The Legacy of Eden (9 page)

A few days after my grandparents were married. Leo came over to get his things from the house. Piper saw the taillights of the removal trucks Leo had organized pass by in the drive, but when she went down to see him he refused to talk to her. In the end his wife came out onto their porch and stared down at her sister-in-law with icy disdain.

“My husband don’t truck with no traitor,” she said.

I suppose I can understand how Leo felt. He had worked his whole life on the farm and he had believed, right up until they heard the will, that he would continue to live and eventually die on it. But the share allotted to my grandfather was too much for him to bear. He may have been right, but even though everyone knew this and even though it had just been the two of them for so long, Piper refused to take a side. At least that was what she said. She didn’t realize that in not taking a side, to Leo, she had in fact taken up with my grandfather. Leo was not a man for neutrality.

He left town and moved to Indiana, where their mother had been born and raised. Rumor had it (though it was eventually proved to be true), that he stayed with one of their uncles there who owned a farm. People thought he would contest the will on the grounds of their father’s mental incompetence, but he never did. He simply left town and all the gossip and scandal with it. That was the last we really heard of him for a long time. He would not speak to my grandfather again for nearly twenty years and Piper for ten. That was the first of the splinters in our family. With hindsight you could take it as an omen, but maybe that’s just me being superstitious.

As for my grandparents, they rarely left the farm during the first year of their marriage. It was at Cal’s insistence that they laid low. Lavinia’s affair and divorce, and Leo’s departure, had brought a fierce amount of attention onto a man who, even when I knew him, was intensely uncomfortable with any kind of spotlight, be it good or bad. My grandmother did as he wished. My grandfather hoped that the less they were seen the more quickly they would fall to the back of people’s minds.

My grandfather began to concentrate on building up the farm. He wanted to show his neighbors that he was just as good as Leo, just as capable. He saw how aloof and wary the other farmers were toward him and he knew the only way that would change would be if he made something of Aurelia, or at least maintained it to the standard of his brother. So they lived and they worked and Lavinia, his wife full of so much ambition and pride, humbled herself and waited.

But she didn’t mind because it was all hers. At last, a home. She would say how different she felt on the farm compared to Lou’s redbrick house. She hadn’t liked the farm when she first saw it at the garden party, but as she worked on it with her husband, walked on it and explored it, while her belly swelled beneath her hand, she began to take strength from it. Soon she knew it as well as if she had been raised there, and every meal with her husband and his sister was always peppered with her questions. Cal was flattered; Piper suspicious.

And then she began to talk to Cal when Piper wasn’t around, about her thoughts and ideas for the place. While frustrating at first, she soon came to realize that their isolation was a blessing. It was a gift that allowed her to penetrate her husband’s strict principles without the interference of outside influence. At first Cal might have thought her ideas were just fanciful dreaming. He would sit next to her at the table and let her words pour over him as he ate his food, or read his paper. My great-aunt always believed that at first he never really believed in what his wife was saying; he was just humoring her. It was a severe underestimation and perhaps for that reason, one day without even fully realizing it, he began to listen.

For the first time in her life Piper felt like she may unravel. In the space of a few months she had lost her father and her younger brother, her family was the speculation of gossip and rumor and, worst of all, now Cal was beginning to act on his wife’s crazy ideas.

The first of which was about the house.

This part is really unclear. Piper never really spoke of it, nor did my grandparents. Whenever the subject was raised with my grandmother all she would say was that the old house was falling apart and needed so many repairs that it made sense to rebuild a new one entirely. Piper would snort if she was in the room and draw her lips together in silent disapproval. My grandmother would watch her as her face would draw to a close, until finally she would snap and say, “Piper, are you sucking on a lemon or something?”

Piper would look up, her features twitching in surprise. “I don’t know what you mean, Lavinia, my tooth is giving me trouble, that’s all,” she would respond, and then she would go on with either her reading or her sewing, unaffected by the glare of hatred my grandmother focused on her from the other side of the room.

How my grandmother managed to secure the approval of my grandfather to rebuild the house, when she was already six months pregnant and he himself was just getting re-accustomed to the farm and all its responsibilities, remains a mystery. What is clear is that she persuaded my grandfather to use most of the money Walter had left him to do it. It shows just how much sway she once had over him.

They moved into Leo’s old place while the house was being rebuilt and, as Lavinia made plans and nested, Piper took over the aiding of my grandfather in building up the farm. That’s one thing I’ll say for him, something which Piper was always grateful for and which may have just saved her: he gave his sister a far greater share in the running of things than Leo ever would have. She managed the accounts and the money, while he went about the practicalities of the farm.

But because she managed the accounts, she began to see how much my grandmother was spending. On more than one occasion when she would see architectural blueprints sprawled on the kitchen floor or swatches and materials draped over the sides of chairs she would tut, she would mutter and she would ask herself and the air around her when it would all end.

“Cal?” she said once to him as he sat at the edge of the kitchen counter, tearing a piece of beef with his teeth as he scrutinized the paper. “Do you know how much your wife is spending? Because I don’t think she does.”

“Leave her be, Piper,” said Cal between mouthfuls. “She never had something of her own like this—she’s just trying to make us a home.”

“Well, does she have to bankrupt us to do it?” she asked angrily and stepped forward with a host of receipts in her fist. Cal batted her away with his free hand as she approached him.

“Daddy’s money is running through her fingers like water, Cal.”

“I’ll make it back.”

“You’d better hope you do,” said Piper as she angrily peered at her brother. “Why don’t you take this seriously?”

And he had looked at her wearily. “Because you do too much.”

So Piper stayed up each night, balancing books and ledgers, holding her head in her hands as she saw the outgoings of her sister-in-law. As she passed the place where she had once lived torn down to form the tall pine erections of a house she did not recognize, but that would now be her home, she saw numbers pouring from it in a haze that made her stay awake at night and worry.

One night when she was staying up late, a mess of ledgers across her table, she heard her brother pass by her bedroom and called out to him. He peered around the corner of the door.

“Why you sitting in the dark for?” he asked.

“Cal, sit down,” she said.

He perched with a frown at the foot of her bed.

“Look at this,” she said and handed him a ledger. His eyes scurried across it and the blood began to drain from his face.

“Exactly.”

She waited for a moment, savoring his uncertainty, his fear. Serve him right, she thought.

“Piper…” he began, his mouth a perfect
O
.

“I don’t want to hear it, Cal—it is what it is,” she said, and snatched the ledger back from him. He looked down at his empty hands, disconcerted.

“Now I been thinking on it and it seems to me the best way would be if I put in some of the money Daddy left me.”

Cal stared at his sister. She pulled her braid down over her shoulder and stroked it as she talked musingly.

“’Course, if I do that it means by right I should have more of a say in what happens with this place. I mean it is my money after all, which is acting as a sort of plug for your wife’s whirlpool of profligacy.”

“What do you want, Piper?” Cal asked slowly.

And that was how my grandfather made his sister a business partner—much to his wife’s hidden chagrin. Though in time even she had to admit Piper knew the business better than she did. It may have been my grandfather who talked about setting up a hog operation, but it was Piper who made it financially viable by waiting two years, saving up money from the harvests, investing in soybeans and maize. With Piper at the reins, Lavinia could not spend as much, did not have the unlimited access she had taken for granted, but because of Piper, the farm stayed afloat in those early years despite my grandmother’s excesses, because she could do what her brother would not—and that was tell her sister-in-law no.

As a trio, they became a successful team. Cal was a physical and hard-working man, Piper had a great head for figures, while Lavinia was all about the presentation. She knew how to make a thing seem better than it was, so that other farmers looked upon Aurelia with new respect and even envy, while Cal and Piper provided it with the goods to back up the claim. Even Piper acknowledged as much, though her newfound respect did not mute her suspicions of my grandmother and her motives.

My uncle Ethan was born in 1947 before the main house was completed and it was said that my grandmother fell wildly in love with him. Apparently he looked just like her, although his hair was a deep dark brown rather than her russet hues. Julia, however, was said to be less than impressed with the new arrival.

But my uncle’s birth did not just affect his family, it rippled far beyond the confines of Aurelia. Upon his arrival a new rumor began to circulate around the town that Lou had been unable to give Lavinia children and this was why she had left her husband. What else, they said, could explain how the woman fell pregnant at the drop of a hat with Cal while her stomach had stayed resolutely flat in all her years of marriage with Lou? My uncle caused not sympathy, but a suspicious empathy toward my grandmother amongst the town folk. They were cautious in their disapproval, no longer sure that they had wielded the sword of truth above her head. They began to wonder if perhaps her actions could be sympathized with, even justified. They began to feel guilt.

The family would move into the house on its completion just after Ethan turned one and Julia started going to school. Lavinia had the idea of throwing a party with all their neighbors to celebrate. She convinced my grandfather that it was a good way of rebuilding relations and showing everybody how well they had done in Leo’s absence—proof that Walter had been right to do what he did. That swung it.

My grandmother said that was a day she would remember for the rest of her life. Honey-colored lights were strewn around the house, there was the smell of newly planted roses in the air and she stood on the porch, one hand resting against the columns, the other cradling her son against her hip as she watched the jaws drop on all the neighbors who had hated and secretly mauled her for years as they walked up the drive in varying degrees of awe, astonishment and incredulity.

Two years after their first child was born, they had my father: Theodore, Theo for short. The farm was beginning to show the seeds of prosperity that in time would make it legendary. Invitations both verbal and written began to arrive regularly from the people who had once scorned them. Lavinia noted the names and the regularity of their invitations, but my grandfather didn’t care. At last, at last he was happy. He was home, and whenever he thought of his brother and the reading of the will, he knocked back a glass of scotch until the memory passed away.

My grandmother would look out onto her home while gently playing with the scar on her arm, and revel in what she would later describe as happiness. She thought it would go on and on, this feeling; she could see no reason why it shouldn’t. None of them did. She was safe in the knowledge that this was to be her home, and just as she had vowed the night she first came to live here, she would spend the rest of her days on it.

She once told my uncle and father the story of that night. My father was thirteen at the time. When they heard it, they, too, went and got out the kitchen knife, went out to a field and cut their arms and spilled their blood onto the land. And so this tale and its actions trickled down the generations so that when my sisters and I turned thirteen, we too would do the same. What began that night in 1946 as a mere act of defiance would eventually become a sacred family ritual.

I remember when it was my turn to do it. Ava, Claudia, Cal Jr. and I stood behind the barn and my fingers trembled as I came to draw the knife against my skin, my body recoiling at the pressure of the blade. I looked at Ava, who winced as she saw me strain, and then Cal Jr. leaned forward and, whispering, asked me if I was okay. I shook my head and the knife drooped in my hand. He pried it gently from my fingers and I leaned against his shoulder, ashamed and grateful at the same time. And then in one sudden movement, he jerked my arm up and slashed the knife through the underside. It was so quick I didn’t have time to register any pain, or even outrage; I could only look at him in astonishment as he held my arm above me coolly, and watch as the blood trickled down and seeped into the earth.