The Legacy of Eden. Nelle Davy

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ