LITMIR.BIZ

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the next sixteen hours for some time afterward. Everyone had their own theories. Leo believed Cal had been planning it all along, Piper believed that the opportunity presented itself and Cal was too weak to say no. My grandmother believed it was destiny. I don’t know what I believe.

      Because it was so unexpected, so shocking, that it has never really made sense. Trying to rationalize it now could only be accomplished through conjecture and imagination. All I know is that my grandfather was a man who felt things deeply. He hated that about himself. He tried not to grow attached, but he was simply a man to whom burdens came easily, and every time he tried to shrug them off, the weight of his guilt would burden him all over again. So here is what I think happened.

      I think he was afraid. Afraid of who he was and what he wanted and what he didn’t want to be.

      I think he was tired of fighting for what he wanted, tired of fighting himself for wanting those things in the first place and tired of feeling guilty for all of the above.

      I think he wanted to settle. I think he wanted it all to stop. I think he knew that life had a will of its own and for the second time he was willing to be borne along by it. I think he reasoned that he was a man, not a boy this time, and he could deal with things better.

      I think he was sick of feeling like a failure.

      Piper cooked dinner for herself and Julia that evening. She made a chocolate pecan pie for dessert that Julia wolfed down in sullen self-pity. She put her niece to bed and checked on her father, before going to bed herself at around eleven. Cal still wasn’t home. The next morning she fixed breakfast, changed her father and gave him a sponge bath. She enlisted Julia’s help in the chores, but gave up after her niece kept crumpling to the floor in mock agony on account of her “bad leg.” She went to check on her eldest brother, but when she knocked on the door he didn’t answer and when she tried the handle, it was locked. She assumed he was still asleep.

      She went to bring Leo some lunch. He was down by the crops on the far side of the farm near the stream. When she gave it to him, he nodded in thanks before jerking his head to the left of her.

      “See that?” he asked.

      Piper turned. Against the well was the stone slab cover. Now broken, the pieces were splayed against the base of the well.

      “What happened?”

      Leo shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

      This was before she discovered that Cal had gone to speak with their father. This was before she would check in on Walter at six to bring him supper, when she would find him, eyes gazing upward and unseeing, his mouth half-open with a fly crawling across his upper lip.

      This was before the funeral and the reading of the will, when things still made sense to her. But later on, after everything, she would recall this moment and wonder.

      Anne-Marie was in the kitchen when she heard that Walter Hathaway had died. She was peeling potatoes for a stew. She listened to her husband talk of the man’s heart failure and willed herself not to scream. She sliced the knife through the potato into her palm when he mentioned the funeral.

      “Good God, woman, what is the matter with you lately?” her husband asked as he pulled up her arm, down which a thin trail of blood was already pouring. “First your jaw, now this. Your head is in the clouds, Anne-Marie.”

      “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

      The night before the funeral Anne-Marie pressed her husband’s best black suit and a somber-looking navy dress with a high-buttoned neck that irritated her skin, and hung them both on the front of their wardrobes. Then when her husband was asleep she went downstairs, pulled aside the half pint of milk that she had left to curdle in the gap between the refrigerator and the wall and forced herself to drink it. She had learned the hard way in the past that feigning illness when your husband was a doctor was not a viable option.

      She was sick all night. The next morning Lou gave her a glass of water, some Pepto-Bismol to settle her stomach and went to the funeral alone. She slept most of the day and dreamed.

      It was after eight in the evening when her husband finally came home. She heard him wandering through the kitchen downstairs: she traced his movements by the opening and closing of doors. The way he hovered in the living room without a sound for a long moment told her that he was having a drink. She timed how long it took for him to come upstairs. If it was ten minutes, nothing out of the ordinary happened, if it was twenty the day had been stressful, if it was forty, hellish.

      An hour later he came up.

      He sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her arm with one hand while the other held a tumbler of whiskey.

      “Are you feeling any better?” he asked.

      “Mmm-hmm.” She nodded, letting her eyes skip over the glass. “Tell me about the funeral.”

      He took a long gulp and then eyed the bottom of the empty glass thoughtfully.

      After a moment he spoke. “I suppose it’s already doing the rounds,” he said.

       “He just sat there, staring at the glass for the longest time,” she said to me as I sat there next to her bedside. This was after she had grown sick and they had all died and gone and there was only the five of us left.

      My body was all tensed up. I was so taut that my stomach muscles started to cramp up again. It took every piece of will in my body not to take the glass from him and smash his head in. I often marvel at the patience I had in my youth. How much of a blessing it would prove to be. I never fully appreciated it until I grew older.” She had splayed her hands as she spoke. “What you see here before you is a product of patience, Meredith.”

      But at length her husband did speak and the story he told would change her life.

      They had arrived at the church for the funeral. Cal and Leo were pallbearers. There had been a big turnout as was to be expected for a man of Walter’s stature. Lou had sat near the front during the service, behind Piper and Elisa. Afterwards everybody had gone back to the house for the wake. Nobody had noticed anything different about Cal at all. He had seemed as normal as could be expected under the circumstances.

      They had the speeches and the food and then Piper, Cal, Leo and the lawyer had gone upstairs into one of the rooms to have the will read.

      Why they did this then, people couldn’t understand. Some said later that it had been at Cal’s insistence—that he had known what was coming and so wanted to get his hands on it all as quickly as possible. Others said he couldn’t have, because when Leo punched and kicked him he didn’t even attempt to fight back. Instead his face was ashen and gray, as if it had been drained of all blood. Piper would later whisper that it had been Walter’s choice—he had wanted the will read out the day of his funeral. She would say that she thought he did so because he believed if it were done then, that Leo might be able to find it in himself to temper his rage. She was astonished, she would say, at how little the man knew his own children.

      The first anyone knew of anything being wrong was when Cal came hurtling down the stairs. Leo picked up his brother as he fell on the bottom step and smashed his fist into his jaw. People roused themselves from their grief to pull him off Cal. Then all hell broke loose: Julia started screaming; the county sheriff, who was at the funeral and had been part of Walter’s poker club, had flashed his badge and used his large overhang of a stomach as a dividing barrier between the two.

      That was when Leo shouted, “You sneaky son of a bitch!” His finger stabbed the air at his brother’s throat. “I knew you would try some stunt like this. What did you do? What did you do?!”

      But Cal couldn’t speak. He tried but his mouth opened and closed with no sound. Leo lunged for him again, but it was a feeble attempt. His wife came to his side and the men pulled him off screaming toward the door. He kicked out and caught one of the legs of the table that held a tray of casseroles. They all went crashing to the floor.

      The townspeople were in their element. Julia was put to bed sobbing, Cal was taken upstairs

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