Playing With Matches

 

~coming July 24, 2012~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Excerpt from

Playing With Matches

 

By Carolyn Wall

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

If there’s help for the little guy -- for my Harry, who won’t talk -- it’ll be north on a green elbow of the slow-moving Pearl. But that’s the one place in the world I cannot go. It would mean the chicken circus, the boy who lived in the tree. The burning bed. Hell’s Farm and the curse of Millicent Poole.

Wherever we go, Thomas Ryder will come after us – won’t he? I hope he’s frantic and sorry, and that he never finds us. But I’m waffling in my thinking. In this tiny motel room with the worn-thin rug and the rusty wash basin, it’s been a long night. The storm has played out. I leave one candle burning.

But oh, God, Harry’s neediness points me upriver. It steers me home.

The candle sputters out. In the stifling dark of after-storm, I kiss my children’s damp foreheads, and I pray for three things:

Jerusha will remember me.

She’ll do for my Harry.

And she’ll care for them both while I’m locked away.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

“Upriver” is Potato Shed Road – dusty shotgun houses and run-down duplexes, folks backed up to False River and poor as Job’s aunt. Miss Jerusha Lovemore’s place was a good ways along, a clapboard house with two floors, a small attic and a crooked turret.

It was widely known that Jerusha once worked for a chicken circus up in Haynesville. What exactly she did there seems a subject best left for adult conversation. In the end, though, she took up a riding crop and thwacked the ringmaster, in the name of the Lord.

Then she bought an old car and putted down through the long green state of Mississippi, heading for the town of False River where her sister lived. She used a chunk of her circus-earned money to buy the big house, and she settled in. Rapidly, she grew to know her neighbors. Her years under the big top had done her no harm because she beat her rugs regular and went to church on Sunday. She put up bread and butter pickles and was a right hand at turning out sweet potato pie and jalapeno cornbread.

Past Auntie’s place was a narrow field of weedy grass, and then the boney old house that belonged to my mama.

I, Clea Shine, was born in Mama’s kitchen – on the table, so as not to ruin the sheets upstairs -- and I lived there for one hour and ten minutes. It took Mama that long to get down off the table, clean herself up and step into her high heels. Then she carried me, in a wicker laundry basket, over to Jerusha’s.

I picture Mama wobbling off through the brown grass, wrapped in a sweater for it was coming on winter.

Poor Auntie, as I came quickly to call Jerusha. I was chicken-legged skinny and already howling for my dinner. She couldn’t have known beans about foundlings and such. And I was a handful.

But her sister, the broad-in-the-bream Miss Shookie Lovemore, was herself raising up a fat daughter called Bitsy, and Miss Shookie knew all there was to know about everything.

 

 

 

For a long time, in those days, I had not a tooth in my mouth or a hair on my head and, according to Miss Shookie, I cried all the time. I must have given Aunt Jerusha one everlasting headache. Still, she held fast to my hard little body, and rocked me long, and hummed slow quiet streams of things like We. Shall. Not. Be. Moved.

At nine months I came near strangling with the whooping cough, and while I crouped and hawked up phlegm and sucked air, Auntie dangled me by the heels over the kitchen sink. For three weeks, she fed me with an eyedropper, slapped mustard plasters on my chest and whomped my back with the pink palm of her hand. At least once each night, she pinched my nose and blew in my mouth just to keep my lungs going.

And all that time, Mama was across the field. Auntie couldn’t help but hear the piano music pouring from there, and I wonder if that noisome key-plunking helped or hindered her in laying this white child down to sleep. It was my lullaby, but maybe Auntie cursed the racket and hated my mama and all the men who came there – prison guards, mostly, but others too, looking for a fine time. Mama obliged them. She was a tireless thing and could drink and dance and laugh all night. For a few dollars, she laid the men down.

My earliest memory could be nothing but a trick that my brain played on itself. I seem to recall Auntie’s front window being propped up in the hope of a breeze. Inside, I rested my chin on the sill -- and thrust out my tongue to receive a drop of whiskey, amber in the moonlight and tasting like butterscotch. It could not have happened, of course, because Auntie kept screen on her windows. Still….

Sometimes she and I sat on the upstairs gallery, cracking beans into plastic bowls, snap snap. From there, we could see Mama drifted out into the yard, lithe as a willow and throwing slops, her yellow hair backed by the sun glinting off the wires of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, another quarter mile on, at the end of the road.

In the heat of the day, Auntie draped a sheet over our upstairs gallery rail, and there we sat, her in her slip and me in my undies, overseeing the dirt road and the prisoners working the far fields in their orange suits, while even the dust shimmered in the heat. Toward the end of the day, we watched guards in gray uniforms park in Mama’s yard. Sometimes she’d greet them at the door – the river wind lifting her pink, feathered boa. Her silver heeled slippers winked like glass in the twilight.

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 or 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

Next 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 wild flowers bloomed on the river bank 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 jut 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-hanky color. He was loved by his congregation and could lift this 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, back-talking and making things up. With his pencil-thin mustache, and his pencil-thin self got up in a fine, blue suit, he 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 boney 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Four

On her side of the field, Mama’s house was tight and hunched like a buzzard’s beak; Auntie’s was broad-beamed and gracious as a southern belle. I was never sure which place 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. On one occasion 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 has 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.”

“The girl doesn’t want,” Mama said, wiggling her feet into spikey-heeled shoes, and as I scooted down the steps, she aimed a kick at my backside with one pointy toe.

“Light me a damn cigarette,” I heard her say to the guard.

On that particular night, Auntie stood in the yard with her hands on her hips. “How many times you got to hear it, girl? How many thrashings it gonna take? Don’t go near that place! You ain’t come back yet without bruises to show.”

And she set off through the grass to stand tall against my mother.

 

 

 

Mississippi women could display gentility, but they were physical, too, and pure-bred tough. Always, Auntie’d return with her hair disarranged and her eyes wide, and breathing hard. Then she’d sit in the parlor, wooden rockers screaming while she shot back and forth. I’d climb in her lap and curl in a ball, and she’d hold my sad self with her two strong arms.

When I felt truly lost – which was most of the time – I went out to the narrow lot and sat down in the weeds. From there I could observe both houses. After all, I had two eyes, didn’t I? Two nostrils, two arms, two knobby knees.

The trouble was, I had only one heart.

 

 

 

One of Mama’s customers carried a yellow valise.

Mama waggled her fingers at me. “Come on in here, girlie girl, and meet this young man.”

I’d held back in the dark kitchen, but now I stepped forward.

“You work at the Farm?” I said conversationally, meaning the prison.

“Not any more. I am not givin’ this state another day of my labor.”

“But -- you’re an ex-con? You’ve seen it inside?”

I had an inordinate curiosity about the Stuart P. Havellion State Penitentiary. It was one old plantation house and a tight bundle of outbuildings, all set on concrete blocks and surrounded by chain link and razor wire. In the beginning it was a river-backed home, with four square miles of cotton fields that flooded every year. Piece by piece, they sold it off. Now the prison and its remaining land were called Hell’s Farm.

Further, Webster defined ex-con as freedom from conviction.

“Guess I’ll be gettin’ on,” the young man said. “They told me the bus comes through False River.”

“On Saturdays and Sundays,” I said. “You got three days to wait.”

He shrugged into his thin coat. “Well, then, how far away’s the next town?”

“Hour or two, if you got a car. We got a railroad station in False River, but my Uncle Cunny says trains haven’t run here, weekdays, in twenty years.”

“You know a lot,” he said.

“It’s a fact, I do.”

The young man pulled a twenty dollar bill from his pocket. “They give me two a’ these this morning.” He handed the bill to my mama. “The other one’s got to do me till I get home.”

“I’ll walk with you a ways,” I said when we went out. I point down the dusty the road.

“Yes ma’am,” he said with a kind of bark. “I been the other way. Now I’m headin’ for Memphis,” he said. “You heard of that?”

“ Tennessee. On the Mississippi River.”

“Well now,” he said.

“You got a mama and a daddy up there?”

“I got a daddy.”

“He know you been here?”

“You ask a lot of questions, missy. And no, ma’am,” he said softly. “My daddy don’t know I been here.”

My heart ached for this former convict who could turn out to be a fountain of information. I wanted to know if what I’d heard was true – that the state swooped in and broke the whole house into cells. That a central basement had been dug underneath and fitted with instruments of torture.

It was commonly known that, at Hell’s farm, the walls ran with moisture while the prisoners alternately baked with the heat and then came down sick with the damp.

“What did you do?” I asked him. What was your crime?”

He looked down at me. “You don’t want to know about that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, ma’am, you don’t. Nobody goes to prison for anything good.” He jerked a thumb to our right. “I guess that there’s the actual False River?”

“You haven’t seen it before?”

“No, ma’am. Not in the whole ten years. We didn’t have windows where we stayed.”

“Well,” I said. “There’s a creek on the other side of the farm. It’s got real steep sides, and it’s heaped with jagged boulders, and it floods in spring.”

“Yes ma’am, we sure know about flooding.”

Personally, I thought it was a good place for a prison. The creek on one side and the river on the other would make it near impossible to escape. “Did you ever think about escaping?” I said.

“That’s all we ever thought about,” he said.

I kicked up more dust. “Did you ever try?”

“I did not. Nobody wants to be set upon by prison dogs – they got bad tempers and real sharp teeth.”

“Did you have visitors?”

Everybody knew the assigned hours at Hell’s Farm. On Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons, junky cars puttered up and down the road, or families walked with brown paper packages under their arms.

“No, ma’am.”

“If I’d known you were there, I’d have come to see you.”

“I reckon your mama wouldn’t a’ let you.”

In that moment, I longed to deny the existence of my own mama. I recalled the Right Reverend Ollie telling us how Peter denied Jesus three times – and all before the cock crowed in the morning! Still, I was nothing like Peter, and my mama was not Jesus.

“It’s what Aunt Jerusha says that counts,” I told him. “She’s real friendly. And smart. You ought to talk to her. You’ve got no place to stay and no money to speak of.”

I was on fire with an idea. Nothing else could crowd into my head. He would stay with us and tell me everything, and I would write it all down so as not to forget.

“Missy,” he said. “I ain’t traveling back on this road for nothing.”

“But you need a bed to sleep in, and a job of work so you can make some money and get home to your family in Tennessee--”

A car motor coughed. I looked around and saw Miss Shookie chugging down the road, heading toward us in her Chevrolet. Bitsy was beside her, and both were hunch-necked and squinty-eyed with curiosity. Miss Shookie leaned out a side window that hadn’t rolled up since 1967.

“What y’all doin’ here, girl? You take up with strangers, your aunt whup you alive.”

“Miss Shookie, this man’s starting a new life, and I was offering him a stay at our house till he gets on his feet --”

“He is on his feets, looks to me,” she said. “Now you git in this car, I’ll take you home. Jerusha let you run so goddamn wild--”

But my own feet were planted solid in the dirt. “No ma’am, Miss Shookie. This young man needs a firm chance, and anyway, I’m not getting in that smelly old thing.”

“Don’t make me get outa this car, girl,” she said, looking pained. “All day, my knees been talkin’ to me--”

She turned her attention to my companion. “So you fresh outa the joint, hey, boy? They give y’all’s clothes back to you, do they?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I told my gal Bitsy, here, they used them to stoke the fires of hell. You gone and made a liar outa me.”

My jaw slacked. “Miss Shookie, the Christian thing to do--”

Miss Shookie’s fat jiggled and rolled around. “Ain’t no Christians at Hell’s Farm, Clea June, and I know he’s broke as a church mouse already. By the time these mens set out on this road, they money’s spent.

“And everybody knows where.”