Princess of Wands

by John Ringo

“God, mother,” Allison said, laughing. “You just say these things!”

  “Honesty is a sign of godliness,” Barbara replied. “And you know what sort of a life you’ll have if you get pregnant. Married to…” She waved around her and shook her head. “I won’t say some slope-brow, buck-toothed, inbred, high-school dropout redneck simply because I’m far too nice a person. And far too young to be a grandmother.” She lifted a printed sign that said “Brandon and Brook Everette” and then dropped it back in the door-holder as the lady calling in parents waved. The teacher was Doris Shoonour, third grade, and she immediately recognized Barbara. Everyone in both schools recognized Barbara. She’d been president of the PTO twice, worked every fund-raising drive and fair and could always be counted on as a chaperone on a school trip. Good old Barb. Call her Mrs. Dependable.

  Finally she reached the pick-up point for Brandon and Brook and the two got in, bickering as usual.

  “Hurry up, stupid,” Brook said, banging at her younger brother’s butt with her book bag.

  “I’m going,” Brandon said, irritably. “Quit pushing.”

  “Quiet, Brook,” Barbara said. “Brandon, get in.”

  The seven-year-old finally negotiated the seats and collapsed with a theatric sigh as his eleven-year-old sister tossed her much heavier bag in the SUV with a thump and scrambled aboard. Both of the younger children had inherited their father’s darker looks and were so nearly alike in height that they were often mistaken for twins.

  When the attending teacher had shut the door, Barbara pulled out, following the line of cars.

  “Mom,” Allison said, “I want to go to the dance after the game Friday night.”

  “No,” Barb replied, braking as a car pulled out right in front of her. “May the Lord bless you,” she muttered at the driver.

  “Why not?” Allison snapped. “I’ve got to go to the game anyway. And everybody else will be going to the dance! You can’t make me just come home!”

  “Because I said no,” Barb said, calmly. “And no means no.”

  “You’re impossible, mother,” Allison said, folding her arms and pouting.

  “Yes, I am,” Barbara said.

  Except for the regular argument in the back, the drive home was quiet.

  “Get ready for tomorrow,” Barb said as they were going in the door to the two-story house. “Brook, get your dance bag. Allison-”

  “I know, mother,” Allison spat, headed for the stairs. “Change into my work-out clothes.”

  “Brandon…”

  “I’m going, I’m going…” the seven-year-old said. “I don’t think I want to take karate anymore.”

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Barbara answered.

  While the kids were getting ready, and keeping up a steady stream of abuse at one another, Barb got dinner prepped so all she’d have to do when they got home was pull it out of the oven. She often thought that the worst part of her current life was deciding what to cook every night. Followed closely by cleaning up after dinner and then the actual cooking.

  So after much mental agony she’d simply decided on making a rut. Tonight was Thursday and that meant meat loaf. She’d made the loaf earlier in the day and now slipped it in the oven, setting the timer to start cooking while they were gone. Broccoli had been prepped as well and she slipped it in the microwave. She set out two packages of packaged noodles and cheese, filled a pot with water and olive oil and set it on the stove. When she came home all she’d have to do was pull the meat loaf out of the oven, get the water boiling, start the microwave and twenty minutes after they were back they’d be sitting down for dinner.

  Technically, Mark could have done it all since he’d be home at least an hour before they were. But Mark was vaguely aware that there were pots and pans in the house and could just about make Hamburger Helper without ruining it. She’d wondered, often, if she shouldn’t have at least tried to get him to learn how to cook. But that was water under the bridge: after fourteen years of marriage it was a bit late to change.

  By the time she was done it was time to start chivvying the children out the door. Brandon couldn’t find the bottom to his gi or his blue belt. Brook was missing one of her jazz shoes. Allison was dallying in the bathroom, trying to find just the right combination of make-up that would proclaim she was an independent and modern thirteen-year-old without being in any way a slut.

  The gi bottom was fished out from under the bed, the belt had apparently disappeared, the shoe was found under a mound of clothes in the closet, and a couple of swipes of eyeliner, some lip gloss and a threat of punishment got Allison out of the bathroom.

  All three children were dropped at their respective locations and when Allison was kicked out the door, still sulking, Barbara heaved a sigh of relief and drove to the dojo.

  Algomo was a small town but unusual in that it successfully supported two schools of martial arts. For reasons she couldn’t define, except a desire to, at least one night a week, avoid her children for an hour or so, Brandon had been enrolled in Master Yi’s school of karate and kung-fu whereas Barb spent Thursday evening at John Hardesty’s Center for Martial Arts.

  She parked the Expedition, mentally cursing its wide footprint and inordinate length, and walked in the back door of the dojo. There was a women’s locker room where she slipped out of the dress and boots and donned tight leather footgear that were something like Brook’s missing tap shoe. Then she entered the dojo.

  The room was large with slightly worn wood flooring and currently empty. In forty minutes or so the next class would flood in and she’d help with it for another forty minutes or so and then go pick up the kids.

  For now she was alone and she started her warm-up, working through a light tai-chi exercise, stretching out each slow muscle movement. After she was slightly warmed up she sped up her pace, adding in some gymnastics and yoga movements for limberness.

  “You know,” John Hardesty said from the doorway. “It’s a good thing I’m gay or I’d be having a hard time with this.”

  “You’re not gay,” Barbara said, rolling from a split to a hand-stand, legs still spread. She looked at him from between her hands and chuckled at his expression. “See?”

  John Hardesty was middling height and weight with sandy-brown hair. His wife, Sarah, helped out a couple of evenings a week and between them they had five children, one from his previous marriage, two from Sarah’s and two together. If he was gay, it was a very closet condition.

  “Why do you do this to me?” John said, going over to the lockers and pulling out pads.

  “It builds character,” Barb replied, flipping to her feet. She fielded the tossed pads and started getting them on.

  Once they were both in pads, with helmets and mouthpieces in, they touched hands and closed.

  John started the attack with a hammer strike and then bounced away lightly, staying out of reach of her grappling attack. He’d learned, through painful experience, not to even think of grappling with her.

  In honesty, the reason that Brandon and Brook, and up until recently Allison, studied with Master Yi, was that Master Yi was simply better than John. John had Barbara, a touch, on speed. And he was definitely stronger; any reasonably in-shape male would be. But Barb had started training when she was five, when her father had been a foreign area officer assigned in Hong Kong. Over the succeeding twenty-eight years she had never once been out of training. The quality varied and the forms definitely varied; over the years she’d studied wah lum and dragon kung fu, karate in the U.S. and Japan, hop-ki do in Korea and the U.S. and aikido. But by the time she was Allison’s age, she could have won most open tournaments if they were “all forms.” And if all attacks were allowed.

  John Hardesty, on the other hand, was straight out of the “tournament” school of karate. He’d won southeast regional a time or two, come in second nationally, and now owned the de rigueur local martial arts school. He was good, but he was by no means a superior fighter. And he’d come to that conclusion
after sparring with Barbara only once.

  Master Yi, despite using “karate” to describe his school, had been studying wah lum before Barb was born and was, or at least had been, a truly superior hand-to-hand warrior. If the kids were going to train with anyone local, she wanted it to be Master Yi. In fact, she often wished that she trained with Master Yi instead of with John. You didn’t get better by fighting someone who was your inferior. But, occasionally, she picked up something new.

  Barbara followed up with a feinted kick and then two hammer strikes that were both blocked. But the second was a feint and she locked the blocking wrist with her right hand, coming in low with two left-handed strikes to the abdomen and then leaping out of range.

  “Bitch,” John said around the mouthpiece.

  “Had to call Allison on using that term,” Barb said, backing up and then attacking in the Dance of the Swallow. It was right at the edge of her ability and she nearly bobbled the complicated cross during the second somersault, but it ended up with Hardesty on his face and her elbow planted in his neck. “Don’t use it on me.”

  “Christ, I hate it when you pull out that kung fu shit,” John said humorously, taking her hand to get back on his feet. “Bad week?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted.

  “Well, if you need to kick my ass to get it out of your system, feel free,” Hardesty said, taking a guard position. “I have to admit that fighting you is always interesting. Anything in particular?”

  “No,” Barbara admitted as they closed. This time two of Hardesty’s rock hard blows got through her defenses, rocking her on her heels, and she was unable to grapple either one of them. She’d take a blow if it meant she could get a lock; once she had most opponents in lock she could turn them into sausage. But she could feel her concentration slipping and she disengaged. “I’m just tired,” she said, stretching and rubbing at her pads where the blows had slipped through.

  “Take a break,” John said, lifting his helmet and pulling out his mouthpiece. “You deserve one.”

  “I’m going to,” Barb said. “This weekend. Mark doesn’t know yet.”

  “He’s going to be so thrilled,” John quipped, slipping his mouthpiece back in. “You ready to get thrown through a wall?”

  “You and what army?”

  Chapter Two

  She helped with training until it was time to leave and then headed for the locker room. Technically, she helped with training the younger kids so she didn’t get charged tuition. In reality, they both knew that she was training John as much as she was training the kids. Who was the master and who the student? But training other people’s kids had never bothered her. She’d thought about becoming a teacher full-time; she was already an occasional substitute. But Mark made enough money that she didn’t have to work and he preferred that she stay at home. And she believed, in a fundamental and unshakeable fashion, that Mark was the master of the house. If he wanted her to stay home and be a housewife, she’d stay home.

  Barbara had been raised an Episcopalian and in her teenage years, when other kids were getting as far away from the church as they could, she’d gotten closer and closer to it. She often thought that if she’d been raised Catholic, God forbid, she’d have become a nun. But her family, her religion and her country were locked in an iron triangle that defined her life. In many ways, it was religion that kept her sane. When times were bad, when she and Mark were at each other’s throats, when Allison had been struck by a car, when Mark was laid off, it was to God she turned for solace. And that solace was always there, a warm, comforting presence that said that life was immaterial and only the soul mattered. Make sure the soul was at peace and everything else would eventually fall into place.

  She wasn’t a fundamentalist screamer. She didn’t proselytize. She simply lived her life, every day, in the most Christian manner that she could. If someone sniped at her, she turned the other cheek. If the children bickered or snapped, she smothered her anger and treated them as children of God. And when someone needed a helping hand because another supposed Christian had said no or simply not turned up, she gave that helping hand.

  She knew that a good bit of her belief centered around what she called “the other Barbara.” One time in the sixth grade she’d been sent home, almost expelled, for putting a boy in the hospital. He’d been teasing her and when she tried to walk away he’d grabbed her. So she’d broken his nose, arm and ankle. She had not used any training; no special little holds or martial arts moves were involved, just sheer explosive rage. It was the rage, as much as anything, that she used her religion to control. She’d learned it from her mother who had much the same problems and who explained that, besides the necessity for belief in the One God, religion’s purpose was to control the demons in mankind.

  Barb worked very hard to control her demons, because she knew what the results would be if she did not.

  It didn’t mean she was an idiot about it. The world was not a nice place and never would be short of the Second Coming. To her, “turn the other cheek” meant “let the small hurts pass” not “be a professional victim.” So she made sure her children were as well grounded as possible, gave them all the advice she could, showed them a Christian way of life in all things and made sure they knew how and when to defend themselves.

  When she was in college, shortly before meeting Mark, she had been attacked on her way home from the library late one Wednesday evening. The path was lit but the location was obscured by trees and landscaping and the man had been on her before she knew he was there. She could have screamed, she could have tried to run, he only had a knife after all. Instead she broke his wrist, struck him on the temple with an open-hand blow and walked to the nearest phone to call the police.

  After the police took her statement she had gone back to her dorm, thrown up and then prayed for several hours. She had prayed for the soul of her attacker and her own. For her attacker she had prayed that he would find a way to Jesus lest the evil in his soul give him to Satan for all time. A soul lost was a soul lost. For herself she had prayed for mercy. For she had, in her anger, given his wrist an extra, unnecessary, twist, that had elicited a scream of pain. She prayed for mercy for letting her anger, which she knew to be volcanic, slip in the circumstances. And for the wash of pleasure that scream of pain had caused her. She’d been really upset by the attack.

  The attacker had been picked up at the hospital while having his wrist set. DNA matched him to a string of rapes around the LSU campus so Barbara hadn’t even had to press charges. She still prayed, occasionally, that while in prison he would find his way to Jesus. Every soul, even that of a rotten little rapist, was precious.

  * * *

  When she got home the TV was on, tuned to ESPN. Mark was settled on the recliner, a position he would assuredly occupy until time for supper. She got him a fresh beer, turned on the water to boil and got out the meat loaf. Twenty minutes later she had the kids washed and at the table.

  “God, thank you for this food,” Mark said, his head bowed. “Thank you for another day of good life, for all the things you have given to us…”

  Barb tuned Mark out and sent up her own prayer of thanks. It was a good life. Intensely frustrating at times, but good. Everyone was healthy, no major injuries, decent grades, Mark had a good and steady job. She felt… under utilized, but bringing three sane and reasonably well balanced kids into the world was probably the best utilization of a life she could imagine.

  When Mark was done she picked up her fork and looked at Allison.

  “Other than the unpleasantness with Marcie, how was your day, Allison?”

  She insisted on conversation at the table, a habit she had gotten from her mother, God rest her soul. Mother Gibson had followed her Air Force husband around the world, often ending up alone with the kids in some God forsaken wilderness like Minot, North Dakota. Often the only conversation she could have was that with her children.

  The kids had learned. A simple “Good” or “Bad” would elici
t parental disapproval of the most extreme kind. So Allison swallowed her bite of broccoli and frowned, trotting out the prepared speech.

  “I think I did okay on my chemistry test…”

  * * *

  When dinner was done, all the kids in bed but Allison, who was doing homework, the dishes in the dishwasher and Mark back watching television, Barbara went over to the couch and sat down.

  “Mark,” she said, softly, “I need a break.”

  “Huh?” Mark said, looking away from a rerun of Friends, then back at the TV.

  “I need a break,” she repeated. “I’m going away for the weekend.”

  “What?” he asked, looking over at her again. The station changed to a commercial and she now had his undivided attention.

  “I’d like you to pick the kids up tomorrow,” she said. “And take the Expedition in the morning, I’ll take the Honda. I just need a short vacation.”

  “Who’s going to cook supper?” he asked. “And Allison asked me if she could go to the dance tomorrow. I said yes. Who’s going to pick her up?”

  “I said no,” Barb sighed. “Because I knew you’d ask that question.”

  “We just had a vacation a couple of months ago!” Mark protested.

  “You had a vacation,” Barbara replied. “I made sure that Allison didn’t wear that thong bikini, got sunscreen on everyone, treated Brandon’s sunburn when he didn’t get it replaced, made sure there were snacks for the beach…”

  “Okay, okay,” Mark said. “I get the picture. But that still doesn’t answer who’s going to cook!”

  “You’ll go to the game on Friday anyway…”

  “And that’s another thing,” Mark said. “I thought you wanted to go to the game. You always do!”

  “I go to the games because it’s a duty, Mark,” Barb said. “I don’t enjoy them. You can eat at the game, everyone will anyway. I’ll leave a casserole for Saturday evening. Sunday you can go out. I’ll be back Monday.”