The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  The way Zenie told it later, he’d called out to her and she’d gotten upstairs as quick as she could, given her leg situation. There was something wrong, she knew it by how many times he called her name. If he’d just called once or twice, she wouldn’t have thought much about it, but here she was frying bacon and heard Zenie Zenie Zenie Zenie in a wave of sound that just wouldn’t stop till she got there. When he saw her coming up the last step, he rose up from the bed and hollered out Zenie one last time. Then he started to fall, then she caught him. He was cold and slimy like a fish. She tried to let him down easy, slippery and heavy at the same time, but her back gave out at the last and he slid into a pile. Then he turned himself just a little as if he were tucking himself in, and expired.

  When she got back from calling, Zenie said, “Get on down to the street and watch for the ambulance. Wave at them when you see them coming so they’ll know where to stop,” so I went running down the steps and out to the porch. I got down to the curb and started looking down the street both ways. I would run right out into the middle of the street and wave them in when they came. I waited under the oak tree at the curb, jumping from one foot to the other, root to root. They didn’t come and they didn’t come, so I started crying and came on back upstairs just to make sure Grandpops wasn’t sitting up and rubbing his elbows and saying what happened? like Freddy Ives did in school when he had his fits. Something made me tiptoe up the steps. When I got to the top of the stairs, Zenie was mopping up the floor next to Grandpops with a towel. She was doing it with her foot so as not to have to kneel down. She was humming a long drawn-out sigh of a song.

  She’d rearranged him into a long line of himself. He was stretched out with his bare toes sticking straight up, and he had another towel over the top of his pajama bottoms. His hands were folded in a little mound on his chest. There was another little mound between his legs. I knew what that meant. I’d seen Daddy in his shorts when he got up in the morning. When it comes up like that there’s not much a body can do but push it down and hope it goes away. “Close the barn door, the pony’s out,” Mama used to say to Daddy.

  I stood in the door to Grandpops’ room crying quietly. Zenie’s back was to me while she was mopping with her foot, holding on to the bedpost for balance.

  “What you doing?” She jumped a little when I said it.

  “Fool, didn’t I tell you go watch for that ambulance?” she said, not turning around. “When folks pass, the bladder going to empty. Get on back down there.”

  That’s when I got it. Mr. L was right. Dead’s dead. Grandpops would never do anything like peeing on the floor or having his pony out if he were alive. He would be embarrassed beyond belief. The little wren Grandpops and I kept seeing on our way home started flying around my head. I couldn’t see it but I knew it was there just beyond my sight. I could feel the flutter of its heart inside my chest, and its little brown tail brushed my face.

  I was starting back down when here came two red-faced men running up the stairs only to stop short at the sight of Grandpops lying there in a line and Zenie shaking her head and humming even louder when they came in. One of them, he had a belly and was huffing and puffing, said, “Out of the way, auntie.” Zenie flashed her eyes and walked over to the corner of the room. The other knelt down and moved Grandpops’ folded hands and planted a stethoscope over Grandpops’ chest, then put his finger on Grandpops’ wrist, then shook his head like Zenie had. That was that. Dead’s dead and nothing else but. They lifted him like he was nothing but a pile of dust and laid him on a stretcher, covered him, all except for his face, with a long gray cloth, and strapped him in. They carried him down the steps like that, but when they turned on the landing, one of his arms fell loose and his hand dragged the step.

  “You,” Zenie pushed me to the stairs, “get hold of that hand. Make them put it back.”

  So I ran down the steps and caught up with them. I reached down and took Grandpops’ page-turning hand, the faithful one, which was heavier than I could have possibly thought, and lifted it up to the men. They didn’t stop until they got down to the living room, but then they put him down again, and tucked his whole arm under the strap. After that they were more watchful to keep him tucked in.

  When they got him down the walk, they laid the stretcher with him on it under the oak tree while they opened the back doors to the ambulance. It was bright morning by then and the new oak leaves fluttered over his face. When I first saw them move, I thought it was his face coming back to life, but then I saw his stillness beneath the leaves’ pretty scallops.

  After they got him in the back of the ambulance, the fat man who’d called Zenie auntie turned to me and said, “Tell your mamaw we’re taking your papaw to the hospital. Tell her to call the hospital.”

  I hated the sound of those names. Mamaw. Papaw.

  When they pulled off from the curb, it was slow and careful. No siren. The ambulance looked smaller and smaller as it went on down the long street under the drooping oaks and sycamores. After a while it became the period at the end of a sentence. Then it disappeared and all I could see was gray pavement and dust.

  When I went back inside, Zenie was still moving around upstairs. She was singing loud now. Oh Lord, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. I was trembling myself, and something loud had cannonballed out of my chest. I started up the steps just about the same time she started down, one step at a time then stop, one step at a time then stop again. She was dragging, I could tell. When she rounded the bend of the landing, I could see she was carrying sheets and towels so I ran up to help her bring them down. She’d wrapped up a neat package of them, the regular sheet package for Uldine except smaller. Damp coming through.

  When she turned on the landing, I saw that she was crying too. Zenie wore lightish powder and the tears had plowed dark rows from her eyes to her jaw line. Suddenly, she raised her head and sniffed the air.

  “Hell and damnation, the bacon!” She dropped the sheets and started down faster.

  “I turned off the stove. I turned it off.” I ran up the steps to help her with the sheets, but she kept on thundering down the steps like she hadn’t heard me.

  I grabbed her arm. “Zenie, I turned off the stove, it’s all right, it’s all right!”

  When I got up next to her on the stairs and reached out for the sheets, she grabbed hold of me behind my neck and pulled my face up next to her chest. I smelled a smell on her that wasn’t her but something that had brushed her and stuck. It had a sweet bite that was old and strong and ripe. I grabbed hold of her waist, scratching the tender insides of my burnt arms. She said, “Oh Lord, girl, what we going to do? What we going to do?”

  When she held me like that on the stairs, heart to beating heart, I thought I knew what she meant. How were we going to live without Grandpops? There was no imagining it. But then I looked up and saw something in her eyes that wasn’t that at all, not sadness but something else that had set forth across her face like a rabbit running zigzags across the open field. She was scared. Not of Grandpops’ dying, but of his not being there anymore. He had held something back.

  13

  There are peculiar days in June when the light turns and you can see that some piece of the world has given way. The day we put Grandpops in the ground, the light cut through us and bounced off. It made us bright and hard to the eye, split between outside dazzle and inside dark, so that when we turned to look at one another, all we saw were strangers. I could look up from my seat in front of the grave and see the tiniest things. The crust of dry lather on the preacher’s cheek as he stood before us. The powdery fuzz on the underside of Mimi’s chin. But I could not see into the life of things. I could not see what waited to be turned over and uncovered. My eyes ran wild along the surface of the world. There were no places to burrow in.

  The afternoon was so hot the metal folding chair burned my butt when I took my seat under the little gray tent next to the grave. The men in coats and pants were flinging sweat, their faces the color
of ripe peaches. They stood clumped together around the edges of the green rug that had been put over the pile of dirt. The red clay hole had smartly cut edges. Someone had taken time neatening them up, making them plumb, though the caretaking was barely worth the trouble since the box was sitting on a platform right on top of the hole. The coffin—Zenie said not to call it a box—was a dark wood with a high coppery shine. It was covered in red carnations. His favorite color and his favorite flower, but cheap, cheap, cheap, said Mimi when she ordered them. Red would have been all right, but those carnations, they mortified her. Were they dyed that color? Regardless, they were tacky as all get out, but what could she do? Everyone who knew Grandpops knew he loved things that were red. Holly berries, carnations, red velvet cake. “Wear the hat with the cherries,” he used to tell Mimi, but you can’t put cherries on a coffin. And he didn’t like red roses. He thought they were a cliché roses in general were, he said.

  The grass all along the ground was green but not the greener-than-green of the rug. The light was a pair of scissors cutting through the open ground and across the surface of us as we sat under the tent next to it. It sliced pieces of us into long lemony strips, while the other parts, half a face, an arm, one leg, stayed in deep shadow. We looked like devil’s food cake, with stripes of lemon icing.

  My mother had gotten sprung from her nervous breakdown to come back from Jackson for the funeral. Daddy had gone to Jackson to get her the day before. All afternoon I’d been at home waiting for them to come through the door. I’d planned it. I wouldn’t squeal or cry like a baby but would walk up to Mama quietly quietly so as not to spook her. I would give her a quick businesslike hug, the way I used to when I’d come in from spending the night up at Mimi and Grandpops’. I had made some nice egg-and-olive sandwiches, with a good kick of mustard the way she liked. I’d sliced the green olives just so, keeping the pimentos inside each little slice. I’d put them into the egg at the last minute and tried to keep the pimentos from coming out of the olives. I was forbidden to cook on the stove, but Daddy had let me boil the eggs that morning before he left. We had some fresh buttermilk in the house, and I’d gotten Daddy to get me some lemons for lemonade the day before, plus some nice rainbow sherbet for refreshment in the heat. I made the sandwiches and cut them into diagonal halves. I covered them with a damp dishcloth the way Mama taught me to keep them from drying out. I put them on the top shelf of the refrigerator. I wished I’d had two pretty sprigs of parsley, but that was the last thing Daddy would think to buy. He probably didn’t even know what parsley was.

  What I had in mind was a nice light supper. Of course she’d be tired, but she’d want to have a little something while she rested up and visited with me before she went on off to bed. After she got on her nightgown, she’d come in and sit beside me as I lay in bed, and I’d move my stack of library books over. She would have a big day coming up so she wouldn’t stay long, just long enough to say she was feeling better and everything was going to be all right, she’d be home soon. Maybe she would tell me Grandpops had gone to his Heavenly Father, and we would see him again one of these days, don’t worry. Then she’d need to get her clothes in order. Instead of the smells of baking while I drifted off, I’d smell starch and hear the sizzle of the iron on her best white blouse over the trains’ friendly comings and goings.

  When Daddy came through the front door, I was expecting him to holler out, “Hey, Sister, come see your mama!” Or just “Sister!” I was in the bathroom but I had the door open. I’d had my bath because I expected Mama to want one and I didn’t want to get in her way. I had patted under my arms with some of her Mum and put on a nice shirt, which was faded but not too small like most of my clothes were getting to be. I didn’t want to have to explain the scars on my arms, so I’d pulled from the back of my closet a long-sleeved shirt, which was as hot as blue blazes. The morning paper said it was going up to right around 100, which if Grandpops had been alive he would have looked up in his almanac to see whether it was a record breaker. I’d washed my hair too, because of the funeral and all. In the tub I’d cried myself out for Grandpops. Lying in the lukewarm water, I just let the tears roll down, washing my face every so often when it got too raw feeling, and then starting all over with the crying. After a while I felt like I was bathing in my own tears. What tore me up was how little he had seemed, how light and thin. Like he’d never been here at all, that it was all a dream, him walking in his seersucker suit and bow tie to work and back and picking me up at Zenie’s and reading me Uncle Wiggily and not wanting anything back except to make me into a decent human being. I’d made him my shining star. But he was only a fleck of dust.

  The screen door squeaked open. Then flapped shut. I heard Daddy walk through the living room, his shoe dragging on the floor. A worn-out, down-and-out sound. I listened for the other footsteps but didn’t hear them. Then I heard the faucet run in the kitchen. I walked out of the bathroom. Daddy was standing with his back to me at the kitchen sink. He was leaning against the sink drinking a glass of water, standing on his good foot, resting the other toe pointed down to the floor. I could see that the edge of his heel had worn down. He needed to get them resoled.

  “Where’s Mama?”

  He didn’t turn around. Then he put his glass down in the sink. He stood there with his back to me still.

  “She wanted to stay up at your Mimi’s tonight. Wanted to be up there in the house with her. Didn’t want her to sleep there by herself with…”

  With Grandpops, I thought. With the body.

  Just when I thought I’d cried myself out, here I was revving up again. “I wanted to see her. I thought she was coming on home. I wanted to see her. I want to see her.” First it came out like a whine, then it changed to a wail.

  “You’ll see her tomorrow.” He still didn’t turn around. He was holding onto the sink. I could see his arms muscle up like he was lifting something heavy and it was a terrible strain. I walked closer and just stood there behind him with my head pressing on his back. My arms ached, and when I felt him quake with his own sadness, I put my arms around his waist. I could see the little white lines on the insides of my arms when I stretched them out. He caught my hands and pulled them to his chest like a lifeline.

  We stood like that for a long time. He had my hands and pulled me closer and closer into his back so that I melted into him. He cried and cried. The more he cried the more he quaked, pushing back and forth on the edge of the sink, faster and faster, breathing deep in his chest until he let out a groan and let go of my hands and just stood there gasping and leaning over the sink. He didn’t turn around, just stood there panting. Then I felt his stomach ripple like a big fish had just swum through it, and he upchucked in the sink. I let go of him and let him finish. Then he ran some water and threw it on his face and rinsed his vomit down the sink. He didn’t turn around.

  I sank down in Mama’s chair at the kitchen table. The sky had gone dark in the window behind the sink. We heard the whistle of the nine o’clock in the distance with its old no no no no and the katydids started up with their yes, yes, yes-ing. I could see the lightning bugs begin to touch the screen and blink with surprise. As night drew its curtain, the outline of my father’s face rose up before me, reflected in the window. His face was dark against the kitchen light behind us, but the lightning bugs outside played and sparked in front of it as it reflected in the pane. His face was not really real but only a reflection, and they were real, the lightning bugs, right outside the window drawn to the light inside; and yet the two of them, his face and the lightning bugs, seemed to touch, as if he were out there with them like a peeping tom instead of being on the other side with me, which goes to show how seeing can fool you. Finally, his breathing was quiet, and I knew he wanted me to turn around and walk away from the dark and go on to bed, so I did. I got on my pajamas and started my fan on medium and got into bed. I arranged the sheet over me and threw the rest of the cover to the side. I lay there waiting. I was thinking he would come in
and sleep beside me like he’d been doing off and on since Mama left, but after I heard him moving around in the bathroom and flushing the commode, the bed in his and Mama’s room squeaked with his weight and I knew he was going to sleep in there.

  After a while I started to drift off. Every now and then a moth or lightning bug would bat the screen on my window. In truth, it was a comforting sound, the fluttery touch. I wanted to unhook my screen and let them all in, but I knew all they’d want to do then was to get back out again.

  The next morning up at Mimi’s, Mama gave me a quick everyday sort of hug with her good arm. The other was in a dirty cast. She said hey honey, but she didn’t look into my eyes. She didn’t even speak to Daddy. He went back outside on the front porch and took up residence in the swing. She seemed distracted by Grandpops lying in his coffin up on the buffet table like a slab of beef. “What’s he doing up there?” she kept on asking everybody, but no one answered her question. Mimi had been in bed for a day and a night and wouldn’t get up for nothing. When the funeral men had knocked on the door, Zenie had told me her legs were on fire and she was trying to get the damn house clean. She said for me to run upstairs and tell Mimi come on down, but when I knocked at Mimi’s door, Mimi didn’t answer. The men had Grandpops out in their hearse and wanted to know what to do with him. Zenie couldn’t very well send him back. So it was just the two of us present and able to say come on in, just like we’d been the ones to send him off in the ambulance. Zenie took one look at the little rickety thing they had for the coffin to stand on and didn’t take to it. If somebody bumped into it, that’d be all she wrote. He’d come tumbling down, box and all, and pop right out and it would be a sure-enough mess and Mimi would skin her hide. So Zenie had swept off the big buffet in a split second, whipped the white linen cloth off the dining-room table—not the best one, but starched and clean, thanks to Uldine—and said, “Put him there.”