Some Small Magic

by Billy Coffey

  “Great what?” Abel asks.

  “Miracles.” Dorothy stares at him. She whispers as though to herself, “There’s places of miracles.”

  She plucks a wildflower from the near grass and removes the petals one by one, as though each of them is a memory itself—Dorothy’s own ghosts.

  “Thirty-four and rain,” she says. “That’s how it was here that day. Cold and wet. And slick. I was here when it happened. I don’t know why that man and his boy were out here on the tractor that day. Maybe it was chores, maybe it was just something to do. Not much else you can do in a place like this at the edge of winter. Either way, that man just . . . lost control. Went too far down along this bank and they went to tumbling. The woman blamed me for it. I can’t begrudge her for that, though I had no hand in it. I promise you that, Abel. But she chased me off, and it’s my sin that I let her. I believe that now. I knew it the second I saw her standing up at the gate with that shotgun in her hands. I shouldn’t have gone. What I should’ve done is sit with her a bit. Help her, I don’t know. Any way I could. But I left. I left because that’s my way, because there are other places for me to go. I knew she would grieve, but that’s what folk do. They grieve, Abel. All the time. I never forgot her. I seen so many faces, Abel, you got no idea how many. But hers never left my memory. When you read that letter on the train last night, she’s the one I thought of. I told myself it’d be okay for us to come up here, but I didn’t know I’d find her in such a way. Some people, they can move on when the ones they love pass. Some can’t. Like her. She’s nothing but a city without walls now.”

  She tosses the flower away. Abel can only look at the debris below. He tries to imagine that day, see the tractor along the bank and a man at the wheel, a boy on his lap. The tractor beginning to lean and then skid, then finally topple. The screams. Was Dorothy standing here when it happened? The woman? Did they run down to where the tractor fell and try to save them, or could they only stand here on the bank in shock, lying to themselves that somehow none of this was real, that any second now the woman’s husband and son would appear and they would be bruised and scared but fine, everything would be fine?

  “You should have told me,” he says. “Dorothy, you should have said what happened before we ever left that train. Then I could have told you how that woman would be.”

  “I didn’t know,” she says, looking at him. “I thought you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Like I didn’t think you’d understand about what happened to Chris?”

  The reply looks to sting her. Abel is sorry for it, though only a little. It’s a hard thing, hearing the truth. It’s harder still to tell it.

  “It ain’t just that she lost her family,” he says. “It’s that she’s poor.”

  Dorothy’s still looking at him, though Abel sees no understanding in her eyes.

  “I’m poor, Dorothy,” he says. “My momma’s poor. We been poor my whole life. That’s how I understand. All of us, Dumb Willie too. We’re all poor. I guess maybe you don’t know what that means because you’ve always been on the rails. But it’s different for other folk. Do you know what poor is? What it really means?”

  “No,” she says.

  “It means you don’t got nothing the world wants anymore. Maybe you once did. Maybe you had dreams of things you wanted to do and a good home. Maybe you got no brittle bones or you had a job. Maybe you even had money. But then all those things got taken away because that’s what the world does to you, Dorothy—it just takes. It claims and claims, and don’t give you nothing back. And when it finally sees you got nothing left for it to take, that’s when you’re poor. That’s what happened to her. That woman’s husband got taken and

  . . . (her boy) . . .

  everything, and she don’t have anything left now. All she gots is this farm, but all this farm does is remind her of how poor she is.” He shudders at the thought that comes next, one Abel does not put to words for the hurt of it. “Do you see?”

  Dorothy looks as though her answer is no, she doesn’t see that at all, or at least she hadn’t until now. And though she could offer up any reaction to this sudden understanding, Abel is puzzled by the look of guilt that covers her face. She lowers her eyes and slumps her shoulders, dipping her chin.

  “She scares me,” Abel says. “That woman. I didn’t know why, but I think I do now. That woman scares me because I think that’s how my momma is now. She don’t know where I went, Dorothy, or why. I couldn’t tell her, because she hid those letters for a reason I don’t know. If she hid those letters, she’d never let me go look for my daddy. We were the only ones we had to love. Now she’s alone. Just like that woman.”

  “I hadn’t considered it,” Dorothy says, and this only looks to heap despair upon despair. “Could be.” She sighs. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here, Abel. What it is I’m to give her.”

  The breeze carries a sound from far away, faint and quick. It passes before Abel can judge it, though he could swear it was a scream. He turns his head back toward the house and sees nothing.

  “Give her the thing all poor folk want,” Abel says. “Give her mercy.”

  -5-

  The sun drops late, turning the world orange and evening into a symphony of night bugs stirred from torpor. Lantern light plays shadows along the barn’s walls. Dorothy sits by an old wagon with Abel, the two of them watching the woman and Dumb Willie upon the stack of lice-covered blankets that is her bed. She feeds him from her plate after his own is licked clean. Staring at Dumb Willie as he dips his head and says, “Fank you,” drowning in his empty grin. She either does not notice or does not mind when Dorothy eases forward to lower the lantern’s wick. She wants it dim in here just now, else Abel’s gaze may wander from the bed to those dancing silhouettes and see they number three rather than four.

  A red mark stains Dumb Willie’s cheek, just above where his lip is swollen. Dorothy and Abel had come back from the field to find him patting the cow and whispering into its ear. The woman was nowhere.

  When Abel asked what had happened, Dumb Willie only shook his head. His answer had been as peculiar as his appearance: “It’sa boozed. Stalk need . . . hugged.”

  Abel had pronounced that to be Dumb Willie’s usual foolishness. Looking at Dumb Willie and the woman now, Dorothy believes otherwise.

  Mercy, she thinks.

  “What they doing over there?” Abel whispers. “It’s like the two of us ain’t even here. I could strip down and run right by them naked, neither one would notice.”

  “What’s wrong? You confused about it, or are you jealous?”

  “I ain’t jealous,” says Abel, in as jealous a way Dorothy decides a person could. The only thing she cannot decide is which of them Abel is most covetous of, the woman or Dumb Willie. “Who cares if they won’t talk to me?”

  “Seems you do. Way I figure it, should make you feel better they won’t pay you no mind. Let Dumb Willie have this moment. It’s been a long road for him, harder in a lot of ways than it’s been for you and me. And as to her, I told you that story. Dumb Willie’s the only one here she’d even try talking to. I’m the one she blames for what happened.”

  “What about me, then? She won’t even look my way.”

  Dorothy thinks on this. “You’re a boy, Abel. Like the one she lost. Seeing you must weigh on her. It just hurts her too bad, that’s all. That ain’t your fault, so don’t go blaming yourself.” She pauses. “It’s none her fault either. And that’s the thing.”

  The explanation is flimsy, but all the one she can manage. And though it seems to satisfy Abel well enough (even to the point that he backs farther against the wagon and more out of the woman’s periphery), Dorothy knows the time is nearing for the three of them to take their leave. The light in Abel’s eyes has grown to a light that pours from his mouth each time he speaks. They must reach Fairhope soon.

  (And then what? she wonders.)

  (There’s hidden places all about this world.)

&
nbsp; This is a safe place—safer than the woods, certainly safer than the areas north and south of Greenville—but there are too many things that could go wrong with the woman here. The longer they stay, the more suspicious Abel may become, and Dorothy has grown weary with her falsehoods.

  (Miracles. There’s places of miracles.)

  “I’m to say my good-nights now,” the woman says. Still looking at Dumb Willie, though her eyes cut to Dorothy as well. “There’s hay yet in the loft. It’ll make beds enough.”

  She rises with her plate and Dumb Willie’s, ignoring the question he asks (“Wh . . . ere you goin’?”) as she turns by the lantern and out, fading into the night at the side of the barn. Dumb Willie is left on the bed alone. He cocks his head and looks at Abel and Dorothy as though for the first time this night.

  “We’ll go up,” Abel says to Dorothy. “Don’t worry, Dumb Willie can carry me if I can’t climb that ladder. You need to talk to her. Bet I can tell you where she’s going.”

  “I know well where she’s going. That’s why I won’t follow. It would be a bad time for us to have words, Abel.”

  Abel says, “There won’t ever be a good time, Dorothy.”

  “Now that reminds me of something I’d think your momma would say. Maybe time on the rails has grown you on the inside, Abel”—she tugs at his ear—“even if it’s done little for you on the out.”

  She returns his grin with a smile of her own, one so near true and full that she feels it creeping even into her dark eyes. The boy is special.

  He is special indeed.

  *

  She manages a glimpse of the woman before she turns up the far side of the garden and out of sight. Dorothy refuses to call out and break the night’s peace, nor does she follow. Instead, she remains in place, caught between the graves and the barn—between the darkness in her past and the deeper one waiting.

  Never once since pulling Abel onto the train has Death pondered the spring, knowing it as a place of mere legend. Even when Dorothy learned of Abel’s purpose in seeking his father, even when he spoke those soft words of his love for her, the spring was something she never considered. Now, here in this place of such despair and need, that single idea has overtaken her. She could take Abel to the spring, if the tales are true. It is hidden. A place of miracles.

  Her mind and heart quarrel over such an idea as this, a thing that has never been done:

  (You cannot seek it. Would be a terrible thing.)

  (Would be a good thing. Would set things right.)

  (What’s right is what’s meant.)

  (The boy received a word. He said something came into that preacher and gave Abel his word. He’ll find treasure and then healing, then a reward.)

  (There is no healing for him but the kind the boy does not know he needs. That is the healing that is meant. That and nothing more.)

  (Unless what’s meant is sometimes wrong. It’s just a place. And maybe it’s just stories. Maybe it’s not real.)

  (You will seek it to your doom.)

  (Better my doom than the boy’s. He is special.)

  (Better the boy moves on than dies twice.)

  (Better the boy dies whole than broken. It’s just a place.)

  (You don’t know where it is.)

  (But I know who does. And it must be soon, else the boy’s soul will fly without me and be cast off.)

  At the garden’s edge she pieces together the scene before her—trampled bits of young corn and unsettled earth, a tarnished hoe abandoned in the grass. Something happened here. Given Dumb Willie’s condition when she and Abel returned from the field, Dorothy is left believing the dim boy had tried sprucing things up before the woman waylaid him. That conversation had progressed to some sort of violence before ending in . . . what? Dorothy does not know of feelings enough to say what Dumb Willie and the woman have come to share. She only knows Dumb Willie has done what Dorothy had not: shown the woman mercy. Abel was right in that, just as he was right in saying his own momma will be left as broken as this woman.

  Death has never considered this. It walks the long edge of the garden, marveling at the pain that thought kindles—a hurt not only for the woman and Abel’s momma but for all the ones it has left behind to grieve and crumble by taking their loved ones on.

  By doing what is meant.

  She finds the woman at the raised mounds near the trees where two wooden crosses stand as sentinel; she is neither bowed nor mourning, but watching. Waiting, Dorothy knows, for what the woman knew would follow. For this moment that has been written down ever since Death’s arrival at the path this early afternoon, a trial with the woman as prosecutor, the dead as jury, and the night their judge. Dorothy moves to the woman’s side. She removes her hat and stares at the graves.

  “How did you know me,” she asks, “when we arrived at your door?”

  “The eyes,” is what the woman says. “You may change your countenance, but not those.”

  “I never believed I would return to this place until it was your time. You have shown us a kindness, and I am sorry. I knew you would remain in hurt. I did not know it would yet be this strong.”

  “You dare stand over these bones and spout your empty words. There is no room in you for regret. You are a shallow thing, callous in your deeds and empty in your feeling. You lay your waste and move on. How did you think you would find me after taking all I have ever loved?”

  She bends to pluck a fallen leaf from one of the plots—her husband’s or her boy’s, Dorothy cannot know. Both graves look equal in length; neither cross is marked. Nor should they be. The woman would forever be their only visitor.

  Yet this motion of her hand, soft and sure and caring, brings a memory of that day long before when Dorothy was first called to this place. Of Death come in the form of an old man to find a house set perfect and gleaming in the midst of such cold and rain. A man upon a tractor, his boy on his lap. The tractor taking to the field, the boy laughing as water and wind played at his hair, his eyes bright and wide and gathering in. The boy seeing Death and waving. Death waving back as he sees the boy’s lips move—Grandpa! The old man moving through the field, feet sinking into the miry soil. Death is the man’s father, the boy’s granddad. Death is whatever will bring them comfort when it takes them on.

  The tractor disappears. Only the top of the man’s head is visible now, a strong face made ruddy by sun and wind yet kind as a good father’s should be. He plays with the boy, joshing him with how the tractor leans and pretending that his thick arms are about to give way and drop the boy down the slope.

  He turns the wheel to bring the tractor back to the level field and flinches as the back tires spin in the rain. Turns the wheel again, this time in the opposite direction, wanting to gain traction as the engine sputters.

  There is a flash of recognition upon the man’s face, that same unyielding expression of fear and fight that the last breaths one will ever take are now being spent. It is a look Death has witnessed in so many as to be uncountable, regardless of age or creed or color.

  A wail of metal folding in upon itself, a cloud of dust. A scream, half caught, rises. Now a longer one and more piercing from the side of the house. The woman comes running. Her long brown hair trails behind like a cape, her hands hiking up her dress so she may run. Yelling for her boys, her men.

  Death takes the slope and moves to where the tractor lies. The man and the boy have been crushed by the weight of the machine and thrown, landing at odd angles though near enough to touch each other as though that were their dying wish. Already they stand apart from their bodies—the man impassive, trying to understand; the boy looking at the image of his grandfather. Death takes the boy’s hand. It’s all right now, boys. We’re going home. You keep with me, it’s only a short way.

  The woman running, tumbling down the slope. She screams even as she rolls and rises up to see her family gone, bones and blood and twisted limbs the only things left. Her eyes settle upon Death’s gaze, seeing it. Some are born with
knowledge of hidden things and the thinness between worlds.

  In this brief time stretched out for her as eternity, she turns from a woman at peace to one in ruin. Calling out, yelling, No! Seeing the bodies of her boy and her man but not their spirits. Not seeing that even as they are unchained from earth and sense the coming life, both look back to the woman they leave behind. They look back, because all look back.

  We must go, Death tells her. It is meant.

  “Taker,” the woman says now. “That is all you are. That is why you are so hated, why all rail against you. You come for what is not yours and what I would not yield to you.”

  Dorothy stares at the graves. “I can only be what I am and only serve the purpose handed me. Would you hate the snake for striking, or the hawk for descending upon the innocent young?”

  “I dug their graves. With my bare hands I dug them, and with my own tears I covered them back.” Dorothy withers beneath the woman’s glare. “Yes, I would hate you. I would hate you forever. Not for what you’ve done, but for what you are. You left a wife abandoned and a mother barren. To forgive you would be to despise myself and cast aside their memory. Their memory is all I have left, and though it chains me, I will not yield that to you as well.”

  I’m poor, Dorothy. My momma’s poor. We been poor my whole life. That’s how I understand. All of us, Dumb Willie too. We’re all poor. I guess maybe you don’t know what that means because you’ve always been on the rails. But it’s different for other folk. Do you know what poor is? What it really means?

  Dorothy does. Standing in this dark place with this woman, Death knows.

  “Where are they?” she asks. “Will you tell me? Are they well? Is it bright there?”

  “Where they go, I cannot,” Dorothy says. “It is meant only that I carry them there. But there is more—that I know. And I know it is a bright land with no remembrance of tears, and the fields there are long and green and bursting. Should there be a comfort for you, it is that.” She thinks now of Abel’s momma. “It is meant.”