Some Small Magic

by Billy Coffey

“I don’t know what you mean, son.”

  He looks down. Shrugs. Flicks at a bit of wood on the pew in front with a shaky finger. “Just don’t mean nothing, I guess. Can get scary sometimes up here in the hill country, though.”

  “Can. But I promise ain’t nothing happen to him. Closed up the barn myself last night, and Reverend Johnny’s car was gone. But I bet I can help with whatever problem you got.”

  “Don’t think so,” the boy says. “Reverend Johnny gave me a word.”

  “He did? Don’t recall seeing you up on the stage last night.”

  “That’s because nobody sees me. And it wasn’t on the stage. I seen him after, out back. Reverend Johnny was getting ready to leave and said the road’s ever long, but he gave me a word anyway. I had to do something I shouldn’t’ve, that’s the only way I could get that word, and now Momma’s heart’s broke on ’count of I cost her and I’m a burden. But now I think Reverend Johnny was right. It didn’t make no sense to me what he said and I thought it was all magic beans, but now I don’t think it was. Because I found something. I found treasure, Preacher Keen. Like he said I would. And that means there’s healing next and then reward. But I need to know it’s true before I go on and hope. That’s why I come. I remembered you said what church is yours and where.”

  “I see. Well then . . . ?”

  Earl Thomas waits. It’s a fine trick he’s learned through the years, wait and let that silence fill until the person you need something from can’t take it anymore. Usually works. Works now too.

  “Abel,” the boy says.

  “Abel”—nodding as he says it. “Fine name. Biblical. You know that? Abel was one of Adam’s sons. He made an offering of the things most precious to him and found favor.”

  “I don’t think that counts for much. My momma named me. Or maybe my daddy. Momma thinks all Reverend Johnny did was tricks. Like that light in his hands? I do tricks too but I can’t show ya. I got all this stuff on and about all I could do is let a smoke bomb off. Which I won’t, since it’s church.”

  “I appreciate that,” Preacher Keen says.

  “Momma says all them people Reverend Johnny healed are gonna come up hurting again, only this time not just in their bodies but in their hearts too. That right?”

  “I guess it’s all the Lord’s will, Abel. His ways are mysterious.”

  “It was a powerful thing Reverend Johnny did to me, Preacher Keen. He scared me so bad I still can’t stand it. I even tried telling myself it was all a trick, all the way to this morning I did. But I think the only reason I wanted to think it was all a trick is because otherwise . . .” Abel shakes his head. “Well, otherwise it means I don’t know anything. So I need to make up my mind either way. A lot depends on it. Maybe even my whole life.”

  Now the smile is gone from the preacher’s face.

  “I’m not sure what you’re tellin’ me, Abel.”

  The boy sits and studies his hands. “I guess I don’t know what to believe. That’s what it is. Reverend Johnny tells me one thing and my momma tells me another. But my momma lied, Preacher Keen. I can’t believe she did because she loves me, but there’s no other way ’round it. That makes me think Reverend Johnny’s telling me the truth. And that scares me.”

  “Why’s that scare you, son?”

  “Because it means I got to do something I can’t. Not can’t in my heart,” he says, then raises up that one busted arm, “but in my body. But I got to do it, because then everybody will be better. So I guess I just need to know if Reverend Johnny’s real. If you hold to miracles. I guess you got to, you being a preacher and all. But I mean truly. For real.”

  “Who’s your momma, Abel?”

  “Don’t guess I’ll say. She’s a good momma. I don’t want you thinking she ain’t. She just don’t believe. I think it hurts her too bad.”

  “Well, if I just knew a little more about what’s happened . . .”

  “It’s private,” says Abel. “If you forgive me.”

  “I will.” He leans back, studying the boy. “Son, ain’t a soul ever walked this earth didn’t crave more than the ground he trods and the sky he looks to. It’s a longing, and it’s in us all. There’s some that gives themselves right over to it and others that go all their lives trying to either ignore it or explain it away. That’s the choice we all got to make before we can move on from this life, and it’s the one eatin’ you right now.”

  Earl Thomas Keen wonders where in the world these words are coming from and thinks maybe they ain’t from this world at all, and wishes he had a pencil and paper to copy all this down.

  “Now, you ask me if I believe in miracles. I do, and I ain’t ashamed to say it. Reverend Johnny Mills made me believe them even more. Just like you want to believe, else you wouldn’t come all this way carrying a broke arm and a hunnert pounds of clothes. I ain’t never seen what I seen last night. Was the Spirit moving. Some people can look on a thing like that and find comfort and joy enough to carry them far. Others like your momma find just as much comfort in denying it’s real. But I don’t expect there’s much in the way of joy in denying it. You tell me this life’s all there is, just rocks and trees and atoms, and all we are’s a sack of bones so we might as well do what we want. That don’t sound to me like a recipe for joy. Now, I don’t know what’s going on with you, Abel. Nor will I ask again. But I’ll say this: no matter what it is, I been where you are. I have. I’ve had doubts and pains and still do. It’s what you do with them that counts in the end. Whatever this is you’re feeling, if Reverend Johnny led you to a road, it’s one you’re meant to take.”

  Abel fiddles with his helmet. “What if that road’s a dark one?”

  “Most is.” Looking at him, because it’s a true thing Earl Thomas says, and hard like all true things must be. “’Specially the ones that hold a light at their end.”

  The boy nods slow, like it’s an answer he didn’t seek but will accept. “I appreciate your time,” he says. “I’ll let you get back to your preaching.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yessir.”

  Earl Thomas reaches over the pew and places his hand on Abel’s good arm. “How about I pray a minute with you before you go?”

  “I don’t guess so.”

  “Well then, how about I pray for you on my own, then?”

  Abel shrugs, still not looking. “I ain’t got a say in what you do with your private time.”

  “You’ll be first on my list, then. Promise you that. I got one more thing to ask. Come on back here in the morning. Bring your momma with you, and your daddy. You’ll find good people here, Abel. Ones asking the same questions as you.”

  “My daddy’s gone,” Abel says. But he says it with a smile on the end that shines as mystery. “Maybe we’ll come, but it won’t be tomorrow.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because I got a long way to go.”

  He stands in slow motion like his legs are tired. Earl Thomas walks him back out into the sunshine. An old bike not fit for riding leans against the edge of the steps.

  “I can take you home if you want. Be my pleasure.”

  “Nosir, Preacher Keen. I should go it alone. Need the practice.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Away.”

  “Well then, you be careful. Here, let me at least help.”

  He cinches the helmet back on Abel’s head, checks the chest protector and the shin guards, smiling all the while because the boy looks three times his real size. He wants to offer the bottle of water for a ride he suspects is farther up into the mountains, poor as the boy looks. Instead, Abel heads east. Toward Mattingly.

  Earl Thomas watches as the boy struggles away, raising his broken arm as a good-bye. Won’t he have a tale for Lori when he gets home. He returns a wave of his own and lets his hand hang in the air as a sudden urge compels him to call Abel back. Reason with him, plead, hold the boy as prisoner so long as Earl Thomas can keep him safe. But in the end he doesn’t, and that f
eeling fades.

  Boy’ll be all right, Earl Thomas says to himself. Abel’s got a path to walk same as everybody else. And just like everybody else, the only one who can walk it is himself.

  -4-

  Whether the heat or the clothes or simply because there is too much for Abel to consider, the ride home feels twice as long as the ride to Preacher Keen’s.

  He keeps his head down and body bent forward, willing his legs to work the pedals up one hill and over another. Even on the downslopes, he can manage no faster than a crawl. The brake on the back tire sticks just enough to make a burning smell that turns his stomach. It is as if all of creation has conspired to slow Abel so that he will fully consider what he will do next. And the more Abel pedals and sweats and the longer the road ahead grows, the more his mind recalls another truism, this one, too, born in the dark hallways of Mattingly Elementary: knowing you have to do something isn’t nearly the same as knowing you can.

  That is his chief problem now—not should, but could. Abel didn’t need Preacher Keen to tell him he should run away. That had been decided early on, though whether early this morning when Abel realized he’d broken his momma’s heart or late last night when Reverend Johnny broke down to convulsions out behind that barn, he cannot know. Maybe, he thinks, the decision came sometime yesterday afternoon between committing his evil act toward Chris and sitting with his momma on the front porch.

  When Abel began to realize just how much of a burden he had become.

  Regardless, it was only upon finding his daddy’s letters that his path was seemingly laid clear. No longer would he be running away from all the mess he’s made of his life and his momma’s. Now he would be running toward something. Fairhope, to be exact. Preacher Keen’s role was merely to settle the question of whether that destination was the right one, the treasure Reverend Johnny had promised. Abel merely wanted to know if Reverend Johnny had done some small magic outside that barn, or if it had all been a trick.

  As he pedals, wincing from how the chest protector chafes his shoulders and how the breeze makes a constant swooshing sound inside the football helmet, Abel decides there remains a lack of hard evidence in that regard. Preacher Keen possessed no real proof beyond his own opinion. All he could say was how the Spirit had moved and people had been brought to believe in more than rocks and trees. Which, Abel must admit, sounds to him now like words spoken in a circle, never going anywhere or saying anything.

  It’s all so depressing, which only serves to make the going slower: Abel has come all this way looking for answers, and all he’s found are more questions. Preacher Keen would probably smile if he heard something like that. He’d say there are always going to be more questions than answers because that’s how things work. Because it all comes down to believing.

  Maybe everything comes down to that. Abel hopes not. If it all comes down to believing, he’ll never get anywhere.

  Not that the past hours can be counted as utter loss. Far from it. Even with Preacher Keen’s admittedly biased position on the matter, Abel has gotten what he most needs: a confirmation of something far greater than a miracle. Preacher Keen managed to say everything Abel has come to feel ever since sitting in that pile of his daddy’s letters in the wreck room, his every motivation and the source of a fire that still burns hot. Not for something so cryptic as faith, but for a chance to even glimpse the joy of which Preacher Keen spoke. The kind that lasts and holds up under the hard things.

  Hope. That is what Abel needs now. Hope is where that dark way Reverend Johnny spoke of will lead. Hope is the light at the end.

  And not just hope—Fairhope. Was there any coincidence in that, or was the name of the town his daddy was in (and in alive) some small magic as well? One more way of someone or something telling him he should go?

  “What happened to my daddy?” he says to the birds and the trees along this empty stretch of road. “That’s what I’m worried about. Because he’s supposed to be dead. Momma’s always told me that. Daddy was a railroad man and then he died because his heart gave out. Only he didn’t die. So he must’a left. But why would he leave, since Momma says he loved her and she loved him?”

  A quiet whisper rises from a place deep inside him—Maybe it’s you. Maybe that’s why he left.

  Abel stops his bike, weighing that thought. He decides no, that’s not it, though he can produce no real reason why it shouldn’t be the case. But why write your kid a bunch of letters when you never even loved him? Or missed him?

  “It’s something else,” he says. “Something maybe bad.” And then this next thing Abel states, which is as much for himself as for the birds and the trees. Three words that settle things: “He needs me.”

  The issue of should, then, is settled. But as to the question of could Abel go? That is another matter entirely.

  In many ways his ride out this morning has served as much as a practice run as a search for answers. Abel has wandered from Holly Springs Road many times on his own, not only for school but to count the trains and visit Dumb Willie. Those trips have never counted for much in distance, however; neither the field beyond his backyard nor the patch of woods to Dumb Willie’s house is so far as to allow Abel a sense of journeying anywhere.

  But Fairhope? Fairhope is different.

  In those strange hazy minutes between finding the letters and getting dressed to go see the Preacher Keen, Abel pulled the atlas down from one of his bedroom shelves. Fairhope lay near the southeastern border of North Carolina. A fair-size town, judging from the size of the circle printed on the map. A whole state away

  (“Practically to the moon,” he moans now)

  and untold hundreds of miles.

  That number had presented itself as huge back at home, the map spread wide over the kitchen table with the popcorn tin of letters beside. When people exaggerate a long distance between things, that’s the number they always use—That place? Shoot, that place gotta be a hunnert miles away. Meaning not just a hunnert but sometimes two or three, even a thousand. Meaning unreachable.

  And if a hundred miles (“Or more,” he huffs) looks a long way on paper, it feels forever on the open road. Abel guesses he’s gone eight miles from home to Preacher Keen’s church and halfway back. He’s sweat so much on the first leg of the trip that nothing is left to leak out of him now other than a runner of slobber that catches on his chin strap, left dangling in the wind. His broken arm hurts even more than it itches, which is plenty. His legs have gone from burning to sore to numb. At the base of the next hill, he surrenders and begins pushing the bike like it’s a horse gone lame.

  “Cain’t even make it out my own town,” he tells the trees. “How’m I supposed to make it all the way to another?”

  The answer comes not from the trees but a place born of his own weariness: What if he’s just misunderstood everything Reverend Johnny told him?

  Abel stops along the road again, weighing that possibility. He lays aside the likelihood that Reverend Johnny is nothing more than a magic bean salesman (a task still difficult, in spite of it all) and embraces for now the notion that a genuine miracle performed by a genuine miracle worker took place behind that barn last night. That Reverend Johnny’s eyes going blank and shining and his body being pulled up from the ground and then tossed like a toy hadn’t been a trick at all, but real, just as his words had been real.

  What does that mean?

  “Means maybe I didn’t even hear right.” A robin chirps in the trees, seeming to agree. “Because something like that’d be scary to anybody no matter what they say, and to a kid especially. And I was scared. Trick or not, I was.”

  It feels good, admitting it.

  He pushes on, left hand trying to hold the bike steady up the next hill, right arm high so it won’t throb. What if that’s what happened really? People almost never hear what’s being told them, only the parts they’re interested in. And even the parts they hear get so twisted and rearranged sometimes that what you think you’re hearing is only what you
want to hear. Treasure and healing? That’s all Abel’s ever thought about. And the way he felt behind that barn after enduring such a hard day? Of course he would twist Reverend Johnny’s words into something else. Even an invitation to run away.

  Your time is come. The treasure must bring healing. The healing must bring reward. Go in haste and do not turn away. For the way is dark.

  It is dark.

  Cresting a hill, glimpsing another far ahead, Abel’s heart begins to sway. He carries no doubt that his daddy’s letters constitute the treasure that was his should he seek it. But healing? There isn’t a doctor in the whole valley and beyond could promise that. His momma has told him so. Even if she hadn’t, that’s a thing Abel doesn’t have to be told by anybody. He knows it. And go in haste could’ve been Reverend Johnny’s way of getting Abel to leave—not home but the barn—just as do not turn away could mean keeping to what Abel has been doing his whole life and the way is dark could have been a warning to stay in Mattingly, right where Abel is.

  It shocks him, the reasonableness of it all.

  Likewise shocking is that in a matter of only a few hours, Abel has gone from finding a treasure so precious he considered it life-changing and so powerful it brought him all the way to the hill country alone to now deciding it will change nothing at all. What he will do with the knowledge that his father is alive and wanting him (not to mention that Abel himself may be in some sort of danger, according to that letter), he cannot say. He supposes he’ll have to settle on something before his momma gets home.

  Pushing the bike along, paying no heed to the little house rising up on his left or the bully sitting on that house’s front porch, Abel is forced to acknowledge two things. The first is that it was not so much the letters themselves that brought him all the way here, it was the sense that he had failed his momma to such a degree and had left her so hurting that leaving for somewhere, freeing her, was the best option. The second is that his desire to make things right will never be enough to carry him to Fairhope.