Beneath a clean pane of museum-grade non-reflective glass…
Was the Four-Inch Solid-Titanium Transponder Key.
Beside it, resting inside a velvet-lined rosewood shadowbox, was the broken gold nib of Chief Justice Arthur Vance’s Montblanc fountain pen.
And beside the pen, preserved in a miniature bronze frame…
Was that silver-framed military portrait of our mother Eleanor Mercer and our grandfather Arthur Mercer Senior, stamped *VOYD AB INITIO // CONSPIRACY VACATED*, resting alongside Arthur Mercer Senior’s original handwritten 1944 sovereign survey patent:
`THE MERCER HOMESTEAD // PARCEL 10`
`ACREAGE: 40 MILES OF SUBTERRANEAN BEDROCK`
`STATUS: SOVEREIGN & UN-ENCUMBERED`
`HELD IN TRUST FOR THE LINEAL HEIRS // AD INFINITUM`
`INSCRIPTION: BUILT PLUMB.
HELD TRUE.`
`BALANCE DUE: ZERO.`
And resting on a pedestal of hand-carved Virginia greenstone beside the garden gate…
Polished until the brass and vellum gleamed beneath the Virginia sun…
Was That Very Bouquet of White Lilies and the Faded Twenty-Dollar Bill.
Their fibers encased in clear crystal resin, a bronze plaque mounted across the pedestal reading:
`THEY WERE ADOPTED AS CHILDREN AND TOLD THEY WERE ABANDONED IN A DITCH.`
`TWENTY YEARS LATER, THEY OVERHEARD THE TRUTH AND RAISED THE BEDROCK OF THE REPUBLIC.`
`BUILT PLUMB.
HELD TRUE.`
A pair of white-tailed sea hawks broke from the high canopy of the northern pines along the shore, circling high on the thermal updrafts above the water, their broad wings catching the sun as they banked clean, deep, and free across the limitless blue American sky.
