by Nelle Davy
Can you understand? Can you discern even from these fragmented recollections the hold that place could have? Why those who lived there would do anything to protect it regardless of the consequences? It was stronger than the bonds of community, this love, stronger in the end than that of family. It affected all of us. Not the same, never the same, but it always left its mark and you knew then who you truly were and why you bore your name.
On the rare occasions my sister and I have talked since resuming contact a few years ago, our conversations have tiptoed around her bitterness—her, I should say, justified anger. Out of fear or diplomacy we have steered clear of anything that might have forced us down a path on which we would have to confront what is between us. I have done this dance mainly on my own. There were times when I think she would have gladly allowed things to degenerate into the spectacle of recrimination and blame that I so desperately hoped to avoid, but she never pushed it. When the time came, and I think we always knew it would, she would have nothing to fear. She was the betrayed, not the betrayer.
And now, here we finally are, because the one time when she expected me to revert to type and walk away I wouldn’t. The irony was not lost on me as I put the phone back on its rest. I know what she thinks—that I’m being deliberately contrary, hurtful, cruel. The rational part of me knows I have no right to blame her for thinking this—haven’t I proved myself to be all these things already? But I am still furious with her, because I so want to be able to do what she is asking and leave the farm to its fate with no regrets, and I can’t. Then I could show that what happened—what I did—was a mistake, it wasn’t me. I can change. I have changed.
I was calling for her. It was I who had offered to find her.
Oh, God, if I had never…if I had never opened that letter today, if she hadn’t told the lawyers she had wanted nothing to do with them, if Cal Jr. had never inherited the farm, if I’d done the things I’d believed I was capable of, if I hadn’t been capable of the things I’d done, if…if…if…somewhere out there, all the potential versions of my life floated on parallel planes. In one I never went out that night, in another more likely alternative, she does not put down the phone. Instead she stays on the line. We talk for a long, long time.
She listens.
She forgives me.
Do you believe in ghosts?
I didn’t until I started living with them.
Two days have passed since the letter arrived. I walk past my mother sitting in my armchair mending my pinafore, or my father at the fridge humming to himself as he scans my feeble purchases of organic whole foods. The walls between my memories and reality are disintegrating and everything from my past that I have tried to push back, now rushes forward to escape.
Once while on the way to the bathroom, I passed my cousin Jude, who I have not seen since I was ten. He cracked a hand on the back of my legs. “Toothpicks,” he chortled; I gave him the finger.
Part of me is terrified. I wonder if I am losing my mind.But I find their intrusions oddly comforting. It is like turning up at a reunion I have been dreading only to remember all the things we had in common, all the memories that made us laugh, and I am reminded of a time when it was easy to be yourself.
At one point when I was flicking through the channels and stumbled on a soap opera my grandmother used to love, I hesitated. Even though I knew it was crap, and I have never watched it, I left it on for her, imagining she was behind me, waiting to hear her slip past and the soft creak of the wicker chair as she settled down to watch it. Just before it broke for commercial I said aloud, “This is madness.”
Swift in reply, she answered, “Only if you expected a different outcome.”
It was at this point that I decided to call the lawyers.
“Good afternoon, Dermott and Harrison, how may I help you?”
“Yes, this is Meredith…” I hesitate. What name do I use? And then with a sense of weariness I think, what’s the point in trying to pretend. “…Hathaway. May I speak with Roger Whitaker, please?”
“Will he know what it’s regarding?” the receptionist asked.
For a second I was struck dumb. “Yes.”
I was sitting down this time. I took a deep breath and leaned back into the headrest as I was put on hold. After a few seconds the line was picked up and a male voice answered the phone.
“Miss Hathaway, so good to hear from you.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“Of course. I assume you’ve had time to think over what we detailed in the letter?”
“What part? The part where you told me my cousin was dead or the other bit where the farm’s going to be sold off and auctioned to the highest bidder to settle against his debts?”
“I know this is difficult to take in—” no, I’ve been waiting for this for seventeen years “—but we think perhaps it would be best if we spoke face-to-face about this. One of our senior partners was a friend of your grandfather’s. He knows how important the farm was to your family.”
“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 a
bout 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
Chapter 2
I GREW UP surrounded by stories. Everyone 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.”
