The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  “There aren’t many of us in New York, either. Women lawyers, I mean.” Willie Willie might not be winded, but Regina was.

  “Then why did that Thurgood Marshall pick you to send?”

  “Because I wanted to come. I asked to come. So he let me. He’s busy, you know.”

  A chuckle from Willie Willie. “That’s what she was counting on, that he’d be too busy to come. I knew that right off, soon as she told me what she was up to. She sure didn’t expect him to have a team behind him up there at that Negro Defense Office, I’ll bet you that.”

  There was another snigger from the porch, this time louder than before. Regina forced herself not to look over, but Willie Willie did. She could tell he was looking straight at them as he said to her, “Why would anybody want to come here?”

  Because of the photograph Mary Pickett Calhoun sent, the snapshot of you and your son, the family-ness of it, and of course what had happened to my own family, to my own father. I came to get us some justice. I came to meet M. P. Calhoun. Those were the words on the tip of her tongue. But how could she say them? Already reason after reason, and Thurgood had said there’d be more.

  “I don’t know.” She looked down at her purse, considering. “Maybe I thought this case might help me to get on. As a lawyer, I mean. It might.”

  He looked at her. “I’ve always been one to let a person go on. That’s how I raised my boy, and he did go on. He was aiming to be a proper lawyer just like you are. Maybe a judge someday, like Judge Calhoun. Who knows? If they hadn’t killed him . . . If he’d moved up north . . . It could have happened.”

  Regina looked over at him. His face had turned flint hard. She thought she could easily have blazed up a match on it.

  Their eyes met. “Bad things go on in the North, too,” she said softly. “You better believe it. But maybe we can get us some justice.”

  “Maybe,” said Willie Willie. “Maybe you can. One thing for certain, you’re here now, and I guess that’s what matters.”

  His eyes were still on her, and there was a glint in them—was it hate or was it hope? Regina couldn’t tell.

  4.

  They stopped at a truck, a battered green Ford pickup that might as well have been sporting a sign that proclaimed it MADE BEFORE THE WAR. It was certainly polished and tidy, but not, Regina thought, something you wore a uniform to drive.

  Again, Willie Willie seemed to read her mind.

  “This was another problem for Miss Mary Pickett.” And maybe it had been for Mary Pickett, but Willie Willie sure looked like he was enjoying himself. “She the one determined to have Thurgood Marshall and nobody less. But it wouldn’t do to dress me up and send me to fetch him in her car, in the old Daimler, the family’s car. Known and recognized. Me sent to drive a colored person as a bona fide passenger in it? God forbid! So she dressed me up, all right, but she sent me around in my own truck. Thought that would be good enough. It was her way of accommodating her Calhoun good manners to the way things actually are.”

  He piled Regina’s bags into the open bed, tied them on, helped her inside, then jumped up himself. The truck cab smelled of cigarette smoke and peppermint buttercream patties, the milky green kind that came wrapped in waxed paper. Regina loved those candies; they were her favorite. Their sweet smell was the first clear thing she’d been able to recognize in this new, strange place. She relaxed a little into the cracked leather seat. Though she wanted to, she didn’t look back one last time at those white men.

  Willie Willie turned the single key in the ignition and steered the truck out onto a deserted two-lane blacktop. But there was an overhang of streetlights, and it was in their glimmer that Regina saw the medal for the first time.

  “Is that Lieutenant Wilson’s?” With the words out, for some reason Regina held her breath.

  “That’s his, all right,” said Willie Willie.

  He kept his eyes straight ahead; he didn’t look at Regina, but his knuckles had gone dead white at the wheel. “I went looking after they drug him up. He was under that trestle bridge spans the Tombigbee, the one the white youngsters swing off of in the summertime. But that wasn’t where they killed him. I knew that. I knew what I was dealing with here, the kind of folks. So I followed the river, went looking, went hunting, every day, into the night. Until I found the place where they’d done it.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because I found his medal. He’s my son, he knew I’d come looking, so he left it for me . . .” Willie Willie paused, cleared his throat. “He left me something else too, an identifying something.”

  “And what was that?” Regina kept her voice low, but she perked right up.

  “A personal something. Nothing that would signify to you.”

  He didn’t say a word after that. He kept his eyes straight ahead, and Regina decided to let him be. For now at least. Lawyer or not, something in her balked at pushing this man who was still so obviously grieving. What would Thurgood do? He’d come back to this later, after his client had gotten a chance to know him better. To trust him. At least that’s what she thought, so she kept her hands clasped firmly in her lap so they wouldn’t reach out to him, wouldn’t try to pat him on the shoulder, so that their fluttering movement wouldn’t cause her mouth to open and erupt with a stream of trite words. He didn’t look like the sort of man who’d want an unknown woman to see him weep. No matter what he said, he was probably just as disappointed that she wasn’t Thurgood Marshall as Mary Pickett Calhoun soon would be.

  “We are going to find out who did this,” said Regina. “Folks just can’t be allowed to get away with murder.”

  Willie Willie looked straight ahead, his gaze on the ribbon of road as it wound its way through a dark forest. “Some people do,” he said. “Get away with murder, I mean. Happens every day of the year.”

  She opened her mouth, the question already rising, Did Mr. Willie Willie really know who’d gotten away with this murder, the killing of his son? Despite what she’d just decided, words rose in her throat. Do you know? But before she could get them out, she heard what her New York–trained ear heard as the staccato crack of a backfire. Then another. Where were they coming from? Regina looked quickly, but their truck was the only vehicle moving along the long, deserted ribbon of road.

  “Bullets. Night hunters,” said Willie Willie. He lit a cigarette, and it flashed bright in the gloom. “Not quite the season for it yet, but we got ourselves a big buck running wild. Now, don’t you let your city self start ooohing and aaahing and crooning on about Bambi. This here one’s a destructive son of a gun—eating away at the crops, kicking down the fences. Folks almost killing themselves trying to dodge him when he’s looking to jump himself over the road.” A pause. A whisper. “Like he is now.”

  She might easily have missed him. If Willie Willie hadn’t slowed the truck, she would have. They rattled nearer as the deer remained motionless, blending into the twilight, shadowed by the darkness of the trees. Suspended in that slight space where the reach of the forest almost, but not quite, touched the road.

  Regina caught her breath as she looked at him, let it out on a pleased sigh. “I’ve never been near a deer before.”

  “A buck,” corrected Willie Willie.

  Regina nodded. “Only in books—I mean, that’s where I saw them. And movies, too . . . Bambi, like you said . . . things like that. I never knew they grew this big.”

  “Big,” repeated Willie Willie. “That old thing there, he’s king of this place.”

  Again, Willie Willie gentled the brakes, slowed his old truck to a creep, and they passed so close that they almost caressed it. Regina felt she had just to reach her fingers through the lowered window and they would touch the tip of his nose. As they passed by, the buck’s eyes followed them, stared after them. They reminded Regina of the bus driver, those white men at the depot, the way their eyes watched, and she was glad
they were behind her. Glad she sat in this snug truck with Willie Willie.

  Another shot rang out in the near distance. Regina looked back as the buck leaped over the road behind them, barely missing the truck, disappearing into a rustle of trees.

  “They never gonna catch him, making all that ruckus,” said Willie Willie. He curled his lip with contempt. “Men firing like that—they must be new to town, new to Revere. Not boys I took out with me into the forest. Those boys would know that this here’s not just your ordinary animal. He’s smart as they are. Eventually going to get what he’s after. Right now, he’s just biding his time.”

  Something in the way the words snapped out of him caught Regina’s attention. She kept her face straight ahead, but her eyes sidled toward him.

  “Mr. Willie . . .” she began cautiously.

  But he’d not stopped talking. “This is my truck, but I drive the Daimler, too. The Daimler belonged to Judge Calhoun. It’s owned by Miss Mary Pickett now, though, ’cause the judge, he’s long dead. But I think I told you that already. Killed off, he was, by a Calhoun writing something caused a scandal. You know about that book?”

  “I read it,” Regina said, “a long time ago, when I was a kid. But I found my copy. I brought it with me.”

  A chuckle from Willie Willie. “Did you, now? Miss Mary Pickett’ll sure put her name in it for you if you tell her that. And even though she won’t act like it, she’ll be tickled pink. She says folks have forgotten all about that book, but they haven’t. How could they? We are talking scandal here. Banned outright, it was, by the legislature down there in Jackson. And not just here, either. It’s a book still outlawed in all the old cotton states. That’s what I heard. I’m not telling who told me.” He winked. “Too hot for folks to handle, I imagine. The black boy, Booker, was too smart. The black man, Daddy Lemon—well, Daddy Lemon was just himself. What you might call a card. The Calhouns are a fine old family. Respected. But there’s lots of folks think Miss Mary Pickett wrote what she wrote for revenge.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Ohhhh, yes,” sang out Willie Willie in a storied crescendo that promised a sure denouement. “Revenge because her daddy wouldn’t let her marry Jackie Earle Blodgett, or Jackson Blodgett, as he calls himself now.”

  Regina shook her head; she didn’t quite understand it. “How would writing her book be revenge against that?”

  “Well, if Miss Mary Pickett didn’t write you nothing about it—and really why should she, her sending off a business letter and all?—I guess I’m going to have to fill you in myself.” Willie Willie chuckled, a low, deep roll of a sound. “The two of them, she and Jackson Blodgett, or Jackie Earle Blodgett, as he was back then, ran on over to Gordo, Alabama, right after she turned fifteen. Called themselves getting married. Her daddy was hot behind, with me at the wheel of the Daimler of course. Calhouns and Picketts never could drive for nothing. There was a whole passel of Mississippi state troopers flaring right behind us. Judge Calhoun had the clout, and he’d put in a call. Thing was, I was the one informed the judge in the first place. I was the one knew all about it. Miss Mary Pickett had told me herself. She’d confided in me how much she was crazy about that boy. And she sure was. Crazy about him, I mean.”

  Like Collie had been for Jack in her book.

  “Now, I loved me some Miss Mary Pickett. I’d known her all her life, just like I’d known her daddy before her. She knew her forest—Magnolia Forest, with its small creatures and its magic. And shooting—why, once you got her shooting she was good as any man. Took down most any critter she aimed for.”

  Regina had never heard being good with a gun described as a virtue, but Willie Willie obviously thought that it was, and so she bobbed her head because that’s what he was doing. Nod along to get along, she thought. But she’d never liked blood, and the idea of someone killing “critters” roiled her stomach, made her very glad she’d not eaten since lunch.

  Willie Willie wasn’t finished. He took a puff of his cigarette, and the smoke from it briefly clouded the cab of the truck. “The judge and I grew up together on Magnolia Forest. That’s the old Calhoun place out deep in the county. Their old cotton place, so I knew my duty.”

  “Your duty?” Again, Regina felt a prickle of resentment that this man whose picture she carried in her pocket, whose son had been killed—that a man like this could be so easily taken in, think that he was important to these white people.

  “My duty, and not just to the judge. To her, too. Oh, yes.” Willie Willie nodded. “We caught up with them on the steps of the Gordo Twilight Inn Hotel in ‘a nick of time,’ as the judge put it. He got them annulled for what he called non-consummation. What he called, ‘before the fact.’ Even though I imagine it was way after the fact, if you take my meaning.” He shook his head, but his face had softened and his eyes had gone dreamy. Like his mind was looking back at the something that now made his lips smile. After a moment he continued, “Miss Mary Pickett was motherless. She was wayward. And she and Jackie Earle Blodgett had been sneaking around together since the day her mama died.” He sighed. He raised his head toward heaven—but not so far toward heaven that Regina couldn’t catch the twinkle in his eye. He looked expectant, like he might want her to say something. But what could she say—yet? Still, she was more eager than ever to meet the great, and perhaps scandalous, M. P. Calhoun.

  And a part of Regina—the no-nonsense lawyer part—wondered why on earth Willie Willie would expect Mary Pickett to put all that in a business letter, but another part of her was already falling into the magic of Mr. Willie Willie’s tale-telling voice that pulled her into his story, made her want to hear what happened next. She heard herself saying, “Why didn’t they just try again, Jackie Earle and Mary Pickett? Later.”

  “Because she got sent away.”

  “To school in Virginia? Just like in the book?”

  “Just like it.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Next thing we knew—and believe me, everybody in this town was paying attention—Miss Mae Louise Wynne turned up expectant. Jackie Earle Blodgett ended up marrying her. And this time it took. At least for Miss Mae Louise it took, but maybe a little less for our boy Mr. Jackie Earle.”

  Regina may have been new at interrogation, but she already knew when to keep quiet and let her client talk.

  “When Miss Mary Pickett got back down here, flowers started arriving, regular as clockwork, every year on her birthday and at Christmas. The biggest box of chocolates you ever wanted to see on Valentine’s Day. Nothing signed, but in a town this size, this prone to gossip . . . No doubt in anybody’s mind who was doing the sending. Everything aboveboard, mind you, everybody smiling in each other’s faces—at least until lately.”

  Now, this was something to ask about. She remembered that the Blodgett house, their “home place,” had been burnt down. That his father’s newspaper had said, practically insistent, Wynne Blodgett was away when it happened. Reading again, on the train, it had struck her as odd that a newspaper article describing a fire would have been so explicit about the whereabouts of someone who wasn’t even there. She wanted to ask him about this, but before she could, the truck turned a sharp corner, and there was the river, a big bear of a thing, lumbering along its slow brown path.

  “That’s where they brought up Joe Howard,” whispered Willie Willie so softly that he could have been in church. “See that trestle bridge there? See that rope swing hanging from it? That’s the exact spot. Little white children play off that rope in the summertime, and the older ones, too. Teenagers. Joe Howard washed up right under there, like he was coming home to me. Killed in Alabama but come home to Mississippi in the end.”

  Regina rolled her window down, leaned out. The air outside the truck was so thick you could lick it. It blew at her hair, almost catching it in an overhang of live oaks. But by the time she turned back there was no more river; it, too, had dis
appeared behind the trees as the blacktop curved and broadened, and, with a magician’s flourish, pushed past the last curtain of wild woods that ushered them into Revere.

  “Main Street,” said Willie Willie softly.

  Nothing much to it. She thought she could see almost to the end of it from this, its beginning. A long row of hanging lights marched straight ahead, over a street carved from the forest. Around her were low frame houses, some painted, most not, some with other tiny huts—outhouses?—behind them.

  But then, immediately, came the big houses. One right after the other, almost on top of one another, brick ones with black trim, white columned antebellums, Victorian gingerbread fronting at least twenty rooms, some that had obviously started out as cottages and been added onto and then added onto again. Regina had no idea what she’d expected this small town to look like, but it sure wasn’t this.

  She gestured to one of the largest. “Shouldn’t this be out on a plantation somewhere?”

  “White folks,” said Willie Willie, “thought it would be better if they all stuck together. Back in the old days, that is. So the men, they built city houses for their wives and their children. Used to be the old families lived on Main. Now the cotton’s mostly gone, people from here leaving close behind it. I’ve heard tell there’s more Revere folks living in Memphis than we got staying on here. Most of what you see been broke up into apartments now.”