Granny Magic.

I didn't know Granny Magic was magic. Actually, I didn't know it was called Granny Magic.

Where I grew up, if you got burned, somebody knew who could talk the fire out. If you had a wart, somebody knew who could talk it off. If someone was pregnant, somebody's mama had a wedding ring and a piece of string. And I don't mean this was some strange little thing my family did.

This was everybody.

Almost everyone I knew growing up had either had the fire talked out of a burn, had a wart talked off, or knew somebody who had. The same was true in the little towns around us. There were people who could stop blood. People who knew who had which gift. People who knew who had passed one down and who could inherit it next. Nobody treated these people like mystics. They were just people we knew.

It was just life.

My earliest memory of this kind of thing is Mama with a piece of string and somebody's wedding band. She would tie the ring to the string and hold it suspended over a woman's wrist. First, she would make sure the ring was completely still. Then she'd hold the string still and wait.

The ring would begin moving on its own.

Straight line: boy. Circle: girl.

She didn't only do it with pregnant women. She would do it with women who hadn't had children yet and ask how many children they would have and in what order. The ring would move, stop, move again, stop. Each movement was another child, and the direction it moved told you the sex.

My Aunt Tina's went straight, stopped, then straight again.

Two boys.

She had two boys.

I watched Mama do this over and over throughout my childhood. Different women. Different combinations. Boy, girl. Girl, boy. Boy, girl, girl. As far as I remember, it was right every single time.

I can do it now.

At some point later in life, I learned that other people might call that divination. That was news to me. To me, it was just something Mama knew how to do.

The same was true of talking fire.

The summer before third grade, my friend English and I were playing outside at Daddy's house. I was barefoot, because I was almost always barefoot. Daddy had one of what we called bulldozer piles burning in the yard: trees, brush and whatever else had been bulldozed into a giant heap and set on fire.

For reasons involving a stolen pack of Marlboro Reds and some spectacular childhood judgment, I decided I needed to climb that pile.

I knew smoke was coming out of the top.

Smoke meant fire.

Apparently, eight-year-old me had not fully explored the implications of that observation.

When I stepped onto the pile, my bare feet sank into hot coals. I remember feeling myself going down into it and trying to get out, only to sink farther.

Then something happened that I still can't explain.

It felt like two hands grabbed me by the shoulders and lifted me straight out.

Suddenly I was standing beside the pile.

I looked around.

Nobody was there but English.

And I knew she hadn't pulled me out. She wasn't strong enough to lift me that way, and more importantly, she was standing there laughing her ass off. She thought I was playing around. Apparently, whatever sounds I had been making while my feet were burning had not effectively communicated emergency.

I remember looking at her like she was crazy. Then I calculated my options.

Daddy wasn't home. English was clearly not going to be much help. The neighbors were.

So I ran.

Bare feet burning all the way across the gravel road and down to the neighbor's house.

I made it into their yard, fell backward onto the grass, threw my feet into the air and started screaming:

“Help! My feet! My feet! My feet!”

By then, English had apparently figured out that I had not, in fact, been playing around. She came running after me and went to the neighbor's door.

The neighbor came outside and found me lying in her yard with my burned feet in the air. I was crying too hard to be particularly useful, so English explained what had happened.

Minus the cigarette bit.

The neighbor went inside and called Daddy. This was before everybody carried a phone in their pocket. She called the house.

Daddy wasn't supposed to be there.

But thank God, he had happened to pull back into the yard and heard the house phone ringing. He answered. And that's how he found out his barefoot eight-year-old was lying down the road in the neighbor's yard with badly burned feet.

Daddy came down to get me.

I could see the fear in his eyes.

Daddy isn't particularly good at looking scared. When he's scared, he tends to get a little mean instead.

So as I lay there crying, my teeth chattering from the pain, Daddy looked at me and said:

“Shut up or I'll give you something to cry about.”

Then:

“If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough. Shut up and take it like a man.”

I remember biting my lip and trying as hard as I could to stop crying.

The neighbor looked at him.

“But she's not a man. She's a little girl.”

Daddy remained unmoved by this technicality.

“Well, if she's gonna be dumb, she's gotta be tough.”

Daddy picked me up and put me in the passenger seat of his truck.

I don't remember what happened to English after that. Maybe we dropped her off at home. Maybe she ran home herself. She lived right down the road. That part is gone.

What I remember is being in Daddy's truck.

My feet were shoved up under the air-conditioning vents, and Daddy had the air blasting on them because the cold air was one of the only things that gave me any relief. My teeth were chattering, partly from the cold and mostly from the pain.

Every time Daddy heard my teeth chatter, he'd turn the air conditioning off because he thought I was freezing.

“No! Turn it back on. Turn it back on.”

So he'd turn it back on, and I'd shove my feet under the vents again.

Meanwhile, Daddy was unraveling.

“Oh my God, your mama's gonna kill me. You're never gonna get to come stay with me again. Oh my God. I wasn't watching you. I'm gonna be in so much trouble.”

I figured we were going to see Old Doc, Dr. Sawyer. He was our family doctor.

Except we weren't.

Daddy pulled up to Ms. Charlene's house, and to me that wasn't strange either.

Mama and Ty Daddy were already there waiting on us.

Ms. Charlene took my right foot. She wasn't touching the burned part. I remember her holding somewhere around my calf or leg and blowing over my foot while mumbling something under her breath. I couldn't understand what she was saying.

But while she talked to that foot, it didn't hurt.

My left foot felt like it was sitting in the pit of hell.

“Ms. Charlene, the left one hurts.”

So she switched. She started talking to my left foot.

The left stopped hurting.

Then the right started again.

“Oh, now the right one.”

“I'm gonna get them both, honey. Just be patient.”

So I tried.

She went back and forth, blowing over my feet and quietly saying whatever it was she was saying.

And when Ms. Charlene finished, my feet didn't hurt anymore.

Not less.

None. Gone.

Then we all went to see Doc.

First thing Doc asked was:

“You take her to Charlene yet?”

Daddy said yes.

“Good, good.”

That question probably explains my hometown better than I can.

Doc didn't roll his eyes. He didn't ask why Daddy had taken a little girl with badly burned feet to Ms. Charlene before bringing me to him. He just wanted to know if we'd taken care of that part yet.

Ms. Charlene talked the fire out.

Doc treated the burns.

Mr. Morris talked off warts.

Mama held a wedding ring suspended from a piece of string and waited for it to move.

Then I'd see them all at church.

Nobody thought any of this was strange, and neither did I.

Doc examined my feet and told us I had second- and third-degree burns. He put salve on them, bandaged them and told us how long I needed to stay off of them. Apparently, being barefoot was a blessing. Otherwise, my shoes, jelly shoes at the time, would have melted into my feet.

He also said they shouldn't hurt since I had seen Ms. Charlene.

The burns were still there. The bandages were still there. I still had to stay off my feet. I started third grade with my feet bandaged and no shoes.

But they didn't hurt.

I spent part of the recovery laid up at Granny Louese's house, where she was appropriately spoiling me. She made me chicken and dumplings and let me watch Bill Nye the Science Guy and Reading Rainbow.

One day, while I was lying there, I felt something inside one of my feet go:

Glub.

Glub.

Glub.

That's the only way I know how to describe it. It felt like pouring soda out of a bottle.

When I took the bandage off, one of the biggest blisters had drained.

Bizarre.

And that was that.

Several years later, I got a wart on my finger.

I showed Daddy.

“I can't get this thing to come off. Why do I have a wart?”

“Oh, let me take you to Mr. Morris.”

“Mr. Morris can talk warts off?”

“Yeah. You didn't know that?”

No.

Apparently, there were gaps in my education.

We climbed into Daddy's truck and went looking for Mr. Morris. We found him walking around his barn in blue jean overalls and boots.

That's how I remember Mr. Morris: blue jean overalls, boots, and most of the time no shirt underneath. Sometimes he wore one.

Mostly he didn't.

Daddy essentially announced:

“Kid's got a wart.”

Mr. Morris looked at me.

“Oh, okay. Bring her over here.”

I held out my hand.

He said something quietly to himself that I couldn't understand.

Then he looked at me.

“All right.”

That was it.

He told me the wart would go away when I forgot about it.

Naturally, I objected.

“I ain't gonna forget about it.”

I was a curious kid. I was also an arguer. And if your instructions required me to forget something, we had a problem.

I remembered everything.

Mr. Morris didn't seem particularly bothered by my objection.

“Well, the longer it takes for you to forget about it, the longer it'll take to go away. It'll go away when you forget about it.”

Which seemed terribly inconvenient.

But eventually, somehow, I forgot.

A few days later, I suddenly remembered.

Oh, shoot. My wart.

I looked down.

The damn thing was gone.

Mr. Morris had also told me I'd never have another one.

I haven't.

There were people who could stop blood too. Some people said they could even do it from somewhere else. They didn't need to be standing beside you.

And there were rules.

Where I grew up, certain gifts had to travel through bloodlines, and they had to cross. A woman could pass the gift to a man in her bloodline. A man could pass it to a woman.

Woman to man. Man to woman. Back and forth through generations.

You could only tell one person.

And once you told them, you couldn't do it anymore.

The gift left you when you gave it away.

I think about that part a lot, because that isn't simply teaching.

It's inheritance.

To preserve the thing, somebody has to give it up.

And still, somehow, none of this seemed mystical to me.

It wasn't until I left home that I discovered other people thought any of this was weird.

Suddenly there were names for it.

Folk magic. Granny magic. Divination. Superstition. Witchcraft. The Devil. Demons.

And I remember essentially thinking:

Wait.

What?

Because none of those words belonged to my childhood memories of it.

My memories were pretty Ms. Charlene. Mr. Morris in his blue jean overalls. Mama with somebody's wedding ring suspended from a piece of string. Doc asking whether we'd taken me to Charlene yet.

We didn't need a word for it.

It was just something people knew how to do.

And the accusations of magic or even demons seemed especially strange to me because so much of it involved Scripture.

Psalms.

Bible verses.

Prayer.

Which eventually left me with a question I still don't know how to answer:

What exactly is the difference between prayer and magic?

If someone asks God for healing and something happens, we call that an answered prayer. If someone knows a particular Psalm, says it over a burn and the pain leaves, when did it become magic?

Is it the ritual? Religion has ritual.

Is it repeating particular words? Prayer does that.

Is it believing certain people have gifts? Christianity has that too.

So where is the line?

And who drew it?

I still do things that live somewhere around that line.

I use muscle testing.

I ask myself a question while standing still and let my body answer. Usually, forward is yes. Backward is no.

It's a natural lean. And when I say lean, I don't mean I deliberately shift my weight.

Sometimes the movement is so strong that Quentin, who doesn't even know what I'm doing, has reached out to catch me because he thought I was about to fall.

Sometimes my yes and no reverse, so I calibrate first. I get still. I get myself back into what I think of as my natural rhythm.

Show me yes.

Show me no.

Wait for the corresponding lean.

Once I know which direction means what that day, I ask the real question.

Sometimes it's something significant: career paths, decisions I've been arguing with myself about.

Sometimes it's what I should eat for dinner.

I trust it.

It has never led me astray.

I have a theory about this.

I think humans have more instincts and senses than the five we learn about in elementary school. Animals certainly perceive things we don't, or perceive them differently and far more acutely. They respond to changes in their environments that we sometimes don't even notice.

And I sometimes wonder whether early humans were better at that too.

Maybe there were things we once had to notice in order to survive that most of us stopped paying attention to when our lives became safer. Maybe some people stopped needing certain instincts and got worse at hearing them. Maybe other people, other families, other bloodlines, needed them longer and kept listening.

I don't know.

That's a Margin for another day.

But it makes me wonder whether some of the things we call gifts are actually things humans have always been capable of doing, and some people simply never stopped.

Or maybe that's not it at all.

Maybe the lean is kinesiology. Maybe it's the ideomotor effect. Maybe it's my subconscious answering a question before my conscious mind has finished arguing about it. Maybe it's intuition. Maybe it's my higher self. Maybe it's a spirit guide. Maybe it's an angel. Maybe it's God.

Maybe it's prayer.

Maybe it's magic.

Maybe some of those are different words for the same thing.

I don't know.

And I don't think I need to.

What I do know is that I can't help noticing ordinary language contains a phrase for the moment when we don't consciously know what we want yet.

We say:

I'm leaning toward...

Maybe that's just language.

Maybe it's more literal than people realized.

I don't know exactly where prayer ends and magic begins.

I'm not entirely convinced they do.

So do I believe in Granny Magic?

I'm leaning toward yes.