The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt
Page 7
I looked at Quincy and Rosemarie. Their eyes were trained on the whip. Possibilities filled our heads, each one more horrifying than the last. Our imaginations were another form of violence, which we were willing to inflict on ourselves, with unblinking devotion. I never considered us particularly obedient children, but we were loyal to our father’s vision of the world.
Daddy Kratt approached us again, but this time, he stopped in front of Olva.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
She stared at him.
He leaned in toward her. Their faces almost touched. “The answer to that question—the answer to every question—is yessir.”
“Yessir,” she whispered.
He backed up. “How did you come to us, Olva?”
She could barely breathe, it seemed to me, let alone answer another question. When our father opened his mouth again, she said quickly, “By way of Tucker’s farm.” She caught herself. “Yessir. Tucker’s farm.”
I knew exactly which route she meant, up the east side of the farm and along the dried-up creek.
Daddy Kratt laughed. “That’s not what I meant, is it? Not how you got to us today. How you got to us in the beginning. But you were just a baby then.”
It was true. Olva was abandoned on our Aunt Dee’s doorstep in a breadbasket lined with a canary-yellow tea towel in 1913. I hadn’t made my earthly arrival yet, but Aunt Dee could be forthcoming when she wanted, and I had cobbled together the information over the years. Dee always did things differently. She had caused quite a stir by giving Olva the DeLour name, which Mama had given up to become a Kratt. And by her own choice, Dee remained unmarried. “I never found reason to take a husband,” she had once told me, as if a husband were something to take or leave, and preferably leave.
Daddy Kratt changed tack with Olva. “What’s Dee been busying herself with lately?” He paused. “And my wife?” When Mama wasn’t in her room, where she mostly stared out the window, she was at Aunt Dee’s.
My father was waiting for Olva to answer him. “I don’t know, sir,” she managed to say.
Daddy Kratt considered this, and the conclusion to his thoughts was not in Olva’s favor. Looking at her, he jabbed the riding whip toward the fireplace and cleared a bit of phlegm from his throat. Olva obeyed, and before she reached the fireplace, Daddy Kratt began striding at her.
“Stop!” Quincy cried.
I had never been more surprised in my life. Here Quincy was, showing some mercy. More surprising was that our father did as he was told. He stopped and turned to hear what my brother had to say.
“I said she didn’t break the Tiffany lamp. I already told you who did.”
Daddy Kratt looked at me with the steadiness of someone who pours liquid metal into a mold.
My heart sank. I returned his gaze and swallowed hard.
“I did it,” I said.
I could tell by a change in the air beside me—it lightened a molecule or two—that Quincy was impressed by my boldness. If I could have blamed him, I would have, but his word was too strong with Daddy Kratt, and there was no sense getting Olva involved in our family affairs.
Daddy Kratt stood still for a heartbeat. Then he walked toward Olva. With one strong lash, he thrust the whip down against the back of her right knee. Her body buckled to the ground, but she made no sound.
Beside me, Quincy took a discreet step in front of Rosemarie, a movement of protection, so that his body stood between her and Daddy Kratt. Slipping one hand behind his back, Quincy motioned to her, and when Rosemarie saw this signal, she emitted a thin whimper and took off up the stairs. This was an angle familiar to me, the back of my sister’s head, her ivory hair fluttering as she ran away from whatever the rest of us were forced to endure.
Daddy Kratt twisted his head and watched Rosemarie flee. He paused, considering things, and then gave Quincy and me a stay put look before returning to his business. It was the first time I realized—it came as a single, serrated thought—that my sister would one day leave Bound.
Daddy Kratt turned at Olva again, and we cringed. But he merely asked a question.
“Has my wife been spending time with anyone in particular lately?”
Daddy Kratt seemed more agitated than usual. I didn’t know if it was the stress of taking on Byrd Parker’s cotton gin. Or maybe it was the transgression of Byrd’s wife—Daddy Kratt had said it was a stain on our town, even though he had benefited from it. Something was amiss in my father’s world, even though he now laid claim to more wealth than ever before. He did not usually suffer from lack of answers.
Olva remained silent. This, I realized, took a staggering amount of resolve.
Something new came into Daddy Kratt’s face. He lifted the whip and thrust it against the back of Olva’s other knee. Then he began hitting her torso. She curled into a ball on the floor, absorbing the blows. She began to cry, a low moan that did not keep rhythm with the pace of my father’s arm.
I squeezed my eyes shut as the beating continued. Olva was sixteen, too old to be disciplined in this way, but what did Daddy Kratt care about the etiquette of punishment? We felt powerless to stop it. The whip whistling through the air had unpinned every thought in my mind. Eyes closed, the sound of the whip magnified, and I imagined it was coming down on me, too. The whip had transformed itself yet again, from something solid to a liquid sensation, hot and terrible, clinging to me like boiling sugar syrup as it lashed the back of my bare thigh.
The next thing I heard was a slam. I opened my eyes to find Daddy Kratt standing, whip in hand, staring out the window. Olva had made her escape through the kitchen and out the back door. What I had heard was the screen door beating itself against the frame as she fled.
Quincy and I backed out of the room wordlessly. Afterward, we stood on the rear porch steps.
Questions collided in my mind. I turned to my brother. “Why did you blame me?”
He shrugged. “I knew you could handle it.”
Anger and pride rose within me in equal measure. It was a heady mixture, but I steadied my thinking. I had another question for him.
“Why did you try to protect Olva?”
“I thought I would spare her.” He had that distant look in his eyes, the one that kept him from holding allegiance to any one outcome. He was squarely on his own side, which left him to pick up and put down people’s causes at will, based on whatever whim guided him that day. If I were Olva, I wouldn’t hold out for Quincy’s continued loyalty.
I didn’t like my brother’s changeability. It left me wondering who I was, what exactly I was working against. This was the way of siblings, how my existence, my very selfhood, grew partly from what Quincy was not. And from what Rosemarie was not. It was like that for them, too. It seemed as close to natural law as anything else, but Quincy was flouting it, as he did whatever laws didn’t suit him.
As I thought this, my eyes landed on the expanse of grass between the porch and the woods, where the shadow of a bird of prey looped in a wide circle, its dark wingspan impressive, its body inscrutable. A chipmunk darted away. When I looked back at my brother, he was studying me. I wanted to push his eyes away, get his lens off me.
“I can tell you one thing, Sister,” he said, done for the moment with his scrutiny. “Olva’s problems are only going to get worse.”
“What are you talking about?” I was still stung he would spare Olva but not me. “Why did Daddy Kratt beat her? Why was he asking after Mama?”
Quincy sighed, bored by my ignorance. “He has some suspicions about Mama. And about Olva.”
“And who gave him those suspicions?”
He snorted. “If they’re true, the messenger doesn’t matter.”
“Are they true?”
Quincy looked up at the sky, as if the truth might drop from there.
“Yes.”
* * *
“See Charlie about the repairs,” Daddy Kratt said after summoning me to his office on the first floor.
I stood close to the door, my hands laced behind my back. My father’s beard rustled under his chin.
“Yessir.”
To find Charlie, I set out from Daddy Kratt’s office toward the attic, the lamp my companion. The venture required weaving through the milliner’s office on the fourth floor—chock full of mannequins, but absent that day of Wade Burns, the milliner—and up a wrought iron ladder. I set the Tiffany lamp at the foot of the ladder. Placing my shoe on the first rung, my mind landed on Mama and how she had slipped up toward the fourth floor on the day of the electric current.
“Charlie,” I called out as I began climbing, “can you invent no better access to your shop? You are the mechanic, after all.”
Along with fixing broken merchandise, Charlie ran and repaired the store’s freight elevator. It was currently in disrepair, and earlier in the week, I had witnessed how Charlie had spent an entire day examining every nut and bolt of the thing before putting it back together again. He was waiting for a part, no bigger than a bottle cap, which would arrive by mail. Only the department stores in the big cities had similar elevators. Charlie had explained to me that ours was the traction variety, with wire cables and a pulley system, all of which was not unlike the traction of a train’s wheels on the tracks. When you thought about it, we had a train shooting vertically through the heart of our store every day. And like the train, it brought us things. What marvels Daddy Kratt supplied!
I called Charlie’s name again, but he wasn’t listening. The whir of an electric tool played in the air. Goggles covered his eyes, and cotton stuffed his ears. He seemed to be about Mama’s age, and his hair, black with traces of gray, stood off from his head.
“Charlie!”
His head popped up—he was grinding down a fragment of metal with a motorized gadget—and I laughed, because he looked like an adventurer-scientist working on a time machine, surrounded by the indecipherable tools of his trade. Equipment concealed the floor around his workstation, and everything was steeped in oil, even the air that met my nostrils.
Charlie put down his equipment and replaced his goggles with tiny round spectacles. He was a lithe and easygoing fellow, well-liked by everyone at the store, and the other Negroes who did manual labor, unloading boxes or hauling equipment, appeared to consult him for advice.
Charlie was the one person I had met in my life, other than Olva, with whom my tongue did not continually trip on itself. I usually ran into him on the first floor while he did his regular maintenance work on the elevator, and sometimes, I would sit with him for a long spell, watching him tinker with the cables, after I had completed my own inventory duties. Sitting with him was almost like being alone, as though he weren’t there at all, so complete was my comfort in his presence. When he did speak, which was rarely, he seemed incapable of small talk and got to the heart of things immediately, sharing parts of his past that were sometimes startling to me. I already knew, for instance, that he had been married once and that his wife was no longer alive, but one day, he let slip that she had died in childbirth. “Charlie! You have a child?” I had cried. He had nodded calmly. “A son. Lives over in Tirzah. I don’t see him much. He’s a grown man now, isn’t he?” And he had resumed his work without another word.
My attention returned to the space of the attic. I looked at Charlie in front of me, and a thought cut across my mind: What else didn’t I know about him?
“What can I do for you, Miss Judith?”
His voice broke the spell of my contemplation. I remembered Daddy Kratt had entrusted me with a task. “Charlie, I have a job for you.”
He stood up, and I cringed when his head nearly hit one of the attic beams. I motioned for him to look through the ladder opening. He walked over to assess what I had brought him, the corners of his eyes lifting with curiosity.
“Ah! The lamp,” he said. “I can fix it.”
“Would you like to know which part is broken?”
He looked at me in a gentle way.
“I suppose everyone knows,” I said.
“Not to worry. I will bring it up now,” he said. As he climbed down the ladder, he called, “Company!”
He returned, carrying the lamp. His height made it possible for him to climb only a few rungs before depositing the lamp on the attic floor. Following him through the opening were Mama and Olva. They both looked surprised to see me, but neither commented other than to offer a quick hello. Surrounded by the three of them, I felt out of place, an intruder.
“We bring news,” Olva said, brandishing the New York Times. I wondered if she had nipped it from Daddy Kratt’s desk. He was a small-town man who read big-city newspapers. If Olva had taken it from him—and he was the only person in town I knew who subscribed to that newspaper—it was both a gutsy and foolish move.
“You sound serious,” Charlie said. He gestured for them to find a seat, immediately falling into contemplation about where that might be among the mechanical detritus around his desk.
Olva didn’t wait for Charlie. She cleared a spot on the floor and found Mama a low stool by first removing from it a hand-crank adding machine that was missing several keys. When Olva sat cross-legged, her pleated wool skirt lifted to reveal the skin between her skirt and one of her knee-high socks. Across the buttery brown of her knee was a raised scar, a souvenir of Daddy Kratt’s beating. We all saw it. Charlie took a step toward Olva, his face grave, and Mama pressed her lips together and turned away.
Noticing our attention, Olva stood up immediately and walked toward me, shaking the newspaper at eye level.
“Did you read the papers this morning, Judith?” She gave the main headline a hard tap with her forefinger. STOCKS COLLAPSE IN 16,410,030 SHARE DAY. It was Wednesday, October 30, 1929.
“No, I did not. I was too busy with the store’s inventory.” That morning, I had been in awe of our stock of shoes, worth well over eleven thousand dollars. Then I had put in a purchase order for car tires and cash registers. I had concluded, with satisfaction, that if our store didn’t sell it, the people of Bound didn’t need it.
I surveyed the rest of the newspaper’s headline. “It says the bankers are still optimistic,” I offered.
“The stock market has collapsed,” she said.
“Really, Olva,” I said. “You make it sound as if it’s a body taken ill.” I considered the matter for a moment. “Now that I think on it, I suppose we do talk about our nation as if it’s a body. Head of government. The long arm of the law.” It was not the cleverest thing I had ever said, but it would do.
“If the nation is a body,” Olva replied sharply, “whose body is it?”
Well, there was no arguing with her. Olva had a keener interest in world politics, so I waved her off. The store’s inventory, my local share of history, was what mattered to me.
“Now, girls,” Mama said, a beat too late. We all looked at her, because she rarely intervened. She didn’t finish her thought, retreating at the sudden attention, but it seemed to pain her whenever Olva and I argued.
“I wonder how it will affect the trains,” Olva considered. “If the trains don’t run, there’s no shipping the cotton, is there? We’ve got no convenient river transport.”
Olva had a point. A worry about Daddy Kratt crawled into my head. He had been ginning cotton at an increased pace lately, so co
nfident was he about its demand. He was always chasing his personal best, when he had ginned over a thousand bales of cotton in 1919, selling it at over thirty-five cents per pound. On that return, Daddy Kratt built his fortune.
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” I said, pushing away my concern. “We’ve always survived, haven’t we?”
“On my way here, I overheard Mr. Clark saying his brother in Charlotte already had financial struggles with his farm,” Olva said. “What will this do to him?” She shook her head. “People will lose their farms. Their businesses.”
“Nonsense, Olva. Anyway, he could always train-hop.” I was trying to lighten the mood, but my comment was met with silence. I pressed on. “If he did, what a twist that would be. One member of the Clark family escaping while the other won’t leave her house.”
Olva gave me an admonishing look. I couldn’t help bringing up Mrs. Clark, the wife of our car mechanic. She fascinated me. Don’t all small towns have their curious cases? Some years ago, she had stopped leaving her house, for what reasons we could only speculate. The Clarks had no children, and for a spell, Mrs. Clark had worked as a hairdresser’s assistant, tasked only with sweeping up the orphaned hair, but she abandoned that job as quickly as she had taken it. The Clarks were not poor, and Mr. Clark was a kind enough man. When we were younger, we would ring her doorbell and run away. Once, Quincy dared me to peek into the east-facing window, its curtains hanging open in a desperate sort of way, as if the house itself had flung them open. What I saw both awed and frightened me. The furniture was pressed together in an odd sort of way, as if huddling for warmth, and knickknacks occupied every surface, mostly figurines of a gnomish sort, grimacing at the papers that littered the floor. When I dashed back to Quincy and Rosemarie, I did not tell them what I had seen. Perhaps Mrs. Clark never left her house simply because she could not navigate through all the things in between her and the front door.
Olva had taken her newspaper to the far corner of the attic. It was possible, due to the attic’s expanse, that she could claim something like solitude to read. Charlie had deposited the Tiffany lamp on his main workstation and was already absorbed in the task of repairing it. As he removed the lampshade gingerly, he glanced up for a few moments to gaze at Olva in the corner, a look of concern on his face. Then he returned to his work. This left me with Mama.