THE INHERITANCE

THE INHERITANCE

The thorny bushes had grown so thick it was almost impossible to make out the old footpath. John Christian carefully pushed the branches aside as he ambled down the quarter-mile into the woods where his family home stood. Memories came closer with each muddy step he took. He recalled how the doctor and the sheriff had been unable to get their autos down the path because, even way back then, it was only three or four feet wide. He remembered how they’d had to park alongside the main road and make this same trek on foot. He was seven that year.

He turned his head toward the right and craned his neck to see the source of the water he now heard bubbling along. He couldn’t see through the thick growth but he knew that was where the stream flowed. That’s where the stills were later found that sunny June day of his seventh year.

The house, just ahead, soon came into view. The roof was covered with fallen dead branches and leaves but structurally it appeared to be sound. The small shed nearby, however, had collapsed and a pile of rotting boards lay in its place. This was where he had grown up. This was where he had spent the first sixteen years of his life. And there, about five-hundred feet from the house, was where his father had shot his mother in the shade of the big chestnut tree.

Yes, the shed was beyond repair. He stood for a moment looking at it then picked up a couple of boards, wet and musty and crawling with insects, and tossed them back into the pile. There was no fixing that. He’d have to build a new one.

The latch on the door to the house was rusted and he had to push the weight of his body against it to gain entry. Inside was dirty and dusty and cobwebbed just as expected. But all the furniture he remembered was still there and even pictures still hung upon the walls. His brother, James Christian, had inherited the house when their immigrant father, Nada Christian, died of pneumonia ten years earlier. Times were different back in the old days. After the shooting, Nada had told police that his wife was drunk and threatening to kill him and that he grabbed his rifle in self-defense and it went off accidentally. When the police found the stills, they accepted that as evidence of Nada’s story. John Christian knew his mother didn’t drink and that their entire income came from those stills of his father’s, but no one asked a seven-year-old boy what his version of the story was. No one asked for the truth. His mother was buried and his father lived out the rest of his life there, widowed and free.

Things weren’t like that anymore though. Now the law took women into consideration and John Christian had found that out first-hand. His wife had sought a divorce the previous year and it had been granted. She told the law that John Christian drank too much but, as far as he was concerned, any man who worked every day and supported his family, should be able to drink any good and damn time he wanted to. Not only was she given a divorce, she was given their two children and the house they'd been living in. John Christian had been living since at Lottie Bate’s boarding house, right across the street from Gino Terralucci’s slaughterhouse. They couldn’t open the windows in the boarding house, even in the sweltering hot days of summer, because the putrid odor of pig flesh hung over the property like a festering, unmovable veil.

“Damn I-talians,” John Christian mumbled to himself, as he kicked a dead mouse laying in the hallway out of his path. His brother James Christian had just recently been killed on the railroad tracks. With his death, the house and property came into the hands of John Christian. He was sorry his brother had thought to walk the tracks utterly un-sober in the middle of the night, but he was right grateful for his timing. Now he could be rid of that wretched boarding house and move into a home of his home. See how she likes that, he thought. She might have gotten his children and his house but all she got was four rooms and an acre. This here house had six rooms and three acres. Looks like the joke was on her, he laughed to himself.

John Christian went into the bedroom where he and James Christian used to sleep and fell back onto one of the beds. A cloud of dust blew up around him and another mouse, this one still alive, ran out from under the bed and scampered beneath the Victorian-era bureau his mother had inherited from an aunt. Yes Sir, things were looking up now. John Christian wished he’d brought a bottle of rum to celebrate his good fortune with. He’d sweep the place up a bit, walk into town and buy himself a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs and a pint of milk. He’d chop up some wood for the stove, eventually rebuild the shed and, if he got lucky, them stills were still out there and he might start up a little sideline business. It was all coming together. She thought she got the best of him, leaving him like that on account of his wanting a drink now and again. Well, she could watch his dust and feel sorry for the choice she made. He wouldn’t miss her, not for a second.

He laid there for quite some time planning his future before hoisting himself up and taking a look around the rest of the house. There’s that damned wood stove. He’d forgotten about that. One night Nada had come home drunk, pulled both the boys out of bed and roughed them up because they hadn’t chopped the wood piled on the porch like he’d told them to before he went to the saloon. He’d thrown John Christian across the room so hard that night, that he’d collided head-first with the stove and lain unconscious until the next afternoon.

Just then, he remembered something else and went into the small pantry off the kitchen. Kneeling down, he lifted up a corner of the frayed braided rug his mother’s mother had made. Yes, there it was. The circle of dried blood still there on the wood planks all these years later. His mother had tried her darndest to scrub it out but it was determined to set there for good so she pulled the rug out of the kitchen and threw it over the stain so they wouldn’t have to look at it. Nada had stumbled into the pantry one night without a candle and stepped on a kitten. John Christian and his brother had found the mother cat and three kittens inside a log out in the woods and brought them home. They named the mother cat Patches and the babies Blackie, Whitey and Spot. It was some of Spot that remained there on the floor under the rug.

John Christian continued his walk. There was the nail hole in the wall above the mantel where a photograph of his mother had once hung. His father pulled it down the night after he shot her and threw it into the fire. “No sense in being reminded of the past,” he had told his boys as they watched the face of their blonde, smiling mother blacken to ash. And there was the nail still in the wall where the big, long hickory stick had hung throughout his childhood. It was no longer there but had also undoubtedly been stained with blood from the years-worth of lashes Nada Christian had inflicted upon his sons’ backsides. John Christian wondered where it had gone to and supposed his brother might have snapped it into a million pieces while the house was in his custody.

Six rooms and three acres; every room and every acre a relic of his past. It was finally his, this place where his roots were planted and no one could take it away. Not her. She could take everything else but she couldn’t take this. He pushed aside the torn curtains in the kitchen and gazed out at the spot under the chestnut tree where his mother had been shot that June of his seventh year. Large roots had grown up and wrapped around the tree so thick its trunk was barely visible. Come winter, he could roast chestnuts on the fire, he told himself. He’d get himself some chickens, maybe a cow. Yes, Sir, she would sit all alone in her bedroom and cry over the day she divorced John Christian.

He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, sat down and lit the cigar that he carried in his shirt pocket. “Yes, Siree,” he said aloud, nodding his head. “Who got the rat’s ass now?”

John Christian laughed and blew out a thick cloud of smoke that mingled with the dust that hung heavy in the air. He sure wished he had thought to bring a bottle of rum to celebrate. Six rooms and three acres. Two fireplaces and a nice wood stove that still looked as sturdy as it did the night it made the dent in his head. He’d yank out the nail where the beating stick had hung and fill in the hole and that of the one where his mother’s photograph had hung with putty. He’d spend all summer chopping wood and clearing off the roof and sprucing the place up and, come winter, he’d gather nuts from the tree his mother had lain dead under while the doctor and the sheriff tried to figure out how to get her body down the footpath.  

He slowly blew out another thick puff of smoke. Tipping back on the chair, he stared at the far wall, the red and white paper peeling off in long dirty strips. It was all his, this place. She took everything else. But this was his legacy. He looked around at all he had. Then he set the burning cigar atop an old pile of newspapers on the floor and left.