ALL THE WAY BACK DOWN TO MOBILE, LUTHER WAS TORtured by the question of whether he could have done a better job. By the time he saw the city lights on the horizon, he had come to a conclusion: there is no good way to tell a man that his wife tried to kill herself.
George’s eyes had gone wide at the news and he had staggered as if from a blow. He asked all the obvious questions, then asked them again. Then he cried and blamed himself for Thelma’s despair. Luther had talked him patiently through it, tried to reassure him that she had seemed all right since coming home. He pointed out as a reason for hope the fact that she had agreed to follow the doctor’s advice and consult a psychologist. And he made George promise to stay in close touch and keep him apprised of his sister’s progress.
By the time they returned to where Thelma and Adam stood waiting, George was composed again, if a bit wobbly. Thelma had given her brother a meaningful look as she took her husband’s hand.
They said their goodbyes there on the sidewalk before King’s old church. More hugs, handshakes, and kisses were exchanged. He had told Thelma to take care of herself. “I love you, big brother,” Thelma had told him as they parted. “You be careful driving home.”
He had not bothered to correct her, but he’d had no intention of going home. At least, not yet. First, he had a stop to make.
Darkness had pulled itself like a blanket over Mobile when Luther turned into the parking lot of the West Haven Rest Home. The man on the radio was reporting on the murder of a white woman—Viola Liuzzo was her name—who had been shot on Route 80 while driving back to Montgomery to provide transportation for some of the marchers.
First Jimmie Lee Jackson, then James Reeb, and now, thought Luther, they were even killing white women. It just never stopped. He shut off the Buick, took a last drag on a cigarette and sat listening to the ticking of the engine.
After a moment, he stubbed out the butt in the overflowing dashboard ashtray and climbed out of the car. He mounted three steps, walked through the front door. The lobby was dark and quiet, the front desk empty. There was no one in the dayroom, either. For once, the television screen was blank. Visiting hours were technically over for the day, but he wasn’t worried about that. They all knew him here and besides that, enforcement of the rules tended to be lax.
Still, he was glad he wasn’t seen as he strode across the room and into the hallway, where he knocked lightly on Johan’s door. After a moment, he heard the voice from inside say simply, “Come.”
He found the old man sitting in a chair before the television, on which some middle-class white family in some middle-class white house was having a middle-class white argument about something that was quite hilarious, to judge from the explosion of canned laughter. Johan, dressed in a brown suit with a matching homburg, turned and smiled at the sight of him.
“Come, come,” he said, patting the chair next to him. “Have a seat.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Luther, tossing his hat on the bed. He unbuttoned his sports coat as he sat. “How you doin’ this evening?” he asked.
“I am doing quite well. Thank you for asking.”
“You know, I went up to the march today.”
“That’s nice.”
“That Martin Luther King, he gave a hell of a speech. You’ll probably see some of it on the news tonight.”
“How wonderful.”
“And I saw George and Thelma. They drivin’ back to New York in the morning.”
“You saw George?”
“Yes.”
“George is doing all right?”
“Yeah, George just fine.”
“That’s good to hear.”
Luther inclined his head toward the television. “So, what we watchin’ here?” he asked.
“Just watching the scenery go by,” said Johan. “Such beautiful country this is, don’t you think? Especially in the fall when the leaves begin to change?”
“The … scenery?” Dread trickled down into the pit of Luther’s stomach.
The old man’s nod was enthusiastic. His eyes gleamed with joy. “It’s really quite lovely, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” said Luther. “Really lovely.” He regarded his friend, consumed by a sudden sorrow for which he had no name.
“How far are you going?”
“How far?”
Johan chuckled at Luther’s confusion. “Yes, young man, how far? Will you be getting off the train at Baja or Kalocsa, or perhaps Dunaföldvár? I myself am going all the way to Budapest. It’s where I was born, you know.”
“Yeah,” said Luther, “I know.”
He struggled to keep his face neutral, but within, he mourned. If there was one thing his five decades had taught him, it was that life is a series of losses. You lost loved things, you lost loved places, you lost loved ones. Yet somehow, each time, loss still managed to come as a surprise.
The old man’s smile was impish. “I am so looking forward to seeing my papa again,” he confided. “And my dear anyuci. It has been so long since I was home.”
“I bet your mama and papa lookin’ forward to seein’ you, too,” said Luther.
They sat for a moment in companionable silence broken only by shrieks of mechanical laughter. Then Johan said, “So what are you doing on this train? Are you traveling for business or for pleasure?”
“Pleasure, I guess,” said Luther. “I come to see you.”
The eyes behind the glasses widened in surprise. “You came to see me? Why?”
Luther made himself smile. “Well, we friends, ain’t we?” he said. “And that’s what friends do. They come see about one another.”
“You are my friend?”
“Yeah,” said Luther, “I’m your friend. And you mine.”
“What is your name, friend? I’m afraid I don’t recall.”
Luther swallowed hard. He extended a hand. “I’m Luther Hayes,” he said. “Glad to know you.”
“Johan Simek,” said the old man as Luther’s hand swallowed his own. “And I am pleased to know you, as well.”
They sat for a long time just watching the television. After a few minutes, the sitcom family resolved its problem. There were commercials selling Chevrolets, Folgers coffee, and Quisp, some new breakfast cereal for kids. Then came the theme song for another sitcom about another middle-class white family. This one was called My Three Sons.
Luther had never heard of it. The window was open a few inches and the room was cooled by a slight breeze. It carried a hint of moisture that made him think they might get some rain before the night was over.
Johan fell silent for a long time. After a while, Luther thought maybe he was asleep. Or perhaps, he was still wandering about in his own mind, enjoying the train trip across the landscape of his long-ago childhood. From out in the dayroom came the faint sound of the janitor running a buffer across the floor. The father on My Three Sons—Luther recognized him as a film actor named Fred MacMurray—was looking befuddled over some confusion between his boys when Luther checked his watch and saw that it was getting toward nine o’clock. He started to push himself up from the chair.
The movement stirred Johan, who turned toward him, eyes bright. He said, “I saw him, you know.”
Luther was confused.
“You saw who?”
“That man who hit me. The one who knocked me down and stomped me. I saw him. He’s here.”
“Yeah,” said Luther. “I know he is. Hell of a world, ain’t it?”
“Hell of a world,” agreed Johan.
Luther pushed up from the chair. His knees registered protest and he was reminded, not that he needed it, that he was getting old. He patted Johan on the shoulder. “This my stop,” he said. “Got to leave the train now.”
“What train?”
“I just meant that I got to go.”
“Very well,” said the old man. “Good night, my friend. Sleep well.”
After retrieving his hat from the bed, Luther stepped back into the hallway. He paused there a moment in the stillness. He took a deep breath. And then, instead of turning right, which would have carried him back through the dayroom and out to the lobby, he turned left, which carried him deeper into the hallway. At room 106, he entered without knocking.
The room was dark but for a small circle of light from a lamp on the nightstand. It was as if the old man hadn’t moved in the almost three weeks since Luther discovered him there. He lay in the same position, on his back, his head turned to face the door. His face was still slumped, and as pallid as that of some creature of the deep sea that has never seen the sun. His right hand still angled up from his body, tracing aimless curlicues in the air. And his eyes were still alert. They watched Luther with friendly curiosity as he came into the room. Floyd Bitters made a sound of apparent greeting.
Luther shook his head. “I can’t understand what you tryin’ to say,” he said, “but I can guess. You wonderin’ who I am.”
Luther found a chair and pulled it closer to the hospital bed, letting it scrape unpleasantly against the floor. “My name Luther,” he said, taking a seat, “but that won’t mean nothin’ to you. You and me, we already met, though, long time ago. Real long time. Forty-two years, in fact.”
The old man made another of his inarticulate sounds. Amiable confusion fogged his eyes, as if a really good joke were being told and he wasn’t quite getting it.
Luther shrugged. “I told you I don’t understand you,” he said. “’Course, I don’t need to. Ain’t nothin’ you could say to me I really need to hear. Not at this point.”
Another grunt from the old man.
“Yeah,” said Luther, “I know. What I want with you, right? Why I come in here to bother you in the middle of the night? Well, like I said, my name Luther, Luther Hayes. You and me, we met one night when I was nine years old. Me, I was small for my age and you was still a big man back then—more mountain than man, tell you the truth—and you snatched me up from the porch. I was so scared, I pissed myself. You remember that?”
Bitters’s brow creased as if all this was ringing some vague alarm bell somewhere deep within.
“You still havin’ trouble rememberin’?” Luther smiled. “That’s all right. Happen a lot more as we get older. Especially if we get in the kind of shape you in. Well, here somethin’ might jog your memory: my daddy’s name. It was Mason. Mason Hayes. You remember that name? You should. See, you killed him that night. You and a bunch of other drunk-ass crackers. Burned him alive at his own front door. My mama, too. Her name was Annie. You remember any of that?”
Instantly, the watery gaze sharpened. Luther leaned in. “Yeah,” he said softly, “I believe you do remember, don’t you?”
He did. It was obvious. The hand moved faster in its aimless course. Bitters made more of his wordless sounds. They had taken on a note of agitation.
“Shhh,” said Luther, almost as if calming a colicky baby. He even patted Bitters’s left arm, which lay still as a stone. “Ain’t nobody here but you and me,” he said. “And I been wantin’ to talk to you about this for a long time, so you might as well just settle in and let me have my say.”
He regarded the old man for a moment. Then he said, “It was all about a hog, you remember that? Big, black som’bitch, way I hear. But my papa, he wouldn’t sell it to you. Said he wanted to keep his hog to feed his family. Seem to me a man got a right to decide if he want to sell his own property or not, so I can’t see nothin’ wrong with that, but you sure did. You got a mob together and you came to the house, and you tortured both my parents and killed ’em. Took your time with it, too. Worst death I ever seen, and I been to war.”
The old man had stopped making his sounds. His eyes had turned feral with terror. Luther would have thought seeing fear in those eyes—the eyes that had once glared down at him with such haughty disdain—would be gratifying, somehow. But he didn’t feel gratification. He didn’t feel anything. It scared him a little.
“Worst death I ever seen,” he repeated. “What you did to them, you wouldn’t do to an animal. Ain’t never been able to figure how you white people could get enough hate inside you to do them kind of things. And then, to top it off ”—he chuckled and it was a bleak and bitter sound—“all this supposed to been over that there hog and you all didn’t even take the damn thing. You shot it and left it there to rot. So it wasn’t never about no damn hog at all, was it? Not really.”
He paused to see if Bitters wanted to add another of his meaningless sounds. The old man was silent. His right hand continued to flutter above him.
“No,” said Luther, “wasn’t about the hog. It was about you hating a Negro for having something you couldn’t have. For that, you came to his house and you burned him and his wife.”
Luther paused again. He lit a cigarette with trembling hands, blew out a long stream of smoke.
“You know what it do to you when you ain’t nothin’ but a boy and you see your parents killed like that? It fucks you up, man. It fucks you up, bad. I mean, I’m doin’ better now, I suppose. Better than I used to. Used to be I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing them. Had to drink myself stupid just so’s I could sleep. But you know, you get older, you learn to deal with the bad shit you seen. Then my nephew, he come to town with that civil rights thing up in Selma—you probably heard about it—and he ask me, want to know what happened to his grandparents. So, I took him there and I told him about what you done, and I swear, it like to killed me—took me right back to that night. I guess it was already on my mind, though, ’cause a few days before that I come here to visit my friend and what do I find but you, lyin’ in here, all fucked up.”
Luther knocked ash from the cigarette onto the linoleum floor. “Life is a bitch, ain’t it? One minute, you’s the king of the world. Next minute, you’s lyin’ in the old folks’ home, can’t even wipe your own ass.”
As if in response, there came a sudden percussive boom that rattled the glass windows in their frames. The old man flinched, hunching his narrow shoulders. “Thunder,” Luther told him.
He crossed the room to the window in time to see the rain begin pouring from the sky, an angry deluge that thumped against the glass. Jagged bolts of fire lacerated the clouds and there was another hard rumble of thunder.
“Big storm,” said Luther. “Look like it’s gon’ go for a while.” He finished the cigarette, mashed it against the window ledge, stuck the crumpled butt into his coat pocket.
For another moment, he stood there watching the rain. Then he crossed the room back to where the old man could see him. “So, what happened to you anyway?” he asked, taking his seat once again. “Stroke, I’m guessin’? That’s sad. Hell of a way to go. Like you’s a prisoner in your own body, I imagine. That friend I told you about down the hall? He done turned senile. Barely remember his own name. I guess gettin’ old ain’t no fun, is it? I ain’t lookin’ forward to it, I tell you that.”
Luther glanced around the nightstand. “I don’t see no pictures,” he said. “You got no wife? No family? Wow. So did they all die on you, or they just don’t give a damn about you?”
There came a series of agitated grunts. “You right,” conceded Luther, “none of my business. Maybe they didn’t die. Maybe you never had no family to begin with.”
A pause. Then Luther said, “I had a family, though.”
His eyes met the old man’s. Bitters’s gaze was made of fear and yet also a certain prideful defiance.
“I had a family,” repeated Luther. “And you destroyed it, sure as if you took a wrecking ball to a house. When you killed Mason and Annie Hayes, it’s like you killed all the hope I had in life, all the joy, all the faith. It’s like you hurt me forever. And the thing that always bothered me, almost as bad as the murders themselves: you never paid no price for what you did. To me, that was like sayin’ it didn’t matter what you did. It was like sayin’ they didn’t matter. Like nobody cared that these two people was here on Earth one minute, raisin’ their children, min-din’ their business, and then the next, they was just … gone.
“But they mattered to us, you see? To me and my sister, to my grandfather. They mattered to us. And it ain’t right that you could just do that and go on with your life for another forty-two years like nothin’ never happened.”
Bitters grunted, still groping for words.
“Shut up,” snapped Luther. He shook his head in disgust. “What you gon’ say to me, even if you could talk? Ain’t nothin’ you can say, man. Not a goddamn thing. So you might as well just lie there and listen.”
Luther fished out another cigarette. He lit it, exhaled a stream of smoke, picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue, looked at it, flicked it away. He laughed. “Bet you ain’t used to nobody look like me talkin’ like that to you, huh? World’s changin’, what can I say? I’m sure you don’t like that very much. Guess I can’t blame you. Must be nice to be white. Do whatever the fuck you want to colored people and don’t never have to answer for it. Dance to the music all night long and tell the piper go fuck his self.
“But I got to say, Floyd, that don’t seem right to me. Ask yourself—be honest with me, now—do that seem right to you? It don’t, do it? I guess that’s why I’m here. You may think Mason and Annie Hayes was just some more niggers you could treat any old kind of way and their lives ain’t meant much. But see, they was my mama and my papa. And they meant everything to me. So that’s the reason I come to visit with you, old man. I come to see that the piper get what he got comin’.”
Luther watched without interest as the words registered in the old man’s colorless eyes, watched his hand flop about in the air like a fish on a pier. Floyd Bitters croaked out more of his stunted vocabulary of sounds, reaching desperately for language that had deserted him long ago. It surprised Luther how little he felt. Not sorrow, not malice, not triumph. He might as well have been washing the dishes for all he felt. Might as well have been taking out the trash.
He stood up, moved toward the bed. “I used to believe in God, you know. Used to know, sure as I knew my own name, that He was up there, keepin’ watch over His world, makin’ everything right. I don’t believe in God no more, though. Somethin’ else you took away from me. Right now, I hope I’m right about that. Hope there really ain’t no God. ’Cause if there is, I’m surely goin’ to hell for this.”
A pause. “But if I do, I’m pretty sure I’ll see you there.”
He clenched the cigarette in his teeth then, reached out with his right hand and clamped the old man’s nose shut. The skin was oily to the touch and he had to reposition his hand to get a tight grip and keep his fingers from slipping. Then he used his left hand to block the old man’s mouth. Floyd Bitters’s eyes flared in panic and he grunted frantically in his stroke language, the one hand flopping desperately in the air. Once, twice, it struck without effect against Luther’s arm.
Luther ignored it, concentrating his attention on the murderer’s eyes, watching the terror there seep into a pleading sorrow. Of course, they would both be murderers now, he supposed. And that realization made him wonder what Bitters might see in his own eyes.
He hoped it was the ghosts of his mother and father. He hoped it was the forty-two years of hatred, rage, sorrow, and pain that had come to define his life.
He hoped Bitters saw some tiny fraction of that.
Then he saw that the old man’s eyes had changed yet again. Terror had become panic and now, panic had segued into a dull surrender. And in that moment, some part of Luther Hayes viewed the scene as if from above, saw a healthy man, a man with his physical and mental faculties still intact, standing above a sickbed smothering the life out of an old man helpless to defend himself, a man decades removed from the person he had been and the crime for which he was being killed. Some voice within him pointed out to Luther that this was a forever thing he was doing, an irrevocable line he was crossing. It reminded him that there were those who would call this an act of evil and that there was still time to pull back from the edge, still time to not kill Floyd Bitters.
Luther registered all of this. He thought about it. And then he dismissed it. He squeezed tighter on the old man’s nose, clamped his palm more firmly on his mouth. It was taking Bitters an awful long time to die, he thought.
And just as he thought this, the hand that had been flapping about in midair fell to the bed like a dead bird tumbling from the sky. Luther marked this. He held the old man’s airways closed a few seconds longer. Finally, he pulled away and regarded what he had done.
The eyes that had shone confusion, pride, anger, defiance, panic, and finally, resignation, now shone not at all. They were empty, gazing blankly upon infinity. Luther stepped back. He wiped his left hand, wet with the old man’s saliva, absently on his pant leg, dragged a forearm across his sweaty brow, surprised at how much effort this had taken.
He stood there for a long moment, gazing down upon the carcass of the man who had killed his parents. Luther waited to feel regret at what he had done. Part of him even wanted to feel it. But still he felt nothing. Then he thought all at once of Martin Luther King’s majestic words of persistence, his eloquent assurance of triumph, inevitable.
And finally, he felt something. He felt cold.
How long?
Forty-two fucking years.
How long?
Too goddamn long.
Luther thought of closing the old man’s eyes but didn’t. Instead, he left him there as he had died, eyes vacant, mouth slack. He stubbed out his second cigarette, put the butt in his coat pocket, put the chair back in place, then opened the door and stepped through into the hallway. He did not look back.
The janitor, a portly Negro man, was still running the buffer in the dayroom. He wore headphones to muffle the sound and did not look up as Luther walked through. Luther stepped out into the rain, got behind the wheel of the old Buick, and seconds later, steered into the street. The red and white lights of traffic made indistinct smears on the windshield. With a steady thunk, the wipers swept the glass clean. Luther drove without thinking.
When he reached the Negro side of town, he pulled to the curb in front of a package store. He ducked through the rain and emerged a moment later with a brown paper sack containing a fresh carton of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon.
Moments later, Luther turned in to the alley that ran alongside his building and pulled into a parking slot. He climbed the stairs to the covered porch, but did not open the door into his apartment. Instead, he took a seat in one of the two chairs he kept out there, flanking a little circular table. He pulled the bottle of amber liquid and an opaque plastic cup from the bag, cracked open the bottle, poured the cup half full, then placed them together on the table. For a long moment, Luther just sat there and regarded the drink warily.
Thunder rumbled heavily above. Water hissed against the pavement below. And then, from somewhere far away, came the sound of a siren. Luther tensed, thinking to himself that it sure had happened fast. The wailing rose to a piercing crescendo. And then it faded, the emergency vehicle passing by on the street out front. Luther’s body relaxed.
He gazed again at the plastic cup of brown liquid. After a moment, he lifted it and tossed the contents over the porch railing into the rain. He set the empty cup back on the table, recapped the bottle of bourbon, lit a cigarette, and gazed out over the low-slung buildings of the town where he was born—little more than shadows on this dark night of storm and wind.
At length, with a tired exhale of smoke, Luther sat back in his chair. He watched the rain sweep down from the sky and waited, cold sober, to see what would happen next.