Read Online The Digger's Rest by K. Patrick Malone - Free Book Online

a PR firm to put an all-American smile on the underlying
greed, but the horns and tail were still there.
    The only difference was now they wore Brooks
Brothers suits, had Pepsodent smiles and developed slogans like,
“Bramsco, building America’s future with our own two hands,” and
“Bramsco, giving back is our middle name,” when in fact the only
thing he was giving back to Americans was the back of his hand;
ushering in the era of the unassailable, squeaky-clean modern image
of the corporate cannibal. But Julian the Third was either too
stupid to see it, too gullible to believe it, or simply too
comfortable to care one way or the other, unless his own boat of
dollars were to be somehow rocked. Then something unexpected
happened.
    While he was in graduate school, he got in
with a bunch of young men who had inquiring minds and actually knew
how to think for themselves. He started taking weekend trips with
them into New York City, daring to disobey his mother’s orders to
keep aloof from those spawned from the working classes. He saw
“HAIR” on Broadway, smoked pot in Washington Square Park, went to
places where there were hippies and beatniks, listened to folk
music at the clubs on Bleeker Street…and met a pretty,
chestnut-haired girl singer from Ohio named Melanie Woodward and
actually felt something, or thought he did, as much as he could
feel anything that didn’t revolve around his own comforts.
    She was everything he wasn’t: working class,
a free thinker who believed in change and dared to try and help
bring it about. He knew from their first conversation that if she
knew who he really was, who his family was, that she’d never have
anything to do with him. They were everything she was fighting
against and trying to change, so he lied to her in ever so many
more ways than one. He told her that he came from regular people
who’d done well for themselves, that he wanted to get a job after
he finished school and make a life with her and that he loved her,
which actually meant he loved her as much as he knew how.
    After about a year, he couldn’t go on with
the charade any longer. He told her who he really was, but that he
would leave his family to be with her and live his life her way.
Whether she ever really believed him or not stayed in her heart and
went with her to the grave in the end, but by then it was too late
because she believed that she was in love with him too, and young
people who think they’re in love can convince themselves of almost
anything. So they ran off to Maryland and got married and within a
month of his weekend visits to her apartment on Grove Street, she
was pregnant.
    Innocently, or stupidly, he made the mistake
of telling his mother about the marriage. The rest, as they say, is
history. The one honorable thing he did in the situation was that,
in a singular moment of clarity, he didn’t tell Annabelle that
Melanie was going to have his child. Annabelle didn’t find out
about that little fact until very much later when she saw the cover
of Time Magazine with the caption “Dr. Bramson’s Bayeux.”
    She was sitting in her favorite chair that
day at her Marie Antoinette writing desk when the maid brought in
her mail. She’d always been an avid reader of all of the serious
national magazines, Life, Look, Newsweek and Time, and had them all
delivered to the house, of course.
    When she opened the mail that day and saw the
cover of Time, that name, and that face, her mind scattered faster
than she could control it. He had that girl’s hair and her eyes,
but he had the Bramson chin and nose, just like her father-in-law,
her husband and…Julian. There was no denying it; the young man on
the cover of that magazine was Julian’s child.
    Her mind flew into a schism of three parts;
he would come after his share of the Bramson Trust and take away
tens of millions from her ‘legitimate’ grandsons, Julian the Fourth
and Alexander; the fight he would put up to get it would create