A Letter to my Brother

The Last Letter

Thy Manor is a house built on tradition. Thick brick walls unchipped by playful kids and hurricanes, protrudes from behind a naturally cultivated vineyard, housing Lord Covellwin who disregarded his title to better transact with 21st century opportunists simply going by Wreede, his current wife Page, and the ghost of his first wife, Adeline.

The bedtime tale I'm often told, the extended birth of their only son, never failed to make me cackle. The child and the adult in me will forever laugh at the part when Wreede unblinkingly commanded his wife to bring forth his heir. Which she did, eventually, along with the contents of her stomach.

April 15 1997

"Breathe, Lady Adeline, just breathe you can do it." Lilly, Adeline's nurse at the time, preached to her as she waited for the monster to crawl from her womb. Her words.

"Don't you dare tell me what I can do! I can't do it. I ca—

"The hell you can!"

Wreede always wanted a son. He had no male siblings— or none alive I should say, so after hearing her curses from behind the door to which he had pierced his ear, he, my Father, pushed his way through the gather of housemaids to confront his dear wife. A typical reaction right? Not quite. Back then, and believe me this was after the dinosaurs, in the Covellwin tradition this was a moral obstruct of the highest order.

The number one rule that descended with all the generations, is that fathers are never allowed to witness the birth of any of his children. And to that rule, my father said: Move!

"Woman!" He yelled apathetically, his index finger shaking as he approached the blooded bed. "How dare you rob me of the chance to meet my son!"

"Wreede I can't do it." She breathed, helpless. "I can't do it anymore, it's too painful."

"I'll give you three million dollars and 45 percent of my company shares."

That's what I imagined Father really wanted to say, but instead he said:

"Not another word. You will deliver this child, and you will do it now!"

Which is still very much like Father. His words are as powerful as his aura of command. He is a husky keg of a man who commanded his own son into world. That, however, is as far as his boasting goes. The moment the boy was born, Father was like single men who had dreams of fathering children with mothers they had met only once.

A thick rubble of hair, brown and curly was thatched in perfection on his tiny head. A head that supported the kindest features that, on no account at all, resembled Father's. Instead, the boy, in form feature face and limb, adopted everything from his mother.

There were crickets, Lily told me. Not the loud cinematic ones cricketing in a cacophony, but there was a deep tension the moment the boy left his safe space. Everything seemed fine, everything, except the fact that he didn't cry.

"What's wrong with it?" Father asked Adeline, who was drenched in sweat with fatigue smeared across her face.

Father was holding him wrapped in a blanket tailored with his initials, RC, which I now think was a prequel to his life as a rascal. They were shadowed, almost like magic, by the enormous chandelier that hung above them and as the light shone down upon the baby boy, before he ever shed a tear, he began a tune.

The boy cried to a melody leaving all who were in the room stunned. In his tiny features, rested no shadow of pain or discomfort, but every evidence of joy when he opened its mouth to expel notes he should not have been able to. My father knew then, that he did not get a future heir. No. He got robbed. And the woman who had done him this injustice, took her last breath as the baby took his first.