Task One

A Tragic Path to a Happy Return Home

Melissa Bolling had noted when he was born … her son had always had that sweet baby smell, and 45, he still smelled sweet, in the way it was always destined for him to do so..

Unfortunately, Mr. Braxton Bolling, her husband, still did not understand.

Their son Lee had gone missing at age 15, and had been missing for 30 years … sort of … but to explain the “sort of” would be the end of everything.

Playing young and dumb had been a smart move for Mrs. Bolling for years, so she went on and let her husband think he knew everything that he didn't know.

“I have lived this long to see my heir return – my life is now fulfilled – I can now die in peace!”

Mrs. Bolling flinched on behalf of their seven daughters, who would now be disinherited. Braxton Bolling's family was truly old money in America with all the old money ways – wives and daughters inherited only when there were not sons to inherit.

Still, much money that would have been in the Bolling estate had been expended, looking for Lee. Mr. Bolling recounted all that he had done while at last sitting and talking at his son – yes, at his son – for the first time in 30 years.

Lee Bolling, now 45 years old, just listened quietly to his father. Occasionally he looked around the big home – one of the very few Virginian plantation homes in that area that had survived the Civil War in quite a lot of the old style.

Lee's branch of the Bolling family had lost their slaves like the other branches of the family, but had invested in railroads as a stopgap measure for their remaining money and then switched into military armaments. Lee's grandfather, Beauregard Bolling, had been made the wealthiest man in the region by World War II.

Of course there was no more sign of this profiting from blood money at the house than there had been when the blood was of slaves. The women were never to be involved in such “upsetting” details, and generations of that family had selected wives considered to be “simple enough” to not even be concerned with such matters.

Melissa Fairlane was from way, way up in Appalachia, specifically from Virginia's Blue Ridge. She seemed to have been the ideal candidate.

All had seemed well until 1991 when Lee was 15, and had disappeared.

At first it was thought to have been a kidnapping because Mr. Bolling was so rich, but there had been no ransom note.

“Of course not – I'd have Blackwater track them down if they had left any clue!” Mr. Bolling had raged whenever he thought about it.

And then, at the funeral of Melissa Bolling's grandfather at R.E. Lee Memorial Episcopal Church in Lexington, her daughter had taken a good, hard look at one of the pallbearers.

“Momma,” she said, “doesn't he favor Lee?”

“Well,” the mother said, “my grandfather would have been Lee's great-grandfather, so we might expect him to have some cousins in Lexington.”

And yet, that smell … the babyhood smell and the smell she remembered on her grandfather … combined – of course it was Lee, and she knew that. Mr. Bolling would have noticed had he not been checking his phone for a business deal going down – even at 80 years old, that next piece of money was a concern.

This made Lee Bolling's question all the more sad when he finally got a word in edgewise.

“So, Dad, how go your investments and such – did depleted uranium work out well owing to the wars of the Bushes?”

Lee Bolling had disappeared on January 16, 1991, the day the first Iraq war had begun.

“Well, Lee, yes, buty ou know we don't discuss things like that in the presence of your mother!”

Of course. Anyone who knew the residual effects of depleted uranium weapons on a population they were used on, even long after the use was over, wouldn't discuss that in polite company any more than Beauregard Bolling, having seen the pictures from the survivors of Hiroshima, had ever shown those pictures to Braxton Bolling's mother.

Lee Bolling sat quietly after his father had laughed his self-satisfied laugh, and his mother remembered his father at that age – rugged features, vivid blue eyes, black hair with big silver streaks, tall, powerful physique and a particular look about him when he had made up his mind.

Yet Lee was more muscled, much less manicured, and in a suit far too poor for his father to even think of wearing, although it was a decent suit for a pallbearer from Lexington. Somehow, although he was clearly his father's son, he did not fit into that plush, soft home with all its comforts.

The meeting had been occasioned by Lee's sister Belle just walking up and saying to him, “Excuse me, sir, but, you look so much like someone I used to know.”

“Hi, Belle. I saw y'all when you walked in, and was going to say hello a bit later – I'm surprised y'all took the time, but I'm glad you did.”

Mrs. Bolling, for once in her married life, had insisted on something. Her grandfather had raised her, and she had wanted to be at his funeral. Mr. Bolling had not wanted to go up to Lexington, but he thus had been present … yet still had not realized that Lee being “found” in the last place he had ever thought to look meant it was all over.

“They must have knocked you in the head pretty hard for you not to be able to find your way home from Lexington! My clever boy, half-knocked into amnesia, but still mine – that cologne, too! Still managed to find your way to the best scents – what is it!”

“The notes are melted beeswax, fresh cut pine wood, and slightly heated honey, Father.”

“Wow! That's unique – what's the name, and can we invest in it?”

“I mean that before coming to the funeral, I got up, cut wood to put under my great kettle, made the last melt of beeswax I have been refining this week, and then used the residual heat to soften up some honey I held back to feed my bee hives on this warm day of the winter – first day it has been above 50 degrees in the Blue Ridge in January in 22 years.”

Braxton Bolling at last heard his son, for the first time in probably his son's entire life.

“What?”

“I am the person from whom you have been buying Mountain King Honey for the past 20 years. I took over for my great-grandfather in 2001, and I have been living with him for the past 30 years.”

“What? Your great-grandfather kidnapped you?”

“I wasn't kidnapped, Dad. I ran away.”

“You what?”

“I was 14 in 1990 when you started talking about the family business to me. I never liked killing anything anyhow, Dad, so I wasn't happy at all when I found out our business was weapons. Then, I looked up depleted uranium. I know that you know depleted uranium and its radioactivity keeps on killing and maiming long after the wars it is used in are over. I also knew that you didn't care, Dad. That's what I found out, when I was 14 years old – that you didn't care.

“Then, I found the pictures that Grandfather had in his files in the study about the business, and the notes he and you had made. I saw the picture of the little girl running naked down the road in Hiroshima in so much pain. I saw what Grandfather had written about it: 'So terrible, but we had no choice in order to end the war.' I was what you wrote 45 years later: 'Depleted uranium has enough of the power without making the picture right away to bother people.'

“I couldn't deal with it, Dad. You were always my hero, everything I ever wanted to be. Mom tried to explain it, saw that I was going to go mad, and so –.”

“You ran away from us!”

“Yes, I did. I went somewhere that I felt safe, with my great-grandfather, the Mountain King of Honey. None of his children or grandchildren wanted to take up his trade –.”

Mrs. Melissa Bolling flinched.

“ – but I was the one meant to learn, and I did.”

Lee Bolling paused, and squared his shoulders before he said the rest.

“I learned how to be the man who could look you in the eye and tell you that I will never be your heir.”

“What? Are you insane? Do you understand the size of the fortune we have?”

“You have it and you can keep it, Dad. It's blood money back to 1687. If you leave it to me, I'll cash it out and burn it to heat my kettles, melt my wax, soften my honey, and feed my bees.

“I didn't expect you would actually come to the funeral, Dad. I didn't want to have to confront you. I didn't want it to have to be this way. I knew you wouldn't change. When people go too far, they can't change anymore. Great-Grandfather Joseph always said, 'Be good as much as you know how, Lee – the Lord will not always strive with any man.' ”

“Wait a minute … .”

Mr. Bolling turned around in shock to look at his wife Melissa.

“That's your grandfather who raised you – you knew! You knew all along! How could you keep this from me?”

“I didn't know for sure, Braxton, and as for the rest, you never listened and never asked.”

“She didn't know,” Lee said. “I didn't tell her I knew the way or that I was going. I didn't put that burden on Mom.”

“But she could have known – and you! I have spent millions of dollars, and you were only 50 miles away, hiding from me! How could you – how could both of you, you, you, you –!”

Braxton Bolling had been raised in the tradition of Southern gentlemen, yet had all the vocabulary you would expect of a man invested in violence. However, he had forgotten why he shouldn't indulge in cussing fits until Death arrived to explain it – massive heart attack, brought on by his burst of rage.

Mr. Bolling had not had time to change his will, so his daughters inherited. It would take years for them to work out what should be done with the estate, but their mother decided not to wait around to find out. Lee Bolling took his mother back to her childhood home, where she again kept bees as she had as a child, now in the company of her son and his family.

“A happy return home after all,” she said to her son one day.

“A tragic path to it, but, yes, Mom,” he said. “We're at home where our home was meant to be.”

Task Two

This task took me days to think out ... the approach I decided to take was to capture the dynamic between the characters and foreshadow the ultimate outcome really early, and then build out the details from there. The hard part was constraining the story to the word count, because there was so much more I could have unpacked from the historical details peppering the story -- but, cutting 800 words was a useful exercise in and of itself.