The Nature of My Inheritance Read Online Free

rare, or so it seemed, that I
couldn’t even find a copy offered for sale by any
book dealer online and, not knowing as yet how
to locate auction records, had to conclude the
thing was basically priceless. I marveled at its
text, not a line of which I could read, and at its
agelessness, these words written in 524 AD or
thereabouts, according to my research, while this
Boethius, about whom I knew nothing before
that morning, was in jail for treason, brought to
his knees by yellow-belly treachery. In other
words, an outlaw I could get behind. His book
seemed to make a bunch of nods to god, but really was a chat with the beautiful Lady Philosophy—
Amanda’s face floated into view—about
how fame and fortune melt away, about how all
of us are good inside even though we do wrong
things, about how prisoners should be treated
with kindness by their captors, about how god
doesn’t finally run things but men of free will
do. Awesomeness incarnate, I thought. I could
have spent the whole rest of the term in school
twenty-four-seven and not learned as much as
I did that morning, sitting with what I began to
wonder wasn’t just maybe a stolen Boethius and
chewing over what my father was doing with it
in his possession, not to mention the other concealed
rarities I found.
    With the exception of one, which I guessed
the reverend used to read from, not a single solitary
Bible I inherited wasn’t hollowed out with
a rare book secreted inside. I found out they
were called smuggler’s Bibles, and were used in
the old days for a purpose that wasn’t much different
than what my dad seemed to be using
them for. It was pretty smart of the old man,
smarter than I suppose I’d have given him credit
for knowing, that if you wanted to hide something
in a place nobody would bother looking,
a good old Bible was perfectly suited to the task.
    I started making a list of titles and a tally of
market values, aware that my phony cold would
have to worsen over the next couple of days so I
would have time to finish the job. Since I rarely
got sick and had a real excuse for coming down
with something—exhaustion from the shock of
losing my dad—my mother was lenient about
letting me continue to stay home from school
that week. My poor brother, who saw right
through my hoax, writhed with jealousy. But
there wasn’t a thing he could do, especially after
that bogus cough of his became a running joke
at mealtimes. So I tucked the aspirin and cold
medication pills in my cheek, just as I had seen
in the movies, drank water from the glass my
mom handed me, swallowed mightily, then spat
out the pills onto my palm the minute she
turned her back. I managed to drink hot tea on
the sly before she put the thermometer in my
mouth to take my temperature, and the results
were impressive. Part of me wished I had played
this game of charades earlier, but I knew my father
would have called me out in a heartbeat,
laid a choice line of scripture on me about lying,
and that would have been curtains, no encore.
    But what about him and lying? Or, if not
lying, keeping a secret from his family to the
tune of half a million plus for starters—these
books added up fast, reaching into six figures even before I was a quarter of the way through
the trove. Just for example, the first edition in
English, 1640, of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The
Prince , which I learned was the greatest textbook
of all time for political leaders interested in
wielding power with an iron fist, brought in the
neighborhood of sixty grand or more. Little brat
of a book, too, a duodecimo they called it. Or
what about Voltaire’s Candide , one of a dozen or
so copies of what was known as the quote-unquote
true first edition, published in Geneva in
1759? A sheaf of fussy notes about its “points”
that verified it as legitimate was tucked into the
smuggler’s part of the Bible underneath Candide itself. Online, a British book dealer—I wondered
if they ought to call themselves bookies?—had
one of