The Professor by Robert Bailey Page A

eye.
    “File it.”

PART THREE

20
     
    Hazel Green, Alabama, is a one-stoplight town on the northern tip of the state. In 1939, two years before enlisting in the army and three years before joining the 101st Airborne, Sutton “Sut” McMurtrie bought a hundred-acre farm across the street from Hazel Green High School. A year later, on a cold and blustery day two weeks before Christmas, Sut’s wife, Rene, gave birth to their one and only child, a son. Wanting the boy to have a strong name, Sut named him after his grandfather’s hero, the general that Newt McMurtrie served under in the Civil War. Thomas Jackson. To the world, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
    Tom was two when his daddy left the farm for the war, and he didn’t remember him going. But he did remember his return. Sut had been badly injured at the Battle of the Bulge when his battalion, led by General McAuliffe, refused to surrender at Bastogne. Sut came home in a wheelchair, wearing the Purple Heart given him by President Roosevelt. Despite his condition, when Sut had seen his son for the first time, he had picked six-year-old Tom up off the ground, sat him in his lap, and kissed him on the cheek and forehead. And for the first and only time in his life, Tom had seen his daddy cry.
    The wheelchair had lasted a week. After breakfast one morning, Sut ran his rough fingers over Tom’s head and slowly stood from the chair. Walking with a limp, he heaved the chair off the ground and stuck it in the garage. “Come on, boy, we got work to do,” he had said. That summer, the summer of 1945, Sut and six-year-old Tom built the brick farmhouse that Tom gazed at now.
    Tom breathed the fresh farm air and looked at the house he and his father built with their bare hands. He touched a brick, remembering how his daddy had laid each one individually. Feeling tears well in his eyes, Tom shook his head and looked away, toward Highway 231.
    “Where the heck is he?” Tom asked out loud, looking down at Musso, who was chewing on an old shoe. They had arrived three days ago, but there wasn’t much Tom could do without some help. The house was a mess, not having had a tenant in over five years, and the yard that surrounded the house and led into the fields of corn might have to be bushhogged, the grass was so damn high. Tom silently cursed himself, feeling guilty that he’d let the place go to pot.
    Sighing, he watched as Musso stopped chewing, coughed, and then made a god-awful throat-clearing sound. When the dog stood up and raised his ears, Tom turned his head and saw a car pulling up the driveway.
    “’Bout time,” he said. As Musso barked and ran toward the vehicle—a Lexus SUV—Tom stood with his arms folded.
    Once the car was parked, an enormous black man wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans stepped out and immediately disarmed Musso, grabbing him behind the ears and stroking him. The dog stopped growling and started shaking his tail.
    “Musso, you’re even bigger and fatter than the last time I saw you,” the man said, picking the sixty-pound animal up off his feet and letting him lick his face. Then, after planting his own kiss on the side of Musso’s massive head, the man—all six foot four and two hundred forty pounds of him—set the dog down, walked toward Tom, and stopped a foot in front of him.
    “Well, well, well,” he said, extending his hand. “The Professor has gone to the farm.”
    Shaking his hand, Tom couldn’t help but smile. In forty years of teaching, he’d had lots of students come and go, but—like all teachers—he had an all-time favorite. And he was looking at him now.
    “Bocephus, you doing all right?”
    “All right?” Bocephus smiled, feigning shock. “I’m living the dream, Professor. One day at a time. One case at a time. One million-dollar verdict at a time. We’re talkin’ wide . . . ass . . . open.”
    He laughed and caught Tom in a bear hug, holding him close. “It’s not right what they’ve done, dog. Let me