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Gaines could now understand Wade Senior’s desire to have Della under his wing. The Wades were staunch Southerners, and their affiliation with Klan was inevitable, directly or indirectly, visibly or not. Nothing overt, nothing obvious, but financial support had surely made its way from some of those Wade-owned businesses into the hands and pockets of pro-segregation activists. So having Della Wade involved with the coloreds would have been out of the question, and to have his daughter scammed by Clifton Regis would have been an insult of the most personal nature. What had Nate Ross said—that the ten grand went back from where it had come pretty damned fast? Gaines could imagine the conversation that had taken place between Regis and a couple of Wade’s people. No kind of conversation at all, in truth. It was a miracle, in fact, that Regis was even alive to tell the story. And then the recalcitrant and troublesome Della had been returned to the fold, appropriately admonished by her father, perhaps Matthias, and there she had stayed. If it was in fact true that Della was maintaining a relationship with Regis, then Gaines hoped that some sour taste of resentment had remained on Della Wade’s lips, the kind of resentment that would see her wanting to inflict some vengeance on her father and her elder brother. But then Gaines could have it all wrong. Della could be the sweetest kind of girl imaginable, led astray by an ill-intentioned men, seduced into a life of drugs and debauchery, an unwitting pawn in their game. Perhaps the ten grand had merely been a precursor, something to test the water, and Regis’s intent had been to fleece the family for a great deal more. Anyway, whoever she was and whatever might have happened, the man she’d been involved with was no longer involved. He was up at Parchman, and Parchman was not a good place to be, regardless of who you were.
Parchman was the oldest prison in the state, the only one capable of providing maximum-security detention. Until the Supreme Court suspension, it was also the home for Mississippi’s death row facility, Unit 17. Up there in the delta, the Farm covered the better part of twenty thousand acres, and due to its location and the inhospitality of its surround, it needed no great and mighty walls to house its inmates. And then there were the Freedom Riders. That was a history all its own. Back at the start of ’61, a host of civil rights activists, both coloreds and whites, came to the South to test the desegregation of public properties and facilities. Within six months, more than one hundred and fifty had been arrested, convicted, and jailed in Parchman. Those activists were given the worst treatment possible, everything from issued clothes being several sizes too small to no mail. The food was barely edible, strong black coffee, grits, and blackstrap molasses for breakfast, beans and pork gristle for lunch, the same again for di
The problem of how to get in there and see Regis was considerable, and it preyed on Gaines’s mind for a while. The natural paranoia of the penitentiary governor and his deputies precluded any real possibility of negotiating an official visit. They would suspect that this was nothing more than further outside interference. Even after the Gates v. Collier case, Parchman was still believed to be ru
Gaines took a hundred bucks from the office petty cash fund, that fund provided for so generously by those who chose to pay on-the-spot speeding fines instead of opting for a ticket and a court appearance. He told Hagen where he was going and why.
“Best of luck to you,” was Hagen’s response. “If you get in there, you’re a better man than me.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt I’ll get in there,” Gaines said, “but whether I get to see who I’m after is a different matter entirely.”
Gaines went home to change out of his uniform. He left his gun behind, but took his ID and the hundred bucks. It was a little after eleven by the time he left the house, and he had a three- or four-hour drive ahead of him.
En route he tried to find some framework within which to put the previous nine days. Inside of little more than a week, the entirety of his life had been upended and scattered on the ground. That was how it felt. And then someone had come along and kicked through every part of his existence as if looking for something they believed was there. Truth was, there was nothing there. Not anymore. Now there was no family. There was just an empty house and a great deal of silence.
Perhaps that was the reason he felt so driven to speak to Clifton Regis, to find a way to get to Della Wade, to find out from Eddie Holland the reason for his visit to Marya