If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  ———

  Then the present knocked on Selma’s trailer door, and called her name. Selma’s voice was croaky, and she knew that if she moved too fast, she’d have an accident. So she lay in bed, answering Rayne and Khalil, as if they could read her mind, to stop banging and come on in like they had some sense. Soon enough, they did.

  “That’s why I gave you the key,” she said, as loudly as her morning voice would allow, “so you wouldn’t have to stand out there bangin like a buncha crazy people.”

  “Yeah,” Rayne answered, “I know.” They shouted through the thin trailer door to her bedroom.

  “But we’re two guys,” Khalil explained in his most reasonable singsong. “We can’t just barge in on you.”

  “Well, now you see I keeps the bedroom door closed at night, so you can feel free. Help yourself to some toast and cream cheese. I got grits up in the cabinet if you not too lazy to make ’em, Ray. Take me a while to get dressed.”

  “Well, maybe I am lazy. Listen, Nana, just so you know, I put the mattress out in the sun. Nothing happened to it, it’s just been in the house and needed to get some air.”

  “Yeah, ’cause you know I don’t heat in there in the winter, and it probably got mildew. And you know I can’t haul it out and beat it. Did you beat it?”

  “Yep, plus Khalil’s been beggin for McDonald’s since we left.”

  “McDonald’s no good for you,” Selma said. “I say we go fishin and get some real good eatin.”

  Khalil raised his eyebrows inquiringly at Rayne, who opened his arms, palms up, and shrugged. Then he asked: “You up to fishin?”

  “Wouldn’ta said it otherwise,” she said confidently. “Especially if I got somebody to take all my gear. I’m as bad as takin a baby. Got the wheelchair and the whatchacallit walker, and we got to take bottles of water for me so I don’t pass out. It’s terrible. I been waitin all year for this. Who else gonna put up with all that to take me fishin?”

  Rayne walked three steps to Selma’s bedroom door across the miniature living/dining area, cracked it open, and said quietly: “I found your strongbox.”

  “Oh, thank you, Jesus!” Selma came to the door in her bathrobe, leaning on her night table with one hand, and carrying a toothbrush in the other. “It was under?”

  “Not under. Behind. He built it into the back of the chimney, where the decorative plate was.”

  “You look in? Is the will there?”

  “Looks like it. And some other papers. A couple strange ones. Listen, I’ma leave them here with you to read carefully while I take Khalil for breakfast.”

  “Well, hang on. Can’t he wait a minute while we go through the box together?”

  “No, he can’t. Maybe he could, but he shouldn’t. We’ll be back soon. Oh, and I’ma stop at the Goodwill and get him a coat, since we lost his on the way.”

  “Lost it? How the heck did y’all lose a coat? Can’t he wear something over to the house? We got jackets there.”

  Khalil shook his head violently back and forth until it was wagging on his neck and his eyes spun back and forth. Rayne laughed and grabbed him to stop him before he got dizzy.

  “Nana, I’ll be back.”

  ———

  Rayne used the errand to stop in at the county courthouse, too. In the register-of-deeds office, he asked a young woman whether she could explain the current laws governing heir property. The deed he found in his great-grandmother’s strongbox listed as owners ancestors whom he’d heard of, but who’d been dead many years. She said simply, “If you have a deed in the name of some ancestors who are deceased, and the deed has not been changed, then the land is held in common by all the heirs.”

  He could feel that she’d had this conversation many times before with people who knew things he didn’t, or who had agendas that she was trying to ward off. Rayne was sorry that he still could not understand. He stood mute at the counter working his face to communicate his attempt.

  “Heir property.” She said it as if it made everything clear. “Or heirs property.”

  “Whose heirs?” He figured that any question might elicit some new information that would give him a sense of what he was not getting.

  Khalil asked: “Can I go get the rest of my soda?”

  “You remember where we parked?”

  Khalil’s head bobbed up and down. “And I don’t need the key, ’cause you didn’t lock it.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “Oops.” Khalil made a naughty smile at the young woman. A slight softening of her angular brown face indicated that the boy had succeeded in breaking through her bureaucratic cloak of invisibility.

  “It’s all the heirs,” she said, elongating the word ahhhhhhl. “Those people on that deed, who are they to you?”

  “They are my great-grandfather’s grandparents.”

  “Okay. Think like the Genome Project, like that. All the people on this earth who came from them—all them people—that’s who owns that land.”

  “Oh, my Lord.” Rayne understood now why she’d been so emphatic. But he thought now it was merely a matter of clarifying. “But my great-grandfather bought them out, as I’m told, years and years ago.”

  “Okay. For every heir who gives up ownership, we have to have a quitclaim deed, meaning that they acknowledge legally they have no claim to the land.” She stopped and looked Rayne up and down, this time with a hint of appreciation and even sexual interest. Rayne noticed the tendril of a tattoo curling up at the back of her neckline. “You Ms. Selma Needham’s boy from Philadelphia, aren’t you?

  “She said you was big. She said you look just like her husband, only darker. And I knew it was you ’cause Americans down here don’t wear big ole dreadlocks like them. Only Jamaicans, couple of ’em now and then. She said you got your own company, too.”

  He smiled weakly. Khalil returned, skipping noisily, banging the door, and sucking the ice dry. “Can I have the rest of your soda, too? You got the supersize one. I just got the child’s size.”

  “Sure. Don’t let the door go.”

  “He cute,” the woman said, her eyes following Khalil skipping back out.

  The door slammed. Bam.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. Everybody does it.”

  “So. We can’t all own that one place. I mean it could be thirty, forty people.”

  “It could be 182. You sound like Ms. Selma. She don’t believe it neither. That why she sent you in here? Tell ’er she ain’t slick.”

  “No. It’s me. I just didn’t understand. But the point is that she can’t sell it. Is that correct?”

  “I told her that she should go the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation. They know all about it—and they know how to get clear title on the land. But without clear title, you can’t will it or sell it, can’t. Can’t borrow against it either, which is what she wanted to do. Least you can’t do it unless all the heirs agree.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No, really. You should go see ’em at the Center. ’Cause if one of the heirs wants to sell, lemme tell you, it’s South Carolina law that they can force the sale—and y’all will only have ten days to buy out that heir, and then another thirty days to match the best sales offer.”

  “But if there are 182 of ’em, like you say, then how much can their share be?”

  “Hey, look at Hilton Head.”

  “That isn’t heir property?”

  “Not anymore, it ain’t. Here, I’ll give you the number. I gave it to Ms. Needham, and I know she threw it away.”

  “Okay,” Rayne said. “Let me put it in my phone.”

  “Shame you don’t live down here,” she said.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Well, that was the longest trip to McDonald’s I ever saw.”

  “We stopped at the courthouse,” Khalil said, getting ready to stuff Rayne’s giant drink cup into Selma’s trash can. Rayne had stayed outside to finish a conversation with Lillie.

  “Unh-unh-unh,” sh
e said. “Take it over to the sink, empty all that ice, and then roll up the cup.” She watched him. “I didn’t say ball it up, I said roll it. You fold it in half lengthwise, and then roll that. My garbage here is no bigger than a pocketbook, and I can’t be running up and down emptying it every commercial break.”

  “I’ll empty it,” Khalil said, grabbing the liner bag. “I saw the trash can outside. It looks like a Dumpster.”

  “It is a Dumpster,” she called after him. “And bring me back my bag!”

  ———

  Outside, between the trailer and the old house, Rayne paced a leisurely parabola while he told Lillie about his conversation with his mother, Selma’s aging, and the confusing business about the land. The mild March sunshine showed up the disrepair. Early weeds grew thick and luxuriant, so tall around the house and the trailer behind it that had there been a breeze, they would have waved to welcome him. As Aunt Big Tootch used to say about people she disapproved of—including Selma—the weeds had “pushed themselves forward.”

  Dandelions and chickweed forced through cracks in the asphalt driveway, laid twenty years before but still called “new” by Selma; already tall wild onion and garlic lined the walkway to the back door, as did bushy yellow nut sedge, and something mintlike that had taken over the kitchen garden between nubs of old collards.

  Everything Rayne saw needed sweeping, at least, and a coat of paint. The downspout had been wired back into place crooked. Old hog houses across the south field had finally fallen in, and JJ’s new chicken wire around the coop was stapled to listing scraps of plywood instead of proper stakes. The whole setup was sloppy. It looked like Selma couldn’t keep it going much longer.

  In the last good structures to remain standing, however, and in the lay of the fields and what was left of the ingenious system of dams and drains, Rayne felt the presence of King Needham. It never failed. King’s phrases came to mind, as if Rayne had heard them himself:

  Know your boundaries, boys; what am I talking ’bout?

  Before breakfast or after supper, Selma said, the towering King, his son who died in the war, and Jones traced the periphery of the land. In this way, eight or ten acres a day, they maintained each area. They policed the weeds, disrepair, insects, varmints, neighbors. By the end of the week, they’d circled the farm. Bobo remembered King carrying him on these jaunts as a toddler: in his arms, on his shoulders, in a sling over the big mare mule.

  Grandma Bett used to say: little by little, hen drink the water.

  A day off on Sunday and do it again.

  Think with your feet, boys, Bobo quoted him. Think with your eyes, boys, your ears; taste and see. We gonna notice what other men miss—pay attention, boys!

  It was the only way to keep the land.

  Rayne told some of this to Lillie, who listened, it seemed to him, as if she were taking a patient history. “But I thought you didn’t want the land.”

  “I don’t. I don’t want the goddamned land. And I don’t want Selma’s money from it. I want Selma to sell it. But she talks double-talk about it, and the county courthouse says it’s not possible, and my mother even said she thought it might be more complicated than just selling the land. Yo, all I wanted to do was to bring the kid down and go fishin and eat some corn bread. Shit.”

  “Listen. My old man and my kid are away for the week. So maybe I could do a little research for you.”

  “Oh, baby, would you? Keepin these two occupied is about all I can handle. Damn, one needs twenty-four seven activity; the other one needs to sit down. I’d rather build a damn retaining wall in the rain.”

  “If I find somebody home at the Center you mentioned, you want me to make you an appointment?”

  “Baby, baby, please. But aren’t you studying?”

  “Oh, for sure. Here at home, and then, later, I’m going out to the medical library to join the study group. You’d be amazed how much I can get done—”

  “Without us to take care of… Go on, you can say it.”

  “Plus, hey! Who got called back to the shop, because another one of the Eagles asked for scarification and wanted the person who did his teammate? Who’s guaranteed a thousand dollars to start? Rocco said he said: ‘I want somebody knows what she’s doing. I want the nurse!’ Hah-hah-hah.”

  “Which player?”

  “You know I don’t know. I don’t know ’em till they come in. I’m only interested in whether they keloid and whether they tip.” She laughed to herself, sighed, and said, “Okay, so I can make an appointment with the Center for any time tomorrow, Thursday, or Friday, if they work on Good Friday, or Saturday. So, now you can go fishing. Hey, did Nana Selma make you your corn bread?”

  “She did make us corn bread. That was good.”

  “And, not that you need to think about it now, but your mother called back to invite us out there to dinner next week.”

  “Too much too soon, you think?”

  “No, why not? I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “Aw, baby, you know I talk about not having any family around…”

  “And now you got two ladies plus us, and it’s too many.”

  “Black people never satisfied,” Rayne said. It was an all-occasion quote they used regularly.

  “Hey, Ray, listen, speaking of black people, your mother’s husband is white.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me about the reappearance of his cancer, and I really urged them to go see my nurse-practitioner mentor.”

  “You and that mentor.”

  “She’s the best. She’s a healer, Rayne. Oncology’s her specialty, and she knows healing. It’s not just medicine and a cure. She’s a healer. I don’t think you’re hearing me on this. You think I’m talking para-science, but healing is more than medicine.”

  “I’m tryin to stay with you, baby. But what’s that have to do with him being white?”

  “Oh, right, sorry. ’Cause I started in on how sometimes black men don’t want to go to white women for their health care, and I have this other practitioner to follow up, and she’s, you know, Blasian, blah-blah-blah, and your mother laughed, and said it wouldn’t bother him, because he’s white, too.”

  “Okay. Well, okay. Uh-oh,” Rayne said. “I see Selma’s sending Khalil out to the truck with the old fishing poles. Looks like it’s time to roll. God, I miss you. Why’d you give me that send-off?”

  “So you’d miss me,” she said.

  CHAPTER 17

  They headed for the river, but driving the old way proved impossible. Where there had been country roads through farmland alternating with swamp and scrub forest, now there had sprung up the new golf course, two pretentious, plantation-something gated communities, and new corporate headquarters for two foreign companies. They swallowed up rights-of-way, so that the roads ended abruptly. Selma thought she remembered, but finally admitted after the third detour that she could no longer find a way. Here and there, they drove through one-horse towns with names Rayne recalled. Twice, they slowed past a lineup of smallish houses, ranch, saltbox, trailers. Young black men stood in the middle of the road where the centerline must have been painted once.

  “This brother must know how to get there,” Rayne said, rolling down his window.

  “They don’t know nothing ’bout nothing but how to sell some drugs and steal,” Selma said. “Don’t ask them niggers nothin.”

  Rayne’s window was already opening to let in the heavy, gritty bass line underneath rap music from a boom box perched on top of a broken kitchen chair. It was a low-tech country setup for a piece of music that Rayne knew from somewhere, but couldn’t place.

  “Hey, you a Rasta? Want some ganja?” the young man asked.

  Selma said: “Don’t put none o’ that stuff in this truck, you! This a clean truck. We got chilren in this truck.”

  “Hey, lady,” the man said, palms up. “Y’all stopped to talk to me.”

  “I’m lookin for the road to the Edisto River. I’m looking for one of the
places right where it opens up to the sea. It’s like a bay, and there’s a place that juts out; it’s like, on one side people swim, and on the other they fish. We used to call it Mermaid Landing, I think.”

  The guy looked at Rayne with heavy-lidded eyes just focused. His cap had slipped back off perfect cornrows done in a tight zigzag. His eyes looked dead.

  “Don’t worry ’bout it,” Rayne said.

  “Where you from? New York?”

  “I tole you he don’t know nothing.”

  “It’s just like a swimming hole.” Rayne meant this to end the conversation.

  “A what?”

  “Roll up the window!” Selma whispered, making a lifting motion with her hand.

  “Nothing, man, just a swimming hole.”

  “Oh, swimmin hoes! No, man. We ain’t got no fuckin swimmin hoes down here. Hoes down here go on they feet, or preferably on they back.” He cracked himself up, and doubled over laughing. “Or on they knees.” The other three men lined along the road turned to see what was happening. The rap line ended with “my bitch.”

  “Jesus!” Selma said. “The boy’s settin right here in the back listenin to that filth. Ray, roll up the window, I tell you!”

  Rayne couldn’t help but think of a crazy comeback: that they used to have mermaids, but now they had drugs instead. He smiled to himself.

  “What is you smiling about?” Selma hissed. “That fool is high as a kite.”

  “Thanks,” Rayne said, and drove off.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Selma said, breathing heavily. “I was sure he was gonna shoot us.”