by Amy Conner
“Why do I have to take it?” I asked plaintively. “I don’t have a headache.”
“Do it. It’ll calm your nerves.” The powder was bitter and dry, but I managed to wash it down with the cold water. My tongue burned like I’d scrubbed it with Comet. “Now you sit here and wait for that to make you feel better. I’ll go find George.” She hesitated and then landed an awkward pat on my shoulder. “Be a good girl and put that snake out of your mind.” The screen door banged shut. “George!” she called. “Get a shovel.”
Alone again, I sat on the kitchen chair, swinging my feet and drawing faces in a puddle of water on the rock-maple table, fast becoming bored, never a desirable state. My eyes lit on the pack of Pall Malls by the sink.
Smoking. I’d always wanted to try it but knew my mother would have shaken me bald-headed if she’d ever caught me. I tiptoed to the sink, shook the pack, and a lone cigarette fell on the floor. Almost without thinking, I put it in my shirt pocket—but I was definitely planning ahead when I took the matchbook.
I had just returned to my chair when Aunt Too-Tai called to me from the yard, “You can come out now.” Still, I lurked on the other side of the screen door until George had finished with the last of the cottonmouth, finally screwing up my courage to edge past the sweet gum tree. I tried not to look at the blood and ran to join my aunt at the barn.
The old wooden barn was a dim, vaulted cathedral of cobwebs and dust, where ancient birds’ nests festooned the crossbeams. Arrows of sunlight pierced the tin roof high overhead, falling on sawhorses, a decrepit set of harness, bald tires, a rowboat with a hole in the bottom, tools, stacks of lumber, an engine, heavy tow chains, paint cans, bundled magazines, and a thousand other discarded, wonderful things. An orange cat stretched in the shaft of light pooling on top of a mountain of hay.
“That’s last season’s hay crop. It’s gone to mold.” Aunt Too-Tai stooped to pick up a snarled length of baling twine. “It needs out of here before we get the first cutting done next week. You can handle this—you did a fine job on those worms.” My aunt smiled, and her sun-faded eyes looked at me with an unusual expression. It was a moment before I recognized it as approval, an opinion I was fairly unfamiliar with, especially recently.
“You did well before, too—being so still,” she said. “I bet you didn’t know that if you run from a cottonmouth, it’ll chase you all the way to Memphis. You were a brave girl.”
Well, I had been, hadn’t I? Joel Donahoe would’ve run off screaming for his mommy, more than likely. My aunt handed me a pitchfork taller than I was, then pushed open a big sliding door in the back of the barn, allowing the breeze to come play inside.
“Just toss that hay into the manure spreader behind the barn over here.” Aunt Too-Tai gestured at the boxy machine attached to the tractor just outside the door. That machine was the manure spreader, whatever that was. “Come on back to the house after you’re done, and we’ll have dinner.” Then she was gone, leaving me with a pile of hay higher than my head.
I got busy right away, stoutly flinging the hay through the door into the waiting manure spreader. As I struggled with the unwieldy pitchfork, dropping more hay than I picked up, I reflected on the morning’s activities and discovered I enjoyed the newfound feeling of being responsible.
At home, responsible meant “don’t do that.” Here, I’d eaten cereal without sugar. I’d made sixteen nickels and saved the tomato crop single-handed. I’d helped Aunt Too-Tai kill a dangerous snake and taken bitter medicine without complaining. Now I was in charge of moldy hay removal, and it wasn’t even dinnertime yet. I was in love with this feeling until about ten minutes into the project, and then the hay began to get under my shirt collar, into the waistband of my shorts. My nose itched. The cat had moved to another patch of sunlight on top of the lumber pile. She opened one eye, blinked, and went back to sleep. I deserved a break, I decided. The breeze beckoned me out behind the barn, so I dropped the pitchfork and slipped outside.
A crow lit on the steering wheel of the tractor and cocked its head, cawing once before it flapped off to the fig trees to poke holes in the ripening fruit. Off in the distance down by the pond, Bob the white mule grazed in the water-meadow amid the purple vetch and cow parsley, his switch tail busy swatting flies. Resting against the manure spreader, I contemplated the new me with satisfaction until I remembered the cigarette in my shirt pocket.
It was time to have my first smoke.
Unaccustomed to playing with fire, I used half the matchbook before I could get the thing lit. The first puff was awful, and the second one was worse. I tried to get the hang of it with another drag and broke into a coughing fit. The cigarette had lost its charm, but I carefully stubbed it out on the edge of the manure spreader and was ready to put it back in my pocket when I heard my aunt’s voice.
“Annie—dinnertime!”
I forgot about saving the cigarette for later. Tossing it over my shoulder, I ran around the back of the barn to the house, suddenly starving.
Sunday dinner was on the table, a feast of vegetables in bowls: sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, tender corn fried in bacon drippings, snap beans with bacon, stewed okra, butter beans and bacon, biscuits, and golden summer squash, also with bacon. Three desiccated pork chops looked lonely on a platter all by themselves. I seated myself, and George walked in the back door and came in the kitchen. He washed his hands and sat down at the table.
I was more than a little surprised. I’d never eaten with a colored person before. The rare times I’d seen Methyl Ivory eat at our house, she took her meals in the laundry room and used her own plate and silverware, kept in the cabinet with the box of Tide soap and the Pledge.
But George put his napkin in his lap, just like everybody always did, so I put mine in my lap, too. After my Aunt Too-Tai’s perfunctory grace (“Bless this food. Amen.”), I helped myself to some fried corn and a pork chop, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the scar climbing George’s upper lip as his jaw worked around a mouthful of butter beans.
“Please pass the salt, Annie.” My aunt generously salted everything on the table. “And don’t stare—it’s impolite.” She speared a tomato slice on her fork.
I looked down at my plate.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. Sneaking a glance at George again, I marveled at his stoic mastery of the tough, dry pork chop with his knife and fork. I’d barely made a dent in mine. He wiped the scar with his napkin and broke a biscuit, raising a piece to his mouth. There was an eyeblink of knurled red gum, a twisted knot of flesh brilliant against his dark lip.
“Annie!” My aunt put her fork down. Her look was icy. “What did I just say?”
“But Aunt Too-Tai,” I said, defensive, “I can’t help it. What’s wrong with Mr. George’s mouth?” George pushed snap beans around on the plate with a hunk of biscuit.
“Mr. George has a harelip.” Aunt Too-Tai looked tired.
“What’s a harelip?” I couldn’t imagine how George got along with a lip made of hair.
“The roof of his mouth has a hole in it. That makes it hard for him to speak or to eat, but that’s no reason for you to stare.” She picked up her fork again and pointed it at the blue bowl of okra. “Now pass him some of that. We’ll have no more rudeness at my table.”
Chastised, I passed the okra. We ate in silence, but inside I was seething. It was George’s fault, surely—Aunt Too-Tai’s being so unhappy with me, the ruination of my previously wonderful morning. Everything had been fine until he sat down with us, him and that scar. I spooned fried corn into my sullen mouth. It was delicious. Why did Aunt Too-Tai let him in the house, anyway? And so my thoughts went in a hateful round-song of self-pity and blame until dinner was almost done.
Perhaps it was the breeze, suddenly shifting to the south and wafting through the screen door, or maybe up until then the omnipresent aroma of smoked pork products had overlaid the smell of something burning, but my aunt’s head lifted, her eyes narrowing. She sniffed the air.
“Do yo
u smell that?” she asked, sharp and apprehensive. George stood up from the table, knocking his chair to the floor.
“You didn’t say excuse me,” I accused before I remembered George didn’t talk.
Aunt Too-Tai jumped up. George was already halfway across the backyard, those long flamingo legs pumping in a ground-covering stride. My aunt was running down the steps before I could speak another word.
“Wait!” I called after them from the kitchen table, my mouth full of biscuit and slack with amazement. Why were they running for the barn? In a tempest of curiosity, I ran outside, too. George and Aunt Too-Tai were nowhere to be seen, but a thin blanket of smoke lay over the backyard. Through the half-open barn door the cat streaked across the grass, an orange ghost in the hazed sunlight, its tail electric in alarm. The hogs squealed and milled in their pen. My eyes smarting, I slipped through the barn door in search of my aunt.
Inside was all choking smoke, lit with an eerie glow. The manure spreader was in flames just outside the back door of the barn.
“Aunt Too-Tai?” I tripped over the pitchfork and fell to the hay-covered floor. As I struggled to my knees, a strong arm grabbed me by the back of my shirt, yanking me upward and swinging me effortlessly over a bony shoulder. My forehead bounced on the back of my aunt’s overalls as she ran with me through the barn, coughing. She banged the barn door open with her hip. My chin slammed the ground when Aunt Too-Tai flung me under the sweet gum tree.
“Stay there.” My aunt was already racing back to the barn. “George!” Her scream was broken with smoke. “Don’t do it!” In the next instant the tractor’s engine caught with a harsh growl. Coughing, gasping like a fish on a riverbank, I sucked the smoky air deep into my lungs.
“George!” Aunt Too-Tai sounded terrified.
Then, with a screech of straining gears, the tractor hove into view from around back of the barn, pulling the flaming manure spreader behind it. High on the wooden seat of the tractor, George’s face was a scarred mask as he steered the tractor in a slow arc toward the pasture, down the rutted track leading away from the barn.
“George!” my aunt called. The tractor lurched onward while the fire in the manure spreader grew huge, fed by moldy hay, smoldering tires, and engine grease. George was hunched low over the steering wheel, the sleeve of his denim shirt smoking where a spark had caught. My aunt ran behind in the tall grass, calling for him to stop, but he held the tractor to its grinding track, hauling the burning manure spreader away from the barn.
George’s shirtsleeve was in flames now. At the last minute he threw himself off the tractor just before the gate to the pasture and rolled when he hit the dirt, but one of the big wheels ran over his work boot before he could yank his foot out of the way. Driverless, the tractor shuddered on and knocked the old iron gate off the hinges, crushing it to rusted ruin while rambling onward into the pasture. Bob the mule galloped to the far end of the field near the pond, honking defiance as though the flaming manure spreader had been sent by Beelzebub to come and take him to hell.
“George!” Aunt Too-Tai stumbled down the path to where he was just trying to get to his feet. When she took his arm across her shoulders to help him get off the ground, George cried a wordless moan of pain. He didn’t put any weight on his right foot.
Under the sweet gum, I stood up and something fell out of my shorts pocket.
The little matchbook.
I was a dead child: even Baby Jesus couldn’t help me now. I closed my trembling hand on the matchbook and stuffed it deep in my pocket. My aunt and George were almost to the backyard, and the hogs were shrieking and trying to climb out of their pen. Down in the pasture the manure spreader was a bonfire, the tractor smoking now, too. Around it a field of flames wavered glass-blue on a black plain of ash, but the barn was safe and the fire would eventually burn itself out in the water-meadow. My great-aunt and George limped past me on their way to the back door, smoke-begrimed and exhausted, and I burst into tears.
In the kitchen, Aunt Too-Tai took care of George.
She cut what was left of the denim shirt off him, washing and salving the burn. George’s arm was spalled and blackened, the skin raw, the smell sickening, like nothing I’d ever known. I stood in the corner by the icebox, still crying, and tried not to draw attention. After dosing him with a BC Powder, Aunt Too-Tai helped George out to the Chevrolet and drove forty miles back to Jackson, to the closest hospital that would treat Negroes. This time, I rode in the front. George lay across the back seat, his broken ankle on a bed pillow, cradling his burned arm across his undershirt and apart from that solitary cry he never made a sound. When we got to the University Hospital, my aunt and I sat in the colored waiting room with George until a harried resident came, put him in a wheelchair, and took him away.
Deep in the pocket of my shorts, I clutched the matchbook in my sweaty palm. You must be more responsible, Annie. Oh, a great weight of responsible descended with giant, thundering treads on my soul until I thought I would suffocate with it. All that long Sunday night in the waiting room, my aunt didn’t call my parents. She never accused me of having set the manure spreader on fire. She didn’t have to, for the cast of her mouth and the fact she wouldn’t look at me buried me deep in the pit of responsible. Unable to bear her silence, I pretended to read a National Geographic while Aunt Too-Tai watched the big double doors for George to come out. When he did—on crutches, white gauze swathing his dark arm—we drove back to the farm in Monday’s dawn.
George, Aunt Too-Tai—they were responsible for each other, and I was responsible for a burned manure spreader, a dead tractor, and the new scar George would wear for the rest of his life, the limp he would have until the day he died.
I spent the rest of that summer in Aunt Too-Tai’s gloomy parlor on the spavined sofa, reading books she would hand me wordlessly before she went out to work on her farm, without the tractor and single-handed until George could come back. I read the Bible mostly, but also several severe, old-fashioned books about heedless children who came to spectacularly dreadful ends. When we had exhausted these instructional tracts, she told me to move on to the antediluvian set of encyclopedias for a little light reading. The day I got to the O volume, at last I was allowed outside and given various menial chores—but only under her watchful eye. Aunt Too-Tai gave up smoking.
Near the end of my visit we had a talk, Aunt Too-Tai and I. It would be time for me to return home soon, and we’d never discussed the events of that day. I had to find out if she’d forgiven me, as well as whether she was going to tell my mother.
It was late, I remember, and the air in the house was sleeping off the day’s heat as though the relentless sun had beaten it half to death. Taking a deep breath to fortify myself, I knocked on the door to the room that Aunt Too-Tai and I had shared all that summer.
“Come in,” she called. Wearing her old housecoat, Aunt Too-Tai was sitting on her bed and had just finishing brushing her iron-gray hair in front of her pier glass. Her faded blue eyes met mine in the mirror. “What is it?”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, dropping my gaze. “I’m so sorry about Mr. George. I didn’t mean to do it.”
Turning from the long mirror, Aunt Too-Tai patted the bed, inviting me to sit down on it beside her. “It’s a terrible thing, Annie—doing something you know you can never take back. I know you’re sorry, child.”
I swallowed hard. “Are you going to tell my mother?”
Her face was grave. “Do I need to? I have a feeling that you’ve already learned an important lesson, maybe the most important lesson you’ll ever learn. No matter how sorry we are, we still have to take responsibility for what we do. Forever. I don’t think you’ll forget it, will you?”
“No, ma’am.” I shook my head. “But it’s hard, Aunt Too-Tai.” My chest burned, on fire with the longing to say something, anything, to make this right between us. I didn’t realize then that Aunt Too-Tai had already forgiven me, that it would be many years before I’d forgive myself. “It
’s real hard.” And it still is.
Aunt Too-Tai smiled ruefully and smoothed the hair on my bowed head. “I know, child. That part never goes away, no matter how old you get.”
Later on that last week at the farm, George came back to work, but he wasn’t able to get a full day in yet. I brought him a glass of ice water where he sat in the shade of the sweet gum tree, mending some arcane piece of machinery. He nodded his thanks as I approached.
“Here you go, Mr. George,” I said politely, and ran to rejoin my aunt in the garden. We were picking the tail end of the pole bean crop, and she was counting on my help.
“Pay attention to me now, Annie,” she said. Though my bucket was heavy and my fingers were tired, by then I knew better than to do anything but keep on picking pole beans and listen. Responsibility, Aunt Too-Tai said, is a ladder. We move up, we move down, and sometimes we miss a rung and swing out into the void, but the ladder is forgivingly endless. I was young, she said. Don’t worry, she said. I’d have many chances at that ladder. She set her bucket down in the dirt and gave me a hug.
I still have the book of matches.
CHAPTER 15
“I still have the book of matches.”
“Really?”
“I’ve always kept it in the bottom of my jewelry box, like a kind of... keepsake, you know?”
The truck’s windows are fogged to opacity, and Troy Smoot is curled around my bare feet like a snoring fur space heater. He jumped over into the back seat a while ago and laid claim to that end of the blankets, although I didn’t notice him right away, being too caught up in my story about that summer spent down on Aunt Too-Tai’s farm. It’s warm here in the truck, wrapped in Ted’s arms, pressed skin-to-skin against his smooth chest, so different from Du’s heavy pelt of hair. I never knew horse blankets could be so comfortable, even though they still smell faintly of stable and laundry detergent.