The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  Instead, Mary Pickett, for a moment, turned quiet as the night around her. Then she said, “I don’t know anymore why I did it. I only know it was something I had to do. And, my God, what a good and right idea it seemed, at least at the time!”

  She smiled then, but the smile was a dreamy one not meant for Regina, but aimed past her, out of the room, out the window, to that piece of rutted sidewalk in front of Calhoun Place where, long ago, a young Mary Pickett Calhoun had first seen a young Jackson Blodgett.

  11.

  It was still dark when Regina left Mary Pickett’s, but there was a morning’s dew already on the ground. She felt the freshness of it as she hurried across and slipped into the cottage, tired and anxious now to climb into her bed.

  Once there, though, she couldn’t sleep; her mind swirled with what Mary Pickett had told her, the story—Mary Pickett’s story—of Jackson Blodgett and Wynne, of Willie Willie, all of them secrets Regina now shared. And the new book itself, the one she’d seen on Mary Pickett’s desk, or thought she’d seen, except now she wasn’t so certain. Had it really been a book after all?

  “Regina, you ever been in love?”

  But it was Mary Pickett who was in love and perhaps always had been with Jackson Blodgett, a man who had once been married to her but was now long married to somebody else. Regina turned around, looked back at Calhoun Place’s darkened upstairs window. Poor Mary Pickett, she thought, and shook her head. Not only had Mary Pickett sided, all those years ago, with Jackson against her father, now she felt called upon to defend his son.

  But from what? That’s what Regina couldn’t understand. It was obvious to her by now that Wynne Blodgett at least knew something about how Joe Howard Wilson had died, if, indeed, he hadn’t been the one to kill him. Everything she’d heard, everyone she’d talked to—black or white, obliquely or pointedly—had at least implied this. And, if so, what was the problem? A rich man like Wynne Blodgett, son of a rich man—the law had already proven that he had nothing to fear. Even if she could somehow or other get him to admit what he’d done, brag about it again like Tom Raspberry said he had done in the beginning . . . What good would that do? None whatsoever. At least, that’s what everybody wants me to believe.

  But a man has been killed, and the man who did it—or the one everybody thinks did it, who knows for sure?—is walking around free as any one of the bluebirds that nested out in Mary Pickett’s mailbox. But without proof, everybody could just be assuming. Regina thought back to Thurgood, to what he had always told her. Assume makes an ass out of u and me. Maybe everybody was wrong and Wynne innocent. It was a possibility. But without evidence one way or the other, how on earth could she know?

  • • •

  REGINA WOKE THE NEXT MORNING to the rich and spicy scent of cinnamon. Groggy, she glanced down at her watch, saw she’d taken it off, looked over for it—and there was Peach, the source of the sweetness, dressed bright as a rainbow and sitting snug on the easy chair. Regina blinked, thought she might be still dreaming. But no, it was Peach, all right, what you might call the Real Deal Peach, all decked out in exuberant snatches of paisley, a yellow scarf, blue dress, red fringed Mexican shawl; bright sunlight streaming through the window, flashing at the edges of the sickle-shaped scar that ruined her cheek.

  “I called in from downstairs. Didn’t hear nothing, so I came on up. Dinetta dropped off your breakfast, but it’s got cold,” she added. “Almost time for lunch.”

  “Lunch?” said Regina, instantly wide awake.

  “It’s a wonder you could sleep, all the racket. Revere Garden Club meeting on Monday. Miss Lilla Raymond—Miss Mary Pickett’s dead mama’s dear friend, from ’cross the street at Raymond Hall—is going to be speaking on ‘The Value of Sweet Olive Versus Autumn Clematis as the Basis of the Fall Herbaceous Border.’ I’ve heard the title called out so many times, I memorized it myself. Place should be packed. Miss Mary Pickett’s working herself into a frenzy.”

  Mary Pickett—my employer—is up and I’m not?

  “Oh, my God,” Regina said, and scrambled to the bottom of the bed for her robe.

  “No hurry,” said Peach. “Miss Mary Pickett’s always in some kind of agitation. It’s in her nature. She never was one could just sit down and be happy, even when she gave it her first best try.”

  “You know her long?” Regina was dying for coffee, but even more than that, she was dying to talk. To Peach.

  “Long enough.” Peach leaned forward. “I don’t live here, not like Willie Willie does, or used to at least, but I work here. Sometimes. I’ve got my own independent place. But I been here and was here the first time Mr. Jackson came around for Miss Mary Pickett, back when they were young and called themselves sparking each other.”

  “I’m not really that interested in what happened back then,” said Regina, a little too quickly. “What I wanted to ask you about is Wynne Blodgett. And about something else, something someone left here.” Even with this, Regina thought she might be saying more about the shirt than she should.

  But Peach shook her head. “Oh, Mr. Wynne . . . All in good time. Well, you sure should be interested in Miss Mary Pickett, in her ways and her means, since you work for her now, too, don’t you? Seems everybody in Revere ends up working for her one way or another, furthering what she got in mind she wants them to do.”

  Regina’s eyes narrowed. She couldn’t tell what Peach meant by this. But she wanted to know. She thought of Peach the first day she saw her, the way she’d gone in the front door of the Old Jail Café, sashayed where she wanted to on the courthouse square. She thought of the two sisters in the forest, their brother, The Secret of Magic—and Willie Willie.

  If she wanted to, thought Regina, Peach could make a few things very clear.

  But Peach seemed to have more important things on her mind than making things clear for Regina Mary Robichard. She reached within the folds of her shawl, pulled out a large paper square.

  Peach said, “I brought you this.”

  “This” turned out to be a thin parchment envelope yellowed with age. The envelope had been addressed to Miss Regina Mary Robichard, Esquire. There was no stamp on it. The envelope had not been sent through the mail. In its lower left-hand corner was a flourished Courtesy of Myself and Mr. Willie Willie. In fact, all the writing was carefully scripted. Regina recognized the swoop of its swirls and its crosses.

  “It was you!”

  “Me, all right,” said Peach Mottley, leaning back, a smile on her face. “Left that shirt here for you to take care of. Did you hide it real good like I told you to?”

  Regina nodded, about to say exactly where she’d put it, but Peach clamped her hand over her own mouth, shook her head. “Don’t tell me a thing about it. Don’t tell me nothing I don’t need to know. And don’t bring it with you, neither.” She tapped a light rhythm—tat-tat-tat—on the envelope. “That is, if you come. But I would come, if I were you, you being Willie Willie’s lawyer and all. Oh, I’d come, all right. I’d make a way out to Peach’s. Now that you’ve been invited. There’s nobody come out to Peach’s who don’t find what they been looking for.”

  She smiled—and her smile was a promise.

  Yet it was hard for Regina to hold back a retort. Peach, like Mary Pickett last night, both telling her what they wanted her to hear and not what she needed to know.

  Luther Mottley’s last still-alive sister was already heaving herself out of the chair, pointing the rainbow of her being toward the stoop door that lay just beyond Regina’s bed and led to the stairs.

  “The shirt, yes. I understand what you’re wanting. But there’s other things you need to know, too.” Peach shook her head, did not stop her progression. Regina waited until she heard the downstairs door open and close, and then Peach’s footsteps echoing across the pea gravel toward Mary Pickett’s, before she opened the envelope.

  Inside was what appeared, at first
glance, to be a very old, decorated Christmas card with a green fading wreath, tarnished raised gold bow, a charming Best Wishes. The works. Regina ran her finger over the wreath, brought the card to her nose. It smelled of faded lavender, though not unpleasantly so. Regina sat silently, waiting until she heard the screen door of Calhoun Place slam before she turned the card over and read.

  Miss Peach Mottley

  Invites

  Miss Regina Robichard

  To take tea and cake with her

  Sunday

  In the Sometime Afternoon

  With Mr. Willie Willie as Escort

  The words had been carefully written, their interweaving ducking into all the nooks and crannies of reverse embossing along the card’s back.

  You bet she’d be there, but . . . what exactly did “In the Sometime Afternoon” mean, anyway?

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, precisely at noon, Regina found herself sitting out in Willie Willie’s little garden plot, waiting. She was dressed in her best gray suit and caramel-colored suede pumps, and wrapped up, she thought, a little like a Christmas present herself in a small crocheted afghan she’d found in the old cedar-planked chest that sat at the foot of Willie Willie’s bed. The day had turned cold, with gray clouds skittering overhead through a hard-looking, bright sky. Beyond the gates of Calhoun Place, Third Avenue stretched out quiet as a museum; even the shacks that struggled down from it to the river were silent and still. A day like this, with its clean autumn smells and its absolute silence, its majesty of trees stretched so tall you had to shade your eyes from the sun to see the tips of them . . . In a week or two, in New York, when she got back there, where would she ever find so much living quiet again?

  She wondered about Mary Pickett: where she was, what she was doing. She’d caught only quick glimpses of her since they’d sat side by side on the window seat and Mary Pickett had poured out her story. About her long-ago love for Jackson, about this town, about Wynne. And maybe that’s all it had been—a story. Regina was already lawyer enough to realize how hard it was to get to the truth, how people hid themselves under all sorts of fictions. But Regina believed what Mary Pickett had told her, and this belief had brought with it a strange realization—that she now already knew more about the white Mary Pickett than she knew about any of the black lawyers she worked with in New York.

  She was weighing all this in her mind, and counting, at the same time, the spider lilies that seemed to have sprung up everywhere, overnight, and trying to identify the fall fragrance, whether it was sweet olive or autumn clematis, when she heard the gentle rumble that heralded the arrival, in the distance, of Willie Willie’s ancient but spiffy Ford pickup.

  • • •

  BUT ONCE SHE WAS SETTLED IN beside Willie Willie in his truck, Regina turned seriously scared. Shaking scared. This was Sunday. Already. So far, she’d come up with nothing really substantive, and almost a week of her two had slipped by. Her thoughts flew straight to New York and to Skip Moseley. Saw him as he would be at this very moment, in the first pew at the Abyssinian Baptist Church up there in Harlem, sitting with his nice, pretty mama and his rich lawyer daddy and his two lawyer brothers, and their two nice, pretty, stay-at-home wives.

  Yes, there would be Skip, his head lowered reverently in prayer, his perfectly tailored Brooks Brothers suit hiding a heart that was pumping away. Heh-heh-heh. Because she had nothing—clouds but no rain, smoke but no meat. And she was going to fail, and already Skip knew it. Had always known it, and soon—very soon—Thurgood would know it as well.

  “Sunday, all right,” repeated Willie Willie. “And that means Church Time, and Church Time—like ‘In the Sometime Afternoon’—means different things in your different places. Around here, it generally means the whole of the day. At least it does in your colored congregations. First off, you got your Sunday school and your choir tune-up, then you got your early-morning prayer for them got to go on to their regular Sunday work, then, about ten-thirty or eleven, they roll out the regular service. After that, there’s normally church dinner, one thing or another. Our churches, we’ll use any excuse for a meal. Congregants take their trip home after that to check on the livestock, get themselves a little rest, because at six it’s straight back for evening worship. Your colored church is a filling station. Folks come in and tank up for their week.”

  Regina looked down dubiously at her watch. “How’s Miss Peach gonna fit me in with all this activity?”

  “Oh, Peach don’t believe in no churching. After Luther got himself disappeared, she decided she was better off just Peach and God on their own.”

  Regina glanced across the cracked leather seat to Willie Willie. His clothes were as crisp and immaculate as they always were, a white shirt, dark trousers, spit-shined work boots. It was hard to tell if he’d been to church or not.

  They were driving out again over the same road that Regina had originally traveled into town, past the Blodgett/Mayhew house, and the place where the buck had leaped their truck, past the now-deserted bus depot. Once they got out of Revere proper, she saw the houses grow smaller and the land they sat on stretch wider and broader until it reached the red and gold autumn-splashed crouch of the trees. Occasionally, Regina saw a rooster or a pig laid out on flat gravel, its soul making peace with the day.

  But that thought of Skip Moseley and their rivalry—or his rivalry with her; that’s how she preferred to think of it—had clinched up her stomach good and tight. She needed to talk to Willie Willie about the case. Did he, too, believe Wynne Blodgett had killed his son? He’d never said it right out, and she needed to know what he thought, there was no more putting it off, so she tried, “Mr. Willie, I went to see Tom Raspberry about your case, and he seems . . .”

  But Willie Willie shushed her right up. “There’s no talking of business on the Lord’s rest day.” Instead, he pointed out the world to her as she passed through it. “See those flowers there, that’s the spider lily. I already told you about them, the ones at the courthouse. They’re all over the place back at the house, practically take over Miss Mary Pickett’s yard this time of year. That’s the sure sign there’ll be no more warm weather. You hear that knock-knocking? That’s one ornery woodpecker noising away. And that there . . . why, that’s a wing-tipped cardinal. And that there—look quick!—that’s a little bluebird family.” He stretched out a gnarled, pointing finger. “Those like the ones make Miss Mary Pickett keep her mailbox empty. Even when she was a little girl, she was always partial to the small creatures, to the ones nobody else wanted.”

  “Like Jackson Blodgett?” Regina said softly. She saw him again, limping away from Mary Pickett, up the long driveway that led out of Calhoun Place, and she knew that Jackson could never really have been Jack, not Jack as he’d been in The Secret of Magic, tramping into the forest, bold as brass, just like the others. He’d not lived The Secret of Magic. How could he have? Regina had seen his limp, and Mary Picket had explained it. Polio had grabbed him young, shook him over. After it finished with him, there’d been no way he could run again. Yet, with the stroke of her pen, Mary Pickett had put him where she wanted him to be, gave him the past that perhaps he himself wanted. And who knew, in years to come and in generations, when the folks who knew were all dead but the book lived on, if truth itself would be forgotten and the fiction Mary Pickett had written be believed as what had happened, as what was real?

  “Hmmmm,” said Willie Willie. He was pointing out the window again, leading her eye to the bare twigs of an azalea bush and then on from there to the drying kudzu that still strangled an old oak tree, to a burdock. On and on as he pointed out things to her that she would never have seen on her own, marking out a hundred shadings of green, each with its own meaning, his fingers opening a land to her—abracadabra!—so glutted with foliage that she wondered how even a rabbit could wiggle through.

  Regina checked her watch. They had been driving about twenty minutes
now, and had come to the edge of a place that was both strange and wild. She had never seen anything remotely like it before, the lushness of green still everywhere as the calendar bore down heavily toward winter. But there was no mistaking. Willie Willie knew exactly where he was. He slowed the truck almost to a standstill and leaned his head close against the windshield with Regina. “See those trees there, Miss Regina? Look up! See those bare branches touching the sky? See those spiderwebs just barely hanging on at the top? There! There! Look up, then look up again!”

  And she saw them! Saw what he meant!

  “That’s mistletoe,” said Willie Willie, satisfied, “the best part of the forest. In the winter, when it decides and it’s ready, it floats right down on top of you. Caresses you on the cheek, touches you with magic. And when you feel that soft kiss of the mistletoe, you know the time’s come to make your wish.”

  “Make your wish?”

  “Anything you want. It’s gonna come true!”

  Regina sighed with contentment. Maybe what Willie Willie said wasn’t real but it sure sounded good.

  “But when will we get there? To Magnolia Forest?”

  Willie Willie started up again, turned to her and winked. “We already there.” Regina looked around her. She didn’t know how it had happened, but green had snuck up all around her, and now it was everywhere.

  “Never have left the forest,” Willie Willie continued, “you been in it since the day you got here, right there where you climbed off the Bonnie Blue bus. Revere is the forest. It was carved right out from the middle of it and built up in its midst. It’s always been a fight between the town and the trees, which one’s gonna win out over the other. My bet’s on the forest. Some parts it’s wider and thicker, some parts it’s thinner. But it’s always there, always ready to take back what it knows belongs to it.”