Cover

Dedication

For Betty and Jerry Iles,

who came out of tiny southern towns and climbed books like stairs to rise.

Thank you for everything.

Epigraph

For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Prologue

Grief is the most solitary emotion; it makes islands of us all.

I’ve spent a lot of time visiting graves over the past few weeks. Sometimes with Annie, but mostly alone. The people who see me there give me a wide berth. I’m not sure why. For thirty miles around, almost everyone knows me. Penn Cage, the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. When they avoid me—waving from a distance, if at all, then hurrying on their way—I sometimes wonder if I have taken on the mantle of death. Jewel Washington, the county coroner and a true friend, pulled me aside in City Hall last week and told me I look like living proof that ghosts exist. Maybe they do. Since Caitlin died, I have felt like nothing more than the ghost of myself.

Perhaps that’s why I spend so much time visiting graves.

Henry Sexton is buried in a small churchyard in Ferriday, his tilted stone exposed to the cold wind that blasts over the Louisiana Delta fields. The simple marker displays the usual census information. Below this is his chosen epitaph, discovered in one of his journals:

Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

Typical of Henry to choose a line from a Bob Seger song.

Underneath this lament for lost innocence are six words chiseled by the black folks who attend this saltbox church, and who keep the grave of this white journalist trimmed to perfection.

Wasn’t that a man?

—Muddy Waters

Enough said.

Caitlin’s grave stands in the Natchez City Cemetery, in the flat square below Jewish Hill, not far from the Turning Angel. Her stone is white Alabama marble, tall and thin and strong, just as she was. Her mother wanted her buried up north, but her father persuaded the family that since Caitlin had intended to marry and raise her family in Mississippi, then here she should remain.

I chose her epitaph, a line she often quoted and attributed to Ayn Rand.

The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who’s going to stop me.