The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  “Luther did what he did ’cause he could. This is Mississippi, after all, and a man can do what he wants in his castle. Even a black man, as long as what he’s doing doesn’t interfere with what the white folks are doing. And Luther made sure what he did didn’t interfere; at least he thought that it didn’t. Until one day—why, up pops the Devil. Then it’s no more Luther owning his badness, it’s his badness owning him.”

  On and on went Willie Willie as the forest settled around him, as tree limbs brushed against the windows, as Peach refilled teacups, as she cut them big slices of Lady Baltimore cake. None of this seemed to matter to Willie Willie. Regina listened, curious, and then she started to shiver. Just as Peach had shivered. She couldn’t be certain, not absolutely, and she didn’t know quite what to make of it, but it was extraordinary to hear what sounded like Mary Pickett’s own story, her Secret of Magic, told by Willie Willie exactly as it had been written. Luther’s face, thunderous as an accumulating cumulus cloud. His eyes hard as Indian flint. His hands big as bullocks. Word by careful word. And with no real ending to it, just like there’d been no real end to the book. Except, of course, the ending of Sister.

  “Luther disappeared, but it was too late for her,” Willie Willie said, shaking his head. “They got her up, got her on into the buckboard, going to the doctor. William Mills. The colored one that was then. Lived over in Mayhew. By the time we—they—got her there, though, it was too late for Sister. She’d already passed on.”

  Regina had been staring at Willie Willie, mesmerized by him, but now she looked up. And there was Peach watching her, eyes big over the rim of her teacup. They were unreadable eyes, really, narrowed by slit lids—but there was something in them that darted Regina’s mind back to Mary Pickett’s, to Willie Willie’s cottage, and to the damaged white shirt hidden there.

  12.

  When tea was finished and the cups and the cake had been wheeled once again outside to the kitchen, Peach said, “Mr. Willie Willie, you go on out there, bring the truck around closer for Miss Regina. She can’t be traipsing around in the dark.”

  It wasn’t quite dark, but Willie Willie said, “Sure thing, Miss Peach,” and set off. The truck was parked at the end of a dirt-pack drive, a short distance, and Regina could surely have walked it, but she stood beside Peach and watched him from the broad Mottley porch. Around them, the silence was suddenly so thick that Willie Willie’s footsteps echoed back to them magnified, as though he might be walking into a megaphone instead of over gravel and then onto solid packed earth. Standing there, brushing up against each other, Regina and Peach heard his truck door slam shut. Regina thought he’d fire the engine, but he didn’t. She saw a match flame and then the glowing ember of his cigarette. She smelled its smoke. Peach reached over and took Regina’s hand. Peach’s hand was warm as cloth cotton, and the air around her smelled like cinnamon toast.

  “Let us rest ourselves here for a spell, enjoy this fine moment.”

  They eased down, sitting side by side, each looking past Willie Willie, their gazes set deep into the forest. Regina leaned toward Peach and held her breath. She realized she’d been doing this all afternoon, even while Willie Willie was telling his story, and that she’d been moving closer, at least in her mind, so that Peach could tell her something.

  And Regina knew that that something would be about the shirt. She’d felt a knowledge scintillating around them all afternoon, since before that, even; a feeling that Peach knew secrets, things that might make a difference, could bring them to the tip of her tongue. That is, if she wanted to. And Peach . . . well, Peach knew about the shirt. She’d hinted it earlier, when she’d come to invite Regina out to Mottley Place, out to the forest. Not wanting to push, Regina wished for the calm of one of Mary Pickett’s Chesterfield cigarettes. Waited. Yet, for a long time, Peach said not a word.

  Then, “You know about Gotcha!, don’t you, from in that Magic book?”

  Regina nodded and Peach nodded with her, the long curved scar on her cheek catching the glow from the kerosene light. “That Gotcha!, it’s real, you know, rooted deep. And we all got some of it growing in us; depending on the life, a little or a lot. Something done to us, something done by us; all in there hidden, waiting to pop out. Just like in the book when the magnolia roots break through the sidewalk, and once they broke up, ain’t nothing you can do anymore to make things right again, make them pretty, unless you cut down the tree. That’s what Gotcha! is, Miss Regina, in that book and in the life. What you done, you got to own up to. Things might still look nice on the surface, but it’s working its way up. One of these days, you least expect it, it’s gonna call Gotcha! You gonna get it or it’s gonna get you.”

  Regina looked up, and for an instant, out there, deep in the trees, she thought she saw her mother, her poor dead father, Joe Howard, all of them together. Honorable people who wanted nothing more than an honorable life. And had been determined to get it, to make something of themselves. Regina squinted closer. Thought for sure, in that instant, she saw a ladybug, bright as hope, flitting around them. Then that same ladybug flying away.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know me some Gotcha!”

  Peach, too, had been staring at something out into the forest. “Wynne Blodgett, rich as he is . . . I got the feeling he’s about to learn him some Gotcha!, too.”

  The rest came out as a rushed whisper. “I’m not good at tale-telling, not like Willie Willie is, so I’ll get this out as quick as I can.”

  After Luther’s “disappearing” and Sister’s “passing on,” Peach had had to get right back to work. No time for mourning. She couldn’t hold on to the store, not by herself she couldn’t. And she needed the money. Black or white, in the South everybody needed money. It would still be some years, she said, before the Great Depressing hit them, but in Mississippi, times were already Depressing enough. But she was a Smart Girl (“At least that’s what they called me”) and worked hard. Her ironing was good. Her pies much renowned.

  “But it’s the laundry part I need to go on about here.”

  At first Peach worked, like she always had, for people like the Lindleighs and the Mayhews, folks who had taken their trade to the Mottley store and knew all about Luther, ladies Peach had known her whole life. But then, as the years wound on and the old families died off, lost their land, started moving away, Peach had to look around and find, as she now delicately put it, “Some new sheets that needed washing.

  “First one showed up, all smiles, was Mae Louise Wynne. Who’d managed to turn herself into Mae Louise Blodgett. She came to me. I didn’t go to her. Seems her husband had recently bought the old Mayhew house and she needed some help, and with what she was paying, I was happy to oblige. But I never had one bit of delusion about Miss Mae Louise and what it was she was after. I was good at what I did, that’s sure enough truth, but it was who I’d done for—that’s what mattered most to Miss Mae Louise. Lindleighs. Mayhews, even Calhouns. She wanted me working for her because I’d once worked for them.”

  But Mae Louise proved easy enough to “do” for, and Peach ended up working over at the Blodgett house for years. They’d settled into a routine early on. Peach showed up at nine Monday mornings, right after Jackson had gone to the office and Mae Louise had gone back to bed. Peach did the washing. That was that.

  “And Wynne?” This from Regina.

  Peach shook her head. “Oh, Wynne could be anyplace, even when he was little and should have been in school. But he wasn’t. Not always. He had those cousins, you see. His mama’s people. He’d sneak off. Spend time with them. He didn’t have much idea what was going on in his house; didn’t care, neither. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.”

  “But didn’t his parents make him go to school?” said Regina, shocked. She thought her mother would have been, too, and Thurgood and Skip Moseley and almost everybody else she knew, striving away up in Harlem, that somebody who had the chance to go to scho
ol didn’t. For all of them, education was the acme of their world, the heartbeat of its ambition.

  “Child,” said Peach, with a shake of her head and a shrug. “You got to understand. Wynne’s mama, his daddy—they loved that boy to death. He could do no wrong. Pretty like he is, maybe everything they wanted to be but weren’t, Wynne got to do just as he pleased.”

  On Mondays, Jackson and Mae Louise would leave their dirty laundry waiting in the hamper in the bathroom, and Wynne’s was supposed to be there, too. But usually it wasn’t, and Peach would have to go hunting it up. She’d take it down to the cellar, wash it all out, hang it to dry, then iron it in the afternoon and put it where it belonged.

  “I hardly ever saw Miss Mae Louise. Once she got up, she was out and about. But she knew how I liked to dress, all patched up and put together. Knew I liked to hold on to things. So, once in a while, she’d sit the sack of clothes, the things she planned to send over to the Salvation Army, at the back door. She told me to take what I wanted and just leave the rest. So, maybe a week after Joe Howard’d gone missing—but before he’d turned up—I sifted through it. And there was the shirt.” A gleam in Peach’s eye aimed straight at Regina. “I didn’t go looking for it. It was just there.”

  “Maybe put in that sack by Mrs. Blodgett?” Regina’s voice barely a whisper.

  “Maybe,” said Peach. “Or by Wynne himself. He was that careless, that above-it-all and special. And it was sure his shirt. I could tell that right away. Nobody in that house was fancy like he was.”

  But she hadn’t realized exactly what she’d found, not initially. The shirt was all smudged up and ruined, but the fabric was good, and almost all the bright, shiny buttons were there, only one of them missing.

  “So I put it with the rest, squirreled it away like I’m used to.” Peach gestured behind her to the house. “Everything I got, I knew I’d pick out a use for it one day. Then things started happening. Joe Howard finally found. Willie Willie beside himself. Miss Mary Pickett looking crushed . . . So much going on, I forgot all about that shirt.”

  “Until?” Regina now edged so close, she could feel Peach’s warm breath on her cheek.

  “Until Willie Willie went tracking, went looking for the place where they killed off his boy and came back with Joe Howard’s medal and a button. Said he’d found them together. And I knew right away it was that button, the one missing from off of Wynne’s shirt.”

  “The thing that Willie Willie’s always flipping,” said Regina, looking back in her mind, seeing him do it, at the bus depot, on Mary Pickett’s street corner. Wherever he’d seen Wynne Blodgett.

  Peach nodded. “And I knew what was around it then, too, that smudgy bad stain where that button had been . . . Why, that was blood. Poor Joe Howard’s blood.”

  “But . . .” said Regina, shaking her head, a lawyer again, not a friend, and Where was the proof?

  “I know what it is,” Peach snapped. “And you know it, too.”

  Regina nodded, and Peach went back to her story, whispering that she hadn’t told any of this to anyone, not even to Willie Willie, and, above all, she’d not shown anyone the shirt.

  “Wynne’s mama,” Peach said, “she’d have forgotten all about it, and Wynne himself would think it long gone. Even if he knew I had it, wouldn’t have made one smack piece of difference to him. I’m Negro, he’s white—that’s the only thing matters. He’s not scared one bit. Ain’t a jury in the South’s gonna go after him. Mr. Bed tried, look what it got him.”

  “But Mr. Willie Willie? Why didn’t you show it to him?”

  This time Peach did sigh. “To keep trouble away.”

  “How?”

  “What you don’t know, really know, how can it hurt you? And that shirt might not mean anything to a Blodgett-bought judge down here in Mississippi. But to Willie Willie—it’s proof.”

  Regina closed her eyes, looked back for an instant. Again, saw that slice of bright silver, tossed into the air, throwing back light. Saw Wynne Blodgett staring at it, transfixed. Saw it land again in Willie Willie’s dark hand.

  “But he knows,” whispered Regina. “Somehow or other.” Both of them do.

  “Not got no proof, though, without that shirt,” Peach insisted. “You the lawyer, you know that. That’s why I gave it to you. You’re Willie Willie’s attorney-at-law, come down to get him some justice. You’ll know just what to do with it, who to give it to. When the time comes, I know you will.”

  “Miss Peach, I’m not sure . . .” And for a moment Regina’s mind was crawling with fear. That Peach was giving her too much credit. That Skip Moseley was right and she was out of her league.

  “No,” insisted Peach. “You’re the one. I thought it out before I gave it to you, and I been thinking about it ever since. You can take that shirt away, use it to get a real trial for Willie Willie. Up there with some fair-minded New York folk.”

  “Miss Peach, justice . . . the system . . . it doesn’t work like that. What happened here, it’s got to be tried here. At least at the start.”

  Peach looked out toward Willie Willie. “You’ll figure out something.” Then, “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

  They sat staring at each other for a moment, each deep in thought, both still as stones. Finally, Peach patted Regina, a soft running of fingers along her arm, then reached into the deep pocket of her apron and brought out something cold and hard, and passed it to Regina. She pressed it deep into the delicate bones and small mounds of tender muscle that made up Regina’s hand. Pressed down so hard that Regina cried, “Ouch,” and would have pulled back, but she couldn’t.

  What Peach had given her was a key.

  She looked over at Peach again, and, for the first time, this close, Regina could see the tracing of fine lines around her new friend’s mouth, could almost see Peach’s lips clutching tight to cigarette after cigarette. She wondered what life must have been like for her, the witch, living out here all these years after Sister had died and Luther . . . After whatever it was that had happened to Luther. Peach all by herself with the Gotcha!

  “It’s to the jailhouse,” she said. “The new one my daddy built up with his two hands, from its foundations. Did everything in it. ’Member I told you about that? Now, my daddy was a man given to pondering deeply, and when he finished up the iron work on the windows and the rooms and the lock-ups over there at the jail what he thought to himself was, ‘Henry Mottley, you go ’head and make yourself an extra one of them cell keys.’ See, living in Mississippi like we do, you never can tell when a nice set of jail keys might come in right handy. You still can’t tell it now.” She took a breath. “Daddy called it a ‘just in case.’”

  Down the path, Willie Willie arched his cigarette out the window. The two women heard his truck door open, heard the rustle of leaves as he ground the cigarette butt carefully into the earth.

  Peach said, “He’s always careful about that. ‘Don’t want no fires this deep in the forest.’ That’s what he says.”

  He climbed back inside, started up, and they heard the gentle rumble of its engine and the smooth way Willie Willie shifted it into gear.

  “Just in case,” Peach repeated. “Keep hold to it. Don’t tell a soul.”

  • • •

  ONCE SHE AND WILLIE WILLIE started off, Regina rolled down the window, looked back. Peach stood on tiptoe on the top step of her porch, as though by stretching tall she might be able to make them out a little while longer before they disappeared. At least, that’s what Regina thought. She waved and waved, quick motions, almost urgent in their goodwill, and Regina wanted to tell Willie Willie to stop the truck for a moment. That she needed to run back to Peach and tell her something, or hear something from her. But she realized how silly this sounded.

  I still have a week here. I’ll see Miss Peach again soon. There’ll be plenty of time to come back. Why, when I come back I’ll
bring my copy of Magic and I’ll get her to sign it. Miss Peach writes as fine a hand as Mary Pickett does. Didn’t that invitation she gave me look perfect, and she must have written it out herself. I’ll bet she’ll like it when I ask for her autograph.

  A crow cawed. An owl hooted. Willie Willie turned out of the forest, onto the main road. And Peach disappeared.

  They drove along in silence, the road a ribbon before them, mile after dark mile. And no sound on it except the rattle of the truck, the call of autumn’s last lonely cicadas, the soft rustle of the wind as it breathed through the trees. Regina’s mind was on what Peach had just told her, on that shirt. She still had no idea what she would do with it. But now that she realized how important it was, she was anxious to get back to the cottage, to check on it, to make sure it had not disappeared.

  She was thinking all this when she heard Willie Willie say, “I do believe you might do it.”

  Regina turned toward him. “Do what?”

  “Set things right for Joe Howard. Peach said you would. Told me that the first time she met you. Repeated herself again when the two of us went out back to the kitchen room after the tea.”

  Again, Regina thought to the shirt, to what Peach had just told her, but said, “She thinks I can get us a trial in New York, but I can’t. We got to work here, and things don’t look good. You got a judge out of town bird hunting, and a district attorney who’s washed his hands of the whole thing. Says he’s done what he could. Got a grand jury called, didn’t he? And everybody, himself included, acts like he’s some sort of saint.”

  “A grand jury was something. Nothing like that’s ever been done before, at least not in Revere. Not for a Negro man. Got my hopes up with it. If the law worked, then the order behind it might work, too. That’s what I thought. But nothing came of it, and before you got here, I swore I’d just . . . Well, I guess you don’t need to know what I was planning to do.”

  “Did I tell you,” said Regina, brightening some. “Jackson Blodgett did get the sheriff to get me the grand jury docket—not that they helped all that much. He said you were the one first took him out to the forest.”