The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  “Honey. Look a here. I got things to show you.” He stuck out the box.

  “I got to go to the bathroom.” I got up off the couch and backed up. I wanted to keep some distance. What things? My arms felt heavy in their bandages, stiff cold wings hanging at my sides.

  Daddy waved his arm in the direction of the bathroom. He seemed in a hurry. “Well giddy up and go then, and get on back. Going to show you what’s in the box. You a big girl now.”

  I ran for the bathroom. I couldn’t believe I was finally going to get to see what was in the box. I sat on the commode and looked down at the wing bandages on my arms. My arms didn’t hurt a bit, thanks to the Ungentine. When I was done I pulled up my bottoms and headed back into the living room. The box was on the coffee table. Daddy was on the couch, one leg folded over the other. The little key had sat itself down nice and comfortable right beside the box. I sat back down on my end of the couch and looked down at the box. It squatted there, waiting.

  “Open it,” Daddy said, and winked like it was Christmas. “But first you got to promise you can keep a secret.”

  I almost laughed out loud. Seemed like everything I knew in life was a deep dark secret. Bootleggers, hats, Daddy and Little Dan, Eva getting messed up, what the sheriff said, burns. Right down to that nasty commode in Mimi’s garage. Seemed like I didn’t know a single thing that wasn’t a secret.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  Then Daddy made a strange move with his hand. He stretched out his pointer finger and put it over his top lip, right under his nose, like Mama showed me to do when you’re trying not to sneeze in church except that he didn’t press, he just held it there while he talked. “Because everything in this here box is a secret, handed down from my granddad to my dad to me, generation to generation, so you can’t ever tell a soul what’s in here or you’ll break the chain.”

  The way he said it made me feel proud and righteous, like I was a link in a golden chain that could stretch on and on through all eternity. “I won’t. I swear. Ever and ever, amen.” I put my finger up the way he had his, right over my top lip. We sat there and looked at each other, our fingers in exactly the same pose. Two statues trying not to sneeze. Mirror images.

  When he picked up the key and handed it to me, my chest seized up. The key felt warm like it had just gotten solid after being hot and molten for a good long time. It went into the hole like it had found its one true home. The lock opened up smooth and easy. When I started to lift the lid up, Daddy said, “Keep the key in the lock so you don’t lose it.”

  I froze. I wasn’t sure whether Daddy wanted to open the box himself. He was breathing as if he’d just run a race, which of course was impossible because of his foot. He got up and went over and pulled Mama’s living-room curtains together. Then he said, “Go on, open it. It won’t bite.” He slapped his knee and he-hawed. “What you thinking’s in there? A big old slimy snake?” And he reached over and tickled me in the ribs.

  So I jumped and hollered and in a scramble I opened it. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, maybe some gold and silver for a rainy day, pirate’s treasure like Uncle Wiggily finds sometimes. Or jewels. Rubies and sapphires, like the Queen of Palmyra would wear around her bare neck when she was riding wild and naked and free. So I got to say I was disappointed. All I saw at first was an outfit. Folded nice and neat like it just got delivered from Sears and Roebuck. A cloth outfit like a bathrobe. Black and shiny. It was kind of pretty, I’ll give it that, the shininess made it look like an oily starling looks in the bright sun. Black with other colors underneath. Plus it had a nice crest on the left side over the chest, the kind you see on a man’s nice suit coat. A white cross with tips that fluted out at the ends. A box inside the cross and a red upside-down comma inside that. It was pretty. The shiny black with the white-and-red design.

  Daddy reached in and pulled it out. “Look,” he said, and he stood up, put his arms through the sleeves, and wrapped it around himself and tied it with a little black rope with tassels. Then he reached back in and got something else. At first I thought it was a matching hat like Mimi had for a few of her good dresses, but no, it was a hood, or maybe a big shiny sock. When he popped it on his head, I could see that wasn’t right either. It wasn’t a hat and it wasn’t a sock. It was a mask. Soft and loose so that it flowed nicely into the neck of the robe. No skin showing between. It had a pointed top that stuck up and cut-out holes for eyes. Nothing like Daddy’s other club outfits with silly little hats topped in tassels and what-all that Mama always laughed at and said, “Win, you look ridiculous in those getups.”

  For a minute Daddy stood in the living room not saying a word, just standing there in the black outfit, mask and all. His eyes peeking through the holes didn’t look like anything like his or any person’s. They looked like a pair of eyes floating in darkness all by themselves, seeing everything and everyone. He looked good and scary. Ready to go trick-or-treating. I was hoping he’d let me wear the thing on Halloween. When people asked me what I was, I’d tell them I was the biggest cockroach they ever would see. No, I’d carry a can of bug spray so they’d get the idea and not even have to ask.

  “Well, what do you think?” he said from inside the thing. I could barely hear him.

  “What do you do in it?” I asked, not having a good answer to his question.

  He pulled off the top part. Sweat was rolling down the front of his face, getting in his eyes so that he was having to blink hard. A lock of his hair fell over his returned eyes. He grinned at me the way a boy grins, joyful and eager. “I’m the Nighthawk. We all were. Granddad, Dad, and me.”

  The Nighthawk. Daddy made it sound proud and brave, maybe even royal. A knight, or at least a sheriff, so I tried to erase the picture in my mind. I saw a fierce bird with a razor beak swooping down in the dead of night to tear a bit of soft fur that scuttled across the forest floor. A cry and then only silence.

  When I looked at the box again, I saw some more stuff in the bottom. A Bible with a pretty marker in it. A big knife—no, a little sword in a metal holder. A Zippo lighter. Two flags rolled up. I unrolled them a little and knew right off what they were. One was the flag of Dixie and the other the flag of the United States of America. Old Glory, Grandpops called it. A little cross of Jesus made of two pieces of board. Some cards. A vase. Not a pretty one, just an old glass one the florist will send you if you have to go to the hospital. Mama had a whole long row of those under the sink from when she had me and almost died on Mrs. C’s floor. It was a good stash of stuff, but not jewels or precious metals. More like what you’d find in the back of the hall closet.

  The cards interested me because they looked like the place cards that Mimi used when she had the Saturday Matinee Bridge Club at her house. They bent in the middle and stood up. Mimi’s favorite chore was to figure out where to put the place cards around at the four bridge tables. “It’s no fun to get your pants beaten off,” she’d say. “You want an even contest.” She’d let me help her put the little cards around. She saved them and used them over and over. She always put a strong player across from a weak player. “Bridge should be a stimulating experience,” she’d say. “Let’s put Joyce across from Jane Stuart so she can teach her how to bid. Joyce is an atrocious bidder. You never know what she’s going to come out with.” Mimi’s cards had little fleur-de-lis on them. The ones in Daddy’s box had two red eyes on the top, the kind that follow you wherever you go. Under the eyes were the words, “The eyes of the Klan are upon you. You have been identified by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “Sister,” Daddy barked my name and jolted me out of my bridge-club thoughts. “Don’t you want to know what the Nighthawk does?”

  “Yes sir,” I lied. It was more interesting looking through the box. Maybe there were some jewels hidden in secret compartments.

  Daddy came over to the couch and stood over me. He still had on the robe. The mask hung from his hand like an Easter basket. “Well, he’s bound to guard everybody els
e, make sure nobody gets into meetings who ain’t supposed to. Who don’t love God and his country and his race and the great state of Mississippi. He gets to wear this special robe. It’s black, when everybody else’s is white, and shorter than everybody else’s in case he’s got to move fast. When some folks, I won’t say who, is being bad, we got our ways to make them behave. First we give them a fair warning. But sometimes they don’t listen. Sometimes we got to whip them good. Like the police do with the criminal element. Like Bomba with the cannibals.”

  Daddy seemed unaccountably excited. His eyes glowed the way they did when he’d go out at night with the box under his arm. I could tell he had in mind he was telling me the best news I’d heard in a long time.

  I didn’t know what to say. What are you going to do when your one and only father wants to run around in a Halloween getup and whip people? Say you’re proud? I just hoped he wasn’t going to wear it out in public.

  “The Nighthawk takes care of the important things too. For when we get together. He sets everything up for the meetings.” Daddy pointed at the stuff in the box. “See, everything’s all here. Nice and neat.”

  While he was going on and on about being the Nighthawk and his precious box, I was thinking three thoughts at the same time. Both my arms had started up burning and stinging under the gauze, and I was wondering whether the second arm was burnt bad. Mama was always worrying about scrapes getting infected and had a heavy hand with the iodine until she discovered Mercurochrome, which kept infection at bay just as well and didn’t sting. That thought led me back to Mama. I wanted to get into the hospital to see her. I wanted to say, Why did you do it, Mama, why did you run yourself into a train when you were supposed to be coming back to pick me up? Somebody had said children under twelve weren’t allowed in the Millwood Hospital, but I had in mind putting on some of her high heels and lipstick and surprising her. She’d get a lift out of it, I bet she would. Everybody said I was the spitting image of her when she was little. Maybe when I pranced in, she’d think she was getting visited by herself and take herself back.

  Thought number three was that my stomach was clawing up my insides, trying to get out and go live in some other girl’s body, and Miss Kay Linda’s sweet rolls might make it stay. The third thought was getting more pressing by the minute. I was eyeing the kitchen counter, trying to catch sight of those rolls, hoping they were still there. That Daddy hadn’t eaten them up this morning while he was cleaning up my try at burning down the house.

  By now, he could tell I wasn’t paying attention. Here he was explaining things to me, grown-up things, he said, and I wasn’t even listening. I wasn’t even interested. “Well, missy, see if I tell you anything no more, it’s like talking to a brick wall,” he said. He clawed at his Nighthawk outfit and pulled it off and shoved it back in the box and slammed down the lid and clicked the little lock shut. The key he dropped into his shirt pocket.

  “That’s it, Sister, show’s over.” He looked down at me like I was a piece of something he’d dropped on a nice clean floor. “Go get something to eat. I’m going to call your grandma to come get you so I can get over to the hospital.” I was a bitter pill for him to swallow. Lord knows he was trying.

  He locked up the box with a hard little click of the hinge between his fingers and headed for the basement.

  “I’ll take it back down, Daddy.” I was thinking we could get back into the swing of things, me carrying the box up and down, him doing the taking and giving of it. When I stood up this time, I felt dizzy.

  “No.” That was all he said, but it hung in the air, not wanting to leave the way normal words do. It wanted to stay and eye me and not let me get away. Ungrateful child that I was.

  So when the phone rang, I wanted to run over and hug it. But I answered nice and polite, expecting a lady wanting to put in a cake order. Mama had taught me to answer the phone saying, “Forrest Residence, Florence speaking,” so it would sound like a business, both for her cakes and Daddy’s policies, though his customers didn’t call on the phone like hers did. When I asked her why not, she said his customers didn’t have phones. Sometimes the Mississippi Assurance district manager would call to speak to Daddy and Daddy would tell him he was busting his butt; he didn’t know how much more he could do.

  So I answered just that way, but it was only Mimi.

  “Florence, honey, are y’all doing all right over there? When did you get up? Did you get some breakfast? Are you feeling better?” Her voice sounded far away.

  “I’m just getting ready to get some.” I heard Daddy clumping down the basement steps.

  “Have you got anything to eat over there?”

  “Enough to sink a ship,” I said. “How’s Mama?”

  “About the same. She’s going to be all right, don’t you worry, honey. She is just having a bad time right now. Now you go eat something. We need to keep up our strength. Let me speak to your daddy, honey.”

  I turned around and saw that Daddy was back upstairs from the basement and standing behind me. “It’s Mimi,” I mouthed. Mama always liked to know who it was before I handed over the phone.

  “Good,” he said, louder than he needed to, and took the phone. “Miss Irene, listen, you right about Florence. Can y’all watch her for me? I got to get to the hospital and then I got to talk to Big Dan about another car and get back to work.” He paused. “I don’t know what to do with her. I mean you got to watch her every dadgum minute. She almost burned the house down last night.” He was eyeballing me while he was talking. Then his eyes froze solid on my face. Not a blink. My arms started to burn like the lighter was at them again. I held them straight down. “Burned her arms pretty bad too. No, I just put Ungentine on them. They’ll be all right. Yeah, I’ll bring her on in a little while.”

  He stopped talking and listened for a minute. “I don’t know. Silly fool thing to do.” Now his eyes were little mice running over my face and arms. “Something about baking cakes for Martha. Lord knows nobody’s thinking cakes today.”

  That’s when I got it. You can make up what happens and it can be that. Smooth as eating a piece of lemon meringue pie. Whatever story you want is yours as long as you can think up the picture you want to see and make somebody else want to see it too. Then the story you make up can take up a long and happy life that you and everybody else can watch happening over and over in your head, forever and ever, amen. Uncle Wiggily taking up his trusty valise and his crutch and setting out to seek his fortune through thick and thin. Bomba swinging through the trees. Queenie and the lady slave. It’s yours, and you can say, Here it is, ain’t it a sight to see? And somebody else can say yes siree bobtail, it sure enough is.

  Now Mimi had this picture of me in her head. Dumb silly little Florence pretending to cook, starting a fire some fool way. Maybe catching the sleeve of her shirt on the flame, before she even got started good. No greasing the pans, measuring just right, using a broom straw to check doneness. No pretty cakes lined up just right on the table, all ready for the icings. No double boiler. No careful stirring. Now, right this minute, Mimi was telling it to Grandpops, the poor child so silly on top of all this that she caught the other sleeve on fire too, instead of turning on the water in the sink. “Lord help us all. What next?” she was saying to him and heaving a big sigh. “We sure enough got our work cut out for us.” Stupid little Florence was the story they all hatched up.

  They worked it out so Zenie had me daylight hours part of the time at Mimi’s and part of the time at her house; Grandpops picked me up at Zenie’s on his way home from work in the afternoon, on Friday reaching into his pocket and passing her some folded bills. They watched over me like hawks watch a field full of rabbits. Daddy came and got me from Mimi and Grandpops’ right after they’d fed me supper. I’d sit on the swing outside on their front porch waiting for him. He’d told me to be out there. He and Grandpops weren’t speaking. They had had a falling out about Mama. Grandpops wanted her to come stay with him and Mimi for a while. Daddy wan
ted to send Mama to Whitfield, which was where Zenie used to say she was going to send me if I didn’t behave.

  Daddy had gotten himself an old Chevy with tail wings. It made popping noises. When you heard it the first time you thought somebody had tied firecrackers to its underside. When I was sitting waiting on the swing and I heard it pop-popping up the street, I’d think, “Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,” and go on down to the curb where Mama had dropped me off that night she ran herself into the train.

  While I went from this one to that one around town, Mama was supposed to be getting rested. It wasn’t long at all before she was out of the hospital, insurance run dry, Daddy said, and he’d taken her down to Whitfield in Jackson, broken bones and all. He told me she was going to visit the people there for a while, nobody knew how long. She was going to get electric shock treatments. It reminded me of stories Zenie told about the Chickasaws getting removed. They just drifted away from home because everybody said that was what they had to do. I wanted to see my mother before she left. I was thinking Daddy could’ve let me ride with them to Jackson in Mimi’s Plymouth, which he took Mama in because Grandpops said Daddy’s piece of trash wouldn’t make it to the county line. But Daddy said no, Mama was sicker than sick and she needed peace and quiet, that’s all, for a good long time. She was not good company.

  When Daddy left me off at Mimi’s that first morning after the fire, Zenie was already there. She was in her chair leaning back and fanning herself with one section of the paper while reading another. Mimi had gone back to the hospital to visit my mother. Zenie’s face looked like it had gotten longer since I’d seen her. She wasn’t just reading the paper at her leisure. She was combing through the pages like she was looking for something in particular. Daddy had dropped me at the front, so I slipped in the front door. The living room was dark and still as a pond, so I hightailed it to the back of the house. Zenie stopped reading when I came into the kitchen. She looked hard at my arms.