The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  The night air outside had turned to syrup. Mimosas, I thought, which made me think of Miss Josephine. Had she finally counted all the leaves she could reach? Was she satisfied? I was more interested in the blossoms, sweet beyond anything, but mixed with something else. Dust? I remember my mother twirling them under my nose to wake me up when I was little. They made me sneeze and laugh. Maybe they would work on Eva and make her forget about the hooligans, I thought; maybe Miss Josephine was concentrating on the wrong part of the tree.

  After a while, Daddy came in and took off his shoes and heaved himself down on the bed. Under the hair oil, he smelled deep-down dirty, the way you smell when you sweat over old sweat and don’t bathe or change your clothes for a long time. Nasty. If he’d come into the house smelling like that, Mama would have said, “Win, what you been into? You’re going to run us all out of the house. Go get yourself a bath before you do another thing!”

  When he fell down on the bed, he rubbed my stomach for a minute like he always did. Then he started humming a hymn. I could put the words to it. “Just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me and that thou biddest me come to thee, oh Lamb of God, I come. I come.” It wasn’t one of my favorites. When I heard it, I always saw someone having to reach out and hug a bloody Jesus. I’d never heard Daddy sing it before. He usually favored fighting songs. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was his favorite. His humming was long and drawn out. Mournful. He was lying flat on his back and so was I. When I turned to look at him, he didn’t look back but I could see his eyes were wide open. After we lay there awhile, the ten thirty came through. No no no no. That got me going again. Then he got going too, and not quiet like me, but sobs that shook the bed. He rubbed on me while he was crying and I patted his hand. Then right in the middle of a sob he fell dead asleep. I turned my face away from him and crawled farther to my side of the bed to get closer to the window and the night air. His dead hand fell on my back when I turned. It was so heavy that it seemed to be dragging me back to him, but then, as I moved farther away, it fell like a log onto the space I’d made between us. I looked out the screen at the shapes moving in the little breeze outside. The limb of an old cedar bush touched the screen again and again as if it were reaching for something inside.

  I lay there for a long time. Daddy seemed to be trying to gallop full speed through his sleep so that by the time he had to get up he would have gotten as much of it as possible. He was breathing hard and fast and he twitched and snorted every now and then. His weight made it hard to stay away from him. It made a little hill out of my side of the bed, and I kept sliding down. Finally I gave up trying and let myself fall back toward him. I burrowed deep into his side. By then I’d gotten used to the smell. It didn’t bother me anymore. I was the bat and he was the cave.

  I’d just about settled when I had a thought that woke me right back up. Everything was dead quiet. No pans sliding in and out, no radio, no spoons stirring or whisks whisking. If Mama had been there, she would have been in the hot kitchen baking right this very minute. The thought made me gasp. Mama’s cakes! Three wholes and two halves, all due for pickup tomorrow! I had seen the list.

  In a flash I rolled out from Daddy’s backbone and sat straight up. I needed to get up and make the cakes or Mama’s whole business would go down the drain. Hadn’t Mama just told Daddy last week, when he was ragging on her for working too hard, that if it weren’t for her cakes, we’d have gone to the poorhouse a long time ago? I could see the word spreading like wildfire through Millwood. Martha isn’t making her cakes anymore. Who’s going to make them now? Then some lady we never even heard of popping up out of nowhere and saying, don’t worry, I will!

  So I got up real quiet. I knew that if Daddy heard me, he’d say, Sister, get on back in this bed, so I shut the door to my room real quiet—just a click was all—and stole into the kitchen. The next thing I did was preheat the oven. Then I got Mama’s little tin recipe holder with the fleur-de-lis on it where she kept her index cards with the cake recipes. I knew most of them by heart, but I wanted to be sure of all the measurements. Then I went to the telephone and found this week’s list. I was relieved to see there weren’t any orders for the lemon, just the devil’s food and caramel, both of which I could make with one hand tied behind my back. I just hoped Mama had gotten in everything I needed before running herself into the train.

  Which she had. I looked in the back of the icebox. It was all there. Which gave me pause. Why, if she was planning on running herself into the train, did she get together all the ingredients for the cakes she had to make? There were two possible answers. The first was that it was all an accident, she didn’t mean to do it. Too much moonshine, which was likely in any case. The second was that she expected me to have the sense to carry on the cake business. Now all the hours she had me in the kitchen helping her made sense. She was training me to take over, to carry on when she fell by the wayside. Whatever the case, Mama was alive! She was going to come home after she got out of the hospital and went over to Jackson for a while. I heard them say so. My job was to make sure she had her cake business to come home to. Lucky it was summer and I hadn’t started back to school.

  I went over to the kitchen calendar to see how much of June was left. Not much, as it turned out. Lately my mother had been crossing out each passing day with a big X, as though she were a convict biding time in Parchment Penitentiary until she could tunnel out to the world of her real life. About a week’s worth of days in June were now X-ed out, including this Saturday. July was right around the corner. My main thought was how long I could take care of Mama’s cake business. I saw I had less than three months before school commenced. I was still worried about Eva and her burns and Miss Josephine and her leaves. I was worried that my mother would be sprung only to run herself into another train. I was worried I’d get kicked out of the fifth grade. So it was a blessed relief to worry about holding down the cake fort. This was something I could do something about, and, when my mother got home, she would love me for saving the day. She would take one look at the pile of money I’d have made and know that she couldn’t do without me.

  So I started. Mama always made me get everything out first, which was no easy job since Mama kept all her ingredients in the icebox, even sugar and flour so they wouldn’t get bugs, and Daddy had pushed them all to the back to make room for the ham and other stuff. I had to pull all that out, which made me feel a little sickish since it was all the stuff I’d just thrown up. But I sat it all back on the table, trying not to look at it, then got the sugar and flour and eggs and milk and shortening out from the back of the icebox. Then I put all the other stuff back in. Nice and tidy. Next I pulled out pans, bowls, the whisk, spoons, measuring cups, two little sharp knives for cutting the shortening into the flour, and so on. Finally I had it all ready. I started in, greasing the pans, cutting waxed paper to fit them, and greasing the waxed paper, so they’d be all ready for the batter. The stove could take eight pans at a time. Mama would double and triple recipes, but I was afraid I’d mess it up if I tried that. So I just made the cake batter over and over, the same thing. I had two whole devil’s foods and two halves, so that made three total, I figured. Then I had one whole caramel and two halves, so that made two of them. I decided to do the devil’s food cakes first. I’d have to turn them out, ice them up, and wash pans before starting on the white batter for the caramel cakes.

  I was going along just fine. It was hot as Hades, but I had Mama’s fan set up on her stool. I set it to rotate so it’d cool the cakes when I got them out. For once I was glad my pajamas were holey because Mama was right, it is cooler. I was about two hours into it. Outside the night was buzzing. The sheep frogs were baaaing outside the window. I could see why Mama liked this time. It was her and the night outside, nobody else. The devil’s foods were out of the oven and cooling on little racks. I’d mixed up the angel icing and started cooking it up in a double boiler, which I was watching like a hawk and stirring every few seconds. I wa
s timing it, plus I planned to use the candy thermometer on it too. I wasn’t going to take any chances with a grainy mess. So I was doing right well, considering. The angel icing started bubbling along, so I beat in the cream of tartar, and in about a minute everything was just right for it to come off the eye.

  Which is where I made my mistake.

  Two mistakes, actually. The first was that I got flustered and forgot to turn off the eye, so the flame was still going right along. If I had just turned that off, none of the rest of it would have happened. Then I couldn’t find any pot holders. I’d used them to take the cakes out of the oven. What had I done with them? I looked around and they were nowhere in sight. I touched the pot handle of the top double boiler. It was too hot to hold. So then I made mistake number two. I snatched up a dish towel. I had to move fast. The icing was boiling up a storm, and meanwhile, the pot under it had suddenly boiled dry and was starting to smoke (again, the mistake of not turning the eye off), so I couldn’t see any way around it. I grabbed the pot of icing with the dish towel. When I did that, part of the dish towel dragged down and touched the eye and took the flame. I held on to it because I wasn’t about to let that pot of icing go and fall. I’d put too much work into it. All I had to do was get the bubbling pot over to the sideboard part of the sink, where it could cool off. Then I could throw the dish towel into the sink and turn on the water, which I’d seen Mama do a million times to put out a little fire. She used dish towels for pot holders all the time.

  I got the icing to the sink. What I didn’t count on was that when I put the pot down, carefully I might add, the dish towel touched Mama’s apron that was hanging up on a nail by the sink, which of course wouldn’t have been there if Mama had been doing the baking, so it took the flame, which flared up because just that very minute the fan moved in its direction. It was no fault of mine that the apron was there, or that the apron was right next to the yellow-and-white-checked curtains Mama had gotten at Kress’s and hung over the sink. Cheery, she’d called them, nice and cheery. So of course they caught on fire too, the fan still moving in that direction. I was hitting the apron and curtains with the dishtowel, but that just made things worse and my fingers were getting burnt. I dropped the dish towel and started running water in the sink. I had in mind getting a glass to throw some water on things. I could have put it all out if the little cloth tab on Mama’s apron hadn’t just then burned through. When it did, the fiery apron, with both its ties burning and standing straight out so that it looked like the cross of Jesus on fire, kind of floated down onto a pile of newspapers in the corner between the sink and stove. Soft and easy it went, and then curled up on the pile.

  When the newspapers started up and the curtains had set in good and I saw the fan making its lazy turn to come back, I started hollering for Daddy. He burst out of the bedroom door shaking his head from side to side looking like Bomba just woken up from a nap in the trees. He didn’t have his shoe, so he rocked from side to side coming across the living room. He came much slower that you’d expect anybody to do under the circumstances, but who am I to point fingers?

  “What you gone and done?” he roared. “What in hell’s name you gone and done?”

  I started toward him. The kitchen was so smoked up I could hardly see him. I was screaming Daddy Daddy by this time. I was being the biggest baby in town. He got to me and snatched me up by the arm, and dragged me over to the front door. He opened the door, kicked the screen out and threw me out on the front stoop.

  “Stay back and shut up!” he hissed. Then he disappeared inside. I heard things banging around and water running. Smoke was curling out of the kitchen window like it was a chimney. I couldn’t believe it. First my mother runs herself into a train, then I burn down the house and kill my father. All in one day.

  I was jumping from one foot to the other. I wasn’t sure what I should be doing. Should I run out into the street and holler Fire? Should I keep quiet so Big Dan and Miss Kay Linda wouldn’t find out that the house they’d rented to us was about to go up in smoke?

  One thing I knew I had to do was go to the bathroom before I wet my pajama bottoms. So I went over into the shrubs and squatted and pulled down my bottoms and let loose. Just as I did, I saw that the smoke had stopped coming out of the window. I heard some more whapping noises from the kitchen along with the running water from the sink. I pulled up my pajamas and went back onto the porch stoop. I didn’t sit down. I wanted to be able to take off fast if the fire came roaring out the front door. But it didn’t, and soon everything got quiet. I waited. Then I had a thought. Last year at Christmas a whole family of five had died in their beds just from smelling smoke! Maybe Daddy was inside lying on the floor breathing his last breath of smoke while I was standing there on the front porch like a fool. Maybe he needed artificial respiration.

  So I went back into the house. I opened the front door and there was Daddy, not breathing his last, but sitting on the couch staring into space. Every second or two, he’d cough and rub his eyes. When I opened the door and he looked up at me out of the smoky darkness, I felt like that baby rabbit out in the open. His eyes shone hot and wild. I looked into the lighted kitchen and saw puddles and burnt things in the sink and on the floor. Soggy pieces of my cakes splattered all over everything.

  Daddy leaned forward and picked up his cigarette lighter that had been lying on the coffee table. “Come here you,” he said, so I walked over and stood in front of him. Then he said, “I ought to snatch you bald-headed. You know what fire feels like?” I said, all whiney and quiet, “Yes sir,” and he said, “Hell no you don’t, because if you did, you wouldn’t have done such a damn fool thing as setting the kitchen on fire. You just a chip off the old block. You your mama all over again, taking us all down.”

  I started up blubbering again. “I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to get Mama’s cakes ready for tomorrow so she wouldn’t lose her business. It was the cup towel. I didn’t mean to start a fire…”

  He grabbed my arm and jerked me down on the couch next to him. The stink coming from him had gathered itself; his mouth smelled like garbage.

  He pulled my arm straight out and turned it so the soft underside was up. His hand over my wrist was so tight it burned. All the time he was rasping hard, deep down in his throat. Was he still winded from fighting the fire? He used the thumb on his other hand to open the top of the lighter, then to flick the flame on. “Yes siree,” he said, “what I’m thinking is you need a good lesson. Teach you a thing or two about fire. You holler out loud and I’m going to beat the living hell out of you.” Then he jerked my arm around again so that the underside was down. Then he passed the flame under it real slow.

  He must have done it to the other arm too—it was burnt like the first one when I woke up—but I don’t remember the second one.

  Which was the beginning of something new. Up until then, I could remember anything. When Mama or Mimi or Zenie would forget something that happened, they’d ask me, and I’d remind them. I was Miss Smarty Pants about it too. “Don’t you remember,” I’d start off, “it was Miss Lucy who said she’d pick up her cake late.” Or: “No, it wasn’t milk Zenie said we needed. It was coffee, don’t you remember?” And so on. If I knew about it, I could remember it better than anyone else could.

  So not remembering the other arm was the commencement of something new. To this very day I still can’t see it. And it’s the seeing, isn’t it, that lets us catch slippery things and hold them forever in the mind’s eye? Of course, even if you can’t see something, you can remember it. I’d gotten good at squinching up my eyes so I couldn’t see Mama go for the poison bottle or take a sharp curve on a dime, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember her doing it. So maybe this was just a natural thing, to go a step further. I was squinching up something bigger than my eyes. Only this time it worked. You can’t see what you don’t remember.

  9

  When I woke up it was bright day. I was flat on my back on the couch, the kitchen was cleane
d up, burnt-up curtains taken down, dishes washed, everything neat and tidy. By looking, you’d never know anything had happened, unless you looked at the kitchen ceiling, which had sooty circles on it right over the sink. I felt loggy, and when I looked down at my sides, I saw white pieces of gauze taped on the underside of both arms. When I lifted my arms to look, the smell of Ungentine and stale smoke rose with them.

  The house was dead quiet. Had Daddy left for good? I wouldn’t have blamed him. Here he was sad and all worn out, trying to see about me after what Mama had wrought, me playing dead under the bed. Now look what I’d gone and done. I wanted to go into my room and crawl under my own bed, but I was scared to move myself from where he had planted me. I just lay there on the couch and opened my eyes and let the water roll out and soak the couch.

  After a while, I heard him. He was coming up the stairs from the basement. Thunk, thunk went his shoe on each step. I sat up on the couch. I had to rest my arms on my lap with the top sides turned down. I was sweating through my pajamas. The door to the basement opened and he came toward me and turned. It was a blessed relief to see his face. He was grinning and had the box under his arm. He walked right up to me and looked down at me. My neck hurt from looking up at him. My eyes were burning hot, but my arms felt like they’d been packed in ice from the coolness of the Ungentine.