Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  While at our house, Aunt Odessa seemed to enjoy the relatively modern and comfortable—although gravely modest—amenities. She warmed herself by the gas heater and watched endless hours of TV. However, she seemed irrationally resistant to incorporating these comforts into her own home life. When the town finally installed a sewage system, she resisted offers to have a bathroom built onto her house. She finally relented, a bit, and allowed one to be built as a separate structure, in effect an outhouse with plumbing, a few yards from the back porch.

  One of her daughters once bought her a black-and-white TV. She watched it, but when it stopped working, she didn’t replace it.

  I’d always thought that Aunt Odessa’s resistance was a product of poverty and prudence, but when she died, I was told that $16,000 in cash was found in the freezer section of her refrigerator, double- and triple-wrapped in Wonder Bread bags.

  Eventually, Uncle Paul and I made it back to the House with No Steps and ate a late lunch. Afterward, I went two doors down to the candy lady’s house. Every neighborhood had one—a lady who sold candy out of her house for extra money. Ours had fashioned a “store” from her closed-in carport. She cared for her ailing father-in-law, which burned through all of her patience. I’d knock. “Wait a minute!” she’d shoot back, ever annoyed. Soon enough, she’d shuffle into the store, always in a loose, ankle-length housedress, and unlatch the screen door. “What you want?” She knew what I wanted, but she always asked. I got the same thing every day: a snow cone, ten cents, and five sugar cookies, three cents each. A quarter.

  Paul and I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting and talking with the old folks in the neighborhood on their porches. For me it was transcendent.

  I was a quiet, introspective boy, and these folks helped me to appreciate that part of myself. They taught me how to be patient and kind—that there was beauty in all things. I picked up their skill for slowing time to a crawl, a skill that people whose time on earth was coming to an end had learned to master. They taught me that you only live once, but for a life well lived, one turn is enough. They baptized me in their sea of stillness, and I emerged more like them than not.

  In my kindergarten year, as the holidays approached, Papa Joe died of a stroke and loneliness. At the same time, my parents’ marriage was dying of divergent dreams and weariness.

  The beginning of the end came one night when my father arrived home late, again, barely beating the sun. My mother was waiting up for him. She had suffered through his controlling nature and his loose ways, but as the old folks had taught me, for everything there comes an end. Cold winters, high fevers, fragile marriages—they all eventually break.

  Earlier in their marriage, when I was living in Arkansas, he had worked construction jobs in Houston, and she and my brothers holed up in a single room of Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace’s house. My mother had tolerated the fact that he had forbidden her to drive the cars he left parked in the yard. When she could find work, she had to bum a ride.

  She had tolerated his boorish behavior, the way he leaned against a doorjamb and moved up and down to scratch his back, the way a bear scratches its back against a tree. Things like that set my mother’s teeth on edge. My father laughed off her annoyance, as he did most things.

  She had tolerated the house he rented with his band, the one where they practiced for gigs and entertained wild women. It was on Boogie Woogie Road.

  My mother dealt with my father’s women who had the nerve to come to our house. She once came home from working a shift at the chicken plant and found a woman leaving the house. She scrambled to find a brick, which she sent flying through the back window of the woman’s car as she drove off.

  She had even tolerated having to take armfuls of groceries and armfuls of babies around to the back door because he hadn’t built those damned steps. Building the steps would have been such a simple thing. He could have done it. He should have done it. The not-doing spoke volumes.

  She had put up with it all, but something about that night was different. Something had changed.

  For one thing, she’d left the chicken plant far behind. She’d taken all the classes she needed for her degree to become a home economics teacher. She once told me that she saw teaching as a way out, insurance that she would never end up in a white man’s field or a white woman’s kitchen. When I was born she was a college dropout still a few credits short of a degree. Now she had that degree, and the year I was five years old she landed a teaching job at the high school in Ringgold, thirty miles southwest of town, where she had done her student teaching.

  As part of her studies, and then as part of her new job, she made things: practical things like most of her clothes and some of our furnishings, and magical things like the only stuffed animal I ever got. It was a furry brown dog with floppy leather ears and big button eyes. But it was more than that. It also was the first thing that made me realize that she thought about me when she wasn’t looking after me, a realization that sent waves of joy washing over me and made me squeeze the dog so hard that I nearly popped the stitching.

  She now had options. She no longer had to put up with my father’s behavior. The fever—and the marriage—had broken.

  So she sat there in the dark and the silence that night, waiting for him.

  He came in, and she let loose. This was bigger than just this one evening. The noise woke us. As it grew louder and more agitated, my brothers and I crept into the hallway, peeking around the corner, a mass of scrawny brown limbs sprouting like weeds in all directions.

  My father was drunk and my mother belligerent. This was not going to end well. He grabbed my mother’s arms, threw her down onto the sofa, and threw himself on top of her. Something about him didn’t seem angry or aggressive to me, but mockingly dismissive, trying to bring a shrill wife to heel. But his attempts to dismiss her anger only seemed to inflame it.

  I stole away to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and ran back to our crouching position in the hallway. My small hand clung desperately to the wooden handle as the heavy blade dangled down to my knee.

  I didn’t know why I had the knife. I didn’t know what I planned to do with it. I was only five years old. All I knew was that I was overcome by fear and anger and sadness, and if I had to choose a side, I was choosing hers. I was a mama’s boy—the kind who followed her wherever she went, funerals and all; the kind who always saw her way as right; the kind who shooed away the curious hogs that put their tongues to her hair.

  Then my mother cocked her ample legs under his body like the hammer of a gun, thrust them upward, and sent him flying backward, partially through the living room’s picture window. He stretched his arms wide and clung to the yellow brocade curtains on either side, keeping himself from tumbling out of the house and onto the broken glass beneath him in the yard. I was relieved, but my mother was still irate. “Let go my damn curtain!” She had made them, too.

  In that moment, the power in their relationship shifted, in my mind, from him to her: she was strong, he was weak.

  The next morning, my father quietly patched up the window as we left for school. That’s the last memory I have of us all together in that house.

  Fed up and with a burgeoning career, my mother felt the time had come for a decision: we were leaving my father and moving into Papa Joe’s house to live with Uncle Paul. Paul couldn’t live alone, and my parents could no longer live together.

  During Christmas break Jed and Big Mama came from Kiblah to help us load our things into Jed’s truck and began to ferry them across town to our new home, the same old house where I spent most of my mornings, Papa Joe’s house, a house with solid steps, steps of brick covered in concrete.

  We were still at the House with No Steps, which was nearly empty, on Christmas Eve when Big Mama called from Papa Joe’s house and said that Santa had delivered our presents there by mistake. We ran out, jumped on our bikes, and sped through the cold, dark streets as my mother trailed us in the car. We never went back to the House with No Steps
again.

  At Papa Joe’s house, Paul kept the room he’d always had, my mother took Papa Joe’s room, and William and Robert took the room in the middle of the house. That left Nathan and me with the room where Mam’ Grace had died, our bed pointing in the same direction as her hospital bed had been, facing the picture window. We tried our best to reclaim that room from what had happened in it, but loss still lingered there in the echoes of screams and the memories of tears.

  My dad also left the House with No Steps, moving back to his family homestead in Bienville, a small town twenty miles southeast of Gibsland, to stay with his two half-sisters and their husbands in a rundown former bed-and-breakfast just off the highway.

  We left our little house with only a month left on the rent-to-own contract. Even one more month would have been too long. My mother had to leave that house to find her way back home.

  For my mother, Papa Joe’s house was home. She had spent much of her life in that house. She had stayed there as a young girl during the times Big Mama had married and moved away and my mother had refused to follow. She stayed there through college, what she’d finished of it, and even through marriage, occupying one room with my brothers while my father went away to Houston. She left Papa Joe’s house only when my father came back to Gibsland from Houston and she moved with us into the House with No Steps.

  I thought Papa Joe’s house would feel like home to me too, that the move would be easy. But I was wrong. For me, the move was hard. It took me away from the neighborhood that had nurtured me, my village, the place where I was everybody’s baby, Char’esBaby, where old folks slowed time to a crawl and a smiling round woman always wanted sugar from Chocolate.

  The move plopped me down in the middle of an emotional nothingness, where ever-active bodies with ever-present anxieties moved around and past me the way a stampede moves around and past a stump—like I was barely there.

  And my brothers, they didn’t seem to have time for me.

  Nathan and I still shared a room, but also an unbridgeable developmental divide: I was new to kindergarten, he was newly a teenager. He was almost never home—always out cutting up and chasing girls—and when he was home, there was little for us to talk about.

  Many evenings there was no one in our room but me and the memory of Mam’ Grace. And, as it had been in the House with No Steps, the only television was in William and Robert’s room, where the family still gathered to watch, resting on the bed or on a hand-me-down sofa that my mother had squeezed into the room.

  William and Robert shared a special bond that only seemed to grow stronger after my parents split. It was a bond that didn’t seem able to stretch wide enough to truly include me or anyone else. I stayed in their room as much as possible, but some part of me always felt like an interloper.

  The most fun I had with them was on our rides to school when the three of us were still in the elementary school together. My mother left early every morning for her long drive to work, so we all piled onto William’s pieced-together bicycle for the crosstown ride to school—Robert on the seat, me dangling from the handlebars, and William standing, legs pumping the pedals like pistons. We raced along narrow streets, down steep hills, and around blind curves, my face outstretched, eyes closed, parting the dewy air like a hood ornament. It was exhilarating, until one day my heel slipped into the spokes, which removed my shoe and scraped all the skin from the back of my foot. From then on, I approached the rides with trepidation.

  As for my mother, she became so consumed with taking care of us that it partially stole her from us. She now had to care for four boys and Uncle Paul, a man-child, all by herself and on her meager salary. At the end of the long days, she’d plop down on her bed, exhausted, and read the newspaper, the Shreveport Times, front to back. In fact, no matter how hard we had it, the home delivery of the newspaper was the one thing that she never forswore. I learned early, from her, to love newspapers. Once a week the newspaper came with a Mini Page, a page of news and games designed for children. My mother would save it for me, and I would read my page as she read hers, each of us lost in broad sheets of paper. When my mother wasn’t reading, she’d talk on the phone with the gossips until sleep came.

  I had never really known the feel of loneliness, but now it was fused to me, creeping up me, the way the kudzu beside the road to Big Mama’s house quickly overgrew the trees, encased them in shadows, and choked them to death.

  It wasn’t a physical loneliness as much as an emotional, spiritual loneliness, a need to be seen and hugged and kissed and held. It was a need to be told stories and have someone listen patiently as I asked too many questions. It was a need to laugh until I cried, about nothing, silly things, with someone who made me feel that I was everything.

  No one seemed to notice this need in me, and I was too young and ashamed of it to articulate it. I was so lonely in that house that the first Christmas there I asked for a ventriloquist’s puppet—a white boy with red hair and brown freckles whom I tried to make black with a Magic Marker—just so I would have someone to talk to.

  I wanted to go back to the House with No Steps, to be among the people who doted on me. It was only a few blocks away. But, for a small child, a few blocks away is a whole world away. I couldn’t get there on my own. That place was now lost to me.

  At the House with No Steps I had not sensed our shortness of money, but now it was all too apparent. We hadn’t been well-off before, but now we would truly struggle.

  Most of the blacks in town lived in some gradation of poverty—some barely eking out an existence, some whose existence could hardly be called living. “Poor as Job’s turkey,” my mother called it.

  They were the kind of folks who did hard jobs and odd jobs—any work they could find to keep the lights on and the children fed.

  They were women whose skin glistened from steam and sweat, whose hands stayed damp from being dipped in buckets and dried on aprons. They were men who worked in boots with steel toes, the kind that didn’t take shining, the kind that leaned over and told stories when you took them off.

  They were people whose bodies melted every night in a hot bath, then stiffened by sunrise, so much so that it took pills to get them out of bed without pain.

  Yet they seemed to me content in what they knew life to be—sharing old stories, deep laughs, and sweet tea. As the old folks had imparted to me early on, grandeur never witnessed could not be coveted.

  Now we were moving to the more desperate end of that spectrum.

  My brothers and I spent many Saturdays scavenging at the city dump. It was on the black side of town, just off the elbow of a blind curve, near the highest point of Boogie Woogie Road.

  At the dump we combed through the discards of other people’s lives, looking for things that could enrich our own, things whose original purpose had expired, things that begged our imaginations to reincarnate them with another. One-rimmed bicycles, card-bare board games, three-legged tables, all dug from rippling heaps under the glare of hungry dogs.

  Being a child with nothing, it didn’t take much to satisfy me. The smallest trinkets sparked the wonder of great treasure—a copper penny, a gold button, a fake gem wiggled free from fake jewelry. They were ideas made real in faraway places by unknown hands, things that somehow made their way into mine, things that, when touched, connected me to another world, one I thought I might never see, where people might have time for me.

  I filled my pockets with these things—talismans against tough times, reminders that the world was bigger than what I saw.

  But even at the junkyard, even with my brothers there, I still found myself alone. They ventured deep into the garbage while I scavenged in heaps close to the street, in case we had to run from the dogs.

  I was tense around dogs. One had almost killed me when we lived in the House with No Steps. I had gone to play one afternoon with other children at the Methodist church down the street, its asphalt-and-gravel parking lot doubling as a scar-multiplying playground. I stood savo
ring a bottle of soda. It was a rare treat, so I took my time, paying attention to every swig, sliding my tongue into the opening until bubbles burned the taste buds on the tip.

  At the time, my mother was chatting with her friends in an adjacent house, trading gossip and giggles, talking as they did about half-a-husbands and a whole lot of problems, propping each other up so that life wouldn’t wear them down.

  One of the neighborhood dogs, a German shepherd named King, weaved a path among us children, panting in the heat. He stopped with his back to me, his fluffy tail rocking back and forth in slow motion. I extended my hand and gently grabbed it. That was my mistake. King turned, fangs bared, and attacked—his hulking frame pinning my small one to the ground. As I lay on my back, he lunged for my face. His eyes went blank. The King I knew was no longer inside that animal.

  I instinctively grabbed his throat with my free hand and held him off with an arm made stiff by sheer terror. With the other hand I held the soda out from the commotion, upright so that it wouldn’t spill. Two hands would have been better to keep myself from being mauled, but my brain didn’t make that click. That was my soda, and I intended to finish it.

  The other children screamed for the mothers, and the mothers burst out of the house, yelling and screaming with the emphasis and pitch only mothers can produce when a child is in danger.

  They scared King away, but not before he carved a wound deep into the part of me that trusted things. I would especially never trust another dog that didn’t belong to us, let alone a rib-bare, junkyard dog scrounging for scraps.

  When my brothers and I finished our digging in the junkyard, we climbed into the ditch across the street and dug for a treat. We flaked off pieces of edible clay dirt that smelled to me like dry earth at the beginning of a fresh rain and tasted like chalk soaked in vinegar. Folks said it was good for you. Settled your stomach. Staved off illness. All I knew was the taste was addictive, and that ditch—where the curve of the road cut deep into the ground and exposed the strata—was the only place in town where that dirt could be found. Best of all, it was free.