A Quiet Belief in Angels (10 page)

“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 Levin, 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.

“You ever see flowers at the side of the road?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You know what they’re there for?”

“Some damn fool got drunk and ran his car into a tree and died, I reckon.”

Reilly nodded. “Mourning should last as long as the flowers, and then it’s done. Life goes on. Truth? I’ll tell you some truth. More talk of the war these days. Used to be talk of the Depression. Whichever way it goes there’s people dying every minute of every day. Don’t matter if it’s hunger or cold or sickness, or Ay-dolf Hitler’s bullets. Dead is dead whichever way it lays down to rest or comes up for air. Times like these is when people get busy in their beds. New people is made almost as fast as the old ones can die. New people are made with greater ease and less fuss than making chokecherry pancakes. Seems nature’s way of cleansing the past and arranging the future. You understand me, Joseph?”

I nodded.

“So let the past be what it was, the present what it is, the future the best it can be. There’s the Devil in angel’s clothing if ever you wanted to see him.”

I smiled. I didn’t really understand what he meant, but by then it didn’t matter. I’d already decided I would go home that day.

My bitterness, my sense of betrayal, was as transient as the narrow twists of dry flowers at the side of the highway, flowers for someone drunk, or someone hurrying, or someone merely absentminded; someone who lost their life and all that went with it in a heartbeat. Nature’s way of pruning back the weak, the sickly, the fragile. Maybe not. Maybe just the Devil in angel’s vestments: white on the outside, black within.

My mother and I never spoke of the episode with Gunther Kruger. What could I have said? What could she have said in return?

Things naturally gravitated toward routine and normalcy. I did not resist the gravitation. Only once did my mother say anything which seemed relevant. That Sunday night, leaning over me, kissing my forehead as I turned my face into the pillow, she whispered, “Pray for me too, eh, Joseph . . . pray for me too.”

I smiled, I said I would, I held her hand and, for a moment, her gaze.

I felt her relax, as if by acknowledging her request I had also granted absolution. I possessed no such authority, but then recognized that the authority considered by self was nothing compared to the authority bestowed by others. My mother gave me as much as she needed me to have, and then accepted my unspoken blessing.

I had decided never to see Gunther Kruger again, nor his deceived wife, but I felt for Elena. I could not let her go. I would watch her in class, and I would think of the girls that had died, and then I would think of her father and my mother and how I had found them. Perhaps I decided to believe something else, that I had been mistaken, that I had not witnessed any such incident. I pushed the shadow to the back of my mind, and there it stayed, growing ever more weak and feeble, craving sunlight, craving attention, receiving nothing.

Some days after I returned home, I walked with Elena to the end of the road. Here she turned and started toward her house, but I reached out and touched her arm. She hesitated, uncertain of why I stopped her, and even though I smiled as sincerely as I could, she seemed nervous.

“Slow up a minute,” I said.

She frowned.

“You in some kinda hurry?”

She shook her head. “No. Why d’you ask?”

I looked down at my shoes. I felt awkward for a moment. “I just wanted to—” I looked at her. She seemed so fragile.

“What, Joseph? Wanted to what?”

I shook my head. “I just wanted . . . I wanted you to know that I will always be here if you need anything.”

Elena didn’t say a word in response. Her expression barely changed. She turned and looked away toward her house. She seemed distant for quite some time, and then she looked back at me and smiled. “I know,” she said, her voice so quiet I barely heard her. “I know, Joseph.” She reached out and touched my arm. “Thank you,” she whispered, and before the words had left her lips she was walking away, running almost. I watched her go. I had said what I wanted to say. I hoped it would be enough.

Years later, after all the terrible things seemed to have ended, I believed that that was the point at which the darkness began. A shroud, a weight, a veil, the shadow in the back of my mind having found nourishment sufficient to grow.

I did not know, and perhaps never would.

I went on writing—wrote my hand sore and my heart out. But writing did not exorcise my fear, my anger, my sense of responsibility for what had happened. It was then that I decided to do something. It was then that I resolved to do all I could to ensure that no other little girls would die.

I spoke to Daniel McRae, to Hans Kruger; I spoke in hushed tones with other boys from the class—Ronald Duggan, Michael Wiltsey, Maurice Fricker. Six of us in all. I was seven months shy of fifteen years old, and there was less than a year between us. We agreed to meet after class, down amongst the trees at the end of the broken-fence field, and for an hour before school ended my palms sweated.

I ran home and collected the newspaper clippings from the box beneath my bed. Alice, Laverna, Ellen May and Catherine. We gathered down there, the six of us huddled together, and I held out the shreds of paper, turned at the corners like yellowed fall leaves.

I watched Daniel as he saw his sister’s name there in newsprint before him. Felt him flinch, like his soul had touched an electric fence. Glanced down at his shoes for some reason; small hole in the toe, skin so dirty beneath you’d never have noticed until you looked hard and long. Maybe his folks—too submerged in grief—hadn’t seen that hole either. Said everything that needed saying. Looked like he was set to cry, but the muscles twitched along his jawline, and I could feel him holding himself together.

No one said a word. Tension like a held breath.

“So . . . so what’re we gonna do?” Ronald Duggan said eventually. Stood there, bangs in his eyes, a head shorter than me, the pallor of his skin like someone raised on leftovers, thin varnish of sweat shining up his forehead. He looked nervous. Hell, they all looked nervous, but I sensed the spirit, the fellow feeling that came when I stood alongside one, two, three of them and knew that they wanted to do something to help.

“Something,” Hans Kruger said. “We gotta do something.”

“Seems to me we should let Sheriff Dearing do what he’s paid to do,” Maurice Fricker said.

“But he’s not doing nothing,” Hans said.

“Anything,” Daniel said. “He’s not doing
anything.”

“It’s that cuckoo clan,” Michael Wiltsey said. “It’s them that’s doing these things. Can’t think of anyone else wrong enough to do such things to little girls.”

“Ku Klux Klan,” I said. “They’re called the Ku Klux Klan, and they’re not interested in white girls, Michael. All they’re interested in is black folks. They just hate black folks for no simple reason.”

“So who is it?” Daniel asked. “If you’re so darn smart then you tell us who’s doing these things.”

I shook my head. I wondered if it was a mistake to be discussing this, as if by talking about it we were bringing the nightmare ever closer. “I don’t know who’s doing it, Daniel, and neither does Sheriff Dearing, nor Ford Ruby. That’s the problem here. Something’s happening and no one knows why, and no one knows what to do about it.”

“And you figure we can do something about it?” Michael asked.

“Hell, Michael, I think we should at least try.” I held out the newspaper clippings again, in such a way as they could all clearly see. “I don’t want to read these things about people we know. Look at Daniel—”

They all looked up one by one, slowly, tentatively—almost as if they were afraid to see.

Daniel McRae stood motionless. He looked like he’d backed up out of his head and left his body standing right where it was.

“Daniel’s lost his sister. You have any idea what that must be like?”

Daniel looked like he was ready to break up. Tears filled his eyes. “Don’t . . . don’t want to—” he started, but I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. He bowed his head, and from the depths of his chest I could hear the small hitches as he suppressed his sobbing.

“We have to do something,” I said. “Something is always a darn deal more than nothing. We’re old enough to keep an eye out for these children, aren’t we?”

“So that’s what we’re going to do?” Hans asked. “We’re going to . . . we’re going to watch out for the girls?”

“We’re going to be guardians,” I said.

“Like a secret club,” Ronald Duggan piped up. “We can call ourselves that. We can call ourselves the Guardians.”

“Name don’t mean a thing,” Daniel said. His voice cracked mid-sentence. “Don’t matter what you’re called. Matters what you do . . . that’s all.”

“The Guardians,” Michael said. “That’s what we are . . . and we should take an oath. We should do that thing where you . . . where you . . . you know that thing?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Maurice asked. He frowned and scowled simultaneously; looked like someone had sewn his eyebrows together across the bridge of his nose.

“The blood brother thing,” Michael replied, “Where you cut your hand and press your palms together, and then you make an oath about what you’re going to do.”

“Nobody’s going to be cutting anybody’s hands,” I said.

“We should,” Daniel said. He spoke quietly, his voice almost lost in the back of his throat. “We should do it because it means something, and because this is important, Joseph. My sister was killed by this . . . this boogeyman.”

“Lord God almighty, you’ve been talking to Hans Kruger,” I said. “It ain’t no boogeyman. There’s no such thing as a darn boogeyman.”

“Just a name,” Daniel replied. “Name don’t mean anything. We call ourselves the Guardians, we call him the boogeyman. Just names, that’s all. Means we know what we’re talking about, nothing more. And we should do something to show we’re all in this together. I think we should do this, and we should make an oath, and then we should work out what we’re going to do so this doesn’t happen again.”

Hans Kruger had a penknife. Blade no more than two inches long, but it was sharp. “Have a stone, and I work it on the stone until it can cut paper longways,” he said. He held out his hand, and when he drew the edge of the blade across the soft pad beneath his thumb, he squealed. Blood followed the line of the knife, and within a few seconds it had crept along the creases of his palm.

I took the knife. I held it for a second. I pressed the blade against my palm, closed my eyes, gritted my teeth. It felt like nothing at first, and then a sharp needle of pain lanced through me. I saw blood, and for a moment felt faint.

Each in turn, one after the other, and then we pressed our palms together.

“Gonna die of blood poisoning,” Maurice Fricker said. “Darn crazy fool kids the lot of you.” But when we held our hands out ahead of us, each of us bleeding, there was a grim determination in his expression that told me he believed in what we were doing.