A Quiet Belief in Angels (30 page)

Close to Christmas of 1948, Truman retained his presidency against Thomas Dewey, and I considered the possibility of leaving Augusta Falls. It was not the town or the county, or in fact Georgia itself, but myself that I believed I could separate from if I traveled a sufficient distance.

“Where?” Reilly asked me when I mentioned it.

“New York.”

Reilly nearly choked on his beer. “New York. New York? What in God’s name would you want to go to New York for?”

“Because it is so completely different from here.”

“No other reason?”

“Seems as good a reason as any.”

Reilly shook his head and leaned toward me through the cigarette smoke. We were in the Falls Inn, it was a Saturday evening and someone was playing the fiddle. “That’s not a good enough reason to leave for New York,” he said.

“Maybe I don’t need a reason. Maybe I could go on impulse.”

“You have to have a reason,” Reilly said.

“Have to?”

He nodded. “Sure you have to. There has to be a reason for everything, otherwise there is no direction. One problem you’ve had is that there’s been no direction. That’s why your life is disappearing, Joseph—”

“My life is not disappearing.”

Reilly smiled, shook his head. “Of course, I’m sorry. There has to be something there in the first place if it’s going to disappear.”

“You—”

Reilly raised his hand. “Face facts, Joseph. Alex is gone. She’s dead—”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Reilly.”

“I don’t care if you want to talk about it or not, it’s the truth. Can’t change the truth whatever happens. She’s dead, Joseph. How long now? Eighteen months, right?”

“Eighteen months, yes.”

“And what’s happened in that time? I’ll tell you what’s happened. Nothing. That’s what’s happened. Absolutely nothing. The only saving grace is that you’re not an alcoholic. Me? Hell, I would’ve drunk the county dry and then moved to Brantley. But that’s the only thing I see, Joseph. You’ve got the house. You’re alone apart from the odd time I see you. You spend that much time alone you lose your mind.”

“Which is why I’m thinking of moving, Reilly.”

“But to New York, of all places. What the hell is there in New York for you?”

“More to the point, what the hell have I got here?”

“Your mother?” he ventured.

I shook my head. “She went, Reilly, she went a long time ago and you know it. My mother is not my mother anymore.”

Reilly was quiet for a time, and then he looked across the table at me, his expression compassionate, almost sympathetic. “You’re all grown now. I knew you when you were two, three years old. I’ve been there and seen it all as far as your family is concerned. I can’t tell you what to do, and I sure as hell wouldn’t presume to. You have some will, and somehow you’ve managed to keep things together despite everything that’s happened with your parents and with Alex. I respect you for that, but part of the reason I respect you is that you’re logical. There’s sense and reason behind the things you do. This New York thing seems to possess no logic at all . . .”

“Which is possibly the best reason for considering it.”

“You got a will, like I said. Doesn’t seem to me that anything I could say is going to influence your decisions. You do what you feel you have to, Joseph.”

“I haven’t decided anything, Reilly, I’ve just been thinking about it.”

“Well, then think about it some more, and let me know what you decide.”

“Of course I will.”

“Hell, maybe if you go to New York you could find someone.”

I frowned. “Someone?”

“Someone you could love.”

I shook my head, looked away for a while. “I don’t know that I could ever love someone like I loved Alex.”

“Sure you could. You’re young. Your heart’s strong enough to survive this.”

“A love like that,” I replied. “You think something as good as that could happen twice in one lifetime?”

Reilly sighed, and it was then that I saw a weight bearing down on him, a weight broad enough to crush us both right where sat.

“Twice?” he whispered. “From what I’ve seen it most often doesn’t happen at all.”

There was silence for a time, and then he looked up at me. “It seems both of us have had a little too much unexpected and not enough predictable, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would, Reilly, I would.”

We didn’t speak of it again. I decided not to decide, that was all, and when it crossed my mind again it was February of ’49 and they found another girl.

She was the tenth one, and she came from Shellman Bluff, Mclntosh County. Her name was Lucy Bradford. She was eight years old, had a brother of twelve called Stanley. I didn’t know who she was, had never seen her before, but she—above and beyond all else—was the reason I finally left.

“You knew Alexandra, didn’t you?” I ask the dead man before me. “You knew her, but I can imagine that you never really understood her . . . never really understood anyone, right? There could never have been anything compassionate or sympathetic about you.”

I want to stand and walk to the window, but I cannot. I feel myself growing tired. I wondered what would have happened had I not pulled the trigger, if I had somehow trapped him, tied him to a chair, made him explain who he was, what he had done . . . made him tell me what kind of person could have killed and killed the way he did.

I want to reach out my hand and place it flat against the window. I want to look through the spaces between my fingers and see the city before me.

“She died, you know?” I say, my voice little more than a whisper. “She was pregnant with my child and she died. For a long time I thought that it was my punishment for Elena. I promised I would protect her. I stood on a hill and looked down at Elena as she stood in the yard behind the house, and I swore I would protect her, that nothing would happen to her.” I pause, I look down and breathe deeply for a while. “But it did . . . and it wasn’t like the others.” I smile and shake my head. “I can’t believe that all these years have passed, and now, here I am, right here in the same room with you, and you don’t even have a chance to explain yourself. How does that feel, eh? Isn’t that what this has all been about? Hasn’t this just been about you trying to get everyone to understand whatever madness lies behind what you’ve done? And now you’re here, now you have finally got an audience, and you can’t speak.” I laugh nervously. “What an irony this is.”

I lean down and retrieve my gun from the floor. I raise it slowly and press it against the dead man’s forehead. I cock the hammer. The sound is loud, like a branch snapping, like a whiplash of lightning in a distant Georgia field.

“Speak,” I hiss. “Speak now . . . or forever hold your peace.”

The silence roars at me, both within and without, and I wonder—just for a moment—if I haven’t made another dreadful mistake.

EIGHTEEN

T
EARS WERE NOT ENOUGH.

A little girl crying would’ve brought many a man to the brink of compassion, but not this one.

What a friend we have in Je-sus—

Praying in her mind perhaps.

On the vic-tory side, on the vic-tory side, no foe can daunt us, no fear can haunt us—

Words going round in her mind. Eyes closed tight like winter shutters.

Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, give me oil in my lamp, I pray—

The smell of something like something dead. Smell of shoe leather, or something that smelled like leather, and after the sudden shock of being snatched, after the moment’s expectation of laughter, that this was a game, just a game, just a fun game.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear—

Like hide-an’-seek, catch-as-catch-can, ollie ollie oxen freeeeee . . .

But realization dawned sudden like a door slam.
Bang!
One thing, now another, and then understanding that the pressure she felt around her neck, the fact that the other hand went beneath her skirt and touched her where she wouldn’t have dared to touch herself, was never part of any game she remembered.

And then her breathing faltered.

Hitching, catching in her throat, and understanding that whatever was happening wasn’t supposed to happen in any kind of world she’d imagined.

The feeling of hands—one around her throat, one beneath her skirt, and the smell of liquor, the smell of tobacco, the smell of leather . . .

Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning . . . keep me burning ‘til the break of day—

And everything inside her screaming that she had to get away, run away, run like the wind, run like lightning across the field to home.

But the arms around her, holding her ironbound, unrelenting, and the sensation of pressure increasing against her chest, her throat, finding it harder to breathe, and wanting to scream like a fire siren, like a great, swooping bird of prey descending . . . like a little girl terrified for her life . . .

Eight years old. A quarter mile from home.

She opened her eyes a fraction and could see the dip and sudden rise of the hill, the way the road wended east then northeast then east again, and in back of the rise to the right was her house.

Had it not been for the dip and rise she could’ve seen the house,
her
house, from where she’d been walking when he came from out of nowhere.

He smelled dark and deep and older than God and baseball.

It smelled like Jesus was nowhere to be seen.

A man behind her with arms like tree trunks, a man who smelled like he’d done this before.

And then she started crying, and that’s when he hit her hard and the sound was like a whip, and the pain that lanced through the side of her head was like the time she fell from a tree and bloodied her nose and bruised her cheek, and felt the sound of the earth colliding with her head for three weeks in her right ear.

She started crying, and he smacked her, and she knew it was a he because no one but a man could have held her so tight, and no one but a man had such iron muscles and rough skin and callused hands.

Her crying sound was swallowed by the darkness of evening, and every thought she had was more terrifying than the previous one, and when she realized what he was going to do it felt like her blood ran quiet and still in her veins.

Down on the ground now, one hand across her throat, his other hand tearing at her clothes, rending cotton and lace and satin trim, tugging the bowed pink ribbons from her hair, and she felt the press of cool air on her skin, and she breathed the smell of dead leaves and broken twigs, and heard the labored breathing over her, her eyes screwed shut in the make-believe wish that if she didn’t see it then it couldn’t happen.

He hit her again. A stinging redness on her cheek, and through her tears seeing the light in his eyes—deadlight, redlight—and white teeth, and smelling his rancid, fetid breath, and feeling the roughness of stubble as he pressed his face against her stomach, as his hands buried themselves, as fingers pushed inside her and made her hurt like she’d never imagined anyone
could
be hurt.

And then deciding to lie still, barely breathing, barely hoping anything at all now, as he does things . . .

There is pain within like her insides are being pushed up into her throat. Sensation of choking, and then the hand across her throat starts to increase its pressure, and feeling her eyes swelling inside their sockets, eyes fit to burst, and the sound of blood like those galloping horses across night fields.

As she struggles the weight and pain increase, and then she knows she’s going, slipping away into somewhere cool and safe, where such things can’t be felt any longer, and she welcomes the silence, the mo tionlessness, the feeling of calm that invades every inch of her body.

She senses the man standing over her with a single pink ribbon in his hand. He pauses, and then he buries the ribbon in his pocket.

And then it all goes away.

All of it.

A feeling of nothing, of emptiness, a breeze like summer.

Figured she would have been a child a little longer.

That much at least

McIntosh County sheriff’s name was Darius Monroe. His father was a sheriff, and his father before him, and before that their lineage went back to horse rustlers, thieves, drunkards and jackrollers. All of them on the muscle, tough men. Great-grandfather Monroe had sired the better part of twenty children out of four different women. Less a family, more a dynasty. Never married one of them. Earned a living playing cards on the steamers. Lothario glint in his gambler’s eyes, a life filled with shameful acts but never a shameful thought in his mind. Darius Monroe was fifty-three and tired. Never married, never would. The family line would stop with him, dead in its tracks, a deer with a headshot. His face was like a crumpled paper bag, his mouth tight like a widow’s purse. His eyes were like his gambler ancestors’, sharp and quick, saving everything until the moment came when he’d spread his hand and take the pot. Due to his station people had to trust him, but felt they shouldn’t.

Darius Monroe’s cousin on his mother’s side, Jackson “Jacko” Delancey, was an awkward-looking man, all knees and elbows with something in his color that spoke of a dalliance with Indians—plumbline-straight hair, black like a crow, nose almost Roman, features too proud for a man so humble. What Jacko found that Friday morning humbled him further. He spoke about it for months afterward—in bars, leaning on fences, walking horses to pasture, watering the herb beds his wife insisted on maintaining despite the taint in the earth that came from the swamp. What he found that Friday morning made him turn cold and quiet, broke a sweat across his skin despite the unseasonably chill air, made him stand back and walk away, made him turn around and keep on going a good thirty or forty yards, and then return to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. He had known he wasn’t. But the unreality of what was before him would’ve made any sane man think twice.