The Queen of Palmyra (34 page)

I got into the bed and pulled myself over to the side where the window was. It seemed hotter than ever. My skin was crawling and itching. Maybe I’d gotten too used to the cool mountain air. I was on fire from the monster Kotex, smelly from the stale air in the bus, and sweating that kind of nasty sweat that comes with
being hurt and plumb wore out. The dirty sheets felt like waxed paper wrapped around me. I couldn’t move much or lie on my left side because of my shoulder. I had to turn away from the door, and I didn’t like the feeling of having my back to it. My eyes kept popping open because I would think I heard something outside my window, a consternation that hadn’t been there before. I tried to tell myself it was all in my head. I was used to the safe buzz of a room full of sleeping girls and the night glowing peaceful and quiet out the window before me as I lay up in my high bunk in the night air of the mountain. I had forgotten what it was like to be the me I really was. The life that I was getting ready to have to take back up stretched out before me. I’d always used words and pictures and stories to think my way through the summer nights. Now, in my mind the stories wilted in my hands and fell through my fingers like Miss J’s ruined leaves. There were no words for this story I was living, or at least not any I knew yet. When the train called out its
no, no, no, no
, that was the only word that came to mind. No.

I saw where I was. At the edge of a deep dark place, barely holding on. The worst part was I now saw how my mother was to blame. She had saved herself, bully for her, but she’d left me to Daddy so he wouldn’t come after her. She’d absconded, casting me off like the extra scarf she’d kept in the glove compartment of the green Ford. I was her ransom. If she’d snatched me up with the grocery list that night she never came back, he’d have tracked her down for sure. I tried to bury what she had done in a dark basement of my mind. I tried to lock it up in a box, the way Daddy locked up his Nighthawk things. But you always knew the box was down there and that the spiders were building their messy webs all around it. It was not something you could forget or make to disappear. It was real and it always waited for you in its secret place because it always knew you’d come back for it.

That night I knew for the first time that I could just let go of the edge and fall in and sink to the bottom and never come up. Once, many years ago, it happened to a girl who went to my camp. They tell the story of how she just jumped into the lake one bright morning like everybody else and then, no girl, just a disturbance in the water, and after that, nothing. The lake folded over her like a fresh sheet over a bed, smooth and untroubled. It was a mountain lake and deep. They never found her. Now, sometimes campers think they see her floating on her back right under the surface of the water. Her mouth is open and she looks like she is trying to tell them something.

But I have another story for the lost girl. She was a fine swimmer who could hold her breath for a good long time. She swam underwater to a far island, and she came up on a golden shore where camp went on forever and ever, and there were no parents and no boxes and no headache sticks and no hot hands. She took up her new life like a queenly mantle and lived happily ever after.

I held my arm close, and I tried to think small. I tried to think about tomorrow. I’d see Zenie and Mimi and maybe Eva too. I could tell Mimi thank you for sending me to camp, which ought to make her day. I figured I could hide my shoulder from Zenie and Mimi, but I ought to avoid Eva because, being left-handed, how could I write or draw diagrams? When I moved, it felt gravelly inside like a little mouse was in there gnawing away. My shoulder felt like it had set in to throb all the night long, but I was betting that out in the daylight I could do almost everything else in a normal-looking way. So I fell into a jittery sleep thinking about how to fool them. Make them think I was all right. I was thinking too that if I pretended enough to be all right, maybe I would get that way. The Power of Positive Thinking, Sherry the counselor would tell us when we were trying to do something that was hard, like hike up a mountain or saddle a biting horse.
Her ponytail would bounce when she said it. Maybe I would grow a ponytail.

The next morning Daddy had to go over to Greenwood for a meeting of Mississippi Assurance agents, so he woke me up at the crack of dawn to drop me off at Zenie’s. It was barely light and he looked like he’d just gotten home. The clothes he’d had on the night before had smudges on them. There were half moons under the arms of his khaki shirt. He smelled like vinegar and smoke and whiskey; and his hair, which had gotten too long, was weighted down with oil, though not Mr. Holcomb’s sweet oil, but the oil of Daddy’s own dirty head.

He stomped into my room. “Get up, Sister. Come on, let’s go.” That’s all he said. When I turned over in the bed, my shoulder gave out a sickening crunch, which woke me up good and proper. I was so worn out I could barely pull myself out of the sack. I didn’t brush my teeth or wash my face or pull the sheets off the bed the way I’d planned. I was already sleeping in my clothes so I just crawled out of bed, grabbed my sack of dirty clothes with my good hand, and followed Daddy out of the door without a word. He didn’t look at me, nor I at him. As I followed him down the path to the car, my arm and shoulder revved up again, throbbing each time I set foot on one of Mama’s stepping-stones.

I had gotten Daddy to let me leave my bag on Mimi’s front porch on the way over to Zenie’s. When he dropped me in front of Zenie’s and scratched off, his elbow out the window and a Lucky Strike in his mouth, I hoped he would have a fiery wreck and die so I’d never have to see him again. That is your father, I said to myself. Your
father
, I said again, just so my murderous self would listen up. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long on the land the Lord Thy God hath given thee. But the man who drove away didn’t seem like anybody’s anything. Much less a father.

I could tell by looking at the front of the place that Zenie and them weren’t up yet. The new day’s sun was just now creeping out with its heat coming on before it actually broke through. It was too early to knock, so I sat down on the front stoop and waited for some sign of life inside. I held my arm down to my side. I needed some Bayer bad. I hoped Zenie had some. Even Ray, who left early in the mornings to beat the heat while he did yards all over town, seemed to be still in bed.

All I wanted was to crawl onto Zenie’s couch. What sleep I had gotten the night before seemed snatched by the hardest from the heat and the trains and the agitated night outside the screen of my window. I kept thinking I needed to pay attention to something out there in the dark, but whatever it was, it seemed to be hiding itself Bomba-style in thickets of nandinas and crape myrtle, which were now blooming their hearts out, it being well into July. I couldn’t depart from the feeling that I needed to listen harder and be more watchful for what was coming. I wondered if Mary and them felt like this while they were hanging around Jesus’ tomb waiting for him to make good on his promise to come back to them. One thing I’d gotten to be an expert in by this time was waiting, like right now what I was waiting for was just a flick of the curtain at Zenie’s front window. You had to wait with your heart and eyes and ears all open. Otherwise you might miss The One when it tiptoed in, and it might tiptoe right back out. You were supposed to be ready with a smile and a glass of iced tea with mint. You needed to be ready to help it come on in, if it needed help. In one of the
Clarion-Ledgers
Daddy had stacked up in our living room I’d read about how Medgar Evers’s wife and little children had waited up for him the night he came home and got shot in his own driveway. When Mrs. Evers and the children heard the shot and came running out, they found their dear one in a pool of his own blood. But what if they had listened so hard
for his car that they would have heard it driving up the street? What if they had opened their side door to the carport just a second sooner, right at the very moment their beloved drove up, would the murderer have said calf rope, called it off, for worry of hitting two boys and a girl and their mother? Just a second can be life or death. Off and on I worried that my mother would try to come back for me and if I didn’t wait with enough care, I would miss her tapping oh so lightly on the window screen for me. Then she would leave and I would miss her forever.

I walked out into Zenie’s yard and folded myself up under Miss Josephine’s mimosa tree, which had new green shoots of leaves coming on strong to replace the ones she’d pulled off to count. I lay down under it, my head on my elbow, and watched Zenie’s front window. Then I must have dropped off because I began to dream that Medgar Evers’s black blood and my white blood had gotten mixed together. Now that he was gone, it was his blood I carried inside of me. I felt it move, slow and sure, heart to legs to belly. That’s what Daddy and his friends thought: that Medgar Evers had to die so my white-girl blood could flow easeful. Top to bottom, in and out. But why and to what end?

Now, the flick of the curtain. Such a little thing that I almost missed it. Zenie opened the door a crack. She was still wearing her nightgown, her face in shadow. Then she moved forward into the dim morning light. She had a frown on her face, then a half smile. “What it doing out here?” she demanded. “Sleeping under my tree like a tramp.” When I got up from the ground and went over to her, she actually gave me a big hug, which sent a jolt through my shoulder. I didn’t want her to see me wince, so I burrowed my face into the front of her nightgown. Once I got in between her bosoms, I didn’t want to leave. She smelled like Alba lotion and sleep. “Whoa, horse!” she said in an aggravated whisper. “Get off of me, girl!” She pushed me away and frowned.
“Weren’t expecting you this early in the morning. We got company. Now be careful and don’t wake nobody up. They all dead to the world.”

That’s when I got a good look at her. I’d gotten a vacation at camp, but it looked like she’d been wallowing in hell headfirst. There was a big exclamation point between her eyebrows, a long up and down line with a hole under it, right between the eyes. There were two parentheses that ran down the sides of her mouth to her chin line, and dark smudges under her eyes. Now, with the sootiness around her eyes and the creamy brown of her cheeks, her face had turned into two different colors. In the two weeks I’d been gone, she looked as if she’d grown a permanent mask.

When I tiptoed through the front room to the kitchen, I could see in the dim light that people were sleeping every which way around and about on Zenie’s living-room floor. I almost tripped over them. Young people. Eva had sure gathered a lot of friends in the time I’d been gone. Then it hit me. Maybe they were here to learn the trade of selling encyclopedias in Millwood before hitting the big cities, like Greenwood and Jackson and Meridian. Eva had a knack. She’d won bonuses for selling. She must be teaching them the trade.

Zenie came in right behind me. “Don’t worry about them there. They just visiting.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and she started boiling the coffee. “They selling encyclopedias too?” I whispered the question.

Zenie’s back was to me. She finished setting up the percolator on the front eye of the stove and came over to the other side of the table and sat down. The water under the coffeepot started to hiss. “They just visiting is all. One thing you got to promise. Don’t tell your daddy we got all this company up here.”

“Why not?” She didn’t have to worry, but I was curious.

“He think too many folks in this house he might not let you come up and see me no more.” Her face slammed shut, and I saw how the lines had come about. “He might not like you being in the house around so much black.”

She was right, I’d gotten wise to Daddy’s ways. He would hate me stepping over Negroes scattered about on the floor like branches cut from a tree. He might decide they were outside agitators and would just love the excuse to come riding up on his white horse and save me from them. Which would cause Zenie and them no end of grief. That much I knew.

“I won’t tell him.”

“You be sorry if you do. We all be sorry. You not supposed to be up here this early in the morning no how.” She glared at me for a minute.

“I won’t tell him. I swear on the B-i-b-l-e.” I spelled it firm and clear and stared deep into Zenie’s penny eyes. Grandpops had told me to only make promises you could keep. I could keep this one until hell froze over.

She could see that. She stood up from the table. “All right now, what sound good to eat? You get any supper out of that daddy of yours yesterday evening?” She kept her voice low.

“What do
you
think?” At camp, I’d discovered that the smarty-pants voice I heard in my head was starting to come out of my mouth more and more often, in little punctuated puffs blown out like cigarette smoke.

“Shhh. Don’t wake up the world. Guess you good and hungry then. Let’s see what I can find to tide you over. Want to get some sewing done before we go on up the street to you-know-who’s.”

She left me sitting at the table while she went back into her and Ray’s room. A few minutes later, she was back in her regular white outfit and the white elastic hose she wore to work. The ringlets were gone from her hair. It was slicked back with oil. She
smelled like fresh Alba. She set about warming some cold biscuits from the night before and stirring up a batch of milk gravy she made from lard and milk and flour in her iron skillet.

The gravy was bubbling when Eva glided into the kitchen without a sound. She was wearing a seersucker robe and had big blue rollers all over her head. Her face was scrubbed and shiny, no lipstick or rouge. She looked like a high-school girl.

“Look here what the cat dragged in.” She whapped me on top of my bad shoulder. It was a friendly whap, but it sent sparks flying through my shoulder and I flinched from the hurt of it.

She peered at me through her cat-eye glasses. “What’s wrong with you? You jumpy, girl.”

“Shhh,” Zenie said.