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So she sat there in the car with Cal waiting for a sign, keenly alert for whatever guise it may present itself as, while he stroked her skin under his hands and called her Lavinia.
And then finally it came.
Cal struck her so hard across the mouth that he broke the skin on her lip and she bled into her teeth. She saw him lean back, his face ashen, and he stared down at his fingers while self-revulsion contorted his features. Without a word she got out of the car and began to walk. It was ten miles from where she had parked her car. She waited for Cal to come after her but he didn’t. She heard the engine of the car roar behind her but the sound faded away. So she walked the ten miles and in that time she thought over what had happened.
Now my grandfather was not a man who ever lifted his hand to a woman, nor would ever again, save once years later when he would strike his daughter so hard she would fall and catch her temple on the table corner as she went down. He would stare at his hand then in the same way as he had looked at it now with Anne-Marie. What shocked me when I first heard these stories was not only that my grandfather, when provoked, could lose all sense of reason and restraint, but also that these provocations existed in the first place.
Maybe this may seem strange, but if you ever met my grandfather you would not have believed it of him. He was a man who was so temperate his perpetual state was placid. It was helped by his drinking surely, but never did his manner or nature ever tip those scales except for three times in his life. Once was when his mother died, once was now in a car parked outside Sunrise Wood and the last time would be in his kitchen in the spring of 1968. But at the time Anne-Marie knew nothing of this. What she did know was that she had said something that, without even realizing it, had flipped a switch in the man beside her, so that for a moment he ceased to exist. She hadn’t even seen it coming; there had been no warning. One minute they were talking; the next, the back of his knuckles had slammed her lips against her teeth. So she went over in her mind what she could have said to set him off.
They had been talking about his father. He was the one who had brought it up.
“Doctor came over yesterday.”
“Lou?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat. “They say it’s not long now.”
“Oh.”
“He wanted to see me up in his room.”
“Who? Lou?”
“No, Pa.”
They fell silent. She curled her hand around the open lapel of his shirt.
“Did you go?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
His chest rose and fell under her cheek. Try as she might she couldn’t hear his heart through the shirt.
“I haven’t spoken to him in sixteen years.”
“Well, you must have now that you’ve come back.”
“No, not at all. I’ve seen him but I haven’t said a word to him.”
“Oh. Why?”
“I don’t know. I kinda like seeing him suffer.”
She lifted her head then and, curling a finger under his chin, she made him face her.
“Why do you hate your pa so much?”
“Doesn’t everyone hate their pa a little?”
“I don’t know my pa to hate him, and your sister and brother don’t hate him.” She added cautiously, “Julia doesn’t hate you.”
“That’s because she hasn’t been raised on hell.”
“It don’t look like hell to me.”
He jerked his head away from her.
“Do you know about my ma?”
She shook her head.
“She died. A while ago now. She got sick, drank some contaminated water and she died in the same bed that he’s dying in. She’s buried on the farm. 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,” said Cal.
He drew out a chair at the table and sat down heavily.
“Where’s Julia?” he asked after a moment.
“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.
