Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels (4 page)

At least he doesn’t mind a little color,
Queenie thinks.

The elegant butcher wipes his hands on his perfectly clean white apron and steps into the aisle to kiss Iris’s extended hand. A girlish giggle escapes her octogenarian lips.

When Queenie is unsuccessful in hiding her smile, Iris shoots her a look that could stop a wildebeest in a dead run. No matter how many times she gets these looks from Iris, they always shock her. Iris returns her attention to Spud and her face colors slightly from Spud’s attention. She tilts her head upward as if this regal gesture might command the color to recede. They speak affectionately of the weather.

Damn, y’all, how many different ways can you describe hot?
Queenie wonders, for Savannah is as hot as a furnace in Hades for six months out of the year.

Iris hands Queenie her leather handbag, heavy enough to contain the wildebeest. As instructed, she reaches inside the bag for a linen envelope containing an order written neatly on Temple stationery. She hands it to Spud Grainger, who thanks her kindly.

Exotic meats, Iris Temple will tell anyone who has the misfortune to ask, are the only thing her delicate, voodoo cursed constitution can tolerate. Whether the strong medicine of these exotic animals is meant to counteract the spell she is at the mercy of remains a mystery.

Antelope, alligator, buffalo, elk, kangaroo and ostrich are flown in from all over the world at great expense. Not to mention iguana, llama, rattlesnake and yak. Exotic animals associated with nursery rhymes or the stars of animated Disney movies Queenie watched with Violet’s daughters. Animals that would have fought harder if they knew their capture would result in ending up in Iris Temple’s gullet.

Spud Grainger studies the list. He smiles and pets his mustache, as if Iris’s exotic orders, as well as her exotic nature, have captivated him.

“The caribou may take a while,” he says thoughtfully. “But I’ll give Violet a call as soon as it comes in.”

A line of Savannah housewives forms behind Iris. Queenie overhears at least one mention of secrets and that Iris should be ashamed of herself. Luckily, Iris doesn’t hear them but that doesn’t stop her from eyeing their khaki shorts and New Balance sneakers before inclining her chin heavenward like she’s on the trail of an unacceptable scent. She wrinkles her nose and furrows her brow. Though the 4th of July is three months away, Queenie anticipates the upcoming fireworks.

“Chanel,” Iris says to Queenie in a whisper that can be heard from the front of the store. The look on Iris’s face reveals her complete and utter disgust.

Chanel no. 5, as Queenie has been told countless times, is the fragrance of the terminally middle class. Iris abhors the wannabe rich or any other kind of rich that doesn’t involve money that has been around since the Confederacy.

Spud Grainger gives Iris an apologetic look and motions to the line forming behind her. Iris stops mid-sniff and thanks Spud, another kindness reserved only for him. Before leaving, she turns to the gaggle of Savannah housewives and gives them a parting hiss, like the rattlesnake she had for dinner the night before. Queenie offers the women a quick apology, but the final word comes from Iris as she departs. Meanwhile, two children holding a box of Lucky Charms cover their noses and run in search of their mother.

Back at the car, Queenie gives Iris the keys to the Lincoln and Iris drives—at the speed of a handicapped snail—the 500 yards to drop Queenie off at the hairdressers.

“I’ll be back in two hours,” Iris says. “You’d better be finished.”

Queenie nods as the grand matriarch drives off to conduct another errand, running over the curb and missing by inches a stop sign at the end of the parking lot. Queenie never questions the nature of Iris’s other errands, but just last week when returning to the car to retrieve her crime novel, she found a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken bones crammed under the back seat, the bones picked clean, like an exotic jungle animal had feasted on them while lying on the plush leather seats.

So much for voodoo and special diets,
Queenie thought at the time, as she held the bucket of bones and smiled back at Colonel Sanders’ emblazoned image. If Iris keeps this up, hardening of the arteries may take her out, but Queenie’s not so sure she has the fortitude to wait for natural causes. Although violence isn’t really in her nature.

Her hair relaxed and styled and all the latest gossip discussed—most of which has to do with the
Temple Book of Secrets
—Queenie puts the charge on Iris’s bill and waits outside, fanning herself with a real estate flyer pulled from the box in front of the beauty shop. Queenie has only seen the
Temple Book of Secrets
twice, both times while in Oscar’s office before the ledger was moved to the safety deposit box. No matter how much Queenie begged, Oscar refused to let her look at it, saying Iris would kill him, which she probably would have. The book was kept in the bottom left hand desk drawer that locked with a key Oscar kept on his key chain. It was moved to the bank vault a few years after his death.

Within minutes, the shiny black Lincoln rounds the corner, rolls over the sidewalk and hits a green trash can that bounces off a silver Toyota wagon before coming to rest at the north end of the parking lot.

“Good lord, this woman is an accident waiting to happen,”
Queenie mutters.

Queenie is a very good driver herself. Oscar, Iris’s husband, taught her when she was sixteen in an equally big Lincoln Continental. In exchange for the driving lessons, she agreed to climb into the back seat with him and show him her breasts. At the time, this gesture seemed a small price to pay for use of the Temple cars.
Of course this is a secret I doubt ever made it into Iris’s precious book
. But there are others that might have. She wishes now she had caught a glimpse of that secret book, but Iris keeps the key to the deposit box locked up, too.

If Queenie’s own secrets are revealed in the classifieds she might be looking for a new place to live. She gulps with the thought. While some southerners follow the motto:
What would Jesus do
?—seen on car bumper stickers as
W.W.J.D?—
Queenie is more prone to ask
W.W.
O
.D.? What would Oprah do?
Having watched nearly every episode of Oprah since the early 90s, Queenie’s best guess is that her hero would put a team of lawyers to work on it. Unfortunately, Queenie doesn’t have that kind of money.

The Town Car rounds the final corner and veers in Queenie’s direction as if Iris is playing a game of geriatric “chicken.” Queenie debates whether to jump aside, but decides to hold her ground.

“Just try it, old lady,” Queenie says, her teeth gritted in determination. She locks her ample knees in place, grateful she has some substance to her. “If it’s my fate to go to the Great Beyond at the hand of that smelly bitch, then so be it,” she adds. “But I refuse to be the first one to flinch.”

The Lincoln lurches twice before screeching to a halt, and then stops only inches away from Queenie. So close that heat drifts from the engine and further relaxes her hair. Queenie gets inside and slams the door while Iris’s wrinkled lips glisten in the sunlight from her latest rendezvous with the Colonel. The grease relaxes her face like a kind of Botox injection while the smell of his secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices permeates the closed car.

After several attempts, Iris coerces the Town Car into drive and hits the curb three times before reaching the main road, causing a family of four to frantically scatter into the good hands of an Allstate Insurance office.

“God in heaven!” Queenie shrieks. “Watch where you’re going.”

“Keep your commandments to yourself,” Iris says with a sneer, as she gracefully raises one hip to expel another one for the record books.

On the slow ride home, instead of worrying what secrets of hers might end up in the newspaper—a legitimate concern—Queenie entertains herself by daydreaming of Iris Temple’s accidental death while choking on one of the Colonel’s chicken bones.

CHAPTER FOUR

Violet

Violet rubs her left shoulder that has ached all morning. The day before her daughter Tia broke her leg in 4th grade, this same shoulder predicted it. It happened before Mister Oscar—Miss Temple’s husband—died, too. Since she was a girl, Violet has known her arm is hooked into a higher level of consciousness. As a result, the minute it begins to ache, she automatically breaks into a sweat.

A sense of urgency accompanies her drive to the Temple house as she wipes a thin layer of perspiration from her upper lip. She has taken this route through Savannah hundreds of times, yet something about this morning feels different. Nearing the house, a blast of pain radiates up her arm. She rubs it and sighs her anguish.

“What are you trying to tell me?” she asks.

Anyone who heard her talking to a body part would assume she was crazy.
But I guess I’m only crazy if I hear it talk back
.
Violet smiles despite the pain, as the throbbing continues. Meanwhile, she catches every traffic light and is still five minutes away from the Temple mansion.

When Violet pulls her car into the carriage house, the throbbing intensifies and her blouse is soaked straight through. Her deodorant works overtime as she turns off the car and gets out. Even though she grew up in Savannah and has never lived anywhere else, to go from air-conditioning to the sweltering Georgia heat is shocking at first, like stepping into a pre-heated oven.

After she walks into the kitchen, she stands still and listens, purse still in hand. The house seems quieter than usual. Violet has the family
sensitivity
, as her grandmother calls it, a sense of invisible things, like the different entities in the Temple house. Now that the
Temple
Book of Secrets
has been in the news, the ghostly presences have seemed especially strong. Violet can usually tell where the spirits are that live in the house, by the energy they give off. It’s like tuning into a distant radio station. Violet turns her head to intuit her next move while the entire house appears to be holding its breath.

“What’s going on?” she asks any spirits listening. She’s never known them to answer back.
But there’s a first time for everything,
she tells herself.

Having read once that so-called
sensitives
often come from tragic backgrounds, Violet wonders if her psychic ability has anything to do with her being an orphan. She has no memory of her mother, who died in an automobile accident when Violet was a baby, and she never met her father, who left town when he found out her mother was pregnant with Violet. For whatever reason, her grandmother never speaks of either of her parents. And even though her grandmother and her Aunt Queenie raised her, at times Violet feels all alone in the world.

Now that she thinks about it, her Aunt Queenie seems worked up about that secret book, too. While Violet used to always retrieve the newspaper from the front porch, it is now Queenie who gets it before she even arrives.

Mysteries are everywhere
, she thinks. But this is nothing new.

Out of habit, she checks the kitchen counter for the note Miss Temple always leaves. In the two decades Violet has worked there, her employer has critiqued every meal, leaving detailed feedback on Temple stationery for Violet every morning. In all that time, she’s never been told she did a good job. If something is prepared well it simply isn’t mentioned. To Violet’s credit, Miss Temple’s communications have become shorter over the years, but she doesn’t know what to think about there not being a note at all. She looks around the floor to see if it might have dropped. Sometimes if the Temple ghosts get rowdy in the middle of the night, things get moved. But nothing is there.

After retrieving two aspirin from the cabinet, she fills a glass with water, takes the pain reliever and then glances at the clock. Queenie is usually already downstairs by the time Violet gets here, but not this morning. Her shoulder tells her again that something isn’t right.

Violet leaves the kitchen and walks into the dining room. With every step her shoulder tells her she is getting closer to whatever she needs to find, like in a childhood game of hot and cold. She steps into the grand foyer which could use a touch up with the dust mop.

“Queenie?” she calls. “Miss Temple?” She waits and listens again. The only sound is her old friend, the large grandfather clock ticking in the entryway that smells of the lemon oil she rubbed into the wood yesterday.

Upstairs, Queenie’s bedroom door opens and then slams. “Is that you, Queenie?” Violet calls.

Queenie steps to the railing wiping her eyes. “My heavens, that’s the deepest I’ve slept in years,” Queenie says. “You would have thought I took one of mama’s elixirs.”

Violet exhales her relief. “With all these nuts worked up about those secrets, I was worried,” she says.

“There’s still plenty to worry about,” Queenie says. “For one thing, Iris is going to give me hell for sleeping so late. Is she in the sun room yet?”

“I haven’t heard a peep out of her,” Violet says.

They turn to look in the direction of Miss Temple’s room at the end of the hallway.

“Maybe she’s overslept, too,” Violet says.

“That wouldn’t be like her,” Queenie says. “She’s usually up at dawn doing her calisthenics on the balcony.” Queenie approaches Miss Temple’s room and knocks on the door. “Iris?” Queenie says.

Violet winces as her shoulder sends her an urgent message that perhaps she relaxed too soon. “Be careful,” she calls after Queenie. She waits downstairs in the middle of the foyer as Queenie knocks again and then slowly opens the door.

“Lord in heaven!” Queenie shouts, disappearing into Iris’s room.

Holding her shoulder, Violet runs up the stairs to find Queenie shaking Miss Temple who lies lifeless on the bed.

“She’s not waking up, Vi.” Queenie’s voice sounds an octave higher than usual. “All this mess about
The Temple Book of Secrets
has gone and pushed her over the edge.”