If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  Khalil groaned. He’d tried to avoid that bag.

  “Nah, baby, we got food for the century. ’Sides, he only half eats anyway.”

  “You gotta make ’im eat.”

  “Not a problem, baby. Boy, Nana Selma will make ’im eat.”

  As if on cue, Rayne’s cell phone rang. Nana Selma shouted into the phone from South Carolina: “Hey! You comin or what?”

  Rayne grinned into the phone. “You cookin?”

  “Your Chinee girl with all that crazy nappy hair, whatsername: I called the house earlier; she say you at the job. So I wanna know how you at the job and coming to South Carolina by supper?”

  “Lillie. Her name’s Lillie. I may not make it by suppertime,” he said, using the old country meal designation.

  “You certainly will not make it by suppertime. I be lucky you get here by bedtime.”

  “I had to check my locks, Nana. My foreman moved down South, and the other guys just don’t pay attention.”

  “You sound like your great-grandfather. All right, Big Man, you handle your business. I’ma see can I put some clean sheets for you. You gonna be sleepin in your old room in the house or you wanna bunk in the trailer here with me?”

  “How cold is it?”

  “It’s cold enough. But JJ fixed that little whatchacallit, stove; he fixed it and he said he lef’ some firewood behin’ the house. I ain’t been out to see.”

  “The stove? What was wrong with the stove? Those things are cast iron. JJ doesn’t know about those old stoves.” She did not quite sound herself. Rayne wondered whether she was slurring her words.

  “Box stove. That’s it. No, he just cleared out the flue after some critter got in and made a nest. It was a mess. So where you want?”

  “I’ll stay in the house. But don’t make up the bed. I’ll do that when I come.” He decided not to tell her that Khalil was coming, so she wouldn’t begin to fuss about that, too.

  “You come before sundown, I’m warning you, all you gonna see is weeds—they done took me over. First shoots of green: nothing but weeds. You just have to find me in the underbrush somewhere, peepin out, like that little old ant in the funnies. ’Member him?”

  It was a joke that she still liked, a pantomime that she’d do in person sometimes: the tiny, antennaed black insect who popped up in the corner of old animated shorts, bug-eyed and with big white grinning lips, a wise guy inserted to give the smart-aleck, darky-style last word.

  Who dat?

  Who day say who dat?

  Who dat say who dat when I say who dat?

  Selma seemed even more amused when Rayne became old enough to take offense. This time on the phone, however, he laughed right along with her, glad to hear her tease after what seemed like slightly halting words: herself, but older.

  “All right, all right, Nana. You still ain’t told me whether you were cooking.”

  “I have told you before: I don’t hardly cook no more for myself. Look, I don’t know. Big as you is, it’s hard to keep enough in the house.”

  “Grits, barbecue, sweet potatoes, greens: Nana, you know the drill.”

  “You better bring me sompin.”

  “Macaroni and cheese, rice and gravy. Anything. Nana, you’re killin me.”

  She laughed easily. He could hear her tip her head back from the phone. “Honey, your Nana is just plain old. You don’t seem to realize. Come on down. See how I feel today. You gonna be so late, maybe I’ll just start getting things ready for tomorrow. I’ll have a bite of sompin here tonight. Just get on the road!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Jewell tried to recall the pattern of one-way streets, but a tiny park and then a new-looking inner-city shopping mall had been built where she thought she should go. By the time she returned to where she figured her son’s block should be, she’d driven instead to Market Street under the elevated train and into a construction zone.

  The El roared. Jewell felt as if the roadbed underneath her were shaking. On either side of her were stacks of big-construction material: steel beams, concrete pillars on their sides, wide wooden planks. Dirt hills rose up under the elevated train tracks. Puddles gave a false surface to potholes. Beams, sewer pipes six feet across, and reclaimed timber blocked her way, forcing her to drive in a sloppy zigzag. After several blocks she noticed that not one other car was moving on Market Street. Somehow, she’d gone very wrong. Now and then a person walked across the street, looking everywhere so as not to step in mud or uneven concrete and asphalt surfaces. But each tiny street leading to and from Market was blocked. How had she gotten so lost in the city she thought she knew? This was a black alternate universe: and now a universe under construction.

  She put the car into reverse to turn around. Red-brown construction clay was piled up behind her like an impromptu Indian burial mound. Next to it were a few municipal trucks and an earthmover. She had never liked backing up in this car, whose trunk was less easy to estimate than her old hatchback. She did not want to hit the dusty municipal vehicles parked haphazardly around the mound, so she swung her gaze from one side of the car to the other to avoid them.

  Clearly she’d driven from some street into this muddy no-outlet mess, she was thinking, and there must be at least one street, if only that one, that could lead out. She was deciding to go the wrong way on that street if necessary, just to get out of there, when, at once, she saw a man who’d materialized between her car and the mound, and felt and heard him banging on her trunk and shouting at her to stop backing up. Jewell jammed her brakes so hard that she felt the ABS system buck over the slippery mud. But she managed not to hit him, a small, earth-colored gnome wearing a gray raincoat. She knew when he rounded the back corner of her car, bawling the whole way, that she had just missed hitting him, and that she easily could have done so had he not punched the car.

  “Jesus!” he called out in a scratchy tenor voice that grated. “Jesus!” he cried again, now that she saw him. “What’re you doin? Where you going? Ain’t even no cars driving. How’d you get in here, lady? Jesus have mercy.”

  She expected him to move from behind the car, but he didn’t. Looked as if he couldn’t. The El roared over, rattling them both. He was yelling again, but she couldn’t hear him, and the entire place, though deserted, seemed so busy and noisy, filled with so much grime and dirt, she almost couldn’t stand it. As soon as the El passed, she felt, they’d be able to break out of their poses. She could get out of the car, he’d step out, and they’d both see that he was all right and that she was very, very sorry. She began to breathe.

  Then, out of nowhere, at least half a dozen people emerged. From where? she wondered. As the El rumbled away, she could hear them clucking and grumbling, chuff chuff chuff, righteous group indignation. An officious man about her age, with large, suspicious eyes, caught her gaze, making sure to purse his lips pointedly and stare her down to show her his disapproval before he walked behind the car with exaggerated care. He was taking in her creamy car and creamy skin. Men had desired her since she was twelve and hated her for it. She could feel it.

  He shouted: “Is that thing in neutral? Is it in park? Can you put on the emergency brake?” He escorted the still paralyzed older man to the side of the car. Jewell had lowered the front window, intending to ask the man’s forgiveness. Now, with the little group of people turning into a tiny ad hoc crowd, she stepped out into the cold damp. The air tasted like suspended particles of dust. A few people popped out of a storefront and picked their way across Market Street with quick-moving excitement. At least two were drunk, with one woman calling out from across the street that she’d seen it all, that the crazy white woman in the Lexus was dangerous, that the man had been knocked over, that Jewell had been driving like a maniac, a bat outta hell, on the damn sidewalk and everything.

  Jewell looked at the little brown-and-gray man, now held under the arm by his officious advocate. She wished that she were alone with the man so that she could apologize and ask him how he was without a hostile choru
s. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry to have scared him, that she hoped she hadn’t hurt him, that there was no way she could have seen him, with the mound, as big as a trailer, really, hiding him completely. She imagined herself saying that she’d made some great connections by accident, including her husband. The little man looked like the type who would laugh with her, friendly-like, once he’d gotten over his fear.

  Instead, the small crowd ringed the front of her car and stood between them. The loud, drunk woman escalated her alarm. “That crazy white bitch is comin out the car. Watch ’er hands. What she grab her purse for?”

  “She’s scared when she get out the car somebody gonna take it.”

  “Maybe she’s tryin to pay ’im off.”

  “He could sue anyway.”

  “Pay me off: hey, for a thousand dollars, I ain’t seen nothin!”

  “Could be a gun.”

  “Tha’s more likely.”

  “Crazy white bitches carry them cute little guns. Little motherfuckin pearl-handle guns.”

  Jewell was shocked at the sudden vitriol—and something familiar.

  She did indeed come from a family of gun-toters, and she felt it now, their presence, or at least their influence. She’d been afraid as they’d started toward her. Now the woman’s talk enraged her.

  “What if I do?”

  “White bitch crazy.”

  “Whatever I got is legal for me to carry.” Jewell found herself holding the clutch purse, which she’d grabbed out of habit, above her head and shouting: “You back up. You back up and let me talk to the man. And I am not… white. Stop saying that.”

  “Oh, oh, well, she crazy and the bitch almost kilt the man, but she ain’t white,” the woman began to yell. “So now we safe.”

  “I feel safer already,” said one man, beginning to snort.

  In her head, Jewell could hear her lawyer husband, Jack, cautioning her to say nothing that people could use against her later. He would say that she’d already said too much.

  The little gnome, who Jewell saw was holding a zip-covered Bible, let out a high-pitched rolling peal of laughter. The openness of the laugh communicated a mischievous goodwill that suddenly reminded her of video she’d seen of Desmond Tutu. Over the objections of his self-appointed bodyguard, the man reached out cold, gnarled hands and held her gloved fingers tightly. He looked up at her with his round face smiling.

  “But, sir,” Jewell said, “I am very, very sorry.”

  He reached up to kiss her. She bent down toward him. His face and nose were cold on her cheek. She breathed in his strong Bay Rum aftershave, a smell she remembered from her own father.

  “Well,” he said in a Caribbean lilt, “I am not dead, as we see, so all’s well that ends well.” Then he laughed again at his own wit.

  Jewell thought of a way to get out of this situation. “If you’re going to church,” she said as the next El approached, “I can drive you there.”

  “What?”

  People shouted the offer to him and to one another over the noise. The discarded bodyguard was shaking his head no, and making a lowing sound to signify that they were wrong to let this thing pass. “I wouldn’t, sir. If I were you, I wouldn’t. You haven’t seen any documentation, any paperwork. You should probably get some information…” He reached into his breast pocket, feeling for a pen that Jewell suspected he knew damn well was not there.

  The little crowd divided:

  “She may not be white, but half-black don’t mean she can drive.”

  “She ain’t half, maybe a quarter.”

  “You can’t tell.”

  “I can. My granmuvver were whiter than her with blue eyes.”

  “Black and blue, maybe!”

  “I swear he should not get into that car with that bitch and the gun.”

  “What she gonna do? Shoot ’im now that we all seen ’er?”

  “Oh, come on, the man grown.”

  “He better hold tight to that Bible.”

  “See, that’s what you don’t know: a prayin man don’t have to fear.”

  “Not like niggers who get up on Sunday and have a drink!”

  As they talked, the man thanked his advocate, shook hands with him, and allowed him to walk him, held by the elbow, to the passenger side of the car. Once inside, the man said, smiling, both at Jewell and at his audience through the windshield, “All right. Let’s get out of here while we can. Turn around like you were doing and you have to go about five blocks to get out. I know where.”

  He told her to call him Jubilee. Together, with his strong aftershave circulating through the heating system and filling the car, the two navigated their way out of the construction area and back onto the streets. Once Jewell was headed toward his church, Jubilee sat back to enjoy the car’s many features.

  “Hey, what an automobile. I’m like the ambassador or the movie lady with Morgan Freeman.”

  “Driving Mr. Jubilee.”

  “Hah! Then tell me, what’s this? Oh, it moves the seat up and down. Is this real wood paneling that I’m rubbing and getting fingerprints on? Very smooth.”

  “Help yourself, Mr. Jubilee.”

  “Much better than Morgan Freeman… Look, take a right here, go half a block to that little corner, see? And we’ll go through the alley to Fifty-sixth Street, and then up to Fifty-second, and I’ll take you through the park.”

  He opened the glove compartment, scanned the manual, and asked her to turn on his seat warmer. In about a minute, he lay back, closed his eyes, and chuckled his satisfaction.

  They arrived at his church, an astonishing French Gothic cathedral in the middle of a tough neighborhood. Forcefully, he invited Jewell in, certain, he said, that God had brought them together for the purpose. Just as certainly, Jewell refused. She told him that she’d promised her husband, who was very ill, that she’d be home in time to make him a lunch. The old man ventured as how maybe that was what was on her mind under the El.

  “Actually,” she said, suddenly confessional, “I was thinking of my son.”

  “Oh, my dear. He is not well?”

  “No, Mr. Jubilee. He is just fine, although it is no thanks to me.”

  “Oh, I see.” He poked out his bottom lip and nodded thoughtfully. “Does he live over this way? Near where we met?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Oh, and you were looking for him, but bumped into me—almost bumped into me—instead.”

  Jewell pressed her lips together.

  “Here.” He handed her his Bible.

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t take it. And I have a Bible.”

  “You can take it. You must. It will make me happy and make up for your frightening me to death. Besides, everyone has a Bible, but no one reads it. Put it in the bathroom. Then you’ll read it.”

  She could not help smiling at him.

  “On the sill. Leave it there. You’ll open it out of curiosity. I have a thousand notes, and maybe one will catch your eye.”

  “And how is it good for you that I take your study Bible?”

  “It will make me read through fresh, without my eye resting on the same passages I’ve underlined for years. This will be very good for me.”

  He made her stay while he went in and grabbed her a program, so she’d have the church’s name and address. He brought it to her, encouraging her to put it on her night table and read it through; it would help her sleep. He asked Jack’s name and said that he would pray for them both. And for her son.

  “I’ve got children, and this is how I pray: Help me to be the father they need today, not before, not the last time I failed ’em, but right now.

  “You haven’t prayed like that, have you? See,” he said, letting rip another run of laughter, “that didn’t hurt, did it? Just ask. Just say: ‘What shall I do?’ Or remember this moment. That’s a prayer!”

  Then he asked whether she’d like him to put anything into the collection plate on her behalf, since she couldn’t come
in. Jewell handed him a twenty-dollar bill and called him a hustler for the Lord.

  He hurled his pealing laughter out into the cold mist again and repeated her joke to himself as he left her: “You know who we are?” he shouted by way of greeting another worshipper, an old lady no taller than he, who was struggling up the stairs. “We are ‘hustlers for Jesus!’”

  The two laughed, and he gave her his arm to help her mount the last step.

  Jewell watched them disappear. The front of the program quoted Paul’s letter to the Romans: “So, then, you are no longer a slave, but rather a son; and if you are a son, you are also an heir by God’s act of adoption.”

  The minister’s name was the Reverend Ivy Needham Ivans; they shared Jewell’s maiden name, Needham. It had to be, she told herself, a coincidence.

  Jewell turned off what she would think of from now on as Jubilee’s seat warmer. The scent of bay rum hung on the upholstery.

  ———

  “Call ’im,” Jack said after she’d told him the saga. “Call ’im today before you lose heart.” Jack lay on his chaise longue by the fire, seven more chemotherapy sessions away from the hope of remission. He’d napped while she went son-fishing, as he called it, in West Philly. “What do I know? I’m an old white guy with no kids, but I think you should finish the job, Jewelly.”

  He lay back with his eyes closed, and she thought he’d dozed off again until he said: “If your father called here today and said: ‘I was a heel, but I couldn’t do any better. I love you. Let me try to make it up,’ what would you say?”

  “Until this morning I would have hung up on him.”

  “And then what if he called back?”

  “He wouldn’t. Not him.”

  Jack said nothing.

  “But I could. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Well, if you wanted to. You can do whatever you want to.” He pointed to the dog-eared Bible. “What’re you going to do with that?”

  “Oh, I forgot. I promised I’d put it in my bathroom.”

  The scent of bay rum rubbed off onto her hands. Having reached out tentatively to her son, she’d drawn back the scent of her father. And now that scent was connected to the image that would play in her mind for as long as she had one: her son’s rolling walk from the little row house stoop to the truck, and then the moment of impact when his body accepted the boy who vaulted onto his back. She’d jumped like that onto her father’s back once, before he beat her and she hated him; before she’d left South Carolina to escape the swirling storm of his rage, and then sent her son back into it.