The Sleeping Night (10 page)

The river. She looked toward it, thinking of Isaiah. Or rather,
deliberately
thinking of him, because she hadn’t really had more than five minutes go by that hadn’t had some hint of Isaiah in them since he got home.

Isaiah. She rocked back on her heels and closed her eyes to relish the lowering sunshine, thinking of his sheepish wish for that pineapple-upside-down cake yesterday. The look on his face as he ate it.
The way to a man’s heart—

She conjured him up in memory. Standing there with a plate of cake in his big hands, sun glittering on the curve of his head. She called up the moment he met her eyes and she glimpsed him,
her
Isaiah, behind the guard he kept up. For one second, they had been real.

It nearly stopped her heart.

She knew it was wrong. She knew it was dangerous and foolish and impossible. Foolish. She knew, she knew, she knew. She’d always known.

But knowing didn’t change what she felt. Knowing didn’t stop the rush of heat and dizziness she felt thinking about him. Her limbs were weak with it, and a prickly circle of restlessness lived on the back of her neck.

Craziness.

She had to stop it, stop making small talk with him, trying to get his attention. It wouldn’t take that much longer to get the roof done, and Isaiah could be safely on his way.

She wished her father was still alive. She would never have dared such boldness if he were still around.

Maybe that’s all this was, loneliness and grief and fear. A breeze carrying the scent of the river brushed the small plants around her ankles, and she looked up at the sky, wondering if her daddy could hear her thoughts now. “Are you ashamed of me?” she asked.

His death, for all that he had been sick for nearly three years, had been sudden. One day he was working, talking to his friends as they stopped in. The next day he couldn’t get out of bed. One week later he was gone.

In the nights since the funeral, she’d lain awake in her bed, night after night, the silence around her as thick as the grave itself. It was silence that carried both heft and emptiness, and for the first time in her life, her faith wavered cruelly. It seemed, suddenly, that she had been a fool about everything, that God existed but obviously did not care about any one person. If he did, how did he let all those soldiers die, all those children, all those tigers, minding their own business in a cage in a zoo.

Worse, it suddenly seemed plain that she had missed the obvious: no matter how big he was, there was hardly any time for him to worry about one single human being, what with wars and starving children and all the rest.

Each morning, when the sun rose, Angel felt ashamed of her night thoughts and asked forgiveness in her morning prayers. Break her daddy’s heart for her to doubt God, for one thing.

Not to mention her own. Faith had woven the spine of her life. If it disappeared, what would she have?

One flower bed was cleared of weeds and, regretfully, Angel straightened, easing the clutch of muscles in her lower back with one hand. As much as she would have liked to stay outside in the soft light, there were linens to be washed, shelves to be stocked. Saturday nights were usually the busiest night of the week, and she had to get ready.

Going inside, she frowned to herself. Last Saturday had been a little strange. The customers were there, but the men were quieter, quicker than when her daddy had been around. The women, led by Mrs. High and the others who stopped on weekday mornings for that cup of coffee, chatted and gossiped with one another the same as always, or almost. Angel couldn’t put her finger on what the difference was.

Seemed like the women came first, came in pairs with children. And the store felt like it always had on Saturday nights, cheerful and full of jokes and
tsks
and mockery. The children tried getting into things and women scolded them, Angel among them.

Then the men drifted in, mainly from the fields, and instead of coming right in, they gathered on the porch with lowered voices. As soon as there was a weight of the men on the porch, the women’s voices lost a little of their banter, and eyes were cast at the shoulders and heads visible through the window in deepening twilight. Men came in two or three at a time, picked their supplies and paid up their bills. Then they exited, taking their wives and children with them like magnets taking iron shavings, until the store was cleared and silent.

Angel couldn’t complain about the money, for the receipts had been even a little better than usual. Just that something had shifted with her daddy’s leavetaking.

She was foolish to think she could stay. Keep the store. Live her life just the way she had been for her entire life.

Terror shimmered along her throat, dove into her belly: if not this, then what?

To stave off the worry, she bustled around, sweeping the floor, picking things up. Humming a tune from the pageant her Sunday school children would present in the morning—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—she plunged her hands into the soapy water in the kitchen sink. The cracked places on her fingers stung. She’d have to take care with her single, precious pair of stockings or they’d be torn to bits by those dry places. Maybe tomorrow she’d wear her green dress. The thought of the dress and the children cheered her. At least that was something she could count on—her children.

As the afternoon waned,
she took a few minutes to change into a clean dress for the evening. She bent over the vanity in her bedroom to make sure her face was clean while she fastened the buttons of her dress and brushed her hair. Her cheeks were sunburned and in the pale red, Angel could see a handful of dry skin lines.

“Good grief,” she said, “look at this. Got wrinkles and no children. Next I’ll be getting gray hair.” She shook her head. No help for it. On her dresser lay a stack of library books she needed to return and she took them with her, putting them next to the cash register where she would remember them tomorrow morning.

From there, the evening went much like it had the week before. A gaggle of women and children filled the store and made it merry with voices and laughter until the men came a little later. They stood outside a bit, talking quietly among themselves, then in twos and threes bought their supplies and faded into the darkness until the store was empty.

The clock read eight o’clock. The night stretched ahead as empty as a pocket. She turned on the radio for company and stepped out back for a cigarette.

Was this it? The moon was absent and, beyond the small circle of light thrown by the windows, an inky darkness surrounded the store. A breeze rustled the trees. From across the river sailed the muted music of the juke joint, joined in chorus by crickets and other night insects.

The despair she’d been fighting all day pressed in hard. She saw her life stretching forward decade after decade with nothing changing except the wrinkles on her face and the looseness of her flesh. She saw herself as one of those strange old women children fear and make up stories about. Saw them throwing tomatoes and eggs at her windows in the night, running away in fear of her witch’s powers.

She closed her eyes against the vision, panic pressing into her chest. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “Please don’t let that happen!”

Out of the shadows on the road from town a figure emerged. Angel straightened sharply. Desperate as she was, there wasn’t a force on earth that could make her consider Edwin Walker seriously, no matter what happened. And there was no one else who would be coming from that direction this time of night.

She squared her shoulders, her fingers tightening on the glass of tea she held. But it was Isaiah, not Edwin, who stepped into the circle of light, still dressed in work clothes dusty with the day. One hand was bandaged. “Evenin’” he said.

She let go of a breath. “You scared me.”

“My mama gone already?”

Angel nodded. “Nobody stayed long.” The pinch in her chest appeared suddenly, giving a vague trembling to her hands. She sipped her tea but, unable to hold it steady, put it down beside her on the porch. “You worked late tonight.”

“Yeah. Gudren was feeling poorly. I stayed to talk to her awhile—” There was a hard sheen in his eyes. “She could use some company, I reckon.”

“I’ll see what I can do. It’s been hard to get away, now it’s only me.”

“Ain’t trying to tell you your business, but she’d come here. I could bring her in Miz Pierson’s car when I come.”

“That’d be fine, Isaiah. You know better than to even ask.”

“Good.” He nodded. “Store still open?”

“Of course. What do you need?”

“Peroxide.” He lifted his bandaged hand. “Tangled with a rose bush.”

“Come on in. I’ll get it for you.”

While Angel found the peroxide, Isaiah paused at the counter and touched her library books. From the corner of her eye, Angel watched him lift one, then another, pausing at the third one down,
The Robe.
As she came back up the aisle, she said, “You read that yet?”

He shook his head and put the books down, stepping back from the counter. From his pocket, he took a quarter to pay for the peroxide. Angel waved it away. “Just take it.”

“No way to run a business.”

“I reckon it’s my store.”

“I reckon it is.” He eyed the stack of books, and looked up at her, as if he would say something. Angel stayed right where she was, telling herself to pretend her daddy was in the other room, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. Her hands wound around themselves.

Isaiah lifted his chin toward the gesture. “Am I making you nervous, Miss Angel?”

She stopped. “No.”

It seemed the air was heavier, that his eyes were saying something partly hostile and partly not, but Angel stayed right where she was.

Finally he moved to take his medicine from the counter. Angel picked up the book he’d fingered and pushed it toward him. “Go on and take this, too.” It was an old custom, one born in childhood.

He picked up the book and stuck it beneath his overalls. “Much obliged.”

October 24, 1943

Dear Angel,

Don’t have a lot of time, but thought I’d scribble out a little note. Keep hearing the King on the radio and it makes me think about you every time.

You remember how you wouldn’t let either me or Solomon be king when we played pretend? I been wondering lately how you knew at such a young age that a queen didn’t have any power if there was a king.

Thanks for the warning, about Edwin, that is. Go halfway around the world and still run into your worst enemy—that’s just my kind of luck. I did run into him, down to one of the canteens. Figures. Couldn’t even be stationed a long way from me. Got to be right here under my nose. They’ll be some trouble, I reckon, but this ain’t Texas and I’m a grown man now, not a boy he can set to with his hounds.

Maybe it’s just time old Edwin had a taste of his own medicine.

Anyway, I got to go to work now. Meant to tell you about the old man I met in a pub last week. Remind me. He was really something.

Your friend, Isaiah.

PS Sent you a newspaper clipping. Show it to your daddy, see what he thinks.

Hitler Murdered Three Million Jews in Europe

Hitler has murdered or destroyed by planned starvation, pogroms, forced labor and deportations, more than 3,000,000 of Europe’s Jews, according to a statement of the Institute of Jewish affairs, published in the United States.

Russia and other countries have given asylum to 2,000,000 exiles, says the report, leaving only 3,300,000 of Europe’s pre-war Jewish population of 8,300,000 unaccounted for.—B.U.P

(THE PEOPLE, 17 October 1943)