Fire Shut Up in My Bones (9 page)

Even more than in the winter, our house in the summer played host to a steady stream of kinfolk and old folk, friends and freeloaders—sitting for a spell, getting a hot plate and a cool glass, sharing tall tales and deep laughs. Sometimes we got a visit from my mother’s great-uncle, who was both Mam’ Grace’s half-brother and her first cousin, since their mothers were sisters and had children by the same man. Uncle Solomon was a deacon in his church and an open polygamist who lived with his three “wives,” only one of whom was his legal bride. He maintained a separate house for the only “wife” who bore him children. The women plotted and schemed about how and when they would leave him, but they never did.

At other times we were visited by another uncle and aunt to whom we were also twice related—he was my mother’s uncle and she was my father’s aunt. Aunt Edna was a pillow-soft woman with extremely fair skin that was jiggly and cold to the touch, dripping like wax from her frame. Kinfolk accused her of masking her chronic laziness with make-believe illnesses. Her body started to atrophy from lack of use, and the illnesses folks accused her of manufacturing eventually manifested. The old lady who had cried wolf was looking the wolf in the face. Her husband was a dark, whip-thin man, with teeth as white as bone china and a habit of talking faster than we could listen. He was an army veteran and retained some of the military rigor in his posture and demeanor, and also in his a sense of duty, expressed in his catering to his wife’s endless stream of dictates.

Sometimes a cousin would spend a couple of weeks with us. This summer, our cousin Chester came to stay for a spell. Chester was the son of my mother’s brother Henry, who as a boy had followed Big Mama to Arkansas when my mother had stayed behind. Uncle Henry was a man who defied easy definition because he seemed to exist outside the rules.

Uncle Henry had been a good-looking young man, cavalier and quixotic. He had gone to Grambling College—twenty miles west of Gibsland—on a band scholarship, but soon joined the army, where folks said he began to make good. While stationed overseas he got caught doing something bad—something to do with military secrets, as best I could tell from the fragments I heard whispered by shamefaced kinfolk. Whatever it was, Grandpa Bill’s Silver Star was tarnished by the foolish acts of his son, who was sent to the military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Uncle Henry fell so spectacularly that he no longer seemed to want to get back up, or to care what people said about him being down. The only time I remembered seeing him was at the funerals of Mam’ Grace and Papa Joe, when the prison had granted him leave to attend. To me, during those brief visits, even though his physical appearance was a bit wild and wayworn, there seemed a certain freedom in his failure—a liberation from the concerns of the world, which I found fascinating.

He emerged from prison a changed man—a drinking, carousing Casanova who mined the juke joints for easy pleasures, repeating the old saw “They all look good at closing time.” He apparently didn’t always look particularly closely at closing time. He once picked up a woman who wasn’t a woman. He didn’t discover her deception until they were rolling around doing the things that people do when they leave juke joints.

“When I flipped that gal ova, she had a thang big’n mine.”

“What did you do, Uncle Henry?” my brothers asked, giggling.

“Well, hell, I was almost finished then!”

The family laughed it off as a mistake easily made when liquor dulls the senses.

Uncle Henry constantly cycled through women—moving in, making babies, and moving on. I understood even then there was something about him—in his smile, in the way he walked, in the way he sweet-mouthed folks—that appealed to a blind and boundless faith in some women that their love alone would be sufficient to lift fallen men or fix broken ones.

“Slick as owl shit,” my mother said of him.

Chester had Uncle Henry’s impish smile, full of subtlety and mischief, the kind that could be used as a tool, a shield, and a weapon, the kind that made people believe things they shouldn’t.

He had stayed with us before, but this time was different. Almost from the moment he arrived, he made clear that he was interested in playing with me more than with my older brothers, who were closer to his age. I was so starved for attention—my own brothers rarely seemed to want to play with me—that this surprised and delighted me. Nathan even gave up his spot in our bed and slept on the sofa so that Chester and I could sleep together. Chester and I laughed and played all day and all night. I was only seven, but now I felt like a big boy.

One afternoon, Chester persuaded me to steal candy from the store up the street.

Next door to our house, past the fencerow where wildflowers and blackberries grew and past a field of majestic sunflowers, lived Mrs. Bertha, a joyless, licorice-colored woman who kept her curls shaped under a black hairnet. She ran a one-room, cinderblock store crowded close to the house she shared with her mixed-race husband. The store had a cement floor with paths worn glass-smooth from people walking the same routes over many years. It had poor lighting and sparse furnishings. Just inside the door, on the left, was a homemade, glass-paned case stocked with stale candies—Tootsie Rolls, Red Hots, caramel squares, SweeTarts, and Lemonheads, my favorite. To the right was an intermittently stocked soda machine that dispensed ice-cold, bottled drinks—root beer, orange, and grape. In the middle of the room was an old wooden desk on which sat a broken cash register and two large glass jars, one containing sugar cookies, the other dill pickles.

Beyond the desk was an old stove and a couple of tables where Mrs. Bertha served lunch and dinner to bedraggled old men who no longer had—or never had—the luxury of an able wife. They were men who wore their loneliness in their clothes. There was no one to soak the stains and scrub them out before they set, no one to mend the holes and bite the thread when the job was done.

I reluctantly agreed to steal from the store. I didn’t realize that this was a test of my willingness to break the rules and of my ability to keep it secret. I didn’t realize that Chester wanted me to make my bones by killing that part of me that was still innocent.

We entered, went behind the case, and chose our loot. I fidgeted. My eyes darted. I was a panicky mass of anxiety. We went to the counter and paid for the candy in our hands, not the candy in our pockets. On the way home, Chester celebrated like he had just won a game. I was overcome by guilt.

I thought about what I’d done, and I did not approve. I decided to return the candy, hoping that doing so would be seen as honorable, and that Mrs. Bertha wouldn’t tell my mother. I returned to the store alone. As I stammered through my apology and slid the candies across the desk, Mrs. Bertha sat silent, angry, and brewing with judgment. Before I got home, she had called my mother and told her what I had done. My mother was disappointed.

That evening I hurried off to bed, retreating from my own reproof, hoping to put that day behind me.

But the shame of stealing candy would pale in comparison to what came next.

Sometime during the night, I was awoken by the feeling of something happening to me below my waist. My underwear was pushed down around my thighs. Chester was pushed up behind me, holding me, the most private part of him moving against me. My body snapped straight and stiff like a cedar fencepost—an instant, reflexive resistance. I jerked, trying to move away, but he held me tighter. I didn’t know what was going on or what to do.

I couldn’t get away. I recalled my mother’s silent submission to my father. Maybe if I just lay hushed and still, I too would rise in the morning moving happily about. But this just felt different, and wrong. I tried to think it through, to find the words that would make him stop. Those words never came. The words that did come were like a thousand sparks in the darkness—too random to make sense, too fleeting to shed light.

And his words rang in my head, whispered in pulses of hot breath from wet lips moving slowly, so close to my ear that they occasionally touched.

“Relax, it’s just a game. Relax, it’s just a game.” He repeated the line over and over, dripping the words into my mind, murmuring soft and metered in a tone usually reserved for the calming of a colicky baby, a carnal incantation meant to loosen my limbs and shield his sins.

I seemed to float above the illicit scene, in it, but not.

His body never entered mine, but to me, in that moment, that seemed a distinction without a difference. In that moment, I reached the fraying point between my spirit and my body—in that moment, the connection between them was irreparably severed.

Soon his grip loosened, and he pushed back and propped himself up on one elbow, still facing in my direction. I rolled onto my back and stared up toward the ceiling at the spot where I had imagined my spirit floating. He said, “It’s just a game. Look, scoot up behind me.” He rolled over on his other side so that he was now facing away from me and toward the wall. I lay there stunned, unable to think or act. “Scoot up!” he barked, looking back over his shoulder. I turned and scooted up behind him, unclear of what I was doing or why. “See, now turn over.” He rolled back over until he was again facing me, then rolled me over so that my back was once again facing him, and he moved up behind me again.

In the same room where Mam’ Grace had turned and released her life and sent everyone screaming, I had been turned and mine taken without so much as a peep. Dead all the same. Just different.

Eventually, Chester tired and went to sleep. I lay there on my side, shocked and silent. I stared at the dim light shining through the crack beneath the door, thinking that Nathan lay just beyond it, thinking that had I screamed, he would have come running. But what would I have told him? Surely I would have gotten in trouble. Somehow this was my fault. Surely I had done something awful to make Chester do what he had done. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. Or maybe there was another reason, one I thought worse. Maybe I had been curious and willing. Maybe I had wanted him to do what he had done and that’s why I hadn’t screamed. That possibility to me was even more frightening than the first.

But, either way, it was obviously me.

The day after Chester locked his arms around me and pushed up behind me, I sat hiding and grieving on the stubbled ground inside a maze that one of my brothers had mowed in the tall grass of the field where Papa Joe had raised hogs. Chester walked by on the street and noticed me there. He came into the maze and knelt beside me. “Hey, let’s do what we did last night again today.”

This time, the words came, haltingly, “No, I don’t want to.”

He said nothing, but his cheeks dropped, and the impish smile fell flat before twisting itself into a scowl. He was not pleased. He surveyed my face for a moment as I stared at the ground, trying to avoid the wither of his gaze, looking down at the cut grass wilting in the heat. Then he got up and left me there and never played with me or spoke a kind word to me ever again.

I don’t know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t—wanted to cry, but couldn’t. I was dead now, and dead boys forget how to cry.

Confused and hurt and irrational, I did the worst thing: I deflected blame from the person who’d hurt me most to the person who loved me most. Why had my mother let Chester sleep with me? Why couldn’t she see what he had done? What I couldn’t muster the courage to let cross my lips was engraved on my face. I was crestfallen, morose—the cold shadow of a child consumed. Why couldn’t she see it?

Part of me wanted desperately to tell her, but another part of me believed that was beyond the realm of possibility—she would punish me, or kill him, or both.

On the one hand, I wanted her to know without hearing, to see something that I couldn’t say. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t read my mind as I had been sure she could. On the other hand, I knew how much she worked and worried. I knew how hard it was for us to grow the vegetables and raise the hogs. This thing that had happened to me was only a few minutes in the middle of a summer night—big to me, but small in the grand sweep of things.

Then I had the idea that it wasn’t her that I needed in that moment so much as a father. This was an issue among boys and men. I needed a man who could understand and help me make sense of what happened, a heavy arm in whose crook I could hide. I needed a father like Jed, someone with the kind of eyes that forgave secret shame before it scarred the throat in the speaking. But I had no father. Jed was dead. And my real father, who had hardly ever been a real father, was lost to me.

There was no one to break my fall. There was no one to save me.

I had never thought it possible that a boy could be drawn to another the way Chester had been drawn to me, but now the idea was woven through the fiber of me—once broken, forever altered. The idea wouldn’t exist in me as an attraction to boys’ bodies, or even to a boy in particular, but—the way it had been introduced to me—as the pull of attention, the idea of being chosen. I hadn’t seen Chester’s body that night. It had been shrouded in darkness. It was in my mind that I believed the thing had happened, and it was in my mind that I now fused together abuse and attraction. It was the embrace—the thing that I no longer got in this house of busy people and in this neighborhood where no one called me Char’es Baby—that I thought had held me quiet.

Chester’s betrayal left me gun-shy around aggressive boys. They could no longer be trusted. I had so misjudged Chester’s intent, that look he gave, that I would spend the rest of my life studying people’s faces, trying to pick up on the hints of kindness and the residue of ill intent, those subtle cues that separate friend from foe. Until I could interpret those clues, I retreated—from conversation, from family, and from friends—for my own survival.

As I retreated, he followed, with an endless tirade of putdowns designed to keep me from telling and to undermine my credibility if I did.