“I couldn’t agree more.” I saw that Olva was preoccupied with her duties. We could discuss the inventory later.
When Olva righted herself, she reached for the two coffee cups with their twin exhalations of steam. She set them on the old wooden tray and loaded the rest of the contents of our breakfast onto it. I studied the tray for a moment, dismissing it. The tray had been in our family for generations—I knew that—but nothing distinguished it. It was not valuable enough for the inventory.
As I headed toward the front porch, I marveled at my new lens. I cast my eyes about the room, and the objects there—Victorian chaise longue, octagonal Jacobean parlor table, and mahogany sewing cabinet—sat up on their haunches expectantly. With a mild nod or shake of my head, I told them their fates regarding whether they would be remembered in my inventory. What hopes they had!
I reached the front door and turned my head back. “Bring out the doilies,” I said, but Olva was already moving through the door, doilies in hand. She set up our folding table, tucked a flowering branch of honeysuckle in a vase, and spooned little banks of orange marmalade alongside our biscuits. The doilies rose to the occasion, too, fulfilling their obligations by guiding our coffee cups back to their spots.
We sat drinking our coffee, and I shielded my eyes from the sun. How bright the world was! Our street was as sleepy as usual, even though it was one of the main arteries through Bound. It was possible to sit on our porch and not lay your eyes on another house; a few were there, of course, about an acre away to the east and south, but hedges or rows of mature red cedars hid them. Our neighbors did not want to see us as much as we did not want to see them.
My gaze returned to what was in front of me. An earthworm, waterlogged from an early morning rain, lay marooned on the brick lip of the porch. Bird songs filled the air, and I considered how their calls would change as the day lengthened, how their light and constant morning chatter would cede to an afternoon of sporadic, urgent cries, and how at nightfall, their conversations would be drowned out by the shattering trills of crickets and frogs. When I looked down again, the earthworm was gone.
A burgundy Pontiac Grand Am crept into view on the street. It was Marcus, our paperboy. Paperman. Olva has reminded me of this distinction, even though from our vantage point, a man in his thirties counts as a boy. From the driver’s side window, his thin black hand extended.
I turned to Olva. “I wonder how long he will retain this job.”
Marcus could not seem to settle on any one way of earning a living. Olva didn’t say anything, so I went on. “It’s a shame he doesn’t earn enough money fixing things.” Despite his lack of ambition, Marcus possessed considerable skills as a repairman. He had once ably restored my Westclox alarm clock (Big Ben model), and I even talked him down to a lower price for his work.
“I’d say his difficulty keeping a job is not entirely his fault,” Olva said, and her face went a little slack, the caramel skin around her eyes sagging, as if what I had said about Marcus had pushed her deep into thought.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Bound is not always the most welcoming place.”
“Welcoming? Marcus’s family has lived in and around Bound for generations. Everyone remembers that.”
“A long memory is sometimes the problem,” Olva responded.
“Good grief, Olva, all I’m saying is that Marcus’s family has a history here.”
She exhaled. “Memory and history are bound up with one another. Where does one end and the other begin?”
She didn’t pause for an answer, because just like that, her expression snapped back to what was in front of her, and she called out “Marcus!” as she lifted herself from her chair. Before launching down the steps, she shifted her body back toward the table to grab one of the unopened jars of marmalade.
“Is that necessary?” I asked. “We already pay for the newspaper.”
She dismissed me with a wave of her hand and made her way toward the car. Marcus met her halfway. The two smiled at one another, and Olva traded the jar of marmalade for the York Herald. She said something to him and leaned back to give him a view of the porch.
Because it was required, I offered a little wave. He squinted at me, not waving back, and the two kept talking.
As I watched them, my attention was stolen by a burst of finches from a nearby bush. One hopped on the porch, angling its thimble head at me. It was clear in that gesture, splendid in its precision, that he wanted some portion of my toast. I didn’t give him any but marveled at our communication, at my ability to know his meaning without a word exchanged. How different it was with people, who always seemed to take offense, no matter how thorough my explanations.
Suddenly, the Pontiac’s back door flew open. Marcus’s six-year-old daughter jumped out, clutching the stuffed brown bunny I had never seen her without. A white blanket and several toys fell out of the car as well, and she hastily gathered the items up and stuffed them where she had been sitting.
“Good morning, Ms. Kratt,” Marcus said as the three of them approached me.
“Hello, Marcus.”
Marcus always struck me as taller up close than my usual view of him from the porch. He stretched so high, in fact, that his slender body assumed a slight sway, not unlike the fir trees out behind the henhouse that always seemed to be looking down on me as a child and judging my juvenile decisions. He would have benefitted from a sturdier build, for he appeared beset by a fatigue that whittled down his already gaunt frame. A boy wearing the exhaustion of old age.
I nodded at his daughter. “And hello to you, too, Amaryllis.”
The child wore a thin yellow sundress but no shoes of any kind. Her poor bunny was naked, its fur frayed. I had known Amaryllis since she was a baby. Olva would bring her to the house when she was too young to accompany her father to whatever job he held at the moment, whether that was house painting or working as a dishwasher at the Bound Grill. The poor thing was motherless. A car accident as her mother returned home alone with bread and milk from the market. In what casual corners tragedy lurked! After the death, Olva told me Amaryllis would survive because Marcus had a maternal way about him. The next day, Olva asked me if I wouldn’t mind not mentioning that to him. Marcus and Amaryllis were the only black folk Olva spent any time with. Olva once told me this was because she and Marcus were both outsiders in their own ways. At the time, I had thought I might respond, but not knowing which words were suitable, I settled on none.
The child’s eyes met mine. “Why are your earlobes so big?”
“Now, Amaryllis,” Marcus said. She ran around to cling to the backs of his legs.
Children can be cruel, and I don’t know why that isn’t a more frequent topic of conversation.
“Is your bunny named Peter Rabbit? Are you familiar with that book? It is a classic.”
She shrugged and moved around to hang on her father’s arm. The child was always draped on him in some fashion or another, but it didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it, though it could not have been comfortable in the least.
“If your bunny is indeed Peter Rabbit,” I said to Amaryllis, “then he should be wearing a smart blue jacket with brass buttons. Did you lose his clothes?”
“Now, Miss Judith,” Olva said.
Marcus appeared to be studying me. I coughed. “I will get her the book,” I said. “I seem to remember we have an old edition in the house somewhere.”
Amaryllis swung the bunny in circles by one of its legs. It was a wonder the thing had managed to retain its limbs. “He lost his jacket in the garden,” she said. Then she stopped twirling the bunny and planted a look on me. “You are old like Mr. McGregor.”
“I will take that as a compliment. It was Mr. McGregor’s property, after all.” Amaryllis dashed toward the side yard, but I called after her. “And Peter Rabbit was the trespasser! One can ha
rdly impugn Mr. McGregor for his actions!”
I looked over at Olva and Marcus, who were both stifling smiles, which they thought they could put past me. I pressed my lips together to let them know they could not.
Olva had something else on her mind. “Did you hear about the car manufacturer?”
“I did, Olva. As I’ve always said, Bound will survive.” A foreign car manufacturer had chosen Spartanburg, fifty miles to our west, for its North American headquarters. Its proximity would benefit Bound: our people could find work there, and if Spartanburg proved hospitable, other companies might follow. And then perhaps one of those companies would someday choose Bound.
Olva sniffed. I knew what she was going to say.
“Like a nickel in a fifty-gallon barrel,” she said. “How will those jobs make up for so many textile factories closing in South Carolina?”
Bound was once a classic cotton gin town. Nowadays, people don’t know what that means. Since the late nineteenth century, the Piedmont of South Carolina, where Bound is located, was a magnet for the textile business, partly because the fleet-footed rivers hugging our hilly terrain made for good waterpower but also in no small part because of the sure-mindedness of residents like my father. It was true that the cotton industry had been on the decline in our area since the 1960s. Lately, so much cloth was imported from the far reaches of the globe. But I, for one, had faith that we would pull through. Towns like Bound built the South, after all.
“Don’t be so pessimistic,” I told Olva. “You need to leave off watching the nightly news.”
“I agree with you,” Marcus said. “I’m always telling Olva to look forward rather than backward.” With this last word, his hand cartwheeled to indicate our surroundings. I wasn’t sure if his gesture meant the South, our town, or my house in particular.
I wasn’t sure if Marcus had understood me completely. Of course Bound needed to look forward, but there was still value in looking back.
“You know, Marcus, you inherited your skills as a repairman from your great-grandfather Charlie. There was nothing he couldn’t fix in our store.”
Rather than let Marcus respond, Olva promptly gestured to something out in the yard, guiding him toward whatever it was, and they continued to talk with one another, their voices fading into the background. My eyelids settled over my eyes. Visitors were exhausting.
“Are you sleeping?”
“No, Amaryllis, I am not sleeping.” I opened one eye, then the other. The child had crept beside me without a sound.
“Do you sleepwalk like Miss Olva?”
“Olva does not sleepwalk,” I corrected.
The child shook her head doggedly. “She told Daddy she has been sleepwalking through life. She said that was about to change.”
I opened my mouth to question Amaryllis, but a riot of birdcalls filled the air, luring her attention. She wheeled off toward one of the large oaks in the yard. As she did, a blue jay dropped fluidly from the same oak and made off with another earthworm. He bolted upward into the lean clouds before sinking back toward the roof of the house. Just when it seemed he might land there on the red clay tiles, he pitched right, heading south toward our town’s main street. I saw him disappear down York Street.
I imagined that blue jay crossing the railroad tracks before he soared over the post office and the site of our old family store, which now sits abandoned. If he continued flying south, that jay would pass over the old Kratt residence, a squalid shotgun house that Daddy Kratt bought before he made his cotton fortune. He was sentimental about it, the first house he bought with his own money, where he went from being a nobody to a somebody. He built this impressive house, but I don’t think he ever loved it as much as that first one. If Daddy Kratt were alive, I wondered, what would he think of my inventory? He was certainly not shy of price tags, but value ran deeper for him.
It was a curious trait of my father. For all his hardness, wistfulness could visibly transport him. (We grew skilled at using those moments to dash out of rooms, away from him.) It might be an old horseshoe from his favorite mare. Or just as likely a bird’s nest saved from his childhood. I once did find a nest hidden away at the back of his cedar closet. It was perfectly thatched, which made me realize that every bird’s nest I’ve ever found—tucked underneath eaves of roofs or abandoned in old oaks—was whole and complete. Never in my life have I come upon a partial or damaged nest. You have to admire a house built so doggedly by a creature whose prevailing instinct is to fly.
That blue jay. I imagined him swerving over the abandoned train depot, gliding further west above the site of the old schoolhouse on which nothing else was ever built, then shooting straight up to take an even wider view of Bound: fields clotted with kudzu, creeks inlaid with blinding mica, and our unnamed lake to the north, where Byrd Parker’s wife drowned herself and her unborn child. The lake was now so overrun with bluegill that it had assumed a moldering, feculent smell. On the other end of town, along the southern boundary, that jay would spy a row of houses—shacks really—that were old sharecroppers’ lodgings. The Bramlett sisters now owned them.
“Miss Judith,” Olva was saying. “Marcus and Amaryllis are leaving.”
They were already walking toward the car.
“Marcus,” I called after him. “Do you still live in one of those rentals owned by the Bramlett sisters?”
He stopped in his tracks. There was a long band of silence.
“Do you still live there?”
Marcus moved his chin so that I saw his profile. “Yes, we do.”
My mind drifted back to the blue jay. Up he flew, taking that towering view again, looking down on where Marcus and Amaryllis lived. The Bramlett sisters, Jolly and Vi, were the daughters of my father’s most trusted business partner, Shep Bramlett.
“Have they come here? Looking for me?”
“What?” I said to Marcus. “No. Why would they?”
Silence settled between us again. I tried to think of something pleasant to say about Jolly and Vi, but a wind seemed to rattle around in my mind. I was therefore grateful when Marcus said he needed to get back to his route and gave Olva a polite salute before joining Amaryllis at the Pontiac. He hurried the child into the car.
As the Pontiac headed off, Olva returned to her seat beside me on the porch. We watched as earthworms continued to be picked off. I had never seen so many blue jays in our yard. Small blue bodies everywhere, as if the sky were relinquishing bits of itself.
“Life is bound by certain rules,” I said to Olva, “and I guess we’ve got to play along.” She didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. “It puts your mind at ease when you think of things that way, wouldn’t you say? Survival of the fittest, I suppose.”
After a few moments, she spoke. “Just like old man Darwin taught.”
She said it like she had seen him last Wednesday at the Piggly Wiggly. I do enjoy Olva’s company. Her response sent us both into a little eddy of laughter, the gay sound rising into the morning air and carrying to the tops of the trees, where I wondered if the birds might be appreciating it in the same way we found enchantment in their songs. We sat in each other’s company in silence, watching the birds and lizards and earthworms and butterflies and every other cog in this brilliant mechanism churn on and on.
After a while, Olva began to stir.
I was still thinking of Darwin. “At the end of Origin of Species,” I mused, “Darwin talks about the most exalted object. Doesn’t that remind you of my inventory?”
“Mmm,” Olva said.
“What I mean—”
“I don’t think he’s talking about an actual object, Miss Judith.”
“Of course not.”
“If I remember correctly, that most exalted object is the evolution of a human being.” Olva paused. “A person.”
I sometimes forgot that growing up, Olva and I shared all the
same books. And whenever tutors were thrust upon the three Kratt children, our Aunt Dee saw that Olva was there alongside us.
“Well, it’s possible you are right, Olva. Details sometimes escape me. At any rate, the phrase is beautifully put. Most exalted object. Darwin was a scientist but a poet at heart. I’ve always appreciated how he had the courage to write the way he wanted.”
Olva seemed to consider this. “It’s a luxury to be able to write or speak in the way you want.” She didn’t appear to invite a response to this, and she began clearing the plates.
I didn’t mind, because there was something else I wanted to know.
“Olva, I have a question for you. Amaryllis mentioned something about your sleepwalking.”
Olva paused suddenly, a plate in each hand. Her face dialed in on something out in the yard. When I followed her eyes, I heard her breath catch. She had keener eyesight than mine, for all I saw was a smudge of motion in the place she was looking. It resembled a gray blemish of grease, like the residue of a nose pressed to a window, which I wanted to clean off with the cuff of my blouse.
“Is that Miss Rosemarie?” Olva said. Her voice seemed to carry less surprise than elation.
I stood up, but an acute rush to my head forced me back into my chair.
Olva didn’t notice. She squinted at the sidewalk, her face crimped in pleasure. “Oh, it is! Miss Rosemarie!” she cried.
Olva lifted her right hand and waved even though she still had hold of a plate. She snorted, put the plate down, then picked it up again. She was in such a state, I’m afraid she didn’t quite know what she was doing.
Rosemarie waved hysterically, prompting Olva to run out to meet her. Reaching one another, they embraced for so long, I had to turn my head.
My blue jay, from his grand height, had not seen everything. Here was my sister, after sixty years.
Olva accompanied Rosemarie all the way back to the porch. When they managed to get there, Rosemarie hauled one muddy boot on the first step and exhaled as if she had walked clear from the edge of the world without stopping until that very moment. I saw she had no plans to remove those boots before entering my home.
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt Page 4