The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  “My mama says y’all are nothing but white trash,” he hollered at my back. “Your daddy can’t even hold a job he’s so trashy.”

  I yelped for my mother, but she was hanging out clothes in the back. So I was riding air, screaming bloody murder, and Little Dan was running under the swing, making me fly. He seemed bound and determined to kill me, for what reason I don’t know.

  Then something happened I didn’t expect. It started out good and ended up bad. You know when you’re looking through the camera and you have the perfect picture and you’re just getting ready to snap it? That split second when everything curls up like a cat? Just when I was ready to arc over the swing set and baby-bird it out, squash flop, none other than my own father rounded the back L of the Chisholms’ place and took in the scene. Glory be, I thought. Daddy never comes home in the middle of the day, but here he is. Here he is! Galloping to the rescue like the brave men in the olden days Daddy was always telling stories about. Saving the day. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself as a damsel in distress, my golden locks fanning out behind me as I flew through the air. I was a beautiful sight to behold.

  May took one look at Daddy and yelled at Little Dan to stop. Little Dan had already seen my father bearing down the stepping-stones Mama had put out for her customers, so he’d stopped his shoving and walked away real fast like he had nothing to do with me or the swing just happening to be up in the clouds, but not before Daddy saw what he’d been up to.

  Before I could drag my feet to slow down the swing, Daddy was mincing toward Little Dan like a crab toward a dead gull. One of my father’s legs was shorter than the other and the foot on his short side tended to flip under. Not only did he walk with a limp, he couldn’t run or even walk at a good clip. His short leg and the brick-high shoe he wore on that foot kept him off balance at the speed he was traveling across the yard. He said this was why he never went off to fight the Koreans, because he couldn’t chase them down. If Little Dan had had the good sense to light out, Daddy wouldn’t have been able to catch him.

  “What you think you’re doing, boy?” My father snatched up Little Dan by the right arm and flopped him back and forth like he was using Little Dan to swat a fly. Daddy had on a short-sleeve shirt, and you could see the veins popping out of the muscles in his arms.

  By that time Little Dan was screaming bloody murder, his dirt-dauber nest of hair unraveling all the way down to his nose. “You quit it!” he yelled. “Mama!” he yelled, but Miss Kay Linda was nowhere in sight. She’d gone grocery shopping. May sounded like she was singing, but it was really a moan, and then, all of a sudden, I was making a noise too because Daddy had gotten Little Dan down on the ground and looked like he was getting ready to stomp Little Dan flat like you’d do a roach.

  Just then Mama rounded the back corner of our house, covered in clothes. Mama always took our clothes to a Laundromat down the street to wash them, but she brought them home wet and hung them out on the line. She had Daddy’s shirts across both shoulders and my pants under her arms. She was carrying a laundry basket piled so high I couldn’t see her mouth. Her eyes, which are round anyway, were two big O’s.

  “Win! My God in heaven!” My mother dropped her basket and ran for Daddy and Little Dan. Daddy’s starched shirts flew from her arms and stood up straight like little white soldiers in the dust. Mama jumped in front of Daddy and pulled Little Dan up out of the dirt.

  I was still up in the swing dragging my toes in the dirt, tearing them up trying to get out of the clouds, but nobody was interested in my situation. They were playing tug of war over Little Dan. Daddy wanted to kill him. Mama wanted to save him.

  “He hurt me!” Little Dan grabbed the arm where Daddy had him. “Broke my arm!” He scrambled to his feet and hid behind Mama’s back. Just as she turned around to look him over, he jumped out from behind her and yelled at Daddy, “You, you, you nigger!”

  Mama spun around like Little Dan was a viper she’d just come upon in the grass. “You! Dan. Shut your dirty mouth!” No such talk was allowed in our house. I knew this because once when Daddy said that word on the phone to Big Dan, Mama had gotten cool as a cucumber and sat him down at the table after he hung up and told him if he ever said it again in her presence—those were the words she used, in my presence, and she struck the table with her first fingernail three times, once for each word—she was leaving to go back home to live with her mama and daddy. And take me with her.

  Now Daddy started to circle. He was half smiling as he crab-dragged around behind Mama’s back, where Little Dan was hiding out. “Call me a nigger. I’ll flat out snatch you bald headed, you little son-of-a-bitch.” The words rolled out of his mouth like whipped cream.

  “Win!” Mama’s voice could have cracked a tree trunk. “Get in the house!”

  Daddy was still circling and growling, so Mama leaned over and grabbed him by the belt. Little Dan scuttled up behind her so as not to get caught out in the open. Mama grabbed Daddy’s belt and said his name over and over: “Win. Win, Win, Win. Win!” until he finally looked her in the face instead of trying to get around her to Little Dan. When his arms drooped at his sides, she spun him around, still holding on to his belt, and pushed him toward the front door. Then Mama turned to Little Dan, who was by this time brushing himself off and planting his nest back on top of his ugly head.

  Little Dan looked hard at Mama. “He almost kilt me.”

  “No he didn’t. Now listen to me, Little Dan.” Mama put on her Kelly Girl voice. “Let’s you tell me what I can do to make you feel better, and I’ll tell you what’ll make me feel better. What’ll make me feel better is for you and May to let Florence swing on your swing every so often without half killing her. What’ll make you feel better?”

  Little Dan pulled his comb out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He sucked on it a minute and then he pulled it out and said real fast and low, “A cake a week.” His eyes were gnats, flitting here and there.

  I’m thinking a cake a week! What a nerve. Even we don’t get a cake a week! Even Miss Shirley Bishop doesn’t get a whole cake a week.

  Mama cocked one eyebrow. I could tell she’d settled into hating him as much as I did. “How about half a cake? I usually have a half left over.” She smiled a thin, hard little smile.

  “Every week?” He poufed his hair up with the slimy comb.

  “Every week. Fifty-two weeks a year. No squawking about all this and no killing Florence. That’s the deal. And that includes May too. We’re all just going to forget this whole thing happened.” May had perked up over the cake deal and was drawing close. Little Dan’s nest had started to take shape and now my mother hated him so much she couldn’t even look in his direction any more. She had her eye on me now. “Now Florence, you pick up these shirts and see if you can shake the dirt off them. Dan, go in and clean up before your mother sees you like that.”

  When Little Dan started for his back door, Mama’s shoulders slumped. She picked up her clothes basket, straightened out the clothes on top, and went into the house. In about two seconds, Daddy came out. He stormed right by me, on down the stepping-stone path. He was carrying his precious box under his arm like a sack of potatoes. I yelled out, “Bye, Daddy.” But he didn’t even turn around, much less answer, and a minute later I heard the Ford start up and then the tires yelp when he scratched off.

  When I opened the front door, Mama was rummaging around in a bottom cabinet under the kitchen sink. She pulled out a bottle marked “poison,” with a skull and crossbones on it. It looked like it was half full of something clear like water and she was pouring some out into a glass.

  “Mama! No!” I ran over and grabbed her hand. “That’s bad stuff. That’s poison! You could die!”

  She looked down at me and laughed, and then she couldn’t stop laughing. It sounded like the laughing that folks do on the Whirly Dervish at the fair when they’re getting flipped and flopped every which way. It goes on and on like the person is going to die laughing before the ride’s over
. Like the hiccups.

  “Unfortunately,” she gulped a swallow between words, “it won’t kill me anytime soon!” She sloshed her glass and some of the stuff spilled on my hands. I teared up, and not just because of the poison. First it was Daddy like to killing Little Dan. Then Little Dan calling Daddy a Negro, which I just didn’t get because Daddy was geisha-girl white. Then here Mama was giving out her good cakes like they were popsicles. And last but not least: my mother drinking poison. All of it my fault.

  Mama put the glass down on the counter. It didn’t make a sound. “Oh honey, it’s not poison, it’s just a little moonshine. For when you have a bad day.”

  “Well I’m having a bad day too.”

  Her heart wasn’t in my bad day. She took up her glass and chugalugged. She looked down at me over the now empty glass. Her round hazel eyes had withered into hard little raisins. “Well, I think you ought to go right out into the yard and have yourself a good swing.”

  After she said the words, they became yellow jackets. You know how yellow jackets will land on you and just sit there and you know that if you swat at them, they’re going to dig right in and sting the fire out of you? So you sit quiet and still until they take a notion to lift off. Then you shake yourself good and go on about your business. I stood there for a while waiting for Mama’s words to lift. She had turned her back to me and was standing at the kitchen sink washing out her glass with her fingertips. When she was done, she didn’t turn around.

  So I just quietly quietly turned around and walked outside. I sat down on the front-porch stoop. No yellow jackets around, but real live bees in a frenzy of crawling and thrusting. The clematis was blooming to beat the band those little white flowers that make you feel swoony they’re so sweet.

  The bees buzzed around my face. I knew I could get stung if I made a sudden move, but it felt right to be in danger, so I just sat there. Still as death. I squinted my eyes and put my hands up to the sides of them like horse blinders. I was a tunnel. I could see straight ahead into what will be: there’s the swing set, now empty, stiller than still. No children in this yard. Me, and Mama, and Daddy, now long gone, though this little house still holds crumbs of us, behind the stove a measuring spoon, under the refrigerator that cap I dropped but could never find from a bottle of vanilla. The roaches have nibbled up all the droppings of icing and cake and on the strength of the sugar have had millions of babies and grandbabies and great-great-grands that stare and scurry when a light is turned on at night. Now that we’re gone, all they have to eat is somebody else’s nastiness and each other. They’ve gotten scrawny and mean-spirited. They’ve grown larger wings.

  Little Dan’s grown, but he’s not selling used cars for his father. He’s sitting in a hard chair in a long room full of hard chairs, a stocky young man whose face is now more square than round. He’s weary from a long bus ride. His mouth is a little open and he’s about to fall asleep as he obediently tilts his head toward an Army barber with a buzzer in his hand, like a little boy whose mother waits with a comb. In a blink, the little nest is a pile of feathers on the floor. Then it’s barely three months and Little Dan’s being pushed out of a helicopter. Lost and hopping around a leafy jungle floor. Now he’s fluttered into the bamboo. Now I can’t see him anymore. He’s nowhere in sight.

  Through the screen I could hear Mama in the kitchen opening a cabinet door again. I hoped she was reaching for the pots and pans, not the poison bottle, but then there was only silence instead of the clatter of cake baking.

  3

  The second Saturday morning after we returned to Millwood, Mama came into my room with a carpet sweeper, which she propped up against my bed. “Okay, now, get on up and clean your floor. Make up your bed nice. Put on some decent shorts. It’s pickup day.” She sounded briskly cheerful and smelled like cough medicine. She’d trimmed her bangs short, drawn her eyebrows in perfect crescent moons. She was wearing a pressed blouse of white cotton so thin you could see the scallops of her slip under it and a little blue checkered skirt that had the look of a nice clean dish towel wrapped over the points of her sharp little hip bones. Her three-inch-wide black patent-leather belt was pulled in tight at the waist. She’d ratted her bob and sprayed it down so that it looked like a little spaceship had landed on top of her head.

  Cake orders had been coming in hot and heavy all week since Mama put out the word that the first pickup would be Saturday. Over the past two nights she’d been up to all hours rattling around in the kitchen. Sunday pickups were nothing special with everyone in a hurry to get to church, but a Saturday pickup was something of an event. A flock of what Mama called her Cake Ladies came clucking in like pigeons. Usually they roosted awhile, and Mama had a big pot of coffee ready. They stood jammed up against one another in our tiny kitchen, holding their coffee cups and saucers high so as not to spill. They leaned over their cups into one another’s faces and said things in half whispers.

  This Saturday the cakes were lined up on the kitchen table. They rested on neatly cut pieces of cardboard with the edges of doilies peeking out from underneath like the wings of angels. The wholes on one side and the still breathing halves with their waxed-paper bandages on the other. From my bed, I could look across our little living room and see their iced tops hovering like puffy white clouds over the kitchen table.

  In the kitchen Mama handed me a glass of orange juice and a piece of buttered toast and commanded me to eat over the sink. She didn’t want crumbs on her nice clean floor, which she’d mopped at three o’clock that morning. In the past it had been my job to open the door when I saw a lady coming up the path of stones Mama had put down when Miss Kay Linda complained that the grass was getting tromped on. So I took my toast out on the front-porch stoop.

  Directly I spotted the first lady questing up the path, and soon they all arrived and were carrying on in Mama’s kitchen like she was hosting a family reunion. How much they had missed her! They were ever so happy that she was back in her rightful place as Millwood’s cake lady. Nobody’s cakes could get within a country mile of hers. Don’t they look pretty all lined up like that? Martha, next week I think I’ll have a lemon. It looks so nice and cool. This one’s mother’s gallbladder getting taken out or that one’s baby’s cough has turned into scarlet fever or now the outside agitators are trying to stir things up over in Clinton, which was only upsetting the colored, who desire only to be with their own kind just like we do. We’ve been blessed with good colored people in Millwood. Lord, down in Shake Rag, the last thing anybody wants is trouble.

  When I heard them start on the colored, I opened the screen door and sidled on in, just in time to hear my mother say the word Negroes. She murmured it so lightly that at first I wasn’t sure what she had said. She was leaning up against the kitchen sink, one hand on the long row of ridges. The first time she said the word it sounded like a little breeze sashaying through the two rooms. It wasn’t “Negroes” really that she said, but “Nig-ras,” with a kind of rasp to it. Once she’d said it, it did some business in the house, blowing out little chats here and there like candles on a cake. The ladies’ eyes folded over their cups as if to keep the coffee warm. They seemed to be holding in one big breath. Then Mama said it again, this time spreading it thicker. “Negroes. What I mean is, they appreciate being called Negroes.”

  Then a skitter of ladies snatching their cakes and putting their money on the coffee table. I held the door as they bustled out, their mouths pursed. Out at the curb they clustered, hissing and quacking. Only my mother’s friend Navis stayed behind. Navis typed the town’s tax roll and knew what everybody in Millwood was worth. But in every other way she kept herself apart. She was shy with the other ladies. An oddball. She told Mama she hated to see the summer property tax season come around because her left shoulder ached unmercifully from throwing the oversized carriage on the manual typewriter down at city hall. In the summer she spent most of her spare time curled up on her Duncan Phyfe couch with a heating pad, her venetian blinds always tilted
to the ceiling because of the glare on her eyes, which burned from all those little numbers. With no husband and children, which she said would have been horribly boring, she was different from Mama’s other cake ladies. Mama had always said she liked Navis because she said anything that came into her head. They wrote letters back and forth the year we were away. Before we’d left Millwood, Navis had had a standing order for half a cake a week, just anything left over, darling, she’d say. After Saturday pickups she outstayed the other ladies and had a second cup of coffee with Mama. They would take their coffee out on the front stoop and sit shoulder to shoulder with the canopy of clematis hanging over them and bees and wasps buzzing all around.

  Navis folded her arms over her chest as the ladies scuttled down the stone path with their cakes. She stood there looking out until they’d all driven off. Then she ran her hand through her short red hair. “What a bunch of nincompoops!” she said. She came up behind my mother, who was now standing with her back to us at the sink, put her arms around Mama’s little waist, and pressed her head up against Mama’s shoulder blades. “Martha girl, don’t think twice about it. They haven’t got a brain in their heads, not a one of them, and they’ll be right back on your doorstep next week. They wouldn’t miss coming over here for anything in the world. They’d miss the gossip, much less the cake! What else do they have in their miserable little lives in this hellhole?”

  Mama laughed a little. The two of them stood there for a minute. Then my mother’s body drooped and she leaned back and Navis held her weight. After awhile Navis patted her shoulder, pushed her forward a little, gathered a half devil’s food off the kitchen table, and slipped out the front door.