A Quiet Belief in Angels (8 page)

Reilly Hawkins’s premonition came true.

On December seventh the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Three hundred and sixty Japanese warplanes attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. They also attacked U.S. bases in the Philippines, on Guam and Wake. Twenty-four hundred people were killed.

Four days later Hitler and Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, declared war on America.

Within six weeks American troops would land in Northern Ireland. They were the first to set foot in Europe since the Expeditionary Forces landed in France during the Great War.

Reilly Hawkins drove all the way to Fort Stewart, itself no more than a stone’s throw west of Savannah, but the Army told him his feet were flat and his arches were fallen and he couldn’t carry a gun for Roosevelt. I’d never seen a man so dejected and broken. He stayed in his house for three days straight, and when he appeared he’d neither shaved nor changed his shirt. My mother said that nothing could crush a man’s spirit so much as telling him he could not help.

Four days before Christmas, Gunther Kruger came to see my mother. Hans was ill—sharp elevations of temperature, relapsing fever, muscular pains, delirium. My mother called Dr. Piper and he examined the boy.

“Streptobacillus moniliformus,” he pronounced sonorously.

“In English,” my mother said.

“Rat-bite fever,” Dr. Piper told her. “The boy’s been bitten by a rat. See here,” he said, and indicated a suppurating welt at the back of Hans’s ankle. “Rat bite.”

“You can treat it?” she asked.

“Sure I can treat it,” Dr. Piper said, “but there needs to be a program to rout out and destroy the rats.”

My mother smiled and nodded. She turned to me. “Go,” she said. “Run to Reilly’s house and tell him that Dr. Piper needs him at the Krugers’.”

Reilly started work on his own, but by the end of the following week there were seven men in all. The Augusta Falls Vermin Unit. That was the name my mother gave them, and Dr. Piper told them that if the infected rats were not found then every child in Augusta Falls was at risk. It was necessary for morale, for the well-being of the families, that this task be undertaken with efficiency, with military discipline, with speed. Reilly was the chief. He was to be addressed as such. There were to be .25-caliber rifles, all ammunition paid for from the town purse. There were traps, nets, heavy boots, other incidentals and requirements, all of it official, all of it—in its own way—vital to the war effort.

Vermin Unit Chief Hawkins shaved every day, wore a clean shirt, patrolled routes that the children took to school. He carried a rifle on his shoulder, his pockets full of bullets, and he worked conscientiously to rid Augusta Falls of the rats.

“There will always be rats,” Dr. Piper told my mother. “You can’t possibly believe that Reilly Hawkins is going to somehow clear the entire county of rats . . . and even if he does, I’ve heard rumor that the rats in Clinch and Brantley are far bigger and far uglier than any we might have in Charlton.”

My mother smiled at him. “I never said such a thing was possible, Thomas, but go and see Reilly Hawkins when you have a moment, and then tell me he doesn’t possess a greater sense of self-worth and respect than he ever has.”

Dr. Piper smiled. “Would that all the women of Augusta Falls were as sagacious as yourself, Mrs. Vaughan.”

My mother bowed her head slightly. “Would that all the men were as easily directed to constructive action, eh, Dr. Piper?”

Nothing further was said. Reilly Hawkins and his Vermin Unit went on finding and destroying rats. They kept a logbook, detailed and precise. By February of 1942, as the Japanese invaded somewhere called Sumatra, the Vermin Unit claimed responsibility for the deaths of more than four hundred and thirty rats. No quarter was given. No prisoners of war. An eight-foot-deep hole had been dug in the middle of a cottonwood and tupelo grove at the very edge of Gunther Kruger’s southernmost field, and dead rats were not only tipped down there by the bucketload, they were burned as well.

That was the last time Gunther Kruger and Reilly Hawkins saw eye to eye on very much of anything, because once Christmas was done and we turned the corner into ’42 the color and pitch of everything in Augusta Falls seemed to change.

It was the war that did it; perhaps not so much the war, but what the war began to represent. It told us that there was a difference between people; that someplace thousands of miles away our own people were dying for something that we didn’t even start. It told us that the German people couldn’t be trusted, that somehow America had been maneuvered into a conflict that was not of its own making.

“Religious intolerance,” Miss Alexandra Webber told us. “Prejudice, religious intolerance, a veritable witch hunt if you like . . . that’s what is being perpetrated against the Jewish peoples. It is a challenge to everything that the United States of America believes in, a challenge to the Constitution. There is no way we can honestly continue to disavow involvement. This isn’t a war between England and Germany, nor America and Japan. This is a war between the Allies and the Axis Powers, and the Axis represents everything that we abhor and condemn. This is a war for freedom, for power of choice, for religious forbearance. Believe me, if I were a man I would be down there at the recruiting office myself.”

Outspoken she might have been, but Alexandra Webber was honest. The consensus of opinion turned against non-nationals—against the Italians, the Germans, even some Eastern European immigrants that had settled farms near Race Pond. There was a tension present at town meetings, something intangible yet unmistakable. The non-Americans started to withdraw from visible life. Even Gunther Kruger kept his children home.

The tension broke on Wednesday, March eleventh, 1942, with the discovery of a fourth murdered girl.

Her name was Catherine Wilhelmina McRae. She was eight years old. Her decapitated head was discovered by children playing near the same grove of cottonwoods and tupelos where the rat pit had been sited. Her body was found thirty-five yards away in a stream gully. There was no reason to assume that Catherine McRae’s killer was not the same person who had killed Alice Ruth Van Horne, Laverna Stowell and Ellen May Levine, and so the assumption was made.

I knew Catherine’s brother, Daniel, better than I knew her. Daniel was a month younger than me. I was there when his father came to collect him from Miss Webber’s class. We watched him go in silence. His father’s face was red-raw from crying. Daniel was chalk-white and stunned.

The three sheriffs—Dearing from Charlton, Ruby from Camden and Fermor from Clinch—met once more. This time there were no maps, no sandwiches and coffee, but instead a tri-county task force mobilized to scour the fields and surrounding countryside for anything that might relate to the murder of the McRae girl.

Reilly Hawkins’s Vermin Unit was established under a different name. Men came from Folkston, Silco, Hickox, Winokur. Twin brothers came from Statenville in Echols County, related by blood to Sheriff Fermor on his mother’s side; they drove more than a hundred miles in a beat-to-hell flatbed to join the line. That line was more than seventy men by the morning of Thursday the twelfth, and without a word, with no direct statement or edict, the foreigners were evident in their absence. There was not one German, not one Italian—even the Poles and the French stayed home. It was just Americans, Irish-Americans, a couple of Scots, and a Canadian with one eye called Lowell Shaner. Perhaps that was when the trouble really started. Perhaps that was the moment that ill will and hearsay became the fuel for some violent fire of accusation, at first nothing more than a spark, an ember, but after two days of searching fields and gullies for any small indication of the McRae girl’s killer, the talk that was spreading became incendiary.

“An American wouldn’t do something such as this.”

“Who could have killed four girls? Surely it would have to be someone who didn’t respect life the way we do.”

“Man who could do this wouldn’t be a churchgoing man, believe me.”

And so, in its own small and narrow-minded way, the people of Augusta Falls began their own line of inquiry. There was talk—hearsay, rumor, scuttlebutt—some of it slanderous, some of it fiction, some of it generated by the type of people that liked nothing more than to incite ill will and bad feelings between folk who previously were neutral toward one another.

There was so much talk of the killings I found it a difficult subject to avoid. Perhaps it was the first time I was scared of the world. The war frightened me—if only from the perspective Miss Webber forwarded.

“We know, as a race of peoples, that we are in trouble when war simply becomes a matter of dropping bombs from planes and killing hundreds, if not thousands of people. History has shown us one thing: that as we become more technologically advanced, we also become more able to kill more people without ever seeing their faces. One day, I am sure, someone will invent a bomb that is capable of destroying a whole town, if not a county. And that, sure as anything, will mark the point at which this civilization begins its slow and inevitable decay.”

So said Miss Webber, but despite her disturbing prediction the war was still something that wasn’t even being fought in my own country, it was something that existed many thousands of miles away. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor had resulted in American soldiers leaving the United States. The war was not being fought on American soil, and so—in a way—we managed to convince ourselves that it was something that did not involve us.

The killings were different. The killing of the four girls was right there amongst us. They were children I had known, and that—despite the smallness of its reality compared to the European front—was all the more terrifying.

One day, another day I stayed behind to wash the blackboard rags, I told Miss Webber of my fears.

She smiled and shook her head. “So write your heart out,” she said. “Writing can be an exorcism of fear and of hatred; it can be a way to overcome prejudice and pain. At least if you can write you have a chance to express yourself . . . you can put your thoughts out into the world, and regardless of whether anyone actually reads them or understands them they are no longer trapped inside of you. Bottle them . . . bottle them up, Joseph Vaughan, and one day you’re likely to just explode.”

Later, many years later, how accurate her words would prove. But then, all of fourteen years old, I just wanted to understand why these things frightened me so much. I believed if I could understand the man then I would no longer fear him. The man who had done these terrible things to these little girls. I tried to imagine what life he might have led, how he would see the world, ostensibly the same world I saw, but somehow different. When I saw sunlight, did he merely see shadows? When I woke from a nightmare, relief washing through me like sea-foam, did he attempt to claw his way back into the nightmare to experience even more of it?

I gritted my teeth. I clenched my fists. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how crazy you’d have to be to kill someone. To kill a child. And I wrote:

His eyes were swollen from crying, or maybe from looking for something. Or maybe his eyes were swollen because he was a crazy man, kind of man you’d keep a picture of to scare children when they were bad.

Smacking hard against the bad edge of life. Smacking hard against the corners, against the rougher angles, the angles that should have been smoothed down by such things as love and tolerance and patience.

And people would watch him from the corners of their eyes, and they would ask themselves what it would take to make a man so dark and crazy. Scattered hair, pinpoint eyes, brooding lips, a strong jawline—but strong with anger and passion, not the strength that comes from character and determination. Man like that would know darkness, they’d think. Man like that would know shadows and hidey-holes, cellars and dungeons and catacombs, and he’d know all too well the chingle-changle chains dragged by headless horsemen as they galloped into dreams.

Man like that you didn’t talk to, didn’t make eye contact, didn’t even think that he was there when he walked right by you. Give him thoughts and he’d see them, know you were thinking about him, and it would be like an energy magnet that pulled him in. And once he’d got you, well, he’d got you. There’d be no getting away, you see.

But no one really knew what he was thinking, because no one had ever asked him. He was just there, had always been there; he was the strangest familiarity along the footpaths and down the byways, hanging back beneath the trees when the rain came down, maybe smoking a cigarette and speaking in tongues to the ghosts that walked with him, beside him, inside of him even.

He’s part of our town, a part of our home, and perhaps everyone believes that if they ignore it, if they don’t think about it, then he will go away. Disappear into the shadows between the broken-down shacks on Cooper’s Row. Vanish. Dissolve into nothing and be forgotten forever.

No such luck, friends and neighbors.

His name was unknown, his face as well. Come springtime, when folks believed in the basic goodness of all things on God’s green earth, he came home to the people of Augusta Falls, Georgia, in many more ways than one.

Things don’t disappear if you ignore them; a lesson learned.

Maybe lessons have to hurt sometimes so they come on home for keeps.

I showed what I had written to Miss Webber. She read it silently, her face expressionless, and then she closed my notebook and slid it across the desk toward me.

“Not one for the Atlanta Young Story Writers’ Adjudication Board,” she said quietly, and then she smiled, but she smiled with her mouth and not her eyes, and I knew somehow—perhaps through nothing more than intuition—that I had upset her. I did not possess the nerve to ask her outright, and therefore I stayed silent.

“I know it’s Monday, Joseph,” she said, “but I have such a headache, and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind staying over for your extra tutorial tomorrow perhaps.”

“No problem,” I said. I gathered up my things.