A Snicker of Magic (12 page)

Jonah sat up straighter at exactly that moment and I was about to ask him if he heard it, too, if he felt as bone-cold as I did.

But Jonah looked out the window and smiled. “Right on time,” he said as he pushed away from the table.

“Pack up the blue book, Felicity!” said Jonah. “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

The wind-chime wind had faded out by the time Jonah led me down Main Street.

I thought about Miss Divinity Lawson’s words. “Every place has a story,” she’d said. So I imagined how Main Street looked one hundred years ago when the Brothers Threadbare played here. Miss Lawson said that the music was so wonderful, so loud and wild and strange, that the trees caught the songs and wouldn’t turn them loose. People could always hear the music, she’d said, “
even when the Brothers Threadbare were out of town.
”

I thought about people dancing down that very same street I was walking down. Maybe the street looked different then. Maybe people dressed different back then. But I’ll bet their hearts sang out
yes-yes-yes
when they danced up the dust of this road.

Nobody was dancing here now. Nobody except Elvis Phillips. And I was fairly certain that’s not the sort of dancing Miss Lawson had in mind.

Elvis stopped howling long enough to say hello to Jonah
when we passed by. Next, we both said hello to Ponder Waller. She was busy sweeping the sidewalk around her storefront, a polka-dot apron cinched tight around her waist.

Made from scratch

Ready to rise

“Bring your mama and sister back and let me feed y’all!” she reminded me. And I promised I would. The door to her shop was propped open with an old book. Smells of sugar and caramel apples drifted into the street, enveloping us in a warm haze of pure delight.

“Bet that’s what heaven smells like,” Jonah said.

“Amen,” I said.

“Hallelujah,” Jonah agreed.

I pulled out my blue book to collect the words Ponder was sweeping up alongside all the dust and dirt and feathers around her door:

Whimsy

Wonder

Celebration

Sorrow

“We’re turning here, Felicity,” Jonah said. And it’s a good thing he told me, because I was concentrating so hard on my words that I might have kept on going.

As we turned onto Second Street, I could hear the river gurgling somewhere close by. And if I could hear the river, that meant we were close to the bridge that brought me into Midnight Gulch.

“The Gallery’s right up ahead,” Jonah said. “Have you seen it up close yet?”

“No,” I answered. My heart ached as we walked toward the old building. “But it looks even sadder up close than it did from far off.”

The paint was mostly chipped off the Gallery wall, but not enough for me to tell what Stone Weatherly had painted there one hundred years ago. His painting was probably faded by now anyway. Time fades every picture, no matter how bright it is to start.

The spray-painted words on the Gallery still trembled and shivered, like they didn’t belong there. But today, the words weren’t the only thing that looked out of place.

A skinny woman sat on the sidewalk, her back against the Gallery wall. She kept her knees pulled up against her chest and her eyes cast down. She kept an old canvas bag slumped on the ground beside her.

I couldn’t tell much about her face right then because all I could see was her hair: dark black and long, with yellow ribbons twisted through the braids closest to her face. She held a cigarette loosely between her skinny fingers. Smoke curled off the tip and rose up into the most extraordinary words:

Magnolia

Star root

Dragon

Luminous

Memory

The silver bracelets along her arm jingled pretty as she lifted the cigarette to her mouth. That’s when I first saw her face; it was as strange and pretty as her words had been. She was spellbinding.

She must have noticed us right then, too. She smiled, starry white.

“Jonah Pickett,” she rasped. “How’d you know I’d be out here, Honeybee?”

“Florentine calls me Honeybee because my hair is blond and prickly,” Jonah said.

“And because you’re so sweet!” said the woman, who looked about the same age as my mama. They were both too young to have so much sadness caught in their eyes. “How’d you know I was sitting here hoping for company?”

Jonah wheeled up beside Florentine. He pulled an icy pint of Blackberry Sunrise from his backpack. He grinned as he handed her the ice-cream carton and a plastic spoon. “The Beedle knows everything.”

Florentine glanced at me. She glanced back at Jonah and raised an eyebrow. “Pumpernickel?” she asked.

Jonah nodded. “She knows.”

“Does she now?” Florentine drawled. “This girl must be something special.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jonah smiled at me. “She sure is.”

The tips of my ears burned so hot I thought about running off to dunk my head in the river. Instead, I sat down on the sidewalk across from the starry-smiled stranger.

“You better tell me more about her, then,” said Florentine. “Better tell me more about this pretty little girl you done told your pumpernickel secrets to.”

“She’s my best friend, Felicity Pickle,” Jonah said.

Best
friend. Not just a friend, a
best
friend. The
friend
word fluttered around between us, still squirmy and bug-legged. Now it had a set of golden wings.

Jonah said to me, “I wanted you to meet Florentine because she’s a poet.”

A poet.
No wonder she was a strange and starry-smiled kind of pretty. No wonder she was beautiful. Poets always are.

“I’ve been many other things, too,” Florentine said. “I’ve been a laundry folder and a bread baker. I worked at a fish market on the Georgia coast. I flicked scales off them fish for so long that I still see words that way, shiny as scales, brittle as bones. And somehow, someday, somewhere along the way” — she shrugged her shoulders — “I became a poet.”

“Felicity’s a poet, too,” Jonah said softly.

“I’m not a poet.” I gulped. I reached down to touch the fluffy crown of a dandelion blooming through a crack in the sidewalk. “I make up silly little rhymes for my sister sometimes. But I’m not a poet.”

Jonah rolled his eyes. “She’s got stories worth telling, Florentine. She just doesn’t believe it yet.”

“You will.” Florentine starry-smiled at me. Then she chuckled. “Don’t matter, anyway, if you do or if you don’t. Stories aren’t peaceful things. Stories don’t care how shy you are. They don’t care how insecure you are, either. Stories find their own way out eventually. All you gotta do is turn ’em loose.”

I felt a chill twirl down my spine, all the way down to my toes, then back up to the tips of my ears. The same strange, cold feeling I had earlier pricked at my arms again. That stupid wind-chime wind followed soon after and I remembered Oliver’s words as clearly as when he first spoke them:

And then he told me the
real
story of the Brothers Threadbare and why they quarreled … or
who
they quarreled over, I guess I should say….

That’s got nothing to do with me
, my head said to my heart.

But my heart disagreed.

I shivered at the creepy wind-chime sound. Florentine cocked her head ever so slightly to the side, looking at me. She’d noticed.

And then she glanced down at the slouchy bag beside her.

Florentine gently rested her hand on top of her traveling bag. As soon as she did, the wind chimes stopped.

The cold feeling faded away, but I couldn’t stop shivering. Thunder rolled, low and steady across the sky.

“Storm must be coming soon,” Jonah said.

Florentine kept her eyes fixed on her traveling bag. Then she slowly looked back up at me. “Storm’s coming indeed,” she said softly.

I didn’t say a word. I let my heart do all the talking.
Yes. Yes. Yes.

“Better make yourself comfortable, Felicity Pickle,” said Florentine. “I’ve got a story worth telling.”

Silver-gray rain clouds crept slowly over the mountains and across the skies of Midnight Gulch. I had a feeling that, just like me and Jonah, the storm was scooting in close so it could hear Florentine’s story.

Florentine crushed her cigarette down onto the pavement. She laced her fingers together over her knees. The knees of her jeans were worn out, barely held together by thin white frays. She wrapped the threads around her finger as she spoke.

“I was born down in south Georgia,” she said. “I grew up at the end of a red-dirt road, in a farmhouse that some folks claimed was magic. And after the tornadoes blew through …” Florentine shook her head. “That’s when I knew those folks were exactly right. I’ll never forget the night the storms came. We had seven twisters total, all before the sun came up.

“Those storms pulled hundred-year-old trees out of the ground.” Florentine said. “Pulled houses right off their foundations. Even the courthouse was nothing but a pile of
bricks and stones and broken glass. But the farmhouse where I lived with my granny Opal stood tall; not even a shingle was blown off our roof.

“I asked my granny Opal why we came out so fine. She looked over at the cupboard in our kitchen, the one she always kept locked up tight, and then looked back at me and said, ‘
A little bit of magic goes a long way.
’

“And I said to her, ‘
So you
do
have something magic locked up in that cupboard?
’

“She said, ‘
I got nothing but burdens in that cupboard, child. That’s what keeps us safe. And that’s what keeps us heavyhearted. Strange magic is what it is. Dark magic. You never, ever open that door. Understand?
’ ”

Florentine popped open the carton of Blackberry Sunrise. She savored a big spoonful. I could tell the ice cream was doing its job, helping her taste old memories and remember the details.

“My granny Opal was the only family I had,” Florentine continued. “My only friend, too. My speech was twisted when I was a girl; words got stuck in my mouth when I tried to speak ’em out. Granny Opal didn’t mind, but everybody else sure made fun of me for it.”

Florentine passed the Blackberry Sunrise back to Jonah. I could tell these memories didn’t taste good.

“The only place I wanted to be was up in my tree. I’d take my granny’s books and climb up to my favorite branch and read myself a good story. The story words were the only things that steadied my soul. Those words weren’t
twisted. They didn’t break apart. They took me out of this world. Some books are magic that way. Your body stays right here, hiding in a tree, tucked away in a closet, sitting up against a crumbling old building.” Florentine grinned. “But good stories take your heart someplace else. My body’d never been out of south Georgia. But my heart lived everywhere. I’d lived a hundred lives without ever leaving my tree.”

“I know that feeling.” I smiled.

“Every word collector sure knows that feeling, whether you’ve been catching songs or poems or stories. You’ve been caught in that magic.” Florentine sighed. “I read other people’s stories. But I kept my own words hidden.”

“But you talk so pretty now,” I said.

“I wish Granny Opal could have heard me find my voice again,” Florentine said. “She told me that it was fine that I steadied my heart against the pages of a book. ‘
But that ain’t no way to live
,’ she told me, ‘
getting so caught up in other people’s stories you never have one of your own
.’ ”

Jonah passed the ice cream back to Florentine again. She savored another bite.

The way the two of them kept passing the ice cream back and forth reminded me of the money plate passed around at the church. I considered how that would be the neatest idea, if the deacons passed around bowls of ice cream instead of bowls of cash-money.

Offering

Sacred

Everlasting

… Words that belonged in a sanctuary filled up the spaces between the three of us. But those words looked as fine there as they’d ever looked in a church, and I wondered if there was something sacred, something everlasting, about melted ice cream and summer days and good stories. “Florentine,” Jonah said, “tell Felicity about the day you set out to find your own story.”

She nodded. “I still didn’t see any point in talking to people. But I liked the idea of having my own story somewhere out in the big wide world. And I knew my story wasn’t in that town. Or even in that old, magic house. So I took this old backpack and I filled it with books. And just as I was about to leave, I remembered the night the storms came, the night my granny pointed to the locked door and told me about the magic behind it. The magic that kept my family safe. That kept my family heavyhearted …

“So I found the key.” Florentine swallowed hard. “And I pulled those burdens out of that cupboard. And I put them in here, too.” Florentine patted her traveling bag.

“I hitched my bag around my shoulders — it was so heavy, heavier than I thought it would be. As I pushed the screen door open, I heard my granny say my name.

“‘
Florentine
,’ she called to me. She was standing in the kitchen. Her chin trembled and her eyes were so full of sorrow that I nearly fell backward at the sight of ’em. ‘
I know what you got in that bag
,’ she said. ‘
Women in this family been carrying those burdens for years. They’ll surely keep
you safe, that I know. But they’ll make you so heavyhearted that you won’t even want to open your eyes some mornings. That’s strange magic you’re taking with you. Sad magic.
’

“But I took ’em anyhow,” Florentine said. Her voice was pressed flat with regret. “For ten years now, I’ve been packing these burdens along.”

“What are they?” I asked. I was hoping Florentine would open the bag up and show me. But she didn’t.

“Those aren’t stories worth troubling you with,” Florentine said. “They’re mine to carry. I figured since I had these burdens keeping me safe, I’d explore a little bit. So I set off to the ocean first. I lived on one of the little islands off the coast of Georgia. That’s when I worked at the fish market. Wasn’t worth it for the pay.”

Florentine plucked one of the threads on her jeans and wrapped it around her ring finger. “But it was worth it for Waylon Cooper. He was a sailor most of the time, but he was a song catcher, too. I didn’t say a word to him, but he didn’t mind. He’d talk to me anyhow. He’d invite me out to hear him play his music. We didn’t need my words between us.

“One day, me and Waylon pooled our money together and bought old bicycles from a tourist shop on the island. We bought a mermaid map, too. This old couple that owned the shop said there were hundreds of mermaids hidden near that island, that we’d be sure to see them if we knew where to look. So Waylon and I rode up and down the shores,
looking for mermaids. We
never
found mermaids,” Florentine laughed. “But I wrote poems in the sand and he sang songs about the setting sun.

“One day he told me I should stop writing poems in the sand. Told me I needed to be brave enough to put them down on paper. Brave enough to say what I felt. So I told him I loved him.” Florentine smiled. “I said it without even thinking. It was as if my heart spoke without getting permission from my mind. Those were the first words I’d said in years —
I love you
.”

Florentine rested her head back against the Gallery. “I always felt brave when he was with me. Waylon’s the reason I started writing my own poems.”

Jonah smiled proudly. “Florentine’s famous.”

“I ain’t famous!” Florentine blushed. “I have a little bit of a following, I guess. That’s all because of Waylon, too. On weekends we’d ride our bikes to new towns. He’d hang up flyers and I’d read my work. Those were good days.”

The thunder let out a long, sad sigh across the sky.

“What happened to Waylon?” I asked.

Florentine shrugged her shoulders. “He’s still fishing, I guess. Still making music, still singing about sunsets and starry nights. This kept getting in the way.” She patted the traveling bag again. “Waylon shouldn’t have to worry about this. So I left the beach and found my way here. I should have come here to start with. Somehow, I’m gonna leave these burdens here. Then I’ll go back to the ocean.”

“So … just leave the bag, then. Walk off and leave it.” I
looked at Jonah. He shook his head no. I suppose it should have occurred to me that Jonah had already tried to help Florentine get rid of those stupid burdens.

Florentine chuckled. “There’s more to it than that. I have to find something first. And I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

“Then let’s start with the easy,” Jonah said. “What
exactly
is in that bag?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Florentine said. “But I sure got an idea.” She shivered the same as I did whenever the wind-chime wind blew.

Tiny dots of rain plinked down, making polka dots all around us on the sidewalk. The thunder rumbled louder. But I didn’t want to leave Florentine. She told stories in such a way that I swear my heart heard them before my ears did. I wanted to wrap up in her stories, curl them around my shoulders like a quilt.

“We should head out soon, Felicity,” Jonah whispered. He knocked the metal rims of his wheels. “I’m sitting on metal. If lightning strikes, my chair’s gonna shoot off into space.” He laughed nervously. “I’ll be a Jonah Rocket instead of a Jonah Pickett.”

“Florentine,” I said as I stood up off the sidewalk. “If you don’t know what you’re looking for … how will you know when you’ve found it?”

“Maybe it’ll find me before I find it,” she said. “All I know to do is wait. I’ll watch. I’ll wait. Then I’ll drift on down to the coast.”

“I’m a drifter, too,” I said. “My family’s from here originally, but I’ve been all over the place.”

“Who’d you say your people were?” Florentine asked.

The thunder rumbled above the mountains again.

“I’m part Pickle,” I said. “The Pickles are from Kentucky. And I’m part Harness, too. And they’re from here in Midnight Gulch.”

“Harness …” Florentine stretched the word out long, ended it in a hiss.

She smiled and cocked her head at me. “Do you know any stories about your people, Felicity? Your people who lived years ago.”

“Not really.”

“You should,” Florentine said. “Won’t do you much good trying to find your own story if you don’t know theirs. I don’t know much, but I certainly know that.”

Florentine glanced down at her slouchy bag of burdens like she could feel its weight even when it wasn’t slung around her shoulders. “I know things about this town,” she said. “I know stories about the people in it. About the people who
used
to be in it.”

She looked me right in the eye when she said, “If your people are who I think they are … then you got a story worth telling, for sure. You got magic in your veins, Felicity Pickle.”