Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  She occasionally let him sleep over, which I read as a weakness. I wasn’t old enough to understand the complexities of the heart and the vulnerabilities of the flesh. My mother was a woman like any other, who sometimes must have needed the comfort of a man, even that man, to hold her tight, to make her feel beautiful, loved, and protected.

  The next morning, my mother sprang up, moving happily about, making breakfast. In the bed I stared at my father as he slept, trying to figure out what he had done to her, what those things were that he had said to her with his eyes, those things that didn’t need words.

  Around midmorning, a young boy called and asked to speak to my father. It was a boy my mother didn’t know, and besides, who knew that my father was here? Suspicious, she woke my father, called him to the phone, then quietly went to the phone in the living room to eavesdrop. She would later tell me what the boy had said: “My mama said meet ha down to West End.” West End was a slant-roofed juke joint just off the highway and just outside the city limits, halfway between our street and Boogie Woogie Road. Most nights the place played host to a scraggly lot of tough men and loose women.

  I got the sense from my mother—in the things she said under her breath for no one to hear, and in the things I overheard her saying on the phone with the gossips—that she could forgive some of the men who went there. In fact, she seemed to like men with a pinch of devil—not low down, but not uptight. Tilted. Rooted in good but leaning toward trouble. They were the kind with enough respect for home to cover their tracks when they ran the streets. Work-till-they-smell-bad, but clean-up-good men. Do-wrong-sometimes, do-right-most-of-the-time men. Men one step shy of my father.

  But she sniffed at women who hung around places like that. They were the ones she waved at but never spoke to. High-heeled, naked-leg women. Too-short-dress and too-much-teeth women. Whistling girls and crowing hens. The lay-down-and-take-up-with-a-man-not-their-own women. The women who went out and slept in, more at home on their backs than on their feet. The drinkers. The ones who wasted money buying a plate of something instead of making a pot of something. Lazy, frivolous, loose—good-time women. Those women. The opposite of her.

  My mother never drank or danced. She never partied in any way, let alone at a low-down juke joint. She didn’t even follow television, except the news and Wheel of Fortune and shows like Sanford and Son and Good Times, which she watched with us when we shelled peas and shucked corn. She read the newspaper.

  She was a do-right woman, not a good-time woman. But now one of those women was calling her house for her husband to come meet her at the West End. Too many levels of disrespect.

  My mother shrieked. There was a commotion. She went for her pistol.

  While my brothers and I, like most boys in those parts, had rifles—small-caliber hand-me-downs used to keep snakes out of the grass and vermin out of the garden, and BB and pellet guns used for target practice and shooting birds for sport—my mother had the only handgun in the house.

  It seemed to show up soon after we moved to Papa Joe’s house, and like me, it followed her everywhere, tucked in her purse, nestled among peppermints and pencils. It was a business piece with no benign intent, protection for a woman who had inherited her father’s, my Grandpa Bill’s, warrior spirit, and who was now out in the world on her own.

  And she had brass knuckles stashed in the glove box. The gun and the brass knuckles were a guard against women who forgot their place and jumped slick, and against men driven crazy by thirst long after the love had dried up. These were men like the pulpwood cutter, whom she’d made the mistake of dating shortly after leaving my father. Realizing her error, she let him go, but for him letting go was hard to do. One day on our drive home from Ringgold, he tailgated us for miles, his big truck bearing down on our back bumper. When my mother had had enough, she pulled over, grabbed the pistol, and marched back to confront the man. I turned in my seat to see what would happen. I could make out only snippets of her scolding as she cursed a blue streak, using all the bad words children get spanked for using. The line I remember most was about me:

  “Are you crazy? My baby’s in that damned car!”

  He never bothered us again.

  Maybe that was why she had let my father back in: he was comfortable, and for all else he might have been, he wasn’t dangerous.

  But that morning, after a night of pleasure, a little boy’s voice on the other end of a phone had shattered her pride and broken her heart. That morning she grabbed that gun to conduct some business with my father.

  He rushed to get dressed, then burst out of the back door clutching his pants at the waist, belt dangling. He bounded down the steps and leapt across the yard and over the fence where my mother had thrown herself when Mam’ Grace died. He continued through the tall grass that grew where Papa Joe had raised the hogs, the dewy seed heads lapping at his legs as he tried to make it to the woods beyond the fence on the other side.

  My mother flung the door open behind him, her gun in hand, and began firing—her shots pierced the morning silence, but missed my father. I watched from my mother’s bedroom window as my father flinched at each explosion. But there was something in his gait that did not suggest a man whose life was in danger, but rather a rascally boy who’d been caught being devilish. It was a casual quickness, not flat-out running, that pushed him across the field, something in him that knew that something in her wouldn’t do it.

  Maybe that’s what drew a smile on my face, the idea that there was a smile on his, too, even when his pants got caught in the barbed wire of the second fence as he tried to clear it. My mother ran to her car and canvassed the neighborhood for him, but to no avail. We found out later that he had hidden in a neighbor’s house.

  Shooting a cheating husband was not uncommon. It was a thing often done. In fact, one of my mother’s best friends had shot her husband a couple years before for the same reason.

  The woman had full hips, high cheekbones, and a short fuse. She lived in a tiny house with her husband and their four children over a hill from the House with No Steps. The husband was the blackest person I’d ever seen. A magnificent, unreal blackness. Burnt black. Shiny. Obsidian. Almost iridescent, the way the light danced across his skin, like the feathers left by the flock of black birds that blotted out the sun and set down in our backyard every winter on their way south, like our house was a place on a map.

  The way folks told it, the full-hipped wife found out that her burnt-black husband was cheating with a younger woman who was known to lie down under older men. So one night, as the man sat watching television with the children, his wife stepped from the bedroom, drew her gun, and aimed at the back of his head. The children screamed. The man jumped and turned. The bullet meant for his head caught him in the stomach. As he lay bleeding out his black belly like a stuck hog, she dressed the children and took them to the Webster Parish Fair in Minden, a town fifteen miles west of Gibsland, leaving the man to die while folks munched on cotton candy and plucked numbered plastic ducks from a false stream.

  Infidelity was license to kill. There was a bullet or a knife or a kettle of boiling water or a pot of hot grits waiting for any lover who dared lay up with a “Jody” or a “Clean Up Woman.” There were people all around who bore the marks of their sins—a chin-strap scar from a cut throat, leathery skin from a scalding, the nub of a shot-off arm. I had learned early in life that the wages of betrayal were meted out at the end of a gun barrel.

  No one called the police before a bad thing happened. The police came only after the body fell. And besides, there was just one police officer in town and no real jail, save an abandoned red calaboose, set beside the shallow ditch that divided the town into black and white.

  When someone felt wronged, they ignored the code of law and invoked the code of honor, leaving the details for God to sort out later.

  In the case of the full-hipped woman, God saw fit to let her husband live.

  And God saw fit to let my father live. Or maybe it was ju
st my mother who had seen fit to let him live. Surely she could have hit him, if in fact she was aiming to. The distance was too short, her view too unobstructed. She was a better shot than that for sure. I believe that it was love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel. A heart still works even when it’s broken.

  So that was it. My mother was done. She had let him back in to lie with her in her new bed, his body making the same old promises, promises that he had no intention of keeping, saying tender, lovely things that could only be passed through the press of flesh and the tips of fingers by a person with whom you shared a past and from whom you’d split apart.

  But it seemed to me, even in their language without words, that his body must still have told lies. So many lies. Smooth, easy lies. The kind that fill women’s minds like smoke fills a hive. The kind that make women drunk with hope, thick blinding hope, the dangerous kind of hope that makes them lose their grip on good sense.

  But no more. Not for my mother. She should have been done the night she kicked him out the window and their marriage shattered, but he patched things up. But what they had could not truly be fixed. It had to be abandoned. He was more trouble than he was worth. He and his lying body. She would be a fool for no man. This was the new, or renewed, mama. The strong mama. My mama. My father never slept over again. In fact, no man did.

  After that, she began to talk openly about my father’s shortcomings—talking more to herself than to us. Each comment was an affirmation, a reminder, that no matter how hard we now had it, we were better off without him. She reminded us that he never paid his child support—only $25—although he regularly came to our house with a pocketful of uncashed work checks.

  My mother’s derision widened the breach between my father and me into a gaping void, filled with the shards of broken promises, attaboys unspoken, and hugs not given. At the same time, my father sank into alcoholism.

  Occasionally, late at night, without warning, the drunken wreckage of him would wash up on our doorstep, stammering, laughing, reeking, voice amplified by the booze.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! “Billie, open the do’! These my boys just like they is yourn!”

  He was on his way home from drinking, gambling, philandering, or some combination of sins, squandering money that we could have used, wasting time that we desperately needed, sometimes just down the block from our house. As a parting gift, he’d drop by to bless “his boys” with an incoherent thirty minutes of drunken drivel, crumbs from the table of his paternity that I hungrily lapped up, time that would be lost to him in the fog of a hangover by the time day broke. It was as close as I could get to him, so I took it.

  He spouted off about what he planned to do for us, buy for us. But the slightest thing we did or said drew the response, “You jus’ blew it.” We always seemed to blow it. I tried not to blow it every time, but no matter how hard I tried: “You jus’ blew it.” I came to understand that he had no intention of doing anything. The one man who was supposed to be genetically programmed to love me didn’t understand what it meant to love a child, or to hurt one.

  To him, this was a harmless game that kept us excited and begging. In fact, although I couldn’t fully comprehend it at the time, it was a cruel, corrosive deception that subtly and unfairly shifted the onus for his lack of emotional and financial responsibility from him to us.

  All I could do was lose faith in his words and in him. I stopped believing. Stopped begging. Stopped expecting. I wanted to stop caring, but I couldn’t. A heart still works even when it’s broken.

  According to the stories folks told, Blow men had always been a grab bag—some hard workers, some hustlers, all smart—all the way back to slavery. My father had a smidgeon of each kind in him. The family traces its roots back to Southampton, Virginia, the same piece of land that produced Nat Turner and Dred Scott, who was actually born Sam Blow. In the early 1800s the man who enslaved Dred moved from Virginia to Alabama with his handful of slaves. That’s where my father’s family history picked up.

  My father’s great-grandfather—who, someone told me, was a high-yellow mulatto man with a flowing mane of dirt-red hair—is said to have saved for many years to buy his own freedom, then to buy a few hundred acres to farm along the Coosa River near a town called Wetumpka, an Indian word meaning “rumbling waters,” just north of Montgomery.

  His oldest child, my father’s grandfather, was a tiny man with big ideas named Columbus. The story I heard was that he ran afoul of white folk in Alabama. Some say he hid a ballot box when it appeared that a Klan-backed candidate for sheriff might’ve won an election. Others say he shot and killed a white man, but few people put much stock in that story. Whatever the case, the Klansmen—“white tops,” they called them—were after him. So he fled one night, leaving his young wife—a half-Indian midwife—and their young children behind. He quietly followed the river and its rumbling waters out of town and found his way to a swampy stretch of land two states over and about thirty miles south of Gibsland.

  It would be two years before he sent for his family.

  The way folks told it, Columbus began sharecropping a large cotton farm there in Louisiana and made a success of it—too much of a success, it turned out. They said that when he had earned enough money to buy the farm outright, the local whites “put a bad white man on him” who harassed and threatened him, and on at least one occasion tried to kill him, shooting into his house while the family was inside. He refused to leave, but his young bride didn’t have his fortitude. Fearing for her life and that of her children, she left him. He wanted that farm—he had earned it—but he wanted her more, so he soon left to join her, about ten miles north, near Bienville.

  White folks had run him off again, but again he had just started over. According to the stories, he established the first black church in the region, which met under a brush arbor until the congregation could erect a building. He earned a living making wooden caskets and baskets from strips of white oak, and blacksmithing.

  Folks spoke of Columbus—or Old Man Blow, as they called him—with a weighty reverence, as a hero, and that’s how I saw him: a savvy, courageous man willing to do what he believed was right, even if it meant turning away from everything he knew, a man who always bounced back after having to start over, a man who always chose love.

  But Old Man Blow was where the trail of honor ran cold.

  My father’s father was by all accounts a peculiar man who piddled about. People rarely spoke of him, but what I heard was that he stayed with Columbus most of his adult life, except for the two periods, one early in life and one late, when he was married. He did anything for money but hold on to a real job—selling watermelons or sodas or hiring himself out to people without cars who needed a ride to town. Most of the time when folks talked about him, he was the butt of jokes. I repeatedly heard the story of how he was so cheap that he would drive up a hill, kill the engine at the top, and roll down the other side to save a little gas.

  He fathered my father by a woman my mother always described as “the most beautiful dark-skinned woman I have ever seen.” The pairing of my peculiar grandfather and my beautiful, dark-skinned grandmother was apparently a violation of the order of things. From what I heard and the pictures I saw, the Blows were so fair of complexion that many could have passed for white. Society sent all kinds of signals, even signals a child like me could register and absorb—that light skin was a precious thing to be perpetuated, not squandered. And that those of us not in possession of it were often devalued to the extent of our deficiency.

  Because of the dark skin my father inherited from his mother, and the unpleasant circumstance of his paternity, it seemed to me that my father was literally and figuratively a black sheep of the Blow family. He didn’t seem to have much investment in its legacy. I never once heard him speak of his father or Old Man Blow or any of his folks, although I wanted and needed those stories.

  But my father said nothing. He stashed those stories away like his guitars: in a dark place whe
re he didn’t have to be reminded of them and no one else could hear them.

  Maybe it was his own complicated relationship to his father and his father’s family that rendered my father cold. Maybe it was being witness to the absence of his siblings’ fathers. Maybe it was the pain and guilt of his car accident. Who knows? But whatever it was, it stole him from us. And I had it worse than my brothers.

  While my brothers talked ad nauseam about breaking things and fixing things, I spent many evenings reading and wondering. My favorite books from our small collection were the encyclopedias. The volumes were bound in white leather with red writing on the covers. They allowed me to explore the world beyond my world, to travel without leaving home, to dream dreams greater than my life would otherwise have supported. I was new to reading, so I preferred the volumes packed with pictures, like G: gemstones and Ghana, Galileo and gravity. Glorious.

  In fact, the first thing that I ever remember buying was a book. It was on one of the days my mother gave me a couple of dollars at Kmart. I ran for the Hot Wheels section. I could afford two: ninety-nine cents each. But on the way, the children’s books caught my eye. I stopped and flipped through them until I found one that I wanted: a picture book of Job from the Bible. I would treasure that book the way a boy treasures his first wallet or pocketknife or pellet gun.

  But losing myself in my own mind also meant that I was lost to my father.

  My father could relate more easily to my brothers’ tactile approach to the world than to my cerebral one. He understood the very real sensation of touching things—the weight of a good wrench, the tension of a guitar string, the soft hairs on the nape of a harlot’s neck—more than the supernal magic of literature and learning.

  So, not understanding me, he simply ignored me, even more than the others—not just emotionally, but physically as well. Never once did he hug me, never once a pat on the back or a hand on the shoulder or a tousling of the hair. I mostly experienced him as a distant form in a heavy fog.