If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  Still. Junior went off to war and died. Charlotte had run away; Bobo went to jail; Jewell just went bad was all Selma could figure, spoiling her boy rotten and then throwing him away, and it looked like little Rayne was close to ruined.

  “All right, then,” she said, looking at him hard.

  “I can see through your eyes.”

  “One story fast, and then we work. Or else.”

  “Or else!”

  “Now. Th’ old woman finds a coin and buys a little piggy, but the pig won’t jump the stile and she thinks she will not get back home before dark.” Raynie was afraid of the dark, Selma knew; she could see that he understood the old woman’s fear of being out on the road alone in it.

  “What she do?”

  Selma answered the boy with as much excitement as she could muster, even though her mind was clicking off the wasted time.

  “Well, she finds a dog to bite the pig,” Selma answered, fixing him with another hard look.

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t want me to fin’ a dog to bite you if you didn’t work, would you?”

  Rayne shook his head slowly. “But he didn’t bite ’im.”

  “Nope, dog wouldn’t bite pig, so the old woman go find a stick. Say: Stick, stick, beat dog. Dog won’t bite pig, pig won’t jump the stile, and I’ll never get home tonight.”

  And on it went. She found a fire to burn the stick, water to quench the fire, and an ox to drink the water.

  “Then what?”

  Selma tells him what he knows: “She went out and found a butcher-man.”

  And then, finally, the bloodthirsty magic that Rayne had been waiting for commences.

  So, the butcher begin to kill the ox;

  ox begin to drink water;

  water begin to quench fire;

  fire begin to burn stick;

  stick begin to beat dog;

  dog begin to bite pig,

  and then, finally, oh my goodness, the pig jump over the stile—and the old woman finally gets back to her home that night.

  Selma sighed, and sat silent for a moment, letting the story end before she drew the natural parallel. “Okay, boy…” She was ready to go on, joking, cheered herself now that the old woman was home, no longer stuck by a recalcitrant animal, dependent as she, and rural women everywhere, were on the creatures in their care. She’d queued up her nicknames all in a row, ready to list them, laughing: “Okay, Newboy, Littleboy, Lazybonesboy, Bigboy, Bigolebutterboy, Sillycityboy, Nana’s Boy, Nana’s Best Boy, okay. Let’s move ’em out, and show me that you can be a Goodboy, be a Farmboy…”

  Selma stood. The boy did not rise with her. “Suckerboy,” he mumbled. “I wanna go home.”

  “This the home you got now, boy. You home now.” Selma mustered her last shred of patience. Up, uppy! she thought.

  He started to shake his head no. She reached over his shoulder and snapped a sucker. With her tar-sticky hand, she grabbed his collar to stand him up and move him along to the next plant, wanting to get some momentum going before he could slow their process yet again. He needed to get some geography between him and the starting point, or else he’d never know the simple satisfaction of the job well done. Or even poorly done, but done. “C’mon, boy.”

  Rayne reared up at being touched, lost his balance, and pitched forward. His elbows splayed out and his face plowed into the ground.

  “Oh, Jesus. C’mon, child, get up.”

  Mouth full of dirt, Rayne jumped up and flailed his body around, spitting out the soil as best he could and cursing: “Shit, shit! I wanna go home! I wanna go home. I want my mommy. I hate this damn old farm! Damn stupid dirt. Piece o’ shit farm. I hate it! I hate you!”

  The children came running back to witness the tantrum. Oh, my gosh, looka him. He spoiled. They’d never seen or even dreamt of such a naked display of temper to an adult. Spoiled.

  By the time the hired men appeared, Rayne was lying on the ground, screaming and crying, face full of snot and tar, unable to catch his breath to cry more than “I want… I want… I want…” on each jagged inhalation.

  JJ picked the boy up by his shirt and carried him to where the others could not hear them. They saw that he held the boy up to his face level, shook him hard once or twice, then dropped him to the ground. He turned and strode back to the others.

  “Let’s go.” Selma fell back in behind him, and the others fanned out according to their usual places, their children gossiping behind.

  “Whatcha tell ’im, bro?” one of the others asked.

  “Same thing King always said,” JJ answered solemnly. “Hope Selma agree.”

  “What’s that?”

  “’S what he doesn’t know yet…”

  Selma finished the sentence so that all of them could hear her say it and know that she’d enforce it: “‘Gotta work to eat.’ In’t that right, JJ?”

  “Yep.”

  The children chattered among themselves and sneaked looks at the spoiled child paying them no mind, not working and certainly not contrite about not working. JJ threatened to beat any of his children who slowed down to talk to the outcast, and one of the others lectured them about working harder. But they could not help but look over at the boy now and then, sitting on the ground in the thin shade, methodically pulling tar from his eyebrows. He had done the unthinkable, and he seemed to have gotten away with it.

  At dinner, after they had all scrubbed with Lava soap and scrubbed him, too, Selma sat him under a turkey oak twenty yards off from their outside table and gave him a mason jar of fresh water. From there, Rayne watched them eat boiled pork backbone stew, field beans and rice, corn bread, and cucumbers. King would not have let him eat or move. Selma let him walk back and forth under his tree, but he could not go farther, and, of course, he could eat no supper at all. His was a big boy for his age, always hungry.

  “Gotta work to eat,” the grown-ups repeated, as if to keep Selma’s resolve.

  ———

  That night Selma did take the boy a bowl of bread and milk, which he drank down too fast and vomited up. To put him to sleep she told another story:

  Once upon a time a boy just like you was sent to the place where the woods met the water to find something for the family to eat. He was getting big, and it was time that he learned how men take care of their families. Because, like his mother said, That’s the way of the world.

  “That’s not how you told me before,” Rayne protested.

  “This the old version, like Grandma Bett told it. ’Cept I’m tired of talkback, so that’s it. Tell it to yourself.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll be quiet,” Rayne said, humbled after the day’s events.

  “Too late, Cityboy. Nana’s had all the talkback I’ma take. That’s the way of this world. You gotta start takin it in.”

  Selma remembered years later lying in bed and talking to King as if he were alive, asking him to help her raise the teenager who had learned to work, but not yet to love. Rayne would get up at dawn before school to do his chores; he no longer whined, and did not need to be awakened or reminded. But he was cool, closed in on himself; he was correct, but unyielding. King’s answer came to her in a dream. Selma knew it was King talking to her because it was his exact brand of wisdom, and something that she’d never have thought of herself: she had to picture whom he might become—and then she had to trust him to grow into himself.

  Her brother, Jones, said something similar years later: you can’t raise a boy to be afraid of what he’ll become.

  The implication for her was not just to love the boy dutifully, but to delight in him as if he were that glorious young man to be.

  She tried. Now and then it came naturally, when she’d catch him out of the corner of her eye across the field. Then she saw King in him, and admired the kernel of the man she sensed he could be. Later, although she always said it would kill her, Selma gave him back to his family in Philadelphia for college, and she prayed God that the hoity-toity Negroes wouldn’t ruin him.
Now here he was, just as she had imagined him.

  It seemed to hit her all at once, as she waited for the night to yield him up. Nothing solid existed anywhere; everything melted into everything else, and she with it. The back door banged open, and his big, heavy boots stomped, and his voice filled the air, and the child next to him jumped up and down.

  The fifty-year-old juice glass in her hand, the one she’d gotten out for Khalil’s table setting, dropped and shattered just as she reached for it.

  CHAPTER 10

  Selma was thinner even than Rayne remembered. In less than a year her braided hair had gone from salt-and-pepper to gray-white. Looking older and stunned, she stood at her kitchen sink, hands hanging loose at her sides, one dripping soapy water, one blood, onto the floor. Her smile drooped a little on one side.

  “Why you standing there lookin simple at me, you big ole Rayne Man?” she asked in greeting. “Come on and gimme a hug.”

  “Nana, look at your hands.” Rayne caught her wrists as she lifted her arms toward him. He turned her palms upward. “What happened? I’m out there callin, and you’re in here cutting yourself like a teenager in a documentary.”

  Selma didn’t know what he meant, but the energy and humor in his voice made her happy. “What’re you talkin ’bout? Hey, baby; is this our new young man in the family?” She grinned even as she took in the fact of her bleeding hand. She had to think about the cut to feel it. Now that he mentioned it, it stung. “Oh, Lord, I done cut myself and wasted the glass. That was your great-grandfather’s wedding present from his first marriage, too.” She looked over her shoulder at the glass in the sink, then down at the hand, at the bloody semicircle around her thumb that dripped both ways, toward the fingers and wrist. Once she studied it, the sting deepened into a slicing pain.

  Together Rayne and Selma held her hand under cold running water. Khalil stood on her right side. Selma turned to him and said: “You must’ve had a long, long ride today. And what’s that on your face?”

  “Poison ivy, I think,” Rayne said.

  “Yeah, I see you still got a little calamine on. Come on, need to put on some more. Do I got any in there? Probably all dried up. Look and see. And if it’s dried up, drip in some water and let it sit and shake it up. Warm water. What you should have is some jewelweed, ’cept it’s too early. Jewelweed be better.”

  “We got some fresh calamine in the truck.” Rayne wanted to take Selma to the hospital. “This looks deep.”

  Selma shook her head: “You just the nurse o’ everybody today, ain’t you?”

  “My mom’s gonna be a real nurse.”

  “I heard that. When she graduate?”

  “This summer.”

  “Then she can stop doing those tattoos?”

  “Mommy says she might still do both, because some of the Eagles players came to her first, and now some others come and ask for her, special. They like going to a nurse, ’cause she won’t give ’em diseases and stuff.”

  “I think we need to get stitches at the hospital,” Rayne said.

  Selma made a dismissive snort. “Shoot. I ain’t thinkin about no hospital. You just walk in the door, and we goin to drive another hour and sit up in that meat market with all the crazy Negroes been shootin each other? How’s that feel? And I got a plate full of food for you sittin on the pilot? Boy,” she said to Khalil, “you wanna drive another hour?”

  Rayne shook his head at Khalil to stop him from answering. “All I’m saying is that it looks deep.”

  “And I’m sayin that this boy gotta eat. I bet you been eating junk all day.”

  “Nope,” Khalil said before Rayne could catch his eyes. “My mom packed us lunch and snacks and dinner. We had sandwiches and oranges and Pirate’s Booty.”

  “Pirate’s Booty?”

  “It’s good. She sent chocolate milk for me, too. He had coffee. And water.”

  “He give the whole inventory,” Selma said, laughing. “Better not do nothin you don’t want reported. This one’ll tell.”

  “Okay, no hospital tonight,” Rayne said. “But if it’s not mending tomorrow, we’re going first thing. Even if they do suspect me of elder abuse.”

  “Oh-ho! Come down and they put you in jail. Just like your grandfather.”

  Rayne did not answer. Instead he read and answered the text that came in from Lillie, checking on them. He typed: Just arrived & nana cut finger. Getting bandages now.

  Lillie asked a few questions, and then told him to ice the hand and make her hold it up. He smiled to himself as he picked the sharp shards out of the drain and dropped them into a paper shopping bag from under the sink. Next to that bag he saw the one-gallon mayonnaise tub in which for years Selma had stuffed plastic produce bags. He grabbed two, lined one with the other, and filled them with ice.

  “Your supper’s right there, Khalil. Your mama call you Lil? Lil Boy? You too big for that. Lil Man, maybe. I go for that. I made plenty, so there’ll be enough for two,” she said, waving the hand. “You don’t eat like Big Man, here, do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Khalil answered. “Nobody does. My mom says.”

  “Oh, some people do, I guarantee you that. And a couple of ’em lived right in this house.”

  Lillie texted back: Calld ur mother?

  “Here, Nana,” Rayne said to Selma as he read the text. “Sit down and hold this ice on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on, go on,” Rayne bossed her gently. He fastened the bundle with rubber bands from the back doorknob and placed it into the trash. No jewelweed, he thought. Then he texted back: No time to self. Tomorrow.

  Selma sat heavily onto the kitchen chair and pressed paper towels into the wound. “Will you get me the bandage stuff?”

  Rayne ducked into the bathroom for adhesive strips, and went to the second shelf in the medicine cabinet that he now recognized as an old silver cutlery box that King must have installed sideways onto the wall and then inset with an oval mirror. The floor was a crazy quilt of off-white tile shards with the occasional black or red and a rough, uneven circle of red pieces in the center. Rayne remembered the feeling of the floor on his bare feet, how he marveled at the many sharp edges, all submerged in grout so that none snagged his skin. The floor was cool in the summer. Rayne wondered where King had salvaged the tile, and a shudder of recognition went through him. “Say, Nana Selma, where’d Great-Granddaddy get the tiles?” he yelled.

  “Same place he got the rest of it: anywhere where they was tearing down. He’d take the mules and load up the cart. Naturally, when we got the Ford, he’d take that and fetch stuff with it. Stored it in the shed where you used to go play and get into trouble. Whenever I need a part for something, I still go in there and look.

  “’Course JJ’s not creative like King Needham were. Or like you. Very few people are.”

  ———

  They bandaged the cut after two more trips to the bathroom and one to her old bedroom to find witch hazel, ointment, gauze. Selma fussed that skinny old ladies could only have but so much in them to bleed out, and Khalil followed behind Rayne with the cell phone ready, if only they’d give him the go-ahead, to call his mother for nursing consult.

  “He still remember where everything is,” Selma said half to herself and half to Khalil. “Well, I guess he would remember the Band-Aids, seein’s how he went through ’em like Grant through Richmond.”

  “Did he fall a lot?”

  “Fall? Child, he fell, he knocked, he scraped, he ran over things, he dropped offa the roof. He got wedged underneath that old yoke-plow, tryin to see could he lif’ it. Everything you can imagine.”

  Then, loudly, to Rayne, her eyes wide with righteous indignation: “Oh, listen, you know they tryin to pass a new ordinance,” she called. “Lemme tell you what they tryin’a do. They wanna make it illegal to have a bathroom off the kitchen!”

  “Yeah, lotta places say that,” he said.

  “Do they call it unsanitary, like we all dirty?”

  Kh
alil read a text from his mother. “Lillie says to hold your hand up higher than your heart.”

  “She is so right. How’d I forget?” Selma raised her hand over her head.

  “Thank you very much,” she said, chin pointed in the direction of the phone. “Can she hear me?”

  Khalil shook his head, frowning.

  “Stop staring, Khalil, and text your mother thanks from Nana Selma.”

  “Why do you do that?” Khalil asked when he looked up. He appeared far more comfortable with Selma than Rayne had ever seen him be with a strange new adult.

  As if in answer and to amuse him, she tilted her head toward the ground and fixed her face in a far-off look. Rayne laughed. It was a family joke, an imitation of an Indian holy man in one of the many National Geographic photos that King had cut out and tacked to the wall. “Go into Rayne’s old room, right there, across the parlor, and bring me back the picture that look like this. Take a butter knife.”

  Khalil frowned. “What for?”

  Selma would not dignify the question with an answer, but swiveled her eyes instead toward Rayne, who picked up a worn stainless steel knife from the table and handed it to Khalil. “You’ll see.”

  “Why children think we don’t know what we’re talkin about?”

  Rayne nodded at Selma, and then smiled when he heard Khalil in the bedroom exclaim at the sight of all the photos.

  “I found it!” As he worked the staple out of the wood, the house was quiet except for the child’s groans of exertion and the sounds of the knife edge scraping the old staple.

  “Want help?”

  “I got it.” Khalil came running back into the room, studying the picture. He bumped into the table. “Sorry.”

  “Can you read the caption?”

  The caption said that the holy men kept their arms raised above their heads for years, until the arms shriveled—Selma anticipated his trouble and said the word as he got to it—from lack of circulation. The nails on the raised hand sometimes grew so long that they pierced the monk’s fists. In a family marked by King’s insistent discipline, the swami had become an iconic jest, but only half joking, about determination. When more hard work was needed, or when someone knew that he or she was failing in fortitude, they raised their arms and turned their eyes heavenward as a reminder of the outer limits of human will: ridiculous as the shrunken-armed swami, but possible! It was the sign for buck up, do better, get strong—“Keep working. Hah!” as Selma wrote in the one or two cards she sent each year.