The Best of Pickering

Magic

Magic when hornus roebuck’s chimney began to smoulder, he didn’t telephone the ‹re department. Instead he ran out the back door, leaped over the fence, crossed Grace’s pasture, and burst into Noonday, Mother Noon’s store on Straddle Street. Mother Noon was Beaver River’s conjure woman, selling charms to the love-sick and nostrums to the feverish. For a damp, rumbling January catarrh she sold Hornus a cigar made from mullein leaves. The cigar cured Hornus, and so when ›ames ›ickered through cracks in his chimney, association ›ared like light wood, the smoke from the stove ‹rst mingling with the memory of hot mullein then rising before his vision to lead him across Grace’s pasture , much like, as Bertha Shifney put it, “that cloud what led the old Jews through the Wilderness.” Mother Noon did not like to disappoint customers in search of the miraculous, so she fashioned a prescription for Hornus. “Cut a branch of noisy leaf,” she said, “and draw three circles around the house in the dirt, each circle nine hand lengths from the one next to it. Then lay the branch down at the east end of the house, and God will help you.” As soon as Mother Noon ‹nished talking, Hornus ran out the door and started for Grace’s pasture. At the fence he stopped, suddenly remembering that only alders and red maples grew around his house and that the nearest quaking aspen was in the back yard of the Shore Grocery two miles away. “Mother Noon,” he shouted, turning back toward Straddle Street, “I ain’t got no noisy leaf. Do you think it would hurt if I dumped water on the ‹re?” “No,” Mother Noon yelled back through the screen door; “it won’t hurt none at all. Pour on water. In fact pour on as much water as you can.” The water put out the ‹re. “It was magical,” Hornus later told Bertha Shifney, adding that only four bricks cracked. “Of course,” he said, “if I’d had some noisy leaf them bricks wouldn’t be bothering me today.” Old-time magic was a staple of Noonday. For warts and bleer-eye Mother Noon prescribed a wash made from green ›ies and apple cider. Hanging above the counter and resembling a litter of long thin peppers
75 was a string of lizards’ tails. When wrapped in skin taken from a goat’s ear and put on the mantle or, “better yet,” Mother Noon instructed, “under the pendulum of a grandfather clock,” a tail protected a family from fever during the winter. On the porch by Mother Noon’s front door was a reed basket full of chestnuts. “If you carry a chestnut with a worm hole in it in the right front pocket of your trousers,” Mother Noon told Hornus, “Cousin Bad Luck will run when he sees you.” On the counter of the store sat a squat yellow jar full of what looked like feldspar, or so Hornus thought until he learned the jar contained snake stones, cut from the craws of birds which ate snakes. The stones absorbed poison, and placing one over a wound rendered the wound harmless. Although the wares for sale in Noonday can still charm a page, they are dusty remnants, relics that no longer astonish or cure. Unlike Mother Noon’s nostrums, stories rarely age into artifact. Instead of drying they swell vital and transport hearers into the magical land of MightHave -Been. None of Hink Ruunt’s mates were long-lived, and sometimes neighbors had trouble keeping abreast of the domestic comings and goings in Hink’s house in South Carthage. On meeting Hink at a tobacco auction, Googoo Hooberry inquired about Hink’s wife, whose name Googoo had forgotten, somewhat understandably because she was the sixth Mrs. Ruunt. Having spent the previous week in Nashville, Googoo did not know that Mrs. Ruunt had died on Wednesday. “Hink,” Googoo said when he ran across Hink looking at sprays for tobacco worms, “you are looking mighty good, and how is that ‹ne wife of yours?” “Well, Googoo,” Hink replied, pausing and pushing the plunger on a spray up and down, “to tell the truth I’m kind of out of wives just now.” Not long afterward on some Caucasian holiday, Robert E. Lee’s or St. Patrick’s birthday, Hink went to Nashville himself. Whether the trip was provoked by grief or, as some said, a quick payment from...