To Come and Go Like Magic (8 page)

S
urry Who Sings …

Surry Nan Honeycutt sings in the shower
. Zeno Mayfield walks around all day repeating this like it’s a rhyme to remember. Miss Matlock says: “Is that your mantra, Mr. Mayfield?”

Everybody laughs. I write
mantra
in my red notebook, which I keep under my desk when I’m at school.

Brown-eyed, forlorn-looking Surry moved here from Tennessee. Her family is big, four sisters and three brothers, and they all sing. Surry plays the dulcimer, plucking strings that whine like her voice, sounding as lonely as Old Tate crying at the moon.

Surry does not even have a shower. They live in a shack near the new projects. The new projects have indoor bathrooms and shiny kitchens and backyard patios, but you have to stay on a list a long time to get a place there. The Honeycutt house has four rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a muddy backyard with a toilet down a path through the trees. It’s full of spiders.
Black widows, Surry said. They can kill you with one bite.

She was just trying to scare us—the welcoming committee: Ginny, Priscilla, and me. The counselor sent us with a bagful of school supplies, a tin of homemade peanut-butter fudge, and a sugar-cured ham.

The minute we walked in the door, Surry’s pop grabbed the ham out of Ginny’s arms so hard the plastic packing ring caught on her friendship bracelet and snapped it off. He said Surry could talk to us for five minutes only, so we went to the front porch, where you can sit and look at the new projects across the street, twenty-five houses all alike with grassy lawns.

“It’s like looking at pretty clothes in a store window,” Surry said. She was rocking back and forth on the concrete porch floor like she was sitting in a rocking chair.

Five minutes on the dot her pop banged on the screen door and said we had to leave. But Ginny had to use the bathroom, so Surry took us to that little outhouse in the backyard and we took turns. She waited and fidgeted like she had ants crawling all over her. Bit her nails and hummed. Wouldn’t look us in the eyes.

When it was my turn, I saw the spiders working on webs in the corners beneath the roof. They didn’t look dangerous. They were just little brown spiders like the ones we have at home.

“Nope. They’re black widows,” Surry said. “They’ll kill you in one bite.”

Her eyebrows came together hard and her eyes finally found ours, but it wasn’t really a scared look she gave us. Not of the spiders, anyway. Not of us, the welcoming committee. There wasn’t one bit of real terror in those eyes until her pop yelled out the back window and said it was the last time he was going to tell her to come in the house.

We started for the road with our heads down, heard the screen door slam, and walked faster.

“DON’T COME BACK HERE!” It sounded like he was talking on a loudspeaker.

Two little boys running with a black dog through the projects stopped and turned around, thinking all that hollering was meant for them.

The Honeycutts sing on Mercy Hill’s radio station every Sunday morning at nine o’clock. Surry plays the dulcimer and sings “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” She writes the words to the song on the cover of her notebook from the welcoming committee bag:

W
histling in Africa …

Whistling girls and cackling hens always come to some bad end. That’s what Aunt Rose says.

The sun has already crossed the equator, so Pop said it was time to plant. Jack and Lenny hoed furrows in straight rows for the scraggly tomato plants Pop brought home from the hardware store. He gets a discount for the plants other people don’t want. He says if you put your sweat into them, they’ll be just as good as the top-notch plants, so that’s what we’re doing. Planting and sweating.

I start whistling. At first Aunt Rose thinks it’s Jack and doesn’t say a word. Anything Jack does is all right in Rose’s eyes.

I keep following her down the tomato row, but when she turns around at the end, she catches me with my lips puckered.

“Just work,” she says, “and don’t whistle.”

I look down at my dirty fingernails and envy Myra,
who doesn’t have to help because she’s looking after that baby, despite the fact that it’s not even here yet.

The sun’s going down fast and we’ve still got a bucket of plants to set. Rose talks too much and slows us down. She places each plant in the furrow and I come along behind her covering up the roots. Momma and the boys are doing the same thing in the next row and now they’re way ahead of us. I start to lose my patience and that makes me want to whistle, but I bite my tongue and hold it in.

Finally, Momma and Rose head back to the house and leave us to water the new plants. In the open field with Rose gone I can whistle all I want to, but no good tunes come to mind.

“I wish I was at a Red Sox game,” Jack says.

We play this game called “I wish” when we’ve been stuck with an ornery task and have to get it done fast. It’s like birthday wishing without the cake and candles and it has to be something that we can’t imagine ever doing for real.

“I wish I was dancing on Broadway,” says Lenny.

We’re supposed to keep the game going fast. I think hard, but no wishes come to mind.

Both boys stop watering and look back at me at the same time. If I don’t say something fast, I’ll be out.

“I wish I was whistling in Africa,” I say.

Lenny laughs out loud, but Jack just shakes his head.

At the end of the row Jack picks me up and carries me piggyback all the way to the front porch, where Aunt Rose is sitting in the swing drinking iced tea.

“Chili wants to go to Africa,” Jack says. “What do you think about that, Aunt Rose?”

I kick him in the side with my heel, but he can’t even feel it.

“Hmph,” Rose says, shaking her head full of beauty-parlor curls. “Why would anybody want to go off to some dangerous place like that?”

Lenny slips up behind us.

“To whistle,” he whispers.

This time Jack laughs, too, and Aunt Rose looks at us like we’ve lost our minds.

F
aces in the Clouds …

“What’s the secret to happiness?” Miss Matlock looks over the room, snaps her fingers. “Don’t hesitate,” she says. “Say the first thing that comes to mind.”

“Having fun,” says Priscilla.

“Lizards and four-leaf clovers,” says Zeno Mayfield.

“Hoofbeats,” says Surry who sings.

Hoofbeats?

“I’ve
always wanted a horse,” she says, her face turning bright red. “One that can run faster than the wind.”

Everybody laughs. “No horse can run that fast.”

“What about you, Chili?” Snap. Snap.

“Distant lands,” I say.

Ginny and Priscilla turn and look at me and frown. They are fully content right here in Mercy Hill, the center of the universe.

We each make a list of happy sights and sounds and smells. The redbuds and dogwood blooming pink and white on the mountains, blackberry cobbler, church bells. Wild grapevines to swing on. Jasmine flowers. Bobwhites singing in the trees. Faces in the clouds.

My list is different from the others, full of sights I’ve never seen, foods I’ve never smelled, sounds I’ve never heard. Happy sights and sounds and smells from pictures and stories of places faraway.

“Those probably aren’t real,” Ginny whispers, leaning across the aisle to see my paper. “Your list is not even real.”

Outside the window there’s a rabbit in the clouds, a rabbit with one enormous blue eye where the sky’s coming through and a crooked smile that keeps getting bigger and bigger. Like it’s laughing at us.

O
pening Shots …

Lenny stands in the living room beneath the ceiling light, a white globe the size of a grapefruit hanging from a brass chain with a blue glass shade covering it like a hood. Flower designs cut into the blue glass let the bright light sparkle through. This fixture is one of Pop’s favorites, bought at an antique fair on the Cumberland Gap. It’s our spotlight.

We pull down the shades. Everyone’s gone to Jack’s baseball game except Lenny and me. I sit on the couch with the cassette player balanced on the arm next to the wall, singing along:
Chick-a-boom Chick-a-boom don’t ya jes’ love it …

“Watch the clock!” Lenny shouts. When he dances, he forgets that time exists. Inside the glass doors of the big clock on the mantel a brass pendulum swings back and forth, ticking off the minutes above the Mars bars. Pop hides candy in the clock so he can have a snack when he stretches out in front of the television late at night.

Almost eight o’clock. I still need to write my essay on Marco Polo.

“Let’s start over,” Lenny says, stopping to take a breath. “How about the Who?”

He digs through the stack of cassettes and hands me a new one. After turning off the light, he waits for me to slip it into place and then run to the switch and turn it back on at just the right time. This is what Lenny calls an “opening shot.” You have to get the timing right.

I slide in the cassette, snap the door closed, and get ready to push the play button.

“Wait, wait!” Lenny yells, and he takes off up the stairs.

I hear the door to the attic open and close. What on earth is he doing?

Before I can hardly breathe, he’s back with Uncle Lucius’s walking cane, the one Uncle Lu takes to the mountains to poke in the underbrush and run off snakes when he’s searching for ginseng.

“What are you doing with that?”

“You’ll see,” he says.

Lenny points the cane and tells me he’s ready. So I push in the play button and hurry to the light switch.

Perfect opening shot! Lenny holds the cane in place and dances around it.

The Who sings:
I can see for miles and miles and miles …

Faster and faster. Round and round. He gives the cane a kick. Slides it under his arm. Whips it out and …

I can’t stop it, can’t get a word out. Lenny twirls the cane like a majorette’s baton and hits the blue glass light shade, splintering it into a million pieces. They fall onto the wood floor in a circle around his feet, and for a moment it looks like Lenny’s on a real stage surrounded by a thousand twinkling lights.