A Druid on My Doorstep

by Brian Schell

I got off the plane at Heathrow an hour before, and I finally got through Customs and out to the car that was waiting for me. I had received the call that Grandpa Edmund had died a few days ago, but this was the soonest I could make it. The funeral was tomorrow morning. The old man had relatives scattered around the globe, and I would be far from the last arrival.

One of my cousins, Ronald, was waiting at the curb for me. Normally, I'd have just rented a car, but I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and I was leery of driving on the wrong side of the road. I sat in the passenger's seat as Ronald pulled away from the curb.

The drive took the better part of an hour, and I had nothing to do but talk to Ronald, whom I'd just met for the first time. He had lived in England his whole life. "Heart attack, huh? Was it sudden?"

"No," Ronald answered, "He'd had problems for a few years now. Had a pacemaker put in back in twenty-ten. He thought that'd solve his problem, but it got worse over the next few years. Then last week, he keeled over out in his garden and never woke up again."

I could listen to him talk with that accent all day. My dad had talked like that on the rare times when he got excited, but most of the time he was careful to use his

practiced American accent. Most people didn't realize he was from here originally. This was my first time visiting. We'd buried Dad last year, but no one from this side of the Atlantic attended that funeral. Tomorrow was going to be a much bigger affair.

I watched out the window as we drove on, and the London cityscape faded into the more sparsely populated countryside. Out here it didn't look much different from the Midwestern states back home.

Then we reached my grandfather's home. Or maybe I should call it an estate. Apparently, Gramps was far more loaded than I understood. I was assigned a guest room upstairs, where I promptly took a nap; it had been a long flight.

The next few days passed in a confusing blur of the funeral, various social gatherings, introductions to relatives I didn't know I had, and weird British food. It was overcast and chilly every day, and I quickly started to miss home.

Then England suddenly became home. Grandfather hadn't bothered to rewrite his will when my father had died, so I wound up with a sizeable chunk of the inheritance. I didn't get the big house, but along with a pile of cash, I got one of the larger guesthouses and matching land as well. It included ten acres, and that was just one of the former guesthouses. It was fully furnished and beautifully decorated, so all I needed was new clothes and supplies. I sent home to have a few personal things mailed to me and got a refund on my return airfare. Now I was British too, or at least I started the paperwork to make it happen.

The only part of the guesthouse grounds, or should I say my grounds, that I wasn't too keen on was the crypt. There was an old, and I mean really old, mausoleum right in the middle of what became my backyard. The damned thing was creepy as Hell, and you couldn't go outside at all without seeing it.

Ronald had inherited and moved in to the house next door, and we got together every few days now just to hang out and shoot the shit, or as they more properly say in England, "for tea." One afternoon, I mentioned that I was considering having the old mausoleum torn down. The way his eyes bugged out told me he wasn't going to be supportive.

"You can't tear that down! It's an old druidic monument!

I had not been aware of that, but I didn't care, either. "I thought druids were into trees and stuff. That thing is solid marble. It's probably got bodies inside it."

He nodded, "It probably does. I know it sounds silly, but your grandfather Edmund came out here once a year and planted a tree with his own hands. That's where the woods at the back of the property came from- he planted every tree himself, for more than seventy years. From what he said, his father used to do the same thing, and his father, all the way back. I think he intended for your father to continue the tradition." He put down his tea and looked at me sideways. "No one ever told you about this?"