If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  “Down at the old place, I found myself walking most every night.”

  “You know why: ’cause King’s mindin the damn fences, wantin company. My sister wouldn’t have it any other way. How is she? Tell me the truth, Ray-Ban. How she doin? She don’t sound so strong.”

  “Ray-Ban?” Khalil asked.

  “Yes, Ray-Ban. And what shall I call you, Lil Man?”

  “Oh, my God!” Khalil said. “That’s what he calls me!” He pointed at Rayne.

  Jones squatted down to look Khalil in the eye, and asked quietly: “And what do you call my Ray-Ban?”

  Khalil shrugged.

  “Well, while we were down South, he called me Dad,” Rayne said, “which was nice.”

  Lillie started to speak, first to Khalil then to Rayne, but she stopped when Rayne threaded his arm around her waist.

  “See, this is what happens when Uncle Jones comes around. He makes you feel a little more courageous.”

  “Is that so?” Jones said, picking Khalil up in his one arm and tucking the other under.

  Khalil shook his head yes. Then he proceeded to give Jones a report on Selma’s physical welfare. He described how she worked from her wheelchair and walker in the kitchen and how she pulled in an eight-pound fish after sitting bundled in the cold. “Uncle Jones, Nana Selma is tough.”

  Jones sat down and balanced Khalil on his ropy thigh. “Boy, you don’t know the half of it. One day I’ll tell you just how tough she’s been in her life. But I bet you’re pretty tough, too, if you’re the kind of young person to notice such a thing.”

  Because it was a school night, and in order to give Rayne and his uncle privacy, Lillie excused herself and Khalil to go upstairs for his bath, which he took by himself while she reviewed the report he’d had to write about his vacation. After that, they visited Tomorrow-Land, which was their ten-minute review of the next day’s schedule. Then bedtime, where Lillie read to Khalil, and then, when she fell asleep midsentence, Khalil read to himself.

  ———

  When they left, Rayne told Jones how things stood. Jones slammed the table with his hand when he heard about Pettiford’s name listed among the heirs and his grandson as Selma’s erstwhile banker. “She put such a store by that damned Pettiford. Damnit. I was gonna take care of the taxes, by the way, but she said she had the damn money!”

  “She’s a proud woman.”

  “Proud? Jesus.” Jones stood, pacing just a few steps in the narrow parlor. “You know, you’re a grown man now, and it looks like it’s on you to handle the heir shit. I’ve got the damned eight thousand dollars to pay them back, and can do the taxes if she needs it, or we can do it together, if you want. You’re her heart.”

  “Uncle Jones, what am I gonna do with fifty-five acres of South Carolina backcountry? Not to mention the Needhams: a whole family of people who think light skin is a skill set.” It was his stock phrase for them. “Why do I want to go find these people?”

  Jones threw his head back and laughed. “But listen, Ray, before you write it off, lemme tell you some more about it.”

  Jones told Rayne that the reason he was able to work with racehorses was not because of his experience with their mares or mules or nana goats, but because King had taught him to aspire to best practices. They didn’t call it that back then, Jones said, but that’s what King searched for.

  King took Jones as a teenager to the agricultural expansion meetings for the same reason that he carried him to North Carolina twice to see a colored doctor: because he wanted him to understand that in matters of vital knowledge there existed higher authorities than county white folks. In the first talk that Jones remembers, a skinny Agriculture Department representative, a half-lame man with thick glasses, exhorted farmers to rotate crops.

  “Gentlemen,” he said to the colored men in the Baptist Church. “I hold here a leaflet, and I’ll leave some for you to take to your homes and read carefully. It’s called ‘What Is a Peanut?,’ written by one of your own, Dr. Carver.”

  King sent Jones to read it aloud to black farmers who couldn’t read. Ver’ interestin.

  A few farmers asked him to read it two or three times. Some made him come back and read it to their children and workers, so that the whole crew could discuss crop rotation. Mostly, however, they admired his reading.

  King took him to hear another Ag-man who begged farmers to refresh the soil with soybeans one year and peanuts the next for an infusion of “peanut nitroglycerine.” On the third year they could go back to cotton. King, Richard, and three other colored farmers did the experiment with one field each, and produced bumper cotton crops, right after the bad boll weevil years, that were the envy of the county.

  “You could see when they set bolls how big and fat they were. The bolls broke open so full and fluffy, they looked like the cotton people talked about back in slavery days, back when they said a tiny little woman could pick three hundred pounds a day.”

  So strong was the subsequent white interest in this rotation miracle that the chamber of commerce requested a visit from the Agricultural Adjustment Administrator each year. He visited black and white farmers separately. Although the colored farms were poor, and half the black people in the rooms owned not one hectare, they questioned him vigorously and debated loudly among themselves when he finished.

  The year before King died, however, the Ag-man made only one appointment—at the town hall. The meeting was supposed to be free and open to anyone. They had had what they used to call “dirty days,” with airborne topsoil clouding the sky like in photos of the dust storms that drove people out of Oklahoma and Kansas.

  “Crop rotation was the best thing the Ag-man could say to them. He’d been telling them every year. Always quoted the old 1899 National Soil Survey; I swear he said it like that, like people call on the King James Bible: ‘The 1899 National Soil Survey tells us, gentlemen, the Egyptians did it, the Romans, the Indians. What better authority?’

  “King liked to repeat that. Some of the soil guys tried to tell farmers about soil bodies and soluble salts. Most of them men, black and white, couldn’t read their own names—and here they come displayin irrigation blueprints. One guy told us when we chopped cotton, we should leave in half the weeds to help hold the topsoil. Those men would look at him like he had two heads.

  “But King’s favorite, the tall, skinny one, he just kept saying that if they could do just one thing that would do the most good—‘for your families, men, and for America!,’ that’s how he talked, like an old radio announcer—it would be: crop rotation!

  “And, by the way,” Jones said, “he stopped at our place every year to see what King had done. He’d gimp out his old Studebaker and start to shoutin. ‘Soybeans—soybeans! Look at you standing in clumps like schoolboys in the yard!’ He just stood there talking to ’em.”

  Jones took the Ag-man around on the little hay wagon so that he could see the peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pecan trees. Of course there wasn’t much market for them. Which the big white farmers knew. If everybody grew sweet potatoes, everybody’d go broke.

  “But that white man almost cried when they turned on the Town Road and saw Selma’s three little goats on Needham’s hill. It meant that someone was listening to his diatribe about the most efficient use of hillsides in animal husbandry versus the waste of hog management. And he saw what we’d started to do with Broadnax’s nasty-ass hog operation.”

  Rayne had been listening with fading attention. As a contractor, he found interest in the land management, but what Jones was telling him—that King sought out and practiced crop rotation as well as mentorship—these were things that Rayne already knew. “You’re telling me why this land should not be sold. That what you’re telling me?”

  “Yeah, I am. I know, it’s all the way uptown to come back downtown, but humor me. For years, I have only been able to talk to Jared about this, and he doesn’t know the players. He doesn’t know the land and the town hall and the crazy package store at the bottom of th
e Church Road.

  “Listen, then we drove right behind the Ag-man to the town hall meeting. Outside, Fairlie Broadnax barred the door to King and a handful of others. King was trying to assess the mood of the white men milling around. Broadnax had just come back to town, and everybody knew him to be a son of a bitch, but had they given him any authority there?”

  As Jones remembered, it was old man Pettiford who came out and suggested gently that they should leave—he had no objections, but not everyone was so neighborly as we’d all hope. He said stuff like that. So King backed off. For one thing, he’d had the factory recruiter from Philadelphia come through recently, and for another thing, he was just getting ready to take his son to report to the army. It was breaking his heart to do it, and Jones thought that he’d lost some of his usual confidence. Jones remembered walking away and hearing Broadnax say: “Don’t look like he needs no advice, ’cause he’s the nigger knows everything there is to know, ’cept how to be careful.”

  Rayne felt blood pumping in his temples. “Why you tell me this shit, Jones?”

  “Because I can’t stand keeping all these damn secrets. And we had nothing to go on, and I only knew what I saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw King go to Fairlie and offer him the land back for what King paid his father, plus improvements. That was a big concession, because he believed that you should never sell land. And they’d worked awfully hard on that nasty ten or fifteen acres. He figured that it was better to sell, though, if Fairlie was going to keep sniffing around and agitating.

  “So, before Junior goes into the army, he makes it his mission to finish off the Broadnax field, which you couldn’t farm worth a damn, because it was full of tree stumps that Old Broadnax never dug out. And we all work on it like dogs, just to be with Junior before he goes, and we’re thinking that this’ll help sell it and get Fairlie off his back. Even Bobo came out and helped at, like, five years old or something. He was big like you and King, and by this time, he was a real trooper. He could fetch and carry.

  “Funny the things you remember. I remember that Bobo got brown as a nut. And I remember that the Ag-man arranged for King to be sent seed and instructions to try fava beans as a winter cover crop.

  “And we all asked: ‘How you cook ’em?’ and finally Selma and me went to the library and found out: Just like any beans. Dry ’em. Store ’em, and boil ’em.

  “Funny. They was so big…

  “The field was almost done when it was time for Junior to go. By then Fairlie had rejected King’s offer to buy back the Broadnax field. He sent word that since King had cheated his father, he owed it to him to restore the property free of charge. King just ignored him.

  “Then, he went to Columbia for Junior to report, and I worked on the stumps in the field, and some of them were sitting right next to the holes they’d come out of. And Fairlie’s daughter came into the field. I’m supposing her father told her that it was their homestead, and she got herself caught underneath one of the stumps, and Selma and I went into town to get someone to help.” He made a big sigh.

  “Where was Bobo?” Rayne asked. “Where was he?”

  “With King. King took ’im with ’im. He went along, because they were going to stop and buy chicks for Selma. They would get different strains and mate ’em to get their own hybrids. And Bobo was gonna get some of his own to raise. They were gonna be his first little business.”

  “Uncle Jones, what did you see?”

  “Early the morning he came back, I saw the truck on fire. I saw the smoke, actually, from where I was comin out of the barn. I saw the smoke. So I started running.

  “And I heard a shot. When you get all the way down to the road, it turns, and you can’t see the field for the stand of oaks there, and I tried to cut through, and Greenie, this little white man who bought eggs from us, Greenie hears me, and he comes crashing through the timber there, pushing me and tellin me to go back, and I start to push past him—I can hear the fire and men ahead of me—and he looks up over my shoulder, and right then somebody gives me a gun butt or sompin like that on the side of the head.” Jones points to the uneven scar on his temple. “When I woke up, I was on a train north.

  “And when I called my sister a couple days later, she told me that King was dead.”

  “What happened to Greenie?”

  “Selma said he left. He had family somewhere. Never came back.”

  Lillie had returned and was sitting on the mission bench where they dumped backpacks and bags on the wall by the vestibule. “Selma stayed,” she said simply.

  Jones nodded. “Yep. Since I was up here, I came to find Amos. He’d made good here. He was King’s favorite. When I told him King was dead, he stood on his steps on Girard Avenue and cried like a baby.

  “Then him and Mary went down to get Selma. Three times, she unlatched the car door and tried to roll herself out onto the road. So after the third time, they just turned around and took ’er back. I mean, what else you gonna do? Keep driving and let her roll out on the highway and kill ’erself?

  “Richard and Mary was the shocker. They left, and my little sister’s been there ever since.”

  Lillie came to sit next to Rayne on the couch and suggested that Jones should come with them to Bucks County the next night.

  “For what?” Jones asked. “I was gonna go back, but I’m good for another day if you need me.”

  “Well, if I’m supposed to start contacting this family…”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  CHAPTER 25

  They were late because of the weather. Jack Thompson sat on the window seat—his oxygen tubing extension barely reached—watching ice drops rain from the sky. To save his breath for company, he snapped his fingers when Rayne’s truck turned into the semicircular driveway.

  Jewell jumped into the air an inch or two as she stepped away from the lemon vinaigrette she was whipping, having decided to add a tablespoon of zest to keep her hands busy. She ran across the room in her new mules, bought for the occasion, and checked her face in the mirror as she went, noting, although there was nothing she could do about it, the forked line of tension between her eyebrows. Eyebrowns, Lonnie used to call them, back when every eyebrow in her life and his was, in fact, black or brown. Outside, in the cold, they were chatting as they came out of the cab, slamming doors. Lillie and Jones saw her, but stood back to let Rayne go first.

  He handed his umbrella to Lillie and reached his hand out to Jewell’s. They studied each other’s hands and face in the yellow porch light before Rayne opened his free arm to beckon her into his chest. Lillie thought she saw Jewell looking for something; some back-of-the-hand was what she appeared to expect, but instead she stepped into the empty space in Rayne’s large arms that seemed to have been waiting for her. Lillie observed each movement, because she believed that this relationship had to be found, even if only to be rejected, for Rayne to turn back to her and Khalil and welcome them in closer. She wouldn’t tell him, directly, but it was why she’d volunteered to find an address, even after her girlfriend Temika warned her of the risks.

  “Whoa,” Rayne said. He felt his mother shaking her head against his coat. He memorized the feeling, so that it would be there for him later.

  “On the train,” she said, “you put your head against me.” Jewell hated herself for bringing up that moment of betrayal, but it was all she could think of, and how their roles were reversed: that she had been bigger, and had held him and gone away, and that now he, the son, was so much larger than she, and holding her, stepping into her life, her home, filling her with hope, as the visiting nurse sometimes said, where she hadn’t known she was hopeless.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. There is nothing I can say,” she said into his chest.

  “No,” he said. “Me neither.”

  It was a few minutes before Jewell turned to Lillie and thanked her for her help. When she saw Jones, she made a little yelp and then cried.


  “Yo, you didn’t cry for me,” Rayne said, teasing.

  “That’s because you’re not eighty years old,” Jones said.

  “You’re not either,” Jewell said. “Look at you; it’s impossible.”

  “Seventy’s the new fifty,” Jones said. “Hey, baby. I’m holdin on to that one.”

  “So what’s that make you?”

  “Alive!” Jones said. “Vertical. Still here!” He laughed into the house and met Jack, who stood, shook their hands, and asked them to forgive his oxygen tubing.

  “Man,” Jones said. “This is your house. I’m glad you let a crude old cuss like me come in. I told Rayne last night: I work with animals, man, and it doesn’t do my manners any good at all.”

  Then Jack hugged Lillie, whose big hair got caught in the hinge of his glasses, although for a moment, they couldn’t figure out whether it was the glasses or the tubing. Once untangled, Jack sat heavily into his long chair.

  Rayne couldn’t help laughing, which gave the rest permission. To his mother he said: “How well did you prepare your husband? Like add water and get instant black rels?”

  Lillie had brought him a gift bag full of vitamins and supplements, which she began to unpack.

  “These are special African-American family supplements?” Jack ventured quietly.

  “Yes,” Lillie said. “And you’re gonna need all of ’em!”

  She brought him salve that she said eased the dryness in the nose that Jewell had mentioned on the phone, and later she wanted to check his oxygen machine. For laughs, she’d also brought a foot glove on which were marked acupressure massage points to help various parts of the body, including lungs and heart.

  “We’ve been needing a nurse in the family,” Jack said. He smiled and closed his eyes.

  Lillie said: “For something specific?”

  “Mexico.”

  “Jack!” Jewell heard him from across the room where she was making drinks for Jones and Ray.