The Nature of My Inheritance Read online

  The Nature of My Inheritance

  Bradford Morrow

  For Peter Straub

  He that with headlong path

  This certain order leaves,

  An hapless end receives.

  —Boethius,

  The Consolation of Philosophy

  In the wake of my father’s death, my inheritance of over half a hundred Bibles offered me no solace whatsoever, but instead served to remind me what a godless son I was and had always been. Like the contrarian children of police officers who are sometimes driven to a life of crime, and professors’ kids who become carefree dropouts, my father’s devotion to his ministry might well have been the impetus behind my early secret embrace of atheism. In church, listening to his Sunday sermons, as I sat in a pew with my mother near the back of the sanctuary, I nodded approvingly along with the rest of the congregation when he hit upon this particularly poignant scriptural point or that. But in all honesty, my mind was a thousand light years away, wallowing, at least usually, in smutty thoughts. His last day in the pulpit, his last day on earth, was no different. I cannot recall with precision what lewd scenario I was playing out in my head, but no doubt my juvenile pornography, the witless daydream of a virgin, did not make a pretty counterpoint with my father’s homily.

  Why he bequeathed all these holy books to me wouldn’t take a logician to reckon. My mother spelled it out in plain English when we were in the station wagon, along with my little brother, Andrew, heading home after the funeral, and she broke me the news about my odd inheritance. “He worried about you day and night, you know. He thought you should have them so you might start reading and find your path to the good Lord.”

  I didn’t want to sound like the ingrate I was, so suppressed my thought that a single Bible would have been more than sufficient.

  “Take care of them, Liam,” she continued. “Do his memory proud.”

  “I’ll try my best,” I said, trying to sound earnest.

  “And never forget how much he loved you,” she finished, her eyes watering.

  “I won’t, ever,” I said, in fact earnest, praying she wasn’t about to crash our car into a curbside tree.

  My mom was a good soul and her intentions were every bit as virtuous as my father’s. Both of them were delusional, though, to think I was going to sit in my attic room, put away my comics, set aside my Xbox, turn off my television, and switch over to Genesis. I was fourteen back then, though I looked older, was recalcitrant as a wild goat, locked in a losing battle with raging hormones I didn’t understand, and while I was capable of barricading myself behind a bolted door to read every banned book I could lay my hands on, I wasn’t about to launch into the Scriptures. To please my poor distraught mother, I did make the gesture of moving the unwanted trove of Bibles up to my room, where I double-shelved them alongside Catcher in the Rye, Candy, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the rest of my more profane paperbacks.

  To my eye, the Holy Books were ugly monstrosities, all sixty-three of them, bound variously in worn black leather with yapped edges, frayed buckram in a spectrum of serious colors, tacky over-ornamented embossed leatherette. Most of them were bulky, bigger than my own neglected, pocket-sized copy, and as intimidating in their girth as they were in their content, tonnages of rules and regulations from on high, miles of begets and begats. I was fascinated that a dozen of them were bound in hard boards fastened shut with brass or silver clasps that needed a key to open. I would have to look for the keys sometime, I supposed, but since I had no intention of reading them, there was no rush to go hunting around the house. The whole passel of stodgy books contained the same basic words, the same crazy fairy tales, anyway, so what did I care?

  It needs to be said at the outset that my father, the Reverend James Everett, minister at the First Methodist Church of — , did not die from natural causes. He was as hale as he was oldschool handsome, with cleft chin, distinguished wavy hair, and the coral-cheeked glow of an adolescent rather than a man well into his forties, the result of clean living and a lineage of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, all of whose middle names were Longevity. He never smoked, not even a pensive evening pipe. He drank exactly one glass of rum-spiked eggnog every year before Christmas dinner, which brightened his cheeks all the more, but other than that and maybe a taste of communion wine, he was as abstinent as Mary Baker Eddy. In winter he shoveled our walk and our next door neighbors’ in his oversize shearling coat, and in summer mowed our lawn—me, I was relegated to weeding my mother’s flower garden—wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, clipon bowtie, and straw boater hat. He was an exercise nut who did a hundred sit-ups every morning and a hundred push-ups before bed. Above all, my father loved walking. He walked here and walked there, and for longer distances, much to my embarrassment, rather than drive the family station wagon, a relic that dated back to the Triassic, he rode a bicycle, his back as straight as Elmira Gulch’s in The Wizard of Oz— except with a faint smile on his face rather than her witch’s frown. He was slim as a reed and wiry as beef jerky. Some of my friends thought he was a bit of a dork, and while I didn’t argue, I knew that if he and any of their dads stripped down to the waist and squared off, my father would pummel them to pulp.

  He seemed to have no enemies, my pop. It was safe to say, or so all of us thought, that he was one of the most liked and respected people in the whole town. All who knew him, whether they were members of his congregation or not, from councilmen who sought his support during elections to pimply grocery boys who happily sacked his free-range steaks and organic greens, agreed that my father was never meant to die. My flaxen-haired and walnut-eyed Sunday school teacher, Amanda was her name—a name that rightly meant “worthy of love”— confided in me when I was ten or eleven, “Your dad is too good to go to hell, and too useful to the Lord’s work here to go to heaven.” I think that was one of the few times in my life I felt sorry for him, a wingless angel with eternal chewing gum on the soles of his shoes that allowed him a future in neither some balmy paradise nor a roasting inferno. Since I didn’t believe in hell or heaven, though, my sorrow quickly dissipated, was replaced by a mute chuckle, and soon enough I was back to wondering what gently curvy, sweet-spirited Amanda, in her late teens, looked like when she changed out of her clothes for bed.

  And yet for all I looked down my freckled nose at my reverend father’s zealous and traditionalist beliefs, I missed him at the dinner table, saying the same dull prayer before every meal, passing me and my brother the meat, vegetable, and starch dishes my mother cooked every night. I missed him carefully reading our school papers and suggesting areas for improvement. I missed his attempts at being a regular-Joe father who took his sons to college football games and sat during our annual excursion to the Jersey shore under a beach umbrella while Andrew and I screeched and splashed around in the water, wrestling in the frothy green breakers. Above all, I missed his warm fatherly presence, like a fastgrowing, scraggly rose vine might miss its fallen trellis, despite the fact I had gone out of my way, especially in recent years, to be a thorn in his side.

  At the funeral, a hundred mourners converged, and I couldn’t help but overhear the rumors about what might have caused him to fall down the set of hardwood stairs that led from the church chancellery to the basement after giving a powerful sermon, by their lights anyway, about the iniquity of avarice and the blessed nature of giving. I knew the message of this sermon well, to the point of nausea honestly, as he and my mother discussed it after dinner for a solid two weeks before he stepped into the pulpit and delivered it on that doomed day. Living in the household of a church father means, for better or worse, having certain insights into the mechanical workings, the practical racks and pinio
ns, of what transpires behind the ethereal parts of any ministry. See, being a clergyman isn’t all riding around on puffy clouds and giving godly advice and just generally being a beacon of hope and inspiration. It is about keeping the tithes and offerings flowing, like mother’s milk—oh, Amanda—so staff wages can be paid, the church roof doesn’t leak, the stained glass window that some local punks saw fit to riddle with thrown rocks can be repaired. The church is a nonprofit, so the tax man never came knocking, but the insurance man did, as well as many others whose services were necessary to keep the ark afloat and the fog machine running—at least, that’s how I viewed things from my corner perch in the peanut gallery, knowing leather-winged Lucifer waited for me with open arms in the bowels of Hades.

  Simply and seriously put, my father was in desperate need of money. Utility bills were overdue. Last year’s steeple restoration remained largely unpaid. The organ was in serious need of an overhaul, and while it had sat idle for a year or so, the piano that replaced it had steadily gone out of tune. Even his own stipend was at risk. I am sure that for every single problem I knew about, watching my folks wringing their hands on a nightly basis and sharing dire worries, there were ten more deviltries utterly unknown to me. One night, when I wandered in on them, deliberately, I must admit, although pretending I only just then heard about these money issues, I offered to pick up a job after school to help out.

  “That’s good of you, Liam,” my father said. “But I don’t think you understood what we were talking about. No need for worry, everything’s perfectly fine. You just stick to your schoolwork and our lord savior will take care of the rest.”

  Yes, he often spoke in such ecclesiastical terms. If it weren’t so innocently offered, his dimples flexing from nervousness and earnest blue eyes searching for the confidence their owner so badly wanted to convey to his eldest son, I would have snorted, “Please, spare me!” Or, worse, I would simply have laughed. I did neither but left the room knowing that I had tried to intercede and was rejected. Like a latterday Pontius Pius, if a lot more reluctantly, I washed my hands of the matter.

  No one at the funeral said that my father was pushed down the stairs, not in so many words. Nobody whispered that he had borrowed himself into debt, very deep debt, on behalf of the church, not in so many words. And not one soul suggested in so many words that in order to get these loans, the church’s minister found himself dealing with less than savory elements in the community, churchgoing, god-fearing folks, maybe, but people for whom the less-than-flattering term “elements” was intended nonetheless. The rumormongers were vaguer than all that. It was from their overheard tones of voice that I cobbled together what I knew, or thought I knew, they were huddling about. One can say the phrase “He’s such a good boy” so that it means the boy is good or the boy is bad just by intoning it differently. That much I understood, as I wandered around, shadowed by my brother, for whom our abrupt fatherlessness hadn’t yet sunk in fully, accepting people’s condolences, not trusting a single one of them, looking into their eyes for a confession of some kind. I wasn’t any more in my right mind than Drew, though I felt I needed to put a brave face on my stunned confusion. The way I figured it was that my father was in the peak of health, athletic in his way, cautious of diet, regular of habits, head on his pillow at ten, up with the cock’s crow at six. In church business he might have been stumbling, but when walking down that flight of stairs after his sermon that Sunday he did not trip, that much I felt was irrefutable.

  The coroner wasn’t so sure. While there was no evidence of a heart attack or anything else in the autopsy to suggest that he had collapsed or fainted, the theory was floated that my father had simply slipped. To me that made no sense, as he had descended those well-lit stairs thousands of times, and while some structural elements in the rest of the church might have needed repair, the hardwood treads on that staircase didn’t even creak, let alone give. For me, it wasn’t his health, wasn’t those stairs, and don’t even hint at suicide. Christ was far more suicidal than my dad. No, I knew in my heart that my father was shoved to his death. The sole problem with my theory was that no one else had been seen back in the stairwell at the time, no one witnessed his tumble or heard him cry out. The unimaginable sound of his skull cracking open, maybe like the cantaloupe he distractedly dropped on the kitchen floor that morning as he carried it from the refrigerator to the counter, was one I did my level best to self-censor. I kept reminding myself about the tree that falls in the forest with no one there to listen, and how it makes no sound. Pathetic, but I found myself in a completely foreign emotional terrain and was forced to improvise the best I could. Lying awake at night, my game console lost on me, my small television muted although I left the picture on for company, I sleuthed my way through every person I had seen with my father during the last months, trying without luck to identify a possible culprit.

  A detective had dropped over the Sunday afternoon of my father’s death to ask my mom, who was numb with heartache and barely able to process his queries about whether her husband had any disagreements, arguments, altercations with anybody. When he stopped by again, not a week later, I knew something was afoot.

  “I’m very sorry about your loss,” he said, repeating his words from that prior visit.

  “Thank you,” my mother said, repeating hers.

  “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind going over a few things with me, now that a little time has passed—”

  “We only just buried him,” she countered, then immediately apologized. “Anything you need. Liam, you should go upstairs.”

  “No, that’s all right,” said the detective. “Nothing to hide here. Plus, maybe he’ll know something, right? Liam, is it?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, all military and respectful for some reason. Badge was unshaven and wearing a pale gray hoodie, a countercultural cop as I saw it, which made me like the man, gave me confidence that a regular blue uniform wouldn’t have. There was something familiar and comfortable about him, too. I was no more fond of police than I was of clergymen, my father excepted, but this one with his frayed jeans was copacetic, in my book.

  He did ask many of the same questions as he had before when I listened in from the adjacent room. Had my father counseled any domestic violence couples or individuals prone to aggressive behavior and happened to mention that he had been threatened as a result? Had she or the deceased—I hated hearing my father called that—seen anybody unusual lurking around the church premises, anybody who wasn’t part of the regular community of worshippers? Had there been any peculiar phone calls, or calls at odd hours? Any menacing letters at home or the church?

  My mother gave him the same answers as the first time, but when he got around to asking again if any of the church employees had been fired or cut back on their paid working hours, she interrupted, “Well, wait. You know, we were getting some calls late at night this fall, around Halloween.”

  “What kind of calls?”

  “I couldn’t say, really. The reverend always took them, given the hour, and when I asked him who was it, he told me it wasn’t anybody and just to go back to sleep.”

  My mother always referred to my father as the reverend. Others thought it somewhat peculiar, but I was used to it from as far back as I could begin to understand language itself, so to my ear it was second nature, even first nature.

  “And what did you do then?”

  My mother looked confused by the question. “I went back to sleep.”

  “Did you ask about it in the morning?”

  “No, there was breakfast to make, the boys to get off to school, and all the rest. Since he made no big deal about it, neither did I.”

  The detective pressed, gently. “How many times would you say these middle-of-the-night anonymous calls happened?”

  “Maybe half a dozen or so. And I never said they were anonymous, just that the reverend never told me who it was.”

  Out of the blue, the detective turned to me and asked, “How are you holding
up, son?”

  “I’m good, I guess.”

  “You helping your mother out, I imagine?”

  “I’m trying,” I said, wondering why he would ask me such lame questions. “You know he was murdered, my dad, right?”

  His turn to be taken aback a little. “We don’t have any solid evidence to suggest that he was. Chances are, this was a tragic accident. He took a misstep and fell. Sad to say it does happen. Accidents are far more common than murders.”

  “He was murdered,” I said, looking at him coolly in the eyes. “I know it.”

  “Liam,” my weary mother admonished me.

  “No, that’s okay,” said the detective. “Since we’re not sure what happened yet, he has every right to his opinion. We’ll see about looking into those late night calls, if there’s any record of them. Meantime, if you think of anything, you already have my cell number, so call me any time,” he finished, rising to go. I saw him to the door and walked him out to his unmarked dark blue Chevy. On the sidewalk, he asked me, “Between you and me, Liam, why is it you think your dad was murdered? A hunch or what?”

  I weighed whether to tell him about all the people to whom my father owed money, all those who were waiting patiently for the church to raise enough to clear its debts, and all those who were less than patient. But I assumed he and the rest of the authorities were already aware about this darker side of my father’s goings- on and were looking into it even as we stood there.

  “You know,” I said, unhelpfully, “sometimes you just know.”

  Looking back, I know he knew that I knew nothing.

  The famous old biblical phrase, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, circulated in my mind like an endless loop in the days that followed the detective’s visit to our house. For reasons I could not then explain to myself, it lodged in my dreamy head with such sticky vengeance that even my fantasy thoughts about Amanda—who visited us several times in the wake of the reverend’s death, a demure young woman behind whose shy gaze I swore lay an unawakened erotic soul—were pushed to one side of my streaming consciousness. This new obsession, a vehement, dry mania rather than an amorous, damp one, was upsetting on many counts. I far preferred Amanda to Leviticus, but the latter had me in its Old Testament clutches. So much so that I decided to put one of my father’s Bibles to use, research where that line came from and exactly what it meant, though I suspect my father wouldn’t have approved of his eldest son’s deepening desire for justice in the form of revenge if and when the perp was found.