If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  “What was the music sayin?” Khalil ventured.

  “No, baby, don’t ask no questions right through here, baby,” Selma said. She huffed as if they were in an emergency.

  “I just wanna ask do he know what they were saying.”

  Rayne did know the piece. He’d forbidden his demo team from playing it on the job. “Don’t interrupt me,” the tagline warned, “while I’m beating my bitch.” Lillie’s Facebook friends had gone into full-cry viral outrage a while back. It was an old piece.

  “That’s all right, I tell you,” Selma said. “We don’t need no more confusion.”

  ———

  At the intersection of the next little town, on either side of the train tracks, Rayne left Selma and Khalil in the cab with the engine running and the doors locked while he went into a convenience and package store. When he came out, he was carrying a bag of local hot sauce. On the outside of the bag, four old-timers had collaborated on a pencil-drawn map of the area with Mermaid Landing indicated by a large, circled M. He also threw five pounds of ice into the ridiculously large cooler he’d found in the old shed, as if they were going to catch a fifty-pound black drum with twenty-year-old line and a number-two hook.

  Selma was telling Khalil how to smoke fish, and how they’d kept the fish-smoking tradition in the family all the way from Africa, and that Grandma Bett said that smoked fish kept them alive for the two terrible winters that followed the Civil War.

  “The Civil War?” Khalil whispered it to himself incredulously in the backseat. When Rayne looked into the rearview mirror to discipline him with a glare, Khalil grabbed his cheeks, pulled them down, and rolled his eyeballs upward until only the whites showed. An involuntary sneezy laugh escaped Rayne’s nose, but he managed to master his face by the time the eyeballs in the mirror returned to peer at him.

  “They had some tur-ble winters,” Selma was saying. “You think down here is all sunshine-palmetto like today, but it could get bad.”

  Rayne gave a stern frown and drove on toward the river, ignoring the bare foot that poked its way into his peripheral vision, waving, no doubt, a naughty reference to the shoeless childhood Selma described.

  “Time we get there,” Selma said, “it’ll be time to turn around and go home. ’Cause lemme tell you, I can’t be up cookin no dinner at ten o’clock tonight again, y’all hear me. No wonder I fell out. ’At’s too late. I’m havin a hard enough time on my pins as it is. Playin around with you young bucks’ll finish me off for sure. I’m already so stiff y’all gonna have to pry me outta here with a can opener…”

  Rayne started laughing then, and Khalil whooped. Selma herself said, “It’s the truth,” and then laughed with them. “And it’ll take y’all half an hour just to get me set up on the dock. Oh, Lord, did he bring the blanket?”

  “I’ma tell you something about the Broadnax field, since we was talking about it before: the old father Broadnax kept hogs there, and it was the sloppiest, filthiest, stinkinest operation you ever saw. Contaminated ev’rybody’s water. That’s why the whites didn’t mind King buyin it, ’cause they knew he’d clean it up.

  “Well, some years before we bought it, the little shoats would get out and run over to our place, and we’d make sure to take ’em back; show ’em which one it was, tell ’im where the fence was broke… But this one time, we was comin back from fishin at night. Dark, dark, dark, and almost home, come up on this fat little shoat. We knew right away whose it was, and King said, he said, just like this: ‘Selma, you think we could can that thing by sunup?’

  “And, oh, my Lord. Good thing it was cold, ’cause we had to work so fast…” Selma remembered King slaughtering the shoat with the fish knife, the mess of it, dragging it home in the fish buckets, blood enough to slosh as the wagon rocked in the cold, clear, quiet night; stoking up the old stove to boil the thing piecemeal. Faces greasy with condensation, they met the morning by piling manure into the wagon to sop up the blood. It was that night chewing cracklin that King and Selma got the idea to buy the place outright.

  ———

  When they arrived at Mermaid Landing, Rayne and Khalil set Selma in her chair, and wrapped her in two blankets despite what was to them a mild day. Then they arranged their gear and pole. Selma reminded Rayne that the summer he came to live with them was one of the last years that the Philadelphia relatives sent their children to stay July and August. He’d forgotten most everything about that summer except that it began with him anticipating his mother’s return and ended with him confronting her abandonment. Now—maybe because he was here, or because he had talked to her and because Lillie was making plans for them to visit his mother in little more than a week’s time, or maybe because the flirtatious woman at the courthouse had drawn in his mind a family tree—he recalled them here, those of his own generation, mostly older, who knew the ropes and enjoyed that he didn’t. He also remembered Binky, the older girl cousin he’d had a crush on, because the bell-like curl at the end of her laugh sounded like his mother’s, and because her presence seemed somehow connected to the mermaids that Jones told him swam in from the sea.

  ———

  Rayne was allowed to ride in the wagon with his Philadelphia cousins. They called him Ray, as Selma did, or Wild Bill Hickok or Samson, because his thick hair had not been cut. All three cousins showed Needham blood: tall and broad-backed, they had the wide-set Needham eyes under arched heavy brows. Also a metallic-edged quality of the voices, so that when they spoke together fast, finishing one another’s sentences, their voices hit him with the noisy clatter of cutlery. Their accents sounded familiar, not quite New York, but closer to it than the people here in South Carolina, whom he could only barely understand. It felt like family with them—and it didn’t. It made him angry that it didn’t.

  “When do you go back?” Binky asked him.

  She’d just turned twelve. Her breast buds pointed sideways. They fluttered up and down on the rutted wagon road. Rayne wanted to touch them. Instead he shrugged.

  “You should probably ride back with us as far as Philadelphia,” she said sensibly.

  “On the train?”

  “No, we’re too young to go on the train by ourselves.”

  “I went on the train by myself.”

  Binky studied him as if trying to judge his truthfulness, but the fact, on its face, was too bizarre to judge. “We drive,” she said. “Daddy borrows the station wagon from Uncle Amos. There’s a seat way at the back that looks out the window. That’s where I sit. You can wave to people in the cars behind you. It’s pretty big. We could fit you, I think.”

  “Philadelphia comes before New York?”

  Binky nodded.

  “I could hide in the trunk. Will you help me?”

  “What are you talking about? It’s a station wagon. It doesn’t have a trunk.”

  He spoke into her ear. No one else could hear him over the road noise and wind in the open truck bed. “They’re trying to keep me here. Granddaddy Bobo’s trying to keep me from going home. I swear for God.”

  She studied him for clues to the mystery. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “If you tell anybody they’ll beat me.”

  “Why would I tell anybody that crazy mess?”

  He decided he’d stow away as far as Philadelphia, then get to New York from there. The thought seemed just right. He had a way home.

  Rayne remembered the exact moment when he decided to stow away to Philadelphia. He remembered the calm that seeped through him at the thought. He withdrew from the others. The Philadelphia cousins decided that he was strange, as their parents’ gossip had already informed them. Why else had his mother shipped him south and disappeared?

  The adults put him to fish with the women and girls, while Granddaddy Bobo and the men sat across the wide tongue of land on the saltwater side. Bobo was complimenting Uncle Jones and an older cousin and two hired boys on the fence they’d laid alongside Bill Gunnerson’s field. Rayne sat next to the tinkling-voi
ced twelve-year-old who resembled his mother and envied the boys. So, very slowly, he reeled in his line, stood, and ambled toward the men to get a new piece of worm to skewer on the hook Jones made for him from a pounded nail.

  “I helped with the fence,” he said, holding out the empty hook.

  “So you think you get to use up all the bait?” Granddaddy Bobo shouted in mock amazement. “What’re you doing? We supposed to be catchin the fish so we can eat ’em. They feeds us. Jones, hey, Jones! Why’on’t you ’xplain so he can learn? We been out since four diggin worms. Look here, just cut the damn worm and throw it in. Be easier for everybody.”

  “Leave the boy alone,” Jones said. “He can’t help if mermaids take his bait.” Jones made a delicate plucking motion. To Rayne he said quietly: “You’re gonna have to learn to do this yourself, Ray-Ban. Watch me.”

  Jones motioned to Rayne. He cut off the makeshift hook and invited the boy to squat next to him over a gray-green tackle box and a hinged lid with neat tray compartments like tiny steps. With his hammer-top fingers, Jones selected a weight, a bobber, and a hook, tied each on the line with a different knot, and guided Ray to do the same. Then Jones closed the squeaky lid and snapped shut one of the rusty clasps.

  “Uh-oh,” Bobo said. “Now he gonna lose good tackle along with the bait.”

  “Now lookahere.” Jones called Rayne’s attention back from his grandfather. But the boy still could not listen. The ocean crashed on rocks, throwing up a clear-white spray that rose straight up, taller than a tree. “Pay attention, Rane-bo, so we don’t make no accident.”

  He removed a tiny cutting board that fitted exactly into a notched groove in the side of the tackle box and took a worm from their dirt-filled, sweetgrass basket. With a small, sharp knife he sliced the worm into halves that writhed as if trying to find each other. He allowed Rayne to try to thread his worm onto his hook. The bloody piece of worm slithered. It wanted its other half. Rayne hooked his own finger by mistake, and Jones congratulated him on not crying.

  “That’s what you want,” Bobo commented from above and behind them, “you want it to move.”

  Jones’s fingers guided the worm’s moving flesh onto the hook. “See that. It’s gotta go through ’im.”

  “Shut up, man. Come ’ere boy, let me show you how to put this worm on so can’t nobody snatch ’im offa the hook while you staring out to the sky.”

  Jones handed him the hook. “Show ’im that.” To Bobo he said: “He got it now.”

  “Lookin for mermaids.” One of the cousins, laughing.

  “He should be lookin for God,” Lil Tootchie said. Since no one stopped her, Lil Tootchie continued: “He should be up in church tomorrow morning thanking God for bringing his little brown butt safely these many miles to the bosom of his family. He should be promising to be good to Selma. What we don’t need is no firebug bringing home no trouble. God knows—”

  Bobo said: “No, Lil Tootchie, nunh-unh. No church here today. You go to church tomorrow and the preacher will not sit up there talking about fishing. So please don’t bring that high and righteous talk to the water’s edge today. I didn’t come here for that.”

  “He will talk about fishing. He’ll tell these children to expect Jesus to come walkin toward them on the water, not no devilish mermaid…

  “I’m telling you what’s right. Don’t look at me funny,” Lil Tootchie said. “I’ma take these children. We could take JJ’s boys, too.”

  “We got our own church, thank you,” one of JJ’s sons answered quickly.

  Rayne wondered out loud: “What’s a mermaid?”

  CHAPTER 18

  It occurred to Rayne years later that Lil Tootchie and her children had stayed not just that summer but throughout most of the year. He didn’t ask until he was in college, and then Selma told him that Lil Tootchie’s husband drank and knocked her around. It got so bad that she took the children to Richard and Big Tootch’s house, but the husband followed her there. At night he’d appear, drunk, shouting into the windows, banging on the door. Selma told Rayne that Lil Tootchie and the four children were like prisoners, and Big Tootch’s neighbors were restive.

  Could they come down the farm, they asked.

  I didn’t say: you sold out your share to Pettiford and lef’ me here by my lonesome. Nope, I say: King say this heir proppity; that’s what it’s here for.

  When Lil Tootchie’s husband finally sobered up the next year, he drove down in the same station wagon he’d borrowed from Amos before. The family behaved formally with one another, but determined to make a go of it. The Husband, which was how Selma referred to him from then on, thanked Selma with a piece of money and a face full of shame for keeping his family for him. She wished them well. The next summer, the children did not return. Selma said she figured that the Husband thought she’d turned his family against him, a job she said he had accomplished his own self by cracking Lil Tootchie’s tooth on the bathroom sink.

  ———

  Rayne did not meet Big Tootch until he went to Philadelphia to attend Cheyney University and visited them for holidays. A self-proclaimed truth-teller and Christian woman, Big Tootch was a widow by the time Rayne met her. Like everyone else, she spoke of King in oversize terms, even when it was to bemoan some occasion when he had overridden her poor husband, Richard. When she talked of Selma, however, a hard self-righteousness pinched her round little mouth and set the jaw under her double chin. She wanted Rayne to know that during the Depression it was she who had taught the motherless Selma, daughter of sharecroppers and oyster shuckers, how to wash her privates with soap and to pull that nappy hair back in two rows instead of in a hundred braids like a pickaninny. It had been Big Tootch who had tutored the tongue-tied, stuttering young Selma to speak in public, drilling her, like a traveler to another country, on stock phrases:

  May I give you my list, sir, so I don’t make any mistakes?

  I’m sorry; I can’t answer that.

  Please give me a moment; sometimes it takes me a minute to say what I mean.

  Can I buy some of this?

  Can I pay you next week, please?

  Big Tootch had taken Selma to church in the first place, and didn’t appreciate that King had been too arrogant or political to go. Big Tootch had introduced Selma to the preacher who’d given Bobo his text—might as well say it because the whole family knew: “If the landowner had known the hour at which the thief would come, he would have kept watch.” And, Lord, would that he had heeded those words!

  These were the things Big Tootch said not only in private but also at Thanksgiving dinner in Philadelphia. Rayne did not appreciate hearing them at table. Hadn’t Selma taken in Lil Tootchie and the four grandchildren? Didn’t that deserve better than to have her unwashed, sixteen-year-old privates mentioned in her absence over turkey and gravy?

  “Just so you know, Aunt Tootch, Nana Selma never talks about your family like this. Never.” It was the best he could muster.

  To her credit, his favorite cousin, Binky, looked embarrassed and got up to fuss around. “Nana Selma was very good to us,” she said.

  “How many times you think we gotta thank her for letting us come stay on our own land, I’d like to know?” her mother asked.

  “I thought that you all sold out to Pettiford.”

  “How’re we gonna sell out to Pettiford? Pettiford don’t own the land. We do; that’s what make it heir property. We always owned it; always will.”

  Rayne ignored these pronouncements, as Selma had taught him to do. Selma called the land hers, and told Rayne that one day it would be his. It was why she wanted him to go to college, so that he could see to it, legally, himself.

  “She was very good to us,” Binky repeated quietly as she cleared and motioned for her seething young cousin to help. When they got to the kitchen, she showed him two quarts of peaches Selma had sent with an old itinerant minister, a seventy-year-old Socialist with no church to call his own, who still went up and down the coast every year
. Rayne brought down one quart. The two of them opened it for dessert and ate out of the jar, sharing a spoon. Rayne thought and then said aloud the question that never seemed to occur to anyone else: How could a man own land without paying for it?

  Binky stopped with her spoon full of peach, halfway to her mouth, trying to figure how to answer her cousin, as quick to anger as he had been as a boy, and still as concerned with impossible questions.

  “You used to look at me the same way back then,” Rayne said, and to avoid her eyes, he scanned the kitchen. It was littered with Thanksgiving preparation. Rayne muttered that this holiday mess wouldn’t be in Selma’s kitchen. She insisted that they clean as they cooked.

  Then Binky laughed, and her whole body moved delightedly with her breath. “Remember when she took us fishing. And they cut your hair?”

  Rayne didn’t laugh.

  “Something else happened on that trip. I’m sorry, I forgot. You fell or something, didn’t you?”

  ———

  Out on the green-and-brown banks of the estuary, with the sun shining right through her glittering eyes, Selma said, in a voice that came out of her like a radio: “Patient! That’s what the mermaid is. They patient. Time don’t mean nothin to a mermaid. They be waiting for bad children all their life, good children, too. Lord, Jones, don’t hit one.”

  Selma looked right into Rayne, her see-through beer-bottle brown eyes exactly the color of her skin, and she laughed. He knew that she was playacting, but a note of true danger rumbled at the back of her throat.

  “Stop scarying the boy.”

  “You know what used to scare me?” she asked in response.

  “Wha?”

  “That old song we used to sing.”

  The older Needham clan answered by breaking into raucous singing:

  Mermaid make the blood run cold;

  Cast it far, drop it deep;

  Call your name, and read your soul;

  Cast it far, drop it deep;

  Snatch you in or give you gold; at the crossroads, pay the toll;

  Pray the Lord my soul to keep.