The Nature of My Inheritance by Bradford Morrow Page A

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