A Snicker of Magic (8 page)

“Oliver Weatherly!” Charlie Sue peeped back in the door. A pair of thin purple glasses were balanced on the tip of her nose. “Don’t hold this meeting too long. The weatherman says a bad storm is headed this way.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “Virgil Duncan is not a weatherman. He’s a meddling old farmer with a transmitter in his barn.”

“Does it always rain here?” I asked.

Charlie Sue nodded. “Most of the time, yes. You should get Oliver to tell you his theory about why, but not today. Y’all don’t wanna be stuck here in a storm, and Virgil says it’s going to be one of the worst of the year.”

Storm or not, the light in Oliver’s library was fading fast. That meant that the sun was sinking on into the mountains for the night. If the sun was nearly tucked in for the night, that meant the birds were finishing up their daytime songs and that meant that the crickets were tuning up their string legs for twilight symphonies. And all of that put
together meant that I needed to go home pretty soon or I would be in a heap-load of trouble.

But my heart was telling me to stay put just a little bit longer. Listening to my heart usually turned out to be the right thing, even if it got me grounded for life.

“I’m almost done talking,” Oliver said.

Charlie Sue rolled her eyes and shut the door and mumbled something about Oliver never, ever being done talking.

“Stone Weatherly didn’t stay here long,” Oliver said. “He was cursed with a wandering heart and had to keep moving along. He was such a lonely man.”

“I’ll bet so,” I said. “Especially if he flew around in a hot air balloon. There’s nobody to talk to up in the sky.” Nobody except the midnight moon. And the moon only knows how to shine.

“That’s a fact,” Oliver agreed. “Stone Weatherly stayed for a day and told me stories. He told me about his wife. They met in a hot air balloon race, he said. He told me about his family.” Oliver’s eyes twinkled. “And then he told me the
real
story of the Brothers Threadbare and why they quarreled … or
who
they quarreled over, I guess I should say.”

Oliver leaned closer to us and whispered, “He told me what
really
happened that day at the Duel.”

Jonah glanced at me and I glanced back at him and I knew, the way only friends can figure out silent signals between each other, that Jonah was every bit as fascinated by the magicians in Midnight Gulch as I was.

“Before Stone climbed back in his balloon,” Oliver said, “he gave me his guitar.”

“The guitar he played to make the clouds change shapes?” I asked.

“The same one exactly!” Oliver smiled. “Stone told me there was still magic in those strings. He hadn’t played it since he left town, since he’d vowed never to do magic again. But he told me it wouldn’t have mattered if he could. He didn’t want to play his guitar without his brother there. He said all the magic was meaningless without Berry around. He told me to give the guitar to Berry, if I ever saw him again, and, if not, just to find a good home for it.”

“Which he did.” Jonah smiled.

“Hey-yo, did I ever,” Oliver said with a grin.

“And he gave you some good advice …” Jonah said. I could tell what Jonah was doing: trying to ease Oliver through the sad parts of the story. Trying to speed him up toward the good.

“That’s right,” Oliver said. He didn’t need Blackberry Sunrise for this part. I could tell he was remembering it as clearly as the day it happened.

“Before Stone climbed into the balloon, he told me to stop wasting my time and try to do some good with my life. ‘
Your words matter more than you know
’ is what he told me. And then he climbed back into that balloon and flew away. Just like a dream.”

Oliver turned his face to the fading light. “Eldee Mae
was right. Hope came down.” Oliver laughed. “Crashed right into my yard, I’d reckon!”

“What happened with Eldee Mae?” I asked.

“Ah!” Oliver grinned. “Later that same night, somebody knocked on my door. Lo and behold, there stood Eldee Mae Cotton. Her truck broke down near here, and she asked if I could help her fix it up.”

“Did you?” I asked.

He grinned again. “Eventually. But first I took Stone Weatherly’s advice. I said the only words that mattered. I told her that I loved her.”

Oliver chuckled, probably remembering the look on Eldee Mae’s face. “Took me some time to convince her she loved me, too. We got married the next summer. She was tired of being on the circuit, tired of talking about hereafters. Lots of right-now passing her by, she said. So we figured out ways to do good for people, to help them find joy in the here-today.”

“So they bought the ice-cream factory,” Jonah said, smiling. “The Honeycutts used to own it, but they’d all passed away and the factory was going under. Eldee said they should buy it and spruce it up again.”

“Every good idea was Eldee’s idea,” Oliver agreed. “After I bought the factory, we started leaving free cartons of ice cream for people. And that was a fine idea. Eldee said we could do better than that. We’d started reading local papers and listening to the news and planning anonymous
good deeds for people. Always in secret, if we could. It’s better that way.”

Oliver reached for a pad of paper on the table and wrote:

The Beedle

And then he wrote
Beedle
backward:

Eldeeb

And then he cut it down the middle and made a spider word of it:

Eldee
/
b

“That’s my wife’s name, of course. And the
b
, that’s my middle initial. The Beedle became our giving name. We’d always leave a note behind, with a red ribbon tied around it. Red was Eldee’s favorite color.”

Oliver’s chin trembled, just barely. “We had plenty of good years together. Hope came down for me, many more times than I ever deserved.”

“And now the Beedle is my job!” Jonah said proudly. “But Oliver is still the CEO.”

Our conversation was rudely interrupted by the loudest thump of thunder punching the sky that I’d ever heard. Rain pelted the upstairs window again, and new words dripped down the glass:

Tremble

Quake

Secret

Curse

My hand shook as I jotted down the words in the blue
book. “I really should go home soon. But I wonder — did you ever hear from Stone Weatherly again?”

“No, ma’am.” Oliver shook his head. “I have a feeling they both spent the rest of their time trying to find each other, trying to break that dang curse. Most people don’t know about that part, either. The curse was very specific, you see:

My heart thumped
yes
so loudly that I could hear it echoing in my ears.

I wrote Oliver’s words in my blue book:
Cords align. And all’s made right.

Oliver said, “I don’t know what that means — cords aligning. But I like to think the Weatherly brothers tried to figure it out. They tried to make things right. So many squabbles seem stupid and silly as you get older.”

As Charlie Sue loaded the ice-cream glasses and empty cartons back onto the silver tray, I asked, “Why do you think they called themselves the Brothers Threadbare?”

Oliver scratched his bristly mustache. “One of the big-city papers called them the Brothers Threadbare on account of how shabby their clothes were. The reporter joked about
their accents and their style of music. Said they were nothing but redneck farm boys. The paper called them homespun, shabby, and threadbare.

“But!” Oliver smiled. “Instead of getting mad over it, Berry and Stone decided to embrace it. They liked the name so much that it became their stage name: The Brothers Threadbare. Folks loved it, too. Because folks loved
them
. Those dancing clouds and dancing crowds never cared about shabby clothes. They were so grateful for a dancing day.”

“My aunt Cleo thinks
threadbare
means ‘well loved,’ ” I said.

“Cleo Harness?” Uncle Oliver’s smile widened. “I didn’t realize she was your kin.”

I nodded. “My mama’s sister.”

“Huh.” Oliver looked down at the grains of the table, the same way Cleo looked off when she had finished talking about a particular topic.

He finally said, “She’s a smart woman, Cleo Harness. She’s right, too. Threadbare’s what we all get to be, if we’re lucky. Will you do me a favor, Miss Felicity?” Oliver propped his arms on the table and leaned toward Jonah and me. “Make sure you always find out
both
sides of a story before you decide what’s true. All righty?”

“Sure thing,” I said. I might have pondered how weird his words were if it weren’t for the much bigger weirdness I realized:

Oliver’s dove tattoo, the tattoo I was one hundred percent
positive I’d seen on his arm not even an hour before, had disappeared.

“Where’d the …” Before I could get my question out, thunder growled across the sky again. Oliver shot up out of his seat. “Charlie Sue’s bringing the van around to take y’all home. I guess that idiot weatherman was right. He said September seventh would be the rainiest day of the year.”

Jonah said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the ringing in my ears. September 7. And a storm was coming. I felt like somebody’d dumped ice water down my back. “You’re sure that today’s … the seventh?”

Jonah nodded. “You okay?”

“No.” I rocketed out of my seat. The chair flipped backward against the shiny hardwood floors with a solid thunk. At the exact same time the chair hit the ground, thunder cracked the sky again. “I have to go home now.
Right
now!”

Jonah wheeled over to me. “Are you scared of storms?”

“Storms and sevens.” I tried to breathe deep, but my chest couldn’t suck in enough air. “I’m not afraid of them, but Mama’s superstitious about them. Every time we’ve ever left a town, it’s always been on the seventh, or during a bad storm. When both things combine” — I shivered — “Mama always leaves. Always.”

Rain blew sideways into my face as I ran up the stairs toward Cleo’s apartment. Flashes of purple lightning
illuminated the entryway as I pushed off the ground and flung myself through the door.

Just as I feared, Cleo’s apartment was a full-on ruckus.

Biscuit was half hidden underneath Cleo’s couch, trembling at every clap of thunder. Frannie sat on top of her little blue suitcase, which she’d dragged out to the middle of the living room floor. Before I even said her name, she flew at me and latched on so tight I nearly lost my breath.

“Is Mama still here?” I gulped.

“She’s packing our things.” Frannie’s words were muffled against my jacket.

And then I heard them, Mama and Cleo bickering as they stomped down the hallway. I didn’t know if they were trying to talk louder than each other or just louder than the storm. Mama carried a plastic laundry basket full of our clothes and books and the very few earthly possessions we’d packed along with us. She smiled when she saw me in the doorway.

“Good news, June Bug! You remember my crazy friend Babette from Virginia? She knows somebody who knows somebody who got me a job in Seattle. Can you believe it?”

My throat felt scratchy and dry when I tried to swallow. “That’s big news, all right.”

Cleo propped her hands on her hips. “Holly, you can’t possibly be thinking about driving off in this mess….”

And back to arguing they went.

The room was too loud and too full of thunder, lightning, and yelling. Frannie Jo hugged me tighter, like I was
the only thing in the world she had to hold on to. Words floated up out of Mama’s laundry basket and burst apart, until the ceiling was made of lightning-bolt letters that never reconnected.

“I don’t want to leave.” Frannie Jo blinked up at me. “Do something. Please.”

“We can’t go,” I yelled, so suddenly and so loud that I scared myself.