A Quiet Belief in Angels (34 page)

Dearing shook his head. “Hell, Joseph, I don’t know. It seems it’s about time you got yourself some happiness.”

Later, Sheriff Dearing long since gone, I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and cried.

I cried for her, for Gunther Kruger; I cried for the ten little girls who perhaps deserved happiness more than any of us; I cried for Elena, for Alex, for the child I’d lost. I did not cry for myself. There was no point. Now I carried something inside of me, and it was not the ghosts of these children. I carried the truth of what had happened, and this was perhaps most terrifying of all.

I thought about leaving. I was not afraid of what people might say or do, not afraid of what they might think of me. I thought about leaving because it made sense to begin again. I thought of New York, of the book I had promised Alex I would write. I made believe I could survive such a change, and tried to convince myself that everything happened for a reason.

I wondered if the girls’ parents had ever tried to believe the same thing.

“Go,” Reilly said.

It was the beginning of March. Reilly had come to eat with me, stayed for the night, much of the following day. We sat on the porch stoop, Reilly smoking, the late afternoon light reminiscent of every previous spring in Georgia. Winter did not leave indelible footprints on this land. There was an element of bleakness and solitude that was present regardless of season.

“Go to New York,” he pronounced, and there was an insistence in his tone that reached me, even through my absentminded wanderings.

“Like Dearing said, there ain’t a whole handful of nothing for you here, Joseph. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

He smiled awkwardly. “That ain’t even getting started.”

I turned and looked at Reilly Hawkins. “You say there’s nothing for me here. What makes you think there’s anything more in a place like New York?”

Reilly smiled and looked down. “Hell, I don’t know. A place like this you get born in and move away from, ’cept of course you got family or something.”

“You don’t have family and you stayed here.”

Reilly laughed, something resigned and slightly sad in that sound. “Me? I’m the best reason you got to get away from here. I’m you thirty years on if you don’t do something, you know? Besides, you were the one who started this talk of New York.”

I looked toward the horizon. An ocean of low shrubs, chickweed, wintergreen, stunted cottonwood and willow that had sucked too much water from the swampland and grown short and ugly; all of it punctuated by the low roofs of houses, houses that seemed to crouch across the earth, avoiding discovery, waiting to surprise whoever came visiting. I wondered if I was just afraid, afraid of the unknown, afraid of the future. I wondered what my life would come to if I stayed where I was. I’d marry some half-minded farm girl, rear some children, grow old resentfully and die from regrets and shortness of breath. New York beckoned like a loud and welcome noise at the end of a long, uncomfortable silence. I paid no mind to the Kruger boys, wasn’t even certain there had been rumors, and figured Sheriff Dearing had his reasons for considering me better gone. I believed that he was the one who didn’t wish to be reminded of Gunther Kruger. I didn’t see people often enough to know if they were looking at me strangely. I’d long since known that the only reason to stay was my mother, and that duty I’d hidden from for the better part of two years, since the visit I’d made just before Alex and I were married. I wondered how old she would look.

“Maybe I should go,” I said, and my voice carried out toward the trees and was lost amongst them.

“I think you should,” Reilly replied, and we didn’t speak of it again.

In hindsight my life appears as a sequence of connected incidents. Like a line of derailed boxcars, each one individual and yet coupled to the next. One car left the tracks—perhaps the death of my father—and everything from that point followed it swiftly, resolutely. I got to believing that I was connected too, and if I failed to disengage myself I would hurtle over the edge of someplace into nowhere.

That, and the Poles, were the reasons I finally left.

His name was Kuharczyk, Wladyslaw Kuharczyk, and he came to the house in the first week of April 1949.

“Your sheriff,” he said, in remarkably good English. “I come here because your sheriff says you are perhaps to sell this house and land and leave this town.”

Wladyslaw Kuharczyk was a good six and a half feet tall, but despite his size there was nothing intimidating about him. His features spoke of something gentle and sensitive.

“I have come with my wife,” he said. “We have three children.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes. “I had seven children, now only three. I had parents, my wife too, and she had grandparents. All of them killed by Nazis. We are just five people now and I come to America. We have money. My brother, he is dead too, but he make much money in Poland before the war. I have money now to buy this house and this land . . . also this land where this other house was burned.” Kuharczyk glanced over his shoulder to the Kruger lot. “So I come here with you and speak about this because your sheriff is telling us that you maybe go away from here and not come back. I come to see if this house is for sale.”

“Come inside,” I said. “Come inside and sit down.”

“My wife . . . my children also . . . ?”

I frowned. “They are here?”

Kuharczyk nodded and grinned widely. “Down there,” he said, and pointed to a knot of trees near the side of the road. He raised his hand and waved. A woman appeared, and within a moment a huddle of children were behind her, and for a moment I believed it was Mathilde Kruger, Hans, Walter and Elena. It was in that precise moment that I decided finally to leave. Wladyslaw Kuharczyk and his family would take the position left vacant by the Krugers, and I would do as many had wished I would for several years, and vanish out of Georgia.

Kuharczyk and I agreed on a price for the house and the land. I later learned that despite the document signed by my mother, the proceeds of the sale would have to be held in trust until she died. I made an arrangement with the bank to issue further funds against the trust, and though it was not a great deal of money, I believed it sufficient to get me to New York, to a place called Brooklyn. I had read of Brooklyn in magazines and books; I understood it was inhabited by authors, poets, artists, and others of a similar leaning and nature. Brooklyn was where I would live and work, where I would write the novel that would encompass all that my life had been, and then herald all that it would become. Brooklyn was to be my spiritual home, perhaps the place Alex would have chosen for me.

I saw two people before I left: Haynes Dearing and Reilly Hawkins. Dearing was almost monosyllabic, shook my hand, gripped my shoulder so hard it hurt.

“You ain’t gonna write no letter,” he said. “You’re gonna have better things to do than write letters, and I’m sure as hell gonna be too busy to read ’em. Get outta here. Place like this’ll wind up pulling everything out of you.”

“Sheriff, I . . .”

Dearing shook his head. “Hell, Joseph, I really don’t have a mind to hear much of anything you gotta say. You an’ me done all the talkin’ we needed a long time ago, right?” He smiled, reached up and tipped the brim of his hat back on his head. “I got word that someone tugged up thirty or forty yards of fence near Lowell Shaner’s place, I gotta go tend to that now. You go wherever you’re gonna go and make something of a life for yourself, okay?”

“Okay, Sheriff.”

Dearing nodded. “Good enough, Joseph, good enough.” He smiled once more, reached out and shook my hand, and then turned and walked away.

“Sheriff?”

Dearing paused and turned back.

“You know I didn’t have anything to do with Gunther Kruger’s death, don’t you?”

Dearing looked down. He raised his right foot slightly and started to dig a hole in the dirt with the toe of his boot. “Seems to me we got a lot of dirty water gone beneath a few burned bridges. Seems to me it don’t matter how such a thing might have happened, Joseph.” He stopped digging, looked up and smiled. “You remember that ten-dollar word you used, the one about someone getting a kick out of someone else’s misfortunes?”

“
Schadenfreude
.”

“That’s the one. That’s pretty much all I’m feeling regarding Gunther Kruger right now, know what I mean?”

“I do, Sheriff,” I replied. “Sure do.”

“Well, okay then, Joseph . . . doesn’t seem to me we got much else to say ’cept good luck and goodbye.”

I raised my hand and stood silently as Sheriff Dearing turned and walked away. I waited for a little while, and then I made my way over to Reilly’s house.

TWENTY-ONE

M
Y BUS JOURNEY PASSED THROUGH SIX STATES—BOTH CAROLINAS, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. The Okefenokee Swamp, Altamaha River, Jekyll Island and Dover Bluff: these things behind me. Looking from the window as the wheels fought against rutted tracks and awkward angles, I passed out of Georgia like waking from a dream, and watched as soft edges gave way to intense light and harsh colors. Jostled in a cramped and airless vehicle, I drove out of the past toward the future that was waiting for me.

A soldier rode behind me, tattered medal ribbons pinned around the brim of his hat, tunes from a cracked harmonica that he held in his hand, his mind lost somewhere in a dark memory of Europe that would forever haunt him. I believed I too heard their voices. An elderly woman sat across the aisle, her face like parchment washed clean of its message, eyes like holes punched through daylight to find the quiet darkness beyond. Huddled with the other passengers, we spilled from the bus into towns like Goose Creek and Roseboro, Scotland Neck and Tuckahoe and filed sluggishly into austere rooms in cheap motels. Thin sheets and gray walls, blankets too scant to cover both face and feet, shivering awkwardly as I resisted wakefulness. Cramped in knee, elbow, shoulder and heart for hours upon hours and hundreds of miles. A thousand miles, or two, or three or more. I changed buses, and faces: a pretty girl with a tiny baby, a brash college jock with too many teeth, a middle-aged man who cried with his eyes closed and never said a word from Richmond to Arlington. My rite of passage.

Alex was in my dreams, the child too, and men walking side by side, an arm’s length between them, beating a ragged path through undergrowth and swampland to find children lost and never to return. My mother: aged, infirm, crazy. A dead father, taken out along the High Road. Gunther Kruger swinging blue and swollen from a rafter. All these things; things of moment, of meaning, of dark and indefinable magic amidst the mundane and monotonous. My life. Nothing more nor less than that.

Road spooled out behind me. Took us days to reach New Jersey. Bus broke down outside of Perth Amboy. Stood at the side of the road, muscular twitch in my left leg.

“Smoke?” a man asked.

I turned, smiled, shook my head.

“Staten Island,” he said, and slanted his eyes northeast. “Is where I come from. It’s where I’m going. You?”

“Brooklyn,” I replied, and looked at the man’s face suspended beneath a wide brim of a wider hat. Skin sallow and slick, waxy cheeks, pockmarked and ridged. Looked like a man who’d survived a terrible illness.

“Don’t look like no trolley-dodger to me.”

“I’m from Georgia,”

“Georgia, is it? And what are you doing headed this way?”

“I’m going to be a writer,” I said as we heard the sound of bells from a distant church steeple.

“A writer, is it? And what’re you going to be writing about in Brooklyn?”

I shrugged and smiled. “I’ll figure that out when I get there.”

“Gateway to the Hamptons,” the man said, and drew on his cigarette. “Scott Fitzgerald, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, something like that is gotta be something good enough,” he said, and he drew on his cigarette once more.

We waited an hour for another bus that came all the way from Linden to fetch us.

That night brought dark sky, heavy rain, and the sound of liquid thrumming against the roof of the vehicle, ceaseless and interminable. I slept with my knees against my chest, and it took ten or fifteen minutes to recover circulation when I woke.

And in the morning, Brooklyn came at me like a wild thing. High-rise and hopeful; light smashing between buildings that reached farther than the eye could see, the glass of a million windows, and people, so many people, too many of them to see as individuals, Broadway, Union Avenue, signs for schools and churches, medical centers, advertisements and hoardings resplendent in colors and messages; and more people, more along one sidewalk than passed through Augusta Falls in three seasons.

We alighted at the bus station on Lafayette Avenue. I carried my bag, which must have weighed all of fifty pounds, and hauled it away into Brooklyn with no clear idea of where I was going. I had just wanted to find somewhere I could lie flat as a board and not wake until I wanted. Three blocks and I could walk no farther. I found a small hotel that seemed clean and took a room for the night. I unpacked some things. I washed my face and shaved. I dressed in a clean shirt, a creased jacket, and ventured out to a world that was both a stranger and my new home. I wandered for an hour, notebook in hand, felt sure I was lost, and then turned a corner to find myself facing the hotel. I felt foolish. I was a rube, a hick, a country-born farmhand. I was also desperately hungry, and in a narrow-fronted diner on Lewis Avenue I ordered enough food for two. I watched cars fender to fender, lights changing, drivers leaning on horns, a traffic cop with a ruthless eye, stepping out into the rush of engines with no concern for his welfare. The passage of time, of people, of the past through the present into the ever-widening future. I smiled like the fool I was. Here was something worth traveling to; here was New York City, heart of North America, its streets like veins, boulevards like arteries, its avenues like snapping electric synapses, channeling; a million voices, a million more laid over them, everyone close up together like family but seeing nothing but themselves. Here was a place one could be somebody at the junction, and nobody by the time you crossed to the other side. Everything I saw was bright and bold and arrogant. The cut of suits, the scarlet lips of girls, the cars a mile of burnished chrome. Majestic. Imposing. A clenched fist of a city. A thunderhouse of humnity.