I want to tell him I love him, but the lump in my throat prevents it. My mind spins with memories of Will Percy, a Mississippian of legendary accomplishments. A hero of the Great War, a Princeton-educated poet, a graduate of Harvard Law School and founder of the Yale Younger Poets, Will Percy represented everything that was best in an educated southerner. Yet in the crucible of the Great Flood of 1927, after being placed in charge of flood relief for Washington County, this man of honor had utterly failed the black population he hoped to save and done irreparable damage to race relations in Mississippi. Does my father see himself in Will Percy? Were the 1960s my father’s Great Flood? I seem to remember that Will Percy’s greatest mistake was failing to stand up to his own father when it mattered most. I can’t afford to make the same mistake.

As I turn away from him and make my way back to my car, I realize that I don’t know much more than I did before I arrived. But I do know this: today Shadrach Johnson, Sheriff Billy Byrd, and Lincoln Turner declared war on my family.

The first casualty of that war will be Shad Johnson.

CHAPTER 31

TOM LAY IN bed beside his wife, who until a few minutes ago had been reading a novel whose plot she would forget in a week. Peggy Cage read more than two hundred books a year, her way of coping with the troubling transition from wakefulness to sleep, an insomnia that worsened a little each year. Now she snored softly beside him as she had for more than fifty years.

After Penn left, Tom had stood in the darkness for several minutes, smoking silently. He suspected that Partagas might be the last he would smoke for a long time, maybe forever. Strangely, this didn’t concern him much. Lying to his son had altered something inside him, and not for the better. The moment he’d denied being Viola’s lover, he’d felt as though some deep part of him had generated malignant cells that would proliferate until they killed him. Yet how could he answer such questions? Did he have a duty to confess to his son every last sin of his life? He didn’t think so. Penn would learn the most painful of laws in his own time: If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.