LINCOLN HIRN

Heorot      

When they got the families all together, there were four dogs and five children, and they played in the meadow between the houses, child and animal indistinguishable save for the fact that the latter still retained some vestigial lupine instinct for avoiding the roots and mole depressions and whatever other hazards lay hidden in the longgrass. And the adults watching from the screen porch, all sat around the table and still with the old woman's seat, empty now for going on nine years, as the unacknowledged focal point. Not a physical chair, of course, because in her later years she had just rolled it with her wherever she went, but a seat all the same, still present and empty and sensed by all eight of them (even John, who had never been to the house before and yet still sensed the absence, still experienced it as an apparition of negative space) as something unfilled and so immovable that it might have been fixed to the wooden deck with carriage bolts. All with the pitcher of tea in the middle of the table sweating in the late August sun while the ice within slowly vanished, still full and only there because the old man, in a halfbaked effort towards propriety, must have figured he ought to offer something other than beer and wine and liquor, like he was afraid that if he didn't the temperance women would show up and beat him over the head or smash up the sideboard or at the very least yell at him in front of his brothers.

The new one, John, was at the far corner of the table next to Jennie. He was asking Aunt Cate about her hens and sitting quietly while she went on about the eggs and the way the birds would sometimes just drop dead and about the raccoons that Uncle Scott sometimes had to shoot at to keep them away from the coop. John listened very carefully and nodded often, as if intent on proving that their provincial ways did not scare him, that even though he had been mock trial captain at Sacred Heart Model in Delaware County and Dea's List at Villanova and down South only because the Virginia law school had been ranked particularly high in Newsweek the year he applied, he was not afraid of their backwardness nor their strange traditions, was not even tempted to wonder if the old man still called it "The War of Northern Aggression" or even "The War Between the States" the way the old partners at the Warwick firm, the ones who still drank when they went out to lunch, sometimes did.

"And do they lay every morning?" John asked, so earnest that Jennie could have run off with him right there, could have thrown her arms around his shoulders and said forget the family and forget Virginia and forget the house. Forget it all and take me away. Could have, if there was any hope of the house going to Warren or Scott or especially Wayne. If there was someone else who could keep it from her father, if the only girls playing out in the meadow weren't dogs, if the only living woman tied to her father by blood wasn't her.
           
"Not every morning," Cate said. "But they all do on different days. So I get at least a few every morning."
           
Jennie could see her father watching, listening. Hoping for something. Deliverance, maybe. For his one and only daughter to disown him and move to Philadelphia and get her halfirish children baptized by some monsignor whose ancestors were still pulling blighted potatoes out of the ground in Kerry when his were charging up that hill in that goddamned state that John might call home but father would keep on calling Pennsylvania. Hoping that something would happen to spare him from going back to that house on the other side of the meadow, the one they all called the Cottage and always had done, because he was the only one with the courage or bitterness to call it by its true name, the name it started out with 170 years ago and the one it kept when it was rebuilt after the War, the name the old woman used to hold over her husband and then her sons in the years before she died, an occurrence that brought with it the one stretch of true happiness father had ever known, a stretch that lasted from the moment he heard about his mother's stroke right up to the moment the will was read.
           
The name that she never called it, even though he knew she thought it. Thought it every time she nagged at his father, every time she doted on the girls she never had. Certainly thought it at the very end, when with her last breath she snatched it away from the eldest of the sons she never wanted, those descendants of the husband's line, the line conceived in the dirt and smutstained hammocks of the same ships where her however-many-times great grandmothers lay in private cabins. The line of enforcers, of triggermen, of the hands that held the whip so her granddaddy could have his clean when he rode off to Richmond to vote to send them all to war. The name that even he could only bring himself to say in fits of drunken resentment, when he would throw his empties in the direction of the Cottage and shout curses out into the suffocating Virginia dark, goddamning the old woman and goddamning his daughter and calling the Cottage by its true name, its old name, the one given it by the original inhabitants of the big house: The Overseer's.

Just by looking at him, Jennie could tell that all John wanted was for it to be over, that he was adding up in his head all the discreet interactions he would need to perform so that when they left he could tell himself that all the uncles and their wives were gathering around the old man to tell him that it was alright, that he was the best they were going to do, to ask him, "Wouldn't you rather it go to him than anyone else? Would it really be so bad if it went to him, a sweet enough boy like he his?"

Jennie had not planned to tell John so soon. Her mercy. Let him live as long as possible in the rented lovenest and the little house he kept saying they would buy, once they had saved enough, in one of those developments off Warwick Boulevard. Let him keep the fantasy a while longer. Let it die out organically. Let the housing market take the blame instead of her. Let her birthright seem a refuge. But when the big saltbox with its chimneys on either end and its eight forwardfacing windows that her grandmother used to put candles in at Christmastime rose up from behind the last stand of trees, she knew suddenly that she could no longer bear the secret alone.

"It's ours," she said, when it came fully into view. "The house, it's ours."

"What?"

"It's mine. From Granny's will. Daddy's only the caretaker. It's mine soon as we get married."

It was the first time she had used the word with him. Which was perhaps what made him stay, what kept him from turning the car around and driving back North to take a job with some firm in a big glassfronted officebuilding with a modern human resources department that was run in a boardroom and not out of the dining room at the James River Country Club over benedictine sandwiches and scotch-and-sodas by four old partners from older families whose histories it would be best not to look too hard into.

Married, she had said. I will marry you if you do this with me. You can have me if you are willing to have it.

"Does he know?" John asked, as they pulled into the driveway.

"Of course he does."

And so John now understood the coolness and the narrow, confronting eyes. The grip too firm even for lawyering. Was smart enough to guess that the old man probably assumed that she would have told him long before that afternoon, that he maybe even assumed that it was the source of his affection for her, that at Virginia (where, surely, a man like him would imagine, the currencies of the past were still measured out and spent) rumor must have spread of her inheritance and the young man from Philadelphia must have heard this rumor and then sought her out because of it. Never imagining the truth of it, which was that John had loved Jennie before they ever spoke and before he had ever even heard her name and for the simple, prosaic, unflattering fact of her remarkable beauty. That he had seen her among the crowd at a lecture given by a visiting professor from a university he had to go back and look up afterwards because as soon as he saw her he had forgotten everything else. That everything he had learned after, from her name to the way her hands felt when she pressed them to his face to the fact that she stood to inherit a half-decrepit mansion spared from the torch only because its owners had, once upon a time, had the good sense to bow to General Butler's every whim, had been but a confirmation of the rightness of that initial instinct. Incapable of imagining that for John it was all completely meaningless, save for its association with the woman from across the lecture hall. Incapable of understanding that to him the house and the father and perhaps even the entire Commonwealth of Virginia were real only insofar as they were associated with her.

Incapable because to her father she was no more than a thief. Just as she had been since the second the will was read. The fact that she was seventeen when the act was committed and not party to it in any way of course of no consequence whatsoever. The sin of the grandmother, the sin of the daughter, the betrayal of his own father, who had been the only one willing to marry the thirty-one-year old daughter of his signer, the only child of an old family gone to seed, the father who in one last act of loyalty to the generations upon generations of country squires for whom his fathers had worked had married the one deemed too difficult to be married by anyone better, and in doing so had saved the line if not the name from ruin, who had given her three sons to bear his name and for her to be ungrateful for, that sin the same for her as for them all, daughter and grandmother and on and on all the way back to Eve. And the worst cruelty of all the provision of marriage, of course. The twisted knife. The eldest daughter of the eldest son shall come into ownership of the property on the day of her marriage. Not her eighteenth or her twenty-first birthday but her wedding day. So that when at last the name was written on the deed it would not be his or his father's or his father's father's but some unknown other's. A Pennsylvanian, as it would turn out. In Virginia barely four years. And his name still preferable to that of the overseers'. 

Which to John, of course, was unforgivable. Thinking Jennie a thief. To think her any more than what she was, which was better than anything the old man deserved. She spoke, sometimes, about how he used to treat her and Wayne. How he kept them only on weekends and only when he didn't have anything better to do. Until her mother died, a woman not sainted in Jennie's retelling but good enough. There, at least, which was more than could be said of the father.

"But he was moved back in with Granny by the time Mother passed and we had to go back to him," Jennie said, when she first told John about it. "So me and Wayne at least had her, and Warren and Scott were around enough, especially once Granny got really sick."

"The better brothers?"

She nodded.

"Not all that high a bar. But yes. The better brothers."

When it was over, he kissed Cate and Mary Anne on each cheek and shook Warren and Scott and Wayne's hands and ruffled the little cousins' hair and when at last he took the father's hand he could feel the strength of his hatred coursing up from where they clasped, but when he went to meet the old and bitter eyes, John found them fixed instead on Jennie, and he knew then that he was merely a vessel for a hatred that had not only long predated him but, in actuality, had nothing to do with him at all, that would have been just as strong had he been anyone else, directed at him only because it was his hand, by sheer random cosmic chance, held within the father's own.

"Who would it go to?" John asked, when they were back in the car.

"What, the house?"

"Yeah. Who would it go to if you gave it up? Or never got married?"

"To him, I think. And for real. Not as caretaker, as the owner. There's no other girls."

"What if Wayne got married and had a daughter?"

Jennie shrugged. "Maybe. But he'd fight it. It's not how the will is written."

When she woke up the next morning, John was already at the kitchen table. He had his last bank statement and a pad and pencil and calculator laid out in front of him. She poured a cup of coffee and sat down across from him and watched him scratch out numbers on the pad. When he was done, he looked up at her.

"Alright," he said.

"Alright what?"

"I can do it. I got enough saved. If you know your ring size, I can go out and get it right now and put it in a box and drive you over and do it in front of him, if you'd like. Unless there's an heirloom or something of hers you want instead."

Jennie shook her head. He couldn't tell if she was crying.

"Uh-uh," she said. "Last of the jewelry all got sold when she died. House is it, really. Sorry, if you were hoping for more."

"Nothing more to hope for." He got up and went to get his shoes.

"Alright," he said, when he was finished pulling them on. "Alright. You want to come with me to pick it out or do you want it to be a surprise?"

She stared into her coffee. "No," she said, after a little while. "I want to come with you. Think I ought to pick it out for myself."

 

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