Fire Shut Up in My Bones

by Charles M. Blow

  The two cemeteries were separated by a chainlink fence, lest anyone, living or dead, forget the rules—say, someone like the “white trash woman” who hung around the West End and had a baby by a black man. The way it was told to me, the baby died and the woman wanted to bury it with her family on the white side of the cemetery. When white folks found out that the baby was half black, they refused her, so she buried her baby on the black side as close to the fence as she could.

  My mother told me that when she was a girl, every black family came on Graveyard Working Day and groomed their family’s plot. It was like an all-day community picnic with the dead. A minister presided over the activities with a group prayer. People hoed weeds, raked leaves, cleared grass, and replaced sun-bleached plastic flowers. Elders recited family histories, connecting brief biographies and fascinating tales with each headstone as if flipping through the pages of a photo album.

  But this year only a few families showed up. Overgrown graves and weed-covered plots were everywhere; it was not uncommon for a grave to get “lost.” Our family brought only water and a few sandwiches and worked quickly and purposefully, leaving as soon as we could.

  On a previous trip to the cemetery I’d learned that Chester had been a twin, but that his brother was stillborn. The dead baby had been buried in an unmarked grave in our family’s area, somewhere to the left of Mam’ Grace and Papa Joe, near the trunk of a large tree. But by the time I learned of Chester’s twin, the grave had disappeared.

  On this day I walked around that tree, looking for some evidence that the ground had once been turned—a slight indentation, the remains of a tiny mound, anything. I wanted to find that boy. My young mind couldn’t help but imagine that he was dead because of Chester. How could Chester have lived and the other boy died? It was simple: Chester had killed him before they made it out into the world. He was another boy whose life Chester had taken. I figured that if I could find him, he could help me to survive, tell me some secret that he had learned too late to save himself.

  I never found the grave. But, standing there under that tree, I imagined that Chester’s twin could hear me, that we understood each other, and that there in that shaded spot we cried together.

  His spirit was present there, as were the spirits of Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace. Like the boy’s grave, I was lost too. But there, surrounded by them, I found the remnants of myself. There my soul could again be quiet, still and untroubled.

  It was like the way I’d felt at the skating rink before I’d reached for the aspirin, except then it had felt more like surrendering to weakness. This felt more like gathering strength. In that moment in the graveyard I saw my own life and trials through the prism of past lives. In that moment the weight of my shame and separation was lifted.

  There, among the sleeping souls of old folks and in the company of a dead boy, I came back to life. But a boy still walking can’t stay in a graveyard, even a boy so recently broken and dead on the inside. I had to find a place to heal myself among the living.

  4

  The Punk Next Door

  I spent much of my third-grade year hanging out with the punk next door.

  At least that’s what everyone called him. His real name was Shane. He was a year older than me and lived on the other side of the wooded lot into which my father had disappeared to escape my mother’s gunshots.

  If I was now two beats off in the dance that boys did to establish and affirm their masculinity and to find their place in the pack, Shane never even heard the music. But I didn’t mind that about him. After all, I hadn’t been touched by a punk. I’d been touched by a regular boy, a boy’s boy. In fact, with Chester now calling me the same thing—punk—I secretly felt some kinship with Shane.

  Still, I hated that word and didn’t want the label to take hold with other folks because of my association with Shane. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to walk into Shane’s world if I had to do so alone. Luckily, another boy my age who’d just moved in down the street—a boy with no stigma other than newness—had also started to play at Shane’s house. The new boy’s presence gave cover for mine.

  Everything about Shane said that he was different from other boys. He was not favored by nature. He had curves in places boys shouldn’t have curves—hippy and chesty and none of it muscle, at least not in appearance. Even his face was different, the kind of face that held no tension in the brow or around the mouth. And his eyes were too soft and stretched too wide open, like they wanted to ask a question they didn’t dare ask, a question that needed to be preceded by an apology.

  As effete as Shane’s manner was, there was a line he never crossed, as far as I knew, a line only ever crossed by two boys in town, both of whom had stopped pretending not to be punks, both of whom were my second cousins.

  Both were starvation-thin. Both had wispy, processed hair grown long enough that it would move with a good snap of the neck. Both wore their pants high and their belts tight. And both walked with their wrists turned out—the kind of walk that tells the world that you prefer being chased to chasing.

  They didn’t even sit like other boys—gap-legged and sprawled out, taking up twice as much space as needed. Instead, they sat with knees together, hands pressed palm-to-palm, the way people do when praying, only their fingers weren’t pointing up toward heaven but pushed down between their thighs. And they held their shoulders concave, bodies contracting, purposely making themselves smaller than they were, shrinking from the world. One had a lisp and the other hissed his s’s so high that they produced a faint whistle when they trailed off.

  Lawrence was the cousin who whistled the s’s. His mother, my great-aunt Trudy, was a big-boned wig-splitter whom I once saw come to shoot a woman for sleeping with her husband. It was on a night when we still lived in the House with No Steps and our wringer washer had failed. My mother had taken our clothes to the laundromat, and, as always, she’d brought me with her. The only two people inside doing laundry were my mother and the cheating woman. I played outside, in and around the car.

  Aunt Trudy whipped her car into the parking lot and jumped out, waving a pistol and yelling at the woman to come outside. My mother and the woman dropped to the floor. I rose up on the seat of our car to see what would happen. My mother yelled for me to get down; no one came outside. Soon Aunt Trudy got back in her car and drove away. She surely would have shot that woman if she’d been certain she wouldn’t hit my mother and I wouldn’t see.

  Aunt Trudy wasn’t a woman given to threats. She was the kind who bit first and barked later. Her idea of childhood stories was talking about the time she jumped from the bushes with a chain and beat a girl who told a lie. If you were on the side of right, you were good with Aunt Trudy. If you were on the side of wrong, God help you.

  I often wondered how a boy as soft as Lawrence could come from such a tough woman. Maybe women like that sucked up so much of the strength in a house that not enough was left for all the men. Maybe that had happened to Lawrence. I worried that maybe it would happen to me.

  Sometimes at night Lawrence would stop by the tiny upholstery shop kept by another cousin, down at the corner where our street met the highway. They were both related to my family, but not to each other. There Lawrence would talk slick and flirty and say things that he didn’t dare say when the sun was up and staring eyes burned holes into him.

  The shopkeeper was a Vietnam veteran who’d come back from the war with a metal plate in his head and something gone from it. He often worked late into the night, partly because he always seemed to be behind and partly because he never seemed to want to go home. He probably preferred his shop full of dead chairs to his house full of live people.

  My brother Robert, the one who had walked like a mummy for the glass of water, was his apprentice, so I often went to the shop at night. It was stacked head-high with wooden chair frames, waiting to have a spring fixed or a cushion replaced, waiting to be covered in fake leather or clear plastic. The shop was full of sounds: the tinny music
of a small radio, the buzz of a sewing machine, and the thump of a staple gun alongside the large air pump that powered it. The whole space spoke to renewal and transformation.

  There was a trail through those chairs that was barely big enough to fit a body, a trail that led to a stash of the shopkeeper’s dirty magazines in the back. Large upholstery needles arched like talons into a piece of foam used as a pincushion. Bolts of fabric leaned against the wall like the trunks of cut trees.

  The shop was like a church for chairs—full of brokenness and resurrection, piercing things and uncomfortable realities.

  Maybe that’s why Lawrence felt at ease coming to the shop and saying things there that he didn’t say elsewhere, the air always pregnant with a “maybe.” Maybe he was flirting. Maybe not. If he went too far, maybe that would be okay. Maybe he was being mocked. Maybe he was being entertaining. Maybe, just maybe. He knew the things he was saying were dangerous, because just being himself was dangerous. He was operating outside the rules.

  It wasn’t the fact as much as the flaunting that raised folks’ hackles. There had always been dandies, men folks snickered about, men whose wives they pitied. But at least those men put forth an effort to bring their behavior in line with their anatomy, no matter the damage repression did to their soul.

  But not Lawrence. He wouldn’t pretend. He wouldn’t hide. And that is what people found repulsive. It was what they saw as his surrender to a lurid impulse, his embrace of an ignoble identity. The scent of a demon on his breath. Dangerous.

  At my age, even I was confused by him. Even I, who now occasionally wrestled with hints of feelings he seemed to embrace. In my mind, I was a mile apart from him. Lawrence seemed to want to abdicate masculinity, slough it off like a feather from a molting chicken. I wanted to accrue it. He had given up on girls. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

  For me, attractions were fluid, not set like they were for other people, not like they were for Lawrence. In me, alternating impulses came in waves—not short, rapid waves like water sloshing about in a bucket, but in great oceanic waves in which one dominated during the day and drowned out the other, which sometimes came at night, the way the betrayal had come.

  It’s not that I didn’t also think about girls and women at night. I did, compulsively. They were girls from school and women from the dirty magazines, smiling and naked, full of praise and empty of judgment. It’s just that the male images sometimes came in their stead, but not in the same way. They were a presence. A wistfulness. Yearning spirits lingering near the place where a life was once lost. They were faceless and without form, no one I knew and not naked like the women, but definitely male. They were not aggressive, but rather an amalgamation of all the men who had ever been nice to me, soothing, antidotes to the boy who had tried to take advantage of me. The nighttime images embodied the opposite of the feeling I had about what Chester had done.

  To me, in my ignorance, Lawrence represented the full gender deviance of which boys are taught to want no part—kind feeding on kind. My mind was so caught between Bible verses and vicious boys—prey and predator, right and wrong, large and small, life and death—that I was incapable of seeing love or tenderness or caring in what Lawrence felt.

  The thing that came to me in whispers and waves seemed to come to Lawrence with the force of whitewater rapids—churning, irrepressible, able to push you over and drag you under. Everything about him hinted at sex—coquettish manner, agreeable glances, a door that would swing wide open with the slightest push. Lawrence couldn’t not flirt. Rivers must move. He could be still for only so long, danger or no.

  The shop was the only place besides church where I saw Lawrence talk to a man. Most men steered clear of him lest folks grow suspicious that they were drawing pleasure from exchanging pleasantries. “How you doing?” That was it. Move on. Barely wait long enough to receive the answer. But there among the dead chairs, Lawrence came alive. There he didn’t shrink; he blossomed.

  As far as I could tell, the cousin who kept the upholstery shop was completely uninterested in Lawrence, although entertained by him. The “maybe” Lawrence floated in the air the shopkeeper gently but firmly brought back to earth with a solid “no.” It just seemed to me that, as a man who had seen the cruelty of war up close, he had no desire to be cruel to a man who posed no threat.

  I would be grown before I recognized how much courage it must have taken for Lawrence to live as he did, outside the rules and ahead of his time in such a small place.

  But not every man was like the shopkeeper. One day—more than a decade later—the danger of Lawrence’s life would catch up to him. He would be found murdered in a neighboring town, tied to a bed. Although I didn’t know anyone in Gibsland who had ever seen him with a man, not in a romantic way, many folks assumed that some of the men who scoffed at him by day played around with him at night.

  The gossip was that it was one of those men who killed Lawrence, but no one knew who did it and few other than his family, particularly Aunt Trudy, really seemed to want to know. His death reduced her bark to a whimper and shook her faith: “I don’t know why God let that happen to Lawrence. I just can’t pray right no mo’.” My heart hurt for her. How could this have happened to Lawrence, the most harmless and most isolated of men? And why weren’t more people upset and unsettled?

  People whispered, but no one protested. The sense of scandal seemed to outweigh the sense of outrage. Yet everyone went to the funeral, many no doubt to see if a strange man turned up who looked too hurt or cried too hard—a distraught lover or a guilty one.

  The unspoken message this sent was horrible and unmistakable: black men who lived their lives as Lawrence had lived his would not be fully valued in life or in death. The world that judged Lawrence’s honest life as dishonorable would in fact conduct itself dishonorably in his death. A few people were questioned in Lawrence’s murder, but no one was arrested, and soon the whole thing faded away.

  Five years after Lawrence was tied to the bed and killed, Matthew Shepard, a young, white, openly gay man, was tied to a fence and killed in a small Wyoming city. While Lawrence’s death hardly made the local papers, Matthew’s provoked an international outcry. That discrepancy would haunt me.

  My friend Shane was not like Lawrence. He didn’t talk slick. Nothing he said sounded like flirting. There was no “maybe” in the air when he spoke. But he still upset the prevailing ethos: that boys from the sticks were hard like stones. What hung on Shane was a thick sense of eccentricity and erudition.

  The suspicion surrounding him was not about what he said, but what he didn’t say—sins of omission. He never spoke of girls, ever. Other boys talked about the pretty one or the ugly one, the fine ones or the fat ones. But Shane never did. He liked to play word games and talk trivia, which he could do for hours, and few could match wits with him. But I knew that this, too, was dangerous. It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark. Quiet was fine for old folks on porches, but not for young boys.

  Sometimes we played basketball, and Shane was one of the best basketball players I knew. But the way he played was different from other boys. He was somehow able to use his oddly distributed weight to his advantage, contorting his body—moving loose and squirmy through the air when he jumped, the way a cat does when it falls—and taking unorthodox shots that somehow seemed to fall into the basket. He could prove his superiority, both intellectual and athletic, as often as it was challenged.

  But perhaps the most inspiring thing about Shane was that he seemed able to insulate his sense of identity. He knew the things that people said about him, but he appeared not to care. He had found a way to hold himself safe and apart—looking down on the cruel ignorance of the world around him, laughing at the idea that others thought they could look down on him.

  This was interesting, for a while. I needed the break. But while Shane may have grown accustomed to his isolation, I could not. Soon Shane moved away, and I moved on.

  The on
ly other person I knew with Shane’s fortitude was a girl who arrived in the neighborhood a few months after Shane moved out, a girl with a strange name, Nevaeh—heaven spelled backward.

  Nevaeh’s family moved into a house less than a hundred feet from where Shane had lived, and they rented out the vacant municipal building across the street. The father, a missionary of sorts, started preaching and having “church” there for a strange new religion called Nation of Yahweh. This was unheard of in our town, a blasphemy. People whispered, and drove by slowly, looking in at the nearly empty services through the open door.

  Nevaeh was a clever, imaginative girl and was covered head to toe in eczema. She was an outsider, not so pretty, and, the way folks told it, her parents were headed straight to hell, but I didn’t care. I was instantly, magnetically drawn to her. The other kids mocked and teased her. But, like Shane, she was resilient, standing like a flower at the edge of a cesspool. The insults she didn’t ignore she volleyed with a quick wit. I was drawn to anyone who didn’t buckle in the face of ridicule. It was a skill I needed to acquire.

  We’d sit for hours on her porch swing, moving just enough to hear the chains creak, talking about imagination and clouds and if-I-hads, everything and nothing—beautiful thoughts flowing effortlessly from her scarred body.

  One day she took me into the municipal building, where her father was preparing for his next sermon. Unbeknownst to me, she was delivering me for conversion. Strange charts and illustrations hung everywhere. Her father asked me if I knew who Yahweh was. I knew that the God of the Old Testament was called Yahweh, but this seemed different. Was he talking about my Yahweh or his? I was overthinking it. I said no.

  He launched into a bizarre speech about a black messiah, true Jews, and the lost tribes of Israel. He talked about how the Y’s formed by the splitting of branches and the veins of leaves were subtle manifestations of Yahweh. He had me spread my fingers like his fingers, two on either side, like the Vulcan greeting on Star Trek.