Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  We drove past fields of cotton where Mexicans were hunched over, trailing cotton sacks, stuffing them full. And while Sam Best asked me all kinds of stupid things about school, Gill bumped the Land Rover through land that Mr. Best owned, along paths barely wide enough to let us through.

  Sam Best would study his crops of cotton and soybeans and rice, and sometimes he’d get out of the Land Rover and pick some, or stand at a fence rail and look at his cattle. The dust was so bad we had to keep the windows of the jeep closed to even breathe.

  There’s only so many cows and soybeans a person can look at and appreciate. And I was about ready to open up my geometry book and get a head start on that when Sam Best asked Gill to stop the car beside a cotton field. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand and half-pulling me into it.

  Mexicans were at the other end of the field, leaning over, dragging cotton sacks. They glanced up at us and then kept working. The dust made a film against the horizon. I was just on the verge of saying that I was about ready to go home. My grandmother would have a hissy fit if I wasn’t there in time to eat, and it must be getting close to supper. And, too, I was so bored I could have spit.

  Across the road were two shacks with colored children sitting on the porch watching us. A litter of puppies was rooting in the ditch. Gill had turned on the radio, and the weather report was rolling out of the Land Rover as if some man with a John Wayne voice was lying under the hood.

  Sam Best reached down and picked up a clod of dirt and then hurled it down. The way he did made me jump. He didn’t use any cuss words, but he let it be known that he was mad as hell just the same. It was the dirt he was mad at, or at least he said it was. Mad at it for being dry. For holding back. For playing him, and everybody else who depended on it, false, like a fickle woman who could never be pleased. I’d never seen such anger—coming quick, shooting out. It scared me, and yet I wanted to be with it. I could have reached down and thrown dirt myself.

  But just as quickly as his anger had come, it left. He looked calmly down the row of cotton, then he looked at me and smiled. His face was so boyish; there was a white line just under the edge of his sideburns where the hair had been freshly cut and the skin hadn’t been tanned by the sun yet. On either side of us, the cotton spread out in straight rows, and he waved his hand across it and looked at me. He was studying my face, smiling. “Looks just like jack rabbits playing ostrich, doesn’t it?”

  He picked some of the white hairy fiber out of the gray boll beside me and rubbed the seeds out of it. “Just like a jackrabbit’s tail,” he said, reaching over, grinning and dusting my nose with it. I could smell shaving lotion on the skin of his hands. His pants were a dark khaki, almost the same color as the soil, and he wore a white shirt with the sleeves of it rolled up high onto his forearms. He was still watching my face. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I got a fine need for something cool. A Coke maybe, or a cup of ice cream. You won’t tell your grandmother, though, if I ruin your supper?”

  His head slanted a little, and he was watching me with a smile that looked as if any minute he was going to bust loose with a laugh. “Well? What is it? Coke? Ice cream? Or both together? And you won’t tell your grandmother on me, will you?”

  For a minute I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was as if we’d been walking in this hot field and suddenly the sky had opened up and let loose with a shower. And this man who seemed like a whole piece of music, who could move quick from one part to another—from one mood of anger so hot it seemed murderous to a quiet, calm one two minutes later—had just asked me to play a trick on my grandmother.

  “You’re safe with me,” I said.

  He laughed and slapped his knee and made me run back to the Land Rover. The whole afternoon changed. It was as if Sam Best and Gill had gone in cahoots to punch a button on some crazy machine. Gill rolled down his window and took off his hat, and Sam Best did the same, and they started beating the side of the Land Rover as if we were part of a posse. They hooted and hollered and the dust rose in clouds, and we coughed and laughed, and Gill made that jeep zigzag down the road better than any ride at a carnival.

  Sam and I were slipping around on the leather backseat, laughing and hollering like country bumpkins on the county fair Tilt-a-whirl. Then we turned the corner onto the only road in Rathwell. Gill slowed down, and we sat up in great dignity. We were sputtering laughs out the sides of our mouths like a bunch of kids tickled in church.

  Rathwell was only a stopping place at a crossroads—a filling station, a store, and a church. I’d heard people say that it had soil so poor the Lord covered it over with dirt to hide the entrance gate to Hell. We walked across the porch of the store, which was lined with old men in overalls, rared back in cane-bottom chairs with their faces as wrinkled and brown as tobacco leaves. Inside, newsprint covered the walls; you could read an item from twenty or thirty years ago while buying a loaf of bread, if you cared to stand awhile. The air smelled musty, except for a trace of cinnamon candy and potato chips. Lined up on the counter was a train of tomatoes as red and ripe as the cherries on ice-cream sundaes. Sam knew everyone there: the clerk, the men on the porch.

  Three colored children stood barefoot, barely able to see over the counter at the candy jars, and when Sam asked their last names, he said that he knew their families and gave them each a nickel. I went to the bathroom, a closetlike room at the back of the store with WHITE ONLY printed on the door. When I came back, Sam reached into a huge red cooler, his whole arm disappearing into ice water. “You ever think what it would be like if you couldn’t use that?” He nodded toward the bathroom and pulled out an ice-cold dripping bottle of grape soda that he popped the cap off of and handed to me.

  He walked across the store and bought pork skins and two beers, which he shared with Gill. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket, and as he paid I saw snapshots of Ellen and Julie in the little plastic slots in his billfold. The one of Julie seemed to be the yearbook picture from the time I hadn’t lived in Coldwater. Having your picture in a wallet, looking good, and in a pocket like his would probably be pretty wonderful, I thought.

  He led us across the dirt street into the pine-needle yard of the church. The late September light was dappled from the trees. The rust-colored dry ground smelled like pine-needle smoke. Gill sat down at one of the picnic tables that dotted the grounds. The white frame church, with “Mt. Olive” painted over its door, separated the yard from the high-grass field where I could see headstones with the faint color of wilted flowers on some of the graves.

  “You going to tell about the murder?” Gill sat down on a picnic table and propped his feet on the bench. His Adam’s apple was so big it gyrated when he talked, like a fishing bobber. He wore black aviator boots and the pork skins crackled as he ate them.

  “Come here,” Sam said to me and walked into the high-grass cemetery.

  He pointed to a gravestone: Obidia Tews, 1803–1855. Beside it was Thomas Jacob Spade, 1811–1855. Linking them was a footstone, “Here they rest in peace.”

  We walked back to the church yard, and Sam smiled and suddenly lifted me to a table under a pine tree. I looked down at him, with the dry rasping sound of crickets and cicadas tuning up in the weeds behind us.

  “It was a hundred years ago.” He smiled. “You want to be the good guy, or the bad?”

  I stood there like a dummy—a stupid dummy who couldn’t talk. The question was simple. Then I got the idea that we were getting ready to act crazy and put on a play right there in the church yard. Yet I didn’t know how to answer what he asked. I knew the truth: I was bad. I never told anybody off. I didn’t make trouble. But inside, I was murderous.

  For a minute, even though I was looking at Sam Best, I wasn’t seeing him. I guess I was too busy seeing what was going on inside my head. Then I felt Sam Best touch my hand, and my eyes came back to focus on him. I knew I must have looked like a person in the middle of a stroke, or else frozen by craziness. But he didn’t look at me
as if I were pitiful or crazy. Instead he smiled, and then he put his arm around me and laughed. “Well, actually both of these guys was bad—so maybe, just for fun—you and I don’t really have a choice.” He went on then and told me the story of how Obidia Tews had been shot dead one day at a church fishfry by Tom Spade, in a quarrel over wages; and while he did he poured an imaginary drink into my half-empty soda bottle.

  The trees stood breathless in the late afternoon as Sam Best came swaggering up, packing a make-believe pistol and yelling at me: “Get yor fishy smelling face over here!”

  Gill hooted. The men on the store porch set their chairs down on all four legs to watch what they must have thought were two town people going crazy in their church yard.

  We shouted insults and shadowboxed. We used sayings we’d grown up with and heard all our lives. “I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you,” Sam said, his eyes squinted and mean.

  I yelled: “Why don’t you walk west until your hat floats!”

  Then I danced around on the picnic table and suddenly Sam pulled his pointed-finger pistol from his belt and shot me. When I shot back, he fell instantly. He lay sprawled on the pine-needle ground; and then, like a dummy, I realized I had forgotten to fall dead myself.

  His eyes were amused, and aimed steadily into the center of mine. I was so busy thinking about the chances of him ending up my stepfather that I just stood there, holding my arms around a make-believe wound and thinking about my mother. I could see her in my head, running off, chasing something like a hunger she could not name. Hell! couldn’t she make a record and keep me and my father at the same time? But she had thrown me away—all of us. And Sam. And even though I knew that I was bad enough to deserve being dumped, I was still so mad about it that it would probably have been easy to commit murder for real.

  “Isn’t it about time you fell dead, or are you going to rewrite the script?” Sam looked at the imaginary bullet hole I was clutching in my middle.

  When I fell beside him, we lay, our eyes open like grotesque dead people’s are supposed to be, looking up at the sky. He said out loud: “You see that cat in that cloud there?” He rolled his head over to look at me and lifted his hand to point. In place of the anger I’d felt at my mother, there was a feeling so warm and fine now that it was like the afternoon was not close to October and growing dark and cool. It was a fine thing indeed that my mother had let Sam go. And me. I was free, lying on the pine needles beside him, his leg stretched out and touching mine. I knew every second that his chest went up with breath and came down, alive, beside me. And even if it was only his love for my mother coming toward me like a creek dammed and changing course, I didn’t care. I was willing to settle for that.

  “We got to go,” Sam said and sat up.

  There was a crisp, distant sound across from us that made me think of pine fat catching fire in winter. When I sat up I realized that the old men on the store porch were watching us and clapping.

  Sam swung me into his arms and began a dance around the skinny pines, whose needles were dropping. The old men on the store porch laughed and changed their clapping into a rhythm, setting a beat that Sam Best and I, then Gill, danced to, laughing too, hooting at the cotton-white sky like three people gone berserk, wonderfully.

  Twirling me to the side of the road, Sam stopped. “We got to hurry,” he said and trotted back to the Land Rover.

  I sat on the backseat beside him. I could smell the heat and the drying sweat on our skins. I glanced at him and the new sunburn on his arms and cheeks. If this was what my mother called love, and what she was making her life a mess over, I could see now what maybe all the fuss was about.

  I didn’t care where Sam and I went or what we did, as long as we were together.

  9.

  Sam and Me

  The sun hadn’t been up long. I sat at the Man-from-Shiloh’s dresser. It must have been about seven. I’d just fed my chickens. I could hear them outside peeping and scuffling around on the ground, looking for more corn mash.

  I pulled rollers out of my hair and smeared on Freckle Fading Cream. I sprayed on hairspray, making my hairdo stiff and disgusting, holding my nose so that the damn stuff wouldn’t go up. Whatever good looks I could come up with had to last at least until three. Sam’d be there then—outside, in the Land Rover, under the magnolia tree. He always was.

  The Land Rover would roll onto the grass beside the sidewalk in front of my grandparents’ house. There in the shade, while Sam wrote business letters in the backseat, and Gill listened to the radio or slept, they would watch for me walking home from school. My grandmother always let me go with Sam. Nobody viewed it as a date. But it was a well-known fact to just about everyone: me and Sam were a couple about town. He was seen as a substitute father for me. And if he was a substitute for me, I was one for him, too. Yet, while I didn’t especially like that, and knew he probably didn’t, either, neither one of us wanted to spend time with anybody else.

  Sam and I would go all over the county to the roadside restaurants or feed stores or car dealerships that he owned, and while he went over the books or talked with his managers, Gill and I would eat ice cream or buy gum, or get in all the new cars and push the buttons.

  Now I could hear my grandparents moving around in their bedroom, talking. I didn’t have much to do with them anymore, except for the stuff they made me do. Every night my grandmother put me up to doing some ankle-reducing exercises that she’d read about in some damn women’s magazine. I decided the main reason that she thought thick ankles were so bad had nothing to do with thoroughbred horses, except maybe how they got born. For what she was actually wanting me to do was to get ready to attract the opposite sex about like I did my chickens when I walked into the chicken yard with a bucket full of mash. And apparently thin ankles were going to help me do just that, because they were so sexy. Of course, once I got to looking sexy—if I ever did—I’d have to deny I wanted anything to do with sex. In fact, almost all the women I knew who belonged to the category of those who could, preferred not to. And here I was: learning to look like I wanted it, while all the time it was supposed to be the farthest thing from my mind. I felt sure that was a practice which, in the long run, could make a person crazy.

  I walked down the sidewalk. The sun was still warm even though it was October. In the distance, I could hear my chickens peeping like the faraway sound of bells. It didn’t matter what happened at school. Nothing would bother me. The secret of Sam and me was like the fist, swelling inside me—only Sam’s love wasn’t squeezing me, and taking away my breath. Instead, it was like a warm sun, spreading out, melting the fist, making it let go. It seemed that I wasn’t going to die, not anytime soon at least. And the secret of thinking that I would soon be dead gave way to the secret of my and Sam Best’s love. Only this time, my secret didn’t just set me apart from everyone else, it made me special. I could even pull the secret out and throw it around a little.

  I walked home at three with a bunch of kids heading for the Rexall’s, half of them country kids staying late for a ball game that night. I was beside Lucy Calhoon, who had an awful case of zits. “You going to the ball game?” She was looking at me, her poor face peppered like she’d fallen face-down in an ants’ nest.

  “Na,” I said. “I got a date.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. I’m serious with somebody, and he doesn’t like ball games.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “Just out—usually somewhere like a nightclub.”

  That, of course, set old Lucy Calhoon off. “What color hair does he have?”

  “Dark,” I said. “With light streaks.” The light was the gray part, but I wasn’t going to get specific.

  “Is he romantic?”

  “Always.”

  Lucy Calhoon was panting and rubbing her zits. And I was able to go on talking about Sam without anybody knowing who I meant.

  Most afternoons Sam and I drove through some of the land that he’d inherited.
Sometimes his voice would get so full of anger that I would sit quiet and still, half-scared but loving it. He’d rail against the ignorance of men, the capacity for cruelty, the poverty of so many lives, the ignorance and stubbornness of the South, and yet how much he loved it. Usually I didn’t understand much of what he was saying. It was the shape of his mouth and the way it moved that took my attention. Once he’d laughed and then fumed about the sign in front of the Little Rock High School two years before, when colored kids had tried to go there: This school closed by order of the goverment. “G-o-v-e-r-m-e-n-t,” he said, spelling it out. Then, “Dern!” I knew he was tempering his language for me. “If you’re gonna fight with the government, you ought to at least spell it right.” He seemed as embarrassed as if his mother had shown up at school with her slip showing.

  At the corner on Main Street, I stood for a minute, looking at what I knew I would see, the Land Rover under the tree where it always was. As I stood, Sam saw me in the rearview mirror and leaned out of the back window to wave at me. He opened the door, got out and yelled, waving a Dixie cup in his hand. “You got to hurry up, girl, this is meltin’!” Drops of ice cream were dripping off onto the sidewalk, and Sam was dancing around them like a movie cowboy getting his feet shot at. I laughed and crawled in the Land Rover beside him, and we drove on out of town.

  A cloud of dust covered the back window. Thick woods came up to the edge of the road on the right, and on the other side there was a wide deep field of cotton, full of Mexicans dragging cotton sacks behind them, some stopping to wave. We drove down that dirt road for some time. On the other side of the woods was the Silver Moon, that nightclub where B.J. worked, and then beyond that as the woods ended and more cotton fields began, a farm that I knew belonged to some colored people named the Jenkins.