Cemetery Road

by Greg Iles

  “Seems like,” Dad whispers, and then he coughs hard, struggles to swallow.

  I’ve become somewhat accustomed to his illness over the past months, but there’s no denying that last night’s coronary knocked him down hard. He doesn’t seem to notice the turn for his neighborhood when we pass it.

  “I have some really good memories of this road,” I tell him. “On our end of town, anyway. The old Weldon barn, and Delphi Spring out at Parnassus Hill. But the other end you can have. The cemetery and the river. This is a road with life at one end and death at the other.”

  Dad grunts again, and before I realize where we are, we’re bumping over the railroad tracks where his wife and daughter died, and where Jet disposed of Max’s gun and bloody hammer.

  “We’re all on Cemetery Road,” Dad rasps, turning his head enough to see the kudzu-choked ravine drift by under the gray sky. “All the time. Some of us are still near enough to that spring to pretend the road leads somewhere else, or maybe goes on forever. But we’re all headed to the graveyard sooner or later. Or that river.”

  I turn and find him looking at me, his jaundiced eyes filled with the pain of all his years in a bottle. But beneath the glaze of exhaustion, I see a faint remnant of the dreams he once had, and memories of heroic things he accomplished before violence and death came into his life.

  “They tried to change the name of this stretch once,” he says, looking forward again. “Where the accident happened. Goddamn Chamber of Commerce. Called it Azalea Boulevard. What a crock. They even put up signs, but it never took. Everybody knew they were on Cemetery Road. Might as well call it what it is, right?”

  Right.

  “What do you want to do out here?” I ask as the green hills of the cemetery come into sight.

  “Just sit,” he says. “I don’t think I can walk. Even with your help.”

  “We’ll just park under the statue then, and stay in the car.”

  “Look at the river some.”

  Great, I think, feeling my stomach roll.

  I pull through the rear entrance of the cemetery, a massive wrought-iron gate set on masonry pillars. The asphalt lane beyond the wall is smooth but narrow, maintained by the Bienville Cemetery Association. Under the steely sky, I drive slowly through cuts between gentle hills covered with marble stones, obelisks, crosses, and mausoleums that range in size from garden sheds to small houses.

  Turning toward the river, we ascend the long road to Laurel Hill, the westernmost redoubt of the graveyard. Standing on one of the highest stretches of the Bienville bluff, it towers 250 feet above the Mississippi River. The McEwan family plot has occupied part of this ground since the 1840s.

  “There it is,” Dad says, pointing with his shaking hand.

  The shoulders and head of Adam’s statue have become visible above the stones on the back side of the hill. Strangely nervous, I drive the last hundred yards to the edge of the hill, then park on the grass before the brick-and-marble base that supports the monument. From the passenger seat, Dad can glance to his right for a full view of Adam, but in general he’s facing Louisiana and the river.

  From this spot, if you look upstream and down, you can see almost fifteen miles of the Mississippi. Looking westward over the delta fields, now planted with cotton and soybeans, you can see to where the land falls away with the curvature of the earth. To the south I see the great towers that carry the electrical cables across the river; the one on this bank is where Adam danced atop the pinnacle while I clung to the ladder in terror, four hundred feet below.

  “Well, here we are,” Dad says softly. “Good old Stavros.”

  This statement doesn’t puzzle me as it would others. The origin of Adam’s statue has been the grist for a dozen local legends. The truth is simple enough. During his work as a reporter for the army, Dad served as a correspondent in Italy for a year, and he took his chance to see all he could of the ruins of the classical world. He made friends everywhere he went, and one man he became close to was a sculptor. Half Greek and half Italian, Stavros Romano began his career as a promising artist, but by the time Dad met him he was sculpting memorial pieces for the private cemeteries of wealthy families. Several of his statues had been cast in bronze or concrete and were sold as copies around the world.

  Shortly after Adam died, Stavros somehow heard of his passing. Five months after the memorial service, a large crate arrived on a freighter at the Port of New Orleans. There it was transferred to a barge headed upriver. Five days later, I drove my father and mother down to the Bienville port to see what Stavros Romano had sent them.

  Inside the crate was a life-size marble angel of breathtaking beauty. The angel, a young male, sat on a stone with an air of weary melancholy, as though exhausted from dealing with the travails of the earthly realm. The statue had been hand-sculpted, and I was too young to grasp what that would have cost had my father commissioned it. My parents were so stunned, they weren’t sure what to do with it. The magnitude of the gift seemed too great to accept. And yet, somehow the statue seemed to fit the hole that Adam’s death had blown in our lives.

  It was my mother who voiced our collective conviction: “It looks like Adam,” she said with reverence. “Not exactly like him, but . . . the spirit of him. We’ll put it in our plot, up on the hill.” My father resisted at first. By that time, he had not merely abandoned the idea of God, but was enraged by it. If his friend’s statue was going into the McEwan family plot, Dad wanted its wings removed, broken off, and the stumps sanded down to hide the fact that they’d ever been there. I could see his point. As beautiful as they might have been on an eagle, the folded wings gave the stone angel a supernatural aspect, whereas without them the figure would have appeared as a strong and handsome boy of about eighteen, the ideal of Greek beauty.

  My mother refused to allow it. She said they hadn’t the right to deface Stavros’s sculpture, and besides, the town would probably rise up to prevent the desecration of a holy statue. Without his wings, she said quietly, the boy would possess an almost decadent, earthly beauty. In this he was like Adam, and in the end that may have been what swayed my father to permit this exotic object to become Adam’s memorial, which now—thirty-one years after his death—is one of the most famous landmarks in the town. When I was in high school, I used to come up here alone sometimes, and I saw more than one tugboat captain shine his spotlight up on the high bluff to pick out the angel where it stood sentry duty at the edge of the cemetery.

  “What do you think happened to him?” Dad asks. “Most people get found when they die in the river.”

  “I don’t know,” I answer warily. “I used to think about it a lot.”

  “I like to think he made it all the way down to the Gulf.”

  “Me, too,” I confess.

  “A river burial,” he mutters. “I don’t like that. They say Hernando de Soto’s men buried him in the river so the Indians wouldn’t realize he was mortal. That was about fifty miles south of here. I like the idea of burial at sea better.”

  “I do, too.”

  “I like the British navy burial service.”

  This conversation is surreal, but I suppose I should have expected something like it. “I think I remember some of that from Patrick O’Brian’s books.”

  “Master and Commander,” he says. “Think of it. Wrapped in your hammock and weighted with cannonballs. That’s the way to go.”

  “Do you remember the words? I think they’re from the Book of Common Prayer.”

  “Nothing’s perfect,” Dad grumbles. “I remember some—leaving out that nonsense about Christ.”

  “Say them,” I tell him, feeling butterflies in my stomach. “This can be Adam’s real funeral. For you, me, and him.”

  “The McEwan men, eh? Why not?”

  He raises a trembling hand to his mouth and clears his throat. Then, in the strongest voice I’ve heard him use since I returned home, he recites, “We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption . . . lo
oking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.”

  In the silence that follows, I hear the cry of a far-off bird, the groan of a truck’s engine down on Cemetery Road. “I like that,” I tell him. “It’s fitting.”

  Driving out here, I intended to repeat the explicit apology I made to Dad while he was sleeping in the ICU. But this doesn't seem the proper moment. He’s staring fixedly at Adam’s statue. “After I’m gone,” he intones, “I want to be cremated. No worms for me. Blythe can keep some ashes. But the rest I want you to take out in a boat and cast over the river. I know you don’t like going out there, but I’m asking you to do it. I’ll follow Adam to wherever he went.”

  My God. He’s still haunted by the loss of his eldest son. But then . . . am I not also?

  “All right,” I tell him. “I’ll do it.”

  Dad raises his left hand a couple of inches in acknowledgment but says no more. Looking at the back of his head, the brittle white hair and frail shoulders, it strikes me how awful it must be to wither and die while your mind is clear. It’s a terrible paradox, sufficient to kill religious faith in a thinking man. Of course, the reverse is also a paradox: to live for years with a ruined mind in a healthy body. Some might argue that’s worse, but only from the outside. At least the victim suffering that fate remains unaware of the true horror of his plight.

  Dad looks out over the river for a while, and I leave him be. At length he says, “I wish I had more time. To make up for some things. This body of mine’s about used up. I haven’t done it any favors with my drinking. But once I got Parkinson’s . . . I just couldn’t abide it. My vanity. I hate to confess that.”

  “You always had a lot of pride.”

  “It’s vanity, not pride. And vanity’s a low thing. That’s one thing the Christians got right. Vanity’s a weakness. That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. There’s nothing wrong with being sick.”

  “No. But it’s human to feel the way you do about it.”

  His eyes find mine, and I see despondency in them. “I don’t recognize the world anymore, Marshall. Maybe when you stop feeling at home in the world, it’s time to leave it.”

  Before he can go further down this road, an urge to confession takes hold of me. “Dad, back at the hospital, you asked if I’d agreed to bury anything in exchange for getting the paper back.”

  “Did I?” he asks, still looking toward the river.

  “Yes. And I avoided the question. But I did agree to bury something. Probably the biggest story of my life. I sold out. And I’m not sure why.”

  “Something to do with the Poker Club? Burying their sins?”

  “Yeah. Some big ones.”

  He takes a few shallow breaths. “I used to be a zealot about ethics. So damn self-righteous. But let me tell you something: I know of cases where guys buried stories—big stories—and I’m talking about legends. I’ll carry that to my grave, but I know.”

  “You can’t tell me more than that? Why they did it?”

  He shrugs, still watching the Mississippi roll below us. “In one case, a president asked him to. Didn’t think the country could handle it. In another, the story would have destroyed a friend. I also knew a couple of guys who took money not to print something. We’re all human.”

  “These Poker Club guys. They basically sold a Senate seat. To a foreign country.”

  Dad cuts his eyes at me. “To get Avery Sumner in? Huh. Are they going to make it right?”

  “Sumner’s going to resign.”

  “What did you get in exchange for your silence? The newspaper? Our house back?”

  “A lot more than that. A new public school, built by next year. Thirty years of full taxes for the city from the paper mill. Money for Buck’s widow. A lot more besides.”

  Dad shifts in his seat, as though forced to by pain. Then he growls, “Here’s what I think. If that’s the deal you made, you probably accomplished more good than you could in twenty years of reporting from your high horse. That may sound facile, but I believe it. If you can hold their feet to the fire and make them do what they promised . . . then sleep with a clear conscience.”

  I feel as though a killing weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

  “It’s a business of whores now anyway,” he says. “Access whores. Everybody talks about the renaissance of journalism. Renaissance, hell. Reporters trade favorable coverage for access every day. I guess you can’t blame them, since any day on the job could be their last. The bean counters are stripping our newsrooms bare. TV anchors recruited at beauty contests and modeling agencies chase ratings like hounds in heat . . . The politico-media complex is as bad as anything Eisenhower warned us about. At least you made a clean deal. In exchange for burying one story, a whole corner of this impoverished state gets a new lease on life. Thousands of kids get a better education? That’s a fair trade, in my book.”

  Dad stops speaking, his chest heaving from the effort of speech. He coughs from deep in his lungs, a ragged sound that finally trails off into a worrisome wheeze. I mean to sit quietly with him, but another confession rises unbidden from my heart.

  “I did that one other time in my career,” I say softly. “I buried part of a story, betrayed my calling.”

  “When?”

  “My Pulitzer book. That night Paul saved me in Iraq . . . he killed some civilians. While escaping the house, we got trapped in an alley with a car blocking us in. A Honda Accord. Paul riddled it with bullets, and we scrambled over the top. It turned out there was a family inside.”

  Dad looks out the window at Adam’s statue. “War’s full of horrors like that. You know that. What if Paul hadn’t fired?”

  “We might not have made it. There could have been insurgents in that car. But that’s not my point. As we clambered over that Honda, I heard a child cry out from the backseat. A whimper, really. The parents were dead in the front, but this child had lived. I started to go back, but Paul jerked me to the ground. Seconds later, a heavy machine gun chewed the car to pieces.”

  Dad looks back at me but says nothing. He knows more is coming.

  “Four years later, when my son drowned, I couldn’t escape the feeling that his death was some kind of karmic payback for me not saving that Iraqi child. It may sound crazy, but I became certain of it. Obsessed with the idea. I’d let an innocent die, and my little boy had been taken as payment. A life for a life. The universe had balanced things out.”

  My father looks into my eyes without pity. “You think you’ve been tormented by that for ten years. But you haven’t. You’ve been comforted by it.”

  Anger flares in me. “Did you understand what I said?”

  He nods solemnly. “Better than most. But you’re not looking hard enough at yourself. Believing your son’s death was a price exacted by fate, or karma, or God, lets you believe there was reason to it—meaning behind it, however hard to bear. The true horror is that you’re wrong. There’s no universal tally of good and evil, balancing right and wrong. The Christians with their God-has-a-plan fantasy, the Hindus with their karmic balance . . . it’s all wishful thinking. Primitive religious impulse. Linus’s damned security blanket.” My father’s eyes burn with hard-earned conviction. “The truth is infinitely simpler and harder to bear. Your son died because your wife had four glasses of wine instead of three. Adam died because you and he tried to swim that damned river down there when you were drunk and exhausted. No other reason.”

  “Then why did you blame me for it?”

  “Because it was your fault!” He shakes his head with what appears to be self-disgust. “But it was Adam’s, too. His more than yours, because he was older. Old enough to know better. But Adam was dead. You were still alive. That was your bad luck. I should have borne all the pain myself. I should have let you be a boy. But I wasn’t strong enough, Marshall. I’m so sorry for that.”

  I never thought I would hear these words from him.

  “Afte
r my first wife and child died,” he says, “I was lost. Searching for meaning, like you. But Adam’s death taught me the terrible truth. There’s no meaning to be found in tragedy. Only in our response to it. What we do matters, nothing else. That’s what kept me at the bottom of a bottle for fifty years. I wasn’t searching for an answer—I’d been given the answer. And I couldn’t handle it. It’s tough to look this life square in the face. The plight . . . the void. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. That’s why your old man’s a drunk.”

  “Ecclesiastes,” I whisper. “From my atheist father. All this time, I’ve figured you blamed yourself for some sin I never knew about and transferred your guilt onto me.”

  Dad’s face fills with loathing. “Freudian claptrap. If that were the answer, I’d have shot myself and been done with it thirty years ago.” He squeezes my knee with surprising force. “You’re alive now because Paul Matheson shot that family in Iraq. If you’d gone back for that child, you’d have died. Your own son would never have been born. You’ll never penetrate the heart of that equation; the human brain isn’t up to it. The randomness will drive you mad. Those Poker Club bastards could put a bullet in your head tonight. What’s to stop them? Fate? Providence? Prayers? Hogwash. Maybe that deal you made today will save your life, or even your mother’s. I sure hope so.”

  “That’s a pretty grim vision of the world, Dad.”

  “Listen at your peril.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do after all this. My personal life’s a mess. And the country has drifted so far off course, nobody even cares about the truth anymore.”

  “You’re right. We’re witnessing the last gasp of white America, and it’s a lulu. Our people think the land of liberty’s their God-given country club and the caddies have forgotten their place. But revolution’s coming . . . just not the one they think. I don’t envy you, son.”

  “Things always come back into balance, though, right? Eventually.”

  Dad goes very still, eerily so considering his disease. “Eventually. Balance came back in 1918 after twenty million deaths. It came back in 1945 after seventy million. It’s getting the pendulum back to the midpoint that’s the killer. And right now it’s being pushed hard right, all around the world. The last gasp of Ozymandias—once more, with feeling.”