Chapter 42
What Can You Tell Me?
When Clerk George Langston left the State Supreme Court chambers after his dressing down by the Chief Justice, his spirit suffered a grave wound. All he wanted was to serve the Chief Justice with honor and nobility.
When Langston arrived at home, he cleared his mind. No good could come from reliving the events of the day over and over and over again. Instead, he turned to his writing. For some time, Langston had wanted to write a family history of his maternal grandfather, Adam Rainey. An imbalance in family memory goaded Langston to dream about a book on his mother's father. When it came to his father's side of the family, the narrative was so transparent as to be dull.
The Carsons were one of the founding families from Exeter, New Hampshire which gave George Langston deep roots in the colonial past. Had his surname been Carson, so many questions and explanations in grammar school might have been avoided. As it turned out, Grandfather Joseph Carson, Sr. died in a shipwreck when his son, Joseph Jr., was three years old. Grandmother Susan Carson remarried Dr. Albert Jackson Langston and the family took the Langston name. A move to Springfield, Massachusetts followed.
Compared to the Carsons' status as documented Old Family, mystery shrouded the Rainey bloodline. George's mother, Valerie, was a blond, blue-eyed woman with an endearing physical appearance, her physical appearance a clear inheritance from her mother Beverly Rainey and not her father, Adam Rainey. A middle-aged man when he died, Adam Rainey had never talked about his past other than to say he had known hard times growing up in New Hampshire. Questions about his parents were deferred or evaded. George Langston felt an urgency to document as much about the Rainey past as he could before his grandmother, Beverly, passed away.
Compared to his blond, almost Nordic appearing daughter, Valerie Rainey, Adam Rainey in his youth had dark silky hair, dark eyebrows, impossibly blue eyes, and olive skin color. At the supper table, George Langston broached the question.
"Grandma Rainey, I know so much about the Carsons and so little about the Raineys. What can you tell me about the Rainey past?" asked George as he sipped a morsel of clam chowder.