The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  The sound of the gunshot was still in the air. I was momentarily deaf. Because of this, I saw more clearly. Twin hallucinations cut across my mind, one toward me, one away. Quincy was suddenly striding at me, and I knew he would pursue me for the rest of my life. Floating away from me was Rosemarie, her hair moving like a golden tide, one that went out and out and would never return.

  Unexpectedly, an image from my vision manifested before my eyes in a blur. It flew across the airy expanse of the attic. I felt myself pitch and reel, and a queasy sensation swept through my body, as if a child’s blunt hand had spun me like a top. With a jolt—I thought I heard my brain snap against my skull—clarity was restored. It was no delusion. It was Rosemarie herself. She had dashed from the blanket-strewn mattress in the corner and was heading toward the attic’s ladder, where Olva had escaped just moments before. Before she hurtled down the ladder, my sister looked back at me as I held the shotgun, a flash of horror on her face. I watched the hole swallow her head, and when it did, her hair licked back through the opening before it vanished.

  Sometime that night, while the rest of us weren’t sleeping in our rooms, Rosemarie slid noiselessly out of our house and escaped Bound. She was thirteen years old.

  Rosemarie escaped, but I stayed. Daddy Kratt wasn’t in the store when Quincy was shot. He was making his rounds at the filling station first, and I found him there alone, rotating some cans of motor oil on a shelf. Daddy Kratt had taught me early on that when I came upon a dented or scratched piece of merchandise to turn it so that the damage was concealed.

  Without a word, my father followed me from the filling station. Something in my face had silenced him. “This way,” I instructed as we entered the store. We moved from staircase to staircase, and the things around us felt like things again, drained of life.

  When we finally climbed the attic stairs, Daddy Kratt stepped forward and crouched beside Quincy’s body. My father reached down and moved my brother onto his back, exposing the blood-soaked front of the vest Quincy was wearing, the buttons he had buttoned this morning like it were any ordinary day. I stood behind Daddy Kratt, not knowing what to say or do. But then he abruptly stood up to face me. He was looking squarely into my eyes. I held his gaze. Then he turned back toward Quincy’s body and knelt down in the same position as before. He reached over and carefully moved his son onto his belly again, hiding the wound from view.

  Daddy Kratt exited the attic with the same stoicism with which he had entered. I trailed him, keeping my distance, all the way through the store and out the back entrance. A few feet outside the store, he stopped. I watched him cautiously from the door so that I could flee inside if necessary. My father’s head tipped up. I then heard a sound so unsettling that my legs nearly folded under me. It was an ancient and unkempt howl, as if the sky had unhinged its blue jaw and let loose all the sound it had never uttered. He looked frail and deflated, but then his body reared up with a deep breath, as if gathering the sound back up. I was confused and afraid until I recognized it was a display of grief. Here was the recognition Quincy had always wanted.

  Daddy Kratt whirled around toward me. “Who did this?”

  I gripped the edge of the door. A woodpecker punished a tree in the distance.

  “Charlie.”

  Without acknowledging me again, my father took off away from the store, and a thicket of trees consumed him.

  The idea to blame Charlie had formed in my head the moment Olva had fired the Purdey. It was the only way I could think to preserve her. Charlie already had a bull’s-eye on his head, and what would it matter if I painted it brighter? And I had saved him, too, hadn’t I? I had turned on the Tiffany light and warned him. I had both saved and sacrificed him. Again, I felt as if two different versions of myself existed, crowded together uncomfortably inside me, and I wondered if I would be remembered, in the end, for the saving or the sacrificing.

  * * *

  That afternoon, I hurried to Aunt Dee’s. I had not seen Daddy Kratt since I took him to see Quincy’s body, and I had not laid eyes on Mama at all. That none of us had sought each other’s company in the face of tragedy made me feel light-headed and empty, and I quickened my pace to Dee’s. By the time I arrived at her house, the winter sun had grown paler and colder. I circled around to Dee’s back door, where friends and family entered, but hearing me struggle through the jumble of her backyard—I had to climb through the doorless cabin of a rusted-out truck—she tore outside with her own shotgun.

  “Who is it? This is my property!” she boomed.

  “Aunt Dee, it’s Judith!” I called out frantically, because I knew that Dee followed through on her plans, however outlandish they seemed to others.

  “Get inside, girl,” she said, lowering the shotgun and beckoning me with her free hand.

  Dee’s kitchen smelled of boiled potatoes and a sharp twang, not unpleasant, that was also the smell of my aunt. Olva turned the corner from the den.

  “Olva!” I cried, and we embraced. “Where is Charlie?” I asked.

  “Already gone,” Dee answered. “My friends in Hickory Grove have taken him in, and he will go on from there. He may make a stop in Tirzah. I don’t know. He has a son there, but they are not close.”

  This last piece of news caught Olva’s attention. From her expression, I couldn’t tell if she knew about Charlie’s son. “I’m planning on joining Charlie,” Olva said. Her gaze then fell on me. She looked stricken. “Is Quincy—” She couldn’t finish.

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  Olva sat down and sobbed into her cupped hands.

  I didn’t know how to respond. A new emotion would be required, one not yet available to me, which could encompass the horror, the guilt, and the whisper of relief I felt. When Quincy had fallen, a great storm of sensation raged through me, only to seize up in the next moment, jolting to a stop, so that a recalcitrant numbness was all that remained.

  Dee swallowed Olva with her arms. “It’s not your fault, Olva. Quincy was threatening Charlie.” Dee turned to me. “Judith,” she said briskly, getting down to business. “You can help Olva pack.”

  “She doesn’t have to leave,” I said.

  “Why’s that?” Aunt Dee asked, her voice sharp and skeptical.

  “Because I told Daddy Kratt…” I paused, closing my eyes. “I told him Charlie did it.”

  I regretted opening my eyes again. The look on Olva’s face might as well have pushed me down into the earth. In that moment, she seemed to disown me, placing me apart from her. Had I not risked a great deal for Charlie? My efforts had been rewarded with a division from Olva that felt too great to bear.

  “Charlie,” she whispered, as if her voice could conjure him into the room. There was something more she wanted to say, but she began sobbing again.

  I wondered if it was to call him her father. I had never heard her call him that.

  Dee squeezed Olva harder. “It’s done,” she whispered in Olva’s ear.

  Olva wrested herself free from Dee’s arms. “They will find him,” Olva said angrily.

  “I have a plan,” I said, moving toward them. Olva seemed to shrink from me, which made me more desperate for her to understand my idea. “Dee and I have to return to the store to get what we need.” I turned to Dee. “We will need your car.”

  “We’ll see if it starts,” she said.

  I felt full of action and purpose. Olva would not look at me. She was elsewhere, perhaps following Charlie’s footsteps. I would bring her back.

  Outside, Dee surveyed her car. It was a Cadillac Daddy Kratt had given her when he was full of familial generosity—this was early on, before he and Dee had spent any time together—and Dee had responded by letting the vehicle rot in her backyard. The passenger door seemed sealed shut, and when I pried it open, I half expected to find soil in the floorboards.

  Luck or something like it was on our side. T
he car started. Dee drove us to the store, and I instructed her to pull to the back loading door. I scooted out of the passenger seat, telling Dee to turn off the engine and wait for me.

  When I entered the store from its back entrance, I noticed that people were pulsing in and out as if it were a normal workday. I didn’t see Daddy Kratt, which was a blessing, but I saw the coroner from York and several of the boys loyal to my father. I shuddered; they were probably there to clean up. Every man in good standing in our town seemed to be there, in fact, and I wondered if Daddy Kratt would speak to them in his office, devising a plan of his own. I pushed the thought out of my mind.

  As I picked my way through the crowd, Mr. Clark, the car mechanic, timidly tipped his hat at me, which startled me into thinking he knew why I was there. But he was just paying his respects. I had lost my brother.

  I traveled to the third floor, avoiding people’s gazes most of the way, and when I got to the millinery shop, I stopped. The coroner and his assistant had already navigated the ladder up to the attic, and they were fluidly guiding a stretcher through the room of mannequins. On it was Quincy’s body, covered in a white sheet. I moved to the side as they brought him through the doorway. Busy with their grim work, they didn’t acknowledge me, and I focused on their hands, gripping the stretcher. I had thought that when my brother’s body passed me—I braced myself for it—I would feel him next to me, just like the hundreds of times we had crossed paths in the store during our young lives. But when the coroner and his assistant went by, the body on the stretcher gave no sense of my brother. Whatever had animated Quincy had abandoned his body. He was just a thing they carried now.

  Once they moved toward the elevator, I stepped into the millinery shop. I pulled back my gaze when it wandered to the opening of the attic. Biting down on my tongue to renew my focus, I found a bolt of fabric and got to my task. When I had my load secured to a shop cart, I pushed it to the freight elevator. I steadied my breath, thinking of Charlie’s last ride on the elevator and whispering a thank you to him for fixing it. His escape and my plan would not have been possible without his mechanical genius.

  When the elevator landed on the ground floor, I backed my cart out and continued toward the rear exit. With the store brimming with people, how I would make it back to Aunt Dee’s car, I was not sure. But people averted their eyes as I passed through. Their discomfort with grief gave me passage.

  When Dee and I returned to the house, Olva was waiting for us on the porch. Beside her sat Mama. Mama wore a long-sleeve, button-up dress, and several of the buttons were off-kilter, her white slip showing underneath. Olva’s torso was draped across Mama’s lap, and Mama was stroking Olva’s back with her hand in long, fluid movements. They were lost in shared pain. I was grateful when Dee called out, rousing them from their poses, but my relief was spoiled as I watched Mama stroke the air two more times, even though Olva had moved. Mama’s gaze floated in front of her, as if she were looking at everything at once or nothing at all. I wondered if the image of her son rose before her, and if so, was he alive or dead in that vision? Or was she thinking of Charlie? I was suddenly very angry with her for bringing this disaster down on our heads.

  Dee was looking at me. I stepped forward and began talking. I explained to them what we were about to do. We worked through the rest of the day and the night, even Mama, whose movements were dreamy and ponderous, as though governed by an invisible tide she had surrendered to.

  * * *

  The next morning, Daddy Kratt’s Cadillac swayed to a stop in front of Aunt Dee’s house. Aunt Dee and I watched from the window. Mama and Olva hid in the Indian’s tepee about a hundred yards from the house. I prayed that my father would not cut the engine.

  The prayer was unanswered. Daddy Kratt, his work boots on, thrust himself out of the car and paused, glaring into the distance where the east side of the house broke out into flat acreage—the beginning of a neighbor’s cotton plot—with a few sturdy red maples on the periphery. Daddy Kratt squinted into the sun, his jaw working. He stayed there, deliberating on what he saw.

  He then bulldozed his way toward the house, knocking over one of Aunt Dee’s empty pots. It broke in two, the larger piece rocking on its side. As if on cue, Dee pushed me aside and flew out the front door.

  “Isn’t the damage done?” she yelled at him, her voice full of rage and despair. She was brandishing her shotgun, but Daddy Kratt didn’t seem to notice. He stood in front of the Cadillac and appraised his sister-in-law’s ravings. Then he looked to the east again. We knew what he was looking at. A body hung from one of the maples.

  “Cruelty!” she screamed. She seemed not to have control of her voice. That was unusual for Dee, and it frightened me. “On my land? This is low, even for you, Brayburn.” The shotgun bobbed in her arms. “Charlie was a good man, and you are a vile fool.”

  Daddy Kratt strode toward her.

  Aunt Dee stood to attention. “You stop right there,” she said. “He’s on my land, and I’ll dispose of the body my way.” My father took another few steps forward, and Dee aimed the shotgun at him. “You know me, Brayburn,” she said, her voice now disciplined.

  He stopped.

  I held my breath.

  Daddy Kratt hoisted a wad of phlegm into his throat and spat onto the cold earth, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his olive-colored work coat. He pivoted slowly and walked back to the Cadillac. It was the walk of a man who had gotten his way. My breath released. Suddenly, he turned his head back toward the tree in the distance. His jaw pulsed. He looked for a final moment before returning to the car’s driver’s seat. Dee stood alert, her shotgun raised, until his car disappeared into the amber haze of the morning road.

  Olva crept out from the tepee, helping guide Mama out, and I joined Dee outside.

  “I hope that worked,” Dee told us.

  “How could it not?” I asked.

  Her laugh was brittle. “For one thing, Brayburn might want to know exactly who did it. And when he starts asking around, he may get suspicious if no one lays claim to the deed.” She paused, seeming to absorb what we had done. “The lynching.”

  “Daddy Kratt is not prone to snooping,” I said. “That was Quincy’s job.” We fell silent at my brother’s name.

  “Will Mr. Burns miss his mannequin?” Dee asked.

  A weight fell from my throat to my stomach. It was something I had not considered. “How could I have missed that?” My mind felt dull, useless. “He adores his mannequins.”

  “We will return it, then,” Dee said.

  “We will bury him,” Olva replied. She held the horizon with her eyes. “We will bury him, and there will be no more discussion of it.”

  We nodded. There was no more discussion of it.

  Olva took off toward Dee’s shed, and we followed her. We gathered our supplies in a wheelbarrow: several stout shovels, hedge clippers, and a small ladder. Over her right shoulder, Dee heaved the bolt of fabric I had brought from the milliner’s shop.

  “Here we go,” Dee said as we set back out. Her face was grave and businesslike.

  As we crossed the field away from Dee’s house, my cold fingers wrapped around the handles of the wheelbarrow. Our breaths were icy plumes, revealing the secret of the air around us. The morning sun had grown more severe, silhouetting the maple so that it loomed as a colossus before us. Its roots knuckled into the earth, and its immense branches expanded in orchestral drama. I wondered what that red maple had seen over its lifetime. How had time filtered through its spired leaves? What night skies had cascaded above, a blinding rush of stars, and how had the hot earth simmered underneath? Had its branches bent with the weight of a body before? Eras of memories, locked into the bark.

  Approaching the mannequin with measured steps, we slowed our breathing and tucked our voices in our mouths. It hung long and limp. To disguise its female form, we had dressed the mannequin in Charlie’s h
at and clothing, which he had left at Aunt Dee’s when hiding at her house. Although the face was featureless and smooth, the body seemed to carry the weight of a real person when suspended. It was tall, too, like Charlie. And the hands! The hands wilted to its sides so delicately and with such human desolation that I felt a wild urge to fill them with mine. But I was afraid to touch them.

  I looked over at Olva, and where I thought I might find gratitude or relief, I found something bitter there, a tightness around her jaw, even as her eyes streamed with tears. She reached out and took the mannequin’s smooth hand in hers for a moment. Then Dee unrolled the shirt cuffs to hide the color of the mannequin’s skin.

  In silence, we went about our duties. Dee sliced the rope with the clippers, and she bore the weight of the mannequin, not letting it touch the ground. We rolled it as best we could in the bolt of fabric, and even Mama managed to help. Olva and Dee carried it, one of them stationed at its head, the other its feet. We decided to bury it by Dee’s wild strawberries, not too far from her house.

  We dug for hours, until our hands ached and our bodies strained to remain upright. It was winter, so no flowers could be found, but Olva collected handfuls of red berries from a holly bush. Olva handed Mama some berries, and the subtle weight in her hand tipped something inside my mother. Mama collapsed next to the wrapped body and began sobbing, her slight frame barely able to contain the coarse, uneven breaths that heaved in and out of her mouth. She lurched violently; no one could approach her, though Dee and Olva tried. A heat rose from her rocking body. The air smelled of crushed berries.

  When Mama stopped crying, the cold swept in again, more biting than before. Dee dropped to her knees beside Mama. “Go with Charlie now,” Dee said. “Take Olva!”