To Come and Go Like Magic (19 page)

S
ong of the Grasshopper …

We dig and hoe and rake and clip. Through thickets of brush and briars, wild-plum thorns and tangled roots. A yellow pumpkin sun overhead and headed west. Shadows lengthening down the hillside.

“It’s sizzling hot out here,” I say.

Willie Bright looks up at me with dirt on his face, a long-handled hoe in his hand.

“We’re about done,” Miss Matlock says.

The pauper’s lot looks like it’s been swept clean, bare as a board. It almost looked better when there was stuff growing here, when there were at least some wild green vines across the graves. But Miss Matlock insisted on stripping the whole lot before planting so the briars don’t take over again.

She has Willie and me pull off the blue tarp from the truck bed and there’s a garden of flowers in the back. Lavender and sweet alyssum and daisies. Blazing stars for the butterflies and Indian pink to attract hummingbirds. And there are lilies and sweet peas and red-hot pokers for
the fence that separates this lot from the real cemetery. A yellow rose for the head of Willie’s grandmother’s grave. A white crepe myrtle that’s just a tiny bush now but will someday be taller than us.

“We’ll put the myrtle smack in the middle,” Miss Matlock says.

Planting is a lot easier than cleaning. I don’t have my watch today, so I keep an eye on the sun. I have to get home in time to clean up before Aunt Rose comes to cook supper.

Miss Matlock sits on the ground to plant.

“I can’t bend over anymore,” she says. “It’s too hard on my back.”

She sets the plants in rows and circles, gets up and steps back to look over it all, and has Willie and me dig up and replant the daisies. She wants the colors to mix just right. She wants this place to look like an English garden.

I’m tired and hungry and hot. I’d rather be in Miss Matlock’s cool parlor looking at books and talking about traveling. These flowers will grow just as well whether the pinks are lined up beside the yellows or the reds or the whites.

I think she cares way too much about this lot. Maybe she’s like Lady Macbeth, who Lenny’s been reading about. He signed up for the advanced classes next fall and they have to read Shakespeare over the summer. He says Lady Macbeth is a kook, that she washes her hands a million times trying to get rid of her sin. Maybe that’s what’s
wrong with Miss Matlock. She’s trying to make up for running away from Mercy Hill. But what’s that have to do with the paupers? With Willie’s grandma Helena?

“Weeding will have to be done next spring,” she says, looking at me. “You and Willie will need to handle it.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll help if I’m around,” she says.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“No plans at the moment, but you never can tell.”

“It’ll have to be done
every
spring,” Willie says. “Weeds always come back.”

“I suppose it’ll be a good project, then,” she says. “It’ll give the two of you something to do.”

All around us the pauper’s lot is blooming—red and yellow and green and purple. The lavender smells like perfume. The yellow rose has three perfect blooms, each petal curled around the stem just right with no flaws like the crepe-paper flowers we make for Decoration Day.

Miss Matlock looks up and smiles. “The ones lying here would be joyous if they could see how we’ve spent our time today.”

Willie starts to say something, but she stops him, puts a dirty finger to her lips.

“Shhh,” she says. “Listen.”

We listen. To a rustling in the summer grass, a breeze full of imagined voices.

“What is it?” says Willie.

“Whispers,” Miss Matlock says. “Whispers of the dead.”

I look at Willie and he rolls his eyes. We quietly go back to planting, crumbling the hard clay earth over the last few lily bulbs.

Willie glances up every now and then and looks toward his grandma’s grave, its metal marker covered with yellow petals and the green, thorny branches of the new rosebush.

“It’s a grasshopper,” I say.

“What?”

“That sound. It’s just a grasshopper singing.”

T
he Music Man Knocks …

A man stops by the house asking about Myra. He is tall and skinny, with red curly hair and little wire-rimmed glasses that keep sliding down his nose. I talk to him through the screen door and keep it locked. I wouldn’t have answered except that Uncle Lu and Jack are both at home.

“Myra and the baby went to town,” I say.

“Baby?” This fellow scrunches his eyebrows at me like I’m lying.

“Baby-to-be,” I say, thinking I’d better make it clear.

“You m-mean? Well, Myra d-didn’t …” He stutters and shuffles his feet and acts like I’ve told him the sky is falling. Myra’s baby is old news. Everybody in town knows about it, so this makes me suspicious.

“Who
are
you?” I ask.

“A friend of Myra’s,” he says. He has a proper accent and is wearing bell-bottom blue jeans and a T-shirt with Bob Dylan’s ugly face on it. His leather sandals have loops around the big toes. They’re clearly hippie shoes.

“I don’t know you,” I say.

“Well, no,” he says. “I’ve been gone awhile.”

“Gone from where?” I ask. “You’re
definitely
not from here.”

He laughs and his eyes dance. They’re blue like the flame on the gas stove. Hot blue eyes. I’ve never seen eyes like that.

“From Jellico Springs now,” he says. “I teach at the college.”

“Oh?”

He hesitates. “I’m originally from Wisconsin.”

“Originally?” I say. I like the way that word bounces on my tongue. “Then Wisconsin’s your true home.”

He smiles and shows a set of perfect teeth. It looks
like he’s about to say something else, but I decide to jump in first.

“If you’re Myra’s friend, how come you didn’t know about the baby-to-be?”

He shrugs and stares. I stare right back. After he says
Well, let’s see
twice, I decide to answer for him.

“You didn’t know because you’ve been away for a really long time, right?”

“Right,” he says. “I’ve been on sabbatical.”

“What kind of word is that?”

“Sabbatical,” he says again, and spells it like I’m in the first grade or something.

“Like the Sabbath,” I say. “Like Sundays. You had a lot of Sundays.”

“Yes and no,” he says, and he starts laughing again. It’s easy to make this fellow laugh.

“There’s no such thing,” I say.

“No such thing as
sabbatical?”
He raises his eyebrows.

“No such thing as an answer like
yes and no
. It’s either yes
or
no. It can’t be both.”

“Sometimes it can,” he says.

“Not in my book,” I say. I wait for him to say that I don’t have a book, but he just smiles and throws his head back to get his long hair out of his eyes. It’s so curly it just falls right back into place.

“You should be in one of my classes,” he says.

“What do you teach?”

“Philosophy. My students argue with me a lot. It takes a while to understand the yes-
and
-no answers to some questions.”

I give him my best serious look. “Really?” I say. “Pop says it takes as long to become a fool as it does to become a bright person.”

“And you’re a bright person, I assume.”

“Well,” I say, “I’m sure not a fool.” I decide to ask him the question that has been burning in my mind all summer, waiting for the right person to come along. This hippie teacher could be the mystery man. “Do you play the piano?”

He pitches me a puzzled look through the screen door.

“Sure, but why do you ask?”

“I knew Myra had a friend who played the piano but didn’t know who he was. Now I guess I do.”

“Now you do,” he says, nodding.

That explains everything. And nothing. Myra’s poems are about this man, this hippie teacher from Wisconsin who has played the piano for her in some other life she lives in secret. This new development will be rich news to Lenny’s ears.

“What’s your name?” I ask. It seems necessary now that I have this information.

“Drew,” he says. “Drew Montgomery.”

“I’ll tell Myra you were here.” I smile at Professor Montgomery and close the front door.

He turns around once from the yard, looks back, and squints in the sun. Then he drives away in a green Volkswagen. Nobody in Mercy Hill would buy a shrimp car like that. Pop says you may as well be riding in a baby buggy.

T
he Lives of Rocks …

“The music man came by to see Myra today,” I say to Lenny.

We’re sitting on the floor in the boys’ room looking through Lenny’s rock collection. He ordered something called a trilobite from a museum magazine that he picked up at the library. He says it’s a prehistoric sea animal, but it looks like a bug to me, a bug that’s been etched in stone. Pop says it’s just a seven-dollar rock.

“The music man?” Lenny looks puzzled, but I know he’s putting on. He’s read Myra’s poems, too, and I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten them.

“That man Myra wrote about in her poem book,” I say.

Lenny lines up the moonstones and geodes and the one red jasper.

“How do you know?” he asks.

“I saw him. He talked to me. His name’s Drew Montgomery.
Professor
Montgomery.” I tell Lenny how the professor stuttered and shuffled his feet.

“Why’d you open the door to a stranger?” Lenny says.

“Uncle Lu and Jack were here,” I say.

“Did they see him?”

“Nope. Didn’t even know he was here.” I like it when Lenny can hardly believe what I’m telling him but knows it’s true all the same. “He teaches philosophy,” I say.

“I thought you said he was a music man.” Lenny opens his rock book to a glossy page of agates and opals and topaz, acting like he’s not much interested in what I’m telling him.

“A philosophy teacher can play a piano, too.”

“You might be right,” Lenny says. “Did you tell Myra?”

“No. Not yet.”

Lenny points out a picture of some more pretty rocks. “Apache tears,” he says. “I have some here.” He takes some stones from a tiny blue velvet pouch.

“Why are they called that?” I ask, admiring the small round nuggets. They’re greenish black and glassy and smooth to the touch.

“They’re from lava,” Lenny says. “Volcanic lava. When it pours into a lake or into the ocean, it cools and forms these rocks.”

“But why are they called that?”

“Apache tears?” Lenny shrugs. “I guess because ancient people used them as tools or sometimes for their ceremonies,” he says. “They get little bubbles of air and are smoothed by the wind and water. They look like real tears, don’t they?”

I take a closer look at the little rocks. They could be beads or pieces of glass. Or tears, I suppose.

“What do you think Myra will do?” I ask, handing the nuggets back to Lenny.

“About what?”

“About that hippie college professor.”

“He’s a hippie?” Lenny’s eyebrows jump.

“He wears sandals and ragged pants, and he’s got long hair,” I say.

“Your pop won’t like that,” Lenny says.

I’m looking over Lenny’s shoulder, reading snatches of his rock book. It says on one page that over a billion years lumps of coal become diamonds, roses petrify, and blue stars die and fade away. Nothing ever stays the same.