A Snicker of Magic

by Natalie Lloyd

  “I need to know for school,” I said, which was a little bit true. But the full-blown truth was this: I needed to know for me. I needed to know why my heart kicked every time I heard their name. I needed to know why the magic left when they did.

  Cleo tapped her cigarette against the ashtray. The ashes spelled out:

  Lucky

  Cursive

  Keeper

  A fog of smoke escaped Cleo’s lips when she spoke. “Threadbare was a stage name; the brothers were really just farm boys called Stone and Berry Weatherly.”

  “I know that part already. I’d like to know more about the Duel.” I sat down across from Cleo and she pushed a bowl of Doritos toward me. Frannie Jo lay on the couch, watching cartoons. Biscuit sat on the floor, staring up at us, waiting for the chips Cleo sometimes pretended to drop on the floor.

  “Well.” Cleo cleared her throat. “Stone played guitar and Berry played the banjo. Some people think the magic came from the musical instruments, not the men. And most people think there was nothing special about them at all, of course. Those stories are probably just old mountain fairy tales.”

  “Is that what you believe?” I asked.

  Cleo didn’t answer my question. But she coughed out a cloud of smoke and words:

  Secret

  Sorrowful

  Holly

  Holly is my mother’s name.

  Cleo didn’t answer my question. “According to the stories,” Cleo wheezed, “Stone lost the Duel because he couldn’t roar like a lion. They were going back and forth making animal noises — Berry screamed like a panther and challenged Stone to roar like a lion, but no sound came out of that poor man’s mouth. The storm cloud hovering up above him morphed into the shape of a lion, which is a much snazzier trick, if you ask me. But they didn’t ask me. Because I wasn’t born back then. And bets are bets and Stone lost. Biscuit won.”

  Biscuit sat up and raised one floppy ear.

  “You mean Berry won,” I said.

  “Berry!” Cleo hollered. “Sorry, Biscuit.” She tossed my dog a sympathy Dorito.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “The Brothers Threadbare were real artsy types. Music might have been their magic, but they were good at everything they put their hand to. Berry could sew. And Stone,” she sighed, “was an artist.”

  “Like Mama!” I said. Part of our gypsy lifestyle had to do with Mama’s job. She was a traveling artist. She painted murals all over the South. She used to, anyway. “She hasn’t painted at all since before we left Kentucky.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Cleo nodded. “I doubt Stone was as good at it as your mama, but he was something. He was the first man ever hired to paint the Gallery.”

  “The what?”

  Cleo accidentally tapped her cigarette ashes into the bowl of Doritos. I figured it’d be best not to mention it. “Stone painted the side of the drugstore; you know that first wall you see when you cross the bridge into Midnight Gulch? We call that wall the Gallery. Since Stone had magic in his veins, the picture he painted on the Gallery changed every day. They say he walked right into the painting every now and again. Sometimes, he did it to be funny. But sometimes, if he got mad over something his brother did, he’d go hide out in the painting and pout. That was some magic those boys had.”

  “Some magic,” I mumbled. I thought about how it would feel to hide out in a picture, to have bones made of paint, able to stretch across a blank canvas any way I wanted.

  “Of course, people’s painted a hundred years’ worth of graffiti all over the Gallery now,” Cleo said. “You can’t even tell what it looked like back then. The picture stopped changing, anyway, after Stone and Berry left.”

  “Because Stone was cursed with a wandering heart,” I said sadly.

  “Don’t I know it.” She stared at the grooves in the table and sighed.

  “Do you think they regretted dueling once they’d done it?”

  “Surely so.” Cleo stood with a grunt. She tossed a stack of tabloid magazines off of the table and onto a chair. She pulled out a pile of quilt squares hidden underneath. “I figure they were too proud to say they were sorry. Pride sure does a number on people.”

  “One more question before I go to bed?” I asked.

  Cleo took up her needle and began sewing plaid star patches onto the squares. “Sure, I reckon.”

  “Tell me about Roger Pickle?” I blurted the words out before I could change my mind.

  Aunt Cleo’s hands stilled. She looked up at me through pink-tinted glasses and I could see a world of sad in her eyes. A bunch of words zoomed out of the quilt, all star shaped:

  Sorrow

  Scandal

  Holly

  Frannie

  Felicity

  “Mama won’t know,” I begged. “She won’t be home for hours.”

  I glanced over to see Frannie Jo, arms propped on the back of the couch. She wanted to know more about Roger Pickle, too. We wanted to know a thousand things, but we would settle for one more thing at a time.

  “Okay,” Cleo said softly. She laid her patches gently in her lap.

  Patch it

  Mend it

  Stitch it back together

  Those words were threads around her gray-blond hair, binding together in the shape of a star, then a drawbridge, then a full-bloomed flower.

  “For one thing” — Cleo ran her hands over the quilt patches as she spoke — “Roger Pickle liked to dance. He’d turn up the radio and take your mama’s hand and pull her out to the middle of the room. He’d spin her around and hold her tight and soon she’d laugh and forget that she didn’t know the steps.”

  Frannie Jo closed her eyes.

  Cinderella

  Snow White

  Sleeping Beauty

  The words glittered in an invisible crown around her head. That was the only dancing Frannie knew, the kind she’d seen in movies. She’d never seen how Mama used to dance, when she’d shake her hips and fling her hair around and laugh. Wild dancing. Free dancing. I want to dance that way someday: free as a mountain girl, not bound up like a princess.

  Cleo cleared her throat. “He could play a guitar, too. Played in a rock band over in Knoxville sometimes, but he mostly played for your mama. She said he could sing down the stars.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “He named you Felicity because he said it meant ‘intense happiness.’ And that’s exactly how he felt when he held you in his arms for the very first time.”

  I could hear my heart again, speaking yes but in a gentler way than it usually did. Yes, this is truer than true and you can believe it. Yes, this is worth remembering no matter what else you figure out.

  “And you.” Cleo stood up and swooped Frannie Jo up into her arms. “He called you Francis Josephine after both your grandmothers. They were wild and wonderful and unique people. And he wanted you to be like them.”

  “And!” She held out her hand to me. “He loves you both, a heap and a bunch and more than you know. No matter where he is, what he’s doing now, or what’s happening between him and your mama, he loves you.”

  “He might come back,” I said. I knew Mama hoped the same thing. She still carried a picture of him in her purse. In the photo, Roger Pickle wore a black T-shirt and blue jeans and a beard every bit as red as his hair. And so that’s always how I pictured him, wearing those same clothes, looking that same way. I worried that most of the memories I had were the made-up kind. I could remember how I felt when he picked me up in his arms and I rested my head on his shoulder. I remember it because that’s the safest I’ve ever felt. But I don’t remember much else.

  “He might,” Cleo said. She didn’t sound very convinced. She kissed Frannie Jo on the forehead. “But he loves you, no matter what.”

  “One more thing?” I asked as Cleo tucked us in. Frannie and I shared an inflatable mattress in our room, which had formerly been Aunt Cleo’s craft room until we surprised her and moved in.

 
Cleo sighed. “One more.”

  I looked up at the picture situated on Aunt Cleo’s wall: a black-and-white photograph of a man standing beside a hot air balloon. I saw the word again, THREADBARE, stretched across the balloon’s canvas.

  “What’s threadbare mean?” I asked.

  “Shabby-looking,” Cleo said. And I saw the other words, too:

  Old

  Thinned out

  Roughed up

  Well loved

  She wheezed a laugh. “Threadbare’s what I am, I guess. Will you do me a favor, Felicity? Don’t tell your mama that we talked about those boys. She doesn’t like that story.”

  I opened my mouth to ask why, but Cleo pressed her finger against my lips and said, “No more questions. Y’all are making my brain tired.” She walked over to the tiny window in our room and raised it up just barely. I heard crickets singing their good-night songs to one another. And I smelled something glorious, like warm cookies just pulled out of an oven.

  “I call that the sugar wind,” Cleo said. I could hear a smile in her voice. “It’s the smell of the waffle cones they bake down at the ice-cream factory.” I think we were both comforted to know Mama was working in a place that smelled so wonderful.

  Cleo left the door cracked open for us so we’d have light if we woke up, so we wouldn’t stumble through the dark. Frannie snuggled up close to my one side, and Biscuit snuggled up close to the other.

  “Catch me a poem?” Frannie asked.

  I whispered:

  “Frannie Jo lives in a house of stars.

  She has a cloud for a pillow

  And a comet for a car.

  She smiles like a sunrise,

  Cries a rainbow when she’s hurt.

  She’ll dance across the sky tonight,

  Then shake the stardust from her skirt.”

  Frannie snored softly, but I knew she’d heard my words. I saw them still shining above her, each letter rippling with her easy breaths:

  Comet

  Cloud

  Ballerina

  I wished I could fall asleep as fast as Frannie Jo, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to until I heard Mama come back. I tried not to think about what might happen if she left work, got in the Pickled Jalapeño … and kept on driving. Left town, just disappeared. Like Roger Pickle.

  Like the Brothers Threadbare.

  THREADBARE

  I closed my eyes and thought of those magical brothers playing music while the clouds swirled into new shapes above them. I thought about Roger Pickle playing guitar while my mama danced, her skirt swirling all around her as she stomped and jumped and kicked her legs. If I had magic in my veins, like the Threadbares did, I’d make a home for all of us. And then I’d use my home magic to help Roger Pickle find us. I’d fill up a flare gun with blinking stars and shoot them into the universe. They’d spell out:

  We’re home.

  Or maybe: We’re your home.

  He would follow the stars and find us. I’d see his favorite words spinning around his head: Holly. Felicity. Frannie Jo. I’d hug his neck and we’d dance on home, wherever home is. Because home is where shabby hearts like ours belong.

  The one stipulation Aunt Cleo had given us when we showed up at the Sandcut Apartments complex with a dog and three grocery bags full of dirty clothes was this: We had to go to church with her.

  I could see in Mama’s eyes that she wanted to take our hands and holler for Biscuit and stomp right back to the Pickled Jalapeño, but something convinced her otherwise. I saw the words French fry floating through the hallway, and it’s not because we craved them but because we’d been eating French fries and service-station nachos for weeks. The Pickled Jalapeño needed a rest and so did we.

  So Mama said, “Fine.” I’m sure she hoped God and Aunt Cleo would forget about our arrangement. But neither of them did.

  Cleo shuffled toward the Pickled Jalapeño that Sunday morning wearing a silky dress in a bold print of blue flowers and hummingbirds. The hummingbird wings looked like they were fluttering when the warm wind blew around us. But Cleo’s hair didn’t budge. Her hair was poufed up high onto her head, into a stiff gray-blond haystack heap.

  “The way you wear your hair makes you look old, Cleo,” Mama said. And she added, “It ages you.” Because I guess she figured Cleo didn’t understand what old meant. Cleo didn’t seem to care. Maybe because she was older than Mama. Cleo was almost twenty years older than Mama.

  Mama’s hair was golden blond, the way Cleo’s probably used to be, but Mama still wore her hair long and wavy. Before we lived in Kentucky, Mama braided feathers into her hair. She always had paint in her hair, too, and she kept paintbrushes in the pockets of her jeans. She painted the ocean. She painted people’s faces. But she hadn’t painted anything in a long time.

  Mama’s pretty blue dress tried to cling to the frame of her body but couldn’t find anything much to hold. Frannie Jo was better at clinging. Mama kept Frannie perched high up on her bony hip.

  “Hey, Cleo.” Mama shifted Frannie Jo to her other side. “Why don’t we wait and go next week?”

  “If you could walk as fast as you talk, we’d be at the van by now,” Cleo wheezed. She lit a cigarette and took a deep drawl. “Toss me the keys. I’m driving.”

  “Why’re we taking my van?” Mama asked. “Church was your idea, remember? Because you think I’m a wayward soul.”

  “All of us can fit in your van!” Cleo hollered. “We won’t fit inside the Beast of Burden.” The Beast of Burden is what Aunt Cleo called her Nissan sedan.

  I didn’t much think we fit anywhere: us Pickles or my aunt Cleo, who tied a leopard-print scarf around her neck before we pulled out of the complex.

  Cleo swerved the Pickled Jalapeño into the parking lot of the Friendship Community Church and turned off the ignition. She was already standing in the parking lot when she realized she forgot to put the van in park, so she had to open the door again, and hop backward through the parking lot on one leg, trying to jump back in the driver’s seat. We stood there and watched while the van rolled backward and Cleo hollered, “Stop! Stop! Stop! STOP!”

  The Pickled Jalapeño finally did as it was told. Aunt Cleo left the van where it stopped, right in the middle of the lot. She slammed the door, yelled out an unsavory word, and leaned over, clutching both knees to steady her breathing.

  “You just gonna leave it parked there?” Mama asked.

  “They know me here,” Cleo heaved. She threw down her cigarette, which she’d kept clutched firmly between her teeth the entire time. “They don’t care where I park.”

  “Hope they don’t mind how we look, either,” said Mama. She brushed my bangs out of my face and said she’d get them cut next time she got paid, and she fussed over Frannie’s yellow tutu, which Frannie’d insisted on wearing over her dress.

  “Nobody cares how you look,” Cleo said, heaving as she climbed the stairs. “And I said you had a wandering heart, Holly. Not a wayward soul.”

  There were hundreds of words spinning through the church house, but they were so clear that I didn’t see them at first. Then the light streamed golden and blue and red through the stained-glass windows and I saw the words plain: They shimmered like water. We had an entire ocean of words above us. Old words from the hymnals spun closest to me:

  Yonder

  Wayfarer

  Everlasting

  Everlasting had a sound to it, ocean water splashing over rocks. I whispered the word. I shivered because I liked the sound of it so much.

  “Shhh,” Mama said. But she smiled down at me even then. She liked the way I cherished words.

  When the woman sitting in front of us tucked her gray hair behind her ear, I saw a single word escape from her ear:

  T i r e d

  So small I nearly missed it. Bold letters, though. The preacher at the pulpit wiped his forehead, and I saw a word leave his mouth that he never said out loud:

  Lonely

  “… if only we could be more like
the Beedle,” the preacher was saying.

  I sat up straighter in my seat. It’s not that I’d forgotten Jonah’s pumpernickel secret, but hearing the word beedle come out of somebody else’s mouth made me realize how special that secret was. And anyhow, I only knew the Beedle’s identity, not exactly what he did or why he called himself the Beedle.

  The preacher said, “We need to follow the Beedle’s example, do good things for people without expecting anything in return.”

  So Jonah’s know-how was anonymous. He did a bunch of good for people, but he didn’t want them to know who did it. That sounded ten different kinds of ridiculous to me. My heart was right about my first friend: He was weirdly wonderful.

  “Let’s close in prayer,” the preacher said. I wondered if he knew how many prayer words had been circling through the room the whole time, even before he told us to pray:

  Help me

  Hold me

  Hear me

  Please

  I looked down at my blue book, hoping from far off it might look like my eyes were shut. I wrote down some of the words I’d seen. I didn’t hear much of what the preacher prayed until he said, “I pray that you know today how deeply you are loved. And I hope you take the time to pray for the ones you love. Tell them how much they mean to you this week. Your words don’t have to be fancy, just sincere.”

  So I gave my words to God without closing my eyes and without speaking a single one of them. Silent words, the kind a person’s heart speaks. Turns out my heart had a bunch to say. I prayed for the Beedle first. Then I prayed Mama might get inspired to paint something again. Next up was Aunt Cleo. I nudged her with my elbow and whispered, “What do you pray to God for?”

  “A man,” she whispered. But then her whisper turned into a snort, and then a snicker. And then she got so tickled at her own joke that the pew vibrated with the laughter she was trying to hold back. I didn’t understand what was so funny.

  “You two,” Mama whispered. “Hush. You’re supposed to be praying.”

  So I prayed for a man for Aunt Cleo, since that’s what she said she wanted.

  I prayed for Frannie Jo and for Biscuit. I prayed we could make a home here in Midnight Gulch. That Mama would settle into this place instead of driving us back out.