Fire Shut Up in My Bones (6 page)

I fell asleep on the way. When I woke I realized that the car was parked and I was the only person in it, alone again. I raised myself so that I could see through the windshield. One of the disemboweled animals’ bodies was hanging by its hind legs from a tree by the side of the house—its bloody entrails sliced from their cavity and spilled beneath it, steamy in the cold predawn air. My family worked feverishly, carving flesh and ferrying pink-marbled slabs of it into the house, visibly elated by the clandestine enterprise and the good fortune that had befallen us. They whispered terse instructions, quietly celebrated their progress, and moved with the speed and caution of a team of surgeons—racing against time, which would soon bring daylight and unwanted attention.

The area was lit by headlights that cast long shadows trailing off into the darkness. The scene dimmed as my eyelids fell, heavy with the exhaustion of having seen too much.

While outright stealing was unacceptable, in my mother’s view, opportunistic scavenging was simply an act of survival. She was wedged between two uncompromising positions. On the one hand was her absolute refusal of, and disdain for, the charity of others, particularly government welfare—she often seethed about a local woman with a brood of children who had once boasted of being able to make more money taking welfare than other women could make putting in an honest day’s work. On the other hand was my mother’s stubborn determination to show the world, and perhaps herself, that she was strong enough to make it on her own.

But my mother was adamant that we would not suffer in the process. Nothing stirred her spirit or shielded her guilt like a child’s wide-eyed gaze of worry, the voicing of a need she could not meet, or the terrible rumble of a tiny stomach she could not fill. Hunger isn’t only the great motivator, it’s the great stealer of joy. The very idea of it moved my mother to make sure that our joy was protected from it.

So, like the spiders in the cracks, she sprang at every scrap of good fortune. The only way that she could see to make ends meet was to stretch the rules that bound them. Why let those wounded cows wander into the woods, die, and be pecked clean by buzzards when we were in such need? She wasn’t proud of scavenging, but she refused to be ashamed of doing everything in her power to ensure that we would never see a hungry day. We never did.

2

The only time I ever saw a person actually shoot a gun at another, I was five years old, and it was my mother shooting at my father.

It was the summer after they’d separated. He’d slept over the night before. I had crept into her bed, as I often did, and fallen back to sleep. But soon the rustling woke me. I looked over to see my father on top of her. They were staring into each other’s eyes, intently, silently, seemingly saying things without words.

I now thought that getting into her bed had been a bad idea. I didn’t know what was happening, but I figured that it wasn’t for my eyes to see, so I closed them and pretended to be still asleep.

I didn’t understand what was going on, but I did understand that my mother’s new life in Papa Joe’s old house was the first time I saw her as a whole person, separate from a man, independent. It wasn’t a grand life or an easy one, but it was hers. She lived it in miniature—celebrating small accomplishments, counting small blessings, stretching small money, avenging small slights. I was coming to recognize that she took some measure of pride in her hard-won self-reliance.

So her being in bed with my father, whom I was increasingly coming to view as less than whole, confused me.

She occasionally let him sleep over, which I read as a weakness. I wasn’t old enough to understand the complexities of the heart and the vulnerabilities of the flesh. My mother was a woman like any other, who sometimes must have needed the comfort of a man, even that man, to hold her tight, to make her feel beautiful, loved, and protected.

The next morning, my mother sprang up, moving happily about, making breakfast. In the bed I stared at my father as he slept, trying to figure out what he had done to her, what those things were that he had said to her with his eyes, those things that didn’t need words.

Around midmorning, a young boy called and asked to speak to my father. It was a boy my mother didn’t know, and besides, who knew that my father was here? Suspicious, she woke my father, called him to the phone, then quietly went to the phone in the living room to eavesdrop. She would later tell me what the boy had said: “My mama said meet ha down to West End.” West End was a slant-roofed juke joint just off the highway and just outside the city limits, halfway between our street and Boogie Woogie Road. Most nights the place played host to a scraggly lot of tough men and loose women.

I got the sense from my mother—in the things she said under her breath for no one to hear, and in the things I overheard her saying on the phone with the gossips—that she could forgive some of the men who went there. In fact, she seemed to like men with a pinch of devil—not low down, but not uptight. Tilted. Rooted in good but leaning toward trouble. They were the kind with enough respect for home to cover their tracks when they ran the streets. Work-till-they-smell-bad, but clean-up-good men. Do-wrong-sometimes, do-right-most-of-the-time men. Men one step shy of my father.

But she sniffed at women who hung around places like that. They were the ones she waved at but never spoke to. High-heeled, naked-leg women. Too-short-dress and too-much-teeth women. Whistling girls and crowing hens. The lay-down-and-take-up-with-a-man-not-their-own women. The women who went out and slept in, more at home on their backs than on their feet. The drinkers. The ones who wasted money buying a plate of something instead of making a pot of something. Lazy, frivolous, loose—good-time women. Those women. The opposite of her.

My mother never drank or danced. She never partied in any way, let alone at a low-down juke joint. She didn’t even follow television, except the news and
Wheel of Fortune
and shows like
Sanford and Son
and
Good Times,
which she watched with us when we shelled peas and shucked corn. She read the newspaper.

She was a do-right woman, not a good-time woman. But now one of
those
women was calling
her
house for
her
husband to come meet
her
at the West End. Too many levels of disrespect.

My mother shrieked. There was a commotion. She went for her pistol.

While my brothers and I, like most boys in those parts, had rifles—small-caliber hand-me-downs used to keep snakes out of the grass and vermin out of the garden, and BB and pellet guns used for target practice and shooting birds for sport—my mother had the only handgun in the house.

It seemed to show up soon after we moved to Papa Joe’s house, and like me, it followed her everywhere, tucked in her purse, nestled among peppermints and pencils. It was a business piece with no benign intent, protection for a woman who had inherited her father’s, my Grandpa Bill’s, warrior spirit, and who was now out in the world on her own.

And she had brass knuckles stashed in the glove box. The gun and the brass knuckles were a guard against women who forgot their place and jumped slick, and against men driven crazy by thirst long after the love had dried up. These were men like the pulpwood cutter, whom she’d made the mistake of dating shortly after leaving my father. Realizing her error, she let him go, but for him letting go was hard to do. One day on our drive home from Ringgold, he tailgated us for miles, his big truck bearing down on our back bumper. When my mother had had enough, she pulled over, grabbed the pistol, and marched back to confront the man. I turned in my seat to see what would happen. I could make out only snippets of her scolding as she cursed a blue streak, using all the bad words children get spanked for using. The line I remember most was about me:

“Are you crazy? My baby’s in that damned car!”

He never bothered us again.

Maybe that was why she had let my father back in: he was comfortable, and for all else he might have been, he wasn’t dangerous.

But that morning, after a night of pleasure, a little boy’s voice on the other end of a phone had shattered her pride and broken her heart. That morning she grabbed that gun to conduct some business with my father.

He rushed to get dressed, then burst out of the back door clutching his pants at the waist, belt dangling. He bounded down the steps and leapt across the yard and over the fence where my mother had thrown herself when Mam’ Grace died. He continued through the tall grass that grew where Papa Joe had raised the hogs, the dewy seed heads lapping at his legs as he tried to make it to the woods beyond the fence on the other side.

My mother flung the door open behind him, her gun in hand, and began firing—her shots pierced the morning silence, but missed my father. I watched from my mother’s bedroom window as my father flinched at each explosion. But there was something in his gait that did not suggest a man whose life was in danger, but rather a rascally boy who’d been caught being devilish. It was a casual quickness, not flat-out running, that pushed him across the field, something in him that knew that something in her wouldn’t do it.

Maybe that’s what drew a smile on my face, the idea that there was a smile on his, too, even when his pants got caught in the barbed wire of the second fence as he tried to clear it. My mother ran to her car and canvassed the neighborhood for him, but to no avail. We found out later that he had hidden in a neighbor’s house.

Shooting a cheating husband was not uncommon. It was a thing often done. In fact, one of my mother’s best friends had shot her husband a couple years before for the same reason.

The woman had full hips, high cheekbones, and a short fuse. She lived in a tiny house with her husband and their four children over a hill from the House with No Steps. The husband was the blackest person I’d ever seen. A magnificent, unreal blackness. Burnt black. Shiny. Obsidian. Almost iridescent, the way the light danced across his skin, like the feathers left by the flock of black birds that blotted out the sun and set down in our backyard every winter on their way south, like our house was a place on a map.

The way folks told it, the full-hipped wife found out that her burnt-black husband was cheating with a younger woman who was known to lie down under older men. So one night, as the man sat watching television with the children, his wife stepped from the bedroom, drew her gun, and aimed at the back of his head. The children screamed. The man jumped and turned. The bullet meant for his head caught him in the stomach. As he lay bleeding out his black belly like a stuck hog, she dressed the children and took them to the Webster Parish Fair in Minden, a town fifteen miles west of Gibsland, leaving the man to die while folks munched on cotton candy and plucked numbered plastic ducks from a false stream.

Infidelity was license to kill. There was a bullet or a knife or a kettle of boiling water or a pot of hot grits waiting for any lover who dared lay up with a “Jody” or a “Clean Up Woman.” There were people all around who bore the marks of their sins—a chin-strap scar from a cut throat, leathery skin from a scalding, the nub of a shot-off arm. I had learned early in life that the wages of betrayal were meted out at the end of a gun barrel.

No one called the police before a bad thing happened. The police came only after the body fell. And besides, there was just one police officer in town and no real jail, save an abandoned red calaboose, set beside the shallow ditch that divided the town into black and white.

When someone felt wronged, they ignored the code of law and invoked the code of honor, leaving the details for God to sort out later.

In the case of the full-hipped woman, God saw fit to let her husband live.

And God saw fit to let my father live. Or maybe it was just my mother who had seen fit to let him live. Surely she could have hit him, if in fact she was aiming to. The distance was too short, her view too unobstructed. She was a better shot than that for sure. I believe that it was love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel. A heart still works even when it’s broken.

So that was it. My mother was done. She had let him back in to lie with her in her new bed, his body making the same old promises, promises that he had no intention of keeping, saying tender, lovely things that could only be passed through the press of flesh and the tips of fingers by a person with whom you shared a past and from whom you’d split apart.

But it seemed to me, even in their language without words, that his body must still have told lies. So many lies. Smooth, easy lies. The kind that fill women’s minds like smoke fills a hive. The kind that make women drunk with hope, thick blinding hope, the dangerous kind of hope that makes them lose their grip on good sense.

But no more. Not for my mother. She should have been done the night she kicked him out the window and their marriage shattered, but he patched things up. But what they had could not truly be fixed. It had to be abandoned. He was more trouble than he was worth. He and his lying body. She would be a fool for no man. This was the new, or renewed, mama. The strong mama. My mama. My father never slept over again. In fact, no man did.

After that, she began to talk openly about my father’s shortcomings—talking more to herself than to us. Each comment was an affirmation, a reminder, that no matter how hard we now had it, we were better off without him. She reminded us that he never paid his child support—only $25—although he regularly came to our house with a pocketful of uncashed work checks.

My mother’s derision widened the breach between my father and me into a gaping void, filled with the shards of broken promises, attaboys unspoken, and hugs not given. At the same time, my father sank into alcoholism.

Occasionally, late at night, without warning, the drunken wreckage of him would wash up on our doorstep, stammering, laughing, reeking, voice amplified by the booze.

Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Billie, open the do’! These my boys just like they is yourn!”