“You’ll have to do something about those boots.” It was an inadequate thing to say, these first words uttered to my sister in more than half a century, but Rosemarie would have to earn my graciousness.
My sister bent down and unlaced her boots, leaning one arm at a time against Olva to remove them. When she lined them on a step, I noticed that her socks were even dirtier than the boots that had sheltered them. She leveled her chin and looked in my general direction.
“Sister.”
The word came out like she had poured it into an empty container and it had not quite reached the mark.
I was not prepared for my sister to be an old woman, and—with a distressing jolt—I wondered if she was having the same thought about me. She had been the town beauty. Both golden-haired and golden-eyed, she had learned early on what extraordinary beauty reaped: people tended to indulge her every whim just to see her face dance with pleasure, but accompanying that privilege was the constant scrutiny of older men, especially Shep Bramlett, whose gaze dispersed strangely when he stared at her.
Her faced had thinned considerably. I could see the muscles working under her cheeks as if they had been removed and rethreaded closer to the surface. Down her back hung a tassel of thick silver hair, tied off in the middle with a length of butcher’s string, and she wore a gray dress that held the sad promise of once being black.
“Do you have any other clothes in that bag?” I motioned at the small camel-colored duffel she had set down on the step. “You look like one of the Sullivan girls.”
“I’ll be staying here, Judith. In the house.”
I coughed. It was ridiculous for her to think she could waltz back into our lives. I wasn’t about to acknowledge the idea of her staying with us. Instead, I said, “Do you remember the Sullivans?”
My sister’s gaze settled somewhere above my head.
“It’s apparent you have forgotten a great deal, Rosemarie.” To supplement her memory, I reminded her of the time I invited the Sullivan girls, all five of them, into our house.
The arrangement was that those girls would pay me two marbles each to wash off in our parents’ shower. It was one of those summers when humidity curdled the air and dark clouds buzzed like hives over the hills. We had grown accustomed to ferocious afternoon storms, which churned up the Carolina clay and dressed in a punitive shade of terra-cotta those wilder children who could not be coaxed indoors. I considered it a civic duty to clean up those girls, whose house did not have running water. Once a week, they were permitted a hasty scrubbing in the aluminum washtub that sat in their backyard. The Sullivans agreed to my arrangement when they realized the experience would involve going inside, the whole concept of bathing indoors being new to them. It wasn’t lost on me that it would be a real treat for them to step into our house, what with the reputation our family had for collecting fine things.
At that time, a walk-in shower was one of a kind. Ours was especially magnificent, with thin rectangular tiles stained a rich caramel and a rainfall showerhead made of pure copper that dangled from the ceiling like the face of a giant sunflower. Those five Sullivan girls stripped down to their undergarments and ushered themselves into the shower. Too petrified to move or make eye contact with one another, ever so faintly turtling their heads into their shoulders, they seemed relieved when nothing more than water rained down on them.
Once clean, their gratitude was less forthcoming than I expected. In fact, the whole occasion was cast with a somberness that I couldn’t quite seem to wash away, no matter how strenuous my reassurances. On their way out, the eldest sister, Lindy, paused to look at the wooden spinning wheel that towered in a grand and frightening way on the landing of our staircase. I told her it was not part of the tour, thank you kindly, and pried an extra marble from her clean little fist.
When I had concluded my story about the Sullivans, I folded my hands in my lap. But it was like my sister had not absorbed a word.
“I plan to stay here, Judith. In the house.”
I looked to Olva, whose mouth was set in a way I understood to mean she was not going to object to Rosemarie’s proposal.
“Stay?” I said to my sister. “Here?” In my voice rose an old fury newly minted. “And how long do you intend to visit?”
Olva tilted her head in the way she did when calculating sums or noticing a grasshopper’s shed skin, the brittle rind of a prior life. “Technically, isn’t this house half Rosemarie’s?”
I was stunned into silence. “Olva, really,” I finally said. I didn’t want to call attention to her ignorance, but we all knew Rosemarie had relinquished her part of our family’s estate when she ran off from Bound.
So it was a shock to me what came out of my sister’s mouth.
“Yes, it is,” she said, climbing the steps and striding toward the front door with renewed strength. In one swift, deliberate movement, she opened it. As she started across the threshold, she paused. Something new came into her face, and she leaned one arm against the doorjamb and plucked off her socks before continuing into the house.
Looking at that dirty little twist of socks in the doorway, I found myself wishing she had left them on.
Olva and I followed Rosemarie into the house as though she were giving us a tour and not the other way around. My sister never did understand how to make a proper arrival, in which she might bring a loaf of currant bread to show some courtesy to her hostess. When we were children, her version of a gift was an outstretched fist with a spring-loaded grasshopper hidden inside. It never ceased to astonish me that we Kratt children grew up in the same hot cocoon of childhood yet emerged as such singular organisms, barely even the same species.
Rosemarie swiveled her head around the living room, taking stock of its contents. “You haven’t moved anything. All this clutter.” She clucked—in judgment of my housekeeping!
I followed her eyes and studied the room myself. The large bookcase that stretched up the far wall was crowded messily with books, their covers in muted shades of brown and green. Books filled every vertical slot, and other books were stacked, balanced on lips of shelves, giving the bookcase the appearance of a majestic oak plagued with a bad case of bracket fungi. On the floor surrounding the bookcase sat more books, stacks upon stacks, as if waiting their turn for a proper spot. From the look of things—a frosting of dust on the shelves—their wait would be indefinite. How long had it been like this?
My eyes trailed across the rest of the room. An empty picture frame, all scroll and gilt, propped against the wall. A tangle of clothes—whose, I wasn’t sure—on the sofa. Various drawers sat ajar (the Hepplewhite side table, the old watchmaker’s workbench) as though someone hadn’t bothered to push them back fully, and this gave the sense of the room having been tipped on its side and shaken by a curious child. I suddenly felt very warm. When I rubbed my hands together, they were covered in a film of moisture.
“Olva,” I said sternly, but she was already trotting over to Rosemarie.
“Tell us everything!” Olva said, grabbing my sister’s hand.
“Everything?” Rosemarie was enjoying the attention.
“Don’t dare leave out a thing!”
“I hardly know where to begin,” Rosemarie said and then fell silent, as if her experiences were threads too fine and numerous to catch hold of. An idea brought her around. “What is that dead traffic light in town?”
“Bound got its own traffic light!” Olva cried. “Can you believe that?”
Rosemarie laughed—uncharitably, I thought.
“It used to be a true traffic light,” Olva went on, “and then a few years back, they replaced it with a single blinking yellow light. Then they turned off the blinking light. But they didn’t even have the consideration to remove it.”
“Is that right?” Rosemarie said, a perk in her voice. She no doubt found great satisfaction in the way Bound had gone down since s
he had left. I didn’t think it was an exaggeration to say she probably saw her absence as contributing to its decline.
People can be wrongheaded in their assumptions about why somebody would stay in a small town. They imagine there must be a meekness in you for choosing to remain in a place where your possibilities are laid out in front of you so far in advance. I was not bothered, for instance, that my neighbor Ruth, who was a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian church, was buried in the same cream calico suit she was married in fifty years earlier.
I gave a little cough, but no one noticed. “Is anyone going to bring the breakfast plates in?”
Olva looked at me crossly, and neither one of them did anything, so I suppose I got my answer. I marched outside and cleared the table. When I returned inside and made a direct course for the kitchen, I heard Olva padding behind me.
“Go talk to your sister!” she said in a hard whisper. “You haven’t seen her in half a lifetime.”
I wheeled around. “Aren’t you the least bit irritated she hasn’t shown her face in sixty years?”
“Start small,” she said gently. “Ask her about her trip home. How hard is that?”
I thought it over. “Not hard at all,” I said, surprised by my answer. I was buzzing a little with the possibility as we made our way back to the living room.
When I saw Rosemarie, all possibility evaporated. I felt something hard crest inside me. She was tipping back and forth in the burgundy rocking chair, and I found merely the way she was sitting infuriating. She had an elbow planted in the upholstery, and her finger was pointing up at the floor lamp that flanked the chair. It looked as if she’d been waiting like that, frozen in that position, while we were in the kitchen. My sister always made the assumption that someone would arrive to take notice of her.
“We need a new light here,” she said. Then looking around, she shook her head critically. “It’s so dark in this house.”
“Taking up your landlord duties so soon?”
For the first time, Rosemarie looked directly at me, squinting a little as if she would have to get used to the practice by degrees. “Is there a general store in town?” she asked, turning to Olva. “I can pick up some light bulbs.”
What little knowledge my sister possessed! She would not even know where to go in Bound for light bulbs. Our family store was no longer an option. Shep Bramlett bought it from Daddy Kratt in 1930 but shut it down shortly afterward. Mr. Bramlett lacked the business acumen of my father, and it was alarming to see how quickly the store went downhill. While I didn’t like to see it go, I felt its closing was a testament to Daddy Kratt’s abilities.
Shep Bramlett’s grandson now owns the only store in town—a scrawny convenience store—and his mother, Jolly, has shared with me, on too many occasions to count, how he can barely make a living selling those low-quality, disposable goods, which are delivered in filthy trucks that grind and belch down the road. Olva once witnessed a delivery in progress. It gave me great pause to hear how the cellophane-wrapped merchandise crashed to the ground, flung there without the least bit of consideration by a pimply-faced boy who hardly looked old enough to drive the delivery truck. When I was in charge of the inventory at our store, I held some reverence for my duties. Our customers often had very little, and the items we sold helped them live their lives the best they could.
My sister was still sitting there in the burgundy rocker, glaring at me. I was so perturbed by her company, I had to leave the room. Olva and I had a laugh about it later, my storming out of the room on account of light bulbs. It just goes to show that conversations with siblings cannot be separated from all the conversations that came before. That is just the way of it.
* * *
The day after her arrival, Rosemarie and I sat on the porch in silence. The cicadas let off their metallic drone as twilight approached. Earlier, Olva had said I was risking the mosquitoes by going outside, but I told her my old blood no longer interested them. She replied that my old blood was doing me just fine. I laughed and remarked that maybe it was the other way around: my blood had turned up its nose at those pests. Natural selection at work, I said to her.
For the past two days, Olva had been helping Rosemarie settle into the house, which generated more commotion than I judged necessary. I had heard Olva making a grand fuss over locating the linens for my sister, who could have found them herself within two minutes of searching. Rosemarie had taken it upon herself to move some items in the house—including a pair of Edwardian neoclassical brass candleholders (10 inches tall)—and while I moved them back promptly, I was immune to her provocations, because I had more important matters to attend to. I had shut myself in the study all day to work on my inventory.
As we sat on the porch, I turned to my sister, but her chin was locked forward. She seemed keen on not missing a moment of the fading light.
Into the driveway swooped a white Taurus sedan. Two figures emerged.
“Should you be driving at this hour?” I called out.
“Who is that?” Rosemarie asked.
“You don’t recognize the Bramlett sisters? I sometimes forget how long you have been away.”
Rosemarie escaped into the house.
Walking along the path toward me were Jolly and Vi Bramlett. I had known the Bramlett sisters my entire life. As children, we spent a good deal of time together, on account of our fathers’ business partnership. Although that hadn’t drawn us together, as it might have, we still shared the acrimony of being something like kin. From an early age, I had determined that Jolly was doomed to live up to the expectations of her unfortunate name. She had always been ebullient to a fault—a forced cheerfulness, the kind that blunts a terrible temper—and over the years, she had gained considerable weight, which had taken up residence exclusively in her cheeks and belly, making her appear, impossibly, even jollier.
Vi cut a different figure. She was alarmingly thin, and her mouth hung open. Her eyes had a soft, pleading quality, as if soliciting help for her mouth problem. Vi’s name was not short for Violet or Viola, and early on in life, she seemed to accept this as a mandate that she was to occupy only about a third of the space of a regular person. Next to one another, Jolly and Vi paired like a set of souvenir salt and pepper shakers.
Well now, I wondered what they were thinking about me.
“We were coming back from checking in on our rental properties, and we saw you sitting on your porch,” Jolly said.
“Do you always check on your properties so late?”
Jolly’s mouth flattened. “Dealing with tenants is like having children all over again.” Suddenly, her right hand reared up and smacked her arm. “Aren’t you getting eaten up by mosquitoes?”
I supposed it was going to be a war of questions, and fatigued by the idea, I pretended not to hear her. Undeterred, Jolly helped herself to a chair on the porch beside me. Vi remained at the bottom of the steps, rocking on her feet to the rhythm of some sad song in her mind.
Jolly was incapable of a quiet moment, so she said, “Do you remember when we used to put straight pins on the railroad tracks, and the trains would fuse them into Xs?”
“We used to play on the crossties, too,” I replied. “The ones stacked up next to the depot.” Here we were, having some memories.
“There was that young black fellow who got caught stealing from the depot office,” Vi said.
Jolly and I stared at her, and our shock at her unsolicited words momentarily dulled our reaction to what she was saying.
“What a sad thing,” Vi finished, shaking her head.
Jolly snapped to her senses. She waved her hand. “Oh, it wasn’t as sad as you remember, Vi. I think he just got in trouble because he was on the whites-only side of the platform.”
“No,” said Vi, and she was uncharacteristically firm. “He got caught stealing—it wasn’t very much, a few dollars from the ti
ll—but some of the boys from our high school caught him and cut off the tip of one of his fingers. I think they used a cotton hoe. It was wrong of them.”
“Good Lord, Vi,” I said. “What in the world are you talking about?” Yet I remembered the boy, too, and what had happened to him.
Jolly set a stern look on her sister. But Vi had already retreated, settling into a doleful contemplation of the yard. “Saturdays were my favorite,” Jolly said, pressing on as if Vi’s comments had been an unpleasant detour. “The baseball games in the summer! And the laying-by time when all the cotton had been planted.”
Jolly turned to me, as if it were my turn to supply a good memory. I did not recall going to any baseball games—I hadn’t been invited to any—so I said, “Did you know that the site of the baseball field is of some historical interest?” Vi actually turned her head toward me, which for some reason gave my heart a jolt of stage fright. I coughed and went on. “It is my understanding that during the War of Independence, a patriot colonel and his troops made camp there after the battle at Kings Mountain. In his custody were several captured Tories, who were hanged and then buried at the site.”
Jolly murmured, “Very interesting.”
“Is it not funny,” I continued, “that when kids play baseball there now, they are running over Tory graves?”
Vi’s forehead wrinkled.
Jolly looked equally puzzled. “Kids do play there, Judith, but it’s not a baseball field any longer,” Jolly said. “It’s a playground now.”
“Of course it is,” I said quickly.
Jolly threw her hands on her knees and said, “Let’s go down to the playground right now.” Her eyes widened. “Or the depot. Let’s go down to the old depot!”
I shot out of my seat. “No!”
“Is everything all right?”
It was Olva, peeping her head out the front door. When she saw Jolly, her face tensed. I had returned to my seat, the sudden movement making me woozy.
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt Page 5