The Bone Tree

You know, the truth isn’t hard to find, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty. Truth waits just under the surface for any man brave enough to scrape a little dirt away. But most people are too afraid or too lazy to get dirty. They’re afraid to ask the right questions. The hard questions.

I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve. —Jane Austen, Persuasion, paraphr.

learned a long time ago, if you’re going to wait for this world to be fair, you’re going to be waiting in the grave.

Greed, apathy, hubris—even loyalty—all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word.

Carl Jung’s admonition: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.

Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time—while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background.

Walt Garrity stands beside them like a tired cowboy who mistakenly wandered into the painting and can’t find his way out.

What Kaiser most wanted was time and freedom to follow the leads he’d unearthed—to wherever they led, unhampered by oversight and regardless of consequences. J. Edgar Hoover might be long dead, but his paranoid ghost still haunted the halls of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Already two men had died since Kaiser and his team had driven north from New Orleans to Vidalia, and more had died in the days before that. These deaths had not gone unnoticed in Washington, and by early this evening a few reporters at national newspapers had picked up on the violent doings in the backcountry of Louisiana. None had yet learned that Kaiser had designated the Double Eagle group a terrorist entity under the Patriot Act (which gave him unprecedented power to combat the survivors of the Klan offshoot), but someone soon would, and that would only increase the political pressure to quickly resolve events

As I leave the DA's office building, the cold wind bring me wide awake. I trot down the steps through the shouting reporters without a word, turning left toward City Hall, which abuts the southeast face of the courthouse Just as I think I've cleared the feeding frenzy, someone catches hold of my arm. I whirl in anger, then find myself facing an elderly black woman huddling in a jacket. 'Yes, ma'am?' I say. 'How can I help you?' "Isobel Handley,' she says with a smile. 'I want to know when you're going to do something about the schools, Mayor. You got elected saying you were gonna fix 'em, but right now it's a crying shame how few children who go into the first grade make it through the twelfth for graduation. And you've been in office two whole years!' The reasons for this state of affairs are both simple and unimaginably complex, and I certainly don't have the resources to go through them on a cold sidewalk. Not today, anyway. But conversations like this one are the daily fare of a mayor. 'I'm talking about the PUBLIC schools,' the woman goes an. "Not the private white schools where the only black kids are football players.' 'Yes, ma'am," I say hopelessly. 'I'm working as hard as I can on the issue, I promise you.' 'If your little girl wasn't in a private school, you'd work harder.' 'Mrs. Handley, I-' 'You don't have to explain, baby, I understand. But you take a stick to them selectmen and supervisors, if you have to. That's what they need. Sometimes I think the schools were better before integration. At least we learned the fundamentals, and we graduated knowing how to read.' There's no point trying to explain that I have no authority over the county supervisors or the state board of education. 'Sometimes I wish I could do exactly what you suggested, Mrs. Handley. Now, you'd better get out of this cold. And Merry Christmas to you.' At last she smiles. 'You too, Mayor. God bless. And don't pay these reporters no mind.

Wharlest Jackson used to ask: ‘How can we change the white man’s heart? How can we make him see that we’re all the same inside?

The past is always with us, darling,” Tom went on. “Sometimes we carry it lightly, but other times it’s like dragging a wounded brother behind you.

Hannah Arendt had it right: evil is incomprehensibly banal. The existentialists went her one better: it’s also absurd, and terrifyingly so.

And I learned a long time ago, if you’re going to wait for this world to be fair, you’re going to be waiting in the grave.

Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word. It’s how we respond that defines us.

he know how to work the computers, navigate our intranet? Would he know the user names or passwords of the reporters?” “No. But if Nick didn’t delete the files, then it could be anybody. How the hell do we

About twenty minutes ago, during a commercial break, Melba had thought she’d heard a helicopter in the distance. Tom had been unable to hear it, but that was no surprise, given his progressive hearing loss, and she’d heard nothing since. He told her it was probably nothing to worry about. Statistically, Mississippi had some of the worst drivers in the nation, so LifeFlight helicopters were common at all hours, even over rural counties.

Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” ran through his overheated brain: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

The stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don't expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed. ...Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable.

between us. That night I prayed like a man trying to polish coal

a military base, to check out the story.

There’s nothing harder than fighting alone, with no one to keep you company in your foxhole.

fervent, will not cure the afflicted. Nor

McCrae was the kind of southerner who had only left the parish of his birth to serve his country in wartime or to carry bulls across the state for mating purposes.

She’s floating outside in the maternal holding pattern all women learn after they have children, one that serves them well after grandchildren come along.