The Legacy of Eden (25 page)

And then he looked at all of us and we smiled back at him. Cal Jr. kept his gaze on his plate.

On the walk home, I had lagged behind with Ava while Claudia held on to Charles’s hand, barely concealing her irritation as Mom escorted Georgia-May. Ethan had gone into town in his truck. We all knew he would not be home until the early hours and that Georgia-May would be over the next morning as ever, while my mother got the bowl of hot water and salts ready. Thinking on this now I have a crack of horror winding its way through my memories for the first time about my aunt. Even though I know now that she would escape with her son, back then her beatings and the tender nursings of my mother for all her injuries was so normal to me, so routine, that I was almost nonchalant when on the weekday mornings, Georgia-May would bare the crimson and purple welts on her back to my mother’s hands while I crunched on my cornflakes.

“Are you excited?” Ava asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I am. It’ll be nice to have new a cousin to play with. I wonder what he’s like.”

“I don’t know, Ava.”

“I hope Cal Jr. won’t be jealous.”

“Why would he be jealous?”

“I don’t— He just, he asked me if I was going to…uh…” She trailed off, her brow furrowing as she concentrated on what she was saying. I looked away from her into the distance.

“I can’t wait,” she said excitedly.

I stifled a yawn and kicked a piece of gravel on the dust path. “Neither can I.”

It was less than a year after my father died when Jude came to Aurelia. My days consisted of waking up in my whitewashed room covered in
E.T.
posters, going to school, doing chores on the farm and playing with my sisters and—occasionally when my mother felt strong enough to allow me to have them over—my friends, who would bring their sleeping bags and blankets and we would camp out in the gardens. Our favorite spot was the clearing with the stone god fountain, where we would pitch up our white sheets and tell ghost stories with flashlights under our chins. I was never short of friends as a child. Nor would I have been even if I were the dumbest, ugliest or most unpleasant. Every family wanted to align themselves with us. Who wouldn’t want to be tied to the most prosperous family in the county, even with their mottled history? But my grandmother was more discerning. She watched the children my sisters and I brought home with a careful eye, asking after the families of those she did not know or recognize, making notes of the behavior of the offspring from those she did. And then a few weeks later we would learn of her decisions.

“Does that Galloway girl ever wipe her nose?” she asked as she sat in our kitchen while my mother served her tea. Or, “It’s a shame the Mackenzies have done so badly this year. I saw that same dress on Mary not two years before and now it’s ended up on Grace.” And so bit by bit, we would come to learn the lives of our neighbors and more importantly, who should stay our neighbors and who were worthy of becoming our friends.

Claudia was better at it than either myself or Ava. She knew her worth as a Hathaway. Her friends were a coterie of the farming equivalent of blue bloods, with herself at the center. She quickly sniffed out who was a farmer and who was a “land owner,” as she called it, casting the former out into the social wilderness.

“You can be friends with whomever you like,” Mom used to tell us deliberately within our grandmother’s earshot.

My grandmother would stop what she was doing and look at my mother, before saying carefully, “As long as you know what to like.”

I didn’t really understand the significance of what this meant back then. I knew I was privileged. I knew and liked the way people would look at me in the street or in class or at fairs when they came up to me and I said my name. But I still didn’t really know what it meant. I should have been paying more attention to things around me, but I was a child who was caught up in the stories and worlds in my mind. I lived in my head and expressed myself with my hands. Always drawing or scribbling, taking things apart and then trying to put things back together again. That’s how we went through two toasters and a burst water pipe under the kitchen sink, for which I got a spanking, one of only a handful my mother ever gave me. I flitted from one obsession to another, constantly questioning, constantly seeking, but never at home. Home bored me because it seemed uneventful.

“Nothing ever happens here,” I would complain, lying in the grass kicking my bare legs at the hot air. And to us kids it never did. However Cal Jr., as I remember him, never seemed to want to go anywhere or do anything else. Every day after school and every weekend he was at home. None of those raucous beer-swilling, cow-tipping days that seemed to form the spare hours of his contemporaries. He kept to himself and to his home. The two seemed to satisfy him. But Claudia found the farm as stiflingly boring as I did. Though it was beautiful, though we loved it, we were crushed by the utter banality of it. For aside from my uncle and grandfather’s drunkenness and despite the savagery of Georgia-May’s beatings, nothing did happen: at least not to me and Claudia. With Ava…now, there was a different story.

I want to say that I have tried to remember, but hindsight only makes the past a murkier thing, not clearer. There was a period just after we lived with my grandparents until she was about fifteen when she was prone to black moods. She would not speak, she would not really eat; she could not bear to be touched. Mom put it down to the hormones of puberty. Her moods could be incredibly fickle, sometimes so affectionate her hands were almost intrusive and Mom would sometimes slap her fingers for how she would hug or coil her arms around us, while we shrugged her away uncomfortably. Other times she was so dismissive, we would not understand what we had done.

But when she was herself, when she was Ava again, she was so different: prone to girlish moments of throwing her arms about herself in a dancing hug when overly excited, playing with her hair and tugging on it hard when concentrating. She was the Ava who soothed and listened to me as we grew older together, who retreated as I blossomed, until by the time she was fifteen she was a quiet, unassuming girl: pretty, loving, gentle. She had come through to the other side, as Mom used to say. That was what we had thought.

She never shirked away from Cal Jr., she didn’t avoid him, she didn’t cower before him. She defended him, she explained him, she was closer to him than any of us, not because they had anything in common, but because he made her that way. He chose her to confide in whenever he needed to, made her seem special, outside of the rest of us in only this one but crucial respect. It was one of the ways I see now that he groomed her and one of the ways in which we unthinkingly allowed him to.

But I digress.

Jude arrived in the middle of March 1982 on a Friday night. We did not see his arrival; Piper came around to the house and told Mom he was here and that the whole family was to be formally introduced to him at Sunday dinner. When the day arrived, dutifully we trooped over there in our clean smock dresses and our hair tied up with ribbons. Mom had gone into town looking for a present to welcome him to Aurelia and she had found a wooden tobacco box with intricate carvings on the lid of a glade with the wind running through it. Inside it we put in little cards and messages of welcome, while she had observed our spelling (Mine: perfect; Ava’s very good; Claudia—well, she needed a few drafts. “If you paid more attention to your schooling than to your looks you’d do better,” Mom had said).

We walked over with Georgia-May, Charles and Ethan. Charles held hands with Ava and me, while Claudia carted Jude’s box in its wrappings of purple tissue and silver string. Charles was thirteen then, and Georgia-May had been looking into schools that could help him since he wouldn’t be able to move into junior high as Ava had done. She had ordered books and tapes about how to school him at home. After all, she had trained as a teacher herself and she had even enrolled at night classes to learn how to teach those with learning disabilities. I don’t know how Charles would have fared without his mother. She did more than keep him alive. If she could have breathed for him she would have. When she had gone, and things started to come out, we learned that she had never cried out when Ethan beat her, not even when he broke her ribs or split her lip with his shoe, in case she should wake her son. Maybe that was why when he got so drunk that night when I was sixteen and held her at knifepoint right before Charles’s eyes, she broke and finally left him, because she could not bear for her son to know and be damaged by what her husband did to her. We always thought that she was what saved Charles, but in the end without even meaning to, he had been the one to save her.

Piper opened the door and we saw by how smart her new dress was and how her braid of silver-streaked hair was so tight and smooth against her head, that we were right to be formal for the occasion.

When we entered the living room, Cal Jr. stood by the window biting his fingernails, my grandfather was pouring a drink and Lavinia sat, her hands clasped over her lap, on the long sofa next to the man who was my long-lost second cousin.

He had the most beautiful green eyes I had ever seen.

As we entered, Ava and I took one look at Jude, his curled brown hair, his blue jeans and white shirt rolled up to reveal his lithe and strong forearms, and then turned to each other and bent our heads in a sudden pique of stifled giggles. Mortifying. Claudia shot us a scathing look and tossed her hair back off her shoulder.

He came forward, hand outstretched, toward my mother, a wide grin showing perfectly white teeth and I could feel myself blush. I turned to look at Ava but she was staring deliberately at the floor.

As my mother introduced him to all of us, he smiled and shook our hands. I remember how calloused his palm was in mine and how big. Immediately I liked him. He set me at ease at once and though he bent his head to try and make Ava look at him, he didn’t draw any attention to her, just shook her hand timidly, enveloping it in his own before moving on, and when he opened our present he leaned back to smile with a grin of surprise. I could see how touched he was as he gently discarded the purple tissue and held the tobacco box in his fingers with a great big smile. That was it—I was smitten. I was suddenly glad that Granddad had done what he had. I could finally see what he had meant by a new start.

Cal Jr. had been sitting on the cream sofa beside our grandmother eyeing the bottom of his empty glass when we had first come in, but then he had stood up and paced the room, his hand straying across ornaments, sweeping along the rim of the mantelpiece. He was always in the corner of our eyes, emerging and then disappearing in an array of sudden inexplicable movements. My grandmother had stayed on the sofa, listening as my grandfather talked to her, I forget about what. Her eyes followed my cousin’s listless movements.

“So have you always been a farmer, Jude?” my mother asked.

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” he said and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. Cal Jr. was beside the antique dresser, his index finger tracing the rim of a Dresden shepherdess doll.

“I mean I never was that school smart and my whole family was farm folk, so…I never really thought about what I wanted to do, I just did what I knew.”

“And if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a lot younger than I expected you to be,” my mother ventured.

He smiled a dimpled smile. I felt my insides dissolve just a little.

“My mom had me late in life. Very late,” Jude said. Cal Jr. came to stand by the door frame. His nails traced the lines.

“How old are you?” I asked. My mother shot me a furious look.

“Merey,” she admonished. Jude smiled and shook his head.

“How old do I look?”

“Forty-seven,” Claudia deadpanned.

Jude’s eyebrows lifted up and he pursed his lips into a whistle. I saw Cal Jr. shoot Claudia a smirk.

“Ouch,” said Jude.

“Claudia.” My mother’s voice slapped her into straightening her spine as she stood.

“No, it’s okay. Guess I need to lay off the beer for a while.” And then he inclined his head toward me and winked. “I’m actually a very old, apparently, thirty-two.”

“That’s not that old,” ventured Ava, half-doubtfully.

Jude let out a belly chuckle. “Thanks, kid.”

Piper’s voice called us all in for dinner and I turned to my grandmother and said, “How come you’re not cooking today, Grandma?”

For a second there was a brief hush. I saw Jude’s eyebrows furrow in disconcertment though his smile had not yet slipped, before my grandmother gave a small, gentle laugh.

“I had a terrible migraine this morning. Piper kindly offered to take over. It’s a bit of tradition for me to cook the Sunday meal, Jude. I’m afraid I’ve let you down somewhat.”

“Not at all, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty more Sundays for you to cook for me. I’m sure you’re wonderful.”

“Thank you,” said my grandmother softly. We turned to walk into the dining room and as was custom, Cal Jr. stood to the side to accompany my grandmother. But she did not look at him. Instead she was still gazing at Jude and then suddenly as if in some sort of silent communication, he crooked his elbow and she slid her hand upward, looping it so that she could take his arm. The two of them walked past Cal Jr. without even a glance.

My cousin hesitated, still staring after them as they went into the dining room and then Piper offered her arm for him and he took it, after a slight pause.