Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read Online Free Page B

relented, a bit, and allowed one to be built as a separate structure, in effect an outhouse with plumbing, a few yards from the back porch.
    One of her daughters once bought her a black-and-white TV. She watched it, but when it stopped working, she didn’t replace it.
    I’d always thought that Aunt Odessa’s resistance was a product of poverty and prudence, but when she died, I was told that $16,000 in cash was found in the freezer section of her refrigerator, double- and triple-wrapped in Wonder Bread bags.
     
    Eventually, Uncle Paul and I made it back to the House with No Steps and ate a late lunch. Afterward, I went two doors down to the candy lady’s house. Every neighborhood had one—a lady who sold candy out of her house for extra money. Ours had fashioned a “store” from her closed-in carport. She cared for her ailing father-in-law, which burned through all of her patience. I’d knock. “Wait a minute!” she’d shoot back, ever annoyed. Soon enough, she’d shuffle into the store, always in a loose, ankle-length housedress, and unlatch the screen door. “What you want?” She knew what I wanted, but she always asked. I got the same thing every day: a snow cone, ten cents, and five sugar cookies, three cents each. A quarter.
    Paul and I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting and talking with the old folks in the neighborhood on their porches. For me it was transcendent.
    I was a quiet, introspective boy, and these folks helped me to appreciate that part of myself. They taught me how to be patient and kind—that there was beauty in all things. I picked up their skill for slowing time to a crawl, a skill that people whose time on earth was coming to an end had learned to master. They taught me that you only live once, but for a life well lived, one turn is enough. They baptized me in their sea of stillness, and I emerged more like them than not.
     
    In my kindergarten year, as the holidays approached, Papa Joe died of a stroke and loneliness. At the same time, my parents’ marriage was dying of divergent dreams and weariness.
    The beginning of the end came one night when my father arrived home late, again, barely beating the sun. My mother was waiting up for him. She had suffered through his controlling nature and his loose ways, but as the old folks had taught me, for everything there comes an end. Cold winters, high fevers, fragile marriages—they all eventually break.
    Earlier in their marriage, when I was living in Arkansas, he had worked construction jobs in Houston, and she and my brothers holed up in a single room of Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace’s house. My mother had tolerated the fact that he had forbidden her to drive the cars he left parked in the yard. When she could find work, she had to bum a ride.
    She had tolerated his boorish behavior, the way he leaned against a doorjamb and moved up and down to scratch his back, the way a bear scratches its back against a tree. Things like that set my mother’s teeth on edge. My father laughed off her annoyance, as he did most things.
    She had tolerated the house he rented with his band, the one where they practiced for gigs and entertained wild women. It was on Boogie Woogie Road.
    My mother dealt with my father’s women who had the nerve to come to our house. She once came home from working a shift at the chicken plant and found a woman leaving the house. She scrambled to find a brick, which she sent flying through the back window of the woman’s car as she drove off.
    She had even tolerated having to take armfuls of groceries and armfuls of babies around to the back door because he hadn’t built those damned steps. Building the steps would have been such a simple thing. He could have done it. He should have done it. The not-doing spoke volumes.
    She had put up with it all, but something about that night was different. Something had changed.
    For one thing, she’d left the chicken plant far behind. She’d taken all the classes she needed for her