From the hospital he’d phoned Audrey and Charlotte. Charlotte said she’d fly down tonight or tomorrow morning. Audrey said she’d be there when he needed her. He had a hard time persuading her not to send Marcus to get him—even though she had no notion of his blindness—so again he told her he needed a few hours quiet time and she finally understood. Alone in the house then, he went to his room first and sat on the bed.
What else did he need to do? Who else must he call? There were no other close relations in fact, no professional colleagues whom Tasker truly honored, and very few of the friends from his father’s era who were still alive and lucid. There might be something in the white envelope he’d need to act on soon; but it lay by his leg on the bed, not ready. Not scary quite but imposing in its plain demand to stay shut.
Mabry’s vision had held up, but now as he sat and waited for what seemed bound to come—some sort of breakup, some genuine tribute before the presence of watchful others would leave him frozen—what he felt was neither tears nor the choking he’d felt awhile ago but a slow return of the maddening jangle down his spine and both his legs, a scalding electric assault from every nerve. For the first time since he left New York, even after yesterday’s blind spell, he felt real fear. This is something dreadful that won’t go away—no detour round it. He was right and would be for the rest of a long life; yet when he stood and brought Philip Adger’s picture back to the bed and studied it two minutes, then he could lie back—holding the picture on his chest with the white envelope untouched at his side—and fall straight asleep.
A little more than an hour later, he gradually swam up to sounds from the kitchen. He’d locked the front door when he saw Gwyn off, so it had to be Audrey or maybe Marcus—did Marcus have a key, or had Audrey lent him hers? He knew he should go and check on whomever, but the jangling in his body was louder still, and he lay in a drench of self-pity for maybe another ten minutes before he heard firm steps coming his way and then Audrey’s voice.
“Mabry, are you in there?”
The sound was more welcome than he’d ever have guessed. “Oh yes ma’m, come in please.” He drew the envelope up under his left flank but stayed in place, the picture on his chest.
And then Audrey stood there, tall in the doorway in the mild lamplight. She was in a black pants suit, handsome attire; and for the first time since the day he met her, Mabry thought again She’s a fine-looking woman. And now he thought I’m proud to know her—exactly the thing his father might have said, and in Tasker’s words (though Tasker might also have phrased his opinion as “a well-set-up woman” or “a handsome woman”). Audrey had conveyed her sympathy on the phone, but again she said “I’ve lost my own parents, so I may know how you feel.”
Mabry thought Lord God, then you know the full contents of a major mare’s nest. But he said “I think you very likely do. I’m a true orphan now.” He smiled, then found he almost meant it.
Audrey walked on into the midst of the room and turned to face him fully. “Yes, Mabry, you are—you and me both—and it’s bad hell, ain’t it?”
She’d heard him use country language with Tasker, but Mabry had never heard Audrey indulge herself that far. He’d slipped the envelope under the picture, so he sat upright now. “You look mighty fine.”
She looked down at herself. “I bought it this morning. I wasn’t babysitting all this time, but I didn’t want to tell you I was shopping for mourning. I somehow knew, though, we’d be having a funeral.” Steadily her voice was assuming trained dignity.
Mabry said “That’s something I’ve got to do myself. Maybe Marcus can help me find a good store.”
Audrey said “He knows every white and black men’s store between here and Richmond. But you sure you can’t wear your father’s suit?”
Mabry realized she’d almost surely never seen his father upright in recent years. “No, child, I can’t. I’m way taller now.”
She said “We got a world of plans to make then. Or you surely do. I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re ready to tell me what I need to do next, if anything. I understand my employer’s departed.”
Mabry hadn’t thought of that. “Oh please don’t say it. Help me forever.” He’d spilled it out without an instant’s forethought. And I mean it, don’t I?
By then she was heading back toward the door. “I bought us some groceries—not a whole lot but I’m glad to cook your supper.”
He was suddenly hungry. “Please do. I’m starving.” When Audrey was almost out of sight, he thought to call behind her. “We won’t be having any drop-in company here tonight, will we?”
Audrey said “Not unless you summoned somebody. Father Kincaid barely knew another soul but you, me, and Marcus. Said all his boyhood friends were dead.”
Maybe Gwyn will be back. But he didn’t say that. He said he’d shower and join her very shortly. He quickly stripped and took his towel, but then the sight of the envelope stopped him. He found the knife in his trousers pocket and carefully slit the white flap open. As he’d thought, right off he could see it was a will—his father’s last testament, entirely handwritten and (as Mabry knew from his mother’s death) legal in the state of North Carolina so long as two friends of the deceased would witness to the fact that the actual script belonged to the dead man. It wasted no time with a florid preamble but proceeded simply.
My beloved and sole offspring, the Master of Arts Mabry Kincaid, is herewith executor of my estate and will at once inherit my desirable holdings. They amount to the Kincaid family home in Wells, N.C., a decrepit Chevrolet, my personal effects (such as gold watch and wedding ring) plus my bank account, the capital in my insulting pension fund and any other inconsequential sums of money that he finds strewn around at my death.
I trust that Mabry will absorb whatever amount he can employ for his own good purposes and then will consign the remainder to the Salvation Army, whom I respect a great deal more than the Red Cross, who seem mainly interested in posters and publicity.
I have given my life to the church I served, so they can hardly be expecting any money from me now.
To my lovable granddaughter, Charlotte Kincaid, who has been her own mother’s fortunate heir, I leave her grandmother Kincaid’s Bible, her favorite cookbook, and her cameo brooch of the boy Antinous, who served the Emperor Hadrian in duties I leave for Charlotte to discover as she moves on upward through time and learns the endlessly curious ways and means of the world from long before the Roman Empire till now and no doubt forever beyond. I never had the nerve to explain the meaning of the brooch to my wife, who had got it in turn from her own grandmother who had got it as a gift from her uncle Bootie who visited Rome in the 1880s. It would just have ended Eunice’s enjoyment of an admirable piece of Italian artistry, and why do that? Anything else I may have neglected here and now will go to my son and his understanding of where any overflow should run.
In conclusion let me put in writing this one more thing I failed to do till now. I have loved the world. I may even have loved it, and its attendant beauties, too much at times, and leaving it—whenever I do—will be hard. But I die in gratitude to every soul who has been kind to me. There are hundreds of them and they know who they are.
(Signed) Tasker James Kincaid,
December 31, 1999
There were no additions from later dates, no crossings-out. So Mabry was left to wonder again—as he folded the spotless pages, put them back in their envelope, and set it behind Philip Adger’s picture on the mantel—Who’s the she he mentioned in the four-word codicil I heard him speak a few hours ago?
In the distant kitchen, a pan clattered down, which reminded Mabry that an audible shower now would give him a quarter hour to think. He moved that way.
Audrey had put a red smock on top of her new good clothes, so when Mabry appeared she felt she had to apologize. “This redness is no sign of disrespect; it’s just to protect me.”
Mabry said “By all means. And by contrast, don’t I look a lot like Huckleberry Finn
toward the end of his misery?” But he stood in the doorway in clean khaki trousers and a long-tailed black shirt.
Audrey looked and smiled a little. “Mr. Finn deserved something better than misery, don’t you believe?”
Mabry hadn’t thought. But he said “I’m glad you feel that way. I’ll join you, if we ever get called to jury duty when he turns up outside the Pearly Gates.”
Audrey didn’t turn back from the sink again—she was peeling shrimp—but she said “You estimate you and I will be inside those Gates?”
Mabry said “Don’t ask for an estimate on me. You and my pa will surely get in, assuming you don’t have a burning crime I haven’t heard about.”
“Not a one,” Audrey said. She waited while Mabry sat at the table; then she said “Wish I’d had a little more fun.”
“God knows you’ve earned it.” That felt like the truth, and it forced Mabry to speak out sooner than he’d planned. He said “Did my father promise you anything I need to know about?”
She still didn’t face him, but she spoke right back. “Meaning what please?”
“—Among other things, I’ve just read his will. He wrote it by hand in December 1999, the night before the millennium; and there are no recent codicils or changes.”
Audrey still felt no compulsion to turn or even look up from the sink. “So anything he promised me wouldn’t be legal, would it?” When she turned back now, she laughed awhile and that revealed a beauty she’d somehow kept hidden in her face since Mabry first met her—beautiful for the first full time since Mabry met her nine days ago.
He rushed onward then. “All right. We want you to have this house.”
Her question came as fast as his offer. “Mabry, who is we?”
He asked her to join him at the table for a minute; she came and sat at the opposite end. He said “We is Tasker Kincaid and his one living child. This morning, not long after you and Marcus left, Pa looked straight at me and spoke four words.” They were hard to repeat, dredging up so much feeling; but he got them out clearly, then needed a pause.
In the silence Audrey said “Who’d he mean by she and which house was it?”
Isn’t she reaching too far now? But no, I asked her to tell me everything. He said “I’ve been thinking hard ever since Pa spoke. At first I thought she couldn’t be anybody else but my daughter; but Pa knew that, with her mother’s wealth, Charlotte won’t need a cent if she lives to be a thousand. In his will he takes precise note of that fact. He was also bound to know that, good as Charlotte is, this house has never mattered to her. She never spent any real time here in her childhood, which is when you mostly come to love places—don’t you? And that was my fault. I never brought her here. She went to her mother’s family home, as most children do. No, Audrey, my father admired you a very great deal. You and I know how grateful he was for all you’ve done—”
Audrey had to break in. “Mabry, it’s nice to hear you working through this whole process; but don’t forget, I only came to know your father less than one full month ago.”
Mabry knew that his age could trump her here firmly; he knew the single relevant truth. “Love, thanks, reward—all the truly good things are measured by heat and depth, not endurance. So Pa’s word she is bound to mean you.”
Audrey waited a long time, then agreed but was silent.
Mabry said “All right?”
She felt no ease yet, if she ever would. “You know I thank you; but Mabry, which house was he talking about?”
“This one surely, the Kincaid place. You don’t know of any secret place he owned, do you?”
She sat on, silent, looking down now.
Mabry said “What’s the trouble?”
She finally said “I owe both of you a world of thanks; and I know that, up till I moved in here, Father Kincaid meant you to have this house for the rest of your life. But you understand, better even than I do, that this house needs a lot of work—call it conservation, which is your trade after all—and I simply don’t have money even to fix the roof.”
Mabry said “I do. Charlotte’s mother—Frances Kenyon Kincaid, the wife I did so much to harm—has lately left me sufficient funds to bring this place back to proud condition.”
At last Audrey looked up; the beauty had lasted. She said “This place is your family’s old home, the only one you’ve got. Surrender this now and you truly are an orphan.” But she was plainly waiting to hear more. “Tell me this please—if this house should be mine, as of now, why on Earth should you be the man to fix it?”
Mabry finally said “All right, how’s this? I told you I just now read his will, not more than half an hour ago. At the present moment, as I’ve just learned, the whole place is mine—house, trees, sheds, land, birds, squirrels, blind possums. Pa left it to me, free and clear. Now once the will’s probated, I’ll consign the deed to you. But then I’ll fix it. Call it a gift. Say I’m giving it to Cooter.” He was trusting she’d understand his equation with its sub-inclusion.
She was plainly baffled, however, and moved to stand from the table and go back to planning the supper she’d promised.
So Mabry saw he was forced to lay out his beggar’s proposition. “You know I may be in bad shape. I had to cancel a meeting with my doctor to rush down here; but frankly I’m sure, from various signals my body’s giving, that I’ve almost surely got multiple sclerosis or something as bad. Sometimes apparently M.S. is mild, but I’ve already had bad pain and worse—real spells of blindness. I have to think that, sooner or later, if I live awhile longer, I may turn out to need steady care.”
Audrey kept her seat then and began to draw geometric figures on the table with her long forefinger. They were complicated as any cat’s cradle, and they slowly stacked up on one another. “Father Kincaid told me that much anyhow. He knew it before you ever got back down here from Nova Scotia.”
“I told him on the phone before I left for Europe. You likely guessed that I very seldom pray, but I wanted his prayers while I was gone—and ever after, I guess.”
Audrey nodded. “You got them, from him and me both.” She pointed to the dark bedroom behind them. “More than once he asked me to come in there and sit beside him and ask God to lead you.”
“Pa didn’t ask for healing?—that I’d get well, I mean.”
She thought it out, then shook her head gently. “I noticed that too. Then finally I figured he was only asking for what we could get—what we might get.”
Mabry said “So I got led to this table here tonight.”
Audrey searched his whole body, all she could see. Then of all things she laughed, a deep splendid over-spill.
But Mabry could feel his face flushing red. “What, please ma’m?”
“You’re trapping me, boy.” She’d never come near to calling him boy. It was at least as shocking as honky, as comic as boss man.
“Trapping you in what?” He was partly confused, partly disingenuous.
“Mabry, first you tell me your father gave me this house outright, in his very last words. Then you say it’s yours but that you’ll fix it up and hand it over to be mine forever—mine and my own heirs once I’m gone. Then you say you’ll hand it over in turn-key condition but that I’ll need to nurse you the rest of your life. Tell me, boy, is that much right?”
It was Mabry’s turn to think through her deductions and her final question, which he hadn’t done till then. At last he imitated the figures she’d drawn on the table and then gave his own laugh, though not as deeply delighted as Audrey’s. He was managing to meet her eyes, all the same.
She said “How wrong am I?”
“Dead right,” he said, “—speaking of dead.” And in the next thirty seconds, which were mute between them, he understood, with real amazement, that of course he meant to give her the house. He had no trace of a wish to disobey his father; but he also desperately hoped that Audrey would give him his own room and help him as needed, as long as needed, which he also knew might be hard as hell and might last a
long while.
By then she’d stood, rebuttoned her red smock, and gone to the sink to assemble the dinner of shrimp and grits which she’d planned for the two of them and whoever else might hear the news and turn up, uncalled for.
Later that same night—a Saturday—Mabry had found, in Tasker’s checkbook on the face of a blank check, this further list of simple requests—that his body be “inexpensively burned” and interred between his wife and Gabe, that there be no service in any church, no presiding clergy but that “my son Mabry and my granddaughter Charlotte stand in the graveyard on the brightest day convenient and read aloud, to one another and whoever else might care to be present, whatever words from the Book of Common Prayer seem beautiful to them and have some chance of being true, since John Keats and I both understand that anything beautiful is bound to be true. They can be sure anyhow that Tasker Kincaid will hear them from whatever mansion he’s in, in the place of many mansions, as Jesus names the place he intends to go when he dies.”
Six
9 . 25 . 01
On the Tuesday then—conveniently bright in late afternoon—they delivered Tasker’s wishes to the absolute letter with Mabry, Charlotte, Audrey, Marcus and his child, Malcolm, Gwyn, and Vance Scott from the Sherwin Pool Hall (of all unexpected but welcome guests) in attendance at the graveyard. Then all returned to the Kincaid house for the lavish spread of funeral provisions, arranged for by Gwyn and hauled in by the best providers in easy reach. There were actual caterers now in the county; and the best, thank God, had not forgot how to cook and present the rewards of Mabry’s childhood—fried chicken that was somehow not greasy but succulent and tender all the same, the salty smoked ham sliced paper-thin and served between the crumbling halves of beaten biscuits no bigger than a quarter, pickled watermelon rind, baby cauliflower and okra, and of course the upper-quality echelons of whiskey, wine, and even beer that Tasker Kincaid would have been proud to serve the souls he valued, including Vance Scott (who arrived unasked but cold sober, though he’d leave as pickled as any gherkin under the roof).
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