The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  “No,” Rosemarie replied, watching her slugs. Her head lifted only once to follow a group of colored boys making their way along the road toward the fields. This was another indication it was Easter time, the beginning of cotton season.

  “You’ll ruin your frock,” I repeated, louder this time, tightening my arms across my chest, as if making my body more compact would distill my message.

  Her head swiveled toward me. As she propped herself on her forearm, I saw how the brick floor of the porch had pricked up the white material on her chest.

  Her mouth snapped open. “I will not ruin my frock,” she said. “This is your frock.”

  Then her face almost broke in two with that smile of hers. We dissolved into giggles right there on the spot, and I squatted down next to her, mussing my own gingham skirt in the process. I sometimes lost track of myself when spending time with Rosemarie.

  But I always managed to find myself again.

  The morning after Easter service, when our preacher had made note of my sullied dress, his lips puckered in disappointment, I took matters into my own hands. I salted her slugs and, for good measure, also daubed them with a slurry of molasses and arsenic, which we used on the boll weevils that sometimes plagued our cotton. A whole year slid by before Rosemarie forgave me. And how could I have known that her gray-marled cat, a grizzled thing and already far too old at the time, had a taste for molasses?

  “Olva,” I said, breaking from my contemplation. “I would enjoy some coffee at the moment.”

  “Would you like to give me a hand?”

  I didn’t answer quickly enough, because she lifted herself from the chair and disappeared into the kitchen.

  I heard the honk of a drawer opening in the kitchen. I braced. Olva moved back through the doorway and stood in front of me, clutching a squall of junk mail—coupons and flyers and whatnot. A single postcard sat on top.

  “Ah, Olva! I knew I’d put this week’s mail someplace but couldn’t recall where. I haven’t sorted through it yet. Thank you for finding it.”

  Olva stepped forward and handed me the stack of mail.

  I examined the postcard. Perhaps I thought slipping it in the drawer would forestall its news. Or prevent Olva from seeing the connection between it and my new need for an inventory. More than anyone, she should understand the necessity of chronicling our family’s history. It is prudent, after all, to keep a record of how one sees things, especially when others perceive matters so differently. On the desk is a letter opener made of cut glass that we played with as children; we marveled at how, held to the window, it produced a different color for each of us. And isn’t that how memory works, too?

  I studied the postcard again. Addressed to me, it pictured a majestic building. The architecture looked Greek Revival. The caption across the top of the postcard read Montgomery, Alabama and across the bottom The First Capital of the Confederate United States, 1861. The whole bottom line had been crossed through with a red ballpoint, as though history could be changed with the stroke of a pen.

  “Olva—”

  But she was gone. I flipped over the postcard, which was unsigned. But I had known from the moment I saw it. It was unmistakably my sister’s hand, a muddle of agitated letters. The message had been scrawled off, with the last word sitting a bit apart from the others, as if she had been in the process of getting up from her chair as she wrote it.

  Sister, I am coming home.

  I stood with the postcard held aloft in my hand, as if aiming it at something. Or someone. It is important to know that Rosemarie has never been bound by any sense of responsibility to our family. You see, Quincy gathered secrets, but Rosemarie’s impulse was to scatter them to the wind. And my sister believes I killed Quincy.

  Well now. It was time to get my inventory underway.

  Windsor chair

  Wooden spinning wheel

  Mahogany secretary

  R. S. Prussia vase

  Pie safe—Grandmother DeLour’s

  Butler’s tray (silver plated)

  Amsterdam School copper mantel clock

  Hamilton drafting table

  Letter opener (cut glass)

  Two

  Our family’s misfortune began on a day meant for celebration. The date was Saturday, June 1, 1929, and Bound was slated to receive an electric current, an achievement for which Daddy Kratt considered himself responsible. The gentlemen at the Southern Public Utilities Company tasked with handling his aggressive and persistent requests were no doubt relieved that their business dealings with him were coming to an end.

  To herald the electric current, Daddy Kratt had arranged for an open house at our store, which was the grandest structure in Bound in those days—ever since then, too. My father had given Bound its first department store. The store’s stature alone was impressive: twenty-six thousand square feet, four grand floors, built in 1913 from brick Daddy Kratt had commissioned at a cut rate from a local mason. There was Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Jordan Marsh in Boston, and Macy’s in New York. And alongside those, the Kratt Mercantile Company in Bound, South Carolina.

  As luck would have it, selling unrelated goods under one roof was Daddy Kratt’s particular talent, honed from his days dealing bric-a-brac when Bound was just a trading post. He could sell a man a shoehorn and a chicken as though they were a matching set. Running a department store also required an understanding of how to manage large numbers of people in one space. There again, Daddy Kratt’s early experiences—this time with livestock—came in handy.

  The Kratt Mercantile Company spanned two generations and was the lifeblood of Bound for nearly twenty years, selling provisions for families (furniture, groceries, clothing, and shoes) and local businesses (farm implements, cottonseed, buggies, mules, and cattle). At its height, our store housed the town’s only bank, the Kratt Bramlett Bank of Bound, and its lone car dealership (Chevrolets at first, then Fords). Not to mention that my father’s Cadillac had served as the local ambulance because it was the only car in town for many years.

  The morning of the open house, I walked to the store, the day full of promise. The sky, honey-colored, was lifting the sun into view, and I paused to consider the light as it stretched in every direction, the red-breasted nuthatches dipping in and out of sight as they gleaned insects from the smooth bark of white pines. Despite a fine sun-soaked day, I would be obliged to remain inside the store. I didn’t mind. It was the first time my father had allowed me to manage the store’s inventory—I was just fifteen years old. That morning, I would check the new merchandise on the floor against our inventory ledger. Afterward, when customers arrived for the open house, I would take them on tours, every hour on the hour, which would culminate that evening in the first display of the electric current.

  When I arrived at the store, Olva was helping our cook, Ima, set brass trays of strawberry shortcakes on an entrance table. Ima was in her forties, around Mama’s age, although she looked a good deal older than my mother. Ima had four children, if I recalled correctly, or perhaps five, and they lived somewhere on the expansive acreage of our family’s land that abutted our house. As Ima surveyed the shortcakes, her face shone with satisfaction, even a cautious kind of pride. She had been required to show up when darkness still hung over the store to bake over a hundred strawberry shortcakes in the workers’ kitchen. I knew her shortcakes personally, each one a precise union of sweet berries and snowslides of whipped cream, all heaped on the bottom half of a buttermilk biscuit, the biscuit’s lid a golden crown. We stood admiring Ima’s creations.

  But then the store’s double doors flew open. It was Daddy Kratt. He stood backlit for a moment, as if his dark figure had burned a hole straight through the weak morning light, until the doors smacked shut behind him and he strode forward. Luckily, Ima had set down the final tray of shortcakes—there were ten in all—or surely she would have dropped it. My father said n
othing as he advanced on us, although he paused for a beat, long enough for one of his horned eyebrows to twitch when he saw Olva.

  He stopped in front of the shortcakes. They sat quietly in their rows. With a steady and quick hand, Daddy Kratt sent three trays, one by one, sailing down. The trays flipped as they landed, the metal clattering and the shortcakes detonating as they hit the floor. Ima let out a cry, and Daddy Kratt merely looked down at his work boots, which were covered in a massacre of berries. His face held no note of emotion as he walked on, flattening a shortcake under his boot as he passed.

  It was like that with Daddy Kratt. Even when you got everything right, you never knew which of his reactions might decide to open the door and greet you.

  Ima’s expression was assembling and disassembling itself, and before her face could settle on any one feeling, she dropped to her knees and began scooping the mess with her hands onto one of the trays. Olva reached down and touched Ima on the arm, but Ima jerked away. Olva retracted her hand and studied the wrecked shortcakes with a blank stare, as if her thoughts had dropped there, too. I knew what she was thinking. Ima’s rejection of Olva was not surprising to either of us, but she seemed no less hurt by it. Ima—not only Ima, our maids, too—regarded Olva with some aloofness, I’m afraid. Olva once told me they kept their distance because of her closeness with our family. “Maybe they’re envious,” I had said, and Olva had responded with a tired smile.

  I looked again at Ima kneeling, Olva standing next to her, and the shortcakes in ruins on the floor. With a sense of determination, I turned around and steered myself toward the middle of the store. Retrieving the daily ledger, I set to work on the store’s inventory, knowing I was capable of completing my duties. I was still worried my father would show up and punish me for some small mistake—or some accomplishment—but I didn’t see him all morning. Going about my tasks, I accounted for a shipment of finely made Junghans mantel clocks we had received last week. I moved from floor to floor, making notations in the ledger, and then I checked the numbers on the new high-arm Singer sewing machines. These were a sight to behold: each measuring 17 by 8 by 13 inches, made of black cast iron with swirls of gold and red on their bodies and large hand-crank wheels on the ends. With their needled noses pointing down, the machines resembled a row of people bending over, doing some kind of work. I thought of Ima hunched over, cleaning up the floor where I had left her and Olva. I considered whether I should have stayed to help.

  But the noise of customers interrupted my thoughts. It was time for the tours. I smoothed my dress and moved toward the entrance. Seven trays of shortcakes sat on the table, the floor below them spotless, no evidence of the earlier scene. No evidence of Olva or Ima either.

  All that morning, the tours ran easily. Daddy Kratt had insisted Quincy join me in leading the tours, but Rosemarie—who was thirteen years old, just a year younger than Quincy and not a child any longer—had been permitted to forgo the task altogether. Rosemarie had been let off the hook, as always, but perhaps it was for the best. Quincy and I were working well as a team, and customers seemed lighthearted and willing to listen to my details about the history of the store and its merchandise.

  But then Byrd Parker showed up, and the atmosphere sobered.

  Byrd Parker had the long face and hushed manner of a funeral home director, and he possessed such a profound capacity for stillness that I never once saw him draw or release a breath. Byrd was the owner of the only cotton gin in town our father had not managed to acquire, though he had tried several times. Looking back, Byrd was not responsible for our family’s troubles, but we should have seen it coming when we saw what happened to him.

  Dreadful circumstances had recently befallen Byrd, and wherever he went, a gloom followed. Three Sundays earlier, Byrd’s wife had left their church service, complaining of a headache. Rather than go home, she had crept out to the unnamed lake, into which she had swum two pew lengths and drowned herself. No one offered any reason for her suicide, and Byrd, already the melancholy sort, seemed to regard the tragedy as another in a long line of scourges that defined his life. In this way, Byrd was Daddy Kratt’s most stubborn business rival; his despondency made him impervious to our father’s threats. According to Byrd, something worse was always around the corner.

  There he stood among the other customers, his face drained of expression and sorrow lifting off him like an odor, medicinal in quality, a bracing mixture of camphor and pickling lime. People edged away from him, as if the smell—and his suffering—might leach into their clothing. But Quincy leaned in. He leaned in with the look of someone who wanted to learn.

  “Sir!” Quincy crossed over to where Byrd was standing. “Would you like to see something very special?”

  Byrd’s lips parted queasily. He glanced around at the rest of the tour group as if someone might answer for him.

  I knew what special thing Quincy meant.

  “Quincy, I hardly think—”

  “Now, Sister, here’s a man who deserves to see something special.”

  A few murmurs arose from the crowd—Quincy was bringing them around—but I knew that my brother’s interest in Byrd was not rooted in sympathy.

  “Let’s take this man to see the Tiffany lamp!”

  There was no stopping my brother. This, I knew. He launched up the grand mahogany stairs, leading the group toward a roped-off section on the wide landing between the two main staircases of the store. I followed. I knew we weren’t supposed to take people to the lamp yet, but all I could do was keep an eye out for Daddy Kratt.

  Quincy had thrown his arm around Byrd. My brother wore a broad-shouldered dress suit, or rather it was wearing him, because he had bought a larger size than needed to mask his featherweight body. It was no use: the acute angles of his body jutted like icebergs through a sea of material when he moved. The fabric was the same tan color as the freckles crowding his nose, and he had custom-ordered the suit to match one of Daddy Kratt’s. When our tailor, Mr. Redmond, had finished the suit, he was surprised to find he would be earning no money on it; my brother had laughed when he told me how he had paid Mr. Redmond with a promise. The promise was that Quincy would not divulge to Mrs. Redmond her husband’s weakness for gambling.

  Quincy had information like that tucked away about everyone in Bound. He knew, for instance, that Clay Babbitt juggled four mistresses and that Randall Clark, the car mechanic, took long walks to avoid his own home. He knew that Prudence Dean drank more corn liquor than all the men in Bound combined; that William Greeley, our butcher, had a taste for prurient literature; and that Priscilla Brown, age seventy-five, had poisoned her own dog, a terrier mix.

  Quincy was not careless with these secrets, nor did they possess him in any lurid way. He was dispassionate, and apart from the rare times he used this backdoor information to his own advantage, he disclosed nothing unless Daddy Kratt made a request. But when this happened, Quincy acted swiftly and without mercy. No sooner had Priscilla Brown back-talked Daddy Kratt at a county council meeting than she found the ugly truth about her dog spread all over town. She lived by herself, and afterward, no one would visit her, not even her own grandchildren. She died quite alone. My brother said I had a sensible enough head than to go repeating the secrets he shared with me. I listened quietly and carefully to everything. He seemed to enjoy simply having someone to talk with.

  Climbing the staircase with Byrd, my brother looked ridiculous to me, all dressed up in his suit as if conducting some crucial piece of business. But then again, Quincy was always in the thick of some kind of operation, making a dozen transactions a minute in his mind about how Daddy Kratt might ruin a person’s life. The tours meant something different to me: they were meant to honor our family and all the things we had brought to this town. I had opted to wear a cotton dress in a subdued floral pattern so that I wouldn’t detract from the merchandise in the store.

  Quincy was awfully good at making peopl
e feel comfortable or at least distracted—a gift of manipulation rather than compassion—and he got Byrd talking. Heads tilted in confidence, the two became absorbed in conversation. No one seemed to notice except me, because in embracing Byrd, Quincy had put everyone else at ease, and their minds were free to wander away from his despair and back to their own. By the time we reached the landing, the group was fizzing with everyday complaints.

  I was not surprised that my brother had transfixed Byrd. To Quincy, it came easily. When he studied a group of people, he saw a more complex design than the rest of us. If he looked long enough, gestures passed unobserved by the average person—the ghostly caress of a wrist, an imperceptible nod, or a breath held in a heartbeat longer than usual—drifted into his view and took on startling shapes, like clouds twisting and untwisting in the sky. Quincy was a reader of the air, a diviner of the ordinary.

  Byrd was talking in Quincy’s ear, but for a moment, my brother’s attention fell away from their conversation. Dovey Aiken had joined our tour. Dovey was the daughter of our town’s pharmacist, and she was beautiful in a classic, wholesome way, though her large eyes were set a little wider on her face than was perhaps necessary. It gave her a look of persistent wonderment. She was always fussing her hands with something—tugging at the hem of her sleeve or pressing her palm lightly against her hair. I am a person who can recognize beauty but is rarely sent into a swoon by it. Dovey, though, seemed a rare sort of loveliness, the kind unaffected by the power it might afford her, and that, I appreciated. When she looked at Quincy, it was with an open and earnest face. My brother, noticing Dovey’s eyes were on him, went a degree paler, like a leaf flipped to its underside, and he appeared a bit confused or like a spell of indigestion had taken hold. I wondered if he had eaten too many of Ima’s shortcakes. Or was it something about Mr. Aiken? Had he discovered some secret about Dovey’s father? Yet Mr. Aiken was bland as they came.