If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  “It’s better than when I was doing tattoos,” Lillie said. “People would just go into their wallets and pull out some drawing on a piece of lined paper they’d had since ninth grade. And I’m like, ‘Are you serious? This piece of crap you did before you had facial hair?’ What do you expect I’m gonna say: ‘I’ve never seen artistic creation like this before in my entire life? Pull up your sleeve?’

  “But Mexico. I mean Mexico makes sense.”

  Jones said: “Tonight, man. I’ma call Jared and tell ’im to book us something. Tomorrow morning: let y’all go home and pick up the kid…”

  Rayne said: “I guess she feels at home.”

  “A tattoo,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Gee. I don’t have an image ready to go.”

  “You could get a heart with my name in it,” Jewell said.

  “Or you could get this new thing the football players are doing, man,” Rayne said, with an edge of sharpness in his voice. “Scarification.”

  Lillie hadn’t told Rayne that the player had come back to the shop every night that week for a complicated image that he wanted punctuated, or skin-embroidered, she called it, with scarification. He’d paid $1,500 each night; out of which she got $1,000 times five. He paid in cash and she put the money in her drawer just slightly anxious, meaning to tell Rayne but forgetting. The player had indeed behaved seductively, asked her out, and brought a signed football for Khalil, which she also had not revealed.

  “Scarification I already have,” Jack said. “I got it last time, fifteen years ago.”

  “Do not show it!” Jewell said. “Talk about pulling up your shirt. He’ll just do it anywhere.”

  “It’s a whopper,” Jack said.

  “Hey, you want us to look at it, we’ll look at it,” Jones said.

  “You want to go to Mexico?” Lillie asked.

  Jack smiled and nodded. “Very silly to think I could pull it off. Jewell humored me as far as possible. We’ve gone every Easter for years. So, I’ve been thinking about it, of course.”

  “You didn’t see the Passion, did you?”

  Jack nodded.

  “My mother went to one in the Philippines, and she always talked about it like… a mystery. What was it like for you?” Lillie asked.

  “Well, now she’s done it,” Jewell said.

  “We walked miles behind someone who considered it the greatest honor of his life to play Jesus.”

  “Play Jesus?” Jones asked.

  Jack closed his eyes again as if to resee the scene. He spoke quietly. “We all walked behind him while he carried the cross. Hundreds and hundreds, in a thousand different stages of belief, from people who had ground glass into their backs and were flagellating themselves to tourists like us with bottled water.

  “You know, you know what is going to happen, but you almost cannot believe it.” He stopped to collect the memories and to catch his breath.

  Jewell continued for him. “And then, we carry on, carry on. You just walk and walk until you’re exhausted, but you cannot stop. I don’t quite know what Jack was thinking we’d do this time. But it’s inexorable. It’s as if once you start, the thing must be accomplished. Almost everyone around you was crying, and they were saying things and praying in Spanish. It was so hot, and hundreds of us, thousands, keep walking. Half of them were barefoot. Some were sick. People were always sick. One man’s feet started to bleed.

  “Jesus was up ahead of us. That was the first look of him I’d caught, and I’ll never forget it. Damned if he wasn’t dragging the cross. It was so hot, and I knew his feet were bleeding, and probably his hands, too, and he kept going, and we just trailed along with the crying women and dizzy from the sun.”

  “And you know what happened?” Jack said. “I found myself feeling, like, a crazy love for the man. I loved him like you should love your parents and your brother and sister. Most of us don’t, but at that moment, I did. My parents had not been good people.” He stopped and looked around. “I’m afraid that I’ve gotten started down this road before I realized what bad taste it’s in. But I’m telling you that the only other time I knew love like this that I was sure of was for Jewell. And then I didn’t know it, except that I knew I wanted to keep feeling it.”

  “They didn’t, um, really crucify him, did they, speaking of big love?” Jones asked.

  “Yeah, they did,” Jack answered. “Every year. Last week, I lay here and thought about it.”

  “They didn’t… nail his hands?” Jones asked more specifically. He was drinking Kentucky bourbon, making appreciative nods to Jewell after every tiny sip.

  “They nailed his hands and his feet.”

  “Crazy-ass Mexicans!”

  “Filipinos do it, too,” Lillie said.

  “Hey, don’t want to leave them out. Crazy-ass Filipinos. Did you see this thing happen?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we saw it,” Jack said. “Everything I felt that day I’m putting into this tattoo design. Ancient people thought you could learn from the harmony of design. That’s it, see, we’re trying to achieve harmony and balance.”

  Lillie looked at Rayne with panic. “You do have a tattoo design?”

  “He’s trying to help restore the balance,” Jewell said. “So am I. So are you. That’s why we think you’ll agree when you see the design he’s done. And when people see this on his body, it will go into them along with their awe…”

  “I don’t think I’m worthy,” Jack said, and then stifled a laugh in order not to choke himself.

  “You two had me going for a minute,” Jones said. “I’m not drinking any more of this Kentucky shit.”

  “And I thought, oh, no, right after I said all those mean things about people’s designs,” Lillie said.

  She thought about the football player’s long, elegant spine. The cross stayed straight. It folded into his back and folded out. The crossbar gave just a hint of its terrible weight. She’d hung a crown of thorns over the center, and driven nails into the ends, just where the feet would be. But the cross was empty. The body had been taken away. The flesh involved was the player’s, a smooth sacrifice, beaded up into wood grain by the scarification. He’d expressed a desire for her to agree to put into the crown of thorn’s tiny scars, traces of his mother’s ashes that he claimed to have outside in his Hummer. She’d declined.

  In a way, Lillie thought, it was good that he’d gone over the line with her. She had decided to stop scarification sooner rather than later. No need to bother Rayne about it. She could simply stop now.

  CHAPTER 26

  At the end of the evening, when Rayne gave Jewell a summary of the heir property laws and what he thought were their options in light of Selma’s advanced age, they were surprised to hear her say vehemently: “You can’t sell it.”

  “I know it seems ridiculous,” she said, clearing the plates, “considering that I’ve been nowhere in sight. But think about it, Selma raised the whole family, and we owe her.”

  “We owe it to her to take care of her and see that she’s safe and warm,” Rayne said. “But do we owe it to her to hold on to the land? And, I hate to say it, but this has been working on me since you said it, Uncle Jones: How can I wrap my mind around the fact that King may have been murdered and Selma’s just livin with the fact. I can’t get past that.”

  “Jones, you think Broadnax did it, that he got a group together and ambushed King?” Lillie asked it, point-blank.

  “I have no proof.”

  “Except that when you got close some white guy knocked you upside your head and threw you on a train,” Rayne said.

  “Well, somebody hit me. Since I didn’t see ’im, I can’t say for sure he was white. But whoe’er it was put money into my hand, too. The hundred-dollar bill I gave you when you started your business? That’s what was in my hand when I came to.”

  “Oh, shit, Jones. Jesus. That was what they put in your hand?” Rayne stood and walked from one end of the room to the other. Jones had called it “King’s last gift” to him, and had gi
ven it to Rayne when he’d first started out with a twenty-year-old truck, five sledgehammers, and a crew of three ex-cons and the girlfriend of one of them, who could pull a day’s work and read for them—McDonald’s menus, directions, road signs. The bill had blessed the business. Rayne had framed it and hung it in his apartment, only taking it down when he moved in with Lillie.

  He walked into the cold sun parlor and looked out into the mid-Atlantic forest encircling the semicircular lawn. “Fuck!”

  Jones followed him into the cold, dark room. Rayne turned and started to ask: “Why didn’t you…?”

  In the dark, Jones’s face took on a masklike stillness. He spoke with sudden quiet fury. “Why didn’t I what? Take my black self back down there in the 1940s and track down his killers?

  “You tell me. I don’t think you fuckin take me seriously. The one black man who had ever been able to protect me was dead. I couldn’t even look at his barn without bawling. And the war was on, and I thought I could get away from death at home by going to war. How was I to know? I was a kid. So I go to the army and continue pretending to be straight, and they make me a man, which means more goddamn death. And when I went down and saw my brokenhearted sister and our little shack, it was all I could do to visit, and help her for a season, but she wouldn’t leave; she wouldn’t fuckin leave, Rayne, and I couldn’t stay.

  “You see that damn wintry mix comin down? Can you make it stop? If you go out there and stand out in the weather all night and freeze to death by the side of the road, will that make it stop? Go on, try it.”

  “I’m sorry, Jones,” Rayne said.

  “And I ain’t even related. I’m not an heir. You’re the heir and you wanna sell the place. You want to get rid of it, and you haven’t even tried being an heir. Try it, buddy. See how you like it. There’s a lotta ways to man up.”

  Rayne had been so busy tiptoeing around where he and his mother might hit trip wires of rage that he’d been careless with Jones. “Uncle Jones, man, I said I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, Ray. But I just come up here and sit in the nice place drinkin Henry McKenna, and I guess I don’t want to be second-guessed. I said I’ma pay off the loan.”

  “We’ll work together on the loan.”

  “No, I said I’d pay for it. You got kids. I don’t have any kids.”

  Jewell had come to the door of the sun parlor.

  “We can help. We don’t have kids either.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Rayne said.

  “Oh, my Lord.”

  “No more talking by Jewelly tonight,” Jack said to Lillie. The two of them had stayed in the room, but could hear.

  “No, you save your money,” Jones said. “You may have to help some other way. Can we get back to the light? I feel like I been in the dark all my life.”

  When they returned, Jack, who’d been lying in his long chair with his eyes closed, said quietly: “You know, I’ve been wondering whether or not maybe this Pettiford might have bought Richard’s share in order to keep Broadnax out. In the tobacco industry, I remember seeing that sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lillie. The others hadn’t paid him much attention.

  “This is a white man thinking he’s protecting black people. Listen: these various states’ laws—they were all different, and all just as ossifyingly complicated. What they had in common, though, was that they were made to keep black farmers from getting equal treatment. Schools, loans, lands, water, inheritance, anything you could legislate. You read these cases, and you can see the pattern.

  “And sometimes, you’d find that the rare white farmer would sign for a black person, or go to the bank and take out money to loan him. Sometimes, they put their names on the deed—you follow me?—and then take out a separate loan on the black farmer’s land. The problem, of course, came with inheritance. When the white father died, his son may not have had the same tender feelings.”

  “I’m glad you all are here, because it makes me mad just thinking about it,” Jones said. His cell phone rang. The ringtone was the sound of a horse’s neigh. “Jared got me this damned thing,” he said, taking it out of his pocket and squinting at the number. “Of course, I don’t know why I’m looking, because nobody calls me on it but him. He might be callin about this very thing, because I asked him to look up for me about the devilish Broadnax…”

  “Uncle Jones, answer the phone!” Lillie shouted, and laughed. They all laughed. They needed it.

  “Don’t worry. It doesn’t go to voice mail until the seventh ring, ’cause I can’t be jumping that fast.”

  “Gimme the phone,” Rayne said. “I’ll answer it.”

  “No, then I gotta explain why my big, strong, muscular nephew is carrying around my phone.” As soon as Jones heard Jared’s voice, his long, tense-mask face eased. It was the first time Jones had revealed himself before them. Until now he’d been theoretically gay. Now, he unfurled his long body and ambled into the kitchen, a relaxed man talking to his longtime lover.

  Rayne turned to his mother: “You ever seen Jones tight before?”

  “Never,” she said.

  Jones snapped the phone closed and returned to them, his eyes wide. “Hey, Jared sends his love.”

  Rayne said mischievously: “We don’t know Jared.”

  “He knows you. And he’s home working on your ungrateful black behalf. I asked him to check for me. His niece is a librarian. Listen, Fairlie Broadnax disappeared twenty-five years ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Our town. In Gunnerson. Jared said that the paper there ran a missing-person article—you can look it up—that said that he had come back from Cincinnati and was living with his brother’s family, and family members said that he had separated from his wife of many years and disappeared within a few weeks of coming to stay.”

  “Say anything about the daughter?”

  “Not a word.”

  “When was it, again?” Jewell asked. And when Jones told her, she touched Rayne’s arm. “That’s right when we left.”

  “Why?” Rayne heard something in his mother’s voice, and wished they were not in the room together, with people around them, but on the phone, where he could simply concentrate on the voice and on asking questions that seemed to cause as well as quell the seismic rumblings inside him. We, he was about to say, meaning him and her: “Why did we leave?”

  She hesitated for a long time before answering. “Your grandfather beat me. I had one child out of wedlock, and I was seeing a boy who wanted to make movies. Like Oscar Micheaux. And I let him take pictures of me, and Daddy told me to stop seeing him, and then he found us out after dark together, and he beat me. It was pretty bad. So I decided that we had to leave.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t.” She got up and cleared the table. Lillie helped. There was dessert, too. Lemon–poppy seed cake from Selma’s recipe.

  Rayne excused himself to replenish the inside basket of wood for the fireplace. He needed the outdoors. It was real there, with the ice crystals dropping into his hair and onto his neck. So Broadnax had gone back to Gunnerson and then disappeared. And Jones had no proof, and Bobo, who had always said that he was imprisoned for the wrong thing, had driven his own daughter, stunningly beautiful but poorly educated and immature, off the land.

  So nothing was clear. He turned his face toward the sky to feel the icy pricks on his cheeks. Whatever cold-case fantasies he’d had for twenty-four hours were just that: fantasies. And foolish. He felt as if he needed swaddling to keep his limbs from flailing.

  And then, as if she’d read his thoughts, Lillie stepped up behind him and reached her hands around his waist. She leaned her head into his back.

  “We want retribution,” she said, “but it doesn’t help, really.”

  “Besides, I don’t even know for sure who did what. I wish I knew what happened.”

  “What would that do for you?”

  “Make me stop looking for ghosts.”
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  Against the foggy gray-black sky the deeper, blacker forest traced a silhouette of animated trees. They moved as if they’d called up the wind on purpose.

  “Maybe you don’t want to know,” Lillie said.

  “No, I do. I want to know. I feel like I’m fuckin haunted by this now.”

  “Well, if it’s a haunting, talk to it. Open up.”

  “You’re a nutcase.”

  “It’s true: brown and crunchy, all organic, raised by ancestor-worshipping Pentecostal Catholics. What else could I be? But I’m not the one haunted. You the one twitchin in your sleep.”

  “Really?”

  “I told you that.”

  “Khalil said on this drive that he felt like he’d been drivin in the truck his whole life. And when he said it, I thought: that’s where I’ve been. It’s like I couldn’t get out of the goddamned truck. Drivin, drivin, drivin. Fuckin driven.”

  “You want ’em in?”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying. Why do you say this shit and it’s like another language?”

  “Invite ’em in, I said. King, the wife who had Bobo and died of the flu, the baby, the son who got killed in the war, old Ma Bett and the slave master’s son, Grandma Bett, Rome, all of ’em. Light the incense—you do know what I’m sayin, but you don’t wanna hear it—light the incense and ask ’em to come to you.”

  “Stop it.”

  She came out into the open in front of him, with her hair sparkling from the ice and rain. She whispered to the sky, but so that Rayne could hear her: “He wants to know. He’s open. He’s ready. I’ll stay with him. I’ll hold him here. Give it to ’im.”

  “Okay. That’s enough. Come on, come on, come on.”

  “Come on, your own self. You don’t want me to be flaky and para-fucking-normal, but lemme tell you, when you were gone, the whole house was quiet. Not full of all them ghosts you be bringin with you. It was like it was before.”

  “Why black people can’t just die?”

  “Go ahead and laugh,” she said, wet and cold now, watching him for any opening.

  “Did I lose my mother’s dog?”

  “Oh, God, call ’im. I’m supposed to be letting him out for a pee. You’re trying to distract me, and it worked.” She called. “Jewell said that he won’t run off in the rain, but how do I know?”