Playing With Matches (29 page)

And I think of Finn across the field, claiming I’m innocent, and Thomas, right here, telling me I’m guilty.

I feel the house shake and the steps twist under me.

“Get up! Get off the stairs!” Thomas shouts, reaching for my hand, and he drags me up. Behind me, board by board, the steps pop apart and fly off in the night, leaving great gaping holes between the downstairs and where we hunker now—what the devil is holding us up?

The wind feels like a giant, whipping and beating. I see Thomas hold the kids close as glass whistles along the hall. Auntie clutches her face. Uncle calls for the flashlight and presses a handkerchief to her cheek. Someone brings more blankets, and that’s when the roar starts—a freight train passing over and around, for certain, and I’m shoving Harry under a bed, pulling Luz in with me. Thomas is here too, flat on his belly on the floor beside us, hands over his head. I don’t know where the others are. I’m afraid to move too close to the wall.

Overhead, something snaps—something finite and heavy—the cracking of a huge collarbone, or a skull maybe. Probably the attic roof is gone, and I wait for the trembling floor to tip and send us into a slide, down into the river that’s by now flowed across the field and is surely a mile wide.

The wind blows from directions that are legion. More boards pop loose. Water is sucked into the sky.

“Jesus Christ,” Thomas says, and he’s pulling us out. “We’ve gotta go up!”

“It’s a tornado, Thomas! We have to go down!”

“There
is
no down. Clea, get the kids
up
!”

Harry’s slung over his shoulder, and he half carries Luz, and I see the attic staircase with its wall blown away, and someone has gone down in the upstairs hall. I see Wheezer take Luz up. On the topless attic floor, they crouch and are lashed by the rain and soaked to the bone. But, right here, Shookie is screaming.

It’s Bitsy, lying outside her bedroom door. I am on my knees in the hall, feeling for a pulse in her neck, calling her name, Uncle calling mine, and then he is here too, groping in the dark. Broken timber is piled on her, on the steps that, a minute ago, went up. Now there are almost no steps at all.

“God, God,” Uncle says, and someone is keening. Maybe that’s me. “We have to carry her up. Thomas, sir!” But there’s nowhere to set so much as a foot, and Thomas pushes rubble out into the night. The strangest things scream away on the wind.

We press against the inside wall. I scramble back into the room, where I drag a sheet from the bed.

“She’s gone,” Uncle says. “Her neck’s broken.”

The floor rattles. The three of us do our best to turn Bitsy and wrap her in the sodden sheet. We bump going up, one step at a time. Some risers and planks are missing.
Please, God, don’t let her fall through
. My own heart is breaking.

Three more steps.

One. Two more. Then I lie down on the attic floor, hold my children, and huddle under what’s left of the roof. Thomas comes and wraps his arms around us.

From here, if it were daylight, I’d be looking out on the land where I was born. I might conjure up Mama, watch through a window while she danced in her high heels. Her feather boa was pink and pretty in the afternoon sun.

Harry has found the blue woolly.

It’s cold in the attic, and the wind is still fierce. Harry looks to me, his thumb in his mouth. How can I tell my boy that life is not only a series of devastations? How do I say that to a four-year-old? How can I tell him there’s more when I’ve spent all my life looking for higher ground? And here it is, three stories up, on Potato Shed Road.

Through a window, in a flash of forked light, I think I see Finn in his tree house. Then the oak sweeps away in the flood and is gone.

We hear the familiar whine of nails bending, things breaking.
We hold on, and after a while, the wind subsides. Luz has her inhaler; she breathes out and takes a puff. It’s the first time she’s used it since we’ve been here.

I think about something Thomas said. I can hate, all right, and feel sad or excited. I know pain over things lost, but he was right—I can’t remember many times when I told anyone I was sorry. Even as a child, with my incessant verbiage, it was probably the one thing I said least.

Nor have I wept much. Now Bitsy is dead. Instead of a wet bedsheet, I wish she were wrapped in fine linen. I lay down by her body, fling my arm across her belly, and cry as though I have never cried. On this night of the storm, I can’t stop.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m sorry, I’m
sorry
!”

On her hands and knees, Auntie comes to me. She sits by me, pats me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“The worst is all behind you, Clea June.”

“But—”

“Sometimes an apology is all you can do.”

I cry for Bitsy. I tell her I ache for the misery I dealt her. I weep, too, for Claudie and Genie and Denver Lee. For their mama, for Miss Poole, and for the prisoners at the Farm. I sob for Finn and his daddy, for Miss Izzie Thorne. I cry for my babies, and for Shookie, whose child is cold and dead.

The rain has slacked off, but the night isn’t over. Lightning and rolling thunder slam in, dirge after dirge. And the river hasn’t crested; the water’s still rising. Up here, someone must stay awake and on watch. We scrounge up quilts and things to lay our heads on and take turns drifting in and out of sleep.

Toward dawn, we hear the crack of a rifle, and then another, and Wheezer rolls over and stifles a terrible sound. I think, somehow,
he might have been shot, but he is on his knees, hands clasped in prayer. An offender has run, and now has been found and is probably dead.

I too have been found. I’m sad for the child I was. All through the night, I have cried myself sick.

A brilliant new sun is coming up. Uncle’s digging into the pillowcases, passing out broken crackers and cheese and quartering apples with his pocketknife. Thomas is rationing half-cups of water.

I lie on my side and stare out where the river used to run, and see, through cracks in the floor, the water that has made us an island. Every piece of junk in Mississippi bobs on its surface.

The False River—about which there has never been anything false—has been fed by a stormy and outraged Pearl, and now trees and chunks of Auntie’s home, and others’, move around us in a tidal swirl. Across the way, the field looks like a rice paddy. The stems that poke through are actually treetops.

Below us float front doors and porch posts, furniture I don’t recognize, wooden pillars, a pickup truck that’s upside down. Auntie’s Kia is in the driveway; my car and Uncle’s truck are gone. Finn’s tree has sailed away, downriver.

I hiccup. “Auntie,” I say, from where I lay on the floor. “If something happens to me, will you tell my kids I loved them? Will you look after them?”

Auntie is tired and thin-lipped. Her night has been long; her own eyes are red-rimmed. “I will not,” she says. “Now, you get yourself up, Clea Ryder, and take care of your own.”

44

W
e wait through the long morning. From here we can look in three directions but are unable to see along the lane to the south, afraid to move around much on our rickety perch. Uncle has ventured halfway down the stairs to the second floor, but the house shakes so badly, he has given it up.

“If we had rope,” Wheezer says, “you could lower me over the side.”

Auntie says, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

Wheezer grins. “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their asses.”

What we do see is dark water, risen around us, on out past the poplar line to the east. To the north, it’s covered the ground floor of the big house at Hell’s Farm and has washed away most of the outbuildings there. It looks like a lot of people are crowded onto the prison roof. I wonder whether I’m looking at the warden and his staff and maybe the guards up there, or if they’ve tried to save offenders too. I think of the weight of waist and ankle chains, and wonder how many have drowned.

Harry’s rabbit has ridden out the night hanging from Thomas’s pants pocket. So Harry has that, and his spoon, and his
woolly, and his parents and Auntie and Uncle, who love him. He has Shookie, who has spoiled him but who is now curled on the floor, pillows under her head, mourning a very private loss.

“Mom,” Luz says. “Last night, you missed Call.”

“I did.” I’ve missed several.

“Tell me what it’s like,” she says.

I reach for a box of Raisin Bran and offer her some, put a pair of raisins on Harry’s tongue. The storm has taken everything from the attic. We have only wet quilts and what things we hauled up from the kitchen.

“Call is about forgetting who you are, Luzie.”

“Jeez. Why would you do that?”

“Well, when a person has had a traumatic life, when he’s gotten lost in all the bad things that happened to him, it’s critical for that person—for every person—to know that he’s still important.”

“That he matters?”

“Yes. He has worth. That’s what I want you and Harry to know. How important you are to me, to your dad, to this world. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Then, after a while—and this usually doesn’t happen till you’re grown up—”

“You think I’m different from most kids, huh?”

“I know you are. You’re wonderful and brilliant and loving and beautiful.”

“Cut the
beautiful
, Mom.”

“You will be. That’s a whole other thing.…”

“So
after a while …
” she says.

“Yes. Some folks discover an even deeper truth. A very precious truth.”

“I’ll be twelve in two weeks,” Luz says, of whatever I’m about to say. “I’m ready.”

I can’t help but smile at this amazing daughter. “I’m so blessed to have you.”

Harry opens his mouth for more raisins.

“Mom. Okay. You said a ‘precious truth.’ ”

“We learn that we are
more
than our bodies, and our minds and our thoughts. If we subtract the body and the thinking, then
being
is what we have left.”

I’m a fine one to talk about subtracting.

“Wow,” Luz says. “Without thinking, I bet it gets kind of quiet, huh?”

“Very quiet. Nothing is left but awareness.”

“But—my heart will keep beating. My lungs will work. And my kidneys and liver and gallbladder—”

“Exactly. Without your help. You don’t have to do anything to just
be
. That’s why people stay aware of their breathing when they meditate. Because breathing has no form.”

“That’s what you guys—the sisters—do at Call? You breathe, and you just are?”

“We say a prayer. Then we try.”

I might add,
We are very kind to ourselves
, but that’s something I keep forgetting. Poor Clea Ryder, child and adult. Been a long, long time since I put my arms around her.

Luz says, “But what if—you know—something’s burning on the stove? Or your kid starts crying, or you have to sneeze?”

“That’s the thing. You can’t push life away. It won’t let you.”

“Then how do you get quiet so you
can
just be?”

“Well—first you turn off the stove, you make sure the baby’s napping or taken care of, then you put your arms around all that you have, all that’s around you—embrace all the sounds and the smells—”

“
Embrace
. Snuggle, enfold, wrap up.”

“Right. You embrace the circumstances of your life. You sit down in the middle of all that, disconnect from it for a minute, or two minutes, and
just be
.”

“What happens to the things around you—like atomic particles and your husband’s birthday and stuff?”

“It’ll still be there when you’re through being. But for a few seconds, or a few minutes, you don’t think about anything. And if you have to sneeze, you just sneeze, and then come back to that quiet place.”

“Can we practice?”

“We can. Tonight, when I go to Call, you do it with me.”

“Why is it called
going to Call
, when you don’t really go anywhere?”

“Because when life is hectic, we feel
called
to a saving stillness.”

“Mom. I used to think, when you went to Call—you were going somewhere. Away from me.”

“Oh, Luzie, no. I take all the wonderful things you are, all the love I feel for you and Harry, and I breathe it in and out at my center, and it makes me a better mom.”

I wish it had made me a better wife. Such a lot yet to learn.

“And—I never stop hearing your voice, no matter what I’m doing.”

“But you didn’t hear the storm that day. At our house.”

“No. To tell you the truth, Luzie, I wasn’t being quiet inside. I was doing lesson plans and daydreaming.”

“You were mad at Dad.”

Yes. For some time, I had been “mad at Dad.”

“That’s all there is to it?” she says. “It’s like—meditating?”

“There’s more, of course. But that’s basically it. And that’s enough for one night.”

“Give me a hint about the rest,” she says. “Like—coming attractions.”

“Well, the best things are coming
right now
, and you don’t even have to worry about how they’ll get here.”

“I kinda like this, Mom.”

“I’m glad, baby girl. I wish I were better at it. But I’ll keep working on it.”

“I love you, Mom. I’m sure glad you came by me that day.”

“Luz! You
remember
the place where we found you, where Dad and I fell in love with you?”

“It was getting dark in my chicken coop,” she says.

“You were so little.”

“You wouldn’t have seen me if you hadn’t struck a match.”

45

T
ime passes by. We spread quilts to dry. Overhead, the sky is the brightest blue I have ever seen, and the air is cool. Uncle says he can see from here to Wednesday.

Where the floor feels the most solid, he has peered over the edge, Thomas holding his ankles. Uncle thinks, under the water, the kitchen walls are intact. But the table and chairs, and the parlor, are gone.

“Water’s down some,” he says. “But it’ll be a while.”