The Messenger of Magnolia Street (5 page)

“When did you start using the word
potential
?”

“Satellite TV will teach you all kinds of things you don't need to know.”

Darla is yelling out orders to the kitchen. Dishes are rattling. People are eating, chewing, pointing, yet something isn't quite the same. Nehemiah is trying to pull up files of memory, flip through the cards, tables, and booths, cash register, same smells. But something's missing. A huge slice of empty.

People are watching Nehemiah. One or two occasionally nod a head in his direction. But even the ones who know him don't speak now, after his reception to Catfish, which they find downright peculiar. They are thinking he looks about the same. Richer but about the same. They are waiting to see if the ice will crack and release the man inside. And, as they are waiting, as they are watching, the ice pick appears.

“You got trouble.” Billy puts his head down, shovels up a forkful of potatoes.

“How's that?” But the question answers itself as Kate sits down with a vengeance on Nehemiah's side of the booth, the bulk of her
pushing him toward the corner. “Well now,” she says and pulls her glasses down on her nose, looks him up and down.

“Well now,” she says again.

“I know, I know.”

“Do you now?”

“Yes, ma'am, I know. Sure is good to see you.” She keeps him captured eyeball to eyeball. “Steak sure is good.”

“Don't sweet-talk me tonight. I'm too tired for it. Right now, I've laid eyes on you and that's enough. Now get your butt back in here for breakfast, and you and me's gonna have a little catching-up talk.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You go home and get in your momma's bed, you hear, and get some real sleep for a change.”

Nehemiah gives her a puzzled look. Starts to tell her that he sleeps fine. Really fine. “I still have an old bed in that house.”

“That's not what I said, now is it?”

He starts to add “no, ma'am,” but there isn't a chance.

“I said, Go get in your momma's bed. That's not too much for you to do, is it? That's a simple thing, don't you think?” She has risen, cleared the booth, whipped a dishrag over her shoulder, and is moving away, still talking. “I ain't asked anything of you in over ten years. Seems to me you oughta be able to do the least little thing I ask before I drop dead. A person never knows when…” and she is still talking as she walks through the kitchen, where the rattle of dishes swarms up to eat her words. She is still talking when she says, “Ed, lock up. I'm going to the house. I have had enough for one day.”

Kate is still talking to Nehemiah under her breath when she cranks up her big Buick and hits the pedal hard enough to chariot away her heavy body home, where she will take off her shoes, put up her feet, and think about her sister, Twila, who passed on way
too soon, and her sister's baby boy, who has finally brought his raggedy butt home where it belongs. “See here, Twila,” she says to the air, “I done sent him home to get in your bed and that's the best that I can do. The rest of it is up to you.”

Presently, though, Kate has barely made it through the kitchen door and the folks in the diner have watched this occurrence with great amusement, seeing how over seventy-five percent of them know Nehemiah and are busy whispering to the other twenty-five percent the whole story to catch them up to speed. They have watched as Ms. Kate has corralled him, and about half of them make a note to change whatever plans might be necessary so that they can drop in for breakfast in the morning, too. Just to see if he shows up. Or to see what happens if he doesn't. Their lives are far from boring. There is just so much to see and do.

Back at the table, Nehemiah is trying to remember why he had to come down here in the first place. “Tell me again, why am I here, Billy?”

“Looks like right now you are here to get chewed out by Kate Ann.”

“I could've come down here and done that any time. I thought there was something going on wrong here according to you and Trice…”

“Naw, naw, naw,” he holds his hand up in protest, “that was Ms. Trice, and you gonna hafta take that up with her.”

“Billy, you said…”

“I ain't said nothin'.” Billy gets up from the table with his bone (which you will notice he has left a nice amount of meat clinging to) and takes it to the door, passes it out to Sonny Boy, who gives him a wordless but tail-wagging thank you.

He calls over to the waitress before sitting down, “Darla, could you please find me some of that peach cobbler? Nehemiah, you want some cobbler? It'll make you feel better.”

Nehemiah looks at Sonny Boy by the door, passes his bone to Billy for the dog later, and says, “Why not? I'm up to my knees in something. I just wish I knew what it was.”

“You ain't up to your knees, boy, you just starting to get wet.”

And the brothers eat peach cobbler and talk about things that it takes two of them to remember, two of them to get straight. Billy doesn't try to bring up the fishing story. He is testing Nehemiah's memory, checking for holes, searching for leaks. And as this is happening, Nehemiah is thinking, just a few days, I'm going to take just a few days, and then I'm heading home. Then the clock on the diner wall begins to chime, and Nehemiah asks, “When did she put that in here?” His eyes are fastened to the clock over the door, listening to the third chime, the fourth chime, thinking how out of place the clock is.

“What?”

“That chiming clock? When did she put that in?”

For the first time since he dropped him off in Washington, Billy looks at his brother with concern in his eyes. “You're tired, Brother. We need to get you home.”

“Well, it's a simple question.”

Billy doesn't want to trouble him by actually pointing out there is no chiming clock. That the clock he keeps staring at in a puzzled way runs on batteries. It says
Time To Eat
on the face of it. And it sure as heck don't chime. He should know, he thinks. He gave it to Kate for Christmas five or six years ago.

“Well now, that is the strangest thing I've noticed since I've been back,” Nehemiah says as he stares up at the sound of the chiming that follows him out the door.

“I'm sure it is.” Billy says, as he cranks up Old Blue, and Sonny Boy, bone in mouth, jumps in the back. Billy watches his brother out of the corner of his eye on the way home. He doesn't know exactly what he's looking for, but he's sure he'll know it when he sees it.

Billy is sitting at the kitchen table the next morning when his brother walks in. He hasn't dropped his guard, is still watching him based on last night's performance.

“Sleep all right?”

“Good as always.” Nehemiah says this, but he isn't telling everything. He isn't telling about the smell that came into the room and woke him up. It smelled like gold. It's the only word that comes to his mind, but then how silly is that? How could gold actually smell? he is thinking. And a dream of transparent gold, almost a shower but not beginning from a cloud, not ending on the ground, just floating gold dust and in that smell
power.
He doesn't think he needs to mention this to Billy. Doesn't think he needs to tell him how long he's been awake, remembering what he is certain must have been a dream. Or how long he lay in the comforts of their mother's bed, basking in the lingering traces of her presence. Her still there in the framed faces of their baby pictures on the dresser where they'd always been. Her wedding picture by the bed. The fading face of the father they had barely known.

“Slept just fine,” he says again to make it so, give it concrete legs to stand on.

Then he takes down a coffee cup and touches the ages-old pattern on the cup. The familiar is everywhere. It's penetrating his skin. A chunk of ice falls off.

This is when he sits down and sips his coffee and tells Billy
about the fox. This is where they have that conversation, such as it is. Then they sit, quiet for as long as you can imagine. Drinking coffee and not saying anything of importance or nonimportance for me to take down. So I must let them sit there in their silent cocoon while I record the other things.

The wind has picked up significantly today. Strong enough even to shake the branches of the oak tree, at least at the edges, to make the moss sway. The tall grasses try to stand straight but are blown westward. The wind is coming from the east, as if the sun were blowing with its rising, breathing heavily over Shibboleth, as if it were moving things about, clearing all the dead away.

“I love this place,” Nehemiah says. He looks to his left and right as if the words had come in of their own accord, carrying with them their own agenda.

“You always will,” Billy says. Then they are quiet again. It is the quiet that gives me more words than you can imagine. It is the quiet that lets me read what's in their hearts, lets me put my finger on Nehemiah's fear (and he is not a fearful man). On Billy's concern.

“You should paint the house, Billy.”

“I was waiting on you.” Billy says and spins the lazy Susan in the center of the table for no reason except to watch it turn.

If we let our eyes wander up and over them, out beyond the back field where the garden is lying fallow ready to be seeded, and through the stand of trees, the scrub oaks and big magnolias and a few firs, they'll carry us straight down the road where we'll run right into Main Street. There we can easily travel over to Magnolia to the house of Magnus, and see her feeding and shooing cats, trying to divide their food, making sure the skinny ones get to eat and the fat ones sit and watch for a while. It is a precarious, demanding job.

We can see Trice spooning oatmeal into her mouth at the table, mindlessly eating while she reads from a book. It is a story about traveling to faraway places, a story filled with exotic flavors so pungent that she lifts her feet up off the ground and begins dancing on her toes even while sitting down. She is unaware that Nehemiah is about. She has forgotten about the whole affair. She delivered her message and rode home, sleeping most of the way with Billy listening to the radio because with her asleep he could drive without Trice singing along. You can't get her to shut up. And Trice can sing to beat the band, but sometimes he just wants to hear the music like he is alone. And driving home he could do that.

But now, Trice doesn't look as if she remembers the trip at all. Isn't the least bit concerned about the things that previously had weighed so heavy on her mind and heart. All that revelation has dissipated, as if she had run her portion of the race, had passed the baton, and was now free to sit down, mindlessly spooning oatmeal, at least until Chapter 4, which is where she'll be when Magnus finds something that must be done.

At the wildly manicured yard of Magnus (which provides great hiding places for the cats to slink and pounce), the road takes a sharp curve past the mailbox. We can then turn back and follow it to the center of things and see that Kate is busy in the kitchen making a batch of potato salad that she is going to offer up at lunch. She occasionally wipes her hands on her apron and walks to the front window, looking out between the cafe curtains (which she notices should be washed and ironed again), and looks up at the clock. It is 8:35, and she is thinking Nehemiah is running late. Or might not come.
But that's all right,
she tells herself,
I know where to find him. And if he doesn't walk in here in the next hour, he'll be sorry.
She doesn't even know why she feels this way. Not really. But her sights have been set. She's not backing down.

Billy stretches his legs out under the kitchen table, angles them sideways so as not to kick his brother.

“You know you're not gonna get out of that meeting this morning.”

“I know.”

“You know she knows you're here now, and she will come looking for you.”

“I know.”

“If you are gonna let it fall that way, just let me know, 'cause I don't want to be here.”

“You want to ride with me down there?”

“Nope.”

“I figured as much.”

Nehemiah rises from the table like a man wearing a noose. The fact is, he loves his aunt Kate with all his heart. The fact is, his heart jumped a little out of sheer gladness when she elbowed her big way into that seat. Fact is, a tiny part of him wanted to put his head over on that big shoulder like he did when he was five, and fifteen, and might just do when he is fifty if she lives to be eighty.

“So you going on down there?”

“Guess I am.”

Billy is chuckling under his breath. “Oh, and Nehemiah, I don't know, it's up to you, but,” he rests his hands on the back of the kitchen chair, looking down, then back up at Nehemiah, “I imagine you got a bag with some more clothes in it, but just in case you need 'em, your other clothes are still hanging in your closet.” He pauses and the brothers just look at one another for a while, Nehemiah not exactly knowing how to process this information. “I hadn't changed anybody's anything. You know, just in case somebody came walking back through the door one day.”

Nehemiah understands the
just in case
scenarios that Billy isn't saying. It's the
just in case
Nehemiah gave up on a different life. The
just in case
their mother resumed hers. Came walking up the front porch steps, her black purse on her arm, calling out, “What are you boys up to?”

Nehemiah got his dimple from his mother, but his is on the opposite side. They smiled at one another like a mirror image. And then smiled even wider.

“I appreciate it” is all Nehemiah says.

Then I wait to see what will happen next.

“Well, I'll just see you later. Me and Sonny Boy's got things to do.” Billy says, and heads outside to his truck, calling to Sonny, saying, “You want to take a ride, boy?”

And Nehemiah is left alone in a quiet house with the memories rising up from the floorboards, wrapping around his ankles, beginning to hold him fast to the ground. He goes back to the door to his room, the one he had lived in every remembered day of his life in Shibboleth. And now, he stands before the door as if it's a vortex, as if when he turns that knob, he will have to say good-bye to any future he had imagined because he will not be able to get back across the threshold. Nehemiah is forgetting that the power of choice is just that. And the making of it is all his.

He turns the knob, opens the door, fights the urge to close his eyes. But there is no blinding flash. No irreversible line crossed. There is just the exact same old space. Exactly the way he left it. Exactly the way that he stood, surveyed the room, repositioned that picture on the dresser one last time, thought about taking it, and for reasons he still doesn't understand, left it sitting there. It's the one taken of him and Trice and Billy. When they were seventeen, sixteen, and nineteen and in that order to be exact. Their faces are still water wet, smiling, hair dripping around
their faces. Trice is standing between the two of them, her arms hooked inside their elbows. It had been a perfect picture. Somehow capturing all their summers. All the green, and the wildness, and the freedom. But then, to capture it fully, you have to have Billy's fingers behind Trice's head because that's the way it was. And you'd have to see what you can't. The fact that Trice was pinching the inside of Billy's forearm—hard. And you'd have to know about the warm place her hand had left on Nehemiah's arm long after it was gone. What I can see is that Nehemiah can't help but soften when he looks at it. He picks the picture up in his hand, studies the image, wipes the dust from the glass before he puts it down.

He opens the closet door. It squeaks on the hinges. Billy is true to his word, not a thing has changed. There is the slightest smell of mothballs, placed there forever ago. Nehemiah runs his fingers down the arm of his old jacket. But then something on the closet shelf catches his eye.

“Hey,” he says aloud. “I'd forgotten all about this.”

 

Trice looks up from her reading and pulls her eyebrows together. She listens, but there is no sound except the wind and Magnus saying, “No, no, you are too fat already.” She knows this must be directed toward General, the gray tomcat with the yellow eyes. He's a pushy one. She listens a little longer and puts her nose back in the book. She is up to Chapter 4.

At this precise moment, between the written lines a solar eclipse is taking place. The world is falling into shadow and the people are perplexed. They do not understand the word
orbit
and are full of fear and trembling. They believe that something catastrophic is about to happen. And that following this event nothing will ever be the same.

Friday, 9:28 A.M
.

It's almost 9:30 when Nehemiah walks through the front door of Kate's Diner. A few die-hard stragglers have been holding on, wanting to see the hornet's nest in full fury, but they are forgetting something as Kate steps through the kitchen door. She looks up and fills her eyes with Twila's boy. Not the one that had smelled—now how would she put that—
good but foreign
. Not the one with the manicured nails and all that slickness hanging about him like so much strange air. But the one that had just walked through her door. The one that was standing before her in his old, faded, threadbare jean jacket and blue jeans. And she thinks,
By God, if he doesn't even have his boots on.

Her wrath spills from her shoulders until it is only a puddle at her feet. A puddle she easily steps over on her way to wrap some fleshy arms around
the boy.
And with that enormous hug, with Nehemiah's head disappearing into the body parts of Kate Ann, the audience members shake their heads and start to count their change. Doggone if the show isn't over before it had good begun.

Kate pulls Nehemiah to a booth in the corner, one situated where other people can't be tending to their business.

“Did you eat?”

Nehemiah says no, but he is looking at the clock. “You changed that clock out.”

“Well, I reckon so, it's been over ten years since you stepped foot in here.”

“Wrong. I was in here last night.”

“How 'bout some biscuits and gravy?”

“Sounds good.”

“And some bacon, or a pork chop, would you rather have a pork chop? And I've got some…”

Now he knows she is talking about food. See him nod. See him plaster on a smile, lock it into place. Nehemiah is no fool. Not by a long shot. He knows that clock hasn't been moved since it was hung there. He now knows what he saw, what he heard last night, was either a delusional apparition or something much more interesting. He starts to look around with a heightened sensitivity.

What's going on?
he wonders. His eyes are still fastened on the clock when Kate begins to deliver a breakfast of sausage links and grits, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes on the side, biscuits and gravy, and homemade blackberry jelly saved from two years ago.

“We didn't get enough rain last year to count for nothin'. Blackberries dried up on the vine.”

“Aunt Kate, is anything strange going on around here?” Nehemiah doesn't call her Aunt unless he's serious. And he's serious. He's thinking about Trice's dream, and the gold rain and the clock.

“Well, I guess so, I'm sitting here looking at your face.”

He stops thinking about clocks and looks into the familiar face across the booth from him. The hair is curled up from the kitchen heat, the blue eyes are still full of spark. “How's it look?”

She cocks her head, “I'd say, just about like it did when you were about five years old. Just about exactly the same.”

“I have a few more wrinkles.”

“I'm looking in between 'em.” She would like to reach over, put the back side of her hand on his face like she did when he was a boy, but he is so new. So new all over again, and she doesn't want to scare him away. “So now, Nephew, tell me, what is going on up there in the high and mighty business of the capitol?”

“Well,” Nehemiah begins a truly serious attempt to answer when he suddenly remembers he is hungry. Then the hunger turns into something else, as if he is growling from his toes, his arches, his ankles. He is voracious. He thinks that he hasn't eaten in, well,
only a few hours, only since last night,
comes to him as a surprise. But his hunger feels much older than that. Hunger that winds and growls around the empty places of his soul. Before he knows it, he isn't eating. He is diving, rolling, wading through food. Rejoicing in food. Passionate all over again, in a brand-new way, about food. About each dish laid out before him. His knife is the conductor, his fork the first string, and he is performing for a private, delighted audience of one. He has wandered right into being love-drunk on gravy, and just another bite of that jelly on just one more biscuit. He is full of so much love, so much flour, and pinches of this and that, that his eyes water. And he can't say a thing about the capitol. Right now it is a far, distant, disembodied land. He is living on the isle of warm comfort. He is swimming in its languid spell.