The Legacy of Eden (24 page)

Strangely it was always our grandmother he turned to, our grandmother in whom he confided, leaned on, learned from. Piper was always hurt and surprised at their relationship, constantly cajoling, even wheedling him for that same needless affection that he threw so readily on Lavinia. She could not understand it; even more so she could not understand why my grandmother took it. It was a question she was too innocent to answer. Even after all she had learned she could not sense a power struggle when it was right under her nose.

On her bed, her breath rattling, suddenly out of nowhere, she interrupted my reading aloud and said, “Don’t trust him.”

“What, Grandma?” I asked, dropping the book and leaning farther in so she did not have to exert herself.

She closed her eyes in frustration and for a moment I thought she had slipped back into whatever blank she had stirred from, but then as I folded back the page she said again, “Don’t be fooled. I’m not. He’s not capable of love. But he’ll take care of the place, he won’t let it go. He needs it. He knows he’s nothing without it.”

“What are you talking about Grandma?”

“Obsession, that’s all it is. He has to have it, but it’s better than nothing. Get away from me!” She struck my hand as I went to rest it on the covers and then she looked at me and started laughing, really laughing, as if her body would erupt with the joke that was on all of us.

But she was wrong. Cal Jr. could love. I remember when he was about fifteen he had a pet once, a kitten given to him by Piper. He adored it, connected to it with a softness and protective possessiveness that no one had thought him capable of. And then one day, quite by accident, he broke its neck. He had held it so tightly against his chest in the crook of his elbow that its fragile vertebrae had snapped. To his credit he was inconsolable for days afterward, it even made him ill. My grandmother nursed him and when he was better again we never spoke of it. That should have been a warning to us all about the dangers of our cousin, who was so destructive even when he was trying to be good, but it wasn’t—at least not until it was far too late.

In those few weeks of my childhood after we’d moved back home with our mother, our lives slowly began to resume a newfound sense of normalcy. Our house was tidy and clean, we did our home chores before we went to school and we helped out on the farm when we came home. Ava took up dance lessons; I tried and failed at piano. Our mother insisted on trying to implement structure and order into our lives. We became governed by routine. Every spare moment seemed to be accounted for, as if she were afraid that any gap was the chance for disaster, that every pause would be an invitation for crisis. Or perhaps she just thought that to aid us in our grief we should be kept busy so we could not dwell on the death of our father. But how could we forget, how could every moment not be colored by his absence? From our school plays, when we looked out into the audience and only saw our mother where once there were two, to the simple quotidian acts of each day, such as setting out places on the table for supper and realizing you’d laid too many plates. I remember seeing Claudia staring at the extra place mat, stricken, the plate still in her hand, and then as she heard our mother’s footsteps, hurrying to put away the offending item before she saw it.

And of course every Sunday we still went to the tall white house for a big roast dinner, which my grandmother and Piper would cook, and there we would watch our grandfather and uncle drink until their faces turned red and their mouths grew slack, while everything in my grandmother tightened to make up for their slow descent. Cal Jr. would be there, sitting across from us beside our grandmother. He would change allegiances per the day. One day he would talk to Claudia, making low jokes and snide looks with his eyes that he knew Ava and I were meant to see and burn over. Other times it would be me and, just like my eldest sister, I entered into his contract of favoritism because being on the inside was more attractive than being on the outside. But with Ava he would never use her against us—instead when it was her turn, he was kind, attentive. He made her laugh, coaxed conversation from her. In short, he knew how to play to our weaknesses: mine and Claudia’s were a propensity to be in the spotlight; Ava’s was to be loved.

Even though they were both heavy drinkers, my grandfather and uncle still managed to run the farm as efficiently as they had before. That is, they made harvest every year, the numbers did not slip, our lands still provided and our farm as a business was still revered. But as people, their alcoholism changed them irrevocably. My grandfather became a muted drunkard whose light could only be turned on in his mind by a tumbler being placed in his hand. My uncle became altogether far nastier a creature. He never touched Charles, but we all knew he beat the shit out of Georgia-May. In the mornings as we would go off to school she would come over to our mother’s house and Mom would bathe her and patch up her back from his belt scars and plead with her to leave him, but she never would.

Mom even went to Lavinia once. She found her in the rose garden, her straw hat tied with its dark green ribbon resting on her shoulders. She told her of the buckle marks on Georgia-May’s back and how if Theo was alive, Ethan would never have been able to get away with what he was doing. Lavinia had looked at her tiredly and said she would speak with him, but it was for nothing. Ethan was beyond her control now and she knew it. So long as he was good for the farm, our grandfather would never cut him off, but the days when she could manipulate and coach his mind into her way of thinking were long gone. The alcohol was too strong a component in making his mind as hard and unrelenting as it made his gut slack and soft. She had no more luck with him than she had with her own husband and truth be told most of her energy was taken up with Cal Jr. Ethan was a lost cause now. With him she could only wait until he was no longer of use. It was on her grandson’s shoulders now that she rested all her hopes.

Which we could all see. When we were young, the two of them were as thick as thieves. Always going off for walks together, gardening, talking, hushing their conversations when someone else intruded on their time together. And that’s what it felt like for us—as if we were an intrusion. We would all learn, my sisters and I, that they were the kind of people who found you, you weren’t to find them.

So Georgia-May stayed and was beaten and Mom and Piper nursed her. Ethan at least did not go whoring; his only satisfaction was taken from inflicting his fists and belt and shoes all over her body. He wouldn’t touch her in any other way now, save to mark her—but never the face, always below the chest and never the arms in summer or the legs. You could tell the seasons on our farm by the location of my aunt’s bruises.

My grandfather knew. Lavinia told him, but he said nothing, only drank some more. She began to seriously doubt whether there was a man left in there, or just the cool amber liquids of various spirits where a soul used to be. I remember him as kind; drunk but kind. And meek—he would lift you up on his lap and let you crouch there so long as you didn’t disturb his drinking arm while you played. His body was a fairground, like a sleeping giant for playful Lilliputians.

But there must have still been something there that none of us suspected, because of what he did when Claudia was fifteen. It was as if for all those years, he had been scrambling in the dark, patting the walls anxiously with his hands and then finally, miraculously even, somehow he found the switch.

It started with a letter. I never read it but my grandmother did. After much scouring of the house she found it wedged behind a radiator in the downstairs toilet. She found it the day my grandfather announced at the table over the Sunday roast that his nephew, our second cousin, would be coming to live and work on Aurelia. His name was Jude; he was the child of his brother, Leo, and had been named after the patron saint of lost causes. Piper later told us it was because he was finally conceived when Elisa was forty-one so that his birth was considered almost miraculous. Elisa had apparently turned evangelical the older she had gotten and the more shriveled her womb had become.

Off my grandfather went on a great tangent over the dining table, peppered with digressions, musings and vague references to feuds and histories that I would come to learn in greater detail years afterward at my grandmother’s bedside. At the time I simply let his words rush over me in their semidrunken torrent as they always did at the table when he decided to speak, which was not often. I did not listen much and so cannot repeat what he said. At the time I did not realize how much this had meant to him: it had just seemed another ineffectual event that would have little to no effect on the alteration of my immediate family’s lives. Ignorance is bliss, my grandmother used to say, and I’ve come to agree with her. That evening I was utterly and happily unaware of the seething resentment stirred up by my grandfather’s declaration. While Leo had eventually learned in part to forgive or forget the grudge that had stopped him from ever setting foot again on Aurelia, he had never been able to fully embrace my grandfather as a brother, until now. His suggestion that Granddad take Jude in and let him have a more active hand in observing Leo’s stock on the farm had washed over me in a haze of boredom and inertia. I remember wondering why Granddad had bothered to have Jude over in the first place. If this man was so important, then how come we had never met him? But then I did not think of Aurelia as a business, it was just my home. I did not monitor its input and profit, even though the money from my father’s share was all that kept my little family afloat since my mother did not work at this time. The bliss of childhood: to see clothes mended and food appear and never feel the need to question.

I do remember this, though, how my grandfather’s eyes kept flickering back and forth to Lavinia the whole time he spoke and though none of us would find out until Cal Jr. told us weeks later, they had the most terrific argument when everyone had gone. The first one they had had in years, it was a screaming match where suddenly everything between them came vividly back to life and forced them to realize that something else, something other than themselves, had been dead all along.

My sisters and I were confused, we didn’t understand the significance of what we were hearing. I remember that Claudia had asked, when our grandfather had finally stopped his long and winding spiel about family and forgiveness and bridges (there had been many a metaphor on crossings), “But Granddad, who is Uncle Leo?”

“Oh—” and he started to smile as if she had told him a clever joke “—oh, of course he’s not your uncle, not
your
uncle, no, but you see that’s what he’s always been called by…by the kids who used to sit at this table—Uncle Leo. I forgot.” He started to chuckle. “I forgot…” And then a flush of remembrance dragged the smile to the side of his mouth so that his face became lopsided and then he shook himself. It was Piper who intervened.

“He was your father’s uncle, Claudia. He was our brother.”

“Where is he?” she asked. “How come I’ve never met him?”

Piper and Cal looked at each other and for a moment there was an uncomfortable silence.

“He died quite recently. Cancer, like our daddy,” Piper said. “That’s why he got in touch with your granddaddy. He and his wife used to live on a farm owned by our mother’s folk, but this was their first home and, well, we thought it best when your grandfather heard about our brother’s death and everything that happened…” She turned to her brother for help, but my grandfather’s face was closed in quiet grief. “We thought how nice it would be for Jude to come back again, for his father’s sake, since we could not do it for him while he was living.”

I had looked down at the rose-leaf dinner plate and played with the food there, circling it this way and that with my fork, my leg listlessly scraping against the wooden floor. Surreptitiously my mother leaned against me and pinched the flesh under my knee to make me stop. I was always scuffing my shoes when I was a kid.

My grandmother turned away as I looked up in pain and picked up her teaspoon to stir her coffee. Her hand was trembling. My cousin Cal Jr. sat beside her. He heard the gentle clatter of her spoon against the cup, and then, he reached across the table and picked up the silver coffeepot, dropping it unsteadily so that it chimed against the milk jug and the sound made me rub my tongue across the front of my teeth. Our grandfather flashed him a look of irritation before clearing his throat to recommence his speech.

“So much has happened in this family. So much loss and fighting. This is going to be a new start for us Hathaways. Get this family back to how it once was,” my grandfather said as he pounded the table and looked at all of us. Piper stood up as he towered over her, a maniacal grin spreading and then sapping at his cheeks, and motioned for him to sit down.

“After Theo and everything…you girls…lost two already and so young…” He trailed off and began to sway on his feet. “This means a lot to me,” he said more to himself than anything else. “A hell of a lot.”

“We know that, Cal,” said my grandmother, watching him while she continued to swirl the spoon around her drink until her hand grew steady.

“No one will ever replace your father,” he began again in an effort to compose himself as his eyes found my sisters and I. “He was a wonderful son. But we need some fresh blood in this place—” Cal Jr. bent his head and a thin red streak appeared on his cheek as the blood colored against the skin there “—and Jude will give us that.”

“And we’ll do everything we can to make him welcome,” said my mother.

“Yes.” He smiled at her gratefully. “Yes, I know you will.”