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Unwritten Laws 01(340)

By:Greg Iles


Snatches of his last conversation with Melba sounded in his mind, like something overheard on a train. The word sin resonated again and again. Tom had committed the usual sins during his life, but there were other, more profound transgressions that he seldom acknowledged, even to himself. He’d done terrible things during the war. He knew the common guilt of the combat survivor, and the special guilt of the combat medic. He carried the deadened grief sense of the civilian physician, who lost so many battles with death in lonely sickrooms, his only weapon at the end his ability to ease pain, and sometimes not even that. As for the more universal sins: the familiar guilt of the adulterer had been dwarfed by that of the absentee father, who brought life into the world and then left it to struggle like a seed abandoned on the ground. A dozen rationalizations came to him, of course, the first being that he hadn’t known of the boy’s existence. But at his core, that brought no comfort.

Ever since Viola had told him about her son, Tom had been reflecting on Thomas Jefferson. Tom been named after the third president, but that was only an accidental irony. At some level, though, he had always strived to follow in Jefferson’s footsteps. How could you not love a man whose library had contained six thousand books in an era when public libraries held only half as many volumes? A man who called himself a Christian but spent six years painstakingly cobbling together a customized Bible that contained no miracles, prophecies, angels, or resurrections?

Six days hence, historians would celebrate the nation’s acquisition of the very land beneath Tom’s feet, one of Jefferson’s greatest accomplishments. And yet, this mental giant whom he’d studied in school like a demigod now shared with him a unique sin. Upon his death, Jefferson had left behind an enslaved black mistress and mixed-race children. He had freed some of his Negro descendants before his death, but others, along with most of his remaining slaves—more than a hundred human beings—had been sold at auction to pay his debts, a monumental hypocrisy and surely a sin by any measure. How, historians asked, could the man who authored the Declaration of Independence have done this?

Tom knew the answer. Moving with the same passive blindness, he had fathered a child by a black employee in her twenties. And though Viola had loved him as surely as Sally Hemings must have loved Jefferson, Tom had to wonder how much choice either woman had really had in their circumstances. He hated to think of himself as a man who during difficult times had offered a troubled woman only temporary comfort and not real help. He was no Thomas Jefferson in intellectual terms, but that probably meant only that Jefferson had found some more facile way to justify actions that went against the grain of all he had championed during his life.

Rubbing his hands together against the cold, Tom recalled a quote from Peggy’s distant cousin, Robert Penn Warren: “And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”

An image of Penn rose in Tom’s mind, but he pushed it away. What of my other son? he thought in desolation. I don’t even know him, much less love him. My Sally Hemings is dead, and my own dark descendant wants only to see me die behind bars. Would Jefferson’s bastards have wanted the same, if they’d had the power to bring about that result? Would they have punished the man who gave them life but not his name? Tom knew one thing: he would not compound his sin by following Jefferson’s example of neglect. If he lived through this nightmare, he would take steps to ensure that his illegitimate child would never suffer in the same way, no matter how much he might hate his father.

Tom felt his keenest guilt over his firstborn son, and all those loved ones who he knew would risk everything to save him. Walt Garrity was risking his life now, though he had a wife waiting for him at home. Melba would have stayed all night, knowing full well that she might die because of it. Tom couldn’t bear to think of what Penn and Peggy would give up to save him, and he had no intention of letting them do so. To that end, he had struck out on his own, separated himself from the lawful community of men, because he believed he had one chance to keep his family intact. The death of the state trooper had complicated matters, but one chance remained. The attempt might cost him his life, but Tom had risked his life before, and only for his country, not his family. This time, if he died, he would do so knowing he hadn’t died in vain.

But the price of freedom would be high. In order to keep his family together, he would have to make a deal with the devil, or that incarnation which had prospered in this country for the past fifty years. Tom was intimately acquainted with evil in its many forms, and in a way that Penn was not. Penn had seen some of the horrific things that humans did to one another, but almost always from the safe perspective of the government prosecutor. As young men, Tom and Walt had entered that transformative zone where the border between “moral” and “amoral” blurred into something not distinguishable by the human mind. In that existential arena, the soul could be seared and scarred or lifted into radiant ecstasy, but none who entered it emerged unchanged.