If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  When the phone rang that night, it was Jones, calling on Easter eve to wish them a happy Easter, in order not to miss them at church or interrupt the ham dinner he knew would follow directly. In answer to Jones’s usual opening, which Rayne could hear from across the table: “Hey, little sis, how’s my girl?” Selma answered: “Oh, I’m here by the grace of God—and bein careful.”

  The tension in Selma’s face relaxed, and by the time she passed the phone to Rayne, she appeared positively happy. Jones surprised Rayne by saying that he’d be at a horse farm outside Philadelphia the next week, and would love to meet up. Jared had insisted he get a cell phone, so he gave Rayne the number and promised to call with exact details in a day or two.

  “Well, Ray, I hate for you to leave,” Selma said, standing, bent over, rubbing first one hip and then the other.

  “I’m not gone yet.”

  She accepted the coat he held behind her, slipping on first one arm and then the other. “I should just say: ‘That’s the way of the world.’”

  “No, let’s just enjoy the last swig of tea and the fire, and our little walk across the driveway.”

  She obliged by turning her cup up to her head. “Don’t it do you good to hear Jones? That’s just how I feel when I’m down here and you call. Just like that. My Big Ole Ray of Sunshine, I say…”

  They washed the cups. A light rain was falling again, so Rayne told Selma to wait while he got his golf umbrella from the truck. When he returned, instead of stepping out, she motioned him in. “You think you can get to all of ’em? We haven’t spoken to some of ’em in years. You can get to Bobo, but what about the others? I mean, where Amos’s children are I don’t know. And what if Bett wasn’t the only child to survive?”

  “I stay in touch with Binky. She’s great, actually.”

  Selma looked past him and said: “Fairlie Broadnax moved back here after he didn’t make it up in Ohio. His father had died, and he come here expecting to inherit the fifteen acres his father had sold to King a few months earlier. What Fairlie thought he could do with fifteen acres, and not being a farmer, I can’t tell you. And I can’t tell you what they said or didn’t say to him to explain it.

  “I do know that King paid the old man in cash. And I know that Fairlie’s own brother Butch carried Broadnax to the bank to deposit the money. So how can Fairlie not have known?

  “But everything was legal. Even when he went to the county courthouse trying to find some loophole, they told him there was none. How I know that is that Pettiford told King, and he told him to keep top eye open.”

  That’s when King got the strongbox, Selma said, because he knew that the same white people who were glad to see Old Broadnax’s sloppy hog operation cleaned up would just as quickly turn when the prodigal son appeared: poor Fairlie, the firstborn cheated out of his homecoming by that big, arrogant red nigger, which was how they saw him. He saw it coming, Selma said.

  And he was arrogant; so what? The whole family was, right down from Grandma Bett, who would always quote Paul’s letter to the Romans, which she called his letter to Rome, using her husband’s name: “In Christ you are not slaves, but sons, and if sons, then heirs.”

  That’s what this heirs property had been all about, Selma said. Nobody cared anymore about the land, and they moved away, just like nobody cared anymore about getting married. And what did they have? Rootless children, floating around, like the Needhams would’ve had…

  “Without you,” he said before they stepped out. “I know that, Nana. They got little monkeys in the zoo just roll up and die without their mothers. I know you saved my life.”

  She patted his arm. “Well, you wa’n’t no monkey, which is good.”

  They laughed, and he walked her to her trailer in the rain. When they got to her steps, they stopped while she collected the energy to mount them going forward, not on her bottom, as she would have done had she been alone. She talked, as if to postpone the physical challenge. “This time tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll be back with your girl.”

  “Yeah, that’ll be nice,” he said.

  “Do me a favor, Ray. I don’t know how else to say it: if y’all make a baby, please get married. Please don’t just have ’em and then he gotta run all over the world tryin to find you, and I can’t get to see ’im without going through some Chinee girl I don’t even know.”

  “She’s half Philippine and half black, and we are not making babies. Okay. No babies.”

  Selma didn’t answer as she climbed the steps, which were too narrow for them to take together. He walked behind and held the umbrella over her as best he could. Rain came into his face. In the tiny trailer porch light, she became a shadow.

  Inside the trailer, once they’d stripped her wet coat and sat her back into her wheelchair, Rayne wiped his eyes with the bottom of his T-shirt and bent to kiss Selma good night.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Come on, Ray?” She reached up and pulled one of his locks. “Ding dong. Why you not making no babies? Why not? That’s why you young. I bet them drug boys out in the road makin babies. Whatchoo gonna do? Wait till y’all too old, like all these white people on TV?”

  “Good night, Nana.”

  “I’m not always wrong, you know.”

  “I do know that.”

  “Good.”

  ———

  Rather than go inside, he walked the boundaries again. Somewhere, a burning field was being rained out, and the charred, wet smell came to him on the wind; or maybe he was remembering. He navigated clumps of dirt pushed up by JJ’s early, haphazard plowing, and under the rainy sky, the wet fences guided his tentative steps. He wondered again, as he had at first manhood: How could it be that a man could own earth without paying for it? He shook his head in the dark. He had not been raised to be an heir. Eight thousand dollars of loan he could handle; the motherless and bitter Bobo in jail, he could visit; less, rather than more, was his default setting. In their few recent conversations, Jewell had signified something similar. And Lillie: Was this the more that she wanted, the push he’d felt and resisted? On this land, they’d been talking, but not living, the spirit of adoption for generations: If sons, then heirs.

  This laying down of the balls of his feet on the earth, and breathing deeply of burned-out ambition and yellow jessamine; this aching for fertility and laughter and love; now that he’d found his mother, could he accept the complicated inheritance of being her son?

  Fear and rain dripped down his collar. What had seemed so solid could slip away with the filing of a document. Then they’d have ten days to try to buy off the owner of a golf course and his state rep father and paternalistic ninety-year-old grandfather. Thirty days more to outbid them.

  Standing in the east field, near the golf course, where he could smell the fertilizers, he called Lillie. “Hey, baby,” he said in greeting, “everything down here is, like, it’s pretty fucked up.”

  “Hey, Ray, listen,” she answered quietly. “I’m over here at Temika’s house. Her baby’s just back from oncology.”

  “God, I forgot.”

  “The baby’s taking treatments like a champ. Temika, too. You want me to call you in a little bit, so we can talk?”

  “No. You hang with your friend. I’ll talk to you when I get home.”

  “Well, here,” she said, “I’ll go in the other room, and you can talk to me now.”

  “Naw, that’s all right. Goddamn, how’s a two-year-old get cancer?”

  “Born with it. They’re lucky they found out. But they’re trying to be normal. So she’s doing my hair.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “’Cause I gotta wear it up in the hospital. Plus, we thought we’d do something special for you. And, listen, if the baby’s hair all falls out, we might just cut ours, like, in solidarity.”

  “Are you cutting it now?”

  “You sound different. No, I’m not cutting it yet.”

  “Good. So I can come home and
mess it up.”

  “I hope so.”

  ———

  Every few days that summer before he died, King Needham checked his fences, because alert was not good enough. Bobo told Rayne these things. When Rayne was a boy, he told him, and then he told him again later, in that stark room where prisoners and families “met.” Bobo told him because he himself had not watched carefully enough… Vigilance had to be a running song of attention. It should have been both vocation and amusement.

  “Come on, boys, best repair today gets a pie.” King’d say crazy stuff like that. Like, “No, I ain’t jokin. Custard pie. I’ll make it my damn self… Second peach bough down in a month, i’n’t? Come on, boys, wha’s she need? Talking to you in Tree. Wha’s she saying? Lookit all the fruit: too much, too small; lookit the leaves. Do she have to throw all ’er limbs on the ground fore somebody will have the heart to prune ’er back? Not too hard… We take these old ones. Here. Here. And here. Clean cuts. And tar the stumps. Don’t leave ’er raw. Not now. After she fruits.

  “Jonesey, how’s our mule?”

  ———

  Rayne wanted to lie down on a clean, dry bed and curl his body around Lillie. He wanted to smell her freshly washed hair and feel the soles of her feet on his shins. And yes, he realized with some chagrin, he did want to make a baby with her. He wanted to watch her grow big and feel it jump under his hands when he pulled her close. Of course he did. How had he not admitted to himself how much he wanted life to run through him?

  CHAPTER 23

  On Easter morning, they drove to church early so that Selma could get seated without trouble. Outside the church, the teenage acolyte whom Khalil had met on Thursday motioned to him to come to the side door where they were lighting the incense. Rayne let Khalil climb out of the truck and shouted to the acolyte: “You’ll send ’im in to us before the service?”

  In the chilly breeze the acolyte’s white vestments blew wide. They looked as if they might lift off and float away. “Oh, yes, sir. Mos’ def. We’re done in five minutes. I’ll send ’im back to the ushers in the narthex.”

  Selma turned to Rayne. “That boy don’t know a narthex from a hole in the wall.”

  “I keep telling you, Nana, it’s just a church, and he’s been here before. Besides, he hasn’t been around any kids this whole week.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  She seemed agitated. Rayne attributed it to the number of people thronging in now, dressed, fussy, many, like him, essentially unchurched and not sure what to do. Knowing this, they’d decided that she’d stay in her wheelchair throughout, rather than park it at the rear of the church and let her venture to walk in. Rayne unpacked at the loading zone in front of the church. He helped her into the chair and gave her her pocketbook before attaching the footrests and pushing her up the ramp and to the row where a pew had been removed to make room for wheelchairs.

  “Does Cornbread know where to come?” She’d begun to give Khalil nicknames: Cornbread, K-boy, Muffin-man.

  “Yeah, hold on.” Rayne asked one of the ushers to look out for his son, and then asked for two folding chairs so that they could sit next to Selma. For the next ten minutes, Rayne followed one person and then another looking for the chairs, which he brought, only to find two other companions for handicapped worshippers asking the same thing. When he began to move his truck from the loading zone, he saw in his rearview mirror Khalil running behind him. Rayne stopped in the narrow street, drawing beeped horns and gesticulations from the cars behind him. When Khalil caught up, he clambered into the truck and laid himself sideways on the seat. He smelled like incense, and he was wheezing.

  “Asthma?”

  Khalil nodded.

  “Shit. Sorry.” Rayne studied the boy for clues. “Did that running get you?”

  “Nah, I run way more than that at school. It’s not bad. I can wait. I went into the little room with them with the charcoal and the incense, and they let me help twirl it around to get it going. I think maybe I breathed in too much.”

  Rayne gave Khalil a piggyback to the church. It was nearly full. The ushers were beside themselves. Selma was looking around. Rayne nodded, pointed her out to Khalil. He bent down to Khalil, speaking next to his ear, hair falling heavily next to their faces. He pushed it back, and Khalil held a lock from getting into his eye: “Look, Lil Man,” he said. “Here’s what you do. You go sit next to Nana Selma, okay, right there in the chair with her pocketbook. I’m going home for your inhalers.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No, I really need you to stay with Nana. Tell ’er I’ll be back in forty minutes.”

  Rayne watched Khalil walk to her just ahead of the procession, and whisper the plan. He smiled at an usher, a trim grandmotherly lady in a gray-and-pink pantsuit who called him back. She was reaching into her pocketbook.

  “Here,” she said, “for when you come back in here.” She handed him an elastic. He’d never used one, but he grinned and slipped it onto his locks at the base of his neck. Then, laughing, he loped to the truck.

  Lillie was calling. “Hey, babe,” Rayne answered.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Mostly. Khalil’s got some wheezing this morning, just started up, so I’m on my way back to the house for his inhalers. Should be back there in half an hour.”

  Lillie did not answer.

  “Listen, baby, he started wheezing no more than ten minutes ago, and I’ll have him taken care of fast as I can.”

  “I called because I realized that it was this day last year when he had his first attack. So I had a hunch. Which is why I called. He’ll be okay. If you catch it in the first hour or so, you can usually get on top of it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll do that.”

  “I can hear the truck burnin up the road. Thanks, Mr. Rayne. You got my little guy covered, I’m mighty grateful.”

  “How grateful you gonna be?”

  She laughed. “Just come on home and see. But first you’ve got to bring my son back from all that damned fresh country air.”

  “You know it could be. All kinds of allergens that he probably hasn’t encountered before. Not to mention the house really does have mold problems. That’s what I’m thinking it may be.”

  “Could be an anniversary. Something he’s intuited.”

  “From where?”

  “Us, or his grandparents. It’s folk wisdom.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe too folksy for me.”

  “Yeah, my nursing mentor, too. She said not to say stuff like that in my oral exam. I think holistic, and they think, like, hocus-pocus… You tell Nana Selma about your mother?”

  “No, I haven’t, and I feel bad about it. But we’ve been talking about her land situation, and it’s complicated. So that’s been plenty.”

  “Can you sell it?”

  “Short answer?”

  “Yeah, for now, short answer.”

  “No.”

  “Wow.” She sucked her teeth. “Wow. Okay. After church, you’ll eat and come home?… And bring Khalil.”

  “Right away. I’d like to see me try to come home alone.”

  “On second thought, why don’t you take a nap first?”

  ———

  They did. After dinner in the old house, and another dose of meds for Khalil, Selma suggested that man and boy stretch out on the bed while she washed up dishes. In an hour and a half, when Rayne woke, brushed his teeth, and carried their bags to the car, Selma had packed individual bags of chips, apples, lemon–poppy seed cake, and ham sandwiches made from dinner rolls into the cooler underneath two Ziploc bags of ice cubes. She’d saved and rinsed four of their original water bottles, and refilled them: two with milk, two with water. And, in a Ziploc bag, one small, round corn bread for Khalil to take to school for lunch the next week.

  Khalil’s breathing had returned nearly to normal, and Rayne felt less of his usual anxiety about leaving. For one thing, he’d be talking to her more about the property. And for another, he’d p
romised to visit every month, one weekend out of four. He had no idea how he’d do it; but when he said to tell him what she really wanted that’s what she’d asked. At least he would no longer feel guilty about not being there.

  For her part, Selma waved from her trailer window, exhausted, but more at peace than she’d been in a year. She’d transferred some of the weight of the place, and of figuring out what to do, and it made her lighter. It took generations to build, she thought, and only a moment to tear down.

  It was nice this year to have Easter with Rayne and the lovely new boy. And although she didn’t talk about it much to anyone, it was especially good to have their company on this weekend. Easter was early this year, so she hadn’t been alone on the anniversary of the day that Bobo and Jewell had both left her and the land twenty-five years before.

  She opened the strongbox again, even though she could not stand to read any of the papers. But she had found King’s first wedding band, which he put away when he’d married Selma. She figured it would probably fit Rayne.

  CHAPTER 24

  When Jones stepped into Lillie’s little house, he and Rayne filled the room. Lillie and Khalil stepped back. The two men embraced and shouted. They jumped up and down together, reared back on their heels, eyed each other, and hugged again and again. Thin, dark, as tall as Rayne, with a bald head and a tiny gold stud in one ear, Jones looked, as Khalil later said, like a black Mr. Clean, old, but nowhere near his eighty-three years.

  “Keep workin out of doors, man,” he said in answer to Rayne’s question: How to stay young? “Don’t stop, and whatsoever you do, don’t go in the house and sit down. That shit’ll kill ya.”