The Messenger of Magnolia Street

by River Jordan

  We can see Trice spooning oatmeal into her mouth at the table, mindlessly eating while she reads from a book. It is a story about traveling to faraway places, a story filled with exotic flavors so pungent that she lifts her feet up off the ground and begins dancing on her toes even while sitting down. She is unaware that Nehemiah is about. She has forgotten about the whole affair. She delivered her message and rode home, sleeping most of the way with Billy listening to the radio because with her asleep he could drive without Trice singing along. You can’t get her to shut up. And Trice can sing to beat the band, but sometimes he just wants to hear the music like he is alone. And driving home he could do that.

  But now, Trice doesn’t look as if she remembers the trip at all. Isn’t the least bit concerned about the things that previously had weighed so heavy on her mind and heart. All that revelation has dissipated, as if she had run her portion of the race, had passed the baton, and was now free to sit down, mindlessly spooning oatmeal, at least until Chapter 4, which is where she’ll be when Magnus finds something that must be done.

  At the wildly manicured yard of Magnus (which provides great hiding places for the cats to slink and pounce), the road takes a sharp curve past the mailbox. We can then turn back and follow it to the center of things and see that Kate is busy in the kitchen making a batch of potato salad that she is going to offer up at lunch. She occasionally wipes her hands on her apron and walks to the front window, looking out between the cafe curtains (which she notices should be washed and ironed again), and looks up at the clock. It is 8:35, and she is thinking Nehemiah is running late. Or might not come. But that’s all right, she tells herself, I know where to find him. And if he doesn’t walk in here in the next hour, he’ll be sorry. She doesn’t even know why she feels this way. Not really. But her sights have been set. She’s not backing down.

  Billy stretches his legs out under the kitchen table, angles them sideways so as not to kick his brother.

  “You know you’re not gonna get out of that meeting this morning.”

  “I know.”

  “You know she knows you’re here now, and she will come looking for you.”

  “I know.”

  “If you are gonna let it fall that way, just let me know, ’cause I don’t want to be here.”

  “You want to ride with me down there?”

  “Nope.”

  “I figured as much.”

  Nehemiah rises from the table like a man wearing a noose. The fact is, he loves his aunt Kate with all his heart. The fact is, his heart jumped a little out of sheer gladness when she elbowed her big way into that seat. Fact is, a tiny part of him wanted to put his head over on that big shoulder like he did when he was five, and fifteen, and might just do when he is fifty if she lives to be eighty.

  “So you going on down there?”

  “Guess I am.”

  Billy is chuckling under his breath. “Oh, and Nehemiah, I don’t know, it’s up to you, but,” he rests his hands on the back of the kitchen chair, looking down, then back up at Nehemiah, “I imagine you got a bag with some more clothes in it, but just in case you need ’em, your other clothes are still hanging in your closet.” He pauses and the brothers just look at one another for a while, Nehemiah not exactly knowing how to process this information. “I hadn’t changed anybody’s anything. You know, just in case somebody came walking back through the door one day.”

  Nehemiah understands the just in case scenarios that Billy isn’t saying. It’s the just in case Nehemiah gave up on a different life. The just in case their mother resumed hers. Came walking up the front porch steps, her black purse on her arm, calling out, “What are you boys up to?”

  Nehemiah got his dimple from his mother, but his is on the opposite side. They smiled at one another like a mirror image. And then smiled even wider.

  “I appreciate it” is all Nehemiah says.

  Then I wait to see what will happen next.

  “Well, I’ll just see you later. Me and Sonny Boy’s got things to do.” Billy says, and heads outside to his truck, calling to Sonny, saying, “You want to take a ride, boy?”

  And Nehemiah is left alone in a quiet house with the memories rising up from the floorboards, wrapping around his ankles, beginning to hold him fast to the ground. He goes back to the door to his room, the one he had lived in every remembered day of his life in Shibboleth. And now, he stands before the door as if it’s a vortex, as if when he turns that knob, he will have to say good-bye to any future he had imagined because he will not be able to get back across the threshold. Nehemiah is forgetting that the power of choice is just that. And the making of it is all his.

  He turns the knob, opens the door, fights the urge to close his eyes. But there is no blinding flash. No irreversible line crossed. There is just the exact same old space. Exactly the way he left it. Exactly the way that he stood, surveyed the room, repositioned that picture on the dresser one last time, thought about taking it, and for reasons he still doesn’t understand, left it sitting there. It’s the one taken of him and Trice and Billy. When they were seventeen, sixteen, and nineteen and in that order to be exact. Their faces are still water wet, smiling, hair dripping around their faces. Trice is standing between the two of them, her arms hooked inside their elbows. It had been a perfect picture. Somehow capturing all their summers. All the green, and the wildness, and the freedom. But then, to capture it fully, you have to have Billy’s fingers behind Trice’s head because that’s the way it was. And you’d have to see what you can’t. The fact that Trice was pinching the inside of Billy’s forearm—hard. And you’d have to know about the warm place her hand had left on Nehemiah’s arm long after it was gone. What I can see is that Nehemiah can’t help but soften when he looks at it. He picks the picture up in his hand, studies the image, wipes the dust from the glass before he puts it down.

  He opens the closet door. It squeaks on the hinges. Billy is true to his word, not a thing has changed. There is the slightest smell of mothballs, placed there forever ago. Nehemiah runs his fingers down the arm of his old jacket. But then something on the closet shelf catches his eye.

  “Hey,” he says aloud. “I’d forgotten all about this.”

  Trice looks up from her reading and pulls her eyebrows together. She listens, but there is no sound except the wind and Magnus saying, “No, no, you are too fat already.” She knows this must be directed toward General, the gray tomcat with the yellow eyes. He’s a pushy one. She listens a little longer and puts her nose back in the book. She is up to Chapter 4.

  At this precise moment, between the written lines a solar eclipse is taking place. The world is falling into shadow and the people are perplexed. They do not understand the word orbit and are full of fear and trembling. They believe that something catastrophic is about to happen. And that following this event nothing will ever be the same.

  Friday, 9:28 A.M.

  It’s almost 9:30 when Nehemiah walks through the front door of Kate’s Diner. A few die-hard stragglers have been holding on, wanting to see the hornet’s nest in full fury, but they are forgetting something as Kate steps through the kitchen door. She looks up and fills her eyes with Twila’s boy. Not the one that had smelled—now how would she put that—good but foreign. Not the one with the manicured nails and all that slickness hanging about him like so much strange air. But the one that had just walked through her door. The one that was standing before her in his old, faded, threadbare jean jacket and blue jeans. And she thinks, By God, if he doesn’t even have his boots on.

  Her wrath spills from her shoulders until it is only a puddle at her feet. A puddle she easily steps over on her way to wrap some fleshy arms around the boy. And with that enormous hug, with Nehemiah’s head disappearing into the body parts of Kate Ann, the audience members shake their heads and start to count their change. Doggone if the show isn’t over before it had good begun.

  Kate pulls Nehemiah to a booth in the corner, one situated where other people can’t be tending to thei
r business.

  “Did you eat?”

  Nehemiah says no, but he is looking at the clock. “You changed that clock out.”

  “Well, I reckon so, it’s been over ten years since you stepped foot in here.”

  “Wrong. I was in here last night.”

  “How ’bout some biscuits and gravy?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And some bacon, or a pork chop, would you rather have a pork chop? And I’ve got some…”

  Now he knows she is talking about food. See him nod. See him plaster on a smile, lock it into place. Nehemiah is no fool. Not by a long shot. He knows that clock hasn’t been moved since it was hung there. He now knows what he saw, what he heard last night, was either a delusional apparition or something much more interesting. He starts to look around with a heightened sensitivity.

  What’s going on? he wonders. His eyes are still fastened on the clock when Kate begins to deliver a breakfast of sausage links and grits, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes on the side, biscuits and gravy, and homemade blackberry jelly saved from two years ago.

  “We didn’t get enough rain last year to count for nothin’. Blackberries dried up on the vine.”

  “Aunt Kate, is anything strange going on around here?” Nehemiah doesn’t call her Aunt unless he’s serious. And he’s serious. He’s thinking about Trice’s dream, and the gold rain and the clock.

  “Well, I guess so, I’m sitting here looking at your face.”

  He stops thinking about clocks and looks into the familiar face across the booth from him. The hair is curled up from the kitchen heat, the blue eyes are still full of spark. “How’s it look?”

  She cocks her head, “I’d say, just about like it did when you were about five years old. Just about exactly the same.”

  “I have a few more wrinkles.”

  “I’m looking in between ’em.” She would like to reach over, put the back side of her hand on his face like she did when he was a boy, but he is so new. So new all over again, and she doesn’t want to scare him away. “So now, Nephew, tell me, what is going on up there in the high and mighty business of the capitol?”

  “Well,” Nehemiah begins a truly serious attempt to answer when he suddenly remembers he is hungry. Then the hunger turns into something else, as if he is growling from his toes, his arches, his ankles. He is voracious. He thinks that he hasn’t eaten in, well, only a few hours, only since last night, comes to him as a surprise. But his hunger feels much older than that. Hunger that winds and growls around the empty places of his soul. Before he knows it, he isn’t eating. He is diving, rolling, wading through food. Rejoicing in food. Passionate all over again, in a brand-new way, about food. About each dish laid out before him. His knife is the conductor, his fork the first string, and he is performing for a private, delighted audience of one. He has wandered right into being love-drunk on gravy, and just another bite of that jelly on just one more biscuit. He is full of so much love, so much flour, and pinches of this and that, that his eyes water. And he can’t say a thing about the capitol. Right now it is a far, distant, disembodied land. He is living on the isle of warm comfort. He is swimming in its languid spell.

  “Well, then, if you don’t have anything to say about your work, what about the women?”

  And again Nehemiah can’t answer. He tries. He tries to conjure up a face of the adjunct professor he had dated for almost but not quite seven months. But instead he bites a link sausage and forks up the home fries. Says something about a “nice girl once. Went to Europe. Didn’t come back.”

  “She was probably testing you and you failed.”

  Nehemiah nods but he doesn’t understand what he failed at. Doesn’t remember a test. Just a blue dress at the airport when he told her good-bye. And now that is what surfaces, a blue dress. The blue dress is wearing brown hair with sorrowful eyes and the scent of lavender.

  “She was wearing blue last time I saw her.”

  “See, it was a test.”

  “I must’ve needed you there to sort it out for me.” He gives her a wink.

  “You don’t need me up there, honey. There’d be trouble in that move. Washington would never be the same.”

  While he eats, and butters, and dips, and dives, Kate fills him in on the remember-when’s. She paints pictures of his mother, tells stories of Billy and Trice and him running around swearing they had discovered treasure. “Made up a treasure map so you could find your way back. Knocked right there at that back door to the kitchen,” she points through the kitchen in the direction of the door, “and asked me for tools, for knives to guard the treasure! Can you just imagine? I gave you spoons, said, ‘Guard it with these.’”

  For the slightest second, Nehemiah hears, “Hurry up, Billy. Hurry up!” But it’s an echo and it fades before he swallows the next bite. “Then you took off again. Down to the springs. It’s a wonder you didn’t all drown. Mercy me.”

  Nehemiah’s cheeks are red, flushed. The warmth is spreading through every region. Even the ends of his fingers feel flushed. But he hears the word springs, knows it is important, and tries to lash onto it. Tries with all his might to use the word for leverage to pull himself up from the plate of gravy, pull his face up from the bite he is about to take. And he does, but by the time he focuses on Kate’s eyes, he has forgotten the word. He couldn’t carry on an intelligent conversation if he had to.

  “Guess you’ll be ready for a nap soon.”

  “I don’t nap,” Nehemiah says, suppressing a yawn. “Besides, I just got up.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  He looks at the clock, the regular diner clock, but the time says 12:04. He prairie-dogs his head up above the booth. The restaurant is almost full of people. The noise carries up where he can hear everything that he was missing. “I’ve been eating for two and a half hours?” He looks at the plates, realizing some have been emptied, taken away, others refilled.

  Kate gets up from the booth; she does this by pulling on the edge of the table until she has enough leverage to hoist herself up and out. “I couldn’t say exactly. Just that right now, you look well fed. And like you need to go to bed.”

  Caught in some strange tide, Nehemiah gets up from the booth and makes his way out the front door. He forgets if he said good-bye or not. He forgets if he offered to pay (knowing Kate would say no but offering just the same). And later, when the sun is much lower in the sky, he will forget exactly how he got back to the house, passed Billy on the porch steps, and went straight inside to his mother’s bed and lay across the top quilt. If he had been a little more aware, he would have noticed the residue of gold dust pressed between the pattern, but he has placed his face in the middle of the threads and gone deeply, dreamlessly to sleep.

  The glacier has met his match. There is the slightest scent of hope in the air, the barest whisper of a whistle on the wind.

  Friday, 4:44 P.M.

  When Nehemiah wakes for the first time, he realizes the magnitude of something peculiar enveloping him. He sits on the side of the bed, looks out the window at the low glow in the west, the shadows being cast across the yard. He pats the quilt next to him and raises his hands to run them through his hair, and stops, holds his palms out before him, bends his head down, rises, and walks to the window. He holds both palms up, turns them to the light, and there, unmistakably, is the glow of gold. He returns to the bed, kneels down, and peers carefully and closely at every thread, every pattern’s curve. Then he rises very slowly, his hands still in the air, and moves toward the door. He is calling Billy. He is trying to turn the doorknob with his elbows. He is calling again and again, trying to call out while looking away, to call without breathing on his palms. He is looking for, longing for, validation, proof, confirmation of this incredulous occurrence when the dust begins to dissipate. He watches, no longer calling but quietly watching. The gold appears to shimmer, rises in the air, then falls back into his palms, sinks below the surface. He doesn’t need to turn around, doesn’t need to examine th
e bed to know there is nothing there.

  Billy is driving around thinking about his brother, who passed him hours ago with not much more than a grunt then fell into some sort of unnatural sleep on the their mother’s bed. He had watched him long enough to make certain that he wasn’t sick or drunk. Nehemiah wasn’t a major drinker when he left town, but a lot could happen, obviously had happened, since he’d been gone. No smell of alcohol. No sign of fever. He had quietly pulled the door to and said, “Come on, Sonny Boy, looks like we got some sniffing around to do.”

  Billy is looking for pieces of something, but the question he asks himself is, to what? He drives over to see Trice. This is one time he’s hoping she’s seen something, anything out of the ordinary, or had any strange feelings at all, particularly where Nehemiah is concerned. Then he realizes that he hasn’t even told her about Nehemiah being home, so he drives on past the house, down to the river, just to think for a while. And maybe, while he’s at it, he’ll drop a line.

  Back on Magnolia, Magnus is sitting in her porch rocker, rocking fast and clippity, her feet touching the floor then pushing off quick and hard again. Was that Billy that just drove past too darn fast? She thinks it was and makes a mental note to tell him he better slow down. Did I mention that Magnus dips snuff? Right now her bottom lip is full, jutting out below her top one. She is rocking and dipping too fast for the cats to ride along in her lap, but they are keeping an eye on her just the same.

  Occasionally, her feet come to a solid stop, then she looks hard off into the distance until she nods to herself and takes off again. She is sorting through some business. She is making up her mind.

  In the midst of this decision-making, Trice opens the screen door, sits absently on the porch swing. Her swinging is slow, rhythmic, her toe barely touching the porch to push off again. This has an effect on Magnus. Without her realizing, she begins to slow, to rock more comfortably, to keep a steady beat. General jumps up in her lap, stretching his paws out almost to her knees. Magnus spits off the porch, her fingers forming a V beside her lips.