The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  Mary Pickett said, “Near Peach Mottley’s. They’ll all be there. Out to Peach’s, or what’s left of it now. That’s where things will begin.”

  The two of them, Mary Pickett and Regina, reached the part of the asphalt where the middle line down the center disappeared so you had to watch what was coming, and around them a forest loomed.

  “He never could understand Willie Willie—Jackson, I mean. He thought if he could just own him like he owns everything else . . . But if Wynne kills Willie Willie, if that happens, it’s Willie Willie owns them. That’s the way it always is with murder, and with everything else. You think you’re getting away with something, but you never are. You think you’ve covered something up, but it never is. Just when you think you’re safe—why, it jumps out to bite you . . . Maybe that’s what he wants. I should have paid more attention. I should have tried to explain things better. I should have . . . at the end.”

  Who was the he? Who was the him? Regina, not from Revere, wasn’t quite certain, and she felt her strangeness, her isolation from this place and the intricate interweaving of its people. She looked over at Mary Pickett to see if it was Willie Willie or Wynne or Jackson Blodgett. She tried to read the answer in her face, in her eyes. But Mary Pickett had veered off the main road then, and they were traveling on a road leaf-littered and cluttered with scrub pine. Regina turned back to her own window, she rolled it down and let the low-hanging branches brush against her, tangle in her hair, like they had that first time when she’d come out to take tea with Peach. She let the trees try to hold her. For a moment she was back in the cottage, back in the bedroom, the night the dog had come. And she saw three children standing in the corner. She saw them shaking their heads. She felt their dread. She smelled what they smelled—the burn on the forest.

  Collie and Jack and Booker crouched at the edge of the forest, frightened by the screech of the hooty owl, by the snake sound the kudzu made as it grew in the night.

  But then they saw Daddy Lemon, always just ahead of them. His big arms arching, smiling at his children. Beckoning them on.

  19.

  November, and still fireflies flitted against the magic that had been Peach Mottley’s house.

  “Sheriff’s already here,” said Mary Pickett, as a matter of fact. “And it appears like he’s brought in a posse of folks with him. Rand’s gonna need all the help he can get. First Peach, now Willie Willie. Our Negroes were already upset enough about Joe Howard . . .”

  Our Negroes.

  Mary Pickett realized what she was saying, looked around at Regina and blushed pink but went right on talking anyway. “Lots of things are changing. Sheriff’s scared they might decide to fight back. On the other hand, he’s got Jackson. And Jackson . . . Well, he’s going to use everything he’s got to take care of his son.”

  They looked around at a litter of vehicles now jutting out of what had once been open space. Regina recognized the sheriff’s Ford, and maybe Bed Duval’s Studebaker. She thought she remembered seeing him in a car like this. But these almost got lost in a jumble of others. Old cars, old trucks, many with decals of the Confederate flag pasted on them. Staring out of their back windows. Holding on tight to any bumper they could get.

  But Regina hardly paid them attention. She was climbing out of the car. She was staring at what, once upon a time, had been Peach’s filled-to-the-brim house.

  Burned, now, to the ground.

  That’s what she’d been expecting. Everything dark and gloaming, smelling of decay. But this place wasn’t like that, not really. There was still too much of Peach in it. Regina made out bright shreds left of her shawls and of her velvet sofas, a glint of gold from a splintered gilt mirror, a shred of brocade wallpaper charred around its edges. Red flashed here, yellow there, garnet and purple, a long piece of quilt, shards of white porcelain—small, defiant specks of color making Peach’s house glow, still bright.

  They stood there for a moment looking around, quiet, and the forest quiet with them. Then Mary Pickett reached into the backseat and pulled out her rifle. She picked up one of the kerosene lamps that winked from steps that had once led up to Peach’s house. The two of them set off toward a flicker of lights they could see through the trees.

  Mary Pickett was a good tracker, a good nimrod. Even Regina, new to the woods, could see that. Mary Pickett led her around Peach’s house, around Peach’s kitchen building, around scarlet geraniums, ash on them but somehow saved from destruction and still bobbing away in their rusting coffee cans. Mary Pickett tracking a path that Regina couldn’t make out until her feet hit it, but she followed anyway. Behind them, other cars drove up, other car doors slammed, and soon there was a babble of voices, a yelping of dogs. Neither Regina nor Mary Pickett turned back.

  Something moved in the bushes over her head, and Regina looked up. For a second she thought she saw a man high above her head, hanging there. And that hanging man became her father, the way she’d always thought of him, swaying back and forth at the end of a rope. She opened her mouth to scream. But she snapped it shut again, because she couldn’t do that. Mary Pickett would send her back for sure then, thinking Regina had called out because of the pain in her arm, using its poor, shattered state as her excuse.

  And it would be an excuse, because even as she said the words Mary Pickett would be thinking, A Yankee girl, her own father dead, she’s not ready for what we’ll be seeing. Regina knew just what that was. Willie Willie out there somewhere. Dancing at the end of a rope.

  The forest touched her again, sassafras and willow and oak branches caressing her, trying to make it better. Mary Pickett stopped, raised her head, canted it, listened. Regina raised her head, too, and looked up at what she’d first thought was her father. Instead, she saw mistletoe, balls of it everywhere, clinging to the tops of the bare trees, floating in the breeze, silver-green in the soft moonlight and round as a face. But it wasn’t a face after all. She looked down and almost screamed again. Little bodies everyplace. Rabbits, birds, a dead possum. All too near Peach’s house when it burned, and taken down by surprise with it.

  Now the voices and the dogs yelping came from in front of them, not just behind.

  “We’re on Magnolia Forest land, near the cleared cotton fields,” said Mary Pickett. Regina didn’t know how she could tell, but she believed her. Mary Pickett took off running, Regina puffing up behind, and suddenly, around them, the trees pulled back, like a curtain going up, and they were in a cleared field. Regina stopped for a second, caught her breath, her arm throbbing. All around her, white in the reflection of moonlight, was a sprinkling of cotton like the remnant trail they’d seen on the road. A cotton field, she thought, but only for a moment, because Mary Pickett stopped now, too.

  Ahead of them, the sheriff was bending over something. And the leashed dogs were going crazy. And someone was vomiting.

  And there was the smell.

  But there was no other way, they had to keep going forward. They slowed their pace, started walking now, because now they were certain what they’d find in the end. Without thinking, Regina reached out her hand—and just like that, Mary Pickett’s was in it.

  And then there it was.

  Willie Willie was not up in a tree. But he was dead anyway, a circle of men around him as he lay on the ground.

  “Holy shiiit.”

  Rand Connelly didn’t look embarrassed about his cussing, even when he saw Mary Pickett. He didn’t try to stop her from coming forward. He seemed dazed, confused. All the men did. And scared.

  Regina looked down, and again, at first, she didn’t recognize it. It was a figure, bloated and dark and burned. It took a moment for her to understand that what she saw was that great buck deer. Poor thing. It must have been caught in that fire at Peach’s. Burned, too, like everything else had been. But how had it gotten here? What was it doing this far from . . .

  It was then she saw the rope holding him t
ogether and the human legs sticking out from the bottom of him, and at first she thought it was just an illusion, like the mistletoe faces had been an illusion or like the Magic children she’d seen that night had been an illusion. Something made up in her mind. Something not there.

  “Miss Mary Pickett, I think you better move off from here. You might want to take that girl with you,” the sheriff said.

  That’s when Regina realized she must be wobbling. She must look like she was going to faint.

  Mary Pickett wasn’t paying attention. She bent down beside the men who were working on the ropes, and she took a knife from her pocket and started cutting at them, too. Gently. Gently. All the time whispering, “Willie Willie.” Over and over again. Sure he’d be in there. All of them preparing themselves for the worst. Only when the last string splayed did Mary Pickett struggle up.

  But she didn’t take her eyes away. Neither did Regina. They owed it to him to be there as witnesses when they got him out. Strong hands pulled the carcass from around him, and there he was with blood everywhere, covered in the blood of that dead deer and his own blood that had oozed into the ground. That had called creatures out of the forest to scavenge.

  “Goddamn! Goddamn!”

  The sheriff cursing in earnest now, his hands digging at the body, wiping the blood from the face. Going quicker, getting deeper, cleaning the face, as the white men drew nearer and the black men—the few who had come out—started edging away.

  “Goddamn Willie Willie. He’s done killed Wynne Blodgett!”

  And all around them the forest started to shriek.

  “Daddy Lemon! Daddy Lemon! Come quick. There’s a toothache tree here and an old creek called Bogue Chitta and an arrowhead big as your fist. And the Dancing Rabbit. Look there! You can just see him! That Rabbit’s dance, dance, dancing everywhere!”

  • • •

  THEY SCATTERED OFF after him immediately, the sheriff and all the white men and their dogs, but Regina didn’t think even they believed Willie Willie would be as easy to find as he turned out to be. But he was. Right there at Peach’s still, barely hiding in what remained of her root cellar. Almost, Mary Pickett said to Regina later, as though it was part of his plan to be caught.

  “Wanted them to know he was the one who had done it.” Mary Pickett said this quietly. “Wanted them to know a Negro did this, and that maybe justice for Joe Howard had finally been gotten. I don’t know why else he would have stayed on.”

  All this was said the next afternoon, after Mary Pickett walked back alone from the courthouse. Regina, finished with the telephone calls she had to make and the pleadings, was waiting for her in the driveway of Calhoun Place, anxiously pacing back and forth. She recognized Mary Pickett’s return by the way her footsteps echoed hollowly as she made the turn onto Third Avenue. Sleepless, pale as death, Mary Pickett had still dressed up to her Calhoun best, in a suit, gloves, a hat. She’d carried a good pocketbook. All of this done so that, once she got where she was going, they’d remember who she was—the last true Calhoun—and that Willie Willie in a sense belonged to her, as the Willies had belonged with the Calhouns for years.

  “It didn’t work. They wouldn’t let me see him. Sheriff said maybe tonight.” She didn’t add, That is, if he’s still alive, but the words hung there just the same. She slumped into one of the wicker chairs on her back veranda, her face looking as old as the forest itself, red curls a jumble, leaking out of her hat and limping down the side of her cheek. When Regina had first seen her, Regina had thought of Mary Pickett as pretty, but now she doubted she had ever seen a more beautiful woman, not even Ida Jane.

  Mary Pickett said, “Maybe tonight. That’s what Rand said, because there’s going to be a rally. Speakers. People coming in from other parts of the state. Over from Arkansas, even. Down from Tennessee. And Alabama. Of course Alabama. All those Wynne connections, they’ll be here. It is unbelievable . . . and women with them. Ladies, even, members of the Revere Garden Club. Folks I’ve known every day of my life. Everybody screaming hate. Everybody so scared.” She shook her head. “Rand Connelly said it’s all he can do to hold the crowd down and keep Willie Willie alive until the state troopers can get here. I think that’s why he’s letting the rally go on tonight, to buy Willie Willie some time. If there’s others coming and all, they won’t do anything, at least not right away.”

  Suddenly, she turned to Regina, her face fierce. “You remember that, though. Promise me you’ll remember. How the sheriff stopped them stringing up Willie Willie right last night, stood there right in front of him with a shotgun. And Big Tiny Watson, I don’t believe you’ve met him, but he sharecropped for my daddy. He and Willie Willie used to work the same field. Now he’s over there, trying to calm things down. All these men know that Willie Willie killed Wynne, and both of them believe that he’s going to die and maybe that he should die. The times being what they are, and the customs . . . the customs are what they are, too. They’re just trying to make sure he goes out with a fair trial and some justice. That’s all, just a little shred of justice. When all this gets out—and it will—everybody up north’s going to say we are monsters. In Omaha, Nebraska, where they killed your daddy, folks will say Mississippi is filled up with monsters. But you’ll know different. You’ll know there are still some few good white people down here. When you tell this story back in New York, remember them, too. You hear me?”

  Mary Pickett was spitting out the words, forgetting all about being a lady. Leaning in so close to Regina that their lips almost touched.

  Regina nodded yes. And she would remember. But most of all, she thought she’d remember Mary Pickett herself, sitting there in the hard sunlight of autumn with her fine felt hat askew and tears leaking like raindrops out of her eyes.

  The nod seemed to satisfy Mary Pickett. She sat up straight in her chair with a little bit of the old Miss Mary Pickett vigor. “There’s not a Negro face on the streets, and who could blame them? Not even Dinetta’s here, and she never misses a day of work. Wynne Blodgett kills Willie Willie’s son. Willie Willie kills Jackson Blodgett’s son. Now we got to sure go on and kill Willie Willie. I ask you now, where will it stop?”

  A shiver ran through her, light and quick. Regina saw it, and it reminded her of a lone leaf clinging to a bare branch as the first cold winds of winter blasted.

  “It’s chilly out. You want to go in? Get some coffee?” Regina asked her, but Mary Pickett shook her head. She glanced around at her great white house, her family house, the home place, like this was the first time she saw it.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to go inside there.”

  Regina’s eyes followed her, and then she looked over at the cottage, so snug and so pretty, and she thought of Willie Willie and Joe Howard and how they had lived in it and how she, for a little time at least, had lived in it, too.

  It occurred to her, Why, this is the first place I’ve ever stayed in all by myself. And even with all the horror behind her and the worse horror she knew was coming, she was grateful to have found, even for this short time, her own home.

  Mary Pickett turned to her. “Did you get anybody?”

  Because that’s what they’d decided. Mary Pickett would go to the jail, try to see Willie Willie, and Regina would get in touch with New York. The idea that Willie Willie might have a lawyer, they’d both agreed, would only have stirred people up more and made things harder. So Regina was to make the telephone calls. First to the governor’s office down in Jackson to try to get protection, and then to Thurgood. There’d been no response at all from the state capital. Thurgood said he’d be on his way first thing in the morning—if they still needed him in the morning. Those had been his exact words. He’d left Regina to catch their clear meaning.

  If they hadn’t lynched Willie Willie by then.

  “Yes,” said Regina. “I’ve made them.” And she told Mary Pickett what had been said.

  S
omebody had gotten loudspeakers, and there was a constant low rumble from the direction of the courthouse, and a progression of cars and trucks and buckboards rolling up Third Avenue toward it. Sometimes they slowed as they passed Calhoun Place, where the NIGGER LUVER still peeked faintly through a badly layered coating of fresh paint. But nobody called anything out at Mary Pickett, and no one stopped a vehicle and got out.

  Mary Pickett nodded at Regina’s words. She raised her hands, sighed, and said, “I just will never understand why Willie Willie didn’t run on off, cross the forest and the river, get on over into Louisiana quick? He could have done it. He knows the land and the forest . . .”

  Regina wondered this as well, but she was reaching some conclusions. Willie Willie was so organized and so tidy. His car, his person, his snug little house . . . all always so methodically arranged. It was the way his mind worked. He left nothing to chance. So if he had stayed on at Peach’s, he was looking for something. He must have thought she had something that would help him, something that might be there even after the burning. Something he might need. Maybe just in case what had happened did happen and they caught him.

  And then Regina remembered.

  “I’ve got the key.”

  20.

  EXCERPT FROM

  In MAGNOLIA FOREST

  by M. P. Calhoun

  J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., NEW YORK, 1948

  Grown up now, Collie was the only one left alive in the forest, what with little Booker dead and Jack lost to her, this time forever, like he always had been, really, except in her mind. Daddy Lemon as good as dead and who would soon be dead, at least to her—and yet Daddy Lemon was all she had left. She hurried up streets, all alone now, where always someone whom she loved, who was close to her, had been.