A Snicker of Magic (4 page)

Jonah must have misunderstood the look on my face, because he said, “Is it okay … if we’re friends?”

“Better than okay.” I smiled, watching the friend-word squeeze out of the open window and flutter toward the sky. Fact: I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of participating in the Stoneberry Duel. But I could explain my dueling
woes to Jonah some other time. Spending more time with him seemed too spindiddly an offer to pass up.

“Cool.” Jonah smiled back. “And by the way, if you’re interested in the Brothers Threadbare, you should also ask Cleo about them. That woman knows everything about everybody in Midnight Gulch.”

When the bus screeched to a stop in front of the Sandcut Apartments complex, I stood up and said, “You never told me why you called yourself a Beedle.”

“SHHH!” Jonah cautioned. “You can’t go telling people you met the Beedle!”

“Right.” I nodded.

“We’ll talk about pumpernickel on Monday,” Jonah said.
Monday.
Nothing good had ever happened to me on a Monday, magical or otherwise. But Jonah said
Monday
so easy, like we could handle ten thousand Mondays because we’d be friends through all of them.

“See you Monday, then,” I said.

Day Grissom said my name as I stepped off the bus, except he said it this way: “Fliss-tee.”

I looked back at him. “Yes, sir?”

“You kin to Cleo Harness?” he asked.

I nodded. “She’s my aunt.”

Day rubbed his fingers down the length of his scraggly beard. “Will you tell her …” He sighed. He chewed on his lip. He sighed one more time. “Will you tell her … that I said …
hi
?”

“Sure.” I answered.

Halfway up the hill, I caught up to Frannie Jo. She was swinging her hips and bopping her head.

“I like this music!” Frannie hollered.

“What music?” I asked. Because all I heard was the good-bye-summer breeze pushing its way through the woods.

“This music!” Frannie Jo swung her hips side to side, the yellow tutu sparkling all around her.

Just as I was about to say something else, I saw a familiar word flickering up ahead. I stopped walking so fast both of us nearly toppled over.

T H R E A D B A R E

This time it was ripple-sparkling, hovering across a window on the third floor of the building: Aunt Cleo’s apartment.

“Spindiddly,” I mumbled.

“Do you hear the music?” Frannie asked.

“Nope,” I said. But at the sight of that word, I heard something else loud and clear:

Yes,

Yes,

Yes!

I poured myself a glass of milk.

Swig

Swallow

Gulp

I watched the words come splashing out of the milk carton and dissolve down in my glass.

The crickets were singing twilight songs outside Aunt Cleo’s window. The moon had bloomed starry white in the autumn sky. Dinner was over. Mama was working a late shift at the ice-cream factory.

“Aunt Cleo, do you know anything about the Brothers Threadbare?”

Cleo coughed and sputtered her tea. Her sewing scissors hit the floor, and her hands stilled. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and stared at me, as if she suddenly needed to study me especially carefully. “Why do you want to know about those boys?”

“Miss Lawson was talking about them in class.” I
poured a second glass of milk for Frannie Jo, then nudged the refrigerator door shut with my hip.

“Your teacher told you about …”

“The Brothers Threadbare.” I nodded. I could have sworn I saw Cleo’s hands tremble as she reached for her scissors. “So do you know much about them?”

“Only a little bit,” Cleo mumbled. She drummed her long red fingernails against the table, collecting all her thoughts about the Weatherly brothers. “But I don’t know if we oughta talk about those boys.” Her hand was trembling for sure when she lit her cigarette. Just the fact that Cleo was so suddenly nervous over dead-and-gone magician farmers made me want to talk about them even more. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who shivered just at the sound of their name.

“I need to know for school,” I said, which was a little bit true. But the full-blown truth was this: I needed to know for me. I needed to know why my heart kicked every time I heard their name. I needed to know why the magic left when they did.

Cleo tapped her cigarette against the ashtray. The ashes spelled out:

Lucky

Cursive

Keeper

A fog of smoke escaped Cleo’s lips when she spoke. “Threadbare was a stage name; the brothers were really just farm boys called Stone and Berry Weatherly.”

“I know that part already. I’d like to know more about
the Duel.” I sat down across from Cleo and she pushed a bowl of Doritos toward me. Frannie Jo lay on the couch, watching cartoons. Biscuit sat on the floor, staring up at us, waiting for the chips Cleo sometimes pretended to drop on the floor.

“Well.” Cleo cleared her throat. “Stone played guitar and Berry played the banjo. Some people think the magic came from the musical instruments, not the men. And most people think there was nothing special about them at all, of course. Those stories are probably just old mountain fairy tales.”

“Is that what you believe?” I asked.

Cleo didn’t answer my question. But she coughed out a cloud of smoke and words:

Secret

Sorrowful

Holly

Holly is my mother’s name.

Cleo didn’t answer my question. “According to the stories,” Cleo wheezed, “Stone lost the Duel because he couldn’t roar like a lion. They were going back and forth making animal noises — Berry screamed like a panther and challenged Stone to roar like a lion, but no sound came out of that poor man’s mouth. The storm cloud hovering up above him morphed into the shape of a lion, which is a much snazzier trick, if you ask me. But they didn’t ask me. Because I wasn’t born back then. And bets are bets and Stone lost. Biscuit won.”

Biscuit sat up and raised one floppy ear.

“You mean Berry won,” I said.

“Berry!” Cleo hollered. “Sorry, Biscuit.” She tossed my dog a sympathy Dorito.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“The Brothers Threadbare were real artsy types. Music might have been their magic, but they were good at everything they put their hand to. Berry could sew. And Stone,” she sighed, “was an artist.”

“Like Mama!” I said. Part of our gypsy lifestyle had to do with Mama’s job. She was a traveling artist. She painted murals all over the South. She used to, anyway. “She hasn’t painted at all since before we left Kentucky.”

“Don’t I know it.” Cleo nodded. “I doubt Stone was as good at it as your mama, but he was something. He was the first man ever hired to paint the Gallery.”

“The what?”

Cleo accidentally tapped her cigarette ashes into the bowl of Doritos. I figured it’d be best not to mention it. “Stone painted the side of the drugstore; you know that first wall you see when you cross the bridge into Midnight Gulch? We call that wall the Gallery. Since Stone had magic in his veins, the picture he painted on the Gallery changed every day. They say he walked right into the painting every now and again. Sometimes, he did it to be funny. But sometimes, if he got mad over something his brother did, he’d go hide out in the painting and pout. That was some magic those boys had.”

“Some magic,” I mumbled. I thought about how it would feel to hide out in a picture, to have bones made of paint, able to stretch across a blank canvas any way I wanted.

“Of course, people’s painted a hundred years’ worth of graffiti all over the Gallery now,” Cleo said. “You can’t even tell what it looked like back then. The picture stopped changing, anyway, after Stone and Berry left.”

“Because Stone was cursed with a wandering heart,” I said sadly.

“Don’t I know it.” She stared at the grooves in the table and sighed.

“Do you think they regretted dueling once they’d done it?”

“Surely so.” Cleo stood with a grunt. She tossed a stack of tabloid magazines off of the table and onto a chair. She pulled out a pile of quilt squares hidden underneath. “I figure they were too proud to say they were sorry. Pride sure does a number on people.”

“One more question before I go to bed?” I asked.

Cleo took up her needle and began sewing plaid star patches onto the squares. “Sure, I reckon.”

“Tell me about Roger Pickle?” I blurted the words out before I could change my mind.

Aunt Cleo’s hands stilled. She looked up at me through pink-tinted glasses and I could see a world of sad in her eyes. A bunch of words zoomed out of the quilt, all star shaped:

Sorrow

Scandal

Holly

Frannie

Felicity

“Mama won’t know,” I begged. “She won’t be home for hours.”

I glanced over to see Frannie Jo, arms propped on the back of the couch. She wanted to know more about Roger Pickle, too. We wanted to know a thousand things, but we would settle for one more thing at a time.

“Okay,” Cleo said softly. She laid her patches gently in her lap.

Patch it

Mend it

Stitch it back together

Those words were threads around her gray-blond hair, binding together in the shape of a star, then a drawbridge, then a full-bloomed flower.

“For one thing” — Cleo ran her hands over the quilt patches as she spoke — “Roger Pickle liked to dance. He’d turn up the radio and take your mama’s hand and pull her out to the middle of the room. He’d spin her around and hold her tight and soon she’d laugh and forget that she didn’t know the steps.”

Frannie Jo closed her eyes.

Cinderella

Snow White

Sleeping Beauty

The words glittered in an invisible crown around her head. That was the only dancing Frannie knew, the kind she’d seen in movies. She’d never seen how Mama used to dance, when she’d shake her hips and fling her hair around and laugh. Wild
dancing. Free dancing. I want to dance that way someday: free as a mountain girl, not bound up like a princess.

Cleo cleared her throat. “He could play a guitar, too. Played in a rock band over in Knoxville sometimes, but he mostly played for your mama. She said he could sing down the stars.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“He named you Felicity because he said it meant ‘intense happiness.’ And that’s exactly how he felt when he held you in his arms for the very first time.”

I could hear my heart again, speaking
yes
but in a gentler way than it usually did.
Yes
, this is truer than true and you can believe it.
Yes
, this is worth remembering no matter what else you figure out.

“And
you
.” Cleo stood up and swooped Frannie Jo up into her arms. “He called you Francis Josephine after both your grandmothers. They were wild and wonderful and unique people. And he wanted you to be like them.”

“And!” She held out her hand to me. “He loves you both, a heap and a bunch and more than you know. No matter where he is, what he’s doing now, or what’s happening between him and your mama, he loves you.”

“He might come back,” I said. I knew Mama hoped the same thing. She still carried a picture of him in her purse. In the photo, Roger Pickle wore a black T-shirt and blue jeans and a beard every bit as red as his hair. And so that’s always how I pictured him, wearing those same clothes, looking that same way. I worried that most of the memories I had
were the made-up kind. I could remember how I felt when he picked me up in his arms and I rested my head on his shoulder. I remember it because that’s the safest I’ve ever felt. But I don’t remember much else.

“He might,” Cleo said. She didn’t sound very convinced. She kissed Frannie Jo on the forehead. “But he loves you, no matter what.”

“One more thing?” I asked as Cleo tucked us in. Frannie and I shared an inflatable mattress in our room, which had formerly been Aunt Cleo’s craft room until we surprised her and moved in.

Cleo sighed. “One more.”

I looked up at the picture situated on Aunt Cleo’s wall: a black-and-white photograph of a man standing beside a hot air balloon. I saw the word again,
THREADBARE
, stretched across the balloon’s canvas.

“What’s
threadbare
mean?” I asked.

“Shabby-looking,” Cleo said. And I saw the other words, too:

Old

Thinned out

Roughed up

Well loved

She wheezed a laugh. “Threadbare’s what I am, I guess. Will you do me a favor, Felicity? Don’t tell your mama that we talked about those boys. She doesn’t like that story.”

I opened my mouth to ask why, but Cleo pressed her finger against my lips and said, “No more questions. Y’all
are making my brain tired.” She walked over to the tiny window in our room and raised it up just barely. I heard crickets singing their good-night songs to one another. And I
smelled
something glorious, like warm cookies just pulled out of an oven.

“I call that the sugar wind,” Cleo said. I could hear a smile in her voice. “It’s the smell of the waffle cones they bake down at the ice-cream factory.” I think we were both comforted to know Mama was working in a place that smelled so wonderful.

Cleo left the door cracked open for us so we’d have light if we woke up, so we wouldn’t stumble through the dark. Frannie snuggled up close to my one side, and Biscuit snuggled up close to the other.

“Catch me a poem?” Frannie asked.

I whispered:

Frannie snored softly, but I knew she’d heard my words. I saw them still shining above her, each letter rippling with her easy breaths:

Comet

Cloud

Ballerina

I wished I could fall asleep as fast as Frannie Jo, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to until I heard Mama come back. I tried not to think about what might happen if she left work, got in the Pickled Jalapeño … and kept on driving. Left town, just disappeared. Like Roger Pickle.

Like the Brothers Threadbare.

THREADBARE

I closed my eyes and thought of those magical brothers playing music while the clouds swirled into new shapes above them. I thought about Roger Pickle playing guitar while my mama danced, her skirt swirling all around her as she stomped and jumped and kicked her legs. If I had magic in my veins, like the Threadbares did, I’d make a home for all of us. And then I’d use my home magic to help Roger Pickle find us. I’d fill up a flare gun with blinking stars and shoot them into the universe. They’d spell out:

We’re home.

Or maybe:
We’re
your
home.

He would follow the stars and find us. I’d see his favorite words spinning around his head:
Holly. Felicity. Frannie Jo.
I’d hug his neck and we’d dance on home, wherever home is. Because home is where shabby hearts like ours belong.