The Nature of My Inheritance (2 page)

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.

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.