The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  The desk (54 by 21 by 50 inches) had been part of her dowry when she married Daddy Kratt. It was—and still is, as far as I’m concerned—a magnificent creature, barrel-chested and solid, with a slatted cover that once ran fluently along its tracks, as if the carpenter’s raw material had been water instead of wood. It is an Abner Cutler, and the company’s stamp can be located in the bottom right drawer. Abner Cutler was the first person to patent the design for the rolltop desk in 1850, and the appraiser from York says that an Abner Cutler original, which I believe this is, could fetch upwards of five thousand dollars.

  The desk’s proportions, though, didn’t suit Mama. When she guided her finch-like body into its matching oak chair, she resembled a child. Sometimes, Daddy Kratt allowed her to do some of the bookkeeping for the store at the desk, but as the years passed, it was a rare occasion when she helped with matters outside of the home. He was fond of saying that her hands were so small, they were good for little else than scooping up jacks with us. He must not have been paying attention, because we never let Mama play with us.

  We all stood on the landing between the stairs, Quincy and I flanking Rosemarie and Olva. Olva had come from Aunt Dee’s to do some cleaning at our house, as she often did, but we invited her to join our scheme. It was afternoon, and we were studying the desk from afar.

  “Tonight,” I commanded. I hadn’t come up with the idea, but I was certainly going to be in charge of its execution. Even Quincy gravely nodded his head, the tyranny of birth order still a serious business.

  The rest of that afternoon, we took turns keeping vigil, watching the rolltop desk with drawn breaths as if it were a great nocturnal eye, its monstrous lid clamped shut. After bedtime, we crept back down the stairs, and how despairing the house seemed without the sunlight to keep it company. Pieces of furniture closed in on us, edging away from their anchored spots. Shadows loomed over our heads, taking an interest in us as well-meaning adults did, with their sprouted nose hair and glittering eyes and garbled questions. When the upright piano flashed me a stained grin, I ran to the others, who had already gathered beside the desk.

  “Rabbit,” Rosemarie whispered, knuckling a drowsy eye.

  I broke from my story to point to the glass rabbit in Amaryllis’s hand. “That one,” I said.

  Eyes widening, she settled further into the sofa and stroked the figurine with her thumb.

  We had seen the inside of the desk every day, I told Amaryllis, but in the dark, it held new promise. It would bestow wishes shaped to the fantasies of whoever opened it. The top was heavier than we’d expected—we held the assumption it would be as compliant as Mama—but as a group, we managed to slide it up.

  For a few moments, we surveyed the desk’s innards, its endless slots and miniature drawers. It was both majestic and attainable. It was a tiny castle bisected, shelves running through it like little staircases. It was a kingdom shrunk down to make us feel like giants. We stood wordlessly, expelling our heavy breaths, and our restraint showed benevolence.

  Quincy was the first to act. He stabbed his hand into a shelf for the glass rabbit, and Rosemarie’s mouth wobbled into a smile. As the figurine disappeared into Quincy’s hand, the spell was broken. We tore through the desk’s contents, leaving no niche unmolested.

  Rosemarie whimpered as she hunted for treasures, and Olva was the only one of us to exhibit moderation. She limited herself to the items we knocked to the floor. I saw her reach down to retrieve a rounded mother-of-pearl button, one that Mama had failed to sew back onto a sweater, that we had judged inconsequential. Olva cradled the button in her palm.

  When I looked over at Quincy, I was startled by the smile on his face, how his jaw hung open and askew, a drawer off its runner. He had been successful in nabbing a few items I had targeted, following my eyes and anticipating my actions. At the same time, we saw a clay bowl filled with loose change. Both our hands shot for it, upsetting the bowl and sending the coins clattering to the floor.

  “We will wake Daddy Kratt!” someone whispered.

  Our father’s name subdued us. We stood blinking at one another, and in settled a silence, like the kind that follows a great catastrophe. His name was a white ash drifting in, shrouding every surface, and giving the room an eerily dimensionless quality. It blurred our confidence, making us feel like children caught in a foolish mistake rather than the grand undertaking we had envisioned.

  Our looting was done. Or at least we had lost our appetite for it. We dispersed to different parts of the house. My main spoils were Mama’s letters, which she kept hidden in one of the back drawers of the desk. Taking as many as my small hands would accommodate, I darted to my favorite hiding place, a nook behind the standing Cheval mirror in the hallway, and I cupped the letters in my two hands as if I were holding water and did not want to spill a precious bit of it.

  At the time, the letters were a disappointment. They were terribly boring, with no treasure maps leading to riches, no mysterious skeleton keys. I couldn’t understand half of what they were getting at. They were from Aunt Dee, whom Mama wrote constantly even though they saw each other almost daily. I couldn’t be bothered to keep the letters nor return them to the desk, so I intended to feed them, one by one, down the laundry chute.

  At the chute, Quincy interrupted me, coming out of nowhere as he always did. He surveyed the letters in my hand. I nodded toward his fist, which held the glass rabbit. He hesitated. I knew he wanted to give the rabbit to Rosemarie—he always had a soft spot for her—but his curiosity was greater. Handing him some of the letters, I claimed the rabbit. Even at a young age, Quincy possessed a keen instinct to collect things that held secrets. Because of his interest, I kept several of the letters. As the years passed, they became more compelling reading material.

  When the gentle light of morning seeped into the house, Mama came downstairs, still in her dressing gown. I was lying alone on the living room rug, and my body tensed as I watched her dodge the debris on the floor. She went straight to the desk and began the slow task of restoring what had been expulsed. As she moved through the room to retrieve the items, she did not make eye contact with me. Nor did she acknowledge me in any other way. I suddenly wished for the presence of the others, on whom I could blame the scene, but my silence had already incriminated me, and I remained motionless on the rug, strewn there among the other shunned things.

  The restoration of the desk was a gentle, noiseless affair, so it was a long while before I realized Olva had returned to help Mama. As she worked, Olva rolled between her fingers, with the absorptive care of a ritual, the mother-of-pearl button, the one item she had taken from the desk.

  “I did not give the rabbit to Rosemarie,” I said to Amaryllis. “Perhaps I should have. But then you wouldn’t be holding it now.”

  My eyes moved from the desk to Amaryllis. She had fallen asleep. This struck me as a spectacular feat, seeing as she had just woken up for the day. Then again, I had a vague and dusty memory of what it was like to be a child, the kind of strenuousness involved, what with everyone telling you what to do all the time.

  Lifting myself from the sofa, I walked over to the far end of the desk. Our looting that night when we were children had not been the worst moment in the desk’s lifetime. I pondered the gashes that riddled the wood on its left side. They had been put there sixty-five years ago. One morning, while the others were away, I had stood, suspended in the doorway, watching Quincy smash a hammer again and again into the desk. He had gripped the tool with two hands, fighting against its weight, and the display was so disorienting that the sound of each blow, it seemed to me, was not the sickening crack of the hammer but rather the desk itself, provoked into utterance, its sharp barks of pain. We had looted the desk two years earlier, but Quincy always had a fresh appetite for damage.

  Poor Mama had come downstairs again to find her desk violated. The gashes extended across to the slats of the desk’s cover. One s
lat had been pried off completely, giving the thing a hideous gap-toothed look, as if it had been too dumb to prevent its own mutilation. The missing slat had been secreted away, for it was not visible on the floor or anywhere else in the room, and the area encircling the desk was tidy. No splinters of wood. No sight of the instrument used to wield the damage. The whole scene had an air of disciplined neatness to it, which made the spectacle of ruin all the more plain.

  Mama’s body seemed to absorb the devastation; she sank into herself. Then she rolled back the desk’s top and arranged her pens and papers in front of her as she always did before writing a letter to Aunt Dee. How slight and undemanding was her touch on everything and everyone! When she wrote to Aunt Dee, her pen trembled across the paper, but the curios that lined the top of the desk (a fluted blue vase, ivory figurines of thin-boned animals) remained undisturbed. This time, before she picked up her pen, she drew her hand tenderly across the broken wood.

  I looked over at Amaryllis. “It occurs to me as I write my inventory,” I told her slumbering ears, “that even though the desk was from Mama’s family, it became Daddy Kratt’s property when they married.”

  As a child, this didn’t concern me: how Mama tended to things she couldn’t call her own. Now, I understand that her light touch on us, the way her fingers whispered a jacket button closed or just barely smoothed down our fine white hair, which stood out from our heads like heat lightning, was her acceptance of these circumstances. In the end, she couldn’t claim us either. And even if there were a time when she could, when the crook of her arm was the only thing that held us up, that time was long past, and we didn’t remember it anyway. We were bound, finally, to belong to the world and not to her.

  I let the child continue to nap on the sofa. I would sit on the porch for a spell. The air held a faint musk. It was too hot to be outside in the middle of summer, but I didn’t want to be cooped up in the house, a feeling I had not experienced before. I watched as a small brown lizard, eyes pert and jaw set stoically, clung to a thin branch of one of the bushes fringing the porch.

  The lizard’s tiny lungs inflated and deflated rapidly, and as I considered the trace of air rushing in and out of its tiny frame, I heard a crunching sound to my left. Footsteps on gravel. The steps came from the carport side of the house. Beyond the carport was the marshy lily pond, and beyond that was a dense stretch of forest.

  “No need to get up.”

  A reedy voice rose from behind me, and I whipped my head around with such alacrity that a bright pain discharged in my neck and my lizard shot away.

  “I’m sure your mother didn’t teach you to sneak up on people,” I said to Rick. “No one else is here. I’m the only one.” I glanced back at one of the windows. I hoped Amaryllis would stay inside.

  “I didn’t ask whether anybody else was home,” Rick replied.

  I wanted to get up from my chair, but I knew that moving quickly was not one of my strengths. I hardly wanted to risk getting dizzy and requiring his assistance.

  “What do you want?”

  Rick chuckled and stepped past me to take a seat.

  “I want to thank you for calling my mother,” he said. “About that black boy.”

  I wagged my hand at him, indicating I didn’t want to rest another moment on the topic.

  “You shouldn’t bother the child,” I said to him.

  “I won’t do it again, ma’am.” He aimed his teeth at me.

  “See that you don’t.”

  He looked up, reflecting on something. “I remember the store, you know.”

  “It was our store first,” I said. “My father built it.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I’ll give credit where credit is due. I guess it turns out my grandfather couldn’t run a business as well as your father.”

  I turned to look at him. Here he was with some real knowledge all of a sudden.

  “I think we got off on the wrong foot,” he said.

  “How is your store?” I asked. I knew, through his mother, that his store was not all he hoped it would be. I was not yet ready to be on the right foot with him.

  “Have you been there?” he asked. Angling his head, he studied me. “No, I haven’t ever seen you there.”

  “Olva does my shopping for me. Not that it is any of your business.”

  His pale eyes lingered on me. Scratching his jaw, he said, “My store. Well, I’ll be honest with you. I can’t really make good money there. I sell junk. I’m not afraid to admit that. I sell junk, right? Junk from China. Or wherever the hell it comes from. With all our jobs gone overseas, pretty soon nothing on the shelves will be ours. At least I don’t have a family to support.”

  “A prudent observation.”

  “I’m not married. No children either.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “Just like you.”

  The sun flashed in my eyes.

  “I doubt you have read much of Edith Wharton,” I said, squinting at him. “The short novel Bunner Sisters?”

  He stared blankly at me, his upper lip twitching a little.

  I lifted my hand to block the sun. A bumblebee was zigzagging through our petunias, its flight comically encumbered by its weight. I thought about the heroine Ann Eliza in Bunner Sisters, who never marries and is forced to close the shop she owns and pawn all the things inside it. I read Wharton’s book as a teenager, and in the years since, I have made it a point to read more books about women like Ann Eliza and me. I suppose we could be called spinsters. The term does not rankle me. There is Miss Bates in Austen’s Emma, Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Rhoda Nunn in Gissing’s The Odd Women, and Miss Birdseye in James’s The Bostonians, to list only a handful. It is true some of these fictional heroines have challenging personalities, but defects of character are often an outcome of circumstances, are they not? Well now.

  “Life is hard,” I said to Rick, “and those who can survive alone are flintier than the rest.” I hoped he didn’t think I was paying him a compliment.

  “Doesn’t your maid live with you?”

  “Olva is not my maid!”

  “But she lives with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re not really surviving alone, are you?”

  I wondered when he planned to leave.

  “You read the paper?” Rick said. He laughed. “Of course you do. That black boy delivers it to you.”

  Now, he was returning to the purpose of his visit.

  “His name is Marcus,” I said. “Why can’t he pay his rent?”

  “He can’t pay it because we raised it.”

  “And why did you do that?”

  Rick eyed me. “First of all, consider it a favor. I know his relations killed your brother.”

  “That’s in the past,” I said. “I’m asking you about what’s happening to Marcus right now.” I had surprised myself, favoring the present over the past.

  He shrugged. “It’s still a favor, whether you accept it or not. Besides, that car manufacturer is coming to Spartanburg. And that big tire plant already relocated to Greenville from New York. Bound could soon be a suburb of those two cities.”

  “And you think people want to live in your little shacks?”

  His jaw set. “We’ll tear them down. Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll take full advantage of the new economic circumstances.”

  “It’s a pity our cotton gins closed,” I said, mostly to myself.

  He spat a laugh. “Isn’t that what sank this town in the first place? Nobody would branch out is what my grandfather told me. Dairy, manufacturing—anything else. The people of this town should have diversified.”

  “Cotton built this town!”

  “Yeah. Cotton sank it, too.”

  “Does your mother know about your grand plans for her properties?”

  “
She’s handing down the properties to me,” he said. “Pretty soon she will, at any rate.”

  “Is she not altogether impressed with your abilities?” I asked, not being able to stop myself. His mouth parted slightly. I had embarrassed him.

  “This town is pathetic.” He was insulting Bound, when he wanted to insult me. How was he to know it was the same?

  “We have always found a way to survive,” I said. “Bound’s population couldn’t have been more than two hundred people when I was a girl, and it hasn’t exceeded four hundred in the years since. As your mother may have told you, my family helped shape this town. My mama’s kinfolk founded one of the first schools in the area in 1818, just down in Blairsville, and they helped establish one in Bullock’s Creek, too.” Here I paused, deciding if I would choose the wrong or right foot. “Well, the Bramletts were the educated sort, too. Right along with the Kratts.”

  I had thrown him a bone.

  Yet he kept his vision fixed on the yard, as if the trees would up and fly away if he didn’t keep an eye on them. He had not gone to college. I had remembered it too late. It was a sore topic for Jolly, one that she didn’t often bring up. Two generations of the Bramlett family before Rick had gone to college, but he had not. My attempt to be polite had instead probed a wound. This was why I kept to myself. How did other people manage it?

  I glanced at Rick again, and all at once, he reminded me of the townsfolk who used to come around when I was a child and tuck religious pamphlets under our door. Not because he shared their religious zeal but because of the way they looked when they came to our house. We owned the only car in town for many years, so it was a weekly spectacle when we drove to Hillwood Presbyterian. We were accounted for, then, religiously speaking, but they came still with their pamphlets, tanned men with light eyes and children with moon faces. I used to sit in the Windsor chair and watch them peering into our windows, eyes scanning for something beyond the glass, and how quickly the curiosity was stolen from their faces, with what sad ease disappointment returned, once they recognized their own reflections staring back. I saw this same disappointment in Rick’s face now. A hopelessness. Nothing—or very little—to lose. It seemed to me a precarious place to be. If you had nothing to lose, you might be willing to try anything.