And God help him, he ached. No matter how busy he’d kept himself, no matter how often he made himself think of something else—songs or war or books—the ghost of her body clung to him.
A gunshot sounded in the still air. He leapt to attention. Another. It came from the direction of the Corey store, and for an instant, Isaiah was frozen in horror. Then came another shot, and the faint ping of metal. He smiled to himself. She was practicing. “Good girl,” he said aloud and went inside to find a cache of bullets. He slipped them in his pocket and headed through the kitchen.
His mama called out in a tired voice from her bedroom, “Isaiah?”
“Yeah, Mama.”
“You going somewhere?”
“Just down to the juke joint for a minute.”
“Isaiah High.”
He went to the doorway of her room. She was stretched out on her bed, a blue chenille spread beneath her, feet bare, ankles swollen. She looked tired. “Just gonna holler at Sam Reed,” he lied. “Won’t be but a minute.”
She scowled. “What you need to do is come back to church with me. Everybody’s been asking.”
He drew the curtains over her window, picked up a pillow that had fallen on the floor. “Maybe one of these Sundays.” He kissed her head. “You need anything?”
She waved a hand. “I’m fine, son. Don’t you get in any trouble out there.”
He grinned to himself. He’d been halfway around the world, waded across a hundred battlefields with bullets and mortar flying around his head, and his mama still wanted to warn him about the players down at the juke joint. “I’ll be all right.” He paused a moment more, feeling guilty. He’d find her some sweets tomorrow.
Walking over the bridge and down the road to the store, he called himself nine kinds of fool, but the minute he laid eyes on Angel, that nasty voice halted. She was in back of the store, still wearing the dress she had worn to town that morning. It was blue-bonnet blue, with little sprigs of white flowers all over it, buttons up the front and a lacey white collar. Her feet were bare. In her hand was the gun, which she aimed at a can set up on a tree stump near the river. As he gained the yard, she straightened, held up her arm and fired. The bullet hit its mark.
“Getting pretty good with that thing,” Isaiah called. Angel glanced over her shoulder as she headed for the stump.
She waved, then picked up the can, put it back on the stump and walked back to Isaiah. “What brings you out tonight?”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of bullets. “I heard you,” he said. “Figured you’d be needing some more ammunition.”
“Just in time.” She aimed and fired. This time she missed. “Obviously I need more practice.”
“Can you load it?”
She gave him an impish grin and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Yes, sir, I can.” To illustrate, she flipped open the chamber and, taking bullets from the cradle of his palm, demonstrated how very efficiently she could load the gun.
It gave him a strange feeling to watch her fine-boned fingers handle the bullets and revolver with such confidence. When the gun was reloaded, she took aim and fired once more, her attention completely focused, her hand steady. She hit the can square center—and laughed with throaty delight.
He stood there in the gathering dusk, holding bullets as Angel practiced. She made him think of the women he’d seen in France, young women from little villages with rifles and ammunition belts wrapped around their sweaters, jaunty smiles on their mouths. They were good soldiers, quick and intuitive. A lot of them had died.
“Do you have a cigarette with you, Isaiah? I left mine inside.”
“You’re doing real good, Angel,” he said, reaching in the pocket of his shirt for the pack of Chesterfields. She took the cigarette and bent her head to the match he struck for her before she answered.
“I got good reason.” She inhaled. “I told him I’d kill him if he came near me again. When I got home I decided I oughta be able to back it up.”
“It’s not the same, firing a gun and killing a man, Angel—no matter how much you hate him.”
She looked at him steadily. “It beats the alternatives, though, doesn’t it?
He lifted his eyebrows in agreement. She practiced some more, cigarette dangling in her left hand while she fired with her right. Something about her was changing. Her step was firmer as she strode over the grass to prop up another can, and her arm swung comfortably at her side. She’d always been much stronger than her frail appearance would have led him to expect, and there was a grit about her that he forgot sometimes, but this change went deeper. The sweetness of attitude that made her seem so innocent was receding, replaced by something solid and knowing.
Isaiah liked it. He sat on the steps and watched her firing and smoked, grinning to himself.
“You better not be laughing at me, Isaiah High,” she said as she returned.
“No, baby, I’m not laughing. I’m proud of you,”
For an instant, a flash of heat showed in her eyes and she glanced away, tossing her cigarette on the ground. With a glance at the rising dark, she said, “This’ll be my last round, I guess.”
He crossed his arms on his chest, the ache back where it had lived all day. He waited in silence as she emptied the chamber, waited as she pivoted and met his eyes. He waited out the powerful urge to touch her, run his fingers over her ears and the dip of her waist. It buzzed in his ears.
She looked away before he did and he saw her swallow.
Flustered, he took the cigarettes out of his pocket, but couldn’t get hold of one with the shells in his hand. “Hold these things, Angel,” he said gruffly. She crossed over to him and held out her hand. Darkness surrounded them. Crickets whirred in the grass.
As he gave her the bullets, he found himself trembling— trembling!—like he was ten and scared to walk past Edwin and his bullies in town. Then he tried to shake a cigarette from the pack, and dropped it on the ground, and both of them, probably aiming to dispel the tension, bent to retrieve it at the same instant. His forehead slammed her cheek, hard enough to knock her sideways, hard enough his hand flew up to the spot on his head automatically. At the same instant, they both made the same, swallowed noise of pain.
“Angel, girl, I’m so sorry,” he said, reaching out for her arm to steady her. “You all right?”
“I’m fine—it was just a little bump.” She let her hand drop from her face and a dark red mark showed on the pale skin.
Now he could smell her lily-of-the-valley talcum. Such an ordinary scent, he thought vaguely, but it always made him lose his train of thought. He moved his thumb on her arm, gently, just feeling the texture of her skin. Lost in a place without thought, he lifted his other hand to brush a lock of fine pale hair away from the bruised spot on her cheek. His fingertips skimmed her ear, and she didn’t move away, looking up at him gravely. He heard her breath catch as he touched her cheek, traced the line of her jaw, pressed his big palm to the curve of her small face .
Time stopped. Dusk was so thick that only the pale gray stones under the trees were visible. A cool breeze blew in from the river. Isaiah, caught in some madness he couldn’t halt, took one step closer, feeling the slight warmth of her legs through her dress. Her hair floated over the back of his hand as he moved his thumb on her chin, traced the edge of her eye. And still she simply looked up at him, her breath as airy and uncertain as his own.
She lifted a hand and touched his face in return, looked at his mouth. Said his name in a quiet whoosh, “Isaiah.”
After twenty years of dreaming and wanting, never daring, Isaiah tucked his thumb beneath her chin, took the last step toward her, bent down.
And kissed her.
A soft noise came from her throat as she kissed him back, moving into him, pressing close. Her lips were full and giving, as ripe as grapes. He breathed it in, every detail—her soft cheek against the tip of his nose, the generosity of her movements, sliding closer, angling her head to accom
modate him. Her body brushed against him, and her palms fell flat against his chest.
Only a sip, he promised himself, feeling something huge moving and growing in his chest. But she edged ever so slightly closer, and her lips parted and he pulled her closer, feeling her small breasts barely press into his chest, and the twilight no longer existed, or the world, or anything but the sense of whirling he felt as he kissed her, as their tongues tangled, met, curled—
When she broke away, violently and urgently, Isaiah was left dizzy and bewildered. Angel stumbled away, her hand pressed against her chest, and his first, pained thought was that he’d been wrong—she was disgusted at his touch.
And then he heard the sound of an engine passing on the road in front of the store, rumbling into the secret invisibility of the backyard. Reality returned, cold and bleak as a January moon.
He could dream all he wanted, fantasize if need be, take his lust to women who could ease the ache. What he could not do, not ever, was forget what could happen to Angel if he let himself move those dreams and visions and hungers into reality.
There was a glimmer of tears in Angel’s eyes when she looked at him, a look full of sorrow and entreaty.
He spoke gruffly. “I’ll be back early to get going on things around here.”
And then, he forced himself to turn and walk away from her. He didn’t dare look back this time.
The next few days passed in an almost supernatural state of quiet. Summer bloomed in the heat of the afternoons, afternoons that moved as slowly as high white clouds.
There was no sign of Edwin. The first night after uttering her challenge, Angel had not slept well, starting awake at every creak and snap. The next morning, she carried a blanket out to the tree house, just in case she needed it sometime, and after that, she slept all right again. Customers kept her busy, and she was grateful to them on two counts. She could no longer keep Paul, of course, and she missed him. And, as long as there were customers in the store, she didn’t have to think of Isaiah.
Toward the end of the week, she knelt in her garden, pulling weeds. Isaiah was on the roof, working like a demon, as he had been all week. He hadn’t 1ingered in the evenings, and Angel didn’t ask him to stay—he was as scared as she was by the moment they’d shared in her back yard. He never met her eyes, never let their hands touch, never even asked for a glass of water. He just worked from morning till night, when he climbed down, visibly exhausted, and walked home. He seemed determined to finish the roof as quickly as possible—had even quit Mrs. Pierson’s job to get it done. At the present rate, he’d be done in another day or two.
Then he would be gone.
Angel yanked a tangle of bindweed from between stalks of corn. The thought of Isaiah leaving made her feel hollow, almost breathless. No more hammering overhead as she fixed supper. No more quiet chats under cover of deep twilight, no more of the tales he shared of the faraway places he’d seen, the places that had given his voice its new cadence, his mind its new turns.
She straightened and brushed her hair from her face, pressing one hand against the small of her back. Isaiah clung to the edge of the roof, nailing shingles. He was shirtless beneath worn overalls, and the sun arced off the red-hued brown of his arms in waves. Muscles rippled in his forearm and back, tensing, releasing, tensing, and his well formed head glistened with a sheen of perspiration. All the outdoor work was turning the temples of his hair a glittery red and she knew he hated it.
The luxury of admiring him without observation was too rich to resist. A long stretch of leg braced against the ladder. He was strong as John Henry, and just as big. She had not really known until he’d stood next to her, holding her, just how much bigger he was than any man she’d ever known.
That kiss.
It lived in every turn of her joints, her toes and wrists, neck bones and hips. She called up the small deep sound that had come from his throat a hundred times a day, remembering.
Isaiah halted his hammering, wiped his brow with an arm and glanced over to where she knelt amid the young plants, under the dappled shadows of an elm. In the instant that his eyes caught hers, she could swear he knew what she was thinking—not only of that single, stolen kiss, but other pictures, too, visions of them tangled together, arms and legs and hands as well as lips. It made her belly twitch.
When he looked away, slamming the hammer hard against the roof—slam. Slam! slam!—Angel felt her cheeks flushed and she lowered her eyes to her task. When she reached for another weed, her hands trembled. The hammering did not resume as she had expected, but Angel kept her head bent, kept it bent even when Isaiah’s worn boots showed in the corner of her vision, at the edge of the garden.
She leaned back on her heels, head bowed, waiting for him to speak. When the moment stretched, with him standing and Angel waiting, into a heavy, loaded thing as full as any noise, she finally raised her eyes. First to his hands, held loosely at his sides, those enormous, silk-skinned, elegant hands. Then to his collarbone. At last she looked at his face, to the deep and expressive eyes. There was sorrow there, sorrow and a hunger as deep as her own. “I got some chores to finish up for my mama. I’ll come on back later.”
Angel nodded. His step was heavy as it carried him away from her, but his head was still high, his shoulders square. As she watched him, she wanted to weep with frustration and loss—wanted to cry after him—don’t you see?
But he did see. That was the trouble.
Rather than brood, which was really her first impulse, Angel left the weeding for another day, and went inside to cook. She turned on the radio for company and brought out pans and spoons and bowls. Cooking always made her feel better, and today was no exception.
By the time Isaiah returned, she’d made a feast—chicken and gravy and greens, a bowl of butter beans left from the day before, and a fat, juicy carrot cake bursting with pineapple.
For him, she finally admitted to herself. She stood at the back screen door as he climbed up the ladder without speaking her. Clouds hung heavy on the horizon and Angel knew there’d be rain within the hour. She could bide her time.
Taking the book of poetry he’d left her, she wandered out to the front porch to settle in and wait. In thirty minutes, the sky was darkening. She glanced up, smiled to herself, and kept reading.
When the rain started, she closed the book of poetry and went inside to check the food she’d left in the warm oven. The scent of paprika and nutmeg escaped on a wave of steam, and she pinched off a bit of crisp batter lying golden in the center of the pan. It was good.
Humming along with the radio, she filled glasses with ice and bits of mint and set the table. Outside, the rain and Isaiah’s hammer warred over which could make the most noise. She checked the chicken once again, then grabbed a hat to cover her head and stepped out into the rain.
Isaiah still clung with ludicrous ferocity to the roof, rain pouring over his face and bare arms. “Isaiah High,” she cried, “come down from there before you break your neck!”
“In a minute!” he called without looking at her, and reached in his pocket for a nail. The gesture was ill-timed. As he let go, his foot slipped, caught the guttering and knocked it loose. Desperately trying to right himself, he grabbed for the ladder and the edge of the roof, letting hammer and nails scatter. For an instant, he hovered, frozen against the nothingness of air and pouring rain—but the thrust was too far in motion to stop. The ladder, with Isaiah clinging mightily, toppled to the ground with a crash.
Angel cried out and jumped off the porch into the mud, running to his side. He lay still, his leg twisted in the ladder. One of the rungs had broken with the impact of his foot. His eyes were closed.
Rain streamed over her shoulders as she knelt next to him. “Isaiah!”
“I’m all right,” he said gruffly.
Alive. Relief made her arms tremble. “Can you get up?”
He shook her arm away, “I’m fine. Go on and get out of this rain.”
“Don’t be so stub
born. Let me help you.”
“No!” He turned to his side, dragging his leg out of the rungs, and pulled himself into a sitting position. The rain picked up, falling now in torrents that soaked them both. Shaking her head, she grabbed his arm. She had to shout to be heard. “Get up and let’s get inside before we both catch our deaths.”
This time he didn’t argue. When he tried to stand up, he stumbled, grunting in pain before he could stop it. He swore, shaking off her hand.
“Come on,” Angel said, moving close. “Throw your arm around my neck and I’ll help you.”
He did as he was told, limping heavily as they made their way to the back door. She got him settled in the kitchen and went to the bathroom for towels. When she returned, he’d taken off his boot and was staring at the swelling ankle with an expression of annoyance. “Hell,” he said.
“Broken?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. Sprained good, though.”
“You’re lucky it wasn’t your neck, Isaiah.” She rubbed a towel over her face. “What in the world possessed you to stay up there in the rain?”
“Hurry.” Letting the ankle gently back down, he swore again. “Just cost myself a week, probably.”
A trickle of blood showed at his crown, and Angel tsked. “You banged your head, too,” she said, crossing the room to blot the cut with her towel. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, Angel,” he said harshly. “Stop hovering.”
Stung, she pulled back. “I’m going to change my clothes. You can go ahead and eat if you want.”
“I ain’t hungry.”
“Suit yourself.” Storming toward her room, she swallowed humiliation bitterly, telling herself that she was an idiot. Thinking of all the food, the set table, she sank down on her bed and pressed the soaked dress to her burning face. She was a fool.
The Sleeping Night Page 22