To Come and Go Like Magic (9 page)

“We need a broom,” I say, and I head toward the kitchen. Neither of us says a word while we’re cleaning up. Lenny gets the vacuum cleaner to suck up the fine pieces and I start upstairs to write my essay on Marco Polo.

“My mother danced on a real stage with a real spotlight and music played by a live band,” he says.

“I know.” I turn and leave him staring up at that bare globe like he can wish it back together.

“Don’t tell your pop,” he says when I’m halfway up the stairs. “Maybe he won’t notice.”

“Maybe,” I say.

I do my homework as quick as a snap and jump into bed, thinking Pop will discover the broken light shade the minute he walks in the door. But maybe not. I cross my fingers under the covers. Maybe he won’t find out until Lenny’s left home. Maybe I’ll be gone by then, too, and he won’t even remember what the light looked like when it had a shade.

T
he May Day Royalty Contest …

Every day at lunchtime the jars go up on a table outside the principal’s office. Alma Jo, the school secretary, sits at a folding chair behind the table and watches the jars, counts the money. Rolled-up dollar bills, silver, lots of pennies. Each jar has a label with a photo and name of the girl running in the May Day contest. The queen will come from the high school, the princess from sixth through eighth, and the miniature queen from elementary. Kindergarten and first grade have their own candidates for the Tiny Miss crown.

This contest has nothing to do with beauty or personality or good grades. It has everything to do with money. The one with the most wins. So if you have money left over from lunch, you can put it in the jars. Or you can bring a donation from home or help wash cars at the Piggly Wiggly on Saturdays or buy big packages of jawbreakers and Hershey’s kisses at Dinky’s Discount and sell the little packages in the lunchroom for a lot more than they cost.

Priscilla and Ginny are both running for princess, along with five of the popular girls. They all sit together in the cafeteria at lunchtime. Since kindergarten we’ve had lunch together every day, but now I sit alone. Their table, the first one inside the door, is just for princess candidates. This is not a real rule, just Melody Reece’s rule. I’ll be glad when May Day is over.

I bring my lunch and enough money to buy milk. That’s it. Every day Ginny and Priscilla ask if I’ve put money in their jars. I’m saving, I say. Maybe tomorrow. But it’s a waste of money to “vote,” which is what they call contributing money, for anyone except Melody Reece. Her daddy is the manager of the Piggly Wiggly store and he’s put jars at every register with a picture of Melody wearing a crown that looks an awful lot like the May Day princess crown. Brock’s store put up jars for Priscilla and Ginny, but the Piggly Wiggly gets a lot more customers, especially ones who actually buy stuff. Most of the people at Brock’s are there to play dominoes. Anyway, they’re old men who don’t have money to waste.

I see Zeno stuffing his lunch money in Melody’s jar every day, thinking he’s going to be the next prince. The girls get to choose their escorts and every single one of them is crazy about Zeno, even though he’s the most annoying human being alive.

Myra was the May Day queen when she was in high school. She wore a long white gown and rode on the back of a red convertible in the May Day parade. Momma has her picture sitting on the mantel above the fireplace.

I tell this to Willie Bright at the bus stop and he says: “If you were running, I’d put all my money in your jar.”

“You don’t have any money,” I say.

“If I did have money and if you were running …”

“That’s a lot of
ifs,”
I say. “Besides, I’m not the princess type.”

M
oments …

I’m helping Momma clean Uncle Lu’s room while he’s out fishing. It’s a mess. Dirty clothes piled up in one corner waiting to be toted downstairs to the washing machine, opened pouches of Prince Albert tobacco lying around half-full, shoe boxes full of dried, muddy roots. Uncle Lu searches the mountains for all kinds of wild roots and seeds and flowers to make herbal remedies.

“Don’t ever eat or drink any of Lu’s mixes,” Momma says.

“I’m not stupid.”

“Chileda, I didn’t say that. I simply—”

“I know, Momma.”

She scoots the shoe boxes under the bed.

“I don’t see how he sleeps with the heat up here,” she says. “Why don’t you go downstairs and bring up a fan.”

I grab an armful of Uncle Lu’s dirty clothes, head down to the kitchen, and drop the shirts and pants and holey socks on the floor in front of the washer. We don’t have a dryer, so Momma has to hang everything on the clothesline out back. It’s not too bad in the summer, but in the wintertime the clothes freeze and take forever to dry. Sometimes, when a whole week is wet and cold, we have clothes hanging inside all over the house. If Myra and Uncle Lu stay until next winter, we won’t have enough room to move around on laundry day.

I bring up the fan and Momma makes a place for it on Uncle Lu’s dresser. It feels cool as long as you follow the blowing air from side to side.

“How big was Grandma Sudie’s house?” I ask. My great-great-grandmother died a long time before I was born and there’s nothing much left of the family house on Mercy Hill.

“I thought it was a castle back then,” Momma says. She’s stripped Uncle Lu’s bed and is putting on a fresh
white fitted sheet. I get on the opposite side and stretch the ends around the mattress corners.

“It must have been huge!” I try to picture the old house from the tales she’s told of kids running through the rooms and up and down the staircase. She made it sound like a party every day.

Momma laughs. “Not really,” she says. “It just seemed that way because I was so small. Everything looks big to a little kid.”

“Was it as big as the Matlock house?” I grab my side of the flat sheet and tuck it under the mattress without looking up, act like this question came right off the top of my head from nowhere.

“Oh no,” Momma says. “The Matlocks were rich people.”

“How did they get rich in Mercy Hill?”

“Coal,” she says. “That’s the only way anybody’s ever gotten rich here.” She slaps Uncle Lu’s pillow and fluffs it up just so.

“Mr. Matlock was a miner?”

Momma laughs again, but it sounds like a put-on laugh this time. “I doubt that man ever went down in a mine,” she says.

“Then how—”

“We’re about done here,” she says. “I need to get supper started.”

“But why can’t we talk about—”

Momma shakes her head. “Chileda, sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“What does that mean?”

“Leave the old stories alone. Let them be done with.”

“But—”

“Besides,” Momma says. “I was a little girl back then, so I wasn’t bothered by all that coal business.”

She takes up the dust mop and runs it hard across the floor. I wish I hadn’t gotten her mind off Grandma Sudie’s house. I like to hear her talk about living there, about all her brothers and sisters and cats and dogs, about being poor and rich at the same time.

“What did you like best about Grandma Sudie’s house?” I ask now.
“Your
home.”

She picks up the rest of Uncle Lu’s clothes and stands looking out the attic window with the view all the way to the river. “Maybe the way the light fell through the kitchen window,” she says. “I liked to stand in that patch of light in the early morning and just dream.”

I start to ask about her dreams, but somehow this doesn’t feel like the right time.

“Your grandma always said that you had to take hold of the moments that don’t last long,” she says. “That patch of light never stayed but a few minutes.”

Momma stands now in the late light falling through
the attic window and I try to imagine her as a young girl standing in the bright morning sunlight of Grandma’s kitchen. She starts to smile but doesn’t look my way. She’s smiling to herself. If I had a camera, I’d take her picture.

M
ay Day Parade …

Melody Reece won the May Day princess contest. She jumped up and down when Principal Goodman announced it, hugging all the popular girls and acting like she was surprised to death. The rest of us sat there and watched. Ginny and Priscilla joined all the hugging even though they lost to Melody. They’d do anything under the sun to be in that group of girls. She deserved it, they said. I wanted to ask why but didn’t. If you have money jars sitting all over town, it’s hard to lose.

Then disaster struck at the May Day Eve queen’s-court dinner. Priscilla walked in wearing the same pink dress as Melody Reece, and Melody’s momma almost had to be carried out on a stretcher. These are my momma’s exact words. Her garden club sponsored the dinner, so she had a front-row view of the whole thing. Everybody thought
Mrs. Reece had a right to be upset. After all, she was the first May Day queen back in 1955. Her lilac-colored dress was one of a kind. It’s still displayed in a glass frame at the Mercy Hill museum room in the public library.

Thank goodness Priscilla and Melody are on different floats today. Melody is riding with the other members of royalty, and Priscilla’s on a float stuffed with the losers. Every year the royalty float goes at the end of the parade, but after the gown problem, Mrs. Reece insisted the winners go first. Momma says it’s to make sure everybody sees Melody in that pink dress before they see Priscilla in hers. Melody’s dress cost eighty-five dollars at the Great Gowns Emporium up in Louisville, but Priscilla’s was just forty dollars at Donna’s Dress Shop, where my momma works.

Momma thinks all this is funny, but she doesn’t know how it is. All those popular girls will hate Priscilla for this. She’ll have to do something to get back on their good sides. You just don’t reduce Melody Reece to a regular person and get by with it.

I’m standing with Momma and Uncle Lu in front of the bandstand with the loudspeakers blaring in our ears and the Tiger Scouts running through the crowd like a bunch of hoodlums. I think about Jack and Lenny and Pop sitting in front of the hardware store in lawn chairs waiting for the parade. We could be there, too, if it weren’t for Uncle Lucius wanting to hear the Shriners
play their songs in the bandstand. So here we are, listening to a bunch of old men make the saxophones screech and the trumpets blast off-key, but Uncle Lu smiles and claps to the music, never hears a wrong note.

When the sirens start, the band stops playing. The police cars and fire trucks inch past us. Everybody waves. The firemen throw hard candy to the crowd. Peppermints left over from the Christmas parade. And the Mercy Hill Band marches by playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” Uncle Lu stands up straight with his hand over his heart.

The royalty float is all white. Carnations and crepe paper. You can’t tell the real flowers from the fakes unless you’re close to the float. The girls are sitting on white thrones waving to the crowd. Melody’s smile looks like it’s been painted on her face, like her mouth’s smiling but her eyes are thinking about something else.

No one’s noticing, anyway. The crowd’s eyes are on the Tiny Miss, who can’t sit still. With her bubbly yellow dress spread around her and the crown of fake flowers on her head she looks like a blossom that’s slipped out of its pot. She wiggles and twists and clings to the side of her throne, getting as far away from the Tiny Mister as she can get. Everybody laughs. The Mister smiles and waves the way he’s supposed to, but the Tiny Miss looks like she’s about to cry.