At the center of the table sits a plate heaped with chicken shallow-fried to a peppered gold. I’ve watched Ruby make that chicken a thousand times and never once use more than salt, pepper, flour, and Crisco. With those four ingredients she creates a flavor and texture that Harland Sanders couldn’t touch with his best pressure cooker. I snatch up a wing and take a bite of white meat. Crispy outside and moist within, it bursts in my mouth with intoxicating familiarity.
“Go slap your daddy’s hand!” Ruby cries, and Annie quickly obeys. “Ya’ll sit down and eat proper. I’ll get the iced tea.”
“I’ll get the tea,” Mom says, heading for the kitchen before Ruby can start. “Make your plate, Ruby. Tonight you’re a guest.”
Our family says grace only at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then almost as a formality. But with Ruby present, no one dares reach for a fork.
“Would you like to return thanks, Ruby?” Dad asks.
The old woman shakes her head, her eyes shining with mischief. “I wish you’d do it, Dr. Cage. You give a fine blessing.”
Thirty-eight years of practicing medicine has stripped my father of the stern religious carapace grafted onto him in the Baptist churches of his youth. But when pressed, he can deliver a blessing that vies with the longest-winded of deacons for flowery language and detail. He seems about to deliver one of these, with tongue-in-cheek overtones added for my benefit, but my mother halts him with a touch of her hand. She bows her head, and everyone at the table follows suit.
“Father,” she says, “it’s been far too long since we’ve given thanks to you in this house. Tonight we thank you for the return of our son, who has been away too long. We give thanks for Anna Louise Cage, our beautiful grandchild, and pray that we may bring her as much happiness as she brings to us each day.” She pauses, a brief caesura that focuses everyone’s concentration. “We also commend the soul of Sarah Louise Cage to your care, and pray that she abides in thy grace forever.”
I take Annie’s hand under the table and squeeze it.
“We don’t pretend to understand death here,” Mom continues softly. “We ask only that you let this young family heal, and be reconciled to their loss. This is a house of love, and we humbly ask grace in thy name’s sake. Amen.”
As we echo the “amen,” Dad and I look at each other across the table, moved by my mother’s passion but not its object. In matters religious I am my father’s son, having no faith in a just God, or any god at all if you shake me awake at four a.m. and put the question to me. There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah’s death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where patients or family members often asked outright if I was saved. I always smiled and nodded so as to avoid a philosophical argument that would benefit no one, and wondered if the question was an eccentricity of Southern hospitals. In the Pacific Northwest they probably offer you crystals or lists of alternative healers. I have no regrets about letting Sarah raise Annie in a church, though. Sometimes the image of her mother in heaven is all that keeps my daughter from despair.
As Dad passes around the mustard greens and cheese grits and beer biscuits, another memory rises unbidden. One cold hour before dawn, sitting beside Sarah’s hospital bed, I fell to my knees and begged God to save her. The words formed in my mind without volition, strung together with strangely baroque formality: I who have not believed since I was a child, who have not crossed a church threshold to worship since I was thirteen, who since the age of reason have admitted nothing greater than man or nature, ask in all humility that you spare the life of this woman. I ask not for myself, but for the child I am not qualified to raise alone. As soon as I realized what I was thinking, I stopped and got to my feet. Who was I talking to? Faith is something you have or you don’t, and to pretend you do in the hope of gaining some last-minute dispensation from a being whose existence you have denied all your life goes against everything I am. I have never placed myself above God. I simply cannot find within myself the capacity for belief.
Yet when Sarah finally died, a dark seed took root in my mind. As irrational as it is, a profoundly disturbing idea haunts me: that on the night that prayer blinked to life in my tortured mind, a chance beyond the realm of the temporal was granted me, and I did not take it. That I was tested and found wanting. My rational mind tells me I held true to myself and endured the pain as all pain must be endured—alone. But my heart says otherwise. Since that day I have been troubled by a primitive suspicion that in some cosmic account book, in some dusty ledger of karmic debits and credits, Sarah’s life has been charged against my account.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Annie asks.
“Nothing, punkin.”
“You’re crying.”
“Penn?” my mother says, half rising from her chair.
“I’m all right,” I assure her, wiping my eyes. “I’m just glad to be here, that’s all.”
Ruby reaches out and closes an arthritic hand over mine. “You should have come back months ago. You know where home is.”
I nod and busy myself with my knife and fork.
“You think too much to be left alone,” Ruby adds. “You always did.”
“Amen,” Dad agrees. “Now let’s eat, before my beeper goes off.”
“That beeper ain’t gonna ring during this meal,” Ruby says with quiet certainty. “Don’t worry ’bout that none.”
“Did you take out the batteries?” Dad asks, checking the pager.
“I just know,” Ruby replies. “I just know.”
I believe her.
My mother and I sit facing each other across the kitchen counter, drinking wine and listening for my father’s car in the driveway. He left after dinner to take Ruby home to the black section north of town, but putting Annie to bed took up most of the time I expected him to be away.
“Mom, I sensed something on the phone. You’ve got to tell me what’s wrong.”
She looks at me over the rim of her glass. “I’m worried about your father.”
A sliver of ice works its way into my heart. “Not more blockage in his coronary vessels?”
“No. I think Tom is being blackmailed.”
I am dumbfounded. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me more. My father is a man of such integrity that the idea seems utterly ridiculous. Tom Cage is a modern-day Atticus Finch, or as close as a man can get to that Southern ideal in the dog days of the twentieth century.
“What has he done? I mean, that someone could blackmail him over?”
“He hasn’t told me.”
“Then how do you know that’s what it is?”
She disposes of my question with a glance. Peggy Cage knows more about her husband and children than we know ourselves.
“Well, who’s blackmailing him?”
“I think it might be Ray Presley. Do you remember him?”
The skin on my forearms tingles. Ray Presley was a patient of my father for years, and a more disturbing character I have never met, not even in the criminal courts of Houston. Born in Sullivan’s Hollow, one of the toughest areas of Mississippi, Presley migrated to South Louisiana, where he reputedly worked as hired muscle for New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. He later hired on as a police officer in Natchez and quickly put his old skills to use. Brutal and clever, his specialty was “vigorous interrogation.” Off-duty, he haunted the fringes of Natchez’s business community, doing favors of