Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  We pulled up in front of the house, which was painted white, and Gill parked near the front walk. It was lined with colored bottles, their necks stuck into the ground in front of blooming marigolds. Behind it, an unpainted barn with a tin roof sat, slightly lopsided. On the other side of the field, I could see the tin roof of the Silver Moon glinting in the sun.

  I knew the story of Ella Jenkins because Louella had told me about her. When she was about my age, she had joined up with a band that had come to the county fair and had traveled around the country with them as a singer. Then ten years later she had come back to Coldwater to settle down, and now she sang at the Silver Moon on Saturday nights.

  We went up the walk. A bunch of kittens looked at us from the damp cool dirt under the house, then ran out and attacked our ankles.

  “Mercy,” Ella said, leaning out the door, her face the color of dark caramel, smiling. “Sweetest sight today.” She held the door open for Sam, and he leaned over to hug her.

  Inside, the room was small, with homey patched furniture and braided rugs, mixing every color of shirt and skirt anybody in that house had probably worn since they’d been born. An old woman, who I knew from what Louella had told me must be Miss Lu, Ella’s mother, sat in a rocking chair dressed in solid white, her face the color of fudge and her eyes covered over with cataracts as white as her clothes. Miss Lu was ninety and practiced a form of magic which she’d picked up in New Orleans, where she’d lived until she followed Cab Jenkins to Coldwater. He’d died before I’d been born.

  “Let me see, Mr. Best,” she said, holding out her open palm with a perfumed lace handkerchief dangling from her blouse cuff. The inside of her hand was smooth and the color of dust.

  He placed his hand in hers. “You’re looking good, Miss Lu.”

  She stroked his palm and traced the lines with her trembling finger and began in a voice as soft and crackling as a wireless message from halfway around the world. “Been doing good for folks. I see that. Been eating well. You’re full of hope.”

  Then she shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Been drinking too much. You going to run out of yourself, Sam Best. You going to.…” Suddenly she dug her finger deeper into the center of his palm and cried out: “Oh Sweet Power of God! What’s this I see?”

  Sam tried to pull away, laughing. “Don’t tell me bad news, Miss Lu.” Then, with the toe of his boot against the rung of her chair, he pushed, pretending to be trying to pull away. But in doing that, he purposely rocked her faster and faster until her head wobbled.

  “Cut that out, Sam Best!” Miss Lu was holding onto the rocker, laughing and yelling: “You going to give me a heart attack and mess up my reading! Hold still. I got to see what this is.” She traced over the line in his palm. She aimed her half-blind eyes at him and said in a low, serious voice: “Who’s this living over in Little Rock supposed to be living with you instead? Your own wife and child. Now just what other women you need?”

  Sam pulled away. Then he yelled as though in pain, complaining over Miss Lu’s finger being too sharp to stand. He looked behind him, where I was. Then he reached for me, putting his arm around my shoulder and pushing me forward. “This is the only new woman in my life.” He said my name. Until then I’d been left out.

  Ella Jenkins poured me lemonade. “Child,” Miss Lu said, reaching for my hand and stroking it. She whispered my name as soft as a prayer. She told me she was running out of my grandfather’s medicine and could I get her some more.

  “I don’t know,” I said, so timidly that I felt ashamed of myself in front of Sam. I said that no more could be sold.

  “Damn government!” Miss Lu screwed up her lips and banged the arm of her chair. “The Outside Medicine’s all allows me to rock this chair. Without it, my legs freeze up and won’t bend.” She leaned over my hand. “But I see here for you a long and happy life.” She felt my palm and looked into my face with her white eyes and sucked her lips a minute. Then she whispered, which I was grateful for, since she started on my future sex life.

  “A nice, curly-headed husband and many children,” she murmured. She paused. “But you won’t be rich. Instead you will travel, dance, and become a queen.”

  I didn’t put much weight in her reading. Everybody in Coldwater knew that Ellen Best had taken Julie and moved out of Sam’s house. Miss Lu wouldn’t have needed to read that in his palm. And Sam’s hair wasn’t curly like the man she’d said that I’d marry. I wasn’t sure what Sam and I would be up to, but I figured we’d be traveling around the world, and there wouldn’t be time for a bunch of kids.

  Sam patted her shoulder. “We couldn’t get along without you, Miss Lu.” He reached in his pocket. “We also came for some of your homemade relish.”

  Ella, who had been sitting quietly, smiling, on a piano bench across the room, stood up. “Want it super hot, Sam, or medium?”

  “Couple of both.” Sam followed her to the kitchen. He stood outside the door and placed a twenty-dollar bill on the dining table. He wouldn’t take change.

  Ella Jenkins handed him the relish in big Mason jars. She touched his arm slightly and said softly, “You look good.” As we turned to go, she sat down at the piano and traveled her fingers over it like vines blown by wind, tinkling an introduction to a song as if it were the first patter of rain. Her hair was swept back and tied off her face. Her Negro features blended into a strong face with rounded cheeks, like the polished mahogany in my grandmother’s living room. Her eyes were light brown and her mouth, when quiet, seemed to be hiding a smile that at any second could flash like fireflies at the edge of dark woods.

  Ella rolled her head back, bending her neck. “I taught B.J. this song. She might do it next week.” She moved her left hand over the keys, playing a hard deep bass. “Only I’m making up my own words for right now.” Her voice, low, laughing, started to sing: “You like my relish? You like it, hon. Well, if you like my relish, there’s plenty more where that comes from.” She added a wink and a sound low in her throat, sexy and teasing: “Umhummm.” Her voice, laughing and warm, changed to an old Negro spiritual. And I knew then what my grandmother had meant when she had said that B.J. Norris stepped over bounds. In my grandmother’s opinion, as well as almost everybody else’s in Coldwater, what Betty Jane Norris did that was as bad as stripping off her clothes in public, or maybe worse, was singing with Ella Jenkins.

  She followed us out of the house to the Land Rover. A crow screamed overhead, then stopped on a dead oak limb to caw at us. Now the sun was almost lying on the fields, sending pink-orange streaks through the rows of cotton where the Mexicans were dragging their bags to the field road to load on trucks that would take them to weigh in their day’s work.

  Gill fished his keys out of his jeans, which lay so narrow over his thin hips it seemed that he was trying to inch into an envelope without crinkling it. Ella said, smiling at me, teasing, but probably serious, too: “Can’t I give you one of these kittens to take home?” She reached down and picked up the one rubbing her leg. She handed it to me, and as I held it against my chest, it started purring as loud as a bee backed up to a microphone.

  “I’ll ask,” I said seriously, yet knowing my grandmother would have a fit if I moved a cat in right after all those chickens—who probably wouldn’t like the cat, either. I handed it back.

  “Take care, Ella,” Sam said.

  Gill started the Land Rover’s motor, which turned over and caught with a grind as loud as an airplane. We drove off with Ella Jenkins watching us, while a couple of cats lay in the grass watching her.

  We’d stayed late and Sam was worried that my grandmother might be waiting supper for me. “I should have called her,” he said.

  We’d gotten good at spoiling my dinner with Coke floats—pouring Coke over ice cream till it bubbled up and flowed over the top of the glass like lava. We’d always cut up, doing all sorts of things my grandmother would pshaw over. But we had never been late. If Sam was concerned, though, it wasn’t anything like the wo
rry the Land Rover gave us when it sputtered and drifted to a stop about half a mile from Rathwell.

  Gill pumped the accelerator, turned the key, kicked the dashboard, where everything from the fuse to the starter shorted out from humidity sometimes, and then he got out and raised the hood, to gawk and wonder at the engine. I was the one who found the puddle in the dirt of the road under the Rover’s back end. “Shit,” Gill said, apologizing to me immediately after he said it.

  As we looked back at the road from where we’d just come, we could see a thin trail of gas that was still dripping through a hole in the gas tank.

  Sam pushed up his sleeves and tied a handkerchief around his neck, saying he’d go for help. But Gill and I didn’t want to sit there doing nothing, so the three of us started off, and after a few minutes of tromping through the thick loose dirt on the road, Sam burst out singing “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”—skipping, singing, going crazy all over the narrow dirt lane like it was Broadway. Then Ezekiel’s mule turned the corner near Rathwell. Half a dozen of his grandchildren were riding in the back of the wagon. They caught Sam and Gill and me in the middle of our number where, along with the Strawman and Lion, I was skipping my way into Oz. “Ho,” Ezekiel called, which the mule seemed to understand meant stop.

  Behind us in the distance, the Land Rover twinkled in the sunset, and Sam pointed to it. “Just laid down and wouldn’t get up,” he said. “And we got to get this lady home.” He smiled and nodded at me.

  “No bother.” Ezekiel nodded at me too. “I got to drop off all this lumber at her place anyhow. Might as well be now.”

  I crawled in the back with the grandchildren and the lumber, and Sam and Gill climbed up front with Ezekiel.

  The mule walked slow, it was pulling so much. The grandchildren and I silently stared at each other. Then one said: “The mule name Kate.”

  Another one said: “Name after my granmomma.”

  The youngest one grinned, showing me a front row of missing teeth with gums as pink as bubble gum. “Can’t have no babies.” He was still grinning, proud of his knowledge and his missing teeth.

  I figured he was talking about the mule, and not Ezekiel’s wife, though it may have been true about both of them.

  He smiled at me again and went on: “She come from a horse and a jackass and can’t have no more like her. Mules got to be made from scratch—like biscuits.”

  The rest of the way we talked about Kate, her likes and dislikes, her personality quirks and pedigree. Her brown haunches kept a steady beat until we hit the streets of Coldwater. Then Sam sat up straight and let out a cowboy-type “Ya-hoo!” and Ezekiel slapped Kate’s rump with the reins, and she started trotting. Gill laughed, his Adam’s apple gyrating, and the grandchildren pointed and laughed at that.

  Sam started waving and bowing to everybody on the sidewalk, and we turned our suppertime rescue into a small town parade. We headed toward my grandparents’ house. By the time we turned the corner, my grandmother must have heard us coming and was standing in the yard.

  While Gill and Sam helped Ezekiel unload the lumber for the sun porch, she stood on the porch steps, too flabbergasted to say anything. I stood beside Kate, feeding her grass that I pulled out of my grandparents’ yard, and I kept petting her head.

  Finally Ezekiel drove off with the grandchildren waving at us, and Sam and Gill got ready to walk home. But first, my grandmother moved into the yard to speak to Sam. He was dusting the dirt off his pants leg and rolling up his shirtsleeves another notch. “Sam,” she said, coming up behind him. “I just don’t like the sight of my granddaughter riding around with a bunch of little Negroes in the back of a wagon.”

  Sam looked at her. “Well, I know, Emily, but I knew you were keeping supper warm, and my car was broke, and I just didn’t see much point in sifting out who came to help.” He put his hand on her shoulder and grinned at her. “I don’t ‘speck it’ll happen again.” Then he turned halfway around and glanced at the outhouse. “I’ve been reading all your letters in the paper. You’re sure doing a fine job. And I think you’re exactly right—it’s time we all got rid of these old things and moved on.”

  My grandmother then started in on the pig-headedness of the newspaper editor, Charles Rankin. Gill stood quietly under the magnolia tree. I listened from inside the sun porch.

  Sam walked my grandmother to the porch door. His voice became as deep and warm as something melted, and my love for him was so big inside me that it was as if I could feel it pushing against my skin, and I was growing, becoming new. “You’re sure a credit to this town, Emily. You’re truly one of the most exceptional women I’ve ever met. And it’s our good fortune that you live here.” He smiled at her and held her elbow as she walked up the steps.

  By then, if my grandmother had had tattoos they’d have been lying on her shoe tops, totally charmed off. After she came inside, we both stood on the porch, watching Sam and Gill walk off.

  The sight of Sam moving away, the fast way that he walked and the tilt of his head, the shape of his back and the distant sound of his voice, could be my grandmother’s or anybody’s. But that’s as far as it went. He was mine!

  We would marry and live together forever, and neither of us would ever fight. I’d never need to see my mother or my father again. I’d never have to leave Coldwater. I was Sam Best’s, and he was my family. He wanted me.

  PART II

  10.

  My Grandmother and Elizabeth Taylor

  Every day was like Christmas morning. I’d wake up in the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed and think about Sam. It was the craziest thing in the world how I could take one short minute spent with him and make it like one of those caramel candies on a stick you could buy at the Ritz and suck on, for days, in private. Whenever I’d be with him, I’d be hoping the minute would never end; and, at the same time, be antsy as hell to get home, or somewhere alone, so I could think about what he’d said and how he’d said it.

  Being in love was—if you really thought about it—a lot like dying. My whole life got real intense. But what I felt wasn’t dark or mean or lonely. In fact, I seemed to tickle Sam every minute he was awake. He laughed at a lot of what I said, and whenever I talked he listened as if what I said was the most important thing in the world. I was, after all and finally, lovable. Lord! that was a relief.

  It was Wednesday afternoon when he came to convince my grandmother that I should take dancing lessons. Louella and I were in the kitchen, fixing iced tea. “What’s Mr. Best telling her?” Louella handed me mint leaves to put in the tea.

  “The weather, his rice crop, the cotton,” I said.

  “Oh, but he’s working up to something.” Louella looked at me. “You been in trouble?”

  I guess she suspected that I hadn’t bought that Purple Midnight lipstick out of a pitiful allowance as an act of love. She also knew that Sam and I had been spending a lot of time together. “No,” I said. Then we heard Sam mention my name. And since it was what I really wanted, he told my grandmother that I should take tap dancing.

  My grandmother was sitting in a wing-backed chair, emitting White Gardenia whiffs as Sam tried to convince her that exercise wouldn’t increase the size of my ankles or anything else. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “It seems the only people tap dancing these days are in minstrel shows.”

  Sam only smiled, and then he socked my grandmother with what he knew she couldn’t resist. He told her he’d just bought an old house down on the highway near the Soybean Plant, and he was opening up a dancing school. What would she think about the idea of me taking a little toe-dance? Sam was a damn genius.

  Of course, my grandmother was real quick to tell him that dancing on one’s toes was called pointe. Then she added that if he found somebody to teach that she might consider it—at least it’d help to make me graceful.

  So that Saturday I was sitting on the front screen porch, waiting for Gill and Sam to pick me up. Sam had convinced my grandmother that a pointe teacher was definitely in t
he works. I held the money my grandmother had given me to order “ballet shoes and a tu-tu,” which I thought meant she’d gone senile and was talking dirty. But tu-tus were what my grandmother associated with ballet, and that was more than I knew about it. Along with everybody else in Coldwater, I thought of ballet as toe-dancing. But I didn’t give beans about who called it what. Sam Best had bought a whole dancing school just for me! He wouldn’t have done that for anybody else—except maybe my mother.

  Over the past weeks almost every one of my chickens had grown more long-legged and long-necked than a chicken that planned to lay eggs. One, though, was smaller than the rest, and calmer. It was either the runt or a misplaced hen, and I’d been teaching it to walk up my arm and sit on my shoulder. For two days, I called it Colleen, after Miss Pankhurst; but then I changed its name to Taylor. When its sex became evident, I’d call it either Robert or Elizabeth—a plan I considered practical.

  By the Saturday that Sam was coming to get me to work on the dancing school for its grand opening, all my chickens had lost their yellow down to white feathers and all but one had the beginnings of large combs. So I knew that my Taylor was an Elizabeth. I was also now a full-fledged chicken farmer and had joined the 4-H. To compensate, my grandmother insisted I learn a lot of facts about chickens. She said that all women should know obscure and unusual things to keep themselves fascinating. So I knew that Romans considered chickens sacred to the God of War and that roosters are symbols of courage. The crowing cock had, at times, symbolized the resurrection of Christ. Also, unless hens are trained they will lay eggs on the ground or almost anywhere. But the most fascinating fact was: chickens are polygamous. And when mine came of age, I was eager to see how Elizabeth liked it.

  I sat in the swing on the front porch, watching down the street for Sam. Inside, my grandmother was watching the World Series. Baseball-watching was patriotic for her. It also fit in with her Saturday afternoon beer and cigarette. She said the cigarette opened up her sinuses, and the beer kept her arteries clean. And during the World Series in October, she never missed a game. Los Angeles was playing Chicago. I could hear her calling the pitcher a ninny. She liked to comment on which players looked like “sweet boys” and then, when the camera came in for a close-up, she criticized all the batters’ haircuts.