The Lightning Rule Read Online Free PDF

Avenue, hurling stones at the fire trucks as they ran. A teenage boy threw a brick through the plate glass window of a nearby liquor store, then another picked up a pipe and swept aside the jagged shards that framed the hole. Three more climbed in the window, raiding the shelves. Soon others were following suit, smashing windows and flooding into stores. Some of the patrolmen spotted the looters and took off after them, creating a gap for Emmett to slide through.
    He cut around the side of the station, glass crunching under his shoes as he hugged the walls, sticking to the shadows. He was afraid of being mistaken for a looter. The tendency would be to attack first. Questions would come later, if at all.
    Rounding the street corner, Emmett knocked into a woman cradling stolen fifths of liquor in her arms. “Sorry,” she mumbled, her politeness a stark contrast to the chaos. With the alcohol held tight, she sped away, glass bottles clinking, and vanished into a plume of smoke.
    From his car, Emmett watched firemen battling to douse the blazing abandoned car. Water collected in the potholes in the road where the old cobblestones showed through, reflecting the flames in a mirror image, and making it seem as if the fire was burning in every direction. Emmett feared it soon would.

FOUR
    The house was dark when he got home. The television hissed static. It was late, and the stations had gone off the air. Even with the windows open, the heat inside was intense, almost audible, like the sizzle emanating from the TV screen.
    Emmett went into the dining room. Edward’s bed was empty, undisturbed since Emmett made it that morning. His initial impulse was to call to Edward, then he remembered his brother’s mocking imitation earlier that evening. He headed into the kitchen to look for him instead.
    The cupboard above the sink hung open. The bourbon was gone. Two wire hangers had been unwound and twisted together into a contraption to reach the cabinet handle and hook the bottle. The device sat, discarded, on the counter.
    The screen door was ajar. Outside, Edward was splayed across the porch next to his overturned wheelchair. The empty bottle of Jim Beam lay beside him in a puddle of vomit.
    “Christ, no.”
    Emmett rushed to him and checked for a pulse in Edward’s neck. The skin was warm to the touch. Beneath it pumped the rhythm of his brother’s heart, steady as the breathing Emmett finally heard over the drumming in his ears. He would have cursed Edward, except Emmettdidn’t swear. He didn’t smoke or drink either. He had purchased the bourbon prior to his expulsion to the Records Room, thinking it might aid in his debate regarding whether to give in to Ahern, but he couldn’t bring himself to taste it, not a drop. The rules and rigors of his Jesuit seminary training were reflex, irrepressible. Taking the Lord’s name in vain was Emmett’s one, occasional slip.
    Fear and fury deflated into exhaustion. He righted Edward’s wheelchair, got a dishrag from the kitchen, and wiped the vomit from his brother’s face. Edward didn’t stir even as Emmett lifted him from under the armpits and hauled him to bed. As his brother’s heels dragged limply across the floor, lines from Saint Ignatius’s Prayer for Generosity droned in Emmett’s mind. To give and not to count the cost. To fight and not to heed the wounds. To toil and not to seek for rest. To labor and not to ask for reward.
    A scholarship to Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City had been Emmett’s ticket out of Newark. Entering the priesthood after graduation was a pardon from a thirty-year sentence of cutting parts at Westinghouse like his father or working the bottling line at Anheuser-Busch. At the time, a life of servitude was a small price for escape. His parents had been beyond proud that he had chosen to become a priest, especially his mother, who believed her years of devotion had at last paid off. That pride shriveled when Emmett left the monastery and