Cemetery Road. Greg Iles

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      MY NAME IS Marshall McEwan.

      I ran away from home when I was eighteen. It wasn’t Mississippi I was running from—it was my father. I swore I would never go back, and for twenty-six years I kept my promise, excepting a few brief visits to see my mother. The road was not an easy one, but I eventually became one of the most successful journalists in Washington, D.C. People say it must be the ink in my blood; my father was a legendary newspaper editor and publisher in the 1960s—the “Conscience of Mississippi,” the New York Times called him—but I didn’t learn my trade from Duncan McEwan. My dad was a legend who became a drunk and, like most drunks, remained one. Still, he haunted me, like a second shadow at my side. So I suppose it was inevitable that his death would be the thing that brought me home.

      Oh, he’s not dead yet. His death has been approaching like a lone black ship that makes itself felt by the waves pushed ahead of it, dark waves that disturb a once-keen mind and roll over the protective boundaries of a family. What drives that black ship is what the doctors call comorbid conditions: Parkinson’s disease, heart failure, hypertension, an alcoholic’s liver. I ignored the situation for as long as I could. I’ve watched brilliant colleagues—most ten or fifteen years my senior—struggle to care for ailing parents back in the small towns of the republic, and in every case their careers suffered. By chance or by karma, my career entered a meteoric phase after Trump’s election in 2016. I had no desire to leap from my meteor, land back in Mississippi, and start babysitting the eighty-four-year-old man who had pretended I didn’t exist since I was fourteen years old.

      I finally surrendered because my father was so ill that I could no longer help my mother manage him from a thousand miles away. Dad has spent the past three decades sliding ever deeper into anger and depression, making those around him miserable and ruining his health in the process. But since I’m a good Southern boy at heart, the fact that an unbridgeable gulf had existed between him and me for more than thirty years was irrelevant. It’s an unwritten law down here: when your father is dying, you go home and sit the deathwatch with your mother. Besides, our family business—the Bienville Watchman (founded 1865)—was disintegrating under his increasingly erratic stewardship, and since he’d stubbornly refused to sell our dinosaur of a newspaper for the past two decades, I had to keep it a going concern until what remained could be sold for salvage upon his death.

      That’s what I told myself, anyway.

      In truth my motive was more complicated. We rarely act from logic when facing the critical choices of our lives. I couldn’t recognize my self-deception then. I was still in a state of prolonged shock from a marriage that had endured a tragedy—or more accurately, failed to endure one—then spiraled into divorce as my professional life entered the stratosphere, but I see it now.

      I came home because of a woman.

      She was only a girl when I left home, and I, a confused boy. But no matter how relentlessly life tried to beat the softness out of me, to encase me in the hard, brittle carapace of cynicism, one pure thing remained alive and true: the half-Jordanian, half-Mississippian girl who unfolded the secret joys of life for me was so deeply imprinted upon my soul that no other woman ever measured up to her. Twenty-eight years of separation had proved insufficient to kill my yearning to be near her again. Sometimes I worry that my mother has known my hidden motive from the start (or maybe only sensed it and prayed that she СКАЧАТЬ