To Come and Go Like Magic (6 page)

We’re waiting at the bus stop and I see the school bus in the distance creeping along like an old yellow turtle. I don’t recall the Brights ever having a garden and I’ve known Willie for as long as I can remember. My family’s been here since my great-great-grandparents Buster and Sudie built the house on Mercy Hill. Willie claims his family’s been here even longer, but I don’t think he can prove it.

He’s poor and I’m not. He knows it and I know it, but mostly we’ve not talked about it. Lately, though, he’s been saying stuff, reminding me that we’re not alike. Sometimes I think he likes being different, but not especially being poor. Maybe he’d like to be different in some other way. Still, I’ll bet he doesn’t know the first thing about planting a garden.

“Where do you get corn plants?” I ask.

“You shell the dried corn,” he says. “You drop the kernels in furrows.”

“What about beans? Do you pick beans once or more than once in a season?”

“More than once,” he says. “Bean plants bear all summer.”

Lucky guesses. “How do you plant potatoes?”

“With the eyes up.” Willie grins and looks down at his feet.

“It’s hard work,” I say. I tell him how the sun gets blistery hot in the garden and the chiggers bite and dirt clogs up under your fingernails. I do this
every
summer.

He looks at me and shrugs. “I’ll do okay,” he says. His eyes are ablaze in the sun.

“Maybe,” I say.

When the school bus stops, Willie Bright steps back and lets me get on first.

T
he Wisdom of Spring …

Rain and freeze and thaw. Icy winds and warm winds, dry winds and winds full of rain. Every day is different; every day is the same. The grass is green, fluttering in the wind, and wild purple violets bloom around the stumps and rocks.

We’re out walking and talking, Aunt Rose and me, searching for wildflowers.

It’s the time of year when people living in the hollows come to town and stretch their legs in the sun. They’re heathens, Pop says. Those little kids are growing up in places that even God forgot.

Every year VISTA workers tote them out of the hills and into town. Volunteers in Service to America is what they’re called, rich northerners thinking they can save the poor. Pop says the mountain people run loose and spit on the sidewalks and claim they’re here to get what the government owes them.

The third Wednesday of every month the commodity
truck comes to town handing out free food—big jars of peanut butter and blocks of yellow cheese and boxes of powdered milk with no-brand, plain brown wrappers, but the ones who get commodities don’t like the no-brand food. They sell everything for money to buy Camel cigarettes and Cokes.

Sometimes Aunt Rose buys commodities from Mountain Bessie, an old woman who collects from the others and sells stuff from the back of her pickup truck just outside the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. Rose puts the cheese through the sausage grinder with pickles and red pimientos and makes enough pimiento spread for a month’s worth of sandwiches.

After the commodity truck’s gone, the mountain people stand on the courthouse square smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes and pretending the third Wednesday is like any other day and they are like any other people. But it’s not any other day and they’re not like any other people.

We’re not either, Pop says. We’re sure not like those newscasters on the six o’clock programs. Whether we like it or not, we’re more like the mountain people.

While we walk, Aunt Rose has been stooping down to pick periwinkle flowers. She hands me a purple blossom.

“See that star?” she says, pointing to the center of the tiny bloom.

I bend over for a better look. The purple star, outlined in white, is as perfect as if it had been drawn with a ruler. Aunt Rose says you can’t really know a thing until you’ve looked at it up close for a good, long time.

S
ecrets, Songs, and Bad Dreams …

I’m putting on my coat to go to school when Myra waddles down the stairs on the verge of tears with her pink robe dragging on the floor behind her. She had a dream about Jerry Wilson, she says. He was in a car wreck on some curvy mountain road and was all alone and waiting to be rescued. She wants Momma to stay home from work today, she says, rubbing her belly. She can’t be alone.

I’m already late and need lunch money, but Momma ignores me and tries to get Myra settled down.

I look out the window and see the school bus stop at the corner to pick up Willie Bright and then head down Persimmon Tree Road without me.

“I’ve missed the bus,” I say to Momma. “There it goes.”

She looks at me like I’m from another planet.

Myra plops down on the couch and almost pushes
Lenny’s cassette player onto the floor, but I run over and grab it while it’s still rocking back and forth.

Last night Lenny set the cassette player on the couch arm so he could listen to his music and dance in front of the living-room mirror. He tapes songs off his transistor radio late at night when our stations close down and clear the airwaves. Then you can hear stations from far away—Chicago, Baltimore, Fort Wayne. But mostly they fade in and out and carry static. Lenny likes some show called
The Top 25
, every night at nine. Rock music. Ear-piercing music, Pop calls it. Some nights he sends Lenny out to the sunporch so nobody else has to listen to it.

Lenny tapes songs that our stations don’t play—“Free Bird” and “American Pie” and “Riders on the Storm.” He goes around the house singing:
I fought the law and the law won
. Uncle Lu wags his finger. You’d best steer clear of the law, he says. Lucius doesn’t like “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” for the same reason. Not the kind of people to associate with, he says to Lenny, like these songs are about real people.

Lenny can dance better than most girls, but Pop says it’s prissy. He makes him chop wood or clip the holly bushes or do some other ornery task when he catches him dancing. But nothing stops Lenny. It’s in his blood, he says, because his momma was a dancer.

When Pop turns his head, Lenny dances with the ax or spins on his toes like one of those Spanish dancers, with the clippers snapping above his head.
Castanets
, he says, and I collect that word for my red notebook.

Now I walk in and out of the room listening to Momma and Myra.

“He was
doing it
with everybody in town,” Myra whispers, like this is a big secret. You can see the disgust curl across her splotchy face. Everybody knows Jerry Wilson ran around with other women, but nobody ever said anything about it to Myra. That’s just the way it is here. People like to talk about the crimes, but nobody wants to tell the victims. If you tell, you’re the one they end up hating. That’s what Aunt Rose says. She’s seen it happen a million times.

“What’s
doing it
mean?” I ask. I like to put them on the spot.

Momma looks at me like she could bite a nail in two. “Go upstairs to your room until I tell you to come down,” she says.

“Yes, ma’am.” I stomp up the stairs but stop at the top to listen. Pop will have a talk with the Wilsons, Momma says to Myra. Jerry Wilson’s going to pay for this baby. That’s the bottom line.

A long silence.

I hear water running in the kitchen. Momma will
make a pot of coffee and pour it down Myra. Coffee always makes the women feel better, but it makes that baby-to-be kick like crazy. Poor little thing. Smaller than a teacup and being drowned in coffee. The doctor tells Myra to drink milk, but she won’t listen. Every night she lines up baby outfits on the bed, like crayons in a box, in every color except blue and pink. Will it be a boy or a girl? She stands and stares.

After a few minutes of thick, hot silence Momma comes to the foot of the stairs and looks up at me through the railing.

“Come on down and I’ll run you to school,” she says.

S
ex Education …

Ginny sits on the thickest branch of the cherry tree. Priscilla’s up one more branch, dangling her legs in Ginny’s face, and I’m stretched out at a fork in the highest spot before the limbs get too weak to hold a person.

“She was half-naked when she ran into the woods,” Ginny whispers.

“Who?” I ask. “Who was half-naked?”

Ginny frowns like I’m a dummy. “I said they didn’t recognize her, Chili. It was too dark.”

Priscilla repeats Ginny’s story about some teenagers parked at night down by the river and the sheriff walking up and popping a flashlight in the window. The girl jumped out and ran into the woods, Priscilla says. They’re both laughing, so I laugh, too.

“Chili doesn’t know what we’re talking about,” Ginny says to Priscilla, and they look at each other like they’re in some special club for two.

“I do, too,” I say.

“You don’t even know what
doing it
means,” Ginny says, swinging down from the tree.

“I do, too,” I call after her.

Priscilla gives me a pitiful look. “It’s just sex,” she whispers. “We’re going to get sex-ed classes next year if the school board says it’s okay.”

I think about the
True Confessions
magazines I’ve seen in Aunt Rose’s closet. Sometimes when she’s busy cooking or hanging clothes on the line, I slip in and read the dog-eared pages. You can learn a lot of stuff from the dog-eared pages, maybe even more than from a sex-education class.

Priscilla and I take our time climbing down. Ginny’s out of earshot, running ahead of us to Brock’s store to buy blue raspberry Popsicles.

“Zeno Mayfield asked me to marry him,” Priscilla says.

“What?”

“To pretend,” she says. “He wanted to pretend we were married.”

“Why would you do that?” I ask.

Priscilla says Zeno wanted to put his hand up her skirt.

“Yuck!” I imagine his dark, rough hands sliding up Priscilla’s pale legs.

“Of course, I didn’t let him.”

“What did you say to him?” I’m curious to know how to handle such a situation.

Priscilla laughs. “I told him he could
pretend
he was doing it.”

A
pril Fool …

I hate oral reports. I hate all those eyes watching me sweat and stutter and cough. I’ve memorized more about Harriet Beecher Stowe than anybody in the world needs to know, because Miss Matlock says that’s the best way to get over the butterflies.