At the moment, while the others were in the cellar, Amaryllis was cradling the book I had just given her. It was our family’s first edition of Origin of Species. Sitting on the sofa, she examined its cover, softened by age, and slowly flipped through the pages, which rasped under her fingertips. How tenderly she was handling it!
“Thank you for this book,” she said, sinking back into the sofa with it and her stuffed bunny. Opening it, she made a soft, inquisitive noise as something dropped from the pages. I looked over and saw her regarding a small piece of yellowed paper, folded in half.
“Amaryllis! I’ll take that,” I said, moving toward her.
She peered at me, then back at the paper, and she was on her feet before I knew it, the sofa a barrier between us. She unfolded the paper, which she saw was two sheets.
“‘Dearest Rosemarie,’” Amaryllis began to read. “‘You do not understand my’”—here she paused, studying the paper—“‘objectshuns’—”
“You can read,” I said, incredulous, and the child shot me a wrathful look, as if underestimating her was, to date, my greatest offense.
The perceived slight only fueled her mischief. I moved toward her, around the sofa, but she skirted to the opposite end, leaving us in the same position as before. She kept a watchful eye on me as she read. “‘You do not understand my objectshuns. It is true I have never done anything according to conven…’” Amaryllis brought her nose closer to the paper. “‘Convenshun!’” The child flashed a triumphant smile, and I used her moment of victory to take several steps closer to her, which she ably matched, scurrying away from me.
“That is quite enough,” I said loudly, and my voice sounded gaudy in my ears, desperate to be in command of the situation. The child heard it, too, and she stood her ground, daring me to advance again on her.
“‘If you leave with Charlie and Olva’”—here Amaryllis paused and considered the arrival of Olva’s name—“‘you will never be safe.’” The child looked up at me, a request on her face, my role as pursuer evaporating from her thoughts, the contents of the letter taking hold of her. She wanted to know what it meant.
I sighed. “If you hand me the letter, I will tell you.” I peered down my nose, trying to muster all the years I had on her in one searing look. Her small face, the color of a chestnut’s hull, darker than Olva’s skin, remained stoic. “All right,” I said. “You require a better deal. If you hand me the letter, I will not only tell you what it means, but I will let you hold something else, something more dazzling.”
She eyed me, fanning herself with the letter, taking her time to consider my offer. All at once, she scrambled onto the sofa and thrust the letter at my chest. I seized it, folding it swiftly into quarters. I must have been holding my breath, for a spell of dizziness caught me off guard. I pressed my fingertips to the sofa table at my right, and when I had sufficiently stabilized, I lifted my head to see the child aiming her unblinking eyes at me.
“Does the letter really matter to you?” I asked.
A throb of something like heat pulsed between us, from her to me, and while her small head balanced coolly on her body, her eyes were molten, animated in an unsettling way, and I worried she would cry out and alert the others, who would come barging in the room, wanting to know what I had done to awaken the child’s outrage. The child would no doubt point to the letter folded hastily in my hand, and that I couldn’t have. The pot had already been sufficiently stirred that day.
I paused to swallow. “The letter is from my aunt to my mother. My mother’s name was Rosemarie—same as my sister.” I gestured below to indicate the cellar, where Rosemarie and the others were. Amaryllis nodded. “Mama wanted to go away with Charlie and take Olva with them, too, but Aunt Dee objected. She thought it was too risky.”
I thought of Dee, ever practical, worrying over my mother. Years ago, I had happened upon this letter, among the others I had not given Quincy after our raid of the rolltop desk. The disagreement described in the letter was why Dee had not joined us at the Easter meal over which Uncle Sally presided. It was a shame in more ways than one, including the entertainment a showdown between Dee and Sally would have provided.
Amaryllis considered what I had said about the letter. I couldn’t see how she could possibly understand the import of my words. But just to be certain, I said, “Now, let’s not speak about this to anyone.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“If you don’t speak about this,” I continued, “I will let you hold that dazzling thing I mentioned. I recall that you once looked at it with interest.”
“You already promised me that.”
I nodded, feeling mastered by the child. “Fine,” I said, waving her toward me. “Here is the tray.”
She regarded me skeptically when she heard the word tray. Nevertheless, she joined me at the long table that flanked the sofa’s back. My artifact did not disappoint. When her eyes lighted on the butterfly tray, she thrust out her hand and grabbed one of its handles, sliding it off the table.
“Amaryllis!” I cried. “Slow down! The tray is very fragile.”
She was managing too many items at once, as children do. Peter Rabbit tucked himself in the crook of her left elbow, and the tray dangled from her right hand, which also clutched, I noticed, Rosemarie’s glass rabbit figurine. Before I could act, the figurine dropped to the floor, and Amaryllis’s hand released to rescue it. Down came the tray.
The damage was immediate and incontrovertible. The tray’s back cracked, and the glass overlay shattered, buckling the layer of stiff butterfly wings, which had been shellacked upon the tray’s construction or had soldered together over time. The message painted across the top of the tray—Rio de Janeiro!—was now indecipherable.
Amaryllis did not move, but a great thundering rose from below us as Marcus, Olva, and Rosemarie rushed up the cellar stairs.
“What’s the matter?” Olva cried, panting. I quickly tucked the letter under the gathered cuff of my blouse. Olva stopped short when she saw the ruptured tray and looked up to gauge my reaction.
When Rosemarie and Marcus arrived beside her, their eyes landed on me, too. Only Amaryllis’s gaze remained locked to the ground. Both of her small hands gripped her Peter Rabbit.
They were waiting on me to say something.
With no warning, Amaryllis bolted across the room and scrambled underneath the maple drop-leaf table. She began to sob in peals that flew out of her with a pitch and intensity I had not heard before. Marcus and Olva raced to her side, but she could not be coaxed from her position, wedged in the frame of the small table with face tucked and arms wrapped around her knees.
I walked over to Amaryllis’s hiding place. The others watched me. Clearing my throat first, I began telling her the story of the butterfly tray.
The tray (23¾ by 15½ inches) had lived on our sofa table for upward of seventy years. Daddy Kratt set it there in 1922, the year he finished building this house and plugging it full of the finest furniture Bound had ever seen, most of it coming from Mama’s family. Clad in rosewood with an interior lined with real butterfly wings, it traveled here from South America in the suitcase of one of my maternal great-uncles.
Those butterfly wings! They were wine and ochre, colors I had always considered too rich for weightless creatures. Nothing ever sat on the tray. It possessed a rather uncommon beauty, and ferrying around food and drinks on it would have been insulting.
Before Daddy Kratt earned his own wealth, he did odd jobs for the richest families in Bound and all the way out to Blacksburg. He never was a scholar, but he was clever and did his own form of research, spending time with Mama’s father, Grandfather DeLour, to see how the old man conducted himself, to learn the secrets of his moneymaking. Daddy Kratt painted the DeLours’ house, built their barn, tended their garden, and did anything else asked of him.
In the beginning, he probably didn’t notice the
toddler girl on the wooden swing who would become his wife two decades later. Once she got older, of course, he would have recognized her beauty, the kind of loveliness that glass acquires when tumbled by the ocean, muted and smooth and useless. When they married, he had not yet achieved his fortune, but he was very close, so claiming a girl from a wealthy, educated family was good business sense.
In the early days, though, when Mama was just a child, Daddy Kratt worked to make himself indispensable to the DeLours. Grandmother DeLour, who died before I was born, was known to be a fine cook even though she rarely set foot in the kitchen. One morning, she decided she wanted to roast a whole chicken that would be basted in a sumptuous sauce, the recipe for which she had found in a French cookbook handed down from her mother. So she walked outside to consult one of the colored girls, who was doling feed to the chickens. They came to an arrangement about which hen would be suitable for the dish, and my grandmother went back inside.
Going to consult the cookbook again, she realized her ruby wedding ring was missing. She ran outside, screaming for the colored girl, who was about to wring the chicken’s neck for the grand dish. She interrogated the colored girl, who I’m sure was in a panic she might be blamed herself. The girl suggested that the ring had slipped off and been consumed by one of the chickens. When they could not hazard a guess as to which bird was the thief, Grandmother DeLour screeched so hysterically that Daddy Kratt, who was about to join some of the boys picking cotton, ran to see what was the matter. My grandmother was in such a state, he had to hear the story from the girl.
When Grandfather DeLour returned home, my grandmother had been in a fit all day; she was resting in her room, where the maids were alternating cold compresses on her head with sips of whiskey, which they told her was an elixir sent by the doctor.
Daddy Kratt put his hand on my grandfather’s shoulder and said, “I’ll handle it.” That evening, he walked outside and slaughtered every single hen and rooster the DeLours owned. After a thorough search, he found nothing.
The next morning, one of the maids found the ring stuck between the pages of the cookbook, marking the sauce recipe. This could have been very bad news for Daddy Kratt. But when he arrived back at the house, uncertain of his fate, Grandfather DeLour hailed him as a “man of action” and, from that moment, regarded my father as his pupil, teaching him everything he knew about the cotton business.
Amaryllis untucked her head slightly. I was touched by her willingness to listen. I continued my story.
Grandmother DeLour never knew her ring had been resting in the cookbook the whole time. She thought Daddy Kratt had found it in one of the chickens. As a token of gratitude, she presented him with the butterfly tray, the most unusual and exotic item in her home at the time, a gift from the same peripatetic brother-in-law who had brought her the blackamoor figures. Then she instructed Daddy Kratt to go out and buy new chickens.
Throughout my childhood, I would occasionally catch my father looking at the tray, drumming his fingers on it as if he could provoke those wings into flight. Because it was placed in such a prominent location in our home, and because Daddy Kratt was fond of it, we regarded the tray with a mixture of fear and awe. When Quincy told Rosemarie that the wings weren’t from butterflies but rather tiny and helpless fairies, she avoided the tray, and when she accidentally went near it, Quincy would shriek under his breath, which would send her sobbing to her room.
I looked down at Amaryllis, worried that this last part would frighten her. She had lifted her head, and her large eyes steadied themselves on me.
“I’m glad that girl didn’t get in trouble,” she said.
“Which girl?” I asked.
“The girl in charge of the chickens.”
“I had not thought of that,” I said.
“Are you mad I broke the tray?”
I shook my head. “We still have the story. It’s nearly as real as the thing. Maybe more so.”
“Are you mad at us for moving in?” she asked. “Do you want us to stay?”
The child and her questions!
The others looked at me.
“Yes.”
* * *
The next morning, Amaryllis beckoned me to the front porch. Marcus was in the study repairing a broken hinge on one of the cabinets, and Olva and Rosemarie were contemplating breakfast in the kitchen. I felt a bit exposed out in the open with her, but the child wore an insistence that agitated her whole body. She could be kept inside no longer. The message on the house was now covered with ochre-colored paint, and we had heard not a whisper from any member of the Bramlett family. I had agreed, then, that we could sit on the porch for a spell.
The air was silent and steady, and I was wondering where all the birds had gone when a blue jay on its twigged feet hopped onto the porch. He eyed me, that robust fellow, and I sat in the green porch chair, returning his gaze, and this seemed nearly like a prayer to me, a different sort than the starchy ones I had been repeating all my life. Amaryllis was busy building a cairn on the porch, and the morning light seemed to take notice, releasing hidden glimmers in the stacked rocks. Everything seemed to be ordering itself in the world.
The rumble of a car drew my attention. Jolly’s Taurus lunged into our driveway, spilling the smell of exhaust into the air.
“Amaryllis!” I cried, bolting up out of my seat, which sent a tremor of vertigo through my body and forced me back down. From my seat, I strained to see who was driving the car.
I had never been so relieved to see Jolly herself. She emerged from the driver’s side, slamming the door before her squat feet marched across our lawn.
“The mean lady is here,” Amaryllis said, grasping a large chunk of blue granite in her hand. “Old Mr. McGregor.”
I was pleased the name had passed on to someone else.
“Maybe you better go inside, Amaryllis,” I said as Jolly approached us.
“I’m fine,” the child said.
“Judith!” Jolly said, stopping a few feet short of the porch. She acted as if we were continuing a conversation already in full swing. “Your maid can’t go around threatening my boy!”
“She is not the maid!” Amaryllis cried, standing up.
“A death threat is hardly something to look past,” Jolly said, ignoring Amaryllis’s comment. The child remained standing, the piece of granite still in her hand.
I didn’t know how to respond to Jolly or how to soothe Amaryllis, and without thinking, I did the thing that was sure to agitate them both: I pointed at the painted-over portion of the house. Jolly’s eyes followed my gesture and squinted in confusion at the spot on the wall. The folds of her face slowly smoothed out in recognition.
“I am sorry about that,” she said with a quietness I had never before heard in her voice. Her eyes lifted to Amaryllis, and she said, “Is your daddy here?”
I tensed, not knowing if Jolly were interested in proffering an apology or sniffing Marcus out of hiding. Amaryllis answered before I could intervene.
“Of course he is,” the child said. “We live here now.”
Jolly’s eyes fell silent in her head. “You what now?” She turned to me. “Is this so?”
I gathered my breath. “Well, it turns out that it is.”
“What on earth is wrong with you, Judith?” Jolly’s voice was controlled, and in it was an earnest appeal. “Aren’t you afraid that boy will steal from you?”
Amaryllis made a little noise—a deflation—and fury spun hard in my chest. The force of it lifted me from my chair, and I remained standing even though I felt light-headed. “He is certainly not going to steal from me!” I said, towering over Jolly, who stood at the bottom of the steps. “As far as I am concerned, the Bramlett family is no longer welcome at—or near—this house!”
Jolly’s mouth stretched into an ugly smile, and we watched her return to her car. Walking there, she took he
r time, our anger not spurring her one bit. When she reached the Taurus, she paused with her fingers on the door handle. “My son is right,” she said, rotating her head toward us. “This house is full of nigger lovers.”
Amaryllis’s feet were swift. They seemed to descend the six porch stairs at once, and before I could register what was happening, she was standing in front of Jolly’s car with her right hand raised, bearing the chunk of granite. I saw Jolly’s mouth softly fall open just as Amaryllis hurled the rock at the windshield. It made a crunching noise, spidering the glass where the rock had landed. It looked almost beautiful, like the shape of a firecracker. Jolly stared dumbly at the cracked windshield before her awareness snapped back. She heaved her body up, preparing to descend upon Amaryllis, with words or actions, I knew not which, but the fleet-footed child was already gone. The front door slammed as she ran into the house.
“Miss Judith?” It was Olva, voice high and strained, peeking her head out. Jolly’s car door slammed, and the Taurus backed down the driveway. Olva watched it tear down the road.
I followed Olva inside. We decided the adults would have a meeting. Before we gathered, I checked that the front door was locked while Marcus checked the other doors. The number of doors in and out of this house! I reflected on those doors: the front door painted the color of Savannah clay; the glass door leading from the sunroom to the south side of the house; the back door with its shabby, chipped paint; and the cellar door, heavy on its hinges. During my childhood, some people used only the front door; others, only the back.
As Marcus was checking the cellar door, Amaryllis was bouncing beside me, full of nervous energy from her encounter with Jolly.
“Good grief,” I said. “You will need something to keep you occupied, won’t you?” I called to Rosemarie and Olva that I would meet them upstairs, and I devised a task for the child.
When I joined the adults, they were already in heated discussion about what to do.
“She knows I’m here now?” Marcus asked. I nodded, and he sighed. “We need to leave.”
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt Page 18
