The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  Zenie’s Heroines of Jericho ladies from St. John the Baptist brought dishes with checkered cloths over them. They stepped around me like you’d step around poison ivy. Ray talked to some men who came up and watched the street with him. Miss Josephine was still counting leaves out in the yard and folks were trying to get her to go in out of the heat but she told them she couldn’t leave, she was afraid she’d lose count. Ray looked through everybody like they weren’t there. “Go on in,” he’d say, but he wouldn’t look at them when he said it. He just kept looking right and left, right and left, like he was expecting Hitler’s Army to come marching down the street. Morning sun was rising and it was getting hotter. Trees lapped over the still streets; everything was already tired and steamed up.

  So I hunkered down next to Miss Josephine. Mimosa leaves are hard to count. When you pull them from the tree the way she was doing, it pains them and they turn in on themselves. Do you count the one frond with all its feather parts? Do you notice that each feather has dozens of its own little leaves that need counting? It’s multiples of multiples, one set of leaves growing out of another set, no end to it. Work of a lifetime to count out one tree if you do it right and Miss Josephine was doing it right. She’d finished high school before she had to start maiding, and was just as good at numbers as she was at reading books. Every time she reached one hundred she heaved a big sigh and pulled out a piece of paper she kept wadded up in the pocket of her dress over her bosom roll and made a single mark on it. The paper was filled with marks on one side, and she’d turned it over and started in on the other.

  I should have been worrying about how sad everyone was, but this was before I knew how sadness can ride the wind, planting and reaping itself over and over, and not always in the same plot of ground, before it leafs out and flowers. Even now, as I remember sitting and watching Miss Josephine, sadness is lighting here and there, like mimosa fluff on the thick air. But, then, sadness had yet to fold itself around my heart and tuck me in at night.

  What I was thinking as I watched Miss Josephine go through each and every leaf frond—singles, multiples, multiples of multiples—was how hard it must be to move through those leaves again and again and not lose count. How it must be the only thing you can hold in your mind if you’re going to do it right. No what’s for supper or doesn’t the feathery leaf feel soft or isn’t it hot today thoughts. No thoughts at all. For to get off track just one instant will make the whole job of counting come folding in on itself, like a deck of cards you pile up just right. A breath, a touch, some trouble in the air. Then, what a waste!

  7

  The hot sun had browsed halfway across the sky, but no sign of my mother. I was still folded up like an old dog by Miss Josephine’s feet. She was wearing some satiny slippers, torn in some places and thin in others. Parts of her feet and toes bumped out here and there so that they looked like little bags of new potatoes. Ray’s eyes were slits; just to look at him you’d have thought he was dozing in the sun, but he still watched everything that came up the street, his head cocked sideways in his hand. Miss Josephine hadn’t missed a beat counting right along on her leaves and the leaves of leaves, forever and ever amen. Did she even know I was down here next to these worn-out feet of hers?

  There were mimosa fluffs all over the ground, trodden down like runny globs of pink cotton candy somebody had dropped out of one of those cardboard cones. It made me sad to see them ruined. Nobody was around. Preachers and Heroines of Jericho long gone. All of Ray and Zenie’s neighbors who’d been sitting and fanning on their porches or front stoops or watering their petunias and zinnias had up and done a vanishing act since Mama drove up. Not even little children playing in the street. It felt like the whole place was holding its breath. The Ford was starting to look bedimmed in the heat, a green place you could see in the desert that turned into nothing but sand when you drew near. The sun was in my eyes now. I knew that if Mama didn’t come out soon, I was going to lay my heavy head down on my hand like Ray had his and then I’d be out like he was pretending to be.

  “Ray?” I let the name come out of my mouth soft and easy like a spit bubble that’s sure to break with heavy breath. When I said it, I could feel something settle in him. Something that said No. He didn’t move an inch. His eyes were still almost closed but I spied them cutting in my direction, waiting for something else, his name in another register he couldn’t say no to, and hoping it wouldn’t come.

  I could make my eyes into slits too, a trick I did when something popped up I didn’t want to see, like Mama reaching for the poison bottle. I squinted my eyes up so that everything turned to fuzz and cast-iron gray and I could see the feathers of my eyelashes fold over the furry little nest of gray inside my head where my eyes used to be. The oasis in reverse because it was not the thing that went away, it was the seeing. When I did it the other day, Mama looked over the glass she was pouring the poison into and said I looked ridiculous all squinched up like I’d just swallowed a lemon. She asked me whether my eyes were bothering me. Could I see all right? I said I could, that was the problem. I didn’t want to see my one and only mother drinking poison. She looked hard at me and said, “Well get out of the kitchen then. Get out of the house then.” The words came out of her mouth like batter, soft and sweet and thick. So I walked out the front door and went to swinging on little Dan and May’s swing, which Mama’s half a cake a week had bought me. Something came over me and I began to swing higher. It was as if something huge and invisible was behind me, pushing me harder and harder. A wind. A hurricane. If I fell and broke something, Mama would have to put down the eternal glass and come running. She would have to stay by my side in the hospital every minute of the day and night. She would have to forget about the poison.

  I pretended I was up in the trees Bomba-style. I let go of one chain with one hand, then one with the other, but I couldn’t make myself let go of both at once, though I wanted to. After a while Mama came out on the front stoop and stood under the clematis vine. She folded her arms over her chest and watched me. Her head tilted to the side. Lips tucked up inside her mouth. After a while she said, “Oh honey, come on back in the house, it’s too hot out here.” Then she turned around and went on back inside. The screen door slammed behind her. I acted like I didn’t hear her, but I stopped kicking the dirt to get higher and, after a while, the swing came on down and finally it just floated in the air like a paper boat on a still pond. The bushes and little Dan’s house looked blurry because of the sweat running in my eyes.

  When I went back in, Mama was nowhere in sight, which is hard to accomplish in our house because there’s so little place to go. She’d made me a sandwich, egg and olive with lots of mustard, which is my favorite. It was sitting there on the kitchen table with a glass of milk and a slice of devil’s food with angel icing and a nicely folded napkin and fork. I took one look and went into my room and pulled Grandpops’ gift, Uncle Wiggily’s Travels, out of my stack of books I kept under the bed. If I’d wanted to edify myself the way Mimi said I should, I would have picked out one of the work sheets Mimi had given me from her class, but they were, to my mind, dull as dishwater, plus I had to look up every other word. I came back into the kitchen—still no Mama—and sat down, propping the book up against one of the heavy pots she’d put on the table to dry.

  Uncle Wiggily’s going along the road with this jolly black cricket that made the skillery-scalery–tailery alligator laugh like a fool and soon they come upon a little boy with an awful toothache. His mama takes good care of him and she’s done everything she can possibly think of to make her little boy’s tooth stop aching, including putting mustard on it. So the old gentleman rabbit and his cricket sidekick tell the little boy a funny story about a dumb monkey who made faces at himself in the mirror because he thought he was looking at another monkey. Well, the little boy’s just laughing and laughing at the monkey story, and while his mouth is hanging as wide open as a barn door, his mama sneaks right in and puts a string on his aching tooth. Th
en she jerks hard on the string and pulls out the bad tooth, and that is that and the little boy is healed in a minute. Glory be! His pain is forever gone.

  I wished it was that easy and Eva’s hurt was like a rotten tooth. Pull it and that’s the end of that. But a burn, that must take a while to heal. Even then, burns leave scars. A boy in my first-grade class had burned his hand on a stove when he was little, and it looked like a spider’s web. Fragile and delicate, as if it might tear apart if he threw a ball or gripped a pencil.

  When Zenie’s screen door at long last slammed, it made me jump. I’d been gone. Dead asleep. The chiggers had been having a field day on my legs. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a mouthful of warm clay, which wasn’t altogether a bad taste, a little sweetness to it, considering the fact that I hadn’t had a bite of anything the whole miserable day and no supper the night before. Dying mimosa leaves everywhere and Miss Josephine still counting away, though slower than before, and Ray on his pallet now staring straight ahead, the whites of his eyes red through and through. The sky had a purple cast. Where’d the day gone? The mimosa leaves left on the tree were folding back the way they always do at the end of the day. They were tired, time to rest. Soon Miss Josephine would have to quit for the night. You can’t count what you can’t see.

  Who was it coming on out Zenie’s front door? For a minute I thought I saw Eva, pretty and perky like always, running out down those steps all ready to say what you-all doing out here in this heat, Miss J? Let’s get on in the house now, baby, and I’ll make us a pitcher of tea for supper.

  But it was my mother coming down the front steps like each and every one would be her last. Down one, then stop. Down another, then stop again. She looked like the Holy Ghost had eaten her up and spit her out. Pinched. Cold sober. One side of her face a splotchy red. Had she been slapped? Or sleeping hard like me?

  When Mama finally got herself down Zenie’s front steps, she didn’t look over at me on the grass, just headed across the yard for the car. I scrambled up and ran around to my side of the car. Jumped in quick. She’d have left me otherwise. I know it now, and I knew it then.

  When I got into the car, huffing and puffing, she didn’t start it up right away. She just sat looking straight ahead. “She wouldn’t have my cake,” she said. “She wouldn’t even look at it.”

  After a while, Mama started up the Ford and drove slow like before, down Church Street, left on Main, right on Jefferson, to a tombstone granite building on the corner, right across from the courthouse square. Chiseled into the granite by the front door was a sign that said MILL COUNTY SHERIFF. COLORED ENTRANCE ROUND BACK.

  She grabbed her purse off the floor of the car and took out her silvery tube of lipstick. She pulled out her little round mirror and put on one thick coat. It looked like red candle wax. She rummaged through her purse for some Kleenex and couldn’t find any so she blotted her lips on the palm of her hand, looked hard at the red heart that was left, and then rubbed it away with her thumb. She reached into a side pocket of her bag and popped a clove in her mouth.

  Outside the car there were two clumps of white men watching us like we were a covey of wild game. Sitting ducks. I eyed them back. There were five or six of them in the courthouse square across the street squatting on some steps leading up to a big statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on a prancing horse. They were leaning against the horse’s back legs. Their shirttails were out and they were sipping something out of little brown bags, real little, so I was thinking paregoric, like my great uncle Nash who was wounded used to drink. He carried a little bag like that around and took pulls from it like it was the most natural thing in the world. The horse men’s heads were nodding. No soldiers of the cross old Nathan Bedford would want. When we got closer, I could see that their eyes were red.

  Right outside Mama’s car door was the other bunch. They were parked hard on some old beat-up benches. Red-eyed too, but in a different way, a meanness coming up through the whites of their eyes, popping out like the little drops of blood on your finger when they pricked it at the Health Department and squeezed. At first sight they looked like they had on uniforms, but if you looked closer you could see they were just matching khaki pants and shirts and holsters with guns snuggling friendly-like, up close to their hips. One real light skinned man with eyes the color of gravel had his hand resting nice and easy on the handle of his gun. He rubbed it back and forth; it was a comfort to him.

  I was scared Mama was set on me staying in the car, or worse, sitting me down on one of those benches. I’d already decided I’d take my chances with the paregoric clan if push came to shove. When she opened her door and got out, I jumped out fast and ran around to the curb. I offered my hand to her, which I never did. I wished she’d taken it, but she didn’t. She just marched through the gun-toters and I scrambled along behind.

  The room we walked into smelled like men. A sharp bite in the air like hard-boiled coffee. Stale smoke and ashtrays piled high with butts. There was a lady at a desk who looked at us like we’d lost our minds coming in here. Her whole face pointed forward until it reached the tip of her nose, like it was wanting to crawl right off her shoulders and go someplace else. Her desk was a mess of folders in high stacks that leaned this way and that, with papers easing out like sneaky prisoners about to make their getaway.

  “I need to talk to the sheriff,” Mama said right off. I was thinking I would have led into it better, maybe saying good evening and allow me to introduce myself and my little daughter Florence and would you mind calling the sheriff in so we can have just a moment of his time?

  “He’s busy right now.” The lady bird-dogged the air.

  “I don’t mind waiting. This is an emergency, though.” Mama stood there with her arms folded, not budging an inch.

  “Just a minute, ma’am.” The lady was disgusted; that I could tell by the way she had her nose up in the air like we’d just broken wind. Did we smell bad? I looked down at my outfit. My shorts were beige and they had grass stains all over them. I’d had them on yesterday when I’d been rolling around on the grave. Some little mimosa tips were sticking to them, though that was from today and Miss Josephine. The shirt looked even worse. It was yesterday’s, maybe even the day before’s. Pink knit with what was left of a teddy bear on the front. It was kind of tight, I noticed, now that I was paying attention, and had chocolate smears from the last baking. Plus more grass stains and mimosa tips and something else hard and dark that didn’t look like chocolate.

  Mama looked better and worse at the same time. Better because her clothes didn’t look like she’d been rolling around in the dirt the way mine did, worse because she was the mother and supposed to look all right. She didn’t. Her lipstick was too loud and had settled into the corners of her mouth, her hair was stuck to her head in little greasy bunches, her sleeveless blouse wrinkled down the front and coming out of her black patent belt, which I noticed had been pulled two holes tighter than its usual pulled-out slit. Her arms were sticks.

  The lady got up and went through a door marked by a torn sign that said NO. No what was what I was thinking, when a skinny little man came through the door like he was on his way to a fire, the nosy lady right behind. He had a white napkin floating down his collar and two shiny wet worms for a mustache. The mustache had yellow corn-bread crumbs sprinkled across both halves.

  Mr. Sheriff marched up to Mama like he was going to walk right through her on out the front door. He said, “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

  I could tell he was mad; here he was, working on a Sunday and now his supper’s getting cold because of this crazy woman he’s got to deal with. I felt about the same way, except I hadn’t seen my supper yet, dinner or breakfast either. One of the Heroines of Jericho ladies had brought a pitcher of ice water out into the yard and that was all that had gone down this old gullet the whole long day.

  “I want to talk to you about Eva Greene, Sheriff,” Mama said. “She’s been bothered and nobody’s done anything to try to find th
e men that did it.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Bothered? How bothered?”

  Mama took a deep breath. Red splotches were crawling up the sides of her neck, like an army of invisible ants were eating her alive. They were almost to her ears. She lowered her eyes, looking down at the sheriff’s napkin, sighed a deep sigh, and leaned into the side of his face and whispered so that I could barely catch the words. “They fooled with her.”

  Now Mr. Skinny seemed nice and worried too. “Don’t know nothing about no lady getting bothered. Greene with an e? Don’t know no Greenes. Who her people? Where she at now?”

  He whipped a little spiral notebook and pencil out of his shirt pocket and started writing something down. But when Mama got to the kin question and said Zenobia and Rayfield Johnson, the man stopped dead and looked at her like she’d just upchucked all over the floor. “Hold your horses, ma’am. You talking about some little colored gal?”

  Mama looked daggers at him. “She’s hurt too. They burnt her. With a car lighter.”

  “Who you say you is, ma’am?” He took out his notebook again.

  “Martha Forrest, Mrs. Winburn Forrest.” Mama chomped down on her clove with her front teeth. She was puffing hard through her bottom lip so that her breath was blowing her bangs straight up. Her lipstick had whiskered the corners of her mouth.

  The sheriff looked up from his notebook. “Win Forrest?” When Mama nodded, his eyes turned sly and skittery. “I expect that husband of yours is worried some too. Maybe he can help y’all find out who-all bothered that little colored gal.” The words came out of his mouth all in an excited little rush.

  Now everything turned quiet, quiet. Suddenly Mama’s face looked like it had been melted down and pressed with strange hands into a shape I’d never seen. Something that had been holding it in place all these years had finally been let go. Husband just hung in the air like a rotten fig oozing juice.