The Nature of My Inheritance by Bradford Morrow

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