Free The Son by Philipp Meyer

She looked around her. There was a haze in the room. She wondered if there was a problem with the flue. And the throbbing in her head; it was not the pain of a stroke. There had been someone in the room with her, she was sure of it.
     
    T HE THING THAT had gone wrong in her children . . . she had always assumed some weakness from Hank’s side, though it might also have been the city, the schools they attended, the friends they had made, their liberal teachers. There were things children did in the city, but work was not one of them, and spending weekends riding with the vaqueros was just another form of entertainment, like dressage or skiing. Making it worse, in order to get to the ranch and back in time for school on Monday, it was necessary to fly there. Her children were not stupid. They knew that real vaqueros did not take private planes to work.
    Meanwhile they had no constitution. Working them during the summer was out of the question. July and August were the hottest of hot months, hot as the plains of Africa, a branding fire you could never escape. Clothes soaked through in minutes, a filthy paste over every inch of skin, and while she’d grown up thinking this was normal, unpleasant but normal, her children could not stand it even for an hour. Susan had passed out and fallen off her horse.
    J.A. was embarrassed by this, though no one else was. She had begun to doubt herself. It was only later, when the children were grown, that she knew she had been right, that once people grew used to free money, to laboring only when the mood struck them, they began to think there was something low about work. They became desperate to excuse their own laziness. They came to believe that their family property was something inherent to life itself, like water or air or clean sheets.
    You ought to give all this money away right now, she thought. But it was too late. She had ruined her daughter; perhaps her son as well. She thought about this and felt sick . . . the money was not the only thing; she knew what she had done to her children. She could not figure out if leaving them more money was penance or some strange form of additional punishment. You are a bad Christian, she thought.
    When her father died she had immediately stopped going to church. If prayer could not even keep your family alive, she did not see what good it was. But after she and Hank moved to Houston, she had started going again. You were marked if you didn’t. She did not really think about whether she believed, though in the past decade, her faith had come back, and they said that was all that mattered. Being old, you had no real choice—salvation or eternal nothingness—and it was no wonder who you saw in church, it was not young people with hangovers and their entire lives ahead of them.
    She remembered a sermon in which the minister named some of the interesting people you would meet in heaven: Martin Luther King Jr. (for the blacks), Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan. Except the minister would not have mentioned Gandhi. John Wayne, maybe. You wondered: all the interesting people in heaven, everyone would want to talk to them. It didn’t take much thinking to realize that there would have to be a separate heaven for famous people, just like on earth, a place they would not be bothered, a private community. She wondered if she would go there. But in heaven there was no such thing as money, so perhaps people would stop caring about her. Trump, Walton, Gates, herself; they would be no more interesting than the garbagemen.
    Of course it would be nice to be reunited with Hank, with her boys Tom and Ben, her brothers as well, but what about Ted, who had been her lover for twenty years after Hank? Someone would be jealous. And Thomas—that small detail—would he be there?
    If you listened to what they said about heaven, it was a massive city with twelve gates. No eating, bowel movements, or sex; you lay around in a trance listening to harp music. Like a