“Because you can’t,” he says calmly. He picks up his dead cigar from the ashtray, puts it in his mouth, and relights it with a high-pressure butane lighter that roars like a miniature welding torch. “Penn, let me tell you something: I thought I knew my father. He lived to be eighty-six, remember? Died of colon cancer. Do you remember how religious he was?”

“He never missed a Sunday at church. Or a Wednesday night.”

“That’s right.” Dad exhales a raft of blue smoke. “Well, near the end, I found him staring out the front window of his house, crying. Crying. Can you see Percy Cage doing that?”

My grandfather was as hard as a Salem judge. “No, I can’t.”

“When I asked why he was crying, Dad told me he was afraid. Afraid of dying. I can’t tell you how shocked I was. I asked whether his religious faith didn’t give him some comfort—his belief in the afterlife. He turned to me with a stare that made me shudder, and he said, ‘There’s nothing after this life, Tom. This world. Nothing.’ Then he looked back out the window.”

Dad studies the glowing tip of his cigar. “I felt like the earth had cracked open at my feet. Even though I believed basically the same thing. Dad had been going to church his whole life, professing faith, teaching Sunday school, saying and doing all the right things. But when it came to actually staring into the void, all that went out the window. All those years, he’d never been the person I thought I knew. Never. I’m not judging him. I’m just saying that I had no idea who my own father really was.”

My palms tingle as I stare back into my father’s eyes. Do I have similar blind spots when I look at him? Is that what he’s telling me? I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what’s around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep, invisible forces within my own father? Could Viola’s flight from Natchez in 1968 have been one of those events? What about my sister’s decision to leave America and live in England? Or Dad’s decision to help my wife die peacefully rather than in agony? You may be right, says a voice in my head, but this isn’t the time or place for speculation. Gathering myself as best I can, I sit back on the sofa and try to punch through his defenses.