Playing With Matches (6 page)

“I never did,” Claudie said. “You got more folks coming?”

“Nope.”

Because she was our guest, Auntie asked first for Claudie’s plate. “Would you like a little of everything?” Auntie asked.

“Well—” Claudie said.

While Auntie and Uncle heaped up spoonfuls for Claudie, I grinned like a fool. Claudie fingered her spoon and looked at it and set it back down, her mouth twisting, and when Uncle laid her plate in front of her, I thought she might bolt.

I wondered why she didn’t take her fork and dig in.

Auntie’s voice was soothing. She asked after Miz Maytubby—was she taking her medicine regular—and how was that handsome Denver Lee doing now that he was back at school?

“Right well,” said Claudie.

“Child,” said Auntie, screwing the lid off a jar. “Would you like to try my homemade chow-chow?”

Claudie said nothing.

“Goes real fine with the chops,” Auntie said.

“Claudie don’t know what chow-chow is,” I said.

“That’s all right,” said Auntie, giving me a look. “Not everybody’s got a taste for it.”

“She don’t know pork chops either. Or candied carrots.”

Uncle murmured into his paper napkin, “The word is
doesn’t
, Miss Clea. Not
don’t
.”

“But Claudie says
don’t
.” I was trying like all molly hell to make her feel welcome.

Silence fell on our table while Claudie stared at her carrots,
then took one up in her fingers and closed her big teeth around it.

“Not like that,” I said, laughing. “With your fork.”

“Clea June,” Auntie said. “The Lord made fingers before he made forks,” and with that she plucked up a new potato and popped it into her mouth. She smiled at Claudie. This was certainly not the first time we’d sopped up cream gravy with biscuits, or cleaned bones with our teeth. But it was the only night that we ate a whole meal with our hands.

Claudie couldn’t seem to get enough. Uncle passed her the chop plate and more potatoes. I marveled that she could put away so much food, and she bent to the work like she was shoveling dirt, digging deeper and deeper into the heap. I could not clean my own plate for watching.

By the time Claudie was gnawing on her third chop bone, her face was shiny with grease and the kitchen heat. She mopped up pickled chow-chow with a fourth buttered biscuit, and when Auntie offered, she slid the last three tomato slices into her mouth. At one point she rose from the table and walked around the kitchen. I couldn’t think what she was doing, or looking for.

“Miss Claudie, I’m glad you came to sup with us,” Uncle Cunny said. “I believe there’s dessert, if you’d like a slice.”

From the sideboard, Auntie brought the pink cake and, with her hair frizzing from the heat and all the labor of preparing a fine dinner, struck a match and lit six candles. Claudie’s eyes bugged out.

I closed my own while I made a wish.

“What you doin’?” Claudie said.

“Haven’t you seen a birthday cake before?”

Ever so slow, she shook her head.

“You make a wish and blow out the candles.” And I did.

Auntie cut slices and set them on our plates.

Claudie lifted the whole triangle to her mouth. Auntie asked, would she like a second piece?
Yes, ma’am
. And the same to honey drizzled on the last biscuit, too.

While I licked icing from my fork, Auntie told Claudie that she had a few small things for Miz Maytubby, if she would be so kind as to carry them home, and Claudie said
Yes, ma’am
again. I knew what those things were because we’d often loaded baskets and grocery boxes with cartons of eggs and great bunches of greens from our garden, bread Auntie had baked herself. I helped tote them. But while she went to each door and knocked, I had to wait in the road. When I once asked why, Auntie told me I could visit when I learned to properly hold my tongue. I didn’t know what that meant.

Just now I’d grown weary of the silence, so I took my own turn with Maytubby inquiries, like I didn’t see Claudie every day of my life.

Having passed into my sixth year, I felt like a grown-up. I squared my shoulders and asked, “How’s your daddy doin’, Claudie? He still gone off?” And, “Lord, I ain’t ever seen anybody
eat
so much!”

Claudie looked stunned. Her eyes slid to her near-empty glass of milk. “You know my daddy run off,” she murmured. “He ain’t been back since.”

“He just up and walk away?” I said because this was a subject I was curious about. Especially since no one could even recount my own daddy’s name. “After your little brothers were born?”

Claudie nodded.

“Clea June,” Auntie warned. “Claudie, let me pour you more milk.”

“Y’all got so many mouths to feed,” I went on, repeating what I’d heard Miss Shookie say. “You think he’d go
before there was thirteen of you
.”

Auntie and Uncle sat frozen in their seats.

“We only twelve now,” Claudie whispered, setting her biscuit down. “One died.”

Thinking I could lift this gloom with a joke, I said, “Too bad it wasn’t more.”

But I knew it was wrong. The room fell away. I felt darkness run up past my neck to my cheeks, and was shattered at the cruelty of my own tongue. My mouth was my surest trip to hell. Here among the remains of dinner, around the crumbs and frosting and globs of honey on the table, God would surely strike me dead.

Uncle cleared his throat and said what a fine meal Auntie had prepared.

“I only meant,” I said, “everyone saying times are hard, and with y’all livin’ on welfare checks—”

“I believe dinner is over,” Auntie said, and was on the edge of rising when a knock came on the screen and through its mesh I saw tall, skinny Alvadene, soaked in the rain. She had her little girl on her hip and a sweater over their heads. “I’m sorry to bother y’all, but Claudie got to come home.”

I shot out of my chair. “No! It’s my birthday, and she ain’t done with her cake!”

“Eulogenie havin’ a ringtail fit ’cause she gone.”

My mouth turned so far down it hurt my chin. “Eulogenie doesn’t get her every minute.”

Alvadene said, “She got to come on. Eulogenie won’t stop crying.”

“I’ll be goin’ now,” Claudie said in a whispery voice.

Auntie was on her feet. “I’ll just wrap up some chops for your mama,” she said, and she dumped the last two onto a square of waxed paper.

So softly I could barely hear, Claudie thanked Auntie for having her.

Only I could make a bad thing worse. When Claudie banged out the door and went off with her sister, I mumbled, “Y’all know her mama won’t ever see those chops. Not with those nasty little boys on the place.”

Auntie said in a tight voice, “Clea June, go outside and fetch me a green willow switch.”

I wandered around beneath the dripping tree and stared at the bent and broken twigs. It was a pure wonder I didn’t come out regularly, gather them all up, and chuck them in the river. But I knew, by now, that Auntie was just as likely to snatch up a fly-swatter, and that was worse.

I waited for her upstairs on my bed. From my attic window in the back of the house, I could see the top of the willow, the row of tall oaks, and the slow-running river with its green inlets. Something rustled in a mossy oak, and I imagined it was birds, flying off to huddle on their nests, in their own high attics. I bet they wouldn’t spend their birthday night tossing with their legs on fire.

When Auntie came heaving and grunting up two flights of stairs, I sat in misery and already-pain where I knew welts would soon rise on my calves. The springs groaned when she sat down beside me. I hunched over, the switch drooping between my knees.

“Clea,” Auntie said, “I can’t think what you’ve gone and done to that girl, made her feel like she’s got nothin’. Saying her family’d be better off dead. What possessed you?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “Every day, you are no more than her. When you act like that, it makes you less.”

She was expecting me to agree, but I couldn’t. For a while tonight I’d been happy. So—when we were most joyful, we ought not to speak? Why, then, had God given me a voice? When I grew up and had kids of my own, I would put corks in their mouths, or at least teach them to suck on their thumbs.

“Well,” said Auntie. “I’m disappointed through and through. You go on over there and apologize, understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.” This was far worse than switching—I had Auntie’s hurt to mix in with my own.

She went off down the stairs, and I sat and thought on how this could not possibly be all my fault. Claudie eating with her fingers had started it. I went to the window, lifted the sash, and threw the stick out as far as I could.

The crickets came out and began to chirrup. I went down the wet drainpipe and on over to the Maytubbys’. I asked if I could talk to Claudie. “I want to say sorry and ask her if she’s still my friend.”

“Best you go on home,” Alvadene said, turning away. “She don’t want no part of you.”

9

A
fter what seemed like a hundred years, it was August.

I’d questioned the effectiveness of school from the start. When word came down that Miss Izzie Thorne from Birmingham, Alabama, would teach Years One and Two, Uncle Cunny and Auntie exchanged a look I couldn’t read.

I worried that there would be something terrible about having Miss Thorne for a teacher, but at least I would have the twins nearby. Claudie was speaking to me, more or less.

“We goin’ to first grade,” she said proudly as the time got closer. They were older than me, though not any bigger.

“I thought you all did first grade last year.”

“We did. An’ the year before that. Me and Eulogenie, we gonna keep on till we get it right.”

I’d worked with Uncle Cunny till I could add three columns and multiply like nobody’s business, but Auntie predicted the sky would cloud over when Miss Thorne set to teaching me subtraction. Still, she said, it would do me good to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

The first day of school came. I wore one of Bitsy’s old dresses—thank the Lord, without frills or bows. My shoes were new and
pinching, but I was pleased with the buckles and the click the heels made on our wood floor. I felt like I was tap dancing, just crossing the room.

I kissed Auntie ’bye.

On the way to school, Claudie and Plain Genie and I passed through False River, crossing the lawn of Red Roof Retirement, which was nothing but a smelly old folks’ home. Half a dozen gnarled coots were on the porch in wheelchairs, drooling on their blankets and watching traffic go by.

Plain Genie loved it. “Someday I’m gonna live there,” she said.

It was the only time I ever saw her sister slap her. Claudie drew back her hand and laid out a good one, Plain Genie falling over, then hunching on her heels to cry between her knees. Plain Genie had snot on her cheek and her taped-up glasses were coming apart. I bet it was her fault that Claudie was serving so much time in first grade.

Claudie helped her up, kissed her cheek, and, with Genie swiping boogers on the back of her hand, we followed the two-lane to the broken-down schoolhouse.

Like the rest of the county, it was a sorry place. The porch was falling off, and Claudie’s foot went clean through when she set foot on the first step. The floors creaked and squawked with the weight of a hundred kids as we all filed in and dispersed into four rooms.

Maytubbys populated every grade. It was that way with a lot of families. Kids punched one another and clowned around while I found a seat near the window. I figured out quick that this room was divided, the left side Year One, the other Year Two.

Somebody had chalked straight lines and circles on our half of the green board. Beneath the window was a shelf of battered picture books, beads and string, and colored blocks. Right away
the air went out of my lungs. There was not one dictionary, nor a single copy of
Jo’s Boys
—which I was now reading—or Edgar Bertolli’s
View of the Planets
. Instead, above our chalkboard, was a yellowed strip of alphabet. On the desks were sheets of paper with red and blue lines, and stubby pencils with the erasers gnawed off. There were first-year primers too, their covers gone and spines nothing but cotton stitch. The first page commanded:
See Jane run
.

“For the love of God,” I said, and some of the boys snickered.

This room was a true learning injustice, and I could not wait to tell Uncle Cunny. No wonder none of the Maytubbys could read.

Miss Thorne stood in front of the room, tall and pointed, from her black patent shoes to her black chicken neck and long, narrow face. She rearranged our seating and moved Plain Genie, who was squinting through her taped-up glasses, to the front of the room, and a few long-legged smart-ass boys to the back. I was glad to keep my seat, because the window felt handy—an emergency exit if things got too bad.

Miss Thorne was new to our school and clearly did not know why Plain Genie had her head down and was sobbing mightily into her one arm, so I raised my hand. When she called on me, I rose and started in explaining conjoined twins and how, while each of these two Maytubbys had her own internals, they’d once shared an arm and didn’t like to sit apart.

To my surprise, Claudie whirled in her seat. “Shut your mouth, Clea Shine.”

“But—”

“You don’t know nothin’.”

“Claudie, I was just telling Miss Thorne the way of things. About the man who took your picture, and the doctor that—”

Feet stopped shuffling, voices died away.

“—chopped you all apart. How you cried, and they had to tape—”

“Shut up, shut up!” Claudie said, on her feet, in my face. “Don’t you know us Maytubbys is private? We take care of our own.”

I thought I knew the Maytubbys well. “I was only saying—”

Miss Thorne was rising from behind her desk.

Claudie was so angry, she was spraying spit. “You ain’t ever liked Genie. But she’s my twin, and we’re plain folks, so don’t you waste fancy words on us.”

“—you owe me seventeen cents,” I said, because it was all I could think of. “For three lemons.”