Castagnera on Legal Rights

Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires:Chapter Five July 18, 2010

CHAPTER FIVE (Now)
That book that lay cradled in my Father’s ample lap on that frosty morning a decade ago lay now on the nightstand next to my side of our queen-sized bed. It was I who had fallen asleep last night with the yellowed and dog-eared volume in my lap. Apparently Judy had taken it gently from my fingers, as she has done with books so many times, careful not to wake me, and placed it on the night table.
I looked at the cover, black as the coal the Irishmen had mined. “The Molly Maguires” by Wayne G. Broehl, Jr. I was reading it for the third time. I’d read it once after Pop’s first reading, and again during law school, when I did a paper on labor law and labor unions. And now I was reading it because the case I’d become involved — no, make that embroiled — in had made me think of Black Jack Kehoe and his hanged comrades. And of course reading it was what had brought on the dream… the nightmare from which Judy had just shaken me awake.
Determined to snap out of the anxious funk the vision of Black Jack had left hanging in the very air around me, I plopped out of bed, my feet thumping down onto the forest green wall-to-wall carpet. My toes felt blindly, unconsciously around, found my battered brown leather slippers and crawled into them. I padded across the carpet and into the bathroom, still unfocused. In the bathroom I jammed my personal attachment onto the electric toothbrush, then loaded up the bristles with toothpaste. I turned on the cold water and wet the blob of Crest. Bringing the dripping, blue blob toward my open mouth, I pressed the electric brush’s ‘on’ button. The little, bristly end began to vibrate. The lump of well-soaked Crest flipped off the bristles and landed in my left eye.
“Oh, shit,” I shouted, dropping the humming appliance on my right foot as I grabbed for the hand towel hanging on a hook beside the sink.
“I hord dat,” said a penetrating little voice about three feet behind me. Startled, I turned reflexively to the left, stepping on the still buzzing electric brush, which made a sharp, snapping sound and abruptly stopped humming.
“I’m goin’ tell Mommy,” said that high-pitched little voice. Little Judy, as she was known in our family circle, ran out of the bathroom, shouting, “Mommy, Mommy, Daddy said the s-word. Daddy said the s-word.”
I turned back to the sink, muttering softly to myself. I plucked the towel from the hook and wiped the Crest from my eye. I picked up the electric brush, now silent and bearing a long, thin crack down its side. I tried the ‘on’ button. Nothing. I put the poor, dead (or was it just badly wounded?) machine on the shelf over the sink and contented myself with a good long gargle of mouthwash.
After a quick shower I felt awake. The residual tension from the nightmare seemed to have washed down the drain with the soap suds and shampoo. With a hairbrush and the electric hairdryer, I teased and cajoled my thinning mop of rusty-colored hair into a posture where it looked thicker than it really was any longer.
“Grass doesn’t grow on a busy street,” Mom was always telling me. Archie, whose silver gray locks now formed a curly fringe beneath a shiny dome, always smiled appreciatively, although the remark was never addressed to him. Recalling her cliché this morning, as I gazed at myself in the mirror, gave me very little comfort. “I’m not even 40,” I muttered. Picturing myself with the same pale Easter egg nestled in a nest of cellophane straw — which is how I pictured the top of Pop’s head — made my heart even heavier than it had been when I climbed out of bed.
I reached into Judy’s side of the medicine chest, intending to add a little hairspray to what seemed on this Monday in mid-March to be my woefully understaffed scalp. Awake now, but inattentive, I spritzed the aerosol mist into my right eye.
“Jesus H Christ,” I growled, again making a desperate grab for the hand towel. The day being what it was, I stuffed into my stinging, hairs-prayed eyeball the corner of the towel containing the blob of Crest I had earlier extracted from the corner of my left eye. “Shit!” I shouted again.
“Mommy, Daddy doin’ it ‘gen,” came the siren-like voice of my two-year old daughter from somewhere near the bathroom door.
Having thrice verbally transgressed — all profanity and vulgarity having been forbidden to me by Big Judy, when God gave us Little Judy two years ago — and my transgressions having dutifully been reported by Little Judy to Big Judy, I left the house without the protection of my ladies’ good luck kisses. With thinning pate and lacking my ladies’ charms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I pointed my yellow Dodge neon toward the office, while idly flipping on WHYY, the local Public Broadcasting news channel.
“Mother, mother ocean, I have heard your call…”, I muttered in a Monday morning monotone of one of my favorite Jimmy Buffett tunes, as I navigated the few blocks to the offices Archie and I share at the corner of Manoa and Eagle Roads. It’s the same place he had his office back in 1987, except now the firm of McAdoo & McAdoo, L.L.C. occupies the largest suite.
“Police say Larkin, who is awaiting trial as the alleged “Elephant Man,” was arrested again, this time as he sprayed dayglo paint on the steps of the Montgomery County Courthouse, where his trial is scheduled to begin early next month.”
The newscaster’s voice reached my ears like a slap aside the head. As my aural sense suddenly concentrated totally upon the broadcast, my visual acuity must have diminished proportionately. Suddenly the predominating sounds were horns blasting on both sides of my little yellow chariot. I reflexively slammed on my brakes. Looking around I realized to my horror that I was half a car length into the intersection of Manoa and Darby Roads. The light was against me and properly angry commuters were snarling at me through their windshields from both sides.
There was little I could do, and little they could do but let me proceed across Darby and continue down Manoa toward the office. This I did at a goodly clip, risking a ticket for speeding through the school zone at the Manoa Elementary School, just half a block before careening into the driveway in front of the white stucco building which was once a branch library but now housed our two-lawyer firm.
I bounded up the steps and threw open the front door, startling Ruthy, who appeared to be in the process of booting up her computer.
“Where’s Archie?” I asked a bit breathlessly and utterly insensitive to having just frightened the wits out of our crackerjack little Italian secretary.
“Oh, God, Ned,” she gushed uncharacteristically (Ruth DiPetro is usually all business), “You scared the life out of me! Archie? Well, ah… jeeze, Ned, you know your Father is never here too early.”
“Yeh, right,” I nodded, my mind now a mix of panic and frustration. Echoing that movie action hero-cum-governor I secretly idolized in a vestigial, post-adolescent way, I muttered, “I’ll be back,” turned and bounded back down the front steps.
I ran across the parking area and the narrow flower bed, now merely mud, that bordered the sidewalk, and on down Eagle Road. I crossed so quickly and recklessly that I again elicited the well-deserved blasts of a startled commuter’s horn, and continued at an almost Arnold Schwarzeneger pace down Stanley Avenue to the house where I had grown up.
Running up the walk, I grabbed the door handle, and came to an abrupt halt. The door was locked. I pounded on it, then rang the bell. Nothing. The absurd thought coursed through my mind, “Not a creature was stirring, not even a…,” when the door swung back from my face and there stood my Old Man. He looked surprised to see me.
“Ned!” he exclaimed. He was wearing trousers and a white shirt, and his face was half shaved, the other half still lathered and awaiting his razor.
I practically pushed his bulky body backwards into the foyer as I burst into the house.
Huffing and puffing, I managed to say, “I presume you haven’t heard the news. You wouldn’t look so calm if you had.”
“What news?” Archie squinted his eyes like some great groundhog who had been disturbed down in his den and had emerged into the morning light still unprepared to face the day.
“John’s been arrested,” I heaved. “Larkin… he’s been arrested.”
Archie sat down on the stairs, oblivious to the shaving soap that coated his left cheek. “My God, Ned. He hasn’t blown somebody up?” Archie’s eyes looked at me pleadingly. Like any attorney who has done his duty and won bail for his criminal client, Archie lived in fear that the accused felon he’s gotten freed will use his freedom to commit more crimes.
Since most accused felons are guilty as sin, this is not an unfounded fear.
“No, no,” I hastily, if somewhat breathlessly, reassured him. “The radio made it sound like it was just vandalism.”
“What?” The Old Man continued to blink in confused disbelief. “Larkin’s become a vandal?”
“That seems to be it,” I shrugged, wiping my forehead with my pocket handkerchief. “If I heard it right, he spray painted the courthouse steps.”
“The courthouse steps!” Pop lumbered back to his bare feet. (I have never been able to comprehend how Archie can stand to pad around the house, which is mainly hardwood floors, without slippers or socks, even in the dead of winter.) His hairy toes, peaking from beneath trouser legs that dragged along the floor, looked like they belonged to Bilbo Baggins. “In Norristown?”
“That seems to be it,” I confirmed with a second shrug. I balled up the damp hanky and stuffed it back into my trouser pocket. “What do you want to do?”
“What time is it, anyhow?” he inquired.
I checked my wristwatch, a Rolex to which I had treated myself on the settlement — very favorable to my client — of my first fairly large auto accident case half a dozen years ago. “A couple minutes past nine.”
“Well,” opined the Old Man, “I guess we need to get on up there and sort this thing out. If Larkin did it, Judge Daedelus is going to revoke his bail for sure.”