A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  Things don’t disappear if you ignore them; a lesson learned.

  Maybe lessons have to hurt sometimes so they come on home for keeps.

  I showed what I had written to Miss Webber. She read it silently, her face expressionless, and then she closed my notebook and slid it across the desk toward me.

  “Not one for the Atlanta Young Story Writers’ Adjudication Board,” she said quietly, and then she smiled, but she smiled with her mouth and not her eyes, and I knew somehow—perhaps through nothing more than intuition—that I had upset her. I did not possess the nerve to ask her outright, and therefore I stayed silent.

  “I know it’s Monday, Joseph,” she said, “but I have such a headache, and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind staying over for your extra tutorial tomorrow perhaps.”

  “No problem,” I said. I gathered up my things.

  “I think—”

  I looked up at her.

  She smiled. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Go. Go on home. Tomorrow we will talk about James Fenimore Cooper and the Mohicans.”

  At the end of the school road I looked back. Miss Webber had walked out beside me and paused there on the veranda at the front of the building. She was looking out at the horizon, her eyes fixed on some distant and indistinct point. She seemed pensive, lost almost. I wanted to walk back and ask her what was wrong. I did not. I turned and hurried home.

  Now I see and understand that this is the only way it could have ended.

  What did the Bible say?

  “Who so sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” An eye for any eye.

  One life in exchange for thirty.

  I try to remember when I realized the truth, when I understood that the man before me could be the only one to have done these things.

  But memories slide across one another and slip out of sequence.

  They are like reflections on mercury, forever seeking the path of least resistance. They gravitate like magnets. They merge and become one.

  All that remains is a reflection of myself. I see the distant image of the child I once was, the reality of the man I have become.

  I close my eyes.

  I try to breathe deeply, but it hurts.

  I know that I am dying.

  SIX

  IT WAS THAT MONDAY—MONDAY, MARCH TWENTY-THIRD 1942, twelve days after the discovery of Catherine McRae’s decapitated head; twelve days during which the men of Augusta Falls and Folkston, Silco and Winokur had found nothing that told them the identity of the child killer in their midst . . . it was that day that everything changed.

  And it started in my house, the house where I lived, where I had been born and had grown up, where I had lost my father when Death came walking down the High Road and left nothing but footprints and irreparable loss. It started when I returned from the schoolhouse, leaving Miss Webber with her headache and her faraway gaze . . .

  It started with the sound of laughter from the upper floor of the house, the same voices I’d heard before, and me creeping along the landing, my heart in my mouth, pulse racing, forehead varnished with sweat—the tension of some indescribable fear pushing me forward.

  My hand on the handle of my mother’s bedroom door.

  The sounds from within.

  An intuitive sense of knowing, an understanding perhaps of why the money came every week, the money wrapped in a piece of leather and tucked beneath a heavy stone. It had been up there, alongside the fence that ran adjacent to the High Road. The road along which Death had walked.

  Even now, all these years later, I can see her face.

  I opened the door and saw them there—she on the bed on her hands and knees, as naked as the day God made her, and he—Gunther Kruger—right there behind her, naked also, his hands on her shoulders, his face flushed and sweating, their clothes scattered across the floor as if they possessed no value whatsoever.

  No one spoke.

  Three people and no one spoke.

  I pulled the door closed. I slammed it, I think. I turned and started running down the stairs, across the lower hallway, through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard. I kept on running.

  Heard a story one time. Was a story about a boy whose father was forever threatening to beat him. Boy was no bigger than a fence post, and he was scared of getting beaten. Didn’t see himself standing up to such a generous thrashing, for his father was like a tree, kind of tree still standing after a hurricane. So the boy started running. Every day. Running to school, running home afterward, running around the field near his house three or four times before dinner. Mother thought he’d lost his mind, brothers and sisters teased him. But the boy kept on running, running just like Red Grange on the broken-field. Later the doctor said he had an “athlete’s heart,” enlarged from continual exertion. Later, they said a lot of things. Boy’s heart gave out it seemed. Just damn near exploded. Running away from the thing that scared him most finally killed him. Ironic, but true.

  I ran like that away from my house. Ran along the fence bordering the High Road, cut through the tupelo grove and across the corner of the Kruger fallow until I reached Reilly Hawkins’s place.

  Reilly was away, maybe after rats, maybe after a child killer, and I waited in the cool silence of his house for more than two hours.

  “Jesus Mary Mother of God!” he hollered when I appeared from the darkened corner of his kitchen. And then, “What the hell . . . ? Christ, Joseph, what happened? You look like someone damned near walked over your grave.”

  I told him what I saw.

  He was silent for a good while. He shook his head and sighed. He seemed to be thinking, not about what to say, but how to say it in such a manner as I would understand.

  “Folks is complicated,” he started. “Folks get lonely, they get afraid, and sometimes the only way they can make themselves feel better is by being close with another person, close like it says in the Bible.”

  “They were having sex, weren’t they?” I asked.

  “Yes, from what you tell me it certainly seems as though they were.”

  “And that’s not in the Bible.”

  Reilly smiled. “Sure it is—”

  “I know,” I interjected. “I know that sex is in the Bible, but not that kind of sex . . . not the kind of sex that a man has with another woman than his own wife.”

  Reilly nodded. “Got me dead square on that one, Joseph. Bible says that that kind of sex is the sort of thing you get in trouble for.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while.

  “She’ll be worried sick, you know?” Reilly eventually said. “She’ll be out in the fields looking for you.”

  I shrugged.

  “You gotta stay here, Joseph,” he said. “I’m gonna go over there and tell her where you are. I’ll tell her you’re staying with me tonight.”

  I shrugged again.

  “There’s some fresh milk and pieces of fried chicken in the cold box,” Reilly said. “Times like this it’s good to eat. You eat, I’ll go and find your mother, and then I’ll come back and show you where you can sleep.”

  “I don’t want you to go, Reilly,” I said.

  Reilly walked across the kitchen and sat down beside me. “I gotta go tell her, Joseph . . . she’ll be worried half outta her mind, you know?”

  “I don’t care.”

  He smiled understandingly. “Now you say that, but in the morning you’ll be sorry for thinking such a thing.”

  “Thinking and doing ain’t the same thing.”

  “No, they’re not, but nevertheless it isn’t good to think or do something you’re gonna be sorry for later.”

  I let Reilly go. He was away a good half an hour, and when he returned my mother was with him. She looked like she’d been crying, and when she stepped into the room I steeled myself not to look at her. Not directly. I wanted to cry too, but I didn’t dare. I knew if I cried I’d be sorry in the morning.

  “Joseph,” she said, her voice soft like a breeze, like
the feeling of a clean cotton sheet billowing over you as you lie down to sleep. “My God, Joseph, I don’t know what you’re thinking now, but I’m sure it can’t be good.”

  I turned my head even further away from her. I felt the muscles stretching in my neck. I wanted to cover my head with something. I was mad at Reilly for bringing her to his house. I felt like he’d betrayed me.

  My mother sat facing me, right there at the kitchen table. She reached out her hand toward me and I tried to withdraw further even though there was no place for me to go.

  “You want to tell me what you’re thinking?”

  I shook my head. I closed my eyes and wished she would disappear.

  “Joseph . . . I’m speaking to you. It’s disrespectful to ignore people when they’re speaking to you.”

  I turned suddenly, my eyes wide. “Disrespectful to take your clothes off and do those things with someone else’s husband!”

  She looked shocked, stunned. She blinked several times. After a moment she rose from the chair and stood there looking down at me.

  Reilly was there too—I could sense him just outside the kitchen door.

  “Is that what the money was for?” I asked. “Is that what the seven dollars was for every week? So he could come and do those things?”

  My mother lowered her head, but not in shame. She was too proud to be ashamed. She lowered her head as if acknowledging a small defeat, the beginning of a war she knew she could not win at such a time.

  “When you are ready to speak to me . . . like a grown-up . . . like a young man, then I will listen,” she said. “You can stay here as long as Reilly Hawkins is willing to have you, and when you are ready to come home the door will be open. I am not going to apologize to you, Joseph Calvin Vaughan, because you do not have the right to judge me. I am sorry that I have upset you, but that is all I am sorry for.”

  She nodded once and left the kitchen. I heard her share a few words with Reilly Hawkins, and then the back door closed and I knew she was gone.

  Reilly appeared in the kitchen doorway. “I have a spare room upstairs,” he said, his tone compassionate, infinitely understanding. “You can sleep here tonight, and then we’ll figure out what we’re gonna do tomorrow.” He paused for a little while and shook his head. “Or maybe the day after.”

  Three days later—Thursday, twenty-sixth March, the same day that the Nazis started deporting huge numbers of Jews to a place called Auschwitz in Poland—I spoke with Miss Webber.

  “How heavy is it?” she asked.

  I looked at her askance.

  “The weight you’ve been carrying,” she said. “How heavy is it?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “As much as a house,” I said.

  She looked at me in a manner I would see in years to come, a way that only girls looked at you: her eyes, her entire expression carrying more complex messages than words could ever convey.

  “It’s good to talk at times like this.”

  “Reilly Hawkins said it was good to eat.”

  “I imagine Reilly Hawkins is right enough, but right now he knows an awful lot more than I do.” She lifted her satchel and started to fill it with our notebooks, the meager offerings of literary vagueness we had submitted for her consideration. She said nothing more, but I could hear the machinery of her mind turning over.

  “It’s personal,” I said.

  She nodded. “Seems to me that anything to do with one’s life is personal, Joseph.”

  “I mean . . . I mean this is really personal.”

  “I am not trying to intrude, Joseph, I am merely expressing my concern as your teacher and your friend for your well-being.”

  She closed her satchel and snapped the buckle closed. She hefted it off the desk and set it on the floor. She stood motionless, motionless but for the circuitous convolutions of her mind.

  I could feel her drawing me in. I knew what she was doing. She was perhaps better than anyone I had known, anyone I would ever know, at gently, cautiously, soliciting communication. There was something in her voice, something earthy and seductive. Even amidst a group, Miss Webber leading the recitation of times tables, the conjugation of perfect verbs, you could hear the singular pitch of her voice, both above and beneath the sound of the class. When she read stories you could hear the sounds she described, smell the woodsmoke of ranchers’ fires beneath the Red Top Mountain or the Amicalola Falls, see the endless waves of brushstroke maize, feel the raw and unrelenting sun cursing the back of your neck . . . all these things were present. It made you want to listen, and when she asked, it made you want to speak.

  “My mother—” I started. I looked at her, my eyes wide as tears crept up behind them, threatening to break the surface and make a run for my cheeks. “My mother was unfaithful, Miss Webber.”

  I looked down at the floor.

  Miss Webber stepped forward. I felt the warm certainty of her hand on my shoulder.

  My mind felt like a drought field, arid and cracked, and my conscience like an aged tree, its roots clawing desperately at parched dust, hoping against all hope to remain. Conscience was slipping, losing its hold, and soon it would tumble. Within the branches of that tree had once flowered loyalty, faith, trust and duty, everything that had once represented family. In speaking I had broken some bond of silence, some unspoken consent that defied any word be spoken beyond the walls of our house.

  “I don’t understand,” Miss Webber said. “Your mother is a widow—”

  “With another woman’s husband,” I interjected, and after the words left my lips there was a stony silence.

  Miss Webber exhaled slowly and sat down.

  I looked at her; she was misty and insubstantial through my tears.

  “Not everyone is perfect,” she said quietly. “Not everyone can live up to your expectations, Joseph. Human beings are human. We all fall from grace at some time.”

  I nodded slowly. My breath came short and fast. “I know,” I whispered. “I know, Miss Webber . . . but something like that would never be forgiven, and that means she will never be an angel . . . and that means she won’t ever see my father again . . . and . . . and you have no idea how much that will hurt him.”

  I stayed with Reilly Hawkins for another day. He spoke with me about inconsequential things. He gave me a book called the life and times of archy and mehitabel. Archy was a poet reincarnated as a cockroach, who typed letters to the author of the book. Being a cockroach he could not reach the shift key, and thus everything he wrote was typed in lower case. Mehitabel was an alley cat, worldly-wise and cynical. Archy was philosophical, more tolerant and forgiving, and together they set the world to rights in their own inimitable way. I read the book and it made me smile, and for minutes at a time I would forget about my mother.

  In the evening Reilly told me stories of his family, first and foremost of his brother, Lucius.

  “I thought you only had one brother,” I said.

  “Levin? Yes, there was Levin. But Lucius was older than both of us.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Lucius was a man with a fire in his belly. He used to work for Daly & Hearst’s firm, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and then he heard of the war in Spain. He left America in ’36 to fight with the loyalists against Franco. He was killed by one of his own people, trampled to death by a horse and rider as they tried to escape from a burning barn. Lucius was crazy and beautiful, dark-haired with eyes like backlit sapphires. My father used to say that he would either be a genius or a fool and he could never tell which. But then my father was crazy too.” Reilly laughed. It sounded like a frog in a bucket on its way down a well. “You know what a laxative is?”

  I nodded.

  “There was this laxative preparation called Serutan. Had a catch-phrase . . . used to say ‘Serutan is natures spelled backwards.’ Get it? Well my pa used to drink that stuff ’cause he liked the taste, and then he used to break wind until the house smelled like an egg fried in sulfur. Me and Lucius and Le
vin, my ma as well . . . we used to leave the house and stand in the yard and wait until the air cleared before we could go back inside.” Reilly shook his head. “He looked the better part of normal, sounded the same way until you started to hear the words, and then you realized John Hawkins was as crazy as a March hare in November. He had his eyes hung low, his lip curled up one side of his face like some crazed cartoon of a crazier man, and when he got mad and shouted at us kids, thin strings of spittle would weave back and forth over his teeth like a water spider was in there building defenses for the winter.” Reilly shook his head. “Crazy he was—him, and probably every single one of his ancestors. Crazy like bugs on a griddle.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He got the cancer, you know? Ate him up from inside. He was always smoking these filthy black cigarettes that came from God only knows where. Anyways, the cancer got him in the lungs and the throat. He shoulda died quick, but he sure as hell took his time about it. He figured to see some scenery on the way out maybe, and he took the long way round to the bone yard. Used to sit on the veranda, sit there in his rocker, smoking his filthy black cigarettes and wheezing up a hurricane of spit, and he’d just look toward the horizon. There was nothing out there, nothing much of anything but weather and distance—and more than likely some extra weather beyond—but still he would sit there as if he was waiting for something.”

  “He was waiting for Death to come get him,” I said. “Same way Death came along the High Road to fetch my pa.”

  Reilly nodded wisely and cocked an eye at me. “Figure you’d be right there, Mister Joseph Vaughan, figure you’d be right.”

  Saturday morning Reilly made chicken-fried steak, and told me that it would be my last meal in his house this time around, that I should chew it well, good nutrients in steak you see, and then I should make my way out to the yard where I was cutting timber the day before. Should finish and bind the stack, and when all was swept and washed I’d be making my way home. Not back to Reilly’s house, but the house I was born in.