A Quiet Belief in Angels (12 page)

“Who’s there?” he shouted.

Michael had screamed, loud enough to be heard in another county.

No one dared move, not a twitch.

And Sheriff Dearing’s voice hadn’t sounded like anyone I knew. But we knew one thing . . . one thing for sure. Knew we were all done for. Done and dead twice over and then some.

Caught us hiding down there behind the wall, his torch illuminating our stricken faces, the momentary sense of relief that seemed to wash right through his features like water through paint, as if he’d been scared too, real scared, as scared as us, and then he was mad, mad as hell, shouting at the top of his voice in the darkness, hollering about how we were all going to be grounded, that our mas and pas would be waiting for us with a darn good thrashing . . . kind of thrashing we’d never forget.

Bundled us wholesale into the back of his car, drove half an hour to ferry us all back home, and when my mom saw me climbing from the back of that police car she started crying. Crying like she did when my dad was buried, but somehow different.

Madder than anything she was, as mad as I’d ever seen her, but wouldn’t let me go, holding me tight until I couldn’t breathe, telling me I was the worst kind of child a mother could ever have—willful, disobedient, ornery, cruel even. But still hugging me, hugging me and crying, saying my name over and over and over.

“Oh Joseph . . . Joseph . . . Joseph . . .”

Sheriff Dearing came to the schoolhouse the following day. He didn’t identify us by name, but as he spoke he looked at each of us in turn, pinned us with a steely eye right where we sat and said as how there’d been some trouble, that things were getting out of hand, and how he’d imposed a curfew on us kids.

Home by six, no later. Home, and locked up tight where we could-n’t be causing any trouble. For our own good, he said, and then he stood there silently while Miss Webber nodded in agreement.

We met after school, the Guardians. Stood in a huddle and tried to pretend to one another how we hadn’t been that scared, that if it had been the killer we’d have overpowered him, brought him to the ground, kicked him left, right, up, down, north, south and sideways. Kicked him so far down to Hell he’d never come back.

We knew we were kidding ourselves. We knew just exactly how frightened we’d been that night.

Frightened like little girls.

SEVEN

W
E FOUGHT THE JAPANESE AT THE BATTLE OF CORAL SEA, AND THEN at Midway. Churchill came from England and talked to Roosevelt. Eisenhower went to London as commander in chief of all American forces in Europe. More and more often there were reports on the radio about the war. Each week Miss Webber would tell the class of another child’s father, another mother’s son having gone to fight. Some of them would come back broken, defeated-looking. Some of them didn’t come back at all.

Time, in some small and narrow way, seemed to heal the rift that had existed between myself and my mother. I went back to visiting with the Krugers. I even learned how to look Mrs. Kruger in the eye without thinking of her husband and my mother in the biblical sense. Routine and predictability brought acceptance. Some of the things I wrote then even suggested there was a sense of happiness within me. I was approaching fifteen years of age. I looked at girls differently. I thought about Miss Webber until I grew too embarrassed. But it seemed not to matter. Nothing seemed to matter. We heard enough of the war to realize that any hardship or awkwardness we might suffer was inconsequential and irrelevant in the face of the real suffering that was taking place. Miss Webber told us that we were old enough to understand the truth of what was happening. She said that there were more than half a million Jews in the Warsaw ghettos; that medical supplies were denied to anyone under five or over fifty; that all Jewish children were made to wear the Star of David on their coats; that the Nazis had murdered seven hundred thousand Poles, a hundred and twenty-five thousand in Romania, and more than a quarter of a million in Holland, Belgium and France. She showed us where these places were on the globe. We looked on in silence. Some of the girls cried, Elena Kruger amongst them. I reached out to hold Elena’s hand, but she smiled awkwardly and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. She said she was fine. Miss Webber said that often the men of the village were forced to dig many graves, and then those same men, their wives and children too, were executed by squads of German soldiers. I thought of the girls that had been murdered right here in Augusta Falls. I thought of how evil men could be. I sometimes took out the newspaper clippings and pored over them, trying hard to make the monochrome faces come to life in my mind. But I never could. I felt like those girls had passed away into some vague and indefinable netherworld. Perhaps they waited for redemption, for salvation from their pain. In truth, I hoped they were angels, but it seemed my faith was as insubstantial as their memory.

Late that month I went home and started to write a story. It had no title, and seemed to me that it didn’t need a title until it was done. I felt awkward writing the story, trying to see through the eyes of a Jewish child in Paris wearing a Star of David and a mournful, broken look. I sat at my window, chin almost touching the sill, and looked out into the night at a sky as hard as flint, with scudding clouds thin and fragile, like the ghosts of day, backlit afterthoughts to remind you of morning. The morning gone, the morning on its way—which one it didn’t seem to matter. In the air the crisp snap of lodgepole pine and bitter juniper made the taste of breath sour. Stars looked down at me, maybe angels too—Alice Ruth Van Horne, Laverna Stowell, Ellen May Levine. I remembered the McRae girl, how they’d found her head lying in the cottonwoods and tupelos, her body in the stream gully. Men from four counties had looked hard and long for any sign of the killer, through daylight and then after dusk with torches. People came with dogs—dogs no more scent-quickened than a cat—and yet they brought them, and there was noise enough to raise the dead, but they found nothing. Those people had homes and jobs, they had children, all manner of livelihoods, but they dropped their livelihoods like fire-bottom potatoes and came running. Did they come out of fear? Fear that it could be their own children next? No, I didn’t believe so, because many of them left their children unminded in their houses, unminded even after nightfall so they could walk out and help. No, it wasn’t so much fear that drove them, it was something altogether more generous and compassionate.

We believed that what we were feeling was real fear. In truth, we had seen nothing as yet. In truth, we had no idea how bad it was to become. The real fear came with the fifth girl. That’s when it came. Came just like Death along the High Road. Like the mailman, like the windmill-pump salesman, like anyone else walking into Augusta Falls with wares to sell, snake-root oil or self-lubricating tractor gears, ready to catch people who should’ve known better on a bad day with a short fuse. And just to get him away from the door they would take whatever was offered and only slow up and make time to curse themselves later. But by then the man would be gone. Gone like the narrow whirlies that sprang up along the horizon with force enough to swallow a cow, and not some sick, rubber-legged calf, but a steer, full of horns and slobber and bad manners. Tornadoes, whirlwinds, whatever they were—you saw them, and then they were gone.

Real fear came fast, moved right in like there’d been an invitation to visit family. Times were it seemed that Death had come to collect all of us, every single sorry one, and had merely started with the children because the children didn’t have the mind to fight back.

The fifth girl was the one who sat beside me in Miss Alexandra Webber’s class, so close that I knew how she drew the number five backwards. Hell, she sat so close I knew how she smelled.

I found her Monday, August third, 1942.

Or, to be precise, I found most of her.

The bad dreams came. Always the same, perhaps small variations in time and place, but always the same.

They started with a sound.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

Like the sound of a heavy pole dragged along a picket fence, or down the stairs, but heavier than that, like somebody whacking something, giving it a goddamned good whack for all it’s worth.

And a sound in back of it, almost like an echo, but not an echo because it wasn’t the same sound, because the sound that followed the BANG! was a wet sound, like something bursting, like a watermelon maybe, but sour and soft and gone too yellow, the sort of watermelon you hurl off the porch just for laughs, just for kicks, just for . . .
monkeyshines!

And then I would see her.

Lying down like she was taking a rest.

A long rest. Rest-of-her-life kind of long rest.

I could see the soles of her shoes.

Coming up toward the brow of the hill, just a little hill, it couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty feet of hill, and just over the brow of the hill I saw the soles of her shoes. New white soles of new shoes facing me, and for a moment there was a ghost of embarrassment haunting my cheeks because I figured that if I could see the soles of her shoes, then I could’ve seen right up her dress to her little white—

I tried not to think of anything, except:
Why was she lying down?

Why would someone, a girl, a little girl . . . why would a little girl come up here and lie down on the hill, lie right there so’s anyone coulda come walking on up and see the white soles of her new shoes?

Didn’t seem to be any kind of answer to a question like that.

And then I heard Miss Webber’s voice, and she was saying, “The sour contradiction of doing everything you can to succeed, and then apologizing for it when you did . . . what kind of life is that?”

Over my head there were fall leaves curling up on their branches like children’s hands, infants’ hands: some final, plaintive effort to capture the remnants of summer from the atmosphere itself, and hold it, hold it close as skin, for soon it would be hard to recall anything but the brooding, swollen humidity that seemed to forever surround us. Winter in Georgia was a bold and arrogant enormity of a thing, like some bilious and uncouth relative, come to stay and charging into private moments and conversations with sourmash breath, and all the etiquette of a firing squad.

Miss Webber again: “This is not Aristotle, Joseph Calvin Vaughan. This is not black and white without a single shade of gray in between . . . this is life, and life happens, and life will keep on happening whatever you might do to stop it.”

And then,
Stop it!
the little girl screams, but it’s dark, Georgia dark, and there isn’t a light on earth but for some farmer’s truck a thousand miles away; or perhaps a fire somewhere out in a clearing where ranchers sit and eat something rank-smelling, their boots off and upended so bugs and spiders and creeping things don’t climb inside and bite their toes come sunrise.

Stop it! Help me . . . oh Jesus, help me!

A girl like that, arms like twigs, legs like sapling branches, hair like flax, scent like peaches, eyes like washed-out sapphire stones, quartz perhaps, something that runs in a seam beneath the ground for a million years until it shows its face.

And she digs and scrabbles, her hands like tight little bunches of knives as she scratches at the ground, as if by scratching a message could be transmuted by osmosis, absorption, anything . . . as if the earth could see what is happening to her and relay the message through soil and roots and stems, through the eyes and ears of worms and bugs and things that go scritch-scritch-scritch in the night when no one can see them, sort of things that cannot be seen with the human eye, things that bug-scientists catch and peer at through microscopes; and when you see them looking up at you through the polished black tube of an eyepiece you gasp, because they have night eyes, wise eyes, and their faces have knowing smiles, like they know they’re dead and squashed between glass slides, but somehow it doesn’t matter, because all the wisdom that seeped through the ground still resides within them. And that wisdom is something that you could never take away—even by killing something you could never take it away.

So maybe that’s what the little girl hoped—that by scratching, clawing, fighting, kicking, punching the ground . . . that by doing those things someone might hear her and come running and see the man hunched over here, the man with bowed shoulder and sweated brow, the man with rusty blade and skin that stank of hole and outhouse and fetid swamp, of swollen river dirt, of raw fish, and raw chicken—so raw and aged it’s blue and withered and punky to the nostrils.

Someone would come and see that man, hunched and working, like it’s his
job
, and a
real
job, not like these pale, anemic desk jockeys in their pressed pants filing things.

But no one came.

No one until I came the next morning, and by that time she’d been out all night, lying there in the grove of trees at the edge of Gunther Kruger’s land, and when I stumbled upon her she was all of five pieces, and each piece cast asunder, but the biggest and the best was her head, because he had kind of sawn down through the side of her neck and then cut a diagonal line, and the line had ended beneath her right arm, and there it was—her head, her right shoulder, her right arm, her right hand all by itself. One of the hands that had clawed and scratched and dug at the ground.

And in the air was the memory of her screaming:
Help me help me oh God Jesus Jesus Mary Mother of God Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come, thy will
—

But that noise only went on for a handful of heartbeats because with the point of his rusty blade the man found a spot between her ribs and then he pushed slowly down on the handle and the blade was resisted by nothing much at all.