Matchbox

“Good story ideas are all about paying attention. The matchbox of this story began with a friend’s family legend of a poor girl’s breakfast. The image dogged me until I found it a home among childhood memories of my grandmother’s North Louisiana sawmill town. There my thoughts stumbled over a mother and daughter who compelled me to write their story. The characters are all imagined, the story is all fiction, and everything is true.” —Steve Beisner

At dawn on a Wednesday in September of 1943 Madeline Menton woke to prepare the first matchbox. As the hard boiled egg cooled, she made biscuits, turning the soft dough onto the kitchen table’s floured oilcloth, cutting perfect rounds with a jelly glass, arranging them so their sides touched slightly on the iron sheet. The wood floor of the old house creaked under her feet as she moved around the kitchen, easing the biscuits into the oven, adding a stick of wood to the firebox, relaxing finally on the chair next to the table. She sipped her coffee and looked through the screen door at the roses climbing the post near the back porch steps, straining to reach the roof. The yard chickens scratched here and there in the hard packed dirt. Madeline thought of Lucy.

Less than a year after Lucy was born Daniel Menton abandoned his wife and daughter and disappeared from Katie, Louisiana, the sawmill town built deep in the virgin hardwood forest by the Louisiana Hardwoods Company. The Company owned every board and nail of the town. In Katie, you could tell a man’s position by the size and location of the house the Company provided him. Only by the Company’s charity were Madeline and Lucy allowed to remain in the house. Everyone knew they were poor.

Lucy was too smart to stay in Katie, too smart for her own good. When she was four, Lucy asked, “Why didn’t God make us rich?”

Madeline had worked hard to find a way for Lucy to get ahead.

Old Miss Vernon, from the commissary store, saved the matchboxes for Madeline. The men liked to keep a handful of wooden Lucifer matches in their overalls with their pipe tobacco. The commissary gave away a lot of matches with the tobacco they sold. The empty boxes were large with thin wood sides and a top which could slide closed to protect whatever was inside.

At a few minutes after eight o’clock each morning Madeline closed her front door and walked down the wooden steps through her oak shaded front yard to the street. A quarter mile along the dirt track towards town brought her to where the street was smooth and had a wooden boardwalk for the remaining four blocks to the center of Katie, to the small wooden structure the Company provided the U.S. government to use as the post office.

The first time Madeline handed a carefully wrapped matchbox to Mr. Raymond Elwin, the postmaster, and the only man in town who didn’t work for the Company, he smiled as he read the address. “Baton Rouge?”

“For Lucy,” she said, fishing coins from her purse and sliding them across the counter. “It has to be there by tomorrow morning.”

The boxes followed each other in steady procession. Each day, when Madeline handed him a package, Mr. Elwin looked up at the pendulum clock ticking away on the post office wall. By nine a.m. he gathered the mail, rarely more than a handful of letters, into a gray canvas pouch. He marched across the dusty square to the train station and draped the mail pouch from the rusty, silver-painted hanger next to the railroad track.

At 9:17 a.m. a hook attached to the speeding mail car of the Yazoo and Southern Line passing through Katie, snatched the pouch from the hanger. The post office men in the mail car looked for the little parcel, as regular as the train they rode. Wrapped in brown paper, tied with cotton twine, addressed to Miss Lucy Menton, they tried to guess its contents, never did, but handled it with special care.

While the train sped along the tracks a few miles south of Katie, the box was sorted into another pouch, to be dropped in Alexandria, Louisiana. From there it rode the 12:05 p.m. train to Baton Rouge and by 3:30 came to rest in the Illinois Central Station on the banks of the Mississippi.

Lucy’s matchbox was trucked out to Louisiana State University that night and by dawn rested in a mailbag with dozens of other letters and parcels at the Women’s Dormitory, the home of Lucy Menton, English and Arts major.

At LSU in Baton Rouge Lucy met people who used their minds, sophisticated people who liked her and said she was going somewhere. To the unavoidable questions about her family she told a ready lie. Her no-account father became a brilliant manager who had tried to revolutionize the lumber industry until he died in a tragic accident. She transformed her mother into a grieving widow, a patron of the arts who stayed in Katie only to bring the finer things, music, theater, and literature, to the town.

Lucy’s scholarship covered tuition and room, but there was not enough money for board. She claimed the first hundred or so matchboxes eagerly, checking with the front desk each morning, then opening her parcel in some private spot. Tearing away the brown paper, she slid open the cover. Breakfast: two small biscuits and a single hard boiled egg. She ate hurriedly and alone, like an animal, afterwards disposing of the matchbox and its wrapping where no one would see.

On days the mail didn’t arrive, she ate no breakfast. She never had lunch. Dinner was whatever she could manage at the restaurant on the north side, far from the university, where she washed dishes and hoped her poverty would not be discovered.

Madeline’s parcel’s often included a note, just a paragraph or two, folded in with the egg and biscuits. “Old Miss Burns heard from her sister, who is deathly ill and may not live until Spring,” one note began. “She’ll die poor, like I will.” As always, the note ended with a sermon on getting ahead in the world, on being strong, on not getting trapped by a man.

Lucy’s mother could always be counted on for something depressing. The litany of illnesses, funerals, and the other disasters that befell the town of Katie were more than Lucy could bear. After a while she stopped reading the notes.

When a new job provided more money, she stopped opening the boxes at all, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her mother that the breakfast packages were no longer needed.

Madeline spent her days thinking about the letter that would go into the next matchbox. She put herself into the messages, distilling a lifetime of being poor, being uneducated, being a woman. She had finally found a way to instruct Lucy without getting backtalk.

For the first time in months, Lucy composed a letter to her mother. “I think we’re responsible for our own happiness,” Lucy wrote, and Madeline nodded to herself, sure that her daughter was finally growing up. But other things in the letter frightened Madeline: Lucy had met Robert. Madeline could not bring herself to think about what Lucy wrote about his rich family. She told herself that Lucy was having growing pains. Lucy would be fine. The matchboxes would make her see.

After a week of nauseous mornings, Lucy went to the student infirmary. The doctor asked her questions, made some tests, and a few days later told her the news.

Robert said it was her fault. She should have taken precautions. He said hateful things: She was as ignorant as her mother. He should have known better than to get involved with trash from the backwoods.

But early the next morning he telephoned her dorm. “I’m sorry I got upset,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right. My dad’s company has a clinic. I talked to a woman who works there. She knows some people who can help.”

She was relieved to hear his voice, grateful that he wasn’t angry. “Robert, we need to discuss --”

“It’s all decided,” he said.

That afternoon Robert drove her to the train station in his Oldsmobile convertible. He gave her a round trip ticket to New Orleans, the address of a doctor’s office in Metairie, and more money than she’d ever held in her hands before. “You’re not going with me?” she asked.

“I can’t. Dad wants me to have dinner with him tonight. But it’s all taken care of. Everything’s OK now.”

“But we have to talk,” she said. “I don’t want --”

“Don’t argue.” He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it. “I don’t want you to get upset over something that’s really not that important. It was just an accident. You’ll be fine when this is all over.” He reached across her lap and pushed open the car door for her to get out.

It was dark in New Orleans by the time the taxi bumped along the rutted street through a crowded neighborhood of tiny houses with hardly a tree to be seen and pulled to a stop at a run down house with peeling gray paint.  A bare electric bulb lit the front door and a tattered screen sagged off its hinges. “Are you sure this is the right address?” Lucy asked the driver. “It doesn’t look like a doctor’s office.”

Lucy’s insides were on fire and she felt woozy as the woman dressed her, bundled her into another taxi, and told the driver to take her to the train station.

The sharp pain ripped at her as she rose from the taxi’s backseat, dizzy, barely able to stagger into the echoing, cathedral-sized station where dozens of people waited for trains on long, polished wood benches. She found a spot across from a woman nursing an infant at her breast while two other children played at her feet. Lucy leaned her head against the back of the bench. Her legs were suddenly warm, wet, sticky. She closed her eyes as the pain rose in a moan from somewhere lonely inside.

“Honey, you in trouble.”  the woman said. “You bleeding something awful.”

Lucy opened her eyes slightly, but the station swirled in the dim light.

The woman, still holding the child to her breast, bent over Lucy, her worried face inches away.

“Help me,” Lucy whispered.

Madeline was preparing the day’s matchbox when the knock came. At the door, she looked over the Rev. Halsley’s shoulder and saw the Sheriff in his tan Ford by the front gate. She invited the Reverend in and offered him a cup of coffee, but she really didn’t have time to listen. He told her an awful story, but he got it all wrong. There’d been a mistake. It couldn’t have been Lucy he was talking about. Lucy was still alive -- that’s why every day she wrote Lucy a note, made the egg and biscuits, mailed the matchbox. When the men left, she went back to her work. She still had to get to the post office by 9 a.m.

On a Monday morning in September, 1950, Raymond Elwin turned from his mail sorting to see Madeline Menton entering his post office. In recent years she’d moved slower, a distant look in her eyes. He glanced at the clock. Right on time. He cleared his throat. “Morning, Mrs. Menton. Goin’ to be a hot one.” He knew not to venture into any topic beyond the weather. He accepted the small package and the postage, watched her shuffle out, shook his head, and dropped the parcel into the pouch for the 9:17 to Alexandria.

Baton Rouge native, Steve Beisner, writes poetry, short stories, novels, and software. He is currently at work on a novel set in Pointe Coupee Parish and in New Orleans in the period from the 1930’s to the 1990’s, whose protagonist re-invigorates his family’s run-down plantation home by converting it into a bordello. Steve is co-editor of Ink Byte Magazine (http://inkbyte.com), an on-line publication featuring articles about writing. He is often invited to speak at writers conferences on technology for writers. Steve lives in New Orleans and Santa Barbara, dividing his time between the two cities.