The Laws of our Fathers (35 page)

    '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.'

    He looked up to be sure he had my attention. The voice of a neighbor's TV drifted through the apartment, a commercial for a fast-food chain that seemed boldly inappropriate.

    'Now I don't know a thing about you and your father, Seth. But let me tell you this much: Free yourself. If you are going to do something as dramatic as running away from your country and allowing some grand jury to indict you and the FBI to hunt for you coast to coast - make sure that it's not for nothing and that you are free on your own terms. If you can't make my revolution, then make your own revolution. Make the revolution you can -and triumph at it. That's what I say.'

    He lifted up his sleeping boy and barely brought his lips to Nile's brow, while his eyes remained on me, knowing that as ever he'd made a deep impression.

    

    Eddgar was expelled the next day, April 30. More than three-quarters of the faculty voted in favor. Jeering members of One Hundred Flowers were dragged off by Damon's finest as they stood with placards, heckling the president of the university when he returned home from the meeting. Eddgar addressed the cameras of virtually every California television station. Freedom of speech and thought, he said - the supposed cardinal values of university life - had been exposed, he said, as a fiction, a sham, a quilted coverlet masking the iron face of political rigor and reactionary values.

    In spite of the high drama, Eddgar's story did not remain at the top of the news. By 11 p.m., when Michael and I took our places in the bedroom where I'd moved the TV set in deference to Nile's sleep, the lead item was Richard Nixon's address to the nation earlier in the evening. I had read that the speech was coming, but like everyone else never anticipated the content. Now Nixon announced he was sending U S soldiers into the Cambodian Fish Hook to rout out North Vietnamese supplies and troops, and also bombing their supply routes in Laos. The screen filled with Nixon's shadowy, humorless mug as the President, in one of his Orwellian fabrications, assured the nation that the war was not expanding.

    'Can you believe this?' I asked Michael, who replied with a limp shrug. The newsreader ran on to other matters - Eddgar's expulsion; the news that the judge at the Kopechne inquest had questioned Edward Kennedy's veracity; suspicion that Juanita Rice and her captors had robbed another bank in West LA. Michael eventually slipped out, saying he was sleepy, while I continued fulminating. After all Nixon's talk about how the war was winding down, he was invading another nation. After all the protests, the marches, the mobilized dissent - after all
my
pain -Nixon was still in the spell of the generals and his ingrained paranoia. He was refusing to bow to the Commies as always, struggling to win a war he could only lose, killing young men for the ego and profit of old ones, and proving, as if he meant to, the correctness of those who had contended all along that only far more dramatic measures would breed change.

    Within the hour, I heard voices blaring behind the apartment. Out on Campus Boul, protesters had commandeered the microphone at a drive-thru fast-food restaurant and were exclaiming, in the amplified voice,
"Dick
Nixon!
Dick
Nixon!' Another group was in the middle of the street, bringing traffic to a skidding halt and chorusing back something similar about Spiro Agnew. I hung through the open window. At top volume, I screamed right along
- Dick
Nixon - yelling until Nile woke and my throat felt so raw I imagined it might be bloody.

    

    

    With the news the following morning, I came to believe that I'd been briefly wrested from sleep by the boom of what I took for a storm. That remains my memory - a single vague concussive pock bouncing off the clouds. I'm still not certain.

    I was in the shower just after 5:00, when I heard footsteps thundering up the stairs - a determined pounding, oblivious of the hour. There was a single phenomenal bang overhead, which seemed to shake the building, and then, I was sure, shouting. I opened the front door of the apartment and saw three Damon coppers on the landing. They were in full battle gear, helmets and shiny boots and bulletproof vests. They had their riot batons drawn. One of them saw me and said, 'Get back inside.' I had only a towel around my waist, but even half-naked I found that my reflexive regard for high authority had fled.

    'Go fuck yourself,' I replied. It was a sign of how my sense was failing. He reared back as if he had been struck, lifting his baton from his side.

    There were shouts from above, and footfalls again shook the wooden stairwell so hard I could feel them. With his arms cuffed from behind, Eddgar was pushed down the steps with a cop at each side.

    'What the hell?' I asked.

    I thought Eddgar smiled as he went by. His dark hair was tousled and he wore pants but no shoes and socks. The three cops, including the one who was prepared to hit me, took off to clear the way. They wrestled Eddgar down the stairs and threw him in the back of a squad car parked below whose noisy radio voice I'd heard but hadn't really noted. When I looked up, June stood a few feet in front of her threshold in her long white night shift, clutching Nile, who wore solely his large diaper. Only now he began to cry. Behind them, I could see the door of the apartment, smashed off the hinges and split; fresh wood was revealed in the rent, as with a lightning-struck tree.

    'What in God's name?' I brought them into my apartment. June was shaking. I dressed Nile and laid him down on my sofa. The diaper, of course, was soaked. I spent a great deal of time soothing him, and June soon joined me. Apparently, he had not seen most of it, but Nile was awake as his father had been cuffed and hustled out. June and I kept assuring him that Eddgar was all right. Finally, he accepted our advice and with little warning went back to sleep. June and I sat in the kitchen, drinking tea and whispering. 'They just broke in?'

    'They said they had an arrest warrant. I never saw it.' She lit a cigarette. In an act of hapless modesty, she had thrown an old green knitted shawl over herself before leaving her apartment. She sat in my kitchen in her cotton nightdress, clutching her bare arms.

    'For what? What are they busting him for?'

    She pondered her cigarette. 'The bomb,' she said. 'Last night. About 1:oo in the morning actually - the ARC was bombed. The whole west wing of the building was destroyed. Most of the labs over there.' She described the explosion scene, dust and bricks blown a quarter of a mile.

    I asked about injuries.

    'The building was -' she said and stopped. 'You'd think the building would be empty. They're saying -' June faltered again. 'Someone was in his lab late. One of the profs. He's hospitalized. They claim he lost his hand, an arm.'

    'Oh God. And they arrested Eddgar for it?'

    'This is what it's going to be like. Now. I keep telling him that. This is what the faculty did. This is what they've intended. They've stripped away the last vestiges - the last protective plumage of class membership. This is going to happen again and again. Any occasion. Any excuse. It doesn't matter how careful we are. You understand that, don't you?' She leaned toward me with rare directness and grasped my hand. Over time, my relationship with June had acquired a subtle confidential air, beginning, I guess, the day I saw her in all her glory on Michael's threshold. On nights she was home before Eddgar, she poured herself two fingers of bourbon, an indulgence she occasionally allowed herself, particularly outside his presence, and talked to me about her household. With the tumbler in hand, she could emit a languorous air, taking all her weight on her heels, an elbow laid on the kitchen countertop. Sometimes she worried out loud about Nile - his social adjustment, his reading. Occasionally there were candid remarks about Eddgar, issued as her eye rose to meet mine above her glass, which I knew I was expected to maintain in strictest privacy. For me, she was a bit of a confidante, as well. I told her about my parents and of course, as I did with everyone else I knew, poured out my anguish to her about my breakup with Sonny. But she spoke to me now as I imagined she talked to someone else, someone who knew her far better than I did.