Free Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall Page A

boy’s name, Auntie said nothing. When Auntie said naught, it was a done-and-set thing. The two girl geese spent their days pecking happily at Auntie’s droppedclothespins or the hem of her dress, and she’d stroke their long necks and smile at their husky trumpeting.
    But that almighty big gander she called St. Augustine, and he was pure delinquent, scarfing up the choicest potato peelings, chopped cabbage leaves, and cracked eggshells.
    “Here you go, sweet Augie,” Auntie cooed, stumping out, throwing him a fistful of popped corn. “A treatie for my boy.” And so it went. Every time he nipped at my ankles or carried off a shoe, I took up a stick and threatened that bird good. But when I wandered out one morning and caught him ripping, one by one, the pages of David Copperfield that I’d left out on the domino table, I took up my switch and ripped him a new one.
    Auntie was away, carrying a basket of bread to Miz Millicent Poole—she being caught in the fist of the grippe—when a couple of Uncle Cunny’s pals passed by in their truck, and they jumped out to pry me off that bird. Auntie must have heard, because she didn’t speak the rest of that day, and that very evening, Uncle Cunny came and nailed up a chicken-wire pen and a lean- to to shelter the geese and hold their water pans. Sophie and Robert settled down inside, but the big gray gander had a mind of his own, and he broke loose more often than not.
    Even from my room in the attic, I heard Aunt Jerusha caterwauling one early morn and flew down the stairs to find her raving in the yard. Clipped wings aside, Augie had apparently flown the coop.
    “Oh, my sweet Jesus,” Auntie wailed and flapped her hands.
    “What?”
    “He’s been stole !”
    I groaned.
    “You get on down the road, Clea Shine, and find that gander.”
    “But, Auntie, I haven’t had breakfast—”
    “Nor will you, lest you come back with my goose!”
    “It’s not my fault—”
    “Was no love lost between you,” she said. “Now, start by the Farm. Check the creek behind and zigzag through the fields. Go to town if you have to, and ask at the fellowship hall.” She filled my pockets with corn to lead him back.
    From the oak tree, I could hear Finn laughing at me. Damn him .
    It didn’t seem likely to me that a goose would have any truck with the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center, but I would stop there and inquire.
    I couldn’t think why they brought prisoners to the hall on Tuesday and Saturday nights just to call the bingo numbers, unless that was Mississippi’s way of rehabilitating. Sometimes convicts were paroled, I knew. And the Farm kept a pig business and a truck garden beyond the trees. They sold vegetables along the highway too, but I knew little else. When a man was given a life sentence and rode in on the shuttered blue bus, I guessed he stayed till he died, at which time the guards took his body out and pitched it into the cemetery across the creek.
    “Damnation,” I said, making a crappy face at Finn. Up in his tree, he made one back.
    I set off, scraping the dirt with my stick and watching dust clouds rise and keeping half an eye out for that goose.
    I inquired at every door. Nobody had spotted a runaway bird.
    Unless he’d slipped under the fence and found himself incarcerated, he was not down at Hell’s Farm, or trapped in the coils of wire, or, as far as I could see, stuffing his gullet in the prison’s garden. A lot of men were out in their orange uniforms today,chained and clanking when they moved in their hoeing. I watched until a fat woman guard looked up and hollered and waved a big black club.
    On the far side of the farm, Devil’s Creek had cut through the land, and it emptied into a particularly deep section of False River. I worried that Auntie’s goose had been wrung by the neck and thrown in that creek, fretting not so much at the loss of the goose as that I would have to find and retrieve him. I went on around the Farm and