The Legacy of Eden by Nelle Davy Page A

end his wife came out onto their porch and stared down at her sister-in-law with icy disdain.
    “My husband don’t truck with no traitor,” she said.
    I suppose I can understand how Leo felt. He had worked his whole life on the farm and he had believed, right up until they heard the will, that he would continue to live and eventually die on it. But the share allotted to my grandfather was too much for him to bear. He may have been right, but even though everyone knew this and even though it had just been the two of them for so long, Piper refused to take a side. At least that was what she said. She didn’t realize that in not taking a side, to Leo, she had in fact taken up with my grandfather. Leo was not a man for neutrality.
    He left town and moved to Indiana, where their mother had been born and raised. Rumor had it (though it was eventually proved to be true), that he stayed with one of their uncles there who owned a farm. People thought he would contest the will on the grounds of their father’s mental incompetence, but he never did. He simply left town and all the gossip and scandal with it. That was the last we really heard of him for a long time. He would not speak to my grandfather again for nearly twenty years and Piper for ten. That was the first of the splinters in our family. With hindsight you could take it as an omen, but maybe that’s just me being superstitious.
    As for my grandparents, they rarely left the farm during the first year of their marriage. It was at Cal’s insistence that they laid low. Lavinia’s affair and divorce, and Leo’s departure, had brought a fierce amount of attention onto a man who, even when I knew him, was intensely uncomfortable with any kind of spotlight, be it good or bad. My grandmother did as he wished. My grandfather hoped that the less they were seen the more quickly they would fall to the back of people’s minds.
    My grandfather began to concentrate on building up the farm. He wanted to show his neighbors that he was just as good as Leo, just as capable. He saw how aloof and wary the other farmers were toward him and he knew the only way that would change would be if he made something of Aurelia, or at least maintained it to the standard of his brother. So they lived and they worked and Lavinia, his wife full of so much ambition and pride, humbled herself and waited.
    But she didn’t mind because it was all hers. At last, a home. She would say how different she felt on the farm compared to Lou’s redbrick house. She hadn’t liked the farm when she first saw it at the garden party, but as she worked on it with her husband, walked on it and explored it, while her belly swelled beneath her hand, she began to take strength from it. Soon she knew it as well as if she had been raised there, and every meal with her husband and his sister was always peppered with her questions. Cal was flattered; Piper suspicious.
    And then she began to talk to Cal when Piper wasn’t around, about her thoughts and ideas for the place. While frustrating at first, she soon came to realize that their isolation was a blessing. It was a gift that allowed her to penetrate her husband’s strict principles without the interference of outside influence. At first Cal might have thought her ideas were just fanciful dreaming. He would sit next to her at the table and let her words pour over him as he ate his food, or read his paper. My great-aunt always believed that at first he never really believed in what his wife was saying; he was just humoring her. It was a severe underestimation and perhaps for that reason, one day without even fully realizing it, he began to listen.
    For the first time in her life Piper felt like she may unravel. In the space of a few months she had lost her father and her younger brother, her family was the speculation of gossip and rumor and, worst of all, now Cal was beginning to act on his wife’s crazy ideas.
    The first of which was about the house.
    This part is