Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels

by Susan Gabriel

  “If I started screaming, I might not stop,” Rose says, leaning into the door.

  “That’s everybody’s fear,” Queenie says, “but from my experience, you do it for a while and then you just get all tuckered out. It’s like sprinting to a finish line. Not that I know anything about sprints.” Queenie smiles and pats her thighs. “These old gals wouldn’t know what to do if I took off running somewhere.” Her giggle turns to a laugh.

  “Has anyone ever seen you scream?” Rose asks.

  Queenie grins. “Lord yes, honey. Sometimes a car full of people will pass me while I’m yelling my lungs out, so I just smile at them and wave. If they’re from Savannah, they probably don’t think anything of it. You’re allowed to be crazy here, as you well know. And if it’s tourists from out of state? Well, I figure I’ve just given them a good story to tell their friends when they get back home.” She gives Rose a wide smile.

  “You are so much braver than I ever could be,” Rose says.

  “It’s not about bravery. It’s about not caring what people think,” Queenie says. “Besides,” she begins again, “I may be responsible for Savannah being one of the premiere tourist destinations in the South. Maybe everybody’s heard of that crazy woman down in Savannah screaming her head off in her car while crossing that bridge, and they come here to see it for themselves.” Queenie cackles her signature laugh. “Hell, for all my efforts, I may be getting a key to the city any day now,” she adds.

  When she opens her mouth and pretends to scream, Rose doubles over in the front seat trying to catch her breath. Her story has worked. Rose looks rejuvenated. Laughter does that. It’s like a secret elixir Queenie uses whenever life gets too heavy. And it gets heavy a lot.

  After their laughter fades, they settle into a comfortable silence. The bridge is now in her rear-view mirror. Queenie likes the idea of having Savannah behind her, at least for a while. The road to the barrier islands gives her breathing room. She doesn’t have to worry what rich white people think about her out here. Different rules apply. You are judged by the quality of person you are, not by big houses and fancy cars.

  Rose sniffs something in the air. For a second, she looks like Iris on the scent of a rogue fragrance. “Do you smell fried chicken?” Rose asks.

  Queenie laughs a short laugh. “Well I don’t see any harm in telling Iris’s secret now,” she says.

  “Mother has a secret?”

  “Your mother has lots of secrets. Too many to get into right now. Of course your mama’s secrets never made it into that stupid book. That would defeat the whole purpose. That book is all about having power over prominent families in Savannah. But if they knew some of Iris’s secrets? Oh my. Now that would cause a stink.” Queenie chuckles, enjoying her pun.

  “Tell me the one you’re thinking about,” Rose says, her eyes are bright with what could be mischief.

  “Well, it seems your mother has a thing for Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Queenie says.

  “Mother eats junk food?”

  “Uh huh.” Queenie smacks her lips together, as if the secret is delicious.

  “I thought she was on this strict diet and couldn’t eat anything except water buffalo or something.”

  “The jury is still out about your mother’s special dietary needs,” Queenie says. “But it seems the Colonel’s secret recipe is the exception.”

  “Are you saying Mother has been faking it all these years?” Rose asks. “What about the Gullah curse?”

  “I’m not sure anymore,” Queenie says. “Mama doesn’t talk much about her spells. But if Iris is sneaking around eating KFC, she may be causing some of it herself.”

  “It’s hard to picture Mother going to a fast food restaurant,” Rose says.

  “Let me just say, I found a bucket of bones crammed under the front seat week before last. Picked clean like a buzzard had eaten them.”

  Rose’s soft giggle grows into a full-fledged laugh, and before they know it Queenie and Rose are laughing so hard Queenie has to pull over to the side of the road.

  “For the first time in my life I wish I wore Depends,” Queenie says, which causes more laughter.

  Smiles linger on their faces when Queenie pulls back onto the highway and drives east toward the ocean, to an area where her mother’s family has lived for seven generations. She signals to turn and then drives down an unpaved road. Pine trees line the right side with an open field on the left. Sand billows behind the Town Car like choppy waves made by a motor boat.

  “I’ve never known anyone who is a hundred years old,” Rose says.

  “Sometimes I think Mama’s winding down. She spends hours looking out over the ocean now. Perfectly content.”

  “I owe her a lot,” Rose says. “I don’t know how I would have survived my childhood without her.”

  “Well, she loves you like you are her very own child,” Queenie offers.

  “I never asked if that bothered you,” Rose says.

  “Of course not,” Queenie says. “Mama has enough love to circle the globe twice. I never felt cheated. Not for one instant.”

  Early on in life, Queenie learned to share her mother. People always needed her. If not for spells and cures, then for advice on everyday things. She has frequent visitors, some of them total strangers and some of them the people her mama looks out for. She is a mother hen with a lot of chicks.

  The ocean waits in the distance—the blue-gray water fading toward an invisible horizon. Rose rolls down her window and leans out to smell the salty air. Seconds later, Queenie parks the Lincoln in the backyard of her mother’s house. Flowers are everywhere and overflow their makeshift containers: large truck tires, a child’s rusty red wagon, a washtub filled to the brim with purple, white and yellow petunias.

  Queenie and Rose take the wooden walkway to the house. Her mama sits in her rocker on the front porch and smiles as if she’s been expecting them. Over the years, her mother’s skin has darkened from the sun. Queenie has always been lighter skinned than her. Every generation of her family seems to have a little more white mixed in.

  As they approach, Old Sally claps her hands with joy. She looks weathered but strong, her gray hair clipped short, an inch from her scalp. The creases of age on her face make her look wise, an elder of their clan. A strong presence, even in her advanced age, she reminds Queenie of a lighthouse lighting the way for weary travelers, steering them to safety.

  Queenie can’t imagine her mother not being there anymore, and even now she forces the thought away. Yet her mother’s death is as certain as the ocean’s ebb and flow. She squeezes Rose’s hand and leads her up the steps, as though bringing her mama a long-awaited gift. One of Old Sally’s daughters has come home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Old Sally

  “She be getting closer,” Old Sally says aloud. “I can feel her.”

  Old Sally stands and faces the sea. The knowing starts out as a vibration in the center of her chest that grows in strength as Rose nears. It won’t be long now before she can see her sweet Rose again.

  Children get unlucky sometimes with who their parents are and it creates bad medicine, like chemicals that shouldn’t be mixed. As soon as Old Sally realized how bad the medicine was between Rose and her mother, she knew Rose was hers to watch after.

  Old Sally glances out over the ocean that feels like an old friend, its waves racing to pound the shore. The rhythm of the tides is etched in her. To Old Sally the land is living. The waterways and marshland along the coast are living. The oak trees are living. For Old Sally everything she touches, everything she sees is alive. Even her Gullah ancestors, who some would say have gone out with the tide of time, are still alive and talk to her.

  A memory is carried in on the breeze. Her grandmother, Sadie, was a slave for the Temple family until freed in 1865. Old Sally touches the small broach pinned to her simple dress that used to be Sadie’s. Sally was only twenty when she learned the Gullah spells and potions from her grandmother, who was well into her eig
hties at the time.

  “I be remembering what you taught me, Granny Sadie,” she says.

  The Gullah ways are as much a part of Old Sally as her heart that ticks away inside of her. She mixes medicines to protect the people she loves from bad things that might happen to them.

  On the porch of the house she grew up in, Old Sally rocks in her wooden rocker. She lives twenty miles north of Savannah on a small island off the South Carolina coast. A place where the Atlantic Ocean bathes the islands and coastland, where waterways work their way inland like fingers grasping to hold onto the edge of the coast. A place where pungent marshes are home to shrimp, crab and alligator; where oysters grow in terraced colonies like pearl necklaces scooped along the neck of the land. A place where osprey and cranes search the brackish water for their supper while sea gulls squawk and hover above shrimp boats heading out to sea. The beauty here is seductive. It is deep and sometimes dark. Just like the Temple secrets that have begun to float up from the depths and come to light.

  A melody comes to her. She hums a song taught to her by her grandmother about the crossing between this life and the next. A bridge we all cross, some early and some later.

  “Iris Temple be making that crossing soon and I been called on to help,” she says, as if her grandmother Sadie is sitting right next to her. “I remember everything you taught me, Granny, and it would please me if you could help, too.”

  For centuries, the Gullah people have carried the mysteries of life. In addition to being guides between the two worlds, her ancestors wove sweet grass baskets. They made medicine from herbs and grew all their own food. When it came time to give birth, they delivered their own babies. They fished the surrounding waters with nets they made themselves. They lived off ocean and land.

  Another memory comes. Memories visit her often these days so she can review her long life. This memory is from thirty five years earlier, in 1965, a time when certain things were set in motion that are about to be made complete. The scene sweeps over her like a warm ocean wave, and she closes her eyes to receive it. The voices of children come.

  “Let’s go, children,” Old Sally says. She ushers Rose and Violet into the back seat of the Temple car.

  Around the age of sixty, the ‘old’ was added to Sally’s name. She never complained. Having worked as a housekeeper all her life and raised three children of her own, there are days she feels older than the land she lives on. Her youngest, Ivy, still lives with her. Lately, everybody calls Ivy, Queenie, a nickname given to her by Rose and Violet that has stuck like the Savannah humidity.

  Queenie drives them to the island. Mister Oscar is good about letting her use one of their cars if she needs it. He has a fondness for Queenie that Old Sally and her daughter don’t talk about.

  Just like her mama was and her mama before her, Old Sally is the Temple maid, housekeeper and nanny. Iris Temple and Mister Oscar have two children. Edward is nearly grown and away at boarding schools most of the year and Rose is ten years of age. Rose is Iris Temple’s only daughter. A child handed over to Old Sally to care for when she was days old.

  Today, Iris Temple is busy with meetings and Old Sally has the time to bring the girls to her house on the shore. She loads her ironing into the trunk, so as not to get behind in her chores. The drive is familiar and comforting, like putting on slippers after wearing shoes all day. As they approach the island she feels her breath deepen. This coastline is where Old Sally feels the most connected to her ancestors.

  After they arrive, the girls run to the beach to build sandcastles and Old Sally opens the doors and windows of her house to catch the ocean breezes. In the kitchen, she refills a coke bottle with water and twists the sprinkler cap on the top so she can moisten the wrinkled sheets before ironing them. A portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shares a wall with photos of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. She greets him, calling him Martin.

  “I miss you, Martin,” Old Sally says, making the leap from then to now. “A lot of people do.”

  As she rocks, the boards of the porch crackle to the beat of the rocking chair, adding background noise for the memory. Her eyes remain closed as she travels back to the past.

  Old Sally turns on a burner on the stove and stirs the roots soaking in a pan. The water has already turned as black as the swamps where she collects them. She is conjuring up a new batch of a protection spell for Rose. Protection spells were one of her mother’s specialties. Old Sally’s mother lived past the age of 90 as an independent woman, still chopping her own firewood, washing clothes in a tin tub and cooking on a cast-iron stove. Old Sally has this same sturdiness.

  From the front porch, she keeps an eye on the three children in her charge—two brown and one white, one older and two younger—while they build a sand castle on the beach. Although Queenie is no longer a child, she is still hers to protect.

  Violet, the youngest, is six years old. She is Old Sally’s granddaughter, with a complicated history, who Old Sally has agreed to raise. Old Sally will raise up whoever needs rearing. It is in her nature. It doesn’t matter if they are her own blood or not.

  Without warning, tears come as she remembers her daughter, Maya, who died the same year Violet was born. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, the pain is still there. The only thing that made that year bearable was Violet’s birth a few months before.

  Earlier that morning, Old Sally braided Violet’s hair and added colored beads to the end of the tightly woven rows. Despite her circumstances of coming into this world, Violet is a happy child. She often sings or hums, the beads in her braids keeping the beat as she moves her head with made up melodies. Old Sally often finds her with her head back, eyes closed, feet stomping and hands clapping as she hums and sways with the music. Someone much older resides in her. Someone who has stories to tell.

  Rose Temple might as well be an orphan, the way her mother treats her. If Old Sally lives to be a hundred, she will never understand how somebody like Iris Temple, given so much in this world, can be so stingy with her love. The ancestral line of Temple mothers are like a drought that changed the landscape from the lush low country marshland into a desert.

  Queenie, Old Sally’s grown daughter, her waist and hips already thick with good eating, helps the girls carry bucket loads of sea water to fill the moat around the sand castle. In some ways Queenie is like a girl herself, though grownup things have happened to her. Secret things.

  Old Sally turns off the boiling roots on the stove and makes egg salad sandwiches and sweet tea. From the front porch she waves and calls the girls to lunch. It is spring and the perfect temperature with the sea breezes blowing. Something sweet is in the air, blooming in the dunes. She closes her eyes to identify the flowers but it is gone before she can catch it.

  Hearing the call, the girls run through the dunes and up the steps to Old Sally’s small beach house painted white with its blue trim to scare off evil spirits. The girls’ bodies and bathing suits are covered with sand. Queenie follows, her sleeveless cotton dress blowing in the sea breeze as she brushes sand off her brown arms and legs.

  “Queenie, please wash the girls off before they come inside,” Old Sally says.

  “Yes, mama,” Queenie says. She uses the green garden hose at the side of the house to rinse them off and the girls squeal in ecstasy as Queenie covers the end with her thumb and sends water spraying in all directions. She can count on Queenie to get them giggling.

  Old Sally returns to her ironing in the front room.

  If I hurry I can get one more piece done before lunch, she thinks.

  The sound of Rose’s laughter makes her smile. She is much too serious for a child, nagged by her mother for every little thing—the way she walks, the way she talks, the way she should always be doing something other than what she’s doing.

  At least out here she be getting a little peace today, Old Sally thinks.

  The two younger girls wrap themselves in towels hanging on the porch railings and come into
the living room where Old Sally is ironing her fourth full sheet of the day. She has four more to go. At home she likes to iron in front of her three large windows, where she can keep an eye on the sea. She sprinkles the wrinkled sheet with the sprinkler bottle. Her iron sizzles as it hits the damp sheets. Steam rises. Sweat dots Old Sally’s brow.

  Rose leans into Old Sally’s wide hip. Birthing hips, she likes to call them, perfect for bringing children into the world. She smoothes Rose’s wet hair with her hand and notices again how thin she is. Old Sally is always trying to fatten Rose up. Yet Rose could eat chicken and dumplings every day of her life and stay skinny. She’s tall for her age, too, most all legs. Her mother keeps her hair styled and permed like some kind of prize-winning poodle and Rose always tugs at it to try to make it straight.

  “Baptize me,” Rose says. She stands nearly as tall as Old Sally’s shoulder and looks up at her, her eyes filled with playful pleading. She asks Old Sally to do this every time she irons, like it is the food she needs most.

  Old Sally nods and Rose turns toward the sea and bows her head about to receive a sacred anointing. When Old Sally sprinkles the water on Rose’s head, the child’s laughter rides on the salty breeze that sweeps through the house.

  Violet begs to be next. Old Sally repeats her christening ritual and Violet and Rose collapse in giggles on the sofa. Queenie shakes her head, as if she is too old for such nonsense, so Old Sally aims a few sprinkles in her direction, too. Her daughter, who also seems much too serious these days, laughs a little.

  “Lunch time,” Old Sally announces.

  The four of them enter the kitchen where the food is set out on her round wooden table. The girls and Queenie each eat two sandwiches that Old Sally has cut into triangles like finger sandwiches at the fancy parties Iris Temple throws. Big slices of watermelon are piled high on a plate in the middle of the table and they devour these, too, collecting all the seeds in a bowl for Old Sally to plant later. The thirsty girls drink a gallon of sweet iced tea to go along with lunch, a slice of lemon perched on the lip of each glass. Meanwhile, Old Sally reheats some shrimp and grits from her dinner the night before and then joins the girls.