Read Online The Blackstone Commentaries by Rob Riggan - Free Book Online

was feeling hemmed-in once again, by the woman sleeping at the other end of his sofa, but even more so by Dugan, his late father’s friend.
    Elmore was learning fast. To hear it said all these years later, his father had been a friend to virtually everyone in Blackstone County. Myths or legends of that sort had a way of growing in the mountains—sainthood for a variety of sins was not uncommon. The exception in his father’s case had been the Damascus elite, the lawyers and doctors and other professionals, the wealthy families who had built the mills, the aging and often eccentric direct descendants of the aristocracy—the would-be cavaliers of the Lost Cause, that greatest of all romances. To them, his father had been at best a communist and at worst a traitor to his class, if not exactly his profession, to be held forever suspect, tolerated only because he was a doctor and therefore by rights one of them.
    Dugan was something else. That was his, Elmore’s, territory. The law as presented in the courtroom was theater, true, and Elmore was learning to enjoy it. But the night before, all he had felt was revulsion at Dugan’s wild assertion of self, of bald power and inherent violence under the guise of law. Worse, it had seemed that only the gods—lightning, thunder and rain—had been able to shut down that travesty.
    Now, more than at any moment since his return to Damascus, everything felt tentative, fragile and alien.
    He recalled driving south out of the gray rain and patches of dirty snow that winter, propelled by a dream, a siren call that had affected his sleep for months, and finally even his ability to have a cup of coffee and just relax. Driving south, excited because he’d finally made a decision, he’d wondered at the lure of Blackstone County, where he’d lived such a short time so many years before.
    It was his father’s funeral that uncorked it all. Elmore was not what the people gathered in Damascus had expected that day, he knew that even then. Rather, what he looked like wasn’t what they expected. He knew there had always been a lot of his father in him, though he was bigger in stature and far more of a hothouse creature in those days, pampered in the private schools he’d hated and college—Yale Law was still to come—all according to his mother’s design, not his father’s. His prior residency in the South had been limited to the three years they lived there as a family before his mother left to return north to hate his father from a safe distance, taking their boy with her. Elmore had never made a visit back; his father had always come north to see him. So the sense of surprise among the crowd when he stepped from the car at the cemetery that day was palpable, a kind of curiosity verging on wonder, as though maybe his father hadn’t died. It was eerie; Elmore had felt himself being almost physically possessed by this expectation or hope, whatever it was. Then, it had been seductive. Now, it was a burden.
    For it was this desire, of course, that he felt from the people knocking on his office door. “No secretary?” they sometimes said, looking around with an almost startled look as they realized they were looking right at him, that there were no barriers to their access. “Yes, your daddy was like that, too,” they might add. Then they’d depart, satisfied, for the bench he’d placed out in the hall alongside a small table with magazines, if he hadn’t already asked them through the closed door to wait there because he had a client.
    For his father’s funeral, vehicles of every sort had parked all the way back downtown as far as the courthouse square, a mile away. And they were parked just as far in the opposite direction, as well as down the side streets. That cemetery with its rolling, manicured lawns and elegant head-stonesand old, enshrouding trees was just where his father belonged, Elmore’s