Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read Free Page A

running, never still, wanting to be somewhere other than where it was—that had finally reached the ocean—vast and deep and exactly where it was always meant to be.
    He did the same for all of us—made us feel that we had finally made it to where we were always meant to be, the place where we could stop running and just relax. He made us all better than we had been, not so much by any one thing I remember him doing, but by the gentle, calming spirit that seemed to emanate from his being. That was the kind of father I wished I had.
    And James was the brother I felt closest to, even though he lived far away. Maybe it was because we had been raised together, just the two of us, when I was a baby. Maybe it was because he too was now a bit of a loner, being raised as an only child in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe it was because I thought him the smartest of my brothers. Whatever it was, he seemed to me special and different.
    He was lighter-skinned that the rest of us, the recipient of a recessive gene, I suppose, and he had his own room and more toys than us, new toys bought from a store, not come across at a rummage sale. And most of all he had Jed, all the time.
    But in the summer of 1974 Jed built the house that he would die in—a death that would drain away the specialness from my special place, a death that would leave a crater in the part of my life where a father should be.
    The new house was built from lumber recovered from a partially burned house nearby. It was a modest ranch-style house with a covered carport. Jed painted it buttercup yellow with brown shutters, and my grandmother decorated the yard by stabbing synthetic flowers into the soil among real ones in the centers of discarded tires repurposed as flower beds.
    The house was a stone’s throw from Jed and Big Mama’s other house, down a dirt road on the other side of the highway, set on a small parcel notched out of a white farmer’s field. It was directly across the road from a kind old widow who had a sprawling yard with a pomegranate tree on one side, its branches straining from the weight of the fruit, and a field on the other side, where Jed and Big Mama grew cucumbers to be sold at the market. There was a butane tank in the yard for fuel, and pungent, metallic-tasting water was drawn from the well in the yard of the widow woman across the street.
    The dirt road led into the Bend, a backwater of black families sandwiched between the highway and a bend in the Red River. The Bend had been homesteaded by ex-slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation. When the man who had enslaved them died, his son deeded the ex-slaves that part of the plantation, about a hundred acres.
    The families who lived there, many of them direct descendants of those slaves, were tightly bonded but widely scattered—connected by the meandering dirt road and a stubborn devotion to the land that flanked it. We drove into the Bend almost every time we visited—through lush valleys and across wooden bridges spanning rippling brooks, some full of fallen branches, some teeming with cottonmouth snakes. In other spots, the road formed a virtual tunnel through the overgrown leafy canopy. Traffic was so rare in these parts that whenever we came upon a house, which could be miles from its neighbor, everyone in the yard would stop, stand, and wave.
    We sometimes drove to the Red River, where we took the ferry to the other side and back again for the sheer slow-motion thrill of it. We stopped at roadside tangles of blackberry bushes or thickets of wild plum trees and gorged ourselves to the point of sickness.
    We visited good-natured boys with the quiet charm of people shielded from the world. We visited pretty girls with pretty skin, made so by yard play, homegrown food, and constant sweating. Everywhere we stopped, people came out smiling, genuinely happy to see us, particularly James, whose name they always said in whole, as if it were one word—Jame’Blow—without the
s,
the way