Playing With Matches (8 page)

While I watched the rings, a noise rose up—not down the road, nor from the prison where sometimes a siren went off—but from across the bare field where weed stalks had long ago fallen and were stubby and wrecked.

This was hollering and common horn honking, and at first it sounded like plain joy riding. I went to the front window and looked out at two pickups bouncing around in the prison’s far field. High school kids waved their arms and yelled, looking just like their daddies on a Saturday night.

But then here they came—bumping across the road, lobbing things at the house, and I heard an upstairs glass break, and over that, the boys chanting something I could not make out.

Then the words came clearer:

“In a golden wig, she smelled like pig, and”
—what was that next?—
“wore her wedding gown!”

Like a nursery rhyme, only ugly and cruel. They shattered bottles and thundered their good time, and here came more hits
SPLOCK SPLOCK
, and I opened the door. Color upon color ran down the wall. Something hit me in the chest and exploded into red paint and bits of balloon.

Then one fired past me. I looked back through the door and
saw Mama cross-legged, and around her the stuff puddled, purple and thickening, on her floor.

Then from the corner of my eye I also saw Auntie and wide Miss Shookie barreling across the empty lot, Auntie screaming and shouting and waving her fists. The boys took off in their fine pickups, bouncing back the way they had come, across the field and through the far trees.

“Beware the ho’ with the painted do’!”
Their voices spun out.

Auntie stepped up on the porch and grabbed me by a hand. Miss Shookie peered into the house, like a voyeur.

“Well, don’t that just make it, that red paint on the girl,” Miss Shookie said. “Puts me in mind of a scarlet letter.…”

Auntie let go of me long enough to draw back a hard fist and sock Miss Shookie a good one.

For a while after that, Miss Shookie and Bitsy didn’t come on Sundays, but then they started again, and we all took up like nothing had happened.

Only it had.

11

S
ummers were too short, made worse by knowing September was ahead. Every August, I sat on the porch with my knees tucked up and, dry-eyed, cried my heart to death.

Auntie had little patience with people who whined and felt sorry for themselves. But if I said nothing at the Sunday table, Miss Shookie picked at me like a dry brown scab. Uncle Cunny was different. He watched over us all. Reverend Ollie told his flock that God’s eye was on the sparrows. If that was true, maybe Uncle was God, come down to earth in a pin-striped suit. He smiled and he praised me, and he passed me the peas. I loved him with a heart so full that sometimes I worried that my aching might leak out.

I sat in the itchy grass and watched Mama’s house. She hardly ever came out anymore, but probably laid up inside with her dress hitched high in front of a slow-moving fan.

When I was ten, they made Miss Thorne principal, and she taught Year Five. I was in her class.

Every morning, in charge, she stood outside to greet us, looking
down at her broken porch steps over which someone had laid a length of plywood. But sometimes in January that old wood became slippery with frost so last winter Miss Thorne had dragged in a length of old carpet and had the older boys nail it to the slick plywood.

I was grateful to be sitting in the back of her room. She had her hair done up nice now, and she smelled of English lavender. I wanted to please her, and it came easy. I had long since left Claudie and Eulogenie behind. It was Eulogenie’s fault. If Claudie wanted to stay back and read
Dick and Jane
till she was old and gnarled up, it was fine by me.

In this class, there were only four of us white kids. I watched the other three stumble over the simplest of spelling words and felt sorry to be counted as one of their color. After that, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but my whiteness.

I wondered what that would be like, having shiny dark skin, pale palms, and pink crevasses on the heels of my feet. In the most secret places of my heart, I wondered too about their private parts, how far
dark
extended, and if their organs inside were the same color as mine.

I imagined I was one of them, my hair twisted up in a hundred tiny braids and threaded with beads. If I were black, I’d wear African clothes and sandals made from the tires of safari jeeps. I’d speak Swahili and lift my chin and be proud. My eyes would be big and brown, my lips full, my backside high and rolling when I walked.

I also wondered what it’d be like to come upon a colored boy and find he was the love of my life. I imagined kissing him, my hands touching his short, fuzzy hair. Like Lucille Maytubby, the world would abhor me.

It was then I knew there was a “them” and a “me.”

It opened my eyes and tore me apart.

I suspect that Miss Izzie Thorne caught on to my thinking. I saw it in the way she looked at me—like I was part of some memory she thought was past.

That very afternoon, I went home, stripped off my clothes, and looked at myself—long white arms and pointy elbows. I pulled off my socks and studied my feet, whitened from winter. I thought of Auntie and dark Uncle Cunny, stared at the concaveness of my belly and the length of my legs. Deep in my bones I felt an ancient division and realized something I hadn’t before. My lack of popularity wasn’t because I was smart, not at all.

Nobody liked me because I was white.

One fall afternoon, I was swinging upside down from a limb of the oak, when I looked over to see a face looking back. It had a long set of jaw and forehead bones, with skin so thin and pale I could see the blue veins. A lick of yellow hair hung like a question mark, and I’d never witnessed such green, green eyes.

“Hey!” I said. “What you doin’ in our tree?”

“Ain’t your tree.” This boy had the longest of legs and was now sitting on a branch, just passing the day. “This tree’s on the river, and can’t nobody own a river.”

“Our property’s right down to the water, then.”

“Show me,” he said. “Where does it say?”

I let go of the branch and landed on the soft bank. “What you doin’ up there, anyway?”

“I live here,” he said.

I thought of the crows I could see from my window, and their high, raggedy nests. “People don’t live in live-oak trees.”

“Can if they want.” He gave a great tumbling swing, sprang up on his feet, and hopped away among the branches.

“Don’t you have a home somewhere?” I asked.

“You’re lookin’ at it.”

“And how old are you?”

He sucked on his top lip. “Old enough, I guess.”

Was this boy, I wondered, all right in the head? I should go in and tell Auntie to call the sheriff and maybe Uncle Cunny and his friends, besides.

“I got to go in now,” I said. And I did, sidling away without turning my back.

In the kitchen Aunt Jerusha was putting a cold supper on the table—sliced cucumbers and tuna and bread and butter. It was just her and me. I sat in my chair and tore at a crust. “Auntie, how come there’s a boy in our tree?”

She went on with her peeling and slicing. “I reckon he likes it up there,” she said.

“Don’t you think his folks want him to come home?”

“Doesn’t seem the case, does it?” she said. “He’s been with us since last night. I took him some ham and biscuits this morning.”

“But, Auntie, people don’t live in trees. Monkeys do. I read—”

She gave me a long look. “Child, there is one thing you got to remember in this life.”

I sighed. Auntie’s list of life rules was longer than my arm.

“First off,” she said, buttering her bread, “are you seeing him with your mind or your heart?”

“That boy is trespassing.”

She laid circles of cucumber on her bread, and salt-and-peppered them hard.

“Second, if it’s not hurting anybody, jus’ leave it alone.”

“But—” Maybe, somewhere, this boy’s ma was calling him.

Auntie took up a fresh peach. She pitted the fruit and sliced some on her plate.

I bit into my own and marveled at the warm juice. “But it’s suppertime, and I’ll bet he’s hungry.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full. Butter him some bread. And fill a glass with lemon water.”

I also slid three peaches into my pocket.

When I went out, I was pleased to the bone that he was still up there, that he had not climbed down and wandered off to set up housekeeping in somebody else’s tree. It was like having a wild and exotic bird. I bet there wasn’t one other person along the False River that could say a yellow-haired boy had moved into their tree.

“Hey!” I hollered up. “I brought you some food. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Finn,” he said. “Hand it here, then.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I’ll lay it on the ground. You come on down, now, and get it ’fore the ants do.”

I could see him through the branches. He wore cutoff jeans, a T-shirt of no color, and a ball cap fixed tight on his head. “I ain’t coming down,” he said.

“Then I brought it for no reason. I’ll just throw it to the geese—”

“Wait,” he said, and he stepped down, and again, till he was perched on the lowest and thinnest branch.

“How come you’re wearing that hat?”

“This here was my daddy’s cap.” Finn gobbled up his dinner. Peach juice ran off his elbows. He tossed the pits away and drained the glass.

“You act like you’re starving,” I said. “Where’s your daddy at now? Isn’t he wondering what’s become of you?”

He didn’t answer but asked a question of his own. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Clea,” I said.

“How old are you?”

“Ten and eleven-twelfths.”

“Ha!” he said. “I’m lots older.” Then he climbed to the top, and I saw no more of him that night.

The next day I sat with my back to the trunk. This was nothing like Claudie’s friendship had been. Finn was older and therefore wiser, and he had secrets. I liked that. Up in his tree he could be quiet as a mouse. In fact, all the next day I heard nothing out of him and began to be concerned. Then came the rustling of leaves, and Finn suddenly asked about the multicolored house across the way.

When I said nothing, he came down a few branches and asked again.

I set down the book I’d been pretending to read. “I was born in that house.”

“Then how come you’re here?”

“My mama’s Clarice Shine. After she birthed me, she brought me here.”

“I heard about her. Seems a sad thing,” Finn said.

“Don’t you go feeling sorry for me, boy.”

“Don’t
you
call me boy,” he said, “and anyway, my ma died when I was two days old. That makes us the same—your ma being dead to you and all.”

That set me off like a bottle rocket. “She’s not dead to me, and she sure isn’t dead to all her friends that stop by.”

“Friends?” Finn snorted. “You ain’t noticed they’re all horny gents, and most of ’em’s wearing boss-man uniforms?”

By
boss-man
he meant guards. It was one reason I hated the
prison worse than any criminal they might harbor there. “Mind your own beeswax,” I said.