Chapter 4 The Grandstand of death and destruction.

Inside the Hermitage—a place the old man viewed as nothing more than a grandstand of death and destruction—he found himself standing before a painting created by Rachel Jackson. It was majestic and imperial. He had already decided back in his Limestone County war room to leave Rachel in peace, determining her only true fault was marrying a monster. But looking at the sheer beauty of the canvas, it was proof positive to him that love is blind, or in Andrew’s case, just blind luck.

“Andrew married way above his station,” the old man thought, shaking his head. “There is no earthly way that a woman of this brilliance and talent should have been anywhere near this lucky bastard’s location.”

He moved further through the house, his eyes catching a curated exhibit section titled, “Road to the White House.”

The old man openly scoffed. “Road to the White House? There was no road—it was a bloody trail that ran right in front of your house!” He knew the verified historical geography: the thousands of Cherokee forced down the Lebanon Pike right past the very gates of this estate. To call it a “road” was just another sanitized lie masking a forced march.

From his extensive readings of the verified archives, the old man knew exactly how the man operated. No matter the insult or perceived slight, Jackson always settled it with a death. Sadly, Andrew survived his duels to continue sitting in his mansion, buying and enslaving African Americans on his plantation to build his mountain of wealth, while the Cherokee kept walking, freezing and starving to their deaths.

The old man let out a dry, raspy laugh, amused by his own dark realization. “I guess it’s a good thing he’s dead; he would never let me survive saying all these things.”

He kept walking, the floorboards creaking under his boots, and overheard a tour guide speaking politely to a group about the “enslaved community” at the Hermitage. It took everything the old man could muster not to shout back at them.

“Which enslaved community are you referring to? He’s known for two at least!”

He bit his tongue hard. He knew from his documents that Jackson’s cruelty wasn’t limited to a single race; the same hand that signed the receipts to buy African American laborers also signed the treaties to erase the Native Americans from the soil. But saying that out loud right now would have ended his tour long before he got to his final destination: gazing at the dirt piled on the tyrant’s corpse.

Finally, he stepped back outside into the humid air and stood before the tomb. He looked at the dirt piled over what was left of the man, and the suffocating weight of the historical injustice was just too much.

The old man thought Andrew should have been exhumed and reinterred under a nuclear waste dump. Like, say, Chernobyl.

Then a grim smirk crossed his face. “Naw,” he thought to himself, looking at the stone. “The Russians just got rid of Stalin’s corpse. They won’t want another drag on society.”