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

mother had insisted to Harlan Monroe, publisher of the Damascus paper, when he called to report his father’s death. He belonged there among “the county’s finest and the brave fallen of the War Between the States,” she had said, her contempt just below the surface, there for the taking. But Harlan was a gentleman and chose to accept things at face value, though Elmore knew now how it must have saddened him. His father had specifically asked to be buried near his clinic up in the forests of Rainer Cove, any pretense of rank having always been a great irritation to him.
    Harlan said it was like nothing he’d ever seen, the hundreds of people who filed down out of the mountains from the north and west, the slow, measured flow of the cars and trucks through town having an ominous feel for any would-be aristocrat. “You just want to take your hat off and pray,” Harlan said, “and mostly for yourself. And here I thought we’d lost the art of celebrating death.”
    But Elmore wasn’t like his father then any more than he was now, he thought, feeling the leather of the old sofa suck at his skin as he moved ever so carefully, trying not to awaken the beast at the other end. My mother sure as hell didn’t have to be afraid of my being him .
    But he didn’t think she really was afraid by the time of the funeral, just that the pretense was simpler than the truth. She was, he was convinced, afraid of something else: that huge crowd’s display of love for Dr. Willis, “Doc,” the apparent simplicity of that feeling that wasn’t really simple at all, any more than his father’s love for them had been. She was afraid of the implied reproach, too; if one thing characterized his parents’ marriage, it had been competition.
    It wasn’t clear if the wives of the good doctors, lawyers and businessmen of Damascus—the New South, as Harlan put it with his curious mixture of pride and irony—who showed up really came to pay their respects to the deceased doctor or to catch a glimpse of her. It had been over twelve years since they last saw her, those who had actually known her. Harlan had probably been his father’s closest friend. He’d called Elmore and his mother when Doc died suddenly, fighting, even hiding, the cancer as long as he could. Then Harlan had arranged the funeral when it became clear that, except to defy his father’s last wish, Elmore’s mother was all too willingto have someone else do the work. Elmore took to Harlan from the moment the publisher wandered out to meet him at the plane in Charlotte.
    Harlan saw the crowd’s reaction to Elmore that day, too, which confirmed what the young man had been feeling. He needed a lot of confirmation about a lot of things. And then Elmore did that crazy thing that all but guaranteed his eventual return: he refused at the conclusion of the committal to get back in the big black car. Leaving the funeral director holding the door in obvious distress, he walked that mile back downtown, meeting as many of those people as he could—factory workers, policemen, farmers, children and their parents—shaking all kinds of hands, gnarled and callused, soft and shy, hearing what they had to say about Doc, the first of the two Docs in his life, all kinds of voices and words, and beneath them a startling, deep kindness. He didn’t think he’d ever heard such kindness and sincerity. He drank in the sweat and perfume and the sweet spring scent of the land itself. He even occasionally saw tears in faces he’d never seen before and scarcely imagined, people who up to that time had been prohibited to him, who seemed strange even in the way they looked and dressed but who claimed him the moment he stepped from that funeral car. He was able to do that crazy thing only because his mother hadn’t possessed the courage or the will or even the desire to show herself that day, had stayed