Some Small Magic

by Billy Coffey

  “Not by my will.” The woman shakes her head slowly. “A comfort, you say. Only one worse than the devil would speak such words.”

  (There is a place, the stories say. A special place.)

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

  (Better my doom than the boy’s.)

  (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.)

  Dorothy nods to the ground in front of her.

  “I cannot undo this, but I may make amends. You are fond of the boy. I saw you feed and tend to him. Dumb Willie is in danger, but I can save him and what he loves most. You can see to his safety, if you give us what you have.”

  The woman stands silent. Dorothy thinks she may not have heard. Finally she speaks. “You take all I have,” she whispers, “and yet you ask for more.”

  “Not only will you save Dumb Willie and what he loves, but you may well have a hand in my own ruin.”

  The woman squats down over the first mound. Rises. She says, “They wish to know what you would require of me first.”

  “We must get to Raleigh. We arrived by train, but there’s no time to wait for another.”

  She bends again, settling her soiled fingers against one grave and then the other. Smiling now.

  “They tell me yes,” the woman says. “But only if it is as you say. If it will save the boy and end you.”

  -6-

  The street is quiet, shaded to the left by pear trees and willows and dogwoods that stand perfectly spaced and well tended, as though they were planted in some long-ago with only a hope of the loveliness they would someday provide. Beyond sits a baseball field. Cars and trucks ring the diamond of dirt; bicycles lean against telephone poles. The sweet smell of grass freshly cut reaches through the rolled-down window. Parents cheer their boys, their girls. Two sets of bleachers behind each dugout gleam in the sinking sun to her right. The fading light is captured by a small forest that mixes shadow and shine, giving the impression of a world blinking in disbelief that it has found Lisa Shifflett here, at this place she vowed never to go.

  Her little Honda putters past the cheers of happy folk. She tries not to stare, keeping her gaze instead to the field not far on. Here is what appear to be acres of crops, most familiar to her but many that are not, all laid out in neat rows without even a single weed to spoil the view. The wooden sign set into the edge of the field reads Fairhope Community Garden, Mon.–Sat. 1 pm–7 pm. Past the sign is a turnoff to the left. She takes it and finds a parking lot, mostly empty, in the shape of a backward L. Ahead is a single fence, tall and imposing and worth more than Lisa has ever made, will ever make. Just beyond the fence is a main building of wood and glass and another sign that promises a warm welcome that she doesn’t believe. Behind the building are laid out several smaller ones, apartments or bungalows, each spotted with silhouettes of the tall maples and oaks that dot the property. Beyond the fence, Lisa sees basketball courts and a softball field.

  She parks in the first spot and turns the engine off, waits with shut eyes as the car sputters and spits and finally dies. Her lungs expand wide and slow. She fumbles for the pack of cigarettes in the console. Two thoughts collide in Lisa’s mind, the second canceling the first: she’s going to have to slow down on all this smoking, and why bother slowing down at all when the one thing you lived for is gone?

  It would be a simple thing to get out and walk toward the office building, push the right buzzer (or whatever they have here), and knock at the right door. The hard part—that five-hour drive down interstates and secondary roads, Lisa clenching the wheel as she met each exit ramp and turnaround, telling herself to keep going instead of go back home—is over. Or so she thought. Now Lisa isn’t so sure. Now she thinks getting here might have been an easy thing compared to what comes next.

  The apron is still tied around her waist. She’d called ahead yesterday, making sure it was okay to make the trip, and decided it was better to go on into work this morning rather than sit around and worry about this afternoon. Streaks of ham and eggs, the morning’s special, stain her chest. The small pocket sewn into the bottom of the apron bulges with ones and fives and tens, along with so much silver that it feels as though she’s carrying another child. So much money that it would take too long to count it all.

  It’s been like that for three days now, ever since the funeral.

  Roy said she could come back to work whenever she wanted, no rush, but she couldn’t bear staying at the house anymore, trapped by all those memories. Sitting on the porch while she smoked and drank, hearing Abel mess about in his room. Seeing his face peering out from the window at her, only to fade to nothingness. She’d gone in the day after the service for only half a shift. Sheriff Barnett was the first customer. After Jake left, Lisa found a twenty next to his empty coffee cup—twenty dollars Jake didn’t have but Lisa needed more. She’d cried for twenty minutes after. Cried more when those four hours yielded eighty dollars in tips and more hugs than Lisa had ever received in her life. The money didn’t mean much. The love did. Both felt so fine that there really wasn’t a choice in asking Roy to let her back full-time.

  There have been cards from classmates who barely tolerated her boy and from teachers who saw Abel only with pity, days of headlines in the Gazette, and an endless stream of visitors to Holly Spring Road bearing casseroles and pies. Much of the town gathered yesterday evening to lay markers along the tracks where Abel and Chris died. All of Lisa’s debts have been covered by love offerings taken up by Mattingly’s churches, heeding their Christ’s call to care for the least of these. It is a rare night that passes now without either a call or visit from Reverend Creech or Preacher Keen, both of whom officiated Abel’s funeral. Hundreds had gathered at Oak Lawn for the burial, one day after Chris was laid to rest in the hill country. Mayor Wallis deemed it a time of mourning for the entire community.

  Lisa would one day like to hear about her son’s service, how beautiful it was. She is likely the only person in Mattingly who remembers none of it except for how tiny that casket looked. Like it was a child’s toy that had to be plucked from some department store shelf and freed of its plastic wrapper before it could be lowered into the earth and covered with her tears.

  People pass along the sidewalk near where she is parked. Some nod hello. Lisa waves, her hand reaching above the steering wheel of its own volition, habit more than intent. She opens the door. Shuts it again. Drops another cigarette from the window and lights another with no thought as to whether such a thing is permitted here.

  She is emptied out. That’s the best Lisa could explain to Reverend Creech as to how the last week has left her. She has been reduced to nothing more than a series of reflexes and stock replies and daily rituals that demand no thought to perform—the minimum requirements to exist and still be considered human.

  The hollowness frightens Lisa more than even the bitterness that grows as a scab over the wound inside her. That is what keeps her up at night. Not the night train’s song as it scrapes the rails past her house, but the knowing that what the world makes empty inside you must be filled again. This revelation came to her not when Sheriff Barnett found her son’s body crushed along the railroad tracks but when what remained of Abel was lowered into the ground. When Lisa heard the soft thunk

  (hollow, it sounded hollow)

  of that first handful of dirt tossed upon his casket and knew that was the sound of Abel never needing her again. Sitting here on this hot evening and in the shadow of this horrible place, Lisa understands that is why she has thus far refused anything beyond the town’s charity. She will take their money and their food, will even take their prayers, but she cannot bear to accept more.

  There will be no grief groups, no friendships forged from her loss. Lisa cannot yet imagine a Sunday morning when she will put on her Going Out dress and accept Preacher Keen’s repeated invitations to join his flock in worship. And though
if asked Lisa will say it is because she cannot worship a God who allows crippled boys to be crushed by trains, that is not the true reason. The true reason is that she knows herself unworthy of anything good to be found in a church pew. Lisa Shifflett is far too broken to be healed. She loved her son more than love can mean, more than she could ever say, and so always found herself unable to express its depths. In a life defined by its failures, chief among them now is the worry that Lisa somehow failed in showing Abel how precious he was, how needed, and how she would fight until her dying breath to keep him safe and well.

  He ran away. Why would he run away from her?

  Reverend Creech says there will come a time when Lisa is ready to move on. It will be a slow process, but meant. Lisa has resisted this notion as well and chosen to view her pain as some form of penance. Besides, it seems life will not allow such a thing. What she repeats to her customers is true—sometimes she does hear Abel moving about behind a bedroom door Lisa cannot bring herself to open. She fears the trains that roll by her house, that one will jump the tracks and come barreling for her because that’s what Lisa deserves for telling all those lies to Abel. She fears those trains and yet in the next breath wishes one would take her, because then she could be with her boy again.

  There are as well the constant rumors swirling of Dumb Willie, how he has been spotted roaming the woods in Happy Hollow or in the hill country, has been seen as far north as Winchester and as far west as Greenville—clear to West Virginia—and how a manhunt is now under way along the border mountains. People everywhere are now vying for the reward (another contribution of the town, and the town’s preachers especially) and vowing justice, especially Henderson Farmer, who has sworn to end Dumb Willie by his own hand so as to protect the family’s good Christian name.

  We’ll get him, the sheriff promised Lisa after the funeral. Dumb Willie will face judgment. You can rest on that, and all Lisa could do was say thank you because that was the thing expected. In truth she felt even then that judgment would come to them all instead should Dumb Willie be found, and that whatever had happened that night, Dumb Willie had become an instrument of mercy as much as death. In her heart, she cannot believe Dumb Willie would ever harm her boy. Such evil is simply not in him. Would Lisa ever stand in Dumb Willie Farmer’s presence again, she would be more apt to wrap him in her arms than spit in his face. His capture would not bring Abel back. And yet she knows all people must lay blame to their troubles, and always to something or someone other than themselves.

  Yet it is not only Abel’s memory that haunts Lisa as a ghost and Dumb Willie’s elusiveness that keeps her from moving on. It is also the thing that has brought her here to this place. She reaches into her apron pocket, past all those folded and crinkled bills, and pulls out the envelope she found in her post office box only hours ago. Mixed in with sympathy cards and the electric bill and a catalog she may now order from rather than leaf through was this, another of the letters. Sometimes they came a week at a time and sometimes more, many times less, but always when Lisa had allowed a hope to grow that they would stop, as though they were a punishment for doubting a father’s devotion.

  She holds the envelope to the setting sun, sees the folded paper inside. The address written on the front (Abel Shifflett, PO Box 57, Mattingly, VA 24465) and the return (213 Kable Street, No. 11, Fairhope, NC 28573).

  Lisa has not read the letter. She has read them all, but this one will remain unopened.

  Her thoughts return to that Sunday on the porch, surrounded by all those women in their Sunday finery that bespoke better lives. To the prayer Lisa uttered in the quietness of her heart—if Abel were found well, there would be no more secrets between them. She would tell him everything, even of his father. That his name was Gary and he was a kind man in spite of his troubles, that he worked hard at helping to build things, houses and offices, because making something out of nothing brought him a peace he had always lacked.

  She would tell of the first time they’d met, inside a seedy little bar not far from this place. How Gary had said, I can see your soul, and I’ve never seen a more beautiful one, and Lisa had melted beneath the romance of those words because she had yet to know their terror. He was handsome in a way that Abel was never quite. A good man, which allowed Lisa to gloss over the drugs he took. She loved him, yes. Lisa loved Gary with that childlike ardor that crops out all those things that do not fit inside the perfect picture the mind creates, setting them aside under the foolish notion that not looking at his faults, his dangers, would make them go away.

  And yet Lisa Shifflett had always been a lonely sort of girl, overlooked in many of the same ways that have

  (Had, she corrects)

  plagued her only son in life. Gary Bragg turned out to be the lonely sort as well, though for much different reasons. They grew to talk of marriage and children and a house along the river, grand plans that a mere carpenter’s helper could never afford. With familiarity came a gnawing sense that something plagued this man she had come to cleave herself to, some darkness Gary could never put to words Lisa understood. “I see your soul,” he would often say. It’s so beautiful, Lisa, and that would somehow make everything better for a while.

  For a while.

  Dreams, Lisa knows. That was all they had. Dreams and something that feels, even these years later and even in this place, like love.

  Those dreams only increased the day Lisa found herself pregnant, but they were hers alone in those long weeks afterward, not Gary’s. His drug use became worse, no longer a mere joint a few days a week but one a night, then two, and then marijuana chased with booze chased with worse. Heroin. Crack.

  I see your soul, he said.

  And then came the end, there on some dusty highway high up in the Carolina mountains, the phone call Lisa received from him late that night, Gary crying and Lisa crying as well, her hand on the tiny bump formed by the child growing in her womb.

  She had always told Abel that his daddy had died just before he was born. That was never a lie. The man Lisa had known and loved was gone by then, replaced by a stranger. She left, taking nothing but a suitcase of old clothes, a handful of cash, and her unborn child. Lisa’s cash ran out just south of a little town in Virginia named Mattingly. She did Gary the courtesy of passing along her address, saying he could write. It was an act of kindness on her part to give a father back a little of the everything he had lost, though Lisa never had any intention of allowing Abel to read whatever letters were sent to the tiny trailer at the end of a dead-end road. Better her boy know a lie, she thought back then, than ever the truth.

  She gets out of the car and snuffs the cigarette beneath her shoe, then closes the door behind her. The winding walkway to the main building is empty but for herself. Lisa smells fresh-cut grass and flowers, hears the trees whistle and cheers from the baseball field far away. She wonders where Dumb Willie is, if he’s sorry for what he did.

  Gary deserves to know what has happened to his son. Not by a phone call or a letter, but in person. And the truth of it is that Lisa longs to see his face for the first time in nearly a dozen years. It may mark a beginning. Or an end. Either way, it is the first small step in moving on.

  Lisa takes the stairs and pulls at the door. This won’t take long. She’ll be back in Mattingly before the late news and back to work tomorrow. It will be a new day. Perhaps she will go see the Preacher Keen.

  Perhaps.

  She turns and looks at a deadening Carolina sky bursting with color, the moon rising and the first stars of the night. It looks endless, that sky. It looks as though it stretches on into forever. Wherever Abel is, she hopes he is being taken care of. That he doesn’t hurt anymore and he’s smiling.

  That someone is watching over him.

  -7-

  It is a fine day that greets Dumb Willie, the sun creeping over the mountains and lighting upon his face through the narrow loft window, fresh hay on his cheeks and in his hair, that warm feeling of tired muscles and a hungry be
lly left over from yesterday’s work.

  He believes he would enjoy it even more were A Bull not sick.

  His face looks bad because of the light that comes from it. From A Bull’s mouth and nose and eyes that light comes, and from his two ears like a leaking, and his face is whiter than the white it always is. A Bull sits by the window and he’s shivering cold. He says he hasn’t slept and Dumb Willie knows it’s because the dead don’t sleep but Dumb Willie don’t say. It’s a finger-over-your-mouth, but Dumb Willie knows it might not be that much longer.

  “I think you better go get Dorothy, Dumb Willie,” A Bull say.

  Dumb Willie scrambles down the ladder. The woeman is on her bed. She’s reading her Bible. She looks at Dumb Willie and wants to smile, but she’s forgotten how.

  “Where. Do. Tee?” he ask.

  The woeman points through the doors and into the yard, so that’s where Dumb Willie goes. He sees Do-tee at the garden thinking and says A Bull’s sick. That woeman don’t move when Do-tee and Dumb Willie run back inside and scurry up the ladder. She don’t move but watches.

  A Bull is where Dumb Willie left him by the window. His face is white with light and there’s sweat on his forehead and cheeks.

  “Cold,” A Bull say. “I’m real cold, Dorothy.”

  Do-tee puts a hand to A Bull’s face and holds it there. He’s trying to smile but Dumb Willie sees it’s a slim one, not even the half grin Do-tee always wears.

  “Think I’m just tired,” A Bull say. “I ain’t been sleeping much. Or eating.” He says it again: “Think I’m just tired.”

  “Maybe so,” Do-tee say. “Could be it’s a little thing more. But don’t you worry none, Abel. You got me here and Dumb Willie too, and we gone take care you fine. Ain’t that right, Dumb Willie?”

  “Gone take care. You,” Dumb Willie says. “Love you A. Bull,” he says, nodding as his mouth works, even though Dumb Willie knows there is nothing he can do for A Bull and no doctor he can call. There’s no doctor for the dead.