Tiger Heron

Legacy Children

51 Legacy Children From the leather seat of the eighteenth-century carriage that carried the childhoods of my friend and her brothers to a castle in the Dordogne— where, with their parents, they carved and painted Belgian draft horses and wrote droll plays in which they starred, wearing plumed costumes pillaged from the family’s steamer trunks— I understood that my parents did not burden me with selling or keeping the mead hall. No, the Florida condo sold quickly, also the Cadillac. They did not leave me in thrall to a troupe of siblings, including itinerant Henry, the handsome farrier, enormous and beloved in the Northeast Kingdom for his way with a difficult steed. No, my parents did not leave me a hunger for relations made fantastical in childhood and thus forever. Or, with a 1000-piece, painted, cast-iron Swiss circus for which the children baked clay figurines in the great room’s stove, and where, from the ceiling, hung a five-foot replica of the Santa Maria with cherry wood masts and hand-sewn sails which the family employed in sea narrative dramas of transatlantic disaster. My parents gave me a sister, but she took her life, confirming griefs we couldn’t disable. They gave me the code to punch for escape, the humble Quakers, their accidental feminism, their refusals. My shot at happiness? Outsourcing myself to strangers. 52 How will my friend dispose of the banked barn that holds the carriage and the Alps? The thrill of opening nights and toasts and cast parties? The forest where they rode to the hounds— mother in the lead, father in the rear? If she abandons it, where will she go? And will she find me when she arrives there? ...