The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  But here we are, returned like mail to its sender as if the past year had never happened. Stuck right back in this quicksand of a town called Millwood, smack in the dead center of the State of Mississippi. Swamps and piney woods all around us. Red-clay hills to the north. Tonight the mosquito trucks are out. They speed up and down the street so as to get to everybody and keep ahead of the poison they’re putting out. Steam’s rising from the spray. The honeysuckle is coming on strong, and it folds into the insecticide like sugar into vinegar. Daddy is long gone with his precious box, and the lightning bugs are commencing.

  I’m ready to dry, but I can see that it’s one of those nights when Mama’s not in the mood for dishes because she has just put the plug into the drain and is filling up the sink with water and throwing in the dishes three and four at a time. They clatter, then float to the bottom. I’m standing right beside her at the sink so she can lean over and wipe her hands on the dish towel I’m holding out in front of me. She takes off her apron and runs her hands through her hair so that her bangs stand straight out like antennae on a bug. Then she turns her head the way a praying mantis will turn to look slow and serious at a tomato worm and gazes over my head out the window at the darkening sky. She doesn’t put her hands on my shoulders the way she sometimes does, but I know to stand there beside her and be quiet. She is considering. The white sink crawls out longer and longer on the ledge of the shadows. Such a stillness settles over Mama as she looks out that I wonder whether she’s breathing. Sometimes when she does this, I feel as though I’m going to float up off the floor and drift away like a cottonwood puff before she comes back to plant me in the good sweet earth, the here and now. Finally, she says, “Do you want to go for a ride?”

  I don’t bother to answer, just run into my room and pull my pajamas out of the drawer of my dresser. I tear off my clothes like they’re full of fire ants and pull on my least raggedy pajamas, the daisy ones. All of my summer pajamas are raggedy. Mama says that’s a good thing because it keeps me cooler to have some holes here and there. Aren’t I lucky? When we take our night rides, Mama makes me get ready for bed before we leave so that I can go right to sleep when we get home, or if I fall asleep in the car, she can drag me in whining and limp and throw me down on the bed. When Daddy gets home, I’m supposed to play dead.

  She’s using the bathroom while I get ready, and now I have to use it too. Use it while you’ve got it, Mama always said before we’d head out for the night, and once when I didn’t we had to stop for me to go in the bushes in pitch dark on the side of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The next morning I woke up on fire with poison ivy and Mama had to put calamine lotion all over Between The Legs, which is what Mama called private parts as if what was important about them was where they were placed instead of what they were for. She said that no matter how bad it itched, I should not scratch Between the Legs, it wasn’t polite, so I’d sit down on a hard chair and rub myself back and forth like a dog, which I discovered felt surprisingly good though it made the itch worse.

  On nights when Daddy got the call for a night meeting and Big Dan Chisholm next door gave him a ride, Mama and I went out in Daddy’s old pea-green Ford. It was the first in a series of trash cars we would have in the coming months, since Mama ended up going through cars that summer like some people go through a bag of peanuts, casting the hulls far and wide or making them disappear into thin air. The radio didn’t work when Daddy brought the Ford home from Big Dan’s used-car place after we returned to Millwood that spring. When he told my mother about the radio not working—no, not a chance of it ever working—she flinched as if he had brought news of somebody dying. “Of all the cars in the entire world.” She said each word separately, like it was a piece of unexpected gristle she was spitting out of her mouth. I was not surprised. Daddy didn’t like radios or televisions. He said commie Jews ran all the stations, and he’d be damned if he’d pay good money to listen to their pinko propaganda. Mama had bought herself a little transistor radio for the kitchen with her cake money, but Daddy drew the line with TV. So I missed out on Dr. King and President Kennedy and the police dogs and hoses and children with little American flags being dragged into garbage trucks and the Cuban Missile Crisis, not to speak of Mr. Wizard and Bonanza. I might as well have lived on Mars.

  After the radio fight, Mama went into her room and shut the door and stayed there for a whole day and night except to use the bathroom. She took two long baths. Daddy went around the house whistling loud. He made us corned-beef hash out of a can for supper, which didn’t turn out at all like the way Mama made it, all nice and brown, baked in the oven in a Pyrex dish with Heinz ketchup for icing and sliced bell peppers in daisy chains on top. He mushed down globs of the hash in a pot to warm up on the top of the stove. Two plates of warm dog food we sat down to. “Eat up, Sister,” he said, and picked up the spoon he’d put by my plate. I didn’t say a word, just got up and went to the drawer and got out a fork, which was what I was used to. Then I sat back down, shut my eyes tight, and shoveled it in.

  But in the end, it was this car or none, and the truth was the whole thing rattled so bad I doubt we could have heard the radio anyway. I liked riding alone with Mama because I could sit in the front seat. The woven upholstery on the backseat had rotted out and the springs were exposed. Over the years, all of our cars had had rotten backseats. Long ago, Daddy had gotten the bright idea to stuff them with Spanish moss, which gave me the feeling of being a little bird in a nest when I rode in back, which was comforting, but the moss got old and scratchy after a while and had chiggers in it that lived on my tender flesh and just waited for their next meal of Florence. In hot weather I would get out of the car with so many welts on the backs of my legs it looked like somebody had taken a switch to me. I’m not even talking about my butt, which was worse. Little Dan, the son of Big Dan who sold the cars and rented our house to us, passed a rumor up and down the street that I had leprosy, so that children I’d never seen in my life were trying to pull up my shorts to look at the backs of my legs. I had to wear long pants to go out and play, which made the chigger bites heat up and itch even worse than before.

  The nights Mama took me for a ride, we told Daddy we went out for ice cream to explain the gas. This was technically true, but we actually went two places. The first was Joe’s Drive-In, where we’d pull up and place our order through the little voice box next to each parking place and then a gum-chewing girl with a scruffy ducktail would bring me out a chocolate milk shake to go. No tray. On these nights Mama was always in a hurry, and she’d tap her forefinger on the steering wheel until I’d say, “Mama, stop doing that.” Then she’d start up the old Ford and pull out of Joe’s, popping hard on the clutch. We opened it up on old Highway 78, her arm on the top of the steering wheel thin and white, me sipping my milk shake just barely enough to get it started up the thick straw. I wanted to make it last all night.

  We took a right by the lake, and then two more rights on dirt roads. I remember the rights because I’d slide across the slick seat into Mama’s side three times and she’d nudge me back three times. When there wasn’t much moon, like tonight, the deeper in we got on those dusty pitted roads, the more I felt our car was being taken into a giant mouth that first tasted us and then swallowed us whole.

  Tonight, like always, we come around the last curve to find ourselves at the end of a line of stopped cars, engines humming backup to the swamp sounds, no radios, no lights, and so dark that you can’t see the drivers. Mama cuts the lights, leans over, and opens the glove compartment. She pulls out an old green scarf and ties it around her head.

  “Duck down,” she orders, and I slide down a little in the seat. I’m short for my age, so it doesn’t take much to put me out of view.

  The dark woods have closed in around our car, and we sit with the car windows down listening to the bullfrogs tune up. Mama is fooling with her scarf, pulling it toward the front of her face so you can’t tell who she is from the side. We don’t speak, whi
ch, I later realize, was why Mama bought me the milkshake. To keep my mouth busy. She didn’t want me getting chatty on her, which, believe me, I could do. Every so often the cars silently roll up a length or two like they’re on an assembly line getting the next part put on. After a while we reach a circular driveway with a shed at the entrance.

  There’s always the same man behind the window of the shed. The first time I saw his face in the shadows, the flesh seemed to have been peeled back so that only the bones rose up to greet us. Bones and eyes, no flesh attached. Even in the dark of this night, I can see his eyes flash as he takes in the first sight of us, a white woman looking like she’s in the worst rainstorm of her life and a white girl in raggedy pajamas with daisies. Is he scared of us?

  I could be scared of him if I didn’t know he was the bootlegger. Right under the lady and the spider picture in the newspaper was a story from Columbus about police looking for a Negro who ripped off a white lady’s clothes and threatened her with an ice pick after she had shown him the kindness of giving him the glass of water he came knocking on her door asking for. She was just being nice and chipping some ice for him when he grabbed the pick away from her and had his way with her. “Don’t believe everything you read,” Mama said when she saw me trying to piece together the words in the article. “People make up stories.”

  We roll to the front of the line and the man steps toward the car. “Yes’m,” he says. That is all he says. He looks at the ground.

  “Two tall boys,” Mama leans her head partway out the window.

  “That be Schlitz, ma’am?”

  “Whatever you’ve got that’s cold.”

  “Yes’m.” The man is waiting. He looks down at Mama’s hands.

  “Here.” Mama pushes a half dollar through the window, then a little torn-off piece of paper with some writing on it.

  The man reaches out his hand. It flutters a little, like a dark leaf disturbed by a slight breeze. He pockets the paper and the money fast.

  “All right, it’ll be all right now. Nothing ever happens until after midnight. Just don’t go wasting any time, though. Get everybody inside, and the boys in the woods.” Mama says all this in one long whispery breath. She doesn’t look at the man.

  The man lifts his head for the first time. His eyes are heat lightning in the heavy dark. Why is he so vexed? “Nobody round here wasting no time.” His voice, which seemed to rise up out of the ground he stood on and shudder like a palsy through his whole body before coming out of his mouth, breaks off.

  Mama doesn’t say anything back, just pulls the car around the dirt circle to the other side of the shed where a woman nods to us and then pulls the beers from an ice chest and puts them dripping into two little paper sacks, one for each can, and hands them to her through the car window. The woman’s eyes are heavy lidded. She looks downward, in the direction of Mama’s door handle. A branch heavy with old sweet gum balls scrapes my side of the car and makes a star pattern against the little piece of rising moon. I reach out and pull one off and touch and touch again its sharp little points. The air smells like somebody’s boiling collards.

  Then the woman murmurs, “You watch out for yourself, Miss Martha. Y’all watch out now.” The words tumble out of her mouth soft and sweet, like a song you’d sing a baby to sleep with.

  “Y’all too. Y’all too,” Mama sings out and takes the cool damp sacks and hands them over to me. I put them on the floor between my feet, making sure not to turn the cans over so they won’t spew up when I open them. She gives a little wave to the woman, and the woman nods and her lips move like she’s saying a little prayer over us the way the preacher does right before we leave church. She and the man start walking up to the cars behind us. They’re pointing to the way out and I can hear them say, “We sold out now. Drive on. Drive on now.”

  Then Mama and I turn out of the dirt in the opposite direction from the way we came in, though after a few miles the road will wind back around to where we made our turn and we’ll hook up with old 78. The cars from the bootlegger are piling up behind us. Later, I will find out that bootleggers always have a way for you to get in and a way for you to get out. In case of a raid. When we make the turn onto the highway and the land opens out into long dark rows of cotton plants, Mama floors the Ford and takes it through its gears hard and long, stretching them out like she’s pushing something big and heavy ahead of the car.

  After a while she looks down at me in the dark and says, like always, “Pop me a top, honey.”

  I put my milk shake between my knees, squeezing it enough to keep it in place but not enough to squish the paper cup and make it overflow. I grope around on the floor for one of the soggy paper sacks that are starting to tear apart and bring out tall boy number one. “Ta da!” I hold it high.

  “Put it down,” Mama says. “Don’t hold it up like that. Don’t go acting the fool.”

  I reach into the glove compartment for the church key Mama keeps hidden in an envelope under the car papers. I puncture one side of the top of the can just a smidgen the way Mama taught me so that the beer would come out nice and easy on the other side. I punch the other side down good and hard to make a nice V-shaped hole. I take the one sip Mama allows, cough because it burns my throat the way ice sometimes does. A little beer and my own spit spray my arm. The air blowing on it cools me down. I’m thinking what a good life it is that we lead in our own secret ways.

  Of course, all of this except the milk shake at Joe’s is a secret. We are being girls together, and girls do things. And later on, when I got old enough to wonder why my mother would take her little girl to the bootlegger at all, and even later, when I found out that there was a white bootlegger for white people, I didn’t have her to ask. She’d flown the coop by that time. Back then I reasoned that she took me because she needed the beer, and she took me to the black bootlegger so she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.

  This was what I saw and nothing more than this. Us tooling down the highway, me sucking on the last of my milk shake now all melted, Mama’s scarf now slipping off her head, her bobbed hair blowing straight out to the sides, like wings.

  2

  That spring we’d gotten lucky when Mimi managed to get our little white house with the pretty trellis back. The previous renters had packed up and vamoosed in the middle of the night, leaving some moldy mattresses on the floor, roaches galore, and two months’ unpaid rent. Before we left for parts unknown, we’d lived in the house for three years, and it had been a step up for us. Then, out of the blue, Daddy had gotten it in his head he needed to find just the right job for someone of his talents. To this end, he dragged us all over the State of Mississippi and after that through parts of Texas that either flooded so bad he had to sweep the water moccasins off the front stoop of our apartment building or were so bone dry the earth had huge cracks, one of which Mama stepped into and broke her foot while she was hanging out clothes. We moved so much that there are places out there I lived whose names I don’t know to this day.

  During our year on the lam, I came down with mysterious ailments. Coughs, earaches, fevers, swollen glands, sore throats, what have you. Except for a few weeks in a little church school where each and every day began with singing, “The B-I-B-L-E, Yes, that’s the Book for Me,” etc., I missed the whole fourth grade. Mama worked for Kelly Girl here and there, but after a while they would drop her. In Houston, when they’d call at dawn on the pay phone right outside our apartment door on the concrete landing and say for her to go here or there, she usually had to say no, her little girl was sick again and she had to stay home and see about her. Sometimes, though, she shook me awake and whispered, “Honey, I’ll be gone for just a little while. I’ve just got to go. Go back to sleep and don’t mess with the stove,” and I would turn my face to the wall on my cot in the living room, which was also the kitchen and dining room.

  When Daddy finally got fired from his umpteenth job, which happened to be at Brown and Root in Houston, my mother didn’t bat an eye.
She blew her bangs up off her forehead. They had gotten longer and covered her eyes. Over the months she had seemed to be hiding behind them. The only way I could judge her mood was by the set of her mouth, which, at that moment, was even more pinched than usual. She marched out the front door, not even bothering to close it behind her. She called Mimi and Grandpops collect on the pay phone outside and told them to wire the money, we were coming home. She came back into the apartment, threw one baleful look at Daddy, who was sitting with his head in his hands on the couch, and then headed off for the bedroom. We heard her pulling the suitcases out from under the bed. There wouldn’t be much packing. Nowadays she kept most of our things in the suitcases. There wasn’t room in most of the places we lived, plus what’s the point of unpacking just to have to pack again in a month or two?

  “Win.” Mama’s voice sliced through the wall.

  Daddy sat there a minute; his eyes darted around the room like he was looking for something he’d lost. Then he got up and went on into the bedroom like a dog ready to be whipped. He shut the door behind him. Mama started in on him the minute he walked in. She didn’t even try to whisper. He could come back home or not, but she wasn’t going to live like a gypsy anymore. They had managed before in Millwood, they could manage again. She had given him a year to sort himself out and now she had to get on home where there were decent doctors and people to take care of me so she could get back to baking cakes and making a living for this family if nobody else around here was going to put food on the table. We’d been dragged from pillar to post, and, like it or lump it, she was planting her feet back on solid ground. He could come if he wanted to, but she was going home and taking me and don’t forget that her daddy is a lawyer.