Fire Shut Up in My Bones (7 page)

He was on his way home from drinking, gambling, philandering, or some combination of sins, squandering money that we could have used, wasting time that we desperately needed, sometimes just down the block from our house. As a parting gift, he’d drop by to bless “his boys” with an incoherent thirty minutes of drunken drivel, crumbs from the table of his paternity that I hungrily lapped up, time that would be lost to him in the fog of a hangover by the time day broke. It was as close as I could get to him, so I took it.

He spouted off about what he planned to do for us, buy for us. But the slightest thing we did or said drew the response, “You jus’ blew it.” We always seemed to blow it. I tried not to blow it
every
time, but no matter how hard I tried: “You jus’ blew it.” I came to understand that he had no intention of doing anything. The one man who was supposed to be genetically programmed to love me didn’t understand what it meant to love a child, or to hurt one.

To him, this was a harmless game that kept us excited and begging. In fact, although I couldn’t fully comprehend it at the time, it was a cruel, corrosive deception that subtly and unfairly shifted the onus for his lack of emotional and financial responsibility from him to us.

All I could do was lose faith in his words and in him. I stopped believing. Stopped begging. Stopped expecting. I wanted to stop caring, but I couldn’t. A heart still works even when it’s broken.

According to the stories folks told, Blow men had always been a grab bag—some hard workers, some hustlers, all smart—all the way back to slavery. My father had a smidgeon of each kind in him. The family traces its roots back to Southampton, Virginia, the same piece of land that produced Nat Turner and Dred Scott, who was actually born Sam Blow. In the early 1800s the man who enslaved Dred moved from Virginia to Alabama with his handful of slaves. That’s where my father’s family history picked up.

My father’s great-grandfather—who, someone told me, was a high-yellow mulatto man with a flowing mane of dirt-red hair—is said to have saved for many years to buy his own freedom, then to buy a few hundred acres to farm along the Coosa River near a town called Wetumpka, an Indian word meaning “rumbling waters,” just north of Montgomery.

His oldest child, my father’s grandfather, was a tiny man with big ideas named Columbus. The story I heard was that he ran afoul of white folk in Alabama. Some say he hid a ballot box when it appeared that a Klan-backed candidate for sheriff might’ve won an election. Others say he shot and killed a white man, but few people put much stock in that story. Whatever the case, the Klansmen—“white tops,” they called them—were after him. So he fled one night, leaving his young wife—a half-Indian midwife—and their young children behind. He quietly followed the river and its rumbling waters out of town and found his way to a swampy stretch of land two states over and about thirty miles south of Gibsland.

It would be two years before he sent for his family.

The way folks told it, Columbus began sharecropping a large cotton farm there in Louisiana and made a success of it—too much of a success, it turned out. They said that when he had earned enough money to buy the farm outright, the local whites “put a bad white man on him” who harassed and threatened him, and on at least one occasion tried to kill him, shooting into his house while the family was inside. He refused to leave, but his young bride didn’t have his fortitude. Fearing for her life and that of her children, she left him. He wanted that farm—he had earned it—but he wanted her more, so he soon left to join her, about ten miles north, near Bienville.

White folks had run him off again, but again he had just started over. According to the stories, he established the first black church in the region, which met under a brush arbor until the congregation could erect a building. He earned a living making wooden caskets and baskets from strips of white oak, and blacksmithing.

Folks spoke of Columbus—or Old Man Blow, as they called him—with a weighty reverence, as a hero, and that’s how I saw him: a savvy, courageous man willing to do what he believed was right, even if it meant turning away from everything he knew, a man who always bounced back after having to start over, a man who always chose love.

But Old Man Blow was where the trail of honor ran cold.

My father’s father was by all accounts a peculiar man who piddled about. People rarely spoke of him, but what I heard was that he stayed with Columbus most of his adult life, except for the two periods, one early in life and one late, when he was married. He did anything for money but hold on to a real job—selling watermelons or sodas or hiring himself out to people without cars who needed a ride to town. Most of the time when folks talked about him, he was the butt of jokes. I repeatedly heard the story of how he was so cheap that he would drive up a hill, kill the engine at the top, and roll down the other side to save a little gas.

He fathered my father by a woman my mother always described as “the most beautiful dark-skinned woman I have ever seen.” The pairing of my peculiar grandfather and my beautiful, dark-skinned grandmother was apparently a violation of the order of things. From what I heard and the pictures I saw, the Blows were so fair of complexion that many could have passed for white. Society sent all kinds of signals, even signals a child like me could register and absorb—that light skin was a precious thing to be perpetuated, not squandered. And that those of us not in possession of it were often devalued to the extent of our deficiency.

Because of the dark skin my father inherited from his mother, and the unpleasant circumstance of his paternity, it seemed to me that my father was literally and figuratively a black sheep of the Blow family. He didn’t seem to have much investment in its legacy. I never once heard him speak of his father or Old Man Blow or any of his folks, although I wanted and needed those stories.

But my father said nothing. He stashed those stories away like his guitars: in a dark place where he didn’t have to be reminded of them and no one else could hear them.

Maybe it was his own complicated relationship to his father and his father’s family that rendered my father cold. Maybe it was being witness to the absence of his siblings’ fathers. Maybe it was the pain and guilt of his car accident. Who knows? But whatever it was, it stole him from us. And I had it worse than my brothers.

While my brothers talked ad nauseam about breaking things and fixing things, I spent many evenings reading and wondering. My favorite books from our small collection were the encyclopedias. The volumes were bound in white leather with red writing on the covers. They allowed me to explore the world beyond my world, to travel without leaving home, to dream dreams greater than my life would otherwise have supported. I was new to reading, so I preferred the volumes packed with pictures, like G: gemstones and Ghana, Galileo and gravity. Glorious.

In fact, the first thing that I ever remember buying was a book. It was on one of the days my mother gave me a couple of dollars at Kmart. I ran for the Hot Wheels section. I could afford two: ninety-nine cents each. But on the way, the children’s books caught my eye. I stopped and flipped through them until I found one that I wanted: a picture book of Job from the Bible. I would treasure that book the way a boy treasures his first wallet or pocketknife or pellet gun.

But losing myself in my own mind also meant that I was lost to my father.

My father could relate more easily to my brothers’ tactile approach to the world than to my cerebral one. He understood the very real sensation of touching things—the weight of a good wrench, the tension of a guitar string, the soft hairs on the nape of a harlot’s neck—more than the supernal magic of literature and learning.

So, not understanding me, he simply ignored me, even more than the others—not just emotionally, but physically as well. Never once did he hug me, never once a pat on the back or a hand on the shoulder or a tousling of the hair. I mostly experienced him as a distant form in a heavy fog.

My best memories of him were from his episodic attempts at engagement. During the longest-lasting of these episodes, once every month or two he would come pick us up and drive us a few miles west on Interstate 20 to Trucker’s Paradise, a seedy, smoke-filled truck stop with gas pumps, a convenience store, a small dining area, and a game room through a door in the back. It had a few video games, a couple of pinball machines, and a pool table. Perfect.

My dad gave each of us a handful of quarters and we played until they were gone. He sat up front in the dining area, drinking coffee and being particular about the measly food.

“Is this soup fresh or from the cain?!”

We loved those days. To us, Trucker’s Paradise
was
paradise. The quarters and the games were fun but easily forgotten. It was the presence of my father that was most treasured. But those trips were short-lived. My father soon sank back into his sewer of booze and women.

And so it was. Every so often he would make some sort of effort, but every time it wouldn’t last.

When he wouldn’t come to us, my mother would take us to him, trying to keep some connection between a bunch of boys, their father, and his folks. She’d drive us to the house in Bienville where he lived with his two sisters and their husbands.

The house was a U-shaped building that surrounded a grass-bare courtyard with a tree withering in the middle. It had high ceilings and dark rooms, especially the spooky, blood-red-painted bathroom, lit by a single exposed bulb, that scared away my need to pee.

On one side of the house was my father’s fast-talking, foulmouthed sister, a woman prone to wild exaggeration and flat-out lying who lived with her mixed-race husband. He had a head of greasy gray hair, straight as strings, although it wasn’t really gray, or white, but dingy, like three-day-old snow when the grime and mud and dog piss gets mixed in. He was the preacher without a church who had married my parents under the tree. He ate fried fish whole, bones and all, and liked to tell us about the disgusting ways white people described black people when they mistook him for one of their own, a mistake easily made since there were no discernible echoes of Negro heritage in his appearance.

On the other side of the house lived my father’s ever-smiling, dwarfish sister, whose overweight frame sweated like a cold drink in a glass jar. She had the kind of look that the world treats cruelly, the kind that pushes a person to extreme pleasantness or extreme bitterness just to survive it. She chose pleasantness. She lived there with her no-account husband, who rarely worked but always drank, and their fun-loving son, who liked to wrestle and loved to laugh.

My father had a room in the middle, between the two families.

Our visits weren’t always warm ones. My father, if he was even home, rarely spoke, and my mother had an uneasy relationship with his sisters. She liked the dwarfish one, but that one kept a nasty house. And the other one was a liar. My mother often reminded us of what my father’s mother had said about the lying sister: “She’s my daughter, Billie, but she sure can lie.” My mother detested liars.

Not all of my father’s folks were too keen on my mother either, which they made known when my mother wasn’t around. My mother’s conservative bent, the way she didn’t curse in mixed company, her going back to college as a grown woman with children, none of it seemed to set right with them. To them, such things were the mark of a woman who thought too much of herself. And they couldn’t comprehend why my mother had left my father.

What kind of woman strikes out to raise all of us boys on her own? What kind of woman puts a man down just because he’s acting up? Surely a piece of a man was better than no man. They reckoned that it was a woman’s lot in life to make do with a scrap of a husband if that was what she was given. My mother reckoned differently.

They slyly pleaded my father’s case to us boys, but I was the kind of boy who always saw my mother’s way as right, so their side-taking soured me on those visits.

As my mother was struggling to keep my real father in my life, Jed, the man I counted as my first father, the one I loved most, was on his way out of it.

Jed fell ill—lung cancer, from a lifetime of smoking. He was in the hospital for a spell but came home when there was no more the doctors could do. He was bedridden, thin, nearly gone. Toward the end, my brother James came to stay with us in Gibsland for a week, but it was not a happy time. Something was wrong. I could feel it. No one said anything, but something came through the silence like the buzz in a too-quiet room: nothing, but something.

The next week, when we took James back to Arkansas, there were strange cars in the yard of the yellow house and strange people inside it—sad people, pacing slowly, in a daze, like people do when they stumble out of a wrecked car, having seen death up close but walking away from it. They were whispering sad things that my ears could hardly make out but my sorrow filled in. I looked around, and through a gap among the unfamiliar folks I saw Big Mama slumped in a chair, face swollen, jaw drooped, eyes blood red and holding the last puddles of a flood of tears. This was bad.

James ran to Jed’s room, the last place he had seen him, but Jed wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. He was gone. Dead, they told us, their manner grave, doing their best to choke back their own sadness and lessen ours.

Nothing could have prepared me. The earth shook. I was now old enough to know what death meant, what it really meant to lose someone you loved, not just people sleeping in a big ol’ suitcase, but the hollow-making finality of it all. Overcome, I stood still and cried. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to hold my body. I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to look into Big Mama’s.

I couldn’t believe it. I went to the bedroom so that I could see for myself. The room was cleaner than I had ever seen it. The bed was perfectly made, without a wrinkle. But Jed wasn’t there. Life was gone from that room. Big Mama would never sleep in that room again.

I wandered around the house, lost and shell-shocked. I overheard Big Mama talking to someone on the phone. “He jus’ start coughin’, coughin’ up a lots of blood, and dat was it.”