The Legacy of Eden. Nelle Davy

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СКАЧАТЬ 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,” СКАЧАТЬ