The Legacy of Eden Read Online Free PDF

“well then. No need to make no fuss.”
    “My thoughts exactly,” said Cal.
    Of course that wasn’t how it turned out.
    It began when Piper came down from their father’s bedroom a few days later and started making a list at the kitchen table of things to get in town. Not from the local store, but up in the city from the place their mother had always used when she needed something special. Then she went out to see Leo. When she found him hoisting hay bales in the barn, she told him to keep the seventh free.
    “What for?” he’d asked between grunts of exertion.
    “Pa’s planning something,” she’d said.
    “Pa can’t wipe his own ass. You’re planning something for him.”
    “And?”
    “And what is it for?”
    “For the family.”
    Leo had grunted again but he did not speak.
    Then three days later, as she went to pick up some meat for dinner, Anne-Marie Parks saw Piper Hathaway order up two sides of beef, three hams, four chickens and a hog.
    “You hibernating?” asked Dan Keenan from behind the counter. “If so you’re early, it ain’t even fall yet.”
    “Luck favors the prepared,” said Piper as she counted out the money.
    Later that week over mashed potatoes with sausages and onions, Lou Parks told his wife about the invitation they had received.
    “Walter’s having a party up in the house,” he said.
    “Where?” asked Anne-Marie.
    “Aurelia, their farm. We’re invited.”
    “Oh,” said Anne. “Why?”
    “To celebrate Cal coming home.”
    “That’s nice,” she said halfheartedly.
    “Leo won’t think so,” her husband muttered in reply, before turning back to read his paper. And so, because he was preoccupied, she didn’t bother to question him, and as usual they finished the remainder of their dinner in silence.
    Two weeks later and my grandmother stepped foot on Aurelia for the first time. The place as it was then would be unrecognizable to me: no sign in curlicue lettering, no pockets of flowers, no white house. I have seen pictures of what it used to be like. Instead of the daisies and hyacinths, the entrance to the farm was simply a sandy drive that wove its way along the crab grass. The house on the mound was not white and tall, but gray and flat with dark shutters and a roof that peeked over the front in a slanted fringe. In the distance the grass swept on and on, periodically knotted with thatches of prairie grass until eventually it found the fields of corn and the stream. It was large and expansive and Anne-Marie’s first thought when she saw all of this was that it was ugly.
    Did she see everything then that it could be? Did she re-envision the sight before her and see in her mind the potential that could arise from beneath her guiding hand? It would not have surprised us if she had. In fact in some ways it is what we would have expected from her, because in the end the way she knew exactly how to mold the farm to suit her tastes and bring out the beauty in it was almost prophetic. She was so intuitive that we all assumed she must have connected to it from the first. But in truth there was no such feeling. Maybe Lavinia Hathaway would come to feel that way, but in 1946, Anne-Marie Parks did not. Instead, she did not like Aurelia and she hated the idea of going to the party.
    It was not the first time this had happened. Her insides had a habit of withering in anxiety whenever she was faced with an event like this. The farm at this point was not the great estate it would come to be in my lifetime, but it was still considered to be a prosperous holding and the Hathaways were a very respected family in the community. Nobody would have missed the party if they could help it and the weight of expectation that was implicit in the invite weighed down on Anne-Marie from the moment her husband had mentioned it to her over dinner. Because no matter what she wore or how many hours she spent on her hair and makeup, she always felt like the unwanted niece of her lawyer uncle, the