But Quincy was not deterred. “Sally,” my brother continued, not waiting for a natural pause in our great-uncle’s speech. “I still don’t understand.”
Sally cleared his throat and kept going, ignoring Quincy’s intrusion. “You see,” Sally said, “the goal of natural selection is that, as a society, we move toward a more perfect version of our species. It is certainly a struggle. But we are up for it, I do believe.” Here he leaned in closer to the table, an attempt at intimacy, but his belly stopped him. He leaned back again, his face souring. “As time moves along,” he continued, “we begin to learn which traits are preferred for the most perfect form of humankind.” This idea put him back in good humor, and he heaved his belly into a great laugh. “We just keep learning! It is a felicitous time to be a scholar!”
Quincy broke in. “I’m not sure you’ve got your facts straight, Uncle. Have you seen our henhouse?” Sally sighed, but Quincy spoke quickly. “You might recall, Uncle Sally, that the henhouse gate was once constructed from a wood frame and wire mesh. It had a broken latch and a chain holding it shut.” Quincy cracked his knuckles and leaned in. My brother always told vivid stories, and with the exception of Uncle Sally, we were already hooked. “Well, one year, we had some thickset foxes mixed in among the lean ones,” Quincy said. “Those critters were so hefty, they could just put their weight against the gate and force an opening for themselves each time they wanted to enter the henhouse. As you can imagine, they enjoyed quite a feast that season. And the lean foxes? They didn’t have the heft to push the gate open, you see. They got skinnier and skinnier. Now here’s the funny thing. The next year, Daddy Kratt fixed the gate. He did a fine job. The latch held firm, and only a narrow gap remained between the gate and its frame. I didn’t think much of that gap at the time. Then I started to see something that made me laugh. All those hefty foxes pushed and pushed against the gate, which didn’t budge. They finally gave up and wandered away. But what do you think those skinny foxes did? They squeezed right through that gap!” Quincy reared back and clapped his hands. The sound punctured the air. “And which kind of fox do you think starved that year?”
My brother turned to Sally, as if our great-uncle were a child, and said, “Uncle, it was the fat foxes that starved.”
Sally readjusted himself awkwardly in his chair, his belly prodding against the edge of the table.
Quincy paused before landing his final blow. “So tell me this, Uncle: Which fox—large or lean—is the perfect one? Seems to me, if you’re a fox, it all depends on what kind of gate you find yourself in front of.” Quincy leaned back in his seat and, finding a toothpick on the table, began working his gums as he watched Uncle Sally’s reaction.
Sally was sweating profusely. But rather than counterattack Quincy, which my brother eagerly awaited, Uncle Sally sharpened his attention on Olva.
“I have a question for you, young lady,” Sally said, the varnish of his false politeness wearing off. “Have you heard of Sir Francis Galton?” Olva replied that no, she hadn’t, and Sally said, “I didn’t expect as much. No matter. There is always time to learn.” Sally explained that Galton was Darwin’s cousin and that Origin of Species was a thunderbolt—the thunderbolt—of his life. After reading his cousin’s book, Galton became obsessed with variations in human populations.
“I have been reading Galton’s lectures,” Sally continued, “beginning with his Huxley lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1901. You have heard of Aldous Huxley?” Sally shook his head before letting Olva answer. “Of course not, but that’s not relevant at the moment. Suffice it to say, Galton gave the second annual Huxley lecture, which was intended to commemorate the scholar. You see, Galton was very interested in talent and character—things a gentleman should be interested in—but what made him a gentleman scholar”—here Quincy snorted—“is that he cared that those traits be passed down, and he became very interested in how we might determine a hereditary basis for them. Which amounts to a philanthropic endeavor, if you see it as I do.”
As Uncle Sally droned on, he was staring at Olva the whole time. I took a deep breath, and, to distract Sally, I bolted from the table. During my flight, I cast my eyes back (unlike Lot’s wife, I was already a pillar of salt) and caught a glimpse of Rosemarie’s bewildered face, for she wasn’t accustomed to being the one left behind. I can tell you that this pleased me even more than salting her slugs. I didn’t dare return to the table, staying in my room until my door cracked open and Olva’s head peeped in to thank me. I had sufficiently diverted Sally—his nerves already jangled from Quincy’s story—and our great-uncle had to remove himself from the table before finishing his speech.
I was done with my story about Uncle Sally. I opened my eyes at the table. The four of them were staring at me. They did not look as transported as I thought they might be.
“Were you listening?” I asked.
“I almost forgot you were there, Judith,” my sister said tartly. “You blend into that chair. It’s as if you’re a piece of furniture yourself.”
“If you think that is an insult, you are mistaken,” I replied.
“I remember the meal with Sally,” Olva said.
Amaryllis raised her hand.
“Are you raising your hand because you want to say something?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Well, go ahead.”
“I think you left the table because you had to pee,” she said. “After drinking all that water because your ham was so salty.”
The heat rose to my face. Rosemarie let out a peal of unbridled laughter.
Marcus and Olva were smiling, too. All four of them were baring their bright teeth at me. I pushed my chair back and got up from the table. They could find me in my room if they needed me.
Once I was in my bedroom, having abandoned the supper table, I was struck by another memory of Uncle Sally.
The next Christmas, the year after Quincy embarrassed Sally, Mama mentioned to Daddy Kratt that she thought one of her other uncles had been in possession of a first edition of Origin of Species. We were rife with great-uncles. Poor Grandfather DeLour had five brothers yet could not sire a son of his own. Most of his brothers had died young—Uncle Sally was the exception—and this was part of the reason many of the family heirlooms had found their way to our house.
Daddy Kratt was not a bookish man, but he sensed when something of value was at hand. “Is it here, in the house?” he asked Mama. The two of them were standing in front of the dining room table. Olva moved silently behind them, clearing the leftovers of our Christmas meal.
“Perhaps,” she whispered.
Daddy Kratt’s eyes fired, and I had the sense it wasn’t the book that interested him. Rather, it was beating Uncle Sally to it. I had seen Sally run his hand across a shelf of books in our study like he was a boy trailing a stick along a fence. Books were a solace to me, too, and part of me felt that if we did have the edition, we should give it to Sally. But Daddy Kratt could not pass up a competition.
After our Christmas meal, Daddy Kratt assembled all the children in front of the stairs, and we hoped it was a prelude to something other than a beating. I had recently turned thirteen, and my siblings were on my heels, yet our father could inspire the same fear as when we were children. This time, Mama was there, lined up as if she were one of us.
We were relieved when our father seemed to be thinking not so much about us as the house. He angled his head in mental calculation. I suppose he was trying to assess the locations of all the bookshelves and stacks of books, a task I didn’t envy, because in our house, books consumed every shelf, gently edging out other items that might vie for space, such as a vase or bowl. All hand-me-downs from the DeLour library, these books huddled in every nook and cranny, and stacks of them seemed to crop up around every corner, places you swore had been empty the previous day. Most of their covers were brown and worn, soft as fur, and
I once saw Olva approach a stack as if careful not to startle them.
When Daddy Kratt was done thinking, he wheeled his head toward us, sending a tremor through the line. He seemed less resolute than normal, and he shook his head as if dissatisfied with the progress of his thoughts. Then his head snapped up. He had decided.
“Bring in Olva.”
Mama was standing beside me, and she took in such a swift and tight breath that it seemed to momentarily lift her off the ground. No one moved to take the order. Daddy Kratt coughed, sharp as a gunshot, which roused us from our positions like we were runners at a starting line. Rosemarie dashed upstairs, Quincy melted off to one side of the room, and I rushed into the kitchen to fetch Olva. Daddy Kratt saw us dispersing, and his face weighed the situation and then allowed it.
As I left the room, I heard Mama say to him, “I will help her.”
I turned to see Daddy Kratt’s face, which had settled into a relaxed expression, heave up again. He boomed, “You will not!” and Mama, pushed backward by the force of his words, drifted over by the sofa.
I returned with Olva, who was twisting a dishrag in her hands. Daddy Kratt flicked his finger at Quincy, who had remained in the room, to indicate that he should explain Olva’s assignment. Quincy nodded, apparently understanding everything that was about to happen.
Daddy Kratt left the room, and Mama knew she should follow him. I watched Quincy explain to Olva how, at the whim of our father, her plans had changed for the evening. Searching for a book wouldn’t have seemed such a terrible task, but as Daddy Kratt’s deed, it took on a worrisome heaviness. Standing there, what most puzzled me was why he hadn’t ordered all of us to look for it. Surely five sets of eyes were better than Olva’s one?
Yet perhaps he didn’t see it as punishment, and he was loath to bring us pleasure. We were all rather bookish, with the exception of Quincy, who favored comics, but even he had taken a shine to the essays of Walter Pater for a period. Rosemarie had the talent for finding the most salacious romances in the house, and Lady Audley’s Secret seemed to be a perennial favorite. As for me, I read widely and voraciously, and while the essays of Ruskin offered me constancy and the poems of Tennyson succor, at that moment, I was taken by a novella by Edith Wharton titled Bunner Sisters, probably brought to our house by Aunt Dee, which detailed the lives of two sisters who kept a shop together. In Wharton’s book, the unmarried older sister, Ann Eliza, makes extraordinary sacrifices for her younger sister, Evelina, but these sacrifices lead only to the suffering and fundamental loneliness of Ann Eliza. I found the lesson bleak but reassuringly clear-eyed.
The next morning, I woke up and came downstairs to an empty kitchen. I knew the rest of the family was still upstairs sleeping, which gave me time for a short morning walk. Our house was so big that there wasn’t any need to go outside. After I had ambled through the sunroom and back through the living room to the study, I took the long route through the main level bathroom and bedroom to access the back hallway.
My plan was to head down into the cellar. As I descended the stairs, I was taken aback. There was Olva. She was crouched in front of a stack of books, her back to me, and her hand was slowly tracing the spines from top to bottom. I took a further step to get a better view, and when I did, I saw Mama. She was in an identical position, crouching beside another stack.
Then it occurred to me. They must have searched straight through the night.
I crept back up two sets of stairs to my own bedroom, where I retreated beneath the covers. As I lay there, what preoccupied me was a fear for Mama. I didn’t know why she had chosen to help Olva against Daddy Kratt’s orders, and that kind of defiance did not correspond with what I knew of my mother. It unsettled me, and I stayed in bed until the warm breath of biscuits made its way to my room.
A rap on my bedroom door startled me from my memory.
“I am fine as I am,” I called through the door.
Silence.
“I will come out in my own time!”
Silence. Another rap.
“Good grief!” I said, lifting myself from my chair and striding toward the door. I slung the door open, terribly vexed, and, when I looked out, saw nothing beyond the stale air of the hallway. A small hand emerged from the right. It was Amaryllis, holding her arm up.
“What is it, Amaryllis? You needn’t raise your hand every time you have a question.”
She composed herself, and I wondered what kind of message those cowardly adults had sent her to convey. “I’m sorry I said pee around the supper table,” she said with great effort.
“Ah now, no matter. Perhaps you are right about why I left Sally’s dinner table.”
She peered at me, considering whether she should agree.
“Will you come back?” she asked. “We still have dessert.” She smiled at me, and her face was like a brisk change of weather.
I returned to the table with her. The three of them were still there, locked in silence. I could tell, in the way Rosemarie’s eyes were animating, that she was preparing to speak again. Olva sat braced. No one had been pleased with my story about Sally, but Rosemarie’s earlier words about Charlie had made both Olva and Marcus uncomfortable. My eyes met Olva’s, and we shared a moment of exhaustion over my sister. A smile hovered at my lips, and I felt the warmth of Olva’s attention. These exchanges had been rare since Rosemarie’s arrival. How I had relied on them and not known it!
Rosemarie turned to Marcus. “Did you know that Charlie was an accomplished mechanic?”
“I believe the skill has been in my family for generations,” he replied.
Olva shifted in her seat. Rosemarie nodded, impressed, it seemed, at Marcus’s knowledge of his own kin.
“Marcus,” I said, “have you thought of putting those talents to use at the new plant in Spartanburg? The car manufacturing plant, I mean.”
“I don’t know that I have the skills needed,” he said.
“You certainly do,” Olva replied.
Marcus smiled at her.
Ignoring this exchange, Rosemarie said, “Marcus, I would watch Charlie repairing the elevator at the store. And do you know what my vantage point was? The majestic oak that abuts the store’s east wall and offers lines of sight into nearly every window on that side of the store. I found a way to climb from the third floor out onto the tree. It was my secret getaway when Shep Bramlett would pursue me through the store.” She paused for a moment. “But I was so fond of Charlie that I showed him my escape route one day.”
“Marcus,” I said, “is the Spartanburg plant hiring?”
“Marcus,” Rosemarie said, raising her voice, “Charlie was the most talented mechanic I ever knew.”
“Marcus,” I said, “Olva said she ran into the granddaughter of Sterling Ray at the post office the other day. The girl mentioned they have some connection to that company. I could look into it for you.”
“Marcus,” Rosemarie said, and in her pause, a heartbeat of a pause, I knew what was coming. “Marcus, did you know I left town when my brother Quincy was killed?”
A silence, like wet snow, drifted across the table. Marcus lifted his water glass and stared into it as he drank.
“Do you know why I didn’t come back?” Rosemarie continued. “Because I found out Charlie had been accused, that’s why.”
I waited. My sister had come back home after all these years to say one final thing, and I waited for it. Her face ordered itself into a single purpose, her eyes trained on me, her mouth a thin line of concentration.
“Marcus, Judith killed Quincy. She killed him, and your great-grandfather took the blame for it.”
Amaryllis sat rigidly, her hand that clutched the glass rabbit resting on the table. Marcus reached over and placed his hand atop hers, and her posture softened with his touch. Olva lowered her eyelids as if shutting her eyes would close her ears.
Anci
ent angers stirred within me. I felt my lungs open up like wings and then fold back down again. I took in a sustaining mouthful of air. “Much ado is made of people like you, Rosemarie, who escape the life they have been given, who refuse to look back as they tear off to explore the great wide yonder. Such a thing has never impressed me. From where I’m sitting, it takes more backbone to stay put and face the known. Daddy Kratt always said, ‘Root, hog, or die!’ Do you remember that? Meaning he was a survivor, like hogs set loose to fend for themselves.” I turned to Marcus. “We never had hogs. It’s just an expression.”
Marcus stood up from his chair. “Amaryllis,” he said. “Let’s get your bath ready.” There was less recrimination in his voice than weariness. He looked drained, as if he’d been sitting at this table his whole life.
“Don’t leave, Marcus,” Rosemarie said. “It’s Judith who should leave.”
He tapped Amaryllis’s shoulder.
“No!” she cried willfully, gripping her chair. She appeared overstimulated and exhausted at the same time. “I am not done with my dessert!”
“Let her stay,” Rosemarie intervened. “Olva has some news.”
We all turned to Olva, whose eyes were still closed.
Olva shook her head slowly. When it was clear she would not speak, Rosemarie said, “My dear Amaryllis, you and Olva are related!”
The child dashed from her chair. “Are you my grandma?” She stood beside Olva’s chair, popping up and down on her toes.
Olva’s eyes opened and fell warmly on Amaryllis. “I was going to tell you on my own.”
“Can I call you Grandma?”
“You may call me whatever you like,” Olva told Amaryllis.
“Olva is your great-great-aunt,” Rosemarie explained. “She and your great-grandfather were siblings. His name was Samuel. And Samuel’s father was Charlie. I do believe I’m right in saying that Samuel’s mother died in childbirth.” Rosemarie turned to Olva for confirmation, but Olva would not look at her.
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt Page 15