The Queen of Palmyra (18 page)

“Sister, I can’t come in, honey. You don’t want Daddy to get sick too, do you? You all right? You all right now?”

I couldn’t see him at all now because he’d moved back to one side of the door so he wouldn’t have to be looking in. But I heard him still talking to me. “Flush it, honey. Smells bad. You all right?”

I kept on till it all came back up. Then I flushed the commode for the last time, I hoped. Mama had showed me how to wet some toilet paper and wipe up the lid when I made a big mess, so I did that and then sloshed some water around in my mouth and brushed my teeth real good, all the time getting encouragement from Daddy. “Okay, good, you must feel better. You just ate too much too fast. Get on to bed now. Just go on to bed.”

I didn’t answer, just did what I needed to do to get the taste out of my mouth. My pajamas needed changing, so I opened a drawer in the dark and got out my last pair and put it on. (Mama would’ve made me take a bath right then before I put on my last pair of clean pajamas.) I put my arm through a raggedy hole in the top, making it tear more, and got confused about where my arm should go but then figured it out. I was sweaty, both from getting sick and the heat, so I turned on the fan and got on top of the bed. I could hear Daddy banging around in the kitchen. He was having a time getting all that food crammed into the icebox.
I could hear him pulling some things out and putting others in, muttering to himself. What did people expect him to do with all this food?

That’s when I started thinking about how strange it was that things can go along so nice for a long long time. The cakes all laid out, and the beer spraying your face on summer night rides and people playing with each other so sweet and nice like Zenie and Ray, and Mimi’s tomato aspic, and Eva’s little red suitcase of makeup, which would cover up that bad place on her face if she’d just get out of the bed, and Daddy’s pretty box that his great-granddaddy made with his own hands to be passed on from son to son. It was all so wrapped up together that I couldn’t see for anything why Mama had to go and do what she did. Tear the web. What was the purpose to it? You tell me.

The night air outside had turned to syrup. Mimosas, I thought, which made me think of Miss Josephine. Had she finally counted all the leaves she could reach? Was she satisfied? I was more interested in the blossoms, sweet beyond anything, but mixed with something else. Dust? I remember my mother twirling them under my nose to wake me up when I was little. They made me sneeze and laugh. Maybe they would work on Eva and make her forget about the hooligans, I thought; maybe Miss Josephine was concentrating on the wrong part of the tree.

After a while, Daddy came in and took off his shoes and heaved himself down on the bed. Under the hair oil, he smelled deep-down dirty, the way you smell when you sweat over old sweat and don’t bathe or change your clothes for a long time. Nasty. If he’d come into the house smelling like that, Mama would have said, “Win, what you been into? You’re going to run us all out of the house. Go get yourself a bath before you do another thing!”

When he fell down on the bed, he rubbed my stomach for a minute like he always did. Then he started humming a hymn. I
could put the words to it. “Just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me and that thou biddest me come to thee, oh Lamb of God, I come. I come.” It wasn’t one of my favorites. When I heard it, I always saw someone having to reach out and hug a bloody Jesus. I’d never heard Daddy sing it before. He usually favored fighting songs. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was his favorite. His humming was long and drawn out. Mournful. He was lying flat on his back and so was I. When I turned to look at him, he didn’t look back but I could see his eyes were wide open. After we lay there awhile, the ten thirty came through.
No no no no.
That got me going again. Then he got going too, and not quiet like me, but sobs that shook the bed. He rubbed on me while he was crying and I patted his hand. Then right in the middle of a sob he fell dead asleep. I turned my face away from him and crawled farther to my side of the bed to get closer to the window and the night air. His dead hand fell on my back when I turned. It was so heavy that it seemed to be dragging me back to him, but then, as I moved farther away, it fell like a log onto the space I’d made between us. I looked out the screen at the shapes moving in the little breeze outside. The limb of an old cedar bush touched the screen again and again as if it were reaching for something inside.

I lay there for a long time. Daddy seemed to be trying to gallop full speed through his sleep so that by the time he had to get up he would have gotten as much of it as possible. He was breathing hard and fast and he twitched and snorted every now and then. His weight made it hard to stay away from him. It made a little hill out of my side of the bed, and I kept sliding down. Finally I gave up trying and let myself fall back toward him. I burrowed deep into his side. By then I’d gotten used to the smell. It didn’t bother me anymore. I was the bat and he was the cave.

I’d just about settled when I had a thought that woke me right
back up. Everything was dead quiet. No pans sliding in and out, no radio, no spoons stirring or whisks whisking. If Mama had been there, she would have been in the hot kitchen baking right this very minute. The thought made me gasp. Mama’s cakes! Three wholes and two halves, all due for pickup tomorrow! I had seen the list.

In a flash I rolled out from Daddy’s backbone and sat straight up. I needed to get up and make the cakes or Mama’s whole business would go down the drain. Hadn’t Mama just told Daddy last week, when he was ragging on her for working too hard, that if it weren’t for her cakes, we’d have gone to the poorhouse a long time ago? I could see the word spreading like wildfire through Millwood. Martha isn’t making her cakes anymore. Who’s going to make them now? Then some lady we never even heard of popping up out of nowhere and saying, don’t worry, I will!

So I got up real quiet. I knew that if Daddy heard me, he’d say, Sister, get on back in this bed, so I shut the door to my room real quiet—just a
click
was all—and stole into the kitchen. The next thing I did was preheat the oven. Then I got Mama’s little tin recipe holder with the fleur-de-lis on it where she kept her index cards with the cake recipes. I knew most of them by heart, but I wanted to be sure of all the measurements. Then I went to the telephone and found this week’s list. I was relieved to see there weren’t any orders for the lemon, just the devil’s food and caramel, both of which I could make with one hand tied behind my back. I just hoped Mama had gotten in everything I needed before running herself into the train.

Which she had. I looked in the back of the icebox. It was all there. Which gave me pause. Why, if she was planning on running herself into the train, did she get together all the ingredients for the cakes she had to make? There were two possible answers. The first was that it was all an accident, she didn’t mean to do it.
Too much moonshine, which was likely in any case. The second was that she expected me to have the sense to carry on the cake business. Now all the hours she had me in the kitchen helping her made sense. She was training me to take over, to carry on when she fell by the wayside. Whatever the case, Mama was alive! She was going to come home after she got out of the hospital and went over to Jackson for a while. I heard them say so. My job was to make sure she had her cake business to come home to. Lucky it was summer and I hadn’t started back to school.

I went over to the kitchen calendar to see how much of June was left. Not much, as it turned out. Lately my mother had been crossing out each passing day with a big
X
, as though she were a convict biding time in Parchment Penitentiary until she could tunnel out to the world of her real life. About a week’s worth of days in June were now
X
-ed out, including this Saturday. July was right around the corner. My main thought was how long I could take care of Mama’s cake business. I saw I had less than three months before school commenced. I was still worried about Eva and her burns and Miss Josephine and her leaves. I was worried that my mother would be sprung only to run herself into another train. I was worried I’d get kicked out of the fifth grade. So it was a blessed relief to worry about holding down the cake fort. This was something I could do something about, and, when my mother got home, she would love me for saving the day. She would take one look at the pile of money I’d have made and know that she couldn’t do without me.

So I started. Mama always made me get everything out first, which was no easy job since Mama kept all her ingredients in the icebox, even sugar and flour so they wouldn’t get bugs, and Daddy had pushed them all to the back to make room for the ham and other stuff. I had to pull all that out, which made me feel a little sickish since it was all the stuff I’d just thrown up. But I sat it all
back on the table, trying not to look at it, then got the sugar and flour and eggs and milk and shortening out from the back of the icebox. Then I put all the other stuff back in. Nice and tidy. Next I pulled out pans, bowls, the whisk, spoons, measuring cups, two little sharp knives for cutting the shortening into the flour, and so on. Finally I had it all ready. I started in, greasing the pans, cutting waxed paper to fit them, and greasing the waxed paper, so they’d be all ready for the batter. The stove could take eight pans at a time. Mama would double and triple recipes, but I was afraid I’d mess it up if I tried that. So I just made the cake batter over and over, the same thing. I had two whole devil’s foods and two halves, so that made three total, I figured. Then I had one whole caramel and two halves, so that made two of them. I decided to do the devil’s food cakes first. I’d have to turn them out, ice them up, and wash pans before starting on the white batter for the caramel cakes.

I was going along just fine. It was hot as Hades, but I had Mama’s fan set up on her stool. I set it to rotate so it’d cool the cakes when I got them out. For once I was glad my pajamas were holey because Mama was right, it is cooler. I was about two hours into it. Outside the night was buzzing. The sheep frogs were
baaaing
outside the window. I could see why Mama liked this time. It was her and the night outside, nobody else. The devil’s foods were out of the oven and cooling on little racks. I’d mixed up the angel icing and started cooking it up in a double boiler, which I was watching like a hawk and stirring every few seconds. I was timing it, plus I planned to use the candy thermometer on it too. I wasn’t going to take any chances with a grainy mess. So I was doing right well, considering. The angel icing started bubbling along, so I beat in the cream of tartar, and in about a minute everything was just right for it to come off the eye.

Which is where I made my mistake.

Two mistakes, actually. The first was that I got flustered and forgot to turn off the eye, so the flame was still going right along. If I had just turned that off, none of the rest of it would have happened. Then I couldn’t find any pot holders. I’d used them to take the cakes out of the oven. What had I done with them? I looked around and they were nowhere in sight. I touched the pot handle of the top double boiler. It was too hot to hold. So then I made mistake number two. I snatched up a dish towel. I had to move fast. The icing was boiling up a storm, and meanwhile, the pot under it had suddenly boiled dry and was starting to smoke (again, the mistake of not turning the eye off), so I couldn’t see any way around it. I grabbed the pot of icing with the dish towel. When I did that, part of the dish towel dragged down and touched the eye and took the flame. I held on to it because I wasn’t about to let that pot of icing go and fall. I’d put too much work into it. All I had to do was get the bubbling pot over to the sideboard part of the sink, where it could cool off. Then I could throw the dish towel into the sink and turn on the water, which I’d seen Mama do a million times to put out a little fire. She used dish towels for pot holders all the time.

I got the icing to the sink. What I didn’t count on was that when I put the pot down, carefully I might add, the dish towel touched Mama’s apron that was hanging up on a nail by the sink, which of course wouldn’t have been there if Mama had been doing the baking, so it took the flame, which flared up because just that very minute the fan moved in its direction. It was no fault of mine that the apron was there, or that the apron was right next to the yellow-and-white-checked curtains Mama had gotten at Kress’s and hung over the sink. Cheery, she’d called them, nice and cheery. So of course they caught on fire too, the fan still moving in that direction. I was hitting the apron and curtains with the dishtowel, but that just made things worse and my fingers
were getting burnt. I dropped the dish towel and started running water in the sink. I had in mind getting a glass to throw some water on things. I could have put it all out if the little cloth tab on Mama’s apron hadn’t just then burned through. When it did, the fiery apron, with both its ties burning and standing straight out so that it looked like the cross of Jesus on fire, kind of floated down onto a pile of newspapers in the corner between the sink and stove. Soft and easy it went, and then curled up on the pile.

When the newspapers started up and the curtains had set in good and I saw the fan making its lazy turn to come back, I started hollering for Daddy. He burst out of the bedroom door shaking his head from side to side looking like Bomba just woken up from a nap in the trees. He didn’t have his shoe, so he rocked from side to side coming across the living room. He came much slower that you’d expect anybody to do under the circumstances, but who am I to point fingers?

“What you gone and done?” he roared. “What in hell’s name you gone and done?”

I started toward him. The kitchen was so smoked up I could hardly see him. I was screaming Daddy Daddy by this time. I was being the biggest baby in town. He got to me and snatched me up by the arm, and dragged me over to the front door. He opened the door, kicked the screen out and threw me out on the front stoop.