To Come and Go Like Magic (22 page)

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Authors: Katie Pickard Fawcett

BOOK: To Come and Go Like Magic
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“I found your trees,” he says. “They’re mostly in the jungle.”

Momma looks at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Just trees,” I say. “Me and Lenny are interested in trees.”

Pop looks over his glasses. “For what purpose?”

“Just to know,” I say.

“For goodness’ sakes, it’s summer,” Pop says. “Put those books away and go climb a
real
tree. You’re not even in school.” Pop gets frustrated about Lenny having his nose in science books all the time instead of doing sports or mowing the yard or trimming the bushes. Pop says Lenny’s too pale and he’s going to keep me inside and make me sickly-looking, too.

At the other end of the table Uncle Lu’s holding a fried chicken leg out in front of him like he doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Trees,” he murmurs, staring at the chicken. He shakes his head and puts the leg back on his plate without taking a bite.

“Why are you interested in jungle trees?” Momma asks. She throws me a suspicious look, but I shrug and go back to eating.

“I read about a tree in Kentucky that owns itself,” Lenny says.

Jack laughs. “Does it own a car, too?”

Lenny ignores him. He says two women decided they wanted to save it, to make sure it couldn’t ever be cut down, so they made up the legal papers to let it own itself.

“How crazy can a person be?” Pop shakes his head. On the word
crazy
we all look over at Uncle Lu without thinking.

“It’s a sycamore,” Lenny says, “a sycamore tree over in Knott County. It’s had its papers since 1918.”

“I was born before that time,” Lucius says proudly. “I’ve got papers to prove it.” He’s eating one green pea at a time, like they’re pills. He picks up a pea with two fingers and pops it into his mouth. Then he takes a drink of water and swallows the pea whole.

“Eat your chicken, Lucius!” Momma taps her fork on her plate to get his attention.

It’s seems strange without Myra at the table. The last two days she’s gone over to Jellico Springs to have dinner with “friends.” But she doesn’t say what friends or why. No one mentions Jerry Wilson’s name. That would be like cursing.

Outside our dining-room window the maple tree is full of green summer leaves. It could almost be a fig tree in the jungle, full of parrots or monkeys or bats. And I could be riding a boat on the Amazon River. Someday, maybe.

F
ish and Flowers …

“You can never have too many flowers,” Miss Matlock says. She’s sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch, her eyes set on the vine of moonflowers climbing up the tulip poplar tree. Her hands are small and delicate lying in her lap, and her hair flies loose from its bun.

I’m on the top step and Willie Bright is leaned up against one of the white columns, whittling a sycamore stick into a sharp point like a pencil.

“What are we gonna do today?” he asks. It’s a hot-summer, middle-of-the-day, nobody-home kind of boredom. When the sun goes down, we’ll both have to work in the garden. I’ll be in the tomato patch dusting for bugs while Willie’s in the bean field. Pop gives Willie all the beans the Brights can eat plus two dollars an hour to help Jack and Lenny.

“How about going underwater?” Miss Matlock says.

“Underwater?” Willie scrunches up his face.

I wait to hear more.

Miss Matlock gets up and goes inside, so we follow her. In the parlor she digs through a stack of
National Geographic
magazines until she finds the one she’s looking for.

“Let’s have some warm gingerbread with cream,” she says, and she goes off to the kitchen to put on the teakettle. Willie Bright can’t wait to eat. Sometimes I think he comes to Miss Matlock’s house just for the snacks. Momma says those Bright kids are bony and look dark around their eyes. I study Willie’s face when he’s not looking, but his eyes seem fine to me. Nice, even.

In the other room the mixer roars to life, whipping up cream with vanilla and sugar.

“Where’re your friends?” Willie asks. “Ginny and Priscilla?”

“They’re at cheerleading camp,” I say. I decide not to mention that I don’t really see Ginny and Priscilla much anymore. Only at church.

“You didn’t want to be a cheerleader?”

“Nope. Not me.”

Ginny and Priscilla got on the yellow bus with the other girls on a hot Saturday morning. I was standing on the courthouse square, but I didn’t wave. I wasn’t jealous—at least, not jealous of them for being cheerleaders. I didn’t wave because I didn’t want them to go. I didn’t want them to get onto that yellow bus with their suitcases and leave town before me. It’s not fair.

That morning Momma had sent me into town with Uncle Lucius so I’d make sure he knew how to get back home. He wanted an ice cream cone at eight o’clock in the morning, so he banged on the window at the Custard Corner for ten minutes before the custard lady got tired of hearing it and opened up an hour early just to dip two cones. We both had brown derbies, soft vanilla dipped in chocolate that hardens. Then we watched the bus leave with the cheerleaders.

Willie Bright smiles when Miss Matlock brings in the warm gingerbread. She sits between us and opens the magazine to a mass of silver fish swimming in the same direction, forming a wall under the bluest water I’ve ever seen. The straight-up sun in the picture is like a camera flash piercing the surface above the fish.

She turns the page and names the fish we’re looking at—orange and white clown fish; sharks and flat stingrays; and purple parrot fish with spots. Schools of fish that you would never find in the Cumberland River. And the pretty flowers under the water are not flowers at all, Miss Matlock explains. They’re living coral, a million tiny animals stuck together, never going anyplace.

“Like the people in Mercy Hill,” I say.

Miss Matlock shakes her head and turns away, but I see her smiling.

Willie and I take the long way home, across the meadow and over the rattling old footbridge to the bottom of the riverbank. We stand and let the water run over our toes. It’s dark green, almost black. Not clear like the blue water with the pretty fish. Miss Matlock says the blue-water oceans have white sandy beaches where it feels like you’re walking in talcum powder, but this riverbank is muddy and the bed of the river is full of rocks.

Willie wades out first and I follow him. When we get to the spot where the water is waist deep, it’s hard to stand. The river rushes by like it’s in a hurry to get on to the next place.

We steady ourselves and sit down at the same time, holding our breaths and letting the cool water rush over our heads. It roars and gurgles and cuts out bird sounds and the dogs barking in the woods. I open my eyes and look around, but it’s all brown and dark and spooky like being in a cave. There are no pretty fish or flowers or bright sunlight shooting daggers through the water.

We pop up to breathe. Somewhere a blue jay squawks in the willow trees.

“You want to do it again?” Willie asks.

“Nope. I think I’ll just dry out and go home.”

At the edge of the river there’s a big flat rock that
heats up in the sun. It’s where I sit and read sometimes when Uncle Lu is fishing. I climb up on the rock and stretch out, squint my eyes against the bright light. Little round drops of water on my eyelashes make rainbows. Rainbows on the river, in the trees, across the sky. I can hear Willie Bright dunking under the water and coming up again and again, looking for flowers and fish and colors that are never going to be there.

I think about this river running into other rivers and all the way to the sea. I turn over and spit into the water and watch that blob of spit head for the blue ocean.

P
olaroid Days …

Lenny has a camera called a Polaroid. It used to be Uncle Roscoe’s and it still works. You snap a button and it spits out a picture. They’re black-and-white and fuzzy-looking, but Lenny says they’ll get better when he becomes more expert at it. He takes pictures of ripe watermelons and bushels of green beans.

“What about the cornfield?” I ask. “Don’t you want a picture of the cornfield?”

“You take it,” he says, handing me the camera. He shows me the little window to look through and which button to push.

Even at a distance the cornfield takes up nearly the whole frame. Green stalks with yellow tassels wave in the breeze under a wide stretch of turquoise sky. I see gold, green, blue, and all the other colors that won’t show up in the picture, the stalks leaning away from the wind.

Miss Matlock says in all of nature this is so. A tree bends but snaps back when the wind stops blowing. The river stays its course until nature sends a raging flood, and the sands of the desert swirl and settle wherever the wind wills. Sand doesn’t refuse to fly, and the river can’t leap its banks under its own volition.

When Miss Matlock used the word
volition
, I went straight home and looked it up in the dictionary. Each time I go to her house, I come home with a new word.
Volition
sounded like one I wanted to remember. It’s a word that can head out on its own.

I snap the picture of the cornfield as a rain cloud edges toward the sun. When the photograph slips out, the stalks are brightly lit with sunshine. You can’t tell that it’s about to rain. Photos can only tell you so much. You can’t see the seconds before or after the snapshot.

Lenny pastes my photograph with his in a yellow notebook.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“A memory book,” he says. When he’s gone from this place, he’ll still be able to see the watermelon on the vine and the cornfield before the rain.

“Why would you want to do that?”

I always figured Lenny would leave and not look back, but he says even when your number-one goal in life is to leave a place, you might still want to remember it.

B
acon, Deans, and Gumdrops …

We’ve been picking beans all day—Jack, Lenny, and me. And Willie Bright, too. We’ve got Kentucky Wonders growing wild like jungle vines.

When we come out of the field, Momma says she needs bacon to put in the beans. Bacon and onions and vinegar. I can already taste them—long, green, and curvy, with brown seeds inside. We’ll have corn on the cob and fresh tomatoes and watermelon, too. Everything off the vine or plant or stalk. It’s a no-meat night, except for the bacon.

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