by Carolyn Wall
Praise for
Carolyn Wall’s debut
SWEEPING UP GLASS
Winner of the Oklahoma Book Award
“This extraordinary debut novel, both a ‘what happened’ and a ‘whodunit,’ explores survival and the guilt that can accompany it. The writing is filled with arresting images, bitter humor, and characters with palpable physical presence. The fresh voice of that clear-eyed narrator reminded me of Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I literally could not put it down.”
—The Boston Globe
“By the end this rich literary portrait of a woman and a place unexpectedly transforms into a surprise-filled thriller.”
—The New York Times
“If it seems implausible for reviewers to compare the almost-unknown writer Carolyn Wall of Oklahoma City with Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, and Charles Portis, you haven’t read her debut novel.”
—The Courier-Journal
“This is a perfect little book, like a head-on collision between Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee, with a bit of Faulkner on a mystery binge. I loved every page of it. Just my kind of book.”
—JOE R. LANSDALE, Edgar Award winner
“The suspense is gripping, the danger is very real and the reader gets caught up in Wall’s powerful, moving debut. Highly recommended for all collections.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“This debut novel does so much more than traditional, tightly focused mysteries. It has a powerfully, sometimes uncomfortably, realized setting; characters who seem drawn from life; and a wide-ranging plot, bursting with complications.… A gripping story and a truly original voice.”
—Booklist
“Carolyn D. Wall has created an engaging character in Olivia Harker and a complex and densely interconnected community in Aurora, Kentucky. Her evocative prose recalls the regional style of such authors as Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and Eudora Welty.”
—Mystery Scene
“A powerful novel … features unforgettable characters placed in a terrifying situation … This is a fine novel which deserves a wide audience.”
—Mystery News
“Gritty, vitally alive first novel. It roars into life on the first page and never lets up.… Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, Sweeping Up Glass is profoundly moving and impossible to read dry-eyed, with one thrilling sequence after another going off like a chain of firecrackers, not to mention plenty of surprises and reversals, subtle set-ups with genuine payoffs … and a brave, honest woman at the heart of the story … whom you love passionately and worry about until the last page.”
—Shelf Awareness
Playing with Matches is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Bantam Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Carolyn D. Wall
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wall, Carolyn D.
Playing with matches : a novel / Carolyn Wall.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53439-2
1. Mute persons—Fiction. 2. Prisons—Fiction. 3. Mississippi—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.A35963P53 2012
813′.6—dc22 2011032703
www.bantamdell.com
Cover design: Belina Huey
Cover photograph: © Lynn Koenig/Flickr/Getty Images
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Dedication
In Appreciation
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
1
If there’s help for the little guy—for my Harry, who won’t talk—it’ll be north on a green elbow of the slow-moving Pearl River. But that’s the one place in the world I cannot go. It would mean the chicken circus, the boy who lived in the tree. The burning bed. Hell’s Farm and the curse of Millicent Poole.
Wherever we go, Thomas Ryder will come after us—won’t he? I hope he’s frantic and sorry, and that he never finds us. But I’m waffling in my thinking. In this tiny motel room with the worn-thin rug and the rusty washbasin, it’s been a long night. The storm has played out. I leave one candle burning.
But oh, God, Harry’s neediness points me upriver. It steers me home.
The candle sputters out. In the stifling dark of after-storm, I kiss my children’s damp foreheads, and I pray for three things:
Jerusha will remember me.
She’ll do for my Harry.
And she’ll care for them both while I’m locked away.
2
“Upriver” is Potato Shed Road—dusty shotgun houses and run-down duplexes, folks backed up to False River and poor as Job’s aunt. Miss Jerusha Lovemore’s place was a good ways along, a clapboard house with two floors, a small attic, and a crooked turret.
It was widely known that Jerusha once worked for a chicken circus up in Haynesville. What exactly she did there seems a subject best left for adult conversation. In the end, though, she took up a riding crop and thwacked the ringmaster, in the name of the Lord.
Then she bought an old car and putted down through the long green state of Mississippi, heading for the town of False River, where her sister lived. She used a chunk of her circus-earned money to buy the big house, and she settled in. Rapidly, she grew to know her neighbors. Her years under the big top had done her no harm because she beat her rugs regular and went to church on Sunday. She put up bread-and-butter pickles and was a right hand at turning out sweet-potato pie and jalapeño corn bread.
Past Auntie’s place was a narrow field of weedy grass, and then the bony old house that belonged to my mama.
I, Clea Shine, was born in Mama’s kitchen—on the table, so as not to ruin the sheets upstairs—and I lived there for one hour and ten minutes. It took Mama that long to get down off the table, clean herself up, and step into her high heels. Then she carried me, in a wicker laundry baske
t, over to Jerusha’s.
I picture Mama wobbling off through the brown grass, wrapped in a sweater, for it was coming on winter.
Poor Auntie, as I came quickly to call Jerusha. I was chicken-legged skinny and already howling for my dinner. She couldn’t have known beans about foundlings and such. And I was a handful.
But her sister, the broad-in-the-beam Miss Shookie Lovemore, was herself raising up a fat daughter called Bitsy, and Miss Shookie knew all there was to know about everything.
For a long time, in those days, I had not a tooth in my mouth nor a hair on my head and according to Miss Shookie, I cried all the time. I must have given Aunt Jerusha one everlasting headache. Still, she held fast to my hard little body, and rocked me long, and hummed slow, quiet streams of things like We. Shall. Not. Be. Moved.
At nine months I came near strangling with the whooping cough, and while I crouped and hawked up phlegm and sucked air, Auntie dangled me by the heels over the kitchen sink. For three weeks, she fed me with an eyedropper, slapped mustard plasters on my chest, and whomped my back with the pink palm of her hand. At least once each night, she pinched my nose and blew in my mouth just to keep my lungs going.
And all that time, Mama was across the field. Auntie couldn’t help but hear the piano music pouring from there, and I wonder if that noisome key-plunking helped or hindered her in laying this white child down to sleep. It was my lullaby, but maybe Auntie cursed the racket and hated my mama and all the men who came there—prison guards, mostly, but others too, looking for a fine time. Mama obliged them. She was a tireless thing and could drink and dance and laugh all night. For a few dollars, she laid the men down.
My earliest memory could be nothing but a trick that my brain played on itself. I seem to recall Auntie’s front window being propped up in the hope of a breeze. Inside, I rested my chin on the sill—and thrust out my tongue to receive a drop of whiskey, amber in the moonlight and tasting like butterscotch. It could not have happened, of course, because Auntie kept screens on her windows. Still …
Sometimes she and I sat on the upstairs gallery, cracking beans into plastic bowls, snap snap. From there, we could see Mama drifting out into the yard, lithe as a willow and throwing slops, her yellow hair backed by the sun glinting off the wires of the Mississippi state penitentiary, another quarter-mile on, at the end of the road.
In the heat of the day, Auntie draped a sheet over our upstairs gallery rail, and there we sat, her in her slip and me in my undies, overseeing the dirt road and the prisoners working the far fields in their orange suits, while even the dust shimmered in the heat. Toward the end of the day, we watched guards in gray uniforms park in Mama’s yard. Sometimes she’d greet them at the door—the river wind lifting her pink feather boa. Her silver-heeled slippers winked like glass in the twilight.
The weeds grew tall around Mama’s place, and the upstairs windows cracked and fell out. I suppose the place looked spookier than all get-out, because teenagers drove by and threw rotten fruit. They chanted things I could not understand, and spray-painted words on the peeling clapboard.
I determined I would learn to read those things. They might tell me something about my mother. Maybe in my heart I already knew what those words said, because, while I grew lankier and clumsier with my long legs and feet, the worst of me was a wide, smart mouth. It spewed chatter and backtalk. Lying was neither harder nor easier than telling the truth. In fact, all my growing-up years, I maintained an unholy attitude for which Auntie whipped my calves with a green willow switch, and I deserved every whack.
Still, I wasn’t a complete loss. I taught myself to read early on and was a smart hand at filling a basket with blueberries.
By the time I was four, my hair had grown dark, unlike Mama’s, and thick as a broom. When Auntie tried to drag a comb through it, I screamed and stomped so that she braided it and wound thick pigtails, like rope, around my head. It was sometimes two weeks before she took down the plaits, saddled up with a comb, and rode into that rat’s nest. The rest of the time, my loose, fuzzy hair stuck out in all directions.
Later, my friend Finn told me that when the sun shone just right, I looked to be wearing a golden halo. But it was like Finn to say that. He was kinder than me, and he never killed anybody.
3
Next to Auntie, I loved Uncle Cunny best. He was no true relation but was a collector and seller of metal junk, and he tended to Auntie’s house and drove over in his pickup truck two or three times a week. He plowed and built a back porch and nailed up shingles, and Auntie paid him in meals and by sewing buttons on his shirts.
But Uncle Cunny Gholar and Sister Shookie did not get along. Nobody got along well with Miss Shookie Lovemore.
After Sunday service, she and Auntie would tie on their aprons, and while they peeled potatoes and rolled out biscuit dough, they hissed and spat and fought royally. When she was riled, Miss Shookie quoted the Bible wrong, trifling with the Beatitudes until they suited her. Auntie laughed at her, but Miss Shookie kept her own commandments, calling my mother a sodomite and me the devil’s babe.
Uncle and Miss Shookie went at it like cats, she creating scripture and Uncle calling her a sanctimonious sow.
Then Miss Shookie’d let loose with “You rusty old sinkhole” and “Pass the biscuits, you goddamned sinner.”
Uncle Cunny Gholar was opposed to all things religious. He declared himself a heathen to the core. So when Miss Shookie went to beating the table with her fork and laying down vague laws of the Old Testament, he’d arch his brows and look away like something more important had caught his eye. That sent Miss Shookie into a royal tear. One time she beaned him with her cast-iron skillet, clonking him good during a funeral dinner at the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center.
The Center, in our closest town of False River, was a low square building with a sloped tin roof, and everything important happened there.
The racket, back in the kitchen, woke things up and spewed blood all around. For a while it looked like Uncle’s funeral might be next. But Reverend Ollie helped Uncle into his Buick and drove him to Greenfield while Auntie and I sat in the back and pressed cloths to his head.
The doctor in Greenfield said Uncle would live, and Auntie, who’d been wringing her hands and praying to Jesus, slapped Uncle a good one.
“Fool!” she said. “You know better than to stand in the face of my sister!”
Even with twelve new stitches lacing his scalp, Uncle was not deterred. At one o’clock the next Sunday, he stepped in our back door, doffed his felt hat, and said, “Miss Shookie, you’re looking particularly ravaged today.”
“You hell-bent old fart,” she shot back, peeling skins from a soft-baked yam.
“And you have the tongue of a spinster viper,” he said.
“Well, I never!” Miss Shookie’s chins bobbled mightily.
“Then it’s plain you ought to,” Uncle Cunny replied, ignoring the paring knife in her hand. “You’d feel considerably better if you did.”
Aunt Jerusha sent Uncle the evil eye, and the conversation turned to the dreadful humidity we’d been having lately. Like the air wasn’t a wet blanket every day of our lives.
In spring, the rain poured down and the False River rose up. The shallows crept into the yard and covered the chicken run and the vegetable garden with a thick layer of river trash and muddy ooze. In the following days, while we slogged around in rubber boots, hundreds of brilliant wildflowers bloomed on the riverbank and in our yard.
But the mud was a nuisance. Annually, I lost my shoes in the muck, causing Auntie to decree that I could just go without. Every time, though, Uncle Cunny drove me in to False River and treated me to a pair of ugly brown lace-ups from the Ninety-Nine Cent Store.
When the crops came up, I scrambled between wire-basketed tomatoes, chasing fat white worms back into the ground and tearing the patches off my overalls. Thereafter I was consigned to pillow-slip dresses and finally hopsacking, until Miss Shookie and Bitsy br
ought a cardboard box of washed-out hand-me-downs. I wore them with great pain—especially on Sundays.
The folks in False River were a holy lot, grounded in the Lord and the First and Last Holy Word Church. On Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, and for Wednesday prayer meetings, I wore Bitsy’s old dresses. I fidgeted beside Auntie in that hard church pew and learned that We shall not be moved ran together in one whole sentence. Still, I liked the way Auntie sang it, as if each word was truly the first and last holy sound.
Sometimes the Best Reverend Ollie Green came to dinner. He was a single man—round of face and shiny black, spiffed up in his striped suit with a flash of pocket-hankie color. He was loved by his congregation and could lift his voice to a pitch that shook our teeth. On an apple-pie Sunday, with Uncle Cunny at the head of our table and Ollie Green at the foot, I asked why he was called the Best Reverend.
While Miss Shookie and her pudding of a daughter helped themselves to the choicest parts of two fried hens, Miss Shookie gave the Reverend a beatific smile. “While some preachers are fair at divining and o-rating, others are better. We are fortunate as hell to have the best.”
Dressed in his own natty suit, Uncle Cunny grinned.
I, too, depended on the Reverend.
More than anything, I longed to read. Words called my name. Because I wasn’t old enough to go to school, the Reverend Ollie lent me volumes from the church library. After a while, Auntie asked Uncle to come twice a week in the afternoons and pursue other segments of my early education.
I excelled at three things—reading, backtalking, and making things up. With his pencil-thin mustache, and his pencil-thin self got up in a fine blue suit, Uncle sat across from me at the domino table. He taught me the basics of arithmetic.
My attitude toward numbers was simple: I could add as quick as I could scramble up the porch roof—but I would not subtract, and he could not make me. In my chair under the willow, I moaned and held my braid-wound head like an old lady with a migraine. “Uncle Cunny, why would we take perfectly good things away?”