The Legacy of Eden

“Was it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Was it important to us—I mean how many of us had you tried to contact before you found me? How many times did you get hung up on or ignored? Probably got cursed out a few times, too, huh?”

The voice was deliberately gentle at this point. “We were aware that there had been a significant rift between several family members. We know this is a delicate situation and for the sake of your family’s past connection with this firm we wanted to make the process as smooth as possible ….”

I saw that I was in for the lengthy legal homily.

“You can’t.”

“I don’t think that—”

“You can’t ever make it better. You can’t make it nice and easy or simple, so do yourself a favor and don’t try.”

There was a pause. “There was talk here that perhaps it might be more effective if you or a family member could sign over the responsibility of handling the dissolution of the farm and its assets to us. Of course this could prove to be difficult, considering that there is no direct claimant to the farm and others could contest the process if they should hear and—”

“No one will.”

“Well, uh, even so there is the matter of personal items, artifacts. We weren’t sure if someone would want to come down and sort these out from what should be sold with the farm and what would be kept.”

I saw my childhood home, the one a mile down from the main house with its yellow brick. Suddenly I was in our blue living room with the window seat behind the white curtains I used to hide under while I perched there waiting for Dad to come home.

“Of course.”

“When can you come down then?”

“What?”

“When would you like to come to the farm and do this? The sooner the better, to be frank. I don’t know if you are working, or if it would be a problem for you to take time off—”

“I work for myself. I’m an artist—a sculptor actually.”

“Excellent, then when shall we set up an appointment?”

I opened my mouth, suddenly utterly bereft. I raised my eyes from the floor and shuddered. They had lined themselves up all around me in a crescent of solemn, knowing faces.

“I don’t know.”

Our farm was on the outskirts of a town surrounded by the farms of our neighbors: people whose children we played with, whose families we married into, whose tables we ate at. Together our farms formed a circle of produce and plenty that enveloped our small town, a hundred and seventy years old with its red-and-white-brick buildings and thin gray roads. Simple people, simple goals, old-fashioned values: this is where our farm is still to be found. I had not seen it in nearly two decades, but as I looked at the crowd of faces glaring at me from the other side of the room, I realized with a thin sliver of horror I had no choice, I would be going back. And I shuddered so violently, I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to stop myself from crying out.

“We’ll leave you to think about it. But please—” his voice retracted back into smooth professionalism “—don’t take too long.”

It took me three hours to find it. There was a lot of swearing, I tore a button off of my shirt and scratched my arm, but eventually I sat cross-legged on the carpet and smoothed the crackled plastic of the front before I opened the album.

Ava had packed it in my suitcase the night before I left for college, the night I found her in the rose garden. I had opened my trunk in my new dorm to find it slotted between my jeans and cut-off shorts. I couldn’t bear to look at it for a long time. I had left it in the bottom of the trunk and when I had to repack for Mom’s funeral, I had tipped it out on the floor, daring only to look at it from the corner of my eye. I am a firm believer in what the eye doesn’t see, can’t be real. That was why, much to my mother’s deep disappointment, I became a lapsed Catholic.

But this time I flipped back the covers and stared. I drank it in. The photos had grown dull with age. The colors, which were once vibrant blues and reds, were now tinged with brown and mustard tones. I slipped my fingers across the pages, watching the people in them age, cut their hair and grow it out again. From over my shoulder, my father leaned down and stared at himself as a young man on his wedding day. The light behind my parents was a gray halo surrounding the cream steps of the New York City courthouse. They had married in November, just before Thanksgiving, and you could see behind the tight smiles, as they stood outside in their flimsy suits and shirts, how cold they were.

“Phew, wasn’t your momma a dish?” he said.

And she was. She wore her hair in the same way she would continue to for the rest of her life: center part, long and down her back. A perpetual Ali McGraw. Decades after this photo was taken, she would be widowed, her children would be scattered and broken, her home rotted out from beneath her. In her last moments, did she think of this? I don’t know. I wasn’t with her, only Ava was there.

She was not alone if she had to face her past and all its demons. And neither am I. I could feel them all pressing against me: the smell of my father’s breath … chewed tobacco and Coors beer somewhere to my left.

I took my time with the album, even though inside I started to scream. My hands trembled but I continued to turn the pages. Each new memory sliced its way out of me, taking form and shape with all the others. I didn’t mind the pain—it was just a prelude to the agony that has been biding its time for the right moment and now it was almost here. With one phone call it was as if all those years of running away were wiped out in an instant. My life is a house built on sand. That should have made me sad but it only made me tired. I turned another page. We looked so normal. In many ways we were, except all the important ones.

I flicked the page and saw my aunt Julia, whom I never got the chance to meet. Her hair was still red, before she started to dye it blond. From what I’ve heard from the strands of people’s covert conversations, Claudia was a lot like her.

And then I looked up from the album and saw him standing there, the cigarette smoke separating and spiraling above his face. He was named after my grandfather, who was lucky enough never to realize what his namesake would grow into.

“Are you in hell, Cal?” I asked him.

He laughed at this. “Aren’t you?”

“What do you remember?” I asked, suddenly urgent.

“Same as you,” he said with a sly grin. “Only better.”

“Don’t listen to him, honey,” my father said, lifting his chin in disdain.

Cal Jr. shot him a look of pure hate. “How would you know? You weren’t even there!”

I stood up and walked out of the room. This is it, I thought to myself, I’ve snapped. I’m finally broken.

“You’re not fucking real,” I suddenly shouted.

“Dear God, girl, still so uncouth,” my grandmother said, stepping out from the kitchen, her tongue flicking the words out like a whip. “I always told your mother she should have used the strap on you girls more often, but she was too soft a touch.”

I turned around to face her, my fists clenching and unclenching by my side. “You—if you hadn’t—”

She turned away from me, disdainful, bored. If this were all in my head, what did that say about me?

“Enough excuses, Meredith.”

I was shaking so hard, my voice tripped over itself.

“You were a monster, you know that? A complete monster.”

“Made not born,” she said and looked at me knowingly.

“Oh, no—” I shook my head “—I am nothing like you.”

“No, Merey—” and she smiled “—you exceeded all of our expectations.”

I took a step toward her—toward where I thought she was.

“I’m going back to the farm. To sell it, to take what’s left of your stuff and hock it at the nearest flea market.”

“Oh, Meredith.” She sighed. “You’ll have to do better than that. Have you learned nothing? In terms of revenge we both know you can do so much more.”

I shook my head and rubbed the heels of my hands into my eyes until the light grew red.

“You’re not here,” I said again, but even so I could feel the light pressure of her hand on my wrist.

“Neither are you,” she whispered.

I opened my eyes and lifted my head. There: the fields on fields of cereals and golden-eared corn from my memory, from my dreams. They lay before me, an ocean of land, the colors all seeping out in a filter of gray.

Exasperated, I finally asked her the question I knew she had been longing for. “Why are you even here?”

“Darling.” She chortled, suddenly filled with unexpected warmth. The silk of her green dress grazed past my arm as she came to stand beside me. “We never left.”

LAVINIA

The Good Soil

2

I GREW UP SURROUNDED BY STORIES. EVERY-one had a story about someone or something: it was our town’s way of reinforcing its claim on its inhabitants. And they have talked to me and around me all my life, so that my memory is not just mine alone, but goes back far beyond my birth.

In the half gray of a reminiscent twilight they stand there, waiting for me to allow them to be remembered. I can see them begin to open their mouths and flood me with their explanations, their whys and wherefores. They want forgiveness just as much as I do and they long for it now more than ever.

But who should start? Who needs it more? And then she disengages herself from them, her form hardening from mere silhouette to actual shape. In a swathe of green she steps forward, out of time and dreams—a ghost who has walked the earth of my memory so many times, the ground is worn underfoot.

What’s hard is not starting at the beginning but trying to decide where the beginning is.

If my grandmother had to choose, for her the beginning of our story would be in May of 1946. We would find ourselves at a church fair with its fairly standard gathering of paper plates, white balloons tied to the end of red checked tables and the food is potluck.

Father Michael Banville stands before a bowl of salad and dressing, chatting amiably with Mrs. Howther about the state of her geraniums. To the left of him stands a small knot of farmers’ wives chewing over the latest town news between mouthfuls of sweet potato pie, and farther on from them, dressed in a loose flower shift, her auburn hair bobbed to curl against her shoulders, stands a tall woman putting the finishing touches to her layer cake. She had brought the icing in a tube that had been wrapped in wet tissue and kept in her handbag throughout the service in the small white church.

Every time someone passes and catches her eye she makes the same apologies about some problem with her oven the night before and how she had to run down to her uncle’s home to finish off the cake before the service, so she has had no chance to do the icing until now. People have nodded at these comments, even offered a smattering of sympathy, but mostly they have moved away wondering why on earth she would have persisted with something that circumstance was so set against. Why not bring a salad instead, or something simple? But no, they guessed correctly, she had to prove something. That was Anne-Marie Parks all over, they all thought.

The potluck was a rowdier affair than usual. Enclosed by a series of collapsible tables with honey-colored deck chairs, the gathering on the small knot of green at the church entrance added a season of color to the otherwise mundane scenery of white building and sky. It was the first one held in the town since the end of the war. Soldiers still dressed in their GI uniforms bore the weight of the grateful wives holding on to them, as they attempted to play with babies who did not know them. People mingled, smiled, and there was even a gramophone propped up on a stack of magazines on a chair. Everyone chatted as they ate and swayed along to the music, all of which Anne-Marie Parks ignored as she continued to ice her cake.

Across from her, standing next to a dish of chicken legs, her husband, Dr. Lou Parks, a tall man with long hands, stood balancing a plate of coleslaw and ham as he tried to pretend that he could not see what his wife was doing. His companion, Joe Lakes, a local farmer, did the same and therefore most of the talking. He chatted about his produce, his animals, his work, anything to keep the talk away from the subject of wives and home. It was this kindness that made him bring up a subject of gossip he would never usually raise, but as he saw Anne-Marie use the flat of a spatula to swipe away a piece of icing that did not suit her, he grasped at the last piece of news he could find that might keep them going until the silly woman had finished.

“You know they say Walter’s boy is coming home?”

“Hmm?” At this, Lou Parks raised his face from his plate and fixed his graying eyebrows into half moons of surprise.

“Don’t know for sure though, of course. But there’s been a lot of talk. Walter’s been laid up a while and Leo’s been manning things alone on the place for so long now, but they say Walter’s been getting worse.”

Lou Parks kept his features stiff as he watched Joe scan his face for confirmation.

“How’d he hear?” he said at last.

“Telegram. Old Florence said how Leo sent a message by the wireless a few weeks back. She won’t say what it was or nothing and there weren’t no name as such, but she said the reply come back all the same and though she didn’t know what it was exactly, Leo opened it then and there in the office—he couldn’t wait. She couldn’t think what else could be so urgent.”

“That’s not much evidence to suggest it was about his brother,” Lou persisted as he swallowed another forkful of ham.

“No, no … true, but Mac at the hardware store said how their sister Piper had come down to get some more linen and stuff. Good kind, too. And when he’d asked her about it she’d sniffed and said they may be expecting visitors.”

“Could be just that,” said Lou.

“Nah, everybody knows Walter don’t know nobody outta town. Whole family what’s alive and they talk to is right here—all except his boy.”

Lou was chewing thoughtfully when he caught a glimpse of his wife slicing away a piece of cake for the minister. The layer cake was all white now, with small red rosebuds lining the corners and forming a heart of sugar flowers in the center. He saw the minister pick up the fat piece in his fingers and his head nodded in silent agreement with whatever he was thinking as he devoured it.

“Very nice, Mrs. Parks,” he said as he strode away licking his thumb thoughtfully. “Very nice.”

A shadow of something passed over Anne-Marie’s face. What, he could not tell, and then she picked up her icing and the tissue and pulled off her apron before leaving the cake. She did not take a slice for herself, or for her husband.

“I haven’t seen that man in a long, long time,” said Joe wistfully. Lou stared after Anne-Marie as she wove her way through the crowds, which parted for her, though not one person looked at her or interrupted their speech to address her. Lou’s jaw slowed to a stop. Quickly he turned back to his companion.

“So how’s your knee, Joe? I noticed you seem steadier than you were last week.”

“Mmm-hmm” said Joe, looking over his shoulder.

“Another piece of ham, Joe?” asked Lou, setting his fork down and reaching to cut a slice.

“Hmm? Oh, yes, thank you.”

“No trouble,” said Lou, heaping the plate high and then Joe pulled up a chair and began to sit down. Relieved, Lou settled himself beside him and took in another mouthful of coleslaw as they silently and methodically began to eat.

Later that night, as he waited in bed while she finished up in their bathroom, Lou thought back to the church fair. He thought of the cake and the delicate rosebuds, of the look on his wife’s face as she had stared at the minister who, blissfully ignorant, had greedily relished the slice she had cut him with only the barest of acknowledgment. She had lost herself for the rest of the afternoon, until finally she had slipped an arm around his waist just as he was thinking he would like to leave. They had passed the table with the cake as they walked to their car and he had noted that it was still as she had left it with only one slice taken away.

He wanted to tell her his thoughts: to say them and wait for her response so that maybe then he would fully understand the meaning behind what he had seen, but as ever when she stepped into the room, her body pale beneath the white cotton nightdress and her hair crowding her shoulders in waves tinged with red, he opened his mouth and the words seemed to fail him. Instead of voicing all these thoughts he said, “You know there’s talk that Cal Hathaway may be coming home.”

“Who?” his wife asked.

“Walter’s boy.”

“Oh. Why does that matter?”

He turned to face the ceiling. “No reason, I guess.” He shifted so that his back faced her when she slipped in beside him. “Just nice for Walter to have his family back.”

“What did you say his name was?” she asked.

“Abraham technically, ‘cept almost everyone calls him Cal.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s his middle name.”

“Like me,” she said quietly.

“I like Anne-Marie,” her husband said, an unexpected tenderness suddenly tugging at him. He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t and so he untensed himself and settled down to sleep.

Outside, crickets chirped before the milk of a half moon and Anne-Marie Parks heard them well until the early hours of the morning when she finally fell asleep. She did not think about what her husband had told her; there was no immediate reason why it should be relevant to her. She did not know that she would later marry the man whose name she had so casually forgotten as she lay hugging her pillow, waiting for sleep to come. Nor everything else that would come to her: things she stayed awake aching for, night after night, until she woke beside her husband, hating the rise and fall of his back because that, and not what she had dreamt of, was her reality. She was so unaware of what lay in store, of what she was capable, or who she really was.

This was all when she was still just Anne-Marie Parks, the local doctor’s wife; seven months, four days and ten hours away from becoming Lavinia Hathaway.

When Abraham Caledon Hathaway finally returned home, it was to find his father dying. The man who had once wrestled him down and cast his belt on his back at sixteen after he had stolen the family truck and gone drinking, had withered to a husk and now lay in blue-striped pajamas on white linen sheets.

Cal had stood in the doorway of his childhood home contemplating how close his father looked to death. He was not horrified by this. He had met death already over a year ago. His wife had been decapitated in a car accident while he was out at work as a salesman. A truck with a load of metal ladders had slammed on its brakes at a red light, but the ladders had not been properly tethered to the back. At the force of the stop, one of them had dislodged and shot straight through the windshield of his wife’s car and smashed into the base of her head at the neck. Their three-year-old daughter, Julia, had been in the passenger seat next to her at the time, although miraculously she was unhurt. Cal had picked her up at the hospital after he had identified his wife. Her skin and cherry-patterned dress were still covered in her mother’s blood. He stared into the calm brown eyes of his child and had known then and there what death really was, and also, that at the tender age of three, she now knew it, too.

That was why he let her come upstairs with him to see his father when they first arrived at the house, even though his sister, Piper, had protested.

“It ain’t right,” she had called after them both from the bottom of the stairway.

“What isn’t?” their brother Leo had asked, coming in to take the lunch she had laid out for him on the kitchen table.

Piper turned. “He’s taking Julia up to see Pa.”

Her brother had humphed as he tore into a cold beef sandwich with mustard. “So they’ve arrived, have they? Anyway what do you care? It’s his kid.”

“Would you let yours come up?”

“I don’t have none so I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I’m thinking that’d be more along the lines of their mother’s call. She don’t have no mother.”

Piper jutted out her chin in irritation. “Still ain’t right.”

“He say how long he staying for?”

Piper watched her brother as he stared at her over his plate.

“I didn’t have time to ask. He just dropped his bags and went straight up.”

“No sense beating ‘round the bush, I guess. He’s only here for one reason and we all know it.”

When Cal came back downstairs, he paused at the bottom step at the sight of his younger brother. Piper ignored them both and, bending down low, she faced the silent unflinching gaze of her niece.

“Do you want some lunch Ju-bug?”

Julia looked up at her father, who stared at her in silent agreement.

“She’ll ask for it when she’s hungry,” he said.

He looked at his sister. She was still as she ever was: thin, wiry, her hard jaw and her overly inquisitive eyes searing everything with their gaze. He looked at his brother sitting at the table, staring at him thoughtfully as he ate. Already he could feel the enmity wash over him. Suddenly he was incredibly tired, and he longed for the silent confines of his small apartment back in Oregon.

He nodded in greeting.

“Long time,” he said. Leo raised his eyebrows; Piper looked at the floor.

“Could say that,” Leo replied.

“I heard you got married,” Cal said.

“Yeah. Just before the war.”

“You fight?” Cal asked, suddenly curious.

Leo used the last of his sandwich to mop up the mustard sauce on the plate.

“Yeah.” He looked up and stared at his brother. “I did my time.”

Cal looked away, as if lost in thought, before he cleared his throat.

“Did you see any action, Cal?” his brother asked softly.

Cal met his brother’s unflinching gaze.

“I saw plenty.”

“Pa’s glad to have you back,” offered Piper, the light notes of her voice grating against the air in the kitchen.

“Pa barely knows his own name,” Cal snapped. Piper looked away out onto the porch and sniffed.

Julia frowned and began to swing against the grip of her father. Cal looked down at his daughter as if he had forgotten she was there.

“Julia, this is your uncle Leo,” he said, raising a finger. “Remember the pictures I showed you?”

Julia looked at her uncle and then shook her head.

“Well, it don’t matter,” said Cal. “He was much younger in them than he is now.”

“Hi there, girl,” said Leo and gave her a halfhearted wave. He turned back to his plate. “You both gonna be here long?” he asked sharply, without looking up.

Cal gave him a level gaze and then shrugged.

“Don’t think so. Got to get back to work, for one thing.”

“Didn’t you tell them the circumstances?” asked Piper, shocked.

“Of course I did. They said I could take as much time as I needed but, uh, I just don’t think I’ll be needing that much time.”

Piper’s eyes slid away from her brother to the floor. Leo paused and then pushed back his chair before wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Well then,” he said, “well then. No need to make no fuss.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Cal.

Of course that wasn’t how it turned out.

It began when Piper came down from their father’s bedroom a few days later and started making a list at the kitchen table of things to get in town. Not from the local store, but up in the city from the place their mother had always used when she needed something special. Then she went out to see Leo. When she found him hoisting hay bales in the barn, she told him to keep the seventh free.

“What for?” he’d asked between grunts of exertion.

“Pa’s planning something,” she’d said.