Playing With Matches (19 page)

So I did, and gave it to them with a light kiss to both their foreheads—the boy’s sweaty, his mother’s hot and dry—and then I sat on a bench with Sister Anne Benefactor, sharing her cheese sandwich.

“No. They were all denominations and were starting a new group.”

“What kind of group?” Auntie asks.

“A new branch of the sisterhood. To learn to do good works. I—I was surprised that I’ve had to
learn
to do charitable things. I was thinking,
My Aunt Jerusha was the queen of charity
.”

Auntie frowns.

“I was never like you,” I say, intending a compliment. “If I were to become a Sister of Mercy, I knew they’d have to—teach me the ropes. I stayed to help. And went back the next day. Pretty soon I was Sister Clea Gloria.
Gloria
, meaning the bliss of heaven, a circle of light.”

And at last
—at last
—I was no longer a
Shine
.

“Never heard of them,” Shookie says.

I look away, to the place where Mama’s home once stood. A couple of people stand in the grass there. “Other things too. We do driving and housekeeping for shut-ins, take groceries and bedding to people who sleep on the floor, in the park, under bridges. I’ve sat at the prison hospital with fourteen-year-old inmates while they tore at their shackles and gave birth. I rocked crack babies who skidded into the world screaming and shivering.”

I’ve done it again—said more than I meant to. I’m still pretty bad about that.

I get up then, and go in to pour a glass of lemonade while I pull myself together.

More than three thousand Sisters of Mercy, most of them lay-women, are stationed at various camps in the United States, Mexico, and Latin America. So many things I love about them. They work for humanity, and they work on themselves. They know there is a God, and they accept one another. I have become more patient with my Pentecostal sisters, the brimstone-fearing Baptists, and the Catholics, who always seemed the most inexplicable of all.

I like thinking:
Nobody’s wrong
.

One day Sister Anne Benefactor said to me, “Life is a great mystery, Clea. Under the surface all things are connected with everything else. With you. With the Source. And it all understands you. Remember that one well-chosen word can replace fifty others.”

Lord, Lord, what a revelation. I’d spent an entire childhood prattling.

Try as I did, I never mastered stillness. The sisters assured me that almost nobody does. But we do keep on trying. Eventually, those few minutes of silence, twice a day, calmed me to the point
that I was moved to write a book. Thanks to Sister Anne, I chose my words carefully.

Every night in my room, I picked up my pen, and words fell onto the paper.

I wrote about Mama.

I wrote about Claudie.

I wrote about the First and Last Holy Word Church and Millicent Poole, with her thin hair and her army of demons. As I wrote, I learned. Words were tricky things: Nothing else had the power to put a man down. Nothing could pick him up so quickly.

Because I had a degree in English—I barely remembered earning it. Those were the bad days with knives and scissors—the sisters assigned me the job of teaching people to read. I especially loved the older folks, who’d spent a lifetime never knowing the power of words.

And I loved Belize City. Three times a week, Sister Margaret Redemptor, who was also the real thing in the way of nuns—one of three externs assigned to lead us—gathered us all at the foot of the great cathedral’s stone stairs. She ordered us to climb the steps on our knees, pausing on each to reflect on our work and the state of our souls. But my mind grew restless on those steps, and I repeatedly turned my attention from my soul, to the holes in my jeans and the blood and the calluses that had thickened and yellowed on my hands.

We sat at the top, hugging our torn shins. No one had brought alcohol wipes or Band-Aids. But Sister Anne kissed our knees and wept over them. I already had raised silver scars on my body to remind me of my past. Here in Belize, I wasn’t cutting myself anymore.

Before we left for the States, we crept up the steps one last time. At the top I sat, while the others prayed, and I looked out
over the city and the deep, dark forests that lay beyond. Sister Anne came and laid a hand on the braids I still wound around my head.

“In your heart, Sister Clea, which do you think God loves more—you on skinned knees, or the way you open old eyes to written words?”

I rose and went down and sat on the grass and knew that my heart was gloriously filled, like the rich insides of a Boston cream bun. Then we all walked back to town and into the tropic-wet furnace of another day.

I’d decided I would stay with a collective that intended to meet weekly in lower Mississippi. One of our group, whose home had been in Biloxi, was eager to get back. She was divorced and had an infant son who, all this time, she’d carried on her hip and breast-fed under the banana trees. But her mother missed her and wanted to see the child. Instead of thirteen, we would be twelve.

Sister Margaret Redemptor led us back to the United States, crammed in a small boat, and swamped with seawater. We came ashore in Dandridge. Most of us needed housing.
I did
.

And we searched for a place to meet once a week.

We found the back room at Fong’s Chinese Wok.

I carry my lemonade outside.

27

W
hen I take my seat under the willow, there is a silence that no one else fills.

Wheezer reaches out, laying a hand over mine. He’s being kind. But it wasn’t
him
I ran away from in the night. He didn’t wonder where I’d gone or if I was alive. It wasn’t his butcher knife I took.

What was it Auntie had said about Wheezer?

 … The chaplain down at the Farm
.

With the back of my hand I wipe sweat from my face and tell them about the collapse of our house in Dandridge. I skip quickly over Thomas, try to make the story funny—“It was a two-story monstrosity. One repair led to another. We needed contractors and an electrician and inspectors and roofers. We’d each decided to cut back on one activity per month so we could pay for all that.

“Luz was spending too much time over her books, so we’d told her she had to sign up for basketball. Naturally, when we each made one sacrifice, she gave up the team. And Harry—he gave this big sigh and said he’d been thinking about getting a rabbit. But now he would not.”

“So he talked, before,” Wheezer says. “Harry talked.”

“Oh, yes. My goodness, yes. When—when the storm came, we were under the dining room table. I could hear the windows breaking upstairs. The big tree on the lawn came down, and the neighbors’ too. Then these cracks opened up, and the ceiling came apart under Harry’s room, and his things just—fell through. His braided rug, his rabbit, his slippers. The legs of his bed. There was so much dust. After that, he wouldn’t eat or talk. I took him to the hospital, but it was crowded there, and they said trauma. Lots of people with trauma. So we—came here.”

Mercifully, nobody asks me more about my husband.

“Dammit to hell,” Wheezer says. He’s looking at the people next door.

Auntie sits up straighter in her webbed chair. “News does travel.”

On the other side of a half-acre of tall grass, two figures stand where my mother’s house used to be. One is stick-thin, curved of shoulder, and flapping her arms. Knees bent, her arms are raised like she might fly away. She’s squawking and wailing, making the noise of a hundred sick chickens. Her hair is wispy and white, and beneath a cotton gown, her veined legs are a road map. I know who she is, and I know the man with her, dark and dignified and leaning on a cane. Millicent Poole and Reverend Ollie Green.

My throat has gone dry. “What are they doing?”

“Millie Poole,” Shookie says. Her voice is smug. “She’s shakin’ up Satan.”

Wheezer, still leaning forward on his chair, gives me a devilish grin. “Miss Millie comes down every so often so she can—dust the place.”

“What?”

“She’s riddin’ the property of demons, Clea. She thinks after your mama and those others died, it left bad juju. She’s afraid it’ll spread down to her place.”

“Y’oughta go over,” Cousin Bitsy says, “say hey.” It’s the first time since I arrived that she’s spoken to me.

That hundred feet would be the farthest I ever walked.

Auntie shrugs. “Place belongs to you now. Do what you want with it.”

No, thanks
.

Auntie says stiffly, “Now and then Cunny has Ernie Shiloh come and mow down the weeds. He hauled off what lumber he could use.”

“Uncle,” I say, “I owe you for that.”

“No,” he says. “You settle with Ernie.”

I remember how that charred flooring and timber stood across the narrow field for so many years. What an awful thing to have next door. No wonder I went away and lived on the curb and took razor blades to my arms. The truth was, I hurt so badly inside, I needed someone to see. It took me God’s long time to learn that.

I realize suddenly that the night has grown cool. The Reverend lifts a hand and stumps into Auntie’s yard. His smile is huge. He hugs me and calls me Sister Clea, an appellation accorded grown women in the church. I imagine he’s retired and been replaced by now.

Millicent Poole scuttles over too, her feet in dirty bedroom slippers. She’s sighted me, and she shakes a crooked finger. “That fancy car—I shoulda knowed it was you!”

Her voice is raw—probably from years of drugs. “That’s all
right,” she rasps. “Don’t you bother to get up, little girl, or say
howdy-do
. All these years, I’ve done your work for you. See that concrete, them broken pieces?”

The old flooring. Part of the kitchen. A piece of staircase, lying on its side. A broken pipe.

“Bad spirits live under there,” she says. “You should be prostrate in that field, begging forgiveness. Doing good works.”

I do good works
.

“Now, Millie—” the Reverend says.

Millicent lifts her chin, her frail self wobbling. “Girl, you’re just the devil in one of his clever disguises. You get yourself over to church on Sunday and confess your sins. You’re a grown woman now—” She paws the air, catching rays of light and dust that only she can see. Her knuckles look swollen and sore. “It’s time you paid for your sins.”

I recall the gray goose that ate up her garden that one day, and how I tried to do right. I think of the opium pipe, and how afraid I was. Although I could now make three of Miss Millicent and could knock her over with my hand, no time has passed. I need somewhere to run.

The screen door creaks open. “Mom,” Luz says. “Harry’s having nightmares again.”

I go to my children.

My heart feels like some rickety place. Like there’s nowhere safe to put my feet. It has something to do, I think, with the way my houses keep falling down.

28

I
n the morning, there’s bacon and a spoonful of scrambled egg on Harry’s plate. He has his spoon in his hand; he slept that way. I was fearful that he’d poke his eye out or run it down his throat, but he’s using it now to chop at the yellow egg.

Auntie’s at the stove, turning hotcakes. She says to Harry, “Honey, you go on and pick up that bacon in your fingers. That’s the way it’s done around here.”

And Harry does. He takes an almost-bite. I want to fall on the floor in relief. Now, if we can get him to talk …

Luz has already eaten. I pour a cup of coffee, hug Harry, and kiss the top of his head, and Luz’s too.

I try to figure how many years I’ve been gone. In this big kitchen, not much has changed. No dishwasher has been added, no microwave. I wonder if I’m welcome enough—or at home enough—to run dishwater in the sink for the washing up. I do it anyway, and squirt in liquid soap, begin to dunk the sticky plates. On the porch, a dryer has been installed alongside the washer. I guess the clothesline, where I used to play among the sweet-smelling sheets, isn’t used anymore.

Auntie brings the plate of hotcakes and the warm syrup jar.
She stirs sugar in her mug and gets right to it. “Clea, all of us, we read your book.”

The book. I began it the day Dr. Ahmed gave me the steno pad in the hospital. When it was finished, I called it
Halo
. I’d changed the characters’ names, at the urging of my editor, and I’d fudged with the places, making up towns, renaming the river. I hadn’t fooled anyone here, nor did I expect to.

“You said bad things about us.”

“No.” I sip my coffee. Too hot. “I said bad things about Mama. I needed to say them.”

“You ran off,” Auntie says, as if she has a whole list. “In the dead of night.”

To save myself
.

Those were the bad years. After False River, before Belize.

I went to live where nobody cared, just sat on the sidewalk and watched shoes go by. I had street people to learn from. When it rained I held cardboard over my head. I could walk two blocks to a food line, and when I needed to pee I went around to the alley, although most didn’t bother.

That was just the beginning.

“I went to college,” I said. “Got a degree.”

Luz has been watching me, her eyes big and round. She knows about the book and has asked to read it, but I won’t let her. Here in this house, though, things are going to come out.

I set my coffee down, give her a smile, and watch Harry toy with his breakfast. In just the last couple of days, his face has grown pale, veins blue at his temples, his eye sockets too big. I’ve heard of children who had to be fed intravenously, and that also makes me afraid. Fear breeds fear—had I not learned that myself, bound to a bed in a psychiatric ward?

What we put into the world, we get back a thousandfold.

When I’ve finished my coffee, I’ll go upstairs to Call, and I’ll give thanks, in advance, for the return of Harry’s appetite.

Meanwhile, I say, “One bite, little guy?”

He rubs an eye with the flat of his hand.

I’m no more rested than when I went to bed. Last night I lay awake, thinking that Millicent couldn’t be more wrong. Whatever sins my mother committed, and wherever she is now, she made her hell right here, where I could see it. I sometimes stepped inside it with her.