The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  “Everything is fine,” I said. “Jolly and Vi were just paying a visit.” I turned to Jolly. “Was there something you wanted?” I was tired of being hospitable. It was wearing me out.

  Jolly pressed her lips together. “I suppose you’ve already received your newspaper?”

  “Of course we have. What kind of question is that?” I said. “Do you want to borrow it?”

  Vi shook her head gently, as if to dissuade her sister, but Jolly went on. “What time would you say that black boy delivers your paper every day?”

  Not missing a beat, Olva said, “It changes every day.”

  Jolly tilted her head in disapproval that Olva had replied to a question directed at me.

  Olva saw this but pressed on. “Today was midafternoon, but there is no set schedule.” She turned to me. “Your bath water’s getting cold, Miss Judith.”

  Jolly moved her eyes from Olva to me.

  What Olva had said was not the truth, but I was ready for this conversation to be over. “Jolly, let’s chat another time,” I said. “My bedtime approaches.”

  Olva walked inside, and when I approached the door to follow her, Jolly stepped in front of me. She placed her wide hand on my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of it through my blouse. Inside her mouth, a piece of white gum flipped from one side to the other.

  “Call me the next time you see your paperboy.”

  “Good grief, Jolly, can you not find him yourself?” I moved out from under her hand. “Bound does not stretch very far in any one direction. He may be my paperboy, but he’s your tenant.”

  “I’m shocked you would take a paper from him in the first place, Judith,” Jolly snapped. “Seeing that he’s related to that Negro who shot your brother.”

  “Jolly!” Vi cried.

  “Charlie was his name, wasn’t it?”

  “Jolly!” Vi cried again. “Hush!”

  To my surprise, Jolly closed her mouth.

  I cleared my throat. “And how is your son, Jolly?” I struck off in a new direction, like swerving a car off the road, eager to find distance from her words.

  Jolly’s face drew together as she weighed whether my question was genuine. She could not help herself when the topic was her son, Rick. He was always in a sorry state, which was never his fault. Jolly’s face released. “Oh, that poor thing!” she said, flapping her hands in the air. “He’s just awful these days. But he’s hardly to blame. He can’t earn a living running that store of his, and he’s a hardworking boy. It’s always the hardworking ones who get punished, isn’t it?” Jolly’s voice was getting louder, and I was satisfied with my distraction. “And those welfare blacks don’t lift a finger!”

  “Ah!” I said. I had not distracted her but sharpened her purpose. “I have my bath running. You will have to excuse me, ladies.”

  “It was such a pleasure to see you, Judith,” Jolly said, her voice high and tight. “I will be expecting a call from you.” The two sisters returned to their car, and it sailed away, the darkening sky taking the car and the road with it.

  When I stepped inside, my sister was standing at the window, peering around the curtains. Olva stood a few feet from the door.

  “You’ll run into Jolly at some point,” I said to Rosemarie. “If you intend on staying in Bound for any length of time, that is. We all know that is not your habit.”

  Rosemarie turned to Olva. “What did Jolly want with Marcus?”

  Olva looked at me. She hesitated. “He owes them money.”

  “What kind of money?” Rosemarie asked.

  “Rent money.”

  “Then they are justified in looking for him,” I said.

  “I doubt that!” Rosemarie countered.

  “Who are you to know anything about it?”

  “I know that the Bramletts are callous,” my sister told me. “That is what I know. And if Olva vouches for Marcus, then he is beyond reproach.” She turned to Olva. “I want to help Marcus. We’ll figure this out.”

  “Into old age, you have carried your penchant for melodrama, Rosemarie,” I said. “What a heavy and florid load.”

  My sister could not help herself. She huffed out of the room, just like old times. My satisfaction at having successfully goaded her was cut short when I noticed Olva staring into the living room with a distracted look, as if tallying the chores she had to accomplish before bedtime. I did not envy her the task, the house being exceptionally large and freighted with so many objects.

  Olva’s eyes seemed to land on the rolltop desk. Perhaps she was thinking of my inventory, because I had opened the desk earlier to work on it.

  “Did you know, Olva, that this rolltop desk is an Abner Cutler original?” She didn’t respond, so I said, “Do you think it would remember Mama?”

  Olva paused, letting out a deep, slow breath. I could tell I had hooked her, because she replied, with true pleasure, “Desks can have memories, can’t they?” As if I had gotten to the real point, the one that confirmed the strange wonders threaded through everyday life. “Of course the desk remembers her. She was a sweet old thing.”

  “Old thing?” I said.

  A laugh galloped out of Olva. It was a familiar joke of ours, the one in which Olva forgets she is the old thing now. I am fond of reminding her that she is a year older than I am. She calls it being chronologically gifted.

  “She was a gentle soul,” Olva said.

  “That’s what I’m getting at. You remember how we used to say that when Mama sat on the sofa cushions, she left no indentation, no impression at all that she had been sitting there?”

  Olva chuckled, and a silence settled on us, the kind in which the conversation keeps going. Then she crossed to the window, and I felt a sudden heaviness in the room, like a new piece of furniture pushed between us, blocking my way to her.

  “I hope Jolly doesn’t get her son involved,” Olva said, the dark window framing her. “A nasty fellow, that one.”

  I stood behind her. Night had fallen, and the cold trill of a cricket rose from some unknown place in the house. “I’m sure Marcus will sort it out on his own,” I said. “Is it really any of our business?”

  Olva reared around. “It certainly is.” Her voice flared at the tips.

  She walked past me and through the living room, and I watched her climb the stairs a little more quickly than usual. When I turned back to the window, its wide, dark eye was staring at me, and I stepped forward to draw the curtains. But closing them seemed to drive the darkness to the next window, like a creature skittering from one opening to another, angling to see me, its breath hot against the glass. I hurried to sweep the curtains closed on that window, but as I did, the darkness ran to the next window, and when I secured those curtains, it sprang to the next, always a step ahead of me. The cricket cried sharply at my foot. When I snatched the final drapes closed, I had to lower myself into the Windsor chair to rest.

  Sitting there, I thought of Jolly’s son. I hoped he would stay far away from us, too.

  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)

  Tiffany lamp (diameter 16˝; 21¾˝ height)—broken

  Victorian chaise longue

  Octagonal Jacobean parlor table

  Mahogany sewing cabinet

  Westclox alarm clock (Big Ben model)

  Hepplewhite side table

  Watchmaker’s workbench

  Edwardian neoclassical brass column candleholders (10˝ tall)

  Abner Cutler rolltop desk

  Four

  It had been a week since
the inauguration of the electric current in Bound. Most homes had not, like ours, been wired for electricity, so while life probably went on about the same for the greater part of Bound, we Kratts felt on top of the world. During the day, our yellow house was the sun, and now, at night, it glowed from the inside like the moon. We could be everything to this town. Yet I wondered about my place in it all. The subject of the Tiffany lamp—its damage—had not been revisited, and I prayed every evening I would escape punishment from Daddy Kratt.

  “Go get your brother and sister,” Daddy Kratt said, not turning around.

  He was doing some ledger work at the rolltop desk in the living room. I had wandered into the room, not aware of his presence. I stood, stunned, and when I didn’t move, he cocked his head as if detecting a faint noise, the filament of some conversation in another room. I heard only cold silence between us, and then I realized he was waiting on me. I ran toward the door. I knew better than to make him speak again.

  I went to find Quincy first. Wherever he was, I knew he would be there alone.

  At the end of our driveway, I took a right, heading south toward town. On my way to find my brother, I passed the milliner, Mr. Burns, whose office occupied the fourth floor of our family’s store. He was walking—and this was curious—with Mrs. Greeley, the wife of our butcher, and when he saw me, his face expanded in alarm before it shrunk to a tight smile. I crossed from the street to the sidewalk, and there I saw Mr. Clark, the car mechanic, walking in the opposite direction. He sped up when he noticed me and tucked his head, creating an egg of flesh between his chin and neck. Moments like these were not uncommon, and they gave me no offense. I knew I carried with me a reminder of Daddy Kratt. It was like living in a town full of siblings, each with his own anguished tale connected to our father.

  After Mr. Clark, I passed Dovey Aiken, who was walking from the direction of our filling station. Unlike the others, she stopped in her tracks.

  “Judith!”

  She was wearing a cornflower-blue dress, which matched her eyes perfectly, and her blond hair hung in one long plait against her right collarbone. A blue ribbon had been woven into the braid, and while I thought she was too old for adornments like that, she had said my name with such warmth, it was hard for me to fault her.

  “Dovey.”

  I didn’t quite know what to say next.

  Her large eyes blinked. Maybe she didn’t know what to say next either. She then touched the fabric of my dress and said softly, “How lovely.”

  My gaze followed her hand to my simple cotton dress with gray flowers so tiny, they were almost illegible. I squinted at the design, trying to find loveliness in it.

  “Well, you have a nice day, Judith,” Dovey said with a gentle smile, and she continued down the street.

  I turned to watch her leave, and I couldn’t even bring myself to criticize the way she was walking, which was rather like a half skip, a bit childish, but there was something appealing about it all the same.

  After my encounter with Dovey, I found Quincy at the filling station, which Daddy Kratt owned and ran. He was throwing rocks at a line of tin cans while listening to the drunken boys playing poker inside.

  They worked for our father, these boys, a grim coterie of unwashed and mannerless fellows from the poorest families in town. They were intensely loyal to him. I suspected they reminded Daddy Kratt of himself at that age. I remembered one night being torn from my sleep by loud raps on a lower window of our house. When we had opened our bedroom windows to peer down, one of those boys had hollered up at us.

  “Mr. Kratt!” he had bellowed. “Mr. Kratt, I come to tell you I got home all right!” He had then stumbled a few feet before collapsing to the ground. The next morning, we had found out that after a particularly wild night of drinking at the station, Daddy Kratt had arranged for someone to escort that boy home, and the poor thing was a tad premature in his gratitude, having gotten all the way home only to turn around and walk back to our house to offer his thanks. Daddy Kratt had driven him back home. That the boy had passed out was a shame, because not many people got to ride in our father’s Cadillac.

  Quincy angled his head toward the open window of the filling station. One of the boys had said something, told some joke perhaps, because riotous laughter tumbled through the window. Quincy laughed, too, and then he said a few words I didn’t hear, some response that they couldn’t hear either. They were too drunk to know Quincy was spying on them, keeping tabs as he did on everyone. Quincy mumbled a few more words, shaking his head in amusement, and it occurred to me that my brother had no friends of his own.

  I thought he didn’t know I was standing there, watching his pretend banter with those boys. But then he said “Daddy Kratt wants me, I take it?” as he nipped a can with a rock.

  “No,” I said, startled. “He wants all of us. Up at the house.”

  Quincy’s hand, which had been lifted midair to sling another rock, fell slowly. I was pleased to deflate him a little. With his town secrets, Quincy had become indispensable to Daddy Kratt. It must have come as a surprise to my brother that the talents he already possessed would be the very ones to make his father proud. Quincy’s curiosity, left unchecked, could fray into recklessness, but now, he had been given focus. The whole town feared Quincy, but respect from Daddy Kratt was new to my brother, and he took to it as if he’d been breathing the wrong kind of air up until that point.

  “He wants all of us up at the house,” I repeated. “Don’t you dawdle.” Before turning to leave, I said offhandedly, “I passed Dovey on my way here.”

  Quincy reared around, and I flinched, because the rock he had lifted to fling at another can was now aimed at me. “What’s it to you?” he snapped.

  All at once, I knew there was something between them. “Nothing!” I replied. “Put your arm down!” I remembered how he had looked at her during the tour a week earlier. “It’s merely that I like her,” I continued, trying to calm him. “She doesn’t bother me in the least.” I laughed a little. “And most people bother me.”

  Quincy chuckled. “She’s innocent, isn’t she?” He smiled, a little bashfully, and I marveled at that.

  “Yes, she is. It’s nice.”

  We stood there together, smiling. I could tell his head was still full of Dovey when he turned to throw his rock at the final can. It missed by a wide margin, and he stood there with his arms hanging by his sides as I hurried away.

  * * *

  It didn’t surprise me that it took the longest to locate my sister, that distractible child, who would follow a butterfly on its jagged flight clear to the next town if you didn’t keep an eye on her. She had climbed up the water oak in our front yard and fallen asleep. How she managed such things, I would never know.

  When we arrived home, Daddy Kratt lined up the three of us in front of the staircase. His eyes were the color of brass. He pulled at his beard, a grizzled thicket that extended well below his chin. For a few moments, we watched him prepare to speak, which was a chilling demonstration, because he was a man of few words, making potent the ones that did manage to escape his mouth. Breaths labored, he stood there coercing an utterance from deep inside as if trying to wrest a boot from the mud. Without warning, a ragged and bottomless “Whooo?” released with such force as to knock him slightly off balance.

  He knew who had damaged the Tiffany lamp. Or he thought he did. The way he kept peering over at the front door gave me the sense we were lined up for something other than an ordinary punishment, but I didn’t know what. No one spoke. This piqued his anger. He walked slowly down the line, pausing in front of each of us. After examining Quincy, he took a step that placed him squarely in front of me. The moments clicked by. It was the longest my father had ever looked at me.

  Suddenly, he squeezed one eye shut, as though examining me through a jeweler’s loupe.

  “Joo-dith,” he taunted.

  I fe
lt guilty even though I had no reason. There, in front of Daddy Kratt, I stood like some wretched, shamefaced thing, and out of nervousness or stupidity, I don’t know which, I zeroed in on Daddy Kratt’s one open eye. I could not stop looking at it. It was transfixing, and it seemed to hold me aloft there in front of it. I was nearly to tears and ready to confess to spoiling the Tiffany lamp, the combination of fear, apprehension, and pleasure proving too much for me to master, when I saw a flash of light through the window.

  Daddy Kratt saw it, too. He seemed to be expecting it. Someone was on the porch.

  He strode over and swung the door open with such force that the doorknob punched the wall behind it. Little wonder people never visited on their own terms. Our terror was blunted momentarily by our confusion. In crept Olva, who looked on the verge of passing out. In her hand was our father’s old riding whip, which he always kept in the passenger seat of his Cadillac.

  “Ah, there it is.”

  Olva passed the whip to Daddy Kratt, and her whole body seemed to lighten for releasing it. Her feet shifted weight, toward the porch.

  “Stay,” Daddy Kratt said.

  Olva sank into herself, but she complied. When she stepped across the threshold of the door, our father motioned for her to join us in the line.

  Daddy Kratt looked at his riding whip with almost loving consideration. I was fairly certain he had never looked at any of us that way. We were familiar with the whip, and it gave us some puzzlement, because we associated it with the unkempt boys he employed, the ones Quincy had been spying on. Daddy Kratt would take his riding whip, a relic from his horse and buggy days, and pretend to giddyap his Cadillac, his arm loping up and down against the black wheel well. Those boys would fold down on themselves in laughter. It was the happiest I ever saw my father, clowning around with them.

  It wasn’t as if I couldn’t anticipate what a fearsome tool for punishment the whip might be. But it didn’t stop me from feeling betrayed by the thing, perhaps even more so than by Daddy Kratt, because it was the whip, not my father, that was acting so unlike itself.