Playing With Matches

by Carolyn Wall

  And so I do. Luz takes the place where I once sat.

  It’s when Uncle Cunny Gholar comes through the door, swinging his hat in his hand, that I lose my togetherness. Right at the table, my face caves in. Uncle stands there, startled, while I catch tears with the tip of my tongue. I don’t care that his hair is white and his face is old. I lost my way. And now I am found.

  I only half rise before I am in his arms. He stumbles but catches us both, and we rock back and forth, and I gulp deep breaths, and my heart beats again.

  I wipe at my face, but I’m dripping and a mess.

  “Take your seat, Cunny,” Auntie says softly, for I see that he’s weeping too. “We all need a good meal.”

  Shookie heaves an impatient sigh.

  “Luz,” I say, with what dignity I can gather, “Mr. Cunny Gholar. My daughter, Maria-Luz Ryder. My son, Harry.”

  Uncle comes around and takes Luz’s hand, holds it tight to his heart. He lays his other on Harry’s head. Harry leans forward, puts his chin on the table.

  Uncle hangs up his hat—a fine black bowler with rounded-up sides. He pulls out his chair and says, “Shookie, I see you were first to the table. You leave anything for me?”

  “You fractious old goat,” Shookie says.

  For now, I am home.

  Then still another man stomps up the porch steps and on in, and my heart rushes to my throat for fear someone has called the law. He nods apologetically when the screen door bangs, and dashes up the stairs. Then he’s down again, pulling out a chair, smiling at me. Auntie looks at me too, quick-like and full of meaning, and passes the roast beef to this tall blond man.

  “You remember Mr. Francis Stengle,” she says. She loads potato on her fork. “From down at Oatys’?”

  I do not recall.

  Auntie eases the fork to her mouth. When she’s chewed and swallowed, she says, “You called him Wheezer.”

  The man grins and wrests the gravy boat from Bitsy.

  Then I do know, I remember. This handsome man—that fair hair, the pale skin. “Oh, God!” I say.

  The Oaty brothers kept him under their house! Finn and I went down to set him free—but some rescue that turned out to be. Social Services hauled him away—that awful Miss Pilcher and her green station wagon.

  “Francis lives here now,” Aunt Jerusha says. “He’s the chaplain down at the Farm.”

  Hell’s Farm! The penitentiary?

  “Wheezer?” I say, and in spite of my fears, that’s funny somehow—for us both, I guess, because we share crooked smiles and wide-eyed looks. It’s hardly a name for a grown-up man with rolled shirtsleeves, a strong jaw, and curly hair on his arms.

  “Hey, Clea,” he says.

  “These are my children,” I tell him, breathless.

  While I pick at my roast beef, I cannot take my eyes off him. I’m overrun with memories. Wheezer’s a pure miracle. And he’s sitting at the same place where my friend Claudie once sat. I remember that night too, all of us eating with our hands, that Alvadene came in from the pouring rain and how, with my running mouth, I ended a friendship.

  Harry, between Auntie and me, leans back in his chair. Auntie has put bits of meat and potato on his plate, a couple of green beans. She watches him for a time, then goes to the refrigerator and brings out Jell-O, which she spoons into a pretty yellow plastic bowl. Harry watches the stuff wiggle. She puts the spoon in his hand, curls his fingers around it.

  “Lord, save us,” Shookie says. “Clea June Shine, you’ve spoiled that one rotten. And the other hasn’t got an ounce of meat on her bones. They both need a good tonic, and some discipline, you ask me.”

  “No one asked you, Shookie,” Uncle says softly.

  “It’s Clea Ryder now.” I wonder if Auntie’s sister always irritated me this much.

  How Luz could use discipline is more than I can see, and she and I exchange faint smiles. But Shookie’s words pinch because I truly have no idea what my little guy needs.

  “Harry,” I whisper, “will you drink some milk?”

  Harry hooks an arm around the yellow bowl.

  Aunt Jerusha says coolly, “He can have milk when he’s tried my lime Jell-O. Go on, now.”

  Amazingly, Harry’s thumb slides from his mouth.

  “That’s right,” Auntie says, as though she and he are the only two in the room. “And there’s more if you want.”

  “Stuff’s nothing but sugar water,” Shookie says.

  Harry touches the wiggly green with his fingers and licks them for taste, and although the thumb pops back in his mouth, he eyes the dish with interest.

  The conversation is surface-thin. I thought I was hungry, but my belly hurts, and I’ve twisted my paper napkin to shreds.

  When supper is done, and we’re clearing up, Harry takes the yellow bowl, slides from his chair, and wanders into the parlor, where he sits on the floor by Auntie’s chair—criss-cross-applesauce—spoon in hand and the bowl in his lap.

  No one says a word.

  Apparently, Wheezer occupies one of two rooms on the second floor. Shookie and Bitsy have taken the other. I wonder how long they’ve been living here, and if they contribute to the cost of things. There might be Social Security from Shookie’s years of laboring in laundries, but I doubt Bitsy’s worked a day in her life. And I know nothing at all about Bitsy’s daddy.

  Until now, one scrap of logic has escaped me—when I am arrested, who will pay for my children’s room and board? If Auntie takes them, who will buy their groceries, their clothes, pay for tennis shoes and Luz’s inhalers?

  If I’d thought of this before, would I have brought them upriver?

  Just now I need to make up the beds. There’s a double in the attic that Luz and I will share. Harry, still gripping his spoon in his fist, will sleep on a camp cot pushed up so tight, Luz and I will have to climb over the foot of the bed.

  I snap out pristine sheets, find old pillows in an upstairs closet. I dump the black plastic bag and sort the kids’ dirty clothes and wonder how much time I have. I wonder if, downstairs, Shookie’s the one who is making the call.

  The sun stays up late in this part of Mississippi, but it’s dusky in the attic, with its four small windows. I put the kids down early. Luz has a flashlight and a borrowed book. I pull the quilts to their chins even though, in the heat, they’ll soon kick them off. Auntie climbs the stairs with cold glasses of Ovaltine for them both.

  Luz says, “Maybe I can get Harry to drink.”

  I kiss them again and go down to find Wheezer sitting out under the willow.

  Wheezer’s looking up at the lighted attic window. “Great kids,” he says, when I sit down.

  “Thanks. Harry was two when we got him. His father was a police officer. Decorated—so I have that to tell him someday.”

  Wheezer waits.

  “Harry watched him gunned down on a street in Chicago. He had no other family. The sisters—I work with a sisterhood—”

  I smile, remembering. “They told me he had a thatch of brown hair, was a thumb-sucker, and kept asking for his daddy. Thomas—my husband—well, we already had Luz.”

  “Smart girl there.”

  “Yes. She was eight by then, and we thought, What’s one more? So we took him and started the paperwork. Watched him, you know, for trauma. But in six months he was calling me Mama. And he—he called Thomas dad.”

  I look at Wheezer to see if I’m saying too much. “He seemed okay until—”

  Harry is nowhere happier than in my lap, or snugged up next to me, with his elbow on my thigh and his chin in his hand, as though he is the greatest thinker in the world. My favorite photo on our refrigerator was a close-up of the kids’ faces, a pencil clamped between Luz’s teeth, Harry sporting a peanut-butter smile.

  “—until this storm.”

  I am wrapped inside myself. Uncle comes out then, and takes a chair. He must be telling a joke, because he and Wheezer roar with laughter and slap each other’s knees. Auntie and Shookie come too. They st
ill gather under the willow after supper.

  Auntie says, “There’s lemonade—”

  Not for me. I want to sit here, hugging my elbows, not recalling. I don’t want to remember anything.

  26

  I suppose I need to explain,” I say.

  Wheezer and Uncle move to get up, but Shookie and Bitsy seem settled in.

  “Y’all stay,” I say. “You might as well hear.”

  “Clea,” Wheezer says, “you don’t have to tell us anything. We’re just so damned glad to see you—”

  “Yes, she does,” Uncle says. “She owes Jerusha that.”

  I nod. I’m wearing a short-sleeved blouse, and I wonder if they’re looking at the scars on my arms. “Well,” I begin haltingly, leaving things out. “I went to Mexico. And then Belize City.”

  Auntie seems surprised. Shookie looks like I’ve already lost her.

  I recall the tramp steamer and how I had dragged my belongings ashore and stood on the street bridge and watched the fish markets below. I wandered past shaded government buildings and bare city parks, and watched children play in filthy ditch water. I strolled along Barakat Street, where funeral parlors had dark, open doorways. In the daytime, the grille fronts of tiny farmacias were pulled back to admit customers, and, upstairs, black women sat alone at open windows.

  “The city was—wonderful. The people had amazing faces. I was wishing I had a sketch pad and pencils so I could sit on the curb and draw them. But I was never really an artist. So I bought an old Polaroid at a flea market, and I took pictures of tourists at bus stops and on the dock.”

  I don’t look at my listeners.

  “I wrote these clever captions across the bottoms and sold them for fifty cents American. Four photographs paid for my room for a week. The house where I lived was on Mortuary Lane.”

  I cannot help but smile at that memory. For my two dollars I’d gotten a narrow bed and a bowl of clean water every morning, an outdoor toilet, and my turn at the backyard shower twice a week. At its highest point, Belize City was thirty-nine inches above sea level. From my upstairs window I watched the ocean sweep the flat beach and lick greedily at the end of the road.

  I knew one thing in Belize: I was alive.

  “Um, some days I caught the bus inland, or up to Progresso.” I don’t tell them about the armed soldiers who stood outside the bank, or the razor wire coiled around an elementary school that was pinkly stuccoed and blinding in the sun. Or that on one corner, hundreds of cartons of eggs were stacked under the overhang of a stall. Quarters of beef hung from hooks in meat markets, where packs of wild dogs leapt and snarled and helped themselves to the lowest parts.

  “The afternoons in Belize City are wicked hot,” I say. “Over a hundred degrees. And by night the mosquitoes are thicker than soup. Worse than here—”

  I knew this would be hard. But I’m coming to my favorite part.

  “One day I stopped at a street infirmary to buy a bottle of water, and I saw these women with blue scarves tied around their heads. They—did everything.”

  “What everything?” Shookie asks. She is listening.

  “They took temperatures and bandaged hurts; they handed out tortillas; they dished up soup on the beach. They rocked babies and played hopscotch with little girls. They sat with the sick. They were the Sisters of Mercy.”

  “Catholics,” Shookie says, and snorts.

  I’d thought so too, and I was turning away that day when a nun caught my sleeve.

  Take their picture, she’d said, pointing to a mother and a little boy, waiting their turn in a plastic chair. She is dying.

  So I did, and gave it to them with a light kiss to both their foreheads—the boy’s sweaty, his mother’s hot and dry—and then I sat on a bench with Sister Anne Benefactor, sharing her cheese sandwich.

  “No. They were all denominations and were starting a new group.”

  “What kind of group?” Auntie asks.

  “A new branch of the sisterhood. To learn to do good works. I—I was surprised that I’ve had to learn to do charitable things. I was thinking, My Aunt Jerusha was the queen of charity.”

  Auntie frowns.

  “I was never like you,” I say, intending a compliment. “If I were to become a Sister of Mercy, I knew they’d have to—teach me the ropes. I stayed to help. And went back the next day. Pretty soon I was Sister Clea Gloria. Gloria, meaning the bliss of heaven, a circle of light.”

  And at last—at last—I was no longer a Shine.

  “Never heard of them,” Shookie says.

  I look away, to the place where Mama’s home once stood. A couple of people stand in the grass there. “Other things too. We do driving and housekeeping for shut-ins, take groceries and bedding to people who sleep on the floor, in the park, under bridges. I’ve sat at the prison hospital with fourteen-year-old inmates while they tore at their shackles and gave birth. I rocked crack babies who skidded into the world screaming and shivering.”

  I’ve done it again—said more than I meant to. I’m still pretty bad about that.

  I get up then, and go in to pour a glass of lemonade while I pull myself together.

  More than three thousand Sisters of Mercy, most of them lay-women, are stationed at various camps in the United States, Mexico, and Latin America. So many things I love about them. They work for humanity, and they work on themselves. They know there is a God, and they accept one another. I have become more patient with my Pentecostal sisters, the brimstone-fearing Baptists, and the Catholics, who always seemed the most inexplicable of all.

  I like thinking: Nobody’s wrong.

  One day Sister Anne Benefactor said to me, “Life is a great mystery, Clea. Under the surface all things are connected with everything else. With you. With the Source. And it all understands you. Remember that one well-chosen word can replace fifty others.”

  Lord, Lord, what a revelation. I’d spent an entire childhood prattling.

  Try as I did, I never mastered stillness. The sisters assured me that almost nobody does. But we do keep on trying. Eventually, those few minutes of silence, twice a day, calmed me to the point that I was moved to write a book. Thanks to Sister Anne, I chose my words carefully.

  Every night in my room, I picked up my pen, and words fell onto the paper.

  I wrote about Mama.

  I wrote about Claudie.

  I wrote about the First and Last Holy Word Church and Millicent Poole, with her thin hair and her army of demons. As I wrote, I learned. Words were tricky things: Nothing else had the power to put a man down. Nothing could pick him up so quickly.

  Because I had a degree in English—I barely remembered earning it. Those were the bad days with knives and scissors—the sisters assigned me the job of teaching people to read. I especially loved the older folks, who’d spent a lifetime never knowing the power of words.

  And I loved Belize City. Three times a week, Sister Margaret Redemptor, who was also the real thing in the way of nuns—one of three externs assigned to lead us—gathered us all at the foot of the great cathedral’s stone stairs. She ordered us to climb the steps on our knees, pausing on each to reflect on our work and the state of our souls. But my mind grew restless on those steps, and I repeatedly turned my attention from my soul, to the holes in my jeans and the blood and the calluses that had thickened and yellowed on my hands.

  We sat at the top, hugging our torn shins. No one had brought alcohol wipes or Band-Aids. But Sister Anne kissed our knees and wept over them. I already had raised silver scars on my body to remind me of my past. Here in Belize, I wasn’t cutting myself anymore.

  Before we left for the States, we crept up the steps one last time. At the top I sat, while the others prayed, and I looked out over the city and the deep, dark forests that lay beyond. Sister Anne came and laid a hand on the braids I still wound around my head.

  “In your heart, Sister Clea, which do you think God loves more—you on skinned knees, or the way you open old eyes to written words?”<
br />
  I rose and went down and sat on the grass and knew that my heart was gloriously filled, like the rich insides of a Boston cream bun. Then we all walked back to town and into the tropic-wet furnace of another day.

  I’d decided I would stay with a collective that intended to meet weekly in lower Mississippi. One of our group, whose home had been in Biloxi, was eager to get back. She was divorced and had an infant son who, all this time, she’d carried on her hip and breast-fed under the banana trees. But her mother missed her and wanted to see the child. Instead of thirteen, we would be twelve.

  Sister Margaret Redemptor led us back to the United States, crammed in a small boat, and swamped with seawater. We came ashore in Dandridge. Most of us needed housing. I did.

  And we searched for a place to meet once a week.

  We found the back room at Fong’s Chinese Wok.

  I carry my lemonade outside.

  27

  When I take my seat under the willow, there is a silence that no one else fills.

  Wheezer reaches out, laying a hand over mine. He’s being kind. But it wasn’t him I ran away from in the night. He didn’t wonder where I’d gone or if I was alive. It wasn’t his butcher knife I took.

  What was it Auntie had said about Wheezer?

  … The chaplain down at the Farm.

  With the back of my hand I wipe sweat from my face and tell them about the collapse of our house in Dandridge. I skip quickly over Thomas, try to make the story funny—“It was a two-story monstrosity. One repair led to another. We needed contractors and an electrician and inspectors and roofers. We’d each decided to cut back on one activity per month so we could pay for all that.

  “Luz was spending too much time over her books, so we’d told her she had to sign up for basketball. Naturally, when we each made one sacrifice, she gave up the team. And Harry—he gave this big sigh and said he’d been thinking about getting a rabbit. But now he would not.”

  “So he talked, before,” Wheezer says. “Harry talked.”

  “Oh, yes. My goodness, yes. When—when the storm came, we were under the dining room table. I could hear the windows breaking upstairs. The big tree on the lawn came down, and the neighbors’ too. Then these cracks opened up, and the ceiling came apart under Harry’s room, and his things just—fell through. His braided rug, his rabbit, his slippers. The legs of his bed. There was so much dust. After that, he wouldn’t eat or talk. I took him to the hospital, but it was crowded there, and they said trauma. Lots of people with trauma. So we—came here.”