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“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 they got out of the car she skipped ahead into the store, only to be severely disappointed. There were no jars of multicolored candy, no licorice laces in red and purple spools. The place smelled and everything seemed dull and boring. She felt she had been betrayed and so she did what she would always do in the face of disappointment. She threw a tantrum.
Her father was angrier with her than usual. Normally he would gaze at her in a cool, collected way until he eventually gave in or she exhausted herself. But this time he slapped her on the back of her legs, hauled her up by the arm and dragged her out of the store, her legs curling underneath her as she tried to kick out in anger and frustration, and then quite suddenly he dropped her; he just let go and the slam of earth on skin made her sob stick in her throat. The silence for the both of them seemed eerie, but while she looked up at him, he was looking somewhere else.
My grandmother said that the moment she saw Julia curled up on the floor next to her father, staring at him obstinately, snot and drool spitting from her lips and nose, she knew she did not like her. It was not the mess the child had made of herself, it was the way she had looked from her father to her, and how when she had seen that his attention had been caught by someone else, her eyes narrowed and she spat out another spit trail that curled under her chin.
“I didn’t know you would be here,” Cal said when he finally found his voice.
“I was out getting groceries,” said Anne-Marie.
Cal saw her lips covered in rouge and the swell of the jaw beneath the heavy makeup. He reached out to touch her and she shrank back, and glanced over her shoulder quickly to see if anyone had been watching. He snaked his fingers through his hair in frustration.
“I thought about calling,” he said.
“I am glad you didn’t.”
She was so cold as she stood there waiting for him to finish, as if he were just another piece of nuisance she had to climb over before she could carry on with her day. It angered him, this aloofness of hers. It made him want to smack her again just to get a reaction. Suddenly he began to feel sick.
“I don’t know what … I don’t—”
She continued to stare at him, her foot rubbing against her ankle in impatience. Beside him he felt his daughter shift and her shoe scuffed against his heel with a small kick. He looked down at her and saw her glare back at him. Her knee was bleeding.
“Please don’t talk to me again,” Anne-Marie said finally.
He panicked. “Lavin—”
“Don’t you ever—” She took a step forward and he saw more clearly the yellowish swirls near her jaw. “Ever call me that again.”
She walked away, passing Leo as he came out with a bag of horse feed. Leo saw his brother standing there, his mouth open, looking at the doctor’s wife and his niece sprawled on the floor, her left knee bleeding, her face bright red as she stared with hatred at her father.
“Cal?” he asked. “What are you doing?”
Cal looked down at his daughter and with one hand pulled her up. She cocked her bad knee for effect as she stood but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Will you take Julia back for me, please?” he asked.
“You thought any more on what I said?” asked Leo as he cradled the feed.
“Yeah, I—I listened.”
Leo paused. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s go, girl,” he said to his niece.
What happened next no one really knows. There was to be a lot of speculation that surrounded the events of the next sixteen hours for some time afterward. Everyone had their own theories. Leo believed Cal had been planning it all along, Piper believed that the opportunity presented itself and Cal was too weak to say no. My grandmother believed it was destiny. I don’t know what I believe.
Because it was so unexpected, so shocking, that it has never really made sense. Trying to rationalize it now could only be accomplished through conjecture and imagination. All I know is that my grandfather was a man who felt things deeply. He hated that about himself. He tried not to grow attached, but he was simply a man to whom burdens came easily, and every time he tried to shrug them off, the weight of his guilt would burden him all over again. So here is what I think happened.
I think he was afraid. Afraid of who he was and what he wanted and what he didn’t want to be.
I think he was tired of fighting for what he wanted, tired of fighting himself for wanting those things in the first place and tired of feeling guilty for all of the above.
I think he wanted to settle. I think he wanted it all to stop. I think he knew that life had a will of its own and for the second time he was willing to be borne along by it. I think he reasoned that he was a man, not a boy this time, and he could deal with things better.
I think he was sick of feeling like a failure.
Piper cooked dinner for herself and Julia that evening. She made a chocolate pecan pie for dessert that Julia wolfed down in sullen self-pity. She put her niece to bed and checked on her father, before going to bed herself at around eleven. Cal still wasn’t home. The next morning she fixed breakfast, changed her father and gave him a sponge bath. She enlisted Julia’s help in the chores, but gave up after her niece kept crumpling to the floor in mock agony on account of her “bad leg.” She went to check on her eldest brother, but when she knocked on the door he didn’t answer and when she tried the handle, it was locked. She assumed he was still asleep.
She went to bring Leo some lunch. He was down by the crops on the far side of the farm near the stream. When she gave it to him, he nodded in thanks before jerking his head to the left of her.
“See that?” he asked.
Piper turned. Against the well was the stone slab cover. Now broken, the pieces were splayed against the base of the well.
“What happened?”
Leo shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”
This was before she discovered that Cal had gone to speak with their father. This was before she would check in on Walter at six to bring him supper, when she would find him, eyes gazing upward and unseeing, his mouth half-open with a fly crawling across his upper lip.
This was before the funeral and the reading of the will, when things still made sense to her. But later on, after everything, she would recall this moment and wonder.
Anne-Marie was in the kitchen when she heard that Walter Hathaway had died. She was peeling potatoes for a stew. She listened to her husband talk of the man’s heart failure and willed herself not to scream. She sliced the knife through the potato into her palm when he mentioned the funeral.
“Good God, woman, what is the matter with you lately?” her husband asked as he pulled up her arm, down which a thin trail of blood was already pouring. “First your jaw, now this. Your head is in the clouds, Anne-Marie.”
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
The night before the funeral Anne-Marie pressed her husband’s best black suit and a somber-looking navy dress with a high-buttoned neck that irritated her skin, and hung them both on the front of their wardrobes. Then when her husband was asleep she went downstairs, pulled aside the half pint of milk that she had left to curdle in the gap between the refrigerator and the wall and forced herself to 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 stomachmuscles 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 on the ladder? Or was it that my grandfather had seen in her all the things she had been waiting for someone to find, and in him she saw the potential to realize those dreams into a reality? Is that what you would call love?
Why, you may wonder, do I not ask the same thing of my grandfather?
Because there is a much simpler way of clearing that up.
Two weeks passed and in that time this was what Anne-Marie learned.
She learned that Leo had not been back to the farm since the day of the funeral.
She learned that Cal had not refused his share and that he had continued to stay in the main house with his sister and daughter. When the suppliers had rung up, it had been he who fielded their calls, and when the farmhands came down in the evenings, they said it was he who gave them their instructions during the day. Leo stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of town and Cal began to farm Aurelia.
Piper tried to see Leo. She was admitted into his room at the hotel. She started to tell him Cal’s side of the story. She pleaded with him to see sense and come home. They could still farm the place together, each taking a share, she insisted. It would be a family business just like their father had wanted.
But when she next tried to call on him a week later, the man at the front desk told her he would not receive her and when she telephoned, she was told that Leo had asked not to be disturbed. She resorted to writing a letter, which she took to the post office and gave to Florence Baxter, who noted the name and address with an uncomfortable grimace. No one saw Cal outside of the farm.
And then one evening Anne-Marie and her husband sat down to dinner. The meat was overcooked and the vegetables wilted on their forks but they ate it nonetheless. When the doorbell rang, Lou pushed his plate forward and wiped his mouth on the napkin before going to see who it was.
She heard him before she saw him.
When he came into the room she saw immediately that he was different. Instead of the cheap salesman suits he usually wore, he was in slacks and a blue plaid shirt. His hair was lightened by the sun and she could see the faint discoloring line on his forearms that spending time out working in the fields had given him.
“So what can we do for you, Cal, that’s so urgent I can’t finish my supper?” asked Lou as he sat back down at the table to do precisely that.
Cal didn’t look at Anne-Marie as he spoke.
“I’ve come to talk to you, sir, about a matter that has been plaguing my conscience for some time now.”
“Why would you come to me about it? I’m a doctor, not a priest,” Lou joked.
Anne-Marie saw the ignorance of her husband draw a blank across his features as he stirred his food with his fork and she allowed herself a brief moment of irritation.
“There’s no real easy way of saying this so I guess I should just say it,” said Cal. Lou did not look up from his plate.
“I believe I’m in love with your wife, sir,” Cal finished.
Anne-Marie watched as her husband’s fork paused underneath a heap of sweet corn. His jaw worked slowly as his mouth caught up with his ears.
“Did you hear me, sir?”
“Yes, I heard you.” Lou put down his fork and, composing his hands in his lap, stared at Cal.
“What do you expect me to do about it?”
Cal flicked a gaze at Anne-Marie but she gave away nothing. This had to be his fight, she decided, though she would never forgive him if he lost.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Well, Cal, you come into my house, interrupt my dinner and tell me that you’re in love with my wife. I assume you’ve done all this for a reason.”
