Playing With Matches (26 page)

“In the 1930s, Clarice was almighty sick of frostbite, ’cause she hitchhiked down from … Minnesota, I think it was.”

“My mother?”

“Your grandmother. Your mama was Clarice the Second. You’re the third.”

I hold my breath.

“She raised up a clapboard house on this side of the Pearl—the house where your mama was born.” Auntie sighs like something’s taken too much space in her for too long a time.

She sits beside me on the bed, holds her stockings in her hands. “That was back in the years when the rain wouldn’t come, and the pecans failed. The sun beat down, oh, yes, Lord. My papa told me he could hear the earth groanin’, watch them cracks widening. My fam’ly was in Greenfield then, along the Pearl.

“Even in the delta, corn died a foot tall, weighted down with dust. Every day was an unswallowable thing. I was just being born about then.

“Folks here and in Alabama, and clear to Kansas, they loaded up and headed for California. They heard they was money in the strawberry fields. Some were bound for Hollywood. Shookie, she’d already fallen in love.”

I did some quick figuring, caught myself wanting to stroke my face.

She looks at her hands. “Men, passin’ through, knocked on your grandma’s door. She bedded ’em down on her porch or her sofa, some upstairs—Clea, you asked to hear this. Before that first winter, your granny grew round as a melon.”

She paused. “Nobody claimed to be father to that child.”

“The baby was my mother.”

“That’s right.”

“Go on.”

Auntie purses her lips, remembering. “That baby girl,
also
named Clarice, grew up comely and with a taste for gin.”

My thoughts are tumbling. I interrupt. “Why didn’t you tell me about Miss Shookie before?”

“Shookie’s business.”

“All right. Yes.”

“She had already come here to live. She said your mama was a hellion, paid no mind to the law. When your grandma died, Clarice had her buried in Potter’s Field, across the creek. Where old prisoners go. Then she went home and fashioned a bar in the parlor and turned the place into a juke joint. That’s when I came to False River.”

“From Izzie Thorne’s.”

“Tha’s right. Ollie Green used to go and sit in your mama’s parlor, try to save her soul. But she backtalked him awful.”

Like me
, I think.

“She was a handful, a grown woman puttin’ the Reverend in his place. I remember him saying, ‘Jerusha, the lights were on, and the corks were poppin’, and I couldn’t change a thing.’ ”

I watch Auntie’s face.

“Gents would park in her dooryard and pay their dues. But you know how that was.”

I do. I did. In my mother, men found a beautiful face and an itch to be taken. Her hair was like silk; her breasts and thighs were north of voluptuous.

“Times were still hard,” Auntie says. “But—oh, my—piano music flowed out of that house. It wasn’t long before
she
birthed
you
. On the kitchen table.”

“So as not to ruin the silk sheets on the bed,” I said.

“You came into the world the color of a sweet peach, squalling and damp as a three-day rain.”

I half smile. I love that someone has a sweet memory of me.

“Shortly, she brought you here in a basket; you know that too.”

“Yes. So she could get on with swilling gin and jitterbugging till dawn. And you’re sure you never knew my daddy.”

“I never did.”

“He could’ve been traveling through, or a guard or a convict released from the prison. A parolee. Anybody.”

“Yes. I don’t think Clarice even knew, how she
could
have known.”

“All right.”

“So then here you were, this third Clarice—long-legged and willful. We called you Clea. Me and Cunny, we wanted so bad for you to stay clear of that house.”

But I couldn’t. How I wish I had.

She says softly, “And then one day, you leveled that place to a bed of ash.”

It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say it out loud.

I can tell that Auntie likes Thomas, which feels like a betrayal. He’s sitting at the table with Harry in his lap, and he’s holding a waffle that Harry is buttering but not eating. Shookie pours coffee for herself and Thomas.

She and Bitsy are down early too, in case there’s something to see. In the event I throw dinner plates or slam Thomas against the wall. Miss Shookie, after all, needs fuel for the fires of her gossip. Meanwhile, there’s no sign, no aura around her—nothing to signify regret at her outburst last night.

We are a full kitchen.

Auntie says, “Luz, think you and Bitsy can make us a spice cake this morning? Recipe’s right here, pans under the sink. Use waxed paper to line them. Shookie can show you how to beat the frosting.”

Luz is excited. From the doorway, she watches as I get ready to leave. I’m wearing black pants and the short-sleeved white blouse I arrived here in. I’ve cleaned the mud from my sandals, but this afternoon I must buy plain tennis shoes so my toes don’t show when I go to the Farm. With some embarrassment, Wheezer has asked if I’ll wear socks with my sandals. I’ve used the least-scented soap in Auntie’s bathroom. I have my folder of the inmates’ stories, and notebooks and pencils from the trunk of the Honda, which we are taking today, before the storm.

“Mom,” Luz whispers from her place next to me. “I’ve also been thinking—do you think I could learn about Call?”

“Marie-Luz.” I stroke her hair. It’s pulled back in four barrettes we found on the floor of the car. I kiss her cheek. “All things are possible.”

40

R
aoul comes in with a bounce. He and Willie G, big Wesley, little Frank, and Horse take the same seats.

“You read our stuff?” Raoul asks. I bet, when he was in school, he chewed gum and cut up. He glances over his shoulder at the back wall that’s right there, and grins wide and brilliant and toothy at me. Two of the many sides of Raoul Sanchez.

“I did, and they were wonderful. I’ve written on each one—what I especially liked, what I suggested. Today we’re going to expand the way we think about ourselves.”

They’ve settled quickly and are so quiet. Maybe they’re already wearying of this. “Let’s talk about the masks we wear.”

I wait for some dumb burglary comment, but no one says anything.

“Every day, each one of us is many people. We love, fear, hate. It’s like changing hats. We put on a different mask to deal with each specific thing.”

“Or person?” says Willie G.

I recall Wheezer’s warning. Am I getting too personal? How the hell do you teach a decent writing class without getting up close?

“That’s right.” I come around and set my butt against the table. “Think about the time before you came here. You were sons, brothers, fathers, lovers. Maybe you had a job, went to school, made plans. You were sick or well, religious, patriotic. For all those things—” I look up and out at the strip of dark sky. “For each of those things, you wore a different mask. You wore one when you heard ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ another when somebody gave you a rash of trouble. Imagine they were real masks you put on and took off. Each one showed who you were in that moment.”

Raoul snorts. “Willie’s got him a hangover mask. Musta been something he drank.”

“Shut up,” Willie G. says. “I’ll put a permanent mask on you, flavor of the month. So now we’re in here—”

“Yes,” I say. “Especially in here. You still wear masks, and you change them constantly.”

They are silent. I know this is true. I was a master at covering up. I witness the shifts in their horsing around, see it in their writing. Shookie was on the mark—they shine one another on. Today I’m giving them a tool with which to do it.

“How d’you know anything about us?” Frank says. “How you know we do this?”

“Because we all wear them. We’re human and complex. We can’t help it. I doubt that anyone ever achieved singleness—great leaders, maybe. Zen masters. Jesus Christ.”

“They wasn’t human,” Willie G. says, and at the looks on the faces of his prison brothers, he amends, “I mean—they had special powers.”

“Did they?”

Willie G. says lightly, “You think we’re human, Miz Ryder? You sure we ain’t monsters?”

I shake my head slowly. “You’re not monsters.”

“Shit,” Frank says. “Some days I’m so fuckin’ many people, I can’t count ’em. An’ Horse, here—he was a man of business. He wore one mask when he dealt with customers—”

“And another when he talked to vendors or his banker,” I say, helping him along. “But Horse was other things too. Today I want you to write a short paragraph for each of four masks you wear—or wore.”

“When we was outside?”

“Or inside, yes.” I hand them paper and pencils. “And you’re to name each mask—each persona you take on.”

“What you mean,
name
it?” Wesley says.

“Well … when I hear someone sing ‘America the Beautiful,’ my eyes tear up. My heart beats like crazy. I’m so red, white, and blue, if I were to look in a mirror, I’d see stars where my eyes are, stripes for the rest. An eagle poised above my head. Hokey, maybe, but that’s part of who I am. And I’d call that mask … Summer.”

“For the Fourth of July,” Raoul says, like he’s figured out the theory of relativity.

I smile. “Maybe. But I could have called it Hot Dogs or Freedom or Mary Lou. It was mine to choose.
You
are to identify
your
masks and name them.”

“Four of them goddamn things,” Wesley says.

“Yes.”

Their fingers cramp, and they begin to write. I think I hear thunder, but it could be cell doors rolling shut. Beyond the little window, lightning flashes.

I walk among the short aisles, look over their shoulders, put my finger on a page. “Strong word,” I say. “Great start. I like that—keep going.”

I read a little here and there. Only Horse hunkers down, covering his paper with his arm.

Willie G. writes that he wants to go home. He misses his sisters, his dead brother, his mom and her cooking. He calls that mask William. He wears another entirely when he thinks of an old love. Still another is the man who rode here on the bus, guilty, watchful, stripped of dignity. He calls that man Done.

Wesley calls one of his Ax.

Sweet Jesus
.

“Hey, this jus’ between us?” Wesley asks. “Or does the man read it too?” The guards, warden, the district attorney.

“Only me,” I say.

He writes that, just now, a cold sausage patty is in his pocket. He stole it from the kitchen where he does the heavy cleaning. He sleeps afternoons. Every night at ten o’clock, he dresses and goes back to scrub the grills, the vent hoods. He mops the floor. Sometimes there’s an extra pork chop that he cabbages onto. He’s always hungry. Mama’s growing boy. Maybe he chows down later on this contraband, or trades two chops and four stamps for a cup of hooch—if he brings the container. He calls it Good Times.

And on it goes.

They write for an hour, and I don’t interrupt. When Horse and Frank put down their pencils, I call time. I can’t afford to let them get restless.

They spend another hour reading and listening and mumbling about more ways to say things, but they lack yesterday’s enthusiasm, more like they’re watching me, waiting for answers to which no one’s asked a question. I bob my head and smile, but I feel them sliding from me. As if they’re slipping into a dark hole.

Have I done something wrong? Have they heard about my mother, that she came here and serviced the guards,
and would I
?

I move on. “Sometimes I’m asked which of these masks is the real me. The real you.”

They wait.

“And I always answer—we’re every one. It takes these four—and four times four more—to make up who we are.”

They don’t ask me if that’s bad or good.

“It is what it is. You’re complex people, and that gives you a lot to write about.”

I drop my notebook and pen on the table. Frank jumps as though I’ve fired a shot. “Okay, gentlemen, what’s going on? What’s on your minds? You’re way too quiet.”

I walk the floor.

Raoul shifts in his seat.

Willie G. stretches out an orange leg, inspects his state-issue boot.

Wesley says, “This your last day, teacher.”

Is he threatening me?
Or is it something else? It’s my plan to be back unless I’m in a cell myself. If I say that, Wheezer will think it too personal.

I recall Miss Shookie saying, “They get what they need.”
Ain’t no man goin’ without very long. If he be down on his luck and in need of thangs, he find a way … a ice-cream bar on a hot day
.

A prayer is in order:
Lord, keep me on my toes
.

Frank with the big teeth says, “We know what’s comin’. We been through it before. Only this time it’s big.”

“What is it—that’s coming?”

“Storm,” Raoul says. “Bad one, we got a feelin’. You around, you’ll see what kinda masks we wear then. Hurricane come, it’s the same ol’
‘Yes, boss, no, boss,’
but we’re all chained together
’cause they can’t take a chance. Can’t have the place fallin’ down and us offenders running wild. We know this much: ’Round here, you sure as hell gotta know how to swim.”