The Messenger of Magnolia Street

by River Jordan

“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.

  “We’re trying to tell you you need to come home.” Billy surprises Trice by adding this. Shocks her, actually. “Trice is wired a little different. That’s her way of telling what she sees. But youknow, Brother, it’s real.” He swallows the last bite of the orange. “And you know what I mean. We’ve had proof.”

  “Like the time Blister almost died except I dreamed”—Trice slams the word dreamed like a gas pedal to the floor—“about him standing in the middle of those flames screaming.”

  “That was when he was still just John Robert.” Billy adds, “Blister came later.” Billy pushes his chair back on its hind legs. “After you got me and Nehemiah to go over there with you at three in the mor
ning, and we pulled his body out of that house.”

  Nehemiah is remembering the smell of scorched flesh on a hot night. Is remembering staring at the blaze engulfing the house, pacing back and forth. Back and forth. Remembers wishing for, needing, rain. Then clouds, fast, white, powerful, rolling in from the east, a clap of thunder, a sudden downpour dousing the flames. Him crashing through the door and John Robert’s identity altered into something, someone else. Remembers looking at Trice with a new respect. A knowledge that her strange dreams were more than crazy hunches. Right then he made a silent vow that no matter how foolish they appeared, he would not deny her their validity. At the time, this vow was not contained in words. At the time, he didn’t know one day her dreams would try to rip him from his world.

  “All I know is that you have something to do with this entire picture or I wouldn’t be here in front of you.” Trice crosses her arms over her chest. It’s a habit she has picked up from the two brothers.

  “I know all about your dreams, Trice. I don‘t doubt their…” He starts to say reality but he drops the word. Nehemiah rubs his nose, attempts to rub away the smell of remembrance. Now he has a decision before him. Has an unexpected Y in the road. One that he wasn‘t expecting when he rolled out of bed at precisely the same time he does every day, beginning the exact same morning routine. Which choice will he make, you ask. Which road will he take? Time will tell. It always does.

  Nehemiah wants to say, “You don’t need me.” He wants to say, “You have an entire town, take care of the problem.” The unidentifiable, nebulous, dark-cloud future of a problem. But he doesn’t. He stalls. It only works for a little while, but that may be all he needs. He reaches over and slaps his brother on the shoulder, rocks him a little under his hand. “You look tired, Brother. And Trice,” he looks over the table and cocks his head with his dimpled smile, “you look just the same.” But he’s thinking, Better actually. Even better. How could that be? And then he smiles that grin at her, the one with the dimple. And lo and behold, Trice smiles back. I look to Nehemiah, back to Trice, and back to Nehemiah, whose dimpled grin is still held firmly in place. I write down the words electric and current.

  Trice interrupts his thoughts with “You don’t have anything living here, Nehemiah.” She has put her finger on the absent spot. “No dog, no cat, no bird,” she smiles at him, “not even a fish.”

  “Maybe,” the dimple grows deeper, “I have all of them,” he points down the hall, “in the bedroom.”

  “No, you don’t.” Trice points to her chest, “I would feel it. But regardless of what you don’t have, I also know you do have hot water and I’m in desperate need of a hot shower.”

  And these are about the final words of the evening. Billy and Trice deflate into a puddle of road-weary and Nehemiah begins to clean up the dishes. They say goodnight and get settled into proper sleeping arrangements after moving Old Blue to a nontowing location.

  Then Nehemiah goes to bed, turns out the light, and just as he is falling asleep gets a feeling he doesn’t like. A push from the inside out. Not a physical one, but a push just the same. Let’s just say it is a deposit into his soul. One that he’ll need should he accept the road ahead of him to the right.

  In the following silence, the traffic fades away. The city itself fades away and is replaced with one single solitary image. It is an image of Nehemiah sitting in Old Blue at midnight down at the entrance to the springs. That’s what he sees, just as clear as if he were sitting there in person.

  He gets out of bed, walks down the hall, and nudges Billy, who is already snoring on the sofa. (Trice has rightfully commandeered the extra bedroom by declaring that she “doesn’t care how big or how tired Billy is, that the last time she checked she was a girl and she is getting her privacy.”) “Hey, Billy.” There is a rattle of rhythm. “Billy?”

  “What—what?” His breathing is almost normal again.

  “What’s going on at the springs?”

  “What?”

  “I said, what is going on at the springs?”

  “Springs ain’t there no more.” Billy rolls over on his side, speaks into the back cushion. “It’s nothing but dust now. The water has left town.”

  Nehemiah nods, although the water drying up makes no sense. No sense in any natural realm. Doesn’t even make any sense the way that Billy rolls it sideways out of his sleeping mouth. As if somehow the water leaving town were an acceptable option.

  He walks to his room, and gets back into bed. He lies wide awake now with his arms behind his head, watching the day-glo green numbers on the clock changing by the minute, remembering a place where his memories were once drawn up from cool, clear water.

  But now memory has run dry.

  Thursday, 5:36 P.M.

  Nehemiah is on his way home and into the unknown. Driving south, trailing the two-day-old fumes of Billy’s truck, the demands and concerns of Washington occupying his every thought. So much so that he is missing the dogwoods. Missing the sunlight that’s left streaming across the road through the pines. Just missing it all.

  Before leaving, he had gone to his office, taken off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and then sat down, only to stare at his day-old sketch of the Shibboleth Oak. Bam. There it was, waiting to face him straight from his own hand. And if there had ever been a feeling that he was going to have a hard time escaping whatever this call was, it was then. For a second, but only for a second, he thought he had seen the leaves move slightly on the tips of the branches. He had rubbed his eyes and risen from his desk, walked to the window, and looked out past the borders of green hedges, beyond the traffic, until he could almost see Billy’s truck beating back the wind.

  He had thought about how very long it had been since he saw his brother and how he had let that happen. How he had let that much time get away from him. And how amazingly good Trice had looked. Not good in a hubba-hubba way. Not good in a sleek, city fashionably perfect way. Trice had looked good like, well, good, like for real. Real natural. Or maybe she had just looked familiar. Maybe it was just good to have a slice of his old life invading the new and improved version for the first time. Or maybe she was just the sexiest, most uncontrived woman he had encountered in, well—forever. He was still thinking about this, still stumbling and troubling over it, when Senator Honeywell walked in unannounced. He had to clear his throat twice before Nehemiah heard him.

  Let’s take a moment to consider the senator, to consider his Southern charms. He looks Texan big, although he’s not from Texas. He’s from a poor county in a poor part of the country. (It is this fact ultimately that helped win him the election.) He has been on this earth sixty-two years and carries himself like a man of determined accomplishment, which of course he is. Senator Honeywell is also a man with extreme observation skills. Able to spot deception a mile away. Also able to recognize loyalty when he sees it. He knows a thing or two.

  Nehemiah had pulled himself away from the window, away from the past, and taken a seat alongside the senator. He has worked for this man for almost a decade. They have become, and there is no other word to describe it, friends in every sense of the word. And the fact that Nehemiah has never, never tried to take advantage of this fact rests well with Senator Honeywell.

  They had, at this point in Nehemiah’s day, this minute portion of his life, proceeded with business as usual. They had discussed current developments and the upcoming elections. Mind you, these developments are crucial by all means, but not crucial to our story. My assignment is to watch the unfolding path that leads back to the Key. My only purpose at that moment was to watch as Nehemiah made his choices and to record the consequences of those actions.

  “I’ve had a surprise visit.” This is how Nehemiah had broached the subject. He had paused then, trying to summon up the words or perhaps the courage to go on. To try to unwrap something that he didn’t fully have his finger on. “A visit from my brother.” And then Nehemiah had looked up at the senator with an earnestness. “Apparently, there is t
rouble in Shibboleth.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I wish I knew, Jim, I really do.” Nehemiah only calls him by his first name when in private. In public, he refers to him as Senator. Always. “That’s part of the problem. They can’t seem to articulate it. Just to implore me to ‘come home,’ as they put it.”

  “They?” the senator had asked. Ahh, a man that doesn’t miss the details.

  “Umm.” Nehemiah had tried to skip over explaining about Trice because that might open up a door to explain about Magnus, Blister, Covey, Catfish, Shook, Wheezer, and so on and so forth, and it would never end. “A friend came with him,” Nehemiah had said and tried to roll it off with such nonchalance that it wouldn’t open the door to any further discussion. Nehemiah had tried to explain that although he had no evidence, no exacting evidence, the request had come from a reliable source.

  The senator was a good listener. What he had heard between the lines was that a choice had been made, a decision reached, but that Nehemiah would defer to him. Would not leave without his permission. Or his blessing.

  The senator had then quietly, quickly steered the conversation back to business. Back to meetings, to votes and to voters. He had covered every necessary topic that a man of his position needed to know from a man who had been his veritable right hand for two terms. Then he had risen to leave. It appeared that the matter of Nehemiah’s personal situation had gone unaddressed. But when Senator Jim Honeywell had reached the door, he had turned and said, “Go home, Nehemiah” with a finality that meant no argument. “Take a few days off and just go see for yourself.” Then he had added, “But call me,” as the door was closing.

  It may have been the senator who held the ticket to Nehemiah’s trip home. But it’s God who is the conductor on these rails of time. There’s a lot to be said for divine favor. And it’s all good.

  And Nehemiah is replaying that moment, and his fast packing, his turning the key in the deadbolt on his door and saying to himself, Just a few days. I’ll be back in just a few days. And he’s still thinking about his return when a red fox runs in front of the car and stops dead in his tracks, forcing Nehemiah to slam on the brakes. The fox turns, locks eyes with Nehemiah, and holds them there, until it finally darts across the asphalt into the afternoon shadows on the other side. This is how it happens that thirty-eight miles from Shibboleth, stopped in the middle of long, empty highway, eyes locked with a red fox, the ties to Washington snap loose. Nehemiah rolls down the window, searches for a fast blur of a tail, a flash of red fur, but there is no sight of him.