Pithy twists her lips so angrily that I think she’s about to spit. “I curse the day the city brought in outsiders to work at those factories after the war. Most were decent working people trying to better themselves, of course. But others … that’s where the Klan recruited their rank and file. They were trash. Low, unadulterated white trash. Backshooters and bombers.”

Decades ago, David L. Cohn, a well-known Mississippi intellectual, made this case in the pages of the New Yorker (echoing Goethe from a century earlier). For all I know, Cohn used Pithy as his source. “Did you ever have any contact with the Knoxes and their cronies?”

“Why, they accosted me right on Main Street! Outside the H. F. Byrne shoe store. Some workers from that battery plant told me I was ‘messin’ in nigra business.’ Said I’d better keep in line or else there’d be trouble. I said, ‘Jody McNeely, if Major Nolan wasn’t lying at the bottom of the Pacific, he’d knock you to the curb this instant. I can’t do that, but if I see you dragging one of those timber crosses onto my property, I’ll shoot you down and sort it out with the sheriff afterwards.’” Pithy lowers her head, cold fire in her eyes. “And don’t think I wouldn’t have done it. I shot my first deer when I was ten.”

“How did they take that?”

She laughed softly. “It plumb stumped them! The ringleader nearly swallowed his Adam’s apple. Their kind always was easily intimidated. They’re peasants in their bones, and they jump at the crack of a whip.”

“Brody Royal won’t.”

Her smile vanishes. “No, he won’t.”

“What about his attorney, Claude Devereux?”

Pithy makes a sour face. “Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent.” While I try to think of how to segue into the question of my father’s past, maternal concern flows from the old woman’s eyes. “Penn, you’re your father’s son, and I love you for it. You’re a knight in shining armor, and most of the time, that’s a fine thing. But fights with men like this aren’t won in court. Snakes as old as Brody and Claude have already been trampled by most beasts of the field, and lived to tell the tale.”

I lay my hand over her cool, dry fingers and squeeze gently. “I’ve been in darker places than you know, Pithy. I can handle myself.”

She gazes back at me with unnerving intensity. “So has your father, dear. Tom was in combat, the same as my husband, and no man comes through that unscathed.”

“Pithy … do you think there’s any chance that Dad could have been friends with Brody Royal? Even a long time ago?”