The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  “What you running off for?” I huff along beside her.

  She doesn’t let up her pace or look down at me. “I got work to do.”

  “What work? Good Lord, Mama, what you got to do that’s so all-fired important right now this very minute?” If she’s crass enough to run off from her own daddy’s funeral party, at least I need to call attention to her malfeasance, which is a word I learned from Eva. It’s not only mental, it’s embarrassing. Since Mama had run into the train, which started people clucking and shaking their heads when they saw me, I’d taken to serious worrying about what people thought. It was bad enough up at Mimi’s. There were Mimi’s friends and the cake ladies clumped up together in the living room murmuring low about why Daddy had the nerve to get all his low-class friends to carry the coffin of such a man as Grandpops, who wouldn’t have given any of them, including his own son-in-law, the time of day while he was alive. Daddy’s friends were trash. They scared the colored to death, ran around at night, didn’t stay home with their wives. Look what happened to poor Martha. I knew what they were saying just by looking across the room at the shapes their lips made. Meanwhile my daddy sat in the breakfast room trying to get the sugar and cream in his coffee right. When he had claimed me with his arm, rough yet gentle at the same time, I wanted to hug him. Walking beside Mama, who didn’t claim or even want me period, I thought I ought to go back.

  But I stuck by Mama. I could see she was heading home, back to our little house behind Big Dan’s and Miss Kay Linda’s. It was only a few blocks away. We walked together as in a parade. Her first, me after, skirting the crape myrtle bushes that grew between the sidewalk and the curb. Thrum thrum went our feet on the sidewalk. The crape myrtles weren’t blooming yet, but I grabbed the round buds as I walked by and popped them open, firing off little pink explosions of blooms under my fingers, then dropped them in the dust.

  When we got there, Mama cut straight across Miss Kay Linda’s side yard instead of using the stone walkway. The second she got inside the front door, she headed left into the kitchen and looked around like she was expecting it to say hello Martha, welcome home. Then she stopped short. I’d gotten used to the bare kitchen, but I could see it through her eyes. A shock. No pots and pans and measuring cups. Not even her apron on the nail in the wall inside the door.

  She turned around and looked at me like the barrenness was my fault. “Where’s my stuff? How am I going to make cakes for all those ladies if I don’t have my stuff?”

  “I didn’t put it up. Daddy put it up.”

  “Ha!” she said. “I guess he didn’t think I’d be coming back. Thought he’d locked me up and thrown away the key. I guess my stuff was just in his precious damn way while he was busy cooking all those wonderful meals for you-all.”

  “We can put them right back out. Look here.” I opened the cabinets and grabbed some bowls. Then I pulled out the tray at the bottom of the stove and got the pots and pans. I opened the drawer and dished out spoons and whisks and forks and dumped them in one of the bowls.

  “Everything’s all messed up,” she whined. “Where’s my apron?”

  “No, look right here Mama, it’s all here. It’ll just take a minute.” I snatched open the cabinets and pulled out measuring cups. I got the recipes out of the drawer just in case the shocks had scrabbled up her brain, which I guess would scramble up her recipes in her head, which would be a terrible mess. Egg yellows in the divinity icing, almond extract in the lemon jell filling. Nobody would eat a thing. I found an old apron, not too clean but still usable and at least not burnt up, hanging on the inside of her closet door with her nightgown. I handed it to her, and she pulled it over her head. She forgot to tie it in back, so I went around behind her and tied it in a nice tight bow. We had a long night ahead. I had just set the stove for 350 when she went over to the kitchen cabinet and opened the door. There was a long silence. Then she shut the door and turned around.

  She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it. She reached over and opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Then she shut the refrigerator door and turned around.

  “He threw away all my ingredients.” Her voice was thoughtful now. “He even threw away my vanilla.”

  I’d forgotten that Daddy had gone through the kitchen with a paper sack the day after Mama had been removed to Jackson. He’d pulled out everything Mama used to make her cakes—Crisco and flour and lemon Jell-O and cocoa and vanilla extract—and dumped it all in the sack. Then put the sack in the garbage for pickup the next day. He did it the way he put up the pots and pans and bowls, fast and all business, like it was something he did every day. Like he was the putter-upper in the family, and good for him. Under his hand, everything disappeared and you’d never have known there had been cakes even conceived of, much less baked, in that kitchen. No crumbs or drips. No stray flour siftings around the kitchen floor.

  Mama had started to untie her apron. She looked distracted. Her eyes bulged a bit, red and worried. “Got to make a list. Got to get to the A & P before it closes. Oh Lord, everything is just too hard.”

  “The A & P closes at six,” I said. The kitchen clock said 5:15.

  “Oh dear.” She stood in the middle of the kitchen and put her hand over her eyes.

  I reached up and grabbed her hand. “Daddy’s car’s out there. We rode to the funeral with Big Dan and Miss Kay Linda. You can make it if you hurry.” I opened a drawer and grabbed a piece of paper with a pencil. “Let’s make a list real quick. What do we need?”

  She didn’t answer, so I started in. “Regular sugar, confectioners’ sugar, sweet milk, buttermilk, flour, butter, vanilla…” I took a breath.

  “Salt, cocoa, butter,” she snatched the list from me and started writing as fast as she could.

  “I said butter.”

  She scratched it through. “Eggs! Almond extract, baking powder, he might have at least left the baking powder!” She started toward the door.

  “Tartar!” I sang out to her. “Soda, vinegar!”

  “Brown sugar,” she hollered back, still writing as she opened the screen door.

  “Crisco. Don’t forget the Crisco. Write it down. Oh, I know we’re forgetting something, Mama.” I was on her heels. “I’m coming too!”

  She stopped short, door half open. “No ma’am, you stay here and get this kitchen organized! Wash and dry my stuff. Get everything in order. Devil’s food first. Lord, I’m going to be up all night as it is!”

  I kept up with her. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I snatched Daddy’s car keys from the nail he hung them on.

  Then she whirled around and pointed one skinny finger at me. “You stay.” She snatched the keys from my hand and made a fluttery motion over her face and body as if to gather herself and make sure all of her was still there and attached. Then out the door she flew.

  It wasn’t until I heard the Chevy start up that I realized that she had left without her purse. I ran in and opened the top drawer where Daddy kept his underwear and rummaged out a handful of bills. I ran out the door to give them to her, but way up at the curb I heard her scratch off. Even then I didn’t worry. They knew her at the A & P, they’d let her have credit the way they always had.

  Then I remembered we hadn’t written down lemons. I just hoped she’d remember the lemons.

  Part III

  14

  What do you do when you turn the page and come upon a giant with snaggled teeth and a big appetite? You close the book without a sound. Tiptoe out into the dead of night. Take to the sky like a pretty red-winged blackbird. Then you can blaze far above the sticky earth until your wings give out and then it’s kerplunk into the marsh and tall sweet grasses of a whole other story.

  Sometimes I dream I’m a lady teacher like Eva. I live in a far place, tucked away in a little house so covered over in trees with leaves like Big Dan’s fig tree nobody will ever find me. I draw lines on the blackboard and tell children to trust the girl who touched the beautiful rose. I tell them
there are things to be afraid of, but sentences will stick by them. Sentences don’t up and run off from you.

  There are ways to leave your own story. You can leave the place it happened, though be forewarned, if the place is too sad about you leaving, it won’t think twice about packing up its valise and hopping the first Frisco through town to follow you. It will be your faithful sidekick. At night when you are sleeping, it will tiptoe straight to your bed and kiss you on top of the head. Its sadness at losing you will burrow down, through brain and flesh and bone, straight to the heart, where it finds its own true home. Then the only thing left is to stop thinking of yourself as the one who had the story, who was in the story. You push that one under the train and start out again.

  The first thing I did after Mama drove off was to rinse out the mixing bowls and pots and pans. You never know when things sit awhile under the counter what’s been crawling over them. I wanted everything nice and clean for the giant baking we were getting ready to undertake. I was thinking too that we ought to have a little supper before we started baking so I checked on my egg-and-olive sandwiches from the day before. I was wishing we’d taken some of the food that people had brought up to Mimi’s, but when you walk out the back door without saying a word the way Mama did, nobody says wait honey, look at all this food! You got to take some of this good food home, we can’t eat this much in a million years. So here I was, staring down a pile of day-old sandwiches. They were all right, a little soggy on the tops from the wet cloth. They needed eating. They couldn’t go another day. I laid them on the kitchen counter to dry out.

  By the time the clock on the stove was straight over to 7, I had eaten four triangles and left the other four for Mama. No thoughts of parsley; I was well beyond that. I had decided to wash the spoons and measuring cups and whisks and so on. I’d dried them all and left them out on the counter. At seven thirty I decided to grease the pans and cut the waxed paper to fit and put it inside them. Then, why not, I greased it too. This I did with a paper napkin, which I dipped in a little butter that was left in the refrigerator. Not having any Crisco, which I know from Eva is not only a dangling modifier but also a sentence fragment. All of the pans would be ready when Mama came back. The stove had been on since she left, and the kitchen was blazing hot. Then there was nothing left to do, so I went and sat on the couch and waited. At eight o’clock I went outside on the porch stoop to cool off, and then walked up to the street so I could help with the groceries when she came back with them. She must have stopped someplace on the way home. Maybe she went back by Mimi’s to see how she was doing and pick up Daddy and some of the piles of food. Maybe she swung by the bootlegger, which aggravated me because I’d have been happy to take the evening ride. A chocolate milk shake would hit the spot about now. I sat down on the curb under the streetlight and settled into myself to wait.

  I waited a good long time. I was hopeful. I was full of care. I was trying to keep my mind open and free to roam, enjoying the shapes and lines and shadows of the growing dark. I was trying not to think about Grandpops under the ground or Daddy above it. I was actually reciting Mama’s cake recipes over and over in my head so I could barrel full speed ahead into the baking and impress her when she got back. Devil’s food was one and a half sticks butter, one and a half cups sugar, three egg yolks, lightly beaten. All creamed together. Add two ounces bitter chocolate, melted in a double boiler. I was trying to think whether there were one or two teaspoons baking powder that went into the sifted flour and salt when I noticed the roaches. Maybe they were reading my mind and I drew them to me with my conjurings of sugar and flour and cutting in the Crisco. Maybe it was just the time of night right after first dark when the little day breezes stop and nothing moves. In any case, there they were, scudding everywhere, gangs of them clumped and peckish under the streetlight, bustling about up and down the sidewalk behind me on errands here and there, busy and nasty, bumping into each other, antennae waving. I’d never realized how many of them ran around at night until I got down on their level and paid attention. I’d taken my shoes off when we got home from Mimi’s, and now the roaches thrust themselves like little soldiers up against my bare feet. I lifted my toes up off the ground. I didn’t want to move, but they were edging around me everywhere. They were getting ready to climb me like a tree and see what tidbits they could find.

  Something had to be done, so I got up and tiptoed back into the house, trying to avoid them on the sidewalk and walkway. They were on the front stoop too. I knew they wanted to get into the house and be ready to pounce when Mama came back with all her ingredients. I went into the kitchen and looked under the cabinet. Mama’s poison bottle of moonshine was gone, Daddy had seen to that, but her blue plastic spray bottle of Sevin dissolved in water was still there. She mixed the chalky Sevin powder with water and sprayed the mixture on monster tomato worms when she used to grow tomatoes along the barbed-wire fence in the backyard. The big green caterpillars would rise up on their haunches and fight the spray but then they curled up in horrible semicircles and died. Within hours their juice had oozed out and they had dried up. I figured it would work with roaches. The bottle was almost full when I shook it, and for that I was thankful. I went into my room and put on some knee socks and saddle oxfords. Then I got the spray bottle and headed back outside.

  The first thing I did was hit the ones on the front porch. They took their own sweet time dying, flipping and kicking and carrying on. The Sevin left milky streaks everywhere, but I figured I could hose down the porch later. When I was convinced I’d gotten all the roaches on the porch, I headed out to the street and started in on them there. I chased them up and down the sidewalk and then went for the curbside under the light. When I’d killed them there, I shook my bottle. I had plenty left, so I started up the street. There had to be a lot more roaches in the neighborhood. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? I was going to get them all. In the morning everybody would walk out to get their papers and find zillions of roaches stretched out up and down the street as far as the eye could see, from here to Kalamazoo and back, belly up with their feet curled in nasty little quotation marks above them. People would holler glory be! Who saved us from the roaches? Who knew how many there were?

  I went on up and down the street spraying and watching them flip and die. I covered about half a block side to side, streetlight to streetlight. Then my bottle ran dry. Which is when I started stomping them. A hopscotch sort of game up and down the street, seeing how many I could squish with two feet at the same time. Once I counted five, three under one foot and two under the other, but mainly just managed one or two at a time. Up and down the street I hopped, from one streetlight to another, because that’s where I could really do some damage. The lights threw my shadow ahead of me; it looked like Sodom and Gomorrah all rolled into one devilish dance. I hopped and stomped, every now and then bending down low over the ground to see their guts.

  It got later and later, but I kept on for a good long time. I heard the nine-o’clock Frisco whistle call out. Every now and again, I’d see headlights and think Mama was finally back. I’d run back to the light in front of our house, but then the car would pass with other people in it, and they would stare at me the way I’d stared at the mental girl on the porch. What was I doing out in the road like that? Why wasn’t I safe in my bed at home with my mother and father like other girls? You could see what they were thinking: that I was Trouble with a capital T and maybe mental in the bargain. Not Precious Cargo.

  Even with the streetlights, the night got darker and darker. The swallows had disappeared. You could see moths and lightning bugs and some big old noisy beetles. Every now and again a bat would whoosh by faster than the eye could trace.

  Then a car came on down the street slow, like it was going to turn into Daddy’s parking spot in front of our house. Instead, it came to a cruising stop in the middle of the street and a back door cracked and out slid Daddy in one long easy motion. He came on walking down the street toward me, and the car co
asted on. I could see a big pile of men sitting shoulder to shoulder inside as it glided by quiet as could be. I wondered why they didn’t let Daddy out in front of his own house instead of half a block up the way. Walking wasn’t Daddy’s strong suit. He came on down the street, rocking back and forth like he was riding a horse.

  When he got nearer and saw me, he started walking faster and hollering at me down the street, “What the hell you doing out here in the dark at this time of night? Where’s my car? Where’s your mama?” When I told him she had gone to the store to get her ingredients, he said, “Bullshit, it’s eleven o’clock at night, A & P’s been closed five hours. Goddamn her hide, she’s gone and flown the coop and stole my car again.”

  “She made a list,” I said, but the minute the words came out of my mouth, it was as if they didn’t really parse. They weren’t a complete thought the way a sentence is if it’s true and good. They dangled in the still night air, like the strands of a torn web that touches your face in the dark and then flies into pieces.

  Daddy kicked the big old oak tree he was standing under. His brick shoe made a soft thud like a baseball being caught in a mitt, and he jumped up and down on his good foot holding the other and yelling, “Fuck that bitch! Goddamn her sorry ass.” Then he hobbled as fast as he could back to the house. I kept up my work of stomping roaches in the street. I’d become a roach-stomping machine. I wasn’t thinking about anything but murder and mayhem. Finally my legs and feet numbed out on me and I had to quit.

  When I dragged myself back into the house, Daddy was on the phone describing the car, but he wasn’t talking to the sheriff; he was talking to his buddies, calling them one by one, telling them to get out there and find her. Red 1957 Chevy. Mississippi V78863. Big dent in left back side. Makes a racket. Try the bootlegger, the county roads. Fan out. Hunt her down. One greasy-headed scrawny white woman. Crazy as a loon. Bring her in.