by Rene Steinke
Food was the one vice the men allowed themselves, and they cut, speared, and chewed greedily, as if it provided them with some answer to a question that had been dogging them for a long time.
If my grandfather had been there, he’d have nodded in thanks to Erma with each bite of a new dish. They all tasted like pickles to me. I kept looking at the place where he usually sat, where Russel was now. It made me angry to think they might have invited him to make my grandfather’s absence less obvious.
My mother smiled at whoever was talking, pushing the food around on her plate as if she were looking for some detail in the china pattern underneath. Fred and Russel were complaining about Plymouth Steel, how it would bring blacks closer to Porter.
The buttery string beans began to make me nauseous, and I wished I hadn’t agreed to come, or that I could leave. “People just aren’t going to stand for it,” said Fred, lifting his chin. As I watched them talking, the skin on their faces seemed to slide forward and, in that dim light, dripped a little around the stubble of their beards.
I untied the little purse of meat in the beef roladen, scraped 94 / RENÉ STEINKE
the pickle and bacon from the inside, and took a bite of bland meat. Marietta and Erma started to argue about which was better for you, eggs or oatmeal. “Eggs are the purest kind of energy,”
said Erma.
“But they’re bad for the blood,” said Marietta. I looked at her rouged high cheekbones, the skin above them sunken, at her wide-set eyes thickly mascaraed in crinkled lids, and the wrinkles pursing her red lips. Old people still talked about how beautiful she had been, but it had somehow misshapen her, I thought, twisted her faculty for empathy and swelled the muscle that protected her heart. Why wasn’t she more worried about my mother?
I pushed away my plate and folded my arms over my stomach.
“The spooks tried to buy that house on Locust,” said Fred. My father wouldn’t tolerate this kind of talk. His best friend at the orphanage had been black. His name was Roger, and he’d gone on to become an engineer in California. My father would have said something like “They have as much right to live here as you do,” and Fred and Russel would have resented him for it, maybe even nodded to one another in confirmation of his pretension.
“Ella,” said my mother, “do you eat enough eggs?”
I shrugged. They were putting up a smug gate, a white fence with a stubborn lock, defending themselves from fear. But fear might have made them humble; it might at least make them feel something. “Before you know it, we’ll have South Chicago at our doorstep.”
I looked down at my plate, at the smear of potato salad, the flecks of pink bacon, the sauerkraut that reminded me of worms.
I wondered if this was how my mother had lost her appetite, disgusted by all the endless chewing and talk.
Erma was blinking back tears. “When we were girls, Porter was a hundred-percent American. When we were young, something
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like this would have been taken care of. It wouldn’t have been allowed to happen.”
My mother was trembling, trying to look at anyone’s face but mine. Erma smoothed her hair and bobbed her head. “I want to show you something, Ella,” she said. She got up from the table and went over to the closet. While she rummaged in its cluttered darkness, Marietta tried to change the subject again. She laid her voice out over the table like an extravagant piece of purple velvet.
“Of course, we had things like diphtheria to worry about when we were girls, too. They called it the monster. It was so sad to see the little coffins, the tiny blue fingers and noses, as if they were turning into china dolls, these beautiful little children.”
There was an old photograph on the wall—a spirit picture—of a mother and father sitting in front of a house. Next to them, the giant cut-out figure of a toddler in a christening dress floated over the yard, one of the Housemans’ dead siblings.
Erma came back to the table, holding a book with yellowed pages that had to be unlocked like a diary. She took out a tiny key, turned it in the lock, and unhooked the clasp, opened it in front of me to a creased poster that said, “Churchgoers, the Women of the Klean Up Society of America invite you to a social followed by a rally for America.” She turned the page. There was a newsbill that said, “Go to Church Sunday—One of the Foremost duties of a Klanswoman is to WORSHIP GOD. Every Klanswoman each Sunday should attend the Church of her choice.”
Marietta cleared her throat and fidgeted in her chair. Erma smoothed down a wrinkled corner. “Isn’t this something?” she said affectionately. She turned the page to a photograph of a crowd in white robes, a large cross burning beside them. I noticed the big bows on some of the shoes, the two pairs of high heels, and it suddenly hit me that these were women. My face and chest got hot. Erma started singing, “Beneath this flag that waves above, 96 / RENÉ STEINKE
This cross that lights our way, You’ll always find a sister’s love, In the heart of each Tri-K.” I turned the page, and though they were much younger, I recognized them: Erma Houseman and Marietta and three others. Then the same crowd, but without their masks, their faces solemn and plump. My mother got up and began to clear the table. “It was a delicious dinner, Erma.
Thank you.”
“Mother,” I said, before she got to the kitchen, “were you one?”
She didn’t answer, and the door swung closed behind her.
“Oh, she doesn’t remember,” said Erma Houseman. “But she went around with us to the rallies, to potluck suppers, and when we had sewing circles. Marietta carried her in a little sling.”
Marietta put her hand over the photo album so I couldn’t turn the page. She tried to sound teasing, but she was too nervous.
“That was so long ago. It’s all supposed to be secret. You know, you’re breaking all the codes.”
“What difference does it make? Practically everyone we knew is dead now anyway.” Erma Houseman turned to me. “What I’m trying to say, Ella, honey, is if you get your girlfriends together, you can talk some sense into these young people, make them see the threat of the Negro, the Jew, the foreigner, make them see this moment of danger.” She was more excited and animated than I ever remembered seeing her, and looking up, speechless, at her glinting eyes, I realized she’d made a career of this.
A short grandfather clock chimed grandly. “There’s no danger,”
I stammered.
When I was a girl, the Klan ghosted among the people we knew like guilt. From the house at night, even safe in my room, I could sometimes hear their rallies in the fields, the men shouting and the singing that sounded like heretical hymns. I saw a burning cross only once. I was with my parents coming home from a THE FIRES / 97
potluck supper—and though my father cursed under his breath, neither of them said anything else. I could feel their hope that I wouldn’t ask about it like a hand around my throat. I was very young and assumed it was a grave marker for a child who’d accidentally burned to death.
“Look how pretty your grandma looks,” Erma said, pointing to a picture of Marietta in a white robe at a scene that looked like a wedding. She had a wreath of lily-of-the-valley flowers in her hair. Her face was unlined and innocent-looking, but I saw in the turn of her mouth, in the tentativeness and the way she held her body, an unspeakable fear. I’d seen a slighter version of it before and always thought it was fear remaining from those years when she was a beautiful girl, envied and hunted. Now I saw it was something else, too.
I barely remember what happened after that. There was some talk about the vacation the Housemans were going on the next day. My mother, despite her crutches, managed to clean up the dinner dishes before anyone else got up from the table. I made up some excuse about work so I could leave. “You’re going already?” said Fred.
“Come back anytime,” said Erma.
Marietta looked into my face and kissed me on the forehead, something she hadn’t done since I was a girl, and my mother, hobbling, followed
me to the door. “I’m worried about you,” she whispered.
I looked at the pointed tip of her shoulder, the elbow, thick now in her bony arm. Her eyes looked scared but steady. I’d never find out how much she knew about me, and now she pretended we’d just heard and seen something nostalgic and incidental, though she couldn’t have done it if my father were there; it would have enraged him. There was a new hollow, lower in her cheek,
98 / RENÉ STEINKE
just above her jaw, where I wanted to slap her, see her shocked into pain, but I didn’t touch her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”
“I will worry,” she said. “You know that.”
T hat night all the lamps in my room seemed to ooze light, and I preferred the dimness, with its blurry outlines and shadows, where my thoughts could remain clear and bright. What had my grandmother done? I tried to picture her in that white robe, holding a torch, marching in a parade, but her face disintegrated in these scenes. I saw only robes and K’s and crosses. What must she have thought of my father, with his black friends from the orphanage and the way people minded what they said around him, and my girlhood friend Anita with her shock of reddish hair—had Marietta grown out of that hatred, or had she been holding it back?
What bothered me most was that I’d fallen right in step with them, my silence complicit—as if I’d marched up behind them in that photograph in a matching white robe—when the whole time I’d felt about to combust with everything I didn’t say, arms and legs blown off from the pressure, head stuck up in the ceiling, my insides strewn all over the table. They probably would have found a way to ignore that, too. I saw their calm faces again, their averted eyes, the visible relief when I left, and knew what it reminded me of: each time Hanna had said good-bye to us.
The next night I drove down Lincoln toward the sign for the drive-in, a twirling root-beer mug with foam (where beehives supposedly nested), and I turned down Locust toward the Housemans’, naming to myself the items probably in their cluttered garage: their dead son’s limp-necked rocking horse, the clocks Fred couldn’t fix, household cleaners, boxes of nails, seed THE FIRES / 99
packets and fertilizer, paint remover and bent rakes—all of it tinder.
I parked at the corner and walked to the house. There was a light on in the picture window, a lamp they must have set on a timer while they were away in Wisconsin. Laughter and the idling snores of cars wafted over from the drive-in beyond the trees.
I tried the door on the side of the garage. It was locked, so I used a stick to break one of the windowpanes and reached through the broken glass to the door handle, heard it click open from the inside, and pulled my hand back through the broken glass. I went in and flipped the light switch.
Two hollow grandfather clocks leaned against a wall near a pile of gray wood scraps. In the corner, cans of paint with crusted lids crowded against paintbrushes and a rusty bucket, next to bundled piles of newspaper. A mop and hoe poked out from the center of three stacked old tires, and next to the garden hose tangled high up on hooks in the wall, an old white shirt with brown stains hung over the top rung of the ladder. The lawn mower leaked gas next to the wheelless bike with bent handlebars.
Jittery from not being able to eat all day, I went over to the front garage door, unlocked it at the side, and helped it slither into the ceiling.
Spilled oil mottled the concrete floor, which would probably make it look accidental. A power saw lay on its side, still plugged into its socket near the front. Crouching so I could see its yellowed cord, I dropped a match into a fold where a hair of gold wire pricked through the rubber. It sputtered out. I dropped another match in the same place, but it went out after a couple of seconds.
“Stubborn,” I heard my grandfather saying. “Obstinate.”
Rummaging in my dress pocket for another match, I heard a rustle, a flounce, in the bushes. Hurrying to the back, I flipped off the light and held myself against the wall. I should have waited, 100 / RENÉ STEINKE
I thought. I should have been more careful. Footsteps swept the lawn.
I studied the megaphone of streetlight at the end of the driveway.
Someone’s been keeping an eye on the house. They wondered why the garage door was left open. Someone spied a light from their parking space at the drive-in. I listened so hard my ears began to ache with the march of my eardrums. I hallucinated a figure that disappeared, heard the hard thrum of silence like the wheel of a record after the music. I pressed my fingernails into my palms and squeezed shut my eyes until they spasmed, sure I deserved to be caught. Standing there counting to myself, I willed my body to be still and tried to blanket my mind as if it were a torch they might see. It took a long time for the fear to lift, for my heart to stop racing so I could tell myself it was nothing, a cat, a branch falling from a tree.
What I had to do was get the thing started. There were several theories for why I had to do this tangled and swirled in my head, but what I remember most was how I wanted to make the Housemans lose their smugness. I had this idea that they wouldn’t be able to hide their regrets anymore in the garage with their son’s old toys and the cabinet that Fred had never finished, because all of this would be burned up and exist only in their minds, so they’d have to think of it all, their long pasts, and the things they worked so hard to ignore and the things they should have been ashamed of but weren’t—all that history, the full weight of it, the things that made them just as human as the black people they hated, would come crashing back, I thought, when they came home to find their garage burned up. And they would know that keeping certain people out of town wouldn’t be enough to keep them safe, because no one was safe.
I turned on the light just long enough to find the can of gasoline near the lawn mower. I took it out the front and spilled it all over the bushes and lit them. The waxy leaves rustled as they caught THE FIRES / 101
fire. I went back in and threw two matches at the electrical socket where the saw was plugged in until it sparked and exploded up the wall. The whole front of my body felt hot.
The fire rolled along the cement floor and weaved among the limbs of the bicycle, then hid behind a pile of cardboard boxes. I waited. I could hear it breathe back there before the boxes began to glow.
At first it was a little like drinking—that bitter release of yourself into alert oblivion. I went out the front and down to the end of the driveway near the mailbox to watch. My eyes teared up in the brightness. In the back of the garage, the fire trailed among the paint cans, until one by one they burst into dandelions, their ragged petals quivering in the hot wind that blew over the clutter.
The left side of the garage roof shook, then tore off and flipped onto the holly bushes, and the branches turned to orange wires.
All the flames rippled over the walls, scrubbed them until they collapsed. “Bowled over.” I heard Marietta’s voice. Had she ever watched a black family’s house burn?
A high tree branch caught fire, and a garbled screech and flapping went into the tree with the popping of wood. Beside me, the grass whined, and a ball of flames darted up to a branch, jerked at a fork that caught fire, then fell down, and the whine stopped just before I smelled the squirrel’s burnt flesh.
For a while I lost myself in the shirring of flames and the cackle of wood. When I looked down again, I was surprised to see that dress, those arms, those laced-up shoes. “You’re not yourself,”
my mother had said, even the time I’d come home with blood dried on my leg, smelling of tree bark, and it was true, just as it was true now. I didn’t dare look to see who it was I was.
Watching the flames shore up the empty flowerpots and the path of round stones that led to the back door of the house, I was struck with awe—this force was miles beyond me, and there was 102 / RENÉ STEINKE
no way to tame it. Was that what made me so unsteady? I lay down in the grass while a car passed behind me on the street.
Loud cracks caught in the wind. From the ground, I look
ed for the red heart where the fire lived, and the flames wrapped around one another like veins, and they braided so tightly it made it impossible for me to see inside them to what I had to see.
I stood up, ran down the street, then walked through the scrawny trees to the pickup window at the drive-in. A few cars were parked in the slanted spots next to the intercoms. I peered inside the window, ordered a soda, and turned to watch a young couple in a station wagon, purple and pink smoke strung up in the trees behind them.
“See that?” I said to the girl behind the counter, pointing.
She gasped, and I felt short of breath, a tingling under my fingernails. “Something’s on fire.”
N ot wanting to go home to the hotel yet, I got back in my car and drove to the liquor store, bought some bourbon, and parked in the empty lot on Lincoln. Crumpling the bag around the bottle’s neck, I gazed across the street into the lit windows of the Big Wheel Restaurant. Two waitresses glided in and out of sight, and a heavy man in overalls guided himself to a booth. I took a long sip, felt the bourbon blanket my chest. Now, after I’d heard the sirens, it seemed I’d seen a knowing look in the counter girl’s freckled face—she’d smelled the smoke on my clothes, spotted a scab of soot. She knew. After she called the fire department, she’d called the police. “There was this woman,” she’d said. “Long, dark hair, her eyes a little too bright.” I smelled the sleeve of my dress, talcum powder. I searched my skin for black marks.
I looked at the car next to mine with no wheels and a FOR SALE
sign stuck to its windshield and drank until my eyes burned.
Loud
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guitar music splashed out of the window of a passing car. The parking lot of the restaurant began to empty, and the street lights cleaved the empty black asphalt. I felt a certain shimmery void—a longing, as if I’d forgotten something back there at the Housemans’.
The air inside the car had a stale, sweet smell, dirty hair and sweat. I found some crackers to eat among the frayed maps in the glove compartment. Already my memory of the fire was fading, and that panicked me. It didn’t usually fall apart so quickly.
