Playing With Matches (2 page)

The weeds grew tall around Mama’s place, and the upstairs
windows cracked and fell out. I suppose the place looked spookier than all get-out, because teenagers drove by and threw rotten fruit. They chanted things I could not understand, and spray-painted words on the peeling clapboard.

I determined I would learn to read those things. They might tell me something about my mother. Maybe in my heart I already knew what those words said, because, while I grew lankier and clumsier with my long legs and feet, the worst of me was a wide, smart mouth. It spewed chatter and backtalk. Lying was neither harder nor easier than telling the truth. In fact, all my growing-up years, I maintained an unholy attitude for which Auntie whipped my calves with a green willow switch, and I deserved every whack.

Still, I wasn’t a complete loss. I taught myself to read early on and was a smart hand at filling a basket with blueberries.

By the time I was four, my hair had grown dark, unlike Mama’s, and thick as a broom. When Auntie tried to drag a comb through it, I screamed and stomped so that she braided it and wound thick pigtails, like rope, around my head. It was sometimes two weeks before she took down the plaits, saddled up with a comb, and rode into that rat’s nest. The rest of the time, my loose, fuzzy hair stuck out in all directions.

Later, my friend Finn told me that when the sun shone just right, I looked to be wearing a golden halo. But it was like Finn to say that. He was kinder than me, and he never killed anybody.

3

N
ext to Auntie, I loved Uncle Cunny best. He was no true relation but was a collector and seller of metal junk, and he tended to Auntie’s house and drove over in his pickup truck two or three times a week. He plowed and built a back porch and nailed up shingles, and Auntie paid him in meals and by sewing buttons on his shirts.

But Uncle Cunny Gholar and Sister Shookie did not get along. Nobody got along well with Miss Shookie Lovemore.

After Sunday service, she and Auntie would tie on their aprons, and while they peeled potatoes and rolled out biscuit dough, they hissed and spat and fought royally. When she was riled, Miss Shookie quoted the Bible wrong, trifling with the Beatitudes until they suited her. Auntie laughed at her, but Miss Shookie kept her own commandments, calling my mother a sodomite and me the devil’s babe.

Uncle and Miss Shookie went at it like cats, she creating scripture and Uncle calling her a sanctimonious sow.

Then Miss Shookie’d let loose with “You rusty old sinkhole” and “Pass the biscuits, you goddamned sinner.”

Uncle Cunny Gholar was opposed to all things religious. He
declared himself a heathen to the core. So when Miss Shookie went to beating the table with her fork and laying down vague laws of the Old Testament, he’d arch his brows and look away like something more important had caught his eye. That sent Miss Shookie into a royal tear. One time she beaned him with her cast-iron skillet, clonking him good during a funeral dinner at the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center.

The Center, in our closest town of False River, was a low square building with a sloped tin roof, and everything important happened there.

The racket, back in the kitchen, woke things up and spewed blood all around. For a while it looked like Uncle’s funeral might be next. But Reverend Ollie helped Uncle into his Buick and drove him to Greenfield while Auntie and I sat in the back and pressed cloths to his head.

The doctor in Greenfield said Uncle would live, and Auntie, who’d been wringing her hands and praying to Jesus, slapped Uncle a good one.

“Fool!” she said. “You know better than to stand in the face of my sister!”

Even with twelve new stitches lacing his scalp, Uncle was not deterred. At one o’clock the next Sunday, he stepped in our back door, doffed his felt hat, and said, “Miss Shookie, you’re looking particularly ravaged today.”

“You hell-bent old fart,” she shot back, peeling skins from a soft-baked yam.

“And you have the tongue of a spinster viper,” he said.

“Well, I
never
!” Miss Shookie’s chins bobbled mightily.

“Then it’s plain you
ought
to,” Uncle Cunny replied, ignoring the paring knife in her hand. “You’d feel considerably better if you did.”

Aunt Jerusha sent Uncle the evil eye, and the conversation turned to the dreadful humidity we’d been having lately. Like the air wasn’t a wet blanket every day of our lives.

In spring, the rain poured down and the False River rose up. The shallows crept into the yard and covered the chicken run and the vegetable garden with a thick layer of river trash and muddy ooze. In the following days, while we slogged around in rubber boots, hundreds of brilliant wildflowers bloomed on the riverbank and in our yard.

But the mud was a nuisance. Annually, I lost my shoes in the muck, causing Auntie to decree that I could just go without. Every time, though, Uncle Cunny drove me in to False River and treated me to a pair of ugly brown lace-ups from the Ninety-Nine Cent Store.

When the crops came up, I scrambled between wire-basketed tomatoes, chasing fat white worms back into the ground and tearing the patches off my overalls. Thereafter I was consigned to pillow-slip dresses and finally hopsacking, until Miss Shookie and Bitsy brought a cardboard box of washed-out hand-me-downs. I wore them with great pain—especially on Sundays.

The folks in False River were a holy lot, grounded in the Lord and the First and Last Holy Word Church. On Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, and for Wednesday prayer meetings, I wore Bitsy’s old dresses. I fidgeted beside Auntie in that hard church pew and learned that
We shall not be moved
ran together in one whole sentence. Still, I liked the way Auntie sang it, as if each word was truly the first and last holy sound.

Sometimes the Best Reverend Ollie Green came to dinner. He was a single man—round of face and shiny black, spiffed up in
his striped suit with a flash of pocket-hankie color. He was loved by his congregation and could lift his voice to a pitch that shook our teeth. On an apple-pie Sunday, with Uncle Cunny at the head of our table and Ollie Green at the foot, I asked why he was called the
Best Reverend
.

While Miss Shookie and her pudding of a daughter helped themselves to the choicest parts of two fried hens, Miss Shookie gave the Reverend a beatific smile. “While some preachers are fair at divining and o-rating, others are better. We are fortunate as hell to have the best.”

Dressed in his own natty suit, Uncle Cunny grinned.

I, too, depended on the Reverend.

More than anything, I longed to read. Words called my name. Because I wasn’t old enough to go to school, the Reverend Ollie lent me volumes from the church library. After a while, Auntie asked Uncle to come twice a week in the afternoons and pursue other segments of my early education.

I excelled at three things—reading, backtalking, and making things up. With his pencil-thin mustache, and his pencil-thin self got up in a fine blue suit, Uncle sat across from me at the domino table. He taught me the basics of arithmetic.

My attitude toward numbers was simple: I could add as quick as I could scramble up the porch roof—but I would not subtract, and he could not make me. In my chair under the willow, I moaned and held my braid-wound head like an old lady with a migraine. “Uncle Cunny, why would we take perfectly good things away?”

“Girl, you are four years old, going on five,” he said. “With a mind like a mousetrap, and the cheese just waitin’. If I tell you
there are—” he held up his ringed fingers to count “—eleven trees on this property, and we take away three, you know there would be eight left.”

“But, Uncle, these are beautimous trees, and—”

“The word is
beautiful
, Miss Clea.”

“—they’ve been growing here longer than Auntie has, longer than her fat sister, and—”

“That’s no way to speak of Sister Shookie,” he said mildly.

I wiggled in my chair, then got up on my knees, put my elbows on the table, and leaned across. “But that’s how
you
speak of her, and have you noticed, Uncle, that her name truly fits her? When she walks, she shakes like a bowl of Jell-O. I can’t hardly eat the stuff without thinking of her bosoms.”

I could see he was trying not to smile. If he’d let his mustache thicken, Uncle would be better at covering a mouth that gave away his feelings.

“The point I am makin’,” he said, “is that there are eleven trees, and—”

“—An’ we love these trees dearly. We ain’t taking away any.”

“Aren’t,”
he said.

“Right. But I can tell you that if we planted four more we’d have fifteen, and if seven seedlings came up after, there’d be twenty-two.”

Uncle sighed, as he seemed often to do.

I hated mathematics. In the evenings, I’d sit in the parlor with my head against Uncle’s bony knee. Auntie clicked her knitting needles across the room and broke up our fights over five times four. The six times tables were ass-kickers to recite.

What I really wanted to do was kiss both their cheeks and scoot upstairs to bed. Then I’d sneak out my window, shinny down the back porch post, and make my way through the weeds
to Mama’s house, where I’d curl up on a cot, which I thought of as my own. Mama kept it on the back porch. I couldn’t stay away from her house; as much as I loved Auntie, I just wanted to go home. On Mama’s porch cot, I’d sit with my knees pulled up and hugging them tight. From there, I could hear my grandma’s piano, and the burble of gin, and the sounds from inside, of what real loving was like.

4

O
n her side of the field, Mama’s house was tight and hunched like a buzzard’s beak; Auntie’s was broad and gracious as a southern belle. I was never sure which one to call home.

I told myself I didn’t care that I had no real place at Mama’s, except on the long slatted space across the back of the house, where the screens were caved in. On my tiptoes, from there, I could see through the kitchen window. I loved to watch my mama move around the place—opening a drawer, smoothing a stocking, her long, fine fingers lifting a glass to the light. She was elegant to observe, cinch-waisted and graceful and delicate of bone. Her clothes hung prettily, like she’d stepped out of a magazine. Her pale hair was wavy, and even in the dry heat of summer, not one strand was out of place. I loved how her red lips parted when she spoke to gentlemen friends, her chin and neck sculpted from smooth white stone.

Sometimes she caught me and shooed me away. Other nights, I could have entered that house, poured a drink, and sat down, and she would never have seen me. I’d stand on the porch and study my arms and legs and wonder how she could possibly look right through me.

On rare occasions, we’d go upstairs and sit at her vanity. I wondered if I looked enough like her that folks would know I was her girl. One bad night, when she’d drunk herself to sleep and woke to find me staring, she leapt from the sofa and split my lip. Another time, she broke my thumb. Auntie called Uncle, and they drove me, grim and silent, to the doctor in Greenfield.

And still I went back. As time went by, more and more loving was performed on Mama’s porch. One night I hid under the cot and waited till the grunting and smacking and pushing ended, Mama screaming so fiercely that I closed my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears.

“Damn, honey,” said the man who was with her. “ ’Pears to be somethin’ under this bed.”

Mama dragged me out while I banged my heels on the boards, and delivered a backhand that sent me tumbling. “Goddamn kid,” she said.

Her scarlet nails had caught the side of my face. I could already feel swelling along my cheekbone, and a throbbing had set up just below my temple. I scrambled to my feet.

“Jesus Christ, look at you,” Mama said. “Wearin’ a goddamn pillow slip.”

I said, “Jesus Christ, look at you, wearing nothin’ at all!”

“That is my business.” She pulled a sheet from the cot and covered her parts.

But the gent on the bed had his gray guard pants shoved to his knees, his own parts pale and slick, his hands grabbing for my mother. “Come here, Clarice,” he said. “Let the girl watch if she wants.”