" I 'm sorry, I don't remember you. Should I?" His eyes moved aimlessly about the room. Guards had told me he was almost completely blind now. When I spoke, the eyes would come momentarily to me. Then they'd move away again.
Because of the blindness, Lou Winter had been kept out of the general population. But they'd got to him a time or two anyway, as the wing-shaped scar splitting the side of his face attested. Cons totally lacking in conscience, people who'd slit throats over a supposed insult and murder a grandmother for bus-fare, can get themselves worked into a moral frenzy over child molesters.
I told him who I was.
"I'm sorry. I'm afraid I don't remember much these days." Guards also told me that he'd had a series of small strokes over the years. "Everyone says that may be a good thing. I don't know what they mean by that. But thank you for coming."
After a pause he added, "Is there something I can do for you?"
"I just stopped by to say hello."
For a moment then I sensed the effort, the force of will. If he could just get hold of it, could just concentrate hard enough… But his eyes moved away, the curtains stayed shut, the play was over.
"I brought you this."
His hand reached out and found by sound the box I pushed across the table.
"It's not much. Some of the peppermints and circus peanuts the guards say you like, toiletries, a few other things."
But he had found the totem, the tiny cat carved out of sandalwood that Al had given me all those years ago, and was not listening. He held it close to his face, smelled it, rubbed it against his cheek where the scar ran down. I told him what it was. That a friend gave it to me.
"And now you've given it to me?"
I nodded, then said yes.
"Thank you." He shifted the totem from hand to hand. "Were we friends, then? Are we, I mean?"
"Not really. But we've known one another a long time."
"I'm sorry… so sorry I don't, can't, remember."
He held up the totem. "It's beautiful, isn't it? Small and beautiful. I can tell."
"Do you need anything, Lou? Is there anything I can do for you?
"Good of you, son. But no." For that moment I would have sworn he was looking directly at me, that he saw me. Then his eyes went away. He closed his hand over the sandalwood cat. "I'm pretty well set up here." He nodded. "Yessir. Pretty well set up."
J. T. asked no questions when I got back to the car. But for some reason as we drove out of Memphis I started telling her about Lou Winter, about my first months on the force, about how hard it had been, going through those prison gates and doors. We sat together quietly then for a while until, looking out at the sign welcoming us to Sweetwater and the tarpaper shacks beyond, she said, "So this is the South."
Getting in towards town, I pointed out the Church of the Ark, a local landmark. It had once been just another First Baptist Church, but in 1921 during a major flood that wiped out most of the area, the building had miraculously lifted off its moorings and floated free, pastor and family taking aboard other survivors clinging to trees and housetops. It was renamed shortly thereafter.