Queen of October Read online

  I rolled over and looked out the other window. I was just going to stay in bed and never get up. They’d forget about me. A hundred years from now, somebody would come into the room, brush away the cobwebs over the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed and find me as an old woman who’d never had a life anywhere outside this room. My feet would be pressed against the footboard like two old bass. The rug would have holes worn in it where I’d tap danced for eighty-six years. The story of my pitiful life would end up a legend.

  Now the early sun was shining on the dew in the backyard, and I could see the orchard and the empty chicken house. My grandfather had put a pump under the grape arbor because he wanted to tap pure water for use in his medicines. My grandmother had gotten rid of the chickens because she found it depressing when the hens pecked each other’s feathers off.

  “Sally?” She opened my bedroom door, holding up a newly pressed dress that looked like something an extra would wear in Gone With the Wind. As she came in and took over the whole room, I knew that all hopes of staying in bed for life were over. I lay there looking at her while she stood at the foot of her relative’s bed and looked at me, one hand holding up the dress so it wouldn’t touch the floor. “Sleep well?”

  “Yessum.”

  She was tall and her hands were twisted a little by arthritis, reminding me of the grape vines. Her hems dipped sideways until noon, when her back warmed up and she could stand straight. And maybe she was in pain a lot and just wanted you in the same boat with her—because she could drive you nuts faster than ants finding sugar. “I just don’t have time to iron and cook,” she said, hanging up that Tara dress on the closet door. “And Louella’s singing a solo at church today and couldn’t see fit to come help. She knew I had to give the Devotional to the Golden Age class, and she’s dying to see you. But could she come and help?—oh, no. She couldn’t pass up that solo—and I don’t know why. She can’t sing worth a toot.”

  Louella was my grandmother’s maid. She could always sing better than anybody I knew. But my grandmother was hard on all of us. Most of all, she hated to cook.

  We had stiff toast and walked to church.

  As we went down the sidewalk, three abreast, my grandfather reached for me. “We’re so glad you’re here,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “Even if it is only because of your mother’s and father’s trouble.” He winked at me. With his other hand he held my grandmother’s elbow. Probably he’d have supported the whole world if he could. Some people thought my grandfather was a genius. And some thought he was nuts. But if he was a little crazy, to me that was what was so wonderful. Now I had to slow down my steps to match his. I hadn’t seen him in a year, and I was again impressed with how large he was. His hair was white, his hands overly large and trembly, reddish, chapped, sometimes peeling—which made you wonder what they’d been into. His features were big, his eyes burrowed under white wiry ledges of brows; and his cheeks were masses of crinkled lines. But the most outstanding thing about my grandfather was that he never worried. Or at least if he did, I didn’t see any sign of it. I guess he got that way from being present at an infinite number of tragedies. He knew how to stanch blood, hold hands, deliver hope, death, new life, not do much and never run out. That was bound to make him calm.

  Main Street in Coldwater was calm, too. There were people like us, walking all along it to some church, dressed up in summer colors. I felt the old circus spell of Coldwater. It was like looking through the decorated opening in a candy egg and seeing there a whole scene, ongoing and contained. Because Coldwater was not only small, it was simple.

  On the central block of Main Street were one feed store, one drugstore, a bank, and two groceries. And just beyond each end of Main Street was a sign that said: Welcome to Coldwater, Arkansas, Pop.: 2,309. For all the years I’d lived in Coldwater, these signs had always said, Pop.: 2,309. When someone was born, someone else died, because the number never changed.

  Cater-cornered to the Best Mercantile was my grandfather’s clinic, which meant he could step out the back door of his office, walk across the alley, and be at home. He thought that was convenient. My grandmother said it was dangerous. If he blew up his office while mixing his medicines, the house would go, too. Yet she also thought that might turn out to be a blessing in disguise, since she’d always wanted to move to the street near the Mill Pond.

  Next to my grandfather’s clinic was the newspaper office where the Coldwater Gazette was printed every Friday. And next to that was the post office. My grandmother stopped to admire the silver compote in the window of the jewelry store. But nothing could compare to the silver that had been passed on to her from her family’s plantation in Mississippi, and as though we didn’t know, she told us that once again as we crossed the street to the First Methodist Church. The bells in the tower were ringing, and around the corner, the bells in the First, Second, and Third Baptist were ringing, too.

  At 5:00 P.M. those bells would be given over to recorded hymns. Every night at just about suppertime the Methodists would chime out a hymn first, and then at half past five the Baptists would pick it up and finish out the hour to six. Fortunately, the Church of Christ was quiet; their women didn’t even wear lipstick, and we had heard they sang without so much as a piano. So after the Methodists reminded us that the tie is blessed that binds and the Baptists topped it off with the amazing grace that saved a wretch like me, the rest of the evening would be as quiet as we cared to make it.

  I stopped on the church steps. Everybody was having a fit over my being there, anyway. My grandparents were referring to my family’s situation as “my little visit,” while I looked across the street at the machine shop. Tractors and combines were parked in front. On any day but Sunday there would be a fire raging inside and the sound of steel being pounded from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., and behind it, sweaty men hunkered down shooting craps and drinking out of bottles that from April to October were a hazard to anybody who went barefoot.

  Mr. Harris, who owned the machine shop, would sit beside his wife during the eleven o’clock service in our church while she played the organ, pumping the pedals with her too-large, varicose-veined legs. Then when her legs gave out, which was usually during the Doxology, he’d take over the pumping.

  I went into a class and sat beside Bobby Watts, which didn’t thrill me. Two other kids were in there and they were from the country. I was the only town kid that year my age who wasn’t a Baptist.

  Bobby Watts reached in his pocket and offered me a cherry Lifesaver. He’d sprouted a case of acne and had on argyle socks, like old men wore. When he and I were six, we’d spent some time together in all sorts of places around town, swapping visions of anatomy. Once we did it in the basement of the Methodist Church and another time in the alley behind the dime store. We were only six and I guess there was nothing to be embarrassed about now, but it drove me crazy to think I’d shown myself to someone who’d grown up to be a nerd.

  I stared at the Lifesaver, balanced on the end of his thumb. I could feel his eyes on my face. Seeing him made me realize what a bad kid I must have been. My parents had probably known all along how rotten I was.

  “No thanks,” I whispered, turning down Bobby Watts’s Lifesaver and catching the attention of Miss Pankhurst, who was our teacher. Her Sunday school lesson for that day wasn’t much different from any other time. For what was always stressed, more than the facts and memorized Bible verses, was the idea—which we saw again, if we went to the Saturday afternoon movie, when the cowboy in the white hat caught the cowboy in the black hat—that evil would get its due.

  Due was something that took me a long time to figure out; there were so many dues: do and dew. But I decided they all had to do with action or something falling. And whenever I walked barefoot over our lawn in the early morning, I knew that wet feet were the mildest of all possibilities.

  I thought the same way about just desserts. Someone got it when he deserved it, but I never ate chocolate cake without it seeming a grand sign.


  So, no one in Coldwater was worrying about the state treasurer. If he was embezzling, God knew it, and he would get his due. Same with the governor and president. And just the same with Mr. Harris, who, more often than not, ran crap games at the machine shop. Pumping the organ for his weak-legged wife on Sundays would certainly help. For it was a just God we believed in, and He’d surely take into account every day of the week.

  To me, that whole theory seemed simple. If you got so happy you couldn’t believe it, you were in trouble. Life had to be balanced; there had to be the bad with the good. Tip the scales and all hell broke loose.

  Once I overheard my mother telling one of her close friends that she’d gone to a psychiatrist and that he’d told her there was no sense in even considering whether or not she was happy. If she found out that she was, she couldn’t live through it. “Leave yourself in blissful ignorance,” he had said. “It’s the only way you can function. Yours is a life better off unexamined.” I guess she forgot what he said, though. Now I’d lost her, and my father.

  My grandparents and I walked out of the church into the hot noon sun and went home for Sunday dinner.

  Ezekiel, my grandparents’ handyman, was up on a ladder picking plums off one of the trees near the chicken yard. Sometimes he came to my grandparents’ house on Sundays to do some yard work that couldn’t be put off. And ripe plums couldn’t wait. The year before, my grandparents had lost almost the whole crop to birds. No doubt my grandmother would be supervising Louella in making plum jelly all week. Probably Louella wasn’t singing a solo in church so much as she was staying home to rest up.

  As my grandparents and I went in the sun porch door, Ezekiel carefully placed a handful of plums in a bushel basket, while calling hello to us. It’d been a whole year since I’d seen him. I’d never talked to him much, but I always remembered the time that he’d oiled my three-wheel bike when I was little, even though we’d both overheard my mother tell a neighbor that she liked to hear the squeak of my trike so she’d know where I was. But when I was four I’d gotten a terrible itch to go farther than I was supposed to go. I’d asked Ezekiel to oil my trike, and he’d done a fine job on it. So after my mother got used to the idea of not hearing exactly where I was, I set off around the corner, with all three wheels purring as smooth as pleated satin, onto the sidewalk of Main past my grandfather’s clinic and the post office and the jewelry store and the machine shop to the parking lot of the Second Baptist Church. There, I did a few fancy figure eights on the asphalt, then headed home. On the way back I caught a glimpse of Ezekiel standing in the alley, checking up on me. But when I pulled into the driveway at home, he was mowing the lawn just as if he’d been there the whole time. Neither of us ever mentioned my trip.

  My grandmother was in the kitchen now, pulling out pots and pans and Lord-knows what else. She could make that whole side of the house sound like a drunk drum section in a band. We always had a big Sunday dinner after church. And while my grandmother worked in the kitchen, I helped by setting the table, being careful with the china and silver that she was also getting out.

  I walked back and forth to the dining room table.

  “How’d you like living over there?” my grandmother asked on my next trip to the kitchen. She handed me a tea service which she told me she would one day pass on to me.

  “All right,” I said.

  My grandfather was reading the paper on the sun porch, which my grandmother called the solarium. It looked out onto the alley and the back doors of the buildings facing Main Street. “Well, nothing’s happened here since you left,” she said. She was peeling apples and dumping the ragged fruit skins into a sack. “Except of course your grandfather was taken to court like a criminal. I have dreams his face is hanging in the post office. Can you imagine! Accused of mail fraud! And the thing that’s giving me ulcers is, he did it!” She came into the dining room, carrying napkins.

  I was getting used to how the house smelled. Mostly it was like the White Gardenia bath powder my grandmother wore. That odor aged into an aroma that pervaded everything she touched. When she gave me a birthday card, even the envelope smelled like her. I never would have told anyone, but to me, when White Gardenia bath powder got old, the smell of it mostly resembled a wet poodle.

  As I carried that silver back and forth, I was again amazed at how tacky my grandmother’s house was. Considering her general taste and philosophy, her total lack of any decorating sense seemed abnormal. For to my grandmother, how to be and how not to be—that was the question. But she hated to spend money. She had inherited almost everything in her house, and if it didn’t match or belong she didn’t care. Even if she had liked to spend money I predict she would have bought ugly things; I don’t know why. My grandmother just couldn’t seem to put anything together in an attractive order, except her large silver collection. The main luxuries in the house were a telephone in my grandparents’ bedroom, another one in the back hall, and one in the kitchen. My grandfather’s profession prompted that.

  I stood a moment at one end of the dining room, which was really part of the living room, to look at the picture of my grandmother, which I hadn’t seen in a while. Honey-brown hair piled into wings on top, delicate curls rimming her face. She was standing straight and very regal in a long white satin gown, holding a rose bouquet in her arms, which were covered in white gloves with seemingly hundreds of buttons all the way to her elbow. Her face was serene, dignified, and very beautiful. She was looking away from the camera at something that only she could see; the result was a picture of total confidence, and something else I couldn’t put a finger on. The angle of her head, and the expression in her eyes, reminded me of some of the people I’d seen in the bus station when the bus drove in and their relatives got off. It was, I guess, a look of excitement and hopefulness. The picture was the one taken for her debut. The one for her wedding was not very different. I stood there looking at that, and at a small picture below it on the sideboard of my mother and father in their wedding gear. I guess something had gotten spilled on the sideboard at one time, because a stain went up one side of the frame and had seeped up across the bottom of the picture. It was probably milk. It was probably me who’d spilled it, some Sunday when we’d all been together for dinner.

  Behind me my grandmother was putting napkins around and bringing me up to date on Coldwater. “And the tenant your grandfather rented your house to isn’t worth much. She’s loud and messy and will probably tear the place up. But she’s the only one who promised to stay all winter so the pipes won’t freeze. And Ellen Best moved to Little Rock week before last. She’ll probably get voted into the Junior League there. But then I don’t think she and Sam intend to divorce, only separate. Which, if you ask me, makes a whole lot more sense than what your mother’s doing. If she’d play her cards right she could be in the Junior League of Memphis. But I’m afraid she’s shot her chances now; a divorced woman looks used.”

  I couldn’t sit on my curiosity about the woman I’d heard laughing in my parents’ house. “Who’d you rent the house to?”

  My grandmother pshawed. Her sound of disgust reminded me of the hippopotamus at the Memphis Zoo, who would look at me, burp, close its eyes, and then disappear underwater. In fact, my grandmother’s pshaw was as famous in Coldwater as that hippopotamus became when he swallowed a rubber tire some smart ass threw to him. His operation made it into the national news, and the state of his health was followed for weeks. “Oh, just somebody I don’t think is fit for you to discuss,” she said, going on about the tenant in my parents’ house.

  “Why?”

  “She sings and dances. She performs every Saturday night.” My grandmother rearranged a few pieces of silver in the china cabinet. “She doesn’t have any talent, but what everybody objects to … I don’t think I’ll go into it.”

  “What?”

  “She’s common. You know—has no sense of what’s proper.”

  “Like what?”

  My grandmother lic
ked her lips and glanced at me. More than anything, I think, she wanted to pass things on: her silver, her opinions, the arrangement of the world in her lifetime. And here was a perfect spot to pass me what she called pearls. “Well-bred people don’t step over boundaries,” she said. “At least when they do, they do it on purpose. Miss Norris does things without even knowing she shouldn’t.”

  I think she left that intentionally vague.

  Then she turned on a light in the living room because she kept the drapes closed. “I halfway hope that girl’ll marry that man she’s carrying on with now—and they’ll move away. Though with my luck, they’ll marry and he’ll move in. Might as well—he just about lives there now, anyway. Your mother would just die.”

  She went on about the year I hadn’t been there and how much she envied me for having left. She considered Coldwater a dump, and the tragedy of her life was having to live in it. She seemed to always be homing in on shortcomings—if not someone else’s, then Coldwater’s. She said it was just her luck to have to live in a place where not one person knew what the Brandenburg Concertos were or could speak a sentence without having to stop and spit a wad or suck his teeth. “I’d give almost anything to trade places with you,” she said. “This town’s got about as much sense as the head on a wooden nickel. I’ve tried and tried to get a beautification plan started and I get about as much response as Miss Pankhurst at the public library.” She pshawed. “The worst thing about this town is its apathy. Why I’ve written four letters to the editor about that outhouse.…”

  Suddenly my grandfather hollered outside. It sounded as if he was pulling the sides off the porch. We were finished setting the table, anyway, and we went to find out.