To Come and Go Like Magic (14 page)

She turns the key and the old engine coughs and sputters twice before hitting on a running rhythm.

“I’m not supposed to leave Persimmon Tree Road,” I say. “If anybody sees us, I’ll get in trouble.”

“Not going to pass anybody,” Miss Matlock says. “We’re going up on the mountain.”

“Why?”

“To do something that ought to have been done years ago.”

Willie looks at me and I shrug.

“What?” he asks.

“You’ll see.”

At the Mercy Hill cemetery the pavement ends. The road up the mountain is all dirt and rocks and cinders. It used to be a coal road and big trucks rolled down the mountain carrying their loads from the mine, but the mine’s been shut down for years. In the winter, though,
we can still fill buckets with enough coal for the fireplace.

The cemetery looks like a big grassy lawn with gray and black and pink shiny headstones to mark the graves. Two of the tombs are made from a stone that’s almost white. Some of the small stones have lambs carved on the top, some have crosses, some are flying tiny American flags. A few of the graves are covered with plastic flowers that can last for months and still look good, and the whole cemetery is surrounded by a chain-link fence with orange trumpet vines twisting through the metal.

Miss Matlock stops the truck where the fence stops. This is the pauper’s lot. The poor people are buried outside the fence in the musk thistle and weeds and wild blackberry briars. There are no stones, just little metal markers with the names written on a slip of paper covered with plastic. Some of the papers are blank, the names long washed away by the rains. Willie points to his granny’s grave, a cleared spot covered with clay dirt and a few droopy white lilies.

“We’ll make it bloom,” Miss Matlock says.

I can’t imagine how. The pauper’s lot is never cleaned or mowed or planted like the real cemetery. I remember coming up here on Decoration Day. I had helped Momma and Aunt Rose make crepe-paper flowers—yellow
mums, red roses, and pink and white tulips. We worked for a week twisting the petals and leaves into place on wires and covering the stems in green before dipping them in hot wax so they’d hold up against the rains. The women lined up behind the tombstones to take pictures that day, and all around them the cemetery bloomed like a fancy garden.

But I’ve never seen anyone decorate the pauper’s lot. I’m thinking we’re probably not supposed to be doing this. There might even be a law against it.

“What if we get in trouble?” I ask.

“What if, what if, what if,” Miss Matlock says, like I’m talking nonsense. She reaches over the side of the truck and takes out the clippers. “I’ll clip the briars back and you two dig up the roots.”

We were supposed to walk through the catacombs today, to stand in the Roman Forum and the Coliseum. I grab the hoe and start whacking hard at the chigger weeds.

“No! No!” Miss Matlock yells. “Leave those flowers.”

“But they’re chigger weeds. We’ll get a million bites.”

“That’s Queen Anne’s lace,” she says. “It makes a pretty border.”

Momma always chops down the chigger-weed “borders” at the edge of our garden. Bug bites are no fun. How will I explain getting eaten alive?

Willie Bright digs up blackberry-briar roots and we take them to the woods with the clumps of crabgrass and cockleburs. With each trip we have to pick burs off our shirts and shorts. I check his back and he checks mine.

“We’ll do a little at a time,” Miss Matlock says. She wants us to go over every inch of the pauper’s lot until it’s rid of weeds and briars so we can plant flowers. Flowers that will come back on their own every year, she says, so it won’t matter that people don’t bring baskets to decorate these graves. She’s going to buy purple sage and pincushion flowers. Dragon’s blood and dusty miller. Goldenrod and red-hot pokers to line the fence that separates this from the real cemetery.

We’ve barely cleared half the lot when a mass of dark clouds rolls in without warning and it starts pouring. We run for the truck.

Finally, we’re bouncing back down the mountain and onto the slippery pavement. I cross my fingers that nobody sees us, that I don’t have chiggers running loose in my clothes, and that I get home before Momma does.

After we help Miss Matlock put away the garden tools, I take off down Persimmon Tree Road with Willie trailing behind me. The sun’s back, breaking through the clouds, and everything that was soaked has started steaming. The dark trunks of the maples, the rocks and pebbles and dirt along the roadway, the hot pavement.
Everything giving off steam like a big cooking pot, setting the water free to go back up in the clouds.

“Rain wraiths,” Willie Bright says, catching up to me.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“That’s what Granny used to call the road fog. Rain wraiths.”

“Do you even know what a wraith is?” The minute I ask I want to bite my tongue. He probably doesn’t know and I’m sure I don’t know and now he’ll expect me to explain.

“Ghosts,” he says. “Wraiths are like ghosts.”

“What kind of ghosts?”

“People ghosts, maybe.”

“Under this pavement?”

“People ghosts from a thousand years ago, maybe,” he says. “When there were no roads.”

“It’s steam, Willie. Plain old water going back up to the clouds.”

“I know that.”

“Then why—”

“It’s just what my granny said. Sometimes I like to pretend.”

“Pretend there are ghosts flying up from the highway?” I shake my head. This boy has some strange thoughts. He’s the last person I’d expect to pretend. He never even believed in Santa Claus.

“You can pretend about anything,” he says. “Anything at all.”

“Well,” I say, “if these were ghosts, they’d be the ghosts of ants and grasshoppers and road kill, because that’s all you’ll find here.”

We walk in silence. A bird starts singing a long way off in the woods. Our shoes slap against the hot, wet pavement. I look over and see Willie Bright walking with his eyes closed, smiling, taking in deep breaths full of ghosts.

T
he Lives of Eels …

“I wish we were sitting on a rock in the Sargasso Sea,” Miss Matlock says. “At least, we’d have the trade winds blowing through our hair.”

We’re drinking lemonade at the dining-room table. It’s ninety-five degrees; too hot for tea.

“Where’s the Sargasso Sea?” I ask.

“Bring me the globe,” she says.

I go to the parlor and bring back the world globe. She spins it slowly and puts down her finger in the middle of
the ocean east of Florida and north of the long band of Caribbean islands.

“That’s the Atlantic Ocean,” I say.

“Ah, yes,” she says, “but this part is also the Sargasso Sea.” She makes a circle with her finger, says it’s the only sea in the world that has no shores, a sea of calm in the middle of fierce currents. “It’s separate from the Atlantic.”

“How?” I ask. To me the blues all run together and look the same.

“This area is very salty,” she explains, “and sometimes there’s no wind at all.” She tells me the water in this spot was once believed to be lifeless, but it’s actually full of floating sargassum seaweed and millions of eels. “Eels are born here,” she says, “and they die here, too.”

“How long do eels live?”

“Twenty years. Maybe thirty. I’d have to look it up.”

“Thirty years circling one spot when there’s a whole ocean to see?”

“No, no, no,” she says. “They spend all those in-between years in faraway places.” When an eel hatches, it’s not really an eel, she tells me; it’s a tiny transparent fish. Currents carry the larvae toward North America, but a mysterious force causes them to separate so that some drift to Europe. And then they are all transformed.

“Transformed?”

“This is when they change from fish to eel,” she says, “and the males and females separate, too.” The males stay in the harbors, but the females swim upstream to creeks and rivers. She says a girl eel might swim from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Minnesota.

“But how can they live out of the salt water?” I don’t know anything about the Sargasso Sea, but I do know that saltwater fish can’t live in the Cumberland River.

“Some mystery of nature helps them adapt,” she says. The females can live in a pond or lake or river in Kansas or Nebraska or even some little village in France for ten or twenty years, she tells me. But then they make a final journey. They eat as much as they can, the way a caterpillar eats before it becomes a butterfly, and head back across the ocean with their bodies changing as they go so that they can live in salt water again. At the coasts they join up with the male eels and head back to the Sargasso Sea.

“That’s a long way to swim,” I say. “How do they find their way back?”

“No one knows,” she says. “But they always do.”

Miss Matlock says that the eels lay their eggs and eventually die, that nothing but death could stop them from taking that journey across the sea, and nothing but death could keep them from coming back home again.

M
yra’s Poems …

Myra keeps a diary. She writes in it every night, but she won’t let me read it. She says she’s making notes about the baby.

Before Myra met Jerry Wilson and got her life ruined, she was planning to go to college. But the day after high school graduation they ran off to North Carolina and got married. Momma still cries when Myra tells about putting on her green prom dress at a Shell station off Interstate 75.

Some nights when Myra is writing at her desk, Momma stands in the doorway and smiles. Maybe she pretends Myra is still home doing her lessons and Jerry Wilson never existed, but then she looks over at me and gets jolted back to the right time. If I’m twelve, Myra can’t possibly be doing her high school homework. When I smile at Momma, she turns and walks out of the room.

This morning Momma and Myra are going over to
Jellico Springs to have lunch at the Bird’s Nest Restaurant, a spiffy place with real tablecloths on the Formica tables. They serve club sandwiches at lunchtime just like the fine restaurants in the city. Momma’s favorite is the ham-and-cheese club on white toast. She makes me hungry just talking about it, but she doesn’t ask me to go. She and Myra have
issues
to discuss.

After they leave, I run upstairs and watch the car turn onto Persimmon Tree Road, climb the hill toward town, and disappear. I picture the two of them sailing down the interstate highway. Momma and Myra and the baby-to-be on their way to a ham-and-cheese sandwich, while I’m left with chicken noodle soup and peanut butter with crackers because no one remembered to buy bread.

I slip Myra’s diary from the desk drawer and sit by the window so I can watch the road in case they forgot something and decide to come back. I skip around from one page to another but don’t find a single word about the baby. Every page has a verse and most of the verses talk about a man, but there’s a space with little stars where the name ought to be. She writes about hearing his footsteps on the wooden porch, but Myra has a concrete porch at her house in Jellico Springs. He plays the piano, she writes, and splays pages of music across the floor.

I look up
splays
and read on through a string of
words I’ve never heard …
adagio, sonatina, pizzicato, concerto, andante, arpeggio
. I pull my red notebook from my backpack and add these to my word list, making two observations: Jerry Wilson never laid hands on a piano, and these words sound like they were written by someone I’ve never met. Still, they are full of Myra’s sadness.

W
omen in the Park …