The Day the Angels Fell

by Shawn Smucker

  © 2017 by Shawn Smucker

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-1107-8

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Scripture quotations marked NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  To

  Cade, Lucy, Abra,

  Sam, Leo, and Poppy,

  for being the main characters

  in my favorite story.

  And most of all,

  to Maile.

  Along with everything else,

  this is for you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1: The Storm

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part 2: The Tree

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Part 3: The Sword

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Part 4: The Fire

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  Part 5: The Secret

  34

  Sneak Peek of the Next Enthralling Novel

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  1

  I AM OLD NOW. I still live on the same farm where I grew up, the same farm where my mother’s accident took place, the same farm that burned for days after the angels fell. My father rebuilt the farm after the fire, and it was foreign to me then, a new house trying to fill an old space. The trees he planted were all fragile and small, and the inside of the barns smelled like new wood and fresh paint. I think he was glad to start over, considering everything that summer had taken from us.

  But that was many years ago, and now the farm feels old again. The floorboards creak when I walk to the kitchen in the middle of the night. The walls and the roof groan under the weight of summer storms. There is a large oak tree in the front yard again, and it reminds me of the lightning tree, the one that started it all. This house and I are two old friends sitting together in our latter days.

  I untie my tangled necktie and try again. I’ve never been good at these knots. My last friend’s funeral is this week and I thought I should wear a tie. It seemed the right thing to do, but now that I’m standing in front of a mirror I’m having second thoughts, not only about the necktie but about even going. She was my best friend, but I’m not sure I have the strength for one more funeral.

  Someone knocks on the front door, so I untangle myself from the tie and ease my way down the stairs, leaning heavily on the handrail. Another knock, and by now I’m crossing to the door.

  “Coming, coming,” I say. People are in such a hurry these days. Everyone wants everything to happen now, or yesterday. But when you’re my age, you get used to waiting, mostly because you’re always waiting on yourself.

  “Hi there, Jerry,” I say through the screen, not making any move to open it.

  “I won’t come in, Samuel. Just wanted to apologize for my boy again.”

  Jerry is a huge bear of a man with arms and hands and fingers so thick I sometimes wonder how he can use them for anything small like tying shoes or stirring his coffee. He’s always apologizing for his boy. I don’t know why—seems to me his boy simply acts like a boy. And because Jerry is always calling him “boy,” I can’t remember the child’s name.

  “I heard he was throwing smoke bombs up on your porch this morning.”

  “Oh, that. Well . . .” I begin.

  “I won’t hear of it,” Jerry says. “In fact, as soon as I find him he’ll be coming here in person to apologize.”

  “That’s really not necessary,” I say.

  “No. That boy will apologize.”

  I sigh. “Anything else, Jerry? How are the fields this summer?”

  “Green. It’s been a good one so far.”

  “All right,” I mumble, then turn and walk away because I’m too old to waste my time having conversations that don’t interest me. “All right.”

  “Oh, and I’m sorry about your friend,” Jerry calls to me as I begin the slow ascent up the stairs. His words hit me like a physical object, make me stop on the third step and lean against the wall. They bring a fresh wave of grief to the surface, and I’m glad he can’t see my face.

  “Thank you,” I say, hoping he will leave now.

  “The missus says she was a good, close friend of yours for many years. I’m very sorry.”

  “Thank you,” I say again, then start climbing the stairs. One foot after the other, that’s the only way to do it. I wish people would mind their own business. I have no interest at my age in collecting the sympathy of strangers. Or near strangers. In fact, I can do without sympathy at all, no matter the source.

  I still imagine myself to be self-sufficient, and in order to maintain that illusion I keep a small garden at the end of the lane. Sometimes, while I’m weeding, I’ll stop and look across the street at where the old church used to be. After the fire they left the lot vacant and rebuilt the small brick building on a lot in town, but the old foundation is still there somewhere, under the dirt and the plants and the trees that came up over the years. Time covers things, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone.

  If I’m honest, though, I have to admit that during some gradual phase in my life I became too old to work the farm myself. There was a time not long ago when my farm fell into disrepair, and I thought it would be the end of me as well, because I couldn’t bear to watch so many memories collapse in on themselves. Then the family that moved into Abra’s old farm, Jerry and “the missus” and his “boy,” asked if they could rent my fields and barns. I said yes because I had no good reason to say no. Now they take care of everything and I live quietly in the old farmhouse, puttering in my garden or sitting on the large front porch, trying to remember all the things that happened the summer my mother died.

  Jerry’s son looks to be about eleven or twelve, my age when it happened. I wonder what he would do if his mother died.

  I think he’s scared of me, and I don’t blame him. I don’t shave very often and my hair is usually unruly. My clothes are o
ld and worn. I know I smell of old age—I remember that scent from when my father started walking with a cane.

  Sometimes Jerry’s son will hide among the fruit trees that line the long lane and spy on me, but I don’t mind. I pretend not to see him, and he seems to have fun with it, climbing up to the highest branch and peering through an old tube as if it’s a telescope. Sometimes, though, when he gets to the top, I find myself holding my breath, waiting for him to fall. Everything falls in the end, you know.

  I stare at the mirror again after climbing the steps and wonder where all the time has gone. I pick up the necktie and try again, but my old fingers can’t quite get it right. I remember when I was a very young boy my mother would sometimes put a tie on me, her delicate hands weaving the smooth fabric in a magical way.

  “There,” she would say, patting the knot of the tie and looking rather pleased with herself. “Now you look like a young man.”

  The boy reminds me of myself when I was his age. He runs around the farm with sticks and pretends they are swords and magic staffs. Those days seem so long ago. Now I move slowly, carrying only a cane that is nothing more than a cane. I don’t know if I have the power anymore to turn this cane into anything exciting, anything like a sword pulled from a stone or a gun that could kill an Amarok. Sometimes I feel like I have forgotten how to pretend.

  I give up on the tie and sit with relief at the desk by the window that looks out over the front yard and the garden. It’s rather eerie how the farm has returned to almost the same condition it was in the summer my mother died, the summer of the fire. Sometimes when I look down the lane I expect to see her walking back up from the mailbox, or my dad to wander in from the barns, dirty and ready for dinner.

  After many years of wondering if I could get the story of that summer exactly right, I have decided to simply write it as I remember it. There’s no one else left who was there when it happened, no one to compare stories with, no one to agree or disagree with my own version. As I think through the story, I wonder if it’s even possible that everything happened as my memory tells me it did. It all seems rather incredible.

  But one thing I’m sure of: after everything that happened that summer, life seemed fragile, like an egg rolling toward the edge of the table. It seemed like anyone I knew could die at any moment. But now that I’m old and all my friends have died or moved away, my own life feels almost unbreakable, like it will never give up.

  Which reminds me of something that Mr. Tennin told me in his thin, wispy voice, right at the end.

  “Samuel,” he whispered. “Always remember this.”

  I leaned in closer as the fire roared on the far side of the river.

  “Death,” he said, then paused. “Is a gift.”

  I stare at the obituary sitting at the corner of my desk, the one I cut out of the paper yesterday—such a small amount of writing meant to tell the story of someone’s entire life. I lift it up and it’s light, almost see-through, and for a moment life seems fragile again, and temporary.

  Death, a gift? I would have shouted at someone had they said that to me at my mother’s funeral. But I’ve been on this earth for many years now, and I’ve seen many things, and I finally believe that Mr. Tennin was right.

  Death, like life, is a gift.

  This is how I remember that summer.

  2

  I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD, and because I was crouched down in left field, picking at random blades of grass and not paying attention, I didn’t notice the darkness gathering in the west. My father signed me up for baseball every year, even though I wasn’t very interested in a game that seemed to be made up mostly of standing around and waiting, and on that particular day I was feeling happy the season was almost over. I stared at a small ant pile and poked at it, spreading panic. The ants dashed here and there, trying to rebuild what I had brushed away in an instant.

  I heard the faint sound of distant thunder.

  It would be remembered as the summer of storms. Nearly every week, massive dark clouds rumbled down over the western mountain range and drenched the valley. The fields outside of town were green from all the rain, and the creeks were muddy and full, bulging at the seams.

  While I heard the distant thunder, it wasn’t enough to get my attention, and I continued tormenting the ants. I glanced up at the parking lot and noticed that my mother wasn’t there yet, which was unusual because she almost always came to pick me up well before practice was over. She normally parked up from third base and sat on the hood of the car, her feet on the bumper, until I saw her and waved. Then she’d get out a book and read until practice was over.

  I had never had to wait for her before.

  I heard a loud ping come from home plate, and I looked at the batter, maybe 150 feet away. It was Stony DeWitt, the biggest kid on the team, and he slammed a screamer that was rising, sailing over my head. I left the ants to recover what they had lost and started running back, back, back. The rest of the kids shouted at me to hurry. We grew tired of Stony hitting home runs every time he was up to bat, and we roared with delight whenever we could get him out.

  The ball traced an arc over my head, bounced, and rolled to the short outfield fence. Beyond the fence was the town of Deen, Pennsylvania, which was nothing more than the intersection of two roads.

  I reached for the ball, and the instant I touched it—the very instant, I tell you—lightning struck, and it was so close that the thunder clapped at the same time. It scared me and I dropped the ball. There are times in those kinds of storms when you begin to feel that there is no safe place, that the lightning will strike anywhere, that you have a target on your back and it’s just a matter of time.

  My breath caught in my throat and I scrambled after the ball, my insides jumping every which way. I turned to run toward the safety of the infield, but I realized the baseball diamond was empty. The lightning had scattered the kids to their parents’ cars. Even Mr. Pelle, my baseball coach, who smoked the delicious-smelling pipe full of cherry tobacco, was running up the small hill to the parking lot, one hand holding a rubber home plate over his head, the other dragging a large red canvas equipment bag behind him. He stopped long enough to drop everything and cup his hands around his mouth.

  “Go into the store!” he shouted, waving me off. “Get inside!”

  My eyes scanned the parking lot again, the one that ran along the baseball field, but my mom still wasn’t there. I turned and ran back to the chain-link fence, climbed over it, and raced toward the edge of town, only a few hundred yards away. Heavy drops hit the ground all around me. There were large amounts of time between the drops, and I could hear each individual one collide with the ground. When they hit my baseball cap or my arms they seemed far larger than normal, the size of marbles that exploded into patches of water wherever they landed.

  I ran for Mr. Pelle’s antique store, which was right at the intersection. I had made it into the parking lot by the time the next lightning missile struck, and this time I not only heard the crash but felt the sizzle in the air, the electric pulse spreading outward. The air woke up, like a viper sensing a small mouse dropped into its cage.

  The rain turned into a constant sheet of water, and I felt like I was trying to breathe underwater. The air was lost, taken over by the downpour. There was no space between drops anymore. Everything, including me, was soaked in seconds. Water dripped from the brim of my ball cap, and my shirt clung to me, suddenly heavy, like a second skin.

  On one side of Pelle’s Antiques was Uncle Sal’s pizza, and the smell of delicious cheese and pepperoni came at me through the rain. I ran into the small alley between Uncle Sal’s and Pelle’s, through the small waterfall tumbling out from the gutters where the rain already overflowed. I pushed open the heavy brown steel door and vanished into the stockroom of Pelle’s Antiques.

  The door slammed behind me, and I went from a white-gray day full of the sound of pounding rain and splitting thunder to shadows and quiet and the smells of old cedarwood, dust, and p
aint. I stopped inside the door as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Outside, when the rain was coming down through that July day, the falling water had felt almost warm, but in the air-conditioned back room of the antique store, the water spread a chill over my body, and I crossed my arms, clutching my baseball glove as if it might bring me some warmth.

  The rain made a distant rushing sound on the roof, and as I meandered through the irregular rows of furniture, I wondered again why my mother had been late, and where she was, and who would take me home. I passed high-backed armchairs standing upside down on barn-door tables, and under them were old windows without any glass panes. There were desks and side tables and large hutches. Wardrobes stood closed and ominous, daring me to open them. Lamps of every shape and size filled in the gaps: tall, skinny ones and short, fat ones, lamps with shades and lamps without shades, some with small white bulbs perched at the top like crystal balls, others with empty sockets.

  I stopped in front of an old mirror framed in black, twisting metal, and I stared at my reflection in the peeling surface. I was a skinny kid and, being soaked through, looked even thinner than usual. I’m sure I didn’t look as old as I wanted to look. My brown eyes were still the eyes of a child. I spent most of my childhood wanting to be bigger, stronger, older.

  I heard voices in the prep room. It was the space between the large storage room and the sales floor, where Mr. Pelle stained and repaired and prepared one piece of furniture at a time before taking it to the store out front with the big glass windows that looked out onto Route 126. It was unusual for anyone besides Mr. Pelle or his family to be in that middle room.

  I moved to the door. I could hear my own heart thumping in my ears, and my breath seemed suddenly loud. My sneakers, waterlogged, squeaked with each step.

  But as I got to the swinging door, it was already leaning open a few inches. Outside, another lightning strike sent thunder through Deen. The sound of the rain was a constant hum, but the voices were loud. I peered through the crack in the door.

  Three old women sat on one side of a large, square table. They were dressed like gypsies, with long, flowing robes that draped down from their shoulders. Scarves were wrapped around their heads, with gray and white hair peeking out from under the colorful fabric. Large golden earrings dragged their flabby earlobes toward their shoulders, and their arms were lined with bracelets that clinked when they moved. They sat so close together that their robes folded into each other, so close that they almost looked like one wide, colorful body with three heads.