The Messenger of Magnolia Street (3 page)

Nehemiah spies Old Blue, a dinosaur from another place and time, illegally parked and taking up most of the street. He pauses, considers this apparition, then fights the urge to drop his briefcase and run toward it. Instead, he walks as slowly as he possibly can to the driver's window, where Billy is asleep. Trice is leaning against the passenger door biting her nails. She has been watching him walk toward her. She has been waiting for Nehemiah for a very long time.

“What's going on?” It's a simple question that introduces an explosion of activity from inside the truck. Billy erupts with a stream of choice curse words. Then he pauses long enough to look over at Nehemiah and say, “Hey.” Nehemiah grins. It's not his usual Washington smile but a grin from way back when.

“We come to see you,” Billy says.

“Well, get on out then.” (A man must speak his native language when the natives are about.)

Now you know these two have come a long way. You can see it, can't you? Those tired eyes, bunched-up muscles. Voices hoarse from yelling at one another over the wind and road noise. And now that they are standing here disheveled, in the midst of so many city lights, they feel just a little foolish, just a little country rumpled. And more than a little hungry.

“Is everything all right?” Nehemiah motions to the front door.

“Do we look all right?” Trice has a streak of anger. It's been building for a few years now and she tries to tame it as she speaks, tries to stroke it, to push it back into place like a lock of her unruly hair. “Hello, Nehemiah. It's been a long time.”

And then I watch Nehemiah
behold
her. Beholding is better than a long look. Beholding is better than most things. And I watch Nehemiah
remember
her. But this isn't the Trice he left behind. This Trice is all grown up. This Trice rattles his nerves. Nehemiah breaks his eyes away, says, “It has been a long time, Trice,” without apology and begins to walk up the steps. He's keeping his facts straight. He's keeping his mind made up.

The three of them settle in at Nehemiah's kitchen table, which doesn't in the least way resemble anything from Shibboleth. It's metropolitan by design. It's amazing how many excellent soul-warming meals have been laid out with little more than an iron skillet, a bowl, and a baking pan. (And, if I might add, the company of angels.) But in spite of all his culinary accoutrements, not because of them, Nehemiah is a surprisingly good cook, so he makes steak and eggs (one of his brother's favorites). And for the second time in a very long day, Billy sits down to breakfast.

This is where they make small talk about the trip, about the people they know, about the precision of Yahoo maps. Then Billy
and Trice ask about Senator Honeywell and Nehemiah's work, because it's the polite thing to do. They dance around this man a little with their words. He is not exactly the same person Billy and Trice remember him to be. They keep trying to look at him through old glasses, trying to see the boy of their youth. The one he was right up to the moment he left them. But now, in some ways he is a stranger. They both steal glances when they think he isn't looking. Suddenly, they are compatriots, all their fussing falls by the wayside. After all, they've been together almost every day he's been away. They've held their feet fast to Shibboleth while he has run away. At least that's what they say. But they don't use those words in front of him. Instead they ask, “How is your work?” And what can Nehemiah really tell them that they will understand? Or at least that will not bore them as they smile and nod. He won't waste their time. Won't torture them with the details, for which they have no reference points. He says, “It's just the way you think it is. Takes a lot of paperwork. Every day the same. Every day different.” He doesn't mention the closed-door maneuverings that stalk his steps on a daily basis. And they don't pry.

They do ask about the general well-being of Senator Honeywell, one of the South's most prestigious poor boys who's “done good for himself.” In their heart of hearts, his constituents believe Senator Honeywell is still one of them, hasn't been eaten up by capitol decay, and they continue to trust him to look out for their better interests. For the most part, this is a mantle that the senator wears responsibly.

All politeness and politics aside, Trice is much more interested in the space of Nehemiah's life than in what he does. About his after-hours and what waits for him (or doesn't) when he comes home. Exactly who is this man who sits before them? The sound of a saxophone filters out from the living room. Trice doesn't recognize
John Coltrane but she likes the sound. She looks at Nehemiah, studies his hands as he tells Billy something, opening his palms and placing them together.
He's learned some things
, she thinks,
he's been some places
. She watches him carefully and purposefully turn up his sleeves, first the right, then the left. Then he slowly pushes the cuffs up over his forearms. And for just a moment their eyes lock. This time, it's Trice who is the first to look away. Her eyes wander over the furnishings and she recognizes the absence of something, a vacancy she cannot identify. She looks for the presence of women but there is none that she can see. Or the presence of
the
woman. The one who would make her presence known even in her absence. Flowers here, a bottle of perfume accidentally left there. Trice considers how road-weary she must look. Considers the possibility of bugs stuck in her hair. She combs it with her fingers as she surveys the living room from her chair. There is a masculine order present, but a different one than she is accustomed to. No guns. No fishing lines or lures. No visible tools. She is pensively puzzling this with one nail in her mouth, when Billy says, “It's all on account of Trice that we're here.”

Trice responds by pulling her feet up in the chair and wrapping her arms about her knees. She remembers their reason. “We came to talk to you about something,” she says.

Nehemiah looks over at her, raps his knuckles twice on the table as if knocking on a door. “I know you did.” He gets up to refill his coffee cup, sits back down and leans back in his chair, hands crossed behind his head. “Why don't you tell me about it.”

“Go on, Trice,” Billy points at her, “tell him about your
feeling
.”

“Don't get smart, Billy,” she says with a hard stare of a dare.

“I didn't say nothing bad. What'd I say bad? You tell me, Nehemiah, did I say something bad?”

“It was your tone.” Trice is snappy, red-eyed weary, and not to be toyed with.

“You two have been on the road too long, that's all. Tell me, Trice,” Nehemiah offers no smiles, no jokes. “Tell me about your feeling.” He says this with the sound of all due patience, moves his arms, crosses them over his chest. He sounds patient but he isn't. Not really. Not right now. He has a lot of work to do and has a strange feeling of his own that there is an interruption coming. An interruption that will try to pull him away from the world that he has worked so hard to create.

Trice unfolds, gets to her feet, and paces the floor, looking down, begins taking those ballerina steps again. Toe, toe, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe. “We didn't see it. Now don't you think that's strange?” She appears to be talking to herself. “I do. I
really
do.” She whips around and faces Nehemiah, “and I'll tell you the truth right now, if you don't get
it
—because I'm thinking you getting
it
is very, very important—I get the crazy feeling in my gut that we won't even remember
being
here.”

“See what having a feeling will do to someone?” Billy offers this out of the side of his mouth as if he was whispering to his brother but knowing Trice can hear him loud and clear, trying to pull her chain.

“What
it
, Trice, am I supposed to get?” Nehemiah's patience is already cracking. He feels something sucking at his feet. And it frightens him. The selfsame boy who stood impervious and brave facing the unknown darkness now feels a shiver up his spine that he cannot explain. And he wants to tell Trice to stop. He wants to tell her to go away. But instead he says again, “What
it
?”

“The
it
that hit me in pictures.”

“Tell it, Trice,” Billy's arms fly out over his head. “Tell the whole thing and get it over with.”

“The pockets of Time,” she says. And stands there as if they understand.

“Just tell him, Trice, just get straight to the story.” Billy's exasperation begins filling up the balloon of the room.

“I woke up trying to remember a dream I had but instead I saw all of Shibboleth at once, like from the air. But from the air all at once at different times. As if there were
pockets
of time.” She closes her eyes and the times and the timing of Shibboleth open up before her. The what-has-beens and the way things are and the way things will be
or the way things will not be at all
without…and that's where she stops speaking, because she doesn't know what she hasn't seen.

“I don't know anything more than what I saw.” Trice tries to continue, stops. It's difficult to explain a waking dream, a vision of otherworldly things. Trice knows. She's tried for years. “It's as if a storm is coming and no one is…”—she stops again, searching for a word—“preparing. No, that's not it. Expecting. No, not…ready. No one is ready. Like inch by inch, something has been stealing…”

I see Trice struggling with words. Struggling to paint the right image. I look to God. He nods and I exhale, breathe out inspiration. It is the smell of old worlds, of Trice reading words layered upon words, of cornbread and ladybugs, of stubborn patience and understanding, of the soft, green moss hidden on the morning side of Shibboleth, and the scent of bold, pure light. It is the essence of Trice. It lifts on the air, circles her head and shoulders, and settles in her hair. She takes a deep breath in, becomes lucid and literal.

“This is the way I saw it.” She stands up and reaches for Nehemiah's fruit bowl, picks up two apples and an orange. “Look.” She sets the apple on the table. “This is everything and everyone and all of life in Shibboleth before us, back in the old days, in the early days of Kate and Twila and Magnus and the days before them.” She sets another apple on the table. “This is the life we
knew. And even in that I saw the smaller pockets. Our times of yesterday when we were kids and all the times of our growing up, including, Nehemiah, the time that we were down at the springs swimming and you kissed me underwater.” Trice pauses, wonders why that memory surfaced. Nehemiah arches one eyebrow, but at this living moment he doesn't remember such a kiss. “And the smaller pocket that makes up the very now.” She sets down the orange at the end of the line. “Now, this is where it gets interesting. This is the time to come. The future. Get it?” She holds up the orange for both of them to examine the future until they nod their heads and agree they understand. And then she grabs a butcher knife from Nehemiah's knife rack. “But look now!” She slices the orange in half. “Here's one future,” she is saying this with one half of a dripping orange held up in her hand then slammed down hard on the table surface, “and this,” she turns the other half inside-out and rips the orange out of its shell until the peel is an empty core, “this is the other future.” “Still the future,” she slams the empty shell down, “but this future is completely empty. Empty, empty, empty. Still time, but time with nothing in it.” She pauses, pinches her brows together and lasers her eyes on both of them. They can think anything about her that they want, but they cannot deny what's in her eyes. (
Brilliance
is the word, but they don't use that word in Shibboleth because they think it's too close to crazy.) “Now, after I saw
that,
I thought of Billy and saw your face.” She gets up and leans her hands on the table, stares into Nehemiah's eyes. “
Your
face, Nehemiah. And I felt the three of us running. Together. I knew it was six legs, two to a pair, and that they all belonged to us. Now I may not know what we were running to, or from for that matter, but I knew we were
together
.” She sits back down in her chair. “And I called Billy because I knew that we were meant to come see you. To tell you that there is trouble.
Serious trouble. That something is being stolen.” She points to the empty shell of the orange.

“What is being stolen, Trice?” Nehemiah is taking shallow breaths, trying to ignore that little scent wafting over him from Trice's hair. Try to ignore it as he may, I know what the man can smell. I know what he's made of.

“My guess, Nehemiah, is everything worth keeping.” Trice runs her hands through the back of her hair, pulls it in a knot on the top of her head, and closes her eyes before she answers. “Something is trying to steal Shibboleth.”

A quiet fills the room with a lot of unasked questions going unanswered. God begins whistling again, hands in pockets. He ambles over to the window and lifts the curtain, looking out. He looks as if he's just waiting, just killing time, and believe me, nobody kills time like God.

Nehemiah is considering all the things in his world worth keeping. But his world and the world of Shibboleth are light-years apart. “This all sounds important, Trice,” he waves his arms about, “and it is mysterious as all get-out, but what does it have to do with me?”

“I've told you. Something bad is going to happen. See this?” She picks up the orange peel. “This is Shibboleth,” she slowly squeezes it in her fist, “and it is disappearing. I don't have to know the part you play. I'm just the message bearer. What you do, Nehemiah, with the message, that's up to you.”

Billy picks up the other half of the orange and begins to eat. He has been very still, very silent, and very seriously listening. To him, if Shibboleth disappears, then there is no hope. Shibboleth is the heart of the planet, and all that is worth keeping is kept there. Only he doesn't remember how. Or where.