Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read Free

other. My brothers and I played in the dusty front yard. Traffic whizzed by just a few feet away from our ball games and bike riding.
    There was no gas heat or running water and no bathroom. For washing, cooking, and drinking, we drew water from the well in the front yard, and heated it on the wood-burning stove. Clothes were hand-washed in a number 2 washtub on the back porch. We bathed out there in that same washtub, sometimes in the laundry water.
    Big Mama was a big woman with a big laugh. Everything about her seemed to be outsized—big hips, big bosom, big heart, big voice. Everything big. But she was aging. Her top molars were missing and her short hair was thinning.
    Jed was a chain smoker with a strong back and soft eyes. It was those eyes that struck you—brown, maple-syrup sweet, a hint of gray around the edges, sunrise yellow where the whites should be; deep enough to get lost in, bottomless like Martin’s Pond; damp like the beginning of a good cry or the end of a good laugh. They were the kind of eyes that saw down into the dark of you and drew up the light; the kind that melted worry like a stick of butter near a warm stove; the kind that forgave secret shame before it scarred the throat on the way out.
    It would take a man with eyes like that to make Big Mama move to the middle of nowhere and bathe outside.
    In fact, this was my grandmother’s second stint in Arkansas. She had moved there once before, to marry another man after she and my grandfather, her first husband, broke up. My mother didn’t follow. She stayed behind in Louisiana with Mam’ Grace. But soon the man died and Big Mama was back in Louisiana, living with my mother and my great-uncle Paul at Mam’ Grace and Papa Joe’s house.
    Then she married for a third time. Again, it didn’t last long. He left her one day after realizing that she’d been spending the car-note money on clothes and shoes. He only became aware of the deceit when a man came to repossess the car. He was outraged. There must be some misunderstanding, he said to the man; his wife had paid the bill every month, on time. He had the receipts to prove it. Unfortunately, he could only find one—an old one.
    Big Mama had been giving her husband the same receipt every month, claiming it was evidence of a new payment and stealing it back from him when he put it away. He was illiterate, and he trusted her. Now he was furious, and done. He grabbed two bags of stuff he had been storing in the smokehouse, “rats and all” was the family joke, and that was the end.
    But that woman existed a world away from the grandmother I knew, the one now married to Jed.
    The only remnant of Big Mama’s past was a water-damaged, hand-tinted portrait of her and a man I didn’t recognize, both sugar-sharp, sitting on a bench in front of a painted backdrop. He was sitting up tall and strong. She was laughing, legs crossed, her head resting delicately on his shoulder. There was a power in his pose, but there was more in hers, a feminine power, the kind that lights a room and buckles a knee, the kind that makes men do things they know they shouldn’t—sneak in through open windows, lie to loved ones, give more than they have.
    I often stared at that picture, trying to connect that woman—young, thin, radiant, dangerously alluring—with the woman I knew now as Big Mama. I couldn’t do it.
    She was different now. Jed had made her different because he was more powerful than she was. He drew his power from a different source—not from hollowness but from wholeness. It was a grand, simple kind of power. It came from the knowing and accepting and loving of self that made the knowing and accepting and loving of everything else possible. It didn’t crush, but accommodated. He hadn’t taken away Big Mama’s power but given her a peaceful place to harness and transform it, to calm down and grow up, to move out of the woman she had been and into the woman she could be.
    She was like a river—always