Ordinary Magic
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
“Five,” Oz said distinctly. “I have five candies. But I’m not showing them to you.” He shook the candy box with the feverish kind of possession little kids have.
“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t interested in his old candy anyway. A few months back I’d have told him that I didn’t need his old candy, because back then I had no less than fifty assorted pieces in a plastic sack, left over from Halloween and probably moldering away stashed in my closet. Only I’d eaten many of them after Eva got sick. Not all that much, just enough so that the hard sour taste of spoiled candy and the dry crumpled chocolates convinced me I’d expire from food poisoning. I hadn’t had the taste for them since.
To Oz this didn’t matter. My mother, for once, made no objections about my teaching him. My only guess is that she was too absorbed with caring for Eva. When Mama Regan wasn’t in her best moods, and sat dribbling cigar juice over the carpet and periodically battering away at the television with her black oak stick to keep herself entertained, the job of distracting her fell to me. I thought I’d buckle under it, but I surprised myself at how easy it seemed. So I distracted Mama Regan from her television and tried to keep her mind on reality, instead of dead folks, while Oz hopped around us, happily reciting whatever school task I gave him.
What with Eva and Mama Regan, no one had time for Oz. For a time he’d stayed with Pete Conroy, who didn’t mind him, and when he returned, he regaled us all with tales of his adventures.
“At Pete Conroy’s, there was ice cream seven times a day.”
“No, there wasn’t.”
Oz frowned. He clutched his pad of construction papers in both hands. I’d gotten them for him to draw with some of my money from collecting for Pete Conroy. “How come?”
“Because if there was,” I told him, folding a dish towel and giving it a snap, “ Mom would have his head. She’s convinced he’s a moonshiner as it is.”
“Watch how you say that,” warned Mama Regan. “It’s an honorable profession. That crazy ice cream man wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to go about it.”
“You like him, Mama Regan, remember?” Oz said.
“Ossian, I do not like the man, I tolerate him. It doesn’t mean the man’s sensible.”
After that, I had to write down the words tolerate, moonshiner, and head for Oz to copy. We only choose words he had an interest in, because he went at them with such enthusiasm, it was hard to believe he’d been held back. The school was going to be puzzled when he showed up to first grade with such words.
“You’re going to first grade, aren’t you?” Mama Regan asked. She already knew that’s where he was going. We had made it our goal. I was spending more spare time with Oz, even though Mom said it was no good, spending so much time with my little brother, since he wasn’t the same age. Besides, it distracted me from Eva.
* * *
Eva was mad as anything when I told her we were going out. “Who’s we?” she asked me, without her usual prissiness.
“Oz and me and Mama Regan,” I told her.
Eva nodded. There was nothing in her eyes. It scared me. I couldn’t see Eva looking out at me. I mean, princess Eva, the one Mom and Dad used to bend over backwards for. This Eva had a paleness about her, a transluceny, as if she wasn’t really there. This Eva had muddy-colored blonde hair and the manner of a wet hen.
She thrust her hands suddenly toward Mama Regan. “Tell my fortune. I’ll give you a quarter if you will.”
Mama Regan gazed at her. She didn’t take the offered hands, though she bent her head like the telling was about to begin. Then she shook her head, two quick times, like a person clearing their ears of bugs. “I’m sorry, Eva. Your hands aren’t working today. I can’t see anything.”
“That’s not right,” Eva told her. I waited for her to command. “It isn’t like a television reception.” She seemed desperate, and it was kind of sad. “You can’t just stop knowing people’s fortunes.”
“It’s cheating,” Oz added. I watched him. He had taken out his five candies again, sticky and tattered now from handling, and he tossed them with short clumsy motions from one hand to the other.
“Grace could show you her magic tricks,” Mama Regan said in consolation.
Eva shook her head. I knew she’d seen my magic tricks more than she cared to, especially when I practiced, and more so now I’d had an actual show in a basement. Thirty people showed up for it, and there was yellow cake and lemonade and milk, and Pete Conroy and Oz made paper decorations for it. Oz still bragged about his. He made a whole paper chain and a large banner. He told Pete Conroy what he wanted to say while Pete wrote it and Ossian scrawled his message below this. It was the longest sentence I’d ever seen Oz put together. Afterwards I folded the banner to put away in my room. I was very proud of him.
Mama Regan told us she’d wait outside for us, since her legs were speaking to her today.
I pestered Eva, but I didn’t have the heart for it, and neither did Eva. Her eyes didn’t glimmer. Finally I said, “You want a splinter from the mill?”
Oz caught hold of my hand, pulling downward until I winced. “Gracie, we aren’t supposed to go to the mill. We —“
“Shut up,” I said. Oz sat obediently on the edge of Eva’s bed and folded his hands. “Be quiet, okay?” I regretted that I’d said it hard like that.
“So how about it? You want it or not?”
I studied Eva’s face. Something hopeful had come into it, a glimmer of her former self. Eva never would have gone into the mill herself, though she would have enjoyed hearing everything. She was grounded, indefinitely, as it turned out, which Eva herself translated as until the snow turned blue.
Instead of mocking, Eva’s voice dropped to a whisper. “When?”
I shrugged, hoping it looked like bravado instead of deliberate indifference. “Whenever. When all of us go out I can…” I paused. A plan was forming in my mind, myself approaching the mill, like a movie. The mill, I knew, was full of security lights, even at night, and modern machinery to strip the jackets off logs the way you’d twirl shavings from a sharpened pencil. There was no fence surrounding the mill, however, there was a crochety ancient man called Eddie to guard the place. Eddie had entered the occupational folklore of the mill and its surrounding areas, being too skinny and deaf to be practical protection against any serious threat. As children, Eva and I pressed our noses against the mesh-covered windows of the guard shack until we wore a pertupetul wire cross hatching across our noses, the symbol of bravery among the elite in the playground. Our sole means of protection against Eddie was that he lacked the legs and wind to run fast, and that he was entirely without a great black oak stick like Mama Regan’s. A stick such as that, Eddie probably knew, was at its best as a missile of war against small children and had the added advantage of destroying televisions when you no longer had the patience to change the channel. “I can sneak past Eddie’s shack,” I finished, realizing I had no idea yet how I would accomplish this feat.
“That’s dumb,” Eva said with some of her usual sarcasm. I was pleased. “And if being stupid wasn’t enough, it’s illegal too.”
“You shouldn’t talk about illegal.” I had the satisfaction of seeing Eva’s face twist. Her mouth half-opened. However, she shut it fast enough, and not from being proper, either. I could tell.
Several uncomfortable minutes followed. I had what I’d come for, because Eva had some of her old spark back. I’d gotten a rise out of her.
“How will you know Grace got the splinter from the mill?” Oz asked. “She could just pick it up any old where, and you wouldn’t know.”
I wished he hadn’t said that. I was beginning to have second thoughts, and I could have easily faked it if Oz hadn’t spoken out. Lately he’d taken to telling his thoughts more. Not just to me, but Mom and Dad and teachers too. Even folks in our little store said they’d never seen the like. Mama Regan told them nothing the sort, that it wasn’t anything at all, it was my doing. And then she’d go on about me having green old-soul eyes – as if that meant something – when everyone knows green eyes are common enough.
I told Eva I’d think of a way to prove it to her, and then I pulled Oz out of there before he decided to share his opinion again. He put up a pretty good fuss about it, muttering unintelligibly, his mouth full to the brim with his five candies. Still, it was better than him having a temper tantrum right then and there, which, believe me, he would not have hestitated to do three months earlier.
“Good, Oz,” I muttered, “You’re patient.” The last thing I wanted was one of his fits. Oz didn’t get into them unless he was frustrated beyond fixing, but then he didn’t spare anything. Real screaming, throwing stuff, take-cover fits, these were. Everyone’s nerves were worn raw from Eva’s troubles, so Oz and I, the misfit children, were pretty left to do as we pleased. We decided we liked it this way.
Oz was good and quiet until we reached Mama Regan outside, when he ran straight to her. “Gracie shushes me too much,” he told her, sticking his tongue out in my direction.
Mama Regan studied her great oak stick. “Everyone has their troubles, now, Ossian.”
“Where we going?” Oz asked.
“Don’t know.”
“Can we stop by Kangaroo’s?” Oz yelled. I cringed at the noise, but I couldn’t very well tell him about using an outside voice, since we were outside.
The asphalt that served for our front yard burned my feet, so I had to hop from one to other. Oz joined me in this, although he wore a grubby pair of black sneakers with white patches over the toes.
Mama Regan shifted her stick in annoyance. “You have perfectly suitable shoes inside this house, Grace. Your father paid enough for them.”
“But it’s summer –“
“Now.”
I got the shoes. I barely used them except for school, and when I minded the store, where having barefoot employees didn’t look right. I didn’t like the shoes. They were nice enough, but they’d been bought with money from the Cadiallac Dad had sold, and I remembered the car too much not to think of it when I saw the shoes.
We did leave then, although none of us knew where we were headed. At Kangaroo’s, we found Kangaroo’s father out barbecueing. Sweat trickled through the bandanna tied round his head, and he wore a holey white undershirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. Mama Regan smiled at him. She knew my mother would have died if she encountered someone dressed like that.
“Is Kangaroo around?” I asked.
Mr. Fulton wiped his forehead with his left hand and jerked the thumb of the other toward the trailer. “There. Where else?”
I headed for the trailer door, but Oz beat me to it, and hollered for Kangaroo. He thought a lot of Kangaroo. He emerged from the dark coolness of the trailer towing Kangaroo by the hand.
“Doing computer work?” I asked.
Kangaroo pushed his glasses up and grinned, exposing a newly chipped tooth. “Is there anything else?”
“For people who aren’t moles, there is.”
“Moles,” Oz said. He fished his notebook from one of his pockets, and I wrote down the word mole for him, hoping he hadn’t put those candies on top of the notebook. I’d paid enough for the notebook.
“Is Eva still in confined in prison?”
“Sure is.” I said. “You know, sometimes I wonder about you. You have a funny way of saying things.”
“Well, it is, isn’t it? And if something is, I can’t help saying something about it, can I?”
We’d come to the main road by now. As always, we stood away from it and drank it in. You’d never think a road was a fine thing to look at, but this one was, for all the dust and grime and poorly painted lines on it. The road went somewhere, after all, and that was the main thing.
“There’s something I can’t figure about you,” Kangaroo itched the back of his head, making his hair stand up in stiff spikes. “How long you think you’ll keep minding the store?”
We kept walking. I kept my gaze focused on Oz while I struggled over an answer. I’d mind the store as long as needed, that was certain enough. I had no say in it, though the work wasn’t hard or even unpleasant. There were cricket noises, and the corn meal smell of their cage, and corn chips and coffee and the hard battered tortillas my father gave away free to the lumber workers. I grew used to the boredom after all these years.
“It’s being in jail, same as Eva,” Kangaroo said with an aimless kind of gesture, the way you would skip a stone. I wasn’t sure if he thought he’d convince me, but I know he believed what he said.
Mama Regan thrust her black stick at Kangaroo, who staggered, leaping nimbly backward before crashing into the weeds by the edge of the highway. After accomplishing this, she continued on in her halting steps without a word.
Oz shuffled over and offered a hand to Kangaroo. He pulled him to his feet, and I noticed Oz had grown stronger.
“It isn’t the same,” I told Kangaroo severely, and both of them stared at me.
“She — your grandmother,” Kangaroo gulped, white-faced and stammering, pushing his glasses up so rapidly that it resembled some kind of primitive jig, “She tried to kill me, and that’s all you can say?”
“Look,” I snapped. Mama Regan herself strolled far ahead of us, even with her stick, and we’d have a hard enough time catching up to her without discussing killing folks in the bargain. By the side of the road, no less, which was uncivilized. Good Lord, I was beginning to sound like my mother. “If she tried to kill you, which is unlikely —“
“She missed.”
Oz nodded agreement at this and I gave him a glare. He returned it.
“She’s an old witch-woman, anyway.” I could tell Kangaroo regretted this a second after he said it because he turned white. Milk-colored, only with pink along his mouth. Mama Regan might not have been out of earshot. His voice sank to a low insistent whisper, very fast. “I didn’t mean that, Grace. Honest. I only meant she –“
“I know what you meant.”
He looked down at his feet, wrenched his glasses off and strode after Mama Regan, though a good distance from her. I almost felt sorry for him. I couldn’t forgive what he said. I didn’t know why, exactly, because I hadn’t been in Mama Regan’s good graces yet. No one had, including Mom and Dad. At least he hadn’t started in on Eva. I couldn’t have that.
Up ahead, I could hear Oz telling Kangaroo all about our plan to take a splinter from the mill. He might be stronger and have less tantrums, but he still couldn’t keep his miserable mouth shut when it came to secrets.
* * *
Eva told everyone that night at dinner that she didn’t want to be called Eva anymore.
My father said he’d heard enough, that she ought to have been through this kind of stuff two years ago, and he for one was not going to stand for it.
“She’s sick,” Mom said. I pulled a face at Oz. The way my mother said that, you’d have thought Eva was off somewhere, dying honorably with a saint’s expression, just like those horrible kids in old movies.
Oz giggled at the face I pulled. Mama Regan’s stick was ever-ready beside the table and she rattled it. We all looked at her, in case she had something to add, but she only wanted the gravy passed, and when it was, that proved too slow for her.
“She’s coddled, that’s all,” said Dad, shoveling peas in his mouth and wiping his face with the cloth napkins Mom set out. “She’s had it too easy around here. A princess.” He stopped with a sudden sharp glance at Mom. “You have two other children or haven’t you noticed?”
Oz and I gaped at them both before Mama Regan banged her black oak stick against the floor. This got everyone’s attention, including Eva, who had said nothing during all this. If things had been normal, she’d have been turned about by now and left her dinner, but she seemed to have neither the inclination or energy for it.
“That’s enough.” Mama Regan said. I could hear her teeth rattle, a low sound like rain-soaked wind chimes. She swallowed to make the ancient ring of fat around her throat wobble. “Ossian, go ahead, child.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t, what?” I said.
Oz blinked. I searched his face for signs of nervousness, but the only expression he gave me was one of interest. “Saying,” he said. “I wasn’t saying anything.” After a minute he withdrew his notebook from his lap and flipped it to a new page. “Write down coddled, please.”
Eva spoke at last. She shouted, or at least something like it, except for her mouth being drawn up and her eyes tight against the light from above the table. “You see? She’s at again. They’re — they’re writing down every word, like — like spies. Oz doesn’t need to learn every word we say around here.”
I didn’t know Eva was going to be genuinuely upset. I don’t think anyone really expected anything other than her usual fuss. She always raised trouble over something or other gone wrong, and it had come to be background noise.
“No one ever notices me!” Eva said. “What if I’m tired of cheerleading? What then? What are my choices?”
I realized, startled, that Eva was the one nobody noticed. Not me or Oz. Eva. Because everyone always expected the perfect one, they never saw her.
“Young lady,” Mom was eating again, slowly and with the careful precision that meant she was angry, “because of what you’ve done, you don’t have many choices now. Later, maybe. But for now, your choices will be made.”
Silence came over the dinner table. We eat and swallowed but there was no chatter and even Oz was quiet. It wasn’t a meal at all.
* * *
I decided, more than ever now, that I needed to get the splinter for Eva. I don’t know why, really. The splinter stayed in front of me while I did my work around our little shop. I did the sweeping and fed the crickets their wet cardboard, and the whole time, that splinter dangled in my imagination, taunting me. The pneumatic drill Dad used for the cars hummed next door in the autobody shop, and at noon Dad came in for his noon glass of milk and slab of corned beef.
He ate these standing up by freezers where we kept the cold soda, the way he’d done ever since I could remember. First a bite of corned beef, then the milk, then the beef again, spacing this with glances around the shop to make sure everything was in its place.
I sat on the counter, cross legged, waiting until he’d finished.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, coming over to me. It didn’t take him long, not with our shop that small. “You didn’t have lunch with me.”
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
“Oz. Eva and Mom. Things.”
“Things,” Dad said. He rubbed the top of his head. The grease from cars worked its way in around his part and drove him crazy with scratching. “Got a job for you. Work’s getting heavy over with the cars. You think you can handle this place here while I go on a business trip?”
I might have jumped at the chance. I thought it over carefully first, before answering. Kangaroo’s warning was still ringing in my ears. “How long?” I said.
Dad sighed. “Two weeks. Think it over. It’s awhile to mind the store by yourself.”
“I’ve done it before,” I said hotly, before I could catch myself.
Dad laughed. “That was short time. You’d believe different after weeks of waiting on these lumberjacks and fishermen.”
“How much?” I said cautiously.
“Who says I’d pay you?”
I glowered and he laughed again.
“Would seven an hour work?” he asked. When I shook my head, he said, “All right, baby, name your price.”
“I want time with Oz.” I said.
That was the last thing Dad expected. He blinked and brushed a hand over his stained work shirt and raggedy jeans. He gave no argument.
“Mom can’t bother us,” I continued. “Eva can’t either, unless she’ll do what I say.”
Dad frowned. “This isn’t a plan to con your sister into something, is it?”
I scowled. “No. And Eva doesn’t need conning. She’s smart enough. Look, I really want this for Oz.”
“You’re good for him, babe. Anyone can see that. But your mother has her own ideas about Oz’s schooling…”
“Well, it hasn’t worked so far, has it?” I said.
We stared at each other for a beat or two. Then Dad said he would see what could be done, but bargaining were not his speciality.
He’d said that before and things turned out well enough. So I ignored this. Dad brushed something white from his jacket before waving the same wave he did after lunch – striding towards the door he raised one hand and moved it side to side. He didn’t know it made him look silly. Today it didn’t strike me silly, though. It looked just about right.
The shop grew hot, and with heat came humidity. A muggy shop specializing in fishing bait is not a pleasant destination, not unless you get used to it or have your nose lopped off in an accident, which I hadn’t. And, since I’d never gotten used to the smell, I counted the holes in the ceiling and the scarred places where the floorboards were beginning to come up.
Business was steady all day, but slow. Two lumberjacks came in wanting boots, and Mrs. Trot from down on O street came in with two babies secured to her hip, but all she did was block the aisles and read magazines, and leave without anything. Oh, she took the two kids, all right – she’s never been known to leave them, though any judge inside this county would probably say she was justified if she did. Those two tossed a disaster area around that woman, and in back of her, too. Her path booby-trapped with cereal, her retreat blocked with spilled soda, at times it appeared to be a close call for Mrs. Trot. I sometimes imagined her, lost and preferably barricaded in with spilled merchandise, after lights out, to spare the town further inconvinence.
I reconsidered this. It might spare the town from the kids, but I’d be stuck in there with them too.
After she left, no one came in for a half hour, and then Pete Conroy knocked the door open so hard it slapped against one of Dad’s hunting pictures and right into the baked bean section.
He came right in, he didn’t even bother to say hello like a decent person. I figured then he looked like a moonshiner. Mom was right. And he hadn’t put on his fedora before going out.
“Grace!” Although both Pete’s hands settled on the counter, he leaned forward and bellowed.
“Yeah. Something you want?”
“I’d like that cousin of yours out of town on a rail, is what I want. Where is he?”
“What’d he do?”
“Oh, nothing. He just came right in and ordered a double-fudge with rum raisin on top of it, and when I told him the rum raisin was in the back, he says that’s fine, and when I went to get it, he rips me off fifty dollars from the register. That’s all.” He took a breath. I expected the bellowing to stop, but it didn’t. “And my rum raisin isn’t exactly on the menu. So I started thinking, how does he know about it?” He pointed a finger at me. “And then I thought, wait a minute – he’s Grace’s cousin.”
I tried hard to think of something that would make everything better. The only sentence I could come up with was, “How much did you have?”
Pete Conroy blinked. He didn’t look as if he’d heard. “Doesn’t matter. More than that.”
I gave him a bright smile. This didn’t make Pete Conroy’s disposition better. At least he stopped yelling. “Then he didn’t take everything, did he?”
“You’re as bad as he is! What kind of an answer is that to give a man?” He glanced my way sharply. “What about you? You ever take anything from me?”
“No,” I said.
“What about that Ossian of yours? He’s got odd enough ways about him.”
I stared at Pete Conroy until he ducked his chin down and looked at the counter like he’d never seen it before. Then he said, “I’m wrung out. Oz is all right with me. And you.”
Something about the conversation puzzled me. “He isn’t my Ossian,” I told Pete Conroy, and he gave a muffled laugh.
He leaned back from the counter to take in the broken ceiling tiles, false, all of them, and when he turned back he smiled at me. “He’s yours, if he’s anybody’s. That one will do whatever you tell him. You got a gift there.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. A gift with Ossian. My gift was being a magician, and, failing that, I wasn’t all that bad with calculating numbers in the shop. Playing with Oz was just something I did when there was nothing else to do.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Shoot.”
“How exactly do you ride someone on a rail? Do they get thrown on a train or something?”
Pete Conroy laughed again. “Give you something to do. Read up on your westerns and you’ll know soon enough.” And he turned to go.
“I don’t know whether to be happy or sad if you find Cousin Jake,” I called after him, but he was gone already. The screen door slapped back, easy this time, and it made a nice hissing noise as it settled back in place.
* * *
If I didn’t know where Jake was, I had an idea where to start looking for him. After nightfall, I slipped out of bed and down the stairs. My back hurt a little, from standing at the counter so long, but I managed the walk down to the beach, hobbling over pebbles. I brought my new shoes, for all the good they did me. The soles too hard for off-road walking, the material too stiff to move without pinching, I soon discarded them entirely. I ran over the sand in bare feet. Luckily there wasn’t any glass or sticks in my way, and I reached Jake’s little driftwood hut. Still standing, scrawled with knife carvings from passing kids.
The fire was out, but the smell of it hung in the air. I stayed away from the hut enough to be safe, just in case someone other than Jake had moved in. I yelled for him from there.
He came out at last, a blanket thrown around both shoulders, bedraggled. He needed a shave and his toenails looked thickened, like a wild man’s. “Oh,” he breathed. “Eva? Is Eva alright?”
I meant to ask him how to break into the mill without being seen. I had it all planned out. Instead, I ended up sitting on the damp sand. “Eva’s fine.”
“Oh,” he said, sitting by me. “That’s good. I’m glad.”
I sounded like a little kid, like Oz did when he got scared. I hated it. “Why’d you do it, Jake?”
“Because the money was there –“
I shook my head. Everyone needed money. Dad, Jake, Pete Conroy. Money was beginning to be a real pain and I was sick of hearing about it. “About Eva…”
“God,” Jake leaned back and put his hands back of his head and looked up at the sky. It looked dark and threatening. He turned his head to look at me. “I don’t know. Because I’m the same screw-up I’ve always been, I guess. You know why magicians have all those illusions?”
“No.”
“Because they don’t want you to see who they really are. Real magic, now, that’s different – you just bend people’s perceptions of how things look until they think their seeing something real, only it’s not. Ask Mama Regan, she’ll tell you. It’s what you did when you learned double-dutch.”
I struggled with this. As far as I could tell, that meant Jake thought what Mama Regan taught me was a lie, something to make other people see me differently, and it wasn’t. I said nothing, and Jake went on.
“The family loves me, all right. They do. But you haven’t ever seen me at a birthday party, have you?” He laughed. It sounded low and half-bitter. “I’m not exactly birthday material. If I did show up, they probably wouldn’t have me.”
I had it on the tip of my tongue to ask him about the mill, but every time it seemed he had something else on his mind, or was just on the verge of saying something important.
About twenty minutes passed without either of us saying anything. Then Jake yawned and stretched out until his limbs popped. “You want to know how my mom died?”
I leaned forward. No one spoke of my mother’s sister, except when they said Jake was poor Mathilda’s child, even long after he was grown. If things were like storybooks, it would be a drug overdose, something like Eva’s.
“We were at the carnival. I was maybe ten. At the pony rides. And there was this white horse there. I wanted to ride it, but the woman who ran the ride, she said that horse wasn’t for me. It was a small bucking one with these big teeth. And Mom said no one was going to stop me riding it, and she’d ride first to tame it down for me.” He stopped and stared out toward the ocean. If you forgot to listen, you couldn’t hear it anymore. “So she did.”
“What happened?” I was interested. Mainly because Ossian always begged to go on the pony rides, on a white horse. My mother never let him.
Jake smiled, something between a grimace and a good memory. He told me he swore that horse transformed, right there, into something strange that shimmered all over. It looked like a blurred staticky TV reception. It looked like something trying to crawl out of the horse’s body. Like the horse tried to slough off used skin to change into something new and different. The woman, too, was no longer the same. Her short racy jacket stretched and grew loose until it flowed around her in a grayish material the texture of moth wings.
Jake told his mother not to. She was into it now, though, riding the horse. He saw something, but only half of the something. His mother laughed. She rode the horse in a slow trot around the enclosure. It was easy. She rode once around again.
She was halfway around for the third time when the horse bucked. It threw her against the metal railing of the enclosure, hard and fast like a thrown baseball. No one thought about internal bleeding.
“And that’s what killed her?” I asked.
Jake nodded soberly. “She shouldn’t have gotten off the horse. She touched the ground. That’s what killed her.” He stood up and with one swift motion he grabbed a fistful of my collar and yanked me up after him. He shook the sand from me very businesslike, thinking. “I don’t know why I told you. I couldn’t have seen what I saw. But anyway, that’s why I became a magician. To figure all that out.”
“And did you?” I squirmed, but he still had his hand at the back of my collar. It was funny.
Jake didn’t answer. He looked critically at me. “Why’d you come all the way out here?”
I had the sudden realization that he might not be sober like I’d thought. Before, I’d have known, but after that night with Eva I wasn’t certain. I wished I’d brought food snatched from the kitchen, so we could make a night of sitting out here, with the breeze from the ocean spitting salt at us. Eva and Oz and all, wrapped in blankets and sleeping over at Jake’s hut. It sounded nice. And I should have brought Jake’s magician jacket so I could give it back to him. He looked like he needed it. “I wanted to ask you…how do I get into the mill without being seen?”
Jake took his hand off my collar so fast my legs went out from under me. I dropped unceremoniously to the ground, and ended up with sand up my nose and in my mouth. I didn’t have long enough time to get used to it before Jake grabbed one arm, and there I was, facing him.
“What are you trying to prove?” He said that low and through his teeth.
“I’m just trying to get a splinter for Eva,” I told him.
Jake grinned like I wasn’t worth bothering with. He let go off my arm then, only to give me a shove toward the road. “Go home to bed,” he shouted. “And don’t any of you kids come here again.”
I set off, half-jogging. To show him he didn’t scare me, I shouted that to him. This caused him to swear and say I was a kid and tell me to get along home before he came after me and made me get. This was all very impolite and not the way I’d ever treated him when he came to visit, which just goes to show you how some people act. That’s something Mom says when folks are rude. When the loggers come in swearing and coughing out in front of the autobody, she says, well, that’s how some people act.
After that display, I figured I’d keep his old magician’s jacket. I’d earned it, and if old Jake wanted it, he could keep himself and get it.
I found my shoes along the highway, I don’t remember exactly where. The highway did that to you, made you think it was longer than it was. I wasn’t scared, I was disappointed by the time I rounded the autobody and reached the house. I hadn’t learned how to enter the mill properly. I hadn’t learned why Jake had let Eva get drugged up, not really. The only thing I’d learned was one stupid long story that made no sense at all and that Jake was still in town, worthless information that was. On our porch I thought I heard something while I was peeling my shoes off. The shoes were hot and my feet had sweat all over. They were sure to smell tomorrow.
“Jake,” I said, not very loud, so I wouldn’t wake anyone in the house.
No one answered me. The night was dark. A few cars went by on the highway from the sound of it, and the cavernous rollup doors of the autobody shop loomed over the house. Sure enough, someone skirted back around the corner of the autobody shop and down the alley.
“Goodnight, Gracie,” Jake called back.
I rolled my eyes. That sounded like a radio show. I hated that. I forgot all about keeping quiet and hollered after him, “You didn’t need to lurk after me! I could’ve gone home all by myself! You didn’t need to walk me home, Jake, you hear me?”
No one answered. Owls called and somewhere far away a car backfired. I smiled. There might be business tomorrow in the autobody shop. I picked up my shoes and got the spare key from saucer under the geranium plant, and went in to bed.
* * *
The next morning all anyone wanted to talk about at breakfast was Pete Conroy being burgled. It had got around town by that time. No one knew who did it, or where to find the burgler. Since these are all important things when investigating a crime, everyone was pretty well stumped. I said nothing about and went on eating my buttered toast.
Dad cleared his throat. “I’ve got news for you, Ossian.”
“News!” Oz repeated. He liked the rhythm of this so well, he beat it on the table and chanted. My mother sighed. She took Oz’s hands and set them in his lap.
Dad looked at me. I knew he was thinking, well, now she’s got herself into this, let’s see her refuse it. When I didn’t try and wriggle out of it, he grinned at Oz. “Instead of studied today, would you like to work with Grace?”
“Yes.”
“You have to study. You can’t just fool around.”
Oz nodded. He slid from his chair and in one motion was around the table pulling at me. “Now, Grace. Let’s go now.”
Dad smiled but Mom looked doubtful. She wasn’t sure Oz and I wouldn’t just play tag or something. Between Oz pulling me to the door and Mama Regan discussing the weather, I didn’t have a chance to ask if Eva could come along. It was strange to actually want her to come along. No one had said when her house arrest would end, and from the look of it, it might be school time before she was released. But no one would be so cruel as to forfeit summer altogether.
Once outside, Oz and I set to work. Dad hadn’t set limits on how we had to do things or where we could go, so Oz and I shouldered our gathering sacks and went out searching for stones for Pete Conroy. In addition to those wonders, we found granite, centipedes, oak logs, and magpies. Oz had me write all these for him in his notebook. I wasn’t certain how to make a lesson out of this, or if I wanted to. I lined up all our rocks neatly in a row.
“If Pete Conroy’s wife is making a mosaic or something, maybe she’d like all her rocks sorted.”
Oz went eagerly to this task to might have bored other folks. We both made small piles of blue, green grey, brown rocks. When we were finished Oz looked at our work with true admiration. “They’re nice, huh, Grace?” he said. “They look nice.”
I nodded. They were nice. It was that simple. We counted the rocks, slowly, Oz stumbling over his as if they were names he’d forgotten. But he stayed calm and peaceful so long as there was no paper and pencil in front of him “to study with.” We wrote down the numbers of the rocks in Oz’s book too. Then we lay down on our stomachs with our legs up in the air.
After some time, Oz said carefully, “Gracie, do you think Mama Regan’s a witch?”
I considered this. “Some people say she is.”
He frowned. “Maybe she can help me.”
“How? Make you different, you mean?”
Oz nodded emphatically. He didn’t have to say why. I could feel it in him. He wanted to go to school. Not baby school, like kindergarden, but the first grade where you learned to read magical stories.
I didn’t know what to say for quite a while. I looked down at my fingers, my scarred fingers. I tried to blur them together so that I had all twelve of my fingers, so that I was whole again. Only the trick didn’t work anymore. My fingers stayed the same, ten of them just like everyone else. I wasn’t sure I wanted to make them blur, either. It wasn’t helping anything. I thought about what Jake said, about the horse that changed shape.
“I could ask her, Oz,” I said. “But sometimes magic takes a little while. It’s hard to get it working you know, ‘cause magic’s ancient. It might be real hard. Do you mind if it’s real hard?”
Oz shook his head no. He seemed serious about this. I breathed a sigh of relief. No tantrums at least not for now.
“Gracie,” Oz said. He breathed in so hard I could see his chest expand. “Can you help me write my name?”
“Sure.” I thought he knew by now.
On Oz’s notebook, I drew the letters that spelled his name. His nickname, not his real name, becaue Ossian was too complicated for most spellers.
When I handed the pen to Oz he gritted his teeth and held the pen so hard his arm shook. He studied the paper to make sure he got everything right and then he began.
It was a scrawl of lines.
Ossian studied this with battered hopefulness, his nose nearly touched the paper. “Is that my name?”
I didn’t say anything. We tried four more times, and each time turned out the same, and each time Oz looked more and more as if he were about to have a tantrum.
I had to take the pen away from him. “We aren’t going to write your name ever again,” I told him.
Oz shivered. He drew his arms around his knees and puckered up for a good bawl. He didn’t have a chance to get into it, though, because I spread the rocks out. Oz had to stop to watch. He blinked as I arranged the stones.
“Can you read it?” I said.
Oz didn’t answer at first. His mouth was open. Finally, he said, “It’s too close together, Gracie.”
So we arranged the two letters farther apart. Oz traced them with his hands. Then he built a second design underneath mine. He looked at me in a hurried manner, certain he had done it wrong. “How is it?”
“Perfect,” I said.
Oz grinned. He ran about the forest and tossed leaves into the air into the air.
Then we crossed the highway to give Pete Conroy his rocks.
Pete Conroy looked us over when Oz held these rocks back from the pile. Oz kept dropping them.
“These are name-spelling rocks,” he informed Pete Conroy.
“Are they? They aren’t giving-away rocks?”
“No!” Oz leaned forward secretively. “I can show these ones.”
“I can’t wait,” said Pete Conroy. After Oz showed him, he didn’t wait either. We got two double scoops of rum raisin right there, and Oz got a hug from Pete Conroy in the bargain. “Have you showed your folks yet?” he said.
I hesistated. “No. It isn’t writing.”
“Well, for a first day at studying, it’s something like.”
I looked doubtfully at the rocks. Sure, I thought they were writing, but all we were doing was playing around with things. That’s the way everyone else would see this anyhow. The rock seemed to hiss and murmur, like talking or the flow of a tide. I don’t why it did, and it made me think possibly I was as crazy as Oz was.
I shouldn’t have thought that. I regretted it all the way home, but Oz was so happy I couldn’t help but by happy with him. We took the writing stones back home with us. Oz balanced where the asphalt met the dirt along the roadside. He fell twice, toppling over, spilling his share of rocks, but we got home in one piece.
* * *
I didn’t tell anyone about the naming rocks. Oz kept them with him and played at stacking them all the next day. I watched him all that morning, but I didn’t try to teach him anything. The whole thing scared me. Not just the fact that, apparently, I was good at teaching Oz, which wasn’t exactly something I wanted to get known for, but the fact that Ossian’s eyes looked different. They were brighter and I could see intelligence there, an attention to everything, that must have been there but that I had missed. Everyone in town would know I was taking the trouble to teach Oz, and Grace Rainbird, the girl with scarred hands, would be permanently linked with Ossian, who did odd things.
Not only that, if I failed, Oz would know.
So I stayed away from him. Ever so often he looked over at me with expectation. I recognized the look I used to give Cousin Jake. It was the look that said you would be taken places. The look intrigued me – and I didn’t like it. Something terrified me that somebody wanted to follow me like I had followed Jake. It was too much, and I didn’t want the responsibility for it.
At noon Dad came out and told me that if all I was going to do was loaf around, he’d have me back working the counter. I decided then that today would be the day I’d get the splinter. Not today, but during the daylight. No one had attempted this before.
I went upstairs to pack a backpack. I had no idea what I would need, so I threw in a bit of everything – fishing line, a broken pocketknife, a flashlight, a walkie-talkie. I didn’t know why I brought that. There was no one I would have to talk to.
Eva appeared in the doorway. She’d kept to herself for the time she was grounded, except meals, and the confinement had changed her. Or if wasn’t that, maybe it was the drugs or the hospital visit – she seemed less excitable and more stable. She appeared before me and I was startled by how she acted. She wasn’t a princess anymore.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t need you to go get the splinter.”
“I need to,” I said, though I couldn’t think why.
She didn’t challenge me after that. I looked about for Mama Regan, certain she’d appear just when I didn’t want her. She had a way of doing that. When there was no sign of her, I set off down the road with the backpack over one shoulder. I had Mama Regan’s malachite stone on one hand and my old worn jump rope slung over the other shoulder. I expected Eva might follow me, but she didn’t.
The mill wasn’t far from our house. It was close enough you could smell the burnt sawdust in the smoke stacks from it, before the fog burnt off in the mornings. I halted at the guard shack.
Eddie, the guard, was there, snoring. He didn’t wake up when I passed the chain link that partially surrounded the mill. Then I set my backpack down and studied the mill.
Eva hadn’t said whether her splinter should come from outside the mill or not, and I really didn’t want to break into the mill for fear of jail, or something worse. I hated the mill. I hated the fact that it had made Eva born a princess, and me with twelve fingers, and Oz born the way he was. Rationally, I suppose, we’d be that way wherever we lived. But I couldn’t see that. It was the mill that controlled how much work there was at the autobody shop. It didn’t matter that Dad had enough work now or that Oz and Eva and I were all changing in our own ways. What mattered was that the mill had caused it all to begin with.
I threw my jump rope at the windows of the mill. It was ineffective, as high as the window, but with no little force, so that it slapped uneventfully and fell to the ground. I was about to pick it up again when a voice called to me.
“Are you lost, child?”
It was Mama Regan. She was swinging her black oak stick toward me and hobbling in my direction.
I froze, and debating running, but we were alone, and Mama Regan alone is less embarrassing than Mama Regan in public. So I said, “No, I was just…picking up my rope.”
I knew from Mama Regan’s eyes, she didn’t believe me. “You have your malachite stone,” she said, “and you know how to fall. You have Jake’s magic tricks now, and you are teaching Ossian. If you’re trying for more than that, you are greedy.”
“So what if I am?” I didn’t see how any of that was being greedy, but I argued through habit.
“You let Eva go her way and you’ll go yours.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrugged. “It means what it means. Eva doesn’t need you doing things she doesn’t feel like doing herself.”
I wondered if she had seen any of this. I didn’t ask her though. Mama Regan didn’t handle any exploration of her witch-woman existence with tolerance. I said carefully, “If I went home with a splinter, what would happen?”
Mama Regan scratched her stick against the bare dirt. “Many things, child. Eva could brag she stole it. She could become a criminal, you could become a criminal. Your father won’t let you teach Oz anymore.”
I stopped. The jump rope swung back against my arm, mid-throw. It all seemed a bit extreme, and I suspected a morality lesson here, but then again, Mama Regan saw things and it wasn’t wise to go against the things she saw.
“And if I go home?”
“If you go home, you have the potential to become a great magician. Perhaps not with cards, but with people. Oz has learned a lot.”
I gaped at her. I hadn’t told anyone about the rocks, except Pete Conroy of course, and Kangaroo, who I’d sworn to secrecy.
Mama Regan smiled. “Maybe things aren’t as mysterious as you seem to think, Grace.” She turned and began to walk away, and soon I ran after her, my new shoes pinching my feet.
I didn’t know why I didn’t get the splinter at first. Only Eva was improving and changing without any magic, so a splinter would be useless. And if I was going to be Oz’s teacher, I suppose I’d better commit myself to it, whether Eva or anyone else objected. Eva’s interest in life at home had perked right up just from talking about the splinter. I didn’t need it to accomplish anything.
On the way home I asked Mama Regan if she was a witch woman. She drew her lips thin and gave me a light whack with the stick. It didn’t hurt. “You are, too, if you’d pay attention to what’s around you.”
I frowned. We barely associated if she was in public, though at home our relationship was different. I was rountinely embarrassed and fascinated by her, but it seemed like she hadn’t done anything that I’d paid attention to lately. Except for whacking a policeman over the head during a car trip, and surely she didn’t want me to imitate that kind of behavior.
“What do you want from me?” I asked. I thought of Oz, how he looked at trees and rocks and the sky with the same attention you would give living things. Something like that couldn’t be all that odd.
“Learn from everything,” Mama Regan told me. “Eva. Oz. Pete Conroy. That cousin of yours. That’s what I want from you. There’s magic and then there’s everyday magic, and they can get mixed up, child.”
I frowned. “So something I’m looking at could be magic instead of being ordinary?” I thought of Jake and the story of the white horse. “Do you know where Jake is?”
“Left town. Probably playing poker this very minute.”
I laughed. That sounded like Jake all right. But behind us, I thought I saw something move quickly in the window of the old mill, in the abandoned portion. It might have been a sweater or a bit of cards falling down. Or it might have mice. Or it might have been Jake.
I didn’t find the splinter, but I’d found Eva could live through things I’d thought she was too weak for, and that I cared about her. At least, some days, she wasn’t such a pain. I never expected to get worried over her, not enough to do something for her. She hadn’t even asked me to do it, I remembered, and then she had told me not to.
I smiled. I went home with Mama Regan and I made up my mind then that I would take Oz into the autobody shop that afternoon. There were pneumatic drills to count and write, and there were the naming rocks. I’d need more of those. And paint. Oz liked to paint. The possibilities for just ordinary magic were endless. After all, it overlapped with real magic, and blurred the real world a little, and that’s where I liked to be.