by Nelle Davy
Mom even went to Lavinia once. She found her in the rose garden, her straw hat tied with its dark green ribbon resting on her shoulders. She told her of the buckle marks on Georgia-May’s back and how if Theo was alive, Ethan would never have been able to get away with what he was doing. Lavinia had looked at her tiredly and said she would speak with him, but it was for nothing. Ethan was beyond her control now and she knew it. So long as he was good for the farm, our grandfather would never cut him off, but the days when she could manipulate and coach his mind into her way of thinking were long gone. The alcohol was too strong a component in making his mind as hard and unrelenting as it made his gut slack and soft. She had no more luck with him than she had with her own husband and truth be told most of her energy was taken up with Cal Jr. Ethan was a lost cause now. With him she could only wait until he was no longer of use. It was on her grandson’s shoulders now that she rested all her hopes.
Which we could all see. When we were young, the two of them were as thick as thieves. Always going off for walks together, gardening, talking, hushing their conversations when someone else intruded on their time together. And that’s what it felt like for us—as if we were an intrusion. We would all learn, my sisters and I, that they were the kind of people who found you, you weren’t to find them.
So Georgia-May stayed and was beaten and Mom and Piper nursed her. Ethan at least did not go whoring; his only satisfaction was taken from inflicting his fists and belt and shoes all over her body. He wouldn’t touch her in any other way now, save to mark her—but never the face, always below the chest and never the arms in summer or the legs. You could tell the seasons on our farm by the location of my aunt’s bruises.
My grandfather knew. Lavinia told him, but he said nothing, only drank some more. She began to seriously doubt whether there was a man left in there, or just the cool amber liquids of various spirits where a soul used to be. I remember him as kind; drunk but kind. And meek—he would lift you up on his lap and let you crouch there so long as you didn’t disturb his drinking arm while you played. His body was a fairground, like a sleeping giant for playful Lilliputians.
But there must have still been something there that none of us suspected, because of what he did when Claudia was fifteen. It was as if for all those years, he had been scrambling in the dark, patting the walls anxiously with his hands and then finally, miraculously even, somehow he found the switch.
It started with a letter. I never read it but my grandmother did. After much scouring of the house she found it wedged behind a radiator in the downstairs toilet. She found it the day my grandfather announced at the table over the Sunday roast that his nephew, our second cousin, would be coming to live and work on Aurelia. His name was Jude; he was the child of his brother, Leo, and had been named after the patron saint of lost causes. Piper later told us it was because he was finally conceived when Elisa was forty-one so that his birth was considered almost miraculous. Elisa had apparently turned evangelical the older she had gotten and the more shriveled her womb had become.
Off my grandfather went on a great tangent over the dining table, peppered with digressions, musings and vague references to feuds and histories that I would come to learn in greater detail years afterward at my grandmother’s bedside. At the time I simply let his words rush over me in their semidrunken torrent as they always did at the table when he decided to speak, which was not often. I did not listen much and so cannot repeat what he said. At the time I did not realize how much this had meant to him: it had just seemed another ineffectual event that would have little to no effect on the alteration of my immediate family’s lives. Ignorance is bliss, my grandmother used to say, and I’ve come to agree with her. That evening I was utterly and happily unaware of the seething resentment stirred up by my grandfather’s declaration. While Leo had eventually learned in part to forgive or forget the grudge that had stopped him from ever setting foot again on Aurelia, he had never been able to fully embrace my grandfather as a brother, until now. His suggestion that Granddad take Jude in and let him have a more active hand in observing Leo’s stock on the farm had washed over me in a haze of boredom and inertia. I remember wondering why Granddad had bothered to have Jude over in the first place. If this man was so important, then how come we had never met him? But then I did not think of Aurelia as a business, it was just my home. I did not monitor its input and profit, even though the money from my father’s share was all that kept my little family afloat since my mother did not work at this time. The bliss of childhood: to see clothes mended and food appear and never feel the need to question.
I do remember this, though, how my grandfather’s eyes kept flickering back and forth to Lavinia the whole time he spoke and though none of us would find out until Cal Jr. told us weeks later, they had the most terrific argument when everyone had gone. The first one they had had in years, it was a screaming match where suddenly everything between them came vividly back to life and forced them to realize that something else, something other than themselves, had been dead all along.
My sisters and I were confused, we didn’t understand the significance of what we were hearing. I remember that Claudia had asked, when our grandfather had finally stopped his long and winding spiel about family and forgiveness and bridges (there had been many a metaphor on crossings), “But Granddad, who is Uncle Leo?”
“Oh—” and he started to smile as if she had told him a clever joke “—oh, of course he’s not your uncle, not your uncle, no, but you see that’s what he’s always been called by…by the kids who used to sit at this table—Uncle Leo. I forgot.” He started to chuckle. “I forgot…” And then a flush of remembrance dragged the smile to the side of his mouth so that his face became lopsided and then he shook himself. It was Piper who intervened.
“He was your father’s uncle, Claudia. He was our brother.”
“Where is he?” she asked. “How come I’ve never met him?”
Piper and Cal looked at each other and for a moment there was an uncomfortable silence.
“He died quite recently. Cancer, like our daddy,” Piper said. “That’s why he got in touch with your granddaddy. He and his wife used to live on a farm owned by our mother’s folk, but this was their first home and, well, we thought it best when your grandfather heard about our brother’s death and everything that happened…” She turned to her brother for help, but my grandfather’s face was closed in quiet grief. “We thought how nice it would be for Jude to come back again, for his father’s sake, since we could not do it for him while he was living.”
I had looked down at the rose-leaf dinner plate and played with the food there, circling it this way and that with my fork, my leg listlessly scraping against the wooden floor. Surreptitiously my mother leaned against me and pinched the flesh under my knee to make me stop. I was always scuffing my shoes when I was a kid.
My grandmother turned away as I looked up in pain and picked up her teaspoon to stir her coffee. Her hand was trembling. My cousin Cal Jr. sat beside her. He heard the gentle clatter of her spoon against the cup, and then, he reached across the table and picked up the silver coffeepot, dropping it unsteadily so that it chimed against the milk jug and the sound made me rub my tongue across the front of my teeth. Our grandfather flashed him a look of irritation before clearing his throat to recommence his speech.
“So much has happened in this family. So much loss and fighting. This is going to be a new start for us Hathaways. Get this family back to how it once was,” my grandfather said as he pounded the table and looked at all of us. Piper stood up as he towered over her, a maniacal grin spreading and then sapping at his cheeks, and motioned for him to sit down.
“After Theo and everything…you girls…lost two already and so young…” He trailed off and began to sway on his feet. “This means a lot to me,” he said more to himself than anything else. “A hell of a lot.”
“We know that, Cal,” said my grandmother, watching him while she continued to swirl the spoon aroun
d her drink until her hand grew steady.
“No one will ever replace your father,” he began again in an effort to compose himself as his eyes found my sisters and I. “He was a wonderful son. But we need some fresh blood in this place—” Cal Jr. bent his head and a thin red streak appeared on his cheek as the blood colored against the skin there “—and Jude will give us that.”
“And we’ll do everything we can to make him welcome,” said my mother.
“Yes.” He smiled at her gratefully. “Yes, I know you will.”
And then he looked at all of us and we smiled back at him. Cal Jr. kept his gaze on his plate.
On the walk home, I had lagged behind with Ava while Claudia held on to Charles’s hand, barely concealing her irritation as Mom escorted Georgia-May. Ethan had gone into town in his truck. We all knew he would not be home until the early hours and that Georgia-May would be over the next morning as ever, while my mother got the bowl of hot water and salts ready. Thinking on this now I have a crack of horror winding its way through my memories for the first time about my aunt. Even though I know now that she would escape with her son, back then her beatings and the tender nursings of my mother for all her injuries was so normal to me, so routine, that I was almost nonchalant when on the weekday mornings, Georgia-May would bare the crimson and purple welts on her back to my mother’s hands while I crunched on my cornflakes.
“Are you excited?” Ava asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I am. It’ll be nice to have new a cousin to play with. I wonder what he’s like.”
“I don’t know, Ava.”
“I hope Cal Jr. won’t be jealous.”
“Why would he be jealous?”
“I don’t— He just, he asked me if I was going to…uh…” She trailed off, her brow furrowing as she concentrated on what she was saying. I looked away from her into the distance.
“I can’t wait,” she said excitedly.
I stifled a yawn and kicked a piece of gravel on the dust path. “Neither can I.”
It was less than a year after my father died when Jude came to Aurelia. My days consisted of waking up in my whitewashed room covered in E.T. posters, going to school, doing chores on the farm and playing with my sisters and—occasionally when my mother felt strong enough to allow me to have them over—my friends, who would bring their sleeping bags and blankets and we would camp out in the gardens. Our favorite spot was the clearing with the stone god fountain, where we would pitch up our white sheets and tell ghost stories with flashlights under our chins. I was never short of friends as a child. Nor would I have been even if I were the dumbest, ugliest or most unpleasant. Every family wanted to align themselves with us. Who wouldn’t want to be tied to the most prosperous family in the county, even with their mottled history? But my grandmother was more discerning. She watched the children my sisters and I brought home with a careful eye, asking after the families of those she did not know or recognize, making notes of the behavior of the offspring from those she did. And then a few weeks later we would learn of her decisions.
“Does that Galloway girl ever wipe her nose?” she asked as she sat in our kitchen while my mother served her tea. Or, “It’s a shame the Mackenzies have done so badly this year. I saw that same dress on Mary not two years before and now it’s ended up on Grace.” And so bit by bit, we would come to learn the lives of our neighbors and more importantly, who should stay our neighbors and who were worthy of becoming our friends.
Claudia was better at it than either myself or Ava. She knew her worth as a Hathaway. Her friends were a coterie of the farming equivalent of blue bloods, with herself at the center. She quickly sniffed out who was a farmer and who was a “land owner,” as she called it, casting the former out into the social wilderness.
“You can be friends with whomever you like,” Mom used to tell us deliberately within our grandmother’s earshot.
My grandmother would stop what she was doing and look at my mother, before saying carefully, “As long as you know what to like.”
I didn’t really understand the significance of what this meant back then. I knew I was privileged. I knew and liked the way people would look at me in the street or in class or at fairs when they came up to me and I said my name. But I still didn’t really know what it meant. I should have been paying more attention to things around me, but I was a child who was caught up in the stories and worlds in my mind. I lived in my head and expressed myself with my hands. Always drawing or scribbling, taking things apart and then trying to put things back together again. That’s how we went through two toasters and a burst water pipe under the kitchen sink, for which I got a spanking, one of only a handful my mother ever gave me. I flitted from one obsession to another, constantly questioning, constantly seeking, but never at home. Home bored me because it seemed uneventful.
“Nothing ever happens here,” I would complain, lying in the grass kicking my bare legs at the hot air. And to us kids it never did. However Cal Jr., as I remember him, never seemed to want to go anywhere or do anything else. Every day after school and every weekend he was at home. None of those raucous beer-swilling, cow-tipping days that seemed to form the spare hours of his contemporaries. He kept to himself and to his home. The two seemed to satisfy him. But Claudia found the farm as stiflingly boring as I did. Though it was beautiful, though we loved it, we were crushed by the utter banality of it. For aside from my uncle and grandfather’s drunkenness and despite the savagery of Georgia-May’s beatings, nothing did happen: at least not to me and Claudia. With Ava…now, there was a different story.
I want to say that I have tried to remember, but hindsight only makes the past a murkier thing, not clearer. There was a period just after we lived with my grandparents until she was about fifteen when she was prone to black moods. She would not speak, she would not really eat; she could not bear to be touched. Mom put it down to the hormones of puberty. Her moods could be incredibly fickle, sometimes so affectionate her hands were almost intrusive and Mom would sometimes slap her fingers for how she would hug or coil her arms around us, while we shrugged her away uncomfortably. Other times she was so dismissive, we would not understand what we had done.
But when she was herself, when she was Ava again, she was so different: prone to girlish moments of throwing her arms about herself in a dancing hug when overly excited, playing with her hair and tugging on it hard when concentrating. She was the Ava who soothed and listened to me as we grew older together, who retreated as I blossomed, until by the time she was fifteen she was a quiet, unassuming girl: pretty, loving, gentle. She had come through to the other side, as Mom used to say. That was what we had thought.
She never shirked away from Cal Jr., she didn’t avoid him, she didn’t cower before him. She defended him, she explained him, she was closer to him than any of us, not because they had anything in common, but because he made her that way. He chose her to confide in whenever he needed to, made her seem special, outside of the rest of us in only this one but crucial respect. It was one of the ways I see now that he groomed her and one of the ways in which we unthinkingly allowed him to.
But I digress.
Jude arrived in the middle of March 1982 on a Friday night. We did not see his arrival; Piper came around to the house and told Mom he was here and that the whole family was to be formally introduced to him at Sunday dinner. When the day arrived, dutifully we trooped over there in our clean smock dresses and our hair tied up with ribbons. Mom had gone into town looking for a present to welcome him to Aurelia and she had found a wooden tobacco box with intricate carvings on the lid of a glade with the wind running through it. Inside it we put in little cards and messages of welcome, while she had observed our spelling (Mine: perfect; Ava’s very good; Claudia—well, she needed a few drafts. “If you paid more attention to your schooling than to your looks you’d do better,” Mom had said).
We walked over with Georgia-May, Charles and Ethan. Charles held hands with Ava and
me, while Claudia carted Jude’s box in its wrappings of purple tissue and silver string. Charles was thirteen then, and Georgia-May had been looking into schools that could help him since he wouldn’t be able to move into junior high as Ava had done. She had ordered books and tapes about how to school him at home. After all, she had trained as a teacher herself and she had even enrolled at night classes to learn how to teach those with learning disabilities. I don’t know how Charles would have fared without his mother. She did more than keep him alive. If she could have breathed for him she would have. When she had gone, and things started to come out, we learned that she had never cried out when Ethan beat her, not even when he broke her ribs or split her lip with his shoe, in case she should wake her son. Maybe that was why when he got so drunk that night when I was sixteen and held her at knifepoint right before Charles’s eyes, she broke and finally left him, because she could not bear for her son to know and be damaged by what her husband did to her. We always thought that she was what saved Charles, but in the end without even meaning to, he had been the one to save her.
Piper opened the door and we saw by how smart her new dress was and how her braid of silver-streaked hair was so tight and smooth against her head, that we were right to be formal for the occasion.
When we entered the living room, Cal Jr. stood by the window biting his fingernails, my grandfather was pouring a drink and Lavinia sat, her hands clasped over her lap, on the long sofa next to the man who was my long-lost second cousin.
He had the most beautiful green eyes I had ever seen.
As we entered, Ava and I took one look at Jude, his curled brown hair, his blue jeans and white shirt rolled up to reveal his lithe and strong forearms, and then turned to each other and bent our heads in a sudden pique of stifled giggles. Mortifying. Claudia shot us a scathing look and tossed her hair back off her shoulder.
