E-Book - John Grisham - The Summons

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2024-12-03 0 0 538.33KB 151 页 5.9玖币
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The Summons
by
John Grisham
Chapter 1
It came by mail, regular postage, the old-fashioned way since the Judge was
almost eighty and distrusted modern devices. Forget e-mail and even faxes. He didn't
use an answering machine and had never been fond of the telephone. He pecked out
his letters with both index fingers, one feeble key at a time, hunched over his old
Underwood manual on a rolltop desk under the portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
The Judge's grandfather had fought with Forrest at Shiloh and throughout the Deep
South, and to him no figure in history was more revered. For thirty-two years, the
Judge had quietly refused to hold court on July 13, Forrest's birthday.
It came with another letter, a magazine, and two invoices, and was routinely
placed in the law school mailbox of Professor Ray Atlee. He recognized it
immediately since such envelopes had been a part of his life for as long as he could
remember. It was from his lather, a man he too called the Judge.
Professor Atlee studied the envelope, uncertain whether he should open it right
there or wait a moment. Good news or bad, he never knew with the Judge, though the
old man was dying and good news had been rare. It was thin and appeared to contain
only one sheet of paper; nothing unusual about that. The Judge was frugal with the
written word, though he'd once been known for his windy lectures from the bench.
It was a business letter, that much was certain. The Judge was not one for small
talk, hated gossip and idle chitchat, whether written or spoken. Ice tea with him on the
porch would be a refighting of the Civil War, probably at Shiloh, where he would
once again lay all blame for the Confederate defeat at the shiny, untouched boots of
General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, a man he would hate even in heaven, if by chance
they met there.
He'd be dead soon. Seventy-nine years old with cancer in his stomach. He was
overweight, a diabetic, a heavy pipe smoker, had a bad heart that had survived three
attacks, and a host of lesser ailments that had tormented him for twenty years and
were now finally closing in for the kill. The pain was constant. During their last phone
call three weeks earlier, a call initiated by Ray because the Judge thought long
distance was a rip-off, the old man sounded weak and strained. They had talked for
less than two minutes.
The return address was gold-embossed: Chancellor Reuben V Atlee, 25th
Chancery District, Ford County Courthouse, Clanton, Mississippi. Ray slid the
envelope into the magazine and began walking. Judge Atlee no longer held the office
of chancellor. The voters had retired him nine years earlier, a bitter defeat from which
he would never recover. Thirty-two years of diligent service to his people, and they
tossed him out in favor of a younger man with radio and television ads. The Judge had
refused to campaign. He claimed he had too much work to do, and, more important,
the people knew him well and if they wanted to reelect him then they would do so.
His strategy had seemed arrogant to many. He carried Ford County but got shellacked
in the other five.
It took three years to get him out of the courthouse. His office on the second
floor had survived a fire and had missed two renovations. The Judge had not allowed
them to touch it with paint or hammers. When the county supervisors finally
convinced him that he had to leave or be evicted, he boxed up three decades' worth of
useless files and notes and dusty old books and took them home and stacked them in
his study. When the study was full, he lined them down the hallways into the dining
room and even the foyer.
Ray nodded to a student who was seated in the hall. Outside his office, he spoke
to a colleague. Inside, he locked the door behind him and placed the mail in the center
of his desk. He took off his jacket, hung it on the back of the door, stepped over a
stack of thick law books he'd been stepping over for half a year, and then to himself
uttered his daily vow to organize the place.
The room was twelve by fifteen, with a small desk and a small sofa, both
covered with enough work to make Ray seem like a very busy man. He was not. For
the spring semester he was teaching one section of antitrust. And he was supposed to
be writing a book, another drab, tedious volume on monopolies that would be read by
no one but would add handsomely to his pedigree. He had tenure, but like all serious
professors he was ruled by the "publish or perish" dictum of academic life.
He sat at his desk and shoved papers out of the way.
The envelope was addressed to Professor N. Ray Atlee, University of Virginia
School of Law, Charlottesville, Virginia. The e's and o's were smudged together. A
new ribbon had been needed for a decade. The Judge didn't believe in zip codes
either.
The N was for Nathan, after the general, but few people knew it. One of their
uglier fights had been over the son's decision to drop Nathan altogether and plow
through life simply as Ray.
The Judge's letters were always sent to the law school, never to his son's
apartment in downtown Charlottesville. The Judge liked titles and important
addresses, and he wanted folks in Clanton, even the postal workers, to know that his
son was a professor of law. It was unnecessary. Ray had been teaching (and writing)
for thirteen years, and those who mattered in Ford County knew it.
He opened the envelope and unfolded a single sheet of paper. It too was grandly
embossed with the Judge's name and former title and address, again minus the zip
code. The old man probably had an unlimited supply of the stationery.
It was addressed to both Ray and his younger brother, Forrest, the only two
offspring of a bad marriage that had ended in 1969 with the death of their mother. As
always, the message was brief:
Please make arrangements to appear in my study on Sunday, May 7, at 5 P.M., to
discuss the administration of my estate.
Sincerely,
Reuben V Atlee.
The distinctive signature had shrunk and looked unsteady. For years it had been
emblazoned across orders and decrees that had changed countless lives. Decrees of
divorce, child custody, termination of parental rights, adoptions. Orders settling will
contests, election contests, land disputes, annexation fights. The Judge's autograph
had been authoritative and well known; now it was the vaguely familiar scrawl of a
very sick old man.
Sick or not, though, Ray knew that he would be present in his father's study at
the appointed time. He had just been summoned, and as irritating as it was, he had no
doubt that he and his brother would drag themselves before His Honor for one more
lecture. It was typical of the Judge to pick a day that was convenient for him without
consulting anybody else.
It was the nature of the Judge, and perhaps most judges for that matter, to set
dates for hearings and deadlines with little regard for the convenience of others. Such
heavy-handedness was learned and even required when dealing with crowded
dockets, reluctant litigants, busy lawyers, lazy lawyers. But the Judge had run his
family in pretty much the same manner as he'd run his courtroom, and that was the
principal reason Ray Atlee was teaching law in Virginia and not practicing it in
Mississippi.
He read the summons again, then put it away, on top of the pile of current
matters to deal with. He walked to the window and looked out at the courtyard where
everything was in bloom. He wasn't angry or bitter, just frustrated that his father could
once again dictate so much. But the old man was dying, he told himself. Give him a
break. There wouldn't be many more trips home.
The Judge's estate was cloaked with mystery. The principal asset was the
house—an antebellum hand-me-down from the same Atlee who'd fought with
General Forrest. On a shady street in old Atlanta it would be worth over a million
dollars, but not in Clanton. It sat in the middle of five neglected acres three blocks off
the town square. The floors sagged, the roof leaked, paint had not touched the walls in
Ray's lifetime. He and his brother could sell it for perhaps a hundred thousand dollars,
but the buyer would need twice that to make it livable. Neither would ever live there;
in fact, Forrest had not set foot in the house in many years.
The house was called Maple Run, as if it were some grand estate with a staff and
a social calendar. The last worker had been Irene the maid. She'd died four years
earlier and since then no one had vacuumed the floors or touched the furniture with
polish. The Judge paid a local felon twenty dollars a week to cut the grass, and he did
so with great reluctance. Eighty dollars a month was robbery, in his learned opinion.
When Ray was a child, his mother referred to their home as Maple Run. They
never had dinners at their home, but rather at Maple Run. Their address was not the
Atlees on Fourth Street, but instead it was Maple Run on Fourth Street. Few other
folks in Clan-ton had names for their homes.
She died from an aneurysm and they laid her on a table in the front parlor. For
two days the town stopped by and paraded across the front porch, through the foyer,
through the parlor for last respects, then to the dining room for punch and cookies.
Ray and Forrest hid in the attic and cursed their father for tolerating such a spectacle.
That was their mother lying down there, a pretty young woman now pale and stiff in
an open coffin.
Forrest had always called it Maple Ruin. The red and yellow maples that once
lined the street had died of some unknown disease. Their rotted stumps had never
been cleared. Four huge oaks shaded the front lawn. They shed leaves by the ton, far
too many for anyone to rake and gather. And at least twice a year the oaks would lose
a branch that would fall and crash somewhere onto the house, where it might or might
not get removed. The house stood there year after year, decade after decade, taking
punches but never falling.
It was still a handsome house, a Georgian with columns, once a monument to
those who'd built it, and now a sad reminder of a declining family. Ray wanted
nothing to do with it. For him the house was filled with unpleasant memories and each
trip back depressed him. He certainly couldn't afford the financial black hole of
maintaining an estate that ought to be bulldozed. Forrest would burn it before he
owned it.
The Judge, however, wanted Ray to take the house and keep it in the family. This
had been discussed in vague terms over the past few years. Ray had never mustered
the courage to ask, "What family?" He had no children. There was an ex-wife but no
prospect of a current one. Same for Forrest, except he had a dizzying collection of ex-
girlfriends and a current housing arrangement with Ellie, a three-hundred-pound
painter and potter twelve years his senior.
It was a biological miracle that Forrest had produced no children, but so far none
had been discovered.
The Atlee bloodline was thinning to a sad and inevitable halt, which didn't bother
Ray at all. He was living life for himself, not for the benefit of his father or the
family's glorious past. He returned to Clanton only for funerals.
The Judge's other assets had never been discussed. The Atlee family had once
been wealthy, but long before Ray. There had been land and cotton and slaves and
railroads and banks and politics, the usual Confederate portfolio of holdings that, in
terms of cash, meant nothing in the late twentieth century. It did, however, bestow
upon the Atlees the status of "family money."
By the time Ray was ten he knew his family had money. His father was a judge
and his home had a name, and in rural Mississippi this meant he was indeed a rich
kid. Before she died his mother did her best to convince Ray and Forrest that they
were better than most folks. They lived in a mansion. They were Presbyterians. They
vacationed in Florida, every third year. They occasionally went to the Peabody Hotel
in Memphis for dinner. Their clothes were nicer.
Then Ray was accepted at Stanford. His bubble burst when the Judge said
bluntly, "I can't afford it."
"What do you mean?" Ray had asked.
"I mean what I said. I can't afford Stanford."
"But I don't understand."
"Then I'll make it plain. Go to any college you want. But if you go to Sewanee,
then I'll pay for it."
Ray went to Sewanee, without the baggage of family money, and was supported
by his father, who provided an allowance that barely covered tuition, books, board,
and fraternity dues. Law school was at Tulane, where Ray survived by waiting tables
at an oyster bar in the French Quarter.
For thirty-two years, the Judge had earned a chancellor's salary, which was
among the lowest in the country. While at Tulane Ray read a report on judicial
compensation, and he was saddened to learn that Mississippi judges were earning
fifty-two thousand dollars a year when the national average was ninety-five thousand.
The Judge lived alone, spent little on the house, had no bad habits except for his
pipe, and he preferred cheap tobacco. He drove an old Lincoln, ate bad food but lots
of it, and wore the same black suits he'd been wearing since the fifties. His vice was
charity. He saved his money, then he gave it away.
No one knew how much money the Judge donated annually.
An automatic ten percent went to the Presbyterian Church. Sewanee got two
thousand dollars a year, same for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Those three gifts
were carved in granite. The rest were not.
Judge Atlee gave to anyone who would ask. A crippled child in need of crutches.
An all-star team traveling to a state tournament. A drive by the Rotary Club to
vaccinate babies in the Congo. A shelter for stray dogs and cats in Ford County. A
new roof for Clanton's only museum.
The list was endless, and all that was necessary to receive a check was to write a
short letter and ask for it. Judge Atlee always sent money and had been doing so ever
since Ray and Forrest left home.
Ray could see him now, lost in the clutter and dust of his roll-top, pecking out
short notes on his Underwood and sticking them in his chancellor's envelopes with
scarcely readable checks drawn on the First National Bank of Clanton—fifty dollars
here, a hundred dollars there, a little for everyone until it was all gone.
The estate would not be complicated because there would be so little to
inventory. The ancient law books, threadbare furniture, painful family photos and
mementos, long forgotten files and papers—all a bunch of rubbish that would make
an impressive bonfire. He and Forrest would sell the house for whatever it might
bring and be quite happy to salvage anything from the last of the Atlee family money.
He should call Forrest, but those calls were always easy to put off. Forrest was a
different set of issues and problems, much more complicated than a dying, reclusive
old father hell-bent on giving away his money. Forrest was a living, walking disaster,
a boy of thirty-six whose mind had been deadened by every legal and illegal
substance known to American culture.
What a family, Ray mumbled to himself.
He posted a cancellation for his eleven o'clock class, and went for therapy.
Chapter 2
Spring in the Piedmont, calm clear skies, the foothills growing greener by the
day, the Shenandoah Valley changing as the farmers crossed and recrossed their
perfect rows. Rain was forecast for tomorrow, though no forecast could be trusted in
central Virginia.
With almost three hundred hours under his belt, Ray began each day with an eye
on the sky as he jogged five miles. The running he could do come rain or shine, the
flying he could not. He had promised himself (and his insurance company) that he
would not fly at night and would not venture into clouds. Ninety-five percent of all
small plane crashes happened either in weather or in darkness, and after nearly three
years of flying Ray was still determined to be a coward. "There are old pilots and bold
pilots," the adage went, "but no old bold pilots." He believed it, and with conviction.
Besides, central Virginia was too beautiful to buzz over in clouds. He waited for
perfect weather—no wind to push him around and make landings complicated, no
haze to dim the horizon and get him lost, no threat of storms or moisture. Clear skies
during his jog usually determined the rest of his day. He could move lunch up or back,
cancel a class, postpone his research to a rainy day, or a rainy week for that matter.
The right forecast, and Ray was off to the airport.
摘要：

TheSummonsbyJohnGrishamChapter1Itcamebymail,regularpostage,theold-fashionedwaysincetheJudgewasalmosteightyanddistrustedmoderndevices.Forgete-mailandevenfaxes.Hedidn'tuseanansweringmachineandhadneverbeenfondofthetelephone.Hepeckedouthisletterswithbothindexfingers,onefeeblekeyatatime,hunchedoverhisold...

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