If Daddy Kratt was hardest on anyone, it was the poor white folks. These were the people he would have felt most comfortable with, owing to his origins, but for them, his kinship and disgust arose in equal measure. In those circumstances, my father was the worst version of himself. From those poor whites, he made me repossess things from their children—a toy train, a worn teddy bear. I wondered whether any of the toys in our house had come from those families. For all I knew, they might still be there, hiding in plain sight among our other toys, even now bewildered by their new surroundings.
That day, as I rode with him, Daddy Kratt was in a particularly foul mood. I wondered if it had to do with his idea to stockpile his cotton. Now, everyone, not just Olva, was worried about the nation’s economy, and offended by the slumping price of the crop, my father had devised a plan to hoard his cotton at one of the gins until the prices rose, which he was certain would happen soon. Shep Bramlett was advising against it, and they rarely parted ways on business matters. I opened my mouth to ask my father about it but then thought better of rousing his anger.
On our way to the next tenant, we passed Aunt Dee’s house, where Olva also lived. Daddy Kratt slowed the Cadillac to a crawl.
Surrounded by sky-piercing loblolly pines and water oaks outfitted with fat-thumbed leaves, Aunt Dee’s house, a simple but sturdy one-room dwelling, sat on a raised callus of earth, a bald spot amid a thicket of trees. When my siblings and I ventured onto her property, she invariably put us to work, snapping beans or digging the stinking guts out of pumpkins. Overrun with all manner of fruit and vegetables, she existed in a continual cycle of stockpiling, pickling, and preserving. You considered yourself lucky when you emerged from her house not brined in a peculiar liquid or stashed in the root cellar. Built with wide hips and solid, ill-proportioned limbs, Dee herself resembled a sturdy tuber, resilient and substantial and guaranteed to be around a long while if stored properly. She often told me that not having a husband was what kept her mind fit and her nerves calm. She said she would outlive all the men of her age in Bound anyhow.
Dee’s acreage was full of curiosities: a battered car shrouded in kudzu, some kind of water-measuring device—a giant tub—heaved onto its side, and a teepee that had been built by a real Indian who had lived on her land for a year. Dee had the knack for attracting all manner of wanderers. She was always taking them in and then eventually sending them away with at least a three-month supply of pickled eggs or leathered ropes of dried fruit to tide them over until their next stop.
The vegetation that surrounded Dee’s was so various, it seemed suited for a different ecosystem altogether. When we were younger, Quincy and I had played cowboys and Indians there, and we hardly had to stoke our imaginations to pretend we were somewhere savage and inscrutable, where the tendril of some plant might curl around your ankle and pull you down into a barbaric underworld. Dee had cultivated her house, as well as the generous land surrounding it, as a place outside of Bound, even though it was still within the town’s limits.
The singularity of Dee’s home, I realize now, was what permitted Olva to live there. Otherwise, a colored child living with a white woman from a prominent family would have been forbidden. And the way Dee lived, more like a vagabond than a true DeLour, perplexed people from the start; maybe that’s why she took up unconventional habits to begin with, so that anything she did subsequently seemed no stranger than the last. Using this tactic, Dee had educated Olva just as we had been educated, with tutors and a sense of determination about the importance of school.
Aunt Dee’s was where Mama lived for an entire year or so before I was born. As Dee told me, Daddy Kratt had barely noticed, because he was so busy with his fledgling cotton business. He had not even noticed when Dee and Mama left town for several months to visit some of Dee’s far-flung friends, people who were always eager to return a favor to my aunt because she was so generous with the ones she doled out in the first place. Cotton fever, Dee said, describing the way Daddy Kratt had lost himself in the business, and she shook her head disapprovingly, but she also seemed a little relieved, as if keeping him distracted might not be such a bad thing.
Daddy Kratt stopped the Cadillac outside Dee’s house. He gave her front door such a hard look, I thought it might push it down.
“Are we paying Aunt Dee a visit?” I asked quietly. “I don’t think Mama is there today.”
He ignored me and put his foot on the gas pedal a little more forcefully than was required. The engine roared, and we sailed away from Dee’s.
As we did, I remembered a conversation I had overheard a day earlier between Mama and Aunt Dee. Having come upon Mama and Aunt Dee talking in our hallway, I was able to duck out of sight in the anteroom to the kitchen and listen. Aunt Dee’s voice guttered with emotion. “You must not give her gifts like that,” she said to Mama. “Do you understand the consequences? Listen to me! Are you listening?”
Silence.
“Say something.”
“I want her to have some of our family’s things” was Mama’s response, spoken in halting whispers. “Can you understand that?” Her voice thinned out as she spoke, dissipating as she lost her resolve. I heard a small spasm of a sob escape her.
“I know you do,” Dee said, her voice softening. “But it puts her in danger walking around wearing Grandmother’s cameo on her neck.”
My ears pricked at the mention of the cameo.
“Yes,” said Mama faintly.
“Oh, Sister,” Dee said. “I love Olva as much as you do, and I hardly want to take things away from her—”
“I cannot ask her to return it! Have we not been cruel enough?” Mama began crying again, and I heard Dee’s ragged sigh.
I felt impatience twitching in my chest, because even though I didn’t know exactly what they were talking about, I was familiar with Mama’s listlessness, the way the mere idea of doing something, let alone something difficult, made her fade into shadow.
Looking back, the image of my mother I most remember is her sitting in her bedroom chair, staring absently out the window, unable to do anything but that. Yet she was insisting Olva keep the cameo. Inside my mother’s vaporousness, a kernel of strength, and it was the thought of Olva that had shored up that strength.
Aunt Dee’s footsteps, hard and mannish, had moved down the hall. Then her steps stopped, lingered for a moment, before she finally sighed, softer this time, and headed toward the living room, leaving me there alone to listen to Mama’s contained sobs.
“Judith, I have a task for you.”
It was my father’s voice, and it jolted me back to the Cadillac. Daddy Kratt’s right hand rested lightly on the steering wheel. Not waiting for my reply, he went on. “I need you to assemble a group of men. Loyal ones—you know who they are. Get Byrd Parker involved, too. He won’t say no. And, of course, the boys who work for me. They are usually drunk, but under these circumstances, that is fine.”
I cleared my throat. “If I may ask, what is the purpose of this group?”
Daddy Kratt had his window down. The air was brisk and rushed into the car, making me pull my sweater closer to my skin. Daddy Kratt stretched his left arm out the window and reached with his fingers, as if trying to take hold of the wind. “That Charlie—”
My hand flew to my mouth. Daddy Kratt looked at me, and I brought my hand down and smoothed my skirt.
“Charlie spoiled something that belongs to me. And here I’ve given him a job and a place to live.” Hoarse laughter seized his midsection, and he labored through it. He turned to face me. “As a matter of fact,” Daddy Kratt continued, “Charlie just as good as belongs to me.” He seemed to chew on the words. With his eyes on mine, the car eased to the wrong side of the road.
I felt a sick pressure at the back of my throat. My gaze shot toward the windshield to see if a car was approaching from the other direction. If so, we would be in a direct collision cours
e with it.
“Look at me!” my father boomed, and I did as I was told. “Charlie belongs to me,” Daddy Kratt said. “And you are in charge of my merchandise, Judith.”
He drew his eyes forward, steering the Cadillac back to the right side of the road.
I closed mine, trying to think only of the steady drone of the wheels against asphalt.
After giving dozens of our tenants bad news, I asked Daddy Kratt to drop me off at the train depot. He was pleased to be spared driving me all the way home, and I was relieved to be free of the Cadillac. The smell of its interior—tobacco and sweat—lingered in my nose.
A crowd of people had gathered to watch the arrival of the train, which now sat stiffly on its tracks. When we were very young, Mama and Aunt Dee brought us to the depot frequently. Mama packed egg salad sandwiches and jars of Dee’s copper pennies, a pickled concoction of carrots, onions, and green peppers. Quincy, Rosemarie, Olva, and I took turns fishing out the vegetables with our fingers. Our favorite place was perched on the knoll on the other side of the tracks, where we could take in the scene as a whole. When the Negroes loaded the ginned cotton onto the train, we felt a swell of pride, knowing our family was responsible.
Still, for all of Daddy Kratt’s accomplishments, he harbored a sour spot for losing the bid for a cotton mill. Cotton gins, like the ones Bound had, separated the seed from the pulled cotton, but the mills, where ginned cotton was made into cloth, held the potential to transform a town into a place that mattered. I remember once seeing a newspaper on my father’s desk, the main headline declaring that the “sun of civilization was rising.” The money of the mills was bringing luxury to rural folk. But not for our town. In the end, Bound’s sun stayed fixed on the horizon. One of the largest mills in the South was already located right next to us in Rock Hill and also in Pelzer, in nearby Greenville County, making a mill in our town a redundancy. For Daddy Kratt, there was always one more thing to want.
I decided I would cross the tracks and sit on the knoll. It would clear my mind so that I could consider what Daddy Kratt had asked me to do about Charlie. Gathering my knees to my chest for warmth, I looked up to see a few of my schoolmates laughing together, children in their winter coats twirling on the platform and collapsing in hysterics, and several men looking expectantly at the train, no doubt waiting for some kind of delivery to be unloaded.
Not one of the people in front of me was free from hardship or secrets. But here they were going on with life, merrily even. Because what was the alternative? Some had come to the train depot for actual deliveries, but most came for the reminder that faraway places existed. Yet when the train left, as it always did, these people would shrug off whatever hopes had been wreathed there and walk away. They would simply return home and face what was waiting for them there.
“Judith,” a voice said, and my body jerked.
It was my brother.
“How do you do, Sister?” he asked. He seemed out of sorts.
“Honestly, Quincy, I’m glad you’re here. I have awful news.”
“Is it about the lynching Daddy Kratt wants for Charlie?”
“Don’t call it that!”
Quincy shrugged. “Call it what you like. The result is the same. Ask that colored boy in Smyrna.”
Not long after Byrd Parker’s pregnant wife had drowned herself, the suspected father of her child was found two towns over, dangling from a tulip poplar tree. Mr. Aiken, our pharmacist, had claimed he’d seen it with his own eyes the day after it happened, and that despite it being a blustery day, the body had hung motionless, as if the wind knew better than to interfere.
After Quincy told me this, he seemed to fall into thought. “I wonder if Dovey was there with her father,” he said. “When he found the body, I mean.”
I saw concern on my brother’s face. Then, as he sank deeper into reflection, a kind of gentle mischief arose in his eyes. He was taken with her; it was unmistakable. I wondered what that mischievous look meant, and why it made him look older, as if he’d done something of consequence. I thought about Dovey, her openness and innocence, and it occurred to me that she was the best match Quincy could hope for. Perhaps she would serve to redeem him some day in the future.
“Do you see her often?”
Quincy’s eyes narrowed. He was in a sour mood, and I had gone too far in asking a question about Dovey.
“Do you think they would harm Charlie?” I asked quickly. “He’s so pleasant. People like him.”
“I heard something the other day,” Quincy said. “No nigger with a job unless every white man has a job.” Quincy met my gaze. “And Charlie has a good job, doesn’t he? I’m not saying it’s fair. But it’s the truth. At the moment at least. You see, what I’ve learned from my, well, line of work, as you might call it, is that the distance from the top of the heap to the bottom is shorter and more precarious than you’d believe, and one idea, if it takes hold of people’s minds in the right way, can be the difference between the two. The men in this town have built things they can see, can touch. That great store of Daddy Kratt’s. The coarse pluck of cotton. But you see, the world rests on less sturdy stuff. Reputation depends on ideas and impressions, which shift and sort, as a warm breeze might. Or a combustible gas.”
As Quincy was philosophizing, and he seemed very pleased with himself for doing so, something else occurred to me. “How did you know what Daddy Kratt asked me to do?”
“He told me he was going to put you in charge of that.” The edges of Quincy’s voice hardened.
“Hardly a sought-after job!”
“I brought him that information about Mama and Charlie. I did that,” Quincy said.
“It’s merely because I’m the eldest.”
“But I’m the eldest boy,” Quincy said, seeming pained by the admission. In his eyes, he was still not sufficient enough to garner our father’s admiration. “He let you handle the repair of the lamp, too.”
“You broke it!”
“Still.”
Suddenly, I knew why Daddy Kratt had chosen me over Quincy to deal with Charlie. My father had sent me to the attic with the broken lamp in the beginning so that I might earn Charlie’s trust, making it easier to trap him later. I felt sick about my part in it. I’d been following Daddy Kratt’s orders without even knowing it: managing the inventory at the store, with Charlie as one of the things on my list.
Quincy turned to me. “If you were a boy, I’d probably hate you less.”
“You’d hate me more,” I said, shrugging.
With a nod of his head, perhaps in agreement, he took off. My brother crossed the field behind the depot, and the dense woods swallowed him.
I looked up. A large cloud pulled apart above me, undoing itself as the wide sky watched. Then I heard a train whistle to the northeast, its call slicing the air. The sound sent a sharp question through me. What would I do?
Seven
It was late morning, the day after Marcus and Amaryllis had moved in. Marcus had already departed for his route. Rosemarie and Olva had left even earlier with my car, before Amaryllis awoke, to make another trip to Hickory Grove. Olva promised it would be their last. They had not asked me to come along, but Olva suggested that Amaryllis would enjoy my company at the house. I told her I strongly doubted that.
“Did you sleep well?” I asked Amaryllis, who had trotted into the living room. Last night, she had shared a bedroom with Olva, while Marcus had occupied the extra guest room upstairs. The child was not listening to me. She was standing beside the rolltop desk and had spied a trinket sitting on one of its shelves.
“You like that?” I asked her, and she nodded with a bit of apprehension. It was a thumb-sized glass rabbit sitting on its hind legs. “You may pick it up,” I said, and she reached out with her free hand more carefully than I thought her capable. With her Peter Rabbit dangling, she now had a rabbit in each hand.
>
Amaryllis’s gaze turned back to the desk. She studied its long front drawer, and, not able to master her curiosity, she reached forward, rabbit-handed, and tried to pull it open before I could stop her.
“Don’t!” I said, even though I knew it was locked.
The sharpness of my voice surprised her, but she gave the drawer one more light tug. I pointed down at the glass rabbit, and she seemed to forget about the locked drawer.
“You know, Rosemarie once wanted that rabbit very badly,” I said.
Amaryllis cocked her head and found a spot on the sofa. She drew her feet up on the upholstery, but I held my tongue. I took the seat next to her.
“You see, Amaryllis,” I began, “it was Quincy’s idea to raid this rolltop desk in the dead of night. I was eight years old at the time, he was seven, and Rosemarie was six.”
“That is my age,” she replied, in the spirit of shared accomplishment with my sister.
It was 1922, I told Amaryllis, and the flu was going around town. Mama begged us not to leave the house. We were content to ignore her pleas until, one day, our iceman told us about the Spanish flu, a pandemic that had torn through America only four years earlier. He did not scrimp on details, telling us stories of people turning blue from suffocation and their mouths filling with froth like Coca-Cola bottles set too long in the sun. Confined for weeks, we exhausted every amusement in the house. Before we turned on each other, we turned on the desk, which our savage curiosities had spared until we remembered it was a refuge for Mama, the place where she wrote her letters. She would be devastated if we spoiled it, so our decision came easily. Perhaps our actions would rouse Mama from her dreamy stupor; perhaps they wouldn’t. We were just bored enough to want to know.
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt Page 11