Playing With Matches (9 page)

Finn sounded far away. “My daddy told me Clarice Shine has a red light and a real bad name.”

“She doesn’t have any red lights. And anyhow, I’ll bet you don’t have a daddy.”

At that, he went silent.

“Finn?” I said. “Come on and tell me the truth, why don’t you?”

He closed his eyes and was quiet for so long, I thought he’d gone to sleep on his perch. “He kilt a man. Where we was camping, about a mile downstream. In the night this fella was trying to rob us, and he held a knife to my throat—thing was
this long
.” He held his hands apart to show. “My daddy kilt him. Somebody saw, so they come to get him. Cops drove up where we was camping. They had these dogs—we heard ’em snapping big teeth.”

“Oh, Finn.”

“My daddy gave me his ball cap, and he said, ‘Son, you run over yonder and climb up in that big oak. You’ll be safe as long as you don’t come down.’ So I did. And they took him away. I been here ever since.”

I could think of no words that might aid him or comfort either of us. But that night I carried Finn a sliver of pie, hoping Auntie wouldn’t miss it from the dish. He didn’t seem to mind that I woke him, and I’d brought along my blanket and pillow. Auntie found me under the tree in the morning.

In the two days that followed, the rains came down and soaked everything till we lived in a world that was spongy underfoot and inside our lungs. Just before noon of the second day, two deputies pulled up in their black-and-white car, and got out and stood in our dooryard, looking up at Finn.

“Don’t you bother him,” I said from some distance. I carried an umbrella. “He’s got our permission to live there, and he isn’t hurtin’ anyone.”

The cops talked in hushed-down voices, saying the boy was fourteen and white, and who in the world would take him in, and the county sure as hell had no place to put him. And then I heard the rest of the story.

Finn was kin to the Sarasons, who lived one county over, and they’d come looking for him, to tell him the court had given his daddy a free lawyer. That man spoke up for his daddy in front of the judge, but he couldn’t get him off, him being guilty as hell. The Sarasons sure as the devil didn’t want Finn.

In the end, Uncle Cunny and some of his domino pals fetched a ladder and climbed up there to rig a canvas tarp over Finn’s head. I climbed up too. They hammered together a platform so Finn could lie down, and for the first time I got a look at the world from his angle. It felt cool and fresh. Up here, there was nothing but the shifting of leaves like silky green clouds, and the way my heart beat, and then skipped, and then beat again.

Aunt Jerusha brought Finn a bar of Palmolive and a towel—plus a bucket of wash water and another to do his business in. I privately wondered what would happen when the shit bucket was full, and I resolved to be Finn’s friend and companion even when this part of the yard began to stink something awful.

12

I
n the side yard, Auntie kept geese, and they were mean as hell—three long-necked, splay-footed honkers bent on flying at me with their necks stretched and throats hissing, and beating me to death with their hard, vicious beaks. Trouble was, they ran loose on the place, and it was my job, twice a day, to round them up from the river or from the field across the road, and herd them home. Auntie’d had their wings clipped so they couldn’t fly away, but they tried, running across that yard like they were about to lift off, making noises like whole pits full of snakes, and they made my life miserable.

On the other hand, they gave Jerusha no more grief than a trio of slugs. They adored her, and she them. In addition to feeding them a fistful of grain each day, she parched corn in the oven, and I guess those geese smelled it, because they stood at the back step like that meal was the Second Coming.

The two small females were called Sophie and Robert. When I pointed out that Robert was a boy’s name, Auntie said nothing. When Auntie said naught, it was a done-and-set thing. The two girl geese spent their days pecking happily at Auntie’s dropped
clothespins or the hem of her dress, and she’d stroke their long necks and smile at their husky trumpeting.

But that almighty big gander she called St. Augustine, and he was pure delinquent, scarfing up the choicest potato peelings, chopped cabbage leaves, and cracked eggshells.

“Here you go, sweet Augie,” Auntie cooed, stumping out, throwing him a fistful of popped corn. “A treatie for my boy.” And so it went. Every time he nipped at my ankles or carried off a shoe, I took up a stick and threatened that bird good. But when I wandered out one morning and caught him ripping, one by one, the pages of
David Copperfield
that I’d left out on the domino table, I took up my switch and ripped him a new one.

Auntie was away, carrying a basket of bread to Miz Millicent Poole—she being caught in the fist of the grippe—when a couple of Uncle Cunny’s pals passed by in their truck, and they jumped out to pry me off that bird. Auntie must have heard, because she didn’t speak the rest of that day, and that very evening, Uncle Cunny came and nailed up a chicken-wire pen and a lean- to to shelter the geese and hold their water pans. Sophie and Robert settled down inside, but the big gray gander had a mind of his own, and he broke loose more often than not.

Even from my room in the attic, I heard Aunt Jerusha caterwauling one early morn and flew down the stairs to find her raving in the yard. Clipped wings aside, Augie had apparently flown the coop.

“Oh, my sweet Jesus,” Auntie wailed and flapped her hands.

“What?”

“He’s been
stole
!”

I groaned.

“You get on down the road, Clea Shine, and find that gander.”

“But, Auntie, I haven’t had breakfast—”

“Nor will you, lest you come back with my goose!”

“It’s not my fault—”

“Was no love lost between you,” she said. “Now, start by the Farm. Check the creek behind and zigzag through the fields. Go to town if you have to, and ask at the fellowship hall.” She filled my pockets with corn to lead him back.

From the oak tree, I could hear Finn laughing at me.
Damn him
.

It didn’t seem likely to me that a goose would have any truck with the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center, but I would stop there and inquire.

I couldn’t think why they brought prisoners to the hall on Tuesday and Saturday nights just to call the bingo numbers, unless that was Mississippi’s way of rehabilitating. Sometimes convicts were paroled, I knew. And the Farm kept a pig business and a truck garden beyond the trees. They sold vegetables along the highway too, but I knew little else. When a man was given a life sentence and rode in on the shuttered blue bus, I guessed he stayed till he died, at which time the guards took his body out and pitched it into the cemetery across the creek.

“Damnation,” I said, making a crappy face at Finn. Up in his tree, he made one back.

I set off, scraping the dirt with my stick and watching dust clouds rise and keeping half an eye out for that goose.

I inquired at every door. Nobody had spotted a runaway bird.

Unless he’d slipped under the fence and found himself incarcerated, he was not down at Hell’s Farm, or trapped in the coils of wire, or, as far as I could see, stuffing his gullet in the prison’s garden. A lot of men were out in their orange uniforms today,
chained and clanking when they moved in their hoeing. I watched until a fat woman guard looked up and hollered and waved a big black club.

On the far side of the farm, Devil’s Creek had cut through the land, and it emptied into a particularly deep section of False River. I worried that Auntie’s goose had been wrung by the neck and thrown in that creek, fretting not so much at the loss of the goose as that I would have to find and retrieve him. I went on around the Farm and approached the steep bank. I did not see him in the water below, nor splayed anywhere on the sharp rocks. Still, I was afraid of the place, and the narrow bridge that spanned the creek. I made my way along the edge, peering through my fingers, lest I encounter, on the other side, human skeletons still clad in orange and rotting in the slime.

I did not find that bird lying dead on the road or any cow track, or paddling in somebody’s water trough. In town, I briefly checked the empty buildings and lots and asked around. He wasn’t poking through the canned goods at the Ninety-Nine Cent Store, and he sure wasn’t playing canasta with the ladies at the Oasis of Love.

At about noon I found him—grinning, if a goose could grin—munching lettuce leaves and collards in Miz Millicent Poole’s garden. He had trampled her tomatoes and plucked early grapes from her vine and was honking in a victorious but sickly way, and I hoped he had a bellyache that beat all.

Miz Millicent would not take kindly to the trodden mess. I’d not had much to do with her in these years because she was tall and pinched, the color of a parsnip, and she smelled bad. A strange odor came out through her pores and rose on her breath. Auntie told me once it was malaria. I asked if a doctor couldn’t do something for her, but Auntie said things had invaded
Miz Millicent’s bloodstream, and they weren’t likely going anywhere.

Miz Millicent’s red hair was thin and stringy so that her pink scalp showed through. Weekly, she put on a hat and sashayed down to First and Last Holy Word, where she supervised Sunday school teachers, picked hymns for the service, and bossed everybody. She told the Best Reverend what lesson us backsliding folks needed and, in all matters, which way was up.

But on many days she was sickly, and Aunt Jerusha walked down the road with a slab of pound cake or half a sweet-potato pie. Auntie’d step up on the porch and tap lightly on the door. From the other side, Miz Poole spoke softly, weeping. But if I was there, and if she saw, she’d begin to screech, “Jerusha, don’t you bring that child in here! She got germs and vermin crawling. You don’t come in, little girl, you hear me, now?”

Auntie’d give me a look that said I’d better back off and pretend to admire Miz Millicent’s hydrangeas, and nod my head at her bobbing zinnias like they were the finest I had ever seen.

Secretly I thought Miz Millicent was a loon, and she scared the living daylights out of me.

But today I was alone, and I had a clear purpose, and I spotted a broom on Miz Poole’s porch. It seemed like a fair thing with which to chase a goose from a garden, and I grabbed it up and rushed into the grapevines and, although we were near the same size, I beat that bird up one side and down the other. He flashed his wings and hissed and flew at me and I swung again, catching him upside the head. He turned to run, but I whacked and whaled until he flat fell over. Then I let go the broom and took hold of his neck. I jerked him across the road and into the field, and I laid down on that thing’s head, his one eye like a bright bead, taking my measure.

I went back to Miz Poole’s and onto her porch and knocked on her door, intending to apologize for Augie’s behavior and her ruined fruit and torn vegetables, and to tell her I was sure Aunt Jerusha would make up for it all. I’d have laid my nose to the screen to see was I bothering her, but a vagueness of smoke had boiled up inside and was escaping through the screen. Then the door jerked open, catching my cheekbone hard, and her hand shot out and yanked me inside. Her eyes were a back-and-forth marvel of wild and jerky, and colorless in their gone-awayness. Smoke pricked my nose and made me cough. I looked around for a flame, but it was something else, a glass contraption. Something inside her had gone terribly wrong.

She opened her awful mouth and screamed in my face, and I screamed too. I backed up. And up again, against the door, but her crook’d fingers reached out, curling for my shirt, the tip of my nose. If she caught me, I would surely roast in her oven.

Her mouth came close. I could smell her bad teeth and her smoky breath, feel her thin lips on my ear. “Don’t you ever tell what you seen here, girlie. Don’t you ever speak my name—else you’re mine, you understand?”

I nodded. True fact. I would never tell, I would never set foot in her yard or on her porch again. And never, ever would I look her in the eye.

I didn’t run until I was well clear of her place, and then I picked my feet up and put them down in clouds of dust, and I didn’t stop until Auntie caught me in her arms, and I backed her into the rocking chair, where, big as I was, she held me and waited for an explanation.

Auntie had the grace not to ask if I’d found Augie. In my heart, I felt Miz Millicent had probably wandered into the field, found Augie, and done him up for her supper. I couldn’t stop shaking,
and my mind was a mess. Over and over I saw that smoke, and smelled that pipe. I knew there were things like what I’d just seen. But—this was the righteous Miz Poole with her hymns and her holiness, a woman who everybody minded and feared!

“Look at me, Clea,” Auntie said. “Something happen down at the prison?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You go into town, then? Something there?”

I shook my head.

She held me closer. Tighter. “The church?”

“No, ma’am.”
Don’t you ever speak my name.…

She held me out to look me over. “Somebody hurt you?”

I shook my head.

Whatever it was, we would rock it to death. “You go over to your mama’s, child?”

“I didn’t, I swear.”

“Hazzletons’? The Bishop place? Miz Maytubby all right?” By now Auntie was shaking too. “Talk to me, Clea! I can’t he’p you till I know! Something happen by the river?”

“No’m.”

She quit rocking. “You stop at Miz Millie’s, did you?”

I held my breath while her mind switched gears, and her knowing rose up and filled the cracks in the walls.

“She—told me never to speak it.” I clung to her strong shoulder and buried my face in Auntie’s neck while the rockers creaked.

“Oh, baby girl. You saw somethin’ you shouldn’t have.”

My stomach rolled like thunder does. “Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s a sickness, doncha know. After all these years, Millie Poole can’t help it. I’m sorry you had to witness that.”