Some Small Magic

by Billy Coffey

  “Abel? Abel, where are you? Dumb Willie?”

  Dorothy’s echo is all that returns.

  -8-

  That man he shot Dumb Willie that man’s a munster, and Dumb Willie thinks Do-tee took that man to the debbil. He isn’t sure Do-tee did; Dumb Willie didn’t see. He had to get A Bull to the wadder because that’s what Do-tee said. She said, You do that no matter what, Dumb Willie, and so Dumb Willie did. He loves Do-tee and A Bull, but Dumb Willie’s bleeding now.

  It’s dark in this place, and scary, but not so much that Dumb Willie turns around and runs back, because what’s back is scary more. There’s paths all laid out inside and he don’t know where to go.

  “Go straight,” A Bull say. “Just go straight, Dumb Willie, that way we won’t end up back where we come.”

  So Dumb Willie goes straight.

  It feels endless, this cavern of old things that remind Dumb Willie of what his ma and da’ee have in their kitchen and in their barn and buried out back of the north field.

  “Run, Dumb Willie,” say A Bull, and Dumb Willie tries, but it’s a hole in his stomach and his feet can’t move good.

  Dumb Willie puts a hand in the wide space between his chest and hips. His overalls feel hot there, and sticky. He carries A Bull on into the dark. It’s a

  (word it’s a . . . word)

  tunnel here and A Bull’s screaming, “Go!”

  The path branches off to the right and to the left, but Dumb Willie keeps straight, taking them deeper. In this darkness, Dumb Willie cannot see how the old junk here looks older, how the knobs and buttons and sleek lines of the washers and ovens and refrigerators at the entrance of the mound have faded to the hard angles and box-shaped appliance machines of another age, and how even those yield farther on to walls made of old wagons and churning buckets, porcelain washbasins streaked with grime, and large wooden wheels.

  A Bull say, “Hurry up, we got to find it,” and Dumb Willie is trying to hurry, but he can’t. Because of the hole in him, that hole is bloody and it hurts. There’s guts in there. He feels them with his hand it hurts so bad.

  “There,” A Bull say. “Up there, Dumb Willie. You see it?”

  He does. Ahead rises a faint light that grows with each lumbering step Dumb Willie takes. The shine alights upon the walls to either side of them, chasing darkness to reveal crumbling hope chests and pieces of a barn. Here their path begins to widen as it makes a gentle curve leftward.

  And here at the end of that curve comes what feels to Dumb Willie as the end of their journey, or perhaps merely his own.

  Hidden deep beneath the mound is a cavern with a high ceiling of interconnected pipes and machines, and in the cavern’s center rests a pool of still water colored in a blue beyond any sky or mountain, sparkling as sapphires, drowning the chamber in a light that would outshine morning.

  A Bull twitches in Dumb Willie’s arms. He kicks like Dumb Willie is a horse he rides on, but Dumb Willie can’t move fast no more. He can’t breathe and it hurts. He sees little of the light around him, it’s just dark and darker, but he sees that pool of wadder, it’s pretty, and Dumb Willie knows it will be good to die here.

  “The spring. Dumb Willie, there’s the spring. Reverend Johnny was right. He weren’t no fake.”

  Reverend Johnny’s a. Taker.

  Dumb Willie merely thinks these words. He cannot speak them.

  “It’ll heal,” A Bull say. “It’ll make everything right.”

  Dumb Willie carries him to the pool’s edge and falls to his knees. A Bull spills from his arms but it’s okay, A Bull’s bonez can’t be hurt because he’s dead but not for long. But now A Bull’s looking at Dumb Willie all wrong, like it’s snowed on his face and turned his skin there all white.

  “Dumb Willie, you been shot.”

  There’s blood on Dumb Willie’s hands and his shirt. It’s a hole there. Dumb Willie thinks it’s a hole, but he can’t see. It makes bubbles on the front of his overalls that swell and pop each time he tries to breathe, sending tiny drops of blood to gather in the soft earth.

  “Inna wadder. Make you . . .”

  It’s a word. Dumb Willie doesn’t know.

  A Bull looks down at that hole; there’s blood and bone too, those red bubbles go pop pop pop.

  “Inna wadder A. Bull.”

  A Bull crawls along the spring’s edge and grabs hold of Dumb Willie. His eyes are wide and shining. Light comes out of his nose and ears, from the tips of his hair. His lips tremble. “We’re gone get you out of here, Dumb Willie. Get you fixed. We’ll take you to a doctor.”

  Blood spills from Dumb Willie’s lips. His head tilts, his shoulders, the feeling in them gone. His body is now as dumb as his mind.

  From the tunnel comes a call of “Abel?”

  It’s Do-tee say that, but A Bull is not the one she’s come to claim. Not Do-tee but Death dressed like her. Another light shines. Dumb Willie sees a path in the air ahead and how that path is like home, like fields plowed and ready to bloom a garden that will never wilt.

  Do-tee call out, “Get in, Abel. Jump in the water. Jump in now.”

  “Will it work, Dumb Willie?” A Bull ask. “Do you really think?”

  “Make you. Better,” are Dumb Willie’s last words. He can’t breathe and it hurts and he don’t see no light, only that path. It’s warm. There is no pain now.

  A Bull stands as if to jump in and turns his light to Death’s darkness. Dumb Willie shudders a final, shallow breath. Behind a curtain of haze and numbness, he feels a tugging. One eye is black and dead. The other glimpses A Bull pulling with what small measure of his strength remains. Pulling and pulling, his good arm and his casted one each filled with Dumb Willie’s sleeve. He strains not with that faint shadow of brittle bone and thin muscle but with the light inside him instead—with his soul, bright and bursting, and a will just the same.

  Dumb Willie’s body falls forward. Blue diamonds rush toward him. Do-tee’s distant scream of “No!” is swallowed as Dumb Willie falls through.

  Water envelops him, splashing A Bull’s feet and knees and a bit of his chest. Dumb Willie sinks. He urges his arms and legs to move but they cannot. That one eye remains open and blank to the sea beneath the cave, a hidden place under a hidden place, laid clear as glass and swarming with lights.

  Streaks of blue and white and crimson and yellow swirl from the edges, gathering him up, and he sees these lights have wings.

  They pour into the holes made through his chest and stomach. Pain that had been brought to unfeeling now bursts to pain once more, and now to a bliss so pure and deep that Dumb Willie’s mind cannot contain it.

  His lungs begin to burn. Dumb Willie thrusts his hands upward, first his right and then his left, like he’s climbing a ladder. His feet kick with the single longing to live. He breaks the surface with a gasp of sweet air and reaches for a world he nearly lost.

  Do-tee and A Bull stand at the pool’s edge, their faces wet with tears. And though Dumb Willie has been healed merely in body alone, his mind is strong enough that it knows they weep for him. One cries in joy for what has been restored, while the other mourns for what has now been lost forever.

  Water clouds his vision. It pours into his mouth, tasting spoiled and brackish, gagging him. When he looks, the blue waters are gone. There are no more lights. Dumb Willie now treads in the brown waters of a mud hole.

  -9-

  It was the spring did it. So says Dorothy as the three of them limp from the mouth of the pile of junk and walk among the bodies. It was the spring that took those men Arthur brought, a holy place that would not abide the evil of men’s hearts.

  There is no blood. The three men lying upon the ground look at peace save the one Dumb Willie called a weed. The terror with which the man called Lester died is now frozen upon his face. Dorothy hides Abel’s eyes from that sight as they pass, though she looks. It is not Death’s place to judge, only to take, yet some of her hopes Lester bore witness to the sadness upon her as he was
dragged away. It would be a kind of mercy, and one that she never could have offered before finding Abel.

  Dumb Willie holds Abel against his soaked chest until they are well clear and near the landfill’s gate. Here they rest at the trucks the men left behind. Arthur is nowhere. Dorothy gives no thought to pursue, knowing they have pursued too much for too long—her a respite from the toil allotted her; Abel his daddy; even Dumb Willie, who has chased a happy end for them all ever since being thrown upon that night train rushing through Mattingly. And for all that chasing they have found not redemption, but the very emptiness from which they had fled. Dorothy is overcome by feelings that rush in such a mangled surge that she can do nothing but buckle beneath them: a grief of her own futility in saving Abel, and a rage—not only at Arthur’s betrayal but at Dumb Willie for being saved, and at Abel for saving him.

  It was meant the boy would die. Death knows that now. What has been done can never be undone, even where there is love.

  The three of them sit leaning against one of the trucks when a metallic groan comes in the distance. Dorothy stands and tries to see, but the way is too cluttered. The ensuing noise forces them all to cover their ears. The great dome of junk overtop the spring collapses in a crashing sound so loud and deep that the echo carries through every wall and hill and pile of the landfill. And after, silence but for Dumb Willie’s panting.

  “What’d you see in there, Dumb Willie?” Abel asks. “Down in that water?”

  “It’sa. Lights.” His clothes still carry a sheen of blue that drips from his elbows and boots. Grass has begun to sprout where the water puddles in the dirt road around him. “It’s lights. In’ere.” He looks one way first and says, “Sorry Do. Tee,” then looks the other way. “Sorry A. Bull.”

  “It’s okay,” Abel tells him.

  Dumb Willie resumes his silence. To Dorothy it is as if what has happened to him was a thing not so special, nor what he saw beneath those waters anything of wonder. All things hold wonder for Dumb Willie, and she knows that is why the deaf and blind call the boy Dumb.

  “What do we do now, Dorothy?”

  “Nothing to be done.” She looks at him. The boy’s glow is all but gone for now, though it will return. If there is any light to be found in the darkness that is this night, it is that the splash of Dumb Willie being tossed into the spring reached enough of Abel to hold his soul a bit longer. Just long enough. “Time we get home now.”

  “I can’t go home.”

  “Abel, there’s things you don’t—”

  “I can’t go home,” he says again, making her pause. “Dorothy? We have to go see my daddy. If we don’t, then all of this will be for nothing.” Abel’s top lip disappears, as though he is trying to chew back tears. “That water fixed Dumb Willie. It restored him, just like you said. That means Reverend Johnny was right. He said there’d be healing. He was right about that too. Then he said I had to go find my reward. That’s in Fairhope.”

  The big man with them shudders. “Got to get you. Home A. Bull.” There is water in his eyes. Dorothy doesn’t know if it’s from the heart of the spring or the heart of Dumb Willie.

  “There’s nothing for you in Fairhope, Abel. Leastways nothing that can fix things.”

  “There’s one letter left. You said the letters were pointing to where we needed to go. They told us to go to Greenville and to the woman at the farm, so we did. But coming here was your choice, Dorothy, and now you’re sad. Because those letters didn’t say it. So let me read this last one. Let’s just go a little ways more. Just a little ways, and then we’ll be done.”

  Dorothy leans against the truck and looks up to where the stars lie. No words come. She has not the strength left in her.

  -10-

  24 March 2013

  Dear Abel,

  I guess I usually start off these letters by saying everything here is the same, but I can’t say that this time.

  All week there’ve been people working on the street outside. You should hear all the racket. Not that things around here are ever really calm and peaceful. Folk go to great lengths here to make it seem like it’s just that, but it isn’t. It’s never been peaceful to me. I look out my window and I see what anyone else would and a good deal more of what no one else can. All week I’ve seen the street blocked and those men in hard hats standing around with their shovels. I watched them bring in big machines and dig up and scoop out and move what’s not really anybody’s to move at all.

  Do you know what all had to happen just to get one inch of soil on top of the ground, Abel? About five hundred years. I read that once in an article. It said one inch of topsoil is five hundred years of weathering. So I’ve spent this whole week looking out my window and watching men who probably make nine bucks an hour go tearing up what amounts to about six thousand years’ worth of history and not even know they’re doing it. Not even care.

  Do you understand what I’m trying to say? I hope you do, Abel, because nobody else does, not my friends and not anybody. They might have said it’s noisy outside but that’s all, and when they saw me staring out the window at all that digging up, they said stuff like Gary, don’t be acting like that. But I had to, Abel. I don’t know how to explain it other than that, and I couldn’t tell nobody because then I’d be in trouble.

  Then it happened, right this morning. What I heard was the town needed a pipe replaced at the end of the street because of all the rain, so they dug down to get the old one out and then dug down more. That’s where they found it. I knew something happened because right then everything just stopped. You should have seen all the commotion. I don’t know why somebody bothered to call the squad, but they did. The fire department came too (just so they could be nosy, I bet) and then the sheriff. By then, there was more people out on Kable Street than I’ve ever seen, and that’s when they started hauling up bones.

  I know now that’s why I got more and more upset all week at watching those men work. There’s things you just don’t know and I can’t tell you even in a letter. I thought the reason I was getting so sad was because all that history was being tore up inch by inch and it’s not supposed to be that way. Things in this world get laid down just so, Abel. That’s what people don’t get. There’s a pattern to everything that happens and we can’t see it because it’s beyond our knowing, but it’s there and we just have to let it. It’s like a wind that stands against every living thing, and we can either bend to it or let it snap us. But that’s not all about them digging those bones that got me. I guess I knew all along there’d be a body under there even though I never seen a thing before them bones got dug up.

  Sanders (he’s the guy they pay to keep everything around here safe and square) told me awhile ago that nobody knows about those bones. He said they look plenty old to him and had to have been down there a long time, maybe centuries. Folks from the university came to take everything away for study. They even took a bunch of the dirt, if you can believe it. I’m glad they did. That dirt’s now as much a part of the bones around it as the bones. Sanders heard some of those professors talking. They said whoever it was sleeping down there went to glory a way back when it was just the first settlers. Maybe even before. The Cherokee were here before anybody else. Did you know that, Abel? Anyway, whoever it was had a hard end. Sanders said the skull had a hole clean through it, like it’d been beat in with something sharp like a stone. He said it’s not ever a good thing to disturb the dead. I told Sanders he’s right. There’s no greater sin than not letting those who’ve passed go on their way. They got to lay in peace.

  I’ll tell you this, Abel, and it’s no secret because plenty of people saw me after all that. Even Sanders did. I cried over those bones. Nobody else but me did, but that’s okay. I cried over whoever that was and how death must have come so violent and lonely. I cried for the ones that person left behind and all the things that person had left undone and unsaid. I guess it was his time or hers just like someday it’ll be everybody’s. This world is both too beautiful and
too terrible to keep a good hold on any of us long.

  But there was selfishness in my tears too. I was thinking about myself as much as that poor person they dug up because I realized one day I’ll be the same. I’ll be bones and nothing more, and I don’t know what happens after that. I know it’s something, but I don’t know if it’s greater or less than what this world provides. All I know is that every page in the great story of our lives is different except for that last one. That last one is the same for every one of us. Death makes us all equal. It’s maybe the only thing that really does.

  So, Abel, what I’m telling you this time is to always make your life the kind that leaves nothing unfinished. Make sure you do every day all the things you need and then a little extra on top. Make sure you laugh and love and stop to watch the sun fall. Keep your eye on the things that matter and don’t, and learn to know the difference. Most people die every day in some way or another. It’s the good ones who only die once.

  Love,

  Dad

  PART VIII

  FAIRHOPE

  -1-

  Dumb Willie drives.

  It is the only way out of Raleigh that Dorothy can find; she believes Arthur may well be on his way to the police. Even if not, the police may well be on their way to the landfill to investigate what must have sounded like an airplane crash to those inside the few homes nearby. Raleigh is no longer safe for the three travelers.

  Nor can Dorothy risk taking them to the rail yard to jump a train. Too dangerous, too many eyes. Better to take one of the trucks and move away from the city, find a lonely track and wait out the night for an eastbound train that could take them to Fairhope. And they must hurry now. They must before Abel’s soul begins to free itself from its prison once more.