The Legacy of Eden. Nelle Davy

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ