If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  This morning, lying in bed at dawn, she felt like death warmed over. She didn’t usually let the word death into her consciousness, but it was sitting there now, at the foot of her beige-and-brown bed that matched the trailer. Last night’s spell had taken everything out of her, and all the cooking for three days to make one simple meal, and staying up late, even though she had napped in the afternoon, and being in the old house in the cold and damp before Rayne lit the stove. Too, too much for the old woman she was. Too much for the woman who wished every day that she’d never carried to her husband the poison gossip that Old Broadnax wanted to sell his farm so badly that he said at the general store, for everyone to hear, that he’d even sell to a nigger if his money was ready.

  Selma turned to sit on the side of the bed, stood, wound her nightgown in front of her, and stuffed it into its own neckline to free her to pee into her bucket. She wiped with a tissue from her night table, and then scrubbed her hands with one of the baby wipes, which she hung on the side of the dispenser to use a second time.

  Then she made her way into the kitchen for a snack, because she could tell that the Old Broadnax field would not leave her head. She got out her crackers and salmon cream cheese and poured herself a small glass of orange juice, all clumsily, with the bandaged hand. Boy, that was silly, too. Then she wheeled herself up to the little table and plucked from the center of the table the napkin she’d saved from the snack that had served as her evening meal. She spread a Ritz cracker and took a bite. It took awhile for the taste to register. Jesus, everything was going. But finally, it came to her: the creamy cheese, the briny tang of the salmon, the familiar buttery crunch of the cracker. Here she was, despite the dark that wanted to pull her into it. Still alive. Despite the Old Broadnax field, and losing King and losing babies, and runaway children, and Bobo in prison, and Needhams who left old black Selma stuck as the caretaker. Her brother, Jones, was the only soul in the world who remembered. Every now and then they spoke about it long distance, him on his fancy cell phone, and reminded each other that they two were neither crazy nor alone.

  Selma spread another cracker and closed her eyes as she ate it. But the Old Broadnax field was waiting for her behind her eyelids, as if everything that happened were always happening, in an excruciating present, eight-tenths of a mile south, as if, with enough faith, she might could open her mouth and swallow back every wrong word and snatch from her mind every thought that led to every wrong word, because each and every word had to have been utterly, horribly wrong, or else none of it would ever have happened.

  ———

  Jones heard the dog before he could tell what was wrong. Everything was as he and King had left it halfway through clearing the Broadnax field. Stumps lay upturned throughout. Heaps of dirt marked the space between pockmarks in the ground. He couldn’t see around them. But a dog whined insistently, frustrated, grieving. He followed the sound.

  “Oh, my God.” Jones whispered it as a prayer. “Oh, my God, don’t let ’er be dead.”

  He knew it had to be the white girl who’d been coming to watch him work. He had not smiled at her—he was no fool—but he knew it.

  What could he do? The stump was so big. And since she was under it, he could not get into the hole to find leverage.

  “Oh, my God!” On his knees by the hole, Jones looked for a miracle. Her dog paced and cried for him to help. He saw the girl’s eyes move. “You’re alive!”

  King was not around. He had gone to deliver his only son to the army. Jones felt panic crawl up from under his scrotum and into his gut. What should he do? What could he do? Try to free her, and then go for help? But he could just make it worse. Go for help first so that someone else could witness what had happened to her? Colored help? White help? He had no protocol to consult. Only a list of consequences. And no time. She was slight, pale, slim, very hurt. He ran across the field and up the hill to get Selma, who, being a woman, could touch the girl to help pull her out if he could hitch a mule and a pull hook.

  ———

  That’s what he came in bawling to her. She was canning peaches; four bushels so far, a total of nearly eighty quart jars. By the time he got to the house, Jones was so out of breath and frantic that at first Selma could not understand him. A pile of peach skins lay on her left side, a fleshy huddle of baldhead fruit on the other. She worked fast in batches so that they would not turn brown. The sweet, peachy steam made her feel hungry and a little sick. Then, when she could understand him, she could not believe him. Jones told her his plan.

  “Oh, Jesus.” It was all she could say. How could such a thing have happened? Her stomach flopped in terror. She wanted to run. Steam from the water bath joined their sweat. They shone at each other, desperate, thin brown siblings with high cheekbones and almond eyes, wild with terror, looking around the kitchen for some scrap of hope that might be lying around, close to hand. “Who is she?”

  “I’on’t know!”

  “We gotta go get somebody else. We can’t do this thing alone. What if she dies?” she asked. “We can’t carry a dead white girl into town.”

  They stood together in the main room of the house—the kitchen, dining room, gathering place—looking at the wide plank floor. Who was this who had brought her foolhardy self into what King called the U.S. of Needham?

  “Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Is she unconscious?” It occurred to Selma to leave her to her own devices. Do what they would have done had Jones not heard the dog. There was no reason for her or Jones to have gone to that field. People had seen King and his son Junior leave with little Bobo; King had stopped in town to fill up his extra tank with gasoline. People had said good-bye to him. Somebody swung by and told Selma some old gossip, and said piously that she was praying for Junior’s safety. Everything that day was wrong, however, and Junior never did come home. King was planning to return the morning after next. By that time, the girl could be dead, and someone else would have found her.

  “What if we mess around going to find people, and she dies and we coulda done something?” Jones showed tears collecting underneath his eyes. He’d been thinking about himself and Selma and the Needhams. Now, being Jones, with his good heart, his mind went back to the girl’s pained face, the brave movement of eyes below translucent lids, the barely rising torso. He felt her dog’s hot-breathed panic as if it were his own. Selma rocked her head from side to side, looking past him through the open door, counting something.

  The problem with leaving her, Selma thought, with brutal calculation, was that she might not die. And if the girl lived to remember that Jones had found her—and left her there—then everything was over for Jones.

  Selma knew the girth of the stumps they’d been removing. The two of them could roll one all the way over her—if she could convince Jones to do it. But even then, if people didn’t find the body for a couple days, God knows what that sight would do to people. You could say dead is dead, but how a body looked would work on people’s minds. Besides, Jones would never do it.

  “Selma!” She remembered Jones shouting at her.

  “Who is she?”

  “I tol’ you. I’on’t know!”

  “You sure she was alive?”

  “Yes!”

  “From where she is, could somebody see the Schoolhouse Road?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Put it like this: If I’m driving the School Road, would I be able to see her?”

  “You could see the dog.”

  “Dog? Jesus. What dog?”

  “Her dog was with her. That’s how I heard, remember?”

  “Right. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus … Okay. This what we gonna do. Listen, I’ma tell you. We gonna go into town like we need dry goods. Take the rubber-wheel buggy wagon and the mare mule. Then in town we gonna bus’ a tire, y’hear? Then I’ma get somebody in town to bring me back. Try to get a white person to carry me back here, and we’ll come, naturally, by the School Road. Maybe old Mr. Mortenson at the General Store; he don’t be doing nothing.”

/>   She stopped for a moment to run through in her mind her choice of the potential driver. Mortenson was middling good-hearted in Selma’s estimation, neither particularly friendly to coloreds nor hostile. Because King had done a good business with him for twenty-five years, he treated Selma with rather more than less respect, given the differences between them. He was chatty, so he’d tell everyone what he’d seen, and, more important, white folks would believe him. She hoped he’d be there. She did the calculation quickly: she went into town once a week. Since January that would mean nine months, and she could remember not seeing him only twice. Two out of thirty-six plus the three extras, one each in January, March, and July this year. She didn’t like that it wasn’t even. That should have been a sign right there.

  “You’ll stay in town with the buggy wagon and the mule. Then, I can look over the field and see what happened and make ’em stop, if the other person don’t see ’er firs’.”

  Tears rolled down Jones’s face. By then the girl could be dead, he said, and they’d be as good as killed her. Selma could see him thinking of her alone, with rain threatening and the crying dog.

  “If we nail a big ole roofin nail into the rubber buggy tire, will it go down by time we get to town?”

  Jones shrugged.

  “Or will we just break down afore we get there?”

  He shook his head and shrugged again.

  Selma pursed her lips and looked at him.

  “We can’t kill ’er.” He said it in the tiniest whisper, as if the wind would carry their sin through all eternity.

  She whispered back in a hissing sound that she could see stung him. “Did we ast her t’ come in and mess around with some stump twice her size? What would happen if some niggers was to mess around on some white gentleman’s land? She did this to her own damn self, and don’t put it on me!

  “It’s her or us. Or King. You know that, don’t you?”

  No. Jones hadn’t thought about King, he later told Selma, but of course, they’d hold him responsible. Still, Jones suspected that if the white girl died, the sound of that dog barking, the slow flutter of her translucent eyelids, would never leave him.

  He went to the wagon barn, took out the rubber-wheel buggy, and hitched the relatively affable mule, who would never perform like their old gray-and-white mare with her sweet nature and wide shoulders. Of course King needed a big horse. Jones drove a nail into one wheel. He remembered learning from King how to shoe the mare’s big hooves. When the air made its initial sigh, Jones jumped, as if blood would spurt from the puncture.

  In town, Selma headed for the store and sent Jones to tell King’s brother Richard what was happening, but to tell him not to do anything. He was to pretend that everything was normal. Jones didn’t want to go. You could never trust Richard. But somebody had to let him know, and Selma had to get Mortenson.

  She told Prentice, the storeowner, that King had gone to take Junior to answer the draft. Yep, he already knew. And, of course, she knew he knew. Then she gabbled on. The horse breeder and trader in Cherokee Falls had asked for them to apprentice Jones to him, ’cause he was so good with horses. Chat, chat, chat. She said that King promised to come back in three days, and everyone knew how King was about making his time. She got nervous then, because usually she didn’t talk so much, and Prentice, the storeowner, was looking at her funny. There were other people in the store. She couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad.

  She apologized, but said she didn’t know what to do with King gone and Junior gone and the buggy wheel busted and she thought that maybe they’d help.

  “Do you think maybe if I ask Mr. Mortenson real nice, he might ride me out to our place to get the replacement wheel? I shoulda had it. King tells me to always carry it underneath. I shoulda put it on.”

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “I already sent him to help my brother-in-law who’s working Mr. Reid’s field over west of town.” She tripped her tongue. “If I’da seen the wheel…”

  “Go ask Mortenson. Did you see ’im on the porch?” Prentice asked.

  She nodded but couldn’t move. Trembling. On the verge of tears.

  “’S just a buggy wheel. Come on, you always been a sensible gal. He won’t bite’cha. Here, I’ll ask ’im for you. Say, Mort. You ain’t doing nothing special right now, are you?”

  ———

  Mortenson chided Selma for undoing the replacement wheel, which had to have been her, because King knew better. Plus, King had always been the most particular Negro you ever met, and so he told Selma, as if these were facts about her husband that she did not know. He’d seen King drive that rubber-wheel buggy, and Mortenson could swear that he’d seen the tire on the bottom there, right where it should be. Well, he figured, she’d have hell to pay when the big red Negro got home and found out his little black gal had been driving the buggy around carelessly. Because he was always so particular.

  Replacement tires and farm management led Mortenson to why everybody wasn’t cut out to own expensive things and why there was a reason some people were tenants; and he named people, first black, then white, who had owned farms and lost them, and others likely to lose them soon. Selma’s heart banged. She counted her heartbeats, twice normal, and cut them into the rhythm of Mortenson’s old horse’s hoofbeats. The peach skins she’d eaten threatened to spill up from her stomach. She forced them down. Then she counted the peaches she was losing: three bushels peeled, sitting out in the heat; twelve more unpeeled, all on top of one another in the kitchen. She’d likely lose half the peeled, and maybe a tenth of the unpeeled. It distracted her for a few minutes.

  As they approached the south field Selma realized with terror that Mortenson was talking too much to notice anything. Her heart flailed around; she gulped at the air so loudly that he asked what was wrong with her. As clearly as she could, she said: “Mr. Mortenson, what’s that? Can you see what that is over there on Old Broadnax field?”

  “Jus’ a dog. ’S not your dog you making all that fuss about?”

  “No, sir. That’s the funny thing: I don’t know that dog, but I could hear it all the way over here. Look like sompin wrong. Sound like it’s whining. Oh, God, Mr. Mortenson, I gotta bad feelin about that dog.”

  Finally, and with a sigh to show her his annoyance, Mortenson stopped the buggy. Together they noticed that where the dog was circling, a stump had toppled into its hole, the only one to have done so.

  Selma got down. “Here, Mr. Mortenson. Shall I see to it? I know you think I’m a silly gal about this… I’ll see to it, shall I?”

  “Well, what’s the point of me comin with you if we run into something and…?” He struggled to get down fast enough so that he didn’t have to tell her to wait. “Come and tie up this horse, Selma. Don’t want three emergencies ’steada the two you already got goin. If this is one, that is,” he said under his breath, “and not a silly gal cryin wolf.”

  She waited for him just inside the field. “Mind the blackberries, sir.”

  “I ain’t so old I can’t see a bramble bush.”

  And there she was. It was no playacting for Selma to shout when she looked on the smallish face, brushed with red dirt, eyes closed, dirty blonde bangs to one side. Everything was wrong. Everything wanted fixing. Selma stood, transfixed, unable to feel anything but her own fear, unable to do anything but contain it, control it, push it into a dry corner, shut the door, then pay attention to Mr. Mortenson, huffing and puffing, now next to her, the dog circling, excited, ready for a human solution.

  Then, without warning, the eyes opened.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Selma screamed, and Mortenson let out a startled grunt.

  Selma’s fear burst its chains like the dead on Judgment Day and flooded her body, circulating round and round so fast that she went dizzy. The eyes stared at her, through her, as if they knew that she’d contemplated leaving her to die.

  “Thank God,” Mortenson said.

  “Thank God,” Selma echoed, the voice bel
ching from her as if she’d been kicked.

  “You one of the Broadnax grandchildren, aren’t you? You hear me?”

  The eyes flickered. Tears began to run from the corners.

  Selma counted seconds to stop herself from vomiting.

  “We gotta get her outta there,” Mortenson said.

  “Can we lift that thing together?” Selma asked. “I get on that side, you get on this side, take hold of the roots?”

  “And what happens if we drop it?”

  “Mr. Mortenson, what’ll we do?”

  “How long you been there, chile?” he asked.

  The girl did not answer. Her dog pawed at the hole again, splattering fresh dirt onto her face. The eyes closed.

  “Stop that, Dog,” Mortenson said. “Stop, you.

  “Selma,” Mortensen said seriously, “look, can you handle my buggy?”

  “Aw, Jesus, Mr. Mortenson. I can drive anything.” Selma heard her own words come out garbled. She hadn’t realized that she was crying.

  “Now, look, Selma. We both gotta keep our wits, girl. Come on, gal. You blubber, I can’t think.”

  “I drive, Mr. Mortenson. I’ll get the pull hook and rig.” She took off running as she spoke.

  Mortenson knelt carefully so as not to lose his balance and fall onto the girl. He stayed just like that, talking to the girl.

  When Selma got back with the rig, it took everything he had to push himself up to a standing position and walk around again. Selma twitched with anxiety. She walked Mortenson’s nag up and down, saying it was to pull the rig through, nice and easy, no back and forth. And then they did it, the old porch gossip and the skinny colored woman: they hitched Mortenson’s horse to the rig bought for King’s 1,200-pound mules. They sank the hook into rotten wood so close to the girl’s young flesh that they shuddered. Mortenson shook as they lifted up on the pulley, to suspend the stump three inches off the ground, and off the girl’s body, which they saw lay mostly in a depression underneath. Selma pulled the horse’s bit just hard enough to keep the stump moving back away from the hole, over the prone body, and onto flat ground beside her.