The Queen of Palmyra Read Online Free

midnight. Just don’t go wasting any time, though. Get everybody inside, and the boys in the woods.” Mama says all this in one long whispery breath. She doesn’t look at the man.
    The man lifts his head for the first time. His eyes are heat lightning in the heavy dark. Why is he so vexed? “Nobody round here wasting no time.” His voice, which seemed to rise up out of the ground he stood on and shudder like a palsy through his whole body before coming out of his mouth, breaks off.
    Mama doesn’t say anything back, just pulls the car around the dirt circle to the other side of the shed where a woman nods to us and then pulls the beers from an ice chest and puts them dripping into two little paper sacks, one for each can, and hands them to her through the car window. The woman’s eyes are heavy lidded. She looks downward, in the direction of Mama’s door handle. A branch heavy with old sweet gum balls scrapes my side of the car and makes a star pattern against the little piece of rising moon. I reach out and pull one off and touch and touch again its sharp little points. The air smells like somebody’s boiling collards.
    Then the woman murmurs, “You watch out for yourself, MissMartha. Y’all watch out now.” The words tumble out of her mouth soft and sweet, like a song you’d sing a baby to sleep with.
    “Y’all too. Y’all too,” Mama sings out and takes the cool damp sacks and hands them over to me. I put them on the floor between my feet, making sure not to turn the cans over so they won’t spew up when I open them. She gives a little wave to the woman, and the woman nods and her lips move like she’s saying a little prayer over us the way the preacher does right before we leave church. She and the man start walking up to the cars behind us. They’re pointing to the way out and I can hear them say, “We sold out now. Drive on. Drive on now.”
    Then Mama and I turn out of the dirt in the opposite direction from the way we came in, though after a few miles the road will wind back around to where we made our turn and we’ll hook up with old 78. The cars from the bootlegger are piling up behind us. Later, I will find out that bootleggers always have a way for you to get in and a way for you to get out. In case of a raid. When we make the turn onto the highway and the land opens out into long dark rows of cotton plants, Mama floors the Ford and takes it through its gears hard and long, stretching them out like she’s pushing something big and heavy ahead of the car.
    After a while she looks down at me in the dark and says, like always, “Pop me a top, honey.”
    I put my milk shake between my knees, squeezing it enough to keep it in place but not enough to squish the paper cup and make it overflow. I grope around on the floor for one of the soggy paper sacks that are starting to tear apart and bring out tall boy number one. “Ta da!” I hold it high.
    “Put it down,” Mama says. “Don’t hold it up like that. Don’t go acting the fool.”
    I reach into the glove compartment for the church key Mama keeps hidden in an envelope under the car papers. I puncture oneside of the top of the can just a smidgen the way Mama taught me so that the beer would come out nice and easy on the other side. I punch the other side down good and hard to make a nice V -shaped hole. I take the one sip Mama allows, cough because it burns my throat the way ice sometimes does. A little beer and my own spit spray my arm. The air blowing on it cools me down. I’m thinking what a good life it is that we lead in our own secret ways.
    Of course, all of this except the milk shake at Joe’s is a secret. We are being girls together, and girls do things. And later on, when I got old enough to wonder why my mother would take her little girl to the bootlegger at all, and even later, when I found out that there was a white bootlegger for white people, I didn’t have her to ask. She’d flown the coop by that time. Back then I