Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  I guess, too, if I were really pushed to admit it, a lot of my anger toward her was just some of my anger toward my parents and The Bust-up. I might never stop being mad at the part of the world that I knew I could not fix; but for that day, it seemed that the biggest tongue in the world had just been set down and stuck out at what neither Ezekiel nor I could talk back to or do much about.

  My grandfather and I walked up the sun porch steps for the Sunday dinner that Louella had cooked. I was still half-afraid something awful would happen to me as punishment for all I’d done. But Joel wasn’t worried, and his mood was catching. I figured if things got too hot for me, I could always join up with the Jews and become one. There didn’t seem to be anything about that I’d mind.

  The next Friday, my picture appeared on the front page of the Coldwater Gazette. Joel was holding my hand, his face turned toward mine, the word “Pool” poking out his lips like a disconnected kiss. My grandmother was embarrassed. I was a little embarrassed myself, but mostly proud, and tickled.

  The sheriff hired Ezekiel to haul the outhouse out of the middle of Main Street, and Ezekiel took it out to Hersham’s Farm. The article about my grandmother’s annual Missionary Society luncheon didn’t appear in the paper. Mr. Rankin wouldn’t print it. But a lot of editorials and letters were written about the outhouse. In fact, there was a lot of community interest in it. Some people took my grandmother’s side, and some took Mr. Rankin’s side. A lot of people thought my grandmother was a heroine for showing up that fork-tongued liberal Rankin. But that worried her even more; for well-bred ladies never got in the middle of a controversy like that.

  Since my grandmother’s character was at stake, she said that she would wait until the next year when the Mexicans came again. Then she would find that Pedro and ask him, straight-out. Of course I knew that Pedro would say—quite truthfully—he didn’t know a thing about it.

  The medical licensing inspector came sooner than we expected. He arrived a few days after Halloween. My grandfather had discovered the broken window and the stolen medicine with the surprised relief of one of his patients learning his heart attack had been gas pains. Ezekiel was hired to fix the window, and my grandfather told no one anything.

  Without my grandmother even knowing that the inspector was there, my grandfather set out his account books. And I stood, mum, proud, and pleased while the inspector looked around in the office, bent over the mixing tubs, put his hands on the tubes and stuff, which only my grandfather and I knew the use for.

  Then after my grandfather showed him the storeroom and the empty shelves except for a handful of bottles, which my grandfather said were “all I have left now,” my grandfather and I walked to the Rexall’s for root beer floats.

  The inspector even drove around town to stop on different streets and talk to people. He asked if anyone had bought any of Dr. Maulden’s medicines lately. When he walked down Louella’s street and knocked on her door as well as on her neighbors’, no one said anything. Apparently a lot of medicine had been handed about in that section of town on the night the outhouse had been moved. I learned about that one day from Louella when I found her in the kitchen rubbing the Outside Medicine on her bursitis. She said that Ezekiel had given her the bottle. I knew then that Ezekiel and his helpers had passed my grandfather’s medicines on to whomever wanted it. But no one was going to say anything about what they’d come upon, free. So when the inspector found out that someone had a bottle, or even a whole supply, whoever owned it could honestly say he hadn’t paid a thing for it. My grandfather never reported the theft, never even mentioned it, despite the fact that, in his opinion, a lot of valuables were missing.

  The inspector spent the night at Mrs. Harris’s rooming house and in the morning came to our house, causing a stir because my grandmother was still in her dressing gown. She was worn out by the Missionary Society luncheon and the outhouse. But graciously she invited him in and had Louella pour him coffee and then went to get my grandfather who was shaving with Toulouse in the bathroom.

  I could hear Toulouse screaming, “Up yours,” as my grandmother opened the bathroom door and said, sort of loud: “There’s a man here who says he’s with the State Medical Licensing Board. What in Sam Hill is going on, Horace?”

  My grandfather dried his face, put up his razor, and went into the living room. I pulled out a chair in the kitchen and sat down to pour Wheaties.

  The inspector sipped his coffee and looked at my grandfather. “Well, I didn’t find any evidence of medicine—or rather, homemade medicine—in your office. And your books are clean.”

  Putting her hand on her heart, my grandmother breathed shallow. My grandfather called for Louella to bring sausage and biscuits.

  “Nothing wrong?” My grandmother barely whispered it.

  The inspector looked at my grandfather. “I don’t see any reason why you can’t continue your practice as long as your own medicine is not prescribed. And there’s no evidence that it is. I didn’t see anything out of order. There are big mixing tubs and equipment. But they don’t look recently used.”

  My grandfather passed the biscuits.

  “There was only one thing I saw that was troublesome. But it’s not my jurisdiction.”

  My grandmother put her hand across the top button of her robe and quickly asked, “What was that?”

  He reached to catch the butter and jelly dripping out of his biscuit. “There’s a toilet hole for an outhouse exposed near the back door—a public health problem—but, as I said, that’s not my jurisdiction.”

  My grandfather laughed. My grandmother turned her head and pshawed.

  The inspector left after a second cup of coffee and a few more of Louella’s biscuits. It was no more than a matter of a few hours before my grandmother had contacted the sheriff and had him issue an order to Mr. Rankin to fill in the dangerous outhouse hole, since it was obvious Mr. Rankin was leaving it open for spite. And Ezekiel knocked on the sun porch door, holding a shovel. Mr. Rankin had hired him to fill in the hole. He leaned on his shovel and looked at my grandmother. “Just how you want them lilies on it, Miz Maulden? In a circle?”

  The air grew colder, and the leaves fell. The cotton fields were plowed under for the winter to rest.

  Sometime after the outhouse was moved into the fields at Hersham’s Farm, just before the cotton crop was ready to be picked, the old sign on the front was covered over. And then on the front, a new one was painted: Mexicans Only.

  26.

  New Times

  I sat on the bed, watching Toulouse on the footboard. He tucked one foot up under him and dozed.

  It was the beginning of the Christmas holidays, and I was leaving Coldwater for good. I was giving Toulouse to Gill. He would be here in a few minutes to get him.

  I heard my mother’s car in the drive as she pulled up beside the sun porch. Her voice was high and familiar and excited. “I’m here. Lord-a-mercy! I nearly had a wreck on the Mississippi River Bridge. I guess I was just rushing so. Where’s my girl?”

  I sat on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, listening to my mother. She was going to travel to promote her record. Most of the year, I would stay with her. When she was away, I would live with my father. I would be split like a banana under ice cream. It wouldn’t be fun. But I could stand it.

  Before I could even put Toulouse in his cage and walk out with him into the living room, she had come to find me. She busted into my room, calling my name. We hugged, squashing Toulouse between us; and he squawked out a word that made my mother blush. “Shoot!” she said. “I haven’t heard that in a month of Sundays!” We looked at each other and giggled. I guess Toulouse was the first dirty joke we’d shared.

  “Sally!” My grandmother’s voice came from the living room. “Mr. Williams is here for that bird.”

  I wasn’t used to thinking of Gill as Mr. Williams. And then my grandmother added: “Praise the Lord!”

  I walked out, carrying Toulouse’s cage.

  “I’ll take re
al good care of him.” Gill looked at me and grinned. He winked. At times like this, I usually hated winks. But this one wasn’t as if for a little kid, or tacky or anything like that. It was Gill’s way of hugging me.

  “I know you will,” I said. I passed the cage over to him.

  “You take care of yourself now, you hear?”

  “I will.”

  My mother and I drove out of Coldwater with me turned to the car window, looking out at my grandparents and Louella and Gill, waving, and then at Main Street. In the reflection of the store windows, it seemed that I could see people I knew. On the sidewalk some farmers stood, talking, leaning against the storefronts. Early that November I had run into Sam like that—passing him on the street when he had his hands full with a bag of groceries—Julie and Ellen with him.

  He’d stopped and looked at me. “Hey, girl.”

  I’d said back: “Hi.”

  “How’s things?”

  “Fine.”

  He reached in his bag and pulled out sacks of lemon drops and packages of gum, offering them.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking one.

  He looked at me, smiling. One side of his mouth slid upward into a half-grin, and it seemed that in the steadiness of the way he looked at me, I could see all the love, real and now understood, still there as I knew it always would be.

  They walked off—he and Julie and Ellen. I stood on the sidewalk watching them. In my mind, lots of times I pictured them, and when I did, I saw Sam as part of a family who had fun every damn minute of the day.

  My mother’s car bumped up over the railroad tracks with dust flowing out behind us. I had Joel’s address in my suitcase; I’d probably write him almost every day. He was planning to come to Memphis, and we were going to go up on the Peabody’s roof and dance and stay out half the night, and who knew what else.

  After the holidays, I was going to a high school in Memphis. I would have to begin in the middle of the year, which wouldn’t be easy. But I was like those butterflies that came in the fall to flit over the field in Coldwater, to light on turnip greens, and move on—their final destination Mexico, I learned—getting passed on to me real well, I guess, my grandmother’s belief in fascinating facts. Because I found out that the butterflies were stopping over for a rest, would gather their strength in sun-warmed fields before moving on. And they were like the strength that sat in me, new and unexpected, silent but felt.

  The water tower was tall and silver in the distance. I watched it grow smaller where it seemed to straddle the end of the alley. And then I joined my mother on a song with a chorus that would last all the way there, or until one of us went nuts and cried, “Kings.”

  On the notes of our voices, that long and crazy year played through my mind. And as it did, I laughed, thinking of how much—in one way or another—could be passed on. Including love.

  P.S. Please don’t write me for any of the Inside Medicine. I can’t remember the recipe.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 1989 by Shelley Fraser Mickle.

  All rights reserved

  Parts of this novel were published as “The Year of the Outhouse,” Cimarron Review, 1978, and “The Queen of Hearts,” The South Carolina Review, 1982.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA is available.

  eISBN 9781565128828