If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  ———

  Greenie, crawling into the woods: You shouldn’t have done it, Big Boy. Whatever it was to make the men so angry. Because blame is better than nothing, better than this.

  Jones does not think as he runs between them. He jumps onto the grille of the truck and onto the hood, colored boy among white men, so afraid that he isn’t afraid anymore, past fear, walking on coals with soul bared, naked as the mermaid, mounting the hot metal hood barefoot to make them stop, make them hear him, distract them for a moment from this thing that cannot happen. He looks around, so insane with fear that he cannot recognize their faces, but only sees Greenie Nightingale curled up in a ball by the woods. No one would believe—no one but Jared—how out of his mind he was to see King like that. If they’d asked him who was there, what would he have said? King was there. King was still there.

  “I found the girl. I found her. He wa’n’t even here!” Jones shouts.

  Stunned at the insane conceit, they stop beating King, whose face is smashed, like an Easter egg, if you believe in Resurrection, which they do, and whose lower body is broken.

  King hears Jones’s voice. Jones hears King’s thoughts.

  Don’t let Selma see.

  King’s thinking has bled into pain beyond his imagining, as sharp and long and blunt, as varied as possible, simultaneous and everywhere. Jones’s voice slices through and what is left of King’s tongue explodes inside his head.

  please please mama please mama please

  jesus make it stop please please god

  Butch knocks Jones off the hood of the car with his one good arm. Jones feels the fall resonate through his thin body in waves. Then someone kicks him in his side and back. He cries like a baby. He cries for Selma and then for the mother he’s never known. Jones doesn’t know who does it, but someone hits him in the back of the head so hard that he thinks he has died with King, which is the best he can hope for.

  He holds out his hand to the man who raised him and asks him to carry him in his arms. King carried him once, when he fell and the ground knocked him out. Jones had felt the power of each thigh pumping up the hill. They’ll die together and have company. They’ll die easy as long as Selma doesn’t see.

  ———

  She doesn’t. She and Big Tootch are baking loaves of applesauce cake for the silly damn Broadnax girl who fell into the hole and for King, because he likes applesauce cake with cinnamon, and for Richard and Big Tootch’s children. As a treat.

  ———

  And because Bobo gets lost in the cornfield, which has grown enough in just three days to look different to him, after eight minutes he finds himself in Richard and Big Tootch’s field, tries to backtrack and ends up at Mitchell’s cows before he can find the fence he recognizes. Go home. Fast.

  He tried to go too fast and got lost in the oaks. He knows what he is: he is a dumb little shit. Now he settles down and walks deliberately, determined not to get lost again. Wishing he took the chick.

  ———

  At the end, they kill him there in the Ford. Fairlie, who is the only one experienced with a pistol, shoots King with his own gun. Pickerelle watches the scene. It was crudely done for certain. The men are bruised, bloodied, stiff from their labor. Pickerelle thinks to himself that had he known King would have beat them up this badly, he would have recruited a doctor. Butch needs a doctor something awful. Strayhorn leans against the car, bent over. They are out of breath and shaking. He is too heavy to drag out of the truck. Pickerelle hands Broadnax a gallon of gasoline from the trunk of his car, and motions toward King’s truck with his chin.

  At the end of the road, Pettiford drives past, then reverses to peer down the road. The truck catches on fire, and the injured men limp away from it. Pickerelle grabs the boy Jones and drags him to the road.

  “Jesus Christ, what have they done?” Pettiford asks Pickerelle.

  “It was a terrible accident,” Pickerelle says. “Can you put the kid on a train?”

  “No,” Pettiford says.

  “You’re a pain in the ass, Ross,” Pickerelle says.

  “It’s your mess,” he said to the judge. “You and your boys can clean it up.” Then, on second thought, he looks at Jones and the desperate men and opens the back door of his car. No telling what else they might do. “Put him in.”

  Pettiford will never forget the sight of the truck burning. And chicks hopping around on the ground behind it.

  Though unconscious, Jones hears the fire. Later, it’s what he remembers.

  Selma smells the rubber smoke and burning flesh, and steps outside. Here comes Bobo, trudging alone. Richard rides up on the mare mule. He and Big Tootch hold her back from going over the hillside. He puts her and Big Tootch onto the mare mule and sends them to his house for the car. Selma breaks away from them and runs toward the orchard hill. Bobo sees her and follows. At the top, she looks down on the Ford, in flames, and then men standing ’round, smoking.

  They hear her when she screams.

  ———

  Jones awakens the next day on a freight car, surprised to be alive. Someone has paid his fare to Philadelphia. In his pocket has been stuffed a hundred-dollar bill. He tries to tell people in Philadelphia what has happened. They tell him that those things don’t happen anymore.

  ———

  Rayne awakens before dawn.

  He has curled his body around Lillie’s. They are naked, but safe.

  The wind blows from the south and the branches continue to scratch on the window.

  He will be given only this one dream.

  His pillow is soaked with tears and snot. The smell of smoke clings to his nostrils. They have breathed in King. He is lodged in their cells. He trickles through the groundwater. There will be no cold case for the heirs. No triumph. Only the land if they can hold on to it. And life abundant, if they choose.

  He moves Lillie’s hair out of his face. She’ll cut it soon to keep Temika’s kid company. Maybe it will help the child heal.

  CHAPTER 29

  Inmates controlled almost nothing at Graterford prison. They could not determine who drove up to the facility to see them, certainly, but they did have some control over who was prohibited. Until Jewell could convince her father that she’d reunited with Rayne, until Rayne confirmed the fact in writing, Bobo would not put his daughter onto his approved list of visitors. But after four weeks and four letters she arrived at the facility, which hulked on the yellow-green and pink Pennsylvania spring landscape like a cursed castle: big and impenetrable, so set apart that she almost expected it to disappear and swallow her up once she had driven onto the parking lot.

  She called Jack once she’d turned off the engine. “Okay, sweetie,” she said. “I’m here. Now, I’m going to turn off the cell phone and put it into my bag and lock the bag in the trunk.”

  “That’s fine. Thanks for reminding me. I won’t be calling, though, ’cause Lillie’s acupuncture lady’s coming again at nine-thirty.”

  “The black Korean?”

  “Yes, she’s marvelous. Blasian, I’m told, is the argot: black and Asian. I asked Nurse Barb to come so they can meet.”

  “Okay, no more talking. Love you.”

  She’d arrived just before visiting hours began at 9:00 a.m., as the website advised, wearing approved clothing, bringing no contraband, just a disposable bag with a small loaf cake, and carrying her Pennsylvania driver’s license and car registration information, change, and keys in her jacket pocket.

  Then Jewell had parked on the wrong side of the parking lot. She walked to the wrong doors, then went back to the main entrance and took a number. By now she was no longer early. She was called sooner than some others, however, and they gave her bad looks as she walked past them, back through the metal detector to another building, up a staircase, and reported there. She asked whether she’d be allowed to bring her father the food she’d made for him. The other visitors tripped their tongues and rolled their eyes. In the maximum-security visiting room,
the only food allowed had to be bought from the vending machines and eaten there. She was going to the OSU, where rules were different, according to the prison website, but the regulations were so stringent, and so perfectly followed, it seemed to her, that she had to ask. She didn’t want pound cake thrown into the trash. The guard repeated that she should get to the OSU and talk to the officer there.

  Bobo appeared fifteen minutes later, a big gray man: gray-and-black hair cropped close, a gray rim around his drooping brown eyes, and deep lines from those eyes down to a hard, gray-stubble chin. On his hulking Needham body, he wore a gray correctional institution suit. He led a sleek young German shepherd, which he put on a down-stay before he acknowledged Jewell.

  “Still gorgeous, I see,” he said. “You didn’t tell me that in your letter. What are you now, like, fifty?” There was no smile, but also none of the old malice. No one else had come into the visiting area yet. The stark and battered waiting room echoed.

  They were allowed to embrace here, but they did not. “Forty-seven. I run now,” she said rather nonsensically. Hair dye, she thought. “And you’ve stayed very fit.”

  “Well, look where I am. And I train dogs now. It’s the best job in here, and Blue—don’t tell the others—Blue is the best dog so far. Aren’t you, Blue?” he asked in a gentle voice.

  The dog’s ears moved with intelligent attention. Its eyes registered Bobo’s every movement, but it did not change position. “Good boy,” Bobo said, acknowledging the dog’s temptation to get up, and its internal discipline.

  They talked about Bobo’s move to the OSU unit, where he had more privacy, a real bathroom, and a microwave. “So, the physical realm,” as he referred to his living conditions, “has greatly improved. Socially, the OSU is more like a rooming house, or a halfway house, I guess you could say. The men here have worked to get here. Up there,” he said, inclining his head toward the main buildings, “you’ve got what this one chaplain calls ‘the festival of dysfunction.’” He shook his head. “You know the old movies with synchronized swimming? Well, in there, you’ve got synchronized issues. Coordinated craziness. My spiritual guide’s been in here for twenty years, and he’s the most peaceful man you’ll ever meet. I said I wanted to be like that, and he’d tell me to do this and that, and I’d just say: you couldn’t get sane in the middle of a nuthouse.

  “And he would just look at me and say that line that Richard Pryor said Jim Brown would say to him when he was smoking like a thousand dollars of crack a day. He’d say to ’im: ‘Whatchoo gonna do?’

  “Usually Abdul Mohammed don’t make jokes. He’s, like, a real serious cat.”

  Jewell translated: Abdul Mohammed was humorless. Who else, she thought, would have helped Bobo come up with the name Ghaffar?

  “Like I said, he’s, like, a real serious dude, but he’d just walk by and whisper it—Whatchoo gonna do?— and crack himself up. He reached out to a lotta guys, but if you’re busy throwing yourself a pity party or a rage-fest, there is no answer. You just stuck.

  “But I thank God, whom I choose to call Allah, the all-merciful, because He let me see that Abdul Mohammed had something these other dudes didn’t have.”

  Given that mentorship over five years, conversion to Islam had been the end, not the beginning, of a gradual transformation. Rayne had been a big part of his change. “I say that Abdul Mohammed schooled me, but Rayne made me able to be redeemed. He did. After he came back North, even when he was in college—no car; I don’t know how he did it—the boy came to us here faithfully once a month. I used to say, ‘like a bitch gets a period.’”

  “Wow.”

  “I know. Now, I say, he came as regular as the phases of the moon. That son of yours is a marvel. Ain’t nothing he can’t do.”

  “I want to thank you for helping to raise him.”

  Bobo humphed. “Selma’s the one.”

  “Oh! Speaking of Selma: I brought you some of her lemon– poppy seed pound cake.”

  “Hers?”

  “No, her recipe.”

  “You seen ’er?”

  “No, although Lonnie—Rayne—and Jones said that she’s gotten weaker.”

  He used the hand sanitizer she offered, then ate a slice of the cake. “Wow,” he said, closing his eyes. “Don’t they say that taste is, like, the strongest sense? Takes you right back.

  “Rayne’s something else, ain’t he? No thanks to us.”

  Jewell didn’t like his brand of honesty, which seemed somehow to slap her harder than it did him, but then, she reminded herself, she was looking for fault. “And he’s having to face this heir property stuff really without much help from the family. He’s going to have to organize us, I’m afraid, if we’re not to lose the land.”

  “Anybody gotta handle this business, he the one to do it.”

  “But he shouldn’t have to do it alone. I owe it to him to help,” Jewell said, as much to herself as to her father.

  “Good. Maybe that’s your job. Good thing he found you.”

  “And he’s just learning that King’s death was not accidental.”

  Bobo took his eyes from her face and back to the dog. Blue noticed the shift in Bobo’s attention. Jewell, who’d kept dogs for years, had never seen such exquisite attunement. Abdul-Ghaffar stood and walked the dog around the room. With a hand movement he had the dog sit in a far corner. Then he turned his back on the dog, walked to Jewell, and squatted down to face her eye to eye. “I’ve become an adherent to the teachings of the prophet Mohammed.”

  “Yes. I looked up your name. Abdul-Ghaffar, servant of the Forgiver.”

  “I have been forgiven. That’s a wonderful thing to know. But it’s a more difficult thing to live up to. Do you know what I mean?”

  Jewell looked between him and the dog, who leaned from one front leg to the other in anticipation, then, as if recovering its dignity, stayed freeze-frame still. “Yeah. I think I do.” She wished that they could embrace as she’d embraced Rayne, and begin to let love soak into dried, cracked openings. But they stayed still. She stayed as still as the dog and spoke through specific and articulate lips, which, to their credit, did not want to spit or curse anymore. “Rayne was wanting to open up a cold case investigation. If he can find Broadnax alive somewhere.”

  “Come ’ere.”

  Jewell almost missed it, the tiny plume of Bobo’s voice tossed lightly into the air, higher and softer than she’d ever heard. Low, carefully, stealthily, Blue came and sat where Abdul-Ghaffar’s pointed finger indicated, next to him. Bobo stayed on one knee, his face close to Jewell’s. His was the same bitter-smelling breath, as if his insides were burning up.

  “Tell him,” he said almost as quietly as he’d spoken to the dog, “that that won’t be necessary. Tell him that there’s no more Broadnax to find. You hear me what I’m sayin?”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “Good, you figured it.”

  “It was this time of year, wasn’t it? Not King, but what we’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “The night you caught me in the flue-cure barn with that boy from Los Angeles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t about me, then, really. That last couple weeks, all those nights.” He knew what she meant; the nights he sat outside on the land, in different places, but often on the Broadnax land, blending in with the shadows, cradling King’s shotgun in his lap. He’d told her he was going to make sure that she didn’t bring any more boys onto the land to make any new babies. The man from Los Angeles who made movies had come over from Charleston to photograph her when Bobo was away, driving his 18-wheeler somewhere—Ohio, Illinois, New York—and Selma was working. Now Jewell knew that she had been his excuse. Like the article said, Broadnax had come back into town, and Bobo must have known that he’d be unable to keep himself from coming onto the land he thought should be his. This is what Jewell had figured out, and what she came here today to have her father confirm. It occurred to her that she
should have come for forgiveness or to forgive. But at least she was here.

  “I’ve worked my way to the OSU, and soon I’ll be eligible for parole. You know what I’m in for? Rayne tell you? Not for anything that happened in late March twenty-five years ago. So I’m not wanting to stay on this track. But because Allah is all-merciful, I do have the option of praying every day. People all over the world pray every day, all day, for all kinds of things. I didn’t know that before. So I lived in a world without prayer. Anything can happen in that world. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I also pray for forgiveness for beating you that night. I really hadn’t expected to find you outdoors. I had a-uh—a lot more to do that night. And I packed out a load to go cross-country, you hear me what I’m sayin—and my nerves were beyond shot. I found you there, and I lost it.

  “It’s the best amends I could do for you to try to help raise your son. You understand. I screwed that up, too—and damned if the kid doesn’t come visit every month. All-merciful, I’m telling you.”

  He moved his glasses up and down and sighed as he sat heavily in a chair beside her, and called the dog to come between his knees for gentle rubbing.

  “These dogs go to the blind, you know, and they go to vets with posttraumatic stress. I love each of these dogs, and then I give ’em up.” He smiled at her. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done right in my whole life.”

  Jewell stood. “If I give you the rest of this cake, can you take it with you?”

  “If you leave it here on the chair, my man Mr. Gregory over here and I can finish it off before I go back. How about that?”

  He opened his arm wide and held her to his gray cotton chest. It was the same movement that Rayne had made. She rested against him, and let the one help her embrace the other. He spoke into her perfumed mahogany hair. “You tell my boy Rayne that if there’s anything had to be done, I already did it. Okay? Tell ’im stay clean. That other thing is over.”