The Legacy of Eden (28 page)

“I did not raise you to have the manners of a field hand, Claudia,” Mom admonished. “I want you to go down to the house tomorrow and apologize to him as soon as you are back from school.”

“I would rather die,” Claudia muttered through her teeth. Ava and I watched from the end of the hall, but the two of them were too engrossed to see us.

“What has gotten into you?” Mom asked, shocked.

“Don’t think I don’t know why he’s here all the time, don’t think I’m stupid,” Claudia yelled. Mom took a step back and then she saw Ava and I staring at them openmouthed.

“I haven’t forgotten, even if you have,” Claudia finished victoriously.

Mom looked at us and then at her, before pushing her back into her room and closing the door. There were no raised voices, but they were in there for a long time and in the end Ava and I grew bored of trying to eavesdrop and dispersed.

The next day when we were outside in the garden doing homework, Ava sat up on her calves and said to Claudia, “Clo, why don’t you like Jude?”

“Who said I didn’t like him?” she replied with an edge in her voice.

“Well yesterday…with Mom…” Ava trailed off.

“It’s not that I don’t like him,” said Claudia, her head bent resolutely over her books, “it’s just I already had one father and I don’t need another.”

“What are you talking about?” I shot back defensively.

Claudia put down her pencil and looked at us both. “We’re it now. We’re all we have got. Anything could happen to any of us. We owe it to Dad to make sure that we stick together. No outsiders, no intruders. Grandma always says how important family is, and now we’re all the family we’ve got.”

“But what about Grandma and Piper and…” Ava began, but Claudia raised a hand to stop her.

“Of course we have them, but…I just mean that it used to be the five of us and now it’s four. Dad isn’t here to protect us anymore, so we have start protecting ourselves. That was all I was doing yesterday.” She picked up her pencil and turned a page of her book. “Trust me, you’ll thank me one day.”

As I looked at my tutor’s face, I realized that I had failed in his assignment. He wanted me to illustrate a moment in my past to show depth or some sort of emotional gravitas, but the truth was that when I looked back at my life with my sisters all I could see was how—even though we lived together, ate together, had only a stretch of hallway to separate us for most of our lives—there was always an ocean between us in terms of understanding: what Claudia knew, what Ava kept hidden, what I refused to believe.

Who were they? Were they friends? Were they sisters?

I ask myself this question over and over again. I loved my sisters—I did—but despite this love the answer I come up with is always the same.

They were liars.

I sat by the window looking out at the expanse of flat land and afternoon sun. She had been quiet for a long time and when I looked over at her she was staring in the distance at a spot near the corner of her vanity table.

“How long has it been since he died?” she suddenly asked me.

“Who?” I asked, confused.

“Ethan. I can’t remember. I try but…” She shook her head and stroked the blanket over her.

“Two years ago,” I said softly.

“How did he die? Did he kill himself?”

I hesitated. “We don’t think so.”

“He blamed me, all his life ever since Alison, he blamed me. Did I force him to marry Georgia-May? Did I force him to be a bad father to his son? I made so many excuses, so many allowances, and then when Jude came, he just rolled over like a dog. After all my efforts, all our plans. It was so disappointing.”

She caught my eye and glared. “What? Oh, you pity him, I suppose. Cal always said I was so hard on him, but he would never be hard enough. He did kill himself, you know,” she said suddenly and I flinched. “It was just the longest suicide I have ever known.”

Three days after I turned ten my uncle received something that was long overdue. Ethan had been in the fields one day in early August, with his father threshing the corn. He had been standing next to him kicking dirt with his shoe while Cal’s voice droned on above him. He felt a small tap on his shoulder, and turned around, but before he had time to register who was in front of him, or what they would want, his nose had been broken and he was on the ground howling in pain clutching onto his face, blood streaming down the back of his throat. He was in too much shock and agony to make out what was being said among the array of shouts and voices above him; he could only rock back and forth on his back moaning into the arch of his hands.

At the time he might have still believed that he was the victim, until he finally managed to open his eyes and saw that out of the crowd of men around him, including his father and cousin, none were reaching down to help him.

And then Jude leaned down.

“If you ever touch that woman again…listen—listen!” He grabbed the thatch of hair to jerk Ethan’s head to attention. “I will finish you,” he added, then lifted my uncle’s head and smacked it back into the ground.

When we came home from the school that day, the first we had heard of anything wrong was the harried way in which our mother welcomed us into the house, just as she was heading out. To Claudia she said, “Look after your sisters. I’m needed at the house,” and moved quickly past us, not stopping to welcome us home as she usually would.

We had no idea what had occurred between our uncle and our cousin for nearly two hours until finally Mom returned home, exhausted, and sank gratefully into a chair in our living room while Ava made her some tea.

She stretched out her legs and curled her toes upward as she threw her head back and raised her eyes to the ceiling.

“Mom?” said Claudia and the urgency of her tone made our mother register us properly since first thing that morning.

“Your uncle beat your aunt last night. Jude found out—doesn’t matter how—but he broke your uncle’s nose.”

“Oh, my God, what?” laughed Claudia in shock and excitement. I sat up on the carpet and curled my legs under my knees.

“Really?”

“Yes. Your uncle is fine but Georgia-May and Charles are up at the house with your grandparents.”

“So what’s going to happen now? I mean…is Jude in trouble?” I asked.

“No, he’s not. Georgia-May showed your grandparents what Ethan did to her. Your grandfather threatened to call the police on your uncle, but your grandmother and Jude talked him out of it.”

Apparently my grandfather had stood over the circles of chartreuse and plum on Georgia-May’s back and, referring to his daughter for the first time in over a decade, asked what he had done to be cursed with such monsters for children.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said.

“Oh, my God. Did Grandma go nuts?” asked Claudia.

“No, she—she was on Jude’s side actually. She’s with Ethan now, getting some things for Georgia-May. She’s told him he’s going to have to see a counselor for…well, you know how much your uncle drinks. I’ve never seen her so angry.”

Angry, she was incandescent with rage.

He ruined everything. With one fell swoop he had undone all those years of work and allowed himself to be so easily and readily usurped in a matter of minutes, when she had worked so tirelessly for him since the day he was born. And she saw then that he would never inherit the farm. And she had no more children to present as an alternative.

“What did she say?” I asked.

My mother debated inwardly for a moment and then she relented—because she wanted us to know, I think, that she felt the same way about her own children. That should have been a warning to all of us—and to most of us it was.

“Your grandmother told Georgia-May that if it had been her, she would have stabbed him in his sleep.”

You’d have thought then that Jude’s fate would have been sealed with my grandmother by that act, but you’d be wrong. She didn’t like it, but it wasn’t enough for her to stick the knife in just yet. My uncle had been circling the drain long before that incident and in a way it was the wake-up call she needed to recognize that there could be no future with Ethan at the farm’s helm.

And then, as with all upheavals, there soon came a period of quiet. Georgia-May did not come to us in the mornings with as many bruises as before. Things seemed to get better, more peaceful. We settled into a family, Jude became less of a novelty and more of a fixture. We seemed complete. Well, almost.

It is strange but that whole time Cal Jr., who had always held himself on the periphery of our lives, withdrew even further into himself. He became like a ghost, to be found always alone and haunting the solitary untended places on our farm. No longer did we see him on walks with our grandmother around the rose garden, or working the fields with our grandfather. He was here, he was always here, and yet his presence felt all the more acute because paradoxically it was through his absence that we became more aware of him. When we would go over to the house on Sundays, he appeared once while we were waiting, drinking in the lounge as was our custom, and then somehow he would disappear and you would only just realize as you were being called into dinner. But suddenly, as if by osmosis, he would be there among you again and then you would wonder if perhaps you had forgotten him, forgotten he had actually been with you all the time. But you never got to ask him because his silence at the table removed him from view, so that you could see the dishes and the white cloth and the talking mouths in front of you, but somehow with a trick of the light you always missed him. He would slip away in the gap. Your eyes let him.

Once I was out down by the cornfields. I batted my hands against the sides of the cornstalks, enjoying the rustle that stirred against the air. And then I saw a flash of a light blue checked shirt and stopped. My hand was still resting against the shoots as I peered ahead wondering if it was a field hand, but then I saw his red hair and I called out to him.

“Cal Jr.? Cal Jr.?”

There was a silence. I looked and then walked toward where I thought I had seen him but there was nothing. “Cal?” I asked, my voice dropping in my uncertainty. There was no noise and then for a moment I thought perhaps I had been wrong. But then a violent tremor went through the field as if someone was thundering toward me. The maize shoots began to tremble and the rustle, which I had so loved a minute before, became a cataclysmic torrent of noise. I screamed and ran, not pausing for breath until I had gotten to the water fountain.

When I saw him next, it was on my way home from school the next day. I looked over at him and stuck my tongue out violently. His hand, which had been raised in a hello, drooped and then fell.

“Merey, what did you do that for?” asked Ava and I told her of what had happened the day before.

“I don’t think it could have been him. I saw him drive off to town to get horse feed around then.”

I stopped and stared at her. “I am sure he was there. I swear it was him.”

Ava’s brown eyes met mine. “Really swear?”

And her confidence filled me with doubt.

He haunted me then, just as he haunts me now. Only Jude isn’t around anymore to keep him at bay.

As we made our way down the drive, Claudia and I looked at each other in shock when we passed the place where our uncle’s house used to be and found that it had been torn down. The car jerked to a stop.

“You don’t think…?” Claudia breathed quickly, but I didn’t answer. Neither of us had contemplated the notion that Cal’s revenge on the farm would be anything other than it as a business. The fact that he could have torn down our homes and already dispersed our things without us knowing had never occurred to us. A stupid assumption I realized now. Why shouldn’t he feel the need to take these things? Though we had not wanted them we had always assumed that because they were ours that was all that should matter. We were still underestimating him as much in death as we had done in life.

I jumped out of the car and looked at the place where my uncle and his family had lived, where I had gone calling for my cousin to play after school and where I would often find my uncle on the front porch drinking with a vigor that would soon outmatch his own father’s. It was here one night when I was fifteen and he was so drunk he could barely stop himself from sliding to the floor, that he had told me the story of the one woman who could have kept some semblance of the humane about him. That was how I came to know of Alison Lomax.

The place was covered in brown grass strewn with bits of debris. There was no trace of what had been there, which considering the memories may not have been such a bad thing. I ran back to Claudia and she drove quickly to where our house should be. Julia’s former home, which had stood half a mile down from ours, had long been demolished on our grandmother’s insistence when Cal Jr. had come to live in the main house. We held our breath when we got to the road that used to be covered in verdant bushes that served as a property line, but over the rims of the green we could see the white peak of our roof and as we swung round the bend, it came into plain view: our honey-colored house, almost exactly as I remembered it—untouched, windows still intact, even the dragonfly knocker was there, though there were cobwebs around the base. Claudia stopped the car and parked it by the front. I let out a sigh of relief and turned to face her, but her eyes were pinched black and I recoiled.