A Comedy of Heirs (4 page)

She smiled, full red lips parting to reveal big white teeth. She hugged me and said, “I didn't get married, I'm just pregnant.”

Gee. You never know what to say or do when you make a faux pas as big as that one. I smiled since she seemed to be comfortable with it. “Oops,” I said.

“That's okay,” she said. “I figure I'm going to be answering that a lot this week.”

“When are you due?” I asked.

“About six weeks. It's a boy.”

“Oh, that is wonderful,” I said. “You're number four.”

Her eyes grew wide. “No way,” she said. “There are four of us pregnant? It happens every year,” she said. “This is scary. Who's number five?”

“Not everybody's here yet,” I said. “If there isn't a number five this will be the first time in ten years.”

Four

Aunt Charlotte, affectionately called Charlie, was built like most of the women in my father's family. She was about five foot five and there was a certain pear shape to her, really narrow through the shoulders with hips twice the size. My mother's family tends to be narrow through the hips and top heavy, so I got lucky and came out somewhere in between.

Aunt Charlotte stood in my living room hanging my antique Christmas ornaments that my grandmother, her mother, had given me years ago. The reason she had given them to me is because she had bought them the year my father was born. I started putting them on the tree only in the last few years because with toddlers it wasn't a smart thing to do. The girls were old enough now, so there was no need for that sort of caution.

Aunt Ruth had not arrived yet and, Uncle Jed, my father and Uncle Melvin were all down in the basement, doing what else? Playing music. Uncle Isaac and Aunt Sissy, whose real name is Felicity, had not arrived either. It was too much of an opportune moment not to say something to Aunt Charlotte about Nathaniel Keith, her grandfather. I wasn't about to say anything about the newspaper articles, I just wanted to get the story from her on how he had died. Or how she'd been told that he had died.

Mary was still trying to get that one strand of lights to work. I considered this a miracle, because Mary is my flighty, rambunctious child and usually does not have the patience for this sort of thing. There were about ten kids in the living room, and at least five of my cousins who were older than me, in their late thirties. I was fairly safe to bring up this subject.

“Charlie,” I began.

“Yes?” she said. She hummed along to the Gene Autry Christmas album that I'd had since I was a kid, the one with Rosemary Clooney on it.

“I've recently dusted off my genealogy cap, and started working on my family tree again,” I said.

“I thought you always did do that stuff,” she answered.

“Well, for other people, but I haven't worked on mine in years. It's really weird getting reacquainted with all of the information. There was so much stuff I had forgotten or things that I got mixed up.”

I placed a ceramic angel in an open spot on the tree. Rachel tied little red velvet bows on the ends of some of the branches. My mother and the sheriff were in the kitchen popping corn and then they were going to start stringing it for us. I preferred popcorn or beads on the tree to that garland stuff.

I ventured further. “Now, who was it, which one was it that died in the hunting accident?”

Anybody that knew me fairly well would know that I would not get something like that confused. Hopefully though, that particular character trait of mine would get by Aunt Charlie.

She looked over at me from the coffee table where she was putting a hook on one of the ornaments. She wore Coke bottle glasses so her brown eyes seemed huge against a rather small-boned face. She had turned sixty-eight this year, and was the best quilter in the state to come along since my grandma. My opinion of course.

“How could you forget that?” she asked.

“Well, some of my records are all mixed up,” I said.

“It was Nathaniel Keith, my grandfather, your great-grandfather,” she said and walked over to the Christmas tree and began searching for the perfect place for the ornament she had chosen. She wore a handmade quilted vest with Christmas ornaments all over a deep blue background.

“That's what I thought,” I said.

My cousin Wendy, Uncle Isaac's daughter and the mother of the Brite twins peeked her head from around the back of the tree. “Torie, you can just talk about dead people at any time, can't you?”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

Wendy rolled her blue eyes. We were the same age and she had plopped out five children in six years. She was a Girl Scout leader, Brownie leader, room mother for all five children, and she made miniatures for a living. The little dollhouse furniture and stuff that you see in craft stores she made with the patience that God gave Job, and totally neglected to give to me. Two of her children were gifted musicians already and one of the boys looked as if he'd be headed to the Olympics in a few years as a swimmer. These kinds of women really do exist. She stood behind my Christmas tree to prove it.

“It's not like I'm talking about blood and guts, Wen. I'm just talking about our ancestors who have died,” I said. I hoped it didn't sound like I was trying to stick up for myself too much. I got a little touchy over this sort of thing. I used to take a picnic lunch and eat it in the middle of the cemetery with the dead people when I compiled the cemetery information for publication. The folks in my family thought I was a bit strange and didn't hesitate to tell me so. Now I'm a little sensitive over it.

“It's just that even at Christmas you still have to talk about dead people,” Wendy went on. Her blond hair bounced around her face, reminding me of those old Prell commercials.

“Well, if they were alive I wouldn't have to talk about them, I'd just go talk
to
them,” I said. Okay, maybe the situation wasn't so ideal to bring this up after all. Somebody's child came running through my living room and skidded into the wall. My record player skipped and Gene Autry went from “Rudolph” to “Here Comes Santa Claus.” I cringed. I really needed to buy this on CD. The boy smiled all precocious-like and took off into the other room.

“Whose kid was that?” I asked with my hand on my hip.

“Looked like one of Lester and Joanie's kids,” Aunt Charlie said.

“I didn't even know they were here,” I answered. I swallowed my irritation and hung another ornament. The popcorn smell from the kitchen was almost more than I could bear. There was a reason I put my mother in charge of that sort of thing. I always ate more than I strung. And when I picked strawberries at my grandma's, I always ate one for every three that I picked. “So anyway, Aunt Charlie. That hunting accident was 1948,” I said. “Do you remember it?”

Of course she would remember it, she would have been about eighteen years old.

“Yeah,” she said. “Course I remember it. Grandpa had gone out hunting with his two sons Uncle Granville and my dad. Jed went along, too.”

“And … what happened?” I asked.

“Torie!” Wendy said and stuck her head out from under the tree this time. Just what was she doing anyway?

“Oh hush, Wendy. I want to know what happened.”

“I don't really know. I was in town,” Aunt Charlie said and pushed her thick glasses up on her nose. “Go ask Uncle Jed. He can tell you. Far as I know they went hunting and they got lost, got turned around or something like that. Grandpa Nate refused to go the way the others wanted to go and he went the other way. He tripped and shot himself with his own gun.”

“Oh,” I said. “How awful.”

“Yeah, it's an awful way to go.” She didn't talk about it as if she was telling a big lie. But then, if she'd been telling it since 1948 she'd have the story down pat. She didn't seem nervous and her mannerisms didn't change when she told the story.

“Can we change the subject now?” Wendy said. She was back behind the tree again.

“Wendy, what are you doing back there?” I asked.

“I'm hiding all the wires from the lights so that it looks like the lights are just setting on the branches.”

“Oh,” I said. That would never have occurred to me.

One of Wendy's sons came in and sat down at the piano.

“Oh, Kevin honey, why don't you play us some music?” Wendy said and walked over and turned off my Gene Autry album without asking. I checked the notion to punch her a good one and smiled. I'd wanted to punch Wendy plenty of times as a kid, and this was no different. Two hours around her and that same insecure little girl surfaced at the hands of my incredibly gifted, patient, multitalented, albeit rude, cousin.

Kevin, who was about ten years old rolled his eyes. He really didn't want to play. He'd just sat down on the piano bench because the couch and chairs were all covered with glass ornaments waiting to be put on the tree. “He doesn't want to play,” I said. “Turn my record back on.”

“Oh, sure he does,” Wendy said. “Don't you, Kev. Come on, play something.”

“You know ‘The First Noel?'” Rachel asked.

Kevin broke into one of the more recognizable Preludes by Chopin. Wendy smiled and played with the hair at the nape of her son's neck, pleased at his selection.

“That's not ‘The First Noel,'” Rachel said with her nose puckered in dislike. “That's not anything.”

THE NEW KASSEL GAZETTE

T
HE
N
EWS
Y
OU
M
IGHT
M
ISS

by Eleanore Murdoch

The Christmas season is fully underway here in New Kassel. It's December and no snow as of yet, so if you guessed the first snow would be in November you were wrong.

The Boys Choir of Santa Lucia is having their annual Christmas play and concert this coming Tuesday night. Oscar wanted me to mention that there are a few girls in the choir because Father Bingham couldn't get enough boys to sing the first soprano part.

The Lick-a-pot Candy Shoppe is hosting a Snowman Contest this year. A pound of chocolate fudge will go to the winner. No adults please.

And ignore any strange noises coming from the O'Shea residence this week. They are hosting a family reunion. Remember the lake? 1991? Those same people.

Until next time,

Eleanore

Five

I drove along Clayton Road in St. Louis County on my way to the library. I wasn't going to the main public library downtown, I was going to the county headquarters. I passed the Mormon church and the Mormon library on Clayton road, then passed Braun Antiques on my left, then made a right on Lindbergh.

The library was just about a quarter of mile, if that, on my left. I went inside and through the octagon entrance into the main part of the library. I had a doctor's appointment at two, so I couldn't spend too long here. I went around to the right and up the open staircase to a loft type of area, then up another flight of steps to the top floor, which housed the genealogical records. They had a few newspapers on file for some of the areas in Missouri and I knew that Partut County was one of them, because I had checked them before.

I signed in for a microfilm machine and opened one of the big drawers with the microfilm. I grabbed the one I needed and sat down to feed the machine. It's a little tricky working the microfilm machine but once you get it down pat, you can usually work all the different kinds. The newspaper began in January 1948. I hit the Forward button and watched as the papers zoomed by so fast it made me sick to my stomach. I stopped the microfilm. May. I zoomed it again and stopped. August. I inched it forward until I had the right day. And the right headline.

LOCAL MAN SHOT TO DEATH ON FRONT PORCH
.

It was real. I had half expected this to be a prank, so the reality of it got me right in the gut. I sat back and ran my fingers through my shoulder-length hair and breathed in a deep cleansing breath. It was real. This was not a prank.

Now I was not only faced with the fact that I'd been lied to my whole life, we'd all been lied to. I had to deal with the fact that this was
unsolved.
And that somebody desperately wanted me to know about it. They wanted me to know about it in time for the family reunion so that I could question everybody. It had to be a member of the family that had sent me these clippings. Who else would have done it? Who else would have known about it?

There was also the fact that somebody had actually killed my great-grandfather. It was unsettling to think that somebody didn't like my ancestor enough to kill him. Don't ask me why, there was no logical reason that I felt this way. I just did. Even though I knew that my ancestors weren't angels. In no way, shape, or form. I even had a murderer in the family tree, way back there. Maybe it was because my great-grandfather was alive in this century. It made him more real to me.

I had pictures of this man. I had pictures of this man sitting on my mantel with my great-grandmother, his wife, Della Ruth.

I rewound the microfilm and put it away. I stopped on the way out and checked out a book on how to quilt. I'd been wanting to try my hand at it for a while, and even though we didn't live in St. Louis County, I could have a library card if I paid for it.

I was on Lindbergh and made a left back on to Clayton. I followed Clayton all the way down to Ballas, watching all the beautiful estates outside my window. Big red bows and wreaths hung from the large doors. This was the neighborhood of money. I made a right on to Ballas and then up to St. John's Hospital for my doctor's appointment.

My doctor was in the office building connected to the hospital. I went in, reported that I was there, took a seat and began thumbing through one of the books that I had checked out. Christmas music was piped in through the little round speaker in the ceiling above me. Watercolors in cheap metal frames hung on two walls and the usual rack of health-related pamphlets hung next to the office window.