Fire Shut Up in My Bones (3 page)

Grandpa Bill was Big Mama’s first husband. They had married on Valentine’s Day in 1942, a month and a half after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Big Mama got pregnant with my mother right away, but before she was born Grandpa Bill joined the army, serving in the 92nd Infantry Division, the so-called Buffalo Soldiers. His division was eventually whisked off to Italy, becoming the only all-black division to see combat on the ground in Europe. Grandpa Bill never spoke of his service, but
Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II
recounts Grandpa Bill’s valor:

On 16 November, while proceeding towards the front at night, Sergeant Rhodes’s motorized patrol was advanced upon near a village by a lone enemy soldier. Sergeant Rhodes jumped from the truck and as a group of enemy soldiers suddenly appeared, intent upon capturing the truck and patrol intact, he opened fire from his exposed position on the road. His fire forced the enemy to scatter while the patrol dismounted and took cover with light casualties. Sergeant Rhodes then moved toward a nearby building where, still exposed, his fire on the enemy was responsible for the successful evacuation of the wounded patrol members by newly arrived medical personnel. Sergeant Rhodes was then hit by enemy shell fragments, but in spite of his wounds he exhausted his own supply of ammunition then obtaining an enemy automatic weapon, exhausted its supply inflicting three certain casualties on the enemy. He spent the rest of the night in a nearby field and returned, unaided, to his unit the next afternoon.

Rhodes was Grandpa Bill’s family name.

He was the first among the Buffalo Soldiers to be recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross, according to surviving records. That recommendation was declined, like all the recommendations for the Buffalo Soldiers. But his bravery and his injury did earn him a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, an honorable discharge, and a lifelong limp.

When he came home from the war, he and Big Mama made a go of it for a while, first in Louisiana, then in Houston. But after they broke up and got a divorce, Grandpa Bill stayed on in Houston. He married a strikingly beautiful woman only a few years older than my mother who was a bit rough around the edges. They had two daughters, about the ages of my oldest brothers, daughters that my mother could never quite bring herself to call her sisters.

When I was growing up, Grandpa Bill’s family lived in a small brick house on a cul-de-sac in a working-class neighborhood in northeast Houston. A large black velvet painting of a curvaceous woman, kneeling with her hands in her hair, breasts exposed, nipples erect, hung in their living room. It looked to me like a painting of Grandpa Bill’s young wife, but I dared not ask.

The entire house seemed to be charged with eroticism and wantonness. Grandpa Bill and his pretty young bride openly gambled and drank. Handguns were on display. Porn magazines and condoms were hidden under my grandfather’s bed. It was as far from Gibsland—in every way—as I had ever been.

One day when we were visiting, Grandpa Bill was playing a small-money card game in the open garage with a neighbor from across the street. My brothers, our young aunts, and I were playing in the driveway. My grandfather accused the man of cheating. The minor disagreement quickly escalated, fueled by alcohol and my grandfather’s sense of honor. My grandfather disappeared into the house and returned with his pistol cocked and aimed. My mother, hysterical, wrestled it away. I was shocked and frightened by how a good time had gone so quickly and badly wrong. Grandpa Bill would surely have killed the man that day, us children watching or no.

Grandpa Bill was quick to violence and unafraid of it. He knew the feel of cold steel in his hand and hot lead in his body. He had been shot twice since the war, for playing around with women who didn’t belong to him. Still, he survived. He seemed indestructible, but in need of defense. So his pearl-handled pistol was always nearby.

The feeling I got in Houston was the opposite of the feeling I got in Kiblah. The air in Houston was always charged, and an explosion seemed always imminent. In Houston, even when having fun, I was a ball of nerves.

After her pregnancy with me, and the sickness it brought, my mother got back on her feet, and a neighbor got her a job at the poultry plant in the town of Arcadia, eight miles east of Gibsland, where she stood on her feet on a production line all day cutting chickens for next to nothing: seventy-five cents an hour. She put in two years in that pit before getting a secretarial job at the high school in Gibsland.

All my other brothers were already in school, but I was not. So my mother had my great-uncle Paul keep me during the day so that she could work and then go to school in the afternoon.

Uncle Paul was Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace’s youngest son, a quiet man unable to read or write his own name. He was dark like a wad of half-chewed tobacco, had wide shoulders into which he diffidently tucked his head like a box turtle, and had a large nose, spread wide and pointed down like a raven’s tail. Uncle Paul was now near fifty and had failed to leave the nest. He had lived with Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace his whole life.

Every morning I’d stand on the car seat, my small arm tenderly draped around my mother’s neck as she drove me to Papa Joe’s house. Uncle Paul was my babysitter, but he was also my best friend—I was growing into childhood, and he had never truly left it.

Papa Joe’s house was dimly lit and filled with old furniture, dark and heavy, collected over a long life, imbued with memories but devoid of value. Papa Joe was a former moonshine runner, an enterprise that had earned him a stint in prison. Now older, wiser, and more settled, he farmed hogs and chickens. I followed him around as he did his chores—fixing things, slopping hogs, collecting eggs. Now that Mam’ Grace was gone, he barely spoke.

One day Papa Joe went out back to get a chicken from the coop for supper, and I blithely followed. He grabbed one by the neck, walked it over to the well-scarred chopping block, pinned its head down, and chopped it off—one swing of an ax, swift and strong. The headless bird sprang from the block and ran around in a spiral, blood spurting from its neck, until it fell lifelessly to the ground. I was horrified. I passed on chicken for a while.

By late morning, Uncle Paul and I began our long walk back to the House with No Steps. Along the way we passed layabout men leaning against muddy trucks parked under favorite shade trees. They checked in every day like it was a job, swigging cheap liquor from twisted paper bags, entertaining themselves with profane ruminations on the world as it passed them by. They cracked wise about other people’s problems, even as they secretly wallowed in regret, lying about wrung-out lives they wished they had lived better, saying things like:

“Dat boy thank he somethin’.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Thank he shittin’ in high cotton.”

“Sho nuff.”

“And look at dat gal.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fuckin’ everythang walkin’, and half of what’s standin’ still.”

“Sho nuff?”

And we passed old women who sat whiling away the days in sagging chairs on rickety porches, thinking backward, looking out through eyes grown wise from bodies grown frail.

We stopped to visit with some of Uncle Paul’s friends and a few of our relatives. One of Paul’s favorites was Sun Buddy, an imposing hermit with a long beard that tangled beneath his chin like the roots of a prairie grass. He drew his name from his habit of sitting quietly in the sun, sucking it up, in much the same way a frog basks on a river rock. He lived in a rundown house behind a yard filled with chest-high weeds, a narrow trail winding through them to a front door that was barely visible from the street. I never went past the weeds or into the house, and never heard Sun Buddy speak. I played near the street until Paul came out.

One of my favorites was a distant cousin named Sarah, one of the only people I knew in town who was my age. She was being raised by her grandmother, a kindly old woman whom I couldn’t imagine raising her voice, even to call for help. Sarah was nice with me, but with her grandmother she released sprays of venom, her irritation in direct proportion to her grandmother’s docility. She seemed subconsciously to blame her grandmother for the absence of her real mother.

A favorite of both of ours was Aunt Odessa, a small, loquacious woman with deeply wrinkled skin and sprigs of gray hair jutting out every which way. She lived at the crest of a hill around the corner from Papa Joe’s place, in a small three-room house, unpainted, its wooden planks weathered silver and warped with decay. Her house had no bathroom, no plumbing, and no gas heating. She retrieved water from an outside pipe, and bathed in a washtub. She went to the bathroom in a slop jar and ferried its contents to a spot out back.

Like the houses of many older people in the area, Aunt Odessa’s didn’t have a living room. Every room served as a bedroom, a dining room, and a bathroom. The front door opened onto the largest room, which contained two beds, a couple of straight-backed chairs, a large wooden trunk, and a wood-burning heater, the only heater in the house. There was another room that I never entered, and a small kitchen. The kitchen, which opened onto the back porch, contained a decades-old refrigerator, her only electrical appliance, and a massive wood-burning stove that she used to cook simple dishes like cornbread and collard greens.

The house was dark and smelled of mothballs and medicine. But it was always clean and orderly—the product of a simple, utilitarian life that produced little clutter. The only oddity was her collection of Wonder Bread bags, knotted into balls and scattered around the kitchen.

Aunt Odessa came to stay with us one winter because she refused to pay to have a blockage cleared from the flue of her heater. Her stay was supposed to be a few days. It turned into a few months. By the end of the stint, her endless, idiosyncratic babblings, which I usually found both fascinating and hysterically funny, had begun to wear on my mother. When she left, my mother vowed that Aunt Odessa would never come back. “That woman’ll worry the horns off a goat.”

While at our house, Aunt Odessa seemed to enjoy the relatively modern and comfortable—although gravely modest—amenities. She warmed herself by the gas heater and watched endless hours of TV. However, she seemed irrationally resistant to incorporating these comforts into her own home life. When the town finally installed a sewage system, she resisted offers to have a bathroom built onto her house. She finally relented, a bit, and allowed one to be built as a separate structure, in effect an outhouse with plumbing, a few yards from the back porch.

One of her daughters once bought her a black-and-white TV. She watched it, but when it stopped working, she didn’t replace it.

I’d always thought that Aunt Odessa’s resistance was a product of poverty and prudence, but when she died, I was told that $16,000 in cash was found in the freezer section of her refrigerator, double- and triple-wrapped in Wonder Bread bags.

Eventually, Uncle Paul and I made it back to the House with No Steps and ate a late lunch. Afterward, I went two doors down to the candy lady’s house. Every neighborhood had one—a lady who sold candy out of her house for extra money. Ours had fashioned a “store” from her closed-in carport. She cared for her ailing father-in-law, which burned through all of her patience. I’d knock. “Wait a minute!” she’d shoot back, ever annoyed. Soon enough, she’d shuffle into the store, always in a loose, ankle-length housedress, and unlatch the screen door. “What you want?” She knew what I wanted, but she always asked. I got the same thing every day: a snow cone, ten cents, and five sugar cookies, three cents each. A quarter.

Paul and I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting and talking with the old folks in the neighborhood on their porches. For me it was transcendent.

I was a quiet, introspective boy, and these folks helped me to appreciate that part of myself. They taught me how to be patient and kind—that there was beauty in all things. I picked up their skill for slowing time to a crawl, a skill that people whose time on earth was coming to an end had learned to master. They taught me that you only live once, but for a life well lived, one turn is enough. They baptized me in their sea of stillness, and I emerged more like them than not.

In my kindergarten year, as the holidays approached, Papa Joe died of a stroke and loneliness. At the same time, my parents’ marriage was dying of divergent dreams and weariness.

The beginning of the end came one night when my father arrived home late, again, barely beating the sun. My mother was waiting up for him. She had suffered through his controlling nature and his loose ways, but as the old folks had taught me, for everything there comes an end. Cold winters, high fevers, fragile marriages—they all eventually break.

Earlier in their marriage, when I was living in Arkansas, he had worked construction jobs in Houston, and she and my brothers holed up in a single room of Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace’s house. My mother had tolerated the fact that he had forbidden her to drive the cars he left parked in the yard. When she could find work, she had to bum a ride.

She had tolerated his boorish behavior, the way he leaned against a doorjamb and moved up and down to scratch his back, the way a bear scratches its back against a tree. Things like that set my mother’s teeth on edge. My father laughed off her annoyance, as he did most things.

She had tolerated the house he rented with his band, the one where they practiced for gigs and entertained wild women. It was on Boogie Woogie Road.

My mother dealt with my father’s women who had the nerve to come to our house. She once came home from working a shift at the chicken plant and found a woman leaving the house. She scrambled to find a brick, which she sent flying through the back window of the woman’s car as she drove off.

She had even tolerated having to take armfuls of groceries and armfuls of babies around to the back door because he hadn’t built those damned steps. Building the steps would have been such a simple thing. He could have done it. He should have done it. The not-doing spoke volumes.