THE

LEGACY

OF EDEN

Set against the magnificent backdrop of Iowa, golden cornfields as far as the eye can see, this sweeping epic charts the doomed legacy of the Hathaway dynasty from the 1940s to present day. A dramatic story of ambition and power, destruction and freedom, love and betrayal.

‘A haunting tale, beautifully written. An impressive debut’

—Sarah Winman, bestselling author of When God Was a Rabbit

‘Totally gripping—this is a seriously impressive debut’

—Lindsay Frankel, Red Magazine

‘Combine Daphne Du Maurier with Jane Smiley and you’ll get The Legacy of Edeni This dark tale of a golden farm family is a wonderfully Gothic read.’ —Jenna Blum, bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers

About the Author

NELLE DAVY was raised in London, in an Afro-Caribbean household. She is a graduate of Warwick University and has a master’s degree in creative writing from Trinity College Dublin. She is married and still lives in London, where she works in publishing. The Legacy of Eden is her first novel.

The

Legacy

of Eden

Nelle Davy

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Jack

Acknowledgments

While writing in itself may be a solitary act, the process of getting published would not have happened without the following people: to my amazing agents Sallyanne Sweeney and Beth Davey, without whom this literally would not have happened; to my editor, Krista Stroever, who was the first person to take a chance on an unknown, and I hope this repays your efforts; to Juliet Mushens for all her amazing support throughout; to my English teacher Mrs. Wells, who was the first person to ever encourage what was before just a shameful habit; and to my husband, Jack Davy, who held me together with tape and glue and who was this book’s biggest supporter, counselor and defender.

PROLOGUE

I WAS CALLING FOR HER.

I pointed the flashlight into the darkness, puncturing the purple haze of the evening with circles of white. The air was full of the smell of azaleas and the sound of crickets, and I began to think of how much I would miss my home. For a moment, I was truly scared of leaving the farm, and I was stricken with both the fear of the unknown, and my desire for it. I gave up a shudder.

And then I heard it.

The sharp snap of twigs being twisted into the earth. I swung around and moved off the path, down to the rose garden. I heard them before I saw them. His voice was low, half in a whisper, but in the stillness of the night, it carried.

“Say it,” he urged, and then more forcefully repeated, “Say it!”

And then another noise. At first, I didn’t even know it was her. It was a sound I had never heard from her before.

I have relived that night so many times. Once, I had dared to believe that I was different from my family, that I was the one who did not fit. But as my grandmother Lavinia, the catalyst for my family’s mottled history, once said, “Blood will out.”

Perhaps you would have made a different choice that night. If so, your heart would not be heavy with such deep regret. But knowing who I am, who my family was, how could anyone have expected anything else?

MEREDITH

The Path to Remembrance

1

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT MEANT TO BE A Hathaway you’d first have to see our farm, Aurelia.

If my family’s name is familiar to you, it may be that you have either already seen it, or at least know something of its reputation. In its day our farm was notorious for being one of the most prosperous estates in our county in Iowa. An infamy only surpassed in time by that of the family who owned it.

I have spent the past seventeen years trying to forget it, forget my family and forget my past. For seventeen years I was given a reprieve, but after that length of time, you stop looking over your shoulder and you forget how precarious your peace is. You take it for granted; you learn to bury your guilt and then you convince yourself that it will never find you.

And then he died.

My cousin Caledon Hathaway Jr. left this earth in late October at the age of forty-five. The cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver. As seemed to be the curse of all Hathaway men after my grandfather, he would die young and alone and how he was found I do not know: he lived with no one and by then Aurelia had ceased to be a business and had become merely a vast space of withering land. Though a notice was placed in the local newspaper, his death was mourned by no one and his funeral attended only by the priest and an appointed lawyer from the firm who handled our family’s assets. His body rested in the ground, at last unable to hurt or harm anyone else, and that should have been the end of it.

But then eight months later, at ten to three on a Thursday afternoon, I received a letter. I settled into my armchair next to the window, my hands still stained with streaks of clay from the morning’s work in my studio. Ever since I left art school I have dedicated myself to sculpture, though it has only been in the past five years that I have made a decent enough living from it in order to do it full-time. Before that I was like any artist-cum-waitress, come every and any menial job you could find. I don’t earn much but I get by and as I fingered through the array of bills and fliers, the stains of my morning’s endeavors trailed across the envelopes until I came across a stark white one, different from the others in its weight and the crispness of its paper. It bore the mark of an eminent law firm whose name seemed familiar to me, but I thought nothing of it and slit open the mouth of the letter with my finger. Why wouldn’t I? I had forgotten so much—or at least I had pretended to.

By the time I had finished reading it, the damage had been done. I looked up from the typescript to find my apartment an alien place. Sunlight was streaming through the windows and reflecting off of the counter surfaces and wood floors. I could feel a prickle of sweat on the back of my neck and my mouth tasted hot and sweet with what I realized was panic.

I rushed to the bathroom and was violently sick.

Pushing myself upright I brought my hands to my face and then ran my fingers through my hair, clawing the strands back from my forehead. I caught sight of my phone and even though my stomach was filled with dread, I had to know, I had to know if they have been told. The letter said that they had tried to contact other members of the family. Who else, who else? I closed and reopened my eyes but it was no use. As soon as I began the thought, they swam across my vision, the living and the dead, diluting the reality of my kitchen with memories I had striven to bury for nearly two decades: my grandmother in her caramel-colored gardening gloves pruning her roses; my father throwing water over his head to cool himself off so that his great mop of blond hair slicked back, grazing the top of his shirt; Claudia in a white two-piece with her red sunglasses; my uncle Ethan shaking a cigarette out onto his palm from a pack of Lucky Strikes. I leapt away from the counter and ran into the studio. I darted around my sculptures to my desk and rooted through the drawers until I found the battered Moleskin address book and flicked through the pages until I found her number.

Where would she be now, I thought as I dialed her number? Is she even home? I knew she had gone parttime at the clinic since she had the girls, but I don’t know her shift schedule. But my thoughts were abruptly cut off as she picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hello,” she said, slightly breathless.

I opened my mouth to speak.

“Hello?” she said again.

There was a pause. I pictured her hanging up.

“Hel—”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

Our voices overlapped. She withdrew. In the interim I somehow managed to ask, “Ava?”

She was shocked. I heard a sharp intake of breath. I said her name again.

“Meredith,” she said finally and then sighed with impatience. I wound the telephone cord around my finger at that and squeezed.

“Can you talk?” I asked

“Yes.”

“I thought you might have been at the clinic. I wasn’t sure if you were in.”

“I just finished a shift.”

“Are the girls around?”

“I’m alone, it’s okay.”

I closed my eyes and swallowed.

“Good, I—I need to talk to you. It’s—”

“Is this about Cal Jr.?” she asked abruptly.

My eyes flew open. I felt winded. My voice, when it came out, was harsh, animal.

“How?”

“The family lawyers called me.”

“When?”

“A few days ago.”

“Why?”

“Same reason I suppose that they contacted you.”

“They did not call me,” I said, looking down at the letter, which was crumpled in the fist of my hand. “They wrote instead.”

“I told them straight out I didn’t care. Not about him dying, not about the farm or how he had driven it so far into the ground it was halfway to hell. They talked about my ‘responsibility.’ I told them I had done above and beyond more than my duty by that place.”

I bit my lip so hard I thought I tasted blood.

“I suppose I was a bit harsh,” she said reflectively, “but I got the feeling that they would just keep calling if they thought they could get anywhere. I guess that must have been why they tracked you down.” She paused. “Have you heard from Claudia? Do you know if they contacted her, too?”

I thought about our eldest sister, probably dismissing shop assistants with a bored wave of her hand in some mall in Palm Beach.

“No, but she has a different name now. She’s married.”

“Did not stop them from getting to me. Or to you, or don’t you go by our mother’s name anymore?”

I swallowed hard at the reproach. “No, it’s still Pincetti.”

She snorted. “And there was once a time when Hathaways were crawling out of our ears, now none to be found. I suppose I was the first person you rang when you got the letter, was I? I am so touched. I wonder why that would be?”

I closed my eyes, blocking out the orchestra of sounds from the taxis and crowds on the road below and the various cacophony of voices that rose in a fog from the streets. I forced my mind to blank, to hold my breath in my chest, to keep everything still.

“So you knew then?” I somehow managed. For a moment I thought she had gone, as there was only silence and then, “Yes.”

I digested this. “I see,” I said and I did, with painful clarity. This was a mistake.

“I told them I didn’t want anything to do with it,” she volunteered. “They could do what they wanted.” She gave a small laugh. “They even asked me about funeral arrangements. I told them the only way I would help would be if I could make sure he was really dead.”

I winced. I hate this side to her, especially because I am part of the reason why it is there.

“It’s all gone you know? The farm …” she began. “In the end it was riddled with debt. They’re going to sell it, did you know that?” She stopped and when she began again, her voice broke. “It was all for nothing and she’ll never know it.”

There was a pause.

“What will you tell them?” she asked eventually.

“Huh?”

“What will you do?” Her voice was careful, deliberate, and I realized with a small shiver that I was being tested and that she had no expectations that I would pass.

“I suppose I will have to call them.”

There was a silence. There was nothing for a moment; just a blank and then when she next spoke her voice had degenerated into a repressed scream of fury.

“Why?!”

This time I spoke without thinking, so that what I said not only surprised me because of my daring, but also because it was true.

“I guess I’m just not ready to walk away yet.”

Even to my mind they were an interesting choice of words. They hung there in the silence between us. I waited for her to speak and I could tell even in the pause how much she wanted to attack me, to use my words as a noose and hoist me up, legs kicking, desperately searching for ground.

“I have to go. I need to pick up the girls,” she said.

All of a sudden I was exhausted. It would never end, I thought. There was still too much damage left to inflict. I had long since ceased to engage in this trading of blows. I had marked her once and that was enough. Nearly two decades later it was still pink and raw, but she was not yet finished.

“I’ll call you back,” she offered.

“Okay,” I said and we hung up. Even as we did so I knew she wouldn’t call back. As if we were still children, she spoke again in code, a code she meant for me to decipher:

You did not do as I expected. You failed me—again.

Aurelia. I don’t know what it looks like now. It has been years since I last saw it from the back of a car window, but I don’t fool myself for an instant that even if the place was rotted out and the fields of once bright corn are now nothing but broken earth, that I wouldn’t still feel the same pull to it, a need to do the unspeakable for it.

That is one of the reasons why I have never gone back.

Why does it have this effect on me? Because of this: regardless of my mother and her lineage, I am a Hathaway. Even though I have taken her maiden name (and no one except my college alumni association asking for money, or Claudia in postcards, refers to me as anything else) it does not matter. I may live in New York, have changed my hair color, name and friends, but tug at the right thread and all this carefully constructed artifice will fall away.

Blood will out.

In its heyday, my family’s farm was impressive: it stretched three thousand acres when the average farm was about four to five hundred. But more than its size, our farm was infamous because it was unusual. Unlike any farm in our county, or indeed any farm that I have ever heard of, my grandmother took it in hand and developed it into something more than just a business, but a thing of real beauty. She did the unthinkable, and even more astonishingly, it worked.

Farms are meant to concentrate solely on that which will maintain them: crops, livestock, tools. They are a place of work and where I come from, the farms that were considered the most impressive were those that embodied this: well-tended fields, a full harvest, up-to-date machinery. This was the attitude of our fellow farmers and their own farms reflected this. If there had been such a thing as Farm Lore, this would be it.

But my grandmother wanted more. She didn’t see why she shouldn’t and somehow, to the puzzlement and then mockery of their neighbors, she succeeded in convincing my grandfather, the son of a seasoned farmer who had been raised on all the principles I have just described, to ignore what he had been taught and bend to her will.

The result was months of gossip, whispers in the grocery store, lingering stares and tight smiles when they were passed on the street. The farmers themselves made fun of my grandfather behind his back; lamented his impending ruin to each other and begged him to his face to curtail his wife’s madness. You must understand, our town was a community, and that meant that everyone had a small stake in everyone else’s business.

“It’ll end in tears,” they said, and secretly hoped.

In little over a year, my grandmother decided that her initial vision was completed enough to her satisfaction and she threw a party. My grandfather, Cal Sr., was relieved—he saw it as a peace offering. She let him believe that.

How can it be so easy for her? I thought, as I sat in my studio, my conversation with Ava repeating in a continuous loop through my head. She who, unlike me, spent years forcing herself to remember when I was struggling to forget. The light was beginning to die outside, eager lamps from the streets sharpening against the encroaching dark. I sat in the corner of my room, surrounded by the half-formed clay models, whose shadows threw deformed specters on the walls behind them. I could tell as we spoke that unlike me she did not see an arched sign hung between two columns of oak with the farm’s name written on it in curlicue black lettering or the gravel paths that wound through sculptured green lawns on which were planted pockets of flowers. It was a path that swung down to a sloping mound on top of which stood a house so impressive that seventy years ago, when it was first revealed to our neighbors, it caught the eyes of every guest carrying their various dishes of dessert and dressed salad and forced them to stop.

The old house where my grandfather had been raised, the one that had been just like their own, had been torn down. In its place, built in a mock colonial style, was a tall square building. What struck them first when they gazed up at it was the color: it was white. Even before they entered it they knew on sight that it was a place of polished woods with the smell of tall flowers in clear vases.

No, my sister did not see this and I knew she would not have cared to do so even if she had.

She did not see the rose garden with American Beauties puncturing the trellis walkway or the grove with the fountain of the stone god blowing water from his trumpet. Her memory had pulled down the shutters onto all the things my grandmother had fought so hard to accumulate and on which she had lavished such loving attention. I could hear in her voice, how little she cared now, how much she almost rejoiced in its demise. What had once been a thing of beauty abundant with fields upon fields of corn, which in the summer took on such hues of yellow mixed with orange that you could be fooled into thinking you were viewing the world through a haze of amber, was now an empty husk, reflecting only the various corruptions and losses of its last and most destructive owner.

She did not always think so. If you had seen the farm in its golden age, you would have called it a halcyon and known in your heart that to live there was to be happy. Secretly everyone thought so. My grandmother knew it and relished it. I could not fully understand why at the time. Her reaction to people’s envy and admiration was almost victorious. Only later did I come to realize how she had longed to be at the receiving end of such jealousy, that she had geared her life toward that moment. It had for so long been the other way around.

Can you understand? Can you discern even from these fragmented recollections the hold that place could have? Why those who lived there would do anything to protect it regardless of the consequences? It was stronger than the bonds of community, this love, stronger in the end than that of family. It affected all of us. Not the same, never the same, but it always left its mark and you knew then who you truly were and why you bore your name.

On the rare occasions my sister and I have talked since resuming contact a few years ago, our conversations have tiptoed around her bitterness—her, I should say, justified anger. Out of fear or diplomacy we have steered clear of anything that might have forced us down a path on which we would have to confront what is between us. I have done this dance mainly on my own. There were times when I think she would have gladly allowed things to degenerate into the spectacle of recrimination and blame that I so desperately hoped to avoid, but she never pushed it. When the time came, and I think we always knew it would, she would have nothing to fear. She was the betrayed, not the betrayer.

And now, here we finally are, because the one time when she expected me to revert to type and walk away I wouldn’t. The irony was not lost on me as I put the phone back on its rest. I know what she thinks—that I’m being deliberately contrary, hurtful, cruel. The rational part of me knows I have no right to blame her for thinking this—haven’t I proved myself to be all these things already? But I am still furious with her, because I so want to be able to do what she is asking and leave the farm to its fate with no regrets, and I can’t. Then I could show that what happened—what I did—was a mistake, it wasn’t me. I can change. I have changed.

I was calling for her. It was I who had offered to find her.

Oh, God, if I had never … if I had never opened that letter today, if she hadn’t told the lawyers she had wanted nothing to do with them, if Cal Jr. had never inherited the farm, if I’d done the things I’d believed I was capable of, if I hadn’t been capable of the things I’d done, if … if … if … somewhere out there, all the potential versions of my life floated on parallel planes. In one I never went out that night, in another more likely alternative, she does not put down the phone. Instead she stays on the line. We talk for a long, long time.

She listens.

She forgives me.

Do you believe in ghosts?

I didn’t until I started living with them.

Two days have passed since the letter arrived. I walk past my mother sitting in my armchair mending my pinafore, or my father at the fridge humming to himself as he scans my feeble purchases of organic whole foods. The walls between my memories and reality are disintegrating and everything from my past that I have tried to push back, now rushes forward to escape.

Once while on the way to the bathroom, I passed my cousin Jude, who I have not seen since I was ten. He cracked a hand on the back of my legs. “Toothpicks,” he chortled; I gave him the finger.

Part of me is terrified. I wonder if I am losing my mind. But I find their intrusions oddly comforting. It is like turning up at a reunion I have been dreading only to remember all the things we had in common, all the memories that made us laugh, and I am reminded of a time when it was easy to be yourself.

At one point when I was flicking through the channels and stumbled on a soap opera my grandmother used to love, I hesitated. Even though I knew it was crap, and I have never watched it, I left it on for her, imagining she was behind me, waiting to hear her slip past and the soft creak of the wicker chair as she settled down to watch it. Just before it broke for commercial I said aloud, “This is madness.”

Swift in reply, she answered, “Only if you expected a different outcome.”

It was at this point that I decided to call the lawyers.

“Good afternoon, Dermott and Harrison, how may I help you?”

“Yes, this is Meredith …” I hesitate. What name do I use? And then with a sense of weariness I think, what’s the point in trying to pretend. “… Hathaway. May I speak with Roger Whitaker, please?”

“Will he know what it’s regarding?” the receptionist asked.

For a second I was struck dumb. “Yes.”

I was sitting down this time. I took a deep breath and leaned back into the headrest as I was put on hold. After a few seconds the line was picked up and a male voice answered the phone.

“Miss Hathaway, so good to hear from you.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“Of course. I assume you’ve had time to think over what we detailed in the letter?”

“What part? The part where you told me my cousin was dead or the other bit where the farm’s going to be sold off and auctioned to the highest bidder to settle against his debts?”

“I know this is difficult to take in—” no, I’ve been waiting for this for seventeen years “—but we think perhaps it would be best if we spoke face-to-face about this. One of our senior partners was a friend of your grandfather’s. He knows how important the farm was to your family.”

“Was it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Was it important to us—I mean how many of us had you tried to contact before you found me? How many times did you get hung up on or ignored? Probably got cursed out a few times, too, huh?”

The voice was deliberately gentle at this point. “We were aware that there had been a significant rift between several family members. We know this is a delicate situation and for the sake of your family’s past connection with this firm we wanted to make the process as smooth as possible ….”

I saw that I was in for the lengthy legal homily.

“You can’t.”

“I don’t think that—”

“You can’t ever make it better. You can’t make it nice and easy or simple, so do yourself a favor and don’t try.”

There was a pause. “There was talk here that perhaps it might be more effective if you or a family member could sign over the responsibility of handling the dissolution of the farm and its assets to us. Of course this could prove to be difficult, considering that there is no direct claimant to the farm and others could contest the process if they should hear and—”

“No one will.”

“Well, uh, even so there is the matter of personal items, artifacts. We weren’t sure if someone would want to come down and sort these out from what should be sold with the farm and what would be kept.”

I saw my childhood home, the one a mile down from the main house with its yellow brick. Suddenly I was in our blue living room with the window seat behind the white curtains I used to hide under while I perched there waiting for Dad to come home.

“Of course.”

“When can you come down then?”

“What?”

“When would you like to come to the farm and do this? The sooner the better, to be frank. I don’t know if you are working, or if it would be a problem for you to take time off—”

“I work for myself. I’m an artist—a sculptor actually.”

“Excellent, then when shall we set up an appointment?”

I opened my mouth, suddenly utterly bereft. I raised my eyes from the floor and shuddered. They had lined themselves up all around me in a crescent of solemn, knowing faces.

“I don’t know.”

Our farm was on the outskirts of a town surrounded by the farms of our neighbors: people whose children we played with, whose families we married into, whose tables we ate at. Together our farms formed a circle of produce and plenty that enveloped our small town, a hundred and seventy years old with its red-and-white-brick buildings and thin gray roads. Simple people, simple goals, old-fashioned values: this is where our farm is still to be found. I had not seen it in nearly two decades, but as I looked at the crowd of faces glaring at me from the other side of the room, I realized with a thin sliver of horror I had no choice, I would be going back. And I shuddered so violently, I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to stop myself from crying out.

“We’ll leave you to think about it. But please—” his voice retracted back into smooth professionalism “—don’t take too long.”

It took me three hours to find it. There was a lot of swearing, I tore a button off of my shirt and scratched my arm, but eventually I sat cross-legged on the carpet and smoothed the crackled plastic of the front before I opened the album.

Ava had packed it in my suitcase the night before I left for college, the night I found her in the rose garden. I had opened my trunk in my new dorm to find it slotted between my jeans and cut-off shorts. I couldn’t bear to look at it for a long time. I had left it in the bottom of the trunk and when I had to repack for Mom’s funeral, I had tipped it out on the floor, daring only to look at it from the corner of my eye. I am a firm believer in what the eye doesn’t see, can’t be real. That was why, much to my mother’s deep disappointment, I became a lapsed Catholic.

But this time I flipped back the covers and stared. I drank it in. The photos had grown dull with age. The colors, which were once vibrant blues and reds, were now tinged with brown and mustard tones. I slipped my fingers across the pages, watching the people in them age, cut their hair and grow it out again. From over my shoulder, my father leaned down and stared at himself as a young man on his wedding day. The light behind my parents was a gray halo surrounding the cream steps of the New York City courthouse. They had married in November, just before Thanksgiving, and you could see behind the tight smiles, as they stood outside in their flimsy suits and shirts, how cold they were.

“Phew, wasn’t your momma a dish?” he said.

And she was. She wore her hair in the same way she would continue to for the rest of her life: center part, long and down her back. A perpetual Ali McGraw. Decades after this photo was taken, she would be widowed, her children would be scattered and broken, her home rotted out from beneath her. In her last moments, did she think of this? I don’t know. I wasn’t with her, only Ava was there.

She was not alone if she had to face her past and all its demons. And neither am I. I could feel them all pressing against me: the smell of my father’s breath … chewed tobacco and Coors beer somewhere to my left.

I took my time with the album, even though inside I started to scream. My hands trembled but I continued to turn the pages. Each new memory sliced its way out of me, taking form and shape with all the others. I didn’t mind the pain—it was just a prelude to the agony that has been biding its time for the right moment and now it was almost here. With one phone call it was as if all those years of running away were wiped out in an instant. My life is a house built on sand. That should have made me sad but it only made me tired. I turned another page. We looked so normal. In many ways we were, except all the important ones.

I flicked the page and saw my aunt Julia, whom I never got the chance to meet. Her hair was still red, before she started to dye it blond. From what I’ve heard from the strands of people’s covert conversations, Claudia was a lot like her.

And then I looked up from the album and saw him standing there, the cigarette smoke separating and spiraling above his face. He was named after my grandfather, who was lucky enough never to realize what his namesake would grow into.

“Are you in hell, Cal?” I asked him.

He laughed at this. “Aren’t you?”

“What do you remember?” I asked, suddenly urgent.

“Same as you,” he said with a sly grin. “Only better.”

“Don’t listen to him, honey,” my father said, lifting his chin in disdain.

Cal Jr. shot him a look of pure hate. “How would you know? You weren’t even there!”

I stood up and walked out of the room. This is it, I thought to myself, I’ve snapped. I’m finally broken.

“You’re not fucking real,” I suddenly shouted.

“Dear God, girl, still so uncouth,” my grandmother said, stepping out from the kitchen, her tongue flicking the words out like a whip. “I always told your mother she should have used the strap on you girls more often, but she was too soft a touch.”

I turned around to face her, my fists clenching and unclenching by my side. “You—if you hadn’t—”

She turned away from me, disdainful, bored. If this were all in my head, what did that say about me?

“Enough excuses, Meredith.”

I was shaking so hard, my voice tripped over itself.

“You were a monster, you know that? A complete monster.”

“Made not born,” she said and looked at me knowingly.

“Oh, no—” I shook my head “—I am nothing like you.”

“No, Merey—” and she smiled “—you exceeded all of our expectations.”

I took a step toward her—toward where I thought she was.

“I’m going back to the farm. To sell it, to take what’s left of your stuff and hock it at the nearest flea market.”

“Oh, Meredith.” She sighed. “You’ll have to do better than that. Have you learned nothing? In terms of revenge we both know you can do so much more.”

I shook my head and rubbed the heels of my hands into my eyes until the light grew red.

“You’re not here,” I said again, but even so I could feel the light pressure of her hand on my wrist.

“Neither are you,” she whispered.

I opened my eyes and lifted my head. There: the fields on fields of cereals and golden-eared corn from my memory, from my dreams. They lay before me, an ocean of land, the colors all seeping out in a filter of gray.

Exasperated, I finally asked her the question I knew she had been longing for. “Why are you even here?”

“Darling.” She chortled, suddenly filled with unexpected warmth. The silk of her green dress grazed past my arm as she came to stand beside me. “We never left.”

LAVINIA

The Good Soil

2

I GREW UP SURROUNDED BY STORIES. EVERY-one had a story about someone or something: it was our town’s way of reinforcing its claim on its inhabitants. And they have talked to me and around me all my life, so that my memory is not just mine alone, but goes back far beyond my birth.

In the half gray of a reminiscent twilight they stand there, waiting for me to allow them to be remembered. I can see them begin to open their mouths and flood me with their explanations, their whys and wherefores. They want forgiveness just as much as I do and they long for it now more than ever.

But who should start? Who needs it more? And then she disengages herself from them, her form hardening from mere silhouette to actual shape. In a swathe of green she steps forward, out of time and dreams—a ghost who has walked the earth of my memory so many times, the ground is worn underfoot.

What’s hard is not starting at the beginning but trying to decide where the beginning is.

If my grandmother had to choose, for her the beginning of our story would be in May of 1946. We would find ourselves at a church fair with its fairly standard gathering of paper plates, white balloons tied to the end of red checked tables and the food is potluck.

Father Michael Banville stands before a bowl of salad and dressing, chatting amiably with Mrs. Howther about the state of her geraniums. To the left of him stands a small knot of farmers’ wives chewing over the latest town news between mouthfuls of sweet potato pie, and farther on from them, dressed in a loose flower shift, her auburn hair bobbed to curl against her shoulders, stands a tall woman putting the finishing touches to her layer cake. She had brought the icing in a tube that had been wrapped in wet tissue and kept in her handbag throughout the service in the small white church.

Every time someone passes and catches her eye she makes the same apologies about some problem with her oven the night before and how she had to run down to her uncle’s home to finish off the cake before the service, so she has had no chance to do the icing until now. People have nodded at these comments, even offered a smattering of sympathy, but mostly they have moved away wondering why on earth she would have persisted with something that circumstance was so set against. Why not bring a salad instead, or something simple? But no, they guessed correctly, she had to prove something. That was Anne-Marie Parks all over, they all thought.

The potluck was a rowdier affair than usual. Enclosed by a series of collapsible tables with honey-colored deck chairs, the gathering on the small knot of green at the church entrance added a season of color to the otherwise mundane scenery of white building and sky. It was the first one held in the town since the end of the war. Soldiers still dressed in their GI uniforms bore the weight of the grateful wives holding on to them, as they attempted to play with babies who did not know them. People mingled, smiled, and there was even a gramophone propped up on a stack of magazines on a chair. Everyone chatted as they ate and swayed along to the music, all of which Anne-Marie Parks ignored as she continued to ice her cake.

Across from her, standing next to a dish of chicken legs, her husband, Dr. Lou Parks, a tall man with long hands, stood balancing a plate of coleslaw and ham as he tried to pretend that he could not see what his wife was doing. His companion, Joe Lakes, a local farmer, did the same and therefore most of the talking. He chatted about his produce, his animals, his work, anything to keep the talk away from the subject of wives and home. It was this kindness that made him bring up a subject of gossip he would never usually raise, but as he saw Anne-Marie use the flat of a spatula to swipe away a piece of icing that did not suit her, he grasped at the last piece of news he could find that might keep them going until the silly woman had finished.

“You know they say Walter’s boy is coming home?”

“Hmm?” At this, Lou Parks raised his face from his plate and fixed his graying eyebrows into half moons of surprise.

“Don’t know for sure though, of course. But there’s been a lot of talk. Walter’s been laid up a while and Leo’s been manning things alone on the place for so long now, but they say Walter’s been getting worse.”

Lou Parks kept his features stiff as he watched Joe scan his face for confirmation.

“How’d he hear?” he said at last.

“Telegram. Old Florence said how Leo sent a message by the wireless a few weeks back. She won’t say what it was or nothing and there weren’t no name as such, but she said the reply come back all the same and though she didn’t know what it was exactly, Leo opened it then and there in the office—he couldn’t wait. She couldn’t think what else could be so urgent.”

“That’s not much evidence to suggest it was about his brother,” Lou persisted as he swallowed another forkful of ham.

“No, no … true, but Mac at the hardware store said how their sister Piper had come down to get some more linen and stuff. Good kind, too. And when he’d asked her about it she’d sniffed and said they may be expecting visitors.”

“Could be just that,” said Lou.

“Nah, everybody knows Walter don’t know nobody outta town. Whole family what’s alive and they talk to is right here—all except his boy.”

Lou was chewing thoughtfully when he caught a glimpse of his wife slicing away a piece of cake for the minister. The layer cake was all white now, with small red rosebuds lining the corners and forming a heart of sugar flowers in the center. He saw the minister pick up the fat piece in his fingers and his head nodded in silent agreement with whatever he was thinking as he devoured it.

“Very nice, Mrs. Parks,” he said as he strode away licking his thumb thoughtfully. “Very nice.”

A shadow of something passed over Anne-Marie’s face. What, he could not tell, and then she picked up her icing and the tissue and pulled off her apron before leaving the cake. She did not take a slice for herself, or for her husband.

“I haven’t seen that man in a long, long time,” said Joe wistfully. Lou stared after Anne-Marie as she wove her way through the crowds, which parted for her, though not one person looked at her or interrupted their speech to address her. Lou’s jaw slowed to a stop. Quickly he turned back to his companion.

“So how’s your knee, Joe? I noticed you seem steadier than you were last week.”

“Mmm-hmm” said Joe, looking over his shoulder.

“Another piece of ham, Joe?” asked Lou, setting his fork down and reaching to cut a slice.

“Hmm? Oh, yes, thank you.”

“No trouble,” said Lou, heaping the plate high and then Joe pulled up a chair and began to sit down. Relieved, Lou settled himself beside him and took in another mouthful of coleslaw as they silently and methodically began to eat.

Later that night, as he waited in bed while she finished up in their bathroom, Lou thought back to the church fair. He thought of the cake and the delicate rosebuds, of the look on his wife’s face as she had stared at the minister who, blissfully ignorant, had greedily relished the slice she had cut him with only the barest of acknowledgment. She had lost herself for the rest of the afternoon, until finally she had slipped an arm around his waist just as he was thinking he would like to leave. They had passed the table with the cake as they walked to their car and he had noted that it was still as she had left it with only one slice taken away.

He wanted to tell her his thoughts: to say them and wait for her response so that maybe then he would fully understand the meaning behind what he had seen, but as ever when she stepped into the room, her body pale beneath the white cotton nightdress and her hair crowding her shoulders in waves tinged with red, he opened his mouth and the words seemed to fail him. Instead of voicing all these thoughts he said, “You know there’s talk that Cal Hathaway may be coming home.”

“Who?” his wife asked.

“Walter’s boy.”

“Oh. Why does that matter?”

He turned to face the ceiling. “No reason, I guess.” He shifted so that his back faced her when she slipped in beside him. “Just nice for Walter to have his family back.”

“What did you say his name was?” she asked.

“Abraham technically, ‘cept almost everyone calls him Cal.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s his middle name.”

“Like me,” she said quietly.

“I like Anne-Marie,” her husband said, an unexpected tenderness suddenly tugging at him. He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t and so he untensed himself and settled down to sleep.

Outside, crickets chirped before the milk of a half moon and Anne-Marie Parks heard them well until the early hours of the morning when she finally fell asleep. She did not think about what her husband had told her; there was no immediate reason why it should be relevant to her. She did not know that she would later marry the man whose name she had so casually forgotten as she lay hugging her pillow, waiting for sleep to come. Nor everything else that would come to her: things she stayed awake aching for, night after night, until she woke beside her husband, hating the rise and fall of his back because that, and not what she had dreamt of, was her reality. She was so unaware of what lay in store, of what she was capable, or who she really was.

This was all when she was still just Anne-Marie Parks, the local doctor’s wife; seven months, four days and ten hours away from becoming Lavinia Hathaway.

When Abraham Caledon Hathaway finally returned home, it was to find his father dying. The man who had once wrestled him down and cast his belt on his back at sixteen after he had stolen the family truck and gone drinking, had withered to a husk and now lay in blue-striped pajamas on white linen sheets.

Cal had stood in the doorway of his childhood home contemplating how close his father looked to death. He was not horrified by this. He had met death already over a year ago. His wife had been decapitated in a car accident while he was out at work as a salesman. A truck with a load of metal ladders had slammed on its brakes at a red light, but the ladders had not been properly tethered to the back. At the force of the stop, one of them had dislodged and shot straight through the windshield of his wife’s car and smashed into the base of her head at the neck. Their three-year-old daughter, Julia, had been in the passenger seat next to her at the time, although miraculously she was unhurt. Cal had picked her up at the hospital after he had identified his wife. Her skin and cherry-patterned dress were still covered in her mother’s blood. He stared into the calm brown eyes of his child and had known then and there what death really was, and also, that at the tender age of three, she now knew it, too.

That was why he let her come upstairs with him to see his father when they first arrived at the house, even though his sister, Piper, had protested.

“It ain’t right,” she had called after them both from the bottom of the stairway.

“What isn’t?” their brother Leo had asked, coming in to take the lunch she had laid out for him on the kitchen table.

Piper turned. “He’s taking Julia up to see Pa.”

Her brother had humphed as he tore into a cold beef sandwich with mustard. “So they’ve arrived, have they? Anyway what do you care? It’s his kid.”

“Would you let yours come up?”

“I don’t have none so I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I’m thinking that’d be more along the lines of their mother’s call. She don’t have no mother.”

Piper jutted out her chin in irritation. “Still ain’t right.”

“He say how long he staying for?”

Piper watched her brother as he stared at her over his plate.

“I didn’t have time to ask. He just dropped his bags and went straight up.”

“No sense beating ‘round the bush, I guess. He’s only here for one reason and we all know it.”

When Cal came back downstairs, he paused at the bottom step at the sight of his younger brother. Piper ignored them both and, bending down low, she faced the silent unflinching gaze of her niece.

“Do you want some lunch Ju-bug?”

Julia looked up at her father, who stared at her in silent agreement.

“She’ll ask for it when she’s hungry,” he said.

He looked at his sister. She was still as she ever was: thin, wiry, her hard jaw and her overly inquisitive eyes searing everything with their gaze. He looked at his brother sitting at the table, staring at him thoughtfully as he ate. Already he could feel the enmity wash over him. Suddenly he was incredibly tired, and he longed for the silent confines of his small apartment back in Oregon.

He nodded in greeting.

“Long time,” he said. Leo raised his eyebrows; Piper looked at the floor.

“Could say that,” Leo replied.

“I heard you got married,” Cal said.

“Yeah. Just before the war.”

“You fight?” Cal asked, suddenly curious.

Leo used the last of his sandwich to mop up the mustard sauce on the plate.

“Yeah.” He looked up and stared at his brother. “I did my time.”

Cal looked away, as if lost in thought, before he cleared his throat.

“Did you see any action, Cal?” his brother asked softly.

Cal met his brother’s unflinching gaze.

“I saw plenty.”

“Pa’s glad to have you back,” offered Piper, the light notes of her voice grating against the air in the kitchen.

“Pa barely knows his own name,” Cal snapped. Piper looked away out onto the porch and sniffed.

Julia frowned and began to swing against the grip of her father. Cal looked down at his daughter as if he had forgotten she was there.

“Julia, this is your uncle Leo,” he said, raising a finger. “Remember the pictures I showed you?”

Julia looked at her uncle and then shook her head.

“Well, it don’t matter,” said Cal. “He was much younger in them than he is now.”

“Hi there, girl,” said Leo and gave her a halfhearted wave. He turned back to his plate. “You both gonna be here long?” he asked sharply, without looking up.

Cal gave him a level gaze and then shrugged.

“Don’t think so. Got to get back to work, for one thing.”

“Didn’t you tell them the circumstances?” asked Piper, shocked.

“Of course I did. They said I could take as much time as I needed but, uh, I just don’t think I’ll be needing that much time.”

Piper’s eyes slid away from her brother to the floor. Leo paused and then pushed back his chair before wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Well then,” he said, “well then. No need to make no fuss.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Cal.

Of course that wasn’t how it turned out.

It began when Piper came down from their father’s bedroom a few days later and started making a list at the kitchen table of things to get in town. Not from the local store, but up in the city from the place their mother had always used when she needed something special. Then she went out to see Leo. When she found him hoisting hay bales in the barn, she told him to keep the seventh free.

“What for?” he’d asked between grunts of exertion.

“Pa’s planning something,” she’d said.

“Pa can’t wipe his own ass. You’re planning something for him.”

“And?”

“And what is it for?”

“For the family.”

Leo had grunted again but he did not speak.

Then three days later, as she went to pick up some meat for dinner, Anne-Marie Parks saw Piper Hathaway order up two sides of beef, three hams, four chickens and a hog.

“You hibernating?” asked Dan Keenan from behind the counter. “If so you’re early, it ain’t even fall yet.”

“Luck favors the prepared,” said Piper as she counted out the money.

Later that week over mashed potatoes with sausages and onions, Lou Parks told his wife about the invitation they had received.

“Walter’s having a party up in the house,” he said.

“Where?” asked Anne-Marie.

“Aurelia, their farm. We’re invited.”

“Oh,” said Anne. “Why?”

“To celebrate Cal coming home.”

“That’s nice,” she said halfheartedly.

“Leo won’t think so,” her husband muttered in reply, before turning back to read his paper. And so, because he was preoccupied, she didn’t bother to question him, and as usual they finished the remainder of their dinner in silence.

Two weeks later and my grandmother stepped foot on Aurelia for the first time. The place as it was then would be unrecognizable to me: no sign in curlicue lettering, no pockets of flowers, no white house. I have seen pictures of what it used to be like. Instead of the daisies and hyacinths, the entrance to the farm was simply a sandy drive that wove its way along the crab grass. The house on the mound was not white and tall, but gray and flat with dark shutters and a roof that peeked over the front in a slanted fringe. In the distance the grass swept on and on, periodically knotted with thatches of prairie grass until eventually it found the fields of corn and the stream. It was large and expansive and Anne-Marie’s first thought when she saw all of this was that it was ugly.

Did she see everything then that it could be? Did she re-envision the sight before her and see in her mind the potential that could arise from beneath her guiding hand? It would not have surprised us if she had. In fact in some ways it is what we would have expected from her, because in the end the way she knew exactly how to mold the farm to suit her tastes and bring out the beauty in it was almost prophetic. She was so intuitive that we all assumed she must have connected to it from the first. But in truth there was no such feeling. Maybe Lavinia Hathaway would come to feel that way, but in 1946, Anne-Marie Parks did not. Instead, she did not like Aurelia and she hated the idea of going to the party.

It was not the first time this had happened. Her insides had a habit of withering in anxiety whenever she was faced with an event like this. The farm at this point was not the great estate it would come to be in my lifetime, but it was still considered to be a prosperous holding and the Hathaways were a very respected family in the community. Nobody would have missed the party if they could help it and the weight of expectation that was implicit in the invite weighed down on Anne-Marie from the moment her husband had mentioned it to her over dinner. Because no matter what she wore or how many hours she spent on her hair and makeup, she always felt like the unwanted niece of her lawyer uncle, the abandoned child, a product of other people’s charity.

It was as if she had been branded and nothing could remove it. Not seducing and marrying the town doctor; not moving into a house of her own, which was only slightly smaller than her uncle’s. Often she would wonder if this was to be it. If she would live and die as nothing more than the doctor’s wife and her uncle’s former charge. She would think these things as she cooked, or ran her errands, and she would suddenly be consumed with an urge to utterly annihilate everything around her. Once she took the kitchen knife to the soft pink curtains that hung over the window above the sink. She slashed at them, not caring where she plunged the knife, thrusting so deeply that the point scraped against the glass, leaving long thin scratches on the pane. She eventually stopped, the energy just draining from her, but once it was over she hadn’t felt contrite or ashamed. She bundled up the material, composed an excuse for her husband and ordered some new curtains from a magazine she subscribed to. Why she felt like this she did not know. It seemed to her she had always been this way: always bitter and resentful because she did not count, and even now she did not know how to change this.

As she climbed the mound to the house, which was already strewn with lights, she began to prepare herself for the night ahead. She knew it annoyed her husband that she couldn’t interact with their neighbors. He had known about the comments and gossip that started after their engagement had been announced, but only from a distance. To his face, at least, it was clear that all the men were secretly envious that he had managed to entrance a pretty nineteen-year-old. He did not know that the women had labeled his wife a harlot and a temptress; that despite the respectability of his name, to them she was still no better than his whore. Nor did he ever guess at how they stared at her belly after the first six months and noted with pursed lips and inward smiles that it had continued to stay flat. He did not sense their distaste, he only saw her isolation, an isolation he believed was self-imposed. That was why he left her at gatherings. After a few weeks into their marriage, he told her that if he stayed with her, she would never force herself to socialize. He chose not to acknowledge that whether he was with her or not, it made no difference.

So when they reached the door and were shown through to the garden, he immediately detached himself, leaving her standing on the back porch, cradling the flowers she had brought and staring at the islands of people knotted among the expanse of green punctured by white-clothed tables and multicolored streamers of silver, turquoise and gold.

She moved through these islands like a navigator through treacherous waters, slipping between the gaps she could find until she reached a small clearing that had not yet been invaded. She did not even try to see where her husband had gone. She came near one of the long tables covered with steaming hams and bowls of salad and rested the flowers near the paper cups and the punch bowl. Nearby stood a group of huddled men, whom she ignored. Instead she served herself a drink, and as she picked over the food she began to wonder how she would be able to get through the evening without taking a knife to something.

“Must just eat you up, Leo,” one of the men near her said.

“He’ll be gone soon, we all know he won’t stay.”

“What was he doing up in Oregon anyway?”

“Salesman.”

“Walter knows he ain’t no farmer. Blood or no blood he’s seen you sweat over this place and he won’t do anything that ain’t in the interests of the farm. Ain’t no salesman can farm.”

“Yeah, but he did use to farm here, didn’t he?”

“That was a long time ago, though.”

“To be sure.”

“You’re the one who’s been here. No one cares about that firstborn stuff. It’s about what you done, not what position you were born into.”

“I hope he knows that.”

“He’s a shrewd man, your pa.”

“Yeah and a sick one. Sick ones stop being shrewd and start getting sentimental.”

“Not when it comes to money they don’t.”

“And besides, if your pa does start to feel sentimental all’s he got to do is start remembering why he sent him away in the first place.”

“Come on now, Dan, everyone knows that were an accident.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“No … sure, Leo, of course. We meant no disrespect.”

“Why, Anne-Marie, don’t you look fetching?”

Anne-Marie turned to see her cousin, the girl she had grown up with, standing before her, a broad smile drawing a hole in her wide, pink flushed face.

“Thank you, Louise,” she replied calmly, though she turned away briefly and slowly closed and reopened her eyes. She had not spoken with her cousin in weeks but each time she did it drained her. It ate up all her reserves to keep a neutral expression on both her tongue and her face, when secretly she wished God would just grant her lifelong wish and snap the girl’s neck like a twig.

“So thin, though, Anne-Marie, if people were to look at you they’d think we were still in the Depression. You know I think you’ve lost weight again. You been losing it steadily ever since you left home, but I guess that’s what happens when you have to cook for yourself. I noticed Lou is thinner than he was, too. Maybe you should talk him into hiring you a housekeeper, if he can afford it on a local doctor’s wage.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t question him about his finances.” Anne-Marie turned to her plate. Louise cackled in laughter and put a hand on her shoulder.

“My God, what wife doesn’t know how much she can push her husband for? You are a funny one. The very least he can do is get you some Negro girl in the place, preferably one from down south somewhere. They don’t haggle as much as the ones up here. I insist you try, any more weight loss and people will start thinking something’s wrong with you.”

“I’m just fine,” snapped Anne-Marie as her jaw ached under the strain.

“But maybe not,” said Louise, cocking her head to her side and fingering the hem of Anne-Marie’s dress. “Maybe the dress just makes it seem that way. Boy, you can do anything with a sewing machine,” she said, dropping her hand away and smoothing down the cream silk that fell across her own waist and flared out at her hips. Suddenly she laughed. “Remember all those times I’d come home and find you just sewing away, always mending, always poring over your clothes and stuff. Why you didn’t just ask Daddy to buy you something new I could never understand.”

Anne-Marie stared at her cousin. She saw her cock her head to her side and gaze at her as if she were waiting for something, always waiting for something, and then finally smiling as she used to when she saw that Anne-Marie could not think of a way to respond.

“Daddy said you used to get that from your mother, that thriftiness.” She bent nearer to her at this point. “Truth be told, I think he was glad that’s all you got.”

Anne-Marie cleared her throat and tried to turn away. Louise stepped back and frowned.

“Sorry, I forgot how you never mention your mother.”

And she never did—never. I remember my father saying how he had asked about her once. My grandmother had gotten up from her chair and left the room without saying a word, and when he had asked his father why she was that way, all my grandfather could say was, “Some things just run through you so deep, all they leave is a hole.”

And so it was with my grandmother, so that she became little more than a void in the disguise of a woman.

But while Anne-Marie may have refused to talk about her mother, almost everybody else did. They couldn’t help themselves after her uncle’s wife, a rotund woman who had an unfortunate partiality to loudly colored prints, had taken every opportunity at the store or in the street, to explain to her neighbors how her sister-in-law had turned up on their doorstep with a carpet bag, a spaniel puppy and a seven-year-old girl in a blue gingham pinafore.

Soon everyone would come to know that Eleanor Brown had left her husband, a teacher in San Diego, to come back to her home town. The rumor was that he had run up debts and their house was to be sold, though people suspected there were far more shameful indiscretions than these two meager facts. No one said so directly, but everyone knew they would divorce. People, including her own family, had assumed that Eleanor would stay in town under the supervision and support of her brother and create a new life, but it was not to be. In the early hours of a Wednesday morning, three weeks after she arrived, her brother came down to his morning coffee to find that not only had it not been made, but his wife also sat at their table, her head in her hands with a note laid open before her. While brief, Eleanor was certainly direct. The child was to stay with them until she could find a job and a home elsewhere. She left no forwarding address in case they chose to forward her daughter to her as well as her mail. So they were left with this little girl from San Diego whom they had only ever met once before and who was now to be staying with them for heaven knew how long.

At first Eleanor decided to keep up the pretense of parenthood and send them money every month. The amount always varied. Then after two years she sent forty dollars and a wedding photograph of her and her new husband. Her sister-in-law had humphed at this.

“At least she’s not wearing white,” she had said.

That was the last they had ever heard of her.

It was after this that they changed my grandmother’s name. Her aunt had never liked it. She had thought it pretentious, flighty: in short, far too reminiscent of the traits inherent in her wayward mother. So they had taken it away and instead settled her with her middle name Anne, though they thought Anne Brown was far too dour so they had given her Marie as well. They had thought in doing so they were being kind.

So she had lived and grown up with them as Anne-Marie Brown, one of them, but always aware this was by their admission rather than her right, so that at any moment this could be taken away and no one would intervene. How much of this was of her own thinking and how much was gauged by their implication, no one will ever really know. What is known is that one day at the age of nineteen, Anne-Marie had placed the silver tray of honey roast chicken on the protective place mat in front of her uncle and when he stood up and scraped the carving knives against each other, over the clang of metal she announced there and then that she didn’t want to be served any dark meat and that she was planning on marrying Dr. Lou Parks.

Her aunt had dropped her fork, her uncle had put down his carving knife and her cousin had shrieked with laughter.

“You can’t marry Lou Parks,” Louise squealed. “He’s a hundred years old.”

“Forty-nine,” Anne-Marie had replied quietly.

Over the dimming candles and intermittent incredulous gasps and other noises, they had questioned her for over an hour, while the chicken shriveled up and the steamed vegetables began to wilt, until all they were left with was a cold meal and more questions than answers.

How had this happened? they wanted to know. Had she done anything improper? Louise at one point demanded to know if she had slept with him, at which point out of disgust or fright her mother had slapped her across the mouth and Louise had burst out crying, which had only made her mother start bawling herself. Her uncle sat there trying to compose himself, but he was hungry and he stared plaintively at the chicken and mourned the fact that on any other evening, he would by now be sitting in his study, fed and sated, not stiff-backed at the dinner table with his women crying.

“Don’t you want to marry someone your own age?” her aunt asked her. “If you ever had any children, by the time they are grown up, why—” she turned to her husband, her hands splayed in a posture of both pleading and exasperation “—he’ll be old enough to be their grandfather.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there aren’t any young men left anymore,” Anne-Marie answered coolly. “And the last thing I want is to raise some brat on my own while my husband gets his head blown off overseas.”

Her aunt had opened and closed her mouth like a fish choking on air.

Finally, in an effort to impart some good on the proceedings, her uncle had asked Anne-Marie if she truly loved this man; if she was ready to spend the rest of her life with him, until death do they part, and, more importantly, if she really knew what this meant. She had leaned back in her chair and sighed, then looked at him with such tired contempt that when she dropped her head and turned away he had not dared to press her for an answer. For the very first time he had seen her naked in expression and suddenly he had an overwhelming desire to get the girl out of his house once and for all.

In that fact, he could not have known how alike in sentiment they were, probably the only thing, apart from blood, that they ever had in common.

Her family could not understand why Lou Parks wanted to marry her. A bachelor, with a taste for whiskey and a strong Presbyterian streak, he seemed the least likely person to fall for Anne-Marie. Her uncle couldn’t help but question him over the validity of the relationship, when Lou, like a lovesick teenager, had come to his house the next day to properly ask for Anne-Marie’s hand. Anne-Marie had bent over the upstairs banister, watching her cousin and aunt in the corridor below, trying to listen in on what he was saying, and she had smiled to herself at what she had accomplished, and even more that they would never know how she did it.

No one believed it would actually happen. They all thought it was a brief bit of madness that would be slowly weaned out before it could ever come to full destructive fruition. But even though the night before the wedding they had lain in their beds and wondered aloud if he would go through with it, the next day Lou had stood up in the church and never once faltered in his vows. Even their kiss had seemed sincere, as he cupped Anne-Marie’s waist to draw her closer. Louise had made a gagging noise until she was hit on the arm to make her stop.

Her family was afraid of her after that, and she was glad. She saw how they greeted her and how anytime they said the words Mrs. Parks, their tongues seemed to slide over the letters as if, should they linger too long, someone would laugh at them and they would realize that they were the punch line to a joke she had been playing on them all this time. That wasn’t too far from the truth and part of them suspected so. To them she was a stranger, capable of what … they did not know, nor did they care to find out. But Anne-Marie did, and she was waiting: waiting for the chance for her true self to emerge as an independent, not defined by who she was with or whose house she lived in. But the more she waited, the less likely it seemed that it might happen.

She saw her cousin look longingly over her shoulder and in that instant she took the chance to slip away. By the time Louise had noticed her absence, Anne-Marie had moved too far away for her to want to call her back. She wove her way through the garden. They called it a garden but in her mind it was no better than an untilled field, just long grass and bushes that sprawled down the back of the house in a wide arc and before she knew it, she had let it lead her away as it branched off to the left behind some trees. It was there, sitting on a bench, that she found Cal Hathaway. Later on in life he would say she was looking for him but she did not know it; that it was fate that had led her there. I am inclined to agree.

“I’m sorry, I did not mean to intrude,” she said. He looked up at her then. He was reclining back on the white bench, a tumbler beside him and a bottle of scotch.

“Who are you? I ain’t seen you before,” he said curiously.

“I’m Anne-Marie Parks,” she replied coolly and then held out her hand as an afterthought, but he’d already turned from her back to his scotch and her hand fell limply to her side.

“You from here?” he asked sharply.

“Most of my life.”

“How come I don’t know much of you then?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows much of me.”

He looked her up and down. “Probably the best way,” he said conclusively. “Soon as anyone knows anything about you in this place they all start wanting a piece. Well, they’ve had as much as they’re going to get of me.”

“Where you been? They—I heard that you had been away for some time now.”

“Oregon. I’m a salesman there.”

“Oh?” enquired Anne-Marie casually. “What do you sell?”

He shrugged. “Whatever needs selling.”

This was how my grandfather was—cold, casual, unattached to anything and anyone except his daughter. He’d had enough of attachments at this stage in his life. All they ever seemed to do was bring him harm.

“I heard your daddy is dying.”

“You heard right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You wouldn’t be if you knew him.”

“I think you knew him and you’re still sorry, or you wouldn’t be down here away from everyone knocking back scotch.”

In the dark she could see his gaze arrest in surprise. His hand hovered over the bottle before he poured a thimbleful.

“Want to taste?”

She drew herself up.

“Ah, now there’s no need to be like that. A bit won’t kill you and it’s the good kind anyhow. My pa has good taste in liquor.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m thirty-five.”

“Well, it’s a sorry state when a man of your age is hiding from a party thrown for him at the bottom of a garden, drinking stolen liquor.”

Cal laughed. “You ain’t very popular, are you?”

Anne-Marie put a hand to her neck and then dropped it in irritation.

“About the same as you from the sounds coming out of people. Who says I ain’t anyhow?”

In the dark he seemed to smile. “Nobody is who likes pointing out other people’s truths.”

He stood up then and she saw how tall he was, the broad shoulders, the thin nose and square jaw, his long hands that were now cradling his drink. She would come to know how much he would like to drink and for a long time it would not bother her.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Weren’t you paying attention? I told you it was Anne-Marie.”

He shrugged. “Anne-Marie just don’t seem to suit, is all. You don’t look like an Anne-Marie to me.” He licked his lips. “Anne-Maries are soft creatures. You ain’t soft, you’re hard and brittle and harder because you know you’re brittle. Your name is a lie, Anne-Marie, but then so is mine. People call me Cal, have done all my life, but my name is Abraham. You know your bible—Abraham is the father of the twelve nations of God’s chosen people, all-wise, all-knowing. But I ain’t no Abraham just like you ain’t no Anne-Marie, so what then is your name, girl?”

It was then, my grandmother said, that she knew it. She watched the swaying man try to steady himself on his drunken feet and even though he wasn’t handsome, even though he was just some salesman from Oregon, even though she felt a creeping vine of disdain tug at the corners of her mouth as she observed him, it could not change her revelation.

“One day you will know,” she would say much later. “You will just know and all you can do is pray for the serenity to accept it and the courage to follow through.”

“My mother called me Lavinia,” she said finally.

He smiled down at her, and as he leaned forward she could smell the rich yeast of his breath.

“See—” he cupped her neck in his palm “—didn’t I tell you?”

That’s as much as she would ever reveal about what happened that evening in the garden. My grandfather on the other hand was more forthcoming. He once told me how even though he had noticed the wedding band, even though she was just a slip of a girl with a bitter tongue and even though her face was twisted in contempt, he had still looped her up by the waist and pressed his mouth against hers. He was drunk, he was angry and he saw in her the same anger at everything. Perhaps it was an act of consolation or the comfort of two strangers who found in each other a sense of kinship. Perhaps I am being too sentimental. Perhaps it was only ever meant to be just a kiss.

Later, when her husband would decide to go home and start to look for her, she would appear next to the table with the punch bowl, and he would ask if she’d had enough and wanted to leave, and she would say, gladly.

On the ride home, my grandmother said, she wrestled with herself. She thought about Cal’s words while she twisted her wedding ring. She conjured the faces of her cousin and her family, of the last time she ever saw her mother and finally of the pink curtain she had slashed to ribbons. The weight of it all, of all she knew and hated and all she wanted and was too afraid of, made her sag in her seat. For once her husband seemed to notice. He leaned over as he steered the car down the thin tree-laden lanes and, holding her hand he said, “Are you okay, Anne-Marie?”

And just like that she broke.

When I think of a time when things could have been different and then when something happened to make it so that they could never be, I find myself back at that garden party. If it were possible to undo that one thing, then everything else in time would unravel with it and we’d be left clean and renewed with hope.

Before I went to bed that night I dialed Ava’s number. It was late but I didn’t care. In the end it was the answering machine that picked up. Usually I would not have left a message but this time was different. This time I said, “I’m going back. I thought … well someone has to look over things and I don’t want Mom’s stuff sold off to a pack of strangers or gossip-hungry neighbors. I was thinking … I don’t … I wondered if maybe you may want to come with me—just to see what stuff you’d want to keep to remember them by …. No, why would you, right? I know. But I am going. I just thought you should know.”

I put down the receiver and lay supine on my bed. I knew I would dream that night, but I did not care. In the silence behind my mouth I said to myself, Let them come.

As if they needed an invitation.

3

AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY-ONE, WALTER HATHAWAY had cancer of the colon. That was the only reason his eldest son had come back. He had been diagnosed in the office of an oncologist upstate, a specialist recommended to him by Lou Parks, who had gone to college with the man and had followed his career with a respect tinged with envy.

After a series of tests and weeks of waiting he had driven back up to the doctor’s office, where after a few minutes of chitchat and polite conversation, the doctor had told him that not only did he have cancer of the colon, but that there was also nothing they could do to save him.

“Bullshit,” said Walter.

He had picked up his hat and thanked the man, who, after taking a moment to recover, was still hastily trying to explain that with his symptoms Walter would be dead within a year. Despite the doctor’s protestations, Walter left him with little more than a curt nod of acknowledgment. He refused to believe that death would be coming for him so soon, and so when he came home and sat before the dinner his daughter had made for him, all he’d said when she asked him where he’d been was that he had spent the day in a meeting with a supplier.

But then four months later he had woken up in a pool of his own shit and blood and saw death beside him sitting in a wicker chair. So he had lain back into his pillow, sighed and said, “Okay, you win.”

It was then he began to talk about his eldest son and how to bring him home.

It was also the first time he had mentioned him in over sixteen years.

When he was laid up in his bed and the doctor had given him his medication, he gritted his teeth against the pain and curled his fingers into claws so that they dug tunnels in the sheets. Twisting in agony he beckoned to his daughter and told her, “Go find your brother.”

“Sure, Pa, I’ll go get him for you,” said Piper. A few minutes later and she came back with Leo, who winced when he saw the state his father had become.

Walter closed his eyes and sighed irritably.

“No, not him. I mean your brother Cal. Get Cal.”

Piper felt Leo stiffen beside her but she dared not look at him. She stared at her father but the old man had his gaze fixed to the ceiling, battling against the forces of his own body, and she saw then what she would become despite everything she was now and her back sank beneath the weight of her revelation.

“Pa?”

“Didn’t you hear me, girl? You making me talk when I got no energy to talk. Do as I say!” he shouted and then doubled over into himself. Piper went to help him but he smacked her hand away. She looked desperately for Leo but he’d already left the room.

When she went down the stairs she found Leo standing on the front porch, his fingers splayed against the fringe of the roof that hung over them. He was staring out onto the drive. Without looking away he asked, “Is he dead yet?”

“What the hell is wrong with you? Of course not,” said Piper.

He turned to face her.

“Well, by God I wish he were. I wish he’d hurry and up and go before he does something stupid.”

“I don’t want to hear you talk like that.”

“That man up there is not my father.”

“He may be more of your father than you’d like.”

Leo lurched himself forward down the porch steps.

“What do you want me to do?” Piper called after him. He turned around, and when he did his face was half in shadow.

“Get a gun and end it. If it were a horse you wouldn’t think twice.”

Piper leaned back and clasped her hands over her skirt.

“Well then, don’t ask me again,” he said, his profile throwing up long shadows as he walked home.

After a while it seemed that the medication began to take hold. Her father was weak but quiet, as if he had resigned himself to his fate. Sometimes as she passed the hall that led to his bedroom she would hear his voice and wonder to whom he was talking. She mentioned it once to Lou Parks, who said not to worry, one of the side effects of the treatment was hallucinations. He asked her if she wouldn’t want to move their father to some palliative care place that would help control his pain before he died, but Piper refused. She had nursed her mother in that same bed before she died and she felt it was only right to do the same for her father. Lou Parks shrugged and touched the rim of his hat as he left her. She went to the kitchen to prepare dinner.

But then a few days later, Lou came into the living room, where she was mending linen, and said gently, “Your pa is asking for Cal.”

“What?” she asked, startled.

He stepped gingerly into the room, cautious to avoid any mines. “Walter won’t stop talking about the boy. He wants to see him.”

“Could this be the effect of the medication?” Piper asked hopefully.

“No, more like the effect of dying and the regrets that come to you before you do.”

“Oh,” said Piper as she sat back in disappointment. “I see.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Cal? Of course I do.”

“It’s just what with Walter feeling how he did about him I thought…”

“I never stopped talking to Cal,” said Piper. “I just didn’t do it in my daddy’s earshot.”

“Well, it’s up to you, of course.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

Later that night, Piper went down to Leo’s house, a small honey-colored place he’d built half a mile down from the main house. She knocked on the door and walked in to find her sister-in-law wiping flour from her hands.

“Hi there, Elisa,” she said. “Is Leo home?”

“Sure is, he’s upstairs having a bath. You wanna wait?”

Piper nodded. “I think I’ll have to.”

The women sat in the kitchen and chatted while Elisa put the finishing touches to her pie. Then quietly Elisa said, “My sister is pregnant again.”

“Oh, how wonderful,” said Piper before she had time to stop herself. Elisa smiled down at her fingers as she licked cherry juice from them.

“Yes, it is. I’m very happy for her. I do love playing with my niece and nephews. She was a little afraid of telling me, I think, on account of the troubles Leo and I have been having, but I’m glad she told me. She must feel so full of purpose.”

Piper kept silent but she watched the back of the woman’s head keenly. Usually she would reach out and touch her, but she could not afford to do so at a moment like this, not with what she had to tell her brother; not with knowing that she had approximately thirty seconds to say what she needed to before she was sent packing out of the house.

When Leo came downstairs, he nodded at his sister in greeting.

“I told Piper about my sister’s baby,” said Elisa as she dusted the pie in sugar. Leo gazed at his wife and then as if conscious of his sister watching, coughed into his hand and turned away.

“So you stopping for supper?” he asked.

“No, not exactly.” Piper placed a hand on her stomach, willing the courage to come, but it would not. So instead she leapt forward anyway, hoping that its inability to show itself was merely a product of delay rather than a sign of total absence.

“I think we should send for Cal.”

From the corner of her eye she saw Elisa’s hand hover in midair and then gently resume shaking the sugar over the crust. Her hand beating against the sieve was the only sound in the room.

Finally Leo said, “Now what in hell gave you that idea?”

“Pa is dying. You should respect a dying man’s wish.”

The chair scraped on the floor as Leo seated himself level with his sister.

“You ever think that maybe you should respect the wishes of a man when he was sane and well, rather than hallucinating and sick? That in his right mind Pa would never ask for such a thing?”

“It’s not just for Pa. Cal has a right to know.”

“For what?” Leo snorted. “He didn’t want to know for how many years now? Did he want to know after Ma died?”

“I think Daddy is ready to forgive.”

“I think this is horseshit.”

Piper stood up from the table and spread her fingers in a fan against the edge. She made herself tower over her brother.

“I believe we are better than this. I believe we are better than some people who would just let their own interests get in the way of doing what is right and I believe that even if Cal came back it wouldn’t make no difference to anything other than Pa would finally stop asking for him and could get some peace before he dies.”

Leo’s jaw worked thoughtfully at this last part. Piper saw it and pressed her advantage.

“You have to trust that Pa would have recognized what you’ve done, Leo. You’ve been here, Cal hasn’t. Maybe things were meant to work out differently to that, but they didn’t. We won’t lose anything by having him back. Once upon a time this is what you would have wanted.”

Elisa’s hands provided the background noise to the pause that followed Piper’s words: the opening and closing of the oven door, the scrape of dishes in the sink. Piper willed her brother to show a glimpse of the boy she had known since childhood. She willed it so hard it was almost a prayer, and for a moment as he lifted her head she thought perhaps God had been listening.

“Whatever,” said Leo and he left the room.

She knew better than to look at her sister-in-law for comfort when it came to this subject so she left and made her way back home. Three days later as Leo came in for lunch, she slipped a piece of paper and some money next to the arm holding his corn beef sandwich.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“I need you to send a telegram for me.”

“To who?”

“To Cal.”

Leo slapped his tongue against his teeth.

“Will you?”

“I wasn’t planning on going into town.”

“Neither was I.”

They stood there in their silent contest of wills, and as Piper felt herself falter, a shadow passed over her brother’s face and he dropped his sandwich onto the plate. He hunched over as he stood up to leave and she made as if to touch him, but he gave her a look that forced her hand back to her side.

And then her father called for her. She was up the stairs in an instant and when she came back down, she saw the plate was now in the sink and that the money with the piece of paper was gone and she held on to the banister to steady herself as she leaned against the wall.

Did Walter have an inkling of what his simple request had done to the equilibrium of his household? Did he even care? It was a question she longed to ask, but she held her counsel. Instead she thought back to the last time they had all been under the one roof. It was the day of her mother’s wake and she had been thirteen years old. She remembered how she had stared up at the blueness of the sky and at the good china laden with finger sandwiches and cakes from their neighbors and the house full of people, and she remembered thinking that on any other day, to any stranger passing by, how much it would have looked like a party.

She remembered her father sitting in his chair, when he was still strong and intimidating, surrounded by their neighbors and Leo, only two years older than she was, hovering in the doorway looking silently at the shadows Cal threw up on the walk as he stalked up the drive away from them.

She remembered all these things with color, and between the stairwell and the walls she gave up a shudder.

Whenever my grandparents talked about their courtship, they always gave the impression of a passion and romance that could not help but transgress all boundaries. In one sense they were being truthful, but in another how else could they have presented it? Because the simple truth, as Piper loved to point out and did so more frequently the older she became, was that while theirs was a respectable marriage, their courtship had been far from it, with the inconvenient fact that my grandmother was already married.

I have often been struck by the differences in the ways in which Piper and Lavinia laid out the early years of my grandparents’ relationship, and indeed both their versions fascinated me because despite their differences they both illuminated an aspect of their partnership that neither myself, nor my siblings, nor even their own children, had ever witnessed: a time when it was my grandfather, not Lavinia, who had the power.

When my grandmother was still known as Anne-Marie Parks, she and Cal had begun their affair. At first, certainly from my grandfather’s point of view, it was never meant to be serious. He had no intention of staying in Iowa—this was simply a way of passing the time until his father died and he could be free. And he liked Anne-Marie: he liked how she always twisted her hair in her hands on one side of her neck as she listened to him tell stories from his childhood; he liked that she smelled of rose water; he liked how she spoke the truth regardless of consequence or feeling; he liked that she was unhappy.

My grandfather used to have a thing for unhappy women. He could sense them a mile off and he was always drawn to them, because they didn’t expect much and were always more than appropriately grateful for what they could get. But more than that, unhappy women, when you made them happy, relished the thing like a cat basking in a pool of sunshine: they unfurled, they blossomed and their smiles of incredulous delight at this transformation always gave Cal a surge of pride in his own abilities. It made him feel like a good person, before he remembered otherwise.

They would meet a few miles down the road from Aurelia, during the day so that Lou was out at the practice or when he had been called away for a series of home visits. Anne-Marie would park her car behind a turnoff into a clearing shielded by the long prairie grass and Cal would meet her there in his Chevy. They would go to secluded woods, sometimes on long drives to nowhere, where they would park in any cloistered place they could find. They would stay there for hours. My grandmother often said later that she lived for those drives, though she would never have indicated as such to Cal. She knew she could not push him, but she heard tales of Walter getting sicker and she would listen to Cal talk of Oregon and what he planned to do when he got back and she would wring her hair in her hands to stop herself from screaming at him.

She waited on those drives for the moment of inspiration to come, just like it had with Lou. She knew better than to force it, but still she worried. She could not bear the idea of Cal going back to Oregon and she stuck in her house with her husband, looking up night after night over the dinner table and finding him sitting there at the end.

Irritatingly, he had grown kinder to her since the garden party. Since the night she had broken down sobbing and choking in their car he had been more tender, more concerned. She had tried to endure it as best she could.

So she sat there in the car with Cal waiting for a sign, keenly alert for whatever guise it may present itself as, while he stroked her skin under his hands and called her Lavinia.

And then finally it came.

Cal struck her so hard across the mouth that he broke the skin on her lip and she bled into her teeth. She saw him lean back, his face ashen, and he stared down at his fingers while self-revulsion contorted his features. Without a word she got out of the car and began to walk. It was ten miles from where she had parked her car. She waited for Cal to come after her but he didn’t. She heard the engine of the car roar behind her but the sound faded away. So she walked the ten miles and in that time she thought over what had happened.

Now my grandfather was not a man who ever lifted his hand to a woman, nor would ever again, save once years later when he would strike his daughter so hard she would fall and catch her temple on the table corner as she went down. He would stare at his hand then in the same way as he had looked at it now with Anne-Marie. What shocked me when I first heard these stories was not only that my grandfather, when provoked, could lose all sense of reason and restraint, but also that these provocations existed in the first place.

Maybe this may seem strange, but if you ever met my grandfather you would not have believed it of him. He was a man who was so temperate his perpetual state was placid. It was helped by his drinking surely, but never did his manner or nature ever tip those scales except for three times in his life. Once was when his mother died, once was now in a car parked outside Sunrise Wood and the last time would be in his kitchen in the spring of 1968. But at the time Anne-Marie knew nothing of this. What she did know was that she had said something that, without even realizing it, had flipped a switch in the man beside her, so that for a moment he ceased to exist. She hadn’t even seen it coming; there had been no warning. One minute they were talking; the next, the back of his knuckles had slammed her lips against her teeth. So she went over in her mind what she could have said to set him off.

They had been talking about his father. He was the one who had brought it up.

“Doctor came over yesterday.”

“Lou?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat. “They say it’s not long now.”

“Oh.”

“He wanted to see me up in his room.”

“Who? Lou?”

“No, Pa.”

They fell silent. She curled her hand around the open lapel of his shirt.

“Did you go?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

His chest rose and fell under her cheek. Try as she might she couldn’t hear his heart through the shirt.

“I haven’t spoken to him in sixteen years.”

“Well, you must have now that you’ve come back.”

“No, not at all. I’ve seen him but I haven’t said a word to him.”

“Oh. Why?”

“I don’t know. I kinda like seeing him suffer.”

She lifted her head then and, curling a finger under his chin, she made him face her.

“Why do you hate your pa so much?”

“Doesn’t everyone hate their pa a little?”

“I don’t know my pa to hate him, and your sister and brother don’t hate him.” She added cautiously, “Julia doesn’t hate you.”

“That’s because she hasn’t been raised on hell.”

“It don’t look like hell to me.”

He jerked his head away from her.

“Do you know about my ma?”

She shook her head.

“She died. A while ago now. She got sick, drank some contaminated water and she died in the same bed that he’s dying in. She’s buried on the farm. I lowered her coffin in the ground with my brother.” He paused to lick his lips and then settled back into his seat and stared ahead again. It was late in the afternoon. Lou had been called away to a conference in another county so they had stayed out later than usual. Their skin took on mottled hues of orange and pale pink from the sunset pouring through the windshield.

“The day of her funeral I was nineteen and I left home for good. I went up the drive and I just kept walking. No one stopped me, no one called after me. I slept rough, hitchhiked, took a shower when I could, lived without it when I couldn’t. I didn’t even know that I was leaving when I was, but I guess my feet knew better. I knew my pa wouldn’t give a shit. He told me as much, that he wanted me out of the place when Ma died. He said he didn’t want me under his roof no more. I been thinking on that for years. It could have been any one of us, it just happened to be me.”

He was still staring straight ahead. My grandmother knew that he’d almost forgotten she was even there. She didn’t care. She sat there watching him, barely moving, her breath shallow and uneven. He heaved a great sigh and when he spoke his voice was flat in a low monotone.

“We had always done chores around the farm, but then when I got to be sixteen Pa started to really teach me the ropes. He was always talking about the farm and leaving it to me and Leo and how we should manage it, and what we had to do for it. He was sick with love over the place, all the more because he only won it from his boss due to sheer sweat. And boy, did he make sure that we sweated over it. He thought it would make us love it as much as him. And we did, I guess. We didn’t really have a choice.”

He narrowed his eyes as he remembered.

“When I got to be eighteen he started giving me more responsibility. I was glad of it. I wanted to do things right. And to be sure, I never saw any other life for myself other than the one he laid out before me. So careful to follow only in his footsteps, neither shifting to the right nor looking to the left. Dead center,” he said as he sliced his hand slowly through the air in front of him.

“We used to use this pesticide during the crop dusting. And one time I was in charge of it. I’d seen it done a hundred times. Small thing, no-nothing thing. Only dangerous if you were careless. On one of the wheat fields near the stream we have a small stone well. Hardly a well, more like a built-up pool. Us kids used to drink from it in summer when it was hot and we were in the fields and too tired to go back in the house for water. During the crop dusting we always covered the well. And I remember … I remember putting the big stone tablet on top of it before I started the dusting. I remember it so clearly. I picked it up, and to be sure that thing was heavy, but I heaved it up on there all the same. I did, I know I did, I remember doing it.

“Ma used to come down to us. She used to help sometimes in the field when we had a lot a work to do. Not often, but she was always one to get her hands dirty. Ma, she grew up on a farm in Indiana with six brothers, she was—” he laughed “—she was a heck of a woman. Sometimes she’d try to tell Pa how to farm and they’d have these blazing arguments about it, real hammer and tongs. She didn’t give a shit if he smacked her on the mouth and told her to hush up—she always had to have her say.

“One day she came down to see me and Leo when we were busy doing some chore and I can see her now, leaning against the well. They all said she had to have drunk from it, weren’t no other way that she could have gotten how she did. But if she did … well … Leo said he saw her drink from it but I didn’t see it. She got sick the next day, took to her bed a few days later and never got out of it. Piper nursed her the whole way through, and she was only thirteen. It didn’t take long for her to die. She was gone before she knew it. Before we knew it.”

He nodded and bit his lip, rocking his neck back and forth as he finished. She looked him up and down for a moment.

“She was young, you know. She was only forty when she died.”

“Is that why you left then?” she asked.

He was struck dumb. He blinked in assent.

“God, I hate this place,” he muttered. “I wish to God I’d never come back. It weren’t by choice me leaving. That son of a bitch. I may not have been a kid exactly when I left but you know at the time I’d never even been out of the state? Farthest I ever got was Des Moines once for a state fair for chrissake!” He braced his hand against the steering wheel and began to chuckle to himself. She shrank back in her seat as he twisted his face this way and that, struggling with his memories.

“Son of a bitch. I’m glad it hurts. I see them all, our neighbors, all wondering why I’m back, wondering why he’s asked me back here now. They don’t know how to greet me. Before it was fine, I was the black sheep, a killer,” he growled, “but now he’s asking to see me like some prodigal son and they’re confused. They can’t figure it out, but I can. I know why he asked me back and I don’t give a shit. He wants me to join Leo on the farm. Be a Hathaway again. Well, that’s his vision, not mine. I’m waiting and just when he needs it the most I’ll pull the rug out from under him, I’ll let him die knowing it all went to hell with him. I’ll have me a real good day.”

“Oh, Cal,” she said, touching his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

She paused.

“It weren’t your fault. He should have known better. He should have known it was just an accident.”

There.

A second later—was it a second later? Wasn’t it less, half a moment, in an instant and his knuckle had slammed into her mouth? Her body cracked against the window with the force. He had screamed at her but at the time she didn’t register. Her hand was at her lip in an instant, she was too shocked initially to feel pain, but she saw his knuckles ripple under her blood as he withdrew.

And that was how she found herself walking down the side of a road now, only eight and a half miles left from where she had parked her car.

What went through her mind at that moment? Was it anger? Was it hurt and betrayal? Was it shame at her own foolishness?

She conjured up the last thing he had said to her as he struck her. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but she heard it clearly as she thought on it now.

“I put the lid on the well!” he’d screamed.

So no, none of these emotions went through Anne-Marie as she walked. She held her hand to her aching jaw and lifted the corner of her lips ever so gently in a smile. She was not angry, she was elated. She saw her opportunity.

I wonder now if I am being unkind to her. Perhaps too much has been colored by what I know would eventually happen to allow me to ever present her in a way in which she could have been innocent, or good. I am too used to seeing her as the villain. But, as she used to say, she was made, not born. Firstly by those who came before us in her life, and now years later by me in memory. I want to say that she didn’t think those things, or feel those things, that it all came out later under duress with due cause. But that’s a lie. It was always there brewing, it had to be. She took to it too easily.

Just like I did when my time came.

4

WHEN CAL CAME HOME, THE FIRST THING HE said to his sister was, “Did anybody call?”

Piper paused in her stirring of the mixing bowl to take stock of her brother.

“No,” she said carefully. “You expecting somebody?”

“No,” said Cal.

He drew out a chair at the table and sat down heavily.

“Where’s Julia?” he asked after a moment.

“She’s out back in the garden. I gave her some of my old toys and stuff. She’s having fun.”

“I think we should be going soon,” said Cal quickly. Piper’s wrist wavered momentarily, before she continued to beat the spoon against the bowl.

“Before Pa dies?”

“Why does that even matter? Who cares if I stay or go before then?”

“Pa will.”

“Screw Pa!”

He drawled the words out in his rage, strangling them in his throat so that they emerged stretched with fury. He put his hands up to his hair and held his crown in his hands. Piper saw the blood on his knuckles.

“You want to tell me something, Cal?” she asked.

He stood up abruptly and went out of the kitchen.

“No,” she said, continuing to stir, “I didn’t think so.”

Three days later he began to panic. He wondered if she would tell her husband. He had certainly given her cause to, and that busted lip would need some explanation. He prowled the farm waiting for Lou to show up. He told himself he didn’t care. He could more than handle Lou Parks. He told himself that people could talk and his siblings could look at him with disgust and it wouldn’t affect him. He would be gone soon anyway. He told himself he was used to exile.

But still he woke up in the night, his mind already crowding with voices tumbling over themselves to be heard first.

He tried calling her once, but he realized he had nothing to say even if she should answer. He saw that he had gotten himself into a mess, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that all he need do was bide his time until his father died and then he could leave. He counseled his heart to be patient, to be patient and to forget. Forget that he had struck her; forget her skin under his hands.

Forget that he missed her.

Piper saw the restlessness in Cal and she tensed. Against her will and much to her self-disgust, she began to wish her father would hurry up and die. She had tried to sound out Lou Parks on the subject. He would only shake his head and say, “He’s holding on. For what, I don’t know, but he’s holding.” Piper nodded in assent, but this only made her worry even more. She knew what her father was holding on for and she knew Cal wouldn’t give in. She had hoped that her brother’s resolve would melt, or that her father’s strength would wane, but she saw now that neither would do as she wished and so one afternoon as she was washing her father’s soiled sheets, she made up her mind and asked God to help her and then to forgive her.

Leo had stopped coming up to the house as much, so she went out to see him in the barn. She brought a plate of roast beef and mustard sandwiches as a peace offering.

“I already had lunch,” he said as his eyes brushed past the plate.

“I’ve come to ask you a favor.”

“Oh,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “Shoot.”

“I need you to talk to Cal.”

Leo began to laugh as he turned away from her. She grabbed his arm and swung him around.

“Enough. You want Pa to go, then you listen to me. The only reason why he is holding on up in that bed is for Cal. That may hurt you but it’s true nonetheless. The only way he will go is if Cal will speak to him.”

“For what?”

Piper sighed and cradled the plate.

“I think he wants forgiveness,” she said, looking down.

“For what?” asked Leo slowly. Piper sighed.

“For sending Cal away all those years ago. What happened to Ma could have been an accident, Leo. You used to think so.”

Leo’s voice when it came out was curdled with venom. “And now Pa does, too, that it?”

“I don’t know,” said Piper, exasperated. “All I know is Cal is itching to leave, you’re itching for him to leave, Pa’s itching to die and it’s about time somebody started to scratch these things out before they do some real damage.”

“Here’s me thinking you were enjoying your little family reunion.”

“Take Cal into town when you go and get the horse feed. Talk to him.”

“And say what?”

“Jesus H. Christ, do I have to think of everything?!” She bit her lip and steadied her voice. “Do it this afternoon.”

She made as if to walk away.

“Leave the plate on the bale,” said Leo after a pause.

If you asked my aunt Julia what her earliest memory was, she’d tell you that it was of her mother’s decapitation. She was lying.

Later on she would admit to her husband, Jess, that she didn’t really remember anything too much about the accident, or her father picking her up at the hospital, or being covered in her mother’s blood. She would say that she had the feeling the memory was there but that for some reason she just couldn’t get to it. Some part of her wouldn’t let it spring into life. That was the closest she ever got to trying to understand her own psychology.

Her first real memory was of her father’s second wedding. She remembered the smell of the courthouse, how polished the woods were and her feet dangling as they scuffed along the floor while she waited for them to finish. She could recall her aunt Piper holding her, the pressure of her fingers on her waist and how Piper’s body had heaved with Julia’s as she gave a great sigh when her father had kissed her new mother. Piper would say that it was the first time Julia had ever met her.

But here she was wrong, because unbeknownst to her, Julia had met the woman who would be her stepmother four months earlier, as she had lain sobbing on the dust floor outside the local feed store.

In the car on the way there she had sat in the back watching the views change in the windows. According to my father and uncle, she used to say that whenever she sat in cars as a child she always felt as if her mother were right there next to her, her head severed from her body, her hands limp, the top of her neck slewed with the bone creating a pyramid of blood and flesh at the top. How she could have known this—when she didn’t remember the decapitation itself—is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was a dormant memory that occasionally sprang into life. Or perhaps it was simply her imagination of what the physical effects of a decapitation might be. If so, you would have thought that she would have envisioned a clean, neat severing, not the crude hewn state she saw. Whatever the reason, it later became a valuable weapon against her younger brothers. But a year before the first one was born, she sat in the back of her uncle’s truck, so intent on not looking at the last surviving image of her mother beside her, that she did not hear the stilted conversation of the men who sat up front. All she knew was that suddenly the car came to a stop and with the unspoken promise she had assumed her father had made to her of licorice laces beckoning, she climbed out of the car, careful not to disturb the dress of her mother beside her as she left.

When they got out of the car she skipped ahead into the store, only to be severely disappointed. There were no jars of multicolored candy, no licorice laces in red and purple spools. The place smelled and everything seemed dull and boring. She felt she had been betrayed and so she did what she would always do in the face of disappointment. She threw a tantrum.

Her father was angrier with her than usual. Normally he would gaze at her in a cool, collected way until he eventually gave in or she exhausted herself. But this time he slapped her on the back of her legs, hauled her up by the arm and dragged her out of the store, her legs curling underneath her as she tried to kick out in anger and frustration, and then quite suddenly he dropped her; he just let go and the slam of earth on skin made her sob stick in her throat. The silence for the both of them seemed eerie, but while she looked up at him, he was looking somewhere else.

My grandmother said that the moment she saw Julia curled up on the floor next to her father, staring at him obstinately, snot and drool spitting from her lips and nose, she knew she did not like her. It was not the mess the child had made of herself, it was the way she had looked from her father to her, and how when she had seen that his attention had been caught by someone else, her eyes narrowed and she spat out another spit trail that curled under her chin.

“I didn’t know you would be here,” Cal said when he finally found his voice.

“I was out getting groceries,” said Anne-Marie.

Cal saw her lips covered in rouge and the swell of the jaw beneath the heavy makeup. He reached out to touch her and she shrank back, and glanced over her shoulder quickly to see if anyone had been watching. He snaked his fingers through his hair in frustration.

“I thought about calling,” he said.

“I am glad you didn’t.”

She was so cold as she stood there waiting for him to finish, as if he were just another piece of nuisance she had to climb over before she could carry on with her day. It angered him, this aloofness of hers. It made him want to smack her again just to get a reaction. Suddenly he began to feel sick.

“I don’t know what … I don’t—”

She continued to stare at him, her foot rubbing against her ankle in impatience. Beside him he felt his daughter shift and her shoe scuffed against his heel with a small kick. He looked down at her and saw her glare back at him. Her knee was bleeding.

“Please don’t talk to me again,” Anne-Marie said finally.

He panicked. “Lavin—”

“Don’t you ever—” She took a step forward and he saw more clearly the yellowish swirls near her jaw. “Ever call me that again.”

She walked away, passing Leo as he came out with a bag of horse feed. Leo saw his brother standing there, his mouth open, looking at the doctor’s wife and his niece sprawled on the floor, her left knee bleeding, her face bright red as she stared with hatred at her father.

“Cal?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

Cal looked down at his daughter and with one hand pulled her up. She cocked her bad knee for effect as she stood but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Will you take Julia back for me, please?” he asked.

“You thought any more on what I said?” asked Leo as he cradled the feed.

“Yeah, I—I listened.”

Leo paused. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s go, girl,” he said to his niece.

What happened next no one really knows. There was to be a lot of speculation that surrounded the events of the next sixteen hours for some time afterward. Everyone had their own theories. Leo believed Cal had been planning it all along, Piper believed that the opportunity presented itself and Cal was too weak to say no. My grandmother believed it was destiny. I don’t know what I believe.

Because it was so unexpected, so shocking, that it has never really made sense. Trying to rationalize it now could only be accomplished through conjecture and imagination. All I know is that my grandfather was a man who felt things deeply. He hated that about himself. He tried not to grow attached, but he was simply a man to whom burdens came easily, and every time he tried to shrug them off, the weight of his guilt would burden him all over again. So here is what I think happened.

I think he was afraid. Afraid of who he was and what he wanted and what he didn’t want to be.

I think he was tired of fighting for what he wanted, tired of fighting himself for wanting those things in the first place and tired of feeling guilty for all of the above.

I think he wanted to settle. I think he wanted it all to stop. I think he knew that life had a will of its own and for the second time he was willing to be borne along by it. I think he reasoned that he was a man, not a boy this time, and he could deal with things better.

I think he was sick of feeling like a failure.

Piper cooked dinner for herself and Julia that evening. She made a chocolate pecan pie for dessert that Julia wolfed down in sullen self-pity. She put her niece to bed and checked on her father, before going to bed herself at around eleven. Cal still wasn’t home. The next morning she fixed breakfast, changed her father and gave him a sponge bath. She enlisted Julia’s help in the chores, but gave up after her niece kept crumpling to the floor in mock agony on account of her “bad leg.” She went to check on her eldest brother, but when she knocked on the door he didn’t answer and when she tried the handle, it was locked. She assumed he was still asleep.

She went to bring Leo some lunch. He was down by the crops on the far side of the farm near the stream. When she gave it to him, he nodded in thanks before jerking his head to the left of her.

“See that?” he asked.

Piper turned. Against the well was the stone slab cover. Now broken, the pieces were splayed against the base of the well.

“What happened?”

Leo shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

This was before she discovered that Cal had gone to speak with their father. This was before she would check in on Walter at six to bring him supper, when she would find him, eyes gazing upward and unseeing, his mouth half-open with a fly crawling across his upper lip.

This was before the funeral and the reading of the will, when things still made sense to her. But later on, after everything, she would recall this moment and wonder.

Anne-Marie was in the kitchen when she heard that Walter Hathaway had died. She was peeling potatoes for a stew. She listened to her husband talk of the man’s heart failure and willed herself not to scream. She sliced the knife through the potato into her palm when he mentioned the funeral.

“Good God, woman, what is the matter with you lately?” her husband asked as he pulled up her arm, down which a thin trail of blood was already pouring. “First your jaw, now this. Your head is in the clouds, Anne-Marie.”

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.

The night before the funeral Anne-Marie pressed her husband’s best black suit and a somber-looking navy dress with a high-buttoned neck that irritated her skin, and hung them both on the front of their wardrobes. Then when her husband was asleep she went downstairs, pulled aside the half pint of milk that she had left to curdle in the gap between the refrigerator and the wall and forced herself to drink it. She had learned the hard way in the past that feigning illness when your husband was a doctor was not a viable option.

She was sick all night. The next morning Lou gave her a glass of water, some Pepto-Bismol to settle her stomach and went to the funeral alone. She slept most of the day and dreamed.

It was after eight in the evening when her husband finally came home. She heard him wandering through the kitchen downstairs: she traced his movements by the opening and closing of doors. The way he hovered in the living room without a sound for a long moment told her that he was having a drink. She timed how long it took for him to come upstairs. If it was ten minutes, nothing out of the ordinary happened, if it was twenty the day had been stressful, if it was forty, hellish.

An hour later he came up.

He sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her arm with one hand while the other held a tumbler of whiskey.

“Are you feeling any better?” he asked.

“Mmm-hmm.” She nodded, letting her eyes skip over the glass. “Tell me about the funeral.”

He took a long gulp and then eyed the bottom of the empty glass thoughtfully.

After a moment he spoke. “I suppose it’s already doing the rounds,” he said.

“He just sat there, staring at the glass for the longest time,” she said to me as I sat there next to her bedside. This was after she had grown sick and they had all died and gone and there was only the five of us left.

My body was all tensed up. I was so taut that my stomach muscles started to cramp up again. It took every piece of will in my body not to take the glass from him and smash his head in. I often marvel at the patience I had in my youth. How much of a blessing it would prove to be. I never fully appreciated it until I grew older.” She had splayed her hands as she spoke. “What you see here before you is a product of patience, Meredith.”

But at length her husband did speak and the story he told would change her life.

They had arrived at the church for the funeral. Cal and Leo were pallbearers. There had been a big turnout as was to be expected for a man of Walter’s stature. Lou had sat near the front during the service, behind Piper and Elisa. Afterwards everybody had gone back to the house for the wake. Nobody had noticed anything different about Cal at all. He had seemed as normal as could be expected under the circumstances.

They had the speeches and the food and then Piper, Cal, Leo and the lawyer had gone upstairs into one of the rooms to have the will read.

Why they did this then, people couldn’t understand. Some said later that it had been at Cal’s insistence—that he had known what was coming and so wanted to get his hands on it all as quickly as possible. Others said he couldn’t have, because when Leo punched and kicked him he didn’t even attempt to fight back. Instead his face was ashen and gray, as if it had been drained of all blood. Piper would later whisper that it had been Walter’s choice—he had wanted the will read out the day of his funeral. She would say that she thought he did so because he believed if it were done then, that Leo might be able to find it in himself to temper his rage. She was astonished, she would say, at how little the man knew his own children.

The first anyone knew of anything being wrong was when Cal came hurtling down the stairs. Leo picked up his brother as he fell on the bottom step and smashed his fist into his jaw. People roused themselves from their grief to pull him off Cal. Then all hell broke loose: Julia started screaming; the county sheriff, who was at the funeral and had been part of Walter’s poker club, had flashed his badge and used his large overhang of a stomach as a dividing barrier between the two.

That was when Leo shouted, “You sneaky son of a bitch!” His finger stabbed the air at his brother’s throat. “I knew you would try some stunt like this. What did you do? What did you do?!”

But Cal couldn’t speak. He tried but his mouth opened and closed with no sound. Leo lunged for him again, but it was a feeble attempt. His wife came to his side and the men pulled him off screaming toward the door. He kicked out and caught one of the legs of the table that held a tray of casseroles. They all went crashing to the floor.

The townspeople were in their element. Julia was put to bed sobbing, Cal was taken upstairs to be washed, calmed and aided. Piper found herself enveloped in someone’s arms; the casseroles were cleared, while others simply dispersed to their corners of allegiance. The lawyer looked on with horror, shaking his head and muttering in low breaths as someone passed him a drink.

Then, when there was no more carnage to be wreaked and then cleared, people began to go home. Some stayed to help, but mostly the flat plain of the farm became a barrage of taillights disappearing behind the bend.

That was when Lou stopped talking. He sat on the bed, lost in thought, and then stood up.

“Would you like anything?” he asked his wife. She seemed flushed. He knelt over her and felt her forehead but there was no fever.

“Some water, I think,” he said as if to himself before turning to leave.

“What was it?” she said quietly to his back. “What made Leo act like that?”

“What else? The farm,” he said. “As far as I can make out, it’s all gone to Cal—or most of it anyway.” He stopped at the doorway and looked at her. In the dark, the features of her face became a hole filled in by shadow.

“Do you want some ice?” he asked.

The instructions of Walter’s will were fairly simple. After a few small bequests to friends and distant relatives, the bulk of the estate would be divided up as such: Piper was to receive a ten percent share of the farm as well as a thousand dollars outright. Leo was to have a twenty percent share as well as another two thousand dollars outright and Cal was to have a full seventy, the main house and all its contents as well as the bulk of Walter’s savings. Walter had a reputation as a frugal man bordering on miserly, and though no one knew how much his savings were specifically, everyone could guess at them being more than substantial.

My grandfather would tell my father that Walter had dictated a letter a couple of days before he’d died, explaining why he had done what he’d done, to be read by the will’s executor. Everyone would say later that it must have meant he had changed the will at the absolute last minute and so it wasn’t really valid because he wasn’t in his right mind, he was so sick.

People longed to ask what had been said in the letter, but the truth was no one really knew. None of the people present had been able to hear all of it, because midway through the opening paragraph, Leo had turned around and driven his fist into Cal’s stomach. Piper would later say that she had no idea why she and Cal were present. From what they could gauge the letter was mostly addressed to Leo. It never mentioned Cal or her once.

That was what happened. But, of course, that wasn’t what people would say.

She waited. She made her husband breakfast in the morning, she did her chores, she made her lists and she served them both dinner in the evening. The sun rose and fell on her patience and she bided her time listening and hoping that what she had done had been enough.

Here is a question I am forced to ask: did she really love my grandfather back then? Certainly, she did later, even to the rest of us it was evident. But at the time all those years ago, did she? Or was it simply an escape, just as Lou had been when she was a girl of nineteen—the next rung on the ladder? Or was it that my grandfather had seen in her all the things she had been waiting for someone to find, and in him she saw the potential to realize those dreams into a reality? Is that what you would call love?

Why, you may wonder, do I not ask the same thing of my grandfather?

Because there is a much simpler way of clearing that up.

Two weeks passed and in that time this was what Anne-Marie learned.

She learned that Leo had not been back to the farm since the day of the funeral.

She learned that Cal had not refused his share and that he had continued to stay in the main house with his sister and daughter. When the suppliers had rung up, it had been he who fielded their calls, and when the farmhands came down in the evenings, they said it was he who gave them their instructions during the day. Leo stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of town and Cal began to farm Aurelia.

Piper tried to see Leo. She was admitted into his room at the hotel. She started to tell him Cal’s side of the story. She pleaded with him to see sense and come home. They could still farm the place together, each taking a share, she insisted. It would be a family business just like their father had wanted.

But when she next tried to call on him a week later, the man at the front desk told her he would not receive her and when she telephoned, she was told that Leo had asked not to be disturbed. She resorted to writing a letter, which she took to the post office and gave to Florence Baxter, who noted the name and address with an uncomfortable grimace. No one saw Cal outside of the farm.

And then one evening Anne-Marie and her husband sat down to dinner. The meat was overcooked and the vegetables wilted on their forks but they ate it nonetheless. When the doorbell rang, Lou pushed his plate forward and wiped his mouth on the napkin before going to see who it was.

She heard him before she saw him.

When he came into the room she saw immediately that he was different. Instead of the cheap salesman suits he usually wore, he was in slacks and a blue plaid shirt. His hair was lightened by the sun and she could see the faint discoloring line on his forearms that spending time out working in the fields had given him.

“So what can we do for you, Cal, that’s so urgent I can’t finish my supper?” asked Lou as he sat back down at the table to do precisely that.

Cal didn’t look at Anne-Marie as he spoke.

“I’ve come to talk to you, sir, about a matter that has been plaguing my conscience for some time now.”

“Why would you come to me about it? I’m a doctor, not a priest,” Lou joked.

Anne-Marie saw the ignorance of her husband draw a blank across his features as he stirred his food with his fork and she allowed herself a brief moment of irritation.

“There’s no real easy way of saying this so I guess I should just say it,” said Cal. Lou did not look up from his plate.

“I believe I’m in love with your wife, sir,” Cal finished.

Anne-Marie watched as her husband’s fork paused underneath a heap of sweet corn. His jaw worked slowly as his mouth caught up with his ears.

“Did you hear me, sir?”

“Yes, I heard you.” Lou put down his fork and, composing his hands in his lap, stared at Cal.

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

Cal flicked a gaze at Anne-Marie but she gave away nothing. This had to be his fight, she decided, though she would never forgive him if he lost.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Well, Cal, you come into my house, interrupt my dinner and tell me that you’re in love with my wife. I assume you’ve done all this for a reason.”

“Yes, sir. I have. I’ve come to take her home with me, if you’ve no objection.”

Lou stared at him, incredulous. Suddenly he laughed.

“Cal, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t hit you. The way you talk I don’t think I could live with myself as a doctor if I hit a simpleton.”

“I’ve been sleeping with her,” said Cal, “in the full sense of the word. It’s been going on for some time now. I have known her and been with her knowing that she was your wife. But that’s only in name, and now it’s time for her to come home with me, sir. Seeing as how she hasn’t been yours for a long time now, I cannot see how you can object to her returning to her rightful place.”

For the first and last time in her life Anne-Marie would see a raft of emotions find life in the eyes of Lou Parks. The man who had been little more than a ghost since she’d come to live with him as his wife remembered his blood and let it course in shades of puce and purple throughout his skin. He was so still she wondered if when he finally broke his pause it would be to fly at Cal and try to kill him. She could see Cal bracing himself as he contemplated the same thing and all the while she kept herself still, wringing her napkin between her fingers under the table.

Finally Lou turned to his wife and asked, “Is this true?”

Anne-Marie nodded.

“And do you want to go with him?”

Anne-Marie paused and then nodded again.

“Well …” said Lou and he stood up from the table, went into the living room and shut the door.

Cal stared at where he had gone and then said quickly, “Get your things.”

She was finished in twenty minutes. She had made a mental inventory weeks ago and made sure everything that was needed would be ready. She came down the stairs carrying her overcoat and a single suitcase.

“Do you want to speak to him?” asked Cal.

Anne-Marie gave him her suitcase. “I’ll see you in the car,” she said firmly.

Cal hesitated, but she had already opened the door to the living room.

In the car he waited for ten minutes drumming his fingers against the wheel. Eventually the front door of the house opened and in a moment she climbed in beside him.

Without saying a word they drove home and that was when my grandmother finally stopped being Anne-Marie Parks, the local doctor’s wife, and came to be known as Lavinia Hathaway: adulterer, whore, monster … victor.

That is where my grandfather used to finish this story. That was where everyone finished the story, but that was not the end.

As they stopped at some traffic lights, my grandmother said very quietly but clearly, “If you ever hit me again, I’ll stab you while you sleep.”

My grandfather nodded in answer and when the lights went green, drove on.

5

TODAY I PULLED OUT THE SUITCASE FROM THE top of my wardrobe and lay it open on the bed. Then I made myself a drink.

I packed some clothes, my diary and a list of phone numbers, and went about the business of trying to organize my life for the next few weeks. I made a checklist of things to do: people to call to let them know I was going away; to change my voice mail; to go through the fridge and throw out all perishables that would otherwise greet me with a noxious aroma on my return. I got to the end of the page and tapped my pen against the pad for a few minutes and waited.

I don’t know what I was waiting for, but after a while I realized that my refusal to stand up and start getting on with things was less a willful act than an inability. Try as I might, I couldn’t move. I sat there feeling the weight of my legs anchor me to the floor. Time passed and I knew I had things to do. I saw the list on the notepad staring at me with reproach, but my body refused to cooperate. For the first time in my life my head was saying yes, but the rest of me was saying no, and there was nothing that I could do about it.

And suddenly I was reminded of my mother. She went through an exacerbated version of this when my father died. She didn’t emerge from her room for a month. After the funeral, she washed and cleaned the house, set out the breakfast things for the following morning, then went upstairs to her room and undressed before she climbed into her bed and then didn’t get out of it again.

Piper came to attend to her with my uncle’s wife, Georgia-May, but it was my grandmother who saw to me and my sisters. She moved us into the main house. There was no discussion, no preamble, she simply showed up at our home the day after the funeral and waited in the kitchen as we each packed a bag and then followed her up the long drive. She cooked breakfast, got us ready for school, watched over us as we did our chores and homework: she was faultless. During that month she took sole responsibility for our welfare. My grandfather helped, of course, but my father’s death hit him hard. I think it if weren’t for the fact that my mother had gotten there first, he would have taken to his bed just as she did.

The only thing that we really hated during that time was that we were not permitted to see Mom. That was Lavinia’s wish. She batted aside our questions with such ferocity that in the end we stopped asking. Once Claudia snuck away, when Lavinia was busy with our grandfather, who had drunk all the whiskey in the house and then tried to drive into town for some more. Claudia walked down to our home in the middle of the afternoon, but whatever it was that she saw or heard there, it caused her to lock herself up in her room when she came back and no matter how much Ava and I pushed and pressed her, she refused to tell us anything about it. In the end, because I wouldn’t leave her alone, she slapped me across the mouth and pushed me out the door. After that, at Ava’s request, I stopped asking her. We’ve never spoken to her about it since.

That was such a strange time, living with my grandparents. That was the first time I really began to see what being a Hathaway meant. Instead of sitting down for meals in our scrubbed kitchen, dinner was a stiff-backed affair every evening at the long polished oak table with triangles of white cloth and china plates with patterns of blue swallows around the rim. Instead of the eight rooms I was accustomed to in my house, I now had twenty-two. The finest linens were on our beds, fresh flowers were in every vase (of which there were plenty) and various newspaper clippings, framed and placed on the walls, were interspersed with the customary family portraits.

Piper caught me staring at them once. She smiled and smoothed her hand down my braid. “Hard to believe sometimes,” she said. “Things used to be so different when I was your age.”

I was not the only one awakened to my social status by our time there. Claudia came to learn of our position in quite a different manner. Our grandmother’s way of trying to help us in our grief was to talk about my father, not how my mother would come to talk of him, as a man, but as part of a legacy: a legacy cut short that we must now take up.

“Make him proud,” she’d say. And Claudia would look up at her so eagerly, her brow became knotted with confusion.

“How, Grandma?”

“Remember who you are. Remember what your last name is.” She leaned back and smiled. As if that were the key to everything. As if we had been born to a world of unlocked doors where everything that lay behind them was there for the taking. Claudia would come to think so and look what happened to her. But if we had been smart enough, we would have remembered our mother in her bed, utterly devastated by the loss of her husband, and known that our name was just a name: it gave us no magical protection; it had no divine right.

As I sit here in my chair, I wonder if this was how my mother must have felt immediately after my father’s death. I can understand now, how during that time her body was acknowledging a fact her mind hadn’t been able to process, which I believe was this: that she was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been in her life, of what was before her, of what she had to do and even more so that she had to do it alone. I know this because that is exactly what I am feeling now.

“We are all alone,” my grandmother had told me once. “No one feels our aches with us, or our pains or our joys. We are like islands floating in a sea together but that’s all, we are still just islands, so close we can touch each other, smell each other, but always from a distance.”

It is strange that it is her voice I remember now, not my mother’s comforting arms when we finally came home, or how she held us and buried her face in our hair and told us she would never leave us again. No, it is not this I think about; it is my grandmother’s words instead. I hear them strung out through the notes of her voice as I sit at my desk. They go around and around my mind in a continuous loop while the light outside seeps from pearl to gray.

A few weeks after her Decree Absolute came through, my grandparents stood in the courthouse and were married. There is only one remaining photograph of that day. It would come to sit in a frame of dark wood on a small chest of drawers in the entrance hallway. My grandfather stands there stiffly, his arm wound about my grandmother’s waist. He is squinting at the camera, though it is difficult to tell because the picture is so grainy. My grandmother is not looking at the camera: she is turned away, her face buried into her new husband’s chest. To the casual observer she looks adoring, overwhelmed with love. In truth she was fighting a bout of nausea that had been plaguing her for days. It didn’t take her long to figure out what had brought it on.

To say that my grandparents’ marriage was a scandal would be something of an understatement, although the way it was expressed by the townsfolk was rather understated. Iowans by nature are polite at all costs and even though they may long to tell you what they actually think of you, something—be it the morals of church or their love of community—holds them in check. So to that end, despite the contempt they felt for her, people still nodded at my grandmother when they passed her in the street though their lips were pursed and they slid their eyes from hers. People still responded to her questions and doomed attempts at polite conversation, though as minimally as they could legitimately get away with. She always knew that once she passed them they would stare at each other and in low voices berate her and everything about her, starting from the day she showed up at her uncle’s house in a pinafore dress accompanied by a feckless mother.

But for the first time in her life she didn’t care. She didn’t care when they noticed her stomach grow and their eyebrows lifted into crescents of surprise and then lowered in disapproval. She didn’t care when her family refused to speak to or acknowledge her (the only people in the town who did so). She didn’t even care when people pointedly mentioned Lou within earshot. None of it mattered; none of it could touch her, because for the first time in her life she was happy. Truly, unadulteratedly happy. She sang to her belly, she did her chores, and while her husband worked in the fields, she imagined the Aurelia I would come to know and live on, the farm we would love and live for; the home we would die and sin for.

Meanwhile Piper despaired.

Her brother’s affair with the doctor’s wife and their marriage had upset her greatly. As long as she would live, she would remember the night Lavinia came to the farm with Cal. Piper had sat at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, waiting anxiously for her brother to return. He had been gone for hours with no indication of where he was or when he would be back and with everything that had gone on in the past few weeks, the uncertainty made her nervous. So she waited up for him after she had put Julia to bed, watching the sunlight outside eventually grow dim and vanish. When she finally heard her brother’s footstep in the hall at around ten o’clock, she leapt up and ran out to see him, but when she saw the doctor’s wife standing behind him holding her suitcase, she took one look at the both of them and slapped her brother so hard across the face, the sound made my grandmother jump against a small rosewood table by the door and topple the flowers in their vase, so that the water spilled across the surface and dripped down onto the floor.

“For God’s sake, Cal,” Piper spat, “hasn’t this family enough to contend with?”

Cal rubbed his face gently, massaging the blood back into his cheek.

“It’s done, Piper.”

Piper looked at my grandmother, who peered at her uncertainly from behind Cal, and curled her lip in distaste.

“Anne-Marie Parks?” she asked, her eyes narrowed to slits. She assessed my grandmother in one long, contemptuous look.

“It’s Lavinia,” my grandmother corrected.

“What?”

“She’s coming to live here, Piper—she’s going to be my wife.” Cal looked down at his sister, who was staring at him in shocked horror.

“Her? She’s married, to a doctor, to our town’s doctor. For the love of God, do you know what people will say?” Piper screeched.

“Hush,” said Cal, looking up at the stairs, “you’ll wake the girl.”

“You need someone who can be a good, faithful wife,” she spat at my grandmother. “Someone who knows a thing or two about farming, someone who will be up with you from sunup to sundown. Not some prissy town maid whose only function is shopping and ordering linen from a catalogue.”

Cal took a step toward his sister.

“You just watch what you—” But then he stopped, because my grandmother had already moved away from him. She came to stand before Piper, her eyes burning a hole in Piper’s face so that my great-aunt leaned her head back and blinked. Then my grandmother stalked past her and went into the kitchen. She began to search through the drawers, opening and closing them, while Cal and Piper stood in the doorway, openmouthed.

When she took out the long kitchen knife and held it up so the light shone on the blade, Cal put his hands up and took a step back, but she was already coming toward them. They sprang away from her as she walked past and opened the door. She went out and stood on the porch and, holding the blade to the soft flesh of her inner arm, she drew the knife across it, so that her blood began to pour from the wound and splatter on the ground.

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