Playing With Matches

by Carolyn Wall

  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

  Summers 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.

  Finn sounded far away. “My daddy told me Clarice Shine has a red light and a real bad name.”

  “She doesn’t have any red lights. And anyhow, I’ll bet you don’t have a daddy.”

  At that, he went silent.

  “Finn?” I said. “Come on and tell me the truth, why don’t you?”

  He closed his eyes and was quiet for so long, I thought he’d gone to sleep on his perch. “He kilt a man. Where we was camping, about a mile downstream. In the night this fella was trying to rob us, and he held a knife to my throat—thing was this long.” He held his hands apart to show. “My daddy kilt him. Somebody saw, so they come to get him. Cops drove up where we was camping. They had these dogs—we heard ’em snapping big teeth.”

  “Oh, Finn.”

  “My daddy gave me his ball cap, and he said, ‘Son, you run over yonder and climb up in that big oak. You’ll be safe as long as you don’t come down.’ So I did. And they took him away. I been here ever since.”

  I could think of no words that might aid him or comfort either of us. But that night I carried Finn a sliver of pie, hoping Auntie wouldn’t miss it from the dish. He didn’t seem to mind that I woke him, and I’d brought along my blanket and pillow. Auntie found me under the tree in the morning.

  In the two days that followed, the rains came down and soaked everything till we lived in a world that was spongy underfoot and inside our lungs. Just before noon of the second day, two deputies pulled up in their black-and-white car, and got out and stood in our dooryard, looking up at Finn.

  “Don’t you bother him,” I said from some distance. I carried an umbrella. “He’s got our permission to live there, and he isn’t hurtin’ anyone.”

  The cops talked in hushed-down voices, saying the boy was fourteen and white, and who in the world would take him in, and the county sure as hell had no place to put him. And then I heard the rest of the story.

  Finn was kin to the Sarasons, who lived one county over, and they’d come looking for him, to tell him the court had given his daddy a free lawyer. That man spoke up for his daddy in front of the judge, but he couldn’t get him off, him being guilty as hell. The Sarasons sure as the devil didn’t want Finn.

  In the end, Uncle Cunny and some of his domino pals fetched a ladder and climbed up there to rig a canvas tarp over Finn’s head. I climbed up too. They hammered together a platform so Finn could lie down, and for the first time I got a look at the world from his angle. It felt cool and fresh. Up here, there was nothing but the shifting of leaves like silky green clouds, and the way my heart beat, and then skipped, and then beat again.

  Aunt Jerusha brought Finn a bar of Palmolive and a towel—plus a bucket of wash water and another to do his business in. I privately wondered what would happen when the shit bucket was full, and I resolved to be Finn’s friend and companion even when this part of the yard began to stink something awful.

  12

  In the side yard, Auntie kept geese, and they were mean as hell—three long-necked, splay-footed honkers bent on flying at me with their necks stretched and throats hissing, and beating me to death with their hard, vicious beaks. Trouble was, they ran loose on the place, and it was my job, twice a day, to round them up from the river or from the field across the road, and herd them home. Auntie’d had their wings clipped so they couldn’t fly away, but they tried, running across that yard like they were about to lift off, making noises like whole pits full of snakes, and they made my life miserable.

  On the other hand, they gave Jerusha no more grief than a trio of slugs. They adored her, and she them. In addition to feeding them a fistful of grain each day, she parched corn in the oven, and I guess those geese smelled it, because they stood at the back step like that meal was the Second Coming.

  The two small females were called Sophie and Robert. When I pointed out that Robert was a boy’s name, Auntie said nothing. When Auntie said naught, it was a done-and-set thing. The two girl geese spent their days pecking happily at Auntie’s dropped clothespins or the hem of her dress, and she’d stroke their long necks and smile at their husky trumpeting.

  But that almighty big gander she called St. Augustine, and he was pure delinquent, scarfing up the choicest potato peelings, chopped cabbage leaves, and cracked eggshells.

  “Here you go, sweet Augie,” Auntie cooed, stumping out, throwing him a fistful of popped corn. “A treatie for my boy.” And so it went. Every time he nipped at my ankles or carried off a shoe, I took up a stick and threatened that bird good. But when I wandered out one morning and caught him ripping, one by one, the pages of David Copperfield that I’d left out on the domino table, I took up my switch and ripped him a new one.

  Auntie was away, carrying a basket of bread to Miz Millicent Poole—she being caught in the fist of the grippe—when a couple of Uncle Cunny’s pals passed by in their truck, and they jumped out to pry me off that bird. Auntie must have heard, because she didn’t speak the rest of that day, and that very evening, Uncle Cunny came and nailed up a chicken-wire pen and a lean- to to shelter the geese and hold their water pans. Sophie and Robert settled down inside, but the big gray gander had a mind of his own, and he broke loose more often than not.

  Even from my room in the attic, I heard Aunt Jerusha caterwauling one early morn and flew down the stairs to find her raving in the yard. Clipped wings aside, Augie had apparently flown the coop.

  “Oh, my sweet Jesus,” Auntie wailed and flapped her hands.

  “What?”

  “He’s been stole!”

  I groaned.

  “You get on down the road, Clea Shine, and find that gander.”

  “But, Auntie, I haven’t had breakfast—”

  “Nor will you, lest you come back with my goose!”

  “It’s not my fault—”

  “Was no love los
t between you,” she said. “Now, start by the Farm. Check the creek behind and zigzag through the fields. Go to town if you have to, and ask at the fellowship hall.” She filled my pockets with corn to lead him back.

  From the oak tree, I could hear Finn laughing at me. Damn him.

  It didn’t seem likely to me that a goose would have any truck with the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center, but I would stop there and inquire.

  I couldn’t think why they brought prisoners to the hall on Tuesday and Saturday nights just to call the bingo numbers, unless that was Mississippi’s way of rehabilitating. Sometimes convicts were paroled, I knew. And the Farm kept a pig business and a truck garden beyond the trees. They sold vegetables along the highway too, but I knew little else. When a man was given a life sentence and rode in on the shuttered blue bus, I guessed he stayed till he died, at which time the guards took his body out and pitched it into the cemetery across the creek.

  “Damnation,” I said, making a crappy face at Finn. Up in his tree, he made one back.

  I set off, scraping the dirt with my stick and watching dust clouds rise and keeping half an eye out for that goose.

  I inquired at every door. Nobody had spotted a runaway bird.

  Unless he’d slipped under the fence and found himself incarcerated, he was not down at Hell’s Farm, or trapped in the coils of wire, or, as far as I could see, stuffing his gullet in the prison’s garden. A lot of men were out in their orange uniforms today, chained and clanking when they moved in their hoeing. I watched until a fat woman guard looked up and hollered and waved a big black club.

  On the far side of the farm, Devil’s Creek had cut through the land, and it emptied into a particularly deep section of False River. I worried that Auntie’s goose had been wrung by the neck and thrown in that creek, fretting not so much at the loss of the goose as that I would have to find and retrieve him. I went on around the Farm and approached the steep bank. I did not see him in the water below, nor splayed anywhere on the sharp rocks. Still, I was afraid of the place, and the narrow bridge that spanned the creek. I made my way along the edge, peering through my fingers, lest I encounter, on the other side, human skeletons still clad in orange and rotting in the slime.