The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  Mama shook her head, and one side of her mouth curled up. “You always said it was unsafe.”

  “What is safe or unsafe any longer?” Dee said. “I thought if you were here, I could protect you. I was naive. Go—be with him. I can send word to my friends that you and Olva are coming. They’ll take care of you. They’ll shepherd you to your next place.”

  Mama looked at the wrapped body in front of her. I thought she would fall into tears again, but her gaze straightened, and she lifted her spine. “Where is he now?” she asked Dee.

  “Hickory Grove.”

  “So close!” Mama cried.

  “He leaves there in the morning,” Dee said.

  Mama turned to Olva, and I could see Mama’s profile, the profile of her beautiful face, and the silhouette was like carved stone, strong and erect, sacred and powerful. Mama’s self-possession made Olva’s eyes grow calm, and the two sat looking at one another, settling on a decision between them, their eyes working it out, making the arrangements, steeling one another’s courage.

  “Don’t leave!”

  My words had come out like begging. But it was anger I felt first, a blood beat hammering at my temples. Anger at the thought of their escaping this calamity, leaving the rest of us to clean it up. Anger at the thought of Mama abandoning one family for another. And on the day of her son’s death! Mama and Olva turned to me. In their faces, I saw immediate resignation. They would stay. Now I was flush with both relief and shame. It was anger, yes, that had pushed the words up from inside me, but I also wanted Mama and Olva to stay because of how I felt that day in the attic with the two of them and Charlie, those moments crisp in my memory, the warmth of the room still resting in the center of my palms.

  “We should lower the body,” Dee said, breaking the silence.

  Before we let it down into the space we had made, Olva leaned over, and around its neck, she hooked the cameo Mama had given her.

  “No,” said Aunt Dee, retrieving the cameo for Olva. “Keep it. Keep it as yours.”

  Olva held it in her palm, curling her fingers around it.

  * * *

  Mama did not attend Quincy’s funeral. Aunt Dee had made the decision, and Daddy Kratt, less despotic than usual, didn’t stop Dee from gathering her sister in the early, fumbling hours and whisking her back to her kudzu-wrapped home. Quincy was dead, Charlie was gone, and Rosemarie was nowhere to be found: the torment that daily visited my mother was plain to see. When I dashed Mama’s final hope to be with Charlie and Olva, I had extracted what remained of her. She became a long, solitary coil of smoke escaping a snuffed candle. Her facial expressions seemed off cue, as if she couldn’t quite keep up with conversations any longer or else she was reacting to different conversations in her mind.

  Daddy Kratt insisted we hold the funeral service in our home. It was three days before Christmas, and our maids had hastily taken down the holiday decorations put up a month earlier. Time did not afford replacing our everyday decor, so the house had an austere feel, as if it, too, were in mourning, wearing simple and somber attire appropriate for the circumstances. With the mantel bare and side tables undressed, the unfamiliarity troubled me. As I look back, I wonder what made our house a home for me. Was it my family? Or was it the things in their proper places?

  In the living room, the furniture had been shifted further so that Quincy’s casket could sit in the same spot as the sofa. Four boys from the church carried it inside and placed it atop a long table, outfitted with a simple black skirt. It was kept closed at my father’s insistence. I would have to account for the casket in my inventory of the store; it had come from the first floor, near the back, next to a small light-filled room that acted as our plant nursery. You could buy a casket and step a few feet over to buy the flowers to plant on top of it.

  I stood for a long while there in the living room. As I studied the glossy wood, I felt a delicate movement of emotion inside me, as a teacup sets down on a saucer. I had outlived my brother.

  Funeral guests trickled into our house, hugging the outskirts of the room to keep a wide orbit from my brother’s body. As the eldest daughter, people directed their condolences toward me, especially when they realized Mama, poor, ephemeral Mama, wasn’t fit for company. I was praised for my stalwartness, how much I was putting my family before myself by keeping my head on straight during these difficult times. Yet their remarks did not go much beyond that. The people who had worked for my father for years upon years did not convey their sorrow. Instead, I sensed relief in their slight handshakes and tepid condolences. What gossip about them had been laid to rest with my brother?

  The exception was the Sullivan family. I watched through the living room window as Lindy Sullivan—the girl I had once forced a shower upon, along with her sisters—approached our door on careful feet. She didn’t come inside for the service, but instead, she set by the door a persimmon crumble, still warm. Our cook, Ima, walked outside to pick up the crumble and thank Lindy, but the girl had already hurried off, not requiring any gratitude in return. It meant a good deal to me, because the Sullivans, poorer than anyone, wouldn’t have come by flour or sugar easily. Their kindness filled me with the sour ache of sadness.

  I greeted Pastor Cunningham when he walked into our house. The pastor was hefty but meek, a gentle manatee of a man, floating along the currents without any will of his own. When he saw me, his face—neck folds, jowls, and all—lifted up into a consoling smile but also as if he were bracing against a pain he hoped would be over soon. I gathered that Daddy Kratt had requested a meeting, at which time the pastor would be given threatening but opaque directions about what the sermon should convey. As he entered our house, Pastor Cunningham’s anxiety was plain to see. His gaze avoided the casket in the middle of the room.

  Rosemarie did not come back, not even for her brother’s funeral. At the time, though, I didn’t know she had left Bound. I assumed she was off somewhere avoiding life, or in this case, avoiding death, picking wild honeywort in a field or wading shin-deep in a river even though the trees clacked with ice. Later, when it was clear she had fled town, Daddy Kratt dispatched some of his loyal boys, a search party meant to find her, as if she were a filly run off from the stable, but they returned, their faces as empty and untroubled as their hands.

  After Pastor Cunningham’s arrival, Daddy Kratt finally walked down the stairs wearing his finest suit, and he did not want to look anyone in the eye, I could tell. His beard sat entirely still under his chin. It was, I now understood, how grief looked on my father.

  The service was short. Pastor Cunningham had elected to say very few words, owing to his nervousness, and those he chose were mild and dull. In attempting to avoid conflict, the pastor might well have created for himself another problem, and time would tell just how much Daddy Kratt had found the sermon lacking. The pastor seemed to sense this, because afterward, when we were all moving into the study for some light food and beverage, there was no sight of him. It was ludicrous, and a bitter laugh rose to my lips, but I restrained myself out of respect to Quincy. What was it about our family that made desertion people’s first instinct?

  I’d grown tired of people telling me how well I was handling things. What had sounded like praise two days ago now sounded like a ruling on my lack of feeling. When I entered the study, its double doors opened wide, I considered how Daddy Kratt had built this house with a study twice the usual size. My father had not come from an educated family, nor did he possess much formal education of his own, but his ambitions were more expansive than anyone’s. In front of me, people nibbled politely at their food. Mr. Burns and Mr. Aiken were arguing over President Hoover, who was still assuring the nation that the economy was foundationally sound.

  As they argued, Dovey cried quietly beside her father. She then crossed the study and stepped into the living room. I followed her. She took a few tentative paces toward the casket and paused, gazing at it, jus
t as I had earlier. Moving forward, she touched it with her fingertips. This was too much for Dovey, and her chin dropped to her chest, tears running onto her black smock, which gathered at her ribs and widened down to her shins. A hand trembled at her temple. The other hand, the one that had touched the casket, dropped to her belly, where her palm landed and gave an almost imperceptible press, there and gone in a fragile pulse of time. But I had seen it. The slight rounding of her belly. A capacious dress to hide it.

  The room seemed to lose its edges around me, everything blurring, but the hard voice of Dovey’s father from the study revived me, tightening my vision so quickly that I felt a sharp tap of pain behind my right eye.

  I hurried back to the study. Others were listening to Mr. Aiken, too. “What’s more,” he was saying to Mr. Burns, “we’ve got our own problems right here in Bound. Brayburn’s being stubborn as ever.” Mr. Aiken was complaining that my father was continuing to hoard his ginned cotton because the prices were still astonishingly low. Mr. Aiken wondered how long our cotton would sit there and how this might damage Bound’s local economy. Talking business at my brother’s funeral! And yet perhaps Quincy’s death was part of that business: some secrets buried with him, other secrets, the ones he protected, that might now see the light of day. I wondered if Mr. Aiken knew about his daughter.

  Suddenly, Mr. Burns, gesturing with his coffee cup, was announcing loudly to Mr. Aiken, “The world may indeed be going to hell in a handbasket, but what concerns me right now is that somebody has stolen one of my mannequins.”

  Daddy Kratt, who had been standing nearby, tilted his head toward the conversation. His jaw began working, his beard coming alive. He took a few steps toward Mr. Burns, and then he changed course and stepped haltingly toward the food table. He made it nearly to that table when he turned on his heels and moved toward the door. He looked almost to be stumbling. Suddenly, the room was silent except for a few loud voices, guests who had not yet noticed my father’s behavior. Those voices stuck out raggedly against the silence of the room but were quickly chastened.

  Shep Bramlett strode forward. “Brayburn, let’s sit down a moment,” he said. He was jocular, trying to overshadow my father’s behavior.

  Daddy Kratt just blinked at his business partner with an empty look on his face.

  Someone behind me whispered, “Where is Mrs. Kratt?”

  When my father heard this, his shook his head lightly, as if having a secret argument with himself, and then his body moved toward a group of people who stood near the door. As he moved toward them, they parted, as though his body let off a kind of magnetic pulse that had edged them aside like iron shavings. He left the room, and we heard his footsteps stamp toward the front door. Everyone scurried to the windows to watch him double back and take off behind the house.

  It was the first time I had ever seen my father flee a room. The others noticed it, too, and when they started to collect their coats and hats, the murmurs picked up in the house, and when they graduated to a steady drone, I could feel something happening. I felt the change as if a string had been gently strummed within me, and I was powerless to dampen its reverberations, leaving a feeling of seasickness hovering at my throat.

  Guests exchanged glances with one another. I saw faint smiles lingering behind their confused looks. No one could articulate it, but everyone felt Daddy Kratt’s diminished presence. His body had not taken up the space it normally did as he had parted the crowd. He had run from them, the way they normally ran from him.

  I stood numbly in the study. I had meant to look for Dovey again, but she was gone with the others. I was now alone, save Ima, who had come in to retrieve the uneaten food. She stood behind me a long while before she spoke.

  “I am sorry, Miss Judith,” she said, and her words were like a warm hand on my shoulder. I didn’t know if she was offering sympathy for my brother’s death or my father’s erratic performance, but I needed shelter from both.

  Clop clop clop.

  Ima and I whirled our heads to the study doors. It had to be my father: the hard clip of his shoes hitting the wood floors, walking from the rear of the house to the front. Ima hurried out the back entrance of the study.

  The footsteps stalled just shy of the study’s entrance. I took a deep breath and walked through the doors. There was Daddy Kratt, waiting for me.

  “We need to head down to the cemetery,” he said. His tongue seemed to sit more thickly in his mouth.

  In his face was the echo of what had happened in the study. A lone nerve twitched the skin of his right eyelid. His jaw was fixed. I studied him, trying to figure out if he had discovered our deception with the mannequin.

  My gaze swept across the living room. During the reception in the study, Quincy’s casket had been noiselessly removed from our house and taken to the grave site. Daddy Kratt had stipulated that his son’s casket would be released into the earth only in front of family members. Which meant the two of us—my father and me.

  * * *

  The day after the funeral, I arrived early at the store. Ice drew down the branches of the oaks that flanked the building. I was on the second floor, completing my inventory and pondering our slipping sales, and the store was more silent than usual. I listened for a sound from my father’s office—a chair scraping, a lone cough—but there was nothing.

  Then I heard rustling above me. I left my daily ledger on the foot of the staircase and made my way toward the noise. It was coming from Mr. Burns’s office. Sweat began to pearl on my body as if it were the middle of summer, and my sweat reacted with the wool of my coat, making me itch at the back of my neck.

  I swallowed hard, heading toward the millinery office. A low hum was coming from the door to the office, and when I rounded the corner, I found Mr. Burns, dressing one of his mannequins in a long, brown trench coat.

  “Oh!” he said, quickly regaining his self-possession. His lips flattened into an insincere smile. “How can I help you, Miss Kratt?” He continued to fuss with the mannequin’s coat, scrutinizing and then pulling off a stray string.

  “Are you still missing one of your mannequins, Mr. Burns?” I asked quietly.

  His eyebrows lifted and fell. “Indeed I am,” he said curtly.

  “I don’t think you are, sir.”

  “Excuse me?” A single note of laughter hopped from his lips.

  “I think you found your mannequin in the storage room, where you had accidentally misplaced it.”

  A sputter of air escaped his mouth. “Miss Kratt, I most certainly did not misplace my mannequin. You may be aware that there have been some rumors,” he said, eyeing me.

  I looked down at my hands.

  “Mr. Burns,” I said, steeling myself as I lifted my gaze, “I know some rumors of my own. Where do you suppose Mrs. Greeley is this morning?”

  He stood taller. “How in the world should I know?” he said, his voice high.

  “I’ve noticed you spend a good deal of time with her. My late brother, Quincy, noticed it, too.” I stepped toward him. “I wonder if Mr. Greeley has noticed.”

  Mr. Burns let out a strained laugh. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, busying himself with some drawings on his desk.

  “If you don’t find your misplaced mannequin, I will pay Mr. Greeley a visit. Business matters, of course.”

  Mr. Burns lifted his head, staring out into the middle of the room. He sniffed. “All right, then.”

  I stepped backward toward the door, not wanting to take my eyes off Mr. Burns but wanting to make my exit as quickly as possible.

  “Good,” I said. “I don’t think my father has come into work yet. I’m going to retrieve him from our house. I need you to speak with him sometime today, Mr. Burns. Tell him you merely misplaced your mannequin. It was never missing in the first place. And you need to spread the word about it. Do you understand?”

  He
gazed down, lifting one of his hands feebly in acceptance of my plan.

  I turned on my heels and shot out the door. A wave of euphoria carried me down three flights of stairs and outside. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat and leaned into the bitter air, shrugging my collar over my ears.

  On my way home, I passed the tree that had always held my sister. It sat bare and silent against the cold December morning. If Mr. Burns managed to be convincing, Daddy Kratt would believe Charlie had indeed been hanged. I wasn’t sure what Daddy Kratt would do if he discovered the truth about how we had used the mannequin. Mama and Olva were still at Aunt Dee’s and had planned to stay there until the storm settled. And Charlie—hopefully, he had flown far away from Bound.

  When I arrived home, I mounted the steps just as Daddy Kratt was opening the front door. “Are you heading to the store?” I asked. I tried to sound nonchalant.

  My father seemed distracted, and he nodded gruffly.

  As he stepped onto the porch, we both stopped. Shep Bramlett’s Plymouth was crawling down the road. My father and I watched it, and I was shocked when it didn’t pull into our driveway. It continued on, at its snail’s pace, which gave us an opportunity to study who was inside.

  Daddy Kratt let off a rough noise as if he had been sucker punched.

  Shep was driving, but in the passenger seat was Byrd Parker, Daddy Kratt’s one-time business rival, the one for whom life was a litany of distress mumbled across parted lips. I still remembered—it had the ability to produce a fresh shock—when Quincy had broken the Tiffany lamp while showing it to Byrd. Sitting in Shep’s car, Byrd turned his melancholy face toward us. In his expression lurked no retribution, even though Daddy Kratt had blackmailed Byrd, taking his cotton gin in the wake of his wife’s drowning in the unnamed lake.

  At that moment, Daddy Kratt knew he had lost his standing in Bound. Quincy wasn’t around any longer to wield his secrets in our father’s favor. Shep Bramlett had found another business partner, and curious as it was, Byrd Parker, who had suffered his own disgrace, was the one Mr. Bramlett had chosen to pluck from the mud and reinstate into the community. Perhaps it was somewhat promising that scandals did not stain eternally, but as I studied my father’s face, sapped of all expression, that was cold comfort now.