The Messenger of Magnolia Street

by River Jordan

One that would carry Nehemiah into the far reaches of a much different city where he was determined to evolve into a different man and never look back to the place where things had come undone. Where all his talents, his gifts, and his stories couldn’t bring his momma back to life. Where he decided if he couldn’t help her, he wouldn’t help anybody. He was mad at himself—or mostly at God—he couldn’t decide which. Maybe a lot of both. And, eventually, that anger had spilled over onto the entire town and every soul that dared to still breathe when the goodness of Twila had been ripped off the face of the earth.

  If Nehemiah’s arms could have reached down through the very earth that night, ripped open that casket, and pulled her out, he would have. Oh, yes, he would have. But then who, in the midst of the terror of grief, the aloneness of grief, wouldn’t do the same?

  Nehemiah is remembering this night as he stands by her grave. He is remembering his brother pulling him up the next morning saying, “Come on brother, we got to go home.” And Nehemiah looking at him with eyes full of sorrow and shock, as Billy had added, “Momma would want us to go home.”

  And so they did, and there they found Kate and Trice and Magnus and Blister and he doesn’t remember who else. People just there because being there was all they could do. And Nehemiah had washed his face, and Trice had come through the bathroom door, stood looking at him in the mirror until he’d turned, put his arms around her, and in the sweetest, quietest way, she’d whispered, “It’ll be okay.”

  Nehemiah had thought all these years that he would be standing here sooner. But, surprisingly what he feels now—is that he is Twila’s strength. As if it’s rising up from the ground, from her very bones, and pouring into him. As if she is reaching out, telling him to go on with what he has to do. To carefully identify his priorities. “And Nehemiah, the true ones,” she would often say, “are not always the ones that appear the most obvious.” If there had ever been a time that he needed her sage words, he felt that time was now. Her understanding of the presence of things unseen. Her un-shakable, unmovable faith.

  Billy is waiting, leaning against the car when Nehemiah picks his way back through the concrete tombstones.

  “Momma says, hi.” Nehemiah says, as he gets in the car.

  “Is that a fact?” Billy closes his door.

  “Yep.” Nehemiah cranks the Malibu, revs the engine, and puts it in reverse, “And to tell you that you that you need to get a haircut.”

  Sunday Night, 9:33 P.M.

  Nehemiah is pacing the perimeter of the house. Pacing in circles. Around and around. Treasure maps indeed, he is thinking. A wind is blowing from across town, whipping through the tops of the trees, bending them over. Lightning flashes, far away, still in the distance. An out-of-season lightning storm. This is August weather, he thinks. Everything is out of season. Everything is out of time. He is still trying, despite his best intentions, to put things together from the perspective of some leftover residual of logic. Just when I was thinking he had come so far, so fast, that there was still a chance.

  “You should come inside. It’s fixin’ to storm.” Billy is hanging over the porch railing.

  “I know that,” Nehemiah says, pacing by and passing Billy in front of the house. “That’s part of the problem.” Nehemiah points his arm up at the sky, “Does this look like a normal storm to you? Well, does it? Because it’s not.” Nehemiah has disappeared again around the back of the house. By the time he clears the corner, Billy is sitting in a rocking chair. “Does making those circles help?”

  Nehemiah pauses long enough to say, “You know, it does. But not for long.” He walks up the steps, sits beside Billy. The wind whips the trees, bends the tops over. The sound of it can be heard over into the next county and beyond.

  They rock back and forth just as if the weather was still as pretty as it had been this Sunday morning. From one extreme to the next. From all flowers to all fury.

  “You know something, Nehemiah?” Billy’s drawl sometimes slows to a crawl. “Me and Trice went to Washington to get you for a reason. I guess you been here long enough to figure out the reason ain’t bogus. What you ain’t been here long enough to figure out is exactly what you’re supposed to do, and I imagine that must burn your butt like a mound of fire ants. But you can pace in circles around this house all you want, the fire ants are still biting, and you’re no more closer to the answer than when you first started out.”

  “Thank you very much, Brother, for that astute observation.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What do you think we should be doing?”

  Billy shakes his head, rubs his face, and stares off beyond the porch railing. “You know something, I don’t know. I really don’t. But the funny thing is, I think you do. And that you just don’t know it yet.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’ll just come to me when I’m not looking so hard.”

  “What’s down there in the springs, Nehemiah? Do you know that much?”

  Nehemiah sighs, or was that a groan that I just heard? “I know it’s bad.”

  “Even I got that much figured out, and that only took one trip.”

  The oak tree shudders. They stop rocking, wait to see if another limb will be ripped away. Satisfied, they resume rocking.

  “Here’s the thing, Billy, this is what I need to know real bad. Why didn’t you know something bad was down there before? Why didn’t you get the feeling…Well, how long has it been that the water’s been disappearing?”

  “For years. Only it was little by little. Not overnight, Nehemiah. You’ve been gone a long time. You know, you go down to the water, and the water’s a little lower, only you don’t notice because you go down to the water every day. Maybe it was even disappearing when we were kids and we didn’t notice.”

  “No it wasn’t. Trust me.”

  Billy laughs out loud. This is an old joke between them. Their last name had been a school joke and a topic of conversation since the day they were born. Some say their great grandfather chose it on his way to America to make himself sound, well, like a man of his word. But the only Trust man they ever knew was their father, Joshua, and what they knew was so very, very little.

  “I do trust you, Brother. But you got to tell me about the fox, and about the rain. You got to reel me in.”

  So, as the brothers rock and talk, Nehemiah goes over once again about seeing the fox for the first time. And about seeing him the last time. Then he talks about the night that he walked into that burning house full of flames and walked out again untouched with Blister in his arms. The wind howls. The trees scream. Sonny Boy comes out from under the porch, leans against Billy’s leg, submits to some serious head scratching. After all, they are a family. And when the storm comes upon them, even Sonny Boy figures they are better off if they stick together. Keep one another well within sight.

  “Did you know, Nehemiah, when you went into that house, that we thought you’d killed yourself?”

  Nehemiah thinks again of Trice’s eyes when he walked out. “I did when I looked at Trice.”

  “We thought you were a dead man when you rushed in there, Nehemiah.”

  “I didn’t see what you saw.”

  “I know that now. What I don’t know is why.”

  “Some things, Billy, I really cannot explain.”

  “Yeah, I know that too.”

  Lightning flashes across the sky. Trice would tell you if she were here that lightning is sometimes friendly. Sometimes it is just plain fire.

  The night that John Robert’s house caught on fire, the blaze was started by lightning. That night had unveiled Nehemiah, scarred John Robert, and scared Trice and Billy so bad they were never the same. The lightning was one solitary bolt out of the sky. Caught a pine tree that was so dry the tree went up in flames like a huge match. Then the tree fell, crashing over into John Robert’s roof. With him sleeping. Soundly. Or maybe, more correctly, passed out. He was known as a drinking man, and it had been a drinking night. Folks around Shibbolet
h, guessing what his condition might have been, had said him being alive at all was a miracle. Never mind his condition.

  When the pine tree hit the roof, it caught nothing but the tar paper that John Robert had used, in a bit of drunken haze, to repair the last leak. The tar paper sucked on the fire like it was juice, and blew up. The rafters ignited and, little by smoky bit, the rest is history. Well, it’s that history.

  Nehemiah, Billy, and Trice didn’t see any of this. Nehemiah answered a phone call from Trice in the middle of the night. She told him she had heard John Robert scream in her dream. Then she said, “Oh hurry. Please hurry,” as if she were on fire herself. What she didn’t know was that the pine tree had just caught fire at the point she woke up. Had just fallen over when she dialed their phone number.

  And within minutes, the three of them had been tearing down the road in Old Blue, who was in his glory days of brand-newer. When they pulled up, what was done was almost finished. Go ahead. Ask me why Trice didn’t wake up an hour before with a premonition about the tree. Wake up before lightning ever struck. Ask, but don’t expect an answer. All answers come in the Sweet By and By. And we’re not there yet.

  But now we are at the part when Nehemiah and Billy can rock and recollect in the middle of this new storm. This storm made of funny, fast-cracking lightning. Odd shoots of lightning from odd sources. A crack from the sky. A bolt low over the field. No pattern they’ve ever seen, and they’ve see a lot. And the wind. And no rain.

  We have come to the part of their remembrance where they will again carve out those countless slow-motion minutes. Count them out one by one by one.

  “Then we were standing there with Trice yelling, ‘Oh, God! Do something.’ Over and over again. And me looking for a hose. Do you remember me looking for a hose, Nehemiah? Like that was gonna be able to do anything.”

  “No. I don’t remember the hose.” And he doesn’t. And he doesn’t remember Trice’s screams. He remembers John Robert’s. He always will. They were the screams of a man dying while he’s still alive. And the screams of a man who knows it. “What I remember, Billy, is needing water. Needing a lot of water. Needing a miracle. And then when I looked up, there were those clouds,” he pauses in wonder all over again, seeing the clouds all over again, “and then there was the rain. Rain like I’d never seen, the house being doused and turning to wet smoke and me running in to find John Robert keeled over. He was more of a shadow on the floor than a real man. Then there I was picking him up. You know the funny thing about that?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe I never told you this.” He rocks a minute. “Or maybe I did, but looking back on it, even in the middle of all that madness, I didn’t just snatch him up and run. You know, you think someone in that situation would snatch and run. But I didn’t. It was like I was in slow motion. Picked him up as carefully as picking up a baby from a crib.”

  “And walked right out of that fire big as you please.” Billy finishes for him. Finishes like he is watching it happening right now before his eyes. “Did you know there were pieces of his clothes still in flames when you walked out?”

  “I remember Trice taking off her housecoat, and you taking it and wrapping it around him, taking him out of my arms. And then the most shocking thing, that was when I turned around, Billy, and you know what I saw.”

  “Yep. That house ate up in flames.”

  “That shocked me.”

  “Would shock anybody that experienced what you did.”

  “Still shocks me.” Nehemiah’s throat catches. “And you know I still can’t explain it. Still can’t.”

  “Maybe there’s some things ain’t meant to be explained.” Billy points to the sky.

  “You were the one that was wanting all the answers, Brother.”

  “Wanting answers and needing them are two different things.”

  Nehemiah grins. Full face. Dimple in place. His brother Billy never fails to humor him. Or surprise him.

  The wind whips the trees into a dancing frenzy. And in the middle of this storm Billy and Nehemiah are rocking. Recollecting. Funny how things can look on the surface. They seem as unaware, as unconcerned about the wind in the trees and the lightning cracking around them as you please. But there is not a second that the hairs on their arms have not been standing up, sensitive to the lightest touch. Not a second that they haven’t been ready for anything at any moment. And yet they will talk until they are weary and tired of talking, and after all, they are still full of Kate’s cooking from a noontime dinner.

  Tonight they will rest well. Tonight, in an act of great defiance, in the middle of this storm, they will lie down and sleep. Full of peace. Pregnant with purpose.

  Monday, 6:33 A.M.

  The sound of metal crashing wakes Nehemiah. He opens his eyes, rolls over in his old bed. He crosses his arms behind his head and stares up at the ceiling, just the same way he had that night in Washington that seems like a hundred years ago. The crashing sound is now rolling, blowing across the backyard and off into the distance until it hits against a stand of trees. The picture of Nehemiah, Billy, and Trice smiles down at Nehemiah, and he smiles back. He looks around the walls at the old emblems of his boyhood. A wild menagerie of skins and photos and dreams of another kind of life. There is his collection of knives on a shelf, his shotgun in one corner, his fishing reels and rods in the other. A bronze metal that belonged to his father (Billy keeps the purple heart). And a six-foot rattlesnake skin nailed along one wall. His momma hadn’t wanted it in the house, but when he was twelve he’d killed it and skinned it and at twelve it might as well’ve been a fire-breathing dragon. And that thought leads him back to where he is and what he’s in the middle of.

  “This is a boy’s room,” he says aloud, “and I’m not a boy anymore.” He throws off his cover and reaches for his jeans.

  In the kitchen he finds Billy awake, sitting at the table, waiting for the coffee to finish.

  “Toolshed roof.” Billy says, sleepily.

  “Thought so.” Nehemiah gets a cup down, stands arms folded next to their mother’s old coffeepot. Billy never updates anything. Nehemiah is staring at the percolator’s top, watching the coffee shoot up into the crystal top and down again, as if he was looking into a crystal ball. “How long have I been here, Billy?”

  Billy thinks for a while. “Why don’t you let me wake up good before you ask me such questions.”

  “It should be simple to answer.”

  “Well, if it’s so simple, you should know.”

  I’m thinking maybe they shouldn’t either one of them talk any more until they’ve had their coffee.

  Nehemiah looks out the kitchen window, where he can indeed see the toolshed roof blown clear across the open field where the garden used to be. Can see it in the distance leaning against the stand of trees. The sun isn’t coming up today. The sky is getting lighter but the light isn’t coming through.

  “It’s going to be dark now,” he says, looking at the sky. There are no physical clouds, just a haze. A strange, sickly yellow haze.

  Monday, 7:53 A.M.

  Kate is cooking up a storm as usual, but she has started to notice that people aren’t eating. Not as much. Not the same. But she doesn’t know why. Everybody says everything’s all right. Sitting in that pale yellowish light coming through the window, that’s what they tell her to her face. “Everything’s all right, Kate.”

  Even Catfish, who came by his nickname as honest as a man can by being able to put away more fish and food even as a child than a grown man could. Now even he nods his head, says the same thing, but he has piles of potatoes and eggs left on his plate and that’s just unheard of. And when Cassie Getty eats only one biscuit, it leaves Kate speechless. Cassie can eat all the biscuits in the kitchen. Is she on some kind of new diet? Kate thinks. But then, Cassie’s not one to diet. She stays too busy with her cloning conspiracy for that. But come to think of it, she hasn’t even mentioned cloning today.

  Now then, that puts Ka
te in a mind. She approaches Cassie’s table with all the subtle gentleness of a bull.

  “You on a diet?”

  “Course not.”

  “What’s the matter, then, with my biscuits?”

  “Nothin’ I know of.”

  “You didn’t eat but one.”

  “Biscuits are all right.” There’s that word again, and Cassie says it with such a bland blankness in her face that it forces Kate back into the kitchen, makes her stand with spoons to her nose and tastes to her mouth.

  Then she goes to the kitchen door again, stands there with her hands on her hips watching what isn’t happening. Listening to what isn’t being said. Something is definitely not all right.

  Monday, 8:33 A.M.

  A black Lincoln Town Car is making its slow, methodical way to the house of Nehemiah Trust. It is moving like a battleship through the seas, as if parting the winded trees in its wake. It slowly passes the graveyard on the right, the old one that is not as well kept, the one where the dead died before the time of living memories. They are now truly dust and ashes, no longer living even in the people who came after them. They are only a vapor. But the vapor contains seeds. Seeds that may just rise up and carry into tomorrow. We’ll wait and see.

  But the driver of the Town Car doesn’t know this. The driver knows to drive. To seek. And to find. And Nehemiah is the only focus of this search. The search will end when Nehemiah takes his second cup of coffee out on the porch, wearing nothing but his jeans. And just you look, he’s barefoot. Cutting a fine picture as the Lincoln swings into the driveway and parks. The front door slowly opens, and a black wingtip touches the ground.

  Nehemiah recognized the car in the distance. He has no questions or doubts about this visitor. This is old stuff. He hadn’t wanted to handle things this way, but now things are at his doorstep.

  “Hi, Butch,” Nehemiah says to the suit that is now steadily approaching the porch.

  Butch doesn’t speak until he walks up the steps, looks around at the house, down at Nehemiah’s bare chest, down to his bare feet, where his eyes hang for a moment. “Hi, Nehemiah.”