The Messenger of Magnolia Street (14 page)

“We thought you were a dead man when you rushed in there, Nehemiah.”

“I didn't see what you saw.”

“I know that now. What I don't know is why.”

“Some things, Billy, I really cannot explain.”

“Yeah, I know that too.”

Lightning flashes across the sky. Trice would tell you if she were here that lightning is sometimes friendly. Sometimes it is just plain fire.

The night that John Robert's house caught on fire, the blaze was started by lightning. That night had unveiled Nehemiah, scarred John Robert, and scared Trice and Billy so bad they were never the same. The lightning was one solitary bolt out of the sky. Caught a
pine tree that was so dry the tree went up in flames like a huge match. Then the tree fell, crashing over into John Robert's roof. With him sleeping. Soundly. Or maybe, more correctly, passed out. He was known as a drinking man, and it had been a drinking night. Folks around Shibboleth, guessing what his condition might have been, had said him being alive at all was a miracle. Never mind his condition.

When the pine tree hit the roof, it caught nothing but the tar paper that John Robert had used, in a bit of drunken haze, to repair the last leak. The tar paper sucked on the fire like it was juice, and blew up. The rafters ignited and, little by smoky bit, the rest is history. Well, it's
that
history.

Nehemiah, Billy, and Trice didn't see any of this. Nehemiah answered a phone call from Trice in the middle of the night. She told him she had heard John Robert scream in her dream. Then she said, “Oh hurry. Please hurry,” as if she were on fire herself. What she didn't know was that the pine tree had just caught fire at the point she woke up. Had just fallen over when she dialed their phone number.

And within minutes, the three of them had been tearing down the road in Old Blue, who was in his glory days of brand-newer. When they pulled up, what was done was almost finished. Go ahead. Ask me why Trice didn't wake up an hour before with a premonition about the tree. Wake up before lightning ever struck. Ask, but don't expect an answer. All answers come in the Sweet By and By. And we're not there yet.

But now we are at the part when Nehemiah and Billy can rock and recollect in the middle of this new storm. This storm made of funny, fast-cracking lightning. Odd shoots of lightning from odd sources. A crack from the sky. A bolt low over the field. No pattern they've ever seen, and they've see a lot. And the wind. And no rain.

We have come to the part of their remembrance where they will
again carve out those countless slow-motion minutes. Count them out one by one by one.

“Then we were standing there with Trice yelling, ‘Oh, God! Do something.' Over and over again. And me looking for a hose. Do you remember me looking for a hose, Nehemiah? Like that was gonna be able to do anything.”

“No. I don't remember the hose.” And he doesn't. And he doesn't remember Trice's screams. He remembers John Robert's. He always will. They were the screams of a man dying while he's still alive. And the screams of a man who knows it. “What I remember, Billy, is needing water. Needing a lot of water. Needing a miracle. And then when I looked up, there were those clouds,” he pauses in wonder all over again, seeing the clouds all over again, “and then there was the rain. Rain like I'd never seen, the house being doused and turning to wet smoke and me running in to find John Robert keeled over. He was more of a shadow on the floor than a real man. Then there I was picking him up. You know the funny thing about that?”

“What?”

“Maybe I never told you this.” He rocks a minute. “Or maybe I did, but looking back on it, even in the middle of all that madness, I didn't just snatch him up and run. You know, you think someone in that situation would snatch and run. But I didn't. It was like I was in slow motion. Picked him up as carefully as picking up a baby from a crib.”

“And walked right out of that fire big as you please.” Billy finishes for him. Finishes like he is watching it happening right now before his eyes. “Did you know there were pieces of his clothes still in flames when you walked out?”

“I remember Trice taking off her housecoat, and you taking it and wrapping it around him, taking him out of my arms. And then
the most shocking thing, that was when I turned around, Billy, and you know what I saw.”

“Yep. That house ate up in flames.”

“That shocked me.”

“Would shock anybody that experienced what you did.”

“Still shocks me.” Nehemiah's throat catches. “And you know I still can't explain it. Still can't.”

“Maybe there's some things ain't meant to be explained.” Billy points to the sky.

“You were the one that was wanting all the answers, Brother.”

“Wanting answers and needing them are two different things.”

Nehemiah grins. Full face. Dimple in place. His brother Billy never fails to humor him. Or surprise him.

The wind whips the trees into a dancing frenzy. And in the middle of this storm Billy and Nehemiah are rocking. Recollecting. Funny how things can look on the surface. They seem as unaware, as unconcerned about the wind in the trees and the lightning cracking around them as you please. But there is not a second that the hairs on their arms have not been standing up, sensitive to the lightest touch. Not a second that they haven't been ready for anything at any moment. And yet they will talk until they are weary and tired of talking, and after all, they are still full of Kate's cooking from a noontime dinner.

Tonight they will rest well. Tonight, in an act of great defiance, in the middle of this storm, they will lie down and sleep. Full of peace. Pregnant with purpose.

The sound of metal crashing wakes Nehemiah. He opens his eyes, rolls over in his old bed. He crosses his arms behind his head and stares up at the ceiling, just the same way he had that night in Washington that seems like a hundred years ago. The crashing sound is now rolling, blowing across the backyard and off into the distance until it hits against a stand of trees. The picture of Nehemiah, Billy, and Trice smiles down at Nehemiah, and he smiles back. He looks around the walls at the old emblems of his boyhood. A wild menagerie of skins and photos and dreams of another kind of life. There is his collection of knives on a shelf, his shotgun in one corner, his fishing reels and rods in the other. A bronze metal that belonged to his father (Billy keeps the purple heart). And a six-foot rattlesnake skin nailed along one wall. His momma hadn't wanted it in the house, but when he was twelve he'd killed it and skinned it and at twelve it might as well've been a fire-breathing dragon. And that thought leads him back to where he is and what he's in the middle of.

“This is a boy's room,” he says aloud, “and I'm not a boy anymore.” He throws off his cover and reaches for his jeans.

In the kitchen he finds Billy awake, sitting at the table, waiting for the coffee to finish.

“Toolshed roof.” Billy says, sleepily.

“Thought so.” Nehemiah gets a cup down, stands arms folded next to their mother's old coffeepot. Billy never updates anything.
Nehemiah is staring at the percolator's top, watching the coffee shoot up into the crystal top and down again, as if he was looking into a crystal ball. “How long have I been here, Billy?”

Billy thinks for a while. “Why don't you let me wake up good before you ask me such questions.”

“It should be simple to answer.”

“Well, if it's so simple, you should know.”

I'm thinking maybe they shouldn't either one of them talk any more until they've had their coffee.

Nehemiah looks out the kitchen window, where he can indeed see the toolshed roof blown clear across the open field where the garden used to be. Can see it in the distance leaning against the stand of trees. The sun isn't coming up today. The sky is getting lighter but the light isn't coming through.

“It's going to be dark now,” he says, looking at the sky. There are no physical clouds, just a haze. A strange, sickly yellow haze.

Monday, 7:53 A.M
.

Kate is cooking up a storm as usual, but she has started to notice that people aren't eating. Not as much. Not the same. But she doesn't know why. Everybody says everything's all right. Sitting in that pale yellowish light coming through the window, that's what they tell her to her face. “Everything's all right, Kate.”

Even Catfish, who came by his nickname as honest as a man can by being able to put away more fish and food even as a child than a grown man could. Now even he nods his head, says the same thing, but he has piles of potatoes and eggs left on his plate and
that's just unheard of. And when Cassie Getty eats only one biscuit, it leaves Kate speechless. Cassie can eat all the biscuits in the kitchen.
Is she on some kind of new diet?
Kate thinks. But then,
Cassie's not one to diet. She stays too busy with her cloning conspiracy for that. But come to think of it, she hasn't even mentioned cloning today.

Now then, that puts Kate in a mind. She approaches Cassie's table with all the subtle gentleness of a bull.

“You on a diet?”

“Course not.”

“What's the matter, then, with my biscuits?”

“Nothin' I know of.”

“You didn't eat but one.”

“Biscuits are all right.” There's that word again, and Cassie says it with such a bland blankness in her face that it forces Kate back into the kitchen, makes her stand with spoons to her nose and tastes to her mouth.

Then she goes to the kitchen door again, stands there with her hands on her hips watching what isn't happening. Listening to what isn't being said.
Something is definitely not all right.

Monday, 8:33 A.M
.

A black Lincoln Town Car is making its slow, methodical way to the house of Nehemiah Trust. It is moving like a battleship through the seas, as if parting the winded trees in its wake. It slowly passes the graveyard on the right, the old one that is not as well kept, the one where the dead died before the time of living memories. They are now truly dust and ashes, no longer living even
in the people who came after them. They are only a vapor. But the vapor contains seeds. Seeds that may just rise up and carry into tomorrow. We'll wait and see.

But the driver of the Town Car doesn't know this. The driver knows to drive. To seek. And to find. And Nehemiah is the only focus of this search. The search will end when Nehemiah takes his second cup of coffee out on the porch, wearing nothing but his jeans. And just you look, he's barefoot. Cutting a fine picture as the Lincoln swings into the driveway and parks. The front door slowly opens, and a black wingtip touches the ground.

Nehemiah recognized the car in the distance. He has no questions or doubts about this visitor. This is old stuff. He hadn't wanted to handle things this way, but now
things
are at his doorstep.

“Hi, Butch,” Nehemiah says to the suit that is now steadily approaching the porch.

Butch doesn't speak until he walks up the steps, looks around at the house, down at Nehemiah's bare chest, down to his bare feet, where his eyes hang for a moment. “Hi, Nehemiah.”

“Mike come with you?”

“Not this time. Told me to check on you. So here I am.” He continues looking down at Nehemiah's toes, keeping a straight face. “I'm going to tell him that you're alive but shoeless and I don't know what that means.”

Butch is a
special
employee of Senator Honeywell's. One that remains on the senator's private payroll. He is the son of an old army buddy of the senator. A buddy who passed away from complications from heart surgery, and keeping an eye on Butch was the only thing that he had asked Mike Honeywell to do for him. And this long before he was a senator. Now Butch keeps an eye on the senator. And draws a healthy paycheck for doing so. He's a former marine, although Butch would frown at
former
. The marines didn't rub off and it's obvious that he's enlisted in something. Obvious in his
barrel chest and his steel spine. In his hair cut so short that you can see his scalp.

Butch surmises enough to see that Nehemiah is well. At least some type of well. Although he can't exactly tell what type of well that is. He turns, surveying the sky. He looks at the wind in the trees and tells Nehemiah without turning back around, “I thought the weather would be better here.”

“Tell me, Butch, have you been driving all night?”

“No. Drove most of the way and stopped. Didn't want to surprise you at o'dark thirty. Came the last hundred miles this morning.”

“When did the weather turn bad?”

Butch considers the weather, but not for long. “About fifty-six miles ago.”

Nehemiah nods his head but doesn't comment. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, I'm fine.” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a cell phone, extends it to Nehemiah. “But you have a phone call to make.”

“I know, I know, Butch.” Nehemiah waves him back and away. “I had to know what was happening down here, what direction things were going to take, before I called. Otherwise,” he twirls his hand in the air, copying a gesture of the senator's, “it would all be smoke and mirrors speculation. And you know how much Mike loves smoke and mirrors.”

“Do you know what direction things are taking now, Nehemiah?”

“The direction. But not the destination.”

Butch flips open the cell phone, begins to dial, “Well, at least
that
will give me something to report.”

“Butch.” Nehemiah squints against the yellow glare. “I just left a few days ago. Don't you think your being here is a little, well, premature?”

“You broke your pattern, Nehemiah.”

“My pattern?”

“Senator Honeywell says you broke your pattern. No call. No checking in. Not like you.” Butch begins to dial the number. “It's time to check in, Nehemiah.”

“I still think this is just a little excessive.” Nehemiah gets up and walks back into the house, passing Billy in the hall.

“Work show up?”

“Yep.”

“I figured that would happen.” Billy is buttoning his shirt as he walks out of the bedroom. “You cooking breakfast?”

“There's not enough food here to feed us and the man that just showed up.”

Billy lifts the curtain, looks out the window at Butch on the porch.

“He looks like me.”

“You know, he sure does. Only harder.”

“I was gonna skip that part, Nehemiah.”

 

Rudy Harris is stocking vegetables in the back of the Piggly Wiggly, but he isn't teasing Billy Shook's youngest daughter, Ellen, like he's done since she started cashiering a year ago. He begins breaking down boxes but doesn't think to turn on his radio and play it so loud that it blares through the doors and out into the front of the store. Today there will be no one yelling at Rudy, “Turn that fuss down!” Rudy isn't making a fuss. And the silence is so heavy it feels like Rudy will never make a fuss again. Not in all the remaining moments of Shibboleth. Moments that seem to be waiting to be emptied into an abyss that screams lost and gone and forgotten and buried forever.

Monday, 9:38 A.M
.

Nehemiah and Billy have invited Butch to breakfast. Nehemiah tells Billy to go ahead without him. Tells Butch to follow Billy. And then Nehemiah goes to pick up his girl. This is what he has decided in the night during the storm. This is what he has decided lying in his room, looking at that picture from the past while listening to the toolshed roof roll across the yard. Trice is his girl. Always has been. It just took him awhile to remember. He is hoping she remembers the same thing.

He pulls into Magnus's yard in the Malibu, walks past the cats without shooing them, and knocks on the door. Then he paces, hands in jeans pockets. He looks like a man who has come a long way in a little bit of time. Still I want to whisper,
Hurry, hurry.

 

Kate looks up and sees Billy and Butch walk in and pull up chairs at a table.

Hmmm. Not their usual booth
, she thinks, and gets ready to take them coffee. Darla has quit on her. Just run off with the Little Debbie Cake delivery man. Some people called it eloping. No decent engagement time. No friends and family at the wedding. No reception. No party and no food. She knew what it was and called it what it was by its real name: running off. “She'll be running back,” she says under her breath.

“Company?” Kate turns over the coffee cups, fills them from the pot in her hand without asking.

“Aunt Kate, this is Nehemiah's…” Billy doesn't have a clue what Butch is. “Butch, exactly what are you?”

“Butch Norris.” He rises from his seat, almost standing at attention. “I work for Senator Honeywell.”

“Well, Butch, you look like a man that can eat. And I like a man that can eat.”

Kate turns and walks away.

“Nehemiah has gone to pick up Trice,” Billy yells at her back.

The storm in Shibboleth is growing. The yellow sky pressing down, unrelenting. The wind, although not whipping as wickedly as the previous night, never pauses. And as the sky grows darker, Nehemiah paces on the porch where we left him. Trice walks up to other side of the screen door. Then she stands there watching him through the wire, but she doesn't move any closer.

“What, Nehemiah?”

“I think we should take care of…” and
business
is what he wants to say. He wants to point at the sky that he sees is getting darker. He wants to apologize for leaving and for not calling and to say thank you for being here, for not disappearing or, even worse, being here and not waiting.

For a man with a wonderful command of the English language, and capable of common phrases of hospitality in six others, “Thank you for waiting” is all he can manage.

“I always knew you'd come home.” Trice folds her arms, book in hand, finger holding her place. She continues looking at him through the screen.

“Are you going to come out here?” He's wearing that dimple again. It's well defined. Trice finds it a hard thing to say no to. She opens the door and takes a small step forward, and with one short step she is out of the house and into Nehemiah's life in a new way.

Nehemiah reaches forward and pulls the book from her hand, looks at the title.
The History of Western Art
. “Is there anything you
don't
read?” He memorizes the marked page number from habit, and closes the cover. Trice fights the urge to walk on her toes.

“I have to be honest with you, home I'm not sure of.” Nehemiah takes her hand, pulls her toward him, and looks in her eyes. “You, I am.”

“Maybe I'm just your familiar, Nehemiah.”

“That you are, Trice.” He smiles her favorite smile. “You're
my
familiar.”

And here Nehemiah kisses Trice. A kiss that seals something. Defines something. Closes a window. Opens a door. Shifts a path forward. I write down,
Two single lines of future melt into one path of now. And, it is
good.

By the time that Nehemiah and Trice have gotten in the car, have driven to the diner, the sky has turned from yellow to a shade of sly brown. A brown that has something up its sleeves.

When they walk through the front door, Kate is just beginning to ladle gravy, pull piping-hot biscuits out of the oven, platter up omelets, something she rarely makes, but she believes that Butch would like an omelet. She is carrying food to at least one table that she knows, or at least hopes, will still appreciate it. The world could come crumbling down around them, and she would be feeding people in the midst of it. She would just think,
Well if it's all gonna end this way, people should at least get one last good meal.
And she'd mean it.