Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  In my family’s new life, the most pressing need was to make sure that we stayed fed, so most of our time and energy went into the growing, picking, and preparing of food.

  Luckily, the house was set on two acres of land strewn with fruit trees—crab apple trees to the right, peach trees behind, fig and plum trees across the street. Another tree out back rained pecans in the fall, and blackberries sprouted up along the fencerow every other summer. We munched on fruit and nuts all day. Whatever we picked in abundance my mother baked into thick-crusted cobblers or bubbling pies.

  We grew our own vegetables across the road. The paved street in front of the house had been laid without regard for property lines, sometimes leaving thin slivers of people’s property across the road from their houses. Some folks did nothing with these scraps of land. Others used them for parking. We turned ours into two truck patch gardens, each about five yards across and fifteen yards long, lying on either side of a small abandoned house that Papa Joe used to rent out to make extra money.

  In the spring, an old man with a mule-drawn plow came to turn the earth. I watched as the man and the mule yanked and pulled each other across the fields, to a chorus of giddyaps and winnies and whoas, until they had created wobbly rows of corrugated soil—crumbly, nearly black, alive with bugs and worms. It smelled strongly of humus, a smell that reached down to the core of me.

  We planted a couple rows of purple hull peas, a couple rows of corn, a half row of tomatoes, and a half row of green beans. Then we planted a couple hills of cucumber and onion on part of the back row. On the rest of the back row my mother let me plant whatever I liked. I chose watermelon, but I didn’t have the patience to let them ripen. When they got to be football-sized I picked them, although the flesh was invariably still white.

  Gardening taught me things I didn’t even know I was learning—lessons about patience and caretaking, but most important about disturbance as a condition of growth, that solid ground had to be plowed up for new seeds to take root.

  When harvest time came, we stayed in the fields all day, picking as much corn and as many peas or beans or greens as we could, trying not to leave a thing.

  At night we sat in a circle, around a mound of vegetables atop an old sheet on the floor in the middle of the room, each person with a large pan, and shucked corn, or snapped green beans, or shelled peas until our fingers turned dark from the pods. We would watch television, tell family stories, and laugh until we nearly peed our pants.

  Everything had to be canned or frozen for the lean winter months. We poured cucumbers, sweet and pickled, and jams and preserves into Mason jars, which we sealed in large shallow pans of slow-boiling water. Blanched peas and tomatoes, cob-scraped corn, and garden vegetable soups we ladled into plastic bags to be frozen.

  Shelling peas and canning pickles: these were the times that drew us together, the only times when I didn’t feel alone in that house. But harvest season lasted only a season. Soon it was done, and I shifted back into the shadows.

  Another occasion that drew us together and made me feel I served a function in our family was Hog Killing Day.

  We used a small space behind the house, beyond the clothesline and under the pecan tree, to raise a couple of hogs, while the large field, where Papa Joe had raised hogs, grew verdant with tall weeds.

  We fattened the hogs until it was time to kill them. It was always after the first frost, after the flies were gone and wouldn’t get at the meat. On that day, the hog killers came before daybreak. They were a small group of old men who still knew how to kill a hog right. They knew where the joints were, how to get through the cartilage, how to get butchers’ cuts from whole slabs.

  We gathered around the pen as one of the men raised a rifle. He wanted a direct shot to the head, but that didn’t always happen. When the bullet hit elsewhere, the hog unleashed a hell-raising squeal.

  When the hog went down the throat was cut, to let it bleed out. Then it was dipped in a barrel of boiling water to remove the hair, after which its hind legs were hooked to a crossbar and its body was pulled up the pecan tree.

  The carcass was split neck to nuts, and the innards were scooped out. They weren’t bloody, but shiny like jewelry—rose quartz and pale amethyst and pearly white. The head was sawed off and set aside for hog head cheese, and the hide was peeled away for cracklings.

  That was my job: cooking the cracklings. The sheets of skin were cut into small chunks, tossed into a cast-iron caldron that was half as deep as I was tall, and heated on all sides by a log fire. I stirred them around with the stick-end of a used-up broom until the fat melted and the pieces crackled in the oil they made. The cracklings were scooped out, salted, and eaten right away, so hot that they burned the tongue, so tasty that we didn’t care.

  But Hog Killing Day lasted just a day. When the killing and the carving and the cooking of the cracklings were done, the old men were paid in meat and money and disappeared in their old trucks. And my loneliness came back home.

  The house had a small galley kitchen where my mother performed daily miracles, stretching a handful into a potful, making the most of what we raised.

  Cooking mostly from memory and instinct, she took a packet of meat, a bunch of greens or a bag of peas, a couple of potatoes, a bowl of flour, a cup of cornmeal, a few tablespoons of sugar, added a smattering of this and a smidgeon of that, and produced meals of rich and complementary flavors and textures. Delicious fried chicken, pork chops, and steak, sometimes smothered with hearty gravy, the meat so tender that it fell from the bone.

  Cob-scraped corn pan-fried in bacon drippings, served with black-eyed peas and garnished with thick slices of fresh tomato, a handful of diced onion, and a tablespoon of sweet pickle relish.

  A mess of overcooked turnips simmering in neck-bone-seasoned pot liquor, nearly black—tender and delectable. The greens were minced on the plate, doused with hot pepper sauce, and served with a couple sticks of green onions and palm-sized pieces of hot-water cornbread, fried golden brown, covered with ridges from the hand that formed them, crispy shell, crumbly soft beneath.

  Mam’ Grace had taught my mother how to turn scrap meat into whole meals. Chicken backs, necks, and gizzards made aromatic stock for rice or dumplings. Chitlins, hog maws, and tripe were boiled all day or pan-fried, then doused with hot sauce. Boiled pigs’ feet were drizzled with vinegar to add some kick and keep our fingers from sticking together when we ate them. Chicken and beef livers were fried crispy and spicy.

  And none of the food was to be wasted.

  When my mother was coming up, people ate anything and everything just to survive. They ate the whole chicken, even the brain, scrambled in eggs, then cracked the bones and sucked the marrow.

  My mother grew up having her hair greased with olive oil and her legs slathered with bacon grease because she couldn’t afford body lotion or even a steady supply of petroleum jelly. She cleaned her teeth with a rag dipped in a solution of baking soda and salt because she couldn’t afford toothpaste or a brush. She slept in a ratty-dress-turned-nightgown between a handmade quilt and sheets stitched from old sacks. She drank tea made from cow chips and pine needles to ward off a cold because her family couldn’t afford medicine. Waste was unconscionable for those who had grown up with barely enough, and we now had to lean on that learning more than ever.

  If anything was left on your plate, you were scolded: “Yo’ eyes bigga than yo’ belly!”

  And no food was to be tossed because of bruising or the onset of decay. There was always another way to use something. Bread ends and stale scraps were crumbled and baked into a bread pudding. Dark spots on rotting bananas were carved out, the remains sliced thin and layered into banana pudding. Bruised spots were pared from apples, the good parts chopped up, dusted with cinnamon and sugar, folded into pockets of dough, and pan-fried until golden brown. Half-sour milk was used to make biscuits and bread, a dash of baking soda added to cut the acid.

  When something truly spoiled, it became scraps
for the dogs or was dropped into the slop bucket for the hogs.

  When the weather got warm enough we fished, as much because we needed to as we wanted to. We fished anywhere you could get a bite—lakes and reservoirs, streams and rivers, spillways and ditches, natural and man-made ponds. All we needed was a pole or rod, a can of worms dug from a shady spot in the yard, and a bucket for the catch. We found a favorable bend in the bank, a spot where weeds were worn down by foot traffic, and moved as close to the water as we could without slipping in. I liked to get close enough to catch sight of the swarms of minnows or clouds of tadpoles playing in the safety of the shallows.

  We’d often clean and fry our catch on the same day—palm-sized perch, largemouth bass, and flathead catfish (my favorite)—their cornmeal-encrusted tails arching upward from the hot oil. We served them with a side of home fries and a vinegar-splashed salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

  But no matter how hard we worked and how much we scrimped, we couldn’t seem to escape the specter of hardship. Not having enough was an ever-present worry, so much so that my mother and her friends took to scavenging the wreckage of cargo trucks that overturned on the interstate.

  One truck accident happened on a spring night shortly after we’d moved into Papa Joe’s house. The air was richly scented with fresh pine and new flowers and laced with a slight chill and endless possibilities.

  My brothers and I were huddled around the front door with its solid steps. A single exposed bulb sprayed us with harsh light, bands of it passing between our legs and bodies and streaking across the yard. My brothers kicked the dirt and threw rocks into the nothingness, longing for something more to do, constrained by the reality that our tiny town went to sleep when night fell. So they were doing what they often did—talking about hopes, dreams, and what-ifs, imagining lives much better than our own, dreaming of a world in which they were the center.

  I tuned it all out, instead concentrating on the small drama playing out just above our heads.

  The light attracted a steady stream of lazy brown bugs the size and shape of half a small grape cut lengthwise. I marveled at the aggressive spiders that sprang from the voids in the siding to seize the bugs that had the misfortune of setting their webs atremble. The spiders made swift business of their prey. They were brutal, unforgiving, hell-bent on survival, like everything else in my world.

  Inside, my mother and grandmother, who was visiting from Arkansas, sat at the dining table cutting geometric shapes from old clothes to make new quilts, stacking each shape and color with its kind to create little fabric towers with jagged edges. They bickered, as they usually did, about minor things, nothing really. It was their way of relating to each other, of loving each other.

  The phone rang. My mother answered. The voice on the other end screamed with joy that a cattle truck had overturned on the interstate and the wounded cows had been left behind.

  Interstate 20 was less than a mile north of town. When cargo trucks wrecked near our exit, the phones lit up, and off we went to scour what was left. In the past it had been paper towels or onions or potatoes. This night it was meat. Jackpot!

  This was what scared me about the night: the darkness and the mystery, the way things could suddenly shift, the way it turned people, changed them, the way it gave cover for things not done in the glare of daylight, things that would go unmentioned when the sun came up.

  Even in my enchanted Kiblah I shrank in fear from the darkness. There the night seemed to fall three shades darker than anywhere else in the world, and the sky—velvet black and studded with more stars than there were wishes—seemed two times bigger. Even there the shadows seemed to move and things came out of them, things like the erratic bats that picked off the bugs attracted to the light on the telephone pole in front of the little yellow house.

  But I was more scared of what else might move out of those shadows, like the monster that walked like a person. Folks talked convincingly about a Bigfoot that stalked those parts at night. There was even a movie made about it: The Legend of Boggy Creek, a creek just up the road from Kiblah. It was a docudrama, with people giving eyewitness accounts of a creature that bayed at the moon, tracked through folks’ bean fields, and killed their cows. The film opened with a narrator gravely saying of the monster, “I was seven years old when I first heard him scream. It scared me then, and it scares me now.” All the talk of “it” scared me too. Every time I looked out a window at night, I was afraid I might see eyes looking back at me.

  That night when the truck overturned, the darkness overtook us and we became the things stalking the night to kill the cows. Our house came alive with excitement as we scrambled for coats and keys and rifles. We quickly loaded into the two cars—I into the car that one of my brothers drove while another rode shotgun, and everyone else in the other car.

  We drove silently, tense with anticipation.

  We entered the interstate in the eastbound lanes and slowly passed the spot where the wreckage had been, marked by scarred asphalt and littered with debris. Stunned and wounded cows limped into the traffic, the median, and the bordering woods. We went about a mile up the road to survey the whole scene, crossed the median, and started back down the westbound lanes.

  As the car slowed, my brother hoisted himself partway out the open window with the rifle. He took aim, and, with a single shot, a huge cow fell. The sound of the shot was diffused by the traffic, but not completely muffled. The crew in the other car also bagged a cow.

  A man with a pulpwood truck, whom my mother had called before we left home, helped load the dead animals into the trunks of the cars as best they could fit. We drove fifteen miles through winding back roads to the house of one of Paul’s brothers, a tall, gentle man who was the deacon of a Methodist church and an amateur chicken farmer. He and his wife—a short, melancholy woman with a raspy voice and a thick mustache—lived there with their children at the bottom of a tall hill. The house was half a mile from the main road and at least half a mile from the nearest neighbor.

  I fell asleep on the way. When I woke I realized that the car was parked and I was the only person in it, alone again. I raised myself so that I could see through the windshield. One of the disemboweled animals’ bodies was hanging by its hind legs from a tree by the side of the house—its bloody entrails sliced from their cavity and spilled beneath it, steamy in the cold predawn air. My family worked feverishly, carving flesh and ferrying pink-marbled slabs of it into the house, visibly elated by the clandestine enterprise and the good fortune that had befallen us. They whispered terse instructions, quietly celebrated their progress, and moved with the speed and caution of a team of surgeons—racing against time, which would soon bring daylight and unwanted attention.

  The area was lit by headlights that cast long shadows trailing off into the darkness. The scene dimmed as my eyelids fell, heavy with the exhaustion of having seen too much.

  While outright stealing was unacceptable, in my mother’s view, opportunistic scavenging was simply an act of survival. She was wedged between two uncompromising positions. On the one hand was her absolute refusal of, and disdain for, the charity of others, particularly government welfare—she often seethed about a local woman with a brood of children who had once boasted of being able to make more money taking welfare than other women could make putting in an honest day’s work. On the other hand was my mother’s stubborn determination to show the world, and perhaps herself, that she was strong enough to make it on her own.

  But my mother was adamant that we would not suffer in the process. Nothing stirred her spirit or shielded her guilt like a child’s wide-eyed gaze of worry, the voicing of a need she could not meet, or the terrible rumble of a tiny stomach she could not fill. Hunger isn’t only the great motivator, it’s the great stealer of joy. The very idea of it moved my mother to make sure that our joy was protected from it.

  So, like the spiders in the cracks, she sprang at every scrap of good fortune. The only way that she could see to make
ends meet was to stretch the rules that bound them. Why let those wounded cows wander into the woods, die, and be pecked clean by buzzards when we were in such need? She wasn’t proud of scavenging, but she refused to be ashamed of doing everything in her power to ensure that we would never see a hungry day. We never did.

  2

  Thanksgiving

  The only time I ever saw a person actually shoot a gun at another, I was five years old, and it was my mother shooting at my father.

  It was the summer after they’d separated. He’d slept over the night before. I had crept into her bed, as I often did, and fallen back to sleep. But soon the rustling woke me. I looked over to see my father on top of her. They were staring into each other’s eyes, intently, silently, seemingly saying things without words.

  I now thought that getting into her bed had been a bad idea. I didn’t know what was happening, but I figured that it wasn’t for my eyes to see, so I closed them and pretended to be still asleep.

  I didn’t understand what was going on, but I did understand that my mother’s new life in Papa Joe’s old house was the first time I saw her as a whole person, separate from a man, independent. It wasn’t a grand life or an easy one, but it was hers. She lived it in miniature—celebrating small accomplishments, counting small blessings, stretching small money, avenging small slights. I was coming to recognize that she took some measure of pride in her hard-won self-reliance.

  So her being in bed with my father, whom I was increasingly coming to view as less than whole, confused me.