The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  When I burst into her room hollering, she was curled up in her usual way in her slip, with a bit of the spread pulled over her fin feet. She had on her white hairnet. “What, what!” She rolled over and glared in my direction, her eyes pinkish and mean.

  I was huffing and puffing. “Daddy’s here! He’s downstairs. I told him you wanted to talk to him. He wants me to go on home with him right now. Come on downstairs. You need to come on down and talk to him and tell him about taking me to Aunt Mabel’s.”

  “All right, all right, go on down and tell him to wait. I’ll be down in a minute, when I get dressed. Where’s Zenie? Is she still down there?”

  I shook my head no. I backed up but didn’t leave her room.

  She sat up and shuffled around with her feet for her bedroom shoes. “Go on now. Shut the door. Let me get some clothes on.”

  I shut her door and stood outside it for a while. I could hear Daddy pacing the floor downstairs. Then he hollered for me to come on, he didn’t have all day. I came down the steps slow. I was trying to buy Mimi time to get dressed and get on down there.

  He was standing at the bottom of the steps looking up. “Come on,” he said, “she can talk to me another time. You got work to do.”

  “She’s coming in a minute.” I stayed on the midway landing where the stairs changed direction. “She said for you to hold your horses. She said to tell you it’s important.”

  “If it’s so all-fired important, why don’t she get on down here?” He shifted from one foot to the other as he looked up at me. Then he clumped on over to the front door. “Come on. I’ll call her on the phone.”

  “Wait. I’ll get her.” I flew back up the stairs before he could say no.

  When I burst into Mimi’s room for the second time, she had on the blue brunch coat. The hairnet lay on her pillow. She sat frozen on the bed facing the door. She licked her lips several times. “Come on,” I said, “he’s waiting for you but he’s in a tearing hurry. Come on now. He’s going to carry me home with him if you don’t get on down there.”

  She was so still she didn’t seem to be breathing. I took her arm with my good hand and pulled. “Come on.”

  Then she came to life and took a shaky breath. “All right, all right. Let go of me.” She swatted at my hand and stood up.

  We went down the steps together, her in front ready to scurry back up. I followed on her heels, collie dog to sheep, over the bridge out to the open road.

  He was clumping back and forth in the middle of the living room.

  “Win,” Mimi said in a little girl’s voice. “How you doing?”

  “Fine.” He looked at her and stopped pacing. “Listen, Miss Irene, I’m in a hurry here.”

  “Sit down, Win, I want to talk to you a minute.” Mimi licked her lips again. “The thing is my sister Mabel. You remember Mabel, the heavy one down in New Orleans? She’s been real sick. In and out of the hospital. I wanted to take Florence and go down to take care of her. I really need for Florence to go with me to help out with poor Mabel. I can’t lift her by myself. Just until after Labor Day when school starts. Just a few more weeks.” She said it the way you’d tell someone the best idea you ever had. “You don’t mind, do you? It’s a terrible situation, and Florence would be such a help.”

  Daddy had sat down in Grandpops’ chair. He was trying to sit on the edge, which was close to impossible because it was a chair that took you in. Mimi was on the couch and I had pressed myself up against her soft hip.

  Daddy’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he said. Just no. No excuse, no I’m sorry can’t spare her myself right now.

  Mimi colored up. “But Win, I really need her. And after all she’s been through, a change of scenery would be good for her. Please think about it. Please. Just think about it.”

  Daddy glared at Mimi. “I want her here. She’s all I got now.”

  I felt Mimi stiffen up. She turned to me. “Honey, step outside.”

  I gladly went out onto the porch. I sat down on the swing where I could watch them through the window. Mimi’s back and the back of her head as she sat on the couch. Daddy’s face. At first Mimi’s voice quavered. Then it started to walk on water. I couldn’t catch most of the words but I heard her say: either you do this or I do that. I saw Daddy’s face turn sour then furious then sly. I heard him say: don’t you tell me what. I know what you want to do. You want to take my girl. Well, you just try it. Then he came storming out the front door onto the porch and said to me, “Come on, you.” His hands were fists and the veins in his neck were ropes. He looked madder than I’d ever seen him look, mad enough to tear a house down and kill everybody in it. I thought about making a run for it. I knew I could outrun him, but I didn’t know what would happen after that, after he’d called his friends. I followed him like he’d put a choke collar on me, tail between my legs, on the way to getting tied up in the yard again. As I got up from the swing, I could see the back of Mimi’s head, which was bent down like a lily. She still was sitting on the couch. She didn’t turn around. The back of her hair was smushed flat where she’d slept on it.

  Daddy had the front seat of the Valiant piled high with papers and envelopes, so I got in the backseat right behind him, which I preferred anyhow so as to keep out of reach of his mean hands. I looked out the window toward Mimi’s, but I could barely see the outline of the house, the back window of the car was so thick with dirt. I looked hard at the back of Daddy’s head. His neck was a red clay brown, deep burnt from day after day of knocking at people’s front doors and saying words they didn’t want to hear. Give yourself and your loved ones a decent burial. Only fifty cents a week. Seventy-five a couple. Between his hairline and his collar the little crisscross lines ran this way and that. Distances traveled, miles and miles of tracks going and coming. When had the first one been laid down? When he was the firstborn boy gathering his mother’s pretty speckled eggs on the farm out in the county? Watching out for snakes in the henhouses? When he took each of his four little brothers fishing for the first time? I’d seen pictures of Daddy when he was little. He was small for his age, with a shock of wavy tar-colored hair and one big shoe. He was holding on to a little beagle hound with dragging tits. When she’d get out of her pen, his dad would make him drown the pups. It was the right thing to do, Daddy told me once, because they had bad bloodlines. Who knew what was in them?

  One day when his mother went to the doctor for a pain in her belly that had had her doubled over for a week and was sent straight out to Mill County Hospital without even getting to pack her own suitcase, never to come home again, his black-haired dad began to think the same thing about his younger brothers, the four of them being all towheads. My father’s hair saved him, for it was the exact color of his dad’s and had the thickness and the curl to boot. As the oldest, younger than I was now, he would stash his bright-headed little brothers around the house and barn when he would hear his dad’s pickup whip up the long gravel driveway late in the night. His mother died before the next harvest, quilted through and through with lines and needles. Daddy visited her in the hospital just once with his brothers. They all lined up before her like crops in a row. She looked at him and rasped in a voice he didn’t recognize, “Win, you got to take care of the boys. You got to. Promise me.”

  He promised and he tried, he told Mama, really he did try, but there were too many of them and not enough of him. He had to let them go to the state after a while. There was one he kept, Donnie the littlest, but it didn’t turn out well. His father didn’t get him, but Daddy stashed him in the wrong place one night. Daddy didn’t know about the loose board in the loft or the bad nail. Of course Donnie was barefooted, Daddy had snatched him up from the bed the minute the gravel sounded (in those days Daddy slept in his shoes). He ran as fast as his bad foot would allow to the barn, half dragging, half carrying little Donnie. Shoved him up there with the hay bales. Donnie knew to keep quiet, even with a rusty nail in his foot. In a month he was gone, jaw locked shut, eyes hollow and surprise
d. Once Daddy told Mama he wished he’d just let the old man beat Donnie that one time.

  But maybe, Daddy said to both of us one night out of the blue, Donnie was just not meant to live. Maybe his dad was right after all. Maybe Donnie wasn’t a real Forrest and the blood will win out. When Daddy said that, Mama had looked nervously at me.

  When we left Mimi’s, Daddy had scratched off like he always did when he was mad. His hands clenched the wheel and he didn’t even bother to light up the way he usually did. After a few blocks of squealing around corners the way he loved to do, he slowed down to a crawl. We were cutting across Shake Rag on the way home, though I didn’t see the point of it. Shake Rag was out of the way. He cruised down Moses Street, past Lafitte’s Grocery. The men sitting outside on the bench studied their feet when we drove by, their careful hats pulled down over their eyes, though anybody could see how crimped their mouths were.

  When we reached a little alley of a street, Daddy took a left the way you make a nice long curve when you ice the edge of a cake, slow and easy and evenhanded. By now I was wishing he’d speed up again. The back window on my side was so coated in dust and grime that I could only see the shapes of things outside. It was stuck shut like all the windows except Daddy’s. What little air there was in the car was coming in from his open window, and when he rolled along at such a snail’s pace, the breeze from his window stopped. It was that time of afternoon when the heat gathers around your face like a tacky web. Shake your head, and it sticks.

  I was thrown forward and then sideways when he slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the left side of the street in front of a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and wild bushes. At first I thought he’d dropped something because he leaned down and rummaged around under a pile of papers that had spilled off the front seat onto the floor below. He pulled out what he was looking for. Something metal, a tool. Now this, I thought. Now the car has broken down. Daddy never bothered to explain anything. So, I thought, this is why he’s been creeping along. I didn’t want to stay in the car because it was so hot. It was beyond hot. The late-afternoon sun was ironing what was left of the day. Everything seemed ready to catch fire and burn. There was no air left to breathe in the car. I felt like a cake that’d just been shoved in the oven to bake.

  Daddy opened the door of the car and got out. I was ready to follow but he told me to stay, so I stayed there behind the closed window in that oven of a car. When he got out, he left his door open a crack. Through my window’s film, I could hardly see anything with the sun coming in at such a slant, but it looked like a woman standing on the dust path next to a big bush with little white flowers. I didn’t really see the woman, just a shape that might or might not have been her. I could hear a buzzing through Daddy’s window, maybe bees, maybe the woman, if there was one, speaking to my father, then him saying something back. They didn’t exchange but a few words. I just heard her murmur something and knew by the pretty way the words lined up that she wasn’t white. Then for just a second it sounded like she was singing.

  But her face, if indeed she were there at all, it was hidden by his back, which was turned toward the car and me. Everything was so close, the street so narrow, and the dirty window was fogging up from my breath inside the mostly sealed car. Stupid Valiant and its stupid windows, I was thinking, I hate this stupid trash car.

  Something, a quickness, caught my eye. Maybe the woman tripped or dropped something, maybe Daddy reached down to pick it up, though it hardly seemed something my father would do for a black woman unless she was paying him her burial money for that week and the coins fell between them on the sidewalk. Then the money would be his and he might pick it up.

  In any case there was this quickness. Then he leaned over her and she seemed to disappear. And whatever encounter they’d had, it was over and done with in no time at all. A second or two was all, and maybe a flutter of color. Then he was back in the car, the tool nowhere in sight. When he got in behind the wheel, he turned around and looked me square in the face for a second. I seemed to be a surprise for him, as if I’d sneaked into the car while he was out of it, as if he’d forgotten I’d been there all along. I was relieved when he turned back around and scratched off and I finally got some air on my face. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  It was all very ordinary, I didn’t give it a second thought. All I could think about was being careful of myself with him. I was my own precious cargo. I watched how the beads of sweat trickled out from under his scalp and began to follow the crisscross railroad tracks that carved the back of his neck, which was even redder than usual from the afternoon sun. I thought, good, he’s sweating, maybe now that he’s hot too he’ll drive faster. And he did. He tore through the streets like a tornado until he screeched to a stop in front of Big Dan and Miss Kay Linda’s house.

  When we’d gotten into our house, he seemed unaccountably excited. He left the keys dangling in the deadbolt lock on the door. “Sit down,” he said, pointing to the kitchen table. Without looking around, he went to the bathroom. I could hear water running for a long time.

  I sat on a stool next to the table and waited. I was thinking that since Grandpops was six feet under and Mimi couldn’t get ahold of me and Mama was as good as dead, I was just going to have to be the most agreeable daughter alive to keep Daddy on an even keel. My plan was to say yes to everything. Absolutely every little thing.

  His box was in a careless place—on the floor just inside the front door. I’d almost tripped over it when I came in. I thought I might offer to oil it for him to get him calmed down. I could do it with my right hand.

  When he came back into the kitchen, he was scrubbed rosy from stem to stern; even his hair shone. He had on a new set of clothes. He sat down across from me at the table. He looked at me straight on, and his eyes flared up. He reached into his pocket. “Sister, you got a birthday coming up in September and I’m going to give you an early present.” He pulled out a handful of quarters and started counting them and placing them in stacks of four, one next to the other, until he had twelve stacks lined up. Policy money. The stacks lay like soldiers marching across the table. Then he counted them again. “One dollar for each year and one to grow on,” he said and, gathering the stacks between his hands, he pushed them slowly across the table toward me. “Here.”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. Mama and Mimi and Grandpops had slipped me some money every now and then, a shiny quarter here, a half-dollar there, a nickel or two from the tooth fairy, but Daddy had never given me a red cent, and nobody had ever laid this much money on me. My hands got to itching for those quarters.

  “Happy birthday.” Daddy rubbed his mouth hard, like he was trying to clean himself up after a meal. “You a good girl. You know how to keep secrets, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir.” I put my right finger over my mouth like he’d showed me.

  “That’s it. That’s the way. Anything you see or hear from being around your dad is a secret.”

  “Yes sir.” I was following my plan to yes sir him to death.

  “All right,” he said in humdrum sort of way, as if he hadn’t just given me stacks of money. As though he were saying all right, have some beans, or all right, take a nickel for an ice cream. Then he got up. “Take the money and go on down to New Orleans with your mamaw. Go to one of them big-city department stores and buy yourself something pretty. Take it and go ahead on.”

  “Yes sir,” I whispered again. I stood and picked up the money, stack by stack. I divided it between the two pockets in my shorts. I watched his face the whole time to see if I was doing whatever it was he wanted me to do. It seemed like I was, so I walked sideways over to the front door. I didn’t look straight at him but I kept him in the corner of my eye to make sure he didn’t get up and go for me. But he didn’t.

  I was turning the doorknob when he said it. “You know what happens if you break the oath?”

  I wasn’t sure what I should answer. No sir seemed dangerous, but so did yes sir. I decided to move my h
ead a little in a roundabout sort of way that might be a nod yes or a nod no.

  He came over to me and took my bad left arm between his two hands. His little spider hairs seemed to stand up higher on the back of them. My arm took on a life of its own and started quaking in his grasp as if I had a palsy. Fire shot from my shoulder down to the dancing arm.

  Then he said the rest of it. “You die.” He said it so quiet and peaceful that at first I wasn’t sure I heard right. Then I looked into his face and saw the words burned across his mouth.

  “Yes sir,” I whispered.

  He turned me loose and stepped back.

  That’s when two stories took shape all at once in my mind’s eye. I could see them both clear as day and for a moment I stood frozen between them. The sentence that began both stories was this: Florence Irene Forrest’s father tells her he will kill her.

  In the first story scaredy-cat Florence slips out the door and walks slow through the yard and then starts to run and never stops.

  The other was a different story with a different girl. Flo.

  Flo is nobody’s fool. She gets into the doorway and pushes open the screen, but she doesn’t hop out like a scared rabbit saying yes sir, yes sir. She gets one foot out the door. Then she reaches down and all in one motion grabs her daddy’s precious box off the floor with her good arm and pulls his keys out of the deadbolt lock with her bad one. No car for him! Then she says what she has to say; she hisses it.

  “Catch me if you can.”

  He grabbed air for me, quarters flying this way and that, but I was too quick. I gathered myself and took a leap out the door and across the porch, barely touching Mama’s stepping-stones on the way up to the street. He came after me with his crab crawl, but I left him in the dust, lickety-splitting it over Mama’s little stepping-stones, the quarters jangling in my pockets. Just as I reached the street, I heard sirens, and when I looked behind me, he’d vanished into thin air.