by Lorene Cary
“I will.”
“And look, I’m sorry. You hear me? ’S all I can say.”
———
When Jewell came home, Jack was asleep. She lay sideways in his hospital bed to be close to him, and when she awoke, he was tracing the curving hairline on her temple, breathing each breath like a countdown.
“He killed Broadnax, Jack.”
“You had already figured that out, Jewelly. Which is why he lost it and beat you so badly.”
“He’d already killed him, I’m pretty sure, and I must have been very close to the body.”
“What do you think he did with him, with it, the body?”
“I think he stuffed him in his eighteen-wheeler. It was right there, a tenth of a mile away, on the road, packed for, I don’t know, somewhere.”
“And dumped him somewhere far away?”
“He must have.”
“So they could never find the body. God, that’s chilling. No wonder you wanted to get away.”
They lay together, listening to each other’s breath.
“Is it justice?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
Jewell lay back, thinking of the stark prison with the bales of razor wire and the family members she saw driving in on her way out of the parking lot. She thought of the exquisite black eyebrows of the dog Blue shifting articulately at each of her father’s sighs. “He thinks that it was his duty to do it, and his business alone and his crime and his punishment. All these years of being tortured.
“But we all paid for it. We all paid. He does not get it. Lonnie paid, too. He doesn’t even know that he’s been paying, I’m sure.”
“I hate to sound like the white guy,” Jack said, “but…”
“You’re feeling sympathy for the devil.”
“Some.” Jack took as deep a breath as he could. They were getting shallower, as if some tiny character from an Edgar Allan Poe story were bricking up the walls of his lungs, brick by tiny brick. “The dead guy’s family paid, too. I’m sure they’ve paid dearly.”
CHAPTER 30
Judge Hortense Needham-Reece, Rayne’s favorite cousin, Binky, made the date for the conference call to bring in help for Rayne.
“It’s heir property,” she told him, “and despite what one overworked, overwhelmed, and undervalued stubborn old lady may think, Cousin Rayne, the heirs really must work together. And can, Ray. I mean, that’s the good news.” She suggested the initial members of a family leadership council that included members from the three brothers’ branches, plus Jones, acting for Selma. They’d include all the generations but not bring in, to start, her mother, Big Tootch, who tended, let’s face it, to argue with everyone, or old Uncle Amos, who couldn’t hear. Binky also insisted on inviting to the leadership an upbeat Methodist minister, Ivy Ivans. She was the child of Amos’s old age, born to his neighbor lady live-in after Aunt Mary’s death.
“She’s pretty proactive,” Binky told Rayne. “Kind of a loose cannon, but these are black people you’re related to—even your mother—and you need clergy involved. Trust me.”
Selma disagreed until Ivy appeared at her trailer door the next week, on Monday, her day off, alone. She was a Needham, all right, with the heavy, arched brows and precise bow lips that seemed to open and close on their own. She wore her black hair clipped very short.
“Well, how’d you get down here?”
Ivy reported matter-of-factly that she’d flown to Savannah that morning, and driven to Gunnerson to meet the aunt about whom her father had told her so many stories. She wondered if Selma would have a private prayer service with her right at that moment, for the family for whom King had so richly provided, for the land that Selma had preserved from his ancestors and for his heirs, including those, like Ivy, who had been invited back into the family. She wanted Selma’s blessing on her, and on the family’s proceedings.
Selma commented that she didn’t know what the Negroes were up to, because they didn’t tell her anything, and she wasn’t interested besides, unless someone said they were going to pay the taxes. And the water and sewer.
Ivy had brought decaf coffee, crumb cake, and orange juice. They drank the coffee while Selma enumerated her bills, and told which ones Rayne was already paying, and how she couldn’t ask him for more.
Ivy pulled out a small white stole, which she draped around her neck, and her Bible and a Communion set. “Will it be all right?”
“Sure,” Selma said. “I never turn down Communion.”
Ivy read from Paul’s letter to the Romans: they had not received the spirit of slavery and fear, but the spirit of adoption—and thanked God that Selma had lived that spirit in the Needham family.
Selma nodded.
And, Ivy went on, because they were not slaves, but children, and if children, then heirs of God, through Christ, with whom they suffered, and in whom they would be glorified. She took out the little silver plate and chalice, the size of a liqueur glass, and wine and said a shortened Communion mass, quietly, but with reverence. Selma mouthed some of the words with her, ate the wafer, and drank the grape juice. At the end of the service, Selma said: “Sounds like Easter.”
Then they were silent. Selma felt a not unpleasant but deep-purple sadness. She was content to taste the grape juice and the last trace of gummy wafer on her tongue and watch the younger woman polish her miniature chalice and paten and pack them up into her brown leather box.
Then Ivy said to her: “Amos never married my mother, Aunt Selma. But my oldest sister brought me into the family through the spirit of adoption. When she did, she told me about you, how you adopted Uncle Bobo after his mother died, and then this little cousin Rayne I’d never met. Anita told me that that’s the sort of family we should have. She said that that’s what Uncle King died for.”
“Nobody ever come down here from Philadelphia and took note of it before.”
“It takes people time, sometimes, to do what’s right, Aunt Selma. But I think a reunion here this summer—”
“Oh, no. Oh, no. Where am I gonna put all them Negroes? Troopin around the place. I barely get JJ to put in a little crop, and I’m tryin to get a better orchard established over on the Broadnax field before Pettiford’s grandson steal it away from me.”
“What if I tell you that some of these people can help with that?”
“Well, where has they been? And how they gonna help? You show me one who can transplant a pecan tree, other than my Ray.”
“Could I do a Thanksgiving service here, then? Whoever comes, comes? They would bring their tents if they want to camp out; they bring their own food. And we have a service for the family…”
Selma’s eyes brimmed behind her reading glasses, which she’d put on for their Bible reading. She withdrew her hands from Ivy’s to reach for her handkerchief in her sleeve. “What you could do,” she said, “is say a funeral for my husband. A memorial service I guess it would be by now. None of them ever came to bury him. Well, we couldn’t really. Didn’t really have anything left to bury.”
Ivy tried to understand what she meant. It seemed incomprehensible that the man would have died and not been properly buried. “Aunt Selma, did your church have a service for him then? I mean, even without remains we can say the burial service.”
“The Reverend did a little something for me. But there was so much confusion. And everyone was afraid. And then Richard and Tootch were leaving. They sold out to Pettiford, so I tol ’em don’t bother.”
“Oh, Aunt Selma.”
“Yep. I did. And I’ve been sorry. He was Richard’s brother, too. ’Course your father offered to come. He always were decent like that.
“But you could do a service for King. And any wanna come pray here, on his land, that’d be all right with me.”
Ivy took Selma’s hands back into hers. The old lady sat so proudly, and so alone. Ivy finished reading:
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, o
r nakedness, or peril, or sword?… Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“Except, really,” Selma said. “Those people ain’t comin down here for no memorial service. Nice of you, but they won’t come.”
Ivy thought for a minute and sent a text to Rayne. “How about doing the wedding in Gunnerson?”
Thirty minutes later, Rayne texted back: lillie sez yes.
———
On the appointed day for the phone conference, Binky reported that she’d talked to Pettiford, the grandson, who had made some blustery remarks at first. He’d built the golf course with a lot of hard work; he’d hired a pro; he had two companies giving careful consideration to a new tournament there, which would bolster the entire county’s economy. His grandfather had been a great benefactor to so many people, and it was the Needham clan itself that had given his grandfather a stake in the heir property, after all his help. Plus they’d loaned them money over the years, interest-free, as far as he could see. So, to continue his grandfather’s tradition of benevolence, maybe he could swap the heir property claim for the Old Broadnax farm, for which he had better use than Mrs. Selma.
Binky told her family that she’d just called him the night before, a Friday, and scheduled the conference call for Saturday morning to make sure that he would not have any business days’ head start on them in case he tried to force a sale. Now that he’d been alerted, they had to move fast.
Ivy asked whether Rayne and Selma could sneak in a visit to the grandfather before the week was out.
Rayne had work left over from the week before, because of bad rain. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got jobs this week. It takes all day to drive… You really gotta get Nana Selma on board…”
“Well, think of it like this,” Binky said in her warning judge voice, “as the Center for Historic Preservation has told us, they can probably line up more dollars for purchase than we can, and they can likely do it faster. And they can argue land value at, I don’t know, a couple million.”
“Oh, my goodness.” A few members said it at once. Rayne was sorry that Binky had injected the big number. It inflamed some and put fear into others.
Ivy spoke over the six-line mumble: “I say we zip Auntie Selma over to the old Pettiford’s nursing home. She told me which one it is—it’s an Episcopal facility; I’ve talked with the chaplain there—”
“Already?”
“Yeah—and present Mr. Pettiford with two checks: one for the eight thousand dollars Selma still owes him for the loan, plus interest—Uncle Jones, you say that’s ready to go?”
“Yep, just say the word.” Jones and Jared listened together on the old Bell Telephone console with a speakerphone feature that Jared claimed was better than the more modern versions. They raised their eyebrows together, satisfied that this group was making a move on a situation that had worried Jones for years.
“Great!” Ivy said. “Okay, and also a check for $2,614.98, which represents the five hundred dollars Pettiford paid Richard and Mary in 1942 for their ‘share’ of the land, plus two-point-five percent interest for sixty-seven years since 1942.”
Rayne laughed into the phone. He’d thought that the minister would come along to provide moral persuasion. No one else was laughing. “Sorry.”
“I was thinking ten percent,” Jewell said. “That’s what it would have made in stocks, you could argue.” Jack was reclining next to her. He pulled down the corners of his mouth, shook his head gently, and mimed no. Jewell swiveled the receiver up over her head. “Too much?” she mouthed.
He nodded.
She handed him the telephone and went to the kitchen to get another extension, so that they could both listen.
“This is Rick in New York, Richard’s grandson.” Rick was a year away from retiring as a community outreach officer for a communications company. He introduced himself each time he spoke in a rounded soft-belly of a voice that sounded perpetually satisfied. He kept an eye on the story they were creating, and the spin. “I was thinking of lowballing them at three percent, making the case that that’s what a savings account would have averaged over the years. But Ivy, how in the heck did you get it down to two-point-five? How do you justify that? The downturn in the economy? That’s just recent.”
“Victory bonds were three percent at the beginning of World War Two, Rick. My parishioner, a very funny man named Jubilee, almost got hit by a car, and that was all he talked about for weeks, was finding his Victory bonds,” Ivy said.
“Jubilee?” Jewell asked. “Jubilee? Funny little short man?”
“Yeah,” Ivy said. “Don’t tell me you know him. Mr. Jubilee knows everybody.”
“I’m the one who almost hit him.”
The conference line made its quiet crackle and hum. Then Ivy spoke: “You’re the crazy white lady?”
Jewell laughed along with the others. “How does one answer that?”
“Hah!” Ivy laughed loudly over the comments others were making. “You are the crazy white woman looking for her family!”
“I didn’t say all that.”
“Well, he’s been prayin for you to find ’em ever since. He had some crazy name for you: Pearl or Ruby—”
“Those are jewels. He was trying to remember Jewell, I bet.”
“Well, I guess we can take you off the prayer list now, since we found you. Oh, Lord. Mr. Jubilee strikes again.”
“Uh, this is Rick. Very funny twist. Very funny, and I love the three percent war bonds thing, but, sorry to be so, uh, goal-oriented, but how did you get it down to two-point-five percent?”
“Oh, Rick!”
Binky couldn’t help herself.
“No, he’s right. Okay, Rick: turning, turning, we come down right.”
Jack put down his phone extension altogether, having laughed so hard that he was having trouble breathing.
Ivy continued: “So, here’s the little cheapie part: in 1942, the feds put a cap of two-point-five percent on government issues. I’m guessing they were just spending money hand over foot. So, anyway, since this money we’re talking about changed hands in 1942, I thought we’d play by World War Two rules.”
“This is Rick again. Ivy, that’s brilliant. I don’t know if it’s Christian, strictly speaking, but it’s brilliant.”
Jack whispered: “See if anybody’s got frequent-flier miles so Rayne can jump on the plane. And then he’d take Selma to the nursing home, so he’ll need a rental car, too.”
Binky volunteered her husband’s miles and promised to send out an e-mail to collect others so that they could travel on demand a few times that spring. Rayne thanked them and looked at Lillie, on the cordless extension, who rolled her eyes and nodded that she’d make the ticket arrangements.
“But is the old man still making his own business arrangements?” Rayne asked. “I mean, say we go in there and drop a few thousand on him, and find out that he can’t sign his name, or the grandson has power of attorney, and then we’ve bullied some old guy who was nice to the colored people. Makes me want to hit somebody.”
Binky answered: “Now, Rayne, we know you’re a big, strong man. No need to hit people.”
“Especially not in the nursing home,” Ivy said.
“This is Rick. But he’s absolutely right about how it will look if he goes in trying to get some old guy to accept, what, like, ten thousand dollars for a parcel worth much more?”
“It’s eight thousand in repayment for the loan, not for land,” Louis said. He ran a small accounting business that did payrolls for beauty shops and day cares. “The twenty-six-hundred-dollar repayment of a five-hundred-dollar heir property share is not payment for land, because I think you could argue—Cousin Binky, you’re the judge; Jack’s t
he lawyer—that they got the share fraudulently.”
“How fraudulently?” Rayne asked.
“Because if Pettiford was in the chamber of commerce and on the bank board back then, then he certainly knew that if there was no will, then they all owned it together, and that clearly, it was acting in pretty bad faith to buy into a share without telling the other principal owners, in this case the widow of the family patriarch.”
Jones made some noises. “Well,” he said. “Well, here’s the other thing about that: he’s gonna say that the only reason he bought it in the first place was to keep Richard from selling to Broadnax, because Richard was desperate to get out, and he’d sell to anyone. Sorry, Binky, Rick; don’t none of this sound good. ’Cause Broadnax was tryin to find a way in to steal the land back then.”
“This is Rick. No offense taken, Uncle Jones. My dad actually told us that that was the one thing he wished he could take back. My concern is that I know he tried once, and the old man wouldn’t take his money back.”
“Shit,” Rayne breathed. “Sorry, guys.”
“Well, that was a long time ago, and the circumstances are different now,” Binky said. “Jack, are you on the line?”
“Yeah.”
“Today’s not a real strong day for Jack, everybody,” Jewell said. “So he’s trying not to talk a lot.” But Friday was a good day, Jewell said, and Jack called an old U.S. congressman whom he had worked with on years of tobacco industry legislation and asked whether he knew and could get Jack a priority phone meeting with Pettiford the father, the state representative. And the congressman’s people had arranged a Monday-afternoon phone call during lunchtime, which was when Binky said she could join in.
For now, they’d leave the grandson alone and go over his head.
Ivy ended the call with what she called the shortest and most necessary prayer for all family business: “Fear not!”
