The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  Sometimes when I hold that drinking glass (swirled from foot to rim) I think on these things, how someone made it with fire and sand plus flux, once called “salt,” to ease the melt. Seems like magic but really it’s skill I don’t have, its steps like rituals learned from an elder, and to ignore those superstitions is to lose a particular history.

  “With all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt,” Leviticus 2:13. So salt your newborn to keep away the devil. Boil and halve an egg, pack salt into the hollow where the yolk had been, eat it, and go to bed to dream of the man you’ll marry, or the day you’ll die. To protect your house from thieves, set aside a glass of water. All night it waits on the table, resting on its pontil scar.

  In the factory on the riverbank, I stood on the siege floor and stared into the white-hot maw of the day furnace. “Like a swimming pool,” the tour leader said, and nobody could look away. Cold as it was outside, I was grateful to be there, coat folded over my arm, furnace warming my cheeks, combustible air shivering with heat. Another Monday at the plant.

  I’d been on this factory tour plenty of times before. On family road trips, we’d go out of our way to stop at Fenton Art Glass, and I loved it all, from the glowing furnace to the handlers to the painters in the basement. At the end of tour, Mom would let us pick out a little something from the gift shop. I still have a ruby vase on my mantel at home, and an iridescent carnival-glass clock rests on the piano.

  It was good to be back, but things were different. “Tour times are subject to change during very busy days,” said the Welcome to Fenton brochure, but it had been printed long ago. As we walked down the steps into the art department, our guide said the shop would close down for half the week because of slow demand. All but one of the painters’ tables were dark. Brushes waited, bristles up, in reject vases of robin’s-egg blue and white hobnail. The canisters of paint lined up beside them were screwed tight shut.

  We moved along to the shop floor, where a man worked on a series of cat figurines. “He has no way to measure, just years of work and experience,” the guide said as a gatherer twisted a clot of hot glass on the end of a rod and stuffed it into a mold. The cat would cool to a custard yellow edged with pink, made with depleted uranium, and it would cost less if it had a bit more pink than others, or listed a little to one side. I’ve always liked noting the slight differences between seconds and perfects. Humans made these.

  Look at the old paintings and see how we furnish our paradise with glass. An apostle dips a pen into an inkwell; angels hold an hourglass, grains sluicing from one bulb into the other; an offering of first fruits rests in a translucent bowl.

  But glass has links to dark magic. People said that the Venetian glassblower who first invented the famous cristallo had connections to alchemists. How else could he have created that clear, lustrous stuff? Black magic the only explanation, unless it was, as an old manuscript claimed, the very air of Murano, “purified and attenuated by the concurrence of so many fires,” twenty furnaces at a time, burning “perpetually, for they are like the vestal fires, never going out.”

  Yet if glass is a thing of fire, it is also a thing of earth. Glassmaking is a trade rich with lore, practiced in more or less the same way for hundreds of years. People used to say a monster called the salamander lived in furnaces, feeding on heat, and that if you looked in the glory hole you’d never look away. Back then, when it came time to replace the village glassmaker’s old furnace, men in animal-skin costumes gibbered and danced through town, making children scream. The maker formed the new pot from pieces of the old one, pounded to dust and mixed with fresh earth from particularly favored spots. He worked the clay with his bare feet and could feel in his skin when it was ready.

  There’s humanity in the glass begotten by the breath that passed from the blower’s lungs and through the tube into the bubble of molten glass that swelled and split into a hollow column that caught the light. The blower set it on a shelf and heard it tick as it cooled. If you could test that trapped air, breathed in another time, what would it reveal? There’s something in it nobody can explain. And in the old days, the makers couldn’t tell anyone else their secrets, under penalty of death, until their sons apprenticed with them.

  German glassmakers used to roam the forests, setting up and moving on when their fuel ran out. They called their ware waldglas, forest glass, and it had a greenish cast from trace elements in the sand they used. This is a thing of our place, and grows from it like a tender plant would. This accent, this turn of phrase, this flower, this dirt-smelling air. Those who know how can tell from which bight in the river the sand came.

  The massive pot furnace, scorched and patched, dominated the middle of the factory. Each door was labeled with the color of the glass inside; there was no way to tell the difference otherwise, since the lava all glowed the same red-white. Ever since glassmaking’s beginning, the furnace has been critical. To keep the glass malleable, the furnace gorges on fuel. Today, Fenton spends one hundred thousand dollars a month on natural gas, and the furnaces run day and night, keeping the glass at a constant twenty-five hundred degrees.

  In Biren Bonnerjea’s A Dictionary of Superstitions and Mythology, I read that “Salamanders are the spirits of fires and live in them. They seek the hottest fire to breed in, but soon quench it by the extreme chill of their bodies. Should a glasshouse fire be kept up without extinction for more than seven years, there is no doubt but that a salamander will be generated in the cinders.”

  Cold beings live in the heart of the fire, then; are spontaneously generated by it. In the blue plasma that floats over a split of well-aged oak as it burns. In the pig iron forced into red melt. In the scrubber flames that roar atop the refinery stacks. Since Fenton has been open for better than a hundred years, that would make fourteen salamanders, give or take, created by the furnace. Quite a family by this time. And in old Constantinople, people believed that the salamander “makes cocoons like a silk-worm. These cocoons, being unwound by the ladies of the palace, are spun into dresses for the imperial women. The dresses are washed in flames, and not in water.”

  The one time the furnace goes dark is when you change the pot. This has always been and still is a tough job. Molten glass fuses the pot to the floor over time, forcing the men to wrench it free. Worse, changing a pot forces downtime. This is not something you want to do any more often than you must. I keep thinking about the pot-setters in their animal skins. It would have been a sight to see, wouldn’t it? Ogres huffing and straining in the red firelight.

  Finally the tour comes to my favorite part: the handlers. All of the Fenton jobs impress me, but this one seems especially challenging, because it requires several steps in quick, practiced succession.

  Picture the basket body attached to a long pole, a punty, that rests on a steel-plated marver table. With a gloved hand, the handler twirls the punty, crimping the basket’s edge at just the right moment. Then he attaches the floppy handle, stretching it out and up with a bar during the twenty seconds he has before the glass cools. If he needs to use a paddle for shaping, he’ll choose one made of close-grained apple- or cherrywood, so it won’t stain the glass at those high temperatures.

  But what I like best is the stamp he uses to attach each end of the handle. It presses his particular mark into the soft glass; the basket goes into the world with his signature, legible to those who know how to read it. His stamp retires when he does.

  Later that day, a half-hour’s drive upriver from Fenton, I walked among piles of busted glass at the marble factory and marveled. The cullet—beer bottles, reject marbles, broken art glass—was separated by color. Fox face in opaque cornflower. Puckish mouse with oversized ears. Shards signed in a flowing hand, blushing coral around the edges—the firepolisher’s mark. Heavy, cold-cast starfish in orange and lemon, part of a set, the soap dish long gone. But melt this down to save, stretch a drip of honey into a feather.

  Later, someone with a front-end loader would scoop up the glass and drive up
the ramp into the Marble King factory, but the furnace was down for repairs the day I visited, and the broken glass waited in the rain. This was the perfect spot for a marble factory. Natural gas waited under the ground; sand collected in the river’s oxbow; the river itself would carry the product to market. Better still, the scrap from Fenton would make gorgeous marbles. It is the nature of glass to break, and once it does, it can never really be made right. You can choose to deny this basic fact or you can face it head-on.

  A man named Berry Pink faced the truth, and by so doing became the Marble King at a time when that still mattered. A hundred years ago, marble factories lined the Ohio River on both sides, turning out aggies and taws, clearies and mibs by the ton. Berry Pink, son of a liquor manufacturer, turned teetotaler after nearly drowning in a vat of shine as a child. (“Can’t stand the smell of it,” he said.) When he lost his job in the crash of ’29, he continued his habit of riding into Manhattan every morning, either for appearance’s sake or for his own sanity. In the city, he met a mysterious man who rented him an office, cheap, and gave him piles of used glass. Milk of magnesia bottles, smeared ink bottles, yellow patent-medicine flasks, shards of ruby dinnerware.

  At this point in the story, I think of the weaver’s daughter in the fairy tale who had to spin straw into gold, and couldn’t do it. Rumpelstiltskin came to her aid, although like anyone, he had his price. She had a place to work, and plenty of material, but she just didn’t have the right touch.

  Berry Pink had no such trouble. He built a machine that could perform magic, creating toys from trash. He must have had a furnace to remelt the discarded glass, a shear to cut the molten stream into slugs, and rollers to shape those slugs into orbs. Let them cool and they’re ready to sell, smooth little globes clear or opaque, dotted with bubbles of air like pips of mercury.

  On the ground outside the Marble King office door, someone had spread marbles instead of gravel. People used to call marbles from around here “West Virginia trash,” but that’s hurtful, and wrong besides. Dozens of factories in this region made micas and melon-balls, slags and corkscrews, bricks and beach-balls and bumblebees. Today almost all of the marble factories are gone, and who remembers how to play conqueror, eggs in the bush, bounce eye, skelly, or cherry pit?

  Marbles seem to be humble things, but in fact they put the world in a poke. Burned trash, junk transformed, art so cheap kids can buy it by the bagful. Marbles take no obvious signature, their skins too smooth for writing. But those who know can tell what made them: an orange starfish, fine-ground river sand, what it all comes back to. Knowledge snared in a line.

  I can’t quite figure out Berry Pink. People snickered at his name, but he said it was a combination of old family names. Quite common in the South, he said—yet he was from Passaic, New Jersey. I ponder the picture of him that ran alongside a New York Post profile in 1938, when he was thirty-seven years old. In the article, it says Berry Pink wouldn’t take off his hat until he went to bed at night—lest his bald spot show. “The kids would know he’s not one of them,” the reporter wrote, “and that would spoil his fun.” But of course the kids knew better, hat or no hat.

  He was a self-made millionaire, even during the worst of the Depression; he was a man who played the kids for keeps, “deploring the fact that it’s necessary—to make Jimmy know how Johnny feels when he loses all his reallies!” He seems like a chiseler, despite the bags of marbles he’d give away at schools to kids who got hundreds on their spelling tests the day he visited. In the photo, Berry Pink’s looking straight at the camera, a little boy next to him biting his tongue and squinching his eyes shut with the effort of aiming. The look on Pink’s face says Trust me, which of course makes me suspicious. Something about him doesn’t square.

  Is it that he’s a hustler? Instead of conning people his own size, he cheats little kids and says he’s doing them a favor by showing them how the world works. Maybe part of him didn’t want to sell the million marbles his factories turned out every day. Every cloth bag handed out for an aced test cost him something. Part of him wanted to take it all back.

  Walking through his world, he clicked marbles in his pocket “like other men clink dimes.” Here was someone who gave himself over to one idea. He was in love with the marble itself, not the particular colors or sizes—let the kids pick the ones they like best, order a million of those, drop the ones they don’t like. He made the marbles from leftovers, what other folks stumbled past.

  I can picture the rented office the “kindly old man” loaned him for a pittance every month. How it filled with boxes of broken glass as he thought about what to do. He must have cut his hands time and again. His thumbnails must have been starred with white from sharp impacts, or darkened with blood. To release the pressure, heat a sewing needle in a candle flame and press the needle into the nail, clear past the quick, and blood will fountain up like oil. Were his hands scarred with stripes of pink and white? Were his knuckles wide and stony? There’s something loutish about a grown man competing with children in their games. He has his own realm of play, called business; why should he need this too?

  Yet: “The national prizes will include a gold-plated crown studded with marbles as jewels, and cash prizes.” He paid for all of this himself, at a cost of fifty-five thousand dollars a year in 1940 money. He said the marble tournaments, which emphasized good sportsmanship and helped keep kids off the streets, were “his life’s work.” I have a soft spot for another photograph of Berry Pink, not the one where he stands next to Jack Dempsey holding a mesh bag of marbles, but the one with the newly crowned Marble Champion, a boy whose shirt proclaims PITTSBURGH, a boy cradling a substantial trophy topped with a figure of a marble-shooting child, a boy whose face wears an expression of shy pride. Berry Pink looks straight at the camera. His ever-present fedora is dented a little on the side, which gives him a kind of salesman’s look. His jacket sleeves don’t quite cover his cuffs, and his pockets are roomy enough for a spare handful of marbles. There are worse ways to spend your working life.

  When Berry Pink died of a heart attack at the Bridge and Whist Club, aged sixty-two, his obituary ran in the New York Times. In the accompanying photo, he’s not wearing his hat, and his face is neutral—gone the toothy smiles of earlier years. “He hopes to be married one day and have some [kids] of his own,” the article from 1938 had said. He never did, and the tournaments faded a decade before he died. But today Marble King is one of the few marble factories still running in the United States, and the woman who runs it, although no relation, is named after Berry Pink. He had been her father’s business partner and family friend. She keeps the furnace lit.

  The big shooter rests in your palm and is warmed by it. Little seeds of air bubbles caught inside, a creased leaf brilliant red. As a child I loved to sort marbles into groups by color and size. Dad had a big coffee can full of them from his childhood. He grew up with nothing but still he had this. Plunging my hands into their cool stony roundness felt like wealth. A little seam where a breath of air had displaced the molten glass, a swirl of black on yellow. Hold on to these, Dad would say. Might be worth something someday.

  And now they are. Today people dig up their gardens in West Virginia and find old marbles put there for fill. It was cheaper to dump them than to pick them up, but now collectors fight over them. Say you bought a little white clapboard house down by the river, pulled your spade from the toolshed, and set about digging a garden. Under a few inches of dirt, the carroty roots of Queen Anne’s lace, and the scrawling stitch of crabgrass, the spade turns up marbles by clutch and cluster. So smooth they shed soil, crumbs sliding off their slick sides. Ruby red, flecked with gold, blue as island water, black and yellow like an old highway, crizzled by heat. Wash them under the spigot and see how lucky you are, heir to this bounty that was once cheaper than dirt. Dumped and covered and waiting all this time for you.

  Not long ago, a boutique marblemaker in West Virginia ran a special batch of marbles for serious collectors. I saw
some of the results online. Beautiful swirls of salmon and gold, oxblood and amber and milk. “This one’s name is Bud Platinum,” the blogger noted. “They named it that because they used Bud Platinum bottles to get the blue glass. It worked well.” Gorgeous, common, beer-bottle sapphire. What are we but swept-up specks of this and that? Curls of brass from the shop floor? Space dust and sand, water and a spark of flame. Destined to break but our pieces can be remade as long as the furnace lasts.

  Not long after I visited, Fenton shut down for good. It’s the same old story, cheaper imports and customers who crave variety. Most people don’t want to look at the same vase for fifty years. A few beadmakers do lampwork in the mostly empty building, the gas tongues that melt the glass threads the only ghosts of the great furnace that once blazed day and night.

  I yearn to do good work that will last. I see this in other people and in these rituals. Once the workday is over, what remains?

  Most people never heard of end-of-day pieces—also known as whimsies, friggers, trifles, or whigmaleeries. Made from leftovers, they’re scarce by nature. At shift’s end, if there’s a dab of material left, you might make a little treat for yourself. A glass top hat. Balloon-ended darner. Paperweight a simple slug of jar glass.

  Most whimsies are unsigned. That seems humble, but don’t be fooled. It takes nerve to make these, swiping time and material for something the boss can’t sell. The work you do during the rest of the shift prepares you for these few redeemed minutes. Who else can stretch glass thread-thin and twist its end into a buttonhook too fragile to use? Who else can pull a hank into a yard-long cane to brandish in the glassmakers’ parade, when men carry glass crowns studded with colored jewels, or hats in whose tops spun-glass plumes nod as a glass orchestra sounds its tune? No ears now listening, I fear, have heard the glass bugle’s four-note song, and all eyes have dimmed that watched the player’s breath condense within the clear tubing. That watched him turn the horn carefully, counterclockwise, and pour the warm water on the ground.