If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  And silence was appropriate. People went to the altar barefoot, and sat in special chairs. The priest knelt in front of the first half-dozen comers; after that he sat on a low stool. He slipped their feet into a white china basin and poured warm water over them from a matching white pitcher. Next to him was a pile of white towels, and another pitcher. The church was dim.

  Rayne found himself listening to the sound of the water, pouring, splashing loudly onto the ceramic surface, and softly onto people’s skin. He remembered Selma’s words about her persistent prayers for a marriage to King.

  Petitioning God for favors seemed childish to Rayne. And yet, Selma’s earnestness had its own truth. She told him once that in years past she had failed to pray for Bobo, but now that he was in prison, she prayed for him every day. She figured he needed it more. And she had never failed to pray, she said, for Rayne.

  Selma used her cane to navigate her way to the front of the church alone. Rayne heard the water splash over her feet, and thought that the sound of water could be its own prayer. The priest took time to dry Selma’s feet carefully, and to slip on her socks and the Velcro-clasped black orthopedic shoes that she had shined that morning.

  As a boy, Rayne had imagined himself married one day. He’d seen himself as a man, driving a truck, coming home from somewhere to a woman and children who would be delighted to see him. He’d taken such a future for granted until he went away to Philadelphia to college and entered into a series of complicated relationships, none of them close to the easy and natural picture he’d imagined. Until Lillie. But he knew the undercurrents in himself, riptides of rage that had never surfaced, but threatened. Both he and Lillie had chosen wrong before. How could they trust themselves?

  After the foot washing, people from the congregation came up to read at a table illuminated by a semicircle of candles. After each person read, he or she would snuff a candle, and Rayne felt an unaccountable sadness spreading through him. Khalil gave evidence of boredom, but also a reverence that helped to enforce the dictum of silence. “Maundy,” they learned, came from mandatum, the commandment Jesus gave to his disciples after washing their feet: to love one another.

  Then, after the readings, with only one white candle burning, the priest and the acolytes began to strip the altar. They took away altar cloths, embroidered chair pads and kneelers, the palms, carpets, candles. Soon, members of the congregation went up to help. Before Rayne realized, Khalil had stood and slipped out into the aisle. He was the only child in attendance besides the acolytes. The priest, a medium-height dark brown man with a Jamaican accent, bowed to Khalil, who reciprocated with his eyes wide. Then the priest reached around his neck, took off his embroidered red stole, and handed it to him. Khalil followed the others into a sacristy off to the side of the main sanctuary to hand the stole to one of the waiting adults.

  The service ended without a benediction. Parishioners filed out quietly, while Rayne and Selma waited in their pew for Khalil to return. The place no longer seemed cold, only reserved, like Selma when they worked together and did not talk. It gave him room for his own mind to float up out of him, and then to return.

  Now his mind returned bringing an image of Lillie and Khalil taking each and every old farm implement out of the old flue-curing barn and placing it somewhere safe until the place stood starkly empty. Rayne saw himself go into the empty barn in search of a plow yoke that was so heavy that only Rayne could shoulder it, as his great-grandfather had. But it was gone. They had opened the front and back doors. Air swept through, and light. The old flue-cure barn was revealed to be a well-built structure, too good to be wasted as a storage bin. Lillie came to him and kissed him, and there in the darkened church he felt an unexpected desire that made him close his eyes and smile.

  “You not gonna go see where the boy went?” Selma whispered.

  “No,” Rayne said. “He’s fine. I’ll go get your wheelchair.”

  “Not to the truck. You’re not gone leave me here alone.”

  “No, it’s right at the back of the church, ’member?”

  Khalil came skipping from the entrance to the side of the altar, swinging an Easter basket and obviously chewing candy as Rayne wheeled the chair from the rear. With a jump and a pivot, Khalil threw himself into the chair. Rayne tilted him back for a spin that spilled candy onto the floor. Rayne stopped the chair where Selma stood holding the pew with her left hand and pointing at the candy a few rows back. Khalil dove onto all fours to find dusty yellow Peeps and shiny foil eggs that rolled, wobbly, under the kneelers.

  In the truck, Khalil told them all about the scented sacristy, where he’d met a teenage acolyte who showed him the brass instrument they used to light incense and swung live coals during Easter service. Then the ladies in the sacristy reached into a closet and gave him an early Easter basket. He did not say that they’d told him to wait until Easter to eat the candy. “What did you do while you were waiting for me?”

  “I did what you’re supposed to do in church: I prayed.”

  Selma studied him in the dark. “Did you really?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Well, in case you didn’t, I prayed for you, too.”

  CHAPTER 22

  That night after Khalil went to sleep, Selma wrapped her coat over her bathrobe and used her walker on the gravel and rough field between her trailer and the old house, because she had to talk to Rayne. It was about the land, and it was complicated, and she’d been at fault. He was right to want to check up on her, she said. She only wished that he’d appeared a couple of generations earlier. He made her a cup of tea with milk and sugar, and he lit King’s box stove to warm her stiff joints.

  Selma knew all about the heir property laws, and she agreed with most of the people of her generation that holding land in common gave families a value that individual ownership could not provide. The problem was that this particular family had not worked together. Amos had left first, after their father Rome had come at him with a buggy whip. Selma was not saying that that was right, but it was hard to explain how things were then. “If you didn’t make a crop, you didn’t eat. There weren’t no Social Security. There weren’t no nothing. You wanted to eat—”

  Rayne finished her statement. “You worked.”

  “And if you didn’t pay your taxes, they took the land.”

  Since she’d been on the property alone, she’d borrowed against the Broadnax land, she’d told him that; but he did not know how much. He figured that she did not have the money to pay it back. And although she wanted to sell Broadnax to finance the heir property, he’d been hatching an idea to do a search of the family, write them, and lay out the scenario. Human nature being what it was, he figured that some of them would agree to sign a quitclaim; some would want to be paid a token; and some others might want to help.

  Rayne hoped that Selma would agree that the Broadnax ownership was in fact more stable than the heir property. He figured they could move the house and trailer for her, and that for a few years while they determined how to convert the heirs’ property into cash, he and Jones could manage the taxes and the fee for someone to come in and help her for as long as she could stay by herself. But first he’d have to attend to Selma’s story, especially since the documents were not straightforward.

  Selma continued: over the objections of King’s brother Richard, King insisted on sending Amos a share of the farm proceeds until Amos made good in Philadelphia. Because Amos had principles and a good heart, when he got on his feet up North, he wrote his equivalent of a quitclaim letter. In a way, Selma said, it was a shame, because Amos was King’s favorite brother and, between Amos and Richard, the harder worker and the more honest man.

  Although King and Richard could read and write, neither of them took the letter to the courthouse or had a formal quitclaim deed drawn up. The people who ran the courthouse did not appreciate landowning blacks. Coming in to do too much legal stuff attracted attention. And when they started paying attention to a black ma
n’s land and his paperwork, bad things happened. So, King and Richard kept the letter, and stopped sending Amos payments, although from time to time, one of his children would come for a summer, work, get paid, and live in one of the old shacks by the eight peach trees and two dwarf apples they called the Orchard.

  Then, after King died, Richard and Big Tootch lost heart. King had protected everyone, and without him, they were scared. Selma tried to get Richard to work with her to keep the land together. She hired JJ and they put in some crops, and she made a schedule for paying Richard some little something at least, but he told her that he had already signed a long-term lease with Pettiford.

  “What kind of long-term lease?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all Richard told me: it was a fifty-year lease he signed with his half of the land.”

  “But that’s what the Center is telling us, Nana; it’s not his half and King’s half. It’s still all the descendents of, who was it, Ma Bett and Rome? Those were Grandma Bett’s parents.”

  “Well, see, I don’t know nobody else.”

  “And I think that’s a problem.”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know. But you ain’t finished hearing what I do know.”

  “Sorry, Nana. Go on. But why Pettiford? Why’d Richard go to him? Why did you?”

  Pettiford had been the white man who backed King when he’d bought the Broadnax land years before, and then he’d been a godsend, Selma said, after King died. He’d run interference for her with the county, helped her file paperwork, and stood between her and Broadnax’s son, Fairlie, who had come back to the county, saying King had stolen his father’s land and wanting it back.

  Now, Selma said, Pettiford’s grandson owned the golf course next to them. The Needham heir property that Richard leased to them for fifty years was now part of the golf course. So, Selma figured that when fifty years was up, she’d go to Pettiford and see what kind of deal she could make with him. That was last year. How could she forget?

  Fifty years. Rayne could not believe that she’d have such a tickler file memory. Fifty years. She hadn’t seen any lease document, of course, because Richard had never consulted her. Luckily, the old grandfather Pettiford said that his one concern was to make sure that no bad development went up next to his land, and then next to his grandson’s golf course. So, Selma proposed that JJ and his family continue to live in Richard’s house, and he and a small crew could work on the golf course and continue to farm King’s land. Pettiford said fine, fine. Selma wanted to write something up, and he said he’d get his grandson to do it.

  “But after I didn’t hear from the devilish grandson, I called him, and he’s sayin there is no such thing as a lease on heir property, and that Richard sold the share to his grandfather, and now the Pettifords own that share, just the same as we do.”

  Selma’s eyes darted across the floor, as if she were checking all the places she’d searched over the years for the strongbox that was supposed to hold in it the documents that would protect the land, as she had vowed to do—and prayed to be allowed to do—for fifty years. “I took care of Richard’s children,” she said. “Richard and Tootch lef’ me here, Ray. They sold out and lef’ me here and never told me.”

  “You think it was a lease or a sale?”

  Rayne recalled the Center director telling him that a Pettiford was listed among the owners. He felt as he had when he’d agreed to partner with a large builder to bid for a job that required a certified black-owned company, and then, when they got the bid, and administrations changed, the owner found a loophole—and dropped RayneDance Construction through it. Rayne had turned down other, smaller jobs, because this one was to keep them working for a year. So he had no big job, and no smaller ones to fill in. He wondered whether the Pettifords could force a sale; whether they could have done so for fifty years.

  “And what about the loan on the Broadnax land?”

  “What about it?”

  “Nana, it’s me. It’s Ray.” He turned away from her to feed thin, short logs into the box stove.

  “You oiled the door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice it don’t squeak.” She watched the fire catch again. “Why’n’t you leave it open?” She took in the heat and cheer before she spoke again. “Over the years, when I need a little loan, I’d get it from Pettiford rather than go to a bank, because they want collateral, and the only collateral I got is Broadnax and the heir property. So, better the devil I know than the one I don’t.”

  “So, you’ve kept a running tab with him?”

  She did not answer, but also did not dispute it. “And then people from the Center came to church. And by the way, Pettiford’s son, the father of the golf course guy, he’s in the State House. He’s supposed to be such a big friend of the blacks here that he’s the one brought the preservation people to our church to talk to us.

  “So after that I went to Pettiford, the legislator. Made an appointment and had JJ carry me over to his office on Friday, when they come back from Columbia. I asked ’im: Did we have a lease or not? He told me, say: ‘As you know…’ And I interrupted him, and say: ‘I don’t know anything, ’cept how to work the land and take care of it and mind my business and pay taxes. And work for his father.’ That’s what I said. ‘That’s all I know, and look like it’s not enough.’

  “And so he stop the BS and say to me that there never was no lease arrangement possible with just one heir. Any lease, everybody had to agree to in writing. The only thing one heir could do was sell. He told me that. And then he admitted that the South Carolina lawmakers wrote it that way so that it would be that much easier for black people to lose the land than to keep it. And people like his father and himself, he said, tried to be good neighbors despite all that. And his father had tried very hard to be a good neighbor, especially after my husband had died, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “But he didn’t give it back.”

  “King told me.” Her watery eyes spilled tears down either side of her nose, and she talked faster. “He said, ‘Anything happen to me, keep your eye on Richard.’ He said, ‘Anything happen to me, call Amos, ’cause Amos got a mind like a steel trap, and he don’t take nothin offa nobody, which is why he couldn’t live with his stepfather Slim, who was a bully.’”

  “I thought it was his father who beat him.”

  “Nah. Bett said. Said it were that ol’ Slim. He thought he’d be all set up. Amos wouldn’t have it.”

  “So, it’s us family and the Pettifords. Are we related?”

  “I ain’t.”

  Rayne thought through the new facts. Jokingly, he said: “So we should get some of the golf course revenues.”

  “Shhh. Don’t say nothing. That’s why I can’t tell Tootch and them people in Philadelphia. They’ll think: ‘Oh, now we can get some more money offa this land that their daddy already done sold down the river.’ Lil Tootchie and that deadbeat husband of hers look for any handout there is. And the minute they start talking like that, the Pettiford grandson could force a sale.”

  “’Cause he’s a shareholder just like any Needham.”

  “’Cause they wrote the law.” Selma poured herself the rest of the tea. “Yes.”

  “Or he could demand the full payment of the loan on the Broadnax land, and in a month’s time”—he whistled—“it’s over.”

  “That’s why I wanted you to become a lawyer.”

  Rayne got up and cracked the window. Between the fire and the real estate tangle, he’d begun to sweat. He tied back his heavy hair.

  “Not too much, Ray, I was just gettin warm,” Selma said. “You cut off that hair, you won’t be so hot.”

  Rayne did not answer. He went into the bedroom where the sleeping Khalil sprawled sideways on the mattress, and changed from his flannel shirt into a RayneDance Construction T-shirt. Something occurred to him.

  “So, Nana, how much do you owe on the Broadnax land? I wish we’d stop calling it by his damn name; getting on my nerves to have
his name in my mouth.”

  Selma smiled, glad to have someone with whom to share the news that she could hardly stand to think about, and to hear him growl and stomp around the house, making the floorboards groan, like his great-grandfather, who also refused to refer to the land by its former owner’s name. I bought it, he said. It’s Needham land. What does old scary-cat Richard call this? My “King”dom. Damn right.

  “I owe eight thousand dollars.”

  “Well, that’s not the end of the world. You got any paperwork on that?”

  She shrugged. “Not like you and your new Heirs Property Center friends want. I figured that probably I’d sell it to him someday, and we’d just take it off the sale price.”

  “Jones knows about this?”

  “Mostly. Some.”

  “What’s he say?”

  “He said talk to you. He told me to tell you. So I wouldn’t die and leave you with a mess.”

  “How about you just don’t die for a while?”

  “I been holdin on to this for fifty years. I need some help.”

  Rayne sighed loudly. “I’ve gotta go home tomorrow after dinner.”

  Selma said: “I know, I know. You got to work, and the boy’s got school.”

  “And it’ll take me a while to wrap my mind around this.”

  “Well, it’s just between us now.”

  “No, it is not. It’s us and all the heirs and the whole goddamn Pettiford family. Sorry, Nana. You know that.” But when Rayne smiled into Selma’s beer-bottle eyes to soften his words, he could see that, having handed over the very old mess, she didn’t know that. She knew that she’d carried this alone, or nearly so, for more than fifty years. She’d contained the damage as best she could and kept the land. What she knew, he saw when she smiled back at him, was that she’d given over stewardship to the only person she thought worthy and capable. What she knew was that, lawyer or not, he’d find a way.

  To him it felt like a way out of no way, the ownership as fragile as each step Selma took: dragging her walker through gravel; going up the trailer steps backward on her bottom, and pulling herself up with both hands wrapped around the railing, over the threshold, using two hands on the doorjamb, and then cooking lemon–poppy seed pound cakes from her wheelchair to sell to B&Bs on Hilton Head. If everything remained exactly, precisely the same, and if she never made a mistake, the system would keep working. But if a screw came loose on the threshold, or a pebble rolled onto the bottom step, everything could change in an instant.