The Rainmaker by John Grisham

One

MY DECISION TO BECOME A LAWYER was irrevocably
sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession. I was a young
teenager, clumsy, embarrassed by my awkwardness, frustrated with life,
horrified of puberty, about to be shipped off to a military school by my
father for insubordination. He was an ex-Marine who believed boys should
live by the crack of the whip. I’d developed a quick tongue and an aversion
to discipline, and his solution was simply to send me away. It was years
before I forgave him.
He was also an industrial engineer who worked seventy hours a week for
a company that made, among many other items, ladders. Because by their
very nature ladders are dangerous devices, his company became a frequent
target of lawsuits. And because he handled design, my father was the
favorite choice to speak for the company in depositions and trials. I can’t
say that I blame him for hating lawyers, but I grew to admire them because
they made his life so miserable. He’d spend eight hours haggling with them,
then hit the martinis as soon as he walked in the door. No hellos. No hugs.
No dinner. Just an hour or so of continuous bitching while he slugged down
four martinis then passed out in his battered recliner. One trial lasted three
weeks, and when it ended with a large verdict against the company my
mother called a doctor and they hid him in a hospital for a month.
The company later went broke, and of course all blame was directed at
the lawyers. Not once did I hear any talk that maybe a trace of
mismanagement could in any way have contributed to the bankruptcy.

Liquor became his life, and he became depressed. He went years without
a steady job, which really ticked me off because I was forced to wait tables
and deliver pizza so I could claw my way through college. I think I spoke to
him twice during the four years of my undergraduate studies. The day after
I learned I had been accepted to law school, I proudly returned home with
this great news. Mother told me later he stayed in bed for a week.
Two weeks after my triumphant visit, he was changing a lightbulb in the
utility room when (I swear this is true) a ladder collapsed and he fell on his
head. He lasted a year in a coma in a nursing home before someone
mercifully pulled the plug.
Several days after the funeral, I suggested the possibility of a lawsuit, but
Mother was just not up to it. Also, I’ve always suspected he was partially
inebriated when he fell. And he was earning nothing, so under our tort
system his life had little economic value.
My mother received a grand total of fifty thousand dollars in life
insurance, and remarried badly. He’s a simple sort, my stepfather, a retired
postal clerk from Toledo, and they spend most of their time square dancing
and traveling in a Winnebago. I keep my distance. Mother didn’t offer me a
dime of the money, said it was all she had to face the future with, and since
I’d proven rather adept at living on nothing, she felt I didn’t need any of it. I
had a bright future earning money; she did not, she reasoned. I’m certain
Hank, the new husband, was filling her ear full of financial advice. Our
paths will cross again one day, mine and Hank’s.
I will finish law school in May, a month from now, then I’ll sit for the bar
exam in July. I will not graduate with honors, though I’m somewhere in the
top half of my class. The only smart thing I’ve done in three years of law
school was to schedule the required and difficult courses early, so I could
goof off in this, my last semester. My classes this spring are a joke—Sports
Law, Art Law, Selected Readings from the Napoleonic Code and, my
favorite, Legal Problems of the Elderly.
It is this last selection that has me sitting here in a rickety chair behind a
flimsy folding table in a hot, damp metal building filled with an odd
assortment of seniors, as they like to be called. A hand-painted sign above
the only visible door majestically labels the place as the Cypress Gardens
Senior Citizens Building, but other than its name the place has not the
slightest hint of flowers or greenery. The walls are drab and bare except for