Playing With Matches

by Carolyn Wall

Wheezer asks her, “Is this the first time you’ve read the Bible?”

  “From the beginning,” she admits. “Although now I’m reading the Old and New Testaments at the same time.”

  “Ah,” he says. “A comparison shopper. You have a very smart daughter, Clea.”

  “I’m like my mom,” Luz says.

  “Yes. Like your mom.”

  This exchange embarrasses me a little. We find a place to sit.

  “Tell him, Mom,” Luz says. “Tell Mr. Stengle how you got me.”

  “Why don’t you tell him, Luzie?” By now, she knows it backward and forward, and tells it much better than I do.

  She likes that. “Mom and Dad were teaching in Mexico when they found me. I was four years old and sitting in the doorway of a plywood coop. Shack. Shed. I was four, and I was having trouble breathing.

  “Mom had this grant she’d gotten from the government, and she used it to buy soap and fresh water and underwear. She brought that stuff to us, to the community.” Luz grins. “She didn’t speak any Spanish, but she handed out bags of dried beans and flour and rice. And she loved on the babies.”

  Listening, I think, Those were good days. On the playa, two other sisters and I had set up a stall where we shaved the kids’ heads to rid them of lice and showed them how to brush their teeth. They laughed until they fell on the ground. But not Luz. She had uneven bangs, a serious face, and squinty eyes.

  “One day Dad—he wasn’t my dad yet—found this donkey cart, and we all piled in.”

  “There were at least a dozen of you kids,” I say.

  “They led us up the mountain to an American clinic so doctors could check us out. They gave us chewable vitamins and shots for diphtheria.” Luz’s face loses its animation.

  “I had brothers, two of them. They were fourteen and twelve. They joined the army. I remember Paulo carrying a rifle. He and Rico went off to fight in the mountains, and they died. So I was left all alone. When Mom and Dad found me, I was skin and bone. Starving.

  “I was hungry, but Mom says I was more interested in the books she had in her bag, so they borrowed me. It was for just a month.”

  “How long ago was that month?” Wheezer asks.

  “A long time. There was nobody to miss me, anyway. We got me tennis shoes and shorts and tops. We went to an ophthalmologist. He gave me eyeglasses. Spectacles. Cheaters.” She grins.

  I add, “Luz had asthma; a doctor prescribed a spoonful of syrup once a day and gave us an inhaler for the worst times.”

  “But they wondered what would happen after they went home,” Luz says, taking up the story. “They got my hair cut, had me vaccinated against everything, and loaded me up with books. At four I knew how to read—can you believe that?”

  She could. Right away, that had struck a chord in my belly and knotted me up. I didn’t care who had taught her, or how she’d learned—I bought her a dictionary, notepads and pencils. A red backpack to hold all her things.

  “Mom and Dad flew to the capital,” Luz says with a flourish, “and started the adoption papers that would let them keep me for the rest of our lives. Dad had to go home to teach class, but Mom stayed.”

  I did. I waded through tons of paperwork, then flew to Biloxi on December 24 with Luzie, her tiny carry-on, and her red backpack.

  “And that’s my story,” Luz says. “Well, except that I’m smart. I skipped second grade. I could’ve jumped fourth, but Mom wouldn’t let me. Also, I love mice and spiders and garden snakes. I turn over rocks. Dad teaches biology. He said sometime he should take me to school with him so I could teach his class.”

  “She sleeps with books spread around her on the bed,” I say. “Last year she was president of the school science club, and an elected officer in the astronomers’ club at Thomas’s college.”

  “Mom said I could have a membership in Book-of-the-Month Club if I paid for it, so I got a job walking dogs.”

  To the park and back, I want to say.

  Wheezer claps as though it’s the best story he’s ever heard.

  “You’re an amazing kid,” he says. “And a lucky one.”

  Luz says, “Why do they call you Wheezer? I don’t hear you wheezing.” She pulls her inhaler out of her pocket to show him. I’ve sewn pockets on everything Luzie owns.

  “I’ve pretty much outgrown it. I don’t know if they had inhalers when I was a kid.”

  “You know much about the Bible?” Luz asks him.

  “Some,” he says.

  “Miss Jerusha said you were a chaplain, so I thought—if I had questions, you might answer them.”

  “I can try, if it’s okay with your mom.”

  “Fine with me,” I say. “In fact, Wheezer’s the very person to talk to.”

  “Mom thinks the Bible is a great history book,” she says, and I’m suddenly embarrassed by that.

  “She’s right,” Wheezer says.

  Luz takes off her sandals and puts her toes in the cool mud.

  I feel like I owe an explanation. “There’ve been so many arguments about which parts we should take literally—and what writings have only metaphoric meaning.” I smile at Luz. “I used to wonder why God didn’t send somebody down to write a new Bible, one that applied to the twenty-first century. And then I realized—maybe He had.”

  Luz presses her toes deeper in the mud.

  I didn’t intend to talk so much.

  “What I mean is, maybe we have our God eyes closed, you know? There are hundreds of writers turning out thousands of books that tell us how to live better, how to love each other and mend our hurts. What if those are our new Bibles?”

  “So many writers, so many points of view.” Luz looks skeptical. “Some are a sham, a ruse. Phony baloney.”

  Wheezer grins again.

  “Some are.” I reach out and rub her back. “But you’ll make your own choices and figure things out. Why else would you have been made so smart?”

  “I know,” she says in that voice that means she’s about to quote me. “ ‘Any path to God is a good one.’ ”

  “A sound philosophy,” Wheezer says.

  I sigh and get up. “I should check on Harry.”

  “Mom. He’s gone fishing.”

  “I’m sure Wheezer needs to get back to work.” I jerk my chin toward the prison.

  He rubs a thumb down his jaw and says, “Clea, that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  My heart lurches.

  “Listen,” Wheezer says as we pick our way back over the rocks and up the bank. “Down at the Farm, we’ve got some guys wondering if you’d take a look at their writings.”

  “You talked about me there?”

  Wheezer turns pink. “There are a couple of offenders—”

  “Offenders?”

  “Inmates. We’re way overcrowded now, and the hog farm’s gone, so there’s not much work for them. Crops are in and sold; ground’s not ready to be tilled. They hang around the dayroom, lay on their bunks, and that’s when they get in trouble—” That grin again. “Start fermenting canned peaches in the shower, hidin’ hooch in the walls.”

  Luz’s sandals dangle from her thumbs. She has that fascinated look on her face.

  “Clea, you’ve got this gift—”

  Luz waves her arms. “Mom works for the sisterhood. She teaches reading and writing. She’d be perfect!” She’s as excited as Wheezer is.

  “Hey, then, would you come down and work with a few guys?” I’m being railroaded.

  “We pay a couple of teachers—one in beginning law, and there’s this art guy. But some of the inmates work on essays. We got some pretty good writers. You be interested in doing a class?”

  “Hold on,” I say. “You went from looking at the writings of one or two to working with a class.”

  Wheezer shrugs. “We take what we can get, and we don’t get much. I’m always workin’ it, Clea. These guys need someone like you.”

  We’ve stopped under the weeping willow tree. I remember how its whippy gree
n branches stung my legs—and the love with which Auntie always rocked me, but only after I’d understood my crime.

  Maybe Wheezer’s afraid I’m thinking too much. “I don’t know how long y’all will be here, but if you want to come on a regular basis for a while, I think I can get you a few bucks.”

  Money. But, God, God. At Hell’s Farm?

  Still, everybody wants to be prized for what they can do. And—what else do I have? “All right.”

  “Great,” he says. “We’ll get you down there tomorrow morning.” He tells Luz, “Your mom’s a great lady. Sometime I’ll tell you how I know this personally.”

  Luz’s brows go up. “If Mom’s so brilliant, why’s she scared all the time?”

  31

  What, I wonder, has happened to Finn?

  And Claudie Maytubby and her brothers and sisters?

  “Luzie,” I say, on the back porch steps. “Will you be all right here for a while? With Auntie and Miss Shookie?”

  “And Bitsy,” she says. “Sure. Where you going?”

  “Just down the road. To see an old friend. I won’t be long.”

  “Mom, I went into Wheezer’s room—it’s okay, he told me to call him that. He has a copy of your book.”

  “Luz, we’ve talked about this before.”

  “And you always say the same thing!”

  “When you’re older—”

  “There you go again,” she says. “I am older!”

  Is she? Where was I—what did I think—when I was eleven?

  “Maybe you’re right. But—we’ll need to talk about it first.”

  Her eyes are almost as round as her glasses. “When can we talk?” she says. “Tonight? Tomorrow?”

  “In the next day or two. Meanwhile, promise me you won’t read it by flashlight after I’m asleep.”

  She sighs. “Cross my heart. But you won’t forget?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Anyway, I’m liking the Book of Mark all right. And, Mom. Did you know Abraham was circumcised when he was ninety-nine?”

  If I were laughing these days, I’d laugh at that. Maybe Luz won’t find Halo unsettling at all.

  “But,” she says, ever curious, “what kinds of things are you going to tell me?”

  “I did some bad stuff.”

  “All kids do things wrong. Base, low, foul. Devilish.” She looks especially owlish. “Mom—did you ever just say you were sorry?”

  The houses seem miniature and across Potato Shed Road, beyond the prison field, the line of poplars doesn’t seem nearly as far away as it used to. A single row of inmates is out, working the soft ground. They look not to be chained anymore, the way they were when I was a kid—no more clanking and shuffling along in step. Still, a supervisor—a guard in that remembered gray uniform—stands with a baton, and I see over my shoulder that another patrols the tower’s outer walkway. A rifle is hard across his chest.

  I wonder what move the prisoners must make before someone throws a switch and sets off the siren. I recall hearing that wailing now and then, and shots fired too, but I didn’t pay much attention to what they meant.

  The lane is narrow and not as long as I recall.

  On the Maytubbys’ porch, a stick-skinny black woman is smoking a cigarette. By the thickness of her glasses I know it’s Eulogenie Maytubby—that and the fact that she has one arm.

  I stand at the road, at the very place where Denver Lee once helped his pretty bride out of the yellow car. Here is that patch of hard land where little boys wrestled and naked babies nursed at swollen breasts.

  “Excuse me. Eulogenie? I know you don’t remember me—”

  She exhales and squints against the smoke. Her voice is still tiny, like her teeth used to be. But I hear her clear. “I knows who you are.”

  “I’m Clea Ryder now.”

  She takes another drag on her cigarette.

  “I wanted to come and see how you’re doing. How Claudie is.”

  “Claudie be dead,” she says.

  I stand there dumbly. “I’m sorry?”

  “Bad news, ain’t it, if you care to think so.”

  I can’t take this in. Claudie Maytubby shouldn’t be dead. Can’t be.

  Eulogenie flicks the filter off the end of the porch, and I shiver in the heat and wait for it to flare up in the dry weeds, but it doesn’t.

  “Can you tell me—how—how did she die?”

  “Kilt in a race riot up to Arkansas. Blown to pieces with a pipe bomb, if you don’t know.”

  Do I remember reading about that?

  “What was she doing in Arkansas?” She’d never live that far from her sister.

  Her face is bony and pinched. Now her mouth pinches too. “Her and four white folks was meetin’ in Little Rock, at one of them adoption places.”

  “Genie, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Likely not. You a Shine.”

  “I mean that. I am.” I’m also mortified that at one time I had the hate and audacity to call her Plain Genie.

  She shrugs. “One minute they was all talkin’, and then they was … gone.” She cocks her head, and her face crumples in an ugly way.

  I move to stand at the foot of the steps. “I—”

  She half rises from her chair. Her mouth opens, and I see that she’s lost some of her teeth. “Don’t you come up!” Her voice is bitter and cracked. “I got me this house an’ my welfare check an’ a pack of cigarettes, and I don’t need you tellin’ me you unnerstand. You done enough here!”

  “Genie—”

  “You was always sayin’ to her, Go on, Claudie Maytubby. Be all you can be. So she did. She left here to bring home her new baby, an’ she never came back—what you think about that?”

  “Claudie was adopting—”

  “I assign you blame. You got you a husband, and I seen your chirrun. I got these bad eyes and bones all cattywampus; my ovaries never come on. Miss Clea Shine—or whatever yo’ name is—who gonna love me an’ marry me, do you think?”

  “Claudie’s baby—”

  “A little Chinese baby boy,” Genie says, and she takes off her glasses. “You go on an’ get outa here, now. Don’t you feel bad, an’ don’t you worry, Miss Shine. I bein’ all I can be.”

  32

  Luz has helped Aunt Jerusha bake a pie—lemon, with meringue stacked like summer clouds. At the table Luz is reading Bitsy a cookbook, adding definitions and synonyms. Bitsy looks fascinated. Luz looks up, tells Bitsy about her books and the computer, how our staircase came loose on Lilac Lane, the ceiling cracking, Harry’s blue bed and his rabbit tumbling down.

  “Through the hole,” she says sadly. “Through the fissure. Abyss.”

  Until this moment, on this very day, I’ve never seen Bitsy look so sympathetic. She shakes her head and heaves herself up the stairs with her mama’s folded laundry.

  Mamas, I think, are a tangled lot—Bitsy, whose baby was taken from her, and Plain Genie with her undeveloped ovaries. Claudie, who’d gone north to bring home a little boy with almond eyes. And my mama. And me.

  Miss Shookie’d had Bitsy. It shakes me to think that Jerusha Lovemore never had babies of her own. Just me. And I ran off. What a disappointment I must have been.

  Shookie sits now, with her crochet hook and ball of cotton, at the far end of the sofa. She likes TV game shows and spends a lot of time bickering with the emcee and nodding off.

  Then a truck door bangs, and I jump from my chair. But they’re just back with the fish, Harry holding tight to Uncle’s hand. Harry watches him clean them under the tree. I watch from the steps. Light slants in and catches the filleting knife and the silver scales and Uncle’s blunt nails. Then, in the kitchen, Auntie lets Harry stand on a chair and keep an eye on his fish while she rolls them in cornmeal and drops them in the sizzling fat. My boy’s wearing a big polka-dotted apron against the grease. He helps her roll out dough for hush puppies, lowers them in on a big spoon, and the oniony smell rises up and fills the kitchen.

&nbs
p; Uncle Cunny comes behind them, puts his arms around both. I’m surprised Uncle hasn’t moved in here too.

  As if my mind is not full enough with Harry and the prison and Thomas’s infidelity—not to mention coming back here at all—I cannot stop agonizing over Claudie. She never got to bring her boy home.

  At dinner, Luz eats her weight in onion-fried potatoes, coleslaw, and filleted fish. With his small fingers, Harry peels the breading away and pokes at the white meat with his silver spoon. Auntie cuts it up for him with her fork, blows to cool it, and Harry lifts a piece to his mouth. My eyes sting, and I look away.

  The conversation is about the mess of branches along the river.

  Uncle and Ernie Shiloh will bring their chainsaws.…

  —The weather is turning; the air is still.

  The fish were biting.

  Because he’s eaten some, Auntie brings Harry Ovaltine and a straw to drink through. He takes a sip, lays his cheek on his plate, and goes to sleep. Too tired to put his thumb in his mouth.

  “My,” says Uncle Cunny. “Would you look at that.”

  I rise from my chair. “I’ll just carry him up.”

  “Let me do it,” Wheezer says, and he comes around and lifts my little guy, light as air, and takes him up the two flights of stairs, and I follow. Wheezer lays him on the cot, and I pull off Harry’s shoes and socks and his shorts with fish scales still clinging. I tuck him in.

  A wind has risen. In the south gable, the glass rattles in its frame.

  “The storm?” I say softly, although I think nothing would wake Harry.

  Wheezer shakes his head. “It’s a ways off yet.”

  I leave a light burning, and say without meaning to, “So many things in my life are shot to hell.”

  “Well,” Wheezer says, “I’m not one of them.”

  Once upon a time, I was falling in love.

  There used to be a song like that. “Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m only falling apart.” Nicki French or maybe Bonnie Tyler. “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” that was it.

  I wonder if eclipses bear as much weight, or go down as significantly in history, as tropical storms. In the last fifteen years I’ve held a lot of hands, seen a lot of scared folks, watched a lot of them die. In that very last second, the light went out. I know some simply gave up. I believe some died from broken hearts.