Free Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall Page B

approached the steep bank. I did not see him in the water below, nor splayed anywhere on the sharp rocks. Still, I was afraid of the place, and the narrow bridge that spanned the creek. I made my way along the edge, peering through my fingers, lest I encounter, on the other side, human skeletons still clad in orange and rotting in the slime.
    I did not find that bird lying dead on the road or any cow track, or paddling in somebody’s water trough. In town, I briefly checked the empty buildings and lots and asked around. He wasn’t poking through the canned goods at the Ninety-Nine Cent Store, and he sure wasn’t playing canasta with the ladies at the Oasis of Love.
    At about noon I found him—grinning, if a goose could grin—munching lettuce leaves and collards in Miz Millicent Poole’s garden. He had trampled her tomatoes and plucked early grapes from her vine and was honking in a victorious but sickly way, and I hoped he had a bellyache that beat all.
    Miz Millicent would not take kindly to the trodden mess. I’d not had much to do with her in these years because she was tall and pinched, the color of a parsnip, and she smelled bad. A strange odor came out through her pores and rose on her breath. Auntie told me once it was malaria. I asked if a doctor couldn’t do something for her, but Auntie said things had invadedMiz Millicent’s bloodstream, and they weren’t likely going anywhere.
    Miz Millicent’s red hair was thin and stringy so that her pink scalp showed through. Weekly, she put on a hat and sashayed down to First and Last Holy Word, where she supervised Sunday school teachers, picked hymns for the service, and bossed everybody. She told the Best Reverend what lesson us backsliding folks needed and, in all matters, which way was up.
    But on many days she was sickly, and Aunt Jerusha walked down the road with a slab of pound cake or half a sweet-potato pie. Auntie’d step up on the porch and tap lightly on the door. From the other side, Miz Poole spoke softly, weeping. But if I was there, and if she saw, she’d begin to screech, “Jerusha, don’t you bring that child in here! She got germs and vermin crawling. You don’t come in, little girl, you hear me, now?”
    Auntie’d give me a look that said I’d better back off and pretend to admire Miz Millicent’s hydrangeas, and nod my head at her bobbing zinnias like they were the finest I had ever seen.
    Secretly I thought Miz Millicent was a loon, and she scared the living daylights out of me.
    But today I was alone, and I had a clear purpose, and I spotted a broom on Miz Poole’s porch. It seemed like a fair thing with which to chase a goose from a garden, and I grabbed it up and rushed into the grapevines and, although we were near the same size, I beat that bird up one side and down the other. He flashed his wings and hissed and flew at me and I swung again, catching him upside the head. He turned to run, but I whacked and whaled until he flat fell over. Then I let go the broom and took hold of his neck. I jerked him across the road and into the field, and I laid down on that thing’s head, his one eye like a bright bead, taking my measure.
    I went back to Miz Poole’s and onto her porch and knocked on her door, intending to apologize for Augie’s behavior and her ruined fruit and torn vegetables, and to tell her I was sure Aunt Jerusha would make up for it all. I’d have laid my nose to the screen to see was I bothering her, but a vagueness of smoke had boiled up inside and was escaping through the screen. Then the door jerked open, catching my cheekbone hard, and her hand shot out and yanked me inside. Her eyes were a back-and-forth marvel of wild and jerky, and colorless in their gone-awayness. Smoke pricked my nose and made me cough. I looked around for a flame, but it was something else, a glass contraption. Something inside her had gone terribly wrong.
    She opened her awful mouth and screamed in my face, and I screamed too. I backed up.