by Nelle Davy
He came forward, hand outstretched, toward my mother, a wide grin showing perfectly white teeth and I could feel myself blush. I turned to look at Ava but she was staring deliberately at the floor.
As my mother introduced him to all of us, he smiled and shook our hands. I remember how calloused his palm was in mine and how big. Immediately I liked him. He set me at ease at once and though he bent his head to try and make Ava look at him, he didn’t draw any attention to her, just shook her hand timidly, enveloping it in his own before moving on, and when he opened our present he leaned back to smile with a grin of surprise. I could see how touched he was as he gently discarded the purple tissue and held the tobacco box in his fingers with a great big smile. That was it—I was smitten. I was suddenly glad that Granddad had done what he had. I could finally see what he had meant by a new start.
Cal Jr. had been sitting on the cream sofa beside our grandmother eyeing the bottom of his empty glass when we had first come in, but then he had stood up and paced the room, his hand straying across ornaments, sweeping along the rim of the mantelpiece. He was always in the corner of our eyes, emerging and then disappearing in an array of sudden inexplicable movements. My grandmother had stayed on the sofa, listening as my grandfather talked to her, I forget about what. Her eyes followed my cousin’s listless movements.
“So have you always been a farmer, Jude?” my mother asked.
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” he said and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. Cal Jr. was beside the antique dresser, his index finger tracing the rim of a Dresden shepherdess doll.
“I mean I never was that school smart and my whole family was farm folk, so…I never really thought about what I wanted to do, I just did what I knew.”
“And if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a lot younger than I expected you to be,” my mother ventured.
He smiled a dimpled smile. I felt my insides dissolve just a little.
“My mom had me late in life. Very late,” Jude said. Cal Jr. came to stand by the door frame. His nails traced the lines.
“How old are you?” I asked. My mother shot me a furious look.
“Merey,” she admonished. Jude smiled and shook his head.
“How old do I look?”
“Forty-seven,” Claudia deadpanned.
Jude’s eyebrows lifted up and he pursed his lips into a whistle. I saw Cal Jr. shoot Claudia a smirk.
“Ouch,” said Jude.
“Claudia.” My mother’s voice slapped her into straightening her spine as she stood.
“No, it’s okay. Guess I need to lay off the beer for a while.” And then he inclined his head toward me and winked. “I’m actually a very old, apparently, thirty-two.”
“That’s not that old,” ventured Ava, half-doubtfully.
Jude let out a belly chuckle. “Thanks, kid.”
Piper’s voice called us all in for dinner and I turned to my grandmother and said, “How come you’re not cooking today, Grandma?”
For a second there was a brief hush. I saw Jude’s eyebrows furrow in disconcertment though his smile had not yet slipped, before my grandmother gave a small, gentle laugh.
“I had a terrible migraine this morning. Piper kindly offered to take over. It’s a bit of tradition for me to cook the Sunday meal, Jude. I’m afraid I’ve let you down somewhat.”
“Not at all, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty more Sundays for you to cook for me. I’m sure you’re wonderful.”
“Thank you,” said my grandmother softly. We turned to walk into the dining room and as was custom, Cal Jr. stood to the side to accompany my grandmother. But she did not look at him. Instead she was still gazing at Jude and then suddenly as if in some sort of silent communication, he crooked his elbow and she slid her hand upward, looping it so that she could take his arm. The two of them walked past Cal Jr. without even a glance.
My cousin hesitated, still staring after them as they went into the dining room and then Piper offered her arm for him and he took it, after a slight pause.
The meal was a good one. Jude told jokes and was genial and interested in everyone. Granddad didn’t drink as much, which was both a relief and yet so anomalous that it made me feel uptight with tension. Cal Jr. barely spoke, but then neither did my uncle, so no one noticed much. Claudia twirled the food around her plate in mock disdain and with bored, contrived posings that made Jude chuckle into his napkin. Mom whispered fiercely into her ear, which made Clo purse her lips so hard they turned purple. In short the meal was a success, or as much as it can be for our family. We seemed to get along.
After Piper’s pecan pie, which made us all lean back in our chairs and rub our stomachs to ease the sweet discomfort of overindulgence, Jude cleared his throat and our grumbles of conversation died away. For the first time that night, I saw him look marginally uncomfortable.
He cleared his throat. “I just wanted to say how thankful I am to all of you for welcoming me into your home,” he said, craning his neck in our direction but not looking anyone in the eye.
“It’s your home too now, Jude, was your grandfather’s, God rest his soul, and your father’s after him. And it’s just as much yours,” said Granddad emphatically. My grandmother licked her lips and flicked him a look from under her lashes. Cal Jr. scraped his fork against the china rim of his plate.
“Well, thank you, sir, and I’m glad you feel that way,” said Jude. “I know there’s been bad blood between our families in the past, but I hope to put an end to that so that we can be together on the land that is and always will be our home. Finally we can be as God intended—happy and healthy, hardworking and free. I look forward to getting to know all the members of my family and working together again just as I’m sure Walter Hathaway, the reason we are even here in the first place, would have wanted.”
“Hear, hear,” said Piper, raising a glass.
“Hear, hear,” repeated Granddad.
“Hear, hear,” we said, some more clearly than others.
“To new beginnings,” said my grandfather.
The lights bounced off of the crystal in our hands.
“To new beginnings,” we all echoed.
That evening, as we dispersed and went our various ways, I found Cal Jr. around the side of the house smoking.
“If Granddad catches you…” I said.
“He won’t give a damn,” he said angrily. “So—” he flicked the match into the hibiscus bush “—what did you think of our little prince there? Interesting that he didn’t arrive on a white horse but a battered old pickup, though judging by tonight who could tell?”
“I like him,” I said, wincing at his tone. “He’s nice.”
“He won’t last,” Cal Jr. muttered.
“Pardon?” I said loudly. Cal Jr. looked at me, but did not answer.
“Are you jealous?” I asked, lifting my voice to show my disdain.
Cal Jr. laughed softly and then began to cough, smoke spluttering out of his nose. “Merey, Merey, Merey. I thought you were the smart one.”
I was affronted. “I am.”
Cal Jr. laughed again.
“Tell Ava I want to see her,” he said.
“Fine, whatever.” I turned and went into the house. I found Ava standing with Jude and Mom.
“Cal Jr. wants you. He’s by the side of the house,” I said breathlessly. I was irritated and annoyed by the conversation I’d had, so I did not stop to tell her anything else or even to look at her. She left us silently, quickly, and I stepped forward into the circle to fill her place.
The arrival of Jude to the farm was a like a new breeze in a stale room. His presence was felt everywhere. It was as if he had lived here on Aurelia all his life. It was only a matter of weeks before he acquired the respect of the foreman and other farmhands, proving that not only did he know what he was doing, but that he was also prepared to work as hard as any of them. I soon heard tales from my mother over dinner of things she had learned that day about Jude. H
ow he had asked to see the business model for the farm. How he spent hours pouring over accounts and ledgers well into the night. How he quietly questioned my grandfather on the practices of the farm, which the old man was all too happy to talk about and to which he would patiently listen. His eagerness to learn about the farm and everything in it was all too clear.
“He’s just so eager to learn,” enthused Piper one day to my mother, who had gone to the main house for lunch.
“Hmm,” murmured Lavinia.
And I soon became accustomed when cleaning out the stables, or feeding the horses in the mornings before school, to seeing his tall frame striding through the fields, alert and ready for the day ahead, my grandfather matching his step with Jude’s as he walked beside him.
We were all suddenly conscious of this new person, this new intruder in a world that I now realize was always so closed and so isolated. It’s strange but even though our grandmother prided herself on making our name known throughout our town, consorting with what she thought were families and people of equal stature, our farm was like a strange microcosm where we receded from the outside world. Unlike the homes of our friends, which we would traipse through with comfortable abandon, every guest was monitored, every invitation carefully thought over and approved. We were so used to this confined existence, so complicit in it, that Jude’s arrival was like a tear in the fabric. Ava and I would walk down the road to our home from school and see him riding a horse, or eating with the farm hands and shyly wave at him before hurrying on. His presence seemed so alien, so strange. We had only ever lived with those we had known our whole lives, and though we knew he was family, he was this strange new entity from a world we ventured into yet I see now, never really believed we were wholly part of. Life was Aurelia, home was Aurelia. It was our past, present and our future. That was how we were trained and we did not question it. We knew of our father going to war, or our mother, who was not raised on a farm herself, but these seemed like strange dreams. Our farm was like the world when people still thought it was flat. And when you left it, it was as if you had simply sailed too far and fallen off the surface into the void.
Both Mom and Georgia-May did their best to be welcoming as they had promised my grandfather. Mom was always enquiring after him at the main house, where he lived along with Georgia-May, who always brought Charles with her. And Piper, I remember, used to fuss over him and exclaim how much he reminded her of her second brother in a voice that always dipped on the last with an expression I could not define, but which tugged at my heart anyway. I think he was such a novelty, like a new toy, we almost did not believe in him, believe that he was here to stay, or that he was truly part of us. There was an element of distrust and yet at the same time, this willing curiosity about him, this need to know him and make him our own.
He was a like a fresh breath that stole away the dust motes that had lingered around us for too long. Piper became more jovial, more active; Granddad stopped drinking so much, he sweated less and even lost weight. He proudly held out the waistband of his jeans to his granddaughters at a Sunday dinner two months after Jude first arrived, happily patting the newfound looseness around his gut.
My uncle and my cousin however, had a somewhat different response. Ethan never really bothered with Jude. I remember overhearing my mother’s conversations with my aunt when they would talk of how Jude would pay them visits, bringing a six-pack of beer and a friendly temperament as he would try to strike a friendship with his immediate cousin and the only man on the farm similar to him in both age and background. But my uncle would simply take the six-pack and drink the beer, barely speaking to Jude, letting his doomed attempts at conversation rise and fall into a silence that was agonizing for anyone else but the drunkard next to him. He would leave each time, his brow furrowed in consternation, and Georgia-May could see that he was bewildered by my uncle, who had so much and hated it all.
In the end he would come to the house, less often than before, but instead of beer, he would bring a toy airplane for Charles, or flowers for Georgia-May. He would stop by always when Ethan’s truck wasn’t parked in the yard and just talk to her and play with her son as she shyly wrapped her clothes about her tighter to cover up her bruises and he politely deferred any questions about the visible collapse of her marriage.
And as for Cal Jr., as far as I remember, they never spent any time together at all. I don’t seem to be able to recall an incident when the two of them would converse alone, or share a joke or even really sit next to each other. At each Sunday meal, Jude would either sit near my mother, or Piper, or right next to my grandfather, and though he would always circle the room so that you thought he talked with everybody, you never saw him alone with my cousin. Perhaps I am wrong, after all they did live together and there must have been moments when they were forced to share each other’s company if only by the laws of close proximity, but never in public, never it seemed, if it could be avoided.
Do I think this was on Jude’s part? No, because he always wanted to try everything, everyone. That was one of the first things I noticed about him. In a life of such rigid routine and tradition, he would always try to implement new ideas, new dishes even, from suggestions of a different kind of dessert at the table, which my grandmother would receive with widened eyes and a tight smile as she stared unseeing at his enthusiastic recount of his latest brainchild, to how the farm was beginning to run. You could find him standing with my grandfather in the cornfields, one hand on his hip, the other waving energetically into the distance as my grandfather listened carefully, intermittently nodding at whatever Jude was saying. And then the next thing would appear, a better harvester, a new piece of land carved out for a different form of crop, so that all around us, small almost imperceptible changes accrued and accreted with time. And soon it became normal to see him riding about the farm, to find traces of his hand in new paint on the barn and new dishes at the Sunday dinners.
One time when the two of us were alone sitting on my porch after my mother had invited him for dinner and Ava was helping her wash up, while Claudia was upstairs doing her homework, I asked him if he was happy here.
He looked at me and smiled.
“You know what, I think I am.”
“You sound surprised,” I said and he eyed me perceptively.
“It was a surprise, Merey. But a nice one.”
We liked having him there, most of us. We began to realize that the new, the outside was not necessarily a bad thing. Could even bring good, could elicit change.
“We were fine the way we were.”
“Says who, Grandma?”
She snorted. “Says me, of course.”
But Lavinia was wrong and she knew it. She saw her last remaining child descend into irretrievable ruin, she watched our mother struggle in her widowhood, she saw her grandson’s recalcitrant relationship with his grandfather and she knew that my father’s death was only the latest and most violent wound on a body that was already mottled with scars. In the middle of the night when she would lie in bed and remember that her youngest child was dead, mingled with any sense of grief was anger that, because of his sudden and horrific departure from this earth, a void was left that my grandfather had unilaterally and dangerously filled. I suppose she was right. Would my grandfather have ever contacted Jude if his son had not died? Of course not. Just one in a series of catastrophic effects from a morning when an otherwise fit and healthy young man had closed his eyes and touched his temple as he felt the stirrings of what he thought would be nothing more than a bad headache. At first.
But if my father’s death had affected anyone the most, apart from his wife, it was Claudia. When we lived with our grandparents, she barely spoke to Ava and me and she hardly left our room, which meant that we never went in there until it was time for bed. And whenever we did infiltrate her eye line, she would snarl and lash out at us, resulting in many arm burns, scratches and raised voices, to which Piper had to intervene and act as peacemaker. Ava was devasta
ted and I…well, I did not know how to compute my father’s death. But Claudia was none of these things. Instead she was something I’ve never been able to fully understand: she was livid. When we came home to our mother, Claudia was livid that she had even taken to her bed in the first place; she was livid that our father had not been buried on the farm like our grandparents had urged our mother to do, but instead was taken to Arlington National Cemetery; she was livid that she had to share her grief with her two sisters, and, most of all she was livid that there was any grief to be had in the first place.
Claudia learned a lesson she would never forgive life for—that bad things can happen for no reason other than they can, and so she stopped trusting in adults and stopped believing in God. She announced this at the dinner table six weeks after my father had died. My mother had put down her fork and stared at her child with such a mixture of fear and horror that I could feel the air crackle around us with shock.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she had said.
“Yes, I do.” Claudia was glaring at our mother, her head hunched beneath her shoulders but her eyes full of hate.
“If there’s no God, Claudia, then where do you think your father is?” Mom asked quietly.
For a second Claudia’s lip trembled and then she leaned forward and screamed down the length of the tablecloth, “With the worms!”
Mom thought it would pass. She did not know how to deal with her grief let alone her daughter’s and she believed that whatever was going on inside of Clo would eventually heal, because all things did with time—that was what she had been raised on. Although she could not understand it and although it made her body ache with soreness, she had to believe that our father’s passing was part of God’s plan. Claudia would come to know this in time.
But time went on and still Claudia was the same. It was that period that really colored my relationship with my eldest sister. She was a horror to live with. Sullen, uncommunicative, vicious—we ended up in more fights during those few months than in any other time of my life and from then on we were constantly battling each other, quick to take offense at what the other had said, eager to read insult in any spoken word or cause injury whenever we could. She treated me as a punching bag for her frustrations, but I quickly learned to fight back so that our mother was constantly pulling us apart, scolding us for ripping apart another dress, ribbon, toy.
