A Comedy of Heirs (11 page)

“I take Damon.”

Crap. I really wanted Damon, too. “I'll take Jed.”

My father sort of smiled at that. “I want Mary.”

“Fine. I'll take Rachel.”

“Hey, doesn't anybody want me?” Rudy asked.

“I'll take Rudy,” Dad said.

“Tillie's mine.”

“I'll take her son, can't remember his name,” Dad admitted, but still trying to seem tough.

“His name is Jeremy,” I said.

“Okay, Jeremy.”

“I'll take Courtney,” I said, who was Damon's twelve-year-old daughter. “You can have Madison.”

My dad nodded to me. I nodded back. “Okay, the chicken coop is your castle, the porch is ours. The object is to drive the enemy back to their castle.”

My dad nodded to me again.

“The picnic table is the middle of the kingdom. You leave the backyard and you're disqualified. You can use anything in the yard. You get hit with a snowball more than ten times, you're out,” I said.

I looked over at my kids. Rachel was rubbing sleep out of her eyes and scratching her head. Mary yawned, sending a billow of warm air out into the night. She might have yawned but her eyes sparkled with anticipation.

“Mom's referee,” I said. Dad nodded that he understood the rules and that he probably wouldn't abide by them. He never did. My group lined up on the house side of the picnic table. Me, Aunt Sissy, in her cut-off jeans even in the snow and tennis shoes with no socks. Tillie, Damon's wife, was bundled so heavily she probably wouldn't be able to move much. She was about thirty-seven and five foot nine and she could kick serious butt if need be. I'd had her on my touch football team one year. Rachel, ready albeit groggy. Courtney, who was eighteen and taller than I was. I hate it when my cousins' children are taller than me. And Uncle Jed, who I'm not even sure was aware of where he was, much less that the object was to throw snowballs at the opposing army.

Dad's army lined up on the opposite side of the picnic table. Him, Rudy, Damon, Jeremy, who was fourteen and built like a football player, Madison, who was ten, tall and scrawny, and Mary, who just looked entirely too little to be on their team. They had youth and vitality on their team. Rudy was injured, though. So we had that going for us. My team was older, but we were … well, I'm not exactly sure.

Mom said her speech about being nice and playing fair, yada yada yada and GO!

Snowballs began whizzing and whirling around the backyard. I could never figure out how my father did it, but he could throw five snowballs for every one of mine. I picked up one of the kid's yellow snow saucers and used it as a shield.

“Oh, not fair!” I heard my father say.

I searched for Mary and found her over by the chicken coop doing nothing but making snowballs. They were using her as an ammunitions maker! She had a big pile of snowballs next to her in nothing flat, and all they had to do was go over there and pick up four or five and nail us! Gosh, I was infuriated. Mainly because I hadn't thought of it first. No wonder my father wanted Mary. He had this planned all along.

Tillie had shoved her way into Rudy's face and knocked him down on his back. She stood over him just pummeling him with snowball after snowball. Jeremy saw what was happening and went over and saved Rudy before Tillie managed to hit him with ten snowballs, so he was still in the battle.

Uncle Jed was already out. He was far too drunk to really know what was going on and he just stood there in the middle of the backyard with his arms up, saying. “Hey, that's not nice. Quit hit-tin' the old man.” He talked about himself in the third person quite often. Especially when he was drunk.

Suddenly I felt the sting of a snowball in the neck. Oh, that stung! I turned around to find Damon up on top of the girl's swing set zinging snowballs down at unsuspecting victims. Like me.

Rachel was giggling way too much to be doing too much damage to anybody. We were losing ground fast. And then I noticed that Aunt Sissy had taken Tillie's guerrilla snow-fighting tactics and was rushing the enemy and knocking them on the ground. I did the same thing. Instead of being worried about getting hit with the snowballs, I just went after my victims and didn't stop until they were on the ground. In this case it was my father. He squirmed and tried to get away, but I just threw snowball after snowball in his face. Then as he tried to get away I shoved a big handful of snow down his shirt.

God, this was great. It was exhilarating and I could feel the tensions of the day just leaving my body. Maybe it was also because I was getting to pummel my father without getting in trouble, and I had a lot of pent-up anger against him at the moment. By the time the fight was over, it was Aunt Sissy, Tillie and me and we had backed the other team all the way to the chicken coop, what was left of them, that is. The only ones left at the end of the battle were Mary, who was still vigorously making snowballs, and Damon.

I had won.

“What in blazes is going on out here?” Mayor Castlereagh yelled from his yard. His floodlights came on with a blast of halogen brightness. A ladder went against my privacy fence and then his bald head appeared in the snowy night sky above the fence. He was not happy.

“People are trying to sleep around here!” he yelled.

“Evidently you're not trying hard enough,” I said. We all walked back inside for hot cocoa and coffee, and left the mayor to stew in his own anger.

Thirteen

Morning came early and I bounded out of bed with abnormal energy. Part of it was because I knew that if I wanted to get this quilt going and find out who had sent me those newspaper articles, I had to do it fast. If I have a definite mission to accomplish I can make myself get up early. The excitement of finally pounding the living daylights out of my father at a snowball fight did a lot to give me that extra push to get out of bed as well.

I bought a large piece of white fabric at the local twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and had the piece of material marked by ten o'clock. I traced the template over and over on the white fabric for the sections of the quilt that everybody was supposed to sign. I knew there was no way that I could get it all cut out and everything, so I was just going to have everybody sign one of the places and I'd cut them out later.

I came down the steps of my bedroom and found Uncle Jed sitting at my kitchen table. Uncle Isaac, the third child of my grandparents, sat across from him. About seventy-four years old, he was a retired steel worker, and a heavier version of my father. His hair was thinner and nearly white, but the same square jaw and prominent nose were evident. Looking at Uncle Isaac's hazel eyes was like looking at my father's, thus like looking at my own.

“Hey, Uncle Isaac, how are you?” I asked. I had barely had a chance to talk to him since he arrived.

“Fine, fine,” he said. I got the distinct impression that I had interrupted something that I wasn't supposed to. I looked at Jed, who was staring at Isaac.

“Would you guys do me a favor and sign your name in one of these squares?” I asked. Well, they weren't exactly shaped liked squares but they got the picture. “I'm going to make a signature quilt to commemorate this reunion and I need everybody to sign it.”

“Sure, sure,” Uncle Isaac said. He had a habit of repeating the first word of every sentence. He didn't stutter, because it never happened at any other time and he didn't sound like he had trouble getting the word out. He just repeated it twice. Uncle Isaac was the very first one to put his signature on what would be the Keith Kin Quilt.

Uncle Jed took the pen and signed his name. The signatures were as different as night and day. Uncle Jed's was barely readable and shaky, Uncle Isaac's was by no means fancy but he exaggerated the first letter of his first and last names.

“Thank you very much,” I said. “We are caroling tonight. You guys gonna be there?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Uncle Isaac said. “Big as our family is, you're going to have an entire choir.”

I giggled. “I doubt seriously if everybody shows up to carol. And it's been my experience that the men tend to skip out on this one, so you guys better be there.”

They both smiled and agreed that they would be there and then they went back to staring at each other. It was obvious that they were waiting for me to leave the room so they could resume their conversation. Which made me not want to leave the room.

I went back up the steps to my office anyway. My mother would be so proud of me.

I found the other box that Aunt Sissy had brought to me. The one that had a bunch of junk in it. I put it up on my desk and began pulling stuff out of it. Aunt Sissy was correct. It looked like somebody had just dumped Grandma's junk drawer in this box. Except every now and then there would be an item that was a little too personal to be put in junk drawer. I found a grocery list from about 1974. She'd made a note to herself to bring cheese for Jalena, my mother, because she didn't like hot dogs. We must have been having a barbecue or something.

Buttons, scissors, shoe dye that must have been fifty years old. I found a box of cards that had not been used. It was just a box of assorted cards for all different occasions. I flipped through them and could tell almost immediately that they were ancient. These things must have been from around the 1930s or so. And in the very back of the box was a carefully folded piece of paper. I, of course, opened it.

In it was a handwritten letter, the handwriting an uncontrolled scrawl, but still readable. It was a letter to my great-grandmother, not my grandmother. I began to wonder how my grandmother had managed to come into possession of this letter, but once I saw the contents of the letter, I didn't care how she had acquired it. It said:

Feb '32

Della Ruth,

I've got to know that you are happy. You made a decision thirty years ago that I don't think was all that fair. I've been patient. I've been silent. And I've loved you from a distance, while you've ignored me and pretended I was dead. I need to hear it with my ears and see your mouth speak the words. We were in it together. You should find it in your heart to grant me this much.

Bradley

My great-grandmother, and Nathaniel Keith's wife, would have been fifty-two years old when she received this letter. Who was Bradley? And what decision was he referring to of thirty years earlier? That would have been 1902. Della Ruth and Nathaniel Keith were married in 1898, when my great-grandmother was eighteen years old and my great-grandfather was twenty-two. Maybe Bradley had meant to say “about thirty years ago” and he was referring to Della Ruth choosing Nate Keith over him.

How did my grandmother end up with this letter? Or maybe she was not aware of the fact the letter had been put in the back of the box for safekeeping.

Then I noticed that the paper lining on the card box was a little lumpy. I pulled the paper up and stood with goosebumps dancing down my arms at what the brown paper revealed. There was another letter, but more important, two photographs. One was of my great grandmother, Della Ruth, with a young man. I flipped the photo over and it said; Me and Bradley F. The other photograph was a small square about one inch by one inch of just the young man's face. Again, it had the name Bradley inscribed on the back.

I didn't get it. Why would Della Ruth think it necessary to hide these photographs of this man? Did she make the wrong decision in men? Or was she forced to marry Nate Keith and really wanted to marry Bradley? I imagined my great-grandmother leaving this handsome young man standing at the altar, or something equally romantic.

I opened the other letter, which had deep creases in it, as if somebody had folded it and unfolded it many times. It read:

Earth and sky, moon and sun.

You and I have joined as one.

All that's come before, and all to come after

Will never touch our love and laughter.

—Marry me, Della.

I felt like a really cheap Peeping Tom. I know I'm nosy as heck, but this was way too personal for me to have read. Then I thought, Maybe that's why Della Ruth put them there. So somebody, someday, would read it and know.

Hubert McCarthy's words came flooding back to me.
I always thought Della Ruth had an agenda of her own.
It was hard for me to believe, though, that my great-grandmother would have waited to kill Nate Keith until she was in her late sixties for a lover or a former lover. It seems like that was something she would have done at a much younger age.

I put the two letters and the two photographs in an envelope and slid it into my purse. I was going down to Pine Branch and Partut County. I absolutely had to know who Bradley F. was.

THE NEW KASSEL GAZETTE

T
HE
N
EWS
Y
OU
M
IGHT
M
ISS

by Eleanore Murdoch

People of New Kassel, I am here to ask you to reach down into the deep recesses of your heart, and give of yourself. There are four kittens at the rectory and they need homes. Wouldn't one of our elderly residents like a companion? Or how about a kitten for your children on Christmas morning? Father Bingham says he can only keep them until New Year's.

Rumor has it that Sylvia and Helen are not speaking to each other. Helen is still giving the tours at the Gaheimer House in place of Torie O'Shea, whose family is on vacation. Oh, and Chuck Velasco's pet iguana has escaped the confines of his cage. Chuck says there is a reward if anybody finds Teddy and returns it to him. Aren't iguanas coldblooded? Just curious.

And Sister Lucy says that the boys' choir, including the girls, all sang beautifully on Tuesday night. She thought she heard God himself applauding the children's efforts on “Joy to the World.”

Until next time,

Eleanore

Fourteen