though it had been applied by an eight-year-old trying to imitate her teenage sister. These two things together told Caitlin that the girl was wearing her idea of a disguise. And what she was disguising was her religion.

Caitlin had been fascinated when Penn told her that Mississippi had the highest per capita number of churches and also the lowest literacy rate. Three years ago, she had used these statistics as the launching point of a story on charismatic religions. People speaking in tongues, faith healing. For her, the most disturbing thing about doing the story had been her contact with the younger girls in the churches. She could see that they aspired to be like other teenage girls, but they

had been raised in families with nineteenth-century values, or certainly pre-Eisenhower-era twentieth-century values. Her portrayal of these churches as patriarchal and sexist had upset a lot of their members and got some girls in trouble with their pastors, but it had also opened a lot of eyes to a closed society.

A couple of the women she’d spoken to had remained kind to her, and so the moment Caitlin suspected that the girl who delivered the note might be Pentecostal, she had checked her files at the

Examiner

and made some phone calls. Using what she’d gleaned from Penn’s description, she said she was looking for a tall girl who had probably lost a lot of weight in the past year or two, and who might have a job in Vidalia. That was all it had taken to get the two pieces of information she needed: a name and a location. Darla McRaney, the Bargain Barn on Highway 15.

At first Caitlin had been tempted to tell Penn what she’d discovered. But then she’d realized it would only prove to him that his jab about her penchant for following a story was on target. If this trip led any closer to Linda Church, Caitlin had promised herself, she’d tell Penn immediately.

The Bargain Barn is a long, low-slung building just off the highway, that looks as if it might once have been a brand-name store. During all the time Caitlin lived in Natchez, she’d only been inside it once, but her memory is clear. The store sells everything from clothing to housewares, medicine to ant poison, all of it cheap both in quality and price.

Only a few cars are in the lot. Caitlin parks between two of them, then locks her car and walks through the glass door. An elderly man wearing an orange vest greets her with a puzzled smile, and she walks past him into the clothing section.

“Can I help you?” asks a middle-aged woman sorting dresses on a circular rack.

“I'm looking for Darla McRaney.”

“Darla mostly stays over in housewares.”

Caitlin quickly navigates the empty aisles until she reaches an area filled with thin metal pots and imitation Tupperware. In the next aisle, above a rack of blenders, she sees Darla McRaney’s head. She knows it’s Darla because a girl would have to be almost six feet tall to be seen above the blenders.

Making a U around the end of the aisle, Caitlin approaches Darla cautiously, like a naturalist trying not to spook a timid animal. In spite of this, Darla looks up sharply and takes a step back, blushing scarlet.

“I didn't see you,” she says. “Can I help you?”

“Darla, my name is Caitlin. I'm a very good friend of Penn Cage.”