The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  “Have mercy,” Zenie whispered. It wasn’t a cry when she said it but a low, long drawn out disturbance of the air that didn’t stop when the words did. There on her knees beside Eva she froze and looked all around us in a full circle. No one was around.

  Eva was still stretched out with her eyes closed. The lids on her eyes were twitching and her lips were mumbling to themselves something I couldn’t hear.

  Then Zenie looked up at me like she was seeing me for the first time in her life.

  “Get Ray.” She said it like it was a cold spring of water running from her lips. “Get him.”

  So I ran for Zenie’s place and burst in the front room yelling for Ray. Miss Josephine was sitting in her big chair with the doilies on the arms. From the depth of the chair she looked out at me like she’d just been waiting years for me to come in and say that very thing. She didn’t say why or what, just pointed to the back door with one long trembling finger.

  I ran straight out the back door, jumped from the bottom step to the hard-packed red dirt below and headed for the shed.

  I was trying my dead-level best to yell, but seeing Miss Josephine’s look had changed me into a little bird that could only chirp. So “Ray” came out like that. Chirp, chirp. Light and sweet-sounding. The kind of sound you’d expect to wake you up on a bright and sunny day. Not the kind of sound that will make a man put down his file, cock his head, and look up. So when I burst into the shed, Ray didn’t look up, he was squatting down to sharpen a lawn mower, but when he did look, it all started to happen. Ray taking that one look and jumping to his feet. Both of us running back to the cemetery. He ran out so far ahead of me that he disappeared over the little hill that separated Shake Rag from the cemetery. He had held onto his file, which had a sharp point. I was left thinking, as I ran by myself with no one in sight, this isn’t happening, nothing has happened. But when I saw Ray’s hat lying in the dust, I knew I was wrong. Ray was careful with his hat. I stopped and picked it up.

  I came over the hill and there was Ray carrying Eva, with her arms wilted at his sides. Zenie was limping along behind, carrying Ray’s file and crying out something, not words but something else. A sound that signified, but not anything in particular. Then she started saying, “In broad daylight.” She said it over and over as if it were the chorus to a song.

  Ray’s hair was plastered to his head where his hat had been and sweat was beading up all over his face. He looked down at me like I was a snake under his feet and said, “Get on back to your mamaw’s. Get on back. Get out of here.” He spit the words out like they were a bad taste in his mouth.

  I didn’t want to go back. Maybe Ray hadn’t thought about how much help I could be. I wanted to run ahead and tell Miss Josephine to get the bed ready for poor Eva and make up a cold pitcher of tea. I looked to Zenie to let me, but she flicked her hand at me no and I knew that meant I had to go. I was worried about Eva too, and wondered who in the world would have hurt her like that. A crazy man whose door she knocked on by mistake? A hobo passing through town? A criminal who’d escaped from Parchment Penitentiary over in Jackson? Did she have a fit and fall on a cigarette lighter someone had offered? My mind was a busy dragonfly, lighting on one possibility after the other.

  Heading back to Mimi’s I passed the cemetery again and something caught my eye. A piece of white beside the Daddy Gone Home grave. It looked like something Eva had dropped, maybe one of her pretty handkerchiefs with the “E” stitched out with little flowers, but when I drew close I could see it was a dirty wadded-up piece of paper with wide lines on it like my school notebook. There was writing printed in big letters on it. Three words. Go Home Bitch. When I said them out loud, they came out of my mouth like a hissy snake.

  So here was this note about going home bitch, lying right there on the grave of somebody called Daddy who had already Gone Home. It hit my funny bone in a peculiar way, like the electric shock you get when you hit your elbow wrong. It went straight through me and burrowed down into my stomach, where it shook and trembled and tried to find a way out. I’m sorry to say I started laughing. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I can make excuses. I can say I was tired. I was aggravated too. Here poor Eva was all sick and hurt, I’d done all the running back and forth, and I thought I deserved to get to find out how things turned out, how the story finally ended. But instead here I was having to walk by myself all the way back to Mimi’s from whence I’d just come, when she was likely still mad as fire at me for what I’d said about her looking like Honey Bunny.

  So I laughed. And the more I laughed the funnier it got. Old Daddy Gone Home and the note about going home and me without a home to go back to, stuck in the cemetery between Shake Rag and Mimi’s. I sat down in the grass on Daddy Gone Home’s grave and held the piece of paper and bent over laughing. The grass over the grave seemed soft as a bed, the ground beneath giving and loving. I laughed so hard I thought my jawbones were going to crack wide open. I thought my heart was going to pop out of my chest. So I lay back on the spongy mound and laughed some more until I got the hiccups.

  Then a strange thing happened. I guess I went dead asleep because before long I saw Eva and my mama dancing the cha-cha around in the sky, Eva in her nice dark suit with her hair flipped just so and Mama in her old loose baking dress and sweetheart rose apron, her bangs standing out like electricity was racing through her body. They were dancing up toward heaven. Left, two, cha, cha, cha. Right, two, cha, cha, cha. Then they did a couple of shuffle ball changes, and Eva grabbed hold of Mama’s apron strings and they turned their backs on me and cha, cha, chaed right up amongst the clouds and through the vault of heaven. Mama leading the way and Eva holding on for dear life to those apron strings. Neither one of them looking back. Then they were gone and I knew it was for forever and eternity.

  When I woke up, the sun was almost down and I felt a weight pressing on my neck. Was I getting strangled? I opened my eyes and there was my flesh-and-blood mother bending over me breathing hard, holding her fingers to the side of my neck and calling out my name.

  “Damn it the hell, Florence, what’s wrong with you, honey? Are you sick? Did you faint?” She rained questions down on me like she was a thunderstorm and I was the helpless earth. “What you doing in the cemetery lying here like this? On a grave! Where’s Zenie, for God’s sake?”

  There was something about the sound of her voice that made me want to bawl my eyes out. I just held out my arms and tried to pull her down to me. I wanted her to lie down in the grass on the giving ground and for us to lie there together forever and forever amen. I had lost my mother, and now she was found. Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine.

  But she didn’t get down. She scrambled to her feet and grabbed my arms. She jerked me up and pulled me along toward the Ford, which was parked right in the middle of the street, I guess at the place where she first saw me lying there on her way up to Zenie’s to pick me up. I was glad to be rescued and tried to come along, but I felt like my bones had melted into a puddle. I could barely walk I was so dog tired from running for help and laughing and sleeping, so she put her right arm around my waist and pulled my left arm around hers and half walked half dragged me to the car.

  “Where’s Zenie? Where is she?” she hissed the questions this time. She cranked up the car and we shot off. She expected answers and fast. She was mad as fire at Zenie for not seeing about me, for leaving me in the cemetery of all places, so I told her what happened with Eva, the way her hair was messed up, the ringworm-looking circle on her face, me running to get Ray, and Ray having to carry her home. At first Mama was asking me things, like what Eva looked like, were her clothes torn, was she bleeding. Then she stopped asking and got real quiet. She leaned over me and opened the glove compartment and pulled out a pack of Daddy’s Luckies. “Open it,” she said, and I pulled the red string and took off the clear paper, then the silver paper, and then she snatched the pack out of my hand and pulled out a cigarette and put it in her mouth. “Light me up,” she said. I pushed
in the cigarette lighter and, when it popped out, I put it up to her cigarette. She looked hard at it for a minute before drawing in. Her hand was shaking on the wheel as she drove us toward home, and she was sucking in and blowing out like her life depended on it. The only sounds I heard the rest of the way home were her sucking and blowing and underneath it all the old muffler in the Ford whining like a dog that wants to be let out.

  When we pulled up in front of Big Dan and Miss Kay Linda’s and started down the stepping-stones to the back, where our house was, Mama commenced running. I just trudged along behind. What’s the hurry? We’re just going home.

  But Mama ran down the path and busted in the front door of our house like the place was on fire and she was going to rescue somebody. “Win!” I heard her hollering for Daddy before I got in the door. “Win! Win!” Daddy’s name cannonballed out of her throat and bounced off the walls.

  But there was no answer because Daddy was not home. The house seemed to call back “Win! Win!” as if it’d lost my daddy too and couldn’t find him either.

  Mama got her poison bottle out from under the sink and pulled out a clean jelly jar from the cabinet and poured it to the top. Then she looked around like she didn’t know what to do next. Her hair was wet around her face. She ran her fingers through it and the bangs stood straight up like little soldiers. She paced the kitchen for a minute. Then she let out a sigh and started to rummage around in the refrigerator for her shortening and eggs and buttermilk and slammed them down on the counter. Saturday was a big baking night and I knew she had seven whole cakes and four halves to make because I had taken most of the orders. She didn’t say a mumbling word to me, so I figured supper was a lost cause. I went and got on my bed and before I knew it, off I went again, just like at the cemetery. Seemed like every time I stopped moving, I went straight to sleep.

  When I woke up it was deep dark and the place had cooled down. I knew it was real late. Wee morning hours, past baking time. I heard the no no no no of the train and guessed it was the one-thirty M & O. I lay there for a while trying to get back to sleep, but my stomach was growling and carrying on. Then the phone rang, and I heard Daddy say “yeah” into it after the first ring. Then he said “number three” and “all right.” Then he hung up. No good-bye. I’d already put my feet on the floor to go down to the basement for Daddy’s box. When the phone rang late and Daddy talked numbers, that was a sure sign he was going to want me to get it. But then I heard Mama come out of her room and say, “Win.” They went back into the bedroom and shut the door. They stayed there for a long time. Then Daddy came out and made a call. I couldn’t hear exactly what he said, but it sounded like “sick” and “be careful,” and by the time he hung up I knew he’d be staying home this one night and we could get some rest.

  After a while I heard Daddy’s snore, which sounded like a little motor trying to start. I was hungry but there was nothing in the kitchen but Mama’s pretty cakes lined up and shining in the moonlight. I opened the refrigerator. It was bare except for some milk. I drank a glass and then got myself a sharp knife and ran it up under each cake where the icing had lapped over onto the cardboard. I turned the knife a little so the sharp edge scrapes off just a little icing and cake from underneath. If I was careful, it wouldn’t show. I licked the knife, careful not to cut my tongue. I went around to each cake and took a little from underneath on each one. When I was done, you couldn’t see a thing. The cakes looked pure and new. In the moon glow they looked like those flowers that bloom only at night when no one’s watching.

  I tiptoed back to my room and put on my pajamas and got back into bed. I was not a bit sleepy, having slept all over town, including bedding down with the dead ones. My heart beat hard to the sugar. After a while I heard another lonesome train come through town, calling out something that sounded like lost, lost. And under the train whistle, I could hear my jittery heart going clickety clack, like wheels flapping the rails.

  Then I heard another sound: my mother crying. Soft, but settled in for the long haul.

  The next morning Mama’s cakes were lined up on the table like little girls with lacy doily collars ready for Sunday School. Daddy was still asleep when here came the cake ladies tiptoeing in single file down the path from the street (my mother still well enough to have Sunday pickups, though that time would soon be over). Some of the ladies had rollers and pin curls in their hair, but they all were dressed and powdered up for church. Mama’s eyes were puffy from crying but she made her lips into pretty curls. She handed the cakes out at the door since the ladies were in a rush and Daddy was still dead to the world. Hello to this one, how’re you doing to that one, she whispered, and pocketed their money in her apron. When the last cake lady walked up the path to her car, Mrs. Winifred Long with the second of two cakes for her twin girls’ birthday party (to which I was not invited), Mama’s eyes filled up again.

  There was one cake left on the table, a six-layer lemon with the divinity icing. My mother looked at me and looked at the cake and said, “All right.” I didn’t know what all right meant. Was she telling me to get ready for church? It wasn’t like Daddy’s “all right” when he hung up the phone. Daddy’s “all right” closed things down; this “all right” coming out of Mama’s mouth opened something up. So I just stood there waiting for a clue as to what was going to happen next, and I was thinking that’s what I’ve been doing all summer, just waiting for the next thing and never ever knowing what it’s going to be. Then Mama went into the bathroom for a while and came out smelling like toothpaste and lilacs. She looked at me hard, spit on her hand, and wiped it across my hair. Her spit smelled like apples that had been on the ground too long. A sweetness that had given way to something else.

  “All right. Can you get the cake?” she whispered, and I whispered back, “Yes ma’am.”

  “Let’s go.” The words were so soft they seemed to curl out of her mouth like smoke. She wanted them to rise and blow away before Daddy woke up.

  My heart started skipping rope. Where were we going? I slid my hands under the cake. Lemon cakes were Mama’s heaviest on account of there being so many layers. Plus the jell is heavy. I hadn’t had a thing but icing and a glass of milk since noon the day before, and the way my heart skipped and hopped over and under the cake made me nervous. Mama held the front door open, and I passed through with the cake held close to my chest for balance like she’d taught me but not so close that it would press up against my front. She came along behind, missing every other stepping-stone up the walk to the street where the green Ford was parked. Against my better judgment, I gave her the cake to hold while I got in the front seat. When I got settled and she bent over to give me back the cake, she almost fell headfirst into my lap. I pushed her back and took the cake from her like it was my own little baby. Nothing had happened to it. It was still perfect.

  I was expecting a wild ride to some cake lady’s house, but instead Mama drove in a slow crawl down Goodlett Street to Shake Rag and Zenie and Ray’s place, as if the Ford were a broken vase whose pieces she was trying to hold together.

  First thing we saw when we drove up was Miss Josephine sitting in a straight-back kitchen chair under the good-sized mimosa tree in Zenie and Ray’s front yard. The mimosa was blooming to beat the band those whiskery pink puff balls. The tree made a tent of lace and fluff over Miss Josephine’s head, like she was sitting under a giant pink and green petticoat. She was bent over like always, but this morning her white hair was a mess, flying all over the place instead of tucked into its neat little bun. She had a big pile of mimosa leaves in her lap and was just counting away, throwing the counted ones in a pile on her right, pulling the uncounted ones from the branches on her left. The bottom third of the tree was bare of leaves. There were piles everywhere, wilted and tucked-in looking, like mimosa leaves get when they’re touched, much less ripped off the tree. The yard was getting to be a mess.

  Ray was sitting on a pallet he’d set up for himself outside under the tree. Was he sleeping
outside? He had his head in his hands. No hat. When he looked up, his eyes seemed darker, all black, even in the bright morning sun. The light, the busy flecks of gold, all long gone. In their place, a swamp of still water.

  All in one breath Mama said, “Morning, Miss Josephine. Morning, Ray.” Miss Josephine didn’t even look up.

  Ray nodded but didn’t get up or look my mother’s way. Mama didn’t notice. I did. Ray had nice manners. He always took off his hat when talking to a lady, black or white, but today he didn’t have it on. Did Zenie drop it on the way back from the cemetery? I would have taken good care of it if they’d let me come along back to the house.

  Mama didn’t stop walking. “Zenie and Eva inside?”

  Ray nodded and looked hard at a spot on the ground.

  Mama told me to go sit down by Miss Josephine while she visited with Zenie and Eva.

  The last thing I wanted to do was stay outside. Ray was eyeing me like I was poison, and Miss Josephine put me in mind of the mental girl on the porch in Milltown. Plus I wanted to see Zenie and Eva too. Eva ought to be feeling better, even if she was still scuffed up some. But Mama grabbed the cake from me and started shimmying up the path to Zenie’s front steps. On the pallet Ray put his head back in his hands and watched the street.

  While Mama was inside, people came and went in the yard patting on Ray and Miss Josephine. Two old men in suits came to stand in the middle of the yard and pray. Good Lord Jesus, give us strength to carry our burdens and strength to cast them away. Make us instruments of Thy peace and strong in every battle. Turn our enemies away and make us victorious over the Satan in our midst and his followers. Bring us peace, oh Lord Jesus, the peace that passeth understanding. Now and forever and ever. Amen.