The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  I hightailed it all the way back up to Mimi’s, my shoulder shooting off firecrackers each time my foot hit the street. The box jostled around. I dropped it once, but picked it back up and kept running. The sirens hadn’t let up. They seemed to be coming from Shake Rag, though I paid little attention.

  I ran up my grandmother’s driveway and into her backyard. I headed straight for the row of pecan trees behind the garage and threw the box on the ground. The latch broke open, and out spilled Daddy’s black garb and all the rest of his paraphernalia. Flags, cross, Bible, sword now flung loose from its holder, vase, cards, Zippo. Ordinary run-of-the-mill things scattered on the ground as if by a child playing some strange made-up game.

  When I saw the lighter gleaming in the leaves, I remembered how easy it had been to start a fire. I also remembered how Ray killed the caterpillars with gasoline. With my right hand, I scraped some leaves and twigs into a pile around the box and piled up my father’s stuff on top of it. I ran into the garage and picked up the can of gasoline next to the lawn mower. I was getting more and more used to doing with my right hand, and I used it to pour what was left in the can on top of the pile I’d made. I kept out Daddy’s hood, which had fallen to the side and looked like a bat struck down in mid-flight. I flicked the Zippo and set fire to the hood. It made a nice flame, and I used it to start the twigs and leaves. They and the box caught in a loud whoosh that made me jump back.

  The box burned for a while. I paced up and down watching it flame, then settle into a nice cheerful burn, and eyeing the driveway where, at any minute, my father might appear. I hoped Mimi would think the neighbors were burning leaves, and vice versa.

  Nothing happened, nobody came. Before long the box and my father’s things were nothing but a pile of reddish ash. With a big magnolia leaf I picked up the hot, smoky glass vase and threw it up against the side of the garage. It crashed to the ground in a million pieces. I took off for Mimi’s back porch.

  I burst through the screen door onto the porch breathing hard and yelling for my grandmother. It was coming dark by then, but she hadn’t turned on the lights in the house the way she usually did this time of day. The door from the back porch to the kitchen was locked and the lights were off. I looked through the glass at the top of the door and saw Mimi sitting in the shadows at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. She scrambled to her feet when I banged on the glass with both hands. Then she peered out. I had my face pressed up against the glass. She jumped back when she saw me, then looked again, out into the dusk behind me. Finally, she unlocked the door.

  “What, what?” she half whispered, half screamed when I burst in on her. She locked the door back behind me as soon as I got inside. When I told her what Daddy had said and the money he’d given me, she looked puzzled for a minute, but then she said, well then, we were going to New Orleans and we were going this very night, damn my clothes, damn the tires, damn the savings bond, damn her job.

  We locked the doors and went upstairs. I helped her pack two big suitcases. One was hers and one had been Grandpops’. She got those into the trunk of the Plymouth by herself; she wouldn’t let me help because of my shoulder. Plus, she said, I needed to watch her load the car and stay in the house by the phone. If anybody came into the yard, call the police. If I saw my father or any of his cronies, call the police.

  After stashing the suitcases, she started snatching hatboxes from the top of her closet and piling them up on the backseat, all the way to the roof of the car. When she got as many into the backseat as she could fit, she squeezed some more hatboxes into the trunk, stacked two between us on the front seat, and put one on the floor of the car on my side so that I had to straddle it the whole way. There were still some hats left in the top of her closet, and she looked up at them and sighed. She took one last small box and opened it and brought forth a little number with a brown feather and a little half veil with butterfly designs. She plopped the hat on her head without even looking in the mirror and folded the veil back so that it wasn’t over her eyes.

  Right after midnight we headed out, fugitives into the night. She left a note for Zenie on the kitchen table. It said, “Dear Zenie, Gone for a while. Taking Florence you know where. Fox on our tail. Will write and send money for paid vacation. Take the food in the icebox and the sugar and flour and the pickled peaches in the crock. Take anything else the roaches would get and lock up the house. Please tell Uldine and the paperboy I’m gone. I will see about the mail. Thank you for everything. I’m sorry if I made you mad sometimes. I’m sorry I made you do the wash that time, truly I am. If you need to work for somebody else for a while, I will understand. I will miss you, Zenie. You have been a help and comfort to me all these years. You know I’d never leave like this if it wasn’t the only thing to do. Yours always, Irene Calhoun.”

  I was worried that Daddy and his friends would appear in Mimi’s backyard at the last minute, but when we ran for the car, the night was quiet and sweet.

  Mimi had a map that she kept on her lap the whole way down to New Orleans. After a while it got soggy with her tears. She wasn’t crying out loud, just drip drip dripping slow and sure as if she’d sprung a leak. I stayed awake long into the early-morning hours. My shoulder throbbed. I was panting the way a dog does when it knows it’s lost. I couldn’t seem to get my breath. We saw shadows of animals along the road. Deer. A warthog. A coon. All intent on getting some secret place only they knew about.

  I kept watching behind us. When a car’s lights would come into view, I’d start to sweat, but then it would pass us or turn off and we’d be alone again.

  Mimi hummed hymns as the tires slapped the road. In the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand. Let the water and the blood from Thy wounded side which flowed be of sin the double cure. In the sweet bye and bye we shall meet on that beautiful shore. After a while the hymns made me deeply peaceful, and my breath became slow and even. Finally, I closed my eyes.

  It seemed as if I slept over centuries and great distances. I felt the earth’s globe groan and turn beneath us, like the deep and invisible current of a powerful river. I felt us rising and falling as that current took us into a vastness that had no tracks to mark it, that seemed both land and water, earth and sky.

  Mimi woke me up saying, “Look, honey. Look.” I woke to the sky just turning to rose. We were on a bridge coming in over dark water. On the other side, in the far distance, the lights of the city were shining before us like the halo of a giant angel.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Mimi said. Her hat had fallen forward so that the feather on it pointed straight ahead.

  “No it wasn’t,” I said.

  The rest was easy. Mabel was still asleep when we piled in so we had to ring the doorbell twice to rout her out. When she finally opened the door, she looked healthy as a horse in her bobby pins and white pajamas and said we looked like escapees from a chain gang.

  Mimi rolled her bloodshot eyes. “You have no idea.” She went into the downstairs bedroom and fell dead asleep across the bed before she even told Mabel why we were there or who I was, or took off her hat.

  Mabel looked at me and said, “Well now, you must be Florence.”

  “Flo,” I said.

  “A name with some spunk. I like it.” She led me upstairs to another pretty bedroom and said, “Maybe you want to take a nap too, Flo?”

  I said yes ma’am and hit the hay.

  In my dream (or maybe I’m still awake) I keep on moving. I am riding on a road that goes straight down into the dark water. No bridges in sight and no shining cities either. Now I’m flying because it’s fly or drown. Not the breaststroke through the air cool as a cucumber, the way Zenie does during her afternoon naps. No. It’s swoop and circle, riding the wind. On the ground below, the flutter of something bright yellow.

  Part IV

  18

  It was all so humdrum. The way he stopped the car and jumped out, with her in the back. I thought he was going to get me to take her with me on my sales rou
nds. That maybe Zenie was off somewheres and couldn’t be found. Or, maybe, I thought, as he clumped over toward me on that foot of his you can always see under his boogey-man sheets, he was going to get me to take her back up by Zenie’s for him. He was in a hurry, that’s for sure, and I thought that was what he wanted me for. To get shuck of her the way he was always trying to do, foist her off on the Negroes. I was thinking nobody here’s going to be your mammy, peckerwood.

  Then I saw the screwdriver, and I thought he must be having car trouble in that pile of rubbish he was driving. Clumping up to me with this easy glad look on his face, like he was real pleased to find me right there, right then. I thought he was going to say, hey girl, help me do something with this here car. Lift this or hold that. I wasn’t going to help him do shit if I could help it, and I might’ve run on down the street and gotten away from him. Sure had every reason to, after the way he and his jerk-ass friends burned me and put their nasty hands on me when all I’d wanted was to make my tuition and a little spending money. I wasn’t looking to be any Rosa Parks either, but he and his peckerwood sidekicks, they did something to me. They made me mulish, and I wasn’t about to go hightailing it back home like a scared jackrabbit, no ma’am, because then they’d think they could just keep right on with their burning and touching and killing.

  Truth be told, though, I was almost too chicken to run. I didn’t know how fast he could move on that gimp leg. Even if I got away, I knew deep down I’d be running forever. I’d have to run all the way back to Carolina.

  So I stood my ground waiting for him to get near me on the sidewalk and have his say. My scarf felt tight around my neck all of a sudden. I started sweating in my scalp and my glasses slipped down on my nose. I pushed them back. They’d fogged up a little so I couldn’t see clearly. But I still wasn’t worried about him starting up anything with me. For one thing, it was broad day still. Frank and the boys had just rounded the corner up on Moses. All I had to do was holler and they’d come running. Plus there she was in the backseat with her moon face pressed up to the glass (why the window was up in that heat I don’t know). He wasn’t going to do nothing to me with his own child looking on. Straight at me she was looking with those yellowish eyes of hers you can see right through. Lost as usual. She always looked lost. He probably wanted me to take her off his hands so he could get dressed up like Halloween and go lynch somebody.

  I concentrated on how I was going to refuse him without him taking a hand to me. I’m sorry, Mr. Man. I’m in a terrible hurry. I feel sickly, sir. Going to upchuck any minute. That would be my contribution to the Movement for the day, keeping him from getting out of the house tonight, though if you ask my opinion, he was the cat at home too. I mean all you had to do was look at her when she dragged in in the mornings. Those burnt arms. He’d done that. I could see it writ across her face plain as day. With the granddaddy six feet under and the grandma’am crying and doping her way through the afternoons, Auntie felt obliged to see after the girl since that crazy cake woman had done so much for the people, warning them and all. But Auntie Z, she needed a rest from it. She was hoping the mental one would come on home and take care of her own flesh and blood, though I told Auntie don’t hold your breath. That heifer’s seen greener pastures, even if it’s the inside of the loony bin.

  He was keeping on coming. Galump, galump, on the bad foot. He put it down hard, and made the dust kick up in little puffs around that big ugly shoe of his. I was still standing there on the bucked-up sidewalk next to a nandina bush with little white flowers crawling with buzzing bees. Lord, big old bees everywhere. Sucking up the juice. I could see the black spots on their backs.

  Watching him coming up the grass toward me, something deep inside me wanted to back up, but I was afraid I’d get stung by those bees, so I stood my ground and waited to see what he wanted. He still looked pleased, almost like he was going to say good evening and how are you and you have won a prize, missy. In the late-day sun, that dark oily hair of his looked like it had shoe polish dripping off it. I was facing the setting sun, and a beam of light blinded me all of a sudden. I couldn’t see his face.

  Then he was up on me and I saw his mouth.

  “No sir,” I said as quick as I could. The words were bees buzzing in the air. “No, sir. No sir. No, no, no, no.”

  He took me by the hair of the head. He pulled my head back with one hand and then I saw the screwdriver come up in the other, like I was a can he was getting ready to open. When I felt my pretty scarf tear and the ragged tip of the screwdriver dig into the hollow in my neck above the bone, between the two cords of muscle, I knew I was done for. It went in hard and it came out easy. When he was done, he let go of my hair, and my knees folded. I sat down in a heap and my head wouldn’t hold itself up. It fell over to one side.

  My throat filled up and when I opened my mouth to scream, all that came out was a river. I swam through it for what seemed like a long long time. And then I went down.

  But when I went down, my eyes were still wide open. I could still see her. She was looking straight at me. I could see her looking out from the shore I wasn’t going to get to.

  Part V

  19

  The next morning Mabel handed the Times-Picayune to Mimi over a bowl of scrambled eggs. “Look what happened up in Millwood. A girl got herself killed. They say it must have been a spat with her boyfriend. Did you know an Eva Greene?”

  Mimi gasped. She put her coffee cup back in the saucer so hard it cracked and the coffee sloshed over into the broken saucer. After she read the story, which was just a few sentences in the folds of a back section, no picture of Eva, nothing like that, she rose to her feet with the paper still in her hand. “Oh my God. Poor Zenie and Ray. I must send them a telegram.” She went to the phone on the little table in Mabel’s hall, picked it up, and then hesitated and put it back down.

  I followed her into the hall. “Eva didn’t have a boyfriend,” I said.

  “Flowers,” she said. “I’ll send flowers. Maybe I should go back. Oh my God. What monster would do such a thing? My Lord in heaven a screwdriver.” She sat down in the chair next to the phone and didn’t do anything. She just sat there and stared down at the floor. I came and stood next to her.

  “Eva didn’t have a boyfriend,” I said again.

  She looked up at me. In the dim hallway, her face seemed ashy; her eyes scurried over my face. She put her hand on my arm and searched my eyes as if she were looking for a lost piece of color in them. Then she reached over and hugged me around my waist. After she let go, she sat staring hard at a red rooster door-stop on the floor as if she had asked it a question and was waiting for an answer. It stared back at her with its little beady black eyes. Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “All right. Let me do this. Go on up to your room and let me do this.” She said it sternly, as if she were correcting me for acting up.

  I started to cry. “Say I’m sorry,” I whispered. “In the telegram tell Zenie and Ray I’m sorry too.”

  Upstairs I sat on the bed and crossed my legs under me. Something fluttered at the back of my mind. Wash on a line, a scrap of paper blowing down the street, feathers. A bit of color. There were nubby tuffs on the white spread, and I started picking at them. I could hear Mimi talking on the phone, but her voice seemed to be coming from under water. I kept on picking threads from the nubs on the spread, piling them up like Miss Josephine’s mimosa leaves. I began to count them, putting them in piles of tens. I thought I knew how Miss J felt when she counted. It was something that had to be done to quiet the flutter. Something had broken out in my chest, something awkward, then loose, a bird falling from the sky.

  I tried to see Eva going home to Raleigh in a box the way Mr. Lafitte had said she would. Would they dress her in a bright scarf? Would they let her keep her cat-eye specs? Would they put her on a train? I tried to see that kind of stillness settle down upon her. But I couldn’t. The stillness wouldn’t stay still. It fluttered.

  Even when the shock of
Eva’s death had dulled, I’d turn a corner and think I saw her sashaying down the street dressed to the nines in her navy blue suit. She remained alive in my mind’s eye, popping up here and there as time went by, saying things like look what the cat dragged in, or bye, Flo, or hey, girl, when she passed through my thoughts in a pretty whirl. When I came to understand the work she did in Millwood, I saw her as the Queen of Palmyra, riding off to do battle against wickedness and save her people. I wondered if someone had killed her for that. I was pretty sure she didn’t have a boyfriend, and if she did, she was too smart and sassy to choose someone who would stick a screwdriver into her throat. She would have chosen a man like Medgar Evers, someone with enough spunk to match her own.

  The flutter, it hovered at the corner of my sight, always there but just outside my line of vision. Sometimes, when it got especially close, I wanted to reach out and close my hand on it the way you’d grab at a gnat that’s buzzing around your head. Mostly, though, I tried to ignore it as best I could, though as time went on, the flutter wore on me, the way a recurring dream you can’t remember but can’t forget either wears on you. You have to either forget it or remember it; otherwise it will spin a web around you and never let you go.

  But as time went on, Millwood and everybody in it began to fade like an old dress. Zenie I missed like crazy, but with Mimi and Mabel showing me how to ride the streetcars and what kind of snowball turns your tongue blue and where to cross Carrollton Avenue to get to school in one piece, Zenie too faded for me, just as my mother had.

  My father loomed in my mind, but only because I was afraid he’d come after me and swoop me up, which he never did. Mimi heard he’d moved over to Greenwood soon after we flew the coop, and he’d started selling tractors for John Deere. I made up a story in my head that he’d become an ordinary man living an ordinary life. I started thinking that maybe he was just angry about something when he said he’d kill me. Maybe he didn’t mean it and now he was sorry. He did send money from time to time. I came to dread those smudged envelopes with his handwriting on them. They made Mimi take a dark turn. She’d take them to her room and put them in her top dresser drawer like they were something dirty. Years later, when she died, I would find them, the checks still inside.