Playing With Matches (12 page)

“Not me,” I said. “I’m not going without him.”

“Well, other side of the house, there’s a crawl-through. It’s nailed over with plywood,” Finn said. “Maybe we can break in there.” He went to the shed that had once been my reading place but which now turned my stomach.

He came back with a claw hammer and we both looked at the eighteen-inch piece of board. “I don’t know,” he said.

“We can free this boy. Did I tell you my birthday’s coming, Finn? I’m going to be twelve. And I can do anything I want.”

What I wanted was to beat the wood with that hammer till I got that kid out. So that’s what I did, Finn holding his breath, lest the old man come running. At first the boy didn’t want to be loose, so I had to flatten myself out on the ground and go in after him, which was bad because the place stunk so.

He could hardly stand up, and he was wheezing something awful. I took his hand and led him home. Finn carried the hammer
in case
, he said,
he had to fight off the Oatys
.

If Auntie was surprised to see the boy we called Wheezer, she never let on. This one took the cake. He was filthy. He froze up, clutching himself, when Auntie tried to take off his clothes, so she filled a dishpan with water and wiped him down the best she could.

In his filthy rags, he sat at our table while Auntie, as an early birthday present for me, stirred up a pan of fudge clotted with walnuts.

Turned out Wheezer loved fudge, but Auntie, who wanted to
spoon-feed him oatmeal with milk, said
Not too much, it could make him sick
.

He stayed the afternoon and through dinner. When Auntie had him full of mashed potatoes and gravy and chopped-up roast beef, she had no choice but to call Social Services and report the Oatys.

Before dark, the children’s superintendent, Miss Pilcher, came in her county station wagon. She parked in front of Auntie’s house. Miss Pilcher was tall and high yellow and flabby of jaw. She had fatty eyes that trusted nobody and nothing, and no one liked her in return. She asked who had found “the boy.”

I said I did, as Finn had eaten his dinner on the back porch step, where we all had joined him, and he’d long since gone up to his tree.

Miss Pilcher gave me a look and said she could not let a minor sign the papers and stuck them under my auntie’s nose. But Auntie said she’d had nothing to do with the freeing of the young man who’d lived under that house.

Miss Pilcher said
Then what did Auntie expect her to do with “the boy,”
and we all looked at each other while she flapped her chins and talked on about the foster care system being grossly overloaded. In the end she packed Wheezer, like freight, in the back end of her station wagon and took him away. He knelt with his face to the window and lifted one hand to me.

I worried that with no one to take him in, Wheezer might soon be living under a bridge in Mobile or in a rough park in Birmingham. On the other hand, what if one day the foster care system unloaded itself, and had all kinds of room. Then what would happen to Finn—and to me?

Later, we all went down to the Oatys’ place, including Finn and the sheriff, who had so far said nothing, and we looked
around. The Oaty brothers acted sorely put out, claiming they had seen “no kid, no pale wheezing boy,” and they knew nothing about it. They got downright huffy and, while the older Mr. Oaty sat on the porch, drinking from a straw and dribbling on his baby bib, we all took turns crouching down for a look under the house. There wasn’t a sign that anybody’d been under there.

My stomach turned over, and I cried out, insisting that was where we’d found him. My voice rose to a caterwaul, until Finn came up and took hold of my hand. “She’s right. That kid was livin’ in there.”

After the sheriff grunted and sucked in his belly fat and crawled under there, he came out saying the earth was packed hard and warm, and there were chicken bones and other garbage scattered around. The Oatys lied and said they’d gotten real bad about throwing trash beneath the house.

The sheriff said he could also tell by the smell that somebody had regularly urinated and defecated under the place.

The Oatys looked at each other and then at their pa. It was possible, they said, he had done that too.

That night, I went out to sit under the tree and talk to Finn. The night was full of cricket sounds. I could not think what they’d witnessed that was good enough to sing about. This world was unfair, and people were sick and stupid and unkind to one another.

“Sometimes they are,” Finn agreed from above.

“It’s a waste of being alive!”

“Ain’t always so,” he said. “Sometimes people are downright funny.”

“Wasn’t nothing amusing about that kid.” I was indignant to
the soul. “And that damned Miss Pilcher—I hate her, Finn. She ever comes back here, I swear I’ll …”

Over my head, Finn’s branch was bouncing something awful, and when I looked up, his eyes were alight, and he was laughing.

“There wasn’t one thing funny today, Finn,” I said.

But he laughed some more and pointed toward the house.

The light was on in my attic room. The window was raised and there, between the pulled-back curtains, stood my wide Cousin Bitsy. She lifted her shirt and presented her great bosoms for Finn and all the world to see. They were big as watermelons. Her broad, flat nipples were the color of creamed coffee.

Finn rattled and roared and couldn’t tear his eyes away.

I went into the house and said no more.

16

I
t was a strangely warm fall, with nothing happening that was near as exciting as the finding of that kid at the Oatys’. Nights, we lay awake on top of the covers, while below us the False River was a green sludgy wallow. It stank mightily.

Our side of the big Pearl was Mississippi; the western bank was Louisiana. Occasionally, but not often, a sigh of wind might drift upriver from the Gulf of Mexico and cool off both sides. The Pearl itself was a wide and rolling body of water that did a mysterious thing. In no hurry to join the Intracoastal Waterway, it appeared to spread out into a lazy swamp. All along the Pearl River, dead trees stuck up like pointy fingers, and thick green scum settled on its surface. It smelled like vinegar and dirty socks but was still good for pulling a catfish or two. But the miles and miles of marsh were deceiving. The currents underneath both False River and the Pearl were amazingly strong.

Autumn was our regular season for bad weather, most of which came up from the Gulf. With landfall, every storm seemed to sprout arms and legs that groped their way up first the Pearl, then its elbow, the False River, with whirling black clouds and rain that blew east to west. Wind ripped off shingles and shutters,
and carried away lawn chairs and plastic swimming pools. It brought down thick branches of trees that had been growing in their places for aeons.

Afterward, convicts came in their orange-striped suits that looked like pajamas, to repair the roof of the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center. They straddled its peak, though they were chained at the ankle and issued hammers and nails while two guards stood by with batons and walkie-talkies in hand. Below, on the ground, stood two more guards with rifles. From time to time, the prisoners were allowed a cup of water from a jug.

Everybody knew what kind of search would go on before these men were allowed back onto Hell’s Farm. Any tiny thing they had found and were smuggling back was called contraband and worth a miserable month spent in the basement of the Farm’s big house.

One windy early September day, when the gale was fierce and flattening the weeds, Auntie and I were closing windows on the third floor in preparation for rain. We looked out and saw Mama bobbling across the field.

Overhead, the black sky began to boil.

Uncle Cunny stood down in the yard, where he’d gone to drag the domino table up on the porch. Mama held something flapping in her hand and was walking herky-jerkied, but not just with the wind, and Uncle left the table and went over to meet her.

I ran down the stairs and out the back door and caught up.

“Afternoon, Miz Shine. Can I help you with something?” Uncle Cunny said.

“You, Cunny Gholar,” Mama said in her thick-tongued voice, more difficult to hear with the shrieking wind. “You get in your truck an’ go on home now. This got nothin’ to do with you.”

“No? What’s that you got there?”

Mama was holding on to a paper that was snapping and already ripped by the gale, and she made an attempt to flatten it, but it only tore more.

“I want for that child, Cunny! I did a wrong, just givin’ her away. Now I’ve wrote me up a bill of sale.”

Uncle Cunny and I stood still in that grass with our mouths dropped open. I looked up at him with eyes so wide they hurt.

“You—what, ma’am?” he said.

“I want for that child. She ain’t worth much. Two hun’ed dollars be fine.”

I must not have been hearing right. Could things like this happen?

“You tell Jerusha Lovemore she owes me for her.” She raised her voice more. “You come on out here now, J’rusha Lovemore! Two hun’ed dollars set it right!”

“Miz Shine, you best go on home and get some rest,” Uncle Cunny said between his teeth. “I’m sure yo’ just under the weather now, and don’t know what you are saying.”

“Oh, I know,” she said.

Uncle looked at me and patted my hand. “Get back inside, Clea. It’s fixin’ to rain. I’ll be there directly.”

And he let go of me, got Mama turned around, and they set off together, she leaning hard against him, her voice still carrying on the wind. Leaves were whirling around my feet.

“Where you going, Uncle Cunny?” I called.

“I’m seein’ a lady home,” he said.

The rain came upon us, and I watched it soak them and slash all around as Mama stumbled and Uncle picked her up, and when I got wet from watching, I went in and slumped down in a corner of the parlor. The rain ran from me onto Auntie’s floor. I
hunkered there with my hands over my head. Auntie tried to raise me up, tried to jerk me alive, but I would not stand or sit, nor look up, down, or sideways.

Uncle Cunny came back then, and they talked in fierce voices and moved into the kitchen so they could holler and yell, and I heard Auntie cry out,
“She guv her to me, fair and square!”
And I thought I felt the floor move under my feet.

Auntie and Uncle went out into the rain and were gone a long time, so long, in fact, that I got up with stiff knees, and, still wet, I climbed to the third floor, where I crawled under my bed and lay flat on my belly.

A while passed, and I heard Auntie’s shoes on the stairs. She came in where I was and got down on her knees. “You can slide on out now,” she said.

I did not reply.

“She was drunk,” Auntie said, “and meant nothing by those ignorant words.”

I closed my eyes tight.

“Uncle Cunny took that paper from her and tore it in a million pieces, and it flew away across the river. Ain’t that good?”

“It’s good,” I said. But I would not come out.

Auntie let herself down, and she just lay there, on her side on the floor, with her head on an elbow and her wet stockings steaming, saying no more, just keeping me company.

In the days that followed, even my breath shut down. I held it close to my chest, like my lungs and my heart were afraid to let go. I ate little and slept less. Conversations were few, and mostly with Finn. I was cold all the time.

Sometimes I sat on the side porch and looked across the field
at the house where I was born. One evening, when fall was tightening down into winter, I took up a towel to give a hand with the dish drying, and I asked Auntie, “Whatever happened to my daddy?”

She paused with her hands deep in the suds. “He went off.”

“But where? He went off
where
?”

Auntie looked up and out through the window. “Just down the road. One day, he set out with a suit of clothes on his back, and wearing his best black shoes. She never saw him again.”

“What was his name, at least?”

For a moment she was silent. “Nobody knows.”