A Snicker of Magic

by Natalie Lloyd

  As Oliver spoke, my mind called up a peculiar memory.

  … the picture on my aunt Cleo’s wall.

  … the sad man beside the hot air balloon.

  “Who was in the balloon?” I whispered.

  “An old man,” Oliver said. “A very, very old man. He was a stout-looking fellow, though, despite his age. He tumbled out of the balloon basket and shook the dust out of his thick white hair, cussing up a firestorm of words until he looked at me. Then his eyes opened up wide, big as gumballs.

  “That old man put his hand over his heart and blinked at me like I might disappear. And then he said … ‘Berry?’

  “I said to him, ‘Yes, sir?’ But then I corrected myself real quick. ‘No, sir. Berry Weatherly was my grandfather. I’m Oliver Berry Weatherly, his grandson, named in his honor.’

  “Hey-yo,” Oliver sighed, taking another bite of Blackberry Sunrise. “That man looked like he might fall over dead when I told him that. He kept his hand pressed against his heart when he said, ‘What do you mean… was your grandfather?’

  “And I told him that I’d never actually seen Berry Weatherly. He took off long before I was even born and never came back to town.”

  Oliver shook his head sadly. “Those words barely left my mouth before the balloon man started crying. I’ll never forget the big tears rolling down his face. ‘You look so much like Berry,’ he said to me.”

  I reached over and patted Oliver’s tattooed arm. “What’d you say back?”

  Oliver sighed. “I got feisty with him, I admit. I asked him how the heck he knew my grandpa Berry. And where the heck he came from. And why the heck he’d crashed a balloon into my yard.

  “That old man looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I come from everywhere now. But before that, I came from this town. I landed my balloon here because I have words worth saying. And I knew your grandfather … I know your grandfather … because he’s my brother.’ ”

  I put down the carton of Chocolate Orange Switcheroo with a thud. “So that means …” My eyebrows raised so high I thought they might float off my forehead. “That man was …”

  Oliver settled back into his chair. “You remember how I told you there’s always more to the story than what you hear? Well, this is exactly what I was talking about. Most people in this town only know the story of the Duel.”

  Oliver looked up toward the second-story window with a sad sparkle in his eyes. “They don’t know about the day Stone Weatherly came back to Midnight Gulch.”

  “Oliver Weatherly!” Charlie Sue peeped back in the door. A pair of thin purple glasses were balanced on the tip of her nose. “Don’t hold this meeting too long. The weatherman says a bad storm is headed this way.”

  Oliver rolled his eyes. “Virgil Duncan is not a weatherman. He’s a meddling old farmer with a transmitter in his barn.”

  “Does it always rain here?” I asked.

  Charlie Sue nodded. “Most of the time, yes. You should get Oliver to tell you his theory about why, but not today. Y’all don’t wanna be stuck here in a storm, and Virgil says it’s going to be one of the worst of the year.”

  Storm or not, the light in Oliver’s library was fading fast. That meant that the sun was sinking on into the mountains for the night. If the sun was nearly tucked in for the night, that meant the birds were finishing up their daytime songs and that meant that the crickets were tuning up their string legs for twilight symphonies. And all of that put together meant that I needed to go home pretty soon or I would be in a heap-load of trouble.

  But my heart was telling me to stay put just a little bit longer. Listening to my heart usually turned out to be the right thing, even if it got me grounded for life.

  “I’m almost done talking,” Oliver said.

  Charlie Sue rolled her eyes and shut the door and mumbled something about Oliver never, ever being done talking.

  “Stone Weatherly didn’t stay here long,” Oliver said. “He was cursed with a wandering heart and had to keep moving along. He was such a lonely man.”

  “I’ll bet so,” I said. “Especially if he flew around in a hot air balloon. There’s nobody to talk to up in the sky.” Nobody except the midnight moon. And the moon only knows how to shine.

  “That’s a fact,” Oliver agreed. “Stone Weatherly stayed for a day and told me stories. He told me about his wife. They met in a hot air balloon race, he said. He told me about his family.” Oliver’s eyes twinkled. “And then he told me the real story of the Brothers Threadbare and why they quarreled … or who they quarreled over, I guess I should say.”

  Oliver leaned closer to us and whispered, “He told me what really happened that day at the Duel.”

  Jonah glanced at me and I glanced back at him and I knew, the way only friends can figure out silent signals between each other, that Jonah was every bit as fascinated by the magicians in Midnight Gulch as I was.

  “Before Stone climbed back in his balloon,” Oliver said, “he gave me his guitar.”

  “The guitar he played to make the clouds change shapes?” I asked.

  “The same one exactly!” Oliver smiled. “Stone told me there was still magic in those strings. He hadn’t played it since he left town, since he’d vowed never to do magic again. But he told me it wouldn’t have mattered if he could. He didn’t want to play his guitar without his brother there. He said all the magic was meaningless without Berry around. He told me to give the guitar to Berry, if I ever saw him again, and, if not, just to find a good home for it.”

  “Which he did.” Jonah smiled.

  “Hey-yo, did I ever,” Oliver said with a grin.

  “And he gave you some good advice …” Jonah said. I could tell what Jonah was doing: trying to ease Oliver through the sad parts of the story. Trying to speed him up toward the good.

  “That’s right,” Oliver said. He didn’t need Blackberry Sunrise for this part. I could tell he was remembering it as clearly as the day it happened.

  “Before Stone climbed into the balloon, he told me to stop wasting my time and try to do some good with my life. ‘Your words matter more than you know’ is what he told me. And then he climbed back into that balloon and flew away. Just like a dream.”

  Oliver turned his face to the fading light. “Eldee Mae was right. Hope came down.” Oliver laughed. “Crashed right into my yard, I’d reckon!”

  “What happened with Eldee Mae?” I asked.

  “Ah!” Oliver grinned. “Later that same night, somebody knocked on my door. Lo and behold, there stood Eldee Mae Cotton. Her truck broke down near here, and she asked if I could help her fix it up.”

  “Did you?” I asked.

  He grinned again. “Eventually. But first I took Stone Weatherly’s advice. I said the only words that mattered. I told her that I loved her.”

  Oliver chuckled, probably remembering the look on Eldee Mae’s face. “Took me some time to convince her she loved me, too. We got married the next summer. She was tired of being on the circuit, tired of talking about hereafters. Lots of right-now passing her by, she said. So we figured out ways to do good for people, to help them find joy in the here-today.”

  “So they bought the ice-cream factory,” Jonah said, smiling. “The Honeycutts used to own it, but they’d all passed away and the factory was going under. Eldee said they should buy it and spruce it up again.”

  “Every good idea was Eldee’s idea,” Oliver agreed. “After I bought the factory, we started leaving free cartons of ice cream for people. And that was a fine idea. Eldee said we could do better than that. We’d started reading local papers and listening to the news and planning anonymous good deeds for people. Always in secret, if we could. It’s better that way.”

  Oliver reached for a pad of paper on the table and wrote:

  The Beedle

  And then he wrote Beedle backward:

  Eldeeb

  And then he cut it down the middle and made a spider word of it:

  Eldee / b

  “That�
�s my wife’s name, of course. And the b, that’s my middle initial. The Beedle became our giving name. We’d always leave a note behind, with a red ribbon tied around it. Red was Eldee’s favorite color.”

  Oliver’s chin trembled, just barely. “We had plenty of good years together. Hope came down for me, many more times than I ever deserved.”

  “And now the Beedle is my job!” Jonah said proudly. “But Oliver is still the CEO.”

  Our conversation was rudely interrupted by the loudest thump of thunder punching the sky that I’d ever heard. Rain pelted the upstairs window again, and new words dripped down the glass:

  Tremble

  Quake

  Secret

  Curse

  My hand shook as I jotted down the words in the blue book. “I really should go home soon. But I wonder — did you ever hear from Stone Weatherly again?”

  “No, ma’am.” Oliver shook his head. “I have a feeling they both spent the rest of their time trying to find each other, trying to break that dang curse. Most people don’t know about that part, either. The curse was very specific, you see:

  “Cursed to wander through the night,

  Till cords align, and all’s made right.

  Where sweet amends are made and spoken,

  Shadows dance, the curse is broken.”

  My heart thumped yes so loudly that I could hear it echoing in my ears.

  I wrote Oliver’s words in my blue book: Cords align. And all’s made right.

  Oliver said, “I don’t know what that means — cords aligning. But I like to think the Weatherly brothers tried to figure it out. They tried to make things right. So many squabbles seem stupid and silly as you get older.”

  As Charlie Sue loaded the ice-cream glasses and empty cartons back onto the silver tray, I asked, “Why do you think they called themselves the Brothers Threadbare?”

  Oliver scratched his bristly mustache. “One of the big-city papers called them the Brothers Threadbare on account of how shabby their clothes were. The reporter joked about their accents and their style of music. Said they were nothing but redneck farm boys. The paper called them homespun, shabby, and threadbare.

  “But!” Oliver smiled. “Instead of getting mad over it, Berry and Stone decided to embrace it. They liked the name so much that it became their stage name: The Brothers Threadbare. Folks loved it, too. Because folks loved them. Those dancing clouds and dancing crowds never cared about shabby clothes. They were so grateful for a dancing day.”

  “My aunt Cleo thinks threadbare means ‘well loved,’ ” I said.

  “Cleo Harness?” Uncle Oliver’s smile widened. “I didn’t realize she was your kin.”

  I nodded. “My mama’s sister.”

  “Huh.” Oliver looked down at the grains of the table, the same way Cleo looked off when she had finished talking about a particular topic.

  He finally said, “She’s a smart woman, Cleo Harness. She’s right, too. Threadbare’s what we all get to be, if we’re lucky. Will you do me a favor, Miss Felicity?” Oliver propped his arms on the table and leaned toward Jonah and me. “Make sure you always find out both sides of a story before you decide what’s true. All righty?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. I might have pondered how weird his words were if it weren’t for the much bigger weirdness I realized:

  Oliver’s dove tattoo, the tattoo I was one hundred percent positive I’d seen on his arm not even an hour before, had disappeared.

  “Where’d the …” Before I could get my question out, thunder growled across the sky again. Oliver shot up out of his seat. “Charlie Sue’s bringing the van around to take y’all home. I guess that idiot weatherman was right. He said September seventh would be the rainiest day of the year.”

  Jonah said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the ringing in my ears. September 7. And a storm was coming. I felt like somebody’d dumped ice water down my back. “You’re sure that today’s … the seventh?”

  Jonah nodded. “You okay?”

  “No.” I rocketed out of my seat. The chair flipped backward against the shiny hardwood floors with a solid thunk. At the exact same time the chair hit the ground, thunder cracked the sky again. “I have to go home now. Right now!”

  Jonah wheeled over to me. “Are you scared of storms?”

  “Storms and sevens.” I tried to breathe deep, but my chest couldn’t suck in enough air. “I’m not afraid of them, but Mama’s superstitious about them. Every time we’ve ever left a town, it’s always been on the seventh, or during a bad storm. When both things combine” — I shivered — “Mama always leaves. Always.”

  Rain blew sideways into my face as I ran up the stairs toward Cleo’s apartment. Flashes of purple lightning illuminated the entryway as I pushed off the ground and flung myself through the door.

  Just as I feared, Cleo’s apartment was a full-on ruckus.

  Biscuit was half hidden underneath Cleo’s couch, trembling at every clap of thunder. Frannie sat on top of her little blue suitcase, which she’d dragged out to the middle of the living room floor. Before I even said her name, she flew at me and latched on so tight I nearly lost my breath.

  “Is Mama still here?” I gulped.

  “She’s packing our things.” Frannie’s words were muffled against my jacket.

  And then I heard them, Mama and Cleo bickering as they stomped down the hallway. I didn’t know if they were trying to talk louder than each other or just louder than the storm. Mama carried a plastic laundry basket full of our clothes and books and the very few earthly possessions we’d packed along with us. She smiled when she saw me in the doorway.

  “Good news, June Bug! You remember my crazy friend Babette from Virginia? She knows somebody who knows somebody who got me a job in Seattle. Can you believe it?”

  My throat felt scratchy and dry when I tried to swallow. “That’s big news, all right.”

  Cleo propped her hands on her hips. “Holly, you can’t possibly be thinking about driving off in this mess….”

  And back to arguing they went.

  The room was too loud and too full of thunder, lightning, and yelling. Frannie Jo hugged me tighter, like I was the only thing in the world she had to hold on to. Words floated up out of Mama’s laundry basket and burst apart, until the ceiling was made of lightning-bolt letters that never reconnected.

  “I don’t want to leave.” Frannie Jo blinked up at me. “Do something. Please.”

  “We can’t go,” I yelled, so suddenly and so loud that I scared myself.

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I blurted out, “We can’t leave, because I’m in the talent show.”

  I looked up at Mama and Cleo’s shocked faces. “I’m a contestant in the Stoneberry Duel. It’s a big deal; the whole town’s going to be there. And I can’t leave now that I’ve promised to participate. I told Miss Lawson I’d read some of my poems.” I hadn’t actually done that yet, but it sounded like a fairly believable lie.

  Cleo cocked her head sideways. Mama’s eyes narrowed, but not in a mean way. She looked like she was trying to figure out what the heck I was up to. “You hate public speaking.”

  “But I want to try again anyway.” That was lie number two. “Cleo says the only way to overcome a fear is to tackle it head-on. So that’s what I’m doing.” Cleo hadn’t actually said that about me. She said it about the characters on her favorite soap opera. But I hoped it still counted.

  I watched Mama’s face. I waited …

  Finally, I saw the shadow of her smile. “You’re in the talent show? I’m so …”

  I held my breath.

  “Proud.” Her smile bloomed beautiful across her face. “The Duel’s only a couple of weeks away, right? I guess we can wait until after that to leave.” Mama planted a quick kiss on my forehead and said, “I’m so proud of you, June Bug.”

  I forced a smile, even though all I wanted to do was crawl under the couch, like my dog, and hide until the Duel and the storm and every other bad th
ing in the world had blown away.

  That night I propped my elbows on the windowsill and stared up at the star-patched sky. If I looked down, I could see the rusty roof of the Pickled Jalapeño parked crooked in the lot. If I looked straight ahead, I could see lights scattered through the dark mountains. They were porch lights, probably. But I imagined they were sleeping stars. I made a wish on every single one of them. Jonah’d be thrilled about me dueling. But I couldn’t summon up even a teaspoonful of happiness. In fact, I had a strange, sinking feeling that I’d just made everything worse.

  “I need a miracle, Frannie Jo.”

  “Amen!” Frannie yelled. She was bouncing on the inflatable mattress like it was a trampoline. “A big miracle.”

  “Exactly,” I groaned. “Pray for a BIG miracle. And pray it turns up lickety-split quick.”

  Here’s what I’ve learned about miracles: Sometimes they turn up quick, and sometimes they take their sweet time getting to you. It’s hard to tell either way because a miracle never looks exactly how you think it should. Some miracles are big and flashy, and others are sweet and simple. Some miracles make you want to shout, and others make you want to sing.

  And some miracles, the very best miracles of all, show up wearing cowboy boots.

  Jonah the Secret School-Building Beedle Do-Gooder had to help out in his mama’s shop the next afternoon. I offered to help, too, but Jonah told me to go straight to Cleo’s and start picking out some important words I might be able to use in the Duel.

  “You told your mom you’d write a poem, right? That’s perfect. That’s a spindiddly talent, Flea. You better write a few of them, though. Miss Lawson says everybody’s talent has to last at least three minutes.”