she was unhappy.
My grandfather used to have a thing for unhappy women. He could sense them a mile off and he was always drawn to them, because they didn’t expect much and were always more than appropriately grateful for what they could get. But more than that, unhappy women, when you made them happy, relished the thing like a cat basking in a pool of sunshine: they unfurled, they blossomed and their smiles of incredulous delight at this transformation always gave Cal a surge of pride in his own abilities. It made him feel like a good person, before he remembered otherwise.
They would meet a few miles down the road from Aurelia, during the day so that Lou was out at the practice or when he had been called away for a series of home visits. Anne-Marie would park her car behind a turnoff into a clearing shielded by the long prairie grass and Cal would meet her there in his Chevy. They would go to secluded woods, sometimes on long drives to nowhere, where they would park in any cloistered place they could find. They would stay there for hours. My grandmother often said later that she lived for those drives, though she would never have indicated as such to Cal. She knew she could not push him, but she heard tales of Walter getting sicker and she would listen to Cal talk of Oregon and what he planned to do when he got back and she would wring her hair in her hands to stop herself from screaming at him.
She waited on those drives for the moment of inspiration to come, just like it had with Lou. She knew better than to force it, but still she worried. She could not bear the idea of Cal going back to Oregon and she stuck in her house with her husband, looking up night after night over the dinner table and finding him sitting there at the end.
Irritatingly, he had grown kinder to her since the garden party. Since the night she had broken down sobbing and choking in their car he had been more tender, more concerned. She had tried to endure it as best she could.
So she sat there in the car with Cal waiting for a sign, keenly alert for whatever guise it may present itself as, while he stroked her skin under his hands and called her Lavinia.
And then finally it came.
Cal struck her so hard across the mouth that he broke the skin on her lip and she bled into her teeth. She saw him lean back, his face ashen, and he stared down at his fingers while self-revulsion contorted his features. Without a word she got out of the car and began to walk. It was ten miles from where she had parked her car. She waited for Cal to come after her but he didn’t. She heard the engine of the car roar behind her but the sound faded away. So she walked the ten miles and in that time she thought over what had happened.
Now my grandfather was not a man who ever lifted his hand to a woman, nor would ever again, save once years later when he would strike his daughter so hard she would fall and catch her temple on the table corner as she went down. He would stare at his hand then in the same way as he had looked at it now with Anne-Marie. What shocked me when I first heard these stories was not only that my grandfather, when provoked, could lose all sense of reason and restraint, but also that these provocations existed in the first place.
Maybe this may seem strange, but if you ever met my grandfather you would not have believed it of him. He was a man who was so temperate his perpetual state was placid. It was helped by his drinking surely, but never did his manner or nature ever tip those scales except for three times in his life. Once was when his mother died, once was now in a car parked outside Sunrise Wood and the last time would be in his kitchen in the spring of 1968. But at the time Anne-Marie knew nothing of this. What she did know was that she had said something that, without even realizing it, had flipped a switch in the man beside her, so that for a moment he ceased to exist. She hadn’t even seen it coming; there had been no warning. One minute they were talking; the next, the back of his knuckles had slammed her lips against her teeth. So she went over in her mind what she could have said to set him off.
They had been talking about his father. He was the one who had brought it up.
“Doctor came over yesterday.”
“Lou?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat. “They say it’s not long now.”
“Oh.”
“He wanted to see me up in his room.”
“Who? Lou?”
“No, Pa.”
They fell silent. She curled her hand around the open lapel of his shirt.
“Did you go?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
His chest rose and fell under her cheek. Try as she might she couldn’t hear his heart through the shirt.
“I haven’t spoken to him in sixteen years.”
“Well, you must have now that you’ve come back.”
“No, not at all. I’ve seen him but I haven’t said a word to him.”
“Oh. Why?”
“I don’t know. I kinda like seeing him suffer.”
She lifted her head then and, curling a finger under his chin, she made him face her.
“Why do you hate your pa so much?”
“Doesn’t everyone hate their pa a little?”
“I don’t know my pa to hate him, and your sister and brother don’t hate him.” She added cautiously, “Julia doesn’t hate you.”
“That’s because she hasn’t been raised on hell.”
“It don’t look like hell to me.”
He jerked his head away from her.
“Do you know about my ma?”
She shook her head.
“She died. A while ago now. She got sick, drank some contaminated water and she died in the same bed that he’s dying in. She’s buried on the farm. I lowered her coffin in the ground with my brother.” He paused to lick his lips and then settled back into his seat and stared ahead again. It was late in the afternoon. Lou had been called away to a conference in another county so they had stayed out later than usual. Their skin took on mottled hues of orange and pale pink from the sunset pouring through the windshield.
“The day of her funeral I was nineteen and I left home for good. I went up the drive and I just kept walking. No one stopped me, no one called after me. I slept rough, hitchhiked, took a shower when I could, lived without it when I couldn’t. I didn’t even know that I was leaving when I was, but I guess my feet knew better. I knew my pa wouldn’t give a shit. He told me as much, that he wanted me out of the place when Ma died. He said he didn’t want me under his roof no more. I been thinking on that for years. It could have been any one of us, it just happened to be me.”
He was still staring straight ahead. My grandmother knew that he’d almost forgotten she was even there. She didn’t care. She sat there watching him, barely moving, her breath shallow and uneven. He heaved a great sigh and when he spoke his voice was flat in a low monotone.
“We had always done chores around the farm, but then when I got to be sixteen Pa started to really teach me the ropes. He was always talking about the farm and leaving it to me and Leo and how we should manage it, and what we had to do for it. He was sick with love over the place, all the more because he only won it from his boss due to sheer sweat. And boy, did he make sure that we sweated over it. He thought it would make us love it as much as him. And we did, I guess. We didn’t really have a choice.”
He narrowed his eyes as he remembered.
“When I got to be eighteen he started giving me more responsibility. I was glad of it. I wanted to do things right. And to be sure, I never saw any other life for myself other than the one he laid out before me. So careful to follow only in his footsteps, neither shifting to the right nor looking to the left. Dead center,” he said as he sliced his hand slowly through the air in front of him.
“We used to use this pesticide during