The Sleeping Night

by Samuel, Barbara

  In spite of all that, Isaiah had liked the Army. He didn’t complain about the building they did, because building had always been his dream. Building roads and runways might not be glamorous work, but he gained valuable education doing it.

  And in England, he had met Sergeant Owens, a black man with a big mind and a need to talk. It had been Owens who had given Isaiah the books he now held in his hands.

  He looked down at the volumes of poetry and novels, all of them written by black men.

  Black men.

  His initial reaction upon reading the words of black poets had been fury—how had he lived to the age of twenty without ever knowing there were poets of his own color?

  Why had no one ever told him?

  But the fury was replaced with excitement. If those men could write and publish their words, it was possible that he could fulfill his own dreams.

  The covers were worn now, the pages soiled with repeated readings in battlefields and ditches and farmhouses. They’d kept him company through the worst of everything, when it seemed he’d spent a whole year in the same smelly uniform. There was never a chance to bathe or change and, like the other soldiers around him, he trudged along doing his job as bombs and mortar exploded and bullets flew.

  Not his own bullets, naturally. White soldiers were the infantry, gaining glory. Colored mainly did the dirty work. They were mine sweeps and grave diggers, called by every name but soldier. Later, as the mortality counts rose, colored soldiers had got their guns, all right, been pressed into service in the desperate need for cannon fodder, Isaiah among them.

  During those long, grim days the poetry had become to him like the Bible others toted with them, the only comfort he could find, outside Angel’s letters.

  “I’m so tired and weary, so tired of the endless fight,” he read now. “So weary of waiting the dawn and finding endless night.”

  The words had been penned by Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., but they echoed Isaiah’s thoughts this night, seemed to embody the fat woman on his shoulders, seemed to echo in the blues floating on the mild night air and the hush of endlessly waiting lower Gideon. The people waited here in this little town like they’d waited in the villages in Europe.

  But no army was marching to free Gideon. There would be no liberation, no dawn to break the endless night. For the first time, he understood what had driven his father to protest so loudly, so long—until he’d protested right into his grave. Parker and Jordan had seen things in the first war that had triggered the same restlessness in them that Isaiah felt now.

  Isaiah had seen the futility of Jordan’s fight, and Parker’s. If he were to make use of this life, it wouldn’t be in Gideon.

  Tossing away his cigarette, he went inside to the comfort of his family. Perhaps the chatter of voices he knew and understood could drown his sorrow for one more night.

  Monday, Angel rose at five to prepare the morning offerings before the sun rose. In addition to dry goods and the sundry items any five and dime would carry, the store sold soda pop and doughnuts and pie, coffee or iced tea for a nickel. A sprinkling of colored women had made it a habit to stop by with dawn’s light to have a bit of the richly brewed coffee before heading off to other women’s homes to make breakfast and scour floors. There were five with positions in the homes of upper Gideon, and they were highly prized situations—long term and good pay.

  But the moments at Corey’s store were often the only moments of silence they found in a day, the companionable silence of women united by the tasks ahead. Here, for a moment or two, they were free of husbands and children and employers, could speak their minds in some semblance of truth.

  It had always been Angel’s project to open the store early. As long as she could remember, she’d awakened to the twitterings of blackbirds in the cottonwoods. Alone in the deep quiet of morning, she’d dress and slip outside to the front porch, waving to those first early travelers on the road to town. It had only seemed natural to go ahead and open up the store. And sometimes, someone would buy thread or a length of cotton or some such thing for the day ahead, but mostly they stopped for the comfort of friendly faces.

  The first customer this Monday morning was Clara Jackson. She came in just as the coffee was finishing, a short, rotund woman with shiny black skin. “Mornin’, Angel,” she called in a high, sweet voice.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Jackson.” She poured a thick ceramic mug full of coffee. “Let me run and get the milk out.”

  “Take your time, honey. I’m in no hurry.”

  Angel filled the pitcher and returned, putting spoons on the counter. Mrs. Jackson took one to stir sugar into her cup. “Hear the rain put some new holes in your roof.”

  “I had buckets all over the place,” she commented, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “How’d you do?”

  “Well, it ruined my garden, of course, but we sit up kinda high. Nothin’ else was hurt.”

  “It drowned my garden, too. I’m thinking I might try planting again this afternoon.” She stirred milk into her cup. “I never liked growing vegetables, but it got to be such a habit during the war that I can’t imagine a summer without it now.”

  Two other women came in, Geraldine High, Isaiah’s mother, and Maylene McCoy, Paul’s grandmother, with Paul in tow.

  “Good morning, Clara,” said Mrs. High. “Mornin’, Angel.”

  “Mornin’.” Angel poured two more mugs of coffee and looked at Paul. “What’ll you have, sir?”

  The boy beamed, crawling up on a stool. “Coffee.”

  Angel glanced at Mrs. McCoy, who nodded. “He drinks half coffee, half milk. Can you do that? I’ll pay for the extra.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. I can spare a little milk.”

  Maylene looked tired, Angel thought, her beautiful walnut skin pulled taut around the eyes, her mouth drawn. “Are you feeling ill this morning, Mrs. McCoy?”

  The older woman shook her head and sipped her coffee.

  Geraldine High spoke. “She’s had to take Paul with her to work for a week now.” Isaiah’s mother met Angel’s eyes. She was nearing sixty but it didn’t show. Her bearing was straight, and behind her spectacles, her deep brown eyes were clear and sharp. Not a single wrinkle marred the skin, a fact that Angel marveled over again and again—especially since she had begun to notice a few on her own face.

  “Last Friday,” Geraldine continued, “Paul accidentally broke a crystal vase and there was considerable fuss.”

  “Why do you have to take him?” Angel asked.

  “Anybody that might keep him is in the fields for the planting right now. They was about to get done, but now with that rain . . .” she trailed off.

  While they talked, Paul had leaned over the counter to grab a handful of straws kept in a tall glass. Angel shook her head, holding out her hand for the straws. He placed them in her palm with a sheepish grin. She winked. “Why don’t you let me keep him here?”

  “Oh, that’s kind, but I can’t impose like that.”

  “In case you never noticed, I really like children, and I like this one here in particular. He won’t be any trouble.” When she saw Maylene still hesitated, she added, “You don’t have to pay me anything, if that’s your worry. It’s been lonely around here and I’d like the company.”

  Maylene’s face softened. “We all miss your daddy, honey. No doubt about it.” She frowned at her grandson. “If I let you stay here, are you gonna mind Miss Angel and stay out of her way?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. I’m always good for Miss Angel.”

  Clara nudged Maylene. “Go on. Ain’t no sense in you losing your place.”

  “All right then. You know,” she said to Angel, “that I sometimes don’t get done till after dark.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll feed him.”

  Geraldine lifted her chin. “Isaiah told me he’d be stopping by here on his way home from Miz Pierson’s this afternoon.”

  Angel waited.

  There was an odd expression in Geraldine’s eye
s—a combination of worry and pride, and something Angel didn’t quite understand. “Why don’t you send Paul home with Isaiah? He surely can’t work in the dark.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Clara stood up. “I guess we better get moving. It’s almost six-thirty.”

  Geraldine let the other women go ahead of her. “God keep you, Angel.”

  “Always has.” She turned to Paul as the screen door swished shut. “Well, sweetie, are you gonna help me out around here today?”

  “Yes, ma’am.

  “I have to plant my garden. You can help me put the seeds in.”

  “I know how to do that.”

  “You have any breakfast yet? Let’s start there.”

  “Can we have pancakes?”

  “Why not?”

  And he might only have been four, but he brought a lot of energy into the day. She really had been painfully lonely, first through Parker’s decline, and then his death. Unless she was at church or made the effort to walk up to Mrs. Pierson’s, she didn’t have a lot of contact outside the store, and that was casual. A friendly wave, an exchange of funds. Done.

  Today, a handful of customers drifted through, but most everyone was busy in the fields or in town. Angel straightened the house and the store, then took a hoe and a rake and packets of seed to the garden.

  “What are we gonna plant?” Paul asked.

  “Carrots and radishes, first of all,” she replied. “The corn looks like it came through all right, some of the collards are okay, too.” She tucked her hair under her hat. “And what do you say to sunflowers and pumpkins and watermelons?”

  “Okay!”

  She paced off the plot, counting under her breath. “Tell you what. If you work hard, I’ll give you a watermelon vine and some sunflowers of your own to take care of, how ’bout that?”

  “Can I have a pumpkin, too?”

  She grinned. “You betcha.”

  As Angel squatted in the cool earth, digging and planting, she sang. Paul bent with fierce intent, meticulous about even the tiniest seed placement. He was born tidy, his mother said, with a powerful sense of how things were meant to be.

  He also had a chatty, silly personality, the side effect of being an only child, a situation she understood completely. Angel laughed at a joke he told, and when they made hills for the watermelon vines, she said, “When I was a little girl, my daddy let me have a whole patch of corn and sunflowers and pumpkins and melons. I just couldn’t wait for it all. Every single day, I asked him to check them for me. Seemed like it took forever.”

  “Is it gonna take forever for mine?’

  She laughed. “Probably will seem like it. But you know, at the end of the summer, you’ll have eaten the melons, and you’ll still have sunflowers, and then you’ll pick your pumpkin. It’s nice like that. You can roast the seeds and then, all winter long you can nibble on them and remind yourself of summer.”

  After a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and sweet tea, they settled on the back porch. Angel left the doors between front and back open to hear the bell if it rang, then slumped in her rocking chair. Paul climbed in her lap. Ebenezer roosted on the railing, his mellow song underscoring the peacefulness of the day.

  She rocked slowly, arms filled with small boy, his legs draped over the arms of the chair, his head nestled into the hollow of her shoulder. He smelled of sunshine and a clean wind and good, rich dirt, that smell of boys fresh from outside. His skin beneath her fingers was a little dusty. She hummed as she rocked, a nameless lullaby someone must have sung to her when she was tiny.

  When she imagined herself with children, it was always with sons. She liked little girls, liked their seemingly innate sense of propriety and the natural order of things, liked their self-conscious hair-flinging and play cosmetics. But it was boys she imagined herself bearing and raising. Boys like Paul who smelled of sunshine, boys like Solomon and Isaiah who fished and climbed.

  She loved the feel of this one settling sleepily into her, his weight and size as comforting as an answered prayer. On that warm thought, she dozed and dreamed the child was her own.

  Isaiah found them there, napping in the warm afternoon. Angel’s cheek had fallen against the ginger hair of the boy, who snoozed slack-mouthed and utterly secure. Such unconcerned slumber had become rare to Isaiah in wartime, where sleep came to a man in uneasy bits, and often not at all. He was loath to disturb them.

  Silently, he let his unobserved eye wander over the curve of Angel’s cheek, where a spray of almost silver-pale hair drifted on a current of wind over her poreless complexion. Her reddened hands, clasped around Paul’s slim body, were fine of bone and raw with work. His gaze wandered down the cotton-draped thighs and lingered at her fragile ankles and bare, dusty feet. He smiled. A grown woman and still didn’t put on her shoes. Calluses showed on the heels and along her cracking big toe. Solomon had hated her barefootedness; had muttered and bullied her about it constantly. Angel had listened in her patient way and worn shoes whenever she thought Solomon might be coming around.

  In some way, Isaiah must have made his presence known, for her eyelids lifted suddenly. For a long moment she regarded him sleepily, openly, in the way she had when they were children. She smiled, then pressed a finger to the oddly voluptuous lips. She rose, cradling Paul gently, and carried him inside.

  She returned without him, shoes on her feet, careful politeness not quite able to erase the soft friendliness of her waking. Her cheek showed the mark of Paul’s hair, and she rubbed it self-consciously. “He’ll have a nice nap,” she said. “He worked hard in the garden this morning.”

  Isaiah nodded, vaguely unsettled and at a loss for words. Angel, too, seemed nervous. She pressed a hand against her stomach.

  He glanced at her feet. “You didn’t have to put on shoes for me,” he said without knowing he would. “I ain’t gonna tell nobody there’s a crazy woman down here.”

  She let go of a small laugh. “Oh, well. I try to behave myself.” She stepped off the porch. When she stood next to him, her head rose no higher than his shoulder. “You seem so much taller now,” she said looking up to him.

  Impossible, he thought, to keep himself aloof from her easy observations, from her long, clear knowledge of him, even though he had intended to. “You just shrunk.”

  “I’m sure that’s it.”

  It felt good to just look at her up close, in real time. So familiar, every detail remembered and imagined and re-imagined when she wrote to him through the war. Heavy-lidded, big eyes with such a softness of color, a mouth too big for the rest of her face. With a little more color to her skin or hair, she might have been a beauty, but she was as pale as the moon.

  When she put on her lipstick, bold as a honk, that was a whole ’nother story. He’d forgotten that until right now, what lipstick did for that mouth.

  A flush crept up her face and her eyes dropped. Isaiah shifted, realizing with discomfort that he’d been staring. Gruffly, he said, “Why don’t you show me where that ladder’s at, and I’ll take a look up there?”

  She led him around the side of the house, pointing at the ladder beneath the old cottonwood. Stepping aside to let him pass, she said quietly, “Thank you, Isaiah.”

  He forced himself to walk to the ladder and pick it up. “It ain’t nothin’.”

  A pick-up truck pulled up in front of the store and Angel backed away. “Holler if you need anything.”

  As she hurried around the house, he let go of the ladder, bracing himself against it for an instant, eyes closed.

  He had missed her like an eye, like a thumb.

  And standing here now in the hot sun, he had to tell himself the truth or be damned. He hadn’t come home to see his mama or deliver Gudren or any of the other things he’d told himself he had to do. He had come home because Angel was here. Every road always led back to her somehow.

  But time hadn’t changed a goddamned thing, and he was much a fool as he ever had been. Didn’t matter if the world was
shaking, if his life had shifted. No matter what he’d seen or learned or become in his years away, not one damned thing in Gideon had changed with him.

  Want had no place here. Wishes were for children.

  Arms heavy with anger and a very real fear, he lugged the ladder around the house and climbed the roof with purpose. The sooner the roof was done, the better. Quicker he was gone, the more likely he’d live to tell the tale.

  Hank Crockett, a white farmer from down the road, needed a handful of things that Angel rang up for him at the counter. “Shame your daddy ain’t here to see the crop this year,” Hank commented. “He’s the one been talkin’ up rotation. I only got a little bit of cotton this year.”

  “I’m sure he knew you’d change your mind eventually,” Angel said, smiling. “Wasn’t a more stubborn man in all of Texas.”

  Crockett cackled, his face breaking into a wreath of wrinkles. The deep blue eyes sparkled. “And his little girl’s cut from the same cloth, ain’t she?”

  Angel lifted her eyebrows quickly and let them go.

  Paul ambled out then, rubbing his eyes.

  “Hello there, young fella!” Crockett boomed. “You sleeping on the job?”

  “Isaiah’s outside, sugar,” Angel said.

  “’Saiah?” Paul smiled eagerly and ran outside.

  “Major case of hero worship there,” she commented, watching Paul leap from the porch.

  “Good-looking little boy.” Crockett held out his charge slip, at the very end of his arm. “You’re gonna have to read that for me, darlin’. My arms just don’t stretch far enough these days.”

  “Pair of glasses might do the trick.”

  “Ah, hell no. Somebody might think I’m an old man.” He winked and gathered his purchases. “You’re getting your roof fixed, are ye?”

  “Hope so. ’Bout time, I’d say.”

  “Yep.” He patted his hat down firmly on his head. “Well, I better get this stuff on back to the wife. I am real sorry about your daddy, Angel. You need anything, you just let us know, hear?”