Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  He looked down, then up. “Well, Miz Maulden, don’t nobody want to go to the trouble to burn it.”

  She looked from the eggs to him. “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t know.” He shifted his weight and traded the hat to his other hand. “That’s what I come to talk about.”

  “Well, what?”

  “Might take more. I was wondering if you was willing to back up the cost?”

  She looked again at the eggs.

  “No. Now, what we agreed on should be plenty. I can’t see why you.…”

  “Miz Maulden.” He took a step closer. “I ain’t taking you. You don’t see.” He watched her rolling the eggs around. “You know, it going to take about two men to shift that toilet up onto a truck. Hard lifting. Take about two dollars apiece. That’s four dollars. Now, it going to take a lot of gas to get that truck all the way to where we can burn it. Cost of that truck be about eight dollars. When they get out there, they going have to lift it down again. Course that’s easier. Be about three dollars. Now, wait a minute, Miz Maulden. I promises you—just let me show, okay? We figures it take about a hour for the toilet to burn. Dollar an hour for each of them men makes two dollars. Whole thing take about half a day. All of it adds up to twenty dollars … only way you can do it.”

  I couldn’t keep up with Ezekiel’s arithmetic, but my grandmother pshawed loudly and said it was ridiculous.

  “Well, you think on it.” He put on his hat. “And I’ll see if I can do better.”

  He went out through the sun porch door and Louella trotted in to give him something to eat, wrapped in a section of newspaper.

  My grandmother was angry now. She was pushing the eggs around roughly and staring at them. She said she’d always known that underneath Ezekiel was a crafty low-down … then she stopped and held up an egg. In despair she swept a half dozen or so into the sling she made of her skirt and carried them like that, bent over, to Louella in the kitchen.

  After Louella returned from Thompsons’ Grocery with new eggs, my grandmother and I went into the sun porch for an early supper. Louella brought it there. She put a plate of Waldorf salad and sliced ham on the table along with a small portion of the aspic for a test. But I was still reluctant to eat anything connected with chickens.

  Halfway through, Ezekiel knocked on the sun porch door again. He came in quickly and took off his hat. He grinned. “I done better,” he said. “You’ll like this.”

  My grandmother squeezed another lemon into her tea and said she seriously doubted it.

  Ezekiel shifted his weight. He looked up, then down. “You know,” he said, “how the Mexican pickers is a problem about.…” He cleared his throat and looked at our plates. “I don’t want to mention it with you here in front of food.… But Mr. Jimmy Hersham is willing to have his foreman, that English-speaking one—Pedro, I think he’s called—have that toilet taken to his field. Good idea, I think.”

  My grandmother put down her fork. The fact of what he’d said, and the perfect fit of it, moved her face into a look I’d rarely seen. “Oh, Ezekiel!” she said. “That’s excellent!”

  He traded his hat to his other hand. “That’ll end our problems. Take off that fire-watching fee, too.” He smiled. “Course you know, Mr. Hersham expected me to get the truck for them Mexicans to use. But I won’t be supervising then, neither—that Pedro will. And Mr. Hersham might would pay you back. But I needs that money to get the boys that’ll help. I can use my own truck, but them boys won’t move until they sees I got something green in my pocket. I got to have chains and a rope, too. That’s a heavy toilet. Comes to fifteen dollars.”

  My grandmother got up and paced a minute. She stopped and looked at him. “Ezekiel.… That’s way too much and we both know it.”

  But she got her purse. Digging out the bills, she went on and told him it wrenched every fiber of her body to pay him that, but she guessed he deserved some of it. Then she handed over the money and she added: “When is the outhouse going to be moved?”

  Ezekiel didn’t hesitate. It would be in the next few days, he told her.

  “It has to be,” she said. “The luncheon is a week from Monday. Mr. Rankin has to have time to fill in the hole.”

  “Yessum. Yessum.” Ezekiel said he hadn’t thought about that. He put on his hat, said his goodbyes and left. Louella gave him a drink of water on the way out.

  I went through the sun porch door, and I stood in the alley for a moment. The outhouse was fully in view. The lilies Ezekiel had brought in cans were still there, straining at the metal, hanging over the sides. They’d get planted now. The outhouse would get moved. I thought about the afternoon when B.J. had watered the lilies, and the slow, dawdling way we’d walked home from Mr. Rankin’s office after delivering her engagement announcement. She had written me two letters, but I knew not many more would come.

  I walked to the end of the street and, in the early dark, I stood in front of Sam’s house. He was somewhere near. He would be home soon. We would be together.

  The shadows of trees were being swallowed by a solid darkness. Clouds like dark rocks hung in a gray sky. And like a crazy person, I whispered aloud to no one, “Yes.” Then I laughed. Joel’s face flirted in my mind, and my grandmother’s comments about my being the Missionary Society’s October Queen with him rolled in my memory like well-aimed marbles. If I won, my picture with him would be on the front page of the Coldwater Gazette. Sam could see it; my grandmother would be embarrassed by it; and best of all, I’d dress up in some Halloween getup that’d make me look like B.J. I’d jolt Sam’s memories with ideas of what could be. It’d be just like we were getting B.J. back and making everything as it had been. We’d all be reminded of the time being wasted. My parents could even see me in the paper, too, and know they shouldn’t be tearing themselves apart.

  My grandfather had still not come home for supper, and my grandmother sent me to fetch him. I dreaded going over there and getting pulled into another whole evening of medicine-making. I walked slowly through his lab, then stood at the door to his office, examining the bones, skulls, and stuff in his glass cases. I could see him in his chair at his desk, rared back, not moving, still and big. My grandmother said he was half-deaf. His ears had white hair growing out of them, and even though most times I thought he seemed to hear fine, they looked defunct. He turned around and saw me, and his voice was so quick and ready, it startled me: “You’re just who I need to see.”

  “I came to tell you supper was ready,” I said.

  “I’m not hungry.” He stared up at the ceiling with cobwebs in the corners. Then he held out to me a typed letter and whispered, “I’m in a bind.” He glanced at me once to see if I was reading the letter. I didn’t want to. I had other things on my mind. But the look on his face was asking me my opinion. I hadn’t had anybody wanting to know what I thought in a long time. Not since Sam had gone away.

  The letter was from the state medical licensing board, and it said that they were sending an inspector to go over my grandfather’s books to make certain he was not selling any of his medicines.

  Suddenly his chair snapped down and his feet hit the floor. “Here they go sending some guy from the state board to visit me, and I’m not doing anything wrong! I’m not selling it, and I’m not giving it to anyone who’s not in my family. I’ll admit I’m finding a lot of cousins I didn’t know I had.” He laughed a little but then quickly stopped. I wasn’t used to seeing him worried. He leaned back, but in only a few minutes the chair snapped forward again. “I ought to do something to help myself.”

  He motioned me to follow him into the lab and when we got to the storeroom door, he opened it. There were shelves all the way to the ceiling filled with medicines. They weren’t labeled but I knew what they were. The Outside Medicine was yolk-colored; the Inside a shade lighter.

  He picked up a bottle and held it to the light. “If I told you I intended to take all of this myself, what would you say?” He looked at me. I didn’t say a
nything. I returned his gaze with the eyes of a good hunting dog. “You’re right,” he said. “No one in his right mind would believe me.”

  He asked me to help clear a path to the sink. We pushed things out of the way, and then he filled one of the vats with soapy water. After we poured out the medicine he said we’d have to wash and dry all the bottles and hide them.

  There had to be a better way of getting rid of the medicine than just pouring it out. I’d made some of it, and I guess I felt a little maternal about that, just as I had on the night that Foster Collins and my grandfather had been examining my baby chicks. Yet I didn’t want to have to hide the bottles any more than I wanted to pour them out. But I also didn’t want to see my grandfather lose his license, or be embarrassed publicly anymore.

  He handed me the first bottle, the cap already loosened. The liquid came out in gulps and the drain swallowed it with a slight burp. He handed me another bottle. It would have made so much more sense for me to be the one to trot back and forth to the storeroom for the bottles. I was so much faster. But of the two of us, I was the only one who could pour. To him it was just too painful. The sound of the stuff going down the drain was awful. I tried to think of ways I could distract us. The room smelled like lemons and something oily. I said that Grandmother had arranged for the migrants at Hersham’s Farm to inherit the outhouse.

  “Well, I’ll swannie!” he said. He whooped and hollered a minute over that. “How’d she’d come up with a brilliant idea like that one?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t about to tell him it was Ezekiel’s idea. If somebody happened to be admiring the person he was married to, you shouldn’t mess with it.

  He kept handing me bottles. There were at least a hundred more. I had made up my mind that after number twelve I would suggest that we stop and think; there had to be a better way. But despite my decision my hands didn’t stop.

  “Sally?” My grandfather stood at the storeroom door. “I think we ought to stop.”

  I stood still and didn’t say a word.

  His voice was loud. “I’m going to tell the truth. I made every one of these bottles for myself and for those I care about, and if those government men don’t believe me, to hell with them! I’m not going to act like some hillbilly with a revenuer coming up the road.” Then he walked around flapping his arms. “If those government men don’t believe me and think I’m a crook, it’ll be my hard luck—because it’ll be the truth.”

  What he said didn’t make sense, but I knew the sense he meant to make.

  I also knew he should save himself, and that I ought to help him. We could hide the stuff and sell it to anyone who could claim kinship. Using the Bible as our guide, we could cover all of Coldwater. The only way we would be found out was if all the people in this part of Arkansas lived to be over a hundred. We’d be on the news then, with those centenarian Russians who ate yogurt. And when one of us held up his little yellow bottle—even if we’d all agreed not to, there’s always someone hellbent on telling the truth—we’d have to build an airstrip in Coldwater to handle the jets. My grandfather would go down in history along with Rudolph, Harry Truman, and Robin Hood.

  “I really think we ought to hide it,” I said.

  He didn’t even look at me. He went to the back door and with his hand on the light switch, he turned toward me and then cut off the light. “I like the truth best,” he said.

  He locked the office door. For a minute we just stood there and looked up at the sky. I could have socked him. Here he’d asked my opinion but wouldn’t take it.

  It was a cloudy night, black, hopeless. As if the dark mood were catching, I looked into the end of the alley and knew that I could never become the Coldwater October Queen. Corinne Hamilton was running. She was paired up with Benjamin Levy. If she wore one of her twirling costumes or something similar and sold nothing but stale raisins, she’d win. I had never won anything. All I was doing was playing a joke on myself. I couldn’t become like B.J. I couldn’t get my parents back as a family. I couldn’t make Sam stronger. My memories of all of them seemed trumped up, too sweet, unreal.

  Only the lights from my grandmother’s sun porch kept my grandfather and me from stumbling in the dark. The outhouse looked desolate, condemned, haunted. I thought of how it would be when my grandfather lost his license to practice medicine and was written up in all the papers for violating the court’s rules. He ought to do better.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “It feels good to know that what I’m doing is right!” He started then. I saw it in his eyes. What little light there was bounced off them like foxfire. It was a look a cat gets when it’s lying flat, twitching, watching a bird in the grass, ready to pounce. He talked about the determined resolve of Patrick Henry, the Duke of Wellington, Jefferson Davis, General Patton, and above all, Harry Truman. He talked of moon travel, Davy Crockett, Custer, and the I.R.S. I knew it wouldn’t be likely that he’d go back to the pouring-out idea.

  Inside the sun porch he hung up his holey lab coat on a hook by the door. My grandmother was in her bedroom on the phone, and we could hear her telling somebody about the arrangements for the outhouse. She’d probably already called all the members of the Missionary Society.

  My grandfather and I got a snack in the kitchen. The refrigerator was stuffed with eggs and aspic, and then we settled down together on the couch opposite the TV to watch the debate between Kennedy and Nixon. Kennedy was tanned; and Nixon looked like my grandmother’s aspic—thin and pasty.

  Just before bed my grandfather and I went into the kitchen to put our dishes up. He took a bottle of the Inside Medicine and poured us each a glass of it, calling it a nightcap.

  The darkness of a night without stars and a moon no bigger than the sliver of a fingernail made the kitchen windows seem gone, blown-out. I put the glass of the Inside Medicine to my lips and drank, but it tasted so terrible that for a second I thought my grandfather had poured us Mr. Clean by mistake.

  I’d been so mean and mad all night. If we had just drunk Mr. Clean, it might only prove to be my first real blessing in disguise. I think we both felt doomed.

  23.

  My Grandmother and Charles Rankin Are in Cahoots

  My grandfather didn’t tell my grandmother her life was about to change. I knew that I should tell her about the licensing inspector. But just like my grandfather, I didn’t get around to it. She was so wrapped up in having the outhouse moved to Hersham’s Farm that, strangely, she was the most cheerful of any of us. I think that’s the main reason my grandfather and I didn’t want to mess with her.

  I put Toulouse on the bedpost and sat in front of the Man-from-Shiloh’s dresser while blowing out my cheeks and sticking out my tongue and planning my Halloween costume. I was going as a Lady of the Evening. I would sell tarts and dress like one, and my grandmother would have a stroke; and I’d be sent to prison for manslaughter. My grandfather would probably already be there.

  My grandmother took me to Leona Sutton’s to be measured for a costume, since she was determined for me to win the contest, using beauty and refinement as weapons. If I didn’t, then at least I’d look nice while strolling around Coldwater with a Jew.

  We crossed the street near the Second Baptist Church and walked to a small frame house on the edge of a field. Across from it was the row of houses where Louella lived. A tractor was parked in the field, which was planted with turnip greens. In the sun, I could smell them, the faint odor of the plants’ leaves. It seemed as though they were cooking slightly. Pale yellow butterflies lit on them, flitting across the field like blown paper. I stood still a minute. My grandmother walked on ahead of me. There seemed to be hundreds of those butterflies, dancing across the rich green turnip field. I didn’t tend to think of butterflies coming out in October. They seemed out of place. They lay so lightly all across the field, they were like a yellow dancing blanket—moving and at the same time still.

  A pair of tall skinny bird dogs came out from under Leona’s ho
use to greet us, licking my hands, jumping up. In her dining room, fat, widened-out Leona Sutton, who reminded me of fresh dough rising in warm air, smiled around the pins she put in her mouth. While using her mouth and bosom as places to keep pins, she twirled me around on her dining room table and stuck together a costume that none of us was certain about. My grandmother studied my face. I turned on Leona’s dining room table like a wound-up doll set to a broken rhythm. “I know,” my grandmother said suddenly. “Leona, make a wand and a tall pointed hat. She can be the Good Witch of the North in the Wizard of Oz. How’s that?”

  Leona and my grandmother designed my outfit, and I didn’t give a damn.

  Later that day after we’d gotten home Louella came through the back door with a handful of greens that she’d gone to pick for supper. She tied on her apron, after putting the greens in the sink. “And now …” she came over and hugged me. “Honey, you going to be the October Queen for sure. Cause I’m going to make the sweetest, best candy any soul ever set his teeth into! I’m going to make you chocolate drops, pecan chips, green and pink mints and.…” She stopped and held her breath. “You and that Weiss boy’s gonna be crowned for sure.… I’m.…”

  My grandmother thumped in from her room. She looked pleased and informed me that she had told Louella yesterday that since I was running I might as well win. Therefore Louella had been ordered to make divinity.

  My grandfather, who was sitting in the den, roared, clapping and yelling like a man at a ball game. “Oh you’ll win with divinity!” he said. “Louella’s is heaven itself.”

  Louella was crowding my face. “What you think?”

  “Fine.”

  That afternoon my grandmother wrote her final letter to the editor. She addressed it to the Citizens of Coldwater, and in it she explained how she and Mr. Rankin were cooperating for the betterment of the community. She said that she had taken it upon herself to have the outhouse from behind Charles Rankin’s newspaper office moved to James Hersham’s farm for the use of the migrants. And then she sent me off with the sealed letter to the newspaper office.