To Come and Go Like Magic (27 page)

Two birds hover above the trumpet flowers. No, sphinx moths. Buzzing like tiny helicopters, revving their engines one second and
zip
, they’re gone. Lenny says that’s how it’s done. That’s how you leave. Wait until the time’s right and
zip
, you go.

I run after them, last light falling through the trees, running and running into deep woods, where
everything’s dark and quiet. The moths disappear in the darkness, go wherever moths go for the night. I can’t see the yard or the cars or the house anymore, but I keep running, blackberry briars and cockle burs catching onto my clothes, on and on up the mountain.

T
alking Birds and Angel Hair …

In a forest of fog a bobwhite sings his name again and again.
Bob whieeeet, Bob whieeeet
. It’s like he can’t stop. Pieces of pink light drop on the morning dew. I recognize the parlor that hasn’t been a parlor since my momma played here, since everybody left and the walls crumbled and the floor fell through and the milkweed started growing.

Little cocoons of silk. Angel hair.
Crack the cocoon and scatter the angel hair in the wind
. It’ll go wherever the wind takes it, wherever it wants to go. I want to go with the angel hair. I want to be scattered in the wind. I close my eyes to the pink light.

Chilleee! Chilleee!

Why is the bobwhite calling my name?

I open my eyes again and try to focus, see the sun
sliding up over the trees, my face in the rotting leaves, legs curled up like a baby. How did I get here?

Slowly, the pictures come like a movie, marching one after the other, a parade of faces and hands and voices. The yard filled with people and music. The dogs barking. That awful scent of burning paper. My dreams, the pictures of my dreams, all going up in smoke. Miss Matlock gone and the books gone and I’m caught. Caught in the wind of this valley like everybody else.

I lie in the place that used to be the parlor of the old house on Mercy Hill and look at the weeds and the rotten boards and the old stone foundation in piles of loose rocks around me. I ran away….

But this is as far as I got.

“Chili!” The bobwhite calls from somewhere close by now. But … bobwhite birds can’t talk.

Shadows shift amongst the trees. First a red cap. Now a blue dress. A Sunday suit. My head spins.

The Reverend I. E. Fisher Jr.’s blue shirt that Zeno’s little brother spit up on hovers in a blur above me.

“Look at her head….”

“Must have hit it on that rock …”

“She’s waking up….”

“Thank God she’s okay.”

That shirt, the very one we wanted to see on a monkey, is now wrapped around my head, its sleeves tied
together and dangling at my ears. The preacher leans close with his coffee breath.

“You’re going to be okay,” he says. “We’re all here.”

Cold water runs over my head and into my eyes and I slip off, dream of big white birds in purple trees and a red sky like Lenny says the sky is on Mars. People birds chant my name over and over, coo and flap their wings in my face, and the wind smells like … fried chicken?

When I wake up for real, they’re all in the parlor, sitting on the rock piles and rotted boards and the hard ground. Sitting amongst the milkweed. Eating chicken and corn on the cob. Holey Roller doughnut holes in cinnamon and powdered sugar and chocolate are piled in baskets on a tree stump and Frances Perkins is standing over the sweets with a paper fan, keeping the flies away. Quilts on the ground and kids on the quilts and women running back and forth like the women always do, trying to make everybody happy. Off in the distance, under the poplar trees, the men laugh and smoke. I can see the lit ends of cigarettes moving in the morning mist.

Uncle Lu’s bent over his walking stick, making his way toward me through the weeds. I hate him, hate him, hate him! He looks down at me and grins, his old mouth empty.

“Lu lost his false teeth last night,” Momma says from somewhere behind me. I recognize her hands now rubbing
my head at the sore spot. “They dropped out when he fell,” she says. He thought he’d found me, but it was just some old blue jacket hanging on a tree limb. It was too dark. “He stumbled,” she says, “but can’t remember where he was.”

My crazy uncle is toothless because of me. The reverend’s blue shirt is ruined, stained with blood because of me. The party is a day late, a dinner on the ground at breakfast time. All because of me.

Uncle Lu bends over in my face, spits when he talks, and I turn my head away from him and shut my eyes.

“What a birthday!” he says. “You made a good celebration.”

I
want
to hate him. I want to be happy that he lost his false teeth and will look like a frog trying to eat without them. But how can you hate somebody who by next week probably won’t even remember what he’s done?

“You’d better eat some,” Aunt Rose says. “Get something in your belly.”

She steps over a loose board and hands me a paper plate with fried chicken and green beans and corn on the cob. There’s garden relish, too, and sliced tomatoes and a chunk of Frances Perkins’s homemade sunflower bread.

But I can’t eat for crying.

No, I’m not hurting anywhere. I’m not mad. Not sad. Not worrying about anything. No. No. No. Really. Everything’s okay
.

And it is.

T
o Come and Go Like Magic …

Where do the ducks go when they fly in a V over the houses and trees and mountains? South, Aunt Rose says. They’re flying away from the cold. Ducks are smart and ducks are free.

“Don’t you wish you were a duck?” Willie Bright says.

“No,” I say. “Why would I want to be a duck?”

“To be free,” he says. “To fly south.”

“I don’t want to go south,” I say. “I want to fly across the ocean.”

“Ducks can’t do that,” he says. “They have to eat.”

We’re walking down Persimmon Tree Road with no place to go. A second flock of ducks quacks overhead, flying low above the treetops. This morning Aunt Rose said they were getting their bearings, so when the time’s right, they’ll be ready to hightail it out of here.

I tell Willie a story Miss Matlock once told me about
the monarch butterflies. I tell him how they fly all the way to Mexico in the winter and millions of them fill the trees, so it looks like the mountainsides are on fire. They stay perfectly still until sunrise and then they fly up in a great orange cloud. A “swirling wind of wings” is how Miss Matlock described it. Nobody knows when they go or how they know to come back. They just do. Spring comes, the flowers bloom, and the butterflies appear like magic.

“I wish I could be like a butterfly,” I say. “I’d like to come and go like magic.”

By habit we slip through the boxwood hedge and cross the yard. Miss Matlock’s house is locked up tight. We stand on the porch and look in the window at the dark, lifeless parlor, the bookshelves empty.

“We can always get books at the library,” Willie says.

“They’re not the same,” I say. “She had stories to go with all those places and pictures.”

“We can make up our own stories,” he says. Willie Bright would say anything to make me feel better.

“But we’ve never been anyplace. Not for real.”

I walk to the end of the porch and sit sideways in the swing; I stretch out my legs and my heels slip over the edge. At the beginning of the summer my sandals fit smack against the arm of the swing when I sat like this. I guess I got taller without even noticing.

Willie Bright sits down on the top step in his usual spot with his back against the white wooden column.

“Miss Matlock left me some money,” he says. Just like that, like this is plain old talk, news I already know—which I didn’t.

“For what?” I ask, trying to sound just as everyday,
so what
, as he sounds.

“To go to college.”

“College?” I’m looking straight at the worn-down bottom of Willie Bright’s left shoe where a hole is starting to form, wondering what on earth Miss Matlock was thinking.

“Just for one year,” he says. “Then I have to make the grades to keep on going.”

“But you could spend that money for whatever you want.”

Willie shakes his head. “The judge read us the will,” he says, “and it’s only good for school.”

“That’s not fair,” I say.

“Maybe Miss Matlock didn’t know how to be fair,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“When she ran away from Mercy Hill, she promised to send for my grandma,” he says. “But she never did.”

“I know.”

“They were friends. Miss Matlock and Granny.”

“I know.”

“Who told you?”

“Aunt Rose.”

“Did she tell you that Miss Matlock’s professor liked my grandma first?”

“No,” I say. Could this be true?

“Granny met him at the market. She was buying meat to make pot roast for the Matlocks and he was buying meat to make pot roast for himself.”

“Really?” I imagine two people meeting for the first time in the meat aisle at the Piggly Wiggly, but back then there wasn’t even a Piggly Wiggly. It was probably a little store on some street corner like Brock’s.

“Grandma was a maid at the Matlocks’,” Willie says.

“I know.”

“Miss Matlock stole the professor away from her,” he says. His eyes are empty-looking, but there’s not one speck of anger in his voice.

“She did?” I wonder why Willie’s grandmother would tell such a wild story. It doesn’t sound like Miss Matlock, but neither does most of the other stuff I’ve learned.

“That’s what Granny said,” he tells me. “She met him first.”

“Maybe that doesn’t always mean anything,” I say. “Meeting somebody first.”

“Maybe not,” he says. “But it ought to count for something.”

“Why’d you go to Miss Matlock’s house all those times?” I ask. “If you knew this, how could you still be her friend?”

“At first I was meaning to take something of hers.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Something valuable. Something that would break her heart. Like she broke Granny’s heart.”

“Did you?”

“What?”

“Did you ever take anything?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Willie shrugs. “I don’t know. Guess I don’t steal.”

“I guess you don’t.”

I hear a car in the distance and I stand up and look over the azaleas.

It’s Pop! Coming home in the middle of the day and driving like he’s on a coon-dog chase. Something is wrong….

I hurry down the steps and head for the house, leaving Willie Bright standing on the porch with his hands in his pockets.

T
oday Everybody Smiles …

Professor Drew Montgomery pecks on the nursery window trying to get the baby’s attention. He smiles and the baby smiles back. Baby Sam likes you, the nurse says to the piano-playing hippie professor from Jellico Springs and Wisconsin.

“He probably peed,” the professor says. “One-day-old babies don’t smile.”

The nurse gives him one of those
you think you’re so smart
looks, but the professor doesn’t even pay attention. He just keeps on smiling at the baby.

When we get to Myra’s room, I tell her I’ll help. We can put baby Sam’s bassinet on my side of the bed. But she says no. She’s taking him to Jellico Springs the minute she gets out of the hospital. To his true home, she says.