To Come and Go Like Magic (24 page)

“That boy’s great-grandpa was the foreman of all these Matlock mines,” she says. “He saw the miners being worked to death for pennies. Why, some days they stayed underground and never saw daylight.”

“Why didn’t he do something about it?”

“He did,” she says. “He caused a strike that cost him his job. No place to work after that.”

“Why?”

“The Matlocks owned everything back then,” she says. “The only clothing store, the hardware, the movie theater. They had power over this whole region.”

“How did they get to own everything?”

“Old man Matlock traveled all over eastern Kentucky making deals, cheating people out of their mineral rights. Paying fifty cents an acre!” Rose shakes her head and clicks her tongue with disgust.

“What are mineral rights?”

“It’s what’s underground,” she says. “The Matlocks bought up everything underground even where other folks were living on top. People didn’t know the difference, didn’t see no harm in selling off what was under the ground. They had no idea that big companies could come in here and tear up everything to get to the coal.”

Suddenly I remember that day helping Uncle Lu sort his lures and him saying Momma owned everything above the ground and under it, too, on Mercy Hill Mountain, and that for sure no strip-mining would be done on it. But Uncle Lu’s mind comes and goes like the wind and you can’t depend on everything he says.

“Uncle Lucius says the strip miners can’t find work here because we own the mountain. Is that right, Aunt Rose?”

“Right as rain,” she says. “Your grandma would turn
over in her grave if she thought that bunch was going to come in here and go to scalping our mountain.”

Aunt Rose says that when the settlers first came to Kentucky, it was a wilderness paradise. People gardened and hunted and lived in peace, she says. And then coal got discovered and came up out of the ground like a rattlesnake, bringing pain and death and miseries of all kinds.

“Why’d the mines around here close down?”

“Too dangerous,” she says. “And the deep coal seam run out. The good Lord put a stop to it.”

“What happened to the old Matlocks?”

“They left town after all that striking business and their daughter, Elvira, running away and all,” Rose says. “Went over to West Virginia to see what else they could destroy.”

“How could those people be so mean?”

“People can be the cruelest animals on this earth, Chileda. You’ve got a lot to learn.” Aunt Rose puts a kettle of water on to boil so we can have the canning jars scalded before Momma gets home.

“But Miss Matlock’s not cruel,” I say. “She’s not like that at all.”

Rose gives me her suspicious over-the-glasses look but doesn’t say anything.

“I mean … she was a nice substitute teacher.”

“Elvira Matlock ran away from it all,” Rose says. “It’s easy to run away.”

“Maybe that was a good thing,” I say. “If her family was so terrible, maybe it was good she got away from them.”

“She was just like the rest of them,” Rose says, “and she used poor Helena Wilkins to get where she wanted to go.”

“What do you mean?”

The story is getting all tangled up, like all the other stories in this town, where everybody knows everybody else’s business, where old grudges can spread down and get bigger through the years and make people hate each other without even knowing why.

“Helena was Willie Bright’s grandma,” Rose says. “She died last spring.”

“I know that.”

“Helena worked for the Matlocks even after her pap got fired. They kept her like a slave, doing the wash and ironing and cleaning toilets,” Rose says.

“Some rich people do have maids. Maybe …”

“No maybes,” Rose says. “I know what it’s like to have to do up a man’s shirt so it’s perfect for some woman who’s never dipped her own painted nails in starch. Besides, they didn’t pay Helena enough money to buy groceries, much less do anything else. There are no maybes,” she says.

“But how did Miss Matlock use Helena to run away? I don’t understand.”

“Promised her the world,” Rose says.

“What do you—”

“Helena packed Elvira’s clothes and slipped her off, walked with her seven miles in the middle of the night to someplace between here and Jellico Springs where that man picked her up.”

“The professor?”

“I don’t know who he was,” Rose says. “Nobody knew him. Nobody except Helena. So that was the last of
her
job, too.”

“Then why’d she do it? Why did she help Miss Matlock run away?”

“Elvira promised to send money and bring Helena to some fancy place in the city. She claimed they’d both be on easy street,” Rose says. “Promises.” She shakes her head. “Nothing but fairy tales.”

“I can’t believe Miss Matlock didn’t keep her promise.”

“Not one letter,” Rose says. “Not one penny.”

“Maybe there’s a good reason,” I say.

Aunt Rose sets the Ball jars in the sink and carefully pours scalding water in each one until it overflows.

I wait, hoping she’ll say that she’s not really sure about any of this, that maybe it’s mostly gossip, that Willie Bright’s family being poor has nothing to do with
anything anyone has ever done to them. That it’s just plain bad luck. Bad luck happens like lightning, without a cause or a plan or a cruel person to direct it.

“There are no maybes,” Rose says again when the kettle is empty.
“Maybe
is a useless word.”

M
rs. Bright, Whose Name is Amanda …

At first I think it’s a fox or a possum. No cars coming, so I walk out in the middle of the road, making a wide swing away from the ditch, away from the thrashing in the weeds. Walk faster but try to be quiet. It might have rabies.

When I look back to make sure nothing’s following me, I see the pink dress with blue flowers. The head is downhill, hidden in the ditch, but the legs are jerking. The whole body is jerking. I hurry back….

It’s Willie’s momma! Her eyes are rolling in her head and her teeth are clenched. They can swallow a tongue, Pop says. In a fit they can even bite it off.

I’m screaming but nobody can hear. Not a car on the
road and Mrs. Bright stuck in some horrible world of her own. I find a stick in the ditch and force it into her mouth above her tongue like Pop has said you’re supposed to do. I scream and yell
Stop, stop, stop
, like Willie says his grandmother used to yell. But nothing helps.

When the blue jeep pulls up, she’s already coming out of it, her legs with only little jerks, her eyes trying to focus.

A tall woman in bell-bottom jeans leaps from the car.

“Does she have her pills?” The woman bends over Mrs. Bright and calmly lifts her head onto a clump of crabgrass.

“Pills?”

“Her medicine. Does she have it with her?”

“I don’t know.” Willie never said his mother took medicine.

“Go get your mom’s medicine now!” The woman shoos me away.

“She’s not my mother,” I say. “She lives in that white house on the hill. I don’t think she has medicine.”

The tall woman wants me to help get Mrs. Bright into the jeep, so I stand on one side and the woman stands on the other and we prop her up and she can walk a little, but she mostly leans on the woman, who is somebody I have never laid eyes on.

“We’ll take her home,” the woman says. “We’ll find out why she doesn’t have medicine for the epilepsy.”

I won’t get in the car. This woman is a stranger and I’m not about to ride with strangers. I point out the house again, just in case she didn’t hear me the first time. I tell her I’m late, that I have to go home.

“Her name’s Mrs. Bright,” I say. “I don’t know her first name.”

Three times I walk back and forth up our lane between the road and the house. I look across the meadow and up the hill to the Bright house, see that blue jeep still sitting in the front yard. I stay on the porch for a while and then walk around the house, making a wide circle out to the edge of the garden, where the hollyhocks have grown above my head. They’re top-heavy with big red blossoms, leaning over like they’re about to fall.

The next time I look across the meadow, the jeep’s in a different place. Where did that woman go? And why’d she come back?

After a while I see Willie come out on the front porch and I wave and take off down the lane. He meets me at the school-bus stop more out of breath than I am.

“Her name’s Amanda,” he says.

“Amanda?”

“My mom,” he says. “That’s her first name.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s got pills now,” he says. “That VISTA woman went to the Rexall and had some doctor order pills to make the fits stop.”

This doesn’t make one bit of sense. “Why wasn’t she taking pills before?”

Willie shrugs. “We didn’t know they had pills,” he says. He looks down, moves his foot back and forth in the dirt like I’ve seen men stomp out cigarettes. “That VISTA woman says there’s a lot we don’t know. She makes you feel like a fool.”

“Aunt Rose says the VISTAs think they know everything, but they’re dumb as bricks when it comes to the ways of mountain people.”

“I don’t much like the VISTAs,” says Willie.

I think about how everything works and doesn’t work. The welfares and the regular people and the VISTAs. You can split the Mercy Hill people up like slices of pie. Every piece is the same but different. And forget about equal. Equal is something people just like to talk about. Still, that woman pulled up in her blue jeep at the right time. If she hadn’t, Willie’s momma might have never known about pills to stop the fits.

“You know, Willie, maybe the VISTAs aren’t all that bad,” I say. “So what if they know some things and we know other things. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

He looks back at his house, shifts from one foot to the
other like he’s getting ready to run a race. Disliking the VISTAs is something we all have in common. It’s like everybody eating the same fried chicken for supper whether they live in the brick houses or the wooden houses or the shacks. Everybody eating except for outsiders. And nobody invites the outsiders.

I see the blue jeep pull out and start down the road. When it stops beside us, the woman leans out the window and tells Willie to go home.

“Your mother needs you,” she says.

Willie straightens up; his face suddenly looks older.

The VISTA woman keeps hanging out the window, waiting, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, dark sunglasses sitting on her nose, and a smile so big it shows all her perfect teeth. Aunt Rose would say she’s as pretty as a picture. But it’s a picture that’s out of place in Mercy Hill. It ought to be in a magazine.

P
ills, Pills, and More Pills …

I head over to Miss Matlock’s house an hour early, when I know Willie Bright won’t be there. I talk to myself as I
walk down the lane, remembering my conversation with Aunt Rose, and practicing what I’ll say.
Why did you run away? What was the
real
reason? Why didn’t you send for Helena like you promised? You live alone in this great big house and the four Brights live in a shack. Is that fair?

She answers the door in her old blue robe.

“You’re awfully early,” she says.

“Just by an hour.”

She looks at her watch and sighs, opens the door.

I follow her down the hallway with my hands in my pockets, my heart pounding.

“Chili, Chili, Chili!” Ivan the Terrible calls from the parlor.

“Good morning, Ivan.” I wave to the parrot like he understands and he lets out a loud wolf whistle.

Miss Matlock pulls out a chair for me at the dining-room table.

“I’m a walking drugstore,” she says, looking a little embarrassed. She takes several brown bottles from a plastic bag and lines them up at one end of the table. “I’ll need a knife to cut the water pills.”

I get up and go to the kitchen for a paring knife. When I come back, she’s got the lids off all the bottles and the pillbox open. There’s a row of slots for every day of the week—pills for morning, noon, and night and for one extra time in between, just in case.
“What’s all this medicine for?” I ask. “I didn’t know you were sick.”