Free The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen Page B

legacy.
Pop made him an offer, and the store was his.
“I didn’t have parents,” Pop would say. “My father was
a broom and my mother was a mop, and they taught me all I needed to
know.” Maybe if Pop had grown up in a real family he would have had a
better idea of how to be a father, Jason sometimes thought, instead of simply
browbeating his sons with lessons about elbow grease and honesty.
By the time Jason was in high school, Pop was a ranking member of the Boosters
Club, meeting with the other local businessmen to trumpet their own virtues and
draft plans for the future of their city. Despite his Irish roots, he was an
outspoken proponent of Prohibition—“Booze makes young people
lazy,” he warned his sons—and later an opponent of speakeasies,
even if he himself indulged at home with the occasional glass of whiskey or
scotch. He wrote letters to the editor deploring the prevalence of truants
running about downtown (and pilfering from his shelves), and he happily gave
money to candidates for city council who supported business (and who,
unbeknownst to him, would soon become very good friends indeed with the
supermarket owners who were eyeing expansion into Lincoln City).
The family store may have been what brought the Firesons out of their cramped
apartment and into a modest house in a tree-lined neighborhood, but it had
never interested Jason as a career. He’d always thought of it as punishment.
Stacking crates, unpacking boxes, filling the shelves, taking inventory,
enduring his father’s constant criticism and moralizing—Jason did
all these things, from a young age, just as he raked leaves or washed the
family car. But he sure didn’t plan on being a professional leaf raker as
an adult, so why should he work at the store, either? Let his brothers take
over. Whit in particular seemed the natural choice; Pop was different with him,
funny and carefree. Whenever Pop imparted advice to his youngest—telling
him, for example, that most men were lazy and that the hardworking man had an
instant advantage over his competitors— young Whit would listen with a
look of awe in his eyes, as if it was an honor to receive such guidance.
Life was a contest, according to Pop, even a battle. You needed to be strong,
of course, but also upstanding and honest—a capitalist Sir
Galahad—for fortune to shine on you. He worked long hours and spent much
of his time at home reading various business papers and journals, ignoringthe chaos of his household until he felt called upon to
interrupt with lessons of struggle and success.
When Jason was eighteen, only two months away from graduation, he dared to tell
his father that he wasn’t sure he wanted to work at the store after he
finished school.
They were sitting on the front porch, Pop’s cigar burning in an ashtray
between them. “And I don’t really see myself being a college boy,
either.”
“You don’t want to work , Jason.” Pop wasn’t thin
anymore, his hair had gone gray, and he looked older than he was. “You
want it all handed to you.”
“No, sir, it’s just that—”
“You want to skate by on charm for as long as you can. You got by on
smiling at the teachers and getting your friends to pass you their notes, sure,
congratulations. But those tricks don’t work in the adult world, and
suddenly all you’ll have to show for yourself is laziness and a smile
that won’t last after you’ve taken a few hard knocks.”
“I don’t plan to be lazy, Pop. I just want to go in a different
direction.”
“You’ve had a pretty nice life, never really having to scrap for
anything.”
“I can scrap just fine.” Jason straightened. He was an inch taller
than Pop and already more muscular.
“I don’t mean scrapping for girls, or for attention. I mean
scrapping to get by.”
God, not this again. Patrick Fireson’s life had been a series of
obstacles to clear. He had conjured invisible advantages from the darkness, had
taken emptiness and poverty and turned