The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  By the time I get back down to New Orleans, a Thursday night, there is a storm brewing in the Gulf. Everybody on the bus is talking about it. It has hit Florida, turned around, and is heading back toward us. The joke amongst the passengers is that we’re heading in the wrong direction.

  The phone is ringing when I unlock my front door. It is Mama. “Damn it the hell, Florence, I’ve been trying to reach you for two days. When are you going to get a cell phone? Where on earth have you been? We’ve been worried sick we’d have to evacuate without you.”

  When she stops for breath, I say, “I went up to Jackson for a few days. Listen, Mama, I think it would be better for me to drive one of your cars out of here. We need to get all the cars out of here.” I don’t own a car myself, and I need one for what I have planned.

  She draws a shaky breath. “Well, all right. I guess so. Damn this place. How the hell did we end up here?”

  I think, well, after you ran yourself into the train and Grandpops died and you took the grocery list and left me with nothing but a stack of greased pans, and Daddy hurt me and killed Eva, Mimi had the courage and decency and good sense to throw me and her hats in the Plymouth and bring me over the dark water to Mabel because she didn’t know where else to go. Then you came back because the coast was clear and there was smooth sailing. I say, “Okay, so can you bring me over a car, then?”

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right driving by yourself?”

  “Of course I will. Just bring me the car.”

  “Why don’t you just follow us? We’ve got two rooms in Jackson. We’re leaving early in the morning. Crack of dawn.”

  “I need to see Daddy.”

  There’s a pause. “Oh. Do you think that’s really necessary?” Mama still hasn’t forgiven me for stashing Daddy in Roselawn Nursing Facility down in Chalmette, just a few miles away. When they called from the John Deere place in Greenwood because he had started to carry his headache stick to work and whap it on his leg when he got aggravated at a customer, Mama had long since gotten a divorce, so it was my little red wagon. I told them to take the stick to him, but soon after that, he had a stroke right there on the sales floor.

  The nursing home is a ranch-style house built low to the ground. It’s flooded twice already and the one time I was there for the paperwork, it smelled like a sewer.

  “Yes I do think it’s necessary.”

  “You’re not going to bring him with you, are you?” Her voice has iced over. There is only one possible answer to the question.

  “Are you crazy?”

  Mama breathed a sigh of relief. “All right, we’re coming right over with my car.”

  I hang up and pour a shot of vodka. It sits on the kitchen counter like the beginnings of a little altar to a lost one on the side of the highway. I pick it up and drink it down.

  I resist the temptation to pour again and instead pick up my suitcase and take it into the bedroom and lay it on my bed. I unpack dirty underwear and put in clean. Then I close it back up. I am ready to go. I light a cigarette and turn on the TV. The storm is back in the Gulf and is building strength. Florida was just a warm-up.

  In a few minutes Mama hurries inside with the car keys. Navis is waiting out in the other car. They are thinking of leaving tonight. They’ve gassed up both cars. Will I be right along tomorrow?

  Yes, I say, yes. I notice that Mama’s hair is more white now than silver. Her bangs all white.

  She stops in her tracks when I come out of the shadows of the kitchen. She peers at me. “You look terrible. What’s the matter? What’s wrong with you?”

  Somehow I make the words line up. I is the subject, saw the verb, Daddy the direct object, the rest of the clause unthinkable.

  She gasps and pushes her bangs straight up in that old lost gesture. “God in heaven, how could you have forgotten that? You remember everything. It’s impossible you didn’t remember seeing him kill her.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t remember what I saw. It’s that I didn’t know what I was seeing.”

  “You’re not a fool, Florence. You must have realized later. Surely you must have figured it out.” My mother’s voice is cold. She looks shocked and innocent. A little old lady with nothing to hide.

  I don’t answer. What I remember about that time right after Mimi brought me to Mabel was my delighted dive into normalcy. Mabel’s spacious high-ceilinged house with long windows and cool wood floors. School down the street and outfits that matched. A little room with a twin bed all to myself. No hot hand, no bootleg runs. I remember taking long naps in the quiet late afternoons, then doing diagrams on the kitchen table while Mabel cooked supper. Lining up the words the way Eva had taught me so that you could tell what belonged to what: where the sentence led and what story it was telling. Where that story began and where it ended. I remember eating scrambled eggs for supper and French toast with powdered sugar for breakfast. Moving from the middle of fifth grade, which Eva’s tutoring had earned me, to the top. I remember my grandmother’s hair turning to gleaming silver, how she let it grow out and wore it on top of her head like a crown. I remember getting to watch Bonanza and Mr. Wizard’s World. I remember Mimi, Mabel, and me clustering around the TV and crying when President Kennedy got shot with poor Jackie in her bloody dress. I felt I’d come into the real world for the first time. It was a world that took its life from my mother’s absence, and, I now see, from Eva’s death.

  I look straight into my mother’s widened, blameless eyes. Something in me curls up to strike, to say maybe none of it would have happened if she’d been there. But then I don’t say it because, even after everything, she still smells like burnt sugar, and all I can see is a woman half my age, her hair like wings, racing the devil to the bootlegger, rescuing someone else’s precious cargo. I walk to the door and open it for her.

  On the way out, she stops and looks at me as if she’s seeing me for the first time. “You were afraid,” she whispers.

  “So were you.”

  She nods. “Eva was the only one who wasn’t afraid of him.”

  “She was afraid,” I said. “But she didn’t run.”

  At first light the next morning I head for Roselawn Nursing Facility down in Chalmette. I head down Claiborne. People cluster in clumps up and down the street. They look at the sky and one another. They shake their heads. Some wait on their front stoops with suitcases beside them. The traffic is terrible and it takes me a good two hours to get there, though I’m going in the opposite direction of most people.

  The parking lot at Roselawn looks deserted. Inside, all the breakfast things have been cleared away. Two old men sit at a table playing checkers. I continue down the long fluorescent hall. A woman clutching a frayed doll dozes in her wheelchair. Daddy’s door is shut. I go in without knocking. He is in bed asleep. His roommate is out or dead. Here, I suppose, you never know. I go back out in the hall and drink a long time from the water fountain. My head is pounding. I get two aspirin out of the bottle in my purse and swallow them with some more water. Then I go back into his room and pull a chair up to his bed, in the process kicking aside his brick shoe on the floor. He’s had physical therapy and now walks with a walker. Judging by the empty breakfast tray, he eats like a horse.

  I watch him sleep. His thinness makes his nose loom large and beaked. With that nose and his bald head, he looks as if he’s finally transmogrified into the Nighthawk of my imagination. Old and loony before his time, as if the swamp of ugliness in his head has turned into quicksand and sucked him in completely. After I stashed him down in Chalmette, I suspected they drugged him more than necessary since he’d lost most of his mind and strength but not his meanness. More power to them is what I thought.

  Now I want him awake. I push the button on his bed to raise him to a sitting position. I poke his shoulder. “Wake up.” I can’t bear to call him Daddy though it’s on the tip of my tongue. I poke him again, harder. He grunts and his eyelids flutter. There is a crust around them. “Hey, wake up!”
r />   “What, what,” he mutters, then turns over and looks at the door, confused and irritated. He hasn’t been shaved today. The bristles on his cheeks and chin are white.

  He struggles to sit up in bed. As he throws back the sheet, I smell his old man filth. I sit back in my chair. He peers at me in a predatory way. I cringe a little, still the rabbit.

  “What?” he says fretfully. “What you waking me up for?” I can tell he doesn’t know me, though I now have his full attention.

  I lean forward into the stink of his excrement. His breath is sour. There are deep pits in his face. “Daddy, you killed Eva Greene. I saw you do it. I saw you.”

  He blinks a few times. Then, ever so precisely, he draws his gnarled right hand, stained brown between his judging finger and his warning finger, from under the sheet and lifts it slowly as if it is monstrously heavy and puts his finger in the position between his mouth and the beaked nose. The sign of silence. He reaches over and fumbles around for my hand. He knows me now. He knows I can keep a secret.

  The hair rises on the back of my neck. “You killed her.” I whisper the words but I feel as if I’m shouting. I lean over him, down into his face and seek out his eyes under their hooded lids. I want some acknowledgment of the truth. A nod, a blink, a twitch. What I discover there is nothing at all. His pupils look like saucers somebody has poured milk into. I haven’t seen him for so long that I didn’t realize he had developed cataracts. He probably can’t see much of anything.

  Now he falls back on his pillow, almost instantly asleep. His mouth opens and he begins to snore softly, contentedly. I get up and walk out of the room. As I go down the deadly bright hall, I contemplate how beautiful the retina is, how it looks like a flower of a million colors. How those colors, the most vivid you’ll ever see and a thousand shades of each, never stay in the same place but are always flowing one into another, becoming the inverse of themselves. My father’s retinas must have looked like that; everyone’s do. And what did those lovely retinas see when they saw Eva walking down that narrow dusty street? They, if not he, must have registered the yellow of her scarf, the neatness of the navy blue suit, the purposeful gleam in her eye. The way she had of putting one foot directly in front of the other when she walked as if she were balancing a heavy load. The backward slope of her shoulder under the weight of the briefcase. The curve of hip and breast. Glint of rhinestones from her glasses frames. And where did all this information from my father’s beautiful retinas go, in the mind’s locked box? What language did it travel to on its airship of innocent, deliberate synapses? Not to the words beauty or strength. Not to live and let live. Not even to lust, though there must have been some of that. The word, if he ever thought it, would have been his father’s. Impurity. The foul and the feculent, corrupt and defiled. Sons who were not sons. Daughters who were more than daughters. Flesh and bone gone wrong. Tainted by blood. Ruined.

  At the front door the nursing home manager catches up with me. She is huffing and puffing. “You’re not taking Mr. Forrest? Most families are evacuating their family members. I thought you had come to get him.”

  “No,” I say coldly. “I’m not taking him.” I keep on walking.

  My evacuation plan is to start driving, not north but east, east to the marshes and east toward the storm. I will cross the four narrow covered bridges, their overhead girders glittering like rhinestones, over water that is both fresh and salt, surly and choppy. The water will soon be getting higher, licking the bottoms of the bridges. I will cross over inlets with alligator swamp tour signs, but no boats. At some point, I will take a right toward the Gulf. I will drive on forsaken roads past boarded-up houses until the road dead-ends into the Gulf of Mexico. Then I will sit on the hood of my mother’s car facing the dark, uneasy water, and I will wait.

  So I drive east, despite all the signs and arrows and roadblocks telling me to go the other way. The strip of flat swampland I drive on gets narrower and narrower as the expanse of gray water on either side grows larger. In the swamp on either side of the road, fingers of murky water make paths through the tall grasses as if giant hands are reaching out for something down in the marshes. As I drive, a sentence takes shape in my head. I begin to diagram it. The girl saw everything through the dirty window, but she didn’t say Daddy stop and she didn’t tell.

  And what would he have done if I’d banged on the window and made him pause? Would he have turned the screwdriver on me? I was the one who zigzagged over the field toward home. He took Eva by surprise and she froze in the tall grasses.

  When I reach the Gulf, the beach is deserted, not even any seagulls on the pilings out in the water. There is a beach road that turns left, following the sea. I ride on it for a few miles across a low bridge that the water is slapping over.

  When I can, I pull off the road and get out of the car. Through the spray and drizzle I see a pelican sitting on a dead branch a ways inland. Perched on her branch, an awkward, hunched thing, she contemplates a still pool of water. We both wait for a good long while; I watch her while she watches the water. I think perhaps she is crippled; it is not a natural way for a pelican to fish. It has started to rain. Behind me the leaden sky and gray ocean have become indistinguishable.

  Once, I watched Eva wash herself at the kitchen sink. The afternoon light had splashed on her wet arms and made them sparkle against Zenie’s green leaf curtains. She had dried herself on a blue and white checked towel. Ray and I had sat at opposite ends of the table with our notebooks open, waiting for our lesson. Then she had turned from the sink and smiled at us and sat down between us, groaning that her feet hurt, and given us our sentence.

  Now, in a motion both hesitant and sure, the pelican gathers her hollow bones and lifts, her pouch full. It is a heavy gathering, a splatter and a moment where it seems she will fail to rise. When I follow her path through the fog and drizzle, I see another road up a ways. It turns left, away from the water. It is a sharp turn, the kind a story can make, but not a railroad track or the line of a diagram.

  A story, who can know its secret night journeys or what precious cargo it might yet carry? Why it says you go or you stay, or wears its hat just so? As for the rest, here’s how it begins: The girl, no, the woman named Flo gets back into her mother’s car and cranks it up and turns the windshield wipers on high. She drives up the road through the fog and the rain and the years behind her and the years ahead of her, shivering, soaked to the skin, her hair in a tangle. In a few hours she will pass a family walking along the road—a man, woman, and boy—and she will stop and pick them up. In another month she will drive to Millwood and tell what she saw, though by then her father will be another untagged, unclaimed body in the state morgue.

  Right now, though, the best she can do is to peer through the windshield and make sure she doesn’t miss that sharp left, finding herself, to her astonishment, back in it because the story—the lines and the chalk, the upturned faces, the river that cupped them all—had already begun to miss her.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  Meet Minrose Gwin

  About the book

  On Writing The Queen of Palmyra

  Read on

  Praise for Wishing for Snow

  Excerpt from Wishing for Snow

  About the author

  Meet Minrose Gwin

  MINROSE GWIN has been a writer all of her working life, starting out as a newspaper and wire service reporter covering politics, human interest stories, and the overnight police beat. Wishing for Snow, a memoir about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, was published in 2004 and hailed by Booklist as “eloquent” and “lyrical”—“a real life story we all need to hear.” Minrose has published creative nonfiction and poetry in the Women’s Review of Books, IKON, and several book collections, and has taught creative writing workshops at universities and the University of New Mexico Taos Writers’ Conference. Wearing her other hat as a literary critic, she has written three
scholarly books (one a CHOICE book of the year) and is a coeditor of The Literature of the American South, published by W.W. Norton, and the Southern Literary Journal. She currently teaches contemporary fiction at the University of North Carolina and lives in Chapel Hill. Like her character Florence, Minrose grew up in Small-town Mississippi. This is her first novel.

  About the book

  On Writing

  The Queen of Palmyra

  The Queen of Palmyra plunges deeply into the psyches of some riveting characters; it also tackles the big issue of racially motivated violence. How did you go about juggling those two balls?

  Very gingerly. Win Forrest is a particularly risky character. He’s so despicable that he could easily drop to the level of a stereotype. We have to understand why he does the things he does, that terrible father of his who drives him every day of his life to uphold “purity.” On the opposite end of the spectrum, Eva can’t be just a saintly victim; she has to have her quirks, she has to be feisty and vulnerable, generous and selfish, fiercely intelligent and naive. That’s why Eva’s voice erupts in the next to last chapter; she can’t be a mute victim.

  This book is fiction but is based in the 1960s South. Did you personally live any of this history when you grew up in Mississippi?