Hearing Charlie’s voice, we crept down the stairs farther so that we could see what was happening. What Mama and Charlie said was very boring, not amounting to more than small talk, but I recall they sat closer on the sofa than I deemed appropriate. Mama then did something unusual. She withdrew to the kitchen and returned with this wooden tray, on which sat two cups of tea in Grandmother DeLour’s Noritake china, along with sugar and cream—such delicacies! She served Charlie from the tray, taking his instructions about how many spoonfuls of sugar and how much cream. He laughed and protested at first, but then he grew quiet and serious and let her do it. They were silent after that, just looking at each other, and we retreated up the stairs as they sipped their tea.
“Are we related?” Amaryllis asked.
“Oh,” I said, surprised my story had prompted that particular question. I considered it. “Well, Charlie is your great-great-grandfather on your father’s side, and Charlie and my mama were—Well, Charlie and Mama were the parents of Olva.”
The child waited.
“That makes us—” I paused, and she searched my face. What word was there? “That makes us—”
“Friendshipped,” Amaryllis said, her grasp on the wooden tray relaxing. Her eyes swept across the kitchen. “I’m hungry.”
I laughed. “Go out on the porch, and I will bring you your breakfast.”
She hopped from her seat and bounded toward the front door. I picked up the wooden tray and began my duties. For her drink, I would fetch chamomile tea.
* * *
Later, I sat in the sunroom. The day was on the decline, and after serving Amaryllis breakfast, I had not moved very much.
“Let’s go down to the train depot,” I said to Olva, who had walked in to check on me.
“They are tearing it down.”
The unused tracks were a nuisance for whoever owned the land now.
“Let’s get our last look then.” I noticed her expression. “My bones can manage it!” I croaked, which made us both laugh.
She nodded and left the sunroom, returning with my shoes.
“Tell Marcus and Amaryllis to join us,” I said.
“They are taking a walk of their own.”
“Perhaps we will see them on our way.”
We maneuvered down the stairs with Olva guiding me. She steadied me with her arm. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.
I knew what she was thinking. I had not been out of the house since my ride with Marcus.
“You needn’t conquer the world so quickly,” she said, but she capitulated when she saw my resolve.
We helped each other down the porch stairs. Well, she mostly helped me, and we made it all the way down the driveway before I had to rest. I squinted back at the house.
“Is it satisfying to have a place to call your own now, Olva? Marcus and Amaryllis will never want for a home.”
Olva turned to appraise the house. “We’ll have to decide what to do with it.”
“What on earth do you mean?” I cried.
She said nothing, a ghost of a smile rising to her lips.
“Will you stay?” I asked. I was wondering who would turn down a house given freely but kept the thought to myself.
The silence was keen. So I asked the question again.
“Will you stay?”
She studied the road ahead of us for a long while. She didn’t answer. We began moving again, and I tried to keep my mind on each footstep rather than what was behind me.
On our journey to the depot, we stopped frequently, giving me time to rest but also to survey what Bound had become. Many of the old homes, which were small but solid in their day, had given way to double-wide trailers. The yards were curious spaces, more dirt than grass and cluttered with all the wrong things: cars, forsaking driveways, in various stages of disrepair, and dirty pieces of furniture—sofas flattened from use and hulking mastodon recliners—all of which sat empty, save for the occasional sleeping mutt. A lone child was rapping a stick on a patch of dirt. He wore a Lone Ranger mask and dirty underwear. His eyes followed me.
Our trek to the depot was a slow one, but it was eased by the fact that autumn had finally soothed summer’s heat. We passed the former site of the Kratt Mercantile Company, where my father judged himself a world maker. He was alone in that judgment now. The store, what was left of it, looked like a deserted sanitarium, its windows pockmarked by rocks and the paint hanging off the front door in long tufts, as if the building had been in the midst of shedding its skin before relinquishing the effort. We moved on.
We passed the old home of the Sullivan girls, who paid me a marble each to walk through our house. I stopped in my tracks when I heard laughter jostling through one of the windows that opened to the street.
“Do the Sullivans still live there?”
“Yes indeed,” Olva said. “Those five girls had too many babies to count. And then those babies had babies.”
Suddenly, the front door swung open, and two gray-haired women stepped out onto the porch. One was bobbing an infant in her arms to calm its cries. They didn’t seem to mind us watching them from the road. I thought the one with the child looked like Lindy, who had tried to steal a glimpse of our spinning wheel those years ago. Who had brought a persimmon crumble to my brother’s funeral. She wore a long gray house robe, and her hair was unkempt. I lifted my hand to wave just as she shifted her focus back to the baby. Yet she glanced back up again, and seeing my hand still raised, stole one hand from the child’s bottom to acknowledge me.
Olva and I continued to walk along the edge of the road, where the wild grass collided with the blacktop like seaweed hugging a shoreline. We passed a few bald spots of land where I remembered houses had once been. We passed someone’s garden, where the butternut squash had abandoned its rectangular plot of land and soldier-crawled all the way to the road. We passed a tract of land Daddy Kratt used to own. Someone had built a ramshackle hut on it, not amounting to much. We passed two kinds of birds I didn’t recognize.
In the distance, we saw the outlines of Marcus and Amaryllis strolling through one of the old cotton plots. The child ran ahead of her father and then back to him, and he raised her up. They were laughing, or so it seemed to me. He lifted her all the way onto his shoulders. They kept walking like that. Together, they stretched long and lean into the sky, and from where we were standing, it looked as if Amaryllis could drag her fingertips across the clouds if she wanted.
When we arrived at the depot, I was too tired to stand any longer, and we found a bench. To the right of the depot was evidence of its demolition. Giant pieces of equipment sat abandoned until the next workday, their long yellow arms collapsed to the ground at severe angles. They looked like grand creatures from another era, but who could tell at which end of life they were poised, if they were coming or going, if we had caught them rising up from the elements or surrendering to the earth.
I saw a speck in the sky. I blinked, and it was still there. A red-tailed hawk! It glided above us, making a languid circle. With no warning, it dropped from the sky and grazed the earth before climbing back up again. Nature, red in tooth and claw. My head was a tad dizzy, and the sensation moved to my chest, then expanded to my limbs. It was like the passing of the seasons in my body, the tight budding of spring in my chest and the flush of summer, followed by the release of fall and the shutting down of winter.
“What will become of Bound?” I asked. A kind of desperation had seized me. I urgently needed to know.
When Olva didn’t answer, I turned to look at her. Her expression was unfamiliar. I couldn’t place it.
She studied the depot. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t believe we will.”
I was confused at first by her answer, but then I understood. Under my skin, I felt my heart chattering. She was answering my earlier question, the one she had left unanswered.
> Will you stay?
* * *
We made it home from the depot. The nearest bedroom on the main floor was Olva’s. I said I would rest there for a spell, if she didn’t mind, because I knew I would not make it upstairs to my bedroom. Inside the room, Olva’s bed was made, watertight, and the air held the faint scent of rose water. It was the perfume from our childhood; it didn’t remind me of myself any longer. It now belonged entirely to Olva. I lowered into a peach-colored parlor chair of Grandmother DeLour’s that was positioned in the corner. By degrees, I felt better, and when my head had settled, I was able to focus on what was around me. I seldom visited Olva’s room.
There was much to see. A stained-glass angel was propped against the window, its colors muted in the twilight. Beside me, atop Olva’s bureau, sat a wooden owl that still bore the marks of someone’s knife. Next to that was a silver tray with edges tarnished by unknown fingerprints. I had never before seen these objects. Everywhere I looked was a new curiosity, unknown to me: a stout forearm of driftwood; a jar of cream-colored ribbon; and a vase, its wisp of a neck stretching up elegantly like a heron’s. Paintings stacked against a wall, the one facing outward an oil portrait of a woman I didn’t recognize, her smile shimmering. There was more. An old pair of binoculars, missing one lens. A bowl of marbles so shiny, they looked wet. These things, their relationship to one another, seemed to structure the room. The variety of objects was remarkable. Before me was a complex system, as intricate as the natural world outside, with its own exchanges and hierarchies and dependencies. The things in the room seemed to be having conversations with one another as clearly as birdcalls might fill the afternoon air. I seemed to hear them, and I felt their eyes, too, looking at me, returning my gaze. On the table beside me sat a notepad and pen. I grasped the pen and wrote a few things down. My inventory felt complete.
Everything turns into something else. This is what Olva says. It occurs to me that objects experience evolution, and not only are they shifting over time on their own, creeping from one state to another, but their significance to us is also transforming, stirring toward different directions in our minds, a permutation that happens whether it suits us or not. And even if objects were possessed of an obstinacy that allowed them to remain unchanged, we should not be fooled into thinking we could approach them in the same ways, because nothing less than our existence, it seems to me, reminds us that this is impossible. We enter this world curling our tiny hands around our mother’s fingers, and we exit with those same hands cinched by arthritis. How could we pretend our grasp, clutching onto life from opposite ends, stays the same?
How had I not known about the items in Olva’s room? My stomach felt like a metronome tipping. The full weight of recognition hit me. Just as the items in my inventory told a story about the Kratt family, these things in Olva’s room told a story about her. It was a story I hardly knew.
I slowly lifted myself up to slip something onto Olva’s bureau. Returning to the chair, I sat a while longer. I felt in the left pocket of my trousers for the newspaper clipping I always kept there. Finally, I closed my eyes, and in my lap, I laid my hands, one palm stacked gently within the other like a crescent-shaped bowl.
Everything turns into something else.
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˝)—Olva’s
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˝)—buried
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
Burr yew wood partner’s desk (80˝× 51˝ × 30˝)
Brass teacher’s bell
Wooden tray
Parlor chair (peach upholstery)
News clipping—York Herald, December 21, 1929
What Olva owns
Obituary
On Thursday, October 5, 1989, Judith Kratt of Bound, South Carolina, passed away at the age of 75 years. She is survived by two sisters, Olva DeLour and Rosemarie Kratt Anderson, and friends Marcus and Amaryllis Watson. A private memorial service will be held for Judith.
Judith lived in Bound her entire life. She stayed, and that is something. She died in her home, surrounded by those who loved her.
York Herald, October 7, 1989
November 5, 1989
Dear Amaryllis,
This morning, you brought your father and me bread and jam on the front porch. Two slices for each of us. You called me Grandma, which I love. You used the old wooden tray to transport the contents of our breakfast, and you shared a little story about the tray. You said Judith had taught you that story. I do believe she would have been proud of the way you told it.
As you know, Judith wrote an inventory of the items in this house. It grew into much more than that. It is my intention to pass along that inventory to you, along with this letter, when you are older. In Judith’s inventory, you will find stories about your great-great-grandfather Charlie. And of your father. And me. You might be interested to find yourself in its pages, too. Perhaps you will read it. Perhaps not. Or you might put it in a junk drawer until you are ready to read it. I have come to believe that the odds and ends in junk drawers are no less distinguished than the Waterford crystal in the cupboard.
Judith left everything, even this house, to you, your father, and me. Only a month has passed since her death, and you have handled this busy time, full of decisions and angry speculation by others, with poise beyond any six-year-old. Every person who paid his or her respects to Judith also challenged our right to stay here. We would invite them in, make them some coffee, and show them her last will and testament, properly signed and notarized. They drank their coffee a little more strenuously after that.
Jolly Bramlett was the first to make an appearance. Her sister, Vi, the more decent one, was not with her. Someone told me they had a falling out, which doesn’t surprise me. It is an illusion to think siblinghood is immutable; it has its cycles just like everything else. Jolly sauntered in as if nothing had ever happened involving our family and her son. Rick’s actions became a part of history, just as easy as t
hat. Too easily, in my opinion. That day is a sore in my mind, and every one of my thoughts aggravates it. Yet I assume Rick has had his own share of troubles since then. I have seen him only once: he was sitting in his truck, eating his lunch alone, a faraway look on his face. I wonder if loneliness is not a constant companion for him. Bound is no easy place to live, after all. It can make people want to reside in the past. Jolly demonstrated that herself: when she strolled inside this house, it appeared her chief interest was getting an eyeful of the Kratt family’s heirlooms. That would have pleased Judith immensely.
None of the visitors has understood that this house has always been every bit ours, even before a piece of paper named it so. It did not rattle me, then, when I read about Dovey’s pregnancy, a potential heir, in Judith’s inventory. What of it? Our ancestors maintained this house, the whole town when you think on it. They labored in the fields, cleaned the houses, and cared for most of the children in Bound. The tending, the mending, the very upkeep of life. We did those things. We keep doing them.
We have decided to sell the house, to move on. You know this, of course. As young as you are, you feel as if you’ve worn through this town, too. We officially own the things around us, and because of that, we may do what we like with them. We have decided to sell most of them. Judith would be greatly saddened by that news, but we will take this inventory with us, and I believe that would mean something to her. Rosemarie returned for Judith’s memorial service. Before she left again, hardly two days after the service, we asked her if she wanted anything from the house. The only thing she requested was a copy of Judith’s obituary. Rosemarie had written it herself.
The things we have found while packing have not ceased to amaze us. The Tiffany lamp was in a box in the attic. We will take that with us. Just yesterday, I found Mama’s double-sided cameo on my bureau. The goddess Athena shone up at me. Judith had left it there. That is a kind of grace, I think. In the cellar, we found a resplendent peacock hat, and I realized at once it was the one that caused Rosemarie so much pain. I hesitated to let you play dress-up in it. You are quite grand when you wear it, though. I like to think you are showing it how a happy memory begins.
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt Page 24
