The Lightning Rule Read Free

send his zealous, fifteen-year-old son to be their king, Casimir obeyed, taking the crown yet refusing to exercise power because it went against his principles. An ineffectual ruler, Casimir returned home to take up his true calling: dedicating himself to supporting the sick and all those who suffered. Canonized forty years after his death as the patron saint of the helpless and the poor, Saint Casimir was the embodiment of selflessness, a trait that was extolled to Emmett on a daily basis while attending parochial school and serving as an altar boy. He got an extra dose of virtue every Sunday at the 9 a.m. mass, which was said in Polish, as if to make the message more potent. A large chunk of Emmett’s childhood had been spent mastering the Decades of the Rosary in English and in Polish. He remembered the Polish version best. Over time, he had gotten rusty at the language, but to that day, he could pray as fluently as a native.
    Newark was a city of immigrants, banded together block by block, tight as rosary beads, each clinging to their traditions and mother tongues. Emmett’s parents were no exception. They preferred pierogi to baked potatoes, swore in Polish, not English, and never ate meat on Fridays, even though the pope, an Italian, had sanctioned it. To them, holding on to the past was a matter of pride. For Emmett, it occurred by default.
    His house hadn’t changed since his youth. The flocked wallpaper and reproduction furniture that aspired to give the impression of middle class were exactly the same, and getting further from middle class every year. His father’s lounge chair, now threadbare on the arms, still hunkered in the spot it had been in when he was alive. After a stroketook his mother, Emmett inherited the place, its contents, and more memories than he had room to store.
    The thwack of a baseball resounded from the radio, followed by cheers. Apart from the play-by-play, the house was conspicuously quiet. He lowered the volume on the game.
    “Edward. Edward? Edziu? ” Emmett’s voice rose half a note when he called his brother’s Polish nickname.
    “I can hear you, Marty. You don’t have to holler. It’s not as if I ran away from home.” Edward rolled out of the kitchen in his wheelchair, a beer can wedged between his useless legs. “You sound like Ma when you do that.”
    Edward took a swig of beer, then mimicked him, calling his own name, a perfect impersonation of their mother shouting at him to stop playing stickball in the street and come in for supper. His tone was too bouncy to be sober. Every day Emmett gave thanks that his parents weren’t alive to see what had become of his younger brother. That would have been too much for them to bear. It was almost too much for him.
    “Who’s playing?” he asked, loosening his tie.
    “It’s the Mayor’s Trophy. Mets are up one over the Yanks,” Edward said sullenly. “A cryin’ shame.”
    “Have you eaten?”
    His brother shrugged and coasted closer to the radio to listen.
    “I’ll consider that a no.”
    Emmett took two TV dinners from the icebox and dropped them into the oven. Edward groaned from the other room at the familiar noise.
    “Why bother with the stove? Put ’em on the front stoop. They’ll cook in five minutes flat.”
    “Ain’t that the truth.” Emmett forced a laugh. Whenever Edward was drunk, Emmett did his best to humor him. Alcohol brought out the fight in his brother. Edward couldn’t hurt him. But he could hurt himself. He would throw books, break dishes, and make a general mess of whatever he could get his hands on. Once he had tried to knock over the television and nearly tumbled out of his wheelchair in the process.
    “Sure was a hot one today, huh? I hope tomorrow’s not another scorcher.”
    The small talk was camouflage so Emmett could open the squeaky cupboard above the sink where he hid a bottle of Jim Beam, placed purposefully out of Edward’s range. The bottle was exactly where he had left it.