“Ma used to come down to us. She used to help sometimes in the field when we had a lot a work to do. Not often, but she was always one to get her hands dirty. Ma, she grew up on a farm in Indiana with six brothers, she was—” he laughed “—she was a heck of a woman. Sometimes she’d try to tell Pa how to farm and they’d have these blazing arguments about it, real hammer and tongs. She didn’t give a shit if he smacked her on the mouth and told her to hush up—she always had to have her say.
“One day she came down to see me and Leo when we were busy doing some chore and I can see her now, leaning against the well. They all said she had to have drunk from it, weren’t no other way that she could have gotten how she did. But if she did … well … Leo said he saw her drink from it but I didn’t see it. She got sick the next day, took to her bed a few days later and never got out of it. Piper nursed her the whole way through, and she was only thirteen. It didn’t take long for her to die. She was gone before she knew it. Before we knew it.”
He nodded and bit his lip, rocking his neck back and forth as he finished. She looked him up and down for a moment.
“She was young, you know. She was only forty when she died.”
“Is that why you left then?” she asked.
He was struck dumb. He blinked in assent.
“God, I hate this place,” he muttered. “I wish to God I’d never come back. It weren’t by choice me leaving. That son of a bitch. I may not have been a kid exactly when I left but you know at the time I’d never even been out of the state? Farthest I ever got was Des Moines once for a state fair for chrissake!” He braced his hand against the steering wheel and began to chuckle to himself. She shrank back in her seat as he twisted his face this way and that, struggling with his memories.
“Son of a bitch. I’m glad it hurts. I see them all, our neighbors, all wondering why I’m back, wondering why he’s asked me back here now. They don’t know how to greet me. Before it was fine, I was the black sheep, a killer,” he growled, “but now he’s asking to see me like some prodigal son and they’re confused. They can’t figure it out, but I can. I know why he asked me back and I don’t give a shit. He wants me to join Leo on the farm. Be a Hathaway again. Well, that’s his vision, not mine. I’m waiting and just when he needs it the most I’ll pull the rug out from under him, I’ll let him die knowing it all went to hell with him. I’ll have me a real good day.”
“Oh, Cal,” she said, touching his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
She paused.
“It weren’t your fault. He should have known better. He should have known it was just an accident.”
There.
A second later—was it a second later? Wasn’t it less, half a moment, in an instant and his knuckle had slammed into her mouth? Her body cracked against the window with the force. He had screamed at her but at the time she didn’t register. Her hand was at her lip in an instant, she was too shocked initially to feel pain, but she saw his knuckles ripple under her blood as he withdrew.
And that was how she found herself walking down the side of a road now, only eight and a half miles left from where she had parked her car.
What went through her mind at that moment? Was it anger? Was it hurt and betrayal? Was it shame at her own foolishness?
She conjured up the last thing he had said to her as he struck her. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but she heard it clearly as she thought on it now.
“I put the lid on the well!” he’d screamed.
So no, none of these emotions went through Anne-Marie as she walked. She held her hand to her aching jaw and lifted the corner of her lips ever so gently in a smile. She was not angry, she was elated. She saw her opportunity.
I wonder now if I am being unkind to her. Perhaps too much has been colored by what I know would eventually happen to allow me to ever present her in a way in which she could have been innocent, or good. I am too used to seeing her as the villain. But, as she used to say, she was made, not born. Firstly by those who came before us in her life, and now years later by me in memory. I want to say that she didn’t think those things, or feel those things, that it all came out later under duress with due cause. But that’s a lie. It was always there brewing, it had to be. She took to it too easily.
Just like I did when my time came.
4
WHEN CAL CAME HOME, THE FIRST THING HE said to his sister was, “Did anybody call?”
Piper paused in her stirring of the mixing bowl to take stock of her brother.
“No,” she said carefully. “You expecting somebody?”
“No,” said Cal.
He drew out a chair at the table and sat down heavily.
“Where’s Julia?” he asked after a moment.
“She’s out back in the garden. I gave her some of my old toys and stuff. She’s having fun.”
“I think we should be going soon,” said Cal quickly. Piper’s wrist wavered momentarily, before she continued to beat the spoon against the bowl.
“Before Pa dies?”
“Why does that even matter? Who cares if I stay or go before then?”
“Pa will.”
“Screw Pa!”
He drawled the words out in his rage, strangling them in his throat so that they emerged stretched with fury. He put his hands up to his hair and held his crown in his hands. Piper saw the blood on his knuckles.
“You want to tell me something, Cal?” she asked.
He stood up abruptly and went out of the kitchen.
“No,” she said, continuing to stir, “I didn’t think so.”
Three days later he began to panic. He wondered if she would tell her husband. He had certainly given her cause to, and that busted lip would need some explanation. He prowled the farm waiting for Lou to show up. He told himself he didn’t care. He could more than handle Lou Parks. He told himself that people could talk and his siblings could look at him with disgust and it wouldn’t affect him. He would be gone soon anyway. He told himself he was used to exile.
But still he woke up in the night, his mind already crowding with voices tumbling over themselves to be heard first.
He tried calling her once, but he realized he had nothing to say even if she should answer. He saw that he had gotten himself into a mess, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that all he need do was bide his time until his father died and then he could leave. He counseled his heart to be patient, to be patient and to forget. Forget that he had struck her; forget her skin under his hands.
Forget that he missed her.
Piper saw the restlessness in Cal and she tensed. Against her will and much to her self-disgust, she began to wish her father would hurry up and die. She had tried to sound out Lou Parks on the subject. He would only shake his head and say, “He’s holding on. For what, I don’t know, but he’s holding.” Piper nodded in assent, but this only made her worry even more. She knew what her father was holding on for and she knew Cal wouldn’t give in. She had hoped that her brother’s resolve would melt, or that her father’s strength would wane, but she saw now that neither would do as she wished and so one afternoon as she was washing her father’s soiled sheets, she made up her mind and asked God