magic

Release Day: Some Small Magic

March 14, 2017 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

Let me tell you about a kid I know, a boy named Abel.

In many ways he’s not unlike a lot of children around here, meaning Abel’s family is poor and he has only one parent at home. That would be Lisa, Abel’s momma. Lisa spends most of her time waiting tables down at the diner. The tips aren’t much but they provide. There’s groceries enough, along with the rent money for their little rundown house along a dead-end dirt road outside town. Abel stays home most times. He came into the world with a mild form of brittle bone disease. Any awkward step can leave Abel casted and laid up for weeks. He’s got to be careful in what he does. Lisa worries about her boy. There are times, many times, when Abel knows himself a burden his momma cannot bear.

But I don’t want you thinking everything in Abel’s life is bad.

Far from it. He doesn’t have much but believes that okay; very often the ones truly cursed in life are those who have more than they know what to do with. It’s hard for Abel to get around with those soft bones, but there isn’t much exercise involved in reading. That’s what he does mostly, Abel reads, which has turned him into maybe the smartest kid I’ve ever known. And you can say all you want about the way his classmates pick on him, Abel’s got someone who will do just about anything in the world for him. Dumb Willie Farmer might only be the janitor at the elementary school (and might only be Dumb, as the name implies), but you will find no better friend. Ask Abel, he’ll tell you.

And about that house: sure it’s nothing more than a rented little shack, but it’s set along the edge of a field where the trains pass three times a day. Abel loves his trains. He’ll limp out there every day to count the cars and wave at the conductor. His daddy’s gone, prayed into the sky before Abel was born, but some days Abel will wave at that train going by and imagine a daddy he never knew waving back.

I’m not sure how life would have turned out for Abel had he not gotten into trouble with his momma and cleaned their house as an apology. Have you ever noticed how quick things can change off one small decision? It happened to Abel that way. He even cleans up the spare bedroom in back of the house where Lisa says he should never go, and that’s where he finds his daddy’s letters—shoved into an old popcorn tin and addressed to Abel Shifflett of Mattingly, Virginia. Some of these letters are dated from years back, but the one on top? Sent three weeks ago. Abel can only sit and ponder it all. His daddy’s not dead. And more than that, one of those letters reveal where his not-dead daddy is: a place called Fairhope, North Carolina.

It’s one of those times when all of life’s murky darkness gets shot through with a beam of light.

Abel knows what he’s supposed to do. He’s going to find his daddy and bring him home. Because that will fix everything, you see? His momma won’t have to work so hard anymore. The two of them won’t have to struggle. If Abel can get his daddy home, they’ll all be a family. It’s all Abel has ever wanted.

The problem is how a ten-year-old boy with soft bones is supposed to make it all the way down to someplace in Carolina without getting found. It’s too long of a way, and there will surely be danger. But then Abel realizes he has a secret weapon in his friend Dumb Willie, and the two of them hatch a scheme to run away from home. They’ll hop one of the trains coming by Abel’s house and ride it as far as they need. It isn’t a terrible idea so far as ideas go, but one which doesn’t take long to go awry. Hopping a moving train at night is an act fraught with peril, especially with a broken little boy and his not-so-smart friend. Abel’s journey seems to end before it begins when he is crushed under the rails.

But this isn’t a tragic story—oh no. This is a tale of magic big and small, and Abel and Dumb Willie aren’t the only ones at the train that night. Death itself has come in the form of a young woman to take Abel on. One look at this broken boy is enough to convince her this is a thing she cannot do. Even Death carries a burden too great, having witnessed so many children having their lives ended in so many needless ways. And while both Death and Dumb Willie (who is not so Dumb after all) understand what has happened to Abel, Abel himself does not. He convinces the strange but pretty girl who saved them to join in their journey, after which he promises to let her take them home.

So it is that Death itself accompanies two boys along the rails through the wilds of West Virginia and eastern Tennessee, clear to the Carolina mountains. Looking for a father long thought dead. Looking for a little magic.

That is the story in short for my eighth novel, Some Small Magic, which is out today.

There’s more to Abel’s journey (trust me, a lot more), but the rest is for you to discover. Believe me when I say you won’t be disappointed.

It’s my favorite book so far, and you can pick it up by heading here.

In the meantime, should you find yourself at a railroad stop in central Appalachia, do yourself a favor. Scan those boxcars as they fly past. They might not be all empty. And if you see three faces peering out at the blue sky, send a little prayer their way.

Because those three are bound west, toward home.

A little sparkle in the muck

February 10, 2017 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

That pile of rock and dirt still sits in the back corner of our yard,

and it still may be some gold in there, but there’s no telling because the kids haven’t dug through it in about forever. The last time they did (I can’t remember when it was, only that they were both a whole lot shorter), my son came running into the house with what looked like a piece of gravel.

Swore it was gold.

I told him the same thing I’d told him a thousand times before:

“Could be.”

How it all started was they’d seen a TV show about prospectors out West. One of them had struck it rich. The kids, young enough to believe if that sort of thing could happen to some guy in California then it surely could happen to them all the way in Virginia, decided they would have a go at it. They used the yellow plastic sifters we’d gotten at the beach that summer and went on out to the creek beside the house. It lasted about half an hour. Wasn’t so much the sifting they minded, it was the snakes.

But that pile of dirt and rocks at the end of our yard was well away from any lingering serpents, plus there was the fact it sat near enough to the neighbor’s oak to give them shade from the sun. There my two kids parked themselves for most of a whole summer. They separated dirt from rock and rock from what they called “maybes,” pebbles which gave off something of a shine and so would be studied later. Took them a few weeks, but that whole pile ended up being moved a good three feet.

Sometimes I’d sit on the back porch and watch them. There was an order to the kids’ work, a methodical examining which carried a strong current of patience beneath. Neither of them minded getting dirty or sweaty in the process.

“You gotta get down in all that muck,” my son told me one day, “because that’s the only way you’ll find the gold.”

To my knowledge that vein of leftover driveway gravel and leaves scattered by the wind didn’t pan out. My kids never did find their gold. Something other came along to capture their attention. Dragons, I believe it was. My daughter had read a book about dragons, which are vastly superior to gold, and so her and her brother spent the next few months out in the woods rather than in our rock pile, looking for dens and nests and serpent eggs.

I thought about their search for treasure this evening when I had the dog out and her sniffer led us both to the end of the yard in a meandering sort of way. Thought maybe I’d go inside and ask the kids if they remember the summer they spent sitting out there panning and sifting. I guessed they maybe would. If not, I would remind them.

Because there’s a lesson in that old pile, I think. One both of my kids would do well to remember.

They’re both getting toward that age when the world can lose a bit of its color. Things don’t seem so wondrous anymore. There are obligations and responsibilities. Things that have to get done. Adulthood is looming, for both of them. There will come a time when they’ll find much of the world is one sort of muck or another. Living can be a messy business. No one can get from one end of it to the other without getting a little dirty in the process.

But what I want them to know is there’s still treasure in there, treasure everywhere, so long as they’re both willing to put a little work into finding it. Won’t always be easy. Sometimes you’ll grab whole handfuls of days and months and even years and find little in there that sparkles. But you’ll always find something, that’s what I’m going to tell them. You’ll always find enough to keep you going.

And really, that’s all we need in the winter seasons of our lives. A little gold to keep us putting one foot in front of the other, to keep us warm and waiting for sun.

The boys of summer

May 14, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

In the late springs it was always school and chores after, and when the grass was cut and the garden weeded, there would be time for an inning or two. Then May would give to June. I cannot fully convey just how special that time of year was to me growing up—those few weeks when the air would first warm and then the mountains blossom, and that long string of big, black X’s on the calendar I’d begun in September finally ended. Summer vacation. That’s when the season would really start. That’s when the lot would open.

There were five of us neighborhood kids, and we’d always get together once school was out. There was me and Greg and Chuck and Noel and Jonathan. Sometimes there was a sixth named Duane, but it wasn’t often he was allowed to play. Duane’s daddy was a preacher—not the holy roller kind but something close—and his momma always frowned on us neighborhood kids running around, shooting each other with pretend guns and playing cops and robbers. It was always better when Duane got to play. He was the only one willing to be the cop. It all turned out for the best, though. Duane, he never had much of an arm anyway.

That’s how we measured ourselves back then—by our arms. Not how big they were or how strong, but how far and how fast we could throw a ball. Because let me tell you—back in our old neighborhood, baseball was king and the lot was our castle.

It wasn’t much, that piece of land Maybe half an acre wide and that much long, with a row of big pines marking the left foul line and Mr. Pannill’s house marking the right. The road was our fence.

Come the first day of summer, we were at the lot every morning at 9:00 sharp. We’d play until the sun got too hot. Sometimes Greg’s mom would feed us, and it’d be peanut butter and banana sandwiches in the shade of those pines. Other times, we’d bike it down to the 7-11 and poll what money we had for the biggest Slurpee we could afford. One time Noel said he couldn’t share a straw with all of us, there were too many germs. Don’t you know we let him have it for being such a wuss. Then it’d be back to the lot for more of the same until the sun went down and our mommas started hollering.

The thing about childhood is that you don’t know how special it is until it’s over. All those memories you make will stay in your pocket for the rest of your life, and you’ll take them out from time to time just to handle them and remember. But I think we all understood that back then. I know I did. Even that young and even in the midst of those moment, I knew how special they’d become one day. How long-lasting.

I grew up in that lot. We all played on the Little League teams in town, but whatever we did on the big field didn’t matter. Our reputations—good or bad—were made between the pines and Mr. Pannil’s backyard, and we all knew it. I hit my first home run there, clear to the other side of the road. Broke my first bone in the outfield. I learned about divorce from listening to Noel talk about his parents, and I learned about sex from listening to Jonathan talk about his.

Things like that, they stay with you. They get tucked into your pocket and are never lost.

I learned this at the lot, too—nothing is ever permanent in this world. Even the good things go away eventually. We spent almost nine good summers on that lot and I remember each and every one of them, and I remember how it all began to slowly disappear. Noel moved away. So did Duane, though we never really missed him. The rest of us . . . well, I guess we all just grew up. We got cars and got older. Too old for the lot.

I’ve lost track of most of them now. That happens often in life too, and I think it’s one of the saddest things. There’s now a house where our lot used to be. It’s a nice ranch with a big front porch and flowers planted all the way down the sidewalk, but to me it’ll always be an ugly thing. To me, it will always be the thing that covered over my castle. But I drove down there tonight and just sat. It’s getting on in May and June is right around the corner—just the sort of evening when we’d get together for a few innings. I sat there with the window down and the breeze rustling through those old pines, and I swear I could hear the laughter of five young boys trying to figure out what it meant to be alive. I swear I would hear the ping of the bat. I swear I could hear someone say the next game’s tomorrow.

Creating magic

March 26, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I’ll say I’m a writer because I can’t speak. At least not well and not in front of large groups of people I do not know. I’ve done so anyway, and many times. And truthfully, I do just fine as long as I don’t count the “aint’s” and dropped g’s that come out of my mouth.

The invitation to speak that I received recently wasn’t one I could pass up. It wasn’t a fancy conference, wasn’t in a fancy city. It didn’t pay well (actually, it didn’t pay at all). It was instead for career day at the local elementary school.

It isn’t often that I get to play author, much less play one for an entire day. Despite the props I brought along—five books, a typed manuscript, and one bulging notebook—I knew it would be a rough road to travel. After all, I was going up against firemen and police officers and radio personalities. A writer would have a tough time competing with that with a bunch of grownups, much less a hundred fourth graders.

But as it turned out I didn’t have much to worry about at all. Sure, they were fourth graders—that peculiar brand of kid to which both reading and writing are anathema. So I started with the fact that when I was their age, I hated reading and writing, too.

It was all downhill from there.

I’m smart enough to know that kids aren’t much interested in publishers or first drafts or the horror that is the adverb, smart enough to know that adults aren’t much interested in them either. But I’ve found over the years that everyone, regardless of age or interest, perks up whenever I mention a writer’s primary gift to the world.

Not wisdom. Not inspiration. Not tight plots or moving themes or even memorable characters. No, writers do what they do because of one reason and one reason only—

They get to create magic.

They didn’t believe me, of course. Not right away. One kid asked me to make his pencil disappear if I knew magic. Another wanted me to guess the number she was thinking. I told them I couldn’t and that it didn’t matter, because the magic writers do was better. It was the greatest magic of all.

It was the magic of writing words down on a page that make pictures in other people’s minds.

It was the magic of being able to create entire worlds from scratch and put anything I wanted to in them.

It was the magic of being able to touch another person’s heart, a person who might live far away, someone you’ve never spoken to and likely will never meet.

And best of all, I told them, is that everyone possesses a bit of that magic. Anyone could be a writer. Didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, didn’t matter what color you were, didn’t even matter if you went to college or not. That magic was still in us.

It takes time, of course. All magic does. But I told them that if they did three simple things, that magic would grow and eventually spill out.

You have to read, I said. Every day.

And you have to write. Every day.

And most important of all, you have to believe you’re special. Because there is only one you in this world, and the way you see life is different than the way anyone else who’s ever lived has seen it. That’s why your story is so important. So needed. After all, that’s what the magic is for.

Turns out that an informal poll conducted by the teachers placed me second of the day’s top speakers. The winner was the radio guy. I wasn’t surprised. I can’t compete with someone who’s met Taylor Swift and Trace Adkins. I wouldn’t even try.

But a teacher told me that the next day when it came time for her class to do their journal writing, there was much less grumbling than usual. They were ready. Eager. When she asked why, her kids told her they wanted to make some magic.

Me, too.

Where the magic be

February 3, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

The people next to us were an extended family—nine of them, arranged in descending order from grandpa to grandchild, all occupying three tables that had been placed end to end in the middle of the restaurant. Most of their attention was focused on the grandchild. It was his birthday.

He looked eleven, maybe twelve. Bright eyed and brown haired. The first volleys of acne were landing upon his chin. The boy did not seem to mind. He nodded and smiled and offered a few words here and there. It was the typical pre-teen response to nearby family, one that said I love you people but I’m now too cool to show it.

I took all this in (writers will invariably call this sort of thing Research, which sounds much better than plain nosiness) and nearly moved on to the next table when the waiter arrived. He inquired as to the quality of everyone’s meal and if anyone would like dessert. The birthday boy’s face turned the color of his encroaching acne when everyone announced the occasion.

The waiter smiled and asked, “You like magic?”

The boy shrugged and snorted in the same motion. “There’s no such thing as magic.”

“I’ll be right back,” the waiter said.

He returned with a man I assumed was a dishwasher. His jeans and apron were soiled and soggy. He smiled down at the boy and said, “Hey there, m’man. Lemme show ya somethin.”

He produced a deck of cards from his apron and fanned them out face up in one fluid motion. Flicked them back with one hand. He smiled and winked at the family, who had by then already begun inching their chairs forward for a better view.

“You believe in magic, m’man?”

Another shrug and another snort.

“Cool,” the dishwasher said. He fanned the cards out again, this time face down. “Pick a card, birthday boy. Don’t let me see now.”

It took prodding from both mom and dad, but the boy did. He took one from the middle of the deck and held it close. He peeked and then let everyone else do the same.

“Toss it back in here,” the dishwasher said. He tilted the deck up and down and wiggled it. “Anywhere you want, Bossman.”

Back in the middle it went. The dishwasher slid the cards back one-handed again and held the deck beneath the birthday boy’s chin.

“Blow,” he said.

“No way.”

“Come on now. That’s where the magic be.”

Neither mom nor dad could get him to budge this time. Grandma stepped in. The boy blew on the deck and the dishwasher tapped it with his forefinger. He flipped over the top card.

I didn’t have to see the card to know the trick had worked. The birthday boy’s bewilderment did that. The slaps on the table by dad and grandpa helped.

“It’s a trick,” the boy said.

The dishwasher raised his eyebrows. “Okay, let’s try again.”

Another fan of the cards. The boy picked one from towards the back this time. He placed it in the middle. He handed the deck to dad to shuffle, who handed it to grandpa, then back to the birthday boy, who shuffled once more for good measure. Then he handed the deck back to the dishwasher and smirked.

The dishwasher held the deck beneath the boy’s chin, who proceeded to not so much blow as snort.

There was a tap on the deck. The top card turned over.

“Ha! That’s not my card.”

“No?” the dishwasher asked. “You sure?”

“Sure.”

“Dang. I dunno what happened. Guess you’re too good for me.”

I will say I was disappointed. I wanted to see the trick. And I’ll say the boy who thought himself a man was pretty disappointed too, even if he was too old to show it.

“You done with your plate there, Bossman?” the dishwasher asked. “Might as well take that on back.”

The boy nodded and picked up his plate. His mouth fell open.

His card was taped to the bottom.

The family applauded. The dishwasher bowed.

I have no idea who that boy was, but I guarantee I will always remember his birthday. I guarantee this too—whatever presents he was given, the best one came from the dishwasher. It was a reminder that no matter how old you think you are, there’s still a little kid hiding inside.

And no matter what we think, there is magic in this world.

There is magic everywhere.