The Last Apologist

The house sat on the flat, red earth of the Sunflower County delta like a question that had been asked so many times nobody remembered what the answer was supposed to be. Magnolias lined the driveway, untrimmed, their white blossoms dropping to the ground where they browned and curled and turned into something that was neither flower nor leaf but something in between, the way everything in Mississippi seems to be neither one thing nor another but some compound state that has its own vocabulary.

Julian Hawthorne stood at the gate with a single suitcase and a cardboard box that his grandmother had handed him that morning with the words: "Your grandfather's study. I want you to sort through his working documents."

Working documents. That's what she called them. Not memos. Not letters. Not the papers of a man who had spent sixty years shaping public opinion with sentences that could make asbestos sound like progress and tobacco sound like tradition. Working documents. Like he was a carpenter and the papers were his blueprints.

The library—the room that was really just a large study with wood paneling from floor to ceiling—smelled of mildew and old tobacco smoke, though Perry Hawthorne had not smoked in eleven years. The smell had absorbed into the walls the way a tattoo absorbs into skin: permanently, despite the best efforts of whoever was trying to remove it.

Perry was sitting at his desk, which was the size of a dining table and occupied most of the room, reading a newspaper with the kind of concentration that a man reserves for things he has read a hundred times before but needs to read again to make sure they haven't changed. They never do.

"Grandfather."

He looked up. Perry Hawthorne was seventy-eight years old and looked seventy-eight and also looked thirty, depending on the angle of the light and the state of his cough. The cancer had been diagnosed three months earlier. Not aggressive. Slow. The kind of cancer that gives you months, not days. Perry had spent those months doing what he had always done: arranging his affairs, signing papers, telling people what they needed to hear.

"Julian," he said. "You made it."

"I made it." Julian set the box on the floor beside the door. It was full of papers. He could see the edges—yellowed, some with coffee stains, some with the precise handwriting of a man who wrote everything by hand because he believed that if something was worth saying, it was worth writing carefully. "Mom said you wanted me to go through these."

"I didn't say that," Perry said. "Your grandmother said that. There's a difference."

"There is?"

"There's always a difference." Perry closed the newspaper. "Do you want coffee?"

"I'm fine."

"Sit down."

Julian sat. The chair was a high-backed wooden thing that had been comfortable in 1950 and was still comfortable now, though not in the way that a 1950 chair is comfortable. It was comfortable the way a ghost is comfortable—inhabiting a space so completely that the space has forgotten it was ever occupied by anything else.

"I found some things in the box," Julian said. "Medical bills. Lung cancer. All of them."

Perry's face did not change. It had spent sixty years learning how not to change in public. But Julian was his grandson, and the mask slips differently for family. "Yes."

"Three generations."

"Yes."

"And you knew."

Perry looked at the wall of framed newspaper articles behind his desk. Every article praised him. Courage. Fair-mindedness. A voice for the voiceless. "I knew what?"

"That the people you defended were killing the people who grew the crops."

The silence stretched. It was the kind of silence that exists only in the South—a silence that is not empty but full, full of things that have been said and unsaid and said again and unsaid again until the air itself has absorbed them and becomes heavy with them.

"I knew," Perry said finally. "I knew when I was twenty-two and giving my first speech for the Delta Growers Association. I knew when I was thirty-five and testifying before a Senate committee about tobacco labeling. I knew when I was fifty and writing a statement for a railroad company that was condemning a community that had lived there for two hundred years. I knew every day. Every single day."

"Why did you—"

"Because knowing and doing are different verbs, Julian. They happen in different rooms. I knew. I also did. That's the story. That's the whole story. Knowing and doing. Two different rooms."

Julian opened the box. He pulled out a document at random. It was dated 1954. The Hawthorne Delta Growers Association. A public statement on soil conservation and worker welfare. He read it silently. The words were beautiful. They were also, he realized, completely hollow. The statement spoke of "mutual cooperation" and "patient cultivation" and "the dignity of labor." It was a piece of writing that could have been published in any magazine, in any decade, about any industry, and it would have been impossible to tell which industry it was about because it said everything and therefore nothing.

"This is beautiful," he said.

"It is," Perry said. "It's also a lie."

"Not a lie. A framing."

"Same thing, different word."

Julian looked at his grandfather. "Did you believe any of it?"

Perry thought about it. "When I was young, yes. I believed that words were a form of truth. That if you could articulate something clearly enough, it became true. That's what I thought when I was twenty-two. When I was older, I learned that words are not truth. They are certainty. And certainty is what moves mountains. Truth is fragile. Certainty has bones."

He leaned back in his chair. The cough came—deep, rattling, the sound of a man whose lungs are negotiating with a force they cannot win. "You know what the saddest thing is?" he said.

"That I'm sitting here coughing and the man I spent my life defending gets a press release."

"No. The saddest thing is that when I was young, I thought my words would outlast me. And now I know they will. They already have. They're in these filing cabinets. They're in the newspapers on that wall. They're in the policies they shaped and the laws they influenced and the public opinions they moved. My words will last forever. And they will mean exactly as much as they meant when I wrote them: nothing, and everything, and everything, and nothing."

Julian went back to the box. He found a death certificate. Beatrice Hawthorne. Died 1968. Age thirty-four. Cause: lung cancer. He did not know he had an aunt. He did not know she existed. His grandmother had never mentioned her. Perry did not mention her now. He watched Julian read the certificate and said nothing.

After a while, Julian said: "Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Tell you what? That Beatrice existed? That she died? That she had cancer?" Perry shook his head slowly. "Because those are not things that get mentioned at family dinners in this family. We don't talk about the things that our words killed. We talk about the things our words saved."

The two timelines of Perry's life seemed to converge in that room: the young man who arrived in Sunflower with a degree and a voice and a belief in the power of language, and the old man who sat in a room full of his own words and understood that they had been tools, not truths, and that the difference mattered more than he had known then and more than he knew now.

"Read this," Perry said, and handed him a single sheet of paper. Julian read it. It was a statement from 1962, defending the construction of a railroad through a community that had objected. The words were magnificent. Julian could feel the craft of them, the careful architecture of each sentence, the way the arguments built on each other like bricks, each one supporting the next, until the whole structure stood solid and immovable and justified the destruction of a neighborhood that had been there for three generations.

"That's the one," Perry said when Julian finished. "That's the one I'm most proud of. And the one I'm most ashamed of."

Three weeks later, Perry died. Not dramatically. In his sleep. In the room with the wood paneling and the desk and the wall of framed articles. Julian attended the funeral and said nothing. He returned to Sunflower a week later with his grandmother's permission to clear out the study completely.

He opened every drawer. He read every file. He found, in the bottom drawer of the desk, a single envelope with his name on it. Inside was a letter, written in Perry's hand, dated the week before the diagnosis.

Julian,

If you're reading this, I'm gone. And if you're in this room, you've decided what to do with what you found.

I don't expect you to forgive me. I don't expect you to understand me. I just want you to know that when I was young, I believed that words were a kind of truth. And when I was old, I knew they were something else entirely.

I hope you find something better to believe in than words.

Love, Grandfather

Julian folded the letter. He put it in his pocket. He closed the drawer. He did not take the drawer with him. He did not take anything from the study except the letter.

He walked out of the house for the last time. Behind him, the house sat in the Delta heat, full of words that no one would ever read again.

Author Note & Copyright: