The Nature of My Inheritance

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 pinions, 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.