Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read Online Free Page A

Fire Shut Up in My Bones
Book: Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read Online Free
Author: Charles M. Blow
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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
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