Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  The telephone dial whirled back into place and then, “Mr. Rankin, please.” I leaned back in my chair, swirling the cloth that was over my finger in the silver polish, and considered giving all the forks a spit shine.

  “Are you going to ignore my letters? You’ve printed them. Why don’t you act?”

  Mr. Rankin must have said something that didn’t mean much. My grandmother’s voice got louder: “We’ve got to do this for the sake of Coldwater. It’s not sanitary. We can’t go around having outside toilets in the alleys. They don’t have any use anymore.”

  Then he must have said something that wasn’t nice because my grandmother pshawed and yelled out his name. I’d heard people say the outhouse was good for the drunks to use when they’d come down the alley every once in a while. And Mr. Rankin had probably brought that up.

  “Mr. Rankin!” my grandmother said again. “This is no time for impertinence and crudity. I propose that you move it. And move it quickly. I’m having the Missionary Society luncheon in a few weeks. There’s no reason why all of us have to sit here and look at your wooden cubicle from my window.”

  I guess he said something again that wasn’t nice. Because my grandmother pshawed again and came out with the best insult she could—on the spur of the moment—think up: “Mr. Rankin … I have always known you are a mule in a dandy’s clothing. But you are certainly now showing your true colors.”

  She hung up.

  My grandmother walked into the sun porch and looked at me. “That just goes to show you,” she said. “You can’t depend on anyone doing anything for you. But in this case, it’s for himself too. That toilet is a health hazard and that’s reason enough to get rid of it.” She walked then toward her bedroom, and I figured she was going to take paregoric and lie down a while.

  Ezekiel closed his paint bucket and took it outside.

  The phone rang. I answered it in the kitchen just as my grandmother answered it in her bedroom. It was Mr. Rankin. And since I figured she’d want me to hear firsthand the way somebody with ill-breeding sounded—so I could, of course, avoid it—I just kept listening. Mr. Rankin apologized. He said he knew he’d been rude, but at the time he couldn’t help it. He did, though, want to be a good citizen; and he believed in improvement for Coldwater. He then suggested that they work together. He promised my grandmother he would hire some men to haul off the outhouse if she would take care of covering up the hole underneath. And it was also agreed that the outhouse would be burned—not only for health reasons (which my grandmother said she cared about) but because Mr. Rankin said he didn’t want it sitting in the dump with his name on it.

  Finally, it seemed, the long-awaited arrangement for getting rid of the outhouse had been made. And even though Mr. Rankin was swapping hauling and burning the outhouse for covering up the hole underneath it, my grandmother, by this time, was willing to settle. Filling in a hole didn’t seem too much to give.

  There was a knock at the sun porch door. I laid the phone receiver down on the kitchen counter and put a dish towel over it to stifle any sounds from my end.

  A man in overalls was standing there holding a straw hat. He seemed nervous and excited.

  “My boy’s done stepped on a nail. I need two dollars of Dr. Maulden’s Outside Medicine.”

  I opened the door so he could step inside. Then I heard my grandmother coming down the hall. I quickly hung up the phone, and when she came into the kitchen I told her that the man standing in the sun porch had come to buy some medicine.

  “It’s against the law,” she called to him. “Don’t come back. We don’t have any.”

  The medicine buyer took a step forward. “Oh, Miz Maulden, please. My boy’s done stepped on a nail. We got to have that medicine.”

  “Go buy some iodine.” My grandmother turned.

  “That’s not the same thing!” The poor man tried to follow her, leaning, reaching out. But he stopped. He held his hand as someone does who’s been roasting a marshmallow and accidentally drops it into the fire, wanting it but thinking twice before going after it. “But Miz Maulden … it don’t work like the Outside Medicine. Did you hear about my brother’s pig? He got cut up in a baler and laid for days with his legs half off. My brother poured a whole bottle of Dr. Maulden’s Outside Medicine on him; and in three days, the legs grew back and the pig got up and walked.”

  “Yes, well, that’s nice. But we’re not selling any more.”

  “Oh, Miz Maulden. Please!”

  My grandmother walked past him and held open the sun porch door. “Absolutely not. If we sold a drop we’d all end up in Alcatraz.”

  The man shuffled off, and she closed the door and said to herself, as though thinking out loud: “Now I’ve got to see about that outhouse hole.”

  “I’m through,” I said quickly. “I’m going out in the yard a while.”

  My grandmother glanced at the table where I had left the forks and nodded absentmindedly. I knew she would be too busy thinking about the outhouse to worry about the forks. I was already out the door and starting down the alley, leaving her standing at the window.

  Ezekiel was near the garage, cleaning his paintbrush in a tin can of turpentine. He looked up and saw me. “‘Lo.”

  “Hi,” I said, heading to the chicken yard to look for Elizabeth Taylor. In my pocket, I’d put a handful of Wheaties. As I trailed them behind me, she and half a dozen of her roosters followed me, pecking at the cereal on the ground. I’d taught Elizabeth to walk up my arm and sit on my shoulder. She’d also learned to flap herself onto the roof of the chicken house—to get away from all her roosters sometimes—and then even flap herself onto a fence post and jump down into the alley. I knelt in the grass and let her walk up my arm and sit on my shoulder.

  Outside the gate I set her down on the ground near Ezekiel and fed her some more Wheaties. Ezekiel had some of my grandmother’s dining room chairs sitting on papers beside his paint buckets. It looked as if he were going to reglue some of the broken rungs and touch up the mahogany finish. We’d all been put to work by the Missionary Society luncheon.

  I planned to ask Ezekiel if I could help fix the chairs. Anything would beat polishing forks. But something in one of the newspapers under the chairs had caught his attention. He was hunkered down, reading it. I don’t think that he was even aware I was there.

  I could tell that it was the Coldwater Gazette under the chair, and it seemed that he was looking at the editorial page. Maybe he was reading one of my grandmother’s letters to the editor. The editorial page seemed to be getting a lot of attention from almost everybody. Usually when people mentioned Charles Rankin’s editorials they sounded mad and irritated. But when Sam did, he’d laugh so much, I thought he’d lose his breath. From what I could understand, it seemed that Charles Rankin, after nearly a lifetime of thinking one way, had suddenly changed. He’d begun slanting his editorials in favor of integration. Sam called them slants like the tilt of an air bag that could, in a second, pop back straight if punched. He said that old Rankin had gotten excited when this man named Harry Scott Ashmore won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Little Rock school mess. And now Mr. Rankin had told Sam that he thought he was going to go after one of those prizes for himself.

  I watched Ezekiel stick his paintbrush in a can of mahogany stain and test the color of it all over the newspaper. In a little while, he began gluing a leg on one of the other chairs and I asked him if I could help.

  I strained to keep the chair rung in its socket as Ezekiel showed me, feeling the sweat begin to trickle down my neck.

  “It’s sure hot for October,” I said. “My grandmother says it’s the sun that makes us healthy. But it takes everything out of me. I don’t believe what she says, do you?”

  Ezekiel didn’t answer. Elizabeth Taylor clucked softly and pecked on the ground.

  I chatted on like a loony; I was so sick of being quiet inside the house. I kept fishing for more criticism of my grandmother and was even ready to mention Sam so that I could
talk about him for a while.

  “There.” Ezekiel rearranged the chair. “Now here.” He pointed to another rung for me to hold.

  I heard the back door bang and saw my grandmother come toward us across the lawn. Ezekiel glanced up. I made a low moan of dread. “Don’t say nothing,” Ezekiel said. “You’ll say more.”

  I looked at him, not understanding what he meant. But understanding that my grandmother wouldn’t like what she saw, I stood up and pretended to be chasing Elizabeth Taylor across the yard.

  “Ezekiel?”

  “Yessum?” He looked up.

  “I’ve got a proposal for you. You see that eyesore?”

  She was pointing to the outhouse. “Well, when Mr. Rankin moves it, I want you to fill in the hole underneath.” She waited then and looked at him. “I’ll pay you two dollars,” she added.

  Ezekiel looked back at the chair rung. “I only do fixing, Miz Maulden.”

  My grandmother’s hem jerked. Elizabeth Taylor pecked around her shoe.

  Ezekiel went on, very slowly. “No moving. No hoeing. No picking. Just fixing and yard work.”

  My grandmother pshawed. “Well, wouldn’t you say that shoveling dirt was yard work?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. It’s a big hole.”

  “Well then, five dollars,” she said. Ezekiel squirted a large amber blob of glue onto the chair. “Might have to buy dirt,” he said. “And then of course I got to haul it.”

  “Seven dollars.” Ezekiel didn’t look up. There were a few moments of silence. “Ten dollars.”

  Ezekiel raised his head. “Well, let me see what I can do.”

  I lifted Elizabeth Taylor over the fence and set her down with her roosters. My grandmother headed for the house, motioning me in. Then she called back: “Ezekiel?”

  Ezekiel looked up.

  “I’m depending on you.”

  “Yessum. I know it. I know you is.”

  We went into the kitchen, and behind us my grandfather came in through the sun porch door wearing a lab coat with large ragged holes in it. Doing what he did, he frequently spilled chemicals on himself, and his clothes were eaten through with quarter- and dime-sized holes. To my grandmother the coat was a sign of weakness and wrongdoing. Furthermore, she thought that as long as he wore that coat, his patients’ would see him to be as much of a quack and crackpot as she fully suspected him to be. One of her pearls was that if you can’t be good, you should at least look like you are; half the time nobody would know the difference.

  “What’s for lunch?” My grandfather was cheerful. He was always cheerful. That was one of the things that irked my grandmother.

  She put a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter on the table.

  “Oh, Lord,” my grandfather said. “This. Again?”

  “Louella will be here tomorrow to cook,” she said. “And until then we’ll just have to do the best we can.”

  “Well, not me,” he said, but opened the bread. “What about you?” He looked at me. “Are you up to this?”

  I said I supposed so.

  While he was making a sandwich, my grandmother filled him in on the history of the peanut, then told him that another one of those farmers had come to the house here for medicine. She looked at him. “I guess you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Well, I saw him sitting at the side of your office just a few minutes ago. You didn’t give him anything, did you?”

  “No. I’ve been seeing a few emergencies and working on the books.”

  “You don’t look like you’ve been working on the books.”

  He took a bottle of yellow liquid out of his pocket and mixed it with a glass of water.

  She pshawed.

  “After one of these lunches,” he said, “I have to have this.” He stirred a little more of the medicine into his glass. Then he took a bite from his sandwich, and his tongue began chasing the peanut butter off his teeth.

  “You’re going to get us all in trouble,” my grandmother said. “And then you won’t have enough sense to get us out.”

  My grandfather turned to me and asked me what I planned to do with the afternoon.

  When I told him that I was going downtown to a show, he gave me some money and told me to be sure to bring him back some Milk Duds. Then he took my arm. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll walk you toward town.” Then he called back: “Go lie down, Emily. You need a nap.”

  My grandmother was washing dishes with her shoulders humped. I guess that if it hadn’t been beneath her, she could have gone on TV and been on “Queen For A Day” and won prizes with the story of how awful her life was. But maybe after she told it, having to live in Coldwater and being married to what she thought of as a nincompoop wouldn’t hold much water next to fire, hailstorm, and cancer.

  The man who had wanted to buy the medicine was sitting on the side steps of my grandfather’s office, cracking a boiled egg and peeling off the shell. He and my grandfather both went in the door to his office, and I walked on down the sidewalk.

  I was at the corner of Main Street when some Mexicans stopped, looked at me, and laughed. My dress was unbuttoned, I thought. Or I had peanut butter on my face—or something worse than that. Then I heard Elizabeth Taylor clucking behind me. She was pecking along on the sidewalk, looking for more Wheaties. I had to pick her up and go back to lock her in the chicken house. Doing that made me late.

  I decided to cut through the alley behind the Mercantile to the Ritz. I walked as fast as I could across the street to the side of the Mercantile, past the public water fountains, one marked colored and one marked white. In Memphis, I’d noticed that all of the department stores had water fountains like that. I turned into the alley. There were a lot of weeds against the back of the stores. A pair of legs in blue jeans stuck out into the first rut of the half-gravel, half-dust alley.

  I wasn’t going to look. I wasn’t going to slow down. I was going to trot on, pretending the body was not there.

  “Hey!”

  I was silent except for breathing.

  A rock skidded across my path.

  “Sally.”

  The voice saying it was young. I stopped.

  “Where you going?”

  It was Joel Weiss. He had a stack of Arkansas Gazettes beside him, folding them into cute triangle-delivery shapes.

  “The Ritz.”

  He laughed. “That’s a bunch of junk.”

  “It’s Mitzi Gaynor and Alan Ladd,” I said. “I wouldn’t call that junk.”

  He laughed again. “I bet you’ve got the hots for Ladd. I bet you wish you looked like Mitzi. I bet you crave her name.”

  “Not me,” I lied.

  “Don’t tell me you’re not thinking about being a Mitzi yourself.”

  I turned my head and looked at a brick wall.

  He scratched his nose. His fingers were black with newsprint. “You’d want to be a Mitzi just so everyone’d look at you and you could tell them to kiss-off.”

  I didn’t have a comeback. I stood watching him as he threw the folded papers into a pile.

  He handed me a stack of unfolded Gazettes. “Do you know how to do this?” I sat down and copied him. He asked me if I wanted to know who the best actor around there was. He was quiet a minute. Then, “your grandfather,” he said. I didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant. But I didn’t have to ask, because he went on and told me. According to Joel, my grandfather was the best thing that had ever happened to the country people. “They don’t have anything else to look forward to but boll weevils, maybe a little pneumonia, a few heart attacks.”

  “Are you talking about his medicines?” I asked.

  He laughed and looked at me. “Yeah.”

  He stuffed the folded papers into his canvas shoulder bag. If he had let it, his hair would have curled over his head in big loops. Before I moved away the year before, Joel’s hair had been cut in a GI with just enough to comb and jelly-up like the bristles on a toothbrush. Now he was sculp
turing the long loops into an Elvis ducktail, which might have been a little late fashionwise, but everything was late getting to Coldwater. And Joel’s hair now was the sort of stuff to make my grandmother’s skin crawl and lead her to describe him as looking like a hoodlum. Right away I was attracted to him.

  “M’ere,” he said, motioning to the indentation between the dime store and the Mercantile Co., where seven years before, I had gone with Bobby Watts.

  Sitting down with his back against the bricks, he leaned around and worked at loosening one. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered them. I didn’t smoke, but I took one.

  “You going to be here long?”

  I raised my shoulder, tough; I looked dirty.

  “Well, if you are.…”

  Upward, I blew smoke. My head felt dizzy. I thought I saw wings of something, beating in the sky, then gliding, moving at the edge of the bricks over us. At first I thought maybe it had something to with the satellites, the Russian ones and ours, shot up there the year before. I’d heard a patient in my grandfather’s clinic say if God had wanted men to be alive in Heaven, He would have sent a chariot for them. Alive, men would have to eat and cause laundry. But America couldn’t just sit by and watch Russia junk up Paradise. On TV I had watched three rockets aimed for the moon from some beach in Florida fizzle and die like giant wet firecrackers. And passenger jets had started flying to Europe. My grandmother said anyone going that way didn’t think much of himself. I pictured planes full of jilted lovers, their faces pressed to the windows looking down at the ocean. I took another heavy drag on the cigarette. What I’d seen on the rooftop was only a candy wrapper, flapping in the wind.