The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt

by Andrea Bobotis

  Olva walked over to the sofa to gather Amaryllis from Marcus’s arms. The three of them stood together—a unit—and then the child followed Olva and Marcus wordlessly up the stairs. I didn’t know if they planned to take a rest or pack their bags and leave.

  “Olva! Don’t leave me!”

  Halfway up the stairs, she turned around, and the silence was agonizing. I counted my heartbeats throbbing in my ears.

  She finally spoke. “Judith, I have no plans to leave you.”

  * * *

  Rosemarie and I remained in the living room long after Olva, Marcus, and Amaryllis disappeared upstairs. I felt no triumph but was relieved beyond measure by Olva’s words.

  I looked at my sister. Her right hand rested on the sofa, index finger absentmindedly tapping the gray fabric, and in her face was an agony of confusion. She had left Bound when she was thirteen years old with a false story about our family. Her eyebrows moved up and down; expressions skittered across her face. I saw that nowhere had ever felt like home for her. Perhaps she had thought coming back to Bound would soothe that restlessness, even now in the dusk of her life.

  “Your husband,” I said. “Sounds like he was a decent fellow.”

  Her finger continued to tap the sofa. “He was,” she said distantly. By degrees, her expression returned to the room. She laid her eyes on mine. I felt it was the first time she had truly looked at me since her return. “You should have met him.”

  I nodded. “If I had, I’m sure I would have found fault with him.”

  Rosemarie’s eyes widened, and then her jaw fell open, spilling loose and ragged laughter into the air, driving the tension from the room. I joined her, and for a few moments, we could hardly breathe, so urgent was our laughter.

  Fourteen

  The next morning, Rosemarie was gone. For a second time in her life, she had fled Bound. I knew she had departed before I entered her room. Her few belongings were missing (the ratty duffel, her man’s shoes), but more conspicuous was the absence of her voice. That laughter, too, which pursued you until you succumbed to it.

  The night before, after Amaryllis was in bed, Marcus and Olva had returned to the living room and stayed up late, the murmurs of their conversation sifting upstairs to my bedroom. After drawing myself a bath that afternoon, I had pulled out Alfred Lord Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam, in which Tennyson mourns the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. I was reading the stanza in which a hand offered at the beginning is finally taken at the end. How well Tennyson understood grief. How hard it was to reach out and take the hand. But in the end, the hand is taken. The hand is taken!

  That night, I tried to tame bouts of fitful sleep, a failed experiment that left me more agitated than before. I had a nightmare about Amaryllis and the shotgun. Then another about Olva and the shotgun. In actuality, Olva had hidden the weapon. She said she had buried it by the stunted peach trees, but she wouldn’t say exactly where. We couldn’t give the thing away. It was indelibly ours, and we could not relinquish ownership. It would always have its hold on us, in our waking hours and in our sleeping hours.

  As the weeks passed, we didn’t speak about Rosemarie’s departure. We hardly spoke at all. Amaryllis asked the most questions, but Marcus and Olva would only answer her when I was out of the room. Olva saw Jolly at the post office, but the two ignored one another. Jolly looked embarrassed, Olva said.

  Marcus kept his paper route, and he went back to his occasional work of repairing items around town. After the altercation with Rick, Marcus was hired by the staff of Grace Baptist, the local black congregation, to restore the church’s faulty electrical switches. Marcus seemed pleased by this. Yet I was careful not to pretend I knew what Marcus and Olva were thinking. The situation was like something freshly painted, and I was careful how I proceeded in its midst.

  One morning, it was early October, I found Marcus working in the study at Daddy Kratt’s desk. The desk (80 by 51 by 30 inches, mid-nineteenth-century English, burr yew wood, satinwood and ebony inlay) was a partners’ desk, with an opening on either side meant for business associates to work opposite one another. It had been Grandfather DeLour’s, and he had purchased it, one would imagine, with the intention of one day working across from his son (the longed-for son of DeLour and Sons). When Daddy Kratt ruined his father-in-law’s company—a feat equal parts calculating and devil-may-care, my father in a nutshell—the desk fell into his possession, too. I would often peer into the study to find him seated there, scratching out his signature on eviction notices or swindled land purchases, and he had the habit of abruptly glancing across the desk and then chuckling, as if it gave him great unceasing pleasure to see the other side of the desk empty.

  When I entered the study, I saw that Marcus had taken apart a small clock, its innards organized in neat piles on the desk. He was working on it with a long instrument, as if he were a dentist, cleaning the clock’s teeth.

  “You look just like Charlie when you do that,” I said from outside the double doors.

  Marcus regarded me with a polite smile before returning to his work.

  I lingered at the doorway. “I have a question for you.” Marcus looked up again, and I stepped into the room so that I might have the courage to ask it. “Will you take me to Rock Hill? I need to see a lawyer to have some business matters handled.”

  His instrument hovered above the open mouth of the clock. “Right now?”

  I hesitated. I did in fact want to go at that moment, but he seemed busy. “Whenever you are ready.”

  He nodded. “I’ll meet you out front in an hour.”

  I retreated from the room to gather some things for the trip, and when an hour had passed, I found Marcus standing beside his Pontiac.

  “I thought we would take my car,” I said, motioning toward my Cutlass as I shielded my eyes from the sun with my other hand. “You can drive me.”

  “We’ll take my car.”

  His voice held no invitation for debate, so I climbed into the passenger’s seat of his Pontiac.

  “No one can say you didn’t prepare for the trip,” Marcus said, surveying my large leather bag, which was an old, distinguished piece of Daddy Kratt’s luggage.

  “Well, yes,” I said, a bit embarrassed. I was certainly not going to tell him what was inside. I had packed pickled okra (one jar), Wray Little’s rum apple butter (one jar, already opened), a sleeve of saltines, four butterscotch candies, my social security card, and an antique brass teacher’s bell, which I thought would be useful in an emergency.

  As Marcus pulled the car onto the road, my breath felt tight in my throat, and it became increasingly difficult to usher air in and out of my lungs. I suppose I sounded quite terrible, because we had not even made the next turn when Marcus swerved the car to the side of the road and stopped.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, alarmed.

  I managed to collect breath back into my lungs. “I am fine.”

  Marcus looked at me, then my bag. I was clutching its smooth handles for support. “Judith, when is the last time you left your house?”

  It took me a long while to speak, but Marcus was patient. I was thinking of Mrs. Clark, wife of our mechanic, who had become a shut-in when we were children. The stories we had spun about her! In our later teenage years, she had been found dead, splayed out on her back porch steps, her walking cane a few feet in front of her. It was dreadful: her first breaths of fresh air in decades had been her last.

  “I have not left my house for sixty years. Since my brother’s death.”

  Marcus made a sound, a surprised but not unkind one. He didn’t say another word about it. My nose stung with gratitude. He didn’t ask why we were going to Rock Hill, so I nestled into my seat and watched the scenery outside. Soft rain began to settle onto the windows, making the world outside hazy and faraway. I was thankful for the obfuscation, because the rate at which the lands
cape between Bound and Rock Hill had changed was distressing. Land that had once supported lively communities was now a smattering of barns gone to seed, and railroad tracks, halfway demolished, sat at odd angles in heaps on the ground. Kudzu hung from the trees like hanks of hair, and trailers outnumbered homes.

  This was the world I had relinquished. A few months after Quincy’s death, Rosemarie long gone, I had given up my duties at the store and simply stopped leaving the house. My sister had gone to make her way out in the world, but I would defend my small corner of it.

  “The world has changed,” I said.

  “It has,” he replied, and his voice went up, as if he were moving forward in his mind.

  When we arrived at my errand’s destination, Marcus accompanied me inside, settling into a chair in the waiting room. The receptionist, chewing gum as if it were her job, eyed Marcus. The lawyer, when he retrieved me, did the same thing. My appointment was fairly straightforward, despite that the lawyer seemed to find my plans ill-advised and spent a few moments asking me all manner of silly and unrelated questions. When I realized he was testing my mental faculties, I made him aware of the Kratt family’s legacy in Bound. I saw that the desk in his office was cheaply made, and I explained to him about our Abner Cutler rolltop desk, adding for good measure the story of when we as children plundered that desk in the dead of night. The lawyer suddenly became quite economical with our time.

  Before I rose to go, without giving the lawyer too much detail—what was it his business?—I asked him if Olva’s claim to the house might be threatened if some new family member turned up and how I might guard against that. He seemed not to hear me at first but then dryly said “These documents are binding” and pushed them across the table.

  I returned to the waiting room, and Marcus and I prepared to leave. The receptionist’s eyes followed him all the way out.

  The rain cleared for the ride home, and we sailed past tobacco farms that lined the highway. When Marcus cracked the windows, the musky smell of fertilizer swept into the car.

  “Why did you ask us to move in?”

  “Oh,” I said, startled. “Rosemarie asked you.”

  “But you knew she’d leave. You could have said no.”

  Here was a pause. On the radio, turned low, a man’s voice, maybe a preacher’s, moved up and down with a kind of self-assured joy, certain of the things he was saying.

  “I care for Olva,” I said.

  Marcus nodded, and I looked out the window at the next exit, which curved away from the highway before disappearing into a stand of pine. “And I care for you and Amaryllis.”

  “You don’t have to stand arm’s-length away from everyone,” Marcus said. “You know that, right?” He could be as direct as his daughter! He waited for a response.

  In the cedar-smelling cabin of his Pontiac, there was no pretending I hadn’t heard him. “I will take the advice under consideration.” I turned my gaze out the window. I felt a familiar sternness inside me. Why was it so hard for me to accept a hand extended? As we passed more shorn fields of tobacco, a great insistence materialized in my mind. Before I knew it, words were escaping my mouth. “I’m sorry I blamed Charlie, Marcus. I didn’t know what else to do to save Olva, and Charlie seemed… He seemed…” I paused, not able to locate the words. “He seemed…”

  “Available to you?”

  I paused again. “Yes.” Another pause, my thoughts gathering in my head like a thundercloud. “I should have…” I had never uttered what I was about to say. Releasing the words to the air would have given them breath, and I had not wanted to allow them life, allow them to grow and mature into regret. Living was burdensome enough as it was. I steadied my thoughts. “I should have let Mama escape with Olva and Charlie. To leave and be a family with them. She had wanted to do that all along. She told us as much when we buried the mannequin. But I begged them not to leave. And their pity for me paralyzed them. I’m sure the decision was against every instinct they possessed. But they carried that pity—so dutifully!—like a rock through a river.”

  Marcus studied me. I felt neither reproach nor forgiveness from him. We fell into silence. After a few minutes, he turned up the volume on the radio, the preacher again, a black one I could now tell, and he was quoting Isaiah. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.

  When we arrived home, Marcus and I found Olva sitting on the sofa. She was reading a book. When I saw its cover, I knew which book it was. The soft room of my mouth went dry.

  “You went somewhere!” Olva said. Her face was wide with wonder.

  “She did,” Marcus said.

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “I did.” I could still surprise myself, even after all these years.

  Olva saw I was looking at the book she held. “I found this book many years ago under your mattress,” she said. “But I figured you had good reason for keeping it there. Every so often, I would slide it out and read a little, returning it before you noticed. I didn’t find it that one night when Mama and I searched, though. You had hidden it too well from us.”

  “I wanted it to be mine alone,” I confessed. “I had hidden it even before you were forced to look for it.” It pained me to admit my selfishness. “I have given it to Amaryllis,” I said, hoping Olva would see my contrition. “In my younger years, it helped me understand some aspects of survival.”

  “Survival,” Olva said, drawing in a breath. She held it for a long while before driving that breath from her body. She lifted herself from the sofa and walked over to face me. “Do you remember when your great-uncle used to come around during the holidays? I remember after every meal, he would push his chair back from the table. His short arms would be resting on his round belly, and he would pontificate on Darwin’s ideas, or what he thought he knew of those ideas, which it turns out was not much. He knew your family had taken me in. I remember that Easter meal as well as you do, when he invited me to the table with the rest of you. It was the first time I’d been invited to that table—in my own mother’s house!” She fell silent. When she resumed, her voice had lowered. I held my breath so I could hear her. “Sally went on and on about how God favors certain traits and how those traits are favored in nature. How the strongest and most deserving humans would be separated from the rest. And the rest—he’s looking right at me as he says this—the rest would perish. Perish. How’s that something to say to a child? So yes, I have thought often and hard on the matter of my survival. I survived by taking care of people my whole life. I used to think it made me a stronger person, how there’s strength in sacrifice, but now I see that even if I found wisdom there, it came by way of force.”

  Olva considered the book again, giving its cover a firm press with her hand before she set it down on the sofa table. “Everything turns into something else, now doesn’t it?” she said.

  Perhaps I’d been reading that book the wrong way my entire life.

  I took a step closer to Olva, placed my documents on the table next to the book, and stuck my arms out straight from my body.

  “Oh,” she said, and it took a moment for her to settle into my awkward embrace. I could feel Olva’s gaze meet Marcus’s over my shoulder.

  “Well then,” I said, releasing Olva. “I’m going to rest in the sunroom on the divan. I’m a tad dizzy and don’t care to take the stairs to my room.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I woke with a start. Fumbling for my glasses on my bedside table, my hand fell through space when it found nothing. I rolled to one side, feeling a pressure on my face. My glasses! By degrees, I realized I was in the sunroom, where I had fallen asleep the day before and slept through the night. Light pressed in through the wide windows, and the house was already stirring. Someone had covered me in a wool Black Watch blanket.

  With some difficulty, I lifted myself from
the divan, not calling for Olva’s help as I usually did. I made my slow way toward the kitchen, and when I pressed my hand against the sideboard in the dining room to rest, there was Amaryllis at the entrance to the kitchen, tapping her foot. Her rabbit dangled from her hand. I winked at her, and she squirmed away, laughter curling off her like whitecaps as she trotted into the kitchen.

  I sat down in one of the chairs at the kitchen table. She twirled around and suddenly was right beside me, our old wooden tray in her rabbitless hand. “What’s this?”

  “Good morning, Amaryllis. That is a wooden tray. Just a plain wooden tray. We use it for carrying our water glasses outside or sometimes even out in the yard when Olva is gathering vegetables from her garden.”

  Amaryllis kept her eyes on me. “What is this?” She held up the tray again.

  “Amaryllis, go get the butterfly tray. It’s not past repair. It’s a true antique. I will tell you that story.”

  “You already told me that story,” she said, pushing the wooden tray at me. “What is this?”

  Children and their need for repetition! Looking at her face, which did not waver, I remembered a story about the tray she was holding.

  I gestured for her to sit down with me at the table, and she placed the tray between us. “This has been around a long time. It was probably from Grandmother DeLour’s house.” I placed my hand over one of the tray’s handles, which was a simple oval carved into its side. As I did, Amaryllis crawled her fingers to grip the other handle. We looked as if we were completing a circuit of some kind.

  I told her that, during my childhood, the tray was a workhorse, as it is now, doing all manner of odd jobs because we did not worry about spoiling it. But once, it was used in a way that was startling to us. It was the only time Charlie ever called on our house, or at least the only time I knew of. (Amaryllis perked at hearing Charlie’s name.)

  Daddy Kratt was away with Shep Bramlett at a trade show in Charlotte, and Mama must have thought that we children were dispatched across town. Yet it was a rare afternoon in which we were all three upstairs, reading in our rooms, but when we heard grown-ups in the living room, we clustered out of sight on the landing between the stairs.