Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,13

he began to view his father as harebrained and weak—a man who had “pathetically” come to “glory in his reputation as the village infidel.” Amirus had raised his children to be skeptics, and Clarence turned that skepticism toward his father. He was angry, and ashamed of being angry, as he watched Amirus consign himself to failure. “A simple child he always was”: this was Darrow’s ultimate, dismissive verdict. He would be different. He would show them. He would show them all.15

IN THE SUMMER of 1872, Emily Darrow died.

Everett had gone to Europe to study and that spring he received a letter from Clarence, alerting him that their mother was ill. Before Everett could leave for home, Amirus wrote him with the awful news. “The doctors have finally pronounced it a cancer,” he told his son. “There is no chance for her recovery.”

“Try to bear up and be reconciled,” Amirus wrote. “She does not suffer so much as she did.”

As the tumor grew, blocking her small intestine, Emily was confined to bed. “I feel so ready to go,” she told Mary. “Death is nothing for sure but rest, and if I might get well now it would only be a few years longer that I could live, for life is so short.”

“It is just a dream, and you will all find it so when your time comes,” she told her frightened children.

Emily’s death came during hard times for the family, when Amirus had been forced to take a second job teaching school. The days of Clarence’s childhood were over, as he picked up the slack in the furniture shop. “Clarence is almost a man and does a man’s work,” Mary reported to Everett, and she postponed her own plans to attend the University of Michigan. Clarence described the “blank despair” that settled over the house, and Mary told Everett how “everything that made it bright and pleasant is gone.”

Clarence was fifteen when his mother died. But he described himself in memoirs as a “little child” and “very young” and “quite little” when he lost her. Her death fed his hunger for affection. He was the fifth of eight children in that Puritan home, and had “no feeling of a time when either my father or my mother took me, or any other member of our family, in their arms,” he wrote. “I cannot recall that my mother ever gave me a kiss or a caress.” Years later, Darrow would joke that he never could master the verb love. He would rush into an early marriage, cheat, divorce, marry again, and never stop reaching for women’s hands, or waists, for comfort. “That verb has never grown easier,” he wrote.

Emily’s rites were agony for Clarence. She was laid out in the parlor of their home. As was customary in small towns, Amirus’s line of hardwood furniture also included coffins, which led him to double as the local undertaker. Between funerals, the Darrow chickens roosted on the hearse, which now needed to be cleaned and its black flowers attached, and Black Hawk, the mare, hitched to take it to the graveyard. Clarence was overwhelmed by “shudder and horror” and an “endless regret that I did not tell her that I loved her.” In the years after, he visited her grave but once.16

Amirus did no draining or embalming; in those years the relatives would simply wash and clothe a corpse for burial. But there were recurring funerals, and the coffins stored in a corner of the shop that Clarence refused to visit after dark. Intellectually, he confronted the questions of existence, always declining the easy solace of religion. Emotionally, he was scared. Friends knew not to raise the subject with him. He visited seers and mediums, and at one point near the end of life Darrow asked his wife to kill herself on his deathbed, because he could not face the crossing alone. As with many other essential matters—politics, money, and his relationships with women, to cite just a few—Darrow’s feelings toward death were rife with contradiction. As a lawyer, his greatest fear was to lose a client to the gallows. And yet he did not shy away. Darrow repeatedly took on capital cases, many seemingly hopeless, where his private terrors inspired some of his greatest performances.17

THE LAW GAVE Darrow his ticket out of Kinsman. He was a student in secondary school when Emily died, studying at the local public “academy.” A year later, his family scraped together enough money to send him to a