The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  Suddenly, Willie Willie spun his truck so sharply to the right that Regina had to clutch tight to the hanging strap to keep from tipping into him.

  And the path he’d turned into was twisted and narrow, the road ahead of them dark, even discreet. Immediately, the smell of the day changed from the soft scent of pine and flowers to that of rich, dark earth. Regina rolled down her window, leaned her head out.

  Willie Willie said, “You gonna like Peach.”

  And Regina called out, her eyes on the forest. “Oh, I already met her.”

  “I know you already met her,” Willie Willie said with great patience. “Now you’re gonna get to like her. Meeting and liking—that’s two different things.”

  Peach’s house was only a small, sly twinkle at first, but as Willie Willie drove on, it grew larger, took form. Four stout walls, then two great brick chimneys atop a dark roof. Everything coming more and more into focus, like puzzle pieces fitting together. Until suddenly the forest parted. They passed through a small clearing, and were there.

  And the house was there, too, the Mottley house, just like it had been in The Secret of Magic. It was a real house, something that Mary Pickett had obviously seen and not conjured. Behind it lay a garden and a snug brick kitchen that was not attached to the main house, which sat atop a riser of red steps that rose up like a sentry from the circular, pea-gravel drive. In front waved a filigreed sign just like the one at Mary Pickett’s, announcing to a visiting world that this was MOTTLEY PLACE, CONSTRUCTED 1901.

  Yet even from a distance Regina could see that the paint had peeled off the main walls in strips so wide they only hinted at what once must have been the original, brilliant, bright white. Still, the red geraniums were there, just like they had been in the book, a bright flash of them on each rung of the stairs and lining the path that skirted the house and led to the forest. Geraniums in terra-cotta, in Maxwell House two-pound coffee tins, in splintery wooden slatted fruit boxes. The house itself was placed at a soft angle slightly off-center of the driveway, making it look something like the top curve of a question mark.

  At the apex of which stood Peach, waving to them from the open front door, her free hand shading her eyes.

  Regina climbed out of the truck; she didn’t wait for Willie Willie. By the time she heard the click of his door, she was already making her way to that house. And there she was right beside her, on the porch, and it was the same porch that Mary Pickett had—green floorboards, a blue-painted ceiling. A combination, according to M. P. Calhoun, that mosquitoes just could not abide.

  “Come on in, sugar,” sang out Miss Peach. But she looked at her in a singular way and, for the first time, Regina hesitated. The forest grew still, seemed to hold its breath around her. For a second she was a child again, stealing her mother’s sewing flashlight, taking it into her bedroom under her covers so she could read The Secret of Magic and find out with the children if Peach was a witch. If she had killed Luther, her brother, and if, after what Raspberry had told her, Willie Willie had helped her.

  But that wasn’t why she was here, not to solve that long-ago mystery—if it was a mystery, if any of it was true at all—but to unravel a real-life present-day puzzle. To find out who had killed Joe Howard and to get Willie Willie some justice for his son. So in the end, she reached out to Peach, to the warm honey-fruit smell of her, to her flowered apron hanging like a picture over a flower-on-flower silk dress, to her sachet-powdered bosom that looked like a tea cake dusted with sugar, and she kissed her warm, scarred cheek, while around them the forest sighed.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” said Regina.

  “Glad for the company,” said Miss Peach heartily, sounding like she meant it. A woman alone, used to being alone. Months, years, decades of loneliness. The thought sobered Regina.

  “Glad for it,” Peach repeated. “Few are the folks now who turn up out here.”

  “I thought she might like going into the house,” Willie Willie said to Peach. He was beside them both, a gentleman opening the faded wooden screen door. “I thought it would be a treat for her, since she read that Miss Mary Pickett book.”

  “But the house wasn’t in the book; the inside of it wasn’t! At least not like it is,” said Peach, looking pleased yet shaking her head.

  “Still, I thought it’d be mighty nice if you showed it.” And then to Regina, “You’re in for a treat. Peach lives in the very best showing place of how things used to be in the South. She worked many a year for Miss Charlotte and Miss Luisa and Miss Hunnicutt Lindleigh, and for their mother before them. Did all their laundry. Other folks’, too.” He winked at her. “Best you remember that. It’s part of her story.”

  A smile gathered up the wrinkles on Peach’s full, biscuit-colored face. “I was always one for being independent. Independent of Daddy. Independent of Luther. I wanted my own livelihood for myself.”

  She laughed at this, and Willie Willie laughed along with her, and then Regina joined in because they seemed to be having a good time. Peach reached over and tenderly ran a finger down the length of Willie Willie’s shirt. Touched his hand, as he flourished open the door so she could pass through.

  How could anyone describe Peach’s house, the absolute profusion of it? The gaudiness, really. It reminded Regina of an overloaded Victorian Christmas tree. Turkey carpets overlapped one another on the floor, sometimes three deep, while up the green brocade walls marched portrait after portrait of gilt-framed American soldiers, some of them old enough that the men were in blue uniform, but the most, and by far the largest of the pictures, memorializing them in gray. One of the pictures had been hung sideways, the only way it could fit. Banners—OUR GLORIOUS CAUSE! HAIL FALLEN HEROES!—waved in a draft from the door. And flags, too, at least two regimental ones, shading down from the ceiling, their colors dim, their edges frayed. But still . . . there.

  On Peach’s walls, the men were segregated on one side, corseted women hung on the other, the ladies holding tightly on to children or to lace handkerchiefs or to nosegays of African violets. But always clutching at something, at least that’s how it looked to Regina, and the children doing it, too, their hands wrapped around a doll, resting small fists on a rocking horse. The only thing they had in common was that they were, all of them, white. Which meant they couldn’t have much to do with the Mottleys, so why were they here?

  Regina looked over, and there was Peach, with her eyes wary but her head nodding, and behind her, Willie Willie nodding as well. Peach raised her hand.

  “Please step into my parlor,” she said with great formality, sounding like the spider in a children’s picture book.

  Six sofas had found a crowded home in a snug little room with gold-green walls. One a rich burgundy velvet, one a green damask, one filigreed gold on black silk. Regina couldn’t tell anything about the other three because these were hidden under scarves so bright they looked like something Peach might wear, and probably did. Chippendale chairs stacked carelessly up one wall and down another.

  “Didn’t have space to put not one more thing over there. Had to crowd the rest of it here,” said Peach, coming up and throwing a gesture toward a closed door. “There’s two long tables and sixteen high-back chairs in the dining room already. Not to mention the sideboards and the butler tables and the silver flatware and the china plates. My goodness, how those Lindleighs could eat!”

  Not everything was in the best of shape, though. Some of the chair cushions were patched with fabric that didn’t quite match the green damask on the sofa nearest Regina. Still, what did a patch or a worn spot here or there matter in the face of so much? In a room with claw-foot tables and brass-legged tables, glass- and marble-topped mahogany, walnut, oak, mother-of-pearl inlaid on ebony tables—an opulence of them, an obstacle course!—Regina decided she’d better watch her step.

  “My house,” Peach said with a pleased sigh. “My home. All mine. My very own.”
/>   “This here is Stream Run, the Willman place,” said Willie Willie in dignified explanation. “Well, technically maybe not Stream Run itself.” He took a moment to ponder over this. “But surely what you might call the idea behind it. You see, Old Mottley, Miss Peach’s departed daddy, always hankered after that house. Had a crush on it. Loved it. He made all his own store deliveries to Mr. Roger Willman’s; he wouldn’t send one of his working boys. And while he was in the kitchen putting things up, he’d look around a corner, peep on in, see just enough to figure things out.”

  “Daddy was good at that,” said Peach, her smile now pouring like sunshine onto Regina. “I already told you how he built that new jail, put together everything in it, from the foundation up. Even forged the iron for the cells.”

  “Good enough,” corrected Willie Willie. “Mottley got his mind around the downstairs, even figured out the wainscoting and the medallions and the brass chandeliers. But there was no way the Willmans were going to let him go up into the bedrooms. No way in this world was that going to happen. That’s why the whole of this place is only one story tall.”

  He moved aside so that Regina could peek at a curving stairway, stare at it as it arched gracefully upward, straight to the ceiling and its abrupt end.

  Willie Willie continued. “Good thing, too, as life turned out. Civil War didn’t make it to Revere, but the Depressing did. Mr. Wilman lost his cotton place out there on the prairie back when Judge Calhoun and a lot of other folks did. Mr. Roger had to break up Stream Run—the original, real Stream Run, that is—into apartments. Efficiency ones, with no kitchens. He did this during the last war and one of the officers in the Army Air Corps living there called himself cooking on a hot plate, something strictly forbidden. The hot plate overheated, the house caught fire, and the whole thing burnt right down clean to the ground. So this little Stream Run out here . . . why, it’s the only Stream Run anybody’s got left.”

  “That’s so,” said Peach in confirmation.

  “With all this beauty added on to it”—a very wide sweep of Willie Willie’s hand that took in the surrounding profusion—“little by little, Miss Peach’s folks gave her all this.”

  “Her folks?” From Regina. Thinking, The Mottleys were this rich?

  “The people she worked for. Mostly the Lindleighs, like I said. When the big houses in town broke up, when they were re-inventing themselves into apartments, folks took to giving away all they could. What they couldn’t, they burned. Miss Carol Ann McCall, for one. Before they moved her to that rooming house in Aberdeen, she stood over that big lawn at her place and called her working men together and had them spark up the sprawlingest bonfire ever seen in this town. And she, tall and straight, stood out in front of it, burning up every single likeness ever been painted of her family members, tossing them on one after another with her very own lace-mitted hands. Took her half an afternoon and into the night. Miss Carol Ann said she didn’t want her people taking up space in some godforsaken auction hall down New Orleans. Miss Carol Ann wasn’t the only one to do it, neither. Lindleighs did it, too. I remember when the last three of those sisters were about getting married. One of them moving up to Memphis, one down to Biloxi, one God knows where. You remember where Miss Luisa ended up, Peach?”

  “Way, way on up north she went,” Peach replied promptly. “Clear to Nashville.”

  “All three of them, during the war, married servicemen and moved into apartments where there probably wasn’t gonna be room to turn around in. What they gonna do with all that Lindleigh stuff? They had put all their own family portraits on a mule wagon along with God knows what else and were hauling it all out to some landfill in East Revere when Peach caught sight of them on Main Street. ‘Why, that’s your grandmamma Rosalie,’ she said to those sisters. ‘You can’t be carrying your grandmamma Rosalie out to the likes of Tom Phinney’s dump.’”

  “True,” said Peach. “That’s what I thought, and that’s what I said.”

  Willie Willie nodded, went on. “So they gave her the whole wagonload. That brown sofa there, those mockingbird dishes—that all came from them. And they added on a little bit of this, a whole lot of that. After a while Peach got herself more things that belonged to Lindleighs than Lindleighs got left for themselves. That’s how she ended up with everything you see in here. Folks she worked for and their friends, they gave it to her. Little by little. Of course, passing on to coloreds that work for you isn’t considered the same thing as selling your fine things or giving your fine things away.”

  “That story told,” said Peach, “let me slip on outside, bring in the tea.”

  Regina asked, “Need any help?”

  “No help at all. I got me a stand-alone kitchen, and those shoes”—she gestured to Regina’s pumps—“you wouldn’t make it there.”

  Peach turned to Willie Willie, who nodded. “Peach’s still cooking over an ole-timey stove. Kerosene. Jugs of it out back. Anything sparks, this place’d go up like spit lightning. Dangerous, but she’s too old to change her ways now. And, of course, there’s no electricity running this far deep in the county, so she needs that oil for everything. I’ll help her. You go on in. Seat yourself wherever you want.”

  Regina almost tiptoed into the parlor, looked around again, did not sit down. She wondered if Mary Pickett had actually seen the Mottley house, been in it. She wondered if she had kept it out of her book on purpose so that people would leave the Mottleys alone. A mercy. She liked Revere, but she’d already seen enough to know that the elements that ruled it would not easily tolerate a colored person who lived a fine life. This was probably why Old Mr. Mottley had decided to build his own Stream Run so deep in the forest. To keep it hidden. To keep his family safe.

  Little more than a minute and then Peach came back. She wheeled in an inlaid mahogany butler’s tray, Willie Willie pulling back the door. Peach peered around the corner toward the front door, cocked her head, seemed to be listening. Finally, she turned back to Regina. The smile of her lips worked deep crinkles into the scar on her face. She said, “It’s getting late. I guess we better go on and get started.” Peach sat down, motioned for Regina to sit beside her, and then poured tea from Georgian silver into delicate, hand-painted chipped cups. Outside, there was a steady rustle of tree branch against house window, the sound of a forest forever trying to get in.

  Across from them, Willie Willie eased himself into a large green velvet chair that sat next to a gold ormolu table, his body fitting comfortably into its depressions, his head the perfect shadow on the ivory lace shawl that covered its back.

  Why, Willie Willie comes here often, Regina thought. But of course that was true. It had probably always been true. Hadn’t Mary Pickett as much as admitted it? Hadn’t Tom Raspberry implied it when he told her about Luther Mottley’s death? Maybe, since he’d left the cottage, he actually lived out here now with Peach. Hadn’t Mary Picket said something like that?

  Regina said, “Miss Calhoun ever been here?”

  “All the children came out here,” Peach immediately corrected. “All with a hankering to see the old witch.”

  “They thought Peach killed her brother, just like it says in the book,” said Willie Willie.

  They looked at her. They both knew she had read it—Willie Willie because Regina had told him, and then, of course, he’d naturally told Peach.

  Well, did you kill him? It was on the tip of Regina’s tongue, but she couldn’t ask it, not to these two old people who had both been so kind to her.

  “Tell her how the Luther part goes,” said Peach quietly. “You know it better than anybody else.”

  Willie Willie leaned back in his chair. He held his head high, almost like he was reading something, a secret scrawled into the delicate wainscoting at the edge of the ceiling—wainscoting that had been carved by free hands, not enslaved hands like the ones that had carved out all that was beautiful in Mary Pickett’s house.<
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  “Mean,” said Willie Willie. “That was the word most used to describe Luther Mottley. The word always stayed the same, though what folks signified by it might have shifted some, down through the years. At first mean meant selfish and tightfisted. Somebody who’d never part with anything if he thought it might do somebody else some good. People complained about him, talked about him behind his back, but he couldn’t do much real damage, could he? That’s all that mattered. A colored man owns a store . . . Want to or not, he has to give credit where credit is due. And down here, credit’s due to white people. But he didn’t have to like it, did he, now, Luther? Didn’t have to like it one bit. And believe me, he didn’t. Every chance he got . . .”

  Beside Regina, Peach shuddered.

  How good Willie Willie was at his story! Not just with his mouth and his words, but Regina watched his eyes move and a shadow cross his face, then lift, watched his lips purse, his shoulders shift up, slip down, the uh-uh-uh in the shake of his head, his hands a symphony in themselves.

  “He kept the store up. He provided. But Luther was always the type to claw you open if he got scent to your weak side.”

  Regina watched, fascinated, as Willie Willie’s body became the bearer of his tale, the living platter from which it was lifted. And it was such a simple story, really, all about a thwarted weak man who plucked daily at those he thought weaker than he was. “‘Go on in there, Peach, and iron my britches the way I like ’em this time. You want me to have to lay my strap upside your nappy head again? Want me to match up that scar I already put on your face? Sister? What you mean about Sister? She ain’t got no broke hip. She don’t need no doctor. What she wants is attention. Nobody give it to her, one day she’ll heal up, get up, go on about her business!’”

  Nothing heroic or noble or even much good lived in the life of Luther Mottley—but, gosh, the way it was told!