Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

mansion in which we lived. Daddy, being the oldest son, inherited it. He had one brother who was five years younger, Perry. He worked in the Heavenstone company, but he lived in Lexington. He was a bachelor and lived alone in a townhouse.
    Our house had ten rooms. Five were downstairs: the large living room with the original fieldstone fireplace with stone up to the ceiling, a large dining room with a grand teardrop chandelier that had been imported years ago from France, a kitchen that had been renovated five times to provide for more modern appliances, twice alone after Daddy and Mother married, a dark oak den that was our entertainment center, and Daddy’s home office with a library with leather-bound first editions. Behind his large desk, built from the same dark oak that was used to make the library shelves, were bay windows that looked south on our property, so he was never bothered by the direct sunlight. His office had a slate floor and an alcove that housed all the modern machinery any business office would have.
    There were ancestral portraits everywhere. Daddy’s favorite was of one of our triple great-grandfather’s son, Asa Heavenstone. Asa was a hero in the Civil War who was killed only a week before the war ended. His portrait with him wearing his Confederate uniform still hangs in the living room next to portraits of our great-cousins, -uncles, and -aunts, as well asGrandfather and Grandmother Heavenstone. The people in Kentucky weren’t all in favor of the Confederacy, so we had cousins who were in the Union Army as well—only none of their portraits were hung on our walls. Daddy told us his grandparents were always terrified that someday, the family would learn that one of those in the Union Army had killed Asa.
    Daddy has a large portrait of his father in the office, angled so that it always seems he’s looking down at him. I have often seen Daddy looking up at his father and nodding slightly, as if they had just had a serious conversation about the business. He often looked at Asa’s portrait the same way.
    Mother often said that if one of us had been a boy, she would have named him Asa. When Asa was killed, our triple great-grandfather went into a very deep depression from which he never recovered. Even though he had two other sons and a daughter, he never got over Asa’s death, because Asa was his oldest and his favorite. His own death was a deep, dark secret. Mother feels confident that he drank himself to death in this very house. She envisioned him spending hours looking up at Asa’s portrait as his heart continued to shatter. Maybe that great sadness was what Daddy felt when he looked up at the portrait. I thought he imagined himself in Asa’s father’s shoes and tried to feel what he might have felt.
    Many times, I have stood in front of Asa’s portrait, studying it for any possible resemblances to my father or myself and Cassie. Daddy had a similar beard, but other than that, I didn’t see much similarity. I could see some resemblances in our otherrelatives but none in him. Cassie says that was because Asa looked too much like his mother. She says his father loved him the most because he looked so much like his mother, “and after all, that was where his father’s romantic love had gone. Husbands favor the child who looks the most like their wives.”
    The Heavenstone family lost much of its land and wealth after the Civil War, but Great-grandfather Patton Heavenstone restored much of it through the fortune he made with his general stores, which eventually became the Heavenstone Department Stores our family now owned. There are ten throughout the state, with an eleventh being developed in Lexington. There is a statue of Great-grandfather Patton Heavenstone in the lobby of the first Heavenstone Department Store in Danville. His first two wives died, one of typhoid and one because of a heart defect, but his third wife outlived him.
    I knew all this because Daddy said learning our family history was more important than learning the history of our state and country.
    “What is a country if not for its families?” he emphasized. “And what is a family without children?”
    We weren’t expected to answer any of these questions. It used to be difficult to tell the difference between questions Daddy wanted us to answer and questions he wanted to ask and answer himself. Even questions about us weren’t necessarily the ones we were to answer, so his pausing for a moment after