Do questions weigh you down and make you wonder?
The world is hard and never gives you peace,
Lay your weary head here on my shoulder,
God will answer everything you seek.”
God knows all my answers. “I’ve been praying for you boys every day for twenty-five years,” Pamela had said. “I think you’re going to find what you’re looking for.”
“Other . . . picture,” I said. Eric tore his attention from the papers and slid the glass off the other picture. At first I thought there was nothing, but there was. Another folded paper, not yellow, but instead clean white. There was only one person who could have written on it. I took it from Eric and opened it myself.
“Jason—”
I almost couldn’t read it. There were just a few sentences, but I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even breathe.
I tried again.
“Jason—
I am at the end. Tonight I will sign my will and I will not return here.
There is no one else to turn to. You have the strength that I no longer have. When everything is yours, you must destroy it all. You will see what must be done, and no one else will understand. They will fight you, but they will not stop you.
Now I understand why you are my son, so that there is someone to right what I have done.
Eric—
Stand with your brother, whatever he does. Only you know how.
My sons—
You are my only achievement and my only hope.”
And then, at the end,
“Jason, my son. I trust you and I am proud of you. You will know what is right.”
It was too much and I was overwhelmed.
There was so much meaning in those words, and more in the words not there. There was no apology for what he knew he was doing to me, hardly even an acknowledgment of his own anguish. That he had left the note where I might never find it spoke much louder of despair than the words themselves.
But now I knew that I had been right. Melvin alone had known without question the truth of power and wealth, and he had answered my questions about them. I would never forget what I had learned.
If I’d found this note the first day, maybe I wouldn’t have lost Katie.
Eric was silent, working out his own understanding of these papers. Around us the light faded and the twilight deepened. All we knew was silence.
And in the silence, free of the babble of questions that had always torn at my mind and my thoughts, I knew that God had given me a life and a purpose.
I shivered in the growing dark, the paper in my hand that so perfectly expressed the man, my father, who’d written it—and that told me why I lived and what my purpose was. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
The Heir Page 33