Fire Shut Up in My Bones (19 page)

Perhaps the most unsettling change for me was that I could no longer cry, at least not for the most part. My tears had been taken from me once before, in the wake of Chester’s betrayal, and now it happened again. I was bottoming out, emotionally, all over again.

This became most apparent during two funerals I attended, back to back, at which I thought that I would collapse in tears, but none came. The first was the funeral of four children murdered by their mother.

Their father was a local boy who had lived down past the segregated cemetery and just shy of the hill where Bonnie and Clyde were killed. He had married the woman and moved to South Carolina. But there was a darkness in the woman. As a child, she was convinced that her own mother, who died of heart failure, had killed herself because the mother’s heart wasn’t big enough to love her. This sent her careening from mental institutions to foster homes. When she grew up and became a mother herself, she became convinced that she too was about to die. So, to protect her children from the pain she had felt when her mother died, she drugged the children, put them in an upstairs bedroom, wired the door shut, and burned the house down. The oldest child was six years old. The youngest was eight months.

The woman showed up for her arraignment in a trance, the magistrate said. She muttered only two words, in the weak voice of a woman who’d done a truly bad thing: “I’m tired.” The forensic psychologist testified, “She protected her children by putting them to sleep and in the hands of God.” God brought the babies home to Gibsland to be sent on to glory.

The funeral was held near my house, in a municipal building across a vacant lot from the house where the eczema-covered girl’s father had tried to induct me into the cult that conspired to kill white people. The building was relatively new and built like a church—wheat-colored brick on a concrete slab, with pews, a pulpit, a choir stand, and a baptismal pool. But the only times it was used was for weddings and funerals when the person’s home church was too small to hold the crowd, and by an elderly music teacher who organized an annual spring play there, until she was killed when her car was hit by a train at the crossing.

I arrived on time for the funeral, which meant that I was late. This was expected to be a spectacle, so people had come early. The ushers sent me through one of the back doors to the choir stand, where there were a few seats still available. As I went up on the stand I stared down at the tiny caskets. Four. Interspersed with flowers. Stretching all the way from one side of the building to the other. I had seen a casket as small as these only once before, when I was a little boy, in the old church in Shiloh, after the death angel had dipped into the crib and taken a baby cousin.

I took a seat facing one of the children’s uncles, who was in the first pew. He was a boxy boy who played on the basketball team with me. I had never seen him cry before, but that day he was bent over with sadness, inconsolable. In fact, there wasn’t a dry eye in the building except mine.

I was embarrassed. The thing that stirred other folks’ souls no longer stirred mine. So I soon got up and left, pretending to be overcome, knowing everyone would understand. I walked around outside among the quiet cars, which were pointing at the building from all directions. I wondered what was wrong with me, wondered what had happened to the heart I once had. Then I thought about the only thing that I was sure would make me cry, the death of the only person in the world who I was sure loved me: my mother. The thought of her dying and leaving me all alone reduced me to tears and reminded me that I was still human, still alive.

The other funeral was for our basketball coach. He had a heart attack and died one night after a parent-teacher conference during which an irate parent yelled at him.

The coach had struggled with us, trying, in the way good coaches do, to make better men as well as better athletes of us. He yelled a lot and often twisted his words: “Dat’s why y’all can’t run no damn where—smokin’ dat wine and drankin’ dat dope!”

He was right, of course, if a little backward in the phrasing. Everyone was drinking and smoking, it seemed, except me. I shared a locker with Russell and Alphonso, regular drinkers who stocked the locker with bags of weed. They smoked, and I didn’t. No pressure, no judgment either way. We had an understanding. But in truth, I could not fully rid of judgment the eye I was turning.

The coach had tried to work with me to improve my passion for the game. I had the talent but not the heart. I was now as tall as my brothers, but as a result of always being the smallest when we played sandlot ball, I’d gotten good at dribbling around outside while they’d post up down low. Playing point guard came naturally now. I was able to see the movements on the floor as if they were being diagrammed on a clipboard, able to handle the ball as if it were a natural outgrowth of my hand, able to thread a pass among a bustle of moving bodies so that it arrived in a spot you didn’t even know a teammate would be.

But I wanted something more from my life than basketball, so I only tried hard enough to be better than my friends, not hard enough to be the best I could be. Still, I was made captain of the team the year the coach died.

The school arranged for the players to ride to the funeral on a bus, the way we went to games. I knew that I would be expected to cry, but I also knew that would be impossible. At the service, big women hung on me, fanning me, waiting for me to fall out like the other boys, yet I couldn’t will it to happen. I was sure that soon their anticipation would turn to suspicion, so I pretended I was overcome, as I had done at the funeral of the murdered children, and walked out of the church.

I knew that there was no way for me to board the bus with dry eyes, so I did again what worked before: I thought about a life without my mother. But I couldn’t keep going to that same well to retrieve my tears. I needed back a bit of the faith I had lost, and with it a bit of my humanity.

I tried desperately to surrender to faith again, but it could not be done. The past year of my life disappeared into the ether as if it had never been real. It was as if it had all been a dream, a trick my mind had played on itself to stop the pain, a luscious, dreamy delusion, the kind people crave, the kind they miss when it is gone.

Just as I was reordering my own faith—falling away from it—I started to see more clearly the ways other people interpreted and interacted with the spirit world all around me—clinging to it.

There was, for instance, the exorcism that took place in the white trailer with the mint-green trim next door to Aunt Odessa’s house.

A classmate of mine—a pretty, gingerbread-colored girl with big, almond-shaped eyes—lived there with her slow-talking, slow-moving grandmother. During the summers the girl’s cousin often came from Dallas to visit. The cousin had short legs, a long torso, and a long face. She looked to me like a Shetland pony standing upright, though I knew that was too cruel a thing ever to say.

Something was wrong with the cousin, a little off, the way she looked at you like she was focusing on something behind you. We all figured that the something wrong was in the girl’s mind, but her grandmother figured that the problem was in her soul. So the grandmother arranged to have the demon drawn out.

One evening, as dusk settled and the air cooled, a group of us teenagers milled around in the street near their trailer, swapping stories and telling jokes. An aging sedan pulled into the drive, and three big, Bible-toting women wearing long dresses and matter-of-fact expressions got out and stepped quickly into the house.

There was a silence, like the quiet before a twister sets down and tears things up. Then the chanting, praying, and singing began. Then came the loud thumps and banging. We stopped talking and started staring, listening closely to the sounds coming from the trailer. The gingerbread-colored girl came outside, embarrassed, and tried to explain what the old ladies were attempting to do. After about half an hour the cousin burst out of the door, stunned and disoriented, clothes disheveled, hair tossed. She paced around the yard like a frightened animal, breathing hard and choking back tears. We asked if she was all right, knowing full well that something was wrong. She didn’t respond. After she calmed down, she went back inside. This cycle repeated itself several times over the next couple of hours. We tried to giggle away our discomfort at this thing that was happening, secretly questioning whether there might be merit in it, openly fretting over our own inaction, knowing that interfering with grandmothers and spirits was out of bounds.

Around the fringes of our tiny society, this kind of pseudo-religious, mystical fanaticism was not uncommon: the desperate and hyper-superstitious visited seers as well as preachers, sprinkled this or that around the house to ward off evil, hid a little bag or small bowls of something under a bed or in a closet to keep a wandering husband home. In their minds, the spirits, both good ones and bad ones, had to be managed. A streak of bad luck was never as simple as it seemed; something was on the move, someone had worked the roots or stirred a “haint.”

Some people were thought to be witches, and others took the craft seriously.

One of our witches lived in a house across the street from the field where Papa Joe had raised the hogs, next door to the trailer where the big women had held down the frightened girl. Her name was Nellie. She was a recluse who lived with her sister in a tiny extension built on her brother’s house. I often went into the main house and stared at the wall that it shared with the extension, trying to measure out Nellie and her sister’s space in my mind—six feet across, I figured, not big enough for two people, not wide enough to swing a cat.

Nellie only left the house to draw water from the outside pipe, slinking around in the shadows of a large tree and darting back inside whenever someone caught sight of her. When the older sister died, Nellie was forced out into the open. She’d be seen shuffling through the streets toward town in multiple layers of moth-eaten, dark-colored clothes and a big-brimmed hat. She held her arm up over her face, the way people do when they first step from the dark into the light.

Nellie was a dark-skinned woman, but her face, at least what we could see of it, was covered in white powder, like a woman just finished making biscuits. There was a space where her eyes must have been, but the shadow from the hat fell hard there. You dared not look close enough to make out those eyes anyway. Who knew what might happen to a child who stared into the eyes of a witch.

When she passed, some children taunted her, calling her ugly, although no one ever really saw the whole of her face. In response, she hissed like a snake, scattering them like rats. I was convinced that she was a witch, but my mother was quick to set me straight: “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with Nellie but crazy.”

Mr. Riley, who lived north of town, was different. Whereas children feared Nellie because she hid in the shadows, grown folks feared Mr. Riley because he seemed to command them. He was the conjure man who, years later, in 1994, spurred a couple of sisters from Arcadia to gouge out the eyes of a third sister, to purge her of a demon.

The woman who lost her eyes, a second-grade schoolteacher, had gone to Mr. Riley complaining of headaches. He told her that she was under attack from a demon. So the woman’s sisters loaded her and their children into a car and headed west on Interstate 20, toward Dallas. The women ditched the car they were in, because they thought it was possessed, and rented a new one. They left their children with strangers at a house with a cross out front. And in a house outside Dallas that doubled as a church they beat the sister and tried to press garlic into her eyes before gouging them out, authorities believed with their bare hands. On national television, on
The
Phil Donahue Show,
the eyeless woman defended her zealous sisters—better to live in darkness than be condemned to hell.

My mother didn’t believe in consulting seers enough to try it, but she wasn’t enough of a doubter to flout it. She constantly reminded us, only half jokingly, not to let anybody “feed us granddaddy legs,” which she thought a common hex. Voodoo was beyond the pale, but superstition was doctrine. My mother held to an elaborate code of superstitions that she had adopted from Mam’ Grace:

If your left hand itched, you were getting a letter. If your right one itched, you were getting money. If someone swept your feet with a broom, you were going to jail. If a dog howled, someone was going to die. If you dreamed of fish, someone was going to have a baby. It was bad luck if you broke a mirror, had a black cat cross in front of you, or traveled with raw peanuts. And if you threw peanut hulls around the back door, your parents were going to argue.

My mother never arched her eyebrows, because Mam’ Grace had told her that a woman once did so and went blind. She never started anything on a Friday that she couldn’t finish in a day, because Mam’ Grace had told her that a lady once started a dress for her little girl on a Friday but didn’t finish. The little girl died that night, and the lady had to bury her in the dress.

Whatever she’d heard Mam’ Grace say was gospel to my mother. I had come to believe that, in many ways, my mother viewed Mam’ Grace as her real mother. That’s why she had run from the house when Mam’ Grace died. That’s why the tears had flowed out of her as they never would again. Mam’ Grace, the woman who had drifted like a raft through the Valley of the Shadow, was more her mother than Big Mama, the woman who had floated from husband to husband until she found the ocean.

Everyone around me seemed to be running scared from a spirit, and it all began to look iffy to me. My faith was slowly eroding. Religion itself increasingly seemed a hollow homage to an eviscerated idea, a thing done out of the momentum of its always having been done.

Finally I fell back on the original God of life, the God that exists apart from books and rules and fear, the God that we first come to know before we know much of anything, God as only children know God.