Chapter 5 – Elephants and Parasols...
Mercy Gable felt the back of her neck burn. No matter the size of the parasol she carried on each summer walk, no matter the layers of sunscreen she smeared over her skin, no matter she never went outdoor without long pants and long sleeves, no matter she always wrapped the bright pink scarf around her throat, Mercy could not prevent the sun from soaking her skin and turning her pallor to a blistered and flaming red.
She lived in a home filled with photos, and from those frames, Mercy knew her ancestral manor grounds once grew groves of trees capable of providing her better shade. Yet those trees had been felled and sold to a furniture maker. The trees shared the same selling, auctioning and pawning fate as did any of her family’s heirlooms that might have passed to Mercy. Of all the treasures she imagined as she paced through her family’s ancestral grounds, Mercy dreamed most of the trees.
Mercy shifted her pink parasol and hoped a twist would obstruct the rays burning the back of her neck. Regardless the sunburn, Mercy preferred passing the summer’s hottest afternoons strolling through her family’s emptying grounds to spending the hours in the levels of her ancestral, Victorian home. Her aunts had sold the air conditioning long ago, and the home felt like a kiln in the summer.
The county once considered the Gable family among its finest. Four generations past, Mercy’s great-great-grandfather applied the dynamite skills acquired laying down railroad to the drilling needs of the oil fields. Explosions and flames claimed many of the men who strove to make their fortunes by making the earth bleed, and Gabe Gable counted all of his brothers’ tombstones before he turned old. Yet Gabe Gable survived. He lost his left arm, and he burned the same side of his face. But he survived, and so his possessions multiplied as steadily as the oil towers marking his empire like flags.
Perhaps because he was the founder of his family’s fortune, perhaps because he knew too well the sacrifice wealth wrenched from his body, Gabe’s favorite luxury was investment. He purchased coal mines, copper pits, smelters, foundries and refineries. By the time Gabe Gable granted death the permission to escort him to the land of shades a day shy of his hundredth and sixth birthday, his empire extended to aluminum, tin, glass, and brick, with a shipping fleet capable of insuring each component reached its proper place. But Gabe Gable did not build the home whose ruins Mercy would one day inhabit. He did not collect the treasures that Mercy’s aunts would one day pawn.
Gabe’s son and successor Luke became the first Gable to invest the empire’s fortune on wealth’s trappings. He hired the most the admired architects and spared no expense in material or labor for the construction of the Victorian manor, a sprawling home filled with books, paintings and lace. Luke entertained colonels and governors in his home’s halls. Luke kept the empire’s ledgers in black, but he spent on a scale his father would never have approved. He filled the acres surrounding his manse with alabaster statues. Shrubbery mazes provided alcoves for church socials and secret trysts. A pond was dug and filled just beyond the iron front gate, stocked with schools of shimmering gold fish, topped by imparted black swans. Luke believed he held a sacred duty to see that his family’s fortune, built upon ugly resources of coal and slag, become transformed into the beauty of shimmering diamond necklaces and gleaming, manicured lawns.
Mercy’s grandfather George learned little else from his father Luke than the duty to transform wealth into sparkle, a task he pursued with a faith to make any Puritan or Imam proud. George crowded the walls of the manse with the stuffed heads of his safari hunts. A purveyor of the wild, George erected a zoo of wrought iron cages, housing elephants, giraffes, monkeys and tigers – determined to share the grandeur of such creatures when the camera failed to do them justice. George’s wild pursuits wrenched awful costs. There were yachts for oversee travel, the commissioning of freighters to return creatures home. Hunting guides required payment. The upgrade of hunting weaponry demanded investment. And George, who always stared upon the empty spaces on globes and maps, spent so little time attending to the responsibilities of his empire’s commerce. He trusted too many chief operation officers, too many attorneys, too many accountants, too many advisors until the first cracks undermined the Gable empire.
Though he married and divorced many wives, George Gable could not acquire the animal he most desired. None of his marriages produced sons, though George’s attempts to sire a male heir left him with an army of daughters. The sisters inherited their father’s taste for the exotic, while also inheriting their father’s debt instead of their great-grandfather’s coin. The aunts watched the Gable fortunes tumble. They realized too late when the bills came due. The sisters combined their minds and thought of means to garner new enterprise. They sought patents on the world’s first submersible pipe and rain-proof cigarette, but the outside world no longer seemed to possess much passion to smoke. They pitched designs for automobile tires with illuminated whitewalls, but production cost outweighed safety benefit.
But the bills still piled. Aunts and animals still hungered on the Gable grounds. The aunts first sold the coal mines, copper pits, smelters, foundries and refineries to deflect the creditors’ first assault against their gates. They sold their father’s yachts. They liquidated the shipping trucks. They purchased time with their pawning, but they only delayed the fall.
These were the aunts Mercy remembered as her family. Mercy’s mother brought scandal to the manor with Mercy’s conception outside of wedlock, scandal which the sisters shared by all retreating into the manse so that none of the outside world saw which woman brought the child named Mercy to term. Thus no aunt would point out to Mercy who among them was her mother. They asked if it was not better that Mercy should have an army of mothers instead of only one. They doted on the child. An aunt was always nearby to tend to any of Mercy’s desires.
“You were the last, Aunt Vicki.”
Mercy’s afternoon strolls always took her to the tombstones of her aunts’ graves. Aunt Vicki had passed away from the cancerous cough at the end of the winter, and her grave marker completed the cemetery set of Gables buried upon the acres surrounding the decaying manor. Mercy feared the family debt passed upon her shoulders, though she failed to find anything remaining upon the grounds left to sell.
“I sold the last alpaca to a rancher just last week,” Mercy spoke to the stones. “We didn’t have to sell any of the animals to the glue factory. Good people took them home.”
But Mercy was not sure, and she hoped the dead did not perceive her uncertainty.
Mercy felt the loss of the animals as painfully as the loss of her aunts. Mercy had always been kept behind her manor’s walls, and the animals – the monkeys and the llamas, the goats and the zebras – had been her closest friends. Mercy still felt guilty for how often an empty, petting hand was all she could give those animals’ hunger. Her aunts had sold the predators first, the caged tigers and mountain lions, when food was no longer affordable. Yet eventually, each animal was sold so that Mercy and her aunts might stay a little longer on the Gable estate. With the release of the falcons and the owls, Mercy became the last creature to call any of the Gable acres home.
Mercy read the names of each of her aunts’ tombstones and still wondered which marked the resting place of her mother. Turning back towards the manse, Mercy tried to imagine where the zoo she remembered as such a young girl had been. Had the aviary been only a few steps beyond that bend in the worn, brick path? Had the goldfish pools been near the drained, concrete pit that remained from the Gable pool? Mercy felt the grounds haunted, and in the hottest hours of the afternoon, she often thought she saw the ghosts of her family’s old grandeur shimmer like mirages on her family’s old acres.
“Where did it all disappear to?” Mercy asked the wind.
A man dressed in a dark suit, with a tie knotted to his chin, waited for Mercy on the home’s porch. Mercy gave him a sheepish wave, and her stomach knotted. Men in ties so often visited her aunts that Mercy had little doub
t what such a visitor would demand.
“I could get you a glass of lukewarm water,” Mercy offered as she took the porch’s step with parasol still over her head.
“No thank you, Miss Gable,” Mercy noticed that the man’s skin hardly looked touch by sun. “I don’t expect to take too much of your time.”
Mercy’s lip quivered. “You don't sound like an an antique dealer. Antique dealers like to take more time to walk the grounds and look under every stone for some kind of piece to take back to their shops. There’s not the selection that there once was.”
The man helped Mercy take the final step with a slight boost given to her elbow. “I fear I’ve not come for any of the antiques.”
Mercy could not meet the visitor’s gaze. “You’re not dressed like one of the scrap collectors. They’re clothes are always covered with so much grime. They’re always finding something out here. They took the last of the statues last fall.”
“Nor am I a scavenger, Miss Gable.”
Mercy possessed the grace to smile. She had never been provided the opportunity to place a single treasure upon the grounds, but she would be the one to see the last piece vanish.
“You come for the home and the acres,” Mercy whispered.
The visitor nodded. “We have new management now, Miss Gable, and new management means an evaluation of all our debtors. Your payments no longer cover much of the interest.”
“My aunts’ loan agreement,” Mercy corrected.
The visitor frowned. “We’ve done what we could to delay this day, Miss Gable. But with the death of your final aunt, and with our new management, we just cannot put the foreclosure off any longer.”
Mercy sighed, but her knees did not shake. She had never felt like she owned anything in her ancestor’s home. Its treasures had never been hers.
“I had assumed you would not call in my family’s debts until I too vanished,” Mercy spoke.
The visitor’s body language sighed as much as Mercy’s. “We searched everywhere, but we could find no written contract of such an agreement. A handshake and promise to your aunts is no longer enough. All of us who knew your aunts are very sorry.”
“And will I just vanish like all the other artifacts of my family’s ruin?”
“My office feels that you are a young woman in fine health,” the visitor peeked at his shoes. “The branch does not feel it can wait for your dying.”
He told Mercy that she had a month to make arrangements. He had no advice to offer. Mercy wondered if she might encounter one of her missing animal friends on the road. She knew no family or friends. If she did not find one of the lost monkeys to hold her hand and guide her to a new road, then who else might she turn to? If the zebras had not prepared her a place, Mercy doubted she would find any place at all.
No creature arrived to comfort her a month later. Thus without a herd or flock to follow, Mercy decided to head in the direction of her family’s ruins.
She hitched a ride with the salvage truck filled with the last bones of the Gable treasure trove. Mercy would see from the passenger side of such a monstrous contraption filled with salvage her first sights of the outside world.
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