by Nelle Davy
What did my grandmother do? What could she do? She fled.
She said she must have walked the whole length of the fair but she didn’t see anything. She was afraid of Cal’s reaction and there was nothing she could say that could justify her behavior in order to abate it. She remembered the time in his truck when she had still been married to Lou, and how she had walked along the dirt road holding her hand to her lip feeling the same isolation, the same confusion, but this time without the bolt of inspiration that had made it bearable. And then she remembered her sons.
She knew where they would be. An hour later, she found them at the singing contest just as Julia was midway through her performance. She watched the infectious excitement in the girl’s movements and how she played to the crowd, and she saw the waves of pride and amusement run through her husband’s features. She came to stand by him and when he saw her he did not inquire where she had been, but put his arm around her and drew her in close so that in appearance, they looked just like the doting parents he believed them to be.
Julia didn’t win, but afterward Cal took her to one of the stalls and bought her a whole box of caramels, her favorite. Lavinia watched them, waiting for the storm to come, but it didn’t. Piper said nothing, though she refused to meet her eye, and the boys were lost in their own amusements. In the car Julia appeared to be normal as she licked her fingers happily as she ate the caramels, and everyone but her stepmother talked about what they had seen and done at the fair and how much they’d liked it.
Because they’d eaten so much they only had a light supper and as they’d done so much walking the children went to bed early. As Lavinia came up to say good-night, she hesitated outside Julia’s room. The door was slightly ajar, and she could see that the child’s small bedside light was on. Cal had bought Julia a small gramophone for Christmas and it was playing a Bill Haley record. Gingerly, Lavinia opened the door and went inside. Julia was lying in bed, the covers pulled down, her washed hair wrapped up in a towel. She saw her stepmother in the doorway and pulled the needle from the record so that the music was scratched into silence. Julia beckoned to Lavinia to come closer and, casting a quick glance over her shoulder, Lavinia did so.
In a small voice Julia said, “I just wanted you to know, that I made Auntie swear not to tell and neither will I.” She paused, watching her stepmother for effect. Lavinia willed her face to show nothing. Julia frowned and then continued. “I won’t ever tell Pa what you did.”
Here is where the discrepancy lies. Julia would later say that she meant it. That this was her way of making a peace offering, holding out the proverbial olive branch. She was only a kid she’d say, how could she have had any malicious intent? But Lavinia would feel differently. To her this was the child’s way of throwing down the gauntlet; letting her know that it was she who had the power.
My father believed his sister. He said that by the time they could recount this memory too much had been done by either side for them to think straight, but to his mind Julia was never clever enough to be that calculating. When he said this to my grandmother, she gave a little smile and simply replied, “The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince people he didn’t exist.”
Years later when she was forced to tell me about her life, my grandmother made a confession to me. What she said was this:
“I would not have done anything differently, you know? Not really. It all had to be done for the good of the family even if they couldn’t see it at the time, but I could. I always could. I don’t regret anything and even the things I might have cause to regret I was proven to be right in all along.”
I was seventeen years old when she began telling me the history of her life, of the things she had done, of what she had made. I believed I was ready, I wanted to know, I felt both privileged and terrified.
“What do you mean, Grandma?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
She had turned away and stroked the sheets with her papery hands.
“Lou, you were the only thing I looked on with any regret. But then I saw, I knew it was the right thing. I knew. You told me so yourself.”
Later I learned that not only was she referring to her first husband, but also to his funeral.
Lou Parks died of a stroke in his office at his desk while reading his newspaper. His secretary had gone in to inform him that the next patient was waiting and found him with his face buried in the sports section.
When my grandmother heard of his death she had shaken out the tea towel she was holding and had said, “Well, at least he died with little interruption to his afternoon routine.” At this my great-aunt bit down hard on her bottom lip.
But despite her laissez-faire attitude, that night my grandmother had a nightmare. She wouldn’t say what it was, only tried to fall back to sleep. But the next night she woke up screaming and then the night after that my grandfather woke and found that the bottom of the bed was covered in dirt. He raised the covers and saw that the soles of his wife’s feet were muddy. She had been sleepwalking.
“Nonsense,” she had said, “I don’t sleepwalk. Theo, how many times have I told you to pick your toy cars up off the stairs?!”
But later, when Ethan had come down in the middle of the night to get a glass of milk, he had found his mother standing in the hall. The moonlight dappled on her hair and in the dark her white nightdress made her look like a ghost. He had screamed and dropped his glass but still she did not move. My grandfather and great-aunt had come down the stairs with Julia complaining from her bedroom and Theo rubbing his eyes as he plodded after them.
“How long’s this been going on?” Piper asked as she came to stand with her nephews and brother in a half circle around my grandmother.
“A couple of nights maybe,” said Cal. “What should we do?”
“Well, don’t wake her, it’s dangerous,” said Piper. “Just lock all the doors and make sure she can’t get out and injure herself.”
“Why’s she doing this?” asked Ethan.
“Maybe she feels guilty,” said his aunt.
“Piper,” Cal warned.
The next day at the scrubbed kitchen table, Lavinia, attempting to rub the stiffness from out of her joints, saw the same crescent of witnesses from the night before holding onto alternating mugs of coffee, hot chocolate and milk. They all turned from what they were doing and stared at her when she came in.
“What?” she asked.
When they told her about happened, she unexpectedly gave a great sigh and sat down at the table. Cal sent the boys out to play. Piper looked at her with curiosity.
“Maybe you should go to the funeral,” Piper said.
“I don’t think—” began Cal.
“I wouldn’t be welcome,” Lavinia answered.
“By whom?” asked Piper. “Lou ain’t got no family. It’s his friends who are doing the funeral. What are you afraid of? You weren’t afraid when you left him, or when you had an affair with my brother, so why are you afraid now?”
And that Lavinia could not answer.
The truth was there were times when she wondered whether she had made the right decision. What if this was not a product of her fate, but a decoy away from it? Was this who she was meant to be? A farmer’s wife…stepmother…mother? They were all suitable roles in themselves but had she ever wanted to play them? She didn’t stab the curtains anymore, but sometimes she would look through them out onto the green and the flowers and the flat horizon beyond and she would feel…weary.
“I am not afraid of anything,” she lied.
So she went. She sat in the white church, outside of which years before she had iced her cake never knowing the name Cal Hathaway. In the stifled air she listened to the hymns and the eulogy and stared at the coffin in which lay the man she had once thought of as her ticket to freedom.
Piper came with her to pay her respects to Lou for everything he had done when she had nursed her father and mother before their deaths, but she watched her sister-in-law when
ever she could. The woman barely moved an inch the whole way through the ceremony. She half whispered the prayers and her voice faltered during the singing. When the service ended and they came out into the air, she was so pale Piper thought she would faint.
She drove her home and for the first time in her life, my grandmother genuinely fell sick. She lay in bed for a week and no one was allowed to visit her. Cal was frantic with worry; no one could tell him what was wrong, but at the same time no one could tell him how to make her right.
“Just let her rest,” one doctor had said.
“That’s the problem,” said Cal.
Then one morning he woke up to discover she was not there beside him. He flung on his overalls and stalked through the house and then the garden until eventually he discovered her forty-five minutes later on the edge of the cornfield.
In her hands was a clump of dirt. She was fingering it, letting it crumble and watching the dust fall on the wind.
“Lavinia, what are you doing? You scared me half to death,” he shouted.
She did not answer him, only stared at the seemingly endless field of cornstalks.
“I had a dream,” she said softly, half to herself almost. “I was dreaming and then…and then I woke up. Yes, I woke up.” She paused and then smiled. “I think I’m better now,” she said, and after a pause he took her by the arm and led her home.
As she passed the house, the boys were outside, dressed and ready for their chores but clearly perplexed at the absence of their parents before breakfast. Julia sat on the porch cradling a glass of milk, watching them.
“I found my way before you came to me, Cal,” she would say in the future at the end of that story. My grandfather would laugh and turn away. I’m not sure he ever really understood what she meant.
I’m not sure she even wanted him to.
JULIA
The Devil and All His Forms
Chapter 6
AFTER MY MOTHER had already had my two sisters, she had decided that that was it; she would not have any more children. Don’t mistake me, my mother loved her daughters and she was a good parent to them, but my father didn’t care about having a son and after two incredibly difficult pregnancies (she almost died with Claudia, from the blood loss), Mom had a categorical fear of childbirth. So she and my father did something that as a Catholic she felt guilty about, but not guilty enough to stop: she began using birth control.
And then one afternoon while her daughters were playing, she sat on our porch swing and in the relentless haze of the afternoon sun, she fell into a sleep in which she dreamt that she was drowning. She said she must have been holding her breath because she could feel her lungs straining, the insides burning and palpitating at the slow suffocation of oxygen. She reached out her hands in the dark mass of water but instinctively she knew she was too far from the surface and that made her panic even more. Then she put a hand to her legs and the sticky wet feeling there reviled her, so that she opened her mouth in anguish and swallowed a lungful of water. She woke up gasping as her body heaved with exertion. She was so focused on breathing that she didn’t realize for a moment that her hands were covered in blood and when she looked down she saw that it was coming from her lap.
Before she knew it she was lying in a hospital bed, her legs in stirrups raised above her head. She was embroiled in a struggle to keep hold of a child she hadn’t known she was carrying and probably wouldn’t have wanted if she had. But that was the charm, you see: I was an ambush.
“I had to love you,” she said. “I was fighting so hard to keep you, I didn’t have enough time to choose not to.”
My mother was in the hospital for three weeks. She was just over four months pregnant. Her periods had been slight and irregular, but she had none of the nausea and cravings she had with my sisters. After she was released, the doctor said she had to have complete bed rest to ensure that I was delivered safely, so for the next five months my mother became intimately acquainted with the pattern of her bedroom ceiling. She read and she listened to music and in the evenings when he came home, my father knelt beside her and told stories to her growing stomach.
He told the still forming version of what would be his youngest and final child the story of the farm. He told me how it grew, about the hog operations and the deal with a major supplier that had cut their outgoings by twenty-five percent; about how the Gainses’ farm to the left of us had been sold and how my grandfather had bought it and added six hundred acres onto our land. He talked to me about growing up in a tall white house with his brother and sister. How he had swum in the stream and built a swing rope so they could dive into it in the summer. He told me of the time he had played Zorro with Ethan and had used the poker irons as a sword, accidentally scoring his brother with it as he had tried to scratch the immortal Z into his chest. He told me how Ethan still had the scars even to this day.
He told me about visiting fairs as a child, and riding horses with his sister along the flat plains of Iowa. He told me how I was to be born into a state of farmers and prairie grass and that as a kid he had gone to see the cornfields on the farm and had been overwhelmed by how tall they were so that it seemed to him the very sky gleamed with the colors of the sunlight hitting the heads of corn.
He told me about the house I would be raised up in and the sisters I would meet, about how proud he had been to grow up on a place like Aurelia and how I would be proud, too. He talked so much that my mother’s dreams were filled with the figure of a yellow-haired boy riding beside his father in a thresher, washing a chestnut-colored colt and falling asleep next to his mother with a milk moustache.
And then one time when I was restless and kicking so hard my mother winced, he told me the one story of his youth that no person was ever allowed to speak of because my uncle had forbidden it, but he told me anyway.
He said: “Child, don’t you ever tell nobody about this, but since you’re kicking up a storm how’s about you hear of a real one? You’re coming to a place that is filled with tornadoes every summer and when we were younger your uncle and I got caught up in one. A pretty big one, too. There was your uncle Ethan, me and there was also this girl. Her name was Alison but everyone called her Allie.”
Ethan’s first love, Ethan’s only love, was Allie Lomax. A slight girl whose father was a clerk in the county court and whose mother was infamous for her pound cake and machine-gun-rattle laugh, he had met her the day of the Iowa State Fair, when he was only eight. She had wandered away from her parents at the fair entrance by a selection of candies at one of the food stalls. She had looked in wonder and greedy anticipation at the spirals of pink cotton candy and sweating chocolates, and as she contemplated all these things before her she did not see the small boy with dark hair and eyes so brown they looked black, who was standing behind the large glass jar of red-and-white-striped candy canes, staring at her as if he had never seen anything like her before in his life.
She had turned to ask her parents to buy her something but they had already begun to move away and she was annoyed.
“Here—take this.”
The boy reached out from the other side of the table and handed her a candy cane. Alison looked at it distrustfully.
“Take it,” said the boy.
“You have to pay,” she said sullenly, arms folded, eyes narrowed.
“Oh.” He frowned and his wrist wavered. “I don’t have any money.”
“Then that’s stealing,” she said, drawing her chin up in righteous indignation before turning on her heel and walking away.
“No, but—but I want you to have it!” the boy yelled, but she was already running after her parents.
“Thief,” she cried over her shoulder.
In those fifteen seconds my uncle’s life changed. Later, he would recount this story many times to himself in memory and then many years after that, sobbing brokenly over it when drunk.
That would be how I would come to hear it for the very first time.
For five years,
since that day, Ethan spent his time haunting the steps of Allie Lomax. At school he searched every hall and sports field for a glimpse of her long brown hair hung in its ponytail, or the sound of her voice high above a crowd and whenever he found her he would stop what he was doing and find a place so that he could watch her and drink her in without notice or interruption. That lasted until his brother found him and asked him what the hell he was doing. “Get off me, squirt,” he would shout and punch my father in the stomach before stalking off in a hotbed of simmering fury.
One night at dinner, he pushed his casserole around his plate, brooding because he had seen Allie wear the varsity jacket of Jimmy Galloway at recess.
Julia, who was sixteen by then, set down her glass of Kool-Aid and, ignoring Lavinia’s retelling of her argument with the assistant at the gardening store over the correct way to treat American Beauties, said loudly, “Jesus, Ethan, why don’t you stop being such a freak and just ask her out on a date? That way I don’t have to watch you mooning like some lovesick pup over every meal.”
My grandparents spoke at the same time.
Lavinia: “Julia, will you please learn some manners and not interrupt me?”
Cal: “Who’s he asking on a date?”
Ethan scowled over the rim of his plate, his eyes boring into the winsome smile of his sister.
“There’s this girl at school—”
“Jules,” growled Ethan.
“Julia, I’m sure this is all incredibly interesting,” drawled my grandmother, “but your father and I were already in the middle of another conversation.”
“What girl?” asked my grandfather, staring back and forth between his daughter and his son with a grin already creeping across his mouth. Lavinia put down her fork and wiped her mouth with her napkin.
