by Nelle Davy
I bit my lip.
“Of course we knew about his mother and the problems there, but still, your grandparents gave him such a good home and we knew they would have raised him right…but from the way he carried on you wouldn’t know it. Those parties—” she shuddered “—and the stories of what he got up to. And of course he drank—well, that’s how he died. But the stories of what he used to do up there…we all knew, but none of us could ever understand it, how he could hole himself up there doing those things for as long as he did. It was like he thrived on it.”
I looked into her eyes and the pity and pain there made me want to run.
“I’m not here to try and make things right, you know?” I said. “I know that can’t happen. I just— I just want to make sure that things are done properly. Someone has to.”
She gave me a weak smile. “I’ll help you as much as I can, Merey,” she said over the strains of Nina Simone.
“Thank you, Jane,” I said. “Thanks a lot.” I stood up. “I think I’ll take a walk, do you want something in town or groceries or something?”
“No.” She patted the radio top. “I’m just fine, you know.”
I turned to go, but then I paused.
“Jane,” I said.
She looked up at me. “Yes?”
“I am really grateful for you putting me up at such short notice… Well, I mean without me asking you to before I came. And it’s really good of you to be this—this kind to me about things, but can I ask you for one more favor?”
“Of course,” she said, leaning forward. “What is it?”
I took in a sharp breath.
“Please don’t call me Merey.”
For a month, my grandfather did nothing. He worked until the light gave out and only turned in when it was so black he could barely see his hand in front of his face. He ignored his sons and sister, he barely spoke to his wife and on one occasion he drank so much he fell asleep in his thresher and was thrown head forward into a ditch. The doctor told him he was lucky the thresher hadn’t toppled over and fallen on top of him. My grandmother had slapped him in her fury; he had done nothing but grunt.
Later on that day, she had come back to his side and taken his hand in hers and apologized.
“But you frightened me, Cal,” she said. “You can’t do this. She is only one child, you still have two others and she’s not much of a child now if she can run off and leave you like this with no thought or care for her family. It’s cruel and she doesn’t deserve your unhappiness. You’ll see. You will come right enough eventually in time.”
“I owed it to her mother to keep her safe,” he said to the ceiling. “I failed her.”
Later that evening, coming out on the porch, Piper found Lavinia staring into the night. The woman was so still, the only thing that stirred around her was the breeze playing with her dress. But then she heard Piper’s step and turned.
“We could look for her in California,” said Piper. My grandmother’s voice when she next spoke was dripping with scorn.
“Oh, yes—just take off half a year and go up the California coast until we spot her and then drag her back, do we? That’s if she isn’t married, in which case we have no rights at all. Besides which I think she’s pregnant.”
“Surely not?” gasped Piper. “No, she would tell me.”
Lavinia’s mouth inched into a smile. “You have no idea who she is.” She turned away. “None of you do. If she doesn’t want to be found she doesn’t want to be found. There’s nothing we can do but get on with our lives. Cal will come through this, as will the boys.”
“And you’d say the same if it were one of the boys, would you?” asked Piper angrily. “Jesus, woman, call yourself a mother.”
“I am a mother, Piper, and do you know what one of the great skills of motherhood is?” She hugged her arms, her hair curling about her temples in the stray breaths of the evening winds. “Adaptability.”
“Well, I made my mind up there and then,” said my great-aunt much later. “The next day I went to find Jess’s parents. His father was upset, as you can imagine, and his mother—well, she was always a bit fragile if you know what I mean, but they told me everything they could think of. Apparently Jess had written to them telling them he was happy and he was planning to marry Julia and that they would have some special news for them soon but not yet. He didn’t say where they were, but he hoped when he’d made it big to have his parents come up and stay with them, and by then no one would think about how it all started. He also added as a postscript, to say sorry to Caroline.”
“Thoughtful, isn’t he?” his mother had said. Piper had kept her counsel at this.
Then a few weeks later she came down the stairs at breakfast carrying a large brown suitcase and told her brother she was going on a holiday.
“Are you nuts?” Cal asked. “Harvest’s due to start soon. We need all the hands we can get. And who’s going to do the books and balance the ledgers?”
Piper laid a small piece of paper with the name of a respectable firm of accountants on the table.
“It’s about time we started using proper businessmen,” she said. “You know the accounts are just growing and growing. We need shrewd investors and people who can manage this thing for us properly. Besides,” she added firmly, “I haven’t had a holiday in I’m ashamed to say how long, Cal, and I’m not asking, I’m telling. I hope to be back in a month.”
“A month!” Cal exclaimed. “Jesus…” And he went to the sideboard and took out a bottle of whiskey.
“No,” said his sister, swiping the bottle from his hands. “Christ, Cal.” And then because she could think of nothing else suitable to add, she said, “Grow up.”
It took her three weeks to find them. She had gone to Sacramento, where a friend of Jess’s lived, and she’d been given his telephone number by his parents. He had balked a bit when he had seen Piper on his doorstep, but he had given her Jess’s forwarding address, which had led her to the fifth floor in a block of apartments in L.A. where she had found her niece, who opened the door with its peeling paint, in nothing but Jess’s oversize Des Moines Demons T-shirt.
The place was furnished but shabby and there had been nothing to offer her aunt in the way of refreshment but cupcakes.
“Is this really how you live, Julia? Doesn’t Jess mind?” Piper had asked, fingering the cupcake with trepidation.
“No, no, he thinks it’s all romantic, like we’re heroes in some novel. And he thinks having cupcakes for breakfast is really sweet,” Julia had said, shaking out her hair. “I think I’m going to dye my hair, you know? Blond like all California girls. Get rid of that lingering farm trace once and for all.”
“So there’s nothing I can do to persuade you to come home?” said Piper, crestfallen.
“Why would I come back? I’m never coming back. Daddy doesn’t want to know about Jess and I can’t stand that bitch any—”
“Julia, please.” Despite her feelings for my grandmother, Piper’s sense of propriety prevailed. Julia shrugged.
“So you will marry?” Piper asked softly.
“Done and dusted,” said Julia, fingering the gold-plated band on her ring finger.
“We’re going to have a honeymoon once Jess gets set up. We’ll go traveling all over once he starts getting gigs. It’ll be so cool.”
“And in the meantime, what’ll you do for money?”
“Oh…” She eyed her aunt carefully for a minute and then shrugged. “I figured that out before I left. Besides Jess’s uncle got him a job in the studio helping out the sound technicians. Jess kinda hates it.” She laughed. “He doesn’t get to do much but lug around amps all day, but it’s fine—he’s going places. I know it. Next time you see him, his face will be on a billboard.”
“And is there…?” Piper’s eyes fell to Julia’s stomach. “Is there nothing else?”
“I thought there was,” said Julia after a pause. “But the doctor says no. There will be soon and it doesn’t matt
er. We married for love.” She bit into a cupcake and the pink icing smudged across her nose. She giggled. “And cupcakes. He just loves my cupcakes.”
Piper didn’t tell Cal she’d been to see Julia, although she saw Lavinia watch her eagle-eyed all through dinner when she came home. All she did say was that she’d received a letter from Julia telling her that she was married and that Jess had gotten a job. Cal had gone silent and then left the room.
“That must have been a great comfort, to know she was safe,” said Lavinia.
“Isn’t it to all of us?” challenged Piper.
“Of course,” Lavinia replied, her head bent over her sewing. “So ingenious of her to know where to send it to you when you were away on holiday. She has powers of detection that not even I could have guessed at.”
Piper excused herself from the company of her sister-in-law and followed in the wake of her brother up the stairs. And aside from a letter on Thanksgiving and a card at Christmas, Julia did not try to get in contact with them again.
And so they went on. For a year afterward the farm still prospered, my uncle still held the silk of Allie’s hair in his hands on their secret afternoons, my father rode his chestnut mare through the neighboring fields and my grandfather began to reach out again for my grandmother as they lay together at night. He never mentioned his daughter.
And then over time, things returned to normal. My grandfather, from his grief at his eldest’s departure, poured himself into the farm. He could barely be torn away from it. His every waking hour was concerned with its welfare and he urged and encouraged his sons to do the same. Once he turned to my father and uncle and picked up a clump of yellow earth. “Look,” he said and he turned his face to the fields. “You can do anything with this if you nourish it, if you love it even. Make it soft with your care and it will yield so much for you.” He took a satisfied breath and let the dust crumble in his hands. “It will always be here even after we are dead and gone. Land will always last.” And so my father and uncle began to see Aurelia as more than just their home, but their birthright. They worked in the fields and watched with awe as the saplings of wheat grew under the toil of their calloused hands, and my grandfather saw the change in them and was proud.
“It’s always been there,” he told my grandmother one night in bed. “It happened with me just the same around their age, though Theo’s a bit younger.”
“Blood will out,” my grandmother said contentedly.
“Reminds me of me and Leo,” he said to the ceiling. “How we used to be over the place.” And a shadow passed over his eyes.
“Hush now,” she said and put a hand on his chest. “No more about that.”
My grandmother told me that for that year, she remembered her happiness as a vivid thing, almost in the same way as when she had first come to the farm with Ethan growing under her heart and her husband’s hand in her own. She saw her husband and sons labor on the place with fervor and she was satisfied. She saw her future clearly as if it were written on the sky: how her family would grow and live here and marry and raise their own families on it. She saw how the people of the town now looked on her with new, if wary respect as tales of the farm’s prosperity grew and at last the road was a smooth one on which all she had to do was travel.
She should have known better than to be so untroubled in her contentment. Even she would say as much in time.
It started with a phone call. My grandmother picked up and the line went dead. She looked at the receiver in bewilderment and then set it on its rest. Then the next day it happened again, except this time my father answered. He was sweating from target practice with his father, who was teaching him to shoot beer cans with his rifle on the fence near the rose garden. His manner was abrupt because Ethan had beaten him in shooting more targets, but his irritation increased when the line again cut off after a few seconds. He opened the larder and started to slice himself a hunk of bread, which he ripped apart in his teeth, when Piper came into the kitchen and raised an eyebrow at his feral state.
“Get a plate for that, Theo,” she said.
“Fine,” he said and pulled one from the cupboard.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” my father said. “Just…what’s the point in phoning someone if all you’re going to do is hang up?”
“I don’t know, Theo, that’s strange behavior indeed.”
“I’ll say,” he said. “Going to watch Dragnet.” And he went into the living room.
But his words had an effect on my aunt and when she casually mentioned the incident to my grandmother, who then told her of her own experience the day before, she felt a sense of uneasiness make the back of her neck prickle.
“If it weren’t for the farm and the business I would have told Cal to make sure that our phone number was unlisted,” my grandmother said as she polished the rosewood desk.
My great-aunt lingered around the house waiting, for what she did not know exactly, but her instincts were telling her to do so and my great-aunt was always a firm believer in instincts.
And then sometime after lunch not two days later when she was alone, the phone rang and she answered it. This time the person on the other end spoke, and when Piper heard who it was a wild joy broke through her, and without meaning to she began to laugh.
One day Piper came to her brother in the barn where he was conversing with his foreman. She drew him aside and said, “Cal, I want you to take me to lunch in town, I have some business to discuss with you.”
“Lunch? What’s wrong with home? There’s still some of that beef from yesterday Lavinia cooked. You could make a stew or something.”
“You’re not listening to me, Cal. I don’t want to cook, I want to be treated. We have some things to discuss about the hog operation and for once I’d like it to be somewhere nice with good food where I don’t have to wash up afterward.”
Cal stared at his sister and after a moment he shook his head.
“All right then, be ready in half an hour.”
“Hmm.” Piper sniffed. “Best if you bathe first.”
Piper decided to drive, but as they turned off Highway 5 and began to get onto the main road that led to the opposite county, Cal shifted in his seat. Then when she parked outside a motel and turned off the engine, he stared at his sister, who was looking at him with a hardness he had not seen in a very long time.
If you were passing by the red pickup truck, you would have seen through the semi-opaqueness of the window the flailing arms and stabbing fingers of two people in the heat of an argument. If you were of an inquisitive, prying mind and had stayed, you would have seen that this tug-of-war took over half an hour before it was resolved. Then you would have seen a tall woman with graying brown hair get out of the car and slam the door before going toward the motel and knocking on the door of one of the rooms. You would have seen the door pull back, but whoever opened it would have been obscured as they stood behind it. You would have seen the woman enter and the man in the pickup truck go still, staring straight ahead at the window, on which its lace curtains would be pulled over by a female hand.
By now you would have thought, whatever the drama there was, was over and you may have gone on, but if you were to wait just ten minutes more, you would have seen the lumbering gait of the man as he stepped out of the pickup truck, walked to the door his companion had just entered through, before he paused and then began to pound his fist against the wood.
Lavinia was a woman who did not like secrets in her house. At least not those kept by other people. She knew when a secret was being kept from her and whenever she discovered this she would do her best to root it out. Secrets were weeds and she would not permit them to flourish unless they were guided by her hand and hers alone.
So when she observed Ethan’s solitary walks in the afternoon, his quietness afterward, his susceptibility to dreaming, she did her best to coax the truth from him. The business of Julia had meant that for a long time her energies had been spent elsewhere and
she admitted she had allowed her grasp on her eldest son to slip, so busy was she in dealing with Cal. But now that things had begun to settle, she could concentrate on her next battle—regaining neglected territory.
So one day when Ethan was late back from school she asked Theo where he was.
“Dunno. He doesn’t tell me this stuff,” said Theo with a shrug.
“Hmm,” she said and, carrying a basketful of laundry, she went up to Ethan’s room.
There she closed the door and carefully but methodically began to go through her son’s things. She checked his drawers, she ran through his closet but she found nothing. She placed his folded clothes on the edge of his bed and went out of the room.
The next evening when once again Ethan came home late, Lavinia said to her son, “What’s keeping you after school?”
Ethan had practiced this in his mind many times. He spun her a story of an after-school science club that he had been afraid of telling anyone about, because people who went there were generally considered nerds and were beaten up.
“You think your father and I would beat you for joining a science club?” his mother asked, her eyes narrowing.
“No, it’s just that…well, you might mention it to one of your friends and if they mention it to their kids then they’ll tell everyone at school and then well…” He tailed off with an emotional flourish. Lavinia could not suppress her feeling of pride and then irritation that he should dare use the instruments she had taught him against her.
“Very well then,” she said. “I won’t tell your father.”
Ethan practically beamed at her before dashing off. She looked after him and it was then she began to worry about exactly how her son had managed to acquire a secret this important, of which she still had no clue.
