Blood on the Leaves Read online

  On the first night she moved into his home, he named her Miranda, then read the cat her rights. They included, among other things, the mutual obligation to respect each other’s private space, private thoughts, and private needs. Miller maintained his part of the bargain, but Miranda intruded whenever her clairvoyant mind deemed it necessary. He had no difficulty understanding why certain cultures worshiped cats while others despised them, although these opposite emotions were caused by the same basic principle: Cats were either possessed by demons or capable of recognizing them in others. Either way, they were dangerous and needed to be idolized for life or destroyed at the earliest risk-free opportunity. But since there’s never a truly risk-free period in anyone’s cowardly life, you learned to live with your fears while simultaneously paying tribute to them. In that regard, having cats was a lot like having family.

  Having concluded that even Miranda deserved more than rotten milk, Miller picked up the carton and dropped it into the plastic wastebasket. If good milk could go bad without ever being opened, what chance did kids have who were exposed to all types of contaminations? As he pondered the question, he cleaned Miranda’s litter box for the first time in a long while, then fed her some tuna. He put two ice cubes into an extra-large bowl, filled it with water, then searched for his car keys. He wondered what had become of his childhood friend Sanford, and continued to think about him until he reached his destination.

  The trip took slightly more than two hours, the last thirty minutes of which were spent on poorly paved roads. The Gulf Coast embraced the contradictions of divergent histories. The past could be reflected in the rusty shrimp boats that dotted the riverbank, barely able to provide sustenance to a family of four, let alone adequately feed an entire marketplace whose appetite for the old ways of doing things had drastically changed. The future in all its splendid glory consisted of floating dreams better known as riverboat casinos. Gambling had invaded Mississippi with a vengeance and harvested the poor more efficiently than Whitney’s invention had stripped cottonseed from the state’s other prized crop.

  Miller planned to phone before he left home, but why give the devil advance warning, especially when it controlled visitation rights? He thought it best to surprise the man, catch him off guard. It wouldn’t necessarily level the playing field, but it might allow him to be competitive, stay in the game longer than he’d managed to do on other visits. Like most sons, Miller had tried valiantly to please his father, but never could. So at some point in his life he had simply decided to do the next best thing and disappoint him at every turn. The disappointment evolved quickly to infuriation and gradually to indifference, eventually culminating in disinheritance.

  Miller had followed the footsteps but decidedly not the path taken by his patriarchs. He became a lawyer or, if he believed his father, a disgrace to his profession. He fought for civil rights with the same intensity he’d lashed out at Sanford, and for the same reason. His father remained the driving motivation behind all of Miller’s important adult actions. If he couldn’t please him, then he’d fail him unconditionally. And he’d keep failing until he finally learned the source of his father’s bigotry—and the target, if any, of his love.

  He drove through the narrow entrance leading to the complex where his father resided. It had been called an elderly nursing home five years ago, then a retirement community two years later, and now simply a senior lifestyle residential retreat. He’d visited many prisons that were far more honest about who lived behind the guarded gates and why. The facility employed a cordial staff. White folks handled the money while blacks carried the bedpans. It used to bring him abundant satisfaction to know his father depended on black people to assist him in performing the most basic of bodily functions. Now it brought only great sadness and deep regret.

  Miller avoided the valet and parked the car himself. He wanted to delay this for as long as possible, and the journey through the maze of gardens and walkways gave him time to reconsider the visit. He could always get back into his car and return home. There’d be no harm done. He would have wasted a few hours, but he’d already spent much of his life avoiding the man who’d disowned him by calling him everything but a child of God or his son. No. The man hadn’t called him his son since the day Miller obtained a law degree and notified his parents what he intended to do with it.

  The knot in his stomach tightened. Several residents were seated in lawn chairs near a pink marbled water fountain. They resembled small porcelain statues wrapped in plaid flannel robes. He wondered if his father might be outside, sweet-talking a younger woman or telling tales of his youthful exploits. If he knew his father, his listeners would be enthralled, charmed by the man who generated genuine adoration from mere strangers and unadulterated fear from his own family.

  Miller proceeded to the main building, where he registered as a family visitor. A friendly student nurse issued him a gold pass on a cloth necklace and told him to wear it around his neck at all times while traveling anywhere on the property. He assumed the trainee feared someone on the grounds might mistake him for a resident and force-feed him Valium before giving him a haircut and a bath. He stroked the back of his ponytail and placed it over his right shoulder. He wanted to make sure it would be the first and last thing his father noticed. That should drive the old man crazy.

  He’d been told to meet with one of the administrators, since the doctor wasn’t available on Saturdays. There he would receive an update regarding the senior Miller’s “situation,” along with other helpful information on how to interact with him. He decided to skip that enjoyable task, feeling that no one could give him a better briefing on the condition of his father than his father himself. In any event, he already knew the best way to communicate with the man who had brought him into this world only to almost drive him out of it: from a distance or not at all.

  He maneuvered his way through an obstacle course consisting of walkers, wheelchairs, and motorized strollers until he found a safe hallway with minimal mechanical traffic. He hated these places. They reminded him of hospitals, except the patients in this warehouse weren’t being cured, since no cure existed for their particular ailment. This halfway point between a holding area and a resting place had a certain antiseptic quality made less stringent by a smattering of potpourri and a whiff of aerosol spray. Miller guessed the scent might be either French vanilla or wild country blossom, since both fragrances worked equally well to temporarily mask the aroma of an unclean house.

  He didn’t know what to expect when he entered room 53 for the first time in five years and discovered his father seated with his back to the door, staring out the window.

  “Dad?” Miller waited for an explosion. When that didn’t happen, he assumed his father would simply ignore him, act as if he didn’t exist. He wouldn’t allow his father that luxury. “Dad, it’s me, Todd.”

  “Toddpole?” his father asked in a gentle voice.

  Miller smiled, in part from nervousness but mostly from genuine surprise. “Toddpole?” Miller said the word with an amused nostalgia as he moved closer to this figure who still hadn’t demonstrated enough decency to turn and face his son.

  “You haven’t called me that since I was a little—” He froze when his father wheeled around to greet him. There was a glimmer of recognition and a glimpse of a smile weakened by time and a lack of practice. This couldn’t be Richard Stanton Miller. Not this withered little man with the translucent skin that revealed pale purple-green veins struggling desperately to complete their mission.

  Miller’s father had been a tower of strength, defiant in every way imaginable. When he spoke to a jury, they had no choice but to believe him. Tall and eloquent, confident and knowledgeable, passionate and unforgiving, he couldn’t be beaten by any adversary save one. After eighty-five years his father had met his match. He’d lost the most important battle of his life to the universal equalizer, time. And that defeat made him gaunt, hollow-eyed, and something not even his avowed racism had ever completely
accomplished: pathetic.

  “You clean up your room?” the soft voice asked.

  Miller tried to respond but couldn’t speak without releasing a lifetime of tears.

  “You know how your mama fusses whenever you don’t clean up like you’re supposed to.”

  Miller turned away. His shoulders slumped a little more with each word he spoke. “It’s clean, Dad.”

  “Including your toys? You sure you put them all away?” His father grabbed the sides of the chair to lift himself but stopped and settled back into his spot. “If you break them I’m not buying you any more.” His father turned and once again faced the window.

  Miller quietly moved to a chair next to his father’s bed and sat down. He looked at the small night table that had three framed photos: a wedding picture of his father and mother, his grandfather posed outside a courthouse, wearing his judge’s robe, and a picture of Miller as a child standing next to his proud, smiling father, who had his hand on his son’s shoulder. Miller felt the first tear moisten his cheek. He placed his fingers on his quivering lips and wept quietly.

  He didn’t remember falling asleep but had the distinct impression of a parched mouth kissing him gently on his forehead, followed by the careful placement of a blanket around his upper body. He kept his eyes closed until his father’s shuffling ceased. Miller rose from the chair and thought about leaving without disturbing the figure who’d returned to the window. He concluded he wasn’t that much of a coward.

  He tried to engage his father in a conversation that entailed more than the distant past, but after a few promising attempts Richard Miller disappeared to a space reserved for memory and dreams. Whether the place was real or imagined, Miller hoped his father would find peace there and, perhaps, another chance.

  The car ride back home seemed filled with shadows. Clouds lingered overhead, threatening to release a sudden storm that hadn’t been forecast. Miller had on occasion read news accounts detailing the lives of the most rabid racists from the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement, the ones who bombed churches and crippled or murdered children and blinded babies. Many of them had avoided prison only to enter, at an early age, advanced stages of dementia. He wasn’t sure whether that represented a punishment or a blessing. Now he’d witnessed his own father ravaged by Alzheimer’s, and realized that the suffering had been left to the son.

  He’d wanted his dad to curse him or strike him or be the terror he’d grown up despising. It would give him energy for the battle that lay ahead. But when he found him shrunken in a wheelchair, with a mind disconnected from today, he realized he’d been living a lie. He’d never stopped loving or needing his father’s approval. Despite his best efforts, he’d never hated him. This discovery made him feel ashamed, terribly lonely, and perhaps more than anything else, betrayed. How long had he lived this pretense of self-righteousness and moral outrage?

  He shouldn’t have visited this place, but in reality he’d never had a choice. Matheson had flung the past in everyone’s face, and perhaps it was only right that his defense counsel take the first blow. He hadn’t realized how often he’d need to turn the other cheek, and certainly had had no idea how much it would hurt. His father had no memory of the things that tormented him most, and Miller dared not remember the times that he himself cherished.

  True enough, they were brief, those glorious exchanges between a loving father and an adoring and obedient son. But they were there. How ironic that they’d returned to a mind no longer capable of distinguishing reality from madness—or perhaps no such distinction ever existed. Hadn’t the world of his father been both real and insane? How else to explain a gifted and highly educated man harboring such sickness?

  Miller wondered if his father or grandfather had ever done anything that might have put them on Matheson’s list. If they had, their actions would forever remain an unsolved mystery. If they hadn’t, they certainly knew friends who belonged there. That fact alone enabled the commission of evil acts and may have even endorsed or encouraged them. When a governor stands at the entrance of a schoolhouse and proclaims, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he’s officially sanctioned the lynch mob whether he intended to do so or not. When respected community leaders remain silent in the face of atrocity, they’ve become the mob in spirit, if not in deed, and have no need to touch the rope.

  It was a strange legacy shared by the descendants of the South, all of whom were one or two degrees of separation from being a child of a victim or a father of a perpetrator, or both. Miller reflected that for his entire professional life, he’d been cursed to represent defendants who looked guilty whether they were or not. Poor, black, and uneducated, their stories stood little chance when weighed against the testimony of reliable eyewitnesses and the judgment of dedicated jurors who feared the same dark skin.

  Now, at long last, he’d been gifted with the ideal client: influential, intelligent, handsome, and articulate. Matheson didn’t fit the profile of a criminal except for skin color, and this one time Miller could make that liability disappear, or at least cloak it within the framework of reasonable doubt. Would an acquittal of Miller’s prized defendant achieve some semblance of payback for all those innocent men convicted? More to the point, would it be the final act of defiance by a son toward his father—a man currently hiding in the secret recesses of his own diseased mind? Miller didn’t know the answers to those questions, but he’d soon discover them.

  For better or worse, he accepted that his life would never be the same. He’d been a southern oddity. Now he would be a celebrity. Back when they’d been on speaking terms, his father had advised him that a traitor shouldn’t publicize his home address. Well, his list of enemies would likely increase, and they’d have no trouble finding him. What they would find still needed to be determined. He prayed it would be a man he’d be proud to know, one who would have the integrity, if not the innocence, of a child his father had once lovingly called “Toddpole.”

  CHAPTER 33

  THE NORTHERN MEDIA descended on the area, exhibiting behavior that would have given locusts a good name by comparison. They devoured everything in sight, from hotel rooms to restaurant seats to the best downtown parking spaces. And they managed to do it with an arrogance and rudeness that surpassed even the lowest expectations of the local population.

  One high-level reporter from a major New York paper entered a coffee shop near the courthouse and asked the owner where he might find some tofu. Aubrey Munson, the bell-shaped proprietor, gave him directions. “Go to the red-light district. You’ll find that and a whole lot more.” The reporter left the shop in an indignant huff, and the regulars laughed for five minutes.

  Aubrey knew enough about tofu to know it would never see the inside of his mouth, let alone his stomach. He had feigned ignorance because the snooty journalist addressed him like a retarded child. In fact, the reporter had treated everyone in the store with contempt from the moment he’d walked in wearing his square-toed, hand-sewn leather Italian shoes with the extra-thick heels to make him look taller.

  Aubrey had received a jury summons, as had most of his neighbors. They’d all thought long and hard about using those official notifications to start a barn fire but decided civic duty outweighed resentment toward the process. He actually hoped he’d get picked. He told the lunch crowd about his last jury experience. “Involved incest,” he solemnly informed them. “I lost ten pounds. Stomach muscles knotted up every time I looked at that pitiful excuse for a father. If it’d been left to me, I would’ve saved the taxpayers a lot of time and heartache and put a bullet through that pervert’s brain—maybe an extra one for good measure. Even let that scumbag’s daughter, a pretty little thing, watch if she wanted. Hell, now that I think about it, I woulda’ helped her squeeze the trigger if it brought back some of her childhood.”

  Aubrey saw himself as a reliable business owner, a decent Chris-tian, and a man of action. If asked to serve in the Matheson case, “I’d do it in a
heartbeat. Wouldn’t be intimidated by the press, the lawyers, or—like I told my wife—those student agitators who are tryin’ to turn that nigger into a hero.”

  Yes. It’d be a privilege to join eleven other honorable citizens to ensure that justice triumphed. Given his previous experience, there’d be no reason why “I wouldn’t be selected to chair the group.” As the man in charge, no matter what the final outcome, he’d be the first one interviewed. Might even get invited to fly to California and meet Hollywood stars who’d want to play him on the big screen. “Jury Foreman: The real-life story of Aubrey Munson.” Now, wouldn’t that be a hoot? As he began to consider these larger issues, he discreetly asked some of his more trusted customers if he’d “been too harsh on that fella from New York.”

  Every single patron reassured him the odd man with the strange appetite “got precisely what he deserved.” Still, politics being what they were, Aubrey wondered if he’d made a mistake offending a potentially powerful ally. It never paid to mistreat a person who had unlimited access to a printing press. Aubrey shrugged, as if to say, “It’s too late now.”

  He’d read that the lawyers for both sides agreed to use a juror questionnaire developed by some high-priced consultant. There were questions on it like “What are your feelings about interracial dating?” and “How do you celebrate Dr. King’s holiday?”

  “What in tarnation does that have to do with a murder case?” he asked the reporter who’d called him at home to conduct a local survey—an opinion poll of sorts. She didn’t know, either. Thought it reflected attitudes of either racial tolerance or prejudice.

  “First of all,” Aubrey had replied, “interracial dating is a no-no that comes directly from the Bible. So, that answers that. Second,” he went on, “the man has a holiday; people take off work, and I ain’t never met nobody bigoted against vacation.” He waited for her to respond. She didn’t. “Where’s the damn problem?” he pushed. She thanked him very much for his time and told him the interview had ended. He wanted to know when it would be published so he could get a copy. She wasn’t certain, but she’d be sure to send him one. That promise had been made three weeks ago, and he still hadn’t seen any of his quotes—so much for trusting the media.