To Come and Go Like Magic (2 page)

Miss Matlock says she’s going on seventy-one years old. She’ll be seventy-two next year on the same day as the bicentennial, she says. The Fourth of July. And America will be two hundred. There’ll be fireworks and picnics and parades everywhere.

Miss Matlock lives on Persimmon Tree Road five houses from us. I’ve seen her puttering in the garden, but she never talks to anybody. She’s new to Mercy Hill, been here just a little over a year, even though Pop says she grew up in that same house back in the day. He doesn’t say what day.

“I once taught seventh grade in Jellico Springs,” she says. But that was in another lifetime, she tells us, a time when teachers were still allowed to hit you with wooden paddles one minute and pray with you the next.

“The Middle Ages,” Zeno says.

Miss Matlock pauses in her introduction, gazes out the window.

After two years of teaching she went off to see the world, she says. The world is her favorite subject. She has never taught grammar, but she can teach anything in a pinch. And we all know the principal was in a big pinch trying to find a last-minute replacement for Mrs. Sturdivant, who had insisted that she was just getting fat until everybody could tell the difference. Fat does not collect in one spot the way a baby does.

Fifteen minutes in the classroom and Miss Matlock takes down our poster of
HOW AND WHEN ADVERBS
and pins a world map to the bulletin board. She points to the map with her ruler and covers up the printed names
with her free hand. What’s this green country? Which ocean is this? How many miles do you think it might be from here to here? Peck. Peck. Her ruler jumps across oceans and continents. We’re all dummies.

“Who cares,” Zeno Mayfield says from the back of the room. “What’s it matter?”

“Hmmm …” Miss Matlock takes a pen from her bag, opens a little composition book with pink lilies on the cover, and looks over her glasses at Zeno. “Your name, sir?”

Sir?
Everybody laughs.

Miss Matlock waits until Zeno spells his name.

“A most uncharacteristic name,” she says. “It has potential.”

Everybody laughs again and Zeno turns red and squints his eyes like he’s looking into the sun.

C
hile, the Country, Spelled Wrong …

I was named after the wife of a Civil War soldier, a Union man who almost died in my great-great-grandmother’s bed. Why Grandma Sudie decided to take mercy on that poor shot-up man and the others who followed him is still
a mystery. After all, my great-great-grandpa Buster was off fighting the very men she was trying to save.

The story goes that this soldier was out of his head for days, calling for a woman named Chileda, so that name got passed down and Momma picked it up and attached it to me. She says it’s the only thing left from that time. The stone skeleton of Grandma Sudie’s old house is still standing at the top of Mercy Hill, the mountain that gave this town its name, but the floorboards are rotted or missing, and in summer the milkweed grows four feet high where the old parlor used to be.

Pop didn’t particularly like the name Chileda, so he nicknamed me Chili and that’s who I am. Chili Sue Mahoney, Brown-haired, green-eyed, and skinny as a rail. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be somebody else, somebody blond and red-cheeked and cute as a button. Or black-haired and purple-eyed like Elizabeth Taylor used to be in those pictures Myra keeps in her
Scrapbook of Stars
. Or to just have a name like Elizabeth that takes its time rolling off your tongue.

But I’m Chili Pepper. Chili with Beans. Hormel. That’s what Zeno Mayfield calls me and he smiles and shows his crooked teeth like an idiot. I prefer to be like Chile, the country, I say. Exotic and foreign and far, far away. I’m Chile, the country, spelled wrong.

T
he Penguin Bird on Blue Ice …

Three o’clock on a sunny February Thursday. The school-bus doors fold open and I get off, plop down my books on the front-porch swing, and turn back around and start walking. I don’t want to go in that house and deal with Uncle Lu and Myra. Not today. So down Persimmon Tree Road I go, imagining what it would be like to keep walking until these brown winter hills disappear and every path and stream and gulley I know is gone. What would a place like that look like?

At Miss Matlock’s old house a musty scent from the boxwood hedge swirls in the air like a strange perfume. Suddenly a straw hat bobs above the bushes. Something sharp and shiny, a pair of clippers, reaches over the top of the hedge and snips the air. It’s too cold to be wearing straw hats and clipping bushes.

“Who’s there?” A screechy voice slips through the boxwood.

I stop like a soldier at attention. Zeno says old Miss
Matlock’s crazy. Last spring she threatened his cousin Clydie—said she’d cut him up in little pieces and throw him in the Cumberland River if he didn’t quit riding his bicycle through her purple phlox plants. She opens the gate now and steps in front of me with her hands on her hips like a judge, but she’s my same height, eye to eye.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Chileda Sue Mahoney,” I say. “I’m in your third-period class.”

She flips up the dark plastic shades attached to her eyeglasses. “Oh yes, yes, yes,” she says. “Mahoney. Bick Mahoney’s girl?”

I nod.

“Come inside my gate, Miss Chili.” She motions with her tiny bird’s-foot of a hand, all skinny and wrinkled and purple-veined. But her sharp blue eyes are steady and glassy clear. She says: “Have you ever been around the world?”

“I’ve been to Jellico Springs,” I say proudly, even though Myra’s old town off the interstate is nothing special, just a bump in the road.

She laughs and takes off her straw hat, freeing that bushel of wild gray hair. “Come on in,” she says, “we’ll take a trip.”

A trip through an old house? I think it but don’t say it.

It smells like a library. Tall bookcases line the parlor walls and every table and chair is stacked with yellowed newspapers and magazines, leaving hardly enough room to sit or stand. With every step we take, the wood floors creak like bones breaking.

Momma would not tolerate this mess for one minute. She’d nail down those loose boards and burn the old papers and make everything spick-and-span clean. But Miss Matlock seems to fit in with the clutter, and I’m drawn like a magnet to its mystery.

She drags a rickety ladder from a closet and asks me to climb up and take down a thick red and black book from the top shelf.

I’m on the fourth rung, feeling the ladder start to wobble.

“¡Hola! ¡Hola, muchacha!”

I turn quickly and have to grab on to the bookcase to keep from falling. A large green parrot is sitting on the back of the sofa. His head is turned to one side and he’s looking up at me. Miss Matlock clicks her tongue and the bird swoops across the room and perches on her shoulder.

“This is my Ivan,” she says. “Ivan the Terrible.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Hello,’” she says. “He was greeting you in Spanish.”

“Spanish?”

“Ivan’s from the jungles of Ecuador,” she says. “He’s bilingual.”

“Bi …?”

“He speaks two languages.” She laughs. “Well, let’s say he speaks a few words in two languages.”

After clearing a spot for the red and black book on the coffee table, Miss Matlock and the parrot go off to make tea.

I hear her singing in the kitchen and the tinkling together of silverware and dishes. A few minutes later she’s back, carrying a flowered teapot with steam escaping in smoky threads and a tray of sugar cookies dripping with white icing.

“This is Miss Chili,” she says to the bird on her shoulder. “Chili, Chili, Chili.”

The bird cocks his head and opens his beak slightly but doesn’t say a word.

Miss Matlock sits and creases back a page in the big book.

“Now we begin,” she whispers, as if she’s about to read a sacred story or reveal some ancient secret.

But it’s only a book full of pictures. Black kids with big round bellies are as naked as jaybirds. Momma would never approve of me gawking at pictures of naked people, especially these boys with enormous bellies.

“They’re hungry,” Miss Matlock explains, her lips quivering at the edges.

How can anybody that fat be hungry?

She turns the page. “Perhaps we should look at something more pleasant.”

We explore the wide streets of Paris, France, and green islands with palm trees in the Pacific Ocean and penguin birds in Antarctica. Something about those bird eyes gets to me. They’re hard and piercing, like a dagger to the heart. I know if I stay in these hills, I’ll never see a real penguin bird standing on blue ice with a milky sky behind him.

“I gotta go,” I say. When I jump from the couch and head for the door, I hear Miss Matlock’s old feet shuffle behind me.

“Where you going?” she calls after me. “Come back some time. We’ve got lots of places still to see.”

On the porch I stop and turn around to thank her for the tea and she’s standing with the screen door wide open. In that drab gray dress and white apron she doesn’t look at all like a teacher. She looks more like a propped-up paper doll, a maid or a grandma posing in a fancy dollhouse doorway, waiting for the paper-doll family to come home.

I walk awhile, skip awhile, past telephone poles with their lines humming in the silence, sending voices from here to there. At the lane to our house I start running as
fast as I can, feeling lighter with every breath. Light as the powder on a moth’s wing. Light enough to float away.

S
and Without Stones …

Miss Matlock brings a Ball jar of sand to school so we can see and feel the African desert. She says the tiniest of these particles floats across the ocean from Africa and lands on our doorsteps.

Willie Bright raises his hand and says this looks like plain old riverbank sand. “It’s got little rocks in it,” Willie says. He sits with his arms crossed and eyes glued to the teacher. His shoes have holes and his pants are too short and his curly yellow hair looks like it’s never seen a comb.

Willie Bright is a welfare. He lives with his momma and little brother and sister and a crinkly old grandma on a hill across the meadow from our house. His daddy ran away when his little brother was born. I guess if you’re that poor, one more kid won’t turn the grass any greener.