To Come and Go Like Magic (25 page)

Miss Matlock has never mentioned being ill. This is the first I’ve seen of these pills.

“I’m not sick,” she says. “I’m old. Old people take pills to keep ticking.”

“Ticking?”

“This one,” she says, holding up the smallest of the white pills. “It keeps my ticker running.” She drops one white pill into each morning slot.

There are yellows and pinks and several other whites in different sizes and shapes. Pills for high blood pressure and arthritis and pain. A round red iron pill and a huge yellow pill that looks important but is only a vitamin.

The window’s open and you can smell the just-mown grass.

“Why’d you leave Mercy Hill?” I ask.

“I left a long time ago.”

“But why? Why’d you leave?”

“Wanted to see the world,” she says.

“You didn’t just want to get away from people? Some people?”

“Nope.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” She drops a pink pill in each second slot across the pillbox.

“Who’d you run away with?”

Miss Matlock stops counting pills and gazes out the window. “A man I loved more than the sunrise,” she says at last.

“Who?”

“Just a man.”

“Was he a professor?”

“Maybe,” she says, smiling. “Perhaps he was.”

Why is this old woman willing to talk about the tiniest incidents in her life but not willing to talk about the big ones? She’s told me the smallest details about African dances, about the way the jungle smells when you first get up in the morning, about the cobalt-colored necklaces women wear in the desert to ward off evil spirits. Those beads were made from smooth stones, she once said. They felt like cool water.

“What about Willie’s grandma?” I ask. “Why didn’t you send for Helena like you promised?” I keep my head down and cut each water pill in half.

“I guess I forgot,” she says finally.

“Forgot?” I look up and meet a blank expression.

“Sometimes when you’re happy, there’s no room for much else. It’s easy to forget about other people.”

“But it’s not right.”

“I suppose not,” she says.

“You
suppose
…”

“It’s a pity you can’t go back,” she says. “You need to
remember that, Chileda. You can try to make up for the past, but a person can never go back and undo anything.” Little pools start to form beneath the blue of her eyes.

“Why’d you come back to Mercy Hill, anyway?” I ask. “If you were so happy, why didn’t you just stay away?”

“Home is always home,” she says. “Some people leave, some stay, some come back. That’s how it works.”

“But …”

“Remember the eels?” she says. “They always—”

“I remember the eels.”

Her explanation is not the least bit satisfying. Questions pour through my head like a wild river…. I want to ask if the Matlocks really did get rich off the miners’ backs like Aunt Rose claims, if her pap fired Willie’s grandpa and made the Brights poor, if she ever feels guilty for using Helena Wilkins and then forgetting her. And that talk about change? What would she go back and change if she could? The words float in my mind like loose tree limbs in the river after a storm, refusing to come together.

“You’ll leave, too,” Miss Matlock says. “When you’re grown up.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know. Someday the world will open up and start calling to you.”

A strong slant of morning light comes through the
dining-room window and in it Miss Matlock looks old.
Really
old. Older even than when I walked in the front door a few minutes ago. I only notice now that her blue robe is dirty, the buttons missing. Her hair hasn’t been combed. I try to picture her as a young girl, walking away from Mercy Hill in the middle of the night with a man she loved better than the sunrise, giving up and forgetting about everybody and everything she’d ever known. Was it courage or craziness or anger? Or maybe all three?

She fumbles with the pillbox, trying to snap shut the little compartments.

“Wait!” I reach over and touch her bony wrist, feel her pulse race. “You forgot the water pills.”

I drop the half pills one at a time into the night slots.

C
razies …

She died in her sleep. Dr. Smith, who’s going to deliver Myra’s baby when it gets ready to come, said it was heart failure that killed Miss Matlock. She went fast, he said. Didn’t feel a pain.

How does he know?

The Reverend I. E. Fisher Jr. won’t be preaching a funeral, and her body will not be put on display in that house, and there won’t be any singing of “Amazing Grace,” which is standard practice in Mercy Hill. Miss Matlock wrote up orders to the contrary. Momma and Rose are discussing this at the kitchen table before supper. Miss Matlock will be sent up North somewhere to be cremated and put up in a jar like preserves, Aunt Rose says. This is what Rose heard from one of the men who brought his shirts over to be washed this morning. A nephew of that old professor Miss Matlock ran off with years ago is going to take her to the jungle in a jar and throw out the ashes.

“In a jungle?” Momma shakes her head and clicks her tongue.

“For the snakes to get, I guess,” Rose says.

“What would make a person want to be put away like that?” Momma asks.

“Craziness,” says Rose. “Pure craziness.”

Uncle Lu walks into the room as if on cue.

“Gretchen died,” he says. His eyes are full of water and he looks from Momma to Aunt Rose.

“No, Lucius. Gretchen didn’t die.” Momma pats him on the arm. “We’re talking about Elvira Matlock.”

“Gretchen’s fine,” Aunt Rose says.

“She is?” Uncle Lu holds on to that one thought. “When did you see her?”

“We didn’t see her, Lu. But she’s okay,” Momma says. Momma talks extra loud now when she speaks to Lucius, even though he has no problem hearing. She could scream and he still wouldn’t understand.

“Elvira Matlock was a crazy woman,” Lucius says.

“That’s right,” says Rose. “She didn’t have a good mind.”

Momma shushes him out of the room. “Get ready for supper,” she says.

The minute Uncle Lu leaves, Aunt Rose bends over and whispers to Momma.

“Poor old fool,” she says. “Wonder what makes a man get like that?”

“Aunt Gretchen left him,” I say. “It drove him crazy.” At least some things have answers.

“Chileda, go wash your hands,” Aunt Rose says. But it’s not even time for supper.

W
hat’s Left …

Miss Matlock left me her books. Some of them went to the public library, but the ones I enjoyed the most, the books about other places, she left to me with a note that
said
Please share with Willie
. She was afraid they might get destroyed at Willie’s house, she said, but I didn’t tell Willie that part.

Jack and Lenny help me load the books in cardboard boxes. It feels strange being in that house without Miss Matlock. It still smells the same, and the professor’s nephew has left everything in place like it’s waiting for her to come back any minute. Everything, that is, except the birdcage, which is now sitting in the backseat of the man’s red car. He says he’s taking the parrot up North to live. I imagine Ivan looking out the window at piles of white snow and wondering what on earth happened to the world.

I sweep my hand across the back of the velvet parlor sofa and close my eyes. It could almost be any other summer day with Miss Matlock in the kitchen baking cookies. Any minute she might come down the hall with a pot of tea and those little cups that tinkled like bells when the sugar spoon touched them, pull a book from a shelf, and take us to the other side of the world. But not today. Not any day ever again.

When we get home, we put the books on the wide shelves in the smokehouse.

“They’ll have to be moved when we kill the hogs,” Pop says.

Every autumn, the hams hang from the rafters and
side bacon is salted down on these shelves. I’ll have to find another place for three big boxes of books. Momma already said no to the living room and it looks like Uncle Lu will be in the attic until he has to be sent to the crazy house. Maybe when Myra leaves and takes all of her stuff, I can line my walls with books. I’ll make it like a real library, a library in my own room, all smelling of books and filled with mysteries.

Nobody asks questions or says anything about Miss Matlock leaving me those books until suppertime. And I’m expecting it. The supper table is where everything gets discussed.

“I can’t understand why she left those books to you, Chili.” Momma holds her fork in front of her like she’s concentrating on it instead of me.

“I like to read,” I say.

“But …”

“She was my substitute teacher last spring. Remember?”

“Did you ever go to that house?” Pop asks.

“Today,” I say. Not a lie, but not the whole truth.

He looks me straight in the eyes without blinking. “I heard down at Brock’s store that several people saw you coming and going to the Matlock house practically all summer.”

“And why would they be telling you that now and not before?” I say.

“Don’t sass,” says Pop, wagging his finger at me. I can tell he means it.

“You know how people are,” Momma says. “They don’t like to interfere, don’t say a thing, unless it seems important.”

“But they gossip plenty,” I say. “They just don’t tell the person they’re gossiping about.”

“That’s enough,” says Pop. “No need to make things worse than they are.”

“Things are not bad,” I say. “There’s nothing bad at all.” Except Miss Matlock’s gone. I think it but don’t say it.

“Well,” he says, “I’ll have to look at those books before you read them.” He wants to make sure they’re appropriate.

“I’ve already seen them!”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Pop. “Does not matter one iota.”

“She needs to be reading the Bible,” Uncle Lu says. Words of wisdom coming from a man who’s drinking his coffee with a straw. Uncle Lu will no longer put his lips to cups. For three weeks now he’s used straws for everything.

“I do read the Bible,” I say to Lucius.

“Then you don’t need other books,” he says. “The devil hides in the pages of books.”

I’d like to lock him up in a library and throw away the key.

C
alifornia Dreamin’ Like the Old Song …

Pop sits on the foot of my bed looking as pale as he did the night Uncle Roscoe died.

“I’ve looked through the books,” he says. “I guess it’s all right for you to have them.”

“I’ve already seen them anyway,” I tell him again. “Front to back.”

Pop looks up at the light and blinks his eyes, sucks on his lips like he’s trying to keep a jawbreaker from slipping out of his mouth.

“The people in those books are not like us,” he says.

“They’re real pictures,” I say. “Real places.”

Pop looks irritated. “I know they’re real places, Chileda. But trying to go to these places, to run off … that’ll get you in trouble. Just like it did Elvira Matlock.”

“Miss Matlock never talked about any trouble it caused.”

“She wouldn’t,” Pop says. “What didn’t hurt her she didn’t notice. But the others …”

“You mean Hel—” I hold my tongue. No use letting Pop know that I’d gossiped about all this with Aunt Rose. “I mean, what others?”