Fireflies
Our hero sees ... fairies?
[Welcome back to the Mad Art Project. This story picks up immediately after Raising Blisters. Tim is driving from Chattanooga to Bethlehem, where he lives in a rooming house near the elder care home where his mother is staying. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.
I should add a couple of notes.
First, I’ve decided what to do with all those quotes in the first chapters of the Mad Art Project. They’re part of a zine a college student is making about Jethra and her art project. More on that to follow, but I’ll need to go back and tag them as such.
Second, several readers have noted these stories — not just the Mad Art Project, but all of Elf’s Writing — are hard to read, or, more specifically, better described as horror than surrealism, Southern-fried fantasy, or any of the other monikers I’ve been using. What do you think? Are these horror tales? Tap in and comment!]
In no way did I think Donnie Ross — or anyone, ever — sold his soul to the Devil.
Momma believed the world was locked in a struggle between Jesus and the Devil, good and evil. My foster parents, with greater subtlety, explained how the Devil only exercised his wiles on sufferance as part of the necessary testing of the faithful. That just convinced me that God, if he did exist, was more of an asshole than I was. I hurt people who threatened me; God —or his agent — hurt people for no reason I could see but gratuitous malice. I therefore concluded there was no God, or if there was a God, he wasn’t worth worshipping.
All the same, I drove back to Bethlehem thinking about Grin Watson’s report that folks say Donnie Ross sold his soul to the Devil the day he turned 21. When people say the Devil, they likely don’t mean an abstract principle of evil. They mean a creature of this world. A bad moon or a dark wind, maybe, or something growing at the bottom of a holler somewhere. Something deep-down-rooted and magic and nasty.
I don’t believe in magic any more than I do in religion, but that’s because I have no need to believe in magic. I have proof.
I might have been three years old the first night I saw them.
We had no cookies in the house that evening, I remember that. No flour to make cookies, maybe, or no money to get a box of Animal Crackers at Biggs’ Market away down the mountain. (I liked the iced ones.)
So I threw the biggest temper fit you can imagine.
My sweet tooth used to torment me when I was a child. I’ve never been in love nor had a broken heart, but when I hear that phrase, a broken heart, I remember what it was to long for a bite of cookie or a spoonful of honey when there was none in the house. By the time I was 5 or 6, I’d wander the lanes and meadows looking for honeysuckle to suck on, spoiling flower after flower for those few drops.
When she did have a bit of money, Momma used to keep me so supplied with sweets that despite or perhaps because of our poverty I had a mouth of gray and black teeth when my foster family got hold of me four years later.
Malnourished, underweight — and every tooth rotten.
No, don’t look away. What I need you to see is that I was loved. Desperately loved.
But I digress.
This particular night, there were no sweets to be had, none anywhere on the mountain, and Momma could not create them out of nothing. I shrieked. I danced up and down. I flung myself to the floor and beat my forehead on the worn, gritty boards.
I knew, without having the words to understand it, that I was punishing Momma for her powerlessness — for something she could not help. The thought of her helplessness frightened me, and my tantrum, I suppose, came out of that terror.
She began to cry. I knew in that moment that I was the stronger of the two of us, because I could hurt Momma’s feelings worse than she could hurt mine.
Terror upon terror. I was relieved when I could no longer control myself. I had some kind of a fit, I suppose, and passed out for a few seconds, wetting myself in the process.
Momma picked me up, wiped the urine off of me with a rag, then boiled water to fill the bathtub. (We did have running water, as I remember, but we must not have had a hot water heater. Momma was always boiling water for baths or laundry.)
By the time she had me in the tub I was limp from crying. She held me and I floated, I suppose, like a mercritter.
A sweet lassitude crept up my fingers and toes, unfurling my limbs and filling my tummy. I looked at my mother, who had cried along with me and still had tears dried like snail’s tracks on her face. I forgave her.
I did not feel quite right about myself, either, but then, my mother’s love was so big I never fully realized it was there. It was air — inside and outside me. Everywhere. I knew I could hurt Momma, but I had no concept of her taking offense or rebuking me and therefore, only the faintest notion that I could do wrong.
Momma got me pinned into my diapers — cotton ones, back then, that you scrubbed and boiled at home — and the plastic pants that went over them. She tucked me into bed. I had a little cot but most nights I shared her bed, right up under the window of her narrow room.
I pulled my Holly Hobbie quilt over my head and knelt up to look out the window. Momma was having her bath, I guess, or sitting on the front step as she liked to do after she tucked me in. Looking at the fairies, she called it. Lemme go look at the fairies and then I’ll come get in bed.
As I said, I knelt up. The window looked west. The moon was setting behind the cedar trees. I saw fireflies rising up from the long grass in the meadow between the house and the treeline — broom grass and lespedeza, I remember. Lots of other grasses. Momma told me all those names once.
I always saw fireflies further off, at first, then closer. I watched for them to come.
Then, winding through the meadow grasses and down under the pine trees, trouping down onto the yard with its thin, fine grass and bare dusty patches, I saw them. Not fireflies but people of light.
They came in ragged procession, dancing, maybe. The tallest was long as Momma’s hand — no taller. A glowing haze wrapped them for garments. Here and there I could see limbs, slender and pale.
They made no sound, except the sound of the wind whispering as it bent the grass to make way for them.
They passed under the window, turned, crossed the yard and disappeared into the ferns under the boarded-up well. But I misremember that part, or could be inventing it. Last I can see clearly in my mind’s eye is them coming closer, those children made of light.
I don’t expect ever to see them again. When I left the mountain I left all that behind. They aren’t relevant to this story, except — I tell you this as plain fact — I know the children of light exist because I’ve seen them.
Jethra had moved up to Orme Mountain from Chattanooga several years after I went away. If fairies, let’s call them, came to Momma, who was strange and strong and defenseless, they would come to Jethra, who was, in her own ways, strange and strong and defenseless.
And if beings of light could find Jethra, so, too, could beings of dark.
By the time I got to that point in my thinking, I was winding up Orme Mountain toward Bethlehem and my rooming house. I had the Honda’s windows open. The chilly night flowed through like a river of air. I might have been pondering a tad more poetically than usual — my usual quotient of poesy is if I never have to read another poem again, it’ll be too soon. But it all came together.
I don’t buy the theology behind Grin Watson’s description of Donnie Ross as someone who sold his soul to the Devil, but I understand what the words describe. Hungry shadows, thirsty air.
The supposition I’d been making all along but suppressing as ridiculous and unfounded now stood before my consciousness as inescapable. Jethra was gone because Donnie Ross had her. He had her because he wanted whatever magic drove her mad art projects. He roped me in because he’d learned somehow that I’d once been friends with Jethra. He wanted to use that connection to get information out of me or make use of me somehow.
There was just one error in his reckoning. I was still that cold-hearted boy who got social workers called on his own mother. I was about as much afraid of the powers of darkness as an old block of chert is of frost.
Oh, son, I thought. You grabbed hold of a rattlesnake when you messed with me.
I still had to find Jethra, though.
Appropriately, the United Methodists who founded Shady Oaks Rest Home back in the 1930s planted trio of the noble trees — water oaks, as I remember, with their clubbed, single-lobed leaves. When you came up the drive to Shady Oaks, the three trees seemed to lean together in conversation over the southwest corner of the house.
I could be wrong. I hadn’t been here for decades until I moved back to Bethlehem in January, and the trees were bare just now.
The rest home was no more than a comfortable, two-story brick house, about 20 years old when the Methodists moved in. It had already been a dwelling house and then a girls’ academy.
I sat up beside Momma’s bed on the second floor and looked out the window at the knobby twigs of the nearest water oak. No other trees were leafing out, either, but forsythia glowed at the corners of the stone steps down front, almost hiding the pier caps.
You will have guessed, after all this, that I came back to give Momma what I could not offer as a boy of 7 or even a young person of 25.
But what could I give?
Love? I can’t say I ever loved anyone in my whole life. As a boy I loved myself tenderly, as children, do, I suppose, but I grew out of that.
Care?
The rest home staff cared for the guests — there were just eight of them that spring — adequately, even kindly. It was a charity place, run on church donations plus the old people’s SSDI or Medicaid payments. Most of the guests had been impoverished or mentally disabled long before they grew old and qualified for a spot. Now they each stayed on a narrow bed in a room many-times-painted with high-gloss paint in pastel colors. Pink for one room, aqua for another. The rooms had religious prints on the walls, the original tongue-and-groove floors, and, for the upstairs ones, a Dutch door so the nurse could glance in but the guests — unless they were particularly nimble — could not get out.
Momma, I’d been told, was one who could still hop the Dutch door, and did, whenever the nurse wasn’t watching her, but only to pilfer cookies from the kitchen or posies from the yard.
Spring beauties it was now, their frail, pink-striped stars frosting the new grass below. She had a couple on the bedside table. They drooped over the edge of a Dixie cup.
But I hadn’t seen Momma climb over the Dutch door, or do much of anything. Instead, she played with her plastic-headed doll. Whenever I came to sit with her — and I was thorough; I came every morning and every afternoon, putting myself under discipline, because each visit was unpleasant for me — she introduced her doll to me again.
She never thought to introduce herself.
The doll she had named Dora.
She sat straight up on her bed, cross-legged and straight-backed like a little girl, wearing a yellow sweatsuit that did not belong to her, and was too big. She moved Dora through some silent play-pretend.
“May I hold Dora?” I asked once.
“No,” Momma said. She clutched Dora to her chest. The baby had waves of sculpted hair painted light brown. “I’m keeping her for Timmy.”
“That’s lovely … ”
“They took him away,” Momma explained. “But he’ll be back this afternoon.”
How could I explain that I was Timmy, and that I had engineered my own release?
What does it mean to abuse someone, to be abused by someone?
Did I, a 7-year-old boy, abuse my mother by abandoning her? She was, after all, nearly illiterate and, in many ways, already, my dependent.
Did she, a 21-year-old, mentally deficient woman, abuse me? I was — after all — the only kid in my elementary school who didn’t get whippings.
Momma never lifted her hand to me. She would have thought — but how do I know what she thought? — she was being gentle with me. Every other kid in my second-grade class was regularly whipped, by hand or with a switch if they were lucky; if not, with a belt. That was 1979 in the woods out from Bethlehem. No one thought anything about it.
Were they abused, all? An entire class? An entire generation? Every generation in human history, or European history, anyhow, right up until 1990?
Was I the lucky exception?
I’m not sure that word abuse means anything, really. We use it so much. Well, not me, I don’t use it except in the narrow sense — to make improper use of — but in general, it’s one of the maggots crawling through our language nowadays.
Abuse. Toxic. Identity. Acceptance. Expression. Comfortable, uncomfortable. Trauma.
Safe space.
Spare me.
We create these chimera for ourselves — identities — and we devote our time and energy to contemplating them, fondling them, dressing them in the latest clothing, the trendiest language, imagining up threats for them, harms done to them, defending them —
And for what?
While we protect our masturbatory images of ourselves, our identities, we give up —
“Do you mind leaving your gun in your car?”
The front desk helper turned around from watering a peace lily in a blue plastic pot and smiled at me.
“Good morning to you, too, Caitlin.” I smiled back at her. “New policy?”
Tennessee is a Constitutional Carry state as of three years ago; of course businesses can ban firearms, but they have to post notices to that effect. I’d been coming here twice daily for six weeks and hadn’t seen a notice yet.
Nor had I been accosted by Caitlin the front desk helper, who, despite her timid smile, wasn’t backing down.
“We don’t have a printer any more,” she explained, “and the one at the Methodist Church isn’t working, but Sally’s gone to Bridgeport this afternoon to print some notices at the Office Depot.”
Bridgeport is in Alabama.
I could have argued that, without the notices, Shady Oaks’ new policy could hardly be said to be in effect. Instead I asked, “Did something happen?”
“Oh my goodness, Mr. Tim.” Caitlin put away her watering can, then flopped down in the rolling chair behind the desk that stood near the front door. She pulled her cardigan more tightly around her. She had her nails done lime-green today. “Oh my goodness, didn’t you hear about that murder-suicide up in Crossville? Old man came right into the nursing home where his wife was staying, shot her in the head, then shot himself. And she was looking forward to Bingo that night.”
“Unfortunate,” I said. I had a lot of other thoughts, starting with the fact that if you’ve been reduced to anticipating Bingo games in a nursing home, a bullet in the head is probably your best outcome.
I didn’t share my opinion with Caitlin.
Five minutes later, unarmed, I climbed the creaking wood stairs up and around the corner to Momma’s room, where I introduced myself as her son, Tim, and she introduced me to her doll, Dora.
Thank you, Ray!
Fabulous