—Everything.
Emmett smiled.
—I’m headed out to the barn to check on the car. You want to come?
—Now? asked Billy in surprise. Hold on! Wait a second! Don’t go without me!
Having carefully laid out the silver dollars in chronological order, Billy now swept them up and began pouring them back into the tobacco tin as quickly as he could. Closing the lid, he put the tin back in his backpack and the backpack back on his back. Then he led the way downstairs and out the door.
As they crossed the yard, Billy looked over his shoulder to report that Mr. Obermeyer had put a padlock on the barn doors, but Sally had broken it off with the crowbar she kept in the back of her truck.
Sure enough, at the barn door they found the bracket—with the padlock still secured to it—hanging loosely on its screws. Inside, the air was warm and familiar, smelling of cattle though there hadn’t been cattle on the farm since Emmett was a boy.
Emmett paused to let his eyes adjust. Before him was the new John Deere and behind that a battered old combine. Proceeding to the back of the barn, Emmett stopped before a large, sloping object draped with canvas.
—Mr. Obermeyer took off the cover, said Billy, but Sally and I put it back.
Gripping the canvas by the corner, Emmett pulled with both hands until it was piled at his feet, and there, waiting just where he’d left it fifteen months ago, was a powder-blue, four-door hardtop—his 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser.
After running his palm along the surface of the hood, Emmett opened the driver’s door and climbed inside. For a moment, he sat with his hands on the steering wheel. When he’d bought her, she already had 80,000 miles on the odometer, dents in the hood, and cigarette burns in the seat covers, but she ran smoothly enough. Inserting and turning the key, he pushed the starter, ready for the soothing rumble of the engine—but there was silence.
Billy, who had been keeping his distance, approached, tentatively.
—Is it broken?
—No, Billy. The battery must be dead. It happens when you leave a car idle for too long. But it’s an easy thing to fix.
Looking relieved, Billy sat down on a hay bale and took off his backpack.
—You want another cookie, Emmett?
—I’m fine. But you go right ahead.
As Billy opened his backpack, Emmett climbed out of the car, stepped to the rear, and opened the trunk. Satisfied that the upright lid blocked his brother’s view, Emmett pulled back the felt that covered the recess in which the spare tire rested and gently ran his hand around its outer curve. At the top, he found the envelope with his name on it, right where his father had said it would be. Inside was a note in his father’s script.
Another handwritten missive from another ghost, thought Emmett.
Dear Son,
By the time you read this, I imagine the farm will be in the hands of the bank. You may be angry or disappointed with me as a result, and I wouldn’t blame you for being so.
It would shock you to know how much my father left me when he died, how much my grandfather left my father, and how much my great-grandfather left him. Not simply stocks and bonds, but houses and paintings. Furniture and tableware. Memberships in clubs and societies. All three of those men were devoted to the Puritan tradition of finding favor in the eyes of the Lord by leaving more to their children than had been left to them.
In this envelope, you will find all that I have to leave you—two legacies, one great, one small, both a form of sacrilege.
As I write this, it shames me some to know that in leading my life as I have, I have broken the virtuous cycle of thrift established by my forebears. But at the same time, it fills me with pride to know that you will undoubtedly achieve more with this small remembrance than I could have achieved with a fortune.
With love and admiration,
Your father, Charles William Watson
Attached to the letter by a paper clip was the first of the two legacies—a single page torn from an old book.
Emmett’s father wasn’t one to lash out at his children in anger even when they deserved it. In fact, the only time Emmett could remember his father expressing unmitigated ire toward him was when he was sent home from school for defacing a textbook. As his father made painfully clear that night, to deface the pages of a book was to adopt the manner of a Visigoth. It was to strike a blow against that most sacred and noble of man’s achievements—the ability to set down his finest ideas and sentiments so that they might be shared through the ages.
For his father to tear a page from any book was a sacrilege. What was even more shocking was that the page was torn from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays—that book which his father held in greater esteem than any other. Near the bottom, his father had carefully underlined two sentences in red ink.