If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  The body smoked.

  After they were outlawed as postcards, the photos traveled the world in envelopes and pockets, passed from hand to hand, lay in side drawers under baptismal records and bowie knives. They were inherited with possessions made affordable by black labor until, finally, “Four or five generations later,” Jones begins…

  “All of us know the outlines by heart,” Rayne finishes. He has in mind the picture of a black man, neck to one side, hanged. An American icon. Now one could see it in museums and coffee-table books. Collectors collected the photos.

  Dirty pictures. Who can touch?

  ———

  Wash your hands.

  ———

  Later, they shear off slices of the body. The pieces turn/turn/turn to dust in the men’s wallets. Like that crazy hundred-dollar bill Jones gave him.

  ’Cause once you’ve sliced off a man’s ear, Rayne thinks, what else can you do but keep it close? It’s a relic. Touches your fingers every time you go for your money. Loose flakes rub off when you pick up your children. Shake hands with business colleagues to show your goodwill. Open hand, unarmed.

  Charmed, I’m sure.

  Over the years, the story had cooked inside Rayne’s head, helped by the comments of the few people he’d ever told. You didn’t bring it out too often.

  But, wait. Here come the miracle. My Lord!

  Jones holds in his voice the exact hopeful reverence of the sharecroppers who’d shared the news with him. They’d get to this part in the story and shake their heads—and this is what I want you to know, too, Jones says, referring to Selma’s silence, because if Rayne didn’t know the first part, then he couldn’t know the miracle: that when the mob had done as much as you can do to a human being and him still be alive, a man pushed his way through the crowd, crazy as they were by now, crazy-mad with liquor and the terrible intoxication of blood—a colored man elbowed his way to the front and begged for the boy’s life.

  That was the part everyone repeated: And then, do Jesus, a black man come up in front of them.

  And it didn’t matter whether the listeners had heard the story before. They told it again, just as Jones told Rayne, and Rayne told his construction partner and later Lillie, because it remained a mystery. And because everyone wanted to know this and to learn, as Jones learned, what was possible.

  Jones’s words, present tense, because heroism exists outside of time: “He stands beside the boy’s body, tied by now so that it won’t fall flat. This black man says—listen what he say standing in front of all these crazy, drunk-up white people—he says: ‘For God’s sake, please, don’t finish this. Whatever you meant to teach him this boy has surely learnt. And he’ll never be good for nothin now anyway. Please, for pity’s sake, just lemme take ’im down. Lemme take ’im home to his mother.’”

  ———

  Where had he come from, this man who appeared like the black face of God speaking mercy?

  ———

  The outrageousness of it would not be suppressed. It leached from between the rocks, seeped into the streams, soaked into the swamps. Finally, it ran in the papers, so they couldn’t say it didn’t happen. Jones was sure that Rayne could find it in the records, and one day, sure enough, he looked it up on the Internet.

  ———

  Yes, they did hang the poor boy, anyway, just hanged him, what was left of him, and roasted him like a hog. They burned him like paper and breathed in the smoke. Particles of him went into their bodies and into the water. That’s what Rayne thinks about sometimes when he starts getting south enough. Like the fish in the Pacific who turn up with plastic granules in their flesh, how many of the residents had drunk water in which was dissolved the ashes from this boy’s body? And others’?

  King dammed up the water running from that field. A wash field, they called it. Was it only because the lower ground was too soggy, or did he intend to erect a barrier? To keep his new raised tobacco beds free of the taint?

  ———

  But because it ran in the papers, see, they couldn’t say it didn’t happen.

  And people did learn from it. Black people learned that the terror was still abroad in the land, but they could choose to fly in its face. You only die once.

  ———

  Rayne’s business cell rang, and instead of Lillie’s voice or one of the guys’, his mother’s purred into his ear like an announcer from a television commercial for something expensive. He listened for a moment. She repeated her name, and called him Lonnie, the slow, elegant voice coming through the phone and up out from his own psychic basement, which until now had been sealed. Where had he misplaced such a voice all these years? There was no other such voice in all the world. Mommy. His face felt hot. He’d thought when he wrote the letter that he’d be fine if and when the call ever came. But now he was not fine. He was in the corner of the truck, watching himself drive, telling himself, by remote control, to hang up the phone. Just hang up. The idiot in the driver’s seat couldn’t get words up out of his throat. Just hang the fuck up. “It’s me,” said the man in the driver’s seat, the man who’d not been called Lonnie since his mother had left him on the train in Trenton, New Jersey, a city he’d always hated for that reason, “but I can’t talk. Talk later. I’m driving.” Then he clicked off.

  CHAPTER 6

  That’s what you get.

  That’s what Jewell heard when her son hung up the phone, after his deep voice, sharp-edged, cool, and dismissive, told her that he was driving. He had a productive life in progress, and she’d interrupted. Like her father, Bobo, would have said, That’s what you get.

  Well, what else had she expected after more than twenty years?

  “He hung up?” Jack asked. Jewell’s husband was so thin now that the two of them lay together like spoons on the chaise longue by the fire, which she’d built directly upon coming home.

  “Said he was driving.” She shrugged into her husband’s bony chest, where the lung cancer had been, and where he now had one lung, maybe growing cancer of its own, maybe not. He’d wanted to go to Mexico again this year for Easter, but their doctor had warned them off. This week, he’d felt stronger, and they’d been thinking of going anyway.

  Jack rubbed his wife’s shoulder-length brown hair. At forty-seven, she was still a striking woman, tall, slow-speaking, and elegant, with an olive complexion and deep-set, dark eyes. She’d taken up running in the last ten years, which seemed to have made her quiet moments more still, like a cold-water lake. People who didn’t know her thought her aloof. Once, she’d admitted to him how guilty she felt to be getting stronger…

  “While I get weaker,” he’d supplied. “Let’s just say it.”

  Theirs had been a romantic, impulsive, and long-lasting marriage. He’d been an inveterate liar—he liked to say “an invertebrate liar”—in his youth, as Jewell knew, and figured there was only a short time to redeem himself. Honesty mattered a great deal to both of them now.

  “Call the other number,” Jack said. “You can leave a message for when he gets back.”

  “What can I say?”

  “I don’t know… Say: ‘This is your mother. You okay?’”

  She laughed in her throat.

  You okay? You okay? It was one of his recurring jokes from what he called Cancer World. You okay? Mostly now, he asked: “Do you want the long answer or the short answer?” People sorted themselves out with surprising honesty, the few people whom they were really close to.

  “What are you afraid of? Right now?” That was a quote from Jack’s favorite visiting nurse, Barbara. Right now, she’d always say, and without making him admit to it, she’d let him see how many were the fears that throbbed through him, like pain, and how fast-moving.

  “My old family,” Jewell answered him after a delay so long he’d almost forgotten the question.

  “But you’re only talking to the son.”

  “He brings ’em with ’im.” She hadn’t thought of that until she saw him. />
  “Maybe it’s time,” Jack said, but his wife wasn’t listening.

  ———

  Instead her mind watched as her younger self boarded the train in New York and then combed the cars to find the perfect Negro schoolteacher to exploit, a plump fifty-year-old spinster wearing a white cardigan sweater over her shoulders, and headed home to Beaufort County, South Carolina, for the summer. Jewell had explained, with easy-to-conjure tears threatening behind her eyes, that she had only enough money for two fares, that she wanted the boy to get out of the city for the summer—it was unhealthy in the city, but she had work here. If he stayed, he’d get into trouble; the other boys ran wild; she needed him to know his people back home. If Jewell continued all the way there, then, to return, she would have to borrow. Or she’d hitchhike, because they barely had enough to go around, and now another mouth to feed.

  With that the schoolteacher had insisted Jewell get off the train in Trenton, go back to New York, and cash in her ticket. She commandeered the goodwill of the black conductor, a genial round-faced man, also in his fifties, and together they fussed over Lonnie until all three agreed that he could be and would be a big boy for sure. If he was very good, the conductor said, he would take him to visit the driver of the train, and Lonnie could sit up on the rail by the window and watch the train plunge into tunnels, shoot out into the open, and climb over the high bridge with a drop of a hundred feet. Big boys could do that, not babies.

  “Oh, boy, oh, boy.”

  Jewell convinced herself that, beginning with this train, her son would be riding into a new, wholesome boyhood. “He’s better off,” she told herself through the years. And, well, obviously, he had been.

  Of course, it was Jewell who’d ended up better off. She and Jack didn’t really need the dog, friends joked, because they were each other’s pet. And until these last few months’ descent again into Cancer World, it had never occurred to her that they had no help, no heirs, no sons or daughters to pop in on Thursday evenings like her friend Eva’s grown daughter, who came to help with Eva’s mother.

  That first time in Mexico, when she and Jack had climbed the hill, she’d felt a warm redemption that pulled out of her a promise to live better. She’d stopped smoking and convinced Jack to join her, which the doctors said had probably earned him his last few cancer-free years. All well and good, but now, trapped by the moist, low-ceilinged sky, Jewell found herself remembering the rest of it, for which there was no pardon. She heard herself moan. She was crying. Jack held her as close as he could.

  ———

  They lived in New York, where she had come after a night when Bobo had beaten her. Her baby was two, and New York seemed exactly the right place to take him to find the unexpected life-changing opportunity that a young woman, stunningly beautiful and headstrong, fully expected to discover. Instead, New York offered her the chance to clean office buldings at night. She left her son with the big woman next door who had her own babies and loved having another one each year.

  Jewell started smoking when Lonnie turned five, and by the time he was six, he would go into her purse and find the matches. She told herself that he was not a firebug, just curious. It was a fluke, a onetime, then an occasional, thing. Four times in all. Small, aborted fires, except the one.

  But at odd moments through the day, his dissatisfied little face told her how desperately he wanted her to be different, and better. When she came home late at night, she’d stop to collect him from next door and carry him to his own bed. He’d have been awake, and she knew it, but he would keep his eyes stubbornly closed in order not to acknowledge her. She saw his eyelids flutter, and she played along, too tired to engage. Then he would watch her when she wasn’t looking. He became a suspicious child, at once sulky and vigilant.

  She tried authority: “Lonnie Freeman Rayne, you touch these matches one more time, and I’ll smash your fingers.” She had, indeed, made him hold out his hands for her to hit with the wooden spoon, and at other times, she had lost all control, beating him with anything she could find, sometimes not even recognizing how enraged she was until she was spent. He’d be crying, screaming, or finally just blubber-babbling things at her that she never would have dared say to an adult: that she was mean, that she couldn’t make ’im stop, that she could hit ’im, but she couldn’t make ’im do anything; that he would do it, whatever it was, again. She slapped his face to shut up the snotty torrent.

  She’d become her father.

  The summer he was six she’d returned to South Carolina for a month. Lonnie had set fire to hay in the smokehouse. In the chaos that followed, she’d beaten him something awful. Nana Selma pulled him away. Later she tried to talk to Jewell: “I’m afraid that I’ll always have that picture in my head, girl, of you holdin that boy up by his arm and beating on him like you fight a grown-up.”

  “Well, I can’t help what’s in your head. All I can do is try to keep him from burning up everything we own,” Jewell had said, although she owned nothing except some share of the land that Selma promised would one day come to them, when she went “from work to refreshment,” or, she said, when she swam back to Africa.

  Jewell returned to New York, with no money and no job, and a boy even more sullen than before. He’d loved the farm and the chickens. He loved the truck. And he loved Selma, who took time with him and who, he informed his babysitter, “didn’t hit.” For a while it was the question he asked everyone he met, child or adult: “Do you hit?”

  Their last argument, when he was seven, had been a fight practically of equals, him screaming hatred and need, Jewell shouting back again and again, “So you want somebody to take care of you like a goddamned baby?”

  “You don’t take care of me,” he’d said.

  ———

  Jewell wiped her nose on Jack’s sleeve and snorted and coughed, but each thought took her back. She got up to throw a few more logs onto the fire, hoping to pull herself out of the sucking memory that was taking her down.

  During that last fight, she’d moved to grab Lonnie and he’d thrown up his hands, mimicking the boys next door, like a little boxer. Jewell remembered that exact moment of insanity. She’d been drinking. She wanted to grab something and beat him until the pain in his own perfect, demanding little body made him understand what he should expect from life.

  Nothing. Nothing. Not a goddamned thing. That’s what you get.

  That’s when it came to her: send him away. She’d been threatening it—I’ll send you away.

  No, you won’t.

  Oh, yes, I will.

  I’ll come back.

  You think you could find your way?

  I could.

  This time she’d do it differently. She slipped out of herself and watched the scene from the corner of the shabby room. She could see the room now: its dirty woodwork and three pieces of used furniture. She could smell it: like grease and old food, like cigarette smoke and a thousand thousand roach droppings. She saw herself back up from Lonnie and sit in her accustomed trough on the couch. She saw herself call him, coax him to her, and put her arms around him. If the argument had been between equals, so, too, was the making up. She was about to lie to him, as she would with a negotiator who held cards of his own. Mommy was not being a good mommy, she said, and she knew it, and she was sorry. Now she would be a good mommy: she would find a way to make enough money so that they could have a nice house and he could have a daddy.

  He was curled up tight, wanting her caress, she could tell, and not wanting to show it; wanting to believe her, and not quite able to do so. She cradled as much of his big, seven-year-old body as she could hold on her lap and let it seep in that she was acknowledging the legitimacy of his grudges. She reminded him that Nana Selma had land as far as you could see, and chickens, and Granddaddy Bobo was down there with the truck that he could ride in again. She’d send him there for the summer, she said, then see how well he liked it when it came time to go back to school. “How ’bout that?”

&nb
sp; “When?”

  “When?” She had no idea how to answer him. There was food money in the jar, but nothing more. “Tomorrow.” The word popped out of her mouth and gained instant, impulsive authority. “Tomorrow morning.” She’d smiled on him like sunshine. He loved her to smile. He’d clown and roll on the floor to amuse her. (Laugh, Mommy, laugh!) “I’ll wire them now. We’ll go together.”

  “Are you comin?”

  “To South Carolina? No, baby, I gotta stay here and find work. But if you’re good, Granddaddy’ll let you feed the hogs.”

  “I don’t like the hogs.”

  “They’ll have piglets, maybe, from this spring.”

  “I don’t like piglets.”

  “Okay.”

  “You say he still got the truck?”

  “Yeah, he’s got a nice pickup truck to haul things from town.”

  “The red truck?”

  “Yup.”

  “I wanna drive the truck.”

  “You ask him.”

  ———

  When the train was about to leave the Trenton station, Lonnie buried his face in her belly. The schoolteacher next to them sucked her teeth. On her son’s behalf, Jewell already hated all the people who would tell him to be a good boy, a big boy, and who would begin to heap shame on him, but nothing like her shame. Her father had predicted this when she got pregnant, when she’d followed Lonnie’s father to Charleston and then come back. Bobo was clever about finding other people’s shortcomings: ungenerous, for sure, but usually correct. He found satisfaction in sensing the undertow of disturbing truths that other people overlooked. He’d said that a cat would be a better mother than Jewell, and that she would end up sending the boy to be raised by Selma, just like his wife, her own no-good mother, had done to Jewell. Yup, he said to himself, he sure knew how to pick ’em.

  And so it was. Jewell squeezed down on the shame to try to contain it, but it had dribbled out, warm, and run down her legs.