THE MAGNETIC GIRL
When the lightning was invented and the tree that was standing was struck sorrow was invented. Love was invented to give us something to do with sorrow.
ALAN MICHAEL PARKER,
excerpt from “The Invention of Money”
For my mother and my sisters, magnetic girls all.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: Cedartown, Georgia: October 1883
CHAPTER TWO: Tennessee: July 1862
CHAPTER THREE: Cedartown, Georgia: October 1883
CHAPTER SEVEN: Cedartown, Georgia: November 1883
CHAPTER TEN: Rome, Georgia: January 1884
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Atlanta, Georgia: February 1884
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: From Savannah to Saratoga, 1884
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Knoxville, Tennessee: March 1884
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Baltimore, Maryland: April 1884
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Washington, DC: 1884
CHAPTER NINETEEN: New York City: April 1884
CHAPTER TWENTY: New York City: April 1884
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: New York City: April 1884
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Saratoga, New York: April 1884
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Cedartown, Georgia: May 1884
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Atlanta, Georgia May 1884
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Knoxville, Tennessee: May 1884
Cedartown, Georgia: October 1883
OBJECTS HAD ALWAYS JUMPED INTO MY POCKETS, which is why I didn’t think of what I did as stealing. Whatever I took from one place to another was merely my attempt to help a lost thing find the right home. A button on the schoolroom floor by the wood stove, the pearly white shine so different from the chapped, dry floor beneath it that the only right thing to do was to rescue that smooth disc. A button the size of my fingertip, escaped from the tight row of its companions along Ada Shoals’s faultless back.
Mine now, and safe, you little button. This treasure joined my collection inside a wooden box that had at one time held spools of thread. I lined the box with a scrap of brown velvet I’d lifted from beside the scissors at the dry goods store. I kept three different glass-topped hairpins in the box, too, along with a playing card that showed a drawing of a mischievous fellow sitting Indian-style, waving a heart over his head. I also kept a glass medicine dropper. The rubber bulb was empty now, but it still squeaked when I pinched it. Once in a while, when I held the tip of the medicine dropper to my nose and inhaled, I could smell the bitter ghost of my brother’s medicine. My mouth watered when I did, a feeling that could nearly transport me back to a time before everyone forgot me.
I helped other things besides the button. An earthworm writhing in the hot dirt, practically calling out to the cool grass that it couldn’t reach. The worm was silent, of course, but I understood how solitary it felt. I crouched down and used a twig to lift the anguished creature. The worm lay crosswise over the twig, brownish-red flesh struggling in the air for something solid to cling to. Quick, before it fell to the ground and perhaps bruised itself—could an earthworm bruise?—I delivered the thing to the soft green strands, a wet place where it could burrow into the dark earth and find comfort.
I hadn’t meant to hurt my brother.
The year I turned six was Leo’s first, and I hardly ever let him be. I pestered Momma enough that she taught me to hold him without her being right there behind me. I listened like she was talking Gospel truth.
“His little neck is like a green branch, Lulu,” she said. “But his head is heavy, so we have to help him hold it up.”
She handed my doll brother to me, and he was warm and solid, and I was so very careful. One hand stayed cupped behind his head, the other under his bottom. Leo’s eyes were gray like a winter sky. He looked right at me. That was the first time a gaze punctured my soul. When Momma said, “Very good, Lulu,” and took him back to her breast, I held his fingers, unwilling and unable to fully let him go.
Momma rarely let me watch Leo alone. When she went to the woodpile or got the water boiling in the yard for the wash, I held him close, fussing with his dress or jiggling him in my lap. I told him intricate, imagined stories about how school would be when he went for the first time.
“Someday, Leo,” I said, “you’ll go, too, and the teacher will be proud that you’re my brother. You’ll already know how to read, like I do, and she’ll clap her hands for you being so smart.