Blood Memory. Greg Iles
another Valium, but I don’t want to risk falling asleep on the interstate. Suck it up, I tell myself, the mantra of my youth and the unwritten motto of my family. After all, it’s not as if my present dilemma is new. I never got pregnant before, but pregnancy is merely a new wrinkle in an old habit. I’ve always chosen unattainable men. In some ways, my whole life has been a series of inexplicable decisions and unresolved paradoxes. Two therapists have thrown up their hands in despair over my ability to function at my present level despite self-destructive behavior that keeps me dancing on the edge of disaster. My relationship with my present therapist, Dr. Hannah Goldman, has survived only because she allows me to skip my scheduled appointments and call her whenever I feel I need her. I don’t require face time. Just an understanding voice.
Actually, it’s about time I gave Hannah a call. She doesn’t know about my pregnancy. She doesn’t know about my panic attacks, either. After four years with her, I still find it difficult to ask for help. I come from a family that believes depression is a weakness, not an illness. I didn’t see a therapist as a child, when one might have done me some real good. My grandfather, a surgeon, believes psychiatrists are sicker than their patients. My father, a Vietnam vet, saw several VA therapists before he died, but none was able to alleviate the symptoms of his post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother also discouraged therapy, saying shrinks had never done her older sister any good, and that one had even seduced her. When suicidal impulses finally convinced me to seek treatment—at the age of twenty-four—neither the MDs nor the psychologists were able to control my mood swings, ease my nightmares, or slow my drinking and occasional reckless sexual behavior. For me—until Hannah Goldman and her laissez-faire style—therapy was pretty much a washout. And yet … though my present situation would qualify as a crisis in Hannah’s book, I can’t quite bring myself to call her.
As the night landscape changes from wet bottomland to hilly forests of oak and pine, I sense the great river out to my left, rolling southward as it has for millennia, oblivious to human travail. The Mississippi River links the town of my birth to the city of my adulthood, a great winding artery connecting the two spiritual poles of my existence, infancy and independence. Yet how independent am I? Natchez, the upstream city—older than New Orleans by two years, 1716 versus 1718—is the source of all that I am, whether I like it or not. And tonight, the prodigal daughter is returning home at eighty-five miles an hour.
Forward and backward …
Hurtling around curves in the dark forest, I feel a sort of emotional gravity sucking at my bones. But until the sign that reads ANGOLA PENITENTIARY flashes out of the night, I’m not sure why. Then I know. Just south of the razor-wire-enclosed fields known as Angola Farm, a great island rises out of the river. Owned by my family since before the Civil War, this atavistic world hovers like a dark mirage between the genteel cities of New Orleans and Natchez. I haven’t set foot on DeSalle Island in more than ten years, but I sense it now the way you sense a dangerous animal stirring from sleep. Only a dozen miles to my left, it sniffs for my scent in the humid darkness.
I step on the gas and put the place behind me, slipping into a driving trance that carries me the remainder of my journey. I slip out of it not on the outskirts of Natchez, but on the high-banked, curving drive that leads through the woods to my childhood home. Once surrounded by two hundred acres of virgin forest, the antebellum estate where I grew up now occupies only twenty landscaped acres hedged around by St. Catherine’s Hospital, a residential subdivision, and a stately old plantation called Elms Court. Nevertheless, the tunnel of oaks that arches over the drive still gives tourists the sense of approaching a cloistered European manor.
A high wrought-iron gate blocks the last fifty yards of the driveway, but it’s been unlocked for as long as I can remember. I stop and press a button on the gatepost. The iron bars retract as though pulled by unseen hands. As though the gods themselves have opened my way home.
Why am I here? I ask myself.
You know why, replies a chiding voice. You have nowhere else to go.
After dry-swallowing a Valium, I drive slowly through the gate.
The bars close behind me with a clang.
In a vast clearing ahead, moonlight washes over a sight that takes most people’s breath away. A French palace rises like a specter out of the mist, its limestone walls as pale as skin, its windows like dark eyes glassy from fatigue or drink. The scale of the place is heroic, projecting an impression of limitless wealth and power. Viewed through the prism of a modern eye, the mansion has a certain absurdity. A French Empire palace nestled in a Mississippi town of twenty thousand souls? Yet Natchez contains more than eighty antebellum homes, many of them mansions, and the provenance of this one perfectly suits the town, a living anachronism of grand excess, much of it built by the hands of slaves.
My family arrived in America in 1820, in the person of a Paris financier’s youngest son, sent to the wilds of Louisiana to make his fortune. Cursed with a cruel father, Henri Leclerc DeSalle worked like a slave himself until he surpassed all paternal expectations. By 1840, he owned cotton fields stretching for ten miles along the Mississippi River. And in that year, like most of the cotton barons of the time, he began building a regal mansion on the high bluff across the river, in the sparkling city called Natchez.
Most cotton planters built boxy Greek Revival mansions, but Henri, fiercely proud of his heritage, broke tradition and constructed a perfect copy of Malmaison, the summer palace of Napoléon and Josephine. Designed to humble DeSalle’s father when he visited America, Malmaison and its attendant buildings became the center of a cotton empire that—thanks to my family’s Yankee sympathies—survived both the Civil War and Reconstruction without mortal damage. It endured until 1927, when the Mississippi overran its banks in a flood of biblical proportions. The following year came crop fires, and in 1929 the stock market crash completed the proverbial “three bad years” that even wealthy farming families dreaded.
The DeSalles lost everything.
The patriarch of that era shot himself through the heart, leaving his descendants to scrape out a meager existence alongside the blacks and poor whites they had so recently exploited. But in 1938, fortune reversed herself again.
A young geologist with Texas backers leased a huge tract of former DeSalle land. Through a quirk in Louisiana law, landowners retained the mineral rights to their property for ten years after it was forfeited. My great-grandfather was ecstatic just to get the lease money. But nineteen days before his mineral rights expired, the young geologist struck one of the largest oil fields in Louisiana. Christened the DeSalle field, it produced over 10 million barrels of crude oil. My great-grandfather eventually bought back every acre of DeSalle land, including the island. He also bought back Malmaison and restored the house to its pre–Civil War splendor. Its present owner, my maternal grandfather, keeps Malmaison in pristine condition, worthy of the Architectural Digest cover it graced ten years ago. But the city that surrounds the mansion, though as well preserved as Charleston or Savannah, seems as doomed to slow decay as any other Southern town bypassed by the interstate and abandoned by industry.
I pull around the “big house” and park beside one of the two brick dependencies behind it. The eastern slave quarters—a two-story edifice larger than some suburban houses—was my home during most of my childhood. Our family’s maid, Pearlie, lives in the western quarters, thirty yards across the rose garden. She helped rear my mother and aunt from infancy, then did the same with me. Well over seventy now, Pearlie drives a baby blue Cadillac, the pride of her life. It sits gleaming in the darkness behind her house, its chrome polished more regularly than that on the cars of any white matron in the city. Pearlie often stays up late watching television, but it’s past midnight now, and her windows are dark.
My mother’s car is nowhere in sight. She’s probably in Biloxi, visiting her elder sister, who’s embroiled in a bitter divorce. My grandfather’s Lincoln is gone, too. At seventy-seven, Grandpapa Kirkland still possesses remarkable vitality, but a stroke a year ago ended his driving days. Undeterred,