Playing With Matches (31 page)

There is no such thing as always doing our best. How utterly exhausting that would be. We just do what we do. And maybe it’s enough
.

I know where my mother did her best—and with whom. Just doing what she did was not enough for her child. Only I can break that chain, fix the past and the present. It pains me to think that Thomas is right.

I’ll begin now.

I snuggle next to Luz and stroke her hair. “I’m so sorry it’s sometimes hard for you to breathe.”

She smiles a little and closes her eyes.

The night is quiet, no crickets chirruping. Then—and maybe it’s just my girl’s labored breathing, but I think I hear music, honky-tonk in slow motion, ragtime on the wind. That once-fast plunking music has now become a slow, hurting waltz.

The gulls are gone; we’re left with one unholy mess, no electricity, no running water. We slog up and down Potato Shed Road,
seeing who needs what—candles, matches, drinking water, canned peaches. Things that will keep without refrigerators, and packaged tightly too, so as not to draw rats. Everything is draped in wet leaves and weed. Cars are on porches. Dogs are dead; we are quick to bury those. We build cook fires in yards, open tin cans, whisper blessings and encouragement, and set to untangling a fisherman’s net from somebody’s door.

On Auntie’s property, it’s hard to find anything dry enough to burn, but Thomas and Uncle Cunny drag broken junk from the house—some of it ours. We burn what’s useless and save the nails. Sister Grace has been given a hammer and a plastic bag, and was put onto yanking nails from any drifting thing she can find. Sister Camille hums softly as she works—something Auntie used to sing, but I can’t remember its name or the words.

Up and down the road, people we know, and do not know, look broken in the eyes, hauling branches and bits of flotsam to their bonfires. Some houses defy logic, their underpinnings washed out and whipped off to who knows where. First floors are gone, while the second floors are left standing. Who’d ever have thought the Pearl, and our placid False River, could have done so much damage?

Genie Maytubby has lost part of her back wall, and her stove and furniture washed away.

Ernie comes around three times a day in his big-wheeled truck. In spite of sheriff’s orders, he’s been past the Farm and over to Finn’s. He reports that the goat is gone, and so is the shack, the dog. He’s checked Devil’s Creek.

“Likely drowned,” Ernie says.

I pinch my lips together.

“Or,” Auntie tells me, “he doesn’t want to be found. Clea, baby, you leave that boy be.”

46

T
hen Wheezer comes home, and somehow it’s Monday. I insist on holding class. He walks me down. His clothes are caked with mud, and I wonder,
When was the last time he ate?
He looks a little like he did the first time I saw him.

Because the fence and gate are twisted and inoperable, guards are posted around the Farm’s perimeter.

Most of the low buildings have been knocked off their blocks and tipped into the river. Two went over the bank of Devil’s Creek, which will have to be searched for bodies and dredged for debris before there’s more flooding.

I wait for Wheezer to toll the count.

He says, “Seventy-four dead, six of those shot. Eighteen more missing.”

“My God.”

“We’re keeping the eighteen under our hats, though they’re long gone by now.”

“What’s happened to the big house?”

“Beaten to hell. Foundation’s all cracked. Northwest corner broke off and went in the river. Took the kitchen and the infirmary with it. We dug six guys out with our hands. One was our
doc, Clea. Here on his own time. Jesus Lord, if I ever wanted a drink, it was then. Now.”

He sucks a deep breath and puffs out some air. “Corrections Department will send buses for the rest. Takes time when other prisons are full too, and have to shift things around. State sent us army rations, but we can’t let ’em open their own damn tins—meanwhile, they’re eating and sleeping on the ground. And we’ve got a makeshift infirmary set up here in the yard.

“We’ve cleared out the big stuff that washed up—refrigerator, sofa, broken umbrellas, anything these guys could use to hurt themselves or each other, piled it up across the road. Might have Jerusha look, see if some of her belongings are there—”

There is most of one fence left. Where it’s lying over, the space has been patched with wire and, because there are no safe buildings, everything’s been moved out into the open. This means there are no classrooms, no cages, no tables left. Raoul, Wesley, Frank, and Willie G. sit in bandy-legged chairs in one corner of the yard. The best chair faces them. It is for me.

Someone says, “Ma’am?”

I look up at a new man, dark skin, orange stripes, and he’s barefoot, with his pants legs rolled up.

He says, “Chaplain said I could join up.”

“Of course. Here—take my chair.”

“No, ma’am.” He folds himself down on the still-wet ground. “Name’s Roland Maytubby.”

Maytubby?
“Are you any relation to the Maytubbys down the road?”

“Yes’m, they my kin. Genie’s my sister.”

Lord, Lord
. “Does she know you’re all right?”

“Yes, ma’am. She came to the fence, and I talked to her ’fore they caught me and dragged me away.”

“I—I used to play with your sister. Claudie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

No judgment, no expectation on his face. Just waiting. The guard who brought him is stone-faced and beak-nosed.

I lean toward them with knees together, pencils and paper on my lap, and elbows on my thighs, palms pressed as if I am praying. “All right. I read your stories from Friday—” Has it been only that long? “I admire you guys for knowing who you are, in the middle of—this.”

Even if they don’t have a clue
, I think.
Even if they made up everything, and they’re shining me on
.

I spread my hands. “After I read them, I put them in the trunk of my car for safekeeping. Now nobody knows where my car is.”

“Then we glad you din’ have to drive here,” Raoul says, trying for humor. Nobody laughs. “Hey, we got no bunks, no soap, no coffee, but we got a teacher, right—you ain’t washed away.”

“I didn’t wash away.”

“When you find our papers,” Wesley says, “go on and keep ’em. We got nowhere to put anything, no cells, no footlockers.”

“Everything’s gone,” Frank says, looking at me.
Frank, who was so afraid he’d be chained and go under
.

“You survived,” I tell him. “Where is Horse?”

“Upstairs hall come down on him,” Willie G. says, his face turned away, speaking to no one. “He’s—in the infirmary.”

“Can I see him?”

“You got clout with Mr. Stengle.”

I pass out paper that I’ve scrabbled for, and stubs of pencils that Uncle sharpened with his pocketknife, and a couple of old pens.

“Today, let’s write fiction. We’ll make up a character, show him in a setting, but not here”—I wave my hand, and that brings
the guard. I shoo him away. “Start with your character doing something physical.”

Their opportunity to say something lewd slides away.

“We’re looking at his movement, muscles stretching, the lengths of bones, the way people stand up or sit down.”

“These private, for sure?” Willie G. asks.

“They are private.”

“Other ones was too,” Frank says. “Now they floatin’ somewhere in Alabama.”

Wesley says, “Teacher not responsible for no hurricane! Nobody knows you there, anyways.”

They all nod and tilt their heads and think. And they write. Roland too. In twenty minutes, they hand me papers that are barely legible and full of pencil-point holes from writing on their knees.

Raoul wants to share. He’s written about Miss Betty Inez, dancing on the stage of the Ivory Club in Juárez. While he reads of her tassels and fringes and gyrations, Frank and Wesley rear back in their chairs and hoot and slap their thighs, and Frank’s dragged up by the guard, whose baton is now drawn.

I settle things down.

Our time is up, and the guard takes them away. They’re not allowed to carry their chairs. Maybe this corner of the yard is now the visiting room.

As always, I read while I walk. Wesley has written about a man washing sand from collard greens in his kitchen, setting the leaves to cook with ham hocks and red-pepper flakes. At the end, there’s a message for me.

Now on, teacher, you call me Black Monday
.

P.S. Monday, for short
.

Willie G.’s character has crossed a line, and is hunted by dogs
with ears flattened and drooling lips and snapping teeth. The dogs draw back on their haunches, then leap across a river. Through the woods on the far side, the man flounders on.

Willie’s writing himself, of course. What if he’s telling me he’s going to run?

I ask for Francis and wait while someone fetches him. “Wheezer, I want to see Horse; can you fix it? In the infirmary. Please.”

We make our way through the broken brick and cinder block, legless cots and twisted tables, urinals, battered kitchen pots. A dozen army cots are set up, and two men with batons are in attendance, while two inmates work over the injured guys. There are splinted legs and arms, one man groaning, one crying into his wrapped hand. Horse lies on the farthest cot, curled on his side, almost unrecognizable under bandages made from torn sheet. Blood has seeped through.

“Horse,” I say, and get down on my knees, my mouth so close I can smell his scabbing, his congealing blood. His bones look brittle, his skin stretched tight. He’s so fragile. I wonder—if I touch him—would he break.…

“Teacher,” he says, sounding smaller than Luz, as small as Harry. “Hold my hand?”

“Ain’t allowed,” says the guard.

I take Horse’s hand.

He does not break.

47

A
nother shot.

God help him, I hope Willie G. has not run. When Wheezer comes tonight, I’ll ask him to intervene. Poor Willie, he’ll know I’ve betrayed his confidence. Then they’ll pen him up. Chain him down. Put him under suicide watch.

Bitsy is buried at eleven o’clock. The funeral-home car can now make its way through town, through the mud and the junk, to the cemetery in back of First and Last Holy Word Church. Shookie has chosen a white casket with painted roses. I think I won’t go to the service. I can’t.

“Of course you will,” Sister Isabel says. “We’ll support you. We’ll hold you in our arms.”

Miss Minnie Roosevelt, who once came to our back-porch concert, and who grew old without marrying, is going to sing “Amazing Grace.”

Ernie, in his best Levi’s and steel-toed boots, and with his truck’s windshield scrubbed for the occasion, has brought an orange. He peels it and pockets the bits, divides it into sections for Luz and Harry. They scarf it up. I close my eyes in relief.

We clean ourselves the best we can and climb aboard the
truck. Harry sits in front with Ernie and Shookie. He’s wearing a pair of overalls that drifted by Saturday, on the flood. I said
Thank you
. Then I washed them and dried them, and they fit him fine.

It’s a short drive to town. The church, on the far end of Main, looks like it could use some repair, and I wonder how much of that is because of the storm. Ollie Green, in a blue suit, meets us there. I look around the cemetery, at all the newly heaped earth, graves that were dug in the last couple of days. A dozen stick markers have sprouted like weeds, with names painted on.

Miz Millicent is here, in a faded housedress and a black wig that’s too big. The hair is too thick; the bangs hang in her eyes. Wheezer has come too, and Genie Maytubby, who stands off a ways with a girl in a very short skirt—and the nice folks from the Oatys’, her arm in a cast. In the farthest corner of the cemetery, the new preacher is conducting another funeral—three weeping people around a plain wooden box.

Our Bitsy has the best.

The service is short. Minnie sings in a wobbly voice, and she moves us to tears. “ ‘… Once was lost but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.’ ”

“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust … in the sure and certain hope …”

After the prayer, we move apart for the requisite visiting. When Reverend Ollie, with Millicent Poole at his heels, asks me how long I’ll be staying, I have no answer.

He says, “You doin’ a fine thing at the Farm, Sister Clea, and those men need you. You’re a holy woman.”

Millie Poole steps up. “Ollie Green, you’re a fool. None of them Shines was no way holy.”

“Now, now,” says the Reverend.

Losing Bitsy and the house and all that we own has taught me
that every connection is valuable—but this one is plain hard. It has plagued me since I was old enough to be Millicent Poole’s victim. Now she’s grown old and feeble and pencil-mark thin. I’m surprised she has come. Her eyes are gone to slits, her mouth permanently pulled up in a nasty smirk, and she keeps turned away, like I’m something that’s catching.

I walk over to Genie and touch her one arm. “I’m so glad you’re here. How’s your place? Can we help?”