The Laws of Our Fathers Read online

  My life in those weeks felt dismal, stillborn, lost. I could not figure out why I had gone on working, why I had not left yet,

  except that it didn't seem I could take any substantial step in such a shattered state. My induction remained a couple of weeks off, on May 4. Michael, Nile, and I continued to eat dinner each night, but they were sorry gatherings, silent except for the TV which Nile watched. I felt Sonny's absence acutely, and Michael, even for Michael, was remote. He claimed his lab was preoccupying him, but I sensed his affair with June had moved to a critical new stage. Those days each of them seemed tense in the other's presence.

  After Nile was asleep, I would lie on the mattress on our bedroom floor - where I now slept alone - my transistor clutched to my ear as I listened to the hearing sessions being broadcast on campus radio at Eddgar's demand. It reminded me of when I was seven or eight and used to lie beneath the blankets at home with the volume on my radio reduced to a secretive hush, listening to the Trappers' baseball games in what I now unexpectedly regarded as happier times.

  The case against Eddgar depended principally on evidence gathered by the campus police. For all the talk of snitches, none had come forward. Nor did they appear to be needed. The cops had photographs. They showed the PLP members in their gas masks. And in the picture that became more or less the signature of the case, the mystery woman, the girl who'd shrieked and disappeared, was portrayed emerging from the crowd. One moment, she was unmarked. Then her hand was at her face. Streaks of dark blood were shown running from her crown, but, said the faculty prosecutor, something was dropping from her hand. A vial? She was identified from mug shots as Laura Lancey, an employee at Bayside Packers, the canning plant where June worked. As Eddgar's lawyers pointed out, none of this proved she was not beaten; none of this implicated Eddgar, even if it was assumed that Eddgar was acquainted with the young woman, which he emphatically denied. But the sequence of photos - the university produced the numbered contact sheets - showed Eddgar looking twice across his right shoulder, behind himself to the area of the broad pea-gravel plaza where Laura Lancey eventually emerged. As if he knew something was going to happen there. Eddgar's lawyers claimed the negatives had been reversed.

  In the cafe discussions on Campus Boul, there were few testimonials to Eddgar's character. No one supposed he was above violence or lying about it afterwards. He was, after all, a revolutionary, dedicated to undermining bourgeois institutions. But if the university was held to the standards of the system it wanted to defend, its evidence seemed flimsy. Eddgar's speech was just that, a speech. The faculty prosecutor tried to establish that Eddgar had been on campus, aiding the rioters. Two cops claimed they had glimpsed Eddgar, supposedly helping the fellow who tumbled from the police-station roof, but they admitted being several hundred feet away at the time. The police had also retrieved a shirt from a trash container on campus. It had a One Hundred Flowers armband tied on one sleeve and the pointillistic remnants of what the prosecutor claimed were Eddgar's initials printed in the collar years before when he still sent his shirts to the Chinese laundry. The ironies of this bit of evidence were not lost on anyone.

  I knew Eddgar was guilty. Until the hearing, I'd never bothered squarely facing that, but the recognition settled on me with barely a ripple of surprise. But I found myself vaguely hopeful that he would get off anyway, even though I still wasn't sure I was on his side. In my present mood, though, I was sympathetic to anybody forced to confront harsh authority.

  Over the months, Nile and I had found our own rhythm. Sometimes we drew on the sidewalk with chalk, sometimes he let me play a snarling man who could not reach him when he threw things down at me from the treehouse. He still preferred to watch TV in my apartment, but he favored me with questions now and then, provoked by what he was seeing. Why was the boy mad at the girl on account of the other girl? Sometimes he called on me to confirm the lessons his father relentlessly taught him.

  'Commercials are just big lies, right?' 'A lot of them.'

  'They just want you to buy stuff. They're just greedy, right?'

  'Maybe they think what they're selling will help you, man.'

  'They're greedy,' Nile repeated. Greed was a sin that Eddgar, especially, furiously denounced. 'They don't want to help the peoples. They don't care about the peoples.' His eyes lit in space, fixing on some troubled judgment about the world and, perhaps, himself.

  Despite June's persistent efforts to shelter him, Eddgar's expulsion hearings inevitably took a toll on Nile as well.

  'We're moving,' Nile told me one night in April. 'Did you know we're getting another house somewhere else?'

  I tried to be encouraging and suggested that might not be the case.

  'June says.' His head bobbed emphatically. 'Are you getting another house with us?'

  At June's insistence, I made only the vaguest references to my plans. She believed he couldn't handle my departure, particularly with their own situation so unsettled, a judgment that seemed well supported by Nile's surprisingly morose response when Sonny had moved out. Sonny had spent time with Nile only at meals, but she was always kind to him and from the start she had been far better attuned to his moods than I was. Back in the winter, I'd complained about the way Nile seemed to disappear into the TV, immune to any other distraction.

  'Don't you see he's depressed?' she had answered. She was seated, legs akimbo, on our bed, surrounded by books like tribute.

  'Depressed? He's a kid. What's he got to be depressed about?'

  'Weren't you depressed as a child? Isn't that what you're always talking about?'

  'I was terrified, man. I'm not sure that's depressed. Why? Were you depressed?'

  She shrugged and turned a page, intent. But some impulse escaped her.

  ‘I mean, baby,' she said, 'you have to look at that house. Think what that's like: to be the child of a revolutionary, someone who's always spouting off about these visions of what's bigger and more important than anything or anyone, including you.'

  'You mean Nile's got like sibling rivalry with Chairman Mao?' I was, as usual, greatly entertained by myself and could not understand Sonny's sizzling, vexed expression, or why she turned back to her books so bitterly.

  Yet she was right. Nile was one of those kids for whom growing up just seemed to be hard. He was always in scrapes of one kind or another at school and often perceived himself as the victim of terrible physical ailments. Any cut, no matter how microscopic, inspired prolonged weeping. He sometimes wore as many as six adhesive strips on his limbs.

  One night in the fall, when I was alone with him, I had heard Nile padding to the John. I was startled because he had never gotten up before. He had stripped off his clothes and stood shivering. He wore only a huge diaper which lapped gigantically around him.

  'I'm wet,' he said, hardly a necessary announcement. The smell was strong. I washed him, as he quivered, his eyes, dark like his mother's, heavy with sleep.

  'Tell my mom I go'd,' he said.

  During the hearings, I covered my sofa in a plastic sheet and assured Nile that I was unconcerned about accidents. With my departure at hand, I didn't care if the place reeked. Throughout the months June had never addressed the subject with me. She never told me what to do to help, or confessed that this was why she'd insisted Nile sleep in his own bed. It was one more secret of their household, which, like the rest of what I knew, I was expected to maintain in silence.

  The night Eddgar finished his testimony, he showed up to collect Nile. I had heard every word on the campus radio and thought he had done a fine job in his own behalf. He denied any intention of

  inciting to riot, said he'd never met Laura Lancey, and claimed he had returned to his apartment as soon as the demonstration at the ARC turned to violence. He had no role, he said, in the ensuing melee on campus. He sounded equable, the soul of reason. I suspected that much of what he said was true - that he had been careful never to meet Laura Lancey. But his voice did not betray him in any way, even in the moments
that I knew he was uttering unvarnished lies. On cross-examination the prosecutor contented himself with the text of Eddgar's many classroom lectures and public speeches.

  'In addressing a group, have you ever repeated the saying "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"?'

  'Of course, I have. That's a matter of theory.'

  'You have called for armed struggle, for violence?'

  'At the proper time.'

  'And who is it who decides the time, Dr Eddgar?'

  The defense lawyer objected, and eventually the senate president cut off questioning.

  I told him now I thought it had gone well.

  'To no avail,' he answered. 'The end is a foregone conclusion. I must admit that was always one of my favorite theological puzzles. Why did Jesus say what he did on the cross? You know the part I'm referring to? About his father forsaking him? Hadn't the poor fool known what was coming? Did his father send him down here with no warning? What kind of relationship did they have, any old way?' He laughed in his usual quiet fashion when something amused him alone.

  I asked about the closing arguments, scheduled for tomorrow, but Eddgar appeared uninterested. His eyes fell to the two cardboard boxes of Sonny's belongings she'd left behind. I'm sure he assumed they were mine.

  'When will you go?' he asked.

  'Next week.' This was the second week in a row that I'd said that. At times, I feared I would never propel myself, that I'd wait until some ugly vortex - the FBI or secret military dragoons sucked me down to a blackish fate. For the moment, though, I used the hearings as my excuse. I would go as soon as the Eddgars were settled again.

  'And your parents - are they still hounding you?' he asked.

  'Relentlessly.' My mother had taken money - her own funds, her knipple, saved out of the household money - and bought an open ticket to Vancouver. My father said she had also packed a suitcase. There was only one in the house I knew of, a brown lacquered valise hard as an insect shell, and I imagined it now poised by the front door.

  'Perhaps you should rethink being kidnapped.'

  We laughed. I had, at moments, returned to the idea. It gave me a vicious thrill to imagine my father pinioned that way -between his child and his money. An antique theme. Midas came to mind, although I tended to think more about Jack Benny, one of my father's favorites, and his famous bit where a robber with a gun and a mask accosts Jack.

  'Your money or your life,' the robber demands, and Jack, after a splendid long take, answers, 'I'm thinking, I'm thinking.'

  Driving my delivery route, turning things over obsessively, like rolling dice, I thought I could measure the true probabilities. Each time, I pushed my imagination further along the train of likely events. My father was too shrewd not to sense the ruse. Of course. He'd see it was far too convenient. Far too coincidental. But my mother would never rouse herself to disbelief - no matter how unlikely the threat to my well-being. She would cry. She would pull on the sleeves of her dress, fumble with her hands, follow him about, crying all the time, begging him in German, shrieking and beleaguering him. He would give in. He would part with the money, suspecting all along that I had exacted a price to leave him in peace.

  'It's like I said a while ago: he'd pay in the end and I'd be no better off than I was to start. It's not really workable.'

  'Oh, there's always a way. It's only details,' Eddgar added, as if particulars were not the stuff of life.

  I was seated in the living-room armchair, picking at the threadbare patch where the ticking showed through.

  'You don't honestly think I should do this, man, do you?'

  'Seth, what I think you should do is join the armed struggle. But I'm not so foolish as to believe that's likely to occur right now.' He'd picked up Nile's stuffed animal and his blanket and he put them down now on the sofa, where the boy still slept, oblivious to our hushed conversation. 'May I tell you a story? This is the worst story I know. The worst. I hate even to think about it. But I have a point to make.'

  He sat down on a milk crate we used as a coffee table and paused to hike each of his pants legs, his preparations deepening the mood.

  'When I was fourteen years old,' Eddgar said, 'I went with my father to the Overlook Valley Hunt Club. What it is in the life of the South - what it is that when there are so many as six prosperous white families in a 50-square-mile region they will organize themselves in either a hunt club or a country club or some similar pastoral enterprise, what it is I have never fully explained to myself, but my father, like his father, was a member of this club, and on Saturday afternoons, as his week was at an end and he prepared himself for our Sabbath on Sunday, he would adjourn to this club and drink Tennessee whiskey until the sun had set and my father was drunk as a lord. I was terribly embarrassed to see my father in that condition - he took a high red color, bright as a geranium, and it was also an unscrupled breach of his own religious principles for which he never made one word of apology. I hated to go with him, but I was raised in the kind of family where you simply said, "Yes, Daddy," when something was required and so I went along on many a Saturday, becoming, I suppose, educated in a tradition which I'm sure he expected me to take up as my own, listenin to large men with the characteristic names - Bear and Dog Head and Billy Ray - drinking bourbon with mint and sugar water, telling about critters they had shot and women they had known. All right?' he asked.

  With this story, Eddgar was at home - in every sense. His lexicon had changed and his accent deepened. He had told the tale many times, I knew, practiced it, but Eddgar held me as he always did. I nodded quickly for him to go on.

  'Well, the tiny little town of Overlook was near the club and you had to drive directly through it to get back to my father's plantation. It was like most little Southern towns: white and colored patches separated by the railroad tracks; not so much as a streetlight yet because we hadn't gotten Rural Electrification. And one evening when my father had drunk himself silly, turned red as those dirt roads, just absolutely radiating the heat of drink, he came flyin round the corner and plowed smack into the front of some old shivering heap that was stopped politely at a sign there in the colored section. I must say this wreck shook up both my daddy and me. He bounced his head against the windshield and took a good lick there, and began spouting a skinny little stream of blood that ran down into his eyes, but finally we collected ourselves and looked out to see some poor Negro man climbing out the door of his car, a rural fellow in a checkered shirt and soiled overalls, who considered the mess that had been made of his Ford. Its entire front end was stove in, completely limp and useless, except for this little white-hot hiss of steam shooting out like some starving cousin of Old Faithful.

  'Now by whatever principle of misfortune that was then operating in Overlook, there was not another witness on that street, not another soul besides this man and my daddy and me who'd seen my father come tearing round that corner, as if the devil himself were in pursuit. And my father got out of his car and he came up to this man - not someone I knew, just some poor terrified black fellow - and my father looked at him and he pointed to his head and he said, "Nigger, you see what you done? Now you got one minute to get some of those other boys out here and get this car of your'n outta my way, or I'm gonna be callin Bill Clayburgh and I'm gonna have him run you in."

  'Well, I suppose I should have been used to that. I can't tell you how my father treated the sharecroppers. When I was a boy, there was one fellow who had accidentally killed a cow, and my father and Billy Clayburgh, the sheriff, and some other white men hog-tied that fellow and held him under the river until he admitted killing that cow and agreed to let the price of that cow be taken out of the pitiful sum that was called his wages. But this wasn't the plantation, this was town, where my father was, as a general matter, better behaved. But I guess his true colors, so to speak, were showing. And he looked that poor man up and down, up and down, that poor black man who stood there wondering, Can this really be happening, can this white man just shoot around a
corner, drunk enough that you can smell it standing five foot away, and make a total wreck out of my car that I worked so hard for and give me not a penny's recompense? Can he do that, or is there some small particle of goodness in this world that will prevent that? And then he looked past my father and caught sight of me in the front seat. His eyes loitered on mine. It wasn't a plaintive look, cause this man knew better than that and he was surely too proud to beg. He just looked and kind of asked me in a way, You too? You gonna do this too? Is this here going on and on? I knew what he wanted and so did my daddy, and he just said, "Don't you look at him, he seen the same as I have." And I said not a word.

  'Well, that fellow didn't have any choice then and soon enough the man did what my daddy told him. He went in and out of some of the little houses, with their tarpaper sides, and collected some of his kin, some friends from out of a store up on the next corner, and by and by they came out and pushed the car out of the way and we left there. And my father, he wasn't done, he rolled his window down and said, "Don't you niggers let this happen again neither."

  'And I say this is the worst story I know, because I just watched. I was fourteen years old. But I knew right from wrong. I knew brute authority from justice. And I spoke not a word. Not because my heart didn't ache to do it. But because I lacked the courage.

  I hadn't planned my escape well enough in my mind. I hadn't yet prepared the path to my own freedom. Oh, I wept my eyes out that night and the nights following. And my resolve grew. And I swore to myself that whatever happened, I would never tie my tongue out of fear of my father or anyone else who was doing what I knew to be plain wickedness. In the years since, I have often heard my father say he raised his worst enemy in his own home, and I take pleasure when I hear him saying that. Because however else I judge myself, I think at least I've kept my word.'