A Comedy of Heirs

by Rett MacPherson

  I was tired. My eyes burned in their sockets and my legs felt like they weighed thirty pounds apiece. This pregnancy seemed to just wear me out and make me tired. No morning sickness or anything like that. Just total exhaustion. Today had been a grueling day. Five or so hours at a library that was forty minutes away, dinner with fifty people at Del Pietro’s and now I had to carol for two hours. It would most likely be midnight before I got to bed. It wasn’t like I’d worked eight hours on my feet, but research time can be mentally taxing.

  I still had to tell my mother that I was pregnant. I’d imagined just how I was going to tell her, hoping with all hope that her reaction would be like I’d imagined it. Happy, rejoiceful, supportive. My mother didn’t take to well to change. It was part of the reason her relationship with the sheriff puzzled me. She was severely set in her ways, and sometimes a good thing could actually depress her.

  One good thing that had come from imagining telling my mother about this baby was the fact that I was becoming more used to the idea of the baby. It wasn’t just a blue stick at the doctor’s office anymore. I could imagine pink pudgy toes and dimpled hands. When it’s the size of an egg, it’s so hard to imagine the living, breathing baby that will eventually be born.

  I was going to have a baby. I was going to be a mom. Again.

  “Hey, Torie!” Rudy yelled from across the parking lot. “Come on, we’ve got to get singing before it gets too late.”

  I walked over to my husband and the group of people standing around him. I smiled up at him and he instinctively kissed me. It was time to sing.

  Seventeen

  “Oh, Christmas tree, Oh, Christmas tree…” we all sang. My left hand held Rachel’s and my right hand held a candle. She sang her little heart out. Snow had begun to fall and I couldn’t believe our luck at this seemingly perfect moment.

  The crowd of my family snuggled in together and in front of the Murdoch Inn. Eleanore and Oscar and the few guests that weren’t my family members stood at the door to hear us. Other people on the street had come to their front doors to hear us, too. Uncle Curtis’s deep baritone voice surrounded me like a warm glove from behind.

  Aunt Charlotte often mentioned that Uncle Curtis was sort of homely but his voice is what had made her notice him. I don’t think he was homely. He was just sort of plain looking, punctuated by absolutely no outstanding features at all and a semibald head. He couldn’t even be bald all the way.

  The next song was “Joy to the World.” The song that can get stuck in my head and be there for a week. We all moved up along River Point Road with the river on our right. The water looked like black oil slithering south, swallowing up all the big fat snowflakes that fell into it.

  Then I heard somebody say, “What is that?”

  We all kept singing. I am fairly short and was surrounded by people so I couldn’t really see what was going on. A few voices trailed off and people were beginning to walk over to the river. I’m not sure what to call that feeling you get, when you know something, and you have no real way of knowing it. But, I knew something was wrong. I made my way through the ten or so people in front of me dragging Rachel close behind me.

  In the Mississippi, facedown, was a body. “All right, everybody back!” I heard Rudy yell. “Go on.”

  “Damon,” I said. Damon, who stood about three people from me, walked over, staring at the body in the river the whole time. “Run up the road to my house. The sheriff is there taking my mother home. Tell him to get down here.”

  “Who is it?” I heard somebody ask. I think the voice was my cousin Wendy’s, but I couldn’t be sure. “Is he dead?” another voice asked.

  “Okay,” Rudy said. “This is nothing for children to see. Everybody go back to our house or to the Inn or a restaurant or something.”

  I was frozen, looking into the water at the body that floated there. “He could have floated for miles,” Rudy said to me. He knew what I was thinking. He knew I was wondering if it was anybody that I knew. “Why don’t you take Rachel and Mary home.”

  “No,” I said. I looked around and saw Aunt Sissy standing by a fire hydrant. I walked over with Rachel and now Mary. “Could they stand back here with you, or would you take them up to Pierre’s bakery for a goodie or something?”

  “Of course,” Aunt Sissy said. “I don’t want to be here when they pull him out, anyway.”

  Aunt Sissy walked up the street. She’d make a left at the next street to get to Pierre’s. Damon had run up River Point Road to my house, which was only two or three blocks away.

  It might as well have been forty miles because the four minutes that it took to get the sheriff creeped by as we watched the snowflakes getting smaller. I thought I could actually hear them landing on the ground and the normal soothing lap of the Mississippi River seemed to echo in my ears. Finally the sheriff pulled up to where we stood by the wharf. He’d called the paramedics and everything from my house. It was another eternity before the EMTs got there. The whole time we all stood around trying not to say the obvious. One of us would say something like, “I haven’t seen so and so in a few days.” And then change the subject again real fast until one of us would say it again with a different name.

  The one person that I’d seemed to forget about and hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t at the dinner this evening was Uncle Jedidiah. I thought it strange, though, that none of his offspring had asked where he was or mentioned where he was. The EMTs pulled the body out of the water and, unfortunately, I was right. It was Uncle Jedidiah Keith. The bottom fell out of my stomach and a cold sweat broke out along my back.

  Oh my God. That was my uncle lying there in that freezing cold water! Tears rose to my eyes and froze on my cheeks as they fell. “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  Rudy was instantly beside me with his arm around me. “It’s all right,” I heard his voice say.

  “Oh my God,” I muttered. “It’s Uncle Jed…”

  “I know,” Rudy soothed. “I know.” He held me close as I turned my head and sobbed heavily into his coat. I couldn’t tell you what anybody else’s reaction was. I couldn’t even tell you who else was present. When I gained control of myself I took a good long look at the stretcher with my uncle’s body and a white sheet draped over it. I doubted I’d ever forget this.

  It had stopped snowing.

  Eighteen

  I sat at the kitchen table shoving a piece of banana cake with cream cheese frosting in my mouth as fast as I could. My eyes were swollen and my nose wasn’t quite finished running from the crying fit I’d just had at the discovery of my uncle’s body in the cold Mississippi River. My mother sat across from me, filling my glass of milk as fast as I drained it.

  “I just can’t believe it,” I said with a slight hiccup.

  “Just calm down,” Mom said. “We don’t know what happened yet.”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “That’s what happened.”

  “Just wait until Colin gets back before you go and convince yourself that evil play is at hand. Okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You’re right. But, I still can’t believe it.”

  “What’re the plans for the rest of the reunion?” she asked.

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. We’re all going to be at a funeral instead of a dinner at the KC hall. How can we go on and celebrate and stuff?”

  “Well, you might want to ask his kids what they want to do. They may want to have the kind of wake where people party instead of moping.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Well, you never know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

  Aunt Sissy had come back already and I’d put my girls to bed without telling them what had happened. Aunt Sissy didn’t feel well so she went upstairs to my bedroom and lay down across the bed. Rudy had walked me home and then gone back with the sheriff.

  “Why couldn’t it have been Ruth?” I asked.

  “Victory!” my mother snapped. “Don’t you ever say something like that.”

 
“I can’t help it,” I said. “Uncle Jed was a fun-loving drunk. He never did anything to anybody.” All right, I felt bad over the statement I’d just made, but at the time I said it, I meant it. Actually, now I felt really, really bad. If something happened to her now I was going to just be convinced it was because I said it. My family wrote the book on how to feel guilty about everything. I can feel guilty about something that has nothing to do with anything.

  My mother gave me her best I’m-ashamed-of-you look. Funny how that worked, because now I felt all ashamed of myself. “Sorry,” I muttered. “I … I just feel so bad. I feel responsible because this happened in my town. I feel responsible because this happened at the family reunion that I was hosting. I feel guilty because I wonder if any of the stuff I was digging up on Nate Keith had anything to do with this … I just feel so many things. And none of it is good.”

  “That’s perfectly natural,” Mom said.

  “It is? Is it natural to immediately feel guilty over everything?”

  “Are you okay?” Mom asked.

  “I think … well, actually no. I’m pregnant,” I spit out.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said.

  I stared at her with sheer astonishment. “What? What do you mean, tell you something you don’t already know? What do you mean? Just … how … what do you mean by that?”

  “You go almost twenty hours a day. The past two weeks you’re nodding off at eight P.M. unless you have to go somewhere. You have a glow about you. You’ve been acting strange, aside from the fact that you’ve got fifty people who are related to you within a five-mile radius—and they are all relatives of your father’s. If it were my family you wouldn’t be so nuts. But you’ve been acting strange. The night Rudy smashed his nose, he was acting strange. You went to the doctor and yet you never told me what the results were. I just figured it out. Mothers know these things,” she said with a big sigh.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “No you don’t,” she said and filled my glass up again. “You wish you could be just like me.”

  “You’re insufferable.”

  “So anyway,” she said smiling from ear to ear. “Congratulations. Where are you gonna put it?”

  “God, I don’t know. We could do a room addition. We’ve got the money from Rudy’s bonus last year,” I said.

  I scraped the last bite of cake off my plate, making sure to get all the icing on the edge and savoring the richness of it. My mother always knew everything. That is so irritating. Plus she’s so darn smug about it.

  “Well, I’m getting married,” she said.

  The banana cake seemed to get hung right there at the part of my throat where pills and stuff always get stuck. I gulped down the milk and swallowed hard. I coughed a little and then just stared at my mother. She didn’t say a word. I got up and walked to the living room and then came back to the kitchen. I started to speak and couldn’t.

  Married? Married. I assumed she meant she was marrying … God, life is just not fair.

  I walked over to the back door and scratched my head. Then I came back to the table and sat down and looked at her again. She hadn’t grown any horns or anything, so as much as I could tell, she was still my mother. I took my dirty dishes to the sink and set them in there a little too roughly.

  I went back to the table and looked at my mother again. “Did somebody do a Vulcan mind meld on you?” I asked.

  “That wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting,” she said.

  “What about Sean Connery?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “I thought you were gonna marry him?”

  “He’s already married.”

  “That never stopped you from saying it before.”

  Flashing that get-real look at me, she crossed her arms and tilted her head, then fixed an expectant stare at me. Okay, she’d told me congratulations. She had been happy for me. I should do the same thing for her. I didn’t want to, but I should. “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “This will work out good. The new baby can have my room.”

  “You’re moving?” I asked, incredulous. “You don’t have to move.”

  “Oh, Colin is going to move in here with you and Rudy, Rachel, Mary, and Junior,” she stated.

  No way in heck could I live with the sheriff in this house. I could barely live with the fact he lived in the same country. “No, I guess not.”

  There was a long, heavy silence between us. A tear ran down my cheek and I was surprised by this. I swiped at it quickly. “That’s great, Mom. Congratulations again.”

  “Victory,” she pleaded. “Don’t cry.”

  “Don’t cry? How can you tell me not to cry? I can cry if I want. My uncle just died. My mother is getting married. My mother is moving out of my house. And I’m pregnant, dammit. I can cry if I want to!” More tears fell and I continued to be surprised. If somebody had asked me what my reaction to my mother moving out would be, I would never have guessed that it would have been crying like a thirteen-year-old girl who’s just been told her best friend is moving to Kansas.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I managed to say. “I … I can’t talk now. I’m going to go lie down.”

  “I’m not moving a thousand miles away. We’ll probably buy a house in Wisteria or here in New Kassel,” she said.

  I didn’t care. I didn’t care what words she spoke to try and make me feel better. My feelings were hurt. We were a team. We were best friends. I could give two hoops in the chicken coop if she moved in right next door. I was crushed.

  I also realized somewhere in the back of my mind that I was being terribly childish and selfish. Try and rationalize that to an exhausted pregnant woman at midnight. What the heck had happened to my life? In one week it had just been torn upside down.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’m happy for you, Mom. Regardless of how many tears you see, I am happy for you.”

  With that I left her seated at the table and went upstairs to find Aunt Sissy sprawled sideways on my bed. I knew I couldn’t sleep, but I was going to try before I found something new to cry about.

  Nineteen

  The room was dark and I could barely make out Aunt Sissy’s form lying across my bed. She still wore her royal blue velvet jumper that she’d worn to the dinner. It was the only time other than weddings that I had seen her actually dress up. Black and white saddle oxfords were still on her feet, hanging off the side of my bed. I don’t know anybody that can get by with wearing those after they turn eight. Aunt Sissy could. Actually I’m not sure that she could really get by with it either, she just did it and didn’t care what people thought.

  “Shut him up,” she whispered. “Shut him up.”

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was dreaming. I sat down on the bed next to her and she began to rock back and forth like a child does. “Aunt Sissy,” I said.

  “Ooooh, shut him up,” she said. Small whimpers escaped her and she began to sob. She repeated that same phrase over and over in a trancelike rhythm.

  “Sissy,” I said, more firm. “Wake up.” I shook her shoulder and repeated her name a few times. Finally, she startled awake and sat up, her eyes wide with fear. For a split second she came across like she was about ten years old.

  “Shut who up, Aunt Sissy?”

  Tear-filled eyes narrowed on me. She swiped at her face to remove the evidence that her dream left on the conscious world. “Nobody,” she whispered.

  “Were you dreaming about Uncle Jed?” I asked.

  “No,” she said and shook her head. “Poor Jed. Have we heard anything new?”

  “Not yet,” I answered. I figured out of all of my aunts and uncles, Sissy would be the one to be the most upfront with. What did I have to lose? “Were you the one that sent me the newspaper articles?”

  She ran her fingers through her hair and looked confused for a minute. “No, I didn’t.” So far, I had collected about fifty-five signat
ures and hadn’t had a chance to compare them with the note that came with the newspaper articles.

  “What newspaper articles?” she asked.

  I really didn’t know how to broach the subject so I just shrugged my shoulders at her. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  “You wouldn’t have asked if it was nothing. Don’t go acting like coy Wendy,” she declared. “Go on, spit it out.”

  “I received newspaper articles on the death of Nate Keith,” I declared. I watched her face closely to see what sort of reaction I was going to get. Disappointment was all I got, though. It was far too dark to read anything real subtle and there was no overwhelming reaction from her.

  “I was wondering when it was going to come around and bite us in the ass,” she said.

  “Who? Bite who?”

  “Us. The family. We’ve tried so long to keep it from everybody.”

  “Why?”

  “A murder,” she said. “An unsolved murder at that. Wasn’t exactly the conversation you wanted to bring up when your boyfriend came to dinner. We all made a pact that nobody would know.”

  “How could you keep that from everybody? I can see, like your husband, he wasn’t from Partut County. But what about Uncle Jed’s wife and Uncle Isaac’s? They were both from that area and adults when it happened. How could you keep that from them?”

  “I don’t know what Jed and Ike told their wives. If they told them, it never went to the next generation,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Tell me what you know,” I said. It wasn’t a request. I stated it simply and plainly.

  She sized me up long and hard. A deep long sigh came from within her. It seemed as though the sigh had been waiting fifty years to come out. “I really don’t know very much,” she said.

  “You were there,” I accused.

  “It was hot,” she said. “God, it was so hot, you could see the steam rising off of the chicken coop. Your dad and I had been down at the creek swimming with the neighbor kids. We were supposed to be eating dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s, which we did a lot. About four times a week Mom and Dad would take us all over there and help with the chores and cook dinner.”