The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  “We can’t leave! You said so yourself. We have to stay and face him,” Rosemarie said.

  “You don’t have to leave,” Marcus said. In the span of half a breath—it was there and it was gone—I saw my sister’s eyes tighten in resentment.

  “I’ll have you remember that the message on the house was directed at me,” Rosemarie said. “I’m in the thick of it with you!”

  Marcus let off a hot laugh, but Olva held up her hand. “Marcus is right,” she said. “Rick will return.”

  We went around and around in conversation, arguing over when Marcus and Amaryllis should leave and how we should orchestrate their exit. Where would they go? We gathered in Marcus’s room, and he absentmindedly bent down to pick up a whistle shaped like a bird from the floor. “We shouldn’t pack much,” he said.

  “Where is Amaryllis?” Olva asked, looking at the whistle.

  “I provided her a puzzle,” I said. “I gave her a handful of keys, and now she’s happily trying to figure out what they unlock. I thought it was quite a clever idea.”

  “The keys from the junk drawer?” Olva asked, a note of alarm in her voice.

  “Yes. Is there a problem?” I said.

  “One of those keys opens the long drawer of the rolltop desk,” Olva said. She wasted not a moment before shooting out of the room.

  “Judith?” Rosemarie asked.

  “The Purdey shotgun,” I managed to say.

  Marcus beat us downstairs. We heard Olva calling frantically for Amaryllis. Then Olva’s cry sharpened. When I arrived downstairs, I saw what the others saw. The front door hung open. In the doorway lay Peter Rabbit, facedown.

  At the sight of the stuffed animal, my thoughts rose so sharply that I felt them as distinct pricks of pain in my head. And then I heard a wailing that soldered me to my spot. It took me a moment to understand the howl was a train, discharging its horn somewhere in the distance. I stood, immobile, until I was the last one left in the house.

  I followed the others. When I emerged outside, the figures on the lawn seemed to prop dimensionless against the morning scenery as if unreal. The birds disagreed. The blue jays had taken up residence in our large water oak, and they cried their war cries and stamped their feet, a cacophony of survival. They saw what was below.

  There was Amaryllis, holding the Purdey shotgun, struggling with its proportions. In front of her, at a ten-pace length, as if caught in a duel, was Rick. His carriage was slumped and perturbed, the weight of something on him that he was angry to bear.

  To Amaryllis’s right were Olva and Marcus, and close to the porch, on Olva’s other side, was a wiry man I didn’t recognize, eyes hot in his head and legs trembling with confined energy. He glanced up at me suspiciously—as if I were out of place! On the porch, Rosemarie stood alongside me.

  “Hand it to me,” Olva was saying gently to Amaryllis. The air seemed lighter, gaseous, as if a spark could ignite it.

  “Amaryllis!” Marcus whispered in a desperate way.

  But Olva put up her hand at him. “Give it to me, sweet girl,” Olva said.

  A small, innocent smile rose to the child’s lips. Her eyes moved past Olva to land on my sister and me, and our expressions seemed to give her pause. She looked down at the shotgun. She smiled again, as if amused by the attention. Her gaze leveled at Rick, and her face was older than it had been before. A world-weariness had taken hold of her, and she blinked slowly, eyelids heavy. She stepped forward—the weight of the gun seemed to pull her forward—and just as she did, Olva matched her movements and stepped toward the child. As if they had reached a silent agreement, Amaryllis let go of the gun just as Olva lifted it from her hands.

  Marcus rushed forward and fell to his knees, pulling Amaryllis toward him. Her face crumpled into tears at having done something of greater consequence than she understood. We thought it had ended, that the child’s actions had sobered the adults, wringing out the madness of the moment so that only common sense remained.

  But then Rick spoke.

  “Good girl,” he said to Amaryllis.

  His friend snickered.

  Olva’s face emptied, and she slowly raised the shotgun toward Rick.

  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 fixed

  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 (54˝× 21˝× 50˝)—damaged

  Riding whip—Daddy Kratt’s

  New York Times (Wednesday, October 30, 1929)

  Peacock hat

  Edwardian coral cameo (1½˝ × 1˝)

  Highboy bureau

  Butterfly tray (23¾˝× 15½˝)—damaged

  Cheval mirror

  Glass rabbit

  Persian Heriz rug

  Revolving mahogany bookstand

  Queen Anne chair (dusty rose)

  Rococo cherub figurines

  Noritake 175 Gold china

  Art deco oyster plates

  Silver cutlery

  Waterford crystal pitcher

  Crystal saltcellars

  Louis XV sofa (silver leaf details)

  Leather ledger book

  Purdey shotgun (barrel 29˝)

  The Tale of Peter Rabbit, early edition

  Bronze blackamoor figures

  Origin of Species, first edition

  Victorian Dresden figurines

  Chippendale wing chair

  Hammond’s globe

  Letter from Aunt Dee to Mama

  Maple drop-leaf table

  Ruby wedding ring—Grandmother DeLour’s

  Twelve

  The morning after Daddy Kratt gave Quincy his Purdey shotgun, I arrived at the store earlier than my usual time. I wasn’t there for my normal inventory duties. Walking through the front door, I was shocked to discover Olva standing beside the entrance table, both hands propped on it, as if it were holding her up. It was the same table where the strawberry shortcakes had sat months earlier. When Olva saw me, she sprang forward.

  “Charlie is at Dee’s!”

  I grasped her arm and pulled her toward me. “Not so loud,” I whispered, glancing around. The store’s silence had a weight to it that made me uneasy. I leaned in. “Have you seen Quincy?”

  “No,” Olva said, her voice rising. “Why? Is there something I should know?”

  “Shh!” I moved my eyes over the expanse of the first floor before my gaze climbed the main staircase. I saw nothing, but all the items of the store, all the things I had spent months watching over, appeared to possess a bridled energy, as though they might lunge forward if I called for them. Everything around us seemed interested in what we had to say, and even one of Mr. Burns’s mannequins, wearing a maize-colored tweed coat, was angling an ear toward us.

  I moved my head even closer to Olva’s. I could barely hear myself speaking. “Go home. Tell Charlie I’ve come to pack some of his things. I’ll make my way to Dee’s as soon as I can.”

  Olva nodded and made for the front door. Before opening it, she turned around. “What does Quincy want with Charlie?”

  I lifted my hand to shush her. I didn’t know what to say. I communicated something, though, even if I hadn’t intended
to, because she nodded. Had all the listening things in the store understood me, too? The rows of canned pineapple in the bulk goods section. The prying mannequin. All the other items that had sprouted a thousand ears. Had they grasped the unspoken? Olva pressed the door open and was gone.

  I swiftly made my way to the attic. On the way, I grabbed one of the leather hide suitcases from the luggage display, careful to keep my gaze trained on the path ahead rather than on the merchandise I passed. It was like making my way through a curious crowd. There in the attic, I packed the remainder of Charlie’s belongings. They weren’t much: a plain black comb, a small worn Bible, and a sheaf of personal papers, mostly his drawings of the internal workings of various mechanical objects. It was cold in the attic, and I rubbed my hands together and blew into them.

  My eyes scanned the rest of the space. The attic stretched to nearly four thousand square feet, and beyond Charlie’s workstation was a vast area where broken items, waiting for repair, were stacked against one another. Those broken things would wait indefinitely. The attic felt different, the arrangement of things altered. Were things missing? I wondered if Charlie had returned, but I didn’t see how that would be possible. A mattress, which Rosemarie sometimes napped on, had been pulled to one of the far reaches of the attic, shrouded in shadows. It was barely visible from where I kneeled, and as far as I could tell, it was heaped in blankets.

  The attic looked sparser, the space more exposed, and this sense of emptiness seemed to invite grandiose ideas. Unable to situate myself in this new composition, I felt a derangement take hold of me. The heap of blankets on the distant mattress seemed to shift, and I pressed my eyes shut to regain my composure.

  The Tiffany lamp still sat on Charlie’s desk. I looked from the lamp to the suitcase and shook my head.

  “It won’t fit.”

  The voice startled me, and I slammed the suitcase shut. When I turned, Quincy was placing the Purdey shotgun on a low bench at the entrance to the attic.

  “I don’t think Charlie would expect you to pack the lamp,” he said, chuckling as he approached me. He peered at the suitcase. “Especially if he’s getting a new piece of luggage. I suppose if you’re packing for him, you know where he is.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “It’s okay, Sister. You don’t have to give up your secret. I already know that Aunt Dee is hiding him.”

  I looked at the shotgun on the bench. His eyes followed mine.

  “You can’t understand my situation, Sister,” Quincy said, “and if you meddle, I’ll tell Daddy Kratt you turned on the Tiffany lamp to warn Charlie.”

  I glanced down. My ear caught sound of movement in the millinery shop—the scuff of a footstep, the shuffle of merchandise, I couldn’t tell. A thought both terrifying and familiar rose up, as if submerged until now, of one of the mannequins from the shop coming to life and climbing the stairs to the attic.

  “What is it?” Quincy asked, noticing my expression.

  “Nothing.”

  Quincy shrugged. “You see, it’s bigger than the two of us anyhow.” He took a step closer to me. “I’ll tell you two things. That Charlie had an affair with—”

  I held up my hand.

  “You already know that,” he finished. There was no anger in Quincy’s voice; it was purely a transmission of information for him. “And maybe you know the second thing, too. They had a child.”

  Quincy waited for my response. My silence triggered another off-kilter chuckle from him. “You know,” he said. “Of course you do. How could you not? You were always smarter. I’m not ashamed to admit that.”

  My gaze remained rooted to the floor. I thought of Byrd Parker. I thought of his wife, their unborn child, and the Negro who was the father of that child. All dead.

  “Charlie’s already a dead man,” Quincy said, as if he’d read my thoughts. “I am—if you can believe it—I’m sorry about all this. You’re fond of talking about survival, Judith. Well, I have to make it through this world like anybody else.” A thin laugh escaped his lips. “You and Rosemarie are the mold, and I’m the gelatin that never set. Do you remember that one mechanic at Randall Clark’s garage? Every time I walked by, he would peer over the black intestines of his popped hood and call out, ‘Look, fellows, it’s the middling!’ He was talking about how I’d been born in the middle, between two girls. And I used to think about that. Because we used to call our average cotton middling. Fair to middlin’. It was foolish of that man to give me a name.” A sly smile rose on Quincy’s lips. “That mechanic called me the name until I dug up one of his secrets—oh, he was dirtier than one of his engines.”

  Fair to middlin’. The phrase called up a memory for me, too. Of Grandfather DeLour, Mama’s father. “You are only fair to middlin’,” he had once told me solemnly as I played with my dolls on the front porch steps. “But your sister, she’s the finest grade there is.” Everything in Grandfather DeLour’s life, no matter how disparate—his grandchildren, the taste of his pipe tobacco, the fitness of his horse—he assessed in the language used to grade cotton. It brought me a strange pleasure, then, when I first heard the story of how he lost his cotton fortune. Back when Daddy Kratt was starting out, he had sold his cotton exclusively through my grandfather’s company, DeLour and Sons. That is, until my father found a better deal, at which time he withdrew his product, bribed his business associates to do the same, and unceremoniously bankrupted Grandfather DeLour. I imagine it pained my grandfather to lose his son-in-law’s business, but even more so his camaraderie. The DeLours had only two daughters, my mother and Dee, and so the company name, DeLour and Sons, was a misnomer. The name might have pointed to my grandfather’s optimism that his wife would eventually bear him a son (she didn’t), but knowing him, I’d say it was more likely evidence of his spectacular lack of imagination. Grandfather DeLour could not envision a world without a male heir to his business. I looked at Quincy. I suspect he had never felt heir to anything substantial in his life. Like me, he was vying for a better position than he’d been born into. Like me, he was searching for where he belonged.

  Quincy considered me. “What, Sister?”

  Now I was looking past him. Someone had emerged from behind Quincy. My brother pivoted to follow my gaze.

  There was Olva, standing with the Purdey shotgun, pointing it at him.

  A pebble of laughter dropped from Quincy’s mouth. My breath stalled. I told myself that the shotgun was just a thing in Olva’s hands. I stood up and moved toward her gently, as if walking in the midst of fragile things. Her eyes were locked on Quincy, but as I approached her, they cut toward me, and I froze.

  “Is this a warning?” Quincy asked wryly. He didn’t think Olva would do it. He didn’t think she had it in her.

  A tang of panic flushed my mouth. My mind, unbalanced by the scene in front of me, cast about for something to seize hold of, and it landed, improbably, on Uncle Sally. I recalled the conversation in which Quincy had told our great-uncle, over those thick slabs of Easter ham, the story of the stout foxes, the lean foxes, and the henhouse gate. The circumstances alone had dictated which kind of fox had survived. I couldn’t help but think that whatever was allowing Olva to point a gun at Quincy might have, under different circumstances, lain hidden inside her, sleepy as a bulb buried in winter soil. But a crucible of recent events—Charlie’s near lynching, Daddy Kratt’s resolve to find Charlie, and Quincy’s willingness to lead the manhunt—had converged with barometrical force, an ear-splitting pressure that had provoked something inside Olva and had put it to use.

  Quincy looked down the barrel of the Purdey. His expression shifted from smugness to belief, just as when I had delighted him with my jealousy of Rosemarie that day, the same day he had made me read aloud from Origin of Species. When he saw that Olva would pull the trigger, that she would go through with it, the very same look of satisfaction fell across his face: it was a look of wonder and ease
dissolving into pleasure, a pleasure borne of the fact that the bullet about to tear through the air toward him would be something he hadn’t anticipated. Quincy always knew everything that was going on around him and everything that was about to happen. It was a kind of ecstasy for my brother, at least I imagined it in this way, that in his final moments on earth, he would be taken by surprise.

  Quincy’s face turned wistful. “Dovey looks so pretty in blue.”

  Then my brother offered a final smile, this time of full recognition. Something new had occurred to him. “You are my older sister,” he said to Olva. Given Quincy’s belief in the despotism of birth order, perhaps her aiming a gun at him confirmed his understanding of the world.

  “You are my older sister,” he repeated.

  Is there an instinct of survival too powerful to suppress? There in the attic of our family’s store, the gunshot fractured the air, an infliction that cracked our eardrums and put the taste of lemon pith on our tongues. Sharpness gave way to a reverberation that now, these decades later, is what I hear in the hollow ache of a train’s horn. The sound filled our bodies, finding a home in each of us.

  My brother crumpled to the floor. The smell of blood rose from his body and met my nose as an alien odor, biological and metallic, life and not life, as if a meteor from deep space had crashed down on that very spot, bringing with it a new existence in which counting how many siblings I had would mean counting how many were dead. Olva released the shotgun from her right shoulder. As if I were watching myself do it, I walked over to her, took the gun, and gestured for her to run. She nodded, scrambling over to the opening in the attic floor where the ladder led to the millinery shop. I knew she would go back to Aunt Dee’s.

  I stepped toward Quincy’s body, then stopped. He had fallen straight down, knees buckling, leaving him in a crouching position, and while I could not see the wound in his chest, I could see the blood, thick and dark, issuing from it, crawling away from his body, surely and steadily, as if it had been waiting to be released. I took a few steps closer but did not touch him. His body seemed leaden; no breath animated it. I thought about the chickens Daddy Kratt had slaughtered in the search for Grandmother DeLour’s ruby ring. Had he twisted their necks or chopped their heads off with a hatchet? I pictured the latter: manic bodies, delivered from their heads, still whirling about the yard, frittering away the final pulses of life. But Quincy was a sleeping stone. I did not have to check his body to know he was gone.