The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  Regina caught herself biting on her pencil, staring over at Calhoun Place. A light that had not been on before shone out of an upstairs window. The light and the window and whatever activity was going on behind it surely belonged to Mary Pickett. But what could Mary Pickett possibly be doing up there, in that big house, all by herself so late? She wondered, fleetingly, if Mary Pickett could be working just like she herself was working, and then she turned back to the thin file and reread everything again.

  This didn’t take long, and once she’d finished, she opened her briefcase and sifted through the newspapers, the old clippings that Mary Pickett had sent to them in New York. With new information, Regina thought she might come up with a fresh idea. She doubted this, but you never knew.

  She laid everything out once again in chronological order. After Joe Howard’s death, after the inquest and the grand jury, the next significant thing that seemed to have happened was the burning of The Folly, Jackson Blodgett’s old family house. His “home place,” as they all called it. Its torching had been written about in both the white newspapers and the colored ones, though for some reason the story was longer in the colored ones—The Jackson Afro-American, The Revere Fair Dealer—which went into the placement of the house near the river and its history and with a little extra history of the Blodgetts thrown in for good measure. Poor folks, who had managed to carve out a way upward. Respectful, but by now Regina had heard enough about folks coming down from the hills to be able to read between the lines. Both articles were long considering their subject—a full column in the Afro-American; the one in the Fair Dealer continued on to the next page. Interesting. Regina wondered about that, and she remembered that Willie Willie had said The Folly was near not only Calhoun Place but the river where they’d found Joe Howard. Regina decided it might be worth her while to go down and have her own look at it.

  She was thinking this when she heard . . . What was that? The pencil slipped from her hand, bounced against the linoleum floor.

  “Shhhh!” she whispered, then realized she was shushing herself. She looked up, listened. Another sound. It seemed to come from right outside her window. A bump. No, not a bump, really; it was more like a rustle.

  Silence. Then that rustle again. Stealthy, she thought. And a little closer this time.

  Boogeyman coming to get you, Collie! Climbing out of the Stink Tree! Watch out! Watch out!

  Then a knocking. A pounding. It took Regina a second before she realized that what was pounding was her heart. She patted her chest, tried to calm down.

  She looked down at her watch, found it was just past midnight, then raised her gaze to the window, took up her courage, pushed the curtain away, looked out.

  Across from her, Calhoun Place was now dark as death, but the night around it sparkled. She had never seen so many stars in her life, a spangle of them, so thick they looked like snow falling upward onto the sky, so plentiful that they almost completely outshone the fat fullness of a chill harvest moon. Regina moved closer to the windowpane, placed her hand on it and squinted her eyes down the driveway. Looking. But, of course, Jackson Blodgett’s Buick wouldn’t be here so late; he had a family of his own. There was no sign of Willie Willie’s truck, either. And the sheriff—he was long gone. Regina held her breath and listened. All she heard now was silence so thick not even a cicada managed to sing through it. Relieved, she was about to move her hand from the window, to close up downstairs, to hurry on up to her safe, warm bed. She was just about to do all this, could even already feel herself snug within sheets, when again she heard the rustle. And this time accompanied by a stealth of footsteps. She was sure about that.

  She moved her hand down to ease open the desk’s one drawer, but there was little in it, no flashlight, not even a candle. Okay. One more look out the window . . . And that’s when she saw him.

  The deer.

  No, the buck.

  That’s what Willie Willie had called him that first night driving in on the highway, and the way he’d said it had been with a capital B. Now he was right smack in the middle of Mary Pickett’s garden, daintily picking at the last flowerings of her prized Confederate roses. All the real deer she’d ever seen in her life—one!—she’d seen since she’d arrived in Mississippi, but she knew this one. She recognized him in the lift of his head, in the strength of his body, in the flash of his hoary antlers, frosted all over in night light.

  He looked up, not toward her but to Calhoun Place. Motionless as a statue for a moment, but alert. The next thing she knew he clattered down the driveway and was gone.

  Regina flung open the cottage door. Outside, the world shivered under a new reality. Summer almost over, winter on the way. She pulled her sweater close, was glad she’d not kicked off her shoes as she worked and she looked down the pathway that led to the house and down into the near reach of the forest, but the only thing left of the buck was a strewing of rose petals, pale against the hard ground.

  “Did you see him?”

  Regina jumped—and bumped hard into Mary Pickett.

  Who hissed, “Ouch. That’s my foot.”

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” apologized Regina. They might have been in a formal parlor or a drawing room except that Mary Pickett had on a pink cotton bathrobe, bare feet, no slippers. And she held a cocked rifle in her hand.

  “Couldn’t shoot him,” she said, breaking it with a sigh. “Lots of reasons why I should have, though. We’re not talking about Bambi. This one’s a damn menace. Willie Willie told me he almost got y’all killed. And he would have expected me to kill him, Willie Willie would have. He’s the one taught me how to bring him down, just where to aim for, and maybe if I could have, made him proud of me, things might go back to being the way they’ve always been.” Mary Pickett shrugged, the barest of movements. “Doesn’t matter, though, ’cause I’m not able to do it, not anymore.”

  She turned to Regina. “You know, when I came out after that deer tonight, this was the first time I ever realized how clearly you can see everything going on at the big house from the cottage. Just goes to show how little I know. I’ve never actually been in it—the cottage, I mean. Not ever. Not even when it was being fixed up, after the book came out and I was putting in the indoor toilet, building on the kitchen. Willie Willie, Joe Howard—when we needed to see them, they always came to us.”

  The two women stood there, looking at each other for a moment, as a float of fallen leaves rose up for the walkway and jitterbugged toward them on a fine breeze.

  “I need a drink,” Mary Pickett decided. She motioned over to her big, dark house. “Bet you do, too. Come on, then.”

  She started off, leading the way over the pea-gravel path to the back door. Regina didn’t have to think twice; all tiredness vanished. This was M. P. Calhoun, after all, not just Mary Pickett, and she was taking her deeper inside, to where The Secret of Magic lived, to where it had been created. The author and the book she had written—or, better yet, the new one she had said she was writing—now formed a perfect locus of anticipation in Regina’s mind. She even forgot about Joe Howard, Willie Willie, the frustrations of her case. All of it, for the breadth of a moment, because—why, ahead of her, she felt Calhoun Place heaving itself up out of a novel’s typeset, made-up pages, and turning into something that was no longer just imagined but was about to be real. Regina had to restrain herself from beating Mary Pickett to the door.

  The screen door slammed as Mary Pickett’s fingers went to the kitchen switch and flicked on the light. She laid the rifle gently on a white enamel table, shifted it a bit so that it was pointed away from Regina, who suddenly realized that it might actually be loaded. She hadn’t thought about that, not really, and she again felt that frisson of fear she’d felt back at the cottage. Mary Pickett disappeared for a moment behind a curtain of barkcloth with palm trees, that looked very much like the one that skirted the sink in Willie Willie’s cottage and behind which, she ho
ped, the shirt was safely hidden. It wasn’t something she thought she’d expected to see in an old, built in 1839 mansion like this one. But then again, she guessed, a house wasn’t a museum. Some fabrics frayed; moths ate at others. You had to be prepared to throw things out, replace them, and move on.

  When she brushed into the kitchen proper again, Mary Pickett held a small silver tray on which sat two hefty crystal goblets. She picked up her rifle again, held it loosely under her arm, balancing the gun and the tray. She did not ask Regina to help her, but she did motion for her to follow along. The mistress of Calhoun Place walked over to the split kitchen door. The top half was already ajar; with her hip, she opened the bottom. One after the other, first Mary Pickett, then Regina, passed through.

  It wasn’t that Regina had never thought about Calhoun Place, what might be hidden within it, how it might look, what it might contain. Sitting there at Joe Howard’s desk in the cottage, she’d look across and wonder about a house like this in a place like Mississippi, just like she’d wondered, years ago, about Collie’s house in The Secret of Magic.

  “Go on into the hall there,” said Mary Pickett. “Turn on the switch by the stairs.”

  Collie’s house was the one thing in Revere that Mary Pickett had not lavished a loving description upon in The Secret of Magic. It had been drawn forth in only one or two quick strokes. The children had run to it; they had run past it. Description had been lavished on the whorls of an oak stump, on the nicks in a red penknife’s blade, on a snake of kudzu that Collie and Jack and Booker had tripped across on a back path. As far as Regina could remember, no one actually had ever gone inside the big house. No one had asked to, no one had wanted to. In her mind she had always pictured it as a very dark place.

  She could not have been more wrong. Calhoun Place only seemed closed from the street, from the sidewalk, when you looked at it from the outside. Once you were actually inside it, even at night, Mary Pickett’s house turned out to be wide-open and bright. It smelled of beeswax. It gleamed with lamp-lit silver. The parquetry beneath Regina’s feet was as burnished as gold.

  Slaves did this. Put it all together. Built it.

  A sobering thought, and it sobered Regina Mary Robichard right up.

  Not that Mary Pickett noticed. “Those floors are river oak,” she said with some pride. “Trees everyplace back in the old days. Jungle thick. My great grandfather and his Negroes had to cut through them, almost to the bend of the Tombigbee River.”

  It was one of the few times Mary Pickett had spoken about race, and Regina would have thought that the mention of it would have distanced the two of them. She had never very much liked talking about race with white people, even the white lawyers who worked in the Fund office. Everyone just seemed so self-conscious. She was, and they were, too. But she found, when Mary Pickett talked about race, really and truly like now, she could have been talking about the weather. Race was just there, a fact of life. Black people were everywhere. Here, you couldn’t hide from them like white people could in New York.

  Mary Pickett handed her the drinks tray, but only long enough for her to lay the rifle on a dove-gray loveseat that fronted the blue silk brocade wall. Regina would have liked to peek into the dim rooms off that hallway. Actually, she was dying to do this, but already she could see this was not to be. Mary Pickett had brought her here for a purpose. Regina could tell this by the set of her shoulders, by her definite tread. The mistress of Calhoun Place took the tray again. She led the way to a needlepoint-carpeted stairway that led upward to a dim landing and then rounded a corner and disappeared.

  “My mother did the handwork on this rug,” said Mary Pickett, as she put her foot down firmly upon it. “She sat in a window at the back parlor, the one that looks over the wisteria arbor and the rose garden, and she worked on this every day of her short life. Stitching bright flowers onto a black background—I always thought this something of an anomaly, even when I was a child and had no earthly idea that a word like anomaly existed—but still, I knew exactly what it meant.”

  She climbed two more steps, pointed. “That’s her over there.”

  Regina’s gaze followed the tilt of Mary Pickett’s long finger as it pointed along the length of a long wall. The portrait dwarfed the hallway. It stretched up almost from the top of a low green marble-topped table to almost touch the wainscoting above.

  Now, that, Regina decided, was a true Southern belle.

  She thought this even though the woman was dressed in Gay Nineties spangles, not Victorian hoops, her russet hair pillowed up over the swan’s reach of an ivory neck, her body facing forward, her head turned back, eyes focused coldly on Regina. At least, that’s what it looked like. But still those eyes fascinated her. They were dark as the earth, just like Mary Pickett’s, and large like hers were, and sad like them, too.

  Mary Pickett said, “After my mother died, my daddy felt guilty and maybe grief-stricken. He wanted her likeness in this house, and he wanted it big. The portraitist he chose worked out of Memphis. He asked for a photograph, and we sent him some I’d done of her. There weren’t many. I thought I’d have all the time in the world to take pictures of my mother, so I took pictures of everything else. Next, he asked for something personal. My father sent the piecework she’d been working on when she died. He couldn’t think of anything else. They were married, but I can’t say Daddy ever really understood Mother that well. On the other hand, the portraitist never came to Revere—at least, he never did until they hung the painting—and, of course, he never knew her but he got her just right. That look on her face, the way it’s turned back. That was the soul of my mother, always searching for something she’d left somewhere behind her. I never wanted to be like that, but I guess I am.”

  A current of air rustled them, an icy draft forcing its way through some unsealed crack. It shivered crystal in the chandelier in the hallway, tinkled the glasses on Mary Pickett’s silver tray. A draft, maybe. But Regina thought it came from the portrait, from the lips of that lifelike, aristocratic, snowy white face, and that it blew straight at her. Determined to whoosh her away.

  There was no time to think fancifully, though, because Mary Pickett was off again, almost at the turn of the landing, and Regina found herself hurrying to catch up. Switch after switch was turned, and light sprang up to open a path past velvet curtains and pretty mahogany furniture and ugly ancestral portraits. Past room after shadowed room.

  Until they came to the place where Mary Pickett wrote her magic books. Regina knew what it was as soon as she saw it. A small space, not much bigger than a closet. And she would have surely missed it except that a green shaded partners lamp had been left burning—by mistake?—on the simple square desk. Not much light, really, but still enough for Regina, curious, slowing down, to pick out a Corona typewriter so battered its carriage return was wrapped in hospital adhesive, a glass-and-silver ink stand, a Red Bird school tablet, a dictionary with a crumbling leather spine, a handful of yellow pencils in a Ball canning jar, books tumbling together like Topsy all up the walls. This was Mary Pickett’s personal place. Regina didn’t need to see anything to know that. All around her was the scent of cigarette smoke mixed with Shalimar, Mary Pickett’s particular perfume, stronger here than Regina had smelled it anywhere else.

  “You coming?” From Mary Pickett.

  “Yes, here I am.”

  Regina turned her head and there it was—the pile of neatly typed pages, weighted in place by a globed glassed-in scene of a forest. A manuscript, that’s what it looked like, all right. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Could this be it? She longed to ask, to touch it, feel the onion-skin pages with her fingertips. To read it. A new novel, a sequel to The Secret of Magic? A sequel in which she’d finally find out what had happened to Collie and to Jack and to Booker after The End. Where you’d learn what had happened to Daddy Lemon and who had killed Peach and Sister’s brother, Luther—if he was dead. Regina realized, sudden
ly, she was dying to know. Had Mary Pickett brought her here to show her this? Would she—Regina Mary Robichard!—be the first one in New York to see this new book? To actually read it?

  “If you’re coming, come on.”

  Mary Pickett opened a door at the far end of the landing.

  This room was like the others they’d passed—good furniture, stuffy air, no magic to it—not like that little office at all. An overlay of fading crochet canopied an oak tester bed, with a reproduced Louis XV chair flush beside it, a bare inlaid oak table, no books or mess, no papers, no pencils. It didn’t even smell like Mary Pickett smelled. No ghost of Shalimar in here.

  Beside her, Mary Pickett put the tray with its glasses and its decanter on a low table, then sat down beside Regina—which came as a shock. She hadn’t thought she would sit down this close; she’d thought Mary Pickett would drag that gilt chair over—or order Regina to do it; with Miss Calhoun, you could never be sure—so that the two of them could look at each other and get right to the point. Because, of course, there must be a point to this little excursion. Regina had already realized this. Mary Pickett didn’t say a word. She also didn’t pour anything from the decanter, either, for Regina or for herself. It just sat there, crystal in the moonlight. But she did fish in her pocket and pull out her Chesterfields. She put one in her mouth, struck a match, flamed the cigarette to life, took a deep pull.

  That done, she turned to Regina. “I imagine it’s your mama made you into a lawyer. A strong woman like that, she would have wanted you to go on.”

  Said so matter-of-factly that Regina, without thinking, answered right back, “She didn’t care what I did. She wanted me to be happy. She never encouraged me to be a lawyer, but once I decided, she never stood in my way. And she supported me. I mean, she worked. Long hours. But it wasn’t something she wanted for me, starting off.”