The Nature of My Inheritance Read online

  Even though it would have thrilled my mother to see me sitting with a King James, leafing through its chapters and verses in search of this charming retribution adage, I had my pride and independence to uphold, and so waited for the lights in our house to go off and my family, all two of them, to fall asleep. As I thought before, when I first inherited these big fat tomes, one Bible was the same as the next, and so I pulled down the first that came to hand. It was on the medium-sized side, a pebbly, limp leather binding sheltering the holy words, but when I looked at the title page and saw it was printed in some language I didn’t know, German I think, I shut it without looking further and reshelved the thing. Why would my otherwise rational, bow-tied, lawn-mowing dad bequeath me a damn Bible in German, or whatever foreign language that was? Maybe he had gone a little more mental in these last years than I’d thought.

  Next I chose one of the larger volumes, since it read Holy Bible on the spine in good old-fashioned English. Settling it on my lap as I sat on the edge of my bed, I opened it up to the table of contents for the Hebrew scriptures—I was a methodical fellow, being Methodist, see—and ran my finger past Genesis and Exodus to Leviticus where, after reading around for a while, I found my phrase. Commentary at the bottom of the page confirmed that the maxim meant exactly what it sounded like. Whoever has inflicted an injury must suffer the same injury in order for justice to be served. Leviticus 24:20 cross-referenced me back to Exodus 21:24 which cross-referenced me to Deuteronomy 19:21— these Old Testament types, I thought as I shook my head, were all on the same page when it came to punishment. Then I was referred forward to Matthew 5:21, where, as I knew from my father’s frequent references to the verse, stern Old Testament practicality was replaced by the gentler love-your-enemies philosophy of the New Testament. Since I believed in none of this nonsense, I suppose it didn’t matter that I sided with the fire-and-brimstone crowd, especially in the wake of my father’s abrupt, inexplicable death and maybe fueled by some of the fiercer among my Xbox games. So I decided to see what argument gospeler Matthew might make to convince me otherwise, and opened the Bible about halfway through.

  What I encountered made my jaw drop. Right in the middle of the Bible somebody had carefully carved out a secret compartment that couldn’t be seen when the book was closed. Hundreds of pages were vandalized, if that was the word for it, in order to hollow out the block of paper just enough to fit inside its dry bowels yet another book. Having no idea what I was doing or what I had stumbled upon, I lifted out the volume that was nestled like an unholy fetus inside the Bible. I set the Bible aside and held this smaller book, as careful as if it were a new alien species and I happened to be the scientist who discovered it, up to my astonished eyes.

  The book was in Latin, which was better than German, since I had spent a grueling year in junior high school trying to learn it, for no meaningful reason I could see until now. Using my rickety knowledge of that defunct tongue, I made out that this pretty pocket-sized book was printed in 1502, by one Aldo Manuzio, in Venice. I was fascinated by the image of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor on the last page, but only got truly excited—so excited I started wheezing and had to use my inhaler— when I Googled around and learned that what I had found inside my father’s Bible was the first Aldine edition, as it was called, of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. That, in and of itself, wasn’t the source of my shortness of breath and whistling windpipes, though. As my eyes scrolled down the backlit screen of my tablet, I learned that this was one of the most important books in the history of printing, the first of Aldo Manuzio’s literary titles available to the regular public, groundbreaking because its revolutionary format made it as portable as one of my risqué paperbacks. And it didn’t hurt my opinion of the thing that, five hundred years later, it was worth over twenty thousand dollars.

  Mind-blown, rattlebrained, heart pounding in my ears, my first thought was where I should hide this treasure, before realizing that the best place to stow it out of sight was right where I found it. After tucking it away again, a golden Jonah safely back in its whale belly, and sliding it onto the shelf, I slipped the tablet under my pillow and turned off the bedside light. Out my dormer window was a crescent moon that looked like a cockeyed smile, probably like the smile on my face as I lay there mulling over my miraculous find. My dear Amanda, light of my life, fire of my loins—yes, to be sure, I had tried and failed to read Lolita—lost out to Dante Alighieri as the center of my focus that night while I drifted off toward sleep, my thoughts bubbling and stewing in a cauldron of questions desperate for answers.

  Next morning, fearing the whole thing had been a dream, I checked to see if Jonah was still there inside his squarish whale. That he was came both as a relief and a worry. The relief was obvious. Twenty-thousand reasons why and then some. But the worry was, what now? How was it that my father possessed such a valuable book, secreted away like that?

  My mother commented when I staggered into the kitchen, “Liam, your eyes are all bloodshot. You feeling sick?”

  “Not so great, Mom,” I said without a moment’s thought, slumping down in my chair at the breakfast table.

  “Maybe you better stay home from school today. It’s cold out and I don’t want you catching a flu bug.”

  If I had written the script, I wouldn’t have changed a word.

  “I want to stay home, too,” my brother tried, a bit over-eager.

  “Why in heaven’s name should you stay home?” our mother asked with a mild scowl, as she forked some toaster waffles onto our plates. “You’re not sick.”

  “Yes, I am,” he said, offering his audience what was easily the most fake cough anybody ever made in the entire recorded history of humankind.

  Laughter hadn’t been heard much in our household those days, so the sound of it, loud and infectious cackles and snorts, was jarring at first. When Drew, knowing his gambit had flamed, broke down laughing, too, I felt as if things were eventually going to be okay for us and that life would hobble on.

  Among the very first things my mother told me, after she gave me the calamitous news about Dad, was, “Now you’re going to have to be the head of the family and take your father’s place in whatever ways you can. He would want you to be responsible and mature enough to do that, Liam.” At the time, while I nodded and said I would do her as proud as I could, my fantasy was that Amanda would move in with us as my wife, and Drew and Mom would be like our children. Something along those lines. The implausible reverie didn’t linger longer than an August icicle.

  Now, though, as our laughter died down, I did sense I might be on the right path to assuming the role she described, wearing the pater’s pants, despite the fact that I was faking illness to ditch school like some punk third grader. It was a necessary ploy, though. I wanted time to think. Time to ponder what to do.

  Needless to say, I couldn’t wait for my family to leave so I could have the house to myself. I traipsed upstairs, my glass of grape juice in hand—the reverend bought bottles of this by the case; we were all addicted to the stuff—and pretended to go back to sleep. When my mother checked on me, I offered her the comfort of finding her sick son safely dozing in bed. I even managed to twitch a little as if I were dreaming, just to add to the effect. She said nothing, although I felt I could plainly hear her thoughts, Poor child’s been through the wringer, immune system’s off-kilter, good for him to have a day off to rest. After I heard her walk back downstairs, open and close the front door, and drive off in the station wagon with Drew, I swung my legs out of bed and in my pajamas dashed to my parents’ bedroom where I easily found a sock stuffed with the keys to the locked volumes in the top drawer of my father’s dresser. Not the most canny hiding place anybody ever came up with, but that was him all over again. I wasted no time chasing back to my room and unlocking the first Bible that came to hand.

  The hidden book this time was from the fifteenth century, Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, in chestnut colored leather, very plain Jane. It was so rare, or
so it seemed, that I couldn’t even find a copy offered for sale by any book dealer online and, not knowing as yet how to locate auction records, had to conclude the thing was basically priceless. I marveled at its text, not a line of which I could read, and at its agelessness, these words written in 524 AD or thereabouts, according to my research, while this Boethius, about whom I knew nothing before that morning, was in jail for treason, brought to his knees by yellow-belly treachery. In other words, an outlaw I could get behind. His book seemed to make a bunch of nods to god, but really was a chat with the beautiful Lady Philosophy— Amanda’s face floated into view—about how fame and fortune melt away, about how all of us are good inside even though we do wrong things, about how prisoners should be treated with kindness by their captors, about how god doesn’t finally run things but men of free will do. Awesomeness incarnate, I thought. I could have spent the whole rest of the term in school twenty-four-seven and not learned as much as I did that morning, sitting with what I began to wonder wasn’t just maybe a stolen Boethius and chewing over what my father was doing with it in his possession, not to mention the other concealed rarities I found.

  With the exception of one, which I guessed the reverend used to read from, not a single solitary Bible I inherited wasn’t hollowed out with a rare book secreted inside. I found out they were called smuggler’s Bibles, and were used in the old days for a purpose that wasn’t much different than what my dad seemed to be using them for. It was pretty smart of the old man, smarter than I suppose I’d have given him credit for knowing, that if you wanted to hide something in a place nobody would bother looking, a good old Bible was perfectly suited to the task.

  I started making a list of titles and a tally of market values, aware that my phony cold would have to worsen over the next couple of days so I would have time to finish the job. Since I rarely got sick and had a real excuse for coming down with something—exhaustion from the shock of losing my dad—my mother was lenient about letting me continue to stay home from school that week. My poor brother, who saw right through my hoax, writhed with jealousy. But there wasn’t a thing he could do, especially after that bogus cough of his became a running joke at mealtimes. So I tucked the aspirin and cold medication pills in my cheek, just as I had seen in the movies, drank water from the glass my mom handed me, swallowed mightily, then spat out the pills onto my palm the minute she turned her back. I managed to drink hot tea on the sly before she put the thermometer in my mouth to take my temperature, and the results were impressive. Part of me wished I had played this game of charades earlier, but I knew my father would have called me out in a heartbeat, laid a choice line of scripture on me about lying, and that would have been curtains, no encore.

  But what about him and lying? Or, if not lying, keeping a secret from his family to the tune of half a million plus for starters—these books added up fast, reaching into six figures even before I was a quarter of the way through the trove. Just for example, the first edition in English, 1640, of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, which I learned was the greatest textbook of all time for political leaders interested in wielding power with an iron fist, brought in the neighborhood of sixty grand or more. Little brat of a book, too, a duodecimo they called it. Or what about Voltaire’s Candide, one of a dozen or so copies of what was known as the quote-unquote true first edition, published in Geneva in 1759? A sheaf of fussy notes about its “points” that verified it as legitimate was tucked into the smuggler’s part of the Bible underneath Candide itself. Online, a British book dealer—I wondered if they ought to call themselves bookies?—had one of these for £60,000, which the conversion chart made out to be about a hundred thousand dollars just by itself. It went on like that. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in three small volumes hidden in three different Bibles, the 1818 first edition? Worth a hundred and a half, easy.

  But what on earth was my dad, the good reverend, doing with Frankenstein when he wouldn’t even let me and Drew see the movie because he didn’t want our snow-pure souls corrupted by the spectacle of a half-man, half-monster roaming around terrorizing people and drowning little girls? Though he never found out, we did see the James Whale original on a friend’s computer, harmless enough moth-bait relic that it was, but the more I thought about Frankenstein, Boethius, Machiavelli, and the rest, the more I realized that my father and I couldn’t be the only ones who knew about the pearls inside these oysters. Couldn’t be blind to the fact that his murder probably had to do with all this. Problem was, if I talked to the detective about it, I worried that the authorities might take my books away from me. But if I didn’t, then whoever pushed my dad down the stairs might never get caught.

  Late morning on the third day of my convalescence— where was Amanda Nightingale when her fallen soldier needed succor?—the telephone rang. This threw me way off, since the house had been quiet as a toothache during the first two days. I debated whether to answer. If I did and it was my mother checking up on me, she might say if I’m well enough to talk on the phone I’m well enough to go to school. Ixnay to that, since I needed at least one more day to finish going through the Bibles. On the other hand, what if it was that detective who maybe had a lead or something? Damned if I did, damned if I didn’t, so damn it I did.

  “Everett residence,” I half-croaked, in case it was the mater.

  “Who’s this?” was what the man on the other end asked.

  I’m not the epitome of etiquette, not by a muddy mile, but that struck me as rude.

  “Who is this?” as breezy as I could muster now that I knew it wasn’t my mother.

  “Is Reverend Everett there, please?”

  “This is his son. And who, may I ask, is calling?”

  Bread on the water, see.

  “I need to speak with the reverend himself, I’m afraid, on a private matter. Would you mind letting him know there’s a party on the phone who wishes to speak with him?”

  Just as the decision whether or not to pick up this call was a kind of crossroads, I found myself at another crossroads here. Do I tell him about my dad’s demise, or play out the line a little more, see what this was about?

  “He’s not here right now. If you give me a name and number—”

  And he hung up. Needless to say, as I continued to work on cataloguing, and roughly, very roughly, appraising the books inside the books as best I could, recognizing my limitations and at the same time continuing to marvel at the literary gems I unearthed, the dark cloud of that call hung over me. Seldom the nervous type, except in the presence of Amanda, whose mild voice raised sweat on my palms and soft scent made my heart race, every lousy sound I heard downstairs, when the furnace boiler went on or the hall clock struck the hour, caused me to jump. I didn’t like that man on the horn. I didn’t like that my father had left me with such a weird legacy. I didn’t like it that my earlier little-boy judgment about my dad’s death being a murder had now transformed into my not-so-little-anymore son’s conviction that I had been dead-on right. I looked at the confounding array of books, as many of them as worthless as the others were valuable, and shook my head in wonder and despair. If the reverend were here, as I very much wished he were, he would no doubt have had some catchy proverb to impart, some elegant verse from the Bible that would bring this mess into focus and help my suddenly incomprehensible world make sense.

  “Where are you, man? What’s all this mean?” I asked and, ashamed as I am to admit it, began crying.

  Toggle life back to summer. Hot as skeet, sky the color of a tin can, the air murky as math. My father and I together in the wagon with its fake wood panels and shocks so spongy every pothole made us heave and bounce like a rowboat on rolling waves. We were headed over to the church with some hymnals another ministry was kind enough to donate, or re-donate, to the First Methodist church. Brotherly-love sort of gesture in the “Give and it shall be given unto you” tradition. It was pretty nice of them, since our church, whose lower middle-class congregation was strong in faith but feeble when the colle
ction plate was passed around, had nearly run out of hymnals. Guess some people wanted to take them home so they could sing all the verses of “The Old Rugged Cross” in the comfort of their bathrooms.

  I helped the reverend, who was in an off mood that late August day, take the boxes of chunky hymnaries out of the car and into the church, where he had me unpack and tuck them into the book racks behind each pew while he went downstairs to his office. Off, too, was that he palmed me two dollars and told me to head over to the bodega a few blocks away and get myself a soda or candy or whatever I wanted. Hang on, I thought. Wasn’t he always on my case, telling me not to drink soda or eat candy? I didn’t really want soda or candy anyway, but dutifully tramped off into the sweltering heat, wondering why he wanted me to amscray like that, for no real rhyme or reason. Besides, it was a lot cooler in the sanctuary than it was outside under a sun hotter than the Eye of Sauron.

  When I returned, I noticed there were two other cars parked in front of and behind our shabby vehicle, cars with far finer pedigrees than ours. One was a Benz, black as venal sin, and the other a most excellent vintage white bathtub Porsche. For whatever reason, I was alarmed by them, girdling our jalopy the way they did. There was plenty of room to park up and down the street, so why make it impossible for us to squeeze out of our spot? Just seemed sinister to me.