The Secret of Magic (25 page)

But there was a world out there that still cared about Peach and Collie and Booker and Jack and shivered when they thought of Luther Mottley crying out,
Gotcha!
from his hidey-hole grave in the hollow of a dead stink tree. And didn’t Mary Pickett realize how important Booker had been, and Daddy Lemon, to Regina and to thousands of other little Negro children like her, reading for the first time about spunky black heroes in a white book?

“There is no new book,” said Mary Pickett, “nor will there be.”

“But what about . . . ?” Thinking,
She told me the first day she was writing a new one. Why, just now, she walked me right past it. She must have known I’d see.
Regina persisted. “You told me you worked on it, every morning.”

“No. New. Book.” And that was that.

After a moment, Mary Pickett continued. Her voice changed now, brisk and to the point. “I brought you here to talk about Jackson so you’d understand enough—so I could talk about Wynne. That’s what you want, isn’t it, to hear something real about Wynne?”

“I’d like to learn the truth about him.”

“The truth?” said Mary Pickett, with a lift of her lips. “Oh, that again.”

She waved her hand through the spectral smoke of her cigarette, waving it away—and maybe the truth with it.

“I imagine Wynne’s attractive enough, but . . . he isn’t smart like his daddy, not disciplined, not used to having to work. Nothing like Jackson.” They were sitting so close that Regina could see Mary Pickett’s eyes widen with the wonder of this as she continued. “Wynne didn’t go to the war like Joe Howard, even though they were the same age, or near the same age. I imagine he’s regretting that now. The not-going-to-war part, I mean. Soldiering’s always been an important tradition around here. The honor of it. The medals. And if people thought your mother might have pulled strings, might have been the one . . . Well, you can imagine. Wynne has his failings, his weaknesses. Still, Jackson loves him. How could he not? His own son.” Through the smoke of one cigarette after another, she said all this to Regina.

“But he—Jackson—was wrong to think that Joe Howard’s death would just go away, that Willie Willie would let it be forgotten and disappear. I must have thought that, too, and I should have known better. It never happens like that.” She lifted her shoulders, let them slump. “Down here, in the South, we tell the same stories over and over again, always hoping things will turn out different and better, with just one more telling, with just one more word said a different way. Can you understand?”

What Regina understood was that Mary Pickett was making excuses for Wynne Blodgett. Which meant she must know perfectly well what he’d done.
Everybody
must know it, just like Tom Raspberry had told her they did. Regina reminded herself that this was Revere. Who’d stand up against the son of a rich man who probably owned every mortgage in town?

No one, that’s who. She thought of this while Mary Pickett went on talking and talking. Regina waited, not saying a word, as Mary Pickett touched flame to cigarette after cigarette, as she took deep drags on them, as she blew the smoke out. As she told her about all kinds of things that didn’t add up. About the town. About the Negroes. About the whites. Explaining, or trying to, at least, about Jackson Blodgett and how poor he’d once been. About the traditions and how they ruled here. This, at last, was something Regina could understand. She’d felt the force of how-things-are-done emanating even from the otherwise progressive soul of Tom Raspberry, even from Willie Willie himself. What an effort it must take to stand up against it. For the first time, Regina realized what a hornet’s nest Mary Pickett had stirred up bringing her here.

“But why did you do it?” Regina said.

I already told you.

That’s what she thought Mary Pickett would say, and she braced herself for it, not only for the sharpness of the words themselves but for the impatience and the loftiness that always seemed to be the force behind Miss Calhoun speaking her mind.

Instead, Mary Pickett, for a moment, turned quiet as the night around her. Then she said, “I don’t know anymore why I did it. I only know it was something I had to do. And, my God, what a good and right idea it seemed, at least at the time!”

She smiled then, but the smile was a dreamy one not meant for Regina, but aimed past her, out of the room, out the window, to that piece of rutted sidewalk in front of Calhoun Place where, long ago, a young Mary Pickett Calhoun had first
seen
a young Jackson Blodgett.

I
t was still dark when Regina left Mary Pickett’s, but there was a morning’s dew already on the ground. She felt the freshness of it as she hurried across and slipped into the cottage, tired and anxious now to climb into her bed.

Once there, though, she couldn’t sleep; her mind swirled with what Mary Pickett had told her, the story—Mary Pickett’s story—of Jackson Blodgett and Wynne, of Willie Willie, all of them secrets Regina now shared. And the new book itself, the one she’d seen on Mary Pickett’s desk, or thought she’d seen, except now she wasn’t so certain. Had it really been a book after all?

“Regina, you ever been in love?”

But it was Mary Pickett who was in love and perhaps always had been with Jackson Blodgett, a man who had once been married to her but was now long married to somebody else. Regina turned around, looked back at Calhoun Place’s darkened upstairs window.
Poor Mary Pickett,
she thought, and shook her head. Not only had Mary Pickett sided, all those years ago, with Jackson against her father, now she felt called upon to defend his son.

But from what? That’s what Regina couldn’t understand. It was obvious to her by now that Wynne Blodgett at least knew something about how Joe Howard Wilson had died, if, indeed, he hadn’t been the one to kill him. Everything she’d heard, everyone she’d talked to—black or white, obliquely or pointedly—had at least implied this. And, if so, what was the problem? A rich man like Wynne Blodgett, son of a rich man—the law had already proven that he had nothing to fear. Even if she could somehow or other get him to admit what he’d done, brag about it again like Tom Raspberry said he had done in the beginning . . . What good would that do? None whatsoever.
At least, that’s what everybody wants me to believe.

But a man has been killed, and the man who did it—or the one everybody thinks did it, who knows for sure?—is walking around free as any one of the bluebirds that nested out in Mary Pickett’s mailbox. But without proof, everybody could just be assuming. Regina thought back to Thurgood, to what he had always told her. Assume
makes an ass out of
u
and
me
.
Maybe everybody was wrong and Wynne innocent. It was a possibility. But without evidence one way or the other, how on earth could she know?

• • •

REGINA WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
to the rich and spicy scent of cinnamon. Groggy, she glanced down at her watch, saw she’d taken it off, looked over for it—and there was Peach, the source of the sweetness, dressed bright as a rainbow and sitting snug on the easy chair. Regina blinked, thought she might be still dreaming. But no, it was Peach, all right, what you might call the Real Deal Peach, all decked out in exuberant snatches of paisley, a yellow scarf, blue dress, red fringed Mexican shawl; bright sunlight streaming through the window, flashing at the edges of the sickle-shaped scar that ruined her cheek.

“I called in from downstairs. Didn’t hear nothing, so I came on up. Dinetta dropped off your breakfast, but it’s got cold,” she added. “Almost time for lunch.”

“Lunch?” said Regina, instantly wide awake.

“It’s a wonder you could sleep, all the racket. Revere Garden Club meeting on Monday. Miss Lilla Raymond—Miss Mary Pickett’s dead mama’s dear friend, from ’cross the street at Raymond Hall—is going to be speaking on ‘The Value of Sweet Olive Versus Autumn Clematis as the Basis of the Fall Herbaceous Border.’ I’ve heard the title called out so many times, I memorized it myself. Place should be packed. Miss Mary Pickett’s working herself into a frenzy.”

Mary Pickett—my employer
—
is up and I’m not?

“Oh, my God,” Regina said, and scrambled to the bottom of the bed for her robe.

“No hurry,” said Peach. “Miss Mary Pickett’s always in some kind of agitation. It’s in her nature. She never was one could just sit down and be happy, even when she gave it her first best try.”

“You know her long?” Regina was dying for coffee, but even more than that, she was dying to talk. To Peach.

“Long enough.” Peach leaned forward. “I don’t
live
here, not like Willie Willie does, or used to at least, but I
work
here. Sometimes. I’ve got my own independent place. But I
been
here and
was
here the first time Mr. Jackson came around for Miss Mary Pickett, back when they were young and called themselves sparking each other.”

“I’m not really that interested in what happened back then,” said Regina, a little too quickly. “What I wanted to ask you about is Wynne Blodgett. And about something else, something someone left here.” Even with this, Regina thought she might be saying more about the shirt than she should.

But Peach shook her head. “Oh, Mr. Wynne . . . All in good time. Well, you sure should be interested in Miss Mary Pickett, in her ways and her means, since you work for her now, too, don’t you? Seems everybody in Revere ends up working for her one way or another, furthering what she got in mind she wants them to do.”

Regina’s eyes narrowed. She couldn’t tell what Peach meant by this. But she wanted to know. She thought of Peach the first day she saw her, the way she’d gone in the front door of the Old Jail Café, sashayed where she wanted to on the courthouse square. She thought of the two sisters in the forest, their brother,
The Secret of Magic
—and Willie Willie.

If she wanted to, thought Regina, Peach could make a few things very clear.

But Peach seemed to have more important things on her mind than making things clear for Regina Mary Robichard. She reached within the folds of her shawl, pulled out a large paper square.

Peach said, “I brought you this.”

“This” turned out to be a thin parchment envelope yellowed with age. The envelope had been addressed to Miss Regina Mary Robichard, Esquire. There was no stamp on it. The envelope had not been sent through the mail. In its lower left-hand corner was a flourished
Courtesy of Myself and Mr. Willie Willie
.
In fact, all the writing was carefully scripted. Regina recognized the swoop of its swirls and its crosses.

“It was you!”

“Me, all right,” said Peach Mottley, leaning back, a smile on her face. “Left that shirt here for you to take care of. Did you hide it real good like I told you to?”

Regina nodded, about to say exactly where she’d put it, but Peach clamped her hand over her own mouth, shook her head. “Don’t tell me a thing about it. Don’t tell me nothing I don’t need to know. And don’t bring it with you, neither.” She tapped a light rhythm—
tat-tat-tat
—on the envelope. “That is, if you come. But I
would
come
,
if I were you, you being Willie Willie’s lawyer and all. Oh, I’d come, all right. I’d make a way out to Peach’s. Now that you’ve been invited. There’s nobody come out to Peach’s who don’t find what they been looking for.”

She smiled—and her smile was a promise.

Yet it was hard for Regina to hold back a retort. Peach, like Mary Pickett last night, both telling her what they wanted her to hear and not what she needed to know.

Luther Mottley’s last still-alive sister was already heaving herself out of the chair, pointing the rainbow of her being toward the stoop door that lay just beyond Regina’s bed and led to the stairs.

“The shirt, yes. I understand what you’re wanting. But there’s other things you need to know, too.” Peach shook her head, did not stop her progression. Regina waited until she heard the downstairs door open and close, and then Peach’s footsteps echoing across the pea gravel toward Mary Pickett’s, before she opened the envelope.

Inside was what appeared, at first glance, to be a very old, decorated Christmas card with a green fading wreath, tarnished raised gold bow, a charming
Best Wishes
. The works. Regina ran her finger over the wreath, brought the card to her nose. It smelled of faded lavender, though not unpleasantly so. Regina sat silently, waiting until she heard the screen door of Calhoun Place slam before she turned the card over and read.

Miss Peach Mottley

Invites

Miss Regina Robichard

To take tea and cake with her

Sunday

In the Sometime Afternoon

With Mr. Willie Willie as Escort

The words had been carefully written, their interweaving ducking into all the nooks and crannies of reverse embossing along the card’s back.

You bet she’d be there, but . . . what exactly did “In the Sometime Afternoon” mean, anyway?

• • •

THE NEXT DAY,
precisely at noon, Regina found herself sitting out in Willie Willie’s little garden plot, waiting. She was dressed in her best gray suit and caramel-colored suede pumps, and wrapped up, she thought, a little like a Christmas present herself in a small crocheted afghan she’d found in the old cedar-planked chest that sat at the foot of Willie Willie’s bed. The day had turned cold, with gray clouds skittering overhead through a hard-looking, bright sky. Beyond the gates of Calhoun Place, Third Avenue stretched out quiet as a museum; even the shacks that struggled down from it to the river were silent and still. A day like this, with its clean autumn smells and its absolute silence, its majesty of trees stretched so tall you had to shade your eyes from the sun to see the tips of them . . . In a week or two, in New York, when she got back there, where would she ever find so much living quiet again?

She wondered about Mary Pickett: where she was, what she was doing. She’d caught only quick glimpses of her since they’d sat side by side on the window seat and Mary Pickett had poured out her story. About her long-ago love for Jackson, about this town, about Wynne. And maybe that’s all it had been—a story. Regina was already lawyer enough to realize how hard it was to get to the truth, how people hid themselves under all sorts of fictions. But Regina believed what Mary Pickett had told her, and this belief had brought with it a strange realization—that she now already knew more about the white Mary Pickett than she knew about any of the black lawyers she worked with in New York.

She was weighing all this in her mind, and counting, at the same time, the spider lilies that seemed to have sprung up everywhere, overnight, and trying to identify the fall fragrance, whether it was sweet olive or autumn clematis, when she heard the gentle rumble that heralded the arrival, in the distance, of Willie Willie’s ancient but spiffy Ford pickup.

• • •

BUT ONCE SHE WAS SETTLED
IN
beside Willie Willie in his truck, Regina turned seriously scared. Shaking scared. This was Sunday. Already. So far, she’d come up with nothing really substantive, and almost a week of her two had slipped by. Her thoughts flew straight to New York and to Skip Moseley. Saw him as he would be at this very moment, in the first pew at the Abyssinian Baptist Church up there in Harlem, sitting with his nice, pretty mama and his rich lawyer daddy and his two lawyer brothers, and their two nice, pretty, stay-at-home wives.

Yes, there would be Skip, his head lowered reverently in prayer, his perfectly tailored Brooks Brothers suit hiding a heart that was pumping away.
Heh-heh-heh.
Because she had nothing—clouds but no rain, smoke but no meat. And she was going to fail, and already Skip knew it. Had
always
known it, and soon—very soon—Thurgood would know it as well.

“Sunday, all right,” repeated Willie Willie. “And that means Church Time, and Church Time—like ‘In the Sometime Afternoon’—means different things in your different places. Around here, it generally means the whole of the day. At least it does in your colored congregations. First off, you got your Sunday school and your choir tune-up, then you got your early-morning prayer for them got to go on to their regular Sunday work, then, about ten-thirty or eleven, they roll out the regular service. After that, there’s normally church dinner, one thing or another. Our churches, we’ll use any excuse for a meal. Congregants take their trip home after that to check on the livestock, get themselves a little rest, because at six it’s straight back for evening worship. Your colored church is a filling station. Folks come in and tank up for their week.”

Regina looked down dubiously at her watch. “How’s Miss Peach gonna fit me in with all this activity?”

“Oh, Peach don’t believe in no churching. After Luther got himself disappeared, she decided she was better off just Peach and God on their own.”

Regina glanced across the cracked leather seat to Willie Willie. His clothes were as crisp and immaculate as they always were, a white shirt, dark trousers, spit-shined work boots. It was hard to tell if he’d been to church or not.

They were driving out again over the same road that Regina had originally traveled into town, past the Blodgett/Mayhew house, and the place where the buck had leaped their truck, past the now-deserted bus depot. Once they got out of Revere proper, she saw the houses grow smaller and the land they sat on stretch wider and broader until it reached the red and gold autumn-splashed crouch of the trees. Occasionally, Regina saw a rooster or a pig laid out on flat gravel, its soul making peace with the day.