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Kirsten Steele
1178 Beaver Dam Rd
Creedmoor NC 27522
ksteele@live.unc.edu
A Pen, A Fire and Steel
I am…a bleeding heart in a world that is a Stonehenge circle. I am the burst of a
gunshot piercing through the whisper of autumn leaves on the pavement. I am the quick wink
of light in a firefly before he is caught in a mason jar for the world to see. And you will never
understand.
Magnolia cocked her head to the right, her skin crinkling around her eyes as she
squinted and concentrated. Her pen dipped in the inkbottle before coming back to the page.
Its scratch was incredibly satisfying, like the scratch of a cat’s claws on a porch as it
stretches in the morning.
“Why the blazes do you write in damn calligraphy? Don’t you ever think of writing
like a normal person with a pen from WalMart?”
Her younger brother’s obnoxious voice cut into her stream of thoughts and an extra
calligraphic tail was added to “apologies.” Rhett never seemed to come in at the right time,
but considering the right time was never, she supposed it was a hopeless case anyhow.
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“Why on God’s green earth do you think you’re so utterly insufferable?”
Rhett gave an eye roll that would have made the sorority president at the local
college proud. In her mind’s eye Magnolia saw again the girl’s haughty glare and the look on
her face when Magnolia asked about rush at a party in a moment of pure, white crystallized
weakness.
“Hey sis! You ever think about the fact that those zoned-out looks you get on your
face only reinforce people’s ideas that you’re a few wrenches short of a full toolbox?”
Magnolia simply looked back at him with her especially calm demeanor, the one
reminiscent of the lull before a tornado. Rhett smiled almost cruelly and left her room, the
oak door swinging shut with a slam. Magnolia threw a dart from the pile next to her
inkbottle at the board on the back of the door. Usually she pictured it as Rhett’s face. Her
fourteen-year-old brother so enjoyed tormenting her.
The pen still lay where she had dropped it. Magnolia breathed deeply, twice. Rhett
had not looked over her shoulder. He hadn’t seen the words she had written, although with
her calligraphy it would have been hard to decipher on one glance anyway, not to mention
he wouldn’t have cared. Probably he wouldn’t have cared. It was such a cliché, really. She
would probably curse herself on the Greyhound later that night for leaving a note at all. She
wasn’t a minor as of last Tuesday; she could leave from her grandmother’s house whenever
she wanted. Hypothetically.
An image of her grandmother appeared before her. The woman’s gray hair was not
the shade of iron but rather of the craters of the moon—those darker gray sections that are
only noticeable if one pauses to really look. That softness was always pinned back in a way
Magnolia found both classy and unattainable. It was the kind of hairdo that defined the
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Southern debutante. There was a galaxy between a plantation house and a trailer park, and
the difference between Grandmother and Magnolia was no different.
Magnolia gripped her pen tightly. She would never understand the ridiculous
Southern mentality her grandmother possessed. For God’s sake, there were other flavors of
steel for women. Just look at Michelle Obama. Now there was a strong woman. She sure as
hell wasn’t Southern.
Still, there was something…something indefinable about Grandmother. It was the
quality that a lily had in its robes of defiantly regal purple on a spring morning. They almost
dared you to pick them, pluck them from their roots and watch with inevitable sadness as
their petals curled up into themselves like children snuggling down for bed. Grandmother
was definitely a lily. Magnolia jotted down the five words even though later she would go
back and wonder why she wasted good ink on something so trivial.
The chores that Saturday were more tedious than seemed absolutely necessary.
Magnolia looked across the pasture at her brother painting the fence under Grandmother’s
watchful eye. Well, Grandmother thought they were watchful. In reality her eyes were
rheumy but she still thought they were sharp as the paring knife she used to cut up peaches
for canning. But no matter what Grandmother’s sight was like, it wasn’t fair that Rhett only
had to paint a fence and Magnolia had to dig a trench for rainwater runoff from the house
to the pond. It wasn’t a big trench, but it still involved digging.
“Magnolia!”
Oh the hope for respite.
“Yes, Grandmother?”
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“That trench sure is a long ways off from the pond. What on earth have you been
doing, lollygagging?”
Magnolia did not throw a tantrum. Or the shovel. She threw neither. Well, she didn’t
until she saw the smug look on Rhett’s face. Lord he was annoying.
As she sat writing carefully under the desk lamp glow without supper, Magnolia felt
the injustice of her punishment. Who sent kids to bed without supper anymore? This was
the twenty-first century. She hated this little farm. To her it seemed like a place they send
juvenile delinquents. Technically she and Rhett qualified, but this was family not a facility.
Family not a facility. A facility was where they would have sent her had she been older.
Setting a kid’s hair on fire just to watch it burn wasn’t really socially or academically
acceptable—or legally acceptable, for that matter. Neither was Rhett’s attempt to seduce a
seventh-grader in the girls’ bathroom.
She didn’t hear Grandmother enter and when the wrinkled hand was laid on her
shoulder she fell out of her chair in fright.
“What do you want? Punish me some more?”
“No. I thought I would tell you a story.”
“Grandmother, I’m a little old for bedtime stories.”
“This…isn’t really a bedtime story. I think you’ll like it. I thought you might want
some writing material for that fiction class.”
Magnolia paused. She couldn’t exactly say that she wouldn’t be around for the
remainder of the class.
“Fine.”
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Grandmother settled into the rocking chair next to the bed, just as if Magnolia was
five and waiting to be tucked into bed. She and the chair seemed to fit together perfectly
and Magnolia remembered that this had been her mother’s room growing up. Grandmother
rocked back and forth a couple times before clasping her hands before her and beginning
the story.
~
~
~
Fire. It does a dance with the air, feeding off the oxygen component and the fuel at
the base of the flames. It caresses the night even as it destroys substantiality.
The most beautiful part of a fire is like life: it lies in the beginning of the end. The
flames settle down with a few sighs and complaints into the embers. The embers play a
song, lighting up one by one in different patterns that work, fight to live, to leap up again in
wildness only tamed by the size of the fuel pile. It is like life, fighting to continue even as the
song slows until the space between the notes eventually outlasts the music. I’m like that
now, Magnolia, and there’s no sense keeping the music notes bottled up inside.
On a pretty cool fall night, I watched the fire deferentially, coolly. I stood there as if I
was about to be picked up from school in Momma’s Ford. I felt no remorse, no regret as the
flames before me licked hungrily away at the white wooden church. I was glad it wasn’t
brick; burning it to the ground would have been a sight more difficult. Soon people from the
neighboring houses would arrive. Soon they would toss buckets of water on the flames
while the old ladies prayed fervently. Ha! As if some tongue of water would come out of the
sky to douse the flames and leave the church standing pure once again—as if it ever had
been.
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As the church burned, I saw again in my head the glares of those same women on
the morning my mother and I had first walked into the sanctuary. I heard the whispers that
continued when no man followed my mother and me. Even the preacher seemed to stare
down at us from his pulpit with the judgment of God. I know now that he had no right to do
that, but to my eleven-year-old mind preachers were the epitome of judgment and
rightness in the world. But that changed with one man. He just so happened to be beginning
a sermon on the sins of the flesh, and he decided to call out my mother right then and there
on the basis of some crackpot snap judgment. He pointed at her, his finger of wrath
supposedly bringing down a mantle of hell’s fires around her shoulders. I was by extension
included in this repugnant sinfulness that he had contrived in his head. Looking around the
church I could see that repugnance reflected on everyone’s faces.
At the time I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the waves of anger but I could
feel their effects. My mother leaned on me for support, the first time she had done so in my
short memory. The hostility was a wall being built brick by brick with lightning speed and
precision. We had no hope of getting through that wall and that was a fact.
Mother continued to bring me back every Sunday, determined that we would be
accepted into what she termed “the fold.” It all sounded like a cult to me and not a very
interesting one to boot. But I guess she liked beating on the wall and hoping it would fall
down of its own accord.
I started setting fires. Little ones. My mother had shown me when I was five that it
hurt when a cigarette burned you. She did that because I was so attracted to that dancing
entity that seemed so simple and complex all at the same time. I think you’re like me in
that, dear.
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Here Grandmother paused to give Magnolia a searching glance, one of those preacher
or mama looks that said “I know what you’re thinking, I know what you did and I damn sure
know what you’re about to do so don’t even think you can get away with it.” Magnolia looked
back at her steady-like; Grandmother wasn’t going to faze her with some crap about them
being similar. Shared pyromania does not a relationship make.
Anyway, that cigarette burn and the ones after it didn’t do anything to stop my
fascination with that yellow-orange flame that occasionally had that pretty blue right there
in the center when it got real hot.
That blue tinge was almost aquamarine at times, but sometimes when the fire was
really hot it was nearly indigo. Indigo was the color in my head when Billy called my
mother that word in school about a month after we got into town. I wasn’t even aware of
that word until he brought it up, and seeing the confusion on my face apparently
necessitated a full explanation. Lord but he was an awful little boy! He was actually older
than me by three years but he hadn’t hit his growth spurt and the little snot was a good
head shorter than yours truly. A swine is what he was! His calling my mother a whore was
the excuse I needed for that brooding anger to get hot, and I mean blue hot. I fueled it even
further by the punch I gave him, which landed me in the principal’s office. In those days a
principal was always a man, always stern and always ready with a switch. Don’t give me
that look. You have to know that the principals used to switch the kids. Your mother got it
too and a fat lot of good it did her. Made her meaner in my opinion.
Anyway, I received a good lashing for that one. Looking back now I think I got
switched pretty regularly, and not always for things that seemed to warrant it. They
probably thought they might as well try to beat the demon out of me that doubtless had
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permanent residence in my soul as a daughter of an unmarried single woman. My mother
never beat me at home. The cigarettes were her only form of punishment and those weren’t
used very often. I think she knew about the way I was treated by the faculty at school even
if I never talked about it.
That day I came home with no tears in my eyes despite the fact that my hand was so
raw from the switching and my behind too that I was afraid to touch any surface with
either part of my body. The principal had told me I was an ungrateful, spoiled, misbehaving
little snot. I thought it was funny he called me the same thing I called Billy. My mother was
cooking dinner—collard greens and some kind of casserole, maybe even chicken potpie—
and she looked at me for all of ten seconds before telling me to go wash up. It was one of
those knowing looks mothers have though. When I came downstairs for dinner it was to
fresh chicken potpie and a conversation about the Bible study I was supposed to be doing
for church. Mother rambled on, really about nothing, once she established that I was
reading the Bible daily for my due diligence.
I knew that she knew something was up, and she knew that I knew. But that
knowledge didn’t even hang like a cloud between us. Rather it crawled up under the dining
room table kind of like a dog and stayed there, occasionally nudging one of us in a
desperate plea for attention. I ignored it. Mother ignored it. Dinner passed calmly.
After dinner and clearing the table, I headed upstairs, ostensibly to do homework.
Mother called after me.
“Ida May, don’t forget to read the Bible and pray for the town!”
I gripped the fragile stair rail with what seemed to be at the time enough force to
break it in half and maybe more pieces. How dare she ask me to pray for the town? They
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hated us. They hated the idea of us at least, which was a close enough facsimile for their
simple minds. Yes, even at eleven years old I thought the townspeople to be incredibly
simple-minded. I saw myself as above them. But I told her yes ma’am like always and kept
on trucking.
When I got upstairs I finally let myself go. I went under my bed for a box of matches
that I kept secret and I lit them one by one, touching them to small wads of paper until I
could feel the heat before I dropped them in the washbasin. The heat didn’t match my
anger but it sure helped it ebb away. But this time the matches did not work. I had used
seven by the time I realized that the matches could serve another purpose.
In my mind, everything had originated from us walking through those white wood
doors of the church. That church was where the judgment started, where the hatred
germinated, where the condemnation of the preacher spelled social destruction for one
young mother and her eleven-year-old daughter. That church was the source, the fuel, the
reason that I was beaten at school. The church was the reason I was obsessed with fire,
with lighting something and watching it burn with a kind of deep-seated gratitude for the
show and the dance the flame provided. Of course, I was conveniently forgetting that my
obsession with fire began long before we got to town.
There was only one solution, really. If I set the church on fire, I thought, then I
wouldn’t have to deal with any more problems. The town would accept us, school would
accept me and God would accept us both. You see, Magnolia, I was sorely mistaken in the
belief that the people didn’t really hate us. It was those four white, wooden walls that held
more black judgment in a single nail than the devil did in his whole self. It held some sort of
sway over the town, kind of like the existence of lightning and thunder held sway over
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whether we could swim in the catfish pond in the summertime. By the way, if you’ve never
swum in a catfish pond you should; they nibble your toes and it’s like a pedicure.
I figured that if the church didn’t exist, neither did hatred. Except maybe in the form
of the preacher. God, I hated that man. His beady little eyes and strong big hands reminded
me of a bull dead set on killing the man riding him. There is no hope when there’s murder
in that creature’s eyes and the day we walked into the church I saw soul-murder in the
preacher’s eyes. The way I saw it, my aim to kill the church would kill the blackness in him
too. Or it could just kill him—at the time I’m pretty sure I didn’t differentiate between him
and the church.
In my head I saw it all happening. The church being swallowed by flames seemed to
be heaven-sent redemption placed on my little shoulders to carry out. I felt honored, I
really did. I felt like I could be on top of the world when all this was done and that Momma
could join me if she wanted to. Even if she wasn’t strong enough to get on top of the world
with me I could sure pull her up next to me despite my skinny arms that were striped from
the school switch. She would be so proud of me. The little girl that saved the broken
family—that’s what I would be.
I heard our Ford rev up in the background. Momma was going somewhere and I
didn’t really know or care where she was headed. All I knew was that a window of
opportunity had been opened up. Providence, I guess. Momma leaving meant one thing to
me: God intended me to burn down the church.
Having no need to sneak out, I marched out the front door with a purpose and the
rest of my box of matches. My only worry was that the few matches would not be sufficient.
But when I lit that dry old wood, it started flaming up instantly. I wasn’t worried, not once,
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about getting caught. Maybe I should have been, but even when I realized that the car
sitting outside the parsonage a hundred yards away was my mother’s Ford I wasn’t
worried. I just melted into the shadows of the trees and watched with delight as the
structure burned.
The next few weeks after the fire were spent scrounging around for money to build
a new sanctuary. I kept hearing people thanking God that the stained glass windows hadn’t
been installed yet. I would grind my teeth and wish I had had a week’s patience. Lord, I was
a willful child. No one suspected my mother. Her and the preacher walking arm-in-arm
around the town square was enough to clear her name on that account, and his constant
praise of Sister Mary’s work in the church soon dissipated any grudging judgment held
against her from the day we slipped into the back pew. I guess Momma and the preacher
man had a real nice conversation the night of the fire because Momma didn’t come home
until early the next morning. She said she went there to discuss how the town’s treatment
was affecting me. I chose not to respond to that statement.
I could not stand it when the preacher called her Sister Mary or when anyone
praised my mother’s “sweet disposition” and “wonderful following of the Lord.” I swear to
you, Magnolia, I almost screamed on the day she told me they were getting married. Instead
I told her that she could pick one, me or the preacher. Her prim comment on my ridiculous
notion told me, then thirteen, that I was no longer a vital member of our two-person family.
The preacher’s pursuit of my mother had earned her the town’s acceptance; his pursuit
redeemed her from her previously unforgivable sins. They forgave her for being an
outsider, for being a single mother, for being different from them. But that acceptance did
not extend to her only offspring.
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You see, after the church burned my life went from bad to worse in a spectacular
way. Magnolia, if school before had been a sparkler held too close to a face then what
ensued was an Independence Day firework celebration going off right beside and all
around me. To top off the Coke float, the preacher bar none hated me. Every time he came
to visit our house I was hastily sent to my room because his eyes would narrow and his
nostrils flare on the mere sight of me. Once again, I was reminded of a prize bull all too
eager for the rodeo.
I was finished in that town. I had known it before but I’d figured I could at least save
some more money than a dollar and forty-two cents, which was more then than it would be
now but it sure wasn’t enough to get to Raleigh. I began planning my escape. I felt that if I
could get away perfectly clean, then my mother would pretend to look for me while the
preacher would put a sad expression on his ugly face and then lie about planning to pray
for me. Sure he would pray—pray that I would fall off the mountain, probably.
You know what happened after that, dear. I left town; I found a program for young
girls at a church school in the Piedmont. They helped me get past my bitterness, my anger. I
found a home there. I eventually settled down near the outskirts of Raleigh to be
apprenticed to your grandfather as a glassblower. We married, opened a shop and gave
birth to your mother who has made herself, may I say, pretty damn unlovable. And coming
from her own mother, that’s a lot.
~
~
~
She stared at some random spot on the floor that Magnolia couldn’t locate even if
she tried.
“Why did you tell me this?”
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Magnolia’s question seemed to startle Grandmother.
“Thought you would like to know a story since you write all the time. I find people’s
lives so crazy to listen to. Life pans out based on the choices people do or don’t make and
time and time again those choices define and shape who you’re going to be. That story
makes me think about my choices. What about you? Anything at all going on?”
Magnolia looked at her grandmother with a look that might have been ice slightly
thawed out, but the ice was still formed and impossible to really manipulate. Grandmother
nodded slowly, accepting Magnolia’s refusal to offer.
Grandmother stood abruptly, said good night and walked out the door, closing it
softly but firmly behind her.
Magnolia stared at the oak door, strong and firm. Immutable. She pulled the note
from her journal on the desk in front of her, tearing it gently from the binding. She folded it
up and then removed a box from her desk filled with matches, a picture of her mother who
had left her and Rhett after their expulsion from the last school. Carefully she set the pieces
in the box underneath the picture of her mother. She sat back down at her desk, tapping
her calligraphy pen against the edge of the oak desk. Then she bent down to write.
There are different kinds of steel in a woman. There are different tempers, different
paths, different perspectives. Like a person, steel is mutable. It can be altered; changed. But it
can only be altered or changed if there is a reason, a catalyst: fire, a tool, the stubborn will of
another person. One kind of steel can be just as strong as another; one woman can be just as
strong as another, just as beautiful. Grandmother is definitely a lily and I…I am not.