Eden: a Novel by Olympia Vernon

Author:Olympia Vernon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter

eleven

The sound of the chain saw ricocheted off the bark of the trees. Landy Collins had been in the forest all afternoon, cutting down a row of pine trees for the next death. Occasionally, he would stop working, as if listening to Fat count aloud the number of times she’d struck the large oak.

I was sitting on the front porch when Aunt Pip came out to join me. She sat on the steps of the house with her head up, stretching her arms out in front of her, then on her stomach. “I got the world in there,” she said.

She wore her blond wig and a fake diamond from her jewelry box. An ant began to crawl up the side of her foot; she killed it. She then opened her gown and slid her fingers down over the lizard-shaped scar, the heat climbing around it. Her eyes were closed now, the occasional wind whistling around the corners of the house. The diamond had begun to make a lump through her gown; she kept her hand there over the lizard’s backbone.

She laughed out loud, her voice like a mountain. “You think Eve told Adam what to do?” She did not wait for an answer; her laughter stopping now, controlled. “I had a dream I swallowed the bastard.”

“Adam?”

Her face was calm.

“Yeah,” she said, “I ate my Father.”

She turned around and reached for my hands, as she had the morning she vomited the things from her stomach into the toilet. “I know,” she said. “It ain’t the soup carrots. It’s my Father. He in there somewhere fooling around with me.”

“Don’t keep things from me,” I said, moving to the edge of the porch.

She listened as the chain saw got going again. “Hear that?” she asked, making fists of her hands. “That’s what it be like all the time. Cutting at you from the bone. Chipping away at you. Chipping away at you.”

“Everyone keeps things,” I said. “Nobody gives anything away.”

Her voice fell into a whisper: “Except green things.” Her hand was away from her breast. “Don’t take nothing green from nobody. Green things die.”

She was not demented. For when I watched her bathe herself, her chin was still above the water. I heard that a demented woman practiced drowning. She forced her head under the water and waited for her nostrils to fill up, and when she came up coughing, she knew what it was to be yet alive.

“My titty still sick, Maddy,” said Aunt Pip.

I turned around to face her. There was no sadness about her. “What are you telling me?”

“I’m telling you that I ate my Father,” she said. “I opened my mouth and let the sins of the world in my body and even He couldn’t fix it. And now I’m paying for it.”

The little bit of hair that had grown back would be lost again. She would soon find herself facing the machine once more, the compressor coming down on her breast, the doctors using their tools to radiate it.

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