When Joel and I made it to the bushes, we lay flat and looked through the bottom of the leaves. The Mexican I had bumped into was Ezekiel.
There were three men, all dressed like Mexicans. And the one that I knew to be Ezekiel looked in front of the outhouse at Joel’s and my display of bottles and exhaled a comment in the name of the Lord. He looked around, searching for where we were. But we were so frozen to the ground beneath the covering of leaves in the darkness that there was no way to see us without coming close. And he wasn’t about to do that. No Mexican would have a good reason. He seemed just as eager to pretend to be a good Mexican as we were to be innocent. So we each ignored what had happened in the previous few minutes.
The counterfeit Mexicans started whispering and then formed an assembly line to the truck, putting all of my grandfather’s medicines into it and moving with great speed.
For the next few minutes, with the detached sense of sitting in the Ritz, I watched the men in ponchos rock the outhouse free from its base and lift it. They edged it onto the truck-bed and then scooted it all the way in so that they could wrap a chain around the bottom part to keep it from falling out. The outhouse was lying on its side in the truck and, without getting close, no one could tell what it was.
Two men pushed the truck down the alley, making only a soft padding sound of tires and feet on layers of dust, which, if the Good Lord had put everything on earth for a reason, as people in Coldwater believed, the dust had now found its.
Joel stood up. “What in hell was that all about?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I told him that some Mexican called Pedro was supposed to move that outhouse to Jimmy Hersham’s farm.
Joel looked at me and smiled. “God, I love nights like this.”
We decided we might as well head for the school. We had gotten rid of enough medicine. The rest could be samples.
While I waited in the bushes, Joel carefully went back inside my grandfather’s office to make sure that we hadn’t left any evidence. He locked the door, and we walked to the high school.
Cars were parked all around it and even on the playground. The gym was decorated with streamers overhead and butcher paper on the floor for the king and queen to walk down. Almost everybody from the Missionary Society had already gone to bed. Miss Pankhurst was counting the money in the fruit jars while Foster and a bunch of teachers helped her.
Kids were dancing in their socks on the varnished wood floor. Joel and I set our Mason jar on the table in front of Miss Pankhurst and the teachers and waited.
The principal was keeping the final tabulations of the counting and as Miss Pankhurst and the teachers got down to the last few pennies, he was grinning and shaking his head in a combination of disbelief and pleasure. He walked to the microphone, and the Home Ec. teacher took the record off the turntable and the principal said—after the microphone made one ear-splitting squawk: “And now, we’re going to do what we all came here for.”
I never had any doubt. To the sound of my own name, I walked to the stage, stood there beside Joel and felt the glittering crown mashed onto my head. A record plopped onto the turntable, and Joel and I started off the next dance.
Everybody crowded around, watching and clapping, and Joel took my hand, pulled me up to him so as to wind up the beginning steps of The Bop. The music seemed to come up through the floor and into our feet and Joel threw me out and we danced connected by curved fingers. The sound of applause was all around me. One side of the ceiling lights went off, and the voice of Johnny Mathis came on with “Chances Are.”
Joel and I danced silently. Pulling my hand behind his back, he guided me with his other, and I buried my head in the curve of his neck.
After a while, Miss Pankhurst tapped on my shoulder and told us that it was time for the picture. She led Joel and me into a locker room where an out-of-town photographer was going to take it. He posed us against a solid-colored wall. Then he stuck his head under a black cloth and said, “Say ‘Peaches’.”
But just as the flash on the camera came on, Joel squeezed my hand, turned toward me and whispered, “Say ‘Pool.’”
It wasn’t until after I walked back out onto the dance floor with everybody watching me—and there was this little ripple of applause again, and the dancers opened up the middle of the floor for me and Joel, and after Joel walked me home and we stopped and messed around a little and kissed a pretty big long one in the shadows of the magnolia tree—that I felt the skirt of the B.J. costume stuck with sweat to the inside of my legs. All night it’d been on me. But since that moment when Joel pulled me away from Sam’s house—totally forgotten.
25.
The Morning After
I lay in the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed only long enough to see the pink light hit the back of the chicken house. Then I was out the door with Toulouse’s cage—as if going to clean it. I left the cage, with Toulouse in it, behind the garage and headed to Sam’s.
I knew that he might not be awake yet. But I could wait. I had to see him and let him know that I was there, ready for him. I went around to the back of his house where I could look in the kitchen windows.
The room was quiet and still dark. I sat on a chair on the back porch and looked out across the dark water of the Mill Pond, watching the sun light up the pasture, watching the shapes of cows come into sight under the trees.
It must have been nearly an hour before I heard someone come into the kitchen and a light come on. I stood up and, through the window, I saw Sam in his pajama bottoms only, measuring out coffee into the coffeepot, looking so sexy that I could barely keep from opening the door and busting in on him. I stood at the window, planting myself on the porch, waiting for him to turn around and see me.
He let the water run and then leaned into the pantry and pulled out sugar. He unwrapped a loaf of bread and put two slices in the toaster. He was thin and wonderful, well and just as I remembered him when we were all together—me and him and B.J. He was going to see me in a minute, and we would grab and hug each other, and he would probably ask me if I was in that Halloween contest that the whole town had gone crazy over. I would tell him yes, laughing. He would ask me how I did. And then, teasingly, he would probably say that if I hadn’t won was there any way that he could fix it?
I’d laugh. I’d go so damn crazy with a case of giggles that he’d probably look at me, half worried and half tickled, and ask had I gone loony without him knowing it? Then I’d tell him that I’d already fixed it.
He’d think I was kidding. But it was a known fact to everyone: I was the Coldwater October Queen. And now I was two inches away from being with Sam.
How can mornings be so good you want to lick them? How can a day start out so right you want it instead of pancakes floating in syrup or crowns that glitter and pictures in newspapers?
Sam opened the refrigerator door and took out jelly and milk. He turned toward the hall as if someone had called him. I stood with my face aimed toward the window, the wood like a frame I was looking through at something that I had never thought of seeing. Julie walked into the room and poured herself a glass of juice and drank it. She stood for a minute, looking at Sam and asking him had he gone out to the porch for the newspaper yet. And then she left and in walked Ellen. She had on this negligee under a flimsy robe, and she reached out and grabbed Sam and kissed him. He sat down and pulled her onto his lap and put his face against her neck, and they stayed there like that while I stepped back from the window and bent down so that there was no chance, now, I would be seen.
I crept off the side of the porch and walked behind Miss Pankhurst’s house.
I stared at the pasture and the cows and the ribbonlike current of the Mill Pond. I would die, I thought. There was no room inside me for what I felt.
I ran down to the end of the street where the turnip greens field spread out near Leona Sutton’s house. I ran through the field, kicking out at butterflies already touching down on the plants in the new early light.
I
t was definitely a world that I could not get to behave, or even do much about. I had belonged with Sam. All through that long year, I had believed that he loved me. It seemed I could stand anything but thinking he had not meant that. I remembered the early part of that year when I’d thought that my parents’ love had been counterfeit, that it had just been a put-on, and lost. Nothing in the whole world seemed worse than feeling that.
I remembered Sam’s face the many times that he had looked at me, so affectionately, and sometimes when he didn’t think that I even knew he was watching me. There were all those long, hot afternoons when he had sat, watching for me walking home from school.
I remembered him touching my hair; and in my mind, I saw again the way that he had sometimes put the warm palm of his hand against my face.
Fatherly.
I realized the truth then. The night I’d told Sam I loved him and that I was going to marry him and that I would never leave was the night we’d gone to see B.J. dance. Sam had been drinking so much. Probably he had not even heard me. Probably he didn’t even remember that night.
They were a family now—he, Julie, and Ellen. I couldn’t mess with that.
I turned at the end of the field and ran up the alley. Loneliness would, I knew, be once again inside me like ice moving across a sore tooth.
I stopped a minute and looked at the place where the outhouse had been. The hole beneath it was open and deep. From behind the garage, I picked up Toulouse and carried him into the house. Louella was grinning, bustling around in the kitchen, stirring blueberries into batter. She looked at me. “I knew my divinity would do it.”
I put Toulouse in the bathroom and my grandmother handed me the Sunday juice in a silver goblet. “Well, Leona’s dress certainly didn’t hurt.” She was delighted I was the queen.
I sat down at the kitchen table to eat pancakes with my grandfather. He winked and said that I sure made a fine October Queen. He said my mother and father had called while I was out and that they were so pleased! They wanted us to send them the picture in the newspaper.
I remembered then that my grandfather hadn’t been to his office yet.
My grandparents and Louella kept going on like that—making such a to-do about me winning. I sat at the kitchen table, eating pancakes with my grandfather, one side of my heart dying over Sam and the other being swelled out with the pride of my secrets. I would be so lonely without Sam; the thought of him as my future had been a part of me for so long. But the longer I sat, the more it seemed that the hole of losing Sam was filling up with the strength of who I was and what I could do and what I could gain for myself. That would always be mine. Like Sam’s love, it might, at times, get misplaced. But it would never leave.
And what Sam had taught me about love would always be mine, too. I might not want to have to settle for just that. But I had to.
The phone rang. “Hello,” Louella said. “This here’s the Maulden’s residence.”
Louella didn’t say any more because obviously my grandmother had picked up the phone in her bedroom. But Louella, her eyes growing wide, and her mouth opening like a kid blowing a bubble bigger and bigger, kept listening. And then she covered her mouth to keep it from busting out with laughter.
My grandfather and I sat over our pancakes, stalled, watching Louella hang up, softly, obviously guilty that she hadn’t put the phone back on its handle before then. She looked at me and my grandfather. “Oh Miz Maulden’s in awful trouble.” She wiped her hands on her apron.
My grandfather looked at her, his brow wrinkled.
Louella’s eyes got big. “That outhouse she was moving for Mr. Rankin … it’s settin’ in the middle of Main Street!” She nodded. “And Mr. Rankin thinks she did it on purpose. That’s him on the phone. He thinks she’s using him for a joke.”
Suddenly I laughed.
My grandmother came thumping down the hall, her hair wild, her eyes wild, her face wild: “Good Lord in Heaven,” she breathed. Then she told us about the outhouse just as Louella had.
“Calmly, Emily.” My grandfather poured some Inside Medicine into her prune juice.
“How can I be calm, Horace! I’m under attack! He thinks I’m a criminal.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“Well, it is sitting right there on Main Street and with his newspaper’s name on it. Everybody knows I was in charge of moving it!”
But then the moment hung in silence a moment. And my grandmother breathed: “Ezekiel.”
It wasn’t a matter of more than ten minutes before my grandmother had ordered my grandfather to warm up his Chrysler, had combed her hair—halfway—put on a dress and was getting in to sit beside him, while I sat in the back. I wasn’t about to miss out on anything if I could help it. And whereas I could have easily reminded her that Pedro had moved the outhouse, I also knew he hadn’t.
She told my grandfather to go around the back way. “I can’t stand to ride down Main Street; I don’t even want to see it.”
“You’re right,” my grandfather said, looking out the Chrysler’s back window as he backed up. And he winked at me. “It’ll probably raise your blood pressure.”
From the backseat I could see only the side of her face. But I could tell that it was a pinched severe look she gave my grandfather. “You needn’t take this lightly,” she said. “It’s humiliating. You should have heard Mr. Rankin on the phone!”
My grandfather hunched his shoulders. I guess with this bad news, on top of what he thought was going to be his bad news, my grandfather was being careful. There sure were a lot of things I wanted to see happen.
“I merely find a little humor in this, that’s all,” he said. “But it is bad—if Ezekiel disobeyed you. He shouldn’t cause you embarrassment.”
We pulled up to Ezekiel’s house, a gray-board dog-trot cabin set on concrete blocks. Three little children were playing with a puppy, running and shrieking up to and then under the porch, the puppy chasing, panting. They stopped and began staring at us. Soon four older children joined them, three coming from behind the house and one coming from under it. They sat on the edge of the porch and joined in the staring. A second later Ezekiel came through the door. He was smiling; he had on a pair of overalls but there weren’t any tools hanging from them. “Morning, Dr. Maulden. Pretty Sunday, ain’t it?”
“I’ve come to talk about something that happened last night, Ezekiel.” My grandfather was standing in the yard, using his plantation voice and he looked straight at Ezekiel. “Miz Maulden thinks you played a dirty trick on her.”
Ezekiel looked at the car and my grandmother sitting in it. His mouth dropped open, and he tilted his head. “What you talking about, Dr. Maulden?”
“That outhouse that’s sitting on Main Street.”
“You mean that outhouse is on Main Street?”
I could see Ezekiel’s neck jump forward in his collar, leaning his head toward my grandmother. He saw me in the backseat and nodded, his eyes meeting mine. I didn’t say a word or move.
He looked at my grandfather. “You mean that Pedro done gone and done that?”
Then he walked over to the car and tapped on the glass beside my grandmother. “Miz Maulden. Miz Maulden.”
She rolled down her window. She looked out at him with her face still pinched in anger.
“I do give you my sympathy. That was a awful thing for that Pedro to go and do.”
My grandfather came up beside him. “You mean you didn’t have anything to do with it?”
Ezekiel was standing beside the car looking down at my grandmother. “You ‘members, Miz Maulden; I was only getting the truck to use. That Pedro was in charge of the moving. Why, I wouldn’t have known where exactly them Mexican pickers was wanting to put that toilet—to get the most use out of it, that is.” Then he looked at my grandfather beside him. “I ain’t had no business about that toilet since I let Pedro use my truck.” He pointed to the black pickup parked under a tree. “It was right back here, bright and early.”
>
While my grandfather started the engine, Ezekiel looked in the back window at me and said, his face nervous, “Lo there. How you this morning?”
“Fine,” I said.
I knew he was worried I was going to give him away. I guess I was having to choose between my grandmother and Ezekiel. But if I told on Ezekiel, I might also get close to telling on myself. And I wasn’t about to give up being the Coldwater October Queen. It was just too much damn fun—being special.
We went to Mr. Hersham’s farm, and even before he told us, we could tell from the silence and the look of the bunkhouses and fields that the Mexicans had been driven out in trucks just before dawn.
My grandmother aired her anger all the way home, and then a heaviness settled in her face.
My grandfather and I went to the eleven o’clock service at church. My grandmother stayed home. She said she simply couldn’t face it.
The outhouse was sitting in the middle of the street in the intersection by the Mercantile and the bank. A few people were walking around it, some were laughing, and some kids were pinching their noses at each other and saying in nasal voices: “Peu. Peu.” Then when we crossed the street I could see the sign on the front that I had not realized was so important until it was seen where it now was.
Property of the Coldwater Gazette
Reserved for the use of Employees only.
—C.J. Rankin
And below that, painted on the door of the outhouse itself was:
WHITE ONLY
Throughout the church service, while I sat beside my grandfather, who still thought that he was in terrible trouble, I thought about the outhouse. Also about Ezekiel and my grandmother and Mr. Rankin and Joel and me. It sure seemed that I was going to sacrifice my grandmother. For I didn’t have any plans to do anything but just keep quiet and let her go on bearing the brunt of the joke. And when I thought of how Ezekiel had come to our house and gotten control over where that outhouse would go, where he would secredy put it, and had gotten paid for doing it, too, I got so tickled, I felt even. It seemed then that my anger toward my grandmother’s pushing and poking me into ways that I didn’t especially want passed on to me lay down, spread out and stayed quiet. Maybe all along she was only trying to give me what she thought would prepare me best for this world. But my world was never to be the one she wanted to prepare me for.
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