Playing With Matches (17 page)

“Yes and no.”

“Mom!”

“You’ll see.”

I’m a wreck. And to make driving harder, it appears yesterday’s storm cut a wide path along the coast. The season has come early, and that does not bode well. Through downed trees and debris, we make our way east to the lazy Pearl. In spite of attaching
itself to the gulf, the mouth of the river is pure trickery—wide and dark, with forests of dead cypress and green slime that pricks the nose. On the eastern bank of the Pearl is a two-lane, and it’s there that I suck a long breath. And turn north.

Power lines are down, blocking the roads, creating detour after detour. Twenty miles on, in Carterville, shingles have blown off. Most houses squat under blue-plastic tarps while people live on their lawns and beside the road, under lean-tos and canvas canopies. A sign on one downtown storefront reads
GENERATORS—SOLD OUT
.

After that, the road is narrow and hilly, cut through miles of pine forest. Here, insects swarm in tandem, flying in our faces and up our noses. I wonder if the storm has brought them out. They cover our windshield in a thick, dead mass. Even the wipers don’t clear them away. Carefully, we drive into a community, and at one intersection Luz rolls down the window and asks what these bugs are and why they fly in pairs.

An orange-vested worker bats at the things. “Love bugs,” he says, grinning with his mouth closed. He waves us through.

“Very scientific,” Luz says, forlorn. “If I had the right book—”

“I know.” As we’d backed the Honda out, through the downpour, Luz’s
History of Greece
had flapped wetly on the lawn.

In these little towns, it has not taken long for help to arrive. Trucks are parked with their back doors opened up, people working food lines, offering sandwiches and juice and tampons and diapers. Bonfires burn windfall in almost every yard. Patients at a nursing home are lined up on the porch, watching electrical crews, watching smoke rising, watching us. In front of a ruined beauty shop, a woman in pink clam-diggers sits, talking on her cell phone and smoking a cigar. A man with a hammer builds on to his outhouse.

While we drive, Luz and I eat slapped-together sandwiches of peanut butter, but we must find something tempting for Harry. We pull up to a grocery store, where the doors are propped open and the inside is dark. Customers go in and out. No one here seems flustered or panicked without electricity, not the clerk or the shoppers, though the shelves were near bare. Feeling guilty, I buy only four apple-granola bars and a couple of jars of baby-food custard. Our needs are less than other folks’, and I hate to take anything.

In the parking lot, a woman says, “Y’all doin’ okay?” She thrusts a plastic gallon of water at me.

Another hands me a slip of paper. “Here, hon, this’ll get you a quart of milk for the kids.”

I take them both, and collect our quart, which we drink on the spot—all but Harry.

Gasoline, in this town, is limited to five gallons per customer. I top up with the five. North of here, there is almost no traffic. We drive on until a siren whoops behind me, and I think my heart will stop and I’ll die. A cop gets off his motorcycle and comes to my window. My knuckles are white, my throat gone to dust.

“Ma’am?” he says. “After this next town, there’s no gas for fifty miles. Just wanted to warn y’all.”

I nod faintly and keep my breathing steady and tell him we’re fine. Plenty in the tank. I sit there until he gets back on his motorcycle and rides away. Then I blink away tears and creep along. Behind me, Luz gives Harry water from a jiggling plastic spoon.

By that night, we’ve driven out of the damn bugs and have arrived at Cain’s Crossing. This place has dried up. A double row of store windows are painted over. Railroad tracks run along a grassy strip in the middle of town. I wonder if trains even come
here anymore. In one day, we’ve gone only a hundred and twelve miles.

The heat has been terrible, but it’s cooler in the evening. We’ve agreed to sleep in the car tonight—not that we have a choice. There’s not a motel room to be had. We’re fortunate to find a city park, where people are camping, and we get in line for the toilets. A woman tells me, “Night before last, tornado come through, touched down, took my kitchen plum off, that’s what.”

I tell her,
So sorry
, usher my kids into the john, latch the door, and we three take turns over the hole. Harry pees too, and I take that as a good sign.

Under the trees, there’s a raft of kids piled on two swings and a slide. They’re laughing and shrieking and playing chase while Harry holds my hand, eyes shuttered down, and he sucks his thumb. I sit in back with the kids and spoon vanilla custard inside Harry’s lip, but it oozes down his chin and onto his shirt.

On concrete tables, folks’ groceries are laid out in inventory—boxes of dry cereal and crackers, some cans—and a few grills are lit, sleeping bags and blankets waiting to be unrolled. It would be a refugee camp except, for these kids, this seems to be a lark.

“Luz,” I say. “You guys want to walk around for a bit?”

“No,” she says, speaking also for Harry. “Get in the car, Mom.”

She’s scared too.

“Let me stand here a minute. I need to stretch my legs.”

We roll the windows down and lock the doors in senseless contradiction. I lay the passenger seat down as far as it will go and tuck Harry in there, giving Luz the back. It still isn’t enough to accommodate her long legs. She sleeps fitfully. I can hear her hard breathing. Finally, I wake her and hand back her inhaler. I lean over the seat and stroke her dark hair.

They want to be at home, of course they do. But the roof fell in—in more ways than one—and we cannot go back.

When Luz is asleep, I listen to the trill and call of night things in the trees.

Over the years, the Sisters of Mercy have created a kind of stillness in my mind. We address that quietude as “coming to Call.” It’s preceded by prayer.

Thank you for the lives that were spared in this town, for my children—their strong bodies and their beautiful minds, for the Sisters of Mercy who’ll wonder where I am
.

I’m not sure that my little guy is all that healthy, but in the last couple of decades I have learned that we humans chant things into being. We summon them to us. It’s the law of attraction. Heartfelt thanks, given in advance, sets gears in motion and allows things to come. I learned this the hard way: to plead with God only affirms the need.

Where Thomas is concerned, though, I’m hurt and angry, and while I know that dwelling on this will only bring more suffering, right now I want to wallow in my pain.

Thomas is a teacher. I see his lying eyes and his cheating heart and all the other things people have ever written or sung about. I’ve gone from numbness to dreaming up fifteen methods for killing the co-ed. I’ve got to get some sleep. Long into the night, I search for ways to bend myself around the steering wheel without also banging my knee on the gearshift.

Thank you, God, for Harry’s voice. His four-year-old voice. I know it’s in there
.

I mourn the collapse of my marriage, hope for rescue trucks to drive up with ladders and hoses, men with hammers to patch things up. I wipe my face with the heels of my hands. And I listen to Harry suck his thumb.

24

A
round three o’clock, we arrive in False River.

The liquor store is now a drive-through. The electricity’s on here, which allows the shack to live up to its bargain:
BANANA DACKAREES TWO/FIVE
. Six or eight cars and a pickup are in line. I do not see a single highway patrol or sheriff’s department car. It will take two minutes for word to get around.

The barbershop has burned to the ground—recently, judging by the blackened mess, the stinging stench, and puddles of water that haven’t yet dried in the heat. The Ninety-Nine Cent Store is now Family Dollar.

The schoolhouse still stands, but the front door and the windows have been boarded up and spray-painted with profane things. Miss Izzie Thorne’s plywood steps are gone. Everything else has been sucked down and covered over with the green kudzu.

Harry’s asleep in the back. Luz is beside me, not saying a thing. I hold my breath and turn onto Potato Shed Road.

I never realized how narrow this asphalt lane was—but, then, I have never driven it. The field on the right is an expanse of browning stubs where corn has been harvested. On the right, a
couple of homes have been torn down, or have fallen down, and are just a chimney or two. I try to think who lived here long ago, but my heart is banging, and my memory is mush.

Some porches are collapsing under rusted washers, and yards are littered with rubber tires and lidless camping coolers, plastic toys, and, in one case, a trampoline. Gardens have gone to seedlings and weed. Was our lane always like this? Were our neighbors poor white trash? Were we?

Jerusha’s, of course, is the last in the line before the quarter-mile to the prison, and flowers are planted all around, in old coffee cans, plastic bowls, and ceramic pots. I pull into a short driveway, next to a blue Kia. My lungs ache; my chest hurts. I try not to look at the guard towers up at Hell’s Farm, the big central brick building, or the rolls of wire that wink in the down-turning sun. I look, instead, at the red salvia planted around a front door we never used. And I think,
Let home be where they take you in
.

I get out of the car and lift Harry and walk Luz around to the back of the house, see the willow and the big mossy oaks along the slow river, a new domino table that nearly makes me weep. I’m carrying a sleeping Harry, his long legs dangling and his face sweaty at my neck.

The screen door opens.

Auntie comes down the steps, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Behind her is an older Miss Shookie, her flat face set in a permanent frown.

Auntie’s hair is mostly gray. She’s a little thinner but still tall and straight and looking me square in the eyes.

She puts her arms out and says, “You give me that baby.”

25

I
leave the parlor where Auntie’s rocking Harry, because it’s more than I can bear to see. We’ve drunk glass after glass of sweet tea, said stilted
howdy
s and almost nothing more. In the kitchen, Luz is watching Bitsy. If it is possible, Cousin has only grown larger over the years. She wears a purple muumuu, and I can no longer see where one part of her leaves off and the other begins. On the drainboard she butters slices of bread and sprinkles powdered sugar on top—something to hold her till meal time, I guess. Bitsy hands a slice to Luz—an offering that nearly bends me in half.

Auntie’s got something roasting in the oven. She gets up, leaving Harry curled on the cushions of her chair, and I wonder if, in all my years, I ever had the privilege of sitting there alone. I excuse myself and go out to perch on the back steps. I have not yet had to offer explanations.

My stomach’s wrenched tight.

In the last few years I lived here, every day seemed a week long. I recall how I found some solace in baking. The rest of the time I moved as though blind. I did my homework, and at night
I read until my eyes were so tired, I thought they’d jump out of my head.

I was invited to a party once, and because Auntie’d bought me a new dress, I went. The house was crowded and blaring with music. Kids passed secret things in the kitchen and danced in ways that bumped breasts and ground hips—I would have danced, too, if anyone had asked me. Instead, I sat in a corner and drank 7Up, a little pile of crackers in my hand. At ten o’clock we all moved toward a bedroom, where they were playing a game, going into the closet in pairs.

We’ll close the door; it’ll be fun. Come on, Clea
. They grinned like cats and wanted me to go first. But the music banged in my ears and hurt my head.
Beware the ho’ with the painted do’ …

I walked home in the dark, sat by the river until after midnight, then went up to my bed.

Finally, on a Saturday, Auntie came to the attic and said,
Clea June, get on your feet and find you a job
.

I did just that. I started working after school at the Ninety-Nine Cent Store. It required almost no thinking. The new manager was a short, fat, and fussy man with a screwy haircut. He said I seemed smart enough to run his cash register and give customers their change. I pushed buttons on that machine from four in the afternoon until closing at nine. Sometimes I wished there were words on those keys, so I could ring up receipts that said who I was.

Thank you
, I told them, as I’d been instructed.
You come back, hear?

When there was nobody to check out, I pulled a bottle of cleaner and a roll of paper towels from under my counter, and I made clean circles on those big front windows. I moved a rack of
houseplants there, and the philodendron and tiny violets grew like crazy. I brought over the garden trowels and boxes of plant food too, and arranged them in a semicircle and stacked flowerpots and bags of potting soil. And I asked each customer,
Find everything okay?

Every night I’d come home to find my dinner kept warm on the back of the stove. Those last years, I hardly ever saw Claudie or her twiggy sister, and I never saw Finn. He’d left the oak tree, and we heard that he lived in a shack in the woods, and he seldom came out. I guess he mourned his daddy that much.

Here in the yard now, I see that a few tree limbs have cracked and split from the oaks. I recall that the big one was Finn’s tree, how he leapt among those high branches. The first time I saw him, he was hanging upside down. The rope ladder is gone too, but a couple of planks from the old platform remain.

Auntie pokes her head out the door. “Come help me with supper,” she says.

“Where’s Luz?”

“Upstairs in the attic.”

I wonder if my bed is still there—my dresser, my things. “I’ll get her.”

“Leave her be,” Auntie says. “We’ll call her when it’s ready.”

Miss Shookie is spooning up string beans with lengths of purple onion.