Parrish Lantern's Casebook

“It was just this morning that I watched a buck come up over the hill that sits behind the north field looking off over toward East Angler. A little doe trailed along behind him, their white tails twitching in the chill of dawn. The sun was coming up over the forest to the east, and I thought to myself that it had come on just a bit later than the day before, its rays glancing quickly off the ground and giving a hint of gold to everything they touched in the softness of mid-autumn. *Lemuel Higgins writes these words to the only woman he has ever loved, from what will be his deathbed. Lemuel lays out all that he has left in this world to those he cares for, telling his tale of how he screwed up, how he went from a king of his own world to dying far from his wife and child in a bedroom in his best friend and brother in-law’s farmhouse. This is the tale of a small-town boy who seeks sporting glory and a way out of the hardscrabble farming community he was raised in.This is a tale we’ve seen countless times splashed across the tabloid papers, a promising athlete, starts to believe all that he reads or is told and comes to believe they are invincible, they become dazzled by all that stardom has to offer, until reality, with it’s size ten boots, kicks them to the ground. Once Lemuel Higgins was on his way to a major league career in baseball, but when we meet him he’s lost everything, and is physically, mentally and emotionally a broken man, dying of aids after a blood transfusion after a drunken brawl. *What’s different about this tale is how it is written, although it’s a memoir and a love letter, it is also a coming of age tale, which makes this a bildungsroman - written in the form of a legal document - because The Last Will and Testament is just that. Each chapter has become a bequest, of which there are fifteen, whether this is to wife, son or the bequest of forgiveness he gives to his dead father and it is through these bequests that we learn of Lemuel’s fall from grace.http://parrishlantern.blogspot.com/2012/02/last-will-and-testament-of-lemuel.html