Sycamore Row - John Grisham

4
The drive from central Memphis to Ford County was only an hour, but for Herschel
Hubbard it was always a lonesome journey that seemed to kill a day. It was an
unwelcome excursion into his past, and for many reasons he made it only when
necessary, which wasn’t very often. He’d left home at eighteen, kicking the dirt off his
shoes and vowing to avoid the place whenever possible. He had been an innocent
casualty in a war between his parents, and when they finally split he sided with his
mother and fled the county, and his father. Twenty-eight years later, he found it difficult
to believe the old man was finally dead.
There had been efforts at reconciliation, usually at Herschel’s urging, and Seth, to his
credit, had hung on for a while and tried to tolerate his son, and his grandkids. But a
second wife and a second bad marriage had intervened and complicated matters. For
the past decade, Seth had cared for nothing but his work. He called on most birthdays
and sent a Christmas card once every five years, but that was the extent of his efforts at
fatherhood. The more he worked the more he looked down on his son’s career, and this
was a major cause of their tension.
Herschel owned a college bar near the campus of Memphis State. As bars go, it was
popular and busy. He paid his bills and hid some cash. Like father like son, he was still
grappling with the aftershocks of his own nasty divorce, one won decidedly by his ex,
who got the two kids and virtually all the money. For four years now, Herschel had been
forced to live with his mother in an old, declining house in central Memphis, along with
a bunch of cats and the occasional freeloading bum his mother took in. She, too, had
been scarred by an unpleasant life with Seth, and was, as they say, off her rocker.
He crossed the Ford County line and his mood grew even darker. He was driving a
sports car, a little Datsun he’d bought secondhand primarily because his late father
hated Japanese cars, hated all things Japanese, really. Seth had lost a cousin in World
War II, at the hands of his Japanese captors, and relished wallowing in his well-earned
bigotry.
Herschel found a country station out of Clanton and shook his head at the DJ’s
twangy and sophomoric comments. He had entered another world, one he left long ago
and hoped to forget forever. He pitied all those friends who still lived in Ford County
and would never leave. Two-thirds of his senior class at Clanton High were still in the
area, working in factories and driving trucks and cutting pulpwood. His ten-year
reunion had so saddened him he skipped the twenty-year.
After the first divorce, Herschel’s mother fled the place and resettled in Memphis.