Free A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston Page B

has already cast you out? He hadn’t so much bequeathed him the hat as he had shoved it in his face. Looking at the box, he fancied that the answer was literally contained within it, a note of explanation from his father sewn into the lining of the hat or that of the box. He felt like ripping box and hat apart just to satisfy himself that they held no secrets. It doesn’t matter if you destroy it, burn it, sell it, lose it, give it or throw it away. It will ever be an affront to you . He could not in this manner decipher the meaning of the hat, for how would he know, who would tell him, which conjecture was the one? It might take nothing less than the decipherment of his father to puzzle out the meaning of the hat, nothing less than the completion of his book.
    He remembered again how his father’s face looked in repose. There was still the hint of the face of a man who in his youth might have been like Landish and had once had put to him by his own father the question the hat might be meant to pose to Landish: what do you want and what are you willing to do to get it and how much of what you could have are you truly willing to renounce in the name of virtue?
    He tried in vain to convince himself he didn’t care why his father wanted him to have the hat. Didn’t care what kind of final gesture of contempt or last attempt to change his mind it was meant to be.
    Perhaps his father meant to tell him that he was all too typical a Druken, his nature inimical to creation, suited for destruction, the only thing that distinguished him from them being the self-abhorrence that he mistook as proof that his basic nature was unlike theirs. His father and the others had not lamented or made excuses for their natures. All the self-abhorrence he could muster would not redeem him if he simply lacked the gumption to act according to whom and what he was. What would he have done if his father had not disowned him, if he had left everything to him, attaching no conditions to the inheritance of his estate, the Gilbert included?
    He wouldn’t have renounced his father’s fortune, though he knew it to have been immorally acquired. He wouldn’t have scuttled the Gilbert . He would have sold it to another sealing skipper or some wealthy merchant, someone who had provoked almost as much dark talk as his father had. He would have accepted his inheritance with the sincere intention of doing something more worthwhile with it than simply enlarging it by any means for which he could escape all blame. He would have convinced himself that, even tended by a Druken, afoul tree need not blossom forth in a foul manner. Would that have made him a better man than Abram Druken or merely an opportunistic hypocrite? It might be that the answer to such questions lay nowhere but in his book.
    Landish brought out the sealskin hat and Deacon smoothed it with his hand. “It’s soft,” he said. “Is that what a seal feels like?”
    “It’s something like what a pup feels like,” Landish said. “Their white coats are not as long as this. This hair is woven together.”
    Landish looked at the hat. Perhaps his father was taunting him. Do something with your life that rivals what I did with mine. Measure up to me. Win the laurel wreath of something . But that wasn’t quite it because writing didn’t measure up to sealing in his father’s estimation. Nothing did. Writers were ineffectuals who came close to not counting at all. His father might merely have been daring him to decline the hat. Tempt fate by declining it.
    There appeared in a local paper:
IN MARCH OF EIGHTEEN NINETY-FIVE
The news rings out from every bell:
The Gilbert’s dead with God survive
While Captain Druken burns in hell.
    Landish decided that it was time to take Deacon to see the Crosses.
    He knew that Deacon’s mother was buried in a boulder-strewn Catholic cemetery called Mount Carmel, but he had never been there. All he knew was that the graves (one empty) of Deacon’s parents were