When Danny Sylvester lay bleeding out in the rust-red dust
of that Miccosukee trailer park, we have no way of knowing whether or not he
was aware of the twenty-seven million dollars Uncle Walter had in mind to leave
him in his will. None of the rest of us had any inkling that Uncle Walter had
that kind of money, but he had taken the boy, the foreman's son, under his
dubious wing years earlier, so maybe Danny knew. Nor can we imagine what Mr
Sylvester thought about handing his son over to an eccentric old bachelor
farmer who'd had no experience raising anything but eyebrows until he started
growing watermelons on the Florida Panhandle in the late Fifties. Walter sent
Danny to school, took him along on annual voyages to Europe and the world
beyond aboard the Cunard line, showered him with expensive gifts and generally
treated him as the son he'd never had; or so we'd like to think. What darker
impulses and stifled yearnings may have motivated this lonely soul I can't say,
but he had a dozen nieces and nephews whom he hardly knew.
Danny was about my brother's age and we'd
see him and some of the kids from the other farm families when we took the
Silver Meteor down to Thomasville to spend Christmas at our Grandmother's place
nearby. There were often presents under the tree for these kids, too, and one
year – I might have been eight years old – I grabbed at a pair of shiny, chrome
six-shooters with pearly, plastic handles, holstered on a Naugahyde cartridge
belt and hanging like an ornament from a low bough of the massive tree. I was
sure they were for me and I'd been craving them ever since I peeked in through
the living-room doors well before dawn. Uncle Walter quickly intervened;
setting down a tumbler of breakfast bourbon, he handed the cap-guns off to
Danny and a box-set of The Jungle Books to me. And that might have been
the last time I saw or gave much thought to Danny Sylvester until the night I
heard he'd been killed.
Whatever effect Walter's attentions and
influence may have had on Danny over the years, they didn't prevent him from
marrying, and it was for the purpose of collecting his wife from the arms of
another man that he set out for the trailer park that fateful night. I picture
him in his kitchen, drinking, enraged, stumbling about in search of his pistol,
about to go off half-cocked. Was Uncle Walter there with him, trying to talk
Danny down? Did he reach for the car keys or the gun in a futile attempt to
stop this madness before things went too far? In the event, they arrived
together and I imagine poor Uncle Walter grasping at Danny's arm or shirttails,
beseeching him to stop as he broke free and ran up the cinder-block stoop to
hammer sobs and threats out into the sticky night upon the rusty, metal door.
We've all seen the movie; this can't end well. A man came to the door, I've
heard; there was a fight down in the scabrous yard and Danny was shot to death
in the desiccated dirt beneath the Spanish moss. I'd like to think he died in
Walter's arms, the same embrace my uncle might have spent so many years yearning
to enfold his Danny in.
The last time I saw Uncle Walter – indeed,
one of the few times I'd ever seen him - was at my wedding. Why he decided to
come all the way to Maine for this event, to celebrate the marriage of a nephew
he'd never known, might have had more to
do with saying goodbye to my mother and aunt, his two half sisters, at what he
knew to be the last leg of his life than any fondness for me. He gave us a
curious little enameled wire candle holder as a wedding present, a sort of
crown of thorns; he gave me a Norelco shaver as a groom's gift. We knew nothing
of his fortune on that day. Some years later, a few weeks after Mom had said
he'd died, someone dressed in Jackass pants, clutching a cocktail, approached
me at some event and shrieked, “ Was that your Grandfather who just left all
that money to that school?”
“My uncle,” I muttered, brushing flecks of
crabmeat spittle and endive from my shirtfront. “ What money? What school?” And
that's the first I'd heard of it. In fact, the patrons and alumni of
Westminster School knew all about Uncle Walter's generous endowment before
anyone in the family even knew he'd died. He might have left us each a million
dollars and still been able to leave the single greatest gift in history to a
private, secondary school. A school, it turned out, he'd spent only one year
at, a post-graduate year, no less, in 1935. Bereft of Danny Sylvester and not
wanting to corrupt his extended family with an embarrassment of riches, some
have speculated that Walter left his fortune to this place with the
understanding that buildings and arenas might be built to bear his name, a
legacy he craved but could not achieve in the shadow of his powerful father, a
politician and statesman, a man of consequence. Many months later, my brother,
who was Uncle Walter's godson, received a check from the estate for the
improbable sum of two hundred and fifty dollars; his assessment may be closer
to the mark. It is my brother's contention that it was during that glorious
Spring of 1935 that our Uncle Walter, however fleetingly, discovered and acted
upon his stifled sexuality.
Whatever the case, he must have been
unrivaled in the world of watermelons.
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