If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  The girl was scratched and red. The bruising would spread everywhere. She was shaking weakly. They covered her with the horse blanket. The dog sat next to her, panting and finally quiet. Stiff and afraid, Mortenson sat himself down again to one side of the hole and brushed the girl’s bangs back every so often. He mumbled little phrases he said to his own children while Selma drove his team hard to fetch the white doctor and white men to help.

  The white men came fast. They examined the scene and the stories that Mortenson told, and then that Selma told in answer to their questions. This was life and death right here, they told Mortenson. And Well, I tell you what it was, it was nothing short of a miracle… Thank God they saw ’er… Don’t know what she was doin there… Probably just wandered in to take a look.

  Mortenson puffed up. He reared back on his heels and rocked and shook his head as he told again how they would have driven right by had he not heard the poor dog whining and howling something awful…

  It didn’t bear thinking on, although, of course, they could think of nothing else.

  Selma dared to hope that they had pulled it off.

  ———

  Although the two crackers with salmon cream cheese had been so comforting, Selma lost her appetite for the third. She wrapped it in her napkin and placed it in the center of the table. The Old Broadnax field felt to Selma like the Bible’s field of blood. That’s why she’d borrowed against it. If mortgaging the one could help her keep the other, whose business was it? And if there was blood on the money, well, at least she hadn’t spilled it.

  CHAPTER 13

  It took Rayne most of the early morning to figure out how King had put in his box stove originally and then how JJ had jerry-rigged its repair. For one thing, JJ had installed the male end of the stovepipe up, no doubt assembling the pipe to follow the smoke. But as it was, black creosote was oozing down into the stove. Eventually, it would gum up the opening. Rayne took newspaper from under the sink, laid it on the floor, and then took the stovepipe apart, hoping that he would not need another part when he reversed the relay. Then he cleaned the drippings and tried to see whether he thought it possible that a strongbox would be buried under the bricks that formed a rough foundation for the stove. He couldn’t tell.

  What he could see was that someone had taken up several of the planks around the stove, and then nailed them back. Whoever had taken them up had put the original nails back into the original holes. Only one or two nails showed hammer indentations. He’d probably used a blanket to keep from marring the old heart pine floor. But none of the nails had been sunk, as King had sunk them, it looked like to Rayne, with a spare nail of the same size. Well, Rayne thought to himself, it was as likely to have been Selma herself trying to get to the box as anyone.

  Two layers of brick had been laid, one on top of the other, into a tight boxlike holder cut into the plank floor, which was itself raised up off the dirt by joists. Rayne had begun to pick out the bricks and mound them next to him on the floor when his phone vibrated in his pocket. Since it was early, he assumed it was Lillie. He put the phone to his head without checking the caller ID.

  “Hey, babe,” he said, happy for her company, “I missed you last night after the Energizer Bunny finally ran out of gas. I’m tryin to man up to the single-parent thing, but baby, you got me.”

  “Oh, Lonnie, I’m sorry. This is your mother, Jewell.”

  “Oh, whoa. Whoa. I thought you were my girlfriend.” Two minutes before, he would not have been able to conjure the sound of her voice, but it was her, all right. One time he had heard a cello concerto on the Temple University station in his doctor’s office, and the instrument had so reminded him of that voice that he had had to walk out. What the hell could he say? “Good morning.”

  Jewell felt as if she were barely inside her own skin. Learning that he and Lillie were not married gave her information to focus on. Was the boy his? she wondered. “I probably should have done something to warn you.”

  “Well, what else could you do? You talked to Lillie. She told me you called yesterday. And I do have a cell phone. I just didn’t look at the number, because my hand was full anyway.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He heard her voice—it curled around in his head and purred and nuzzled—as if they’d talked last week; it seemed that familiar. Her question, though simple, however, drove home to him their distance. What was he doing? How to answer? She knew the very stove, and had likely heard Selma brag about it: that King’s Grandma Bett, and her second husband, Slim, had carried it from an auction of the contents of their former master’s house on a borrowed cart. Rayne’s mother probably knew that Bett had died here in this very room, napping next to her stove, bundled in her wedding quilt, on a Christmas evening, having eaten half her holiday dinner and asked to save the rest for her to eat the next day.

  Rayne was pretty sure that she did not know about the strongbox or the will. But then she might.

  “Sorry. It’s none of my business,” she said, when he hesitated. “Are you able to talk now, or is this a bad time?”

  “I’m fine for the time being.”

  They did not say anything for long enough that she asked him: “You still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here, not knowing what to say.”

  “Is there something you’d really like to say, like, I don’t know…?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “you do know. My girlfriend’s son asked me last night why you gave me up. I told him that I used to think it was because I wet the bed.”

  “Oh, Lonnie.”

  “I did. And I was a bad kid. I know that now. When I see him, I know how bad I was.”

  “I didn’t give you up because you were bad, Lonnie. I gave you up because I was bad.”

  Again, they were silent. Rayne’s elbows were on his knees and his head hung down between them as if he were trying to catch his breath. His hair slipped out from where he had tied it and hung around his face like a dark tent. The anger sent up soundings from somewhere very far below the surface of his current, everyday life. Very faint.

  “I was a wreck, and it’s taken me years to become, I don’t know, a full person, I guess. Except I wasn’t a full person, because I didn’t find you and tell you this. You had to come find me. You deserve great parents. But you got me. All I can tell you is the person you’ve found is better than the person who left.”

  “And I’ve got Selma. And Bobo.”

  “Of course. They raised you. Of course. I didn’t mean to slight them… You’re there now?”

  “Right now? Right this very second, I’m here in the old house workin on the stove.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me the old stove’s still working.”

  “You know it is.”

  “Is Selma there? I hesitated to call, because I figured she didn’t want to hear my name.”

  Rayne started to demur, but he knew his mother was right. Instead, he said simply: “Nana Selma’s not here in the house. She’s in the trailer.”

  “The trailer?”

  “Oh, right. You haven’t seen the trailer. Jones bought it a few years ago now, for when he came to visit. Mostly Selma stays there now. It’s compact, air-conditioned, easy to heat, easy to clean.”

  “What about Jones? Oh, Jones, my God.”

  “Why are you crying?” Her crying affected him. She’d seemed cool until now, almost too perfect. And yet, had she simply cried about her own guilt, he would have wanted to smash the phone.

  She sniffed and said in a higher range: “To hear you, to talk like this, like we’re still a family.”

  “We are. We are. So, I’ll tell you about Jones. He stayed for a while. We thought he would retire down here with her, but then he got a lead on a great job: the best job for him. It’s like the gig you wish he’d had all his life.”

  “Horses?”

  “Yep. There’s a rich guy who raises and sells them to people all over the world. Jones breeds ’em, raises ’em, and goes with ’em w
hen they’re sold to help the new owners learn about ’em. He’s like a different guy. Truth: I think they’re a couple. That’s the way it sounds. But, at any rate, he’s happy.”

  “Hunh.” Jewell’s mouth was dry: something about Jones coming into himself at, what, eighty? She conjured his deep, sharp voice asking her how much money she needed to live up there in New York. His right hand, with its missing pointer finger, peeled off five twenty-dollar bills. Listen, baby, he’d said, you act like you all alone in the world, but you got family. Don’t forget that. Then he laughed. May not be the family you woulda chose, but we here. You got a home.

  “Jones deserves to be happy. My dad thought he was gay for years.”

  “Yeah. Well, you know him and Selma; they’re, like, indestructible.”

  They laughed together, and it felt good, although Rayne had to go back and correct himself. “Except that Nana Selma’s showing some wear and tear. A lot, really. I think it’s hard for her keeping this place up. She is, uh, she’s not happy.”

  “My dad always said that she hasn’t been happy since King died.”

  “I think sometimes she and I were happy,” Rayne told Jewell. “We had some good times. Maybe. I guess you’d have to ask her.”

  Every exchange chastened Jewell. Of course the two of them had been happy together. And of course, she couldn’t ask Selma anything at all, so she’d continue to ask her son. “Selma used to have a man there who rented a place over on one corner and worked it. My dad said it was modern-day sharecropping.”

  “Mr. JJ. He’s still here.”

  “Jesus.”

  Rayne laughed. Her voice and humor and memory were bringing him comfort. It soaked in like a slow rain. “I know. Mr. JJ’s like the oldest handyman in America. No, seriously, he’s like a hundred and fifty years old.”

  Jewell made an alto yelp of delight. “Is he still as sloppy as he always was? He would fix things, and they’d do the job, but it wasn’t pretty.”

  “Are you kidding? That’s why I’m sitting here with the stovepipe in pieces on the floor.”

  More laughter: his, hers. They egged each other on: JJ’s fence posts at half-mast; JJ’s doors that wouldn’t close, or wouldn’t open. The lock on the toolshed installed upside down. Then quiet, companionable, as if they were in the same room. Easy.

  “I’m glad you called,” he said.

  “I’m very grateful you wrote. It was an act of enormous generosity.”

  “My girlfriend is the one who found you.”

  “Lillie?”

  “Yeah, Lillie. You talked to her yesterday, right?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “She’s the one did the research. I just sorta said: ‘I wish I could tell my mother about this contract.’ It really isn’t easy to get a contract with the city, you know, and I was feeling…”

  “Proud?”

  “That sounds sort of, um…”

  “It sounds absolutely natural to me. And I am so proud of you, too. I am.”

  “Thank you.” It was funny thinking back to the months before, when he began this search, with Lillie’s help and encouragement. He did not know what else to say.

  Jewell did: “Lillie sounds lovely.”

  “Yep. She is. And hardworking. Smart, too. She’s almost finished nursing school.”

  “That’s great. That’s just great. This spring?”

  “Yeah. Just a coupl’a months. Well, finished nursing school, but she wants to be a midwife, so there’s still more. But she’s, like, in the top ten of the class.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, no joke.”

  “Wow,” she repeated, slowly, contemplating. “And my father?”

  “Granddaddy’s in prison again.”

  “Did he hurt anybody?”

  “No. Just himself.” Rayne did not want to gossip about his grandfather to his mother, just as he no longer nodded in agreement when his grandfather complained about the daughter who left him with her child to raise. “Yeah. He’s pretty much converted to Islam.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “No, I think it’s a good thing for him.” (“All-merciful,” Bobo had once said to him. “All-merciful: If I could believe that, how would that feel?”)

  “Well, good.” An embedded bitterness curled gracelessly at the edge of her own voice. She heard her son hear it. “I’m sorry.”

  “Bobo’s had it rough.”

  “Please, tell me what happened.”

  “It’s hard to say, exactly.” He shot up his TV, and the cops came, and he jumped stink with a gun in his arm? The summary would sound like making fun of him.

  “Yes, I’m sure. You don’t have to bother. I just wondered…”

  “You know that stand of scrub oaks—I’m not sure what they’re called—by the road as you come up the drive?”

  “The one between the heir property and the Old Broadnax fields?”

  It took Rayne aback to hear his mother use Selma’s exact language. He hadn’t thought of them as the boundary, but, of course, they were. “Yeah. Well, when I drove up yesterday, the same thing happened to me that happened when I drove here in his truck when he went in the first time.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Bobo had spoken of it as a great forest, Rayne told his mother, where he had gotten lost once as a very little boy. Jewell made assenting noises to indicate that she had heard this story, too.

  Bobo always called himself “a dumb little shit” for not obeying King and getting himself lost. Very lost. Even as a grown man sitting in Graterford prison, learning to pray to Allah, the all-merciful, Bobo suspected that had he gotten home sooner as a five-year-old, things would have turned out differently.

  But it had to be a wrong memory, Rayne said to his mother. In part, he wanted to hear from her even a splinter of compassion for the grandfather who did his best by him, miserable though he often was. But he was also fishing for family facts, like an adoptee searches medical records.

  “Here’s what never made sense to me about that: like, sure, people then gave kids more responsibility, but the King they described was, like, he was like the only black man I ever heard about from back then who would not beat his children. I cannot believe he would have put a five-year-old out onto the road alone to find his way home. This is like a crazy bum rush, I know, but I’ve never been able to ask anybody, and since you mentioned him…”

  “Yes, he has told that story all his life, and truth to tell, I always dismissed it, because I figured that my dad’s story is that he’s always the victim. Period. I’ve never thought about it this way before. You’re way ahead of me in terms of generosity.”

  “But think how he talks about himself: dumb little shit. That’s how he described himself.”

  “Yes. Did he call you that?”

  “No,” he said. That wasn’t where he was going, and it wasn’t until later that he realized that Bobo must have called Jewell something similar, or maybe worse.

  “Here’s another thing, since you’ve brought it up about him,” Jewell said. “My father always paired that story with his own personal Bible text, the one that Selma’s favorite old preacher gave him. Did he ever tell it to you?”

  “I guess, probably…”

  “‘If the householder had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would have kept watch.’”

  “Yeah, yeah, he did.”

  “I always figured he was showing me that it was not his fault that life had robbed him. The way he talked, it was like God Himself was the Great Thief.” Jewell regretted saying it the minute it left her lips.

  “Lillie says that maybe it was easier for Bobo to blame himself than to take in the loss of the man who loved him.”

  “I do realize,” Jewell added quietly, “that no matter what his part in it was, eventually everything was taken from him.”

  “Everything except that Ford Ranger…”

  “Even you,” she continued, “and I imagine that havin
g your company and your respect must have been very important to him.” She knew at that moment something else she’d never thought about: how very hurt Bobo must have been by her scorn, even though he’d earned it.

  ———

  Closing his eyes, Rayne saw himself again that night, around the corner from his grandfather’s apartment at his friend Malcolm’s, smoking a joint when the others rushed in.

  Yo, man, the cops on your porch. Your grandfather come at ’em with a gun. C’mon!

  He’d run, light-headed, stunned, and yet expectant, arriving home in time to push through the neighbors and see in the jaundiced yellow streetlight his grandfather being dragged off the porch, hog-tied, ridiculous: screaming that he’d rather be dead than go back to prison. His soft, naked belly scraped the sidewalk. He left an almost imperceptible smear of blood.

  ———

  “I am so proud of you,” Jewell said again.

  “I may need to ask you some questions about the heir property,” he said.

  “Anytime. Feel free. I think the law says that everybody in the family owns it, whether they’re there or not. I’m pretty sure that’s what it says. But Selma doesn’t agree. I don’t know what you can do about that.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Well, call me again anyway. I’ll try to be more help.”

  “This is help. Just this. Believe me.”

  “I do.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Jewell had gone to the park to make the call, and now that it was over, she and her dog began to trot slowly on the muddy paths. At least she had managed not to burden Rayne with any more of the story of her leaving him on the train—and especially not the tawdry, self-absorbed plan to kill herself after she had sent him south. Nor did she want to speak just yet of her undeserved rescue: how she wriggled out of the bed she’d made and into a false, velveteen life that eventually came true.

  Falseness was what she remembered from that time that she usually chose to forget: the unbearable distance between whom she portrayed and the cringing girl inside. At the New York train station, after Jewell had abandoned her son, busy people hurried past her to their trains: men in suits, well-groomed wives who were free to screw them or not, as they pleased, at the end of a tarragon-and-butter roast-chicken evening, she imagined, with no consequence to next week’s allowance. They turned discreetly to observe her, the tall, gray-suited beauty who stood apart, indifferent, wondering, no doubt, what was her story.