Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

In the years since, Eddgar and she had both come to assume, without ever saying it, that their demise was her fault. She'd wanted his faith and could not have it. She could not believe what he believed and so she took it from him. Believe something else, shesaid, something I can share. Rev-o-lution! Oh, she had believed in that. Sanctified by revolution. Reformed by revolution. Everything errant in her life would be corrected. She challenged poor Eddgar. Because he was always her example. How much can you believe? she wanted to know. How much faith can you have? Are you still pure? If I let other men inside me? That was her challenge. And he took it up in his own way and eventually invited himself into those beds. Not in the lurid sense that he ever wanted details. But her love affairs, her animal needs, had to serve the revolution somehow. And in that way, Eddgar, with his stillborn loving, remained, in the way he always had to be, supreme.

'I think this could be dangerous,' Eddgar had said, holding the car keys this morning.

'He's my son, too.'

'I'm not questioning your devotion, June. I don't think it's safe. I know it's not safe. Ego and self-esteem are what really move the folks down there. I think we should do what I told Ordell we were going to do. We should take Nile and go to the PA. I know him.'

'Eddgar, stop. Stop the heroism. And the scheming. It's no answer. That's a disaster. For you. And especially for Nile. Even Michael will be jeopardized if you're not careful. That's asking to destroy everyone. You should speak to a lawyer before you do anything, and you shouldn 't do that until I've talked to this fellow now.'

'June. It's dangerous. I wouldn 't be surprised if he's got half a mind to kill me. Maybe more than half. This is too dangerous for anyone.'

'It's not as dangerous for me as it is for you. I'm a fat old woman. I'm not going to threaten anyone. Give me the keys. I'll call as soon as we 're through.'

So here she was again, on one of Eddgar's missions. God, the places she had gone in this life. She thought about the Panther safe houses to which Eddgar used to send her. What a crazy scene. With the guns all over. The automatic weapons, fully loaded, leaning against the wall, much as a farmer would lean his hoe, bandoliers of rounds in full metal jacket looped over the rifle barrels. The windows were newspapered so the cops and FBI could not see inside. Near the end, after the Oakland Armory raid, there was military issue about: M-16s and M-79s, ammunition boxes, blasting caps piled into a green duffel marked by stencil company a, 92nd engineers and the M-18 smoke grenades and C-4 plastic explosives. Sometimes there was cocaine piled up on a table like flour. And always women, and babies crawling under foot, among the men in berets and boots.

Eddgar had nearly been shot half a dozen times in those places. Someone was always pulling a gun on him, angered not so much by his opinions as by his manner. He looked down the barrel of the gun, implacable. She – everybody there, everyone but Eddgar – saw the same thing in him, a Southern boy refusing to bend to their rage. But Eddgar would not flinch. He thought about his death, the need to die for the revolution every day. And he never let those incidents pass. He believed in discipline. When poor Cleveland was released from the Alameda County jail, when they bailed him after he had snitched out Michael, Eddgar could barely wait to get to the inevitable denouement. He made a show of good cheer, but the last time they saw Cleveland, the morning he was killed, Eddgar took a.44 and fired off a round and laid the muzzle, hot enough to burn, right against Cleveland's temple. He left a mark and didn't say a word, even as Martin Kellett and two Panthers grabbed Cleveland. The mark of Cain, she thought now. It was all so crazy.

About much of it, about Cleveland's death, for example, she had been too sorry since to live much of a life. She had gone down, fallen helplessly into the chasm. She had made a silly marriage to a handsome, empty man, a man who was even somewhat cruel. He gave her drugs, and she took that for love. They broke up. She took the cure, but started drinking again seven years ago, and now she drank too much every day. She sat up nights, lapping up cheap Bordeaux by the liter and playing computer solitaire.

Now she made a right and came closer to the projects. She could see the blunt towers looming over the rows of industrial buildings, the final structures before the blocks of wasteland around Grace Street. There were old foundries with smokestacks, like arms raised in warning, warehouses with huge gantry doors, all the buildings guarded by razor wire atop their fences. What was in there to steal? The few faces on the streets now, as the early morning dark was starting to dissolve, were black, and in her present mood of recollection she thought of Mississippi in the old days and the God-fearing simple people they wanted to help, people who were so good, so radiantly good they seemed almost angelic, suffering their life of deprivation and toil. Lord, she loved to leave the churches, the meetings on Sunday nights in summer. The Southern air hung like a damp sock and the broken light of the moon silvered the trees and the bosks of the heavy landscape. She loved to hear the singing voices rising, gathered together and holding, like the voice of history, to a single note. How could we have gone from there to here with so little gained? she wondered. How could we have raised up these despairing children, dispossessed, who felt from their first moments there was no place on earth for them, who were untouched, unsaved by any tradition of human nobility? How could this have occurred? We were right! she thought, suddenly, desperately. We were right. That was why she was here now, in the cold hand of danger. She was doing what she'd done a hundred times before, saving him, saving Eddgar, this beautiful passionate boy, because she had to save everything he believed in, because she had no faith herself. But oh, oh, she had believed in him, in revolution, and she claimed some fragment of that surging feeling now as she swung onto the street. She rolled the window down and smiled absurdly.

'Lady,' a young woman said, a perfectly beautiful young woman with flawless chocolaty skin. She had a stocking cap tugged down over most of her face. 'Lady,' she said, 'you in the wrong damn place.'

Seth

So this is how it happens, Seth thinks. You hassle the guy inside your head for twenty-five years and then you walk up to his door on a Tuesday morning and knock and here he is, holding his half-frame glasses and today's newspaper. Eddgar is stock-still behind the screen door.

'Is this about Nile?' he finally asks. 'Is he in more trouble?'

‘I hope not'

Eddgar undertakes another instant of visible deliberation, his face obscured in the deep shadows of early morning. Seth waits on the tongue-and-groove porch that wraps around the front of the old frame house.

‘I was about to make a cup of tea,' Eddgar finally offers and nudges the door open a few inches. The interior architecture is baffling. The corridor goes on forever, and the air is heavy with the scent of frying oil and gathered human smells, a little like a barracks. 'Have you heard from him?' Eddgar asks when they reach the small kitchen.

Seth removes the paper Hobie gave him last night, the microfiche from the delivery company showing Michael's address. Eddgar puts the kettle on to boil and replaces his glasses before taking up the record.

'Am I being threatened?' he asks then.

'I'm trying to put some things together, Eddgar. It's not a threat.'

'Quite certain? Not planning any reunions with the FBI? No confessional in your column? You see, I want to be sure we aren't going to have another act in that morality play in the courtroom. The Revenger's Tragedy? Isn't there a drama of that name? I believe June studied it.' Eddgar coughs at that moment, a rattling attack on his lungs. He holds a fist before his mouth. 'But I suppose your impulse for vengeance is well satisfied at this point.' Eddgar smiles solely for his own benefit. 'What is it you want to know, Seth?'