If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  Rayne listened for the dog, but could not hear him over the wind and pelting bits of ice, the creaky trees and thin, staccato twigs banging against one another. “No, really, I think you lost my mother’s dog. I’m trying to get in touch with my family, and you lose my mother’s canine companion.”

  “Shut up.”

  Rayne whistled for the dog and pulled her to him. “Remind me not to rile old Jones again, will you?”

  “I don’t think he holds a grudge. In fact, I think he’s the best one to rile.” Lillie made kissy noises. “Here, doggie.”

  Rayne kissed her in answer. “And remind me not to get jealous about your Eagles.”

  “You shouldn’t be. But don’t worry. I’m not doing any more of those tattoos or scarifications. It was starting to get like a cult.”

  “’Cause of me, old stick-in-the-mud jealous construction worker. That’s not a reason to stop. You like it; you’re artistic; it makes you some change.”

  “I’m gonna be a nurse. I’ve wanted to be a nurse since I was a kid. You’re helping me do that. I don’t need to prick holes in people’s skin and inject dye into them anymore.”

  “You think we can make this work?” He bent over and grabbed the backs of her thighs as a sign for her to jump up and straddle him. Her hair with its familiar heavy crimps was blowing up into his face.

  “You really gonna cut this?”

  “Call the dog,” she said while she scooched up and down gently on his abdomen.

  “Stop,” he said, “you’re getting me hard.”

  “You’re so easy,” she said.

  “Shit, now I gotta go back in like this.”

  “We’re gonna talk about that heir property some more. That’ll chill you down.”

  “It’s working already,” he muttered. He whistled for the dog. “Come on, damnit,” he said quietly, walking to the door. “Inside.”

  The dog bounded to the back porch and began pawing. Lillie got ready to open the door, “How’d you do that?”

  “Like this.” Rayne put her down and motioned to the dog with his hand and a snorting sound. “Hey, dog, get back,” he said.

  “Oh, now you’re the Dog Whisperer. That dog doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” Lillie said.

  “Oh, yes, he does. My granddaddy showed me,” said Rayne. “Now go ahead and open the door.” Rayne squatted to pick up an armload of wood. The dog did not move. “Go ’head.”

  Lillie opened the door and stepped in. Rayne crossed behind her, and then nodded to the dog to follow.

  “We are getting a dog,” Lillie said. “Khalil needs to learn this.”

  Inside, Jack was sitting up on the side of his chair. Before Rayne could put down the wood, he said, “The old man Pettiford, he’s still alive? Still got his marbles?”

  “I guess,” Rayne said. “Jack, you in here thinking like a lawyer.”

  “I am a lawyer, and glad still to be able to think.”

  “I don’t know about Pettiford myself,” Rayne said, “but Selma talked about him as if he were… viable.” He knelt down and laid the short logs in the metal tray, then stood two upright over the fire to make it draw.

  Jack said: “You do that just like your mother.”

  “Selma taught us… and his son is a state rep, and the grandson, who’s a little older than I am, is the one who’s built the golf course.”

  Jack said: “Well, they have an interest in the land, of course, but how much of the father’s district is black? Could he afford a big, ugly news campaign about taking heir property away from a seventy-something African-American widow, et cetera? Think about it.”

  “It’s South Carolina.”

  “Yeah, but the black voters there can pay attention. We know that… Well, in any event, the approach would be first to decide whether or not you want Amos’s kids to file another, more recent, quitclaim. If they are good people, it might be better, actually, to have more hands to the wheel.”

  “Second,” Jewell said, “to decide what to do about Richard’s and Big Tootch’s clan.”

  “They sold out.”

  “Their father sold, but if this comes to a court fight, or a fight in the press, do you want these people with you or against you?”

  “Jack,” Rayne said, “you wouldn’t say that if you knew Lil Tootchie.”

  “Give ’im more black family supplements.”

  “And then, listen, hey,” Jack said softly, “I’ve talked too much. But before I go to bed—I’m so sorry to spoil the party—do you have any other lawyers in the family?”

  “Other lawyers in the family?” Lillie said, laughing.

  “He is family. Hey, you’re not spoiling the party, man. I told you we’re in your home,” Jones said. “You have been a gracious host, despite your touchy new relatives bringing a crazy deal to your doorstep.”

  “Richard’s granddaughter, my favorite cousin, Binky, is a judge.”

  “See,” Jones said, “we told you not to count Richard’s clan out. They need to make amends.”

  Rayne sucked his teeth. “No, you’re so right, Jones. If they are out and we keep ’em out, they’ll hate us. If we invite them in, as if it’s not an invitation, but expected, it means the possibility of…”

  “Redemption.” Jack smiled at Jewell. “Better and better.” Jack closed his eyes to think for a minute. “Does this Binky have a proper first name? Maybe she and I should make a conference call to the state rep. Double-team ’im. I might still know a few good old boys to call—if you want me to.” He grinned weakly. “I haven’t threatened anyone in a long time. I’m thinking it could have healing properties. Nurse Lillie, what do you think?”

  Lillie said that she wanted to examine the water reservoir on his oxygen machine. Jack invited her to inspect to her heart’s content. They went into the bedroom together. As she suspected, it was empty. She showed him how to refill it with distilled water and told him that she’d tell Jewell, too. That should give him a little moisture to keep the skin in the nostrils from drying too much. She didn’t say it, but they could crack and bleed.

  “So you did all the Mexican crucifixion pilgrimages; you’re a Christian, I guess,” she asked.

  Jack gave a half smile. “You know how some Jews say that they’re culturally Jewish; well, I think that I’m culturally Christian.”

  Such a thought had never occurred to her. Lillie had been about to say something to him about prayer and comfort. Now she did not know how to respond.

  “You’re wondering whether that’s enough to face death with.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “Well. You should if you’re going to be a nurse. Because this is about life and death, isn’t it? Everything we’ve been talking about tonight. Jonesey in the army, killing Japanese; somebody here killing King, whom Jones probably loved as much as his sister did. My wife running away from them all, trying to kill herself. Her father doing God knows what, spending half his life in prison. And me with cancer, breathing through a tube…

  “Christianity is obsessed by death. I’m a cultural Christian, because given the pervasiveness of death in life, a dead-human-turned-eternal-advocate does seem like an appropriate response.”

  “That’s pretty sad.” Lillie wondered whether she’d heard him right about Jewell.

  “This helps—this seeing Jewell find a new family. This is very good. When we were younger, we couldn’t find a way to do family. She and I were like damaged houseplants. We repotted ourselves in each other.”

  “Do you feel as if you’re healing?”

  “Well, Christianity will tell you that physical healing is often beside the point. But a little lawyer work may help.” He sat heavily on his side of the bed and pointed to the tiny fridge they’d sandwiched in the bookcase. “Without work, I feel kind of… superfluous.”

  Lillie could see what an effort the evening had been for him.

  “Maybe you’ll draw me up a hit of morphine. I’m allowed some before bed. It does
wonders. It’s that or a sledgehammer.”

  Lillie pulled up the tiny eyedropper, figuring that he’d use three CCs. “This right?”

  He nodded and tipped his chin up to let her slip the eyedropper under his tongue.

  She could see the muscles around his eyes loosen in about thirty seconds.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I can undress myself. At least I still can for the time being.”

  As she left he said: “The worst thing about dying is that nobody needs you anymore. Jewell has needed me in these last weeks. It was nice to be needed, even just a little, tonight.”

  ———

  Despite Jack’s entreaties for them to stay, Rayne went out and turned on the truck to let the defroster start to work while they collected their coats and said good-byes. He followed his mother to the guest bedroom, where she’d hung them on hooks on the backs of the doors. Jewell told her son how grateful she was that Lillie fielded her calls while he was in Gunnerson.

  “Talking to Lillie makes me think,” she said, choosing her words carefully.

  “Think what?”

  “When you look at it just in terms of facts,” Jewell said, “you’ve found someone who has some of the same circumstances I had when I had you: she’s a single mother with a son, and she’s made the right decisions for them. For him, is really what I mean.”

  “Yep, she’s good.”

  “She’s mature. She’s still got plenty of youthful energy and all, but it takes maturity to think of the child first, to live your life with him in mind first. I admire her for that. And I admire you for finding her. Most people just repeat.

  “You could’ve found another me. There’s no shortage of them. Us. You’ve made a wise choice. Choices, really.”

  “Choices.” Rayne had been only halfway listening. When she began to describe herself leaving him, his mind wandered. His jaw and gut tightened. The purr in her voice rubbed up against him too softly. He found himself wanting to roughen the surface of their interaction. Given the jagged edges of their past, sometimes he couldn’t believe her now. “Do you pass for white?” The sentence said itself through his lips. He heard himself and approved.

  She’d prepared three or four different answers, all prevaricating, all partly true. In America, people assume race, and unless she quizzed down each clerk at Macy’s and then corrected them, in fact, she passed, de facto. But this was not what he was asking.

  “I did pass. It started happening sometimes in New York, and I didn’t stop it. Then I married Jack. Jack knew from the start. Because he’s white, he didn’t understand what a big deal it was for me to step over. So we lived in white suburbs, and the lawyers in his department were all white, and his club was white. I told a few people, but only when I got close, and I didn’t get close to too many people. It’s been mostly the two of us. I didn’t join the NAACP or anything. Out in the world, yeah, I let it happen.”

  “Because Bobo beat you? To get away from Selma? To get rid of me?”

  “No, Rayne. I left you because I was a rotten mother and I couldn’t make myself do better, and I would have ruined you. Selma wouldn’t have. She didn’t.

  “We’re talking tonight about heir property. It’s true that after Daddy ran off that boy and beat me there in the barn, and then dragged me into the house through the mud… I mean, I didn’t want to inherit any of it. Really, I wanted a different history.”

  It was bad luck for her to have had Bobo as a father, Rayne thought, because Bobo saved his particular distrust of the world for women and white people. So she fixed him, Rayne thought. “Bobo has converted to Islam now,” Rayne said, following his own train of thought. “He changed his name to Abdul-Ghaffar.”

  “Ghaffar? I suppose it means something.”

  “He’s been promoted to a lower-security section of the prison, and he raises dogs for the blind and war vets with PTSD. When he said that, I thought: he’s like somebody with PTSD; this’ll be like therapy for him. And it is. The dogs do anything he says. He’s shown me all kinds of things with them.”

  “Good for him.” It was a cool, formal acknowledgment, the best she could do. What she was thinking was: how perfect that he now had a creature to control. And that Ghaffar was a ridiculous name, like something out of Disney. Why, she wondered, weren’t any of them satisfied to be themselves? “And you no longer use Alonzo? Or Lonnie? Too babyish?”

  “That was your name for me.”

  “And you hated it?”

  “No, Jewell. Mom. I didn’t hate it. I saved it. For you.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Rayne drove back to the city over icy Bucks County two-lane roads with names like Mill Road and Alms House Lane. They wound around the hills and creeks with slopes and sharp turns under very few dim streetlights. The four-wheel drive kicked in, but so, too, did Rayne’s hyperalertness. Helped by Lillie, his thinking tonight was both magical and analytical. The haunting continued. The whispery sense of a shadow just out of sight, at the edge of his peripheral vision. Not a presence, but presence. He turned on his high beams. Tree limbs had come down in the wind and with the weight of the ice. He felt guided around them.

  To drain off nervous energy, he let himself think of how to convert the budget-and-timeline proposal for a nursery school renovation into a PDF with print large enough to read, but small enough to fit onto an 8½-by-11 sheet. A startled deer launched itself up and over the road, from one banked, slippery hillside to the other, almost high enough, it seemed to Rayne, to have cleared the truck if need be. He went back to his technical problem solving. They’d wasted three days in failed e-mailing, because his powerful timeline software for the Mac would not read on the director’s slow old PC. Her fax machine sent terrible copies, and she had tried to tape the two halves of long pages, but lost what little data had not been blurred with too much ink.

  After the deer crossing, Rayne decided to go simple and old school: stop trying to e-mail the proposal or put it on the cloud and instead take the file to Staples, have them print it out on a large sheet, as if it were a small poster, and then hand-deliver it. He calculated the time they’d already spent messing with e-mail and fax. Two hours for him, one and a half for her, and he multiplied it times twelve dollars an hour, had they had a secretary, or two hundred and fifty, if he’d been able to spend his time installing a photovoltaic cell. He’d also print a large drawing of the playroom in color and back it with foam and stand it on an easel. That way, every person who walked in would see it and get excited. She could take it to her board.

  Lillie sat in the back. When she reached over the seat and patted his shoulder, he touched her gloved hand. Maybe he’d ask Lillie to deliver the timelines on her way back from Jefferson Hospital. Last time she’d done something like that for him, she’d sealed the deal by adding a classy little gift bag with a RayneDance baseball cap and two bottles of Fiji water thrown in. Simple. But it never would have occurred to him. Not to mention the pert lift in her walk, the very black almond eyes.

  “I’m so glad Khalil stayed over with Joshua and Coleman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a good thing to know that your kid is safe. None of them had that feeling. Your folks. Except with Selma. You realize that?”

  “And Selma had it with King until they killed him.”

  His mind answered with the family refrain: That’s the way of the world. And here he was, back in the cab of a truck. It occurred to him that he should add a few choice truck parts to Khalil’s Climbing Wall. Duh.

  Jones adjusted his body in his sleep and jammed his knee into the dashboard. “Shit.” Eyes closed, he touched the glove compartment with his long fingers and seemed to lie back, having measured the dimensions of his enclosure. Then, touching his fingers to the latch, he said: “King used to keep a gun in his glove box. In the house he had that shotgun that Bobo took with ’im, but he also stored a little pistol in the glove box. Forget what kind.”

  “Jones, you’ll spend the night with us.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, yes, oh, yes. Jared already read me the riot act. I know I’m old and half-drunk. ’S that damn Henry McKenna. I only drank it ’cause I knew you were driving.”

  ———

  Once they were home, the wind picked up, and the trees in the alley scratched at the brick walls. Rayne thought he heard the horse stomp in the barn across the alley. He wondered what Jones would say about how the animal was kept.

  Still damp from her shower, Lillie came to the bed and straddled him. “Whoa. Whoa. Have I been sleep? What’s goin on?”

  “Want a little bit?” Mouth, touch, wet.

  “Lips,” he said.

  They’d brushed their teeth, but she still tasted faintly of the coffee they drank in the truck on the way home. It was a morning taste. He touched her wet neck and arms and breasts, quizzically. It was nighttime, not dawn, after all. He couldn’t figure out where he was.

  “Don’t take much to throw some people off.”

  “Told you. Old Stick-in-the-Mud.”

  “Come on, Old Stick.”

  He clicked his tongue. “What’s happened to you? You’re like you used to be again.”

  “I’m finishing nursing school. I’m not scared to death of losing my house… You’ve been good to my kid. While you were away I had a talk with myself. Time to stop preparing to live. Like the Chinese fortune said.” She felt her throat tightening, and her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you have brought your family with you, and you keep trying to stay apart, but you can’t. You’re repeating something, and I don’t know what it is, but I’m afraid of it. You got Khalil and me with you, and now we’re in it, too.”

  Rayne pulled the covers over her body. “Oh, baby. You been scared?”

  “I didn’t even know how scared I’ve been. It’s all in here.” She touched her hands to her body, starting at the head, touching her temples and throat, her heart, her stomach, and groin. His hand followed hers. They were warm on her cool, damp skin. “Tonight I asked Jack what he believes in. You know what he told me? He told me that he’s a ‘cultural Christian.’ What is that? It’s fifty-fifty for him with this monster chemo they’re doing, and, like, what is his backup plan?”