by Nelle Davy
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 agai
nst 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.
We did not understand then, the power such an action has. We shed our blood on Aurelia, willingly, to claim it, to be part of it, just like our grandmother: yield for us and we are yours. And so we are tied to Aurelia and to each other until the day we die. Somehow when I think of that, despite a sliver of horror, I feel less alone.
My childhood was filled with stories of my father. My mother focused on telling them to me in particular because I was only seven when he died. So whatever we were doing, no matter how small or banal, she would try and find a way of twisting the conversation to incorporate some story about my father and his life. This was a few years after his death, when she could finally mention his name.
Those stories were, of course, ones he told my mother himself, though in time I would come to know much of the truth behind my father’s memories, from a completely different source. My father was an incredibly intuitive man, observing and detecting all the unsaid things that hung in the air of his memories while growing up on the farm, storing them in hidden vaults until a later time when he could draw them out and reminisce about them. He was a man who lived inside his imagination and memory.
This made sense when people described him as a child. Theo was a golden boy: he had curly blond locks and milk-and-honey cheeks, but it was his temper that set him apart. While Julia was an extrovert and Ethan a simmering cauldron of emotions that always got the better of him, my father was temperate, placid—in short, exactly like his father.
To say that he was Cal’s favorite would be going too far, because Cal spoiled and indulged Julia far more than he ever did the boys, but my father and he shared a quiet bond of kinship, the like of which he never had with his other children. Whether it be the way they both cocked their heads to the left as they sat and watched Dragnet, or the way they both walked, arms swinging, their bodies springing from hip to hip. Theo was Cal’s boy and so, in contrast—maybe even because of it—Ethan became Lavinia’s.
My uncle and his mother would come to share a complicated relationship, the seeds of which were sown in his youth. Lavinia poured all her energies into her eldest child. She watched him, she analyzed him; she questioned and prodded him so much that in the end she came to know him better than anyone, better even than he knew himself. One day when she had mused over the choice of colors he had used in a drawing he made her, Piper had snapped at her and said, “Jesus, Lavinia, they were the only crayons left in the box, that’s all.”
Piper thwarted her in every way she could. She was always encouraging the children to run off and play together away from the watchful eye of their mother. Lavinia recognized her attempts to undermine her and complained to Cal, who, naturally seeing nothing wrong with the notion of kids playing alone, lamented his curse that with two boys in the house he was still beset by the constant problems of women.
Almost as soon as they arrived, the children became a battlefield between Piper and Lavinia. Piper observed the way she made factions between them: her constant eye on Ethan, her dismissal of Julia, and she believed herself to be a neutral party, pouring balm on the oil fires their mother created. She saw the way Lavinia watched Cal and Julia together and her increasing irritation at the child’s hold over her father, which caused her to push Ethan to try and be the same, but the boy just didn’t have it in him. A solitary and thoughtful creature, Ethan was an introvert, constantly absorbing everything about him in such a way that he was perpetually affected by every aspect of his environment. It was a trait Lavinia preyed on. But Julia was different. She grew into a hedonistic, savvy creature, already aware of the ways in which to manipulate and control the men around her, beginning with her father and brothers. Perhaps you may have thought Lavinia would have seen in her more of the prodigal elements that could be molded into her own likeness. But this was the problem. The likeness between the two of them was too striking and she soon saw her stepdaughter as less of a child, and more of a rival.
The feeling was more than mutual. My father often said that his childhood was beset by arguments between his sister and his mother with Piper or Cal acting as an intermediary. They were at constant war and what my grandfather failed or refused to realize was that he was the battleground. In the end, it was Julia who took home more victories than my grandmother. She had only to wrap her arms about his neck and my grandfather would remember his three-year-old daughter in her blood-spattered dress and his mind would twist and turn to find a way to absolve her of whatever infractions she had been accused of.
It took several years, but eventually Lavinia learned her lesson. When she heard the way her husband talked of the impact of the death of his first wife and his relief that his daughter had been spared, she realized that direct confrontation with her stepdaughter would always be to no avail. No matter what, her husband would always take her side because for him, time had stopped in a hospital ward in Oregon. She watched over her sons and the farm and whenever she thought of their future and the land, a sharp thorn of remembrance pierced her reverie as she heard Julia’s singsong voice carry out of the windows toward her. No matter that she was Cal’s wife, or that she had given him two sons, she could not deny the unassailable fact that Julia was not only his firstborn, but that she had also faced death and survived. That one act held her above everything, even her clutches, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Never was this fact made clearer than when Julia became a teenager. Once, the family had traveled to the Iowa State Fair. It was 1955 and Julia was thirteen years old. A huge attraction, it covered about four hundred flat acres of wooden campsites littered with people, farmers, produce, food stalls and rides. It was a great place for families and even more so for farmers. With its huge emphasis on all things grown and reared, farmers from all over the state came to show off wares, make business deals and forge new connections with suppliers. That was why my grandfather went, but the rides and contests meant that the whole family could enjoy it, too. I would be taken along to these often as a young girl.
My father said that his favorite thing at the fair had been the butter cow. Every year they would produce a cow sculpted from butter like some latter-day version of the golden calf. My father would reach out his hand and try to stroke the smoothness of its skin before his mother caught him and smacked it back.
At some point after they had eaten, my grandfather had gone off to meet a supplier who’d recently advertised their new business. There was a talent contest later that afternoon and Julia had wanted to sing in it. My grandmother had rolled her eyes at this, but as usual Cal hadn’t noticed and had promised to be back in time for it. Besides he wanted to enter the arm-wrestling contest himself, he’d said with a smile before challenging Theo to an arm wrestle in midair. My father had grappled with his father, laughing as he tested his strength with his idol. His mother was less than impressed. She soon took him and his brother by the hand and kissed Cal goodbye, while Piper listened to Julia jabber excitedly over what song she thought she should sing.
As they wandered about the fair and saw the largest rabbit and the sheep shearing race, Julia continued to dance around them, her arms splayed, her voice strangling Patsy Cline in a timbre that lacerated at the tight bonds of self-control protecting her stepmother. Lavinia held on to her sons and sucked in her cheeks, but her eyes still found the figure of her preening stepdaughter nonetheless. At one point, as Julia half pirouetted in the air in front of her, her stepmother could no longer resist her near murderous impulses. Lavinia felt her self-control snap and grabbed Julia, pinching her underarm violently between her finger and thumb.
“At least attempt to conduct yourself like a young lady,” she spat.
Julia
rubbed her arm and, staring over her shoulder, narrowed her eyes and mouthed the word bitch.
My father said that before he knew it his mother had smacked his sister with such ferocity, the ringing clap brought the people near them up short. Julia, who had been preening at the time and unaware of what was coming, had overbalanced and gone sprawling to the floor. She looked up at her stepmother in a mixture of shock and alarm before a glimmer of triumph raced across her features, for what she saw in front of her was a trembling tower of unbridled fury.
She screamed, raised an accusing finger at her stepmother and said, “She hit me! She always hits me! I didn’t do anything. What did I do to you?!”
Lavinia swept down and grabbed the girl to haul her up, her nails digging into the pink flesh of Julia’s upper arm so that she buckled and twisted in pain.
Piper came running. She had been lagging behind with Ethan, but at the commotion and Julia’s screams she was behind Lavinia in an instant. She wrestled the girl’s arm from her stepmother and as Julia crumpled back to the floor crying and twisting her arm in her hands as she doubled over, Piper stared at my grandmother with a mixture of fury and fear. Lavinia looked down at the child with a seething hatred that seemed to have burst its banks and was now coursing through her with heat. Her skin began to flame and her temples throbbed. She could not control it, she could not mask it—she looked at the girl and in her mind she knew she could not stand her; she could not wish her anything but harm. She knew then that this girl was perhaps the greatest enemy of her life and try as she might she could only see her childish form as a disguise, not an excuse.
It was the first and last time she ever lost her composure in public and it was also the last time she ever allowed anyone to know the strength of her feelings. She saw Piper inspect Julia for bruising and as she gently moved her arms, she found the small red half moons where Lavinia’s nails had dug into the skin. She helped Julia to her feet and they both stood there, accusations flying from their eyes.
