If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel
Page 27
———
When Jack Thompson and Judge Hortense Needham-Reese came onto the Monday lunch call together, Pettiford’s first question was whether Jack had mentioned this heir property business to the congressman.
“Well, I had to give him just a heads-up,” Jack said suavely.
“But Representative Pettiford,” Binky said with assurance, as if they were already good pals, “Jack and I have been double-teaming this whole effort, and I can tell you that he’s just been as discreet as you’d want. We in the Needham family are really only recently working together in these new ways, and I’m just sorry I never had a chance to see Jack at work in a courtroom.”
“May we tape this conversation?” Jack asked in a low voice just this side of a growl.
“Of course. I had nothing to do with any of this,” Pettiford said.
“And if your family just sends us a notarized quitclaim, then it’ll stay that way.”
“I hope you haven’t worried my father with this. This kind of thing gets him awfully agitated.”
“Well, I believe that Mrs. Selma Needham has gone to visit him personally. But she tells me that she’s an old family friend. She has cared for him, too, right? She says that your father was very good to her family.”
“He’s awfully fragile.”
“I’ll tell you what, I’ve learned that our older relatives have a steel in their spines that we mustn’t fail to recognize,” Binky said. “And our younger relatives sometimes need to be reined in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Representative Pettiford, Mrs. Needham is taking a check to your father that comprises the whole of the loan your son made to her, including whatever interest they agreed upon. But you ought to know that he was trying to cut a deal…”
“When?”
“This morning. Old folks are better in the morning.”
Binky heard Jack’s breath run out. She took up the thread. “The deal your grandson was trying to cut, Mr. Pettiford, was to get Mrs. Needham to turn over the entire parcel to him in exchange for his forgiving an eight-thousand-dollar debt.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean exactly that.”
“Yes, I’m sure he did. And there was just a hint of a threat, Mr. Pettiford, that he might force a sale of the heir property if she refused.”
“We could have handled this without the visit. I wish you’d come straight to me.”
“We have.” Jack was using his emergency oxygen tank instead of his machine to keep down background noise. Now and then, he took the phone away from his mouth to keep from breathing too heavily into the receiver. Jewell had turned up the oxygen as far as it would go. He could hear that Binky was about to say something, but he cut in with a snarl, as much as he could muster. “I don’t know what exactly happened to King Needham, but your father does, Mr. Pettiford, and so does Mrs. Needham’s brother. He was there.”
Binky continued, “It was enough to make my mom and dad cut and run. They were grateful that Mr. Pettiford paid them five hundred dollars to get started in a new and less threatening place, but believe me, they had no idea that they were endangering the entire parcel of heir property by selling him what they thought was theirs. We think that your father knew these things, Mr. Pettiford. If there had been no threat, then she would not have needed ‘looking after,’ as your family has called it.”
“She’s a very capable woman,” Jack said.
“Why, certainly she is, but back then, there were a lot of people, frankly, who had no scruples about just finessing African-American widows and some of the illiterate people out of their land,” Pettiford said. Then, catching himself, he added, “Of course I hardly need to tell you all that.”
“Well, it still happens, Mr. Pettiford. I’m just letting you know that we believe she’s being finessed now. And the other heirs—I mean, our conversation with your son did not reassure the judge at all. That’s why we’ve called you directly before we do anything else. Because we know that your family doesn’t need to finesse this family out of its property today.”
“I resent that word, and I really resent the direction of this conversation. I resent your trying to muscle my father. My daddy was a great help to their family, Mr. Thompson, and he always thought of what he did for the family you represent as a gift.”
“It’s my family, Mr. Pettiford, through my wife. Let’s think of it as a loan. Five hundred dollars invested in 1942. The children of Richard Needham figure that if you’d invested that in 1942 war bonds, you’d have about twenty-six hundred in the bank now.”
“That’s ridiculous. Do you know what the land is worth today?”
“The heirs are not selling the land, Mr. Pettiford. They’re repaying a loan, with interest and gratitude. Are you the one to sign the quitclaim? Does your father do his own business or are you power of attorney? Can we have the quitclaim messengered over to you today? Binky, we can do that, can’t we?”
“I can do it before court goes back into session if we stop talking about it and get off the phone in the next ten minutes.”
“Look, wait till I’m back in Gunnerson. Don’t send it here to my capital office.”
“We’d hate to have to wait. Once these things are out…”
“I’ll be there Friday. I see people there every Friday.”
“And you’ll talk to your son, so nothing changes between now and then?”
“You take care of your family; I’ll handle mine.”
“We’ll enclose a FedEx envelope.”
“Now, that’s to my Gunnerson office.”
“I’ll make sure to let the congressman know what a help you’ve been,” Jack said smoothly. “He’s a great guy, isn’t he?”
———
Jewell called Rayne. “You driving?”
“The rental car.”
“Where’s Selma?”
“Here, next to me.”
“She feel like talking?”
“I don’t think so. Let’s just say we did what we went there to do. We left the check. And he has a whiteboard next to his bed, so I wrote that we’d been there and left the check. Then we told the nursing staff. Every damn body in the place knows. No more secret.”
Selma sighed heavily.
“How’d he take it?”
“He cried. Asked whether ‘the boy’ was alive: Jones.”
Jewell was silent.
“You hear me?”
“I heard you. It was hard for Selma?”
“Yep. Yep. And now, we’re going to go order a headstone for King.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Selma said, her voice flat, just controlled, necessary.
“What did she say?” Jewell asked.
“Nothing. We’re gonna get his full name. King Charles Freeman Needham. Did you know that?”
“I guess I did.” Jewell would put that full name into the letter she’d been writing for a month. She’d mail it now for Rayne’s sake, finally.
———
In the late afternoon in August, when everyone said it was too hot to do a wedding in South Carolina, the wedding party drove up to Selma’s old Methodist church in a rented Town Car, because Lillie wouldn’t marry from the truck, followed by the Needham “Family Leadership,” and a dozen and a half other family members. They pulled up the driveway to the old church that King had helped build with his ten-dollar donation and the thousand feet of seasoned lumber. It was a simple old wooden building set up off the green grass with yellow bricks. Afternoon sun passed directly through three large windows in front and seemed almost to pass through the back windows, sun and breeze moving through, to refresh tired sharecroppers whose short, hard lives brimmed with brutal losses. The signs said that the building had been built in 1925 and used as a church and school until the 1980s. Behind it sat a squat new Methodist church, air-conditioned, made of whitewashed concrete blocks.
Rayne and Lillie had been adamant about no pre-wedding parties or attendants or frills. Lillie had just taken
her nursing exams, and Rayne was now working out a schedule that would allow him to do jobs in Philadelphia until December, then live in the old house in Gunnerson and begin construction on the family-run bed-and-breakfast during the winter. They’d had no time to plan, and refused to spend big wedding money with new travel costs. Exhausted, they invited Khalil to tell them what kind of wedding he’d like. He reminded them that it would be hot, and that everyone had told him about a great swimming hole down the hill from Selma’s old church, the site of church picnics and baptisms. He wanted a swimming-hole wedding.
Accordingly, the bride and groom and guests were instructed to wear bathing suits under their clothes. In the trunk of the Town Car was a huge basket of fried chicken, and ice chests with champagne that Jewell and Jack had sent and lemonade and watermelon.
Ivy conducted the service with a reverent verve and dispatch. After fifteen minutes, in which everyone but the bride and groom fanned themselves, Rayne and Lillie were married, and the party began the walk down the hill toward the swimming hole, including Selma, who bounced in the wheelchair as long as she could, and then made her way with her walker. Lillie walked next to her, still wearing her off-white veil, attached by a headband to the slick short hair she’d just cut.
“It didn’t used to be this far,” Selma said several times.
Lillie gave her hand to Jones, who seemed almost apologetic to be stronger than Selma despite being several years older.
At the pond, the dark water lapped just the slightest bit. A few families had spread picnic tables with cloths. This was not the stunning seacoast or a man-made lake with paddleboats and cabanas. This swimming hole served local people, most of them white and working class. A few black families sat in little clumps, and a few black children joined the white children in the water, doing handstands, and swimming underwater while holding their noses shut. The sun was big and low in the west, burnished dark brass at the end of the day. Bronze light had begun to spill onto the river.
“A wedding!”
Others on the dirt beach moved their blankets to make room for the wedding party, who spread out, took drinks, and removed outer clothing self-consciously. Selma took off her shoes and knee-high stockings and placed them carefully on one corner of the blanket Lillie had spread for her. Then she folded carefully her pearl-gray dress. Underneath was a thin housedress. No way was Selma walking out of a wedding and straight into a bathing suit. Instead, she inched the walker to the water’s edge, then called Khalil to run her housedress back to her blanket and then come into the water with her.
The wedding party watched the two at the water’s edge, with puddles of orange-gold light splashing through the Spanish moss on overhanging trees. The sun backlit the boy’s long, taut torso as he cartwheeled next to the great-great-grandmother. Her thin body sagged over the walker, and the skin on her thighs, which had once pulled 150-pound sacks of cotton, draped slightly toward her knees.
“Khalil!” Rayne called. “Watch Nana!”
“Look,” Khalil shouted back. “She’s taking her thing into the water.”
Selma reached out and pinched him. “It’s galvanized,” Selma said. “It don’t rust, and if it do, I’ll get another one.”
“You swim?” Khalil asked.
“I been swimmin since time began,” she said. “One day I’m gonna swim back to Africa. Come on; show me something new.”
“Okay, Dad,” Khalil said loudly, and publicly, for the first time. He made a thumbs-up, and then did his own handstand next to her.
Selma called back that she would have to watch him.
Rayne and Lillie told the family that they were going back to the Town Car. Binky volunteered her niece and nephew to run the newlyweds’ errands, but Rayne and Lillie waved them off. In the Town Car’s air-conditioning they marveled at what they’d just done. Their bodies took in the luxury of the cool air. And time.
“You just want to get me pregnant, don’t you?” she asked. “I felt it. I’ve been feeling it.” She was partly joking.
“So what?” He smiled, seriously, almost relieved.
“And you’re thinking that you might want to come live down here sometime?” she asked. “Come on, we’re married. Talk to me now.” These ideas had never occurred to her before, but when she said them, it was as if she’d always known.
“I might. Like standing in that church he built. So simple, but look at how the light comes through. I could build things here for a lot less.”
Lillie wished her mother were alive. Then she kissed her new husband in the delicious newness of his commitment and twirled on his thick finger the gold ring that had been King’s.
“Well, good thing about nursing,” she said airily, “they got hospitals everywhere.” She opened the car door to the hot and humid evening to return to their guests.
At the swimming hole, their family had taken over the two picnic tables. The burnt-orange wafer of a sun was dipping down over the rim of the world. Its rays glanced off Selma’s galvanized walker, planted where she’d waded in. Rayne and Lillie breathed a single, sharp, fearful breath.
Then they saw her forty feet out in the pond, brown like the pond water, catching lavender-orange droplets of light as she laid her arm out along the water and her face toward the sky. Near her, Khalil broke the surface, laughing and proud, to gulp down all the air he could hold before diving back under.
Acknowledgments
I acknowledge gratefully the lavish resources and gifts of the mind and spirit that helped me write this book.
For space and time:
Pew Fellowships in the Arts
Yaddo
Civitella Ranieri
David and Rebecca Pepper Sinkler
Helen Cunningham and Ted Newbold
For tough minds, generous hearts, and patience:
Jane Dystel
Miriam Goderich
For encouragement and strategy:
Malaika Adero
Todd Hunter
For careful attention:
Sybil Pincus
Martha P. Trachtenberg
For reading, listening, advising:
Rebecca Alpert, Sasha Anawalt, Houston A. Baker Jr., Beth Feldman Brandt, Tarana Burke, Carole Cary, Veronica Chambers, Melissa Cotton, Helen Cunningham, Nancy Hickman, Lorene Jackson, Debora Kodish, Hannibal Lokumbe, Walter and Beverly Lomax, Isaac Miller, Biany Perez, Susan Sherman, Laura Hagans Smith, R. C. Smith, and Tina Smith-Brown
For courage:
Jenny Dietrich
John Hough
For hope and love,
Laura, Zoë, Ora and Sinayya, Samantha, Zachary, Joshua, and Coleman