"Jesus Christ, man, what is this? Neville Chamberlain time? What the hell do you think you're doing, anyway? Are you working for developers? Or it could be you're just plain gutless. Either way, you're full of shit."
Everyone in the room froze. Raff was speechless. This was not the Harvard way. It was trash talk you'd expect from some gang member on the street.
For a full minute the two young men glowered at each other. Raff's surprise was quickly replaced by anger. Then, oddly, he relaxed. He'd been there before. As a boy in the more primitive world of Clayville he'd had several schoolyard fights, of the kind usually set off when a bully taunts some other kid. His own ended when a teacher or older boy pulled the two scrappers apart. The usual outcome of a confrontation, however, was a standoff, with both talking trash but neither attacking the other. The others crowding around would chant, "One's scared, and the other's damn glad of it."
Raff was back in Clayville. He took a step toward the Californian, who now stood, but did not come forward himself.
It's the way of nature, Raff thought. Animals spend a lot more time displaying and bluffing than they do fighting. Even his ants held tournaments, settling their territorial boundaries without the loss of a drop of hemolymph--ant blood--most of the time.
They stood like that for another half minute. The remainder of the group remained silent. He's preserving status, Raff thought. He's bigger than me, but he may not be in very good shape. All those marijuana tokes, all that beer could have slowed him, and maybe he knows it.
Raff was sure, by the unspoken and primitive dictate of primate emotion, that if he turned and walked away from this, he would lose whatever status he had among the Gaians. More importantly, he would be humiliated in front of JoLane. She might tell him it was all right to walk away and that she was glad he didn't stoop to violence. But she wouldn't mean it.
It was Ainesley who then spoke to Raff, to a ten-year-old boy: Never back down if you're in the right. The Gaians to the rear of the room were beginning to stand up, to leave or come forward, he couldn't tell, and Raff could hear whispers. Raff thought he knew his man. It was time to call the bluff. He was ready to pay the price of a bloody nose. He took another step forward. The two were now less than four feet apart. Raff's arms were at his side but with fists clenched.
Then the showdown challenge. "You don't know jackshit about anything, do you, boy?" Raff growled. "Let me give you a piece of advice. You keep going where you're headed, boy, and you'll end up in jail somewhere. Everybody'd be better off if you did, you ridiculous loudmouth."
It was the Californian's turn to be startled. He stood his ground, but the only response he managed was "Fuck you," the traditional coward's exit line. Raff let him have that last word, making it a draw.
Then both managed to turn away from each other simultaneously, shaking their heads in mock amazement at the perfidy of the other. Testosterone did not win in the confrontation that day, no violence erupted, but it showed Raff in a way mere introspection never could that he was not gutless, and Chinos the Californian was not entirely stupid.
It was then that Raff finally realized the absurdity of the situation. Nobody, under any circumstance, has a fistfight in the Lowell House Common Room of Harvard University. But Raff felt good about the outcome anyway.
Immediately afterward a greatly relieved and proud Raff walked JoLane home to her room in Leverett House. He decided that the manly thing to do was say nothing to JoLane about the confrontation with the Californian, thus implying, Oh, that? That was nothing, I can handle that kind of thing easily. But he was puzzled that she said nothing about it herself, not even enough to signal her loyalty to him. Nothing was said when they met again two days later in the Memorial Hall cafeteria. By that time Raff had begun to put the confrontation out of his mind, but JoLane's silence still troubled him.
Raff dropped by the next Gaia Force meeting, two weeks later, determined to show that he had not been intimidated by the Californian's hostility, and wanting to continue the friendship he had made with several other members. He looked around to locate his enemy, however, determined to plant himself as far away as possible. No point in going through all that again. When he spotted the other man, he was dismayed to see him in an apparent warm conversation with JoLane. When she spotted Raff, she broke away and came over to him.
Raff felt a surge of jealousy as he struggled for the right things to say to JoLane. Why is my girl, he thought, talking with that jerk. As the feeling receded, it was replaced with a sour aftertaste of resentment.
As more days passed, Raff's annoyance grew, and with it came an ebbing away of trust. JoLane continued to offer no support. She then became too busy with a flood of classwork for sex. Raff tried to rationalize her shift in mood. He loved her, he thought, for the fierce free spirit she now was showing. And why should he think he owned her? Still, Raff began to lose some sleep trying to figure out JoLane Simpson. There seemed to be no way to solve the problem and keep his pride too.
JoLane herself brought it all to an end. After coffee in the Leverett House Common Room, she asked him to take a walk with her along the Charles River. She paused midway on the Longfellow Bridge, where lovers sometimes met, and as they gazed down the river, JoLane turned to him, tipped her head up, and kissed him on the lips.
"Raff, I've decided what I'm going to do after graduation. I've joined the American Friends of Haiti. They've got a chapter at Harvard. I'm going to go down there and see what I can do to help the people. I might go into agriculture or reforestation. You know, do something for the environment. God knows, that's what they need. Every little bit helps, doesn't it?"
With that final scrap of inanity, she walked away ahead of him back toward Harvard. It was so very JoLane, he thought. Abrupt, decisive, get on with life. He knew he would never find another woman with the same combination of intellect, fierceness of spirit, and passion as JoLane Simpson.
Wounded more deeply than he wished to fathom, Raff never attended another Gaia Force meeting. He was left to wonder whether JoLane would take the California tough guy with her to Haiti, and whether she would really in the end go herself. It didn't matter; now he had to restore his own balance. He threw himself back into the study of law.
32
WITH EACH PASSING month and as the end of his time at Harvard came in sight, Raff learned better one major advantage of being at an elite law school in a great university. It is the potential power of the network of friends and professional contacts that can be built. Raff did not have to travel around the country in order to meet the right people. They came to Harvard to attend meetings, to give seminars, to consult libraries, to look up others among their peers visiting the university. Raff, in order to get information and help in the future, made contacts now in The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund. While at it, he learned where to go in the federal Departments of Justice and the Interior, and whom best to see there. He made friends with several staff members in Alabama's congressional offices. He began to compile addresses and telephone numbers among environmental leaders and their private supporters in Alabama, the Mississippi coastal counties, and the Florida Panhandle.
He learned how to run down cases of conflict between private rights and public good in domains other than the environment. He became expert in the common law developed all across the breadth of such cases. He was convinced that this knowledge could be applied to even the most difficult problems arising in his homeland of the central Gulf Coast.
Raff increased his command of conflict resolution, building scenarios, arguing them with other students. He became more convinced than ever that the classic nature-versus-jobs could not be solved by outright victory of one side over the other. That would leave the loser bitter and spoiling for a fight the next time around. Much better, and the higher road to take, would be an agreement that satisfies both. But--how best to reach such an agreement? That was much the harder nut to crack. It is always tempting instead to let th
e courts, America's Solomon on the throne, listen to both sides and settle the matter with a decision.
There was some reason for optimism in taking the middle road. He discovered several promising procedures worked out over the previous several decades by the Department of the Interior and nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. Suppose, for example, that the owner of a tract of biologically valuable wild land wants to keep it intact but is forced by necessity to sell it to a waiting developer. In some cases the solution is simple: preserve the tract by acquiring it in exchange for biologically less valuable land suitable to the trader, and let the owner sell that for an equal or greater amount. Suppose, in a second situation, an owner wants to preserve the land and pass it on to his heirs but is afraid they would have to sell part or all of it to pay estate taxes. Arrange, if possible, a tax defferal without limit of time, granted so long as the tract is preserved in its natural state.
These kinds of solutions, devised case by case rather than top-down by some abstract application of constitutional law, were the weapon of choice Raff carefully added to his armamentarium for the fight to come.
In starts and reversals, spring comes absentmindedly to New England. April is a month of cold rain and occasional, charitably brief snowstorms. Nor'easters still visit regularly, whipping up winds that drive the chill factor down to the freezing mark. Finally, by the end of April and into early May, the forsythia bushes burst into brilliant yellow and along the narrow residential streets of Boston and Cambridge, and falling white-and-purple petals of deciduous magnolias carpet the ground of the meager gardens. Among them brave crocuses spring up and hurriedly bloom before being smothered by grass and crushed by dog droppings. Until that happy time, however, anyone wishing to see emerging plant growth must drive into the countryside, push his way through brambles into some roadside swamp, and search for clumps of skunk cabbage.
This year, because it was his last at Harvard, Raphael Semmes Cody had cheerfully endured the long postglacial winter. In mid-April letters from law firms began to trickle in: inquiries and even tentative offers from Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Miami, and New York. His specialty had recently become a seller's market. The word among the faculty at the Law School was that the big firms were stocking up on talent able to handle environmental litigation.
Raff made polite, deferential responses, keeping the doors open. But he knew his career would probably never go that way. He was going home to Mobile, with or without a job in hand.
That decision was still firm when he graduated two months later. The Harvard commencement was held, in accordance with custom, on the morning of the first Thursday in June. Raff invited his parents to be his guests for the event. The evening before, he took them to dinner at his favorite Indian restaurant, located on Massachusetts Avenue a block from Harvard Square. Ainesley was clearly uncomfortable with all things Cambridge. He was not feeling well after the long trip up from Mobile, and was irritable. Raff's love surged for him when his father put on spectacles, took a long time studying the menu, and finally asked, "Don't they have anything fried?"
The next day, contrary to custom--and some said in violation of divine providence--a light rain fell on eastern Massachusetts. The commencement ceremony, the grandest and most venerable in the nation, began with bells ringing from all the churches in the neighborhood to bring on happiness, joy, and cheers as President Lawrence Summers, accompanied by members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, emerged from the Old Yard and filed into the rain-soaked Tercentenary Theatre. Members of the faculty, draped in flowing pavorine robes from universities all over the world and wielding umbrellas, followed them in.
They passed along a narrow corridor walled in by the massed graduates. Cheers and greetings were exchanged back and forth over the heads of the packed thousands of families and guests assembled on all sides. The noise ended abruptly when, the groups on the platform having been seated, the sheriff of Middlesex County walked to front center with his staff of office, rapped thrice upon the hollow boards, creating a sound like rifle fire, and called the meeting to order.
There followed the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by the whole assembly. Then a prayer, carefully bowdlerized to be ecumenical in tone, the rendering of the anthem "Domine Salvum Fac," followed by student orations in Latin and English, de rigueur since the seventeenth century. There was more choral and instrumental music, and the calling forward of the summa arts and sciences undergraduates.
President Summers now conferred the earned Harvard degrees, school by school. The mood turned from sedate to merry. The M.D.s wore stethoscopes thankfully not yet used on any patient, and of course the Business School graduates threw fistfuls of one-dollar bills into the air. Raff rose with his classmates to receive his degree. He was now certifiably learned, as the president intoned, "in those wise restraints that keep us free." As he stood, Raff looked for his parents in the huge crowd, without success. In a moment of unexpected intense yearning, he also searched for JoLane Simpson among the graduating seniors. It was impossible to find her in the sea of capped heads.
Finally came the awarding of honorary degrees to nine luminaries. Each stood in turn, to applause ranging variously from polite to thunderous. Each heard his encomium read, poetic in tone and short enough to serve as a tombstone epitaph.
After the platform party recessed, filing back through the student-walled corridor, the great anthill of Harvard celebrants dispersed. Marcia and Ainesley went out into Harvard Yard to wait for Raff at the foot of the John Harvard statue.
As he waited, Ainesley went up to the statue and rubbed his hand on the tip of one of the shoes, brightly polished by the ministrations of thousands of tourists before him. He saw an elderly black man standing close by, leaning on a silver-headed cane, and speaking in a courtly Southern voice. Ainesley struck up a conversation and learned he was a professor at Southern Mississippi University, located in Hattiesburg. His granddaughter, who was waiting next to him, turned out to be one of the new graduates of Harvard Law School. She allowed that she had met Raff, but didn't know him well. When Ainesley asked about her plans, she said she was going to enter Mississippi politics. Marcia was startled to hear Ainesley say to the two, "I wish y'all would come over to our neck of the woods. We sure could use you."
The next day was spent touring Cambridge and Boston. At Marcia's insistence, a major part of it was spent at the Museum of Fine Arts. The morning afterward, the Codys returned. At the Mobile Regional Airport, Ainesley retrieved his new plum-colored Toyota pickup, of which he was very proud, and the three returned to Clayville. That evening Raff called some old friends from Nokobee Regional High who were still around, to collect news and gossip. The next day, Sunday, he drove over with his parents to Brewton and attended the Episcopal church service.
Through the rest of the afternoon Raff stretched out on his old bed, next to the unread Sunday News Register, and dozed. After supper, as they sat drinking coffee, Raff asked his father if he had any late word on the Nokobee tract. "It's fine as far as I can see. It's not going away," Ainesley said.
Raff was now set to implement his plan, over a year in the making. It had been constantly on his mind for weeks. Better now than later, he thought. Don't mess around. Just get moving. The next morning he called Cyrus Semmes's office and made an appointment.
Two days later, at seven A.M., he took the bus from Clayville to Mobile. He hoped that it would be one of his last bus trips anywhere. He'd told Ainesley the first thing he was going to buy when he had a job was his own car. From the station near Bienville Square, Raff walked to the Loding Building and rode the elevator up to the top floor.
Cyrus met him at the receptionist's desk, and hugged his nephew.
"By God. I can't tell you how proud I am of you, Scooter. I guess I ought at least to get started by calling you Raff now, or how about Mr. Cody? We'll save 'Scooter' for your own son, if you ever have one, and I sure hope you do. I know the Codys, on your father's side, are awfully proud t
oo. I'll tell you one thing: you're going to be the big star in that bunch of peapickers, for sure. Listen, I'm going to take you to lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club. I want you to meet some of our family's friends, and, if you don't mind, let's talk a little bit about your future."
So they strolled together the five blocks to the Bankhead Tower, chatting like father and son. They took the elevator to the gated top floor and entered the sanctum of Mobile's business and professional elite. There followed hearty verbal greetings, handshakes, gripping of arms and shoulders, and good-natured jostling and laughing. The men were mostly middle-aged, white as June wedding gowns, and dressed in coat and tie. But there were also the mayor of Mobile and a sprinkling of other African-American leaders and businessmen. Almost all assembled spoke with Southern accents. Even those from other parts of the country slowed their speech a little, double-syllabled a few names, and dropped g's. "Come Saturday, Fray-yed," he overheard one say, "I think I'll do me some snapper fishin' out of Biloxi."
There were also a scattering of well-dressed women. Several, judging from the ease with which they conversed and laughed with the men, were professionals and executives themselves. The rest, in this proper environment, talked among themselves and were almost certainly all wives. The day you brought a mistress would be your last as a member of the Cosmopolitan Club.
Cyrus, with Raff following, was led to a corner overlooking the Mobile River. Raff went over to the two-sided window to look out. He stared at the traffic twelve stories below, then beyond to Cooper Riverside Park and the new Convention Center. Well away to the south he could see Pinto Island and the northwestern shore of Mobile Bay. He squinted to peer where the river flowed into the bay. Somewhere out there on the water, a great-grandfather on Ainesley's side, working as ship's engineer, had died when the boat caught fire and sank. Raff tried to picture that tragedy. He turned his attention to a freight train moving slowly northward out of the Mobile Yards. Its whistle blew once, the kind of three-o'clock-in-the-night farewell that never fails to stir a wisp of melancholy.
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