Legacy

As I stood at my father's gravesite, watching him slowly being lowered into the ground, I heard the muffled sobs of friends and realtives alike. One of my aunts, a tall, broad beast of a woman with a flair for the dramatic and a desperate need for attention cried out, "I can't believe it, I just can't believe it!"

"Believe it," I thought to myself, annoyed that here we were again with Henrietta making it all about her. "It was hard to believe he lasted this long!" My father had been given 6 months to live every six months for the past 7 years. His death, from terminal pancreatic cancer, wasn't a surprise to anyone. And to be honest, after his final few months of suffering, his death, in some way, was a bit of a relief. Noone should have to suffer like that. And to watch him being taken to the brink of certain death, accepting and coming to terms with it, only to rally over and over again, until he didn't, was the kind of rollercoaster ride no one wants to be on.

I had tears in my eyes too. But my tears, I knew, were mostly for me. The one person I had ever felt a connection to, that loved me and understood me, was gone. After 48 years, I was truly alone. I stood silently, reviewing my entire life.

I never fit with my family, or should I say either of my families. It was obvious from an early age that I was adopted. I was a tall, slim, blonde blue-eyed child with two Cree parents. My mother hated me. I mean hated my guts, and said so at every opportunity. She kept me fed and clothed, and that was about it, and even that, she reminded me often, was a chore she had been goaded into.

My father, on the other hand, adored me. He worshipped the very ground I stood on. He explained that my biological parents were his younger brother, only 19 at the time of my birth, and a young lady of Scottish extraction. I was the 3rd child and final child to be born of their romance before my birth mother died of some sort of infection when I was an infant. As the story goes, hearing of the hard time his baby brother was having, my father stepped in to help any way he could and ended up falling in love with what he called the most beautiful baby he'd ever seen. He ended up adopting me presumably to take some strain off of his brother who kept the older children.

My father and I were so close people often remarked that we looked alike. I could never see it. He was, like the rest of his family, more on the short side, with black hair, smooth dark skin and brown eyes. Aside from maybe my high cheekbones and almond shaped eyes, you'd never know I was related to his side of the family at all.

My biological father interrupted my thoughts, "it's up to me to see to you now," he said with a smile. I forced a polite grin as I shook his hand off my shoulder. The man was a stranger to me. I'd met and spent time with him over the years, dozens of times. I even spent a month with him and my biological siblings, two brothers, when I was a teenager, but still he was a stranger. I felt nothing for him. Nothing at all. No connection, no feeling of familiarity, nothing. Honestly, he could be any guy off the street. I wasn't expecting lightning bolts, but I was expecting something.

It was the same with my brothers. They looked nothing like me, both having the dark hair, eyes and skin of their/our father. I stood head and shoulders above them, even though they were men. If either of them were 5'6" I'd be surprised.

As the crowd dispersed, Daddy now in the ground, I felt another hand on my shoulder. This one was large, heavy. I turned around to see a huge, proud looking man in a tailored grey suit and a sleek ponytail. I'd never seen him before.

"Jennifer?" he asked.

I nodded.

"My name is James Francis," he offered his hand, "I was your father's attorney."

I shook his hand. I was surpised my father had an attorney. When I had decided to go to law school he'd made fun of me saying, "if you're going to do all that schooling, shouldn't you be something useful like a doctor and not a liar?" He thought that was hilarious - the play on words lawyer/liar. He had no use for lawyers. He didn't trust them and made no secret about it.

Mr. Francis smiled, "he wasn't one for lawyers, was he?" he joked. Then he continued, "however, once he became ill, he thought he should get his affairs in order."

I nodded again. Made sense, I suppose.

"I have something for you," he said, his face clouded over with an odd solemnity, "I don't know the contents, but my impression is this is something you should open on your own."

"Is there a will?" I asked. Not that it mattered, my parents had nothing. Well, they had just above nothing. My father always worked, when he was healthy, and we always had a car, and food. But we never owned our home and never had fancy things. If there were $50 in his bank account, I'd have been surprised. And even if there was, it'd rightfully been my mother's.

"Yes," he said, "but this is something else." He turned, pointing to his black Mercedes across the lawn.

I followed him.

As he handed me the box, wrapped in plain brown paper, he explained, as though he really needed me to understand him, "I don't know the contents, it came to me exactly as it is now. My instructions were to give it to you upon his death."

I reminded him that I was an attorney as well and that he needn't spell everything out as though I required explanation.

He laughed. "I just wanted to make sure you got it before you went back to New York."

I thanked him and we said our goodbyes. I wasn't in my hotel room 5 minutes before I tore into the box. My heart fell initially when I saw 2 envelopes and a smaller box. I'm not sure why. I hadn't been expecting a box full of lost treasure. I guess it just seemed to be a big box for such small contents.

I opened the little box first. It was a tarnished gold chain with a small, tacky pendant, a bull with a star on either side of it. Okay, my father's birthday was May 13, so his sign was Taurus. I pulled it from the box and fingered it gently thinking perhaps the piece had some sort of sentimental value to him. The bull. A fitting sign for the most bull-headed person I knew, aside from myself. In fact that was one of the things my mother used to use as an insult when she was berating me for some transgression or another.

"You, you, you," she'd yell, "you're a Bastien alright, bull-headed just like your damn father!"

She was right. I remember taking great pride in that. I still do.

The first envelope had a letter:

To My Stinker (that was the pet name he had for me):

I'm dead now or you wouldn't be reading this. What I didn't have the courage to tell you in life, I tell you now. You might think I'm a coward and you may hate me for lying to you all these years. I hope not because I love you. I always have.

In this box, you'll see a necklace and some pictures. The pictures are of Carol, your birth mother and I. The necklace is something Carol gave me as a birthday gift. I never wore it, I wasn't one for jewelery, I kept it in my wallet. All these years, I kept it. She was so proud of it, spent half her pay on it from the diner. There's no easy way to say this, but I am your father. Not just legally. I AM your father, in every way.

You knew for a long time that your mother and I weren't happy together. You said so yourself. In many ways, she was a cold woman. Well, I was a man, and a weak one, I suppose. Especially when it came to beautiful women.

Your real mother left your father back in 1970 (one of about 100 times she did), and I was home, looking after dad. We met and commiserated over our unhappy lives and one thing led to another. It didn't last long, maybe 3 or 4 months and she went back to my brother (as she always did). I can't say I regret it because I got the best thing in my life from it, you. You are exactly like her, beautiful, smart and full of fire! I loved her and she loved me, for a time. It was complicated.

Mom didn't know, well, she didn't have proof, but she suspected and often threw it in my face. I always denied it. It was easier that way, for all of us, her, you, and yes, me.

I hope you don't hate me. And please don't be angry with Mom, she'll need you now that I'm gone.

Love,

Daddy.

I read the words over and over, allowing them to sink in. I opened the final envelope. It contained 3 Polaroid snapshots of my birth mother and my father making goofy faces. She was stunning, tall, slender, but strong looking, stately! I could plausibly imagine her on horseback fighting alongside William Wallace and being a force to be reckoned with. Yet she had delicate, feminine features and flaxen curls. And he was so handsome. They looked happy and made quite a nice couple. It all made sense now. All the resentment, all the strange looks, all the whispers. More importantly, I made sense now, and really, I think I knew it all along. Not exactly consciously, but on some level, I knew.

He didn't ask me to continue to keep his secret. But I did. His baby brother is now 73 and my adopted mother is well over 80. Although I'm sure some of the family have a pretty good idea of what actually happened, I see no need to open this long sealed can of worms. It's not like we can go back and change anything. And really, at least for me, the truth can only serve one person, and that's the person who opened the box.