The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  Daddy Kratt’s breath got quieter and quieter. We both stared at Byrd. Mr. Bramlett was going slowly because he wanted us to see. The look on Byrd’s face, riding there in Shep’s Plymouth, was a salute, solemn in nature, as if paying his respects to my father’s own misfortune. Not only the loss of his son, but also his diminished position in Bound, a town on which he had laid siege—and enjoyed the spoils—ever since his arrival almost half a century ago.

  Not long after we watched those two men parade by that day, Daddy Kratt sold his cotton gins to Byrd Parker, including, of course, the one that had been Byrd’s in the first place. He held onto the store for a few more years, but ultimately, he was forced to sell the Kratt Mercantile Company to the Bramlett family. Until he died, Daddy Kratt worked at his filling station, which he had sold to Mr. Clark, and he spent most of his time there, mainly drinking. After Shep Bramlett ran our store into the ground, he didn’t even have to sell it, because he had weaseled it out of my father’s hands for such a cut rate. Every day on Daddy Kratt’s walk to the filling station, he could see the store he built from nothing sink back into nothing again.

  After Quincy’s death, Mama and Olva spent most of their time at Aunt Dee’s, although Olva would come visit me in the house from time to time. Under the care of Dee and Olva, Mama regained some of her vitality before she went quietly in the night by way of a stroke, her gentleness in life extending to her death. After that, Daddy Kratt became a wisp of himself, running the filling station poorly and spending the day drinking with his loyal boys, who weren’t loyal any longer, until he died from tuberculosis. Mr. Aiken came to pay his respects to me at the house after Daddy Kratt died, and he called tuberculosis the “poor man’s disease,” which would have killed my father if he hadn’t already been dead.

  When Mr. Aiken visited, I didn’t dare ask him about Dovey, who had gone to stay with an aunt in Atlanta shortly after the funeral. Dovey never returned to Bound. I heard nothing more about her, whether there was a baby, how she was faring. If there was gossip, my ears were spared it. There was nothing to substantiate she had given birth to Quincy’s child, another Kratt, a possible heir. Because of this, I told no one, not even Olva.

  I was alone in the house for many years until Olva agreed to move in after Dee died. Like Mama, Dee suffered a stroke. She asked to be buried in her own garden, upside down and only to her hips so that her leg bones could be used for tomato ladders, a request we very nearly honored. Who knew Dee would outlive all the men of her age in Bound, just like she said she would? Who knew my sister would come back home? Who knew Olva’s kin, Marcus and Amaryllis, would move in? Who knew Olva would raise a shotgun at a man for a second time in her life?

  I had not even known these were the questions to ask.

  Thirteen

  Rick glanced at his friend. We were all standing in our same positions, frozen in a terrible tableau. Olva was pointing the Purdey shotgun at Rick. Her arms were fixed, tireless. The next time I blinked, I saw Quincy where Rick was standing, and I squeezed my eyes to quit the hallucination. Opening my eyes again, I found just Rick, his jaw hanging slackly, some mixture of amusement and insolence there.

  Behind Olva was Jolly’s Taurus, which I now saw was parked half on the driveway, half on the lawn, in a reckless and presumptuous way. Rick’s friend was still the closest to me, and when he smiled uncivilly, I saw that his two front teeth were gray. He reminded me of the Sullivan sisters, who used to hide their neglected teeth from me with mysterious, pressed-lipped smiles.

  “It’s not even loaded,” Rick said to his friend, chuckling.

  With a sober, practiced fluidity, Olva whipped the barrel open to show two shells and snapped it back shut. Rick’s face fell quiet. How was he to know that Olva had once fired this very shotgun at someone? I was the only living person who knew.

  No one said a thing. Olva stood there aiming the gun. Amaryllis clung to the backs of her father’s legs. I wondered if Marcus would do something, but his feet were planted solidly, as if sheltering the child was the most important thing he could be doing at that moment. I thought we all might stand there forever. Rick spoke first, in a way that signaled he thought he held the right to speak and be listened to.

  “No reason for you to get involved,” he said to Olva. He was relaxed, confident. His friend’s mouth twitched. Rick turned to Marcus. “It’s you who started this whole thing. You thought you could slide by without paying your rent—”

  “You raised our rent—”

  Rick held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it. You think I make squat down at my store? Property is my livelihood now, and people like you are always thinking you can cheat the system to take more than the rest of us.”

  “You’re the cheat,” my sister interjected.

  Rick didn’t even look in her direction. “How I see it,” he said, “is that you call your grandma off or Tommy and I will get that gun from her the hard way. Nobody ever gave me a handout, but that’s all you want. We’re just living our lives, and you go on making problems for us.” Rick looked over at his friend. “You’re making Tommy tense. Can’t you tell?”

  Tommy’s face quivered.

  Olva’s laugh was swift and metallic. “Tense?” she said. “His tension? Yours?” She kept the gun steady. “I will tell you a thing or two about tension. I will tell you that we did not create it. You did. You merely have not felt it until now. Understand this—for me, for Marcus”—she nodded toward Amaryllis—“for that child, tension lives under the surface of everything. We feel the itch of it under our skin. But we will rise from that tension. Agitation is what sheds the snake of its skin, what shucks the moth of its cocoon.”

  Rick and his friend Tommy exchanged glances. Rick’s face held a slight smirk.

  “The last time I pointed a gun at a man,” Olva continued, and this got Rick’s attention, “I knew that pulling the trigger would mean making some things worse, even if it might make other things better. But it was the only way I knew to protect my family. It was the means I was given at that moment. And as I stand here before you, I can tell you that Marcus and Amaryllis are my family, and I’ll make things worse to make them better if I have to. I’m not afraid to do that.”

  Rick and Tommy looked at each other again. Rick then seemed to motion with his eyes, a signal for Tommy.

  “It’s time for you to leave now,” Marcus said to them, as gentle as if he were coaxing his child to go to bed. He gestured for Amaryllis to join Rosemarie and me on the porch. The child came to stand to my left, above the gray-toothed man. Marcus then positioned himself close to Olva, his long body standing with hers.

  Rick brought his hands to his face and cradled his head for a moment. He seemed to be wrestling with something in his mind, and it was unsettling the way he was letting us watch him. All at once, his contemplation veered to action. Events rushed forward at a cruel velocity, thread unspooling irrevocably from a bobbin. Rick lunged at Olva, knocking the gun from her hands. As Rick and Marcus scrambled for the weapon, Tommy charged Olva’s back. Time thinned out, became brittle, and, for a moment, no noises arose from the fray, no sounds at all, just bodies moving around and around, chasing survival, arms and legs interwoven, inseparable. Time broke. A ferocious wail shot through the air, seizing our eardrums. The birds screamed and shook the trees. Amaryllis, still wailing, soared off the porch—clear over the hedges—and alighted next to Tommy. Her body had the force of an ungovernable wind. As she landed, she threw her weight at Tommy’s knees, pushing him down. Fear and pride converged on Olva’s face when she saw what Amaryllis had done. As Tommy fell on his side, Rick wrenched the shotgun from Marcus and stepped back to clear a space for its long barrel. He aimed the shotgun at Amaryllis.

  Olva let out a noise that sounded halfway between life and death. Marcus said hoarsely, “Please don’t.” His eyes, wild with terror, seemed trapped alive in a body gone dormant. He swayed gently on his feet
.

  Tommy looked up from the ground. His face twitched violently. He got to his feet and stumbled backward. “I’m done helping you,” he said to Rick. “You’re on your own.” Rick did not watch as his friend staggered past the car and took off running down the road.

  Amaryllis leveled her eyes at the barrel of the gun in Rick’s hands. “Go away!” she screamed.

  Rick stared at her. His skin was thick, veiled in sweat, and it seemed to sit more heavily than before on his face. His expression was protean. It shifted before our eyes in a disquieting way, rearranging with each new thought, and I wondered if he had control of what was happening, thoughts scrambling and slipping in his mind, each vying for ascendancy. And then his expression settled into the shape of recognition. Recognition, it seemed to me, that Amaryllis was a child. He took a few slow steps back. He did not look at anyone. He carried the gun with him to the edge of the driveway, where he laid it down on the grass before yanking the door of the Taurus open. He started up the engine and reversed heedlessly, almost slamming into our brick mailbox. The car careened away.

  * * *

  Inside, we locked the front door. We could hear one another panting. Olva peered out the window. Marcus held Amaryllis on the sofa, and she cradled her Peter Rabbit, which she had rescued from the doorway.

  “He didn’t do it,” I said, feeling both grateful and bewildered. “Rick spared her.”

  Olva turned from the window and gave a dark look. “He hasn’t earned my respect for one moment of mercy.”

  Rosemarie was walking in circles. The emergency had awakened a frenetic energy in my sister. “Holy God, Olva! When you had the shotgun, I thought you would really shoot him!”

  I could tell my sister was entertaining with feverish delight a scenario: Rick, shot dead on my front lawn. My tongue pressed to the roof of my mouth. For here was my sister who had not been living encircled by the heirlooms in this house. My sister, who had breezed in with all her easy emotion about it. Who had gone out to get some fresh air for sixty years.

  Rosemarie was speaking again. “You should have shot him! He pointed a gun at Amaryllis!” Rosemarie’s forehead creased. “Wait, when did you ever point a gun at a man? You said that to him.”

  Olva turned toward her. “I shot Quincy.”

  “Is that a joke?” Rosemarie said with a jumpy laugh.

  Olva, mouth set, shook her head.

  “That’s not possible.” My sister was silent for a moment. “I was there,” she said quietly. “When Quincy was killed, I was there. It was Judith.” An old rage emerged in her eyes, but she wouldn’t look at me. Her voice rose. “I saw Judith. I smelled the rose water she used to wear. The smell makes me sick now.”

  “I did it,” Olva said.

  “No, I saw Judith,” Rosemarie insisted. She was tracing the same path in her mind, around and around. “Judith was holding the shotgun.”

  “She had taken it from me,” Olva said.

  Rosemarie stepped toward the wall and steadied herself. “No. Quincy even said it himself. You are my older sister. He said that right before she shot him.”

  “He was talking to me,” Olva said. “I’m his older sister, too. We share a mother, Rosemarie.”

  “What?” my sister said, her face a squall of confusion.

  “I’m your half sister. I’m Mama and Charlie’s child.”

  Rosemarie’s gaze scattered and refocused. “Mama is your mother?” Her eyes lashed toward me. “Did you know this? Am I the only one who didn’t know?” She steadied herself again. “Olva—before we searched, did you already know who your parents were?”

  “Rosemarie, let me explain—”

  “Why did we go to Hickory Grove?” Rosemarie asked, livid. “Is that why you asked me to play with Amaryllis and that dog so you could talk to the preacher alone? So you could keep secrets from me?”

  Olva spoke calmly. “I have known since my childhood that Charlie and Mama were my parents. I decided it was time to tell Marcus and Amaryllis how I was related to them.” She looked gently at the child, who smiled. “I had never tracked down the records. I wanted to show Amaryllis most of all. I could tell her I was her great-great-aunt, but I wanted her to see that someone wrote it down. Someone cared enough to document it. All these years, the black church in Hickory Grove kept the real history of the births and deaths of the area. What brave custodians they were. All those stories of men and women and children who could not claim their own lives.” Olva looked at me. “I suppose that is another type of inventory, one in defiance of the inventories from a generation before that sought to erase the existence of a whole people by turning them into possessions. It’s a question of what we own. Do you own your own life? If you have never had to ask that question, you are fortunate indeed.”

  Rosemarie was still shaking her head in bewilderment. “Why did you invite me here, Olva? If you already knew the details of your birth?”

  “It was time you knew the truth about Quincy’s death,” Olva said. “For you. But also for me. I needed it to be known by everyone. All these years, Judith was the only one who knew.”

  Here, she looked at me pointedly. I glanced away.

  At the mention of Quincy’s name, Rosemarie’s face contracted. “Quincy always protected me. It was why I left when he died.”

  My sister stood in silence for a few moments, rocking back and forth, and I wondered if she were testing out her new footing. Our family’s story sat on a different foundation than she had once thought. She turned to Olva. “How could it be?”

  “When Mama became pregnant with Olva,” I explained, my voice finally available to me, “she stayed at Aunt Dee’s. Daddy Kratt didn’t notice, because he was building his local empire. Then Mama traveled with Dee away from Bound so that she could give birth to Olva.”

  Rosemarie shook her head. I hadn’t answered the right question. She turned her eyes at Olva. “You cared for us so thoroughly. Even if you were our sister”—here, she paused, absorbing her own words—“you cared for us as if we were your children. You were always so”—her mouth sought the word she wanted—“selfless.”

  Olva’s face contorted, and I said quickly, “Olva was trying to protect Charlie.”

  Olva let out a solemn breath before her voice rose. “I killed a man! I killed my brother! Every dawn I am blessed to see greets me with that fact. It is like a ringing in my ears I cannot stop.” She lifted her palm. “And I allowed my father to be blamed for my actions. All these years, I have been too ashamed to tell Marcus and Amaryllis.”

  I could see the back of Marcus’s head, which straightened when he heard their names. I could not see the child, who was still folded in his lap on the sofa.

  Olva’s voice sank to an accusing whisper, and she looked at me. “I have always been afraid you would tell them.”

  “I kept quiet about it!” I cried. “Rosemarie was the one to tell Marcus and Amaryllis you were related to them. I kept quiet about that, too!” My attempt to shift the blame to my sister felt feeble. I lifted my fingers to my eyes, rubbing them, which triggered small bursts of light against the backs of my eyelids. I did not feel well at all. “I did the best I could,” I said to Olva. “I helped Charlie escape. I silenced Mr. Burns. Pointing a finger at Charlie was to save you. But you have never forgiven me for that decision.”

  “Decisions are a luxury,” Olva replied. Her voice was hard.

  “Charlie would have been dead if I had not thought to string that mannequin up in a tree. But you never saw it that way, Olva.” I was exhausted. A sensation of nausea began to flip-flop gently in my throat; I stepped to the Windsor chair and lowered myself into it. I tried to steady my breath. “It was the last time in my life when I resolved to act. After that, I went back to watching.”

  No one said anything, and I couldn’t bear to look over to gauge Olva’s response.

  Rosemarie made
a soft noise of disgust. “So Charlie wasn’t hanged after all.”

  “Wasn’t he?” It was Marcus’s voice from the sofa. The words sat in the air. He stood up, lifting Amaryllis with him. She tucked her head in the crook of his neck. Marcus did not appear shocked, as I thought he would be, to hear that Charlie had not been hanged. Instead, his expression was steady. “I have carried the memory of my great-grandfather strung up in a maple—a maple I pass every day on my paper route. To me, Charlie swung from that tree, even if you say he really didn’t. I have felt the weight of him hanging inside me as long as I can remember. Like I’ve been housing two bodies in this one my whole life. And the outside world hasn’t been any easier. It was part of my family’s history that my great-grandfather killed a white man. And a Kratt no less. People in this town don’t forget things like that. Over the years, it drove the rest of my family away from South Carolina. But I’m the one who stayed. I’m the one who kept my family here despite everything. Do you know how careful we had to be? How invisible we had to make ourselves? How selfless?” Marcus looked at Rosemarie. Then he took a few steps toward me, the child dwelling in his arms as if part of him. He looked squarely in my eyes. “And wasn’t it convenient for you that you could hold Quincy’s death over Olva’s head for all these years?”

  “It wasn’t like that—it isn’t like that! Tell them, Olva!”

  Olva said nothing.

  Marcus kept talking. “You held it over Olva’s head. So don’t tell me that wasn’t Charlie’s body hanging. So many things hanging in the balance. No wonder Olva and I found each other. All our lives, this place has bound us.”