Below is a selection from a manuscript we absolutely love that we are
currently sending out on submission.
Marjorie Kemper's Between The Devil & Mississippi asks what happens when
two neighboring towns separated by class and race clash over a lost child:
At the Phelps' house Adelle slept in a small bedroom next to the back porch.
Besides being Adelle's bedroom it served the Phelps as an interim storage
room for things they didn't use but weren't ready to give away or put up in
the attic. Besides Adelle's narrow bed, it contained an old set of the
doctor's golf clubs, a dressmaker's dummy corresponding to Margaret Phelps'
pre-Susan-measurements, a bureau and toys out-grown by the children.
Because of the heat Adelle had shoved her bed under the room's
double windows so she could get the breeze at night. When there was one.
The night air coming in at these windows smelled of dust, just as the night
air in Rose O' Sharon did, but here in Myrtle there wasn't the scent of
pine. There weren't that many pines in Myrtle: they’d long ago been chopped
down and replaced by ornamental trees-- live oaks, magnolias, tulip-trees
and red-bud. But like Rose O' Sharon, Myrtle had no street lighting, so to
Adelle's mind the two towns were most alike at night, and once in bed she
pretended she was home. When the house was asleep, Adelle lay and watched
the sky. She liked to look up through the old oak's branches and watch the
thin clouds sailing across the moon -- the same moon which hung over Rose O'
Sharon.
At least a couple of times a week the phone rang in the middle
of the night for the doctor. He had an extension by his bed, and he
answered these night-calls himself. Adelle would wake, then listen for a
moment, and if she heard the doctor opening and shutting the wardrobe doors
in his room, signifying he was getting dressed, Adelle got up and heated the
coffee. She always kept two cups saved back after supper for this
eventuality.
On this particular night she heard the phone ring and then the
water running in the front bathroom, so she put on her robe and went into
the kitchen to heat the doctor's coffee. This was by now a familiar routine
-- the doctor would step into the kitchen, Adelle would hand him his coffee
and he would drink it standing up, then walk out the back door to the
carriage house and his car.
"I may not be back tonight," the doctor told Adelle that night.
"I didn't want to wake Mrs. Phelps, so tell her in the morning that I had to
go out on a call and may go on to the office and hospital afterwards instead
of coming home."
"Yes, sir."
The doctor downed his coffee, put the cup on the drain board,
picked up his medical bag from the table and went out by the back porch.
Adelle rinsed out the cup and returned to bed, but by then she was too wide
awake to go back to sleep. She listened to a whippoorwill calling from the
oak to its mate in the azaleas. Even in the middle of the night, even in
the Phelps' big old house, whose high ceilings and thick walls captured and
held coolness so well, and whose big ceiling fans kept it stirring, it was
hot. Adelle had thrown back even her top sheet. Suddenly a little breeze
came up, the kind of quick rustling breeze that in every other summer of
Adelle's life had foretold a rain shower.
Excited, she got up and went out through the back porch, opened
the screen door and stepped out. Leaves skittered across the walk,
propelled by the phantom breeze. But when she eagerly scanned the sky for
clouds she saw only a few wispy mares' tails, high, high in the sky. Then
as quickly as it had sprung up, the breeze died away and the night was as
heavy and still as before.
She'd started back in to bed when her eyes, now adjusted for
darkness, lit on the doctor's medical bag, big as life, on top of the
washing machine. The doctor had only one of these bags. His name was
written in gold lettering right below its gold clasp. And he always kept it
with him. He walked out the door in the morning with it, and he walked back
in the house with it in the evening. Nights he kept it locked in a special
cabinet.
Hadn't she just watched the doctor place his coffee cup on the
drain board, and pick up this same bag from the table and walk out with it?
She had. But there it was on the washing machine. So tonight's phone call
was never from a patient at all. Adelle wondered who else would be calling
up the doctor in the middle of the night. Whoever it was, it was somebody
he'd needed to lie about.
Adelle went back to bed.
Stay tuned, we will post another selection next week.
