I could not imagine his private punishment for what he had created, for somewhere in his father’s heart he still loved his son.
‘Mr. Gault,’ I said. ‘Please let me talk to you.’
He dug his thumb and index fingers into the corners of his eyes to stop from crying. Wrinkles deepened in his tan brow, and a sudden blaze of sunlight through clouds turned stubble to sand.
‘I’m not here out of curiosity,’ I said. ‘I’m not here doing research. Please.’
‘He’s never been right from the day he was born,’ Peyton Gault said, wiping his eyes.
‘I know this is awful for you. It is an unapproachable horror. But I understand.’
‘No one can understand,’ he said.
‘Please let me try.’
‘There’s no good to come of it.’
‘There is only good to come of it,’ I said. ‘I am here to do the right thing.’
He looked at me with uncertainty. ‘Who sent you?’
‘Nobody. I came on my own.’
‘Then how’d you find us?’
‘I asked directions,’ I said, and I told him where.
‘You don’t look too warm in that jacket.’
‘I’m warm enough.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll go out on the pier.’
His dock cut through marshlands that spread as far as I could see, the Barrier Islands an infrequent water tower on the horizon. We leaned against rails, watching fiddler crabs rustle across dark mud. Now and then an oyster spat.
‘During Civil War times there were as many as two hundred and fifty slaves here,’ he was saying as if we were here to have a friendly chat. ‘Before you leave you should stop by the Chapel of Ease. It’s just a tabby shell now, with rusting wrought iron around a tiny graveyard.’
I let him talk.
‘Of course, the graves have been robbed for as long as anyone remembers. I guess the chapel was built around 1740.’
I was silent.
He sighed, looking out toward the ocean.
‘I have photographs I want to show you,’ I quietly said.
‘You know’ – his voice got emotional again – ‘it’s almost like that flood was punishment for something I did. I was born on that plantation in Albany.’ He looked over at me. ‘It withstood almost two centuries of war and bad weather. Then that storm hit and the Flint River rose more than twenty feet.
‘We had state police, military police barricading everything. The water reached the damn ceiling of what had been my family home, and forget the trees. Not that we’ve ever depended on pecans to keep food on the table. But for a while my wife and I were living like the homeless in a center with about three hundred other people.’
‘Your son did not cause that flood,’ I gently said. ‘Even he can’t bring about a natural disaster.’
‘Well, it’s probably just as well we moved. People were coming around all the time trying to see where he grew up. It’s had a bad effect on Rachael’s nerves.’
‘Rachael is your wife?’
He nodded.
‘What about your daughter?’
‘That’s another sorry story. We had to send Jayne west when she was eleven.’
‘That’s her name?’ I said, astonished.
‘Actually, it’s Rachael. But her middle name’s Jayne with a y. I don’t know if you knew this, but Temple and Jayne are twins.’
‘I had no idea,’ I said.
‘And he was always jealous of her. It was a terrible sight to behold, because she was just crazy about him. They were the cutest little blond things you’d ever want to see, and it’s like from day one Temple wanted to squash her like a bug. He was cruel.’ He paused.
A herring gull flew by, screaming, and troops of fiddler crabs charged a clump of cattails.
Peyton Gault smoothed back his hair and propped one foot on a lower rail. He said, ‘I guess I knew the worst when he was five and Jayne had a puppy. Just the nicest little dog, a mutt.’ He paused again. ‘Well’ – his voice caught – ‘the puppy disappeared and that night Jayne woke up to find it dead in her bed. Temple probably strangled it.’
‘You said Jayne eventually lived on the West Coast?’ I asked.