To Come and Go Like Magic (18 page)

Aunt Rose sits on the front porch swing sewing on a baby quilt for Myra. It’s hot and the carpenter bees are boring holes into the wood beneath the gutter, scattering dirty spots on the white paint like bird poop. When Pop comes home and sees this, he’ll spray the holes with poison from the hardware store.

Rose doesn’t notice the bees. She’s humming “Rock of Ages” as she brings the needle up and down through the cotton pieces without even using a thimble. She never sticks herself like I do.

“You’re good at that,” I say.

“What?” Rose looks over her nose glasses.

“Sewing,” I say. “You’re good at it.”

“The good Lord gave each one of us something to be good at,” she says.

“What am I good at, Aunt Rose?” I look at her and wait, thinking how Jack can play ball, Lenny can dance, and Myra can write poetry.

Rose looks out toward Persimmon Tree Road like she’s gazing at a plain white wall with no pictures on it.

“Well,” she says, “you could be a real sweet girl if you didn’t sass.”

I look at the floor.
Sweet
. That’s the last thing on earth I want to be. You can find sweet all over the place. Mercy Hill’s cup is running over with sweetness.

“I don’t want to be sweet,” I say. “I want to go places.”

Aunt Rose throws back her head and laughs out loud.

“Go places?” she says. “You want to be the mayor of Mercy Hill or maybe president of the USA?”

“No,” I say. “I want to
really
go places, like travel to the other side of the world.”

“No point in that,” says Rose, looking back at her fabric.

“No point? What do you mean?”

“Daydreaming’s a waste of time, Chileda. You ought to be a schoolteacher,” she says. “They make good money.”

“I want more than money,” I tell her, but I’m not even sure what I mean by that.

“You have to have money,” Rose says. “You’ve got to live.”

“But I feel caught,” I say. “I want to fly in a …”

“Caught?” Aunt Rose shakes her head and laughs again. “Darlin’, we’re all caught.”

I admire her patience, the way she makes the smallest stitches and keeps them all straight. Every piece fits perfectly alongside the next. Still, each one is different. Green paisley, blue checks, bright red and purple solids. Rose turns them into wedding rings and flower gardens and maple leaves. Her special gift is sewing; it’s having the fingers and the eyes and the heart to do something that would drive a person like me crazy.

You’ve got to live
, she says. Those words pop around in my head like a whip cracking. She talks about making money and teaching school in Mercy Hill, but that last sentence,
You’ve got to live
, is the only one that makes any sense to me.

C
ollecting Pop Bottles …

I meet Willie Bright at the edge of the pine forest just as if we’d timed it, even though we didn’t, and we head to Miss Matlock’s house.

Halfway through the woods I see a blue baseball cap bouncing toward us. Zeno Mayfield. It’s too late to turn
around and go back. It’s too late to tell Willie Bright to keep his mouth shut about where we’re going.

Zeno breaks into the sunlight between tree shadows with a smug look on his face.

“Well, now,” he says. “If it ain’t Chili Pepper and Bright Eyes. Where’re you two lovebirds headed?”

My face turns hot and I want to strangle Zeno. I can’t let Willie answer him.

“The store,” I say, realizing instantly that he’ll know I’m lying.

“Are you sure? You’re headed in the wrong direction,” he says, wagging his finger in front of my face.

I look at that dirty finger and think: once I leave Mercy Hill, I will never have to see Zeno Mayfield’s ugly face again.

“I’m collecting pop bottles to take to the store,” Willie Bright says to Zeno.

“Pop bottles?” Zeno’s suspicious.

“In the ditch over there,” Willie says, pointing to the creek that runs alongside the pine forest separating the woods from Miss Matlock’s yard.

“Why?” Zeno asks.

“To sell,” says Willie Bright. “People throw bottles in the ditch and I sell them at Brock’s store.”

I push past Zeno and head down the hill.

“Don’t run off,” he says. “Think I’ll come along.”

I can’t believe our luck.

At the creek Willie takes off his shoes and steadies himself on the rocks, placing one foot after the other like a tightrope walker.

“Come on,” he says, waving to me and Zeno.

Some rocks stick up out of the water, sharp and slippery and covered with slime. At the end of the concrete culvert a heap of trash has collected and made a dam. Bottles are stuck amongst the tree branches and paper and plastic—mostly Pepsi and Coke and 7UP. There’s a Fanta orange, too, and three Dr Peppers beneath an empty bottle of rubbing alcohol and a woman’s pink hairbrush.

We collect the bottles—eighteen in all. Willie was clever to pull us out of this predicament, but he’ll have to share his money with Zeno. What’s worse is now Zeno knows about this ditch and he’s sure to start taking all the bottles.

At Brock’s store we split the money three ways and Zeno buys bubble gum. Willie puts his coins in his pocket and I do, too. When Zeno takes off toward the baseball field, he’s all smiles, cracking bubbles like a cap gun.

I take out my money and offer it to Willie.

“Keep it,” he says.

“But Zeno will start getting your bottles now and you won’t have any money.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I know places you can find a ton of bottles. We go every Saturday morning.”

“Who?”

“My family. We all go.”

I think about Willie Bright wading barefoot through the creeks on Saturday morning picking up bottles from amongst Mercy Hill’s weekly trash while I read and Jack runs and Lenny dances for real or in his head. I think of Saturday mornings with Myra and the baby-to-be sleeping with the shades down and Uncle Lucius stomping across our attic from one end to the other without going anyplace. I think about Willie Bright saying his is a different world, and he may be right.

F
ishing and Fairies and Bugs That Kill Themselves …

First there’s darkness without sound and then a bird calls and another and soon a whole chorus of birds starts singing. Light seeps in through the tree branches and melts the fog and moves like a ghost through the valley. Finally, you can see pieces of sky and the blue
mountains in the distance. This is how morning comes to Mercy Hill.

I plow through weeds up to my knees, headed to the river with Uncle Lucius. I’ve got a book and he’s got a fishing pole. The river’s dark green, almost black, but it shimmers in patches where the sunlight falls. Uncle Lu says the light on the river is made by fairy dancers. Every time their feet touch the water it sparkles.

“I don’t see any fairies,” I say, looking down so Uncle Lu won’t see me smile.

“Nobody can see them,” he says. “You can only see the spots where their feet touch.”

I don’t care for fishing, but here on the riverbank it’s quiet and cool and I can read in peace and not be disturbed by the television blaring or the screen door slamming or Aunt Rose coming over and giving me something boring to do while Momma’s at work. Here Uncle Lu can pace the riverbank without making any stomping sounds. In the wettest places the mud squishes under his shoes, but the river flow drowns out even the squishing sounds.

Last night Myra was in one of her crying moods, talking about Jerry Wilson drowning and the baby coming and not knowing how she was going to make it, so Momma sat up with her till midnight. Myra can sit and watch game shows on television half the night, laughing
and guessing the answers and complaining when the contestants miss easy questions, but the minute she turns off that set, she starts bawling.

I couldn’t go to bed when she and Momma came into the room, so I went out on the front porch and sat with the bugs. A whole bunch of hard-shelled beetles went after the porch light over and over until they beat themselves to death on the screen door. This morning Momma swept a pile of dead bugs off the porch and into the azalea bushes. What makes a bug want to do something like that?

“What are you reading?” Uncle Lucius asks. He’s standing with his fishing pole in one hand and a cigarette dangling from the other.

“Pride and Prejudice,”
I say. I start to mention that there were questions about this book on my state test last spring, that I later saw a copy on Miss Matlock’s bookshelf and asked if I could borrow it. She just gave it to me, said I could have it for keeps. I almost let all this slip, but I stop talking in time.

“What’s it about?” he asks.

“It’s a love story.” I hold up the book and turn the cover around so Uncle Lu can see it.

“Too much pride’s a sin,” he says. “You ought to be reading the Bible.”

“I do. I read the Bible sometimes.”

“If I was going to read, that’s the
only
book I’d open,”
Uncle Lu says. He brings his line up out of the water, but there’s nothing on it.

“Of course, you don’t read much, do you?” I give Uncle Lucius a knowing look that could verge on sassy.

“Got better things to do with my time,” he says, tossing the line back into the water.

I try to think of something Uncle Lu does that’s better than reading a book, but I can’t come up with anything.

“Like what?” I ask.

He thinks for a second while he’s dragging on his cigarette.

“Fishing,” he says. “Fishing’s better than reading.”

“Not in my book,” I say.

He laughs and shakes his head. “You don’t
have
a book.”

H
ome Alone …

They’re all gone! This never, never, never happens.

Before we loaded up the house with relatives, I was alone at least once a week. I’d slip Old Tate and Foxy Lady inside and we’d chase up and down the stairs as free as
whip-poor-wills until it was time for the others to come home. There was some excitement to this as Momma does not allow dogs in the house. They have fleas and drop hair and like to mark their territory.

This morning the dogs are stretched out asleep on the porch. I open the screen door halfway and call Old Tate, but he just cracks his eyes a wee bit and closes them again. Foxy Lady doesn’t even bother to wake up. I guess I don’t want to chase dogs through the house anymore anyway.

I pour a glass of iced tea and head upstairs. Being bored is not an excuse. Still …

Myra’s diary is not on her desk. It’s not lying open in plain sight where anybody could just glance over and read something by accident. It’s not even in a top drawer with the pencils and paper and rubber bands that somebody else might need. It’s all the way in the bottom dresser drawer beneath the stockings and underwear.

Myra’s poems don’t rhyme. Some are only two lines long. Others go on for pages. One verse is just a list of questions:

Will he come back someday?

Will he play, again, the songs I love to hear?

Will he ever see his gift to me?

Why doesn’t she write it all out, tell the whole story? If I kept a diary, I wouldn’t write nonsense verses that don’t even rhyme.