To Come and Go Like Magic (5 page)

L
enny
…

You can turn away stray cats and strangers, but you can’t turn away family. After the funeral Big Nan took an extra suitcase from the trunk of her car and plopped it on the driveway. She had Little Nan and Humphrey to raise, she said, and didn’t have the time nor the energy for a teenaged boy who belonged to some other woman. Lenny’s mom, Uncle Roscoe’s first wife, died the day he was born.

So Lenny moved in with my brother, Jack.

It’ll never work. Jack plays baseball and football and his friends are rough and vulgar. Basically, he’s everything Lenny can never hope to be.

Still, Lenny starts out trying to act tough. “I killed
one momma and drove the other one crazy,” he says. But his mouth twitches at the corners and it looks like any minute his legs might collapse.

“Lenny’s mother was a dancer from New York City,” Momma tells me. “She talked with a strange accent, but she was as pretty as a picture.”

“Roxy March is pretty, too,” I say, remembering the woman with the green reptile bag who came to see Uncle Roscoe.

“Well … yes,” Momma says. “Roscoe was certainly handsome in his day. He could have any girl he wanted.”

“Did he
really
want Big Nan?”

Momma laughs. She says Roscoe had the bad luck to fly around all the pretty roses in the garden and then land on a cow pie.

C
hurch, Chimps, and Eyes …

“Get up!” Pop yells from the bottom of the stairs. “Time to go to church.”

He stomps up the stairs and sticks his head inside my doorway. “Are you ready?”

“What’s it look like?” I say, throwing off the covers. Pop’s always asking questions when he already knows the answers.

“Don’t sass,” he says. Beside me Myra groans and covers her head. She’ll be excused again from going to church.

We sit together stretched out in the pew. Lenny, Jack, Momma, and me. Pop’s up front singing in the choir. He throws back his head and I can hear his voice above the others in the refrain of “In the Sweet By and By.”

I hope Pop’s not thinking about meeting up with Uncle Roscoe anytime soon. Our house already seeps with sadness. Uncle Lu lost Gretchen and Myra lost her no-good husband, Jerry Wilson, and Pop lost Roscoe. But Momma says Lenny’s lost more than anybody. He lost his parents and his home and his half brother and sister. But I say there is one good thing: Lenny lost Big Nan, too.

The preacher paces behind the pulpit with the Bible in his hand, his white shirt wet with sweat and sticking to his back. He stops and wags a finger at Frances Perkins sitting at the organ.

“We did not spring from chimpanzees!” he shouts.

Miss Perkins teaches science at Mercy Hill High School and this drives the reverend crazy. Twice he’s tried to get the city council to burn those new textbooks with pictures of ape-looking men, but they’re afraid the government will take back its education money. Without that money Mercy Hill couldn’t even buy toilet paper for the school bathrooms. That’s what Pop says.

Lenny shakes his head and bends across Momma’s lap to say something to me. “Darwin again,” he whispers.

When Lenny was unpacking his suitcases, he showed me drawings of hairy cavemen in a book about Charles Darwin. They do look like apes, but so far I’ve been agreeing with the preacher. I’ve never seen a real person who looks like a monkey and I’ve seen some ugly people in these hills.

Suddenly the preacher shouts a string of strange words, leaps into the air, and comes back down on the edge of the stepping-up place. He tumbles out of the pulpit and onto the organ.

“Lord have mercy!” Miss Perkins screams and the whole choir stands up at once like they’ve been told to rise.

The preacher’s face is red and pinched up in pain. He jerks like he’s been stung by a hornet and keeps calling
out to the congregation in a language that nobody understands. Momma says he’s talking in tongues.

“Hallelujah, he’s alive!” Little Clyde Cummings shouts from the back of the church. “Call the ambulance!”

Frances Perkins shuts off the organ and sits weeping loud enough for everybody to hear. Finally, some men come and carry the preacher away on a stretcher with the sirens blaring.

It’s quiet in the car on the way home and I’m thinking about last summer when the traveling carnival came through town and Pop gave me money to buy a bag of peanuts for the monkeys. They’d crack the shells and slip off the hulls before popping those nuts into their mouths. I remember their round, beady eyes full of water.

“The preacher shouldn’t get so upset about monkeys,” I say.

Momma shrugs. She’s sitting in the front seat with her back to me. “Those apes do look a little like people, don’t they?” she says.

I look over at Lenny, but he doesn’t say a word about Darwin and the ape-men.

“Maybe it’s their eyes,” I say. “It’s the way they stare at you.”

U
ncle Lucius and the Kites …

The March wind is fierce. Every morning Uncle Lucius goes to the meadow with a cart full of kites and sets them flying until the sky is filled with color. Diamond shapes, boxes, some with long tails and others that swirl round and round like whirligigs. All day long Uncle Lu sits in his fold-up chair hidden amongst the grasses between the mountains and the river. He sits with his kites in the air against the blue sky, working the strings, as if this were a real job. When the sun sets, he brings them down again and loads them onto his two-wheeled cart and heads back to the house, his hair a ball of cotton torn apart in the March wind.

At breakfast I ask Uncle Lu what he’s doing in the meadow when the kites are flying all by themselves.

“Thinking,” he says.

“I wish I could stay home all day and fly kites,” I say.

I grab my backpack and head for the school bus, imagining all those colors blowing across the sky and all that time to do nothing but think. Somehow I’ve got
to drag myself through math and history before English/geography which is the only class I’ve ever had that goes by too fast.

All day the rain starts and stops, pours and drizzles, the sky gray and cold-looking like a slate dump. No kite flying today. At last bell we all get soaked running from the classroom building to the school bus, but the bus driver won’t turn on the heat. He’s wearing a green jacket with a hood, says we need to remember to bring our own jackets, and makes it sound like the rain’s our fault.

Halfway home the sun comes out and melts the gray clouds with its heat. In patches high above the holes in the clouds, the sky is blue like the ocean must be.

At the supper table Pop unfolds the newspaper and hands Lucius a section, trying to get him interested in what’s going on in the real world, but Uncle Lu stares out the window and sips his coffee. He doesn’t even care about what’s going on in this room.

After a while he gets up, walks into the front hallway, and pulls something from his coat pocket. A long cylinder wrapped in blue tissue with a red ribbon. He smiles and hands it to me, even though it’s not my birthday or anything.

I peel off the paper and find a cardboard kaleidoscope with colored gemstones inside a tiny peephole.

“It’s great, Uncle Lu. Where’d you get it?”

“From a hippie,” he says.

“A hippie?”

“Down at Brock’s store. He was walking the Appalachian Trail end to end, and he got off in Virginia just so he could see Kentucky.”

“Really?” Pop looks up from his paper.

“That man had hair clear down to here,” Lucius says, swiping his hand midway across his back.

“He just gave this to you?” I ask. The kaleidoscope looks brand-new.

Uncle Lu shakes his head. “I bought it,” he says.

Pop puts down his fork and looks hard at my uncle. “How much did you pay for it, Lucius?”

Uncle Lu shrugs. “Gave him what I had in my pocket.”

Momma groans at the other end of the table. I know Uncle Lu went into town this morning to cash his Social Security check. That money was supposed to last all month. “Surely …” She looks at Pop and sucks in her breath.

I feel like a worm crawling around in the dirt.

“You don’t have
any
money left?” Pop asks.

I look from Momma to Pop. “It’s not my—”

“Shush,” says Pop, wagging his finger at me.

“I’ve got plenty money in my wallet,” says Uncle Lucius. He takes it out and spreads bills on the table. “I gave that hippie my pocket change.”

Pop looks relieved, and Momma reaches over and
pats Uncle Lu on the arm. Veins are popped up on his bony hands like little blue rivers. I look over at him and smile, and Uncle Lu smiles back.

When supper’s over, I take the kaleidoscope to the window and aim it at the sky where the sunset’s brightest. The plastic colors fall into perfect shapes, one after the other, like glass flowers, gumdrops, tiny kites.

O
n Being Different …

“I’m gonna be working in the garden when planting time starts,” says Willie Bright.

“You are?”

“Yep. It’ll be a lot of responsibility. I probably won’t have much free time.”