The Queen of Palmyra (37 page)

I was turning the doorknob when he said it. “You know what happens if you break the oath?”

I wasn’t sure what I should answer. No sir seemed dangerous, but so did yes sir. I decided to move my head a little in a roundabout sort of way that might be a nod yes or a nod no.

He came over to me and took my bad left arm between his two hands. His little spider hairs seemed to stand up higher on the back of them. My arm took on a life of its own and started quaking in his grasp as if I had a palsy. Fire shot from my shoulder down to the dancing arm.

Then he said the rest of it. “You die.” He said it so quiet and peaceful that at first I wasn’t sure I heard right. Then I looked into his face and saw the words burned across his mouth.

“Yes sir,” I whispered.

He turned me loose and stepped back.

That’s when two stories took shape all at once in my mind’s eye. I could see them both clear as day and for a moment I stood frozen between them. The sentence that began both stories was this: Florence Irene Forrest’s father tells her he will kill her.

In the first story scaredy-cat Florence slips out the door and walks slow through the yard and then starts to run and never stops.

The other was a different story with a different girl. Flo.

Flo is nobody’s fool. She gets into the doorway and pushes open the screen, but she doesn’t hop out like a scared rabbit saying yes sir, yes sir. She gets one foot out the door. Then she reaches down and all in one motion grabs her daddy’s precious box off the floor with her good arm and pulls his keys out of the deadbolt lock with her bad one. No car for him! Then she says what she has to say; she hisses it.

“
Catch me if you can.
”

He grabbed air for me, quarters flying this way and that, but I was too quick. I gathered myself and took a leap out the door and across the porch, barely touching Mama’s stepping-stones on the way up to the street. He came after me with his crab crawl, but I left him in the dust, lickety-splitting it over Mama’s little stepping-stones, the quarters jangling in my pockets. Just as I reached the street, I heard sirens, and when I looked behind me, he’d vanished into thin air.

I hightailed it all the way back up to Mimi’s, my shoulder shooting off firecrackers each time my foot hit the street. The box jostled around. I dropped it once, but picked it back up and kept running. The sirens hadn’t let up. They seemed to be coming from Shake Rag, though I paid little attention.

I ran up my grandmother’s driveway and into her backyard. I headed straight for the row of pecan trees behind the garage and threw the box on the ground. The latch broke open, and out spilled Daddy’s black garb and all the rest of his paraphernalia. Flags, cross, Bible, sword now flung loose from its holder, vase, cards, Zippo. Ordinary run-of-the-mill things scattered on the ground as if by a child playing some strange made-up game.

When I saw the lighter gleaming in the leaves, I remembered how easy it had been to start a fire. I also remembered how Ray killed the caterpillars with gasoline. With my right hand, I scraped some leaves and twigs into a pile around the box and
piled up my father’s stuff on top of it. I ran into the garage and picked up the can of gasoline next to the lawn mower. I was getting more and more used to doing with my right hand, and I used it to pour what was left in the can on top of the pile I’d made. I kept out Daddy’s hood, which had fallen to the side and looked like a bat struck down in mid-flight. I flicked the Zippo and set fire to the hood. It made a nice flame, and I used it to start the twigs and leaves. They and the box caught in a loud
whoosh
that made me jump back.

The box burned for a while. I paced up and down watching it flame, then settle into a nice cheerful burn, and eyeing the driveway where, at any minute, my father might appear. I hoped Mimi would think the neighbors were burning leaves, and vice versa.

Nothing happened, nobody came. Before long the box and my father’s things were nothing but a pile of reddish ash. With a big magnolia leaf I picked up the hot, smoky glass vase and threw it up against the side of the garage. It crashed to the ground in a million pieces. I took off for Mimi’s back porch.

I burst through the screen door onto the porch breathing hard and yelling for my grandmother. It was coming dark by then, but she hadn’t turned on the lights in the house the way she usually did this time of day. The door from the back porch to the kitchen was locked and the lights were off. I looked through the glass at the top of the door and saw Mimi sitting in the shadows at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. She scrambled to her feet when I banged on the glass with both hands. Then she peered out. I had my face pressed up against the glass. She jumped back when she saw me, then looked again, out into the dusk behind me. Finally, she unlocked the door.

“What, what?” she half whispered, half screamed when I burst in on her. She locked the door back behind me as soon as I got inside. When I told her what Daddy had said and the money
he’d given me, she looked puzzled for a minute, but then she said, well then, we were going to New Orleans and we were going this very night, damn my clothes, damn the tires, damn the savings bond, damn her job.

We locked the doors and went upstairs. I helped her pack two big suitcases. One was hers and one had been Grandpops’. She got those into the trunk of the Plymouth by herself; she wouldn’t let me help because of my shoulder. Plus, she said, I needed to watch her load the car and stay in the house by the phone. If anybody came into the yard, call the police. If I saw my father or any of his cronies, call the police.

After stashing the suitcases, she started snatching hatboxes from the top of her closet and piling them up on the backseat, all the way to the roof of the car. When she got as many into the backseat as she could fit, she squeezed some more hatboxes into the trunk, stacked two between us on the front seat, and put one on the floor of the car on my side so that I had to straddle it the whole way. There were still some hats left in the top of her closet, and she looked up at them and sighed. She took one last small box and opened it and brought forth a little number with a brown feather and a little half veil with butterfly designs. She plopped the hat on her head without even looking in the mirror and folded the veil back so that it wasn’t over her eyes.

Right after midnight we headed out, fugitives into the night. She left a note for Zenie on the kitchen table. It said, “Dear Zenie, Gone for a while. Taking Florence you know where. Fox on our tail. Will write and send money for paid vacation. Take the food in the icebox and the sugar and flour and the pickled peaches in the crock. Take anything else the roaches would get and lock up the house. Please tell Uldine and the paperboy I’m gone. I will see about the mail. Thank you for everything. I’m sorry if I made you mad sometimes. I’m sorry I made you do the wash that time, truly I am. If you need to work for somebody else
for a while, I will understand. I will miss you, Zenie. You have been a help and comfort to me all these years. You know I’d never leave like this if it wasn’t the only thing to do. Yours always, Irene Calhoun.”

I was worried that Daddy and his friends would appear in Mimi’s backyard at the last minute, but when we ran for the car, the night was quiet and sweet.

Mimi had a map that she kept on her lap the whole way down to New Orleans. After a while it got soggy with her tears. She wasn’t crying out loud, just drip drip dripping slow and sure as if she’d sprung a leak. I stayed awake long into the early-morning hours. My shoulder throbbed. I was panting the way a dog does when it knows it’s lost. I couldn’t seem to get my breath. We saw shadows of animals along the road. Deer. A warthog. A coon. All intent on getting some secret place only they knew about.

I kept watching behind us. When a car’s lights would come into view, I’d start to sweat, but then it would pass us or turn off and we’d be alone again.

Mimi hummed hymns as the tires slapped the road. In the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand. Let the water and the blood from Thy wounded side which flowed be of sin the double cure. In the sweet bye and bye we shall meet on that beautiful shore. After a while the hymns made me deeply peaceful, and my breath became slow and even. Finally, I closed my eyes.

It seemed as if I slept over centuries and great distances. I felt the earth’s globe groan and turn beneath us, like the deep and invisible current of a powerful river. I felt us rising and falling as that current took us into a vastness that had no tracks to mark it, that seemed both land and water, earth and sky.

Mimi woke me up saying, “Look, honey.
Look
.” I woke to the sky just turning to rose. We were on a bridge coming in over dark water. On the other side, in the far distance, the lights of the city were shining before us like the halo of a giant angel.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Mimi said. Her hat had fallen forward so that the feather on it pointed straight ahead.

“No it wasn’t,” I said.

The rest was easy. Mabel was still asleep when we piled in so we had to ring the doorbell twice to rout her out. When she finally opened the door, she looked healthy as a horse in her bobby pins and white pajamas and said we looked like escapees from a chain gang.

Mimi rolled her bloodshot eyes. “You have no idea.” She went into the downstairs bedroom and fell dead asleep across the bed before she even told Mabel why we were there or who I was, or took off her hat.

Mabel looked at me and said, “Well now, you must be Florence.”

“Flo,” I said.

“A name with some spunk. I like it.” She led me upstairs to another pretty bedroom and said, “Maybe you want to take a nap too, Flo?”

I said yes ma’am and hit the hay.

In my dream (or maybe I’m still awake) I keep on moving. I am riding on a road that goes straight down into the dark water. No bridges in sight and no shining cities either. Now I’m flying because it’s fly or drown. Not the breaststroke through the air cool as a cucumber, the way Zenie does during her afternoon naps. No. It’s swoop and circle, riding the wind. On the ground below, the flutter of something bright yellow.

It was all so humdrum. The way he stopped the car and jumped out, with her in the back. I thought he was going to get me to take her with me on my sales rounds. That maybe Zenie was off somewheres and couldn’t be found. Or, maybe, I thought, as he clumped over toward me on that foot of his you can always see under his boogey-man sheets, he was going to get me to take her back up by Zenie’s for him. He was in a hurry, that’s for sure, and I thought that was what he wanted me for. To get shuck of her the way he was always trying to do, foist her off on the Negroes. I was thinking nobody here’s going to be your mammy, peckerwood.

Then I saw the screwdriver, and I thought he must be having car trouble in that pile of rubbish he was driving. Clumping up to me with this easy
glad
look on his face, like he was real pleased to find me right there, right then. I thought he was going to say, hey girl, help me do something with this here car. Lift this or hold that. I wasn’t going to help him do shit if I could help it, and I might’ve run on down the street and gotten away from him. Sure had every reason to, after the way he and his jerk-ass friends burned me and put their nasty hands
on me when all I’d wanted was to make my tuition and a little spending money. I wasn’t looking to be any Rosa Parks either, but he and his peckerwood sidekicks, they did something to me. They made me mulish, and I wasn’t about to go hightailing it back home like a scared jackrabbit, no ma’am, because then they’d think they could just keep right on with their burning and touching and killing.

Truth be told, though, I was almost too chicken to run. I didn’t know how fast he could move on that gimp leg. Even if I got away, I knew deep down I’d be running forever. I’d have to run all the way back to Carolina.

So I stood my ground waiting for him to get near me on the sidewalk and have his say. My scarf felt tight around my neck all of a sudden. I started sweating in my scalp and my glasses slipped down on my nose. I pushed them back. They’d fogged up a little so I couldn’t see clearly. But I still wasn’t worried about him starting up anything with me. For one thing, it was broad day still. Frank and the boys had just rounded the corner up on Moses. All I had to do was holler and they’d come running. Plus there she was in the backseat with her moon face pressed up to the glass (why the window was up in that heat I don’t know). He wasn’t going to do nothing to me with his own child looking on. Straight at me she was looking with those yellowish eyes of hers you can see right through. Lost as usual. She always looked lost. He probably wanted me to take her off his hands so he could get dressed up like Halloween and go lynch somebody.

I concentrated on how I was going to refuse him without him taking a hand to me. I’m sorry, Mr. Man. I’m in a terrible hurry. I feel sickly, sir. Going to upchuck any minute. That would be my contribution to the Movement for the day, keeping him from getting out of the house tonight, though if you ask my opinion, he was the cat at home too. I mean all you had to do was look at her when she dragged in in the mornings. Those burnt arms. He’d done that. I could see it writ across her face plain as day. With the granddaddy six feet under and
the grandma’am crying and doping her way through the afternoons, Auntie felt obliged to see after the girl since that crazy cake woman had done so much for the people, warning them and all. But Auntie Z, she needed a rest from it. She was hoping the mental one would come on home and take care of her own flesh and blood, though I told Auntie don’t hold your breath. That heifer’s seen greener pastures, even if it’s the inside of the loony bin.

He was keeping on coming.
Galump, galump,
on the bad foot. He put it down hard, and made the dust kick up in little puffs around that big ugly shoe of his. I was still standing there on the bucked-up sidewalk next to a nandina bush with little white flowers crawling with buzzing bees. Lord, big old bees everywhere. Sucking up the juice. I could see the black spots on their backs.

Watching him coming up the grass toward me, something deep inside me wanted to back up, but I was afraid I’d get stung by those bees, so I stood my ground and waited to see what he wanted. He still looked pleased, almost like he was going to say good evening and how are you and you have won a prize, missy. In the late-day sun, that dark oily hair of his looked like it had shoe polish dripping off it. I was facing the setting sun, and a beam of light blinded me all of a sudden. I couldn’t see his face.

Then he was up on me and I saw his mouth.

“No sir,” I said as quick as I could. The words were bees buzzing in the air. “No, sir. No sir. No, no, no, no.”

He took me by the hair of the head. He pulled my head back with one hand and then I saw the screwdriver come up in the other, like I was a can he was getting ready to open. When I felt my pretty scarf tear and the ragged tip of the screwdriver dig into the hollow in my neck above the bone, between the two cords of muscle, I knew I was done for. It went in hard and it came out easy. When he was done, he let go of my hair, and my knees folded. I sat down in a heap and my head wouldn’t hold itself up. It fell over to one side.

My throat filled up and when I opened my mouth to scream, all that came out was a river. I swam through it for what seemed like a long long time. And then I went down.

But when I went down, my eyes were still wide open. I could still see her. She was looking straight at me. I could see her looking out from the shore I wasn’t going to get to.