All they could do was "talk the fire out."

Part of my nightly ritual is calling U.L., checking in with him before I go to bed.  He’s a very nervous and worried man, and has a slight addiction to mayonnaise, like the rest of us in Mississippi, despite believing that it causes him great anxiety. 

It’s gotten a little better now that he’s on his “nerve pill.” Which took every preacher south of God to convince him to take.  This side of my family is very old, very superstitious, maybe a little Christian Scientist but registered as Southern Baptist…

And it never fails that each night our phone conversation goes a little something like this:

U.L.: How was today?

ME: Fine. You?

U.L.: Fine.

ME: You asleep in the chair?

U.L.: Yeah, I need to get to bed. What time is it?

ME: About 10:30.

U.L. The Lord…that late already?

ME: Yeah.

U.L. (sigh) Ok. Oh (pause) Miss Mildern was found dead today, in the bathtub.

ME: Really. What happened?

U.L.: Nobody knows. She was reading the Bible, Jermiah, Chapter 6. For what that’s worth. Oh, and Frankie Mitchie’s dead, somebody dragged him, tied to the backend of a pick-up off down in Lobutcha Swamp, out way past the cemetery.

ME: Who’s Frankie Mitchie?

U.L.: Uh, it’s (searching for names) Janine’s youngest, what’s his name, Charlie, it’s Charlie’s half-brother, you know his mother, Brenda, she married, what’s-his-face, had that other boy, at the Academy with you, John?, anyway, on the Roberts side.

ME: Oh, ok.

U.L.: Probably drugs. (pause) Ok, good night, love you.

ME: You too.

I’ve never entirely understood this fascination with who died and how. But, it’s as common to hear on the phone as hello. It’s macabre, but it’s how it is. And there’s comfort in it, somehow. 

Where I grew up, people paid attention. They talked about you, and that kept you alive, even in death.

I like knowing that. We’re obsessed with death, with its mystery and its sting.  And it’s near-misses. That’s where the superstitions lie and breed, and I revel in the supersitions that have divined my upbringing.  The home remedies, the croup cure, the p0ultices, the peppermint brandies, the horse-tail stems…any and all of it. 

It seems that most of our superstitions, the ones I remember anyway, were always about health and longevity and fixing what “ails you.”  That can’t be that bad, can it? It’s a rich past, though, having some herbal concoction to ward off evil or bend the knees of a cheating lover backward would have only made it richer.

When I was eight or nine, my great-grandmother, who was referred to as Tigi (ti-gee), passed away, moved on – as we tend to say.  I was young, of course, but I have her firmly planted in my mind; she was bewitching and irresistible, born in the middle of the last decade of the 19th century, in the Delta, I believe on a cloud.

It never ceases to impress me, to this day, that I knew someone like her, so ”fixed” and yet, transfixing; I feel I live here, in the present, too stolidly.

She always had a plate of fried dill pickles and cut cheese and chocolate milk, when I got home from school. (I have a rather amusing pallate, I know).  One morning I woke up and told her I wanted to cook with her that afternoon, so could she please wait until I came home before she cooked the pickles? She agreed.  At some point, that afternoon, when she was in the bathroom, I suppose, I decided that a jar of pepper jelly needed to be placed on the stove with the frying pickles. It was after that happened, that she calmly told me this story:

Way out in the woods past Beth-Eden Church, there was a family, one that’s lived back there for years and years, and they grow all their own food and rarely come into town but they never miss a revival because God gave them a gift, what some non-believers would call magic, but it isn’t:  they’re healers.

But now, God, gives what He wishes to whom He chooses, and He never gives any one person everything. They couldn’t heal a broken leg, or a shot-gun wound, according to Jack McKay, or make you get rich…no. 

All they could do was ”talk the fire out.”

The summer of 1944, Tigi was pregnant with her last child and was peeling potatoes for a skillet fry. She’d put the bacon grease from that morning’s breakfast in the skillet, and it was popping, eager for a scald. (The grease was hot, in other words). She wasn’t finished with the potatoes, so she went to move the skillet off the eye and it was heavier than she’d expected. She reacted by spilling the burning grease down both of her arms to the elbow. Her oldest son was of driving age, had himself a car of his own, can you believe that?, and so she sent him off for Pub Jerning, the head of the healer household.

When he arrived, he sent all the children out of the house and spoke in silence to Tigi; it’s a secret prayer with holy, unknown words and according to God’s directions, I guess, can only be passed down to one member of the household, at a time. He wrapped her arms, and in the morning, not a burn, not a scar was visible. No discoloration, no pain.

At that point, she lifted her sleeves to show me how honest the story was, and of course, I was only a child…heck, I believed that Mr. Rogers was talking only to me, every afternoon at 3:00. I thought I had complete mind-control over the entire PBS station, for crying out loud. Naturally, I believed my great-grandmother.

She died in 1984. I’ve missed her ever since.

Fast-forward to 1992. One of my older sisters is cooking dinner for the family, boiling chicken, recently divorced, unsure of why she feels this pressure to prove to everyone else that she can do this on her own; two small children, under the age of 2, and what happens?  

In an almost-identical incident to Tigi’s, she goes to lift the boiler off the hot eye and spills every last drop of oil and broth down both her arms to the elbow.  We were sitting in the den, talking, enjoying our own company, as we tend to do, watching the babies…and then a horrible scream.

We rush into the kitchen, and there bubbling on her arms is her own flesh, her eyes are nearly bloodshot from pain. Daddio, the grandfather, heads off in the car with my sister towards Beth-Eden Church. We follow behind. Pub Jerning’s granddaughter, in her late 40s now, possessor of the secret prayer, takes my sister deep into the house, leaving the rest of us on the carport.

Half an eternity passed. Finally, my sister is brought back out, arms wrapped in thinning towels. Panic seems to have abated; we all pile into our respective vehicles and return home, hungry, but thankful.

The next morning, the towels are removed, and her skin is as smooth and clear as ever. A miracle.

I can’t explain it, and I don’t want to, really, I love just knowing it, owning this information, and having even a small part to play in its lifetime. And what a lifetime it’s had, already, in my family alone. I can only imagine the day the gift was given to the Jerning family, what they must have been doing, how they heard the call: a dream, a vision. It’s delicious and spellbinding.  And the more I learn about the history of Christianity and of my own family, I must admit, the more this absorption of pagan ritualism resonates. The Church has such a colorful pre-history.  But, old eyes can’t read old truths; at least, not in the Deep South.

I graduated high school with the only Jerning great-grandchild; it’s a little like having things come full-circle. Sadly, the Jerning granddaughter, now in her early 60s, has developed terminal cancer, and so I imagine the torch will soon be passed. Pun intended. But, the Jerning great-grandchild has moved away, far from the village and its drawbridge. No doubt, what little magic was left in my hometown will soon be gone as well.

I mean not magic, the gift.

But God is still there in the village; I can see His reflection every Sunday from my Nana’s kitchen window, the top pane of which is still just within the shadow of the steeple. 

Maybe He’ll see fit to offer someone else another gift, a different gift; maybe this time He’ll ask what we need the most. 

My guess would be a microwave.

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