by Lorene Cary
Rayne barked out a laugh, even as he noticed how very thin her small arms had become. The two of them sat laughing in the kitchen, enjoying Khalil’s first discovery of the persistent swami, and also remembering, and reassuring each other of who they were together, which was different, even in this most tiny and atrophied of families, from who they were apart.
“It’s cold in here,” Khalil said.
“Yeah, it was fine while I was cookin,” Selma said. “But now, you right. It is cold. Bet you didn’t think South Carolina got cold. And when I was your age, half us didn’t have shoes.”
Khalil opened his mouth and eyes wide.
“Ray, you think you feel like firing up the stove?”
“Sure. C’mon, Khalil.”
At the back door they grabbed empty milk crates that served as kindling baskets and went outside and across the old kitchen garden to the mound of sticks from cleanouts of the underbrush and teardowns of old outbuildings.
Khalil pointed to it as they approached: “If that’s an old Indian burial mound, we can’t disturb it.”
“Nah, man, if anybody’s buried there, they’re not Indians.”
In the moonlight, Rayne could see one very large branch. He snapped off a twig. It made a dry crack.
“That’s how it should sound. If your twig’s not dry like that, it won’t burn.”
Khalil hung back.
“Come on, Lil Man, what?”
Khalil eyed the pile.
“Lil, listen. This is a bunch of wood, and Nana’s in there cold. See, this is why they used to send city kids to the country,” Rayne said.
“So they’d be haunted?”
“That, too. Here.” Rayne put Khalil’s hand onto the log as if to connect him to the mound and break the spell. “We’ll work on this one. I’ll give you a twig and break it up this long. You lay it up against that cinder block, and then snap it with your foot, like this.”
“Whoa, ninja!”
“Yeah, ninja. But before you do that, gather up like an armful of little twigs about the thickness of your finger. That’ll get us started.”
They worked together in the moonlight, with Khalil cracking the branches until they were too thick for him. Then Rayne took over.
———
Now what? popped into Rayne’s mind.
Never before had he worried about Selma’s ability to take care of herself and the farm. You leavin me? she’d say every August when he got onto the bus that said NEW YORK on the front but that would drop him off—that’s how Selma always thought of it—in Philadelphia for college. You leavin me? And he’d walk away smiling at her pitiful little voice, knowing that she was as strong and as capable as anyone half her age and twice her size.
This time he’d just arrived, and already he was afraid to leave her alone. The land was too much, too heavy for her to keep pulling from its productive past to some future where she imagined it would once again support their extended family, with Rayne, like King, at the center.
As if to answer his question about her capacity, however, by the time they returned, Khalil carrying the kindling and Rayne the small logs, Selma had somehow already rolled the newspapers in the bottom of King’s old stove with one hand and adjusted the damper. A box of wooden matches lay on the ledge.
“This gonna feel so good,” Selma said, mostly to Khalil.
“I’m not even cold anymore,” he said.
Rayne laid his careful latticework of twigs, and then medium branches. “I didn’t get anything too big,” he said.
Selma finished his thought. “Because it’s too dark. And I had ’im put away the little hatchet I used to keep in the basket so somebody wouldn’t steal it. Crack came in, and, honey, they steal everything. They liable to grab the hatchet and chop me up just to get the ring offa my finger.”
Khalil glanced the question over to Rayne.
Rayne shook his head no, but felt his gut contract.
The fire flared, and the old stove’s cold metal pinged as it warmed. They watched until the twigs had burned down and the two small starter logs had caught before putting in a larger log and two jagged triangles of half-rotten pine board.
Then Rayne closed the stove door. He got up and walked back to the bathroom to put away the antibacterial cream.
“’Course,” Selma continued, as if they’d never left the subject of bathrooms, “that’s where us all got our bathrooms, ’cause that’s where the pipes is. I mean, what they think people gonna do? Carry the pipes over t’other side the house? Who got that kinda money?”
“Don’t they give out waivers for old construction?” Rayne asked. King had built the one-story, hip-roofed house in the 1920s onto the old shack his father had dragged to this spot forty years earlier on a wagon flatbed. Plumbing came later.
“Waivers?” Selma said derisively. “What’s a waiver? These people down here don’t know nothin about no waiver. You may have waivers on your construction jobs in the city, but down here, all they know is taxes. That’s why I had that job taking care of Pettiford on the weekends, ’cause of the taxes. ’Cause if I miss—if I miss one deadline—they’d be more’n willing to take the whole thing away, all your grandfather’s land. They be happy to take it away.”
Khalil asked whether they could please eat.
“Aw, man. Yes! I can’t believe it’s eleven o’clock at night.”
“Oh, Jesus, eat,” Selma said. “You know me: a boy should eat.”
CHAPTER 11
Khalil ate every neck bone. Selma encouraged him to pick them up with his fingers. He sucked them noisily until they were clean. His mother, he said, didn’t serve meat; he’d have to tell her about neck bones.
“You do that,” Selma said mischievously.
He ate every grain of rice. He ate down to the last fingerful of corn bread and then mopped the essence.
Selma grinned happily. She was comforted by their appetites, and by Rayne’s simple and sure answers to her questions about his business. His own business. He told her that he’d be working on the newly designed memorial at the house where George Washington and John Adams lived before the capital was moved to D.C. It was going to be a unique National Park Service building, for once commemorating the enslaved Africans, not their rich and powerful masters.
“Oh, really?” Selma did not appear as impressed as Rayne had expected.
“People protested outside the place; they’d go there and pour libations and shout, and there was a group of white historians who were working over the Park Service meanwhile. It’s a big deal, Nana, to talk about the slaves and not just the founders. And it is a very big deal that I got a piece of the contract. Not the whole contract, but still, a piece of it.”
“Jones carried me up to Mount Vernon once,” she said. “And the black lady—she was in costume, pretending to be one of the slaves—she acted like, I don’t know, like she was just so proud to be one of the general’s people. That’s what she kept sayin: ‘We was the most trusted of his servants.’ Make me sick. It’s not gonna be like that, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But really, I’m just working on the basic stuff: floors, curbs, the low walls around the borders. They’ve got a special company who’re designing a system to put video and sound outside in the open. I want to learn that: sound design.”
“Like Times Square in New York, where the ball drops?”
“Yeah, sort of, on a smallish scale. If everybody can get along. There’s a new fight, because the architects have moved some of the walls, like two feet one way or the other.”
“Why they do that?”
“’Cause the street has been widened since 1790, for one thing.”
“Well, are they gonna tell the people that ole Washington had his slaves’ teeth extracted to make his dentures?”
“What?” Khalil choked on his spoonful of food, and Rayne pumped his back until a grain of rice flew from his nostril.
They laughed until they couldn’t breathe, then they
caught their breath and laughed some more.
“You didn’t know that, did you?” Selma said after they’d collected themselves.
“No, Nana, I don’t think there’s documentation for that.”
“They document anything they want, baby, when the lions tell history.”
———
Selma’s vision was fading, but she could see that Rayne’s neck and jaw had thickened, and something in him felt more sure. He felt more like King. Selma supposed that now that he had his own business, Rayne was learning things that King had understood, especially about having to support a family and workers, and having to tend the physical and social networks that make up a going concern. Other people said they understood, King had told her, but, when the deal went down, most of them had not stood in a field of tobacco that had been flooded and counted out the loss in their heads, or worked all night to set smudge pots next to fruit trees facing a late frost. Most people got to blame others and curse the sky, he said. If he made an error, even if there had been no way to know better, his mistake could take down his family and everybody who worked for him.
Rayne had also inherited King’s spirit of adoption with the boy here sucking neck bones. It’s what King had done for her and Jones, and what she’d done in turn with King’s children’s children. Selma knew that Rayne had grown into his own because he’d inherited the spirit of adoption.
———
For his part, Rayne observed that Selma was much weaker than she’d been the year before. She tired more easily, leaned harder on the table to stand, wobbled a little when she walked. Carried not two plates but one at a time. The house, though she’d cleaned it, had dust in the corners. The top of the fridge, he could see, was black. And every so often she wiped away with her handkerchief, stuffed up her sleeve, a little drool that collected in the right corner of her mouth. He wondered whether she’d had a stroke, and he wondered whether she knew it and had kept it to herself, or didn’t know, or whether the doctor had told her and she’d denied it. The last was very likely. Or maybe she was right that that’s what younger people always thought: that old folks were having a stroke every time they caught a cold.
Selma’s dinner was fine, but not spectacular. Rayne used a little more hot sauce than he usually did, but tried not to let her see.
“Good?” he asked Khalil.
Eyes and hands puffy from the poison ivy, Khalil nodded vigorously. “Don’t put hot sauce on the rest of the meat, please,” the boy pleaded.
“Why, you think you gonna want some more?” Rayne asked.
“Yeah!”
The homemade canned peaches, however, were perfect, just the right combination of peach flavor and sweetness and gentle, golden-red tang. Of all the food, they tasted precisely as they always had, back from when he was a little boy and he’d pick the peaches and help Selma spice them and set the bottles into their boiling bath. Selma would wipe sweat from Rayne’s forehead and tell him that in winter, they’d remember the hot summer afternoons when they’d preserved peaches in these bottles.
“It’ll be chilly and col’, and we’ll say: ‘Could it ever have been that hot that the sweat run off us like rain?’ Be so col’ and gray we won’t even b’lieve it.”
And sure enough, when winter came, they’d recall that very moment. Then she’d repeat the recipe: “Peach, lemon, cinnamon, sugar,” said like a song so he’d remember. And he had. A faraway sadness called, like the whispered roar of the waves as they traveled toward the ocean on a small boat on the estuary. One half peach was left in the jar.
“You want that last one?” he asked Khalil.
Khalil nodded enthusiastically, and Rayne scooped the shiny golden half onto his saucer. “Only if you stop scratching.”
“I shoulda had some cream with that,” Selma said. “If JJ had come by, I woulda asked ’im to run pick some up for me. Or some ice cream. But cream is better. I get so tired so fast. Like I can really only do three things a day, two, really. Sometimes one.”
“That’s all right, Nana Selma,” Khalil said. “It’ll be okay.” He patted her hand, and then took the mason jar to his mouth and sipped the sweet syrup.
“He like a little ole man,” Selma said. “Looka him, telling me everything be okay.”
“Come on, Nana,” Rayne said. “Let’s walk you over to the trailer.”
———
It was close to midnight by the time they started to make the hundred-yard walk to Selma’s trailer. The moon had migrated to the top of the sky. A light breeze came toward them from the east, carrying the scent of fire. Running ahead, Khalil was the first to catch it.
“What’s that smell?” he asked.
“Farm trash. Smells like somebody’s burning it off.”
A hint, at the start; it smelled to Rayne like quintessential country, preparing the land for planting. Then the wind picked up, and the smoke came at them so heavily it burned their eyes.
Selma was holding on to Rayne’s arm hard with her one good hand and the bandaged hand aloft. She could not see her feet. She thought to say to him that the county had outlawed that kind of burning, and that the farmers knew damn good and well that they were not supposed to burn off the fields, which is why they did it in the middle of the night. But then she felt that telltale slip, as if her leg were going out in front of her of its own volition, and her arms did not respond to the certain knowledge that she had to grab on to something. And the smoke caught in her throat, in her eyes and nose, just as it did before. Don’t breathe it in. She was shouting from inside, but they couldn’t hear her. For God’s sake don’t breathe it in.
Selma’s panic rolled up into them both, as if whatever they were breathing would shred them slowly from the inside. Khalil turned, coughing, and shouted: “She’s falling.”
Rayne grabbed her up. Shhhh, shhhh. He held her tight and close against his chest—Come on, no; come on— and after a few minutes the quivering, gulping, choking subsided. She quieted. He strode to the trailer.
Once inside the tidy beige interior, they smelled the strong scent of smoke that clung to their clothing and hair. Rayne did not know what to do with Selma, until with her trailing hand she indicated the thin wheelchair she’d left on purpose by the door. It was a child’s chair that JJ had found at a yard sale. Anything else would have been too wide for the trailer. The last time Rayne had visited, she’d had it folded in the corner. He hadn’t noticed.
Khalil started to wheeze. And he was touching the red welts on his face and arms. Rayne felt in the breast pocket of his parka for the Ziploc bag of inhalers that Lillie had insisted he bring. Khalil made a face. Rayne knew that he hated the medicine: he said that it made his heart pound.
Selma, meanwhile, needed to go to the bathroom.
“I can do ’em myself,” Khalil said, reaching for the inhalers and the long spacer chamber, a plastic tube through which to breathe in the more powerful steroid medicine.
Rayne hesitated.
“I could do it right. You don’t have to watch me.”
Rayne handed him the bag. Then he pushed Selma’s wheelchair a few yards into her tiny bedroom, and aimed the chair toward the open bathroom door.
“I’m all right now,” Selma said, obviously not all right. “Go on outta here, unless you wanna look.”
Rayne returned to the tiny parlor, and observed Khalil finish his protocol of inhaling, waiting, and inhaling again, twice for each inhaler. He wanted to bundle the boy and the old lady into bed immediately, simultaneously.
“Hey, Lil Man,” Rayne asked, “listen, you think you can go across the yard and across the driveway by yourself and put some ice into a bag for your face?”
Khalil shrugged hesitantly. He did not want to disappoint. Neither did he want to walk out alone into malignant smoke that could slip among the long black shadows of the moon and clamp down the tiny airways in his chest.
“How bad is the wheezing?”
“Not too bad. I can feel the medicine. I feel diz
zy, though.”
Rayne hoped he was not being self-serving when he remembered and then reminded Khalil that Lillie often preferred him to sit up for half an hour or so after taking the meds. “Okay. Sit over there, and close your eyes. The air in here is clean, okay?”
Khalil did as he was told, even though the air in the trailer did not seem especially clean to him. In fact, from the bedroom doorway came the faint odor of urine. But Khalil would never say so, because Nana Selma was old, and that would be rude.
Although the tidy trailer did not cure Khalil, it had an immediate effect on Selma, who was breathing nearly naturally within five minutes of returning, in her wheelchair, to her little parlor. The shuddering that so frightened Rayne had lasted no more than a minute or two.
They sat for a moment until Selma gathered the strength and the determination to say: “Now, this is business. Listen, this farm is on two separate pieces of land. One part your great-grandfather bought from Old Broadnax the drunk, and they tried to steal back from him, but we kep’ it. That part is over by the golf course, and I lease it to Pettiford, the greedy grandson, and now he wants to buy it.”
As far as Selma was concerned, she said, and the phrase stuck in Rayne’s mind: “As far as I’m concerned…,” which meant that maybe her ideas did not square with others’ or law or custom, but as far as Selma was concerned, she held the land in trust for Rayne. What she needed him to do now, she said, was to figure out how to get clear title on the heir property so that they could transfer ownership, properly, in writing, while she was alive to tell any judge, if it came to that, that King bought out Brother Amos’s share, and that Brother Richard had forfeited his by leasing it out in some kind of long-term deal with Pettiford that they’d kept secret between them.
