Winter was worst time of year, and Christin considered Christmas the worstest. It was supposed to be a time of happiness when everybody got together and celebrated what made his family special, but over the last few years, it had turned into more of a time for funerals and mourning. This morning’s trip was not helping.
There was only so long that Christin could sulk in the passenger seat of the car while his mother drove, even with sunglasses to deal with the low angle of the sun in the early morning. The last thing he was going to do was bug her with a long series of ‘Are we there yet’ or ‘Can we stop for a break’ like he did when he was younger. Fourteen years old this morning, and instead of spending his birthday at home, trying to bring some sense of normality back to their smaller family, they had to drive halfway across the country. He wanted to be petulant and crabby about the trip, but his mother had been planning this for some time, even before his father passed away. It was just the two of them in the house now, widowed mother and ‘Whoops’ baby while the rest of his brothers and his sister had passed to college and onto families of their own.
Stand up. Be a man. Be strong. You’re the man of the house now. Dad would have wanted you to take care of your mother.
He ran a hand across his beardless chin and scowled, settling instead for staring listlessly out of the car window through dark sunglasses. Brightly-lit houses and business streamed by, all waiting for this evening when an inflatable Santa Claus would visit or the little Jesus would be born into their plastic stables. The season used to be such fun until he realized how having his birthday so close to Christmas made the total number of presents received over the year fewer than any of his siblings. It only added to the depression of being the baby of the family, particularly when his sister was talking so happily about starting a family while all he had to look forward to was military school this next fall.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Christin’s mother was still was driving with all of her attention out the windshield at the thready traffic, but she never needed to look in his direction to know what he was up to. He reclined the seat further and grunted back, which was about as much as he felt like saying at the moment.
“Look.” His mother took a deep breath and tapped the cruise control, which indicated the seriousness of whatever lesson she was planning on attempting to teach. Missus Devonshire, the one hundred percent concentrating, no holds barred lawyer, Queen of the Casual Gesture took to child rearing much the same way as she handled her work, which made his upcoming stint in military school seem not quite so bad. Still, his mother had never hesitated after an introductory phrase like that, which was a little unnerving.
“What?” he managed to ask without sounding interested. “Did we forget something and have to go back home?”
“No, I’ve got everything we need in back. Polish, rags, even an extra winter coat, even if we’re not going to need it.”
Mom glanced out the driver’s side window away from Christin as if the dry Massachusetts landscape was somehow less preferable than looking at her own flesh and blood child. A good, thick blanket of dirty white snow would be more in tune with the season and his memories of birthdays past, but Christin was glad the weather was unseasonably warm for their upcoming task rather than slogging through a blizzard.
“I wish we didn’t have to go the cemetery,” he grumbled almost under his breath.
“It’s tradition,” she echoed almost automatically. “More than that, it’s required.”
“I know, I know,” he growled. “Every Devonshire at the age of fourteen goes to Great-Great-Grandfather Devonshire’s grave. And if we don’t, no access to the trust fund, no scholarships for college, and the family business won’t hire me even if I had a coating of peanut butter on my back and could dance Swan Lake.” He folded his arms and resumed looking out the side window. “That doesn't mean I have to like it.”
“I was with each of your brothers when they made the trip,” said his mother. “Don’t think this conversation hasn’t been had before. Your sister threatened to move out with Aunt Joyce if I didn’t stop the car, right now and go back to the party she had planned. She screamed and wailed like your father was pulling teeth. But she went.” Mom’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “I wish your father were here. I wish you didn’t have to dance to the tune of a bitter man dead over a century ago and still determined to pass his bile and spite on to his descendents. I fought with your father just as much as your sister did, but when we got to the gravesite, I realized just how important this is.”
“You make it sound like Grandpa Devonshire was some sort of vampire,” grumbled Christin before perking up. “He isn’t, is he?”
“No!” Mom returned to her single-minded concentration on the road, although after a few minutes, she relaxed slightly. “Vampire. If only. Then we could stake him and it would be all over. No, it’s worse. He was a lawyer.”
Christin regarded his lawyer mother rather skeptically. “I thought you said ninety-nine percent of lawyers gave the rest of them their bad reputation?”
“What do you call one dead lawyer in a grave?” asked his mother. “A good start. Yes, there’s some truth in that, and your great-great-grandfather seemed dead-set on proving it from the tomb.” She reached out toward the cigarette lighter, then put her hand back on the steering wheel with a grimace. Mom had quit smoking when Dad died, but the old habits were still there right under the skin.
“I know Grandfather wasn’t the nicest person,” said Christin, “but he started our family fortune and set up the foundation.”
“His sons set up the foundation,” corrected Mom. “How much do you know about the old reprobate?”
Christin shrugged. “A little. Dad never talked about him much.”
“For good reason.” Mom picked up her purse and placed it in the back seat, with the included pack of cigarettes that much further away from temptation. “I didn’t understand Ezekiel Devonshire much when I married your father, and I didn’t think much of dragging your sister Daisy up to Boston to look at a grave either. I learned more later, so I suppose it would make more sense to you if I explained a little bit about him.”
“Ya think?” Christin dropped his sunglasses back in front of his eyes and slumped back in the car seat. “All I know is he was some rich jerk back around the eighteen hundreds. Something about investment banking and running a law firm. He left a ton of cash behind and a couple of sons, who built and diversified across the whole country and overseas later.”
“Ezekiel was a little more than that.” His mother unwrapped a cough drop and popped it into her mouth in an obvious attempt to stop thinking about the cigarettes in the back seat. “He started his business back in an age where only the ruthless survived. The family tree ends with him. Nobody knows who his parents were, or any other relatives. Some rumors say he killed a man in Ireland and fled here to keep from being hanged. There were at least three people who died under… let’s just say less than fully understood circumstances around him.”
“Whoa.” Christin sat up and pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead. “I have a mobster in the family tree.”
“He wasn’t a criminal. For all intents and purposes, the family business started down that path, but not anymore. I understand we had a brush with prohibition back in the thirties, but the administrators kept their noses clean and out of trouble.” Mom was in full lecture mode now, much the same as when Christin would watch her practice a final summation for the jury. One hand stayed locked to the steering wheel, but the other would gesture and punctuate as she talked. “Railroads, industries, mechanization and the like, from the Civil War to the present. Our family helps the country grow and prosper. From barges bringing grain down the river to the machines that harvest it, electronics, hydraulics, petroleum.”
At this, she hesitated. It had only been two years since Christin’s father had died, and it still hit her hard at times.
“I know, Mom.” Christin hesitated himself, but reached out and took his mother’s hand, putting it back on the steering wheel after a brief squeeze. “I wish he had never gone to that godforsaken chunk of jungle.”
“He was doing what he wanted to do,” said his mother. “There were a lot of poor people in the area who would have been helped by the money an oil well would have brought in.”
Christin bit his bottom lip so hard he could taste blood, but he still could not help but say the words. “If they would have been helped so much, they wouldn't have blown him up.”
“Criminals set the bomb,” countered his mother. “They didn’t care who they hurt or what they damaged, as long as the people remained afraid of them, and they could move their filthy drugs. They wanted the people to be helpless and terrified so they would not stand up on their own.”
Mom fairly clenched the steering wheel for a time after that, with white knuckles and an intent focus on the road ahead. It took until they were approaching the Boston suburbs until she calmed down enough to talk again, and then only to say, “They were just like your grandfather.”
Christin was startled up from reading on his phone, and put it carefully back onto the charger. He waited for a while for his mother to continue before gently prompting her. “I thought you said my Grandfather Ezekiel wasn’t a criminal.”
“A criminal? No, not in that era.” Mom sucked in a deep breath through her teeth and blew it out again. “He didn’t have friends. He made enemies. Powerful enemies. The kind who hire other people to make ‘accidents’ happen. The kind of people you have to pay a special kind of attention, and never let them get behind you with a knife. He survived into a bitter, spiteful old man because of his precautions, and he wanted to make sure his family survived too, because they were all he had. He plotted and schemed to make certain his enemies would all fear him, and he boiled and condensed that evil, vile brew into a list. People never to trust. People who had attempted to hurt him. How to deal with them. Grudges he carried beyond the grave and impressed upon his children to carry when he was gone. You see, he had this idea that if he could pass this legacy of hatred and bile onto his descendents, they could be just as ruthlessly successful as he was. He made it a requirement in his will that any descendent who was to have any claim at all upon the family money had to read that vile list, every single word, and keep it in their heart afterwards.”
It was a weighty lump to swallow in one bite, but Christin thought about it while his mother changed lanes and left the turnpike, slowing as they drove alongside the river for a time. It was a familiar road, since it led past the Harvard campus where his brother had attended, but it really did not explain what they were doing there.
“If there’s just a list of stuff I have to memorize, why come here?” asked Christin. “You could have just printed it off and I could have memorized it at home.”
“Not quite. It will make more sense once we get there.” She gestured with several fingers at the buildings of Harvard while they drove. “Maybe you’ll even want to follow in your brother’s footsteps and get a business degree.”
“Is that why you enrolled me in military school?” he grumbled.
“Not quite.” His mother changed lanes and began signaling for a turn. “Your father and I discussed things several years ago. Ezekiel Devonshire set up the restrictions on his estate to include a period of military service, since each of his children and grandchildren served in the military, but the estate has moderated the conditions to include military school. Two years and you qualify. Your father was in the Army for ten because he was considering it as a career, as his father before him did. We thought this way you would be able to graduate from high school with all of your options open. It was supposed to be a gift to you.”
“Merry Christmas to me.” He stared out the window while the car traveled across the bridge. “So all I have to do here is memorize a list. Shouldn’t be that tough.”
His mother pretended she did not hear while she maneuvered the car through the skimpy Christmas Eve traffic and into the Mount Auburn cemetery. It seemed cold and empty, with no live flowers or trees, just rows of bare stones under the bare trees, without the cheery Christmas decorations scattered across the rest of town. Their absence was actually a little comforting, because Christin could think of few things more unnerving than a tomb decorated for the holidays. He was just starting to be comfortable with his surroundings, making it almost a shock when his mother pulled the car up in front of a stone structure just large enough to hold a few caskets.
“The Devonshire family mausoleum.” Christin’s mother got out of the car and walked up to the intimidating stone door in front of the structure. “The family mailed me the key a few weeks ago. Bring the box, please.”
The plain cardboard box in the back of the car inexplicably held several bottles of metal polish and a large number of rags, which Christin obediently brought over to his mother. She had finished unlocking the door to the mausoleum, but was still standing in front of it with an inscrutable expression.
“They say you can’t take it with you, but Ezekiel Devonshire tried his best to prove them wrong. He had the list I told you about before cast in bronze and fixed to the inside wall right by his casket, and every member of the family studied it and kept it polished, just as he ordered. His sons fought over the privilege, but they obeyed his wishes, and made certain their sons and daughters followed the same rules. And so it has been ever since, year after year. Now it’s your turn, Christin. Go on in.”
She swung the heavy door open, revealing a small, somewhat dusty room with light pouring in through the small stone windows to the side. There was no mistaking Ezekiel Devonshire’s final resting place in the mausoleum, due to the prominence of his sealed casket, but the thick bronze plate on the back wall was what drew Christin’s attention.
It was huge, extending up almost as far as a man could reach and edged with little scrollwork. As his mother had said, the buttery yellow of the bronze was well-polished with only a little hint of corrosion in places where generations of Devonshires had not applied quite enough pressure.
It was also blank except for his own wavering reflection.
Christin’s stunned observation was interrupted by the strong voice of his mother behind him, speaking slowly and deliberately, much as if she were putting the final statements into a criminal deposition. “His sons hated each other, and nearly killed themselves trying to compete with the old man, like there was some sort of contest into who could follow his rules the closest. It wasn’t until they were quite old and their own grandchildren started to work together, making friends with each other and helping one another out before the sons realized something was wrong. They traveled here together, because they did not trust each other individually, and saw what you see now.”
“Where are the words?” asked Christin before the answer became obvious. He glanced back at the box of metal polish and rags before looking at the smooth bronze slab again. “Oh. His children and grandchildren followed his directions. Every generation, until eventually the words were polished away.”
His mother nodded. “At first, the sons were going to have a new bronze slab cast, but after talking for a while, they realized just how much of their lives they had wasted hating each other the way their father hated everybody instead of working together, like their grandchildren.”
“So everybody in the family comes here and sees… this.” Christin walked up to the thick slab of bronze and laid a hand on it as his reflection did likewise. “We see ourselves, instead of the grudges Grandfather Ezekiel wanted to last beyond his death.”
“The old man wanted a legacy.” Christin’s mother put a hand on his shoulder. “He wanted vengeance, retaliation, and hatred.”
“And he got us.” Christin smiled and looked at their indistinct reflections. An hour or two with the metal polish and all of the tarnish would be gone, just the same way as his father had polished this slab of bronze, and his father before him. “I guess the old saying isn’t as false as they say.”
His mother frowned and cocked her head slightly to one side. “What’s that?”
“Great-great-grandfather Ezekiel worked all his life to create a legacy.” He reached out and patted the dusty casket. “And he took it with him.”