Steelie

Richard Schreck

Hoke St. John hurled the shiny sphere far out into Bayou Lafourche, perfect form bringing to bear the strength of his entire being, legs to wrist. When the surface of the water had stilled, Aunt Estelle’s voice called out from higher ground behind him, “Perfect. Now throw the rest. You know why.”

Throw the rest. Hoke recalled the day he had arrived at her door, an orphaned child appointed to relatives. That day Uncle Mike had shown him the shooters—a pair of three-quarter inch diameter stainless steel ball bearings, small components of a long-discarded piece of machinery—along with the leather pouch now settled heavy in Hoke’s pocket and the cat’s eye marbles inside. Wary in the presence of unfamiliar adults, Hoke had sat silent in a straight-back dining chair as Uncle Mike and Aunt Estelle spoke together on the far side of the room. Out in the yard, his cousins Les and Billy shouted taunts and derision to each other in raucous play, their words blurred by distance and windows shut tight against the Louisiana heat.

At last, Uncle Mike had left the room and returned with the pouch. “Ever seen a steelie?” He handed over one of the stainless steel spheres to Hoke.

A quick child, Hoke had read in Uncle Mike’s eyes that the expected answer was no. An honest child, Hoke shook his head. He closed his fingers around the steelie, the weight of it redolent of gears and ominous racket, a window into the mysteries of dangerous mechanical devices.

 “No one plays marbles anymore, but when I was your age, we did. I used this for a shooter. C’mon. I’ll show you.” Out in the yard, Uncle Mike scratched a circle in the ground with a stick and placed several of the cat’s eye marbles in the center. “There’s different ways to play. This way we take turns using our shooters to see which one of us can knock the most marbles out of the circle.”  

Hoke had caught on quickly. Engrossed in the techniques Uncle Mike was using, he even developed a few of his own. Their game continued until Aunt Estelle had called them in for dinner.

Uncle Mike and Aunt Estelle raised him with their own two sons. From the first, the brothers admired Hoke and readily followed him into boyhood explorations and adventures. The three became inseparable.

But as Les and Billy had grown older, new acquaintances lured them into questionable activities. Out on their own, the brothers made poor choices, falling victim to addictions punctuated by cycles of rehab and defiance. Ultimately, the destructive pattern took both their lives.

In her grief following their burials, Aunt Estelle often spoke about the effect Hoke had had on her family. Each time he visited, she insisted on recounting the summer of his arrival—the afternoons she and Uncle Mike had watched “their three boys” playing marbles in the yard, the ways they found contentment as their family circle calmed, Les and Billy more mature in Hoke’s presence.

When Uncle Mike succumbed to cancer, Aunt Estelle lost her anchor. In her loneliness, she had fallen into the hands of charlatans—fortune tellers, palm readers, con artists—one of whom convinced her that something among her husband’s possessions had been cursed. That unnamed item had caused the deaths of her sons, then the death of her husband and, if not identified and disposed of, would surely kill Hoke as well. Fearing for his life, she had embarked on a great cleansing. Each time Hoke returned to visit, more of Uncle Mike’s possessions had vanished. In the end, nothing in the house remained to evidence Uncle Mike had ever lived there.

Exhausted, Aunt Estelle had believed her task complete. 

And then she had remembered the marbles …

Memories of that first game with Uncle Mike crowded from his mind awareness of the soft ground at the water’s edge, of wet grass soaking his legs, of bayou mud easing into the creases of his shoes. Reaching back into his pocket, he grasped for the pouch of cat’s eyes. He rolled the glass spheres around through the soft leather, picturing Uncle Mike, then flung underhand to make it arc high, easy for Aunt Estelle to see, his arm ending straight out, open palm turned to the sky. Far from shore, the pouch hit the water, concentric circles marking the spot.

Hoke held the position long enough to make the point.

Clutching the remaining steelie, he turned to Aunt Estelle, behind him on higher ground. “I’d like to keep this one.”

Impatient, she shook her head. “All those things have to go.”

For the past three years, as she rid herself of Uncle Mike’s possessions, Hoke had witnessed her being consumed by this obsession and knew she had the will to fixate on this last steelie for the rest of the year—for the next five, the next ten. Damn, her fractured reasoning was going to keep her fixated on his last steelie forever.

But he could not bear to throw out this one last shooter. His final tie to Uncle Mike. “You should go back to the truck.”

She tucked a handkerchief under her coat sleeve, leaving a corner out under her wrist in practiced efficiency. Silent and unmoving, she kept her eyes trained on her nephew.

Hoke turned again to face the bayou. Uncomfortable with his reliance on subterfuge to keep the shooter, he stalled, turning his attention to a water bird searching for food in the shallows. Familiar with the intrusion of humans, the heron gave him little notice before returning to its hunt.

The heron.

A flood of other childhood memories overwhelmed him. Memories of Uncle Mike, of the bayou, of their times together on the water. Of long, lazy afternoons in the boat fishing for bass.

Having committed to keeping the last steelie, Hoke carried off the bluff as best he could with Aunt Estelle’s eyes on his back. He feigned a second toss.  

He dropped his arm and turned from the bayou. Making his way toward Aunt Estelle and past, shoes sending up sucking sounds with each step, he reached the Silverado without looking over his shoulder. At the passenger door, he waited to help her in, still not looking back at her.

“Thank you, Hoke.” Flat and formal, she spoke with forced politeness from close behind him.

Hoke opened the door of the pickup and moved to take her elbow, but she brushed him aside, grasped the door frame, and pulled herself up onto the seat. As he closed her door and rounded the front of the truck, her unrelenting gaze glued his thoughts to the steelie and kept him silent as he climbed in behind the wheel.

“You kept it. I could tell.”

Seeing no benefit to replying, he drove in silence, resisted reaching for the sphere to assure himself.

  “I know you want to hold onto Michael’s steelie. Why? What are you going to do with it?” Aunt Estelle’s tone conveyed exasperation as with a child grinding down on her last nerve but grown beyond her command. The marbles had long been Hoke’s, and the right to keep them as well. “We have to let it go.’’

Hoke drove faster now, calling upon the bayou rushing past and the churning crunch of gravel underneath to calm him. They yielded no relief. Aunt Estelle had forced him to discard his treasures. Compelled his compliance through her certainty that—since he loved her and she had no one left but him—her dependence upon him gave her power over him. Through age and loss, she had ceased to be the person he’d known.

Across the narrow strip of ragged grass separating the road from the bayou, a water bird caught his eye. The heron, wading in the shallows looking for food, gave the passing truck no more than a glance before returning assured to its hunt. This time, the bird evoked even more memories of his times with Uncle Mike. The steelie, Hoke realized, was not the only link between the two of them. He would always have their times together on the bayou. Uncle Mike had taught him to fish, helped land his first largemouth bass. He’d given advise sparingly but always as if Hoke were an equal deserving of respect.

Above all else, Hoke wanted to become the kind of man he understood his uncle to have been.

As he drove, the heron’s image appeared in his side mirror, its sanguine posture demonstrative of calm intent, secure in its knowledge of what it was and what it was meant to do. Hoke’s memories broadened and he recalled Aunt Estelle as the one who had insisted they take him in as an orphan. Hoke stopped the truck, opened the door, and stepped out. He reached into his pocket. In one smooth motion, he hurled the steelie up and out across the narrow strip of ragged grass into the waters of Bayou Lafourche.