The Sleeping Night (23 page)

V-Mail

September something, 1944

Dear Angel,

I really don’t know where I am—somewhere in France is as close as I can get. It’s rough out here, I can tell you that. Brutal. Used to be pretty, but not so much now with all the bombing and troops and tanks running things over.

The people are tough and damned glad to see L’Americans! Break your heart to see how little they got, and want to share it anyway. I been seeing some of those buildings from that book you got me from the library that one time, remember? Gothic Architecture. Only problem is, most these churches already been bombed by the time we get here, so you come up on this big church with one wall left, and all the rest fallen down in piles of stones around the altar. Maybe one pretty window in place, the rest all over the ground like a bag of spilled marbles.

Tired now. Stink, too, and I’m so hungry for pie and cake and baby limas. Collard greens with plenty of bacon. Like a big glass of real sweet tea, too. I caught me a right fine pile of fish a little while back and fried it up in some bad grease they got around here. I know what it supposed to taste like when you fry it right in cornmeal and bacon grease, but them soldiers I fed it to practically cried, even the white boys.

We been going for days and days now. First rest we really had. Thank you for all your letters, Angel. You just don’t know how much they help. War ain’t like it is in the movies. Not a bunch of big strong guys standing up to the guns, while all the womens and children are safe in the house, peeking through the windows. Movies never show all the children get killed by the bombs. Or the old ladies. Everybody knows, all the French, too, that we got to drop the bombs, but I ain’t the only soldier sick about seen the babies and old folks dead by they house. And I know you’re tenderhearted and I ought not to say but I need to tell somebody—I never thought about all the animals. Cows and horses and mules swelling up in a field where they were just minding they own business when the guns and battles and bombs reached them. A shot dog lying in the road. Cat squashed by a piece of house, lions and bears in the zoo, dead in they cages, caught by the war.

You just don’t think. It ain’t about the soldiers.

I probably shouldn’t even write about it all to you, because I know you’ll cry, but I don’t know who else to tell, Angel, and I gotta tell somebody or I’m gonna bust. Pray. And write me some more letters.

That’s all,

Isaiah

V-Mail

August 8, 1944

Dear Isaiah,

I’ve just been outside boxing mosquitoes for the pleasure of picking the 900
^th
zucchini of the season. I’m going to turn into a zucchini, I swear. Next time you see me, I’ll be green-skinned with seed-teeth. (haha) I’m sending socks in a package, not with the letter, and some little food stuffs we thought you could use. Mr. Hayden said his son wrote that they can’t carry that much with ’em, but I figure you’d find a way.

Been going to the movies just about every week. Saw Gaslight last week with my daddy. We both liked it a lot. Couldn’t believe he wandered downtown with me. We even had a chocolate soda!

Tonight I’m making tuna fish salad sandwiches since we’re so hot and not very hungry.

You take care,

Angel

August 11, 1944

Dear Isaiah,

In my Sunday school class, we’ve been studying on the loaves and fishes story. One of my favorites. I like the happy Jesus stories for the children.

I have been on a big reading kick! A man named Edgar Cayce has come to my attention. He’s a country man who heals people by going into a trance. They don’t even have to be in the same room with him! Somebody just reads him a letter about the problem and he can figure out what’s wrong by talking to angels or something. He also tells people about their former lives, which is a very interesting thing to think about, even if my daddy says it’s sinful! I wonder what other lives I might have lived. What do you think?

Best go get the laundry on the line.

Your friend,

Angel

“That bastard,” Angel said.

She felt Isaiah look over in shock, but she didn’t care. She moved toward the railing, with some idea of going to the store and getting the gun there and shooting Edwin Walker dead on the spot for vandalizing her store. He had no right! She touched her throat, where anger beat so hard she thought blood might explode right through her skin.

As she turned to go, Isaiah grabbed her arm just above the elbow. “You ain’t going anywhere right now.”

Furiously, she jerked her arm from his grip. “You want me to just sit here?”

“You on a suicide mission tonight?’’

She swallowed and looked in the direction of the store, where a whoop of laughter sounded in the dark night. “No.” The lunacy of her thoughts sank in. She might, if she was mad enough, be able to take on Edwin by himself. Maybe. Not all of them. She blew out a hot breath. “I’m going to the sheriff tomorrow.”

“Uh huh. You think that’ll help? That he’ll get locked up or something?”

“I saw him with my own eyes. It’s Edwin Walker breaking my windows right now, and that’s against the law no matter who your daddy is.”

“How you gonna tell him you saw Edwin out there? You want to tell him about this here tree house? Saved your behind tonight.”

She lowered her eyes sullenly, hearing the truth of his words but unwilling to passively accept Edwin’s violence. Again. “He just doesn’t have any right to keep doing these things.”

“He never did,” Isaiah said harshly and tapped a cigarette out of his pack of Chesterfields. He gave it to Angel and lit one for himself, holding his match for her. “Believe me, baby, I plotted some ugly things for that son of a bitch.”

Baby.
Angel dipped her head to smoke, feeling a curious flutter in her belly, an ache. He was close enough that she could feel his warmth along her arm. His scent drifted toward her on the sleepy breeze—no longer the coppery river-water, dusty, sunshine smell of the little boy that she remembered, but something richer, now, muskier. A man’s smell. The dream she’d been fighting came back. Almost without thinking, she looked directly at his mouth. It was wide and well cut, unadorned with facial hair.

How many years had she wanted to kiss him? How many times had she imagined it? She wanted to feel the thudding of his heart through his chest and touch his hair and hold his big hands between her own, feeling him against her breasts and ribs, her belly. The hunger was so sudden and physical and real that it made her hands shake.

She moved away abruptly, taking smoke into her lungs, deep, and blowing it out into the treetops, pressing her palm to the point between her ribs that ached so, turning her back so that her face and all that raw emotion would be hidden from him. When she could speak, she asked, “What did you plot?”

“Chinese water torture when I read about it,” he said matter of factly. “And the stretcher machines they used in the Inquisition.” He glanced over his shoulder, “But my favorite was that thing the Indians used to do—you know cut off a person’s eyelids and tie ’em to the ground in the sun, maybe over a red ant hill. That seemed like fittin’ punishment.”

Angel laughed. The sound was too loud in the stillness of the forest, and she crouched down to cover her mouth with her hand. The laughing soothed her aching middle and, when she quit, she could look at him again. “I missed you, Isaiah,” she said impulsively.

“I missed you, too, Angel,” he said and paused. “I tried so long to hate you—” He shook his head. “You just can’t hate your best friend.”

For a long moment, he looked at her, his eyes shining gently in the darkness, and it was like the day before when he brought her the gun, as if a vine were springing up between them, weaving them together. Yesterday, it had been as fleeting as twilight. Tonight it felt stronger.

She smiled. “Chinese water torture?”

But he seemed not to hear. “They going now.” His expression was grim. “Let’s give ’em a few minutes to get on back to town, and then we’ll go see what kind of damage they’ve done.”

The sound of a truck, and then another roared into the quiet, and then there were lights making their way back toward Upper Gideon, one truck, two, one car, low to the ground. Angel gripped the wooden railing until she had splinters. Behind her, Isaiah said, “They’re gone.”

Not every single window was gone.
The one in the kitchen was high enough off the ground that they hadn’t been able to reach it properly, and they hadn’t bothered the one in her daddy’s bedroom. A couple were only cracked.

The rest were shattered, the glass hanging in the frames like triangular teeth. Angel surveyed the damage silently, no thoughts at all in her mind as she rounded the building. But as she moved, her throat closed, and heat swept over her neck and into her face. Her legs were clumsy.

“I’ll never be able to fix all these windows,” she said, and then whirled around, thinking of Ebenezer. She whistled for him, knowing how terrified he would have been by the torches and noise.

No response. She whistled again.

Silence. Forgetting Isaiah, she hurried up the front steps. “Ebenezer,” she called, and whistled again. And again. She went through the house and came out the back door, calling and whistling repeatedly, her worry growing. Had he just run away in terror?

So focused was she upon the absence of Ebenezer that she didn’t realize how uneven the ground beneath her feet was, or how odd it seemed until she heard Isaiah utter and earthy curse. She turned. “What now?”

With a sharp gesture, he bent and picked up a black square. “The roof.” He flung it across the yard. “Where’s your God now, Angel, huh? When’s he gonna send an army to keep your house safe?” He stepped toward her, his eyes narrowed, his voice low. “How come God can’t keep you safe from one crazy man? How come, if God is so damned good, he hasn’t done something about Edwin Walker?”

For one long moment, Angel didn’t know how to answer him. The question went far, far deeper than tonight. It had to do with the evil things he’d seen in war. It had to do with the widows and starving children and dead animals.

God
, she prayed silently.
Now what
?

The answer was so simple it made her smile. “He didn’t have to send in an army, Isaiah,” she said quietly. “He sent you.”

He looked at her for a long time, then shook his head. “You’ll be safe enough tonight, I reckon.” All the fight was bled out of his voice. “I’ll come on back early and help you pick it all up.”

As he turned to go, a squawk sounded in the quiet night, and Ebenezer flitted down from a hiding place under the roof. He fluttered up to Angel’s shoulder, purring, and a sense of relief flooded her. “I thought they got you, too, baby. Who cares about a house, long as you’re safe.”

“Go on inside now, Angel. Get some sleep.”

“Good night, Isaiah. You, too.”

It wasn’t until she got inside to the light she realized Ebenezer had blood on his beak and claws. She checked him over carefully, but found no wounds.

With satisfaction, Angel knew she had a solid clue to take to the sheriff in the morning.

Isaiah walked home,
disturbed by Angel’s words. Combined with the gentle chiding Mrs. Pierson had delivered in her garden about the power of one person for good or evil, there was a weight of weary consideration in him. He had been taught that God had reasons for things, that he could turn even the most base of evils into a force for good.

And Isaiah had believed it for most of his life. Believed in spite of his father’s murder. Believed in spite of having to quit school to help put bread on the table, in spite of getting half his life beat from him by the same posse that destroyed Angel’s windows and roof tonight.

In spite of segregation and bloody Texas, Isaiah had believed God would transform good into evil. His mama preached patience, said God did things in God’s time.

Even amid the grisly thicket of war, Isaiah had believed in good, in the power of God, had believed in the nobility of giving his earthly life for the greater good of mankind, had walked proudly with men who had been called to make that sacrifice, and had done it gladly.

Sitting in the dark of his mama’s front porch, he lit another cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the night.

Dachau.

Two years since they had walked down the road toward Dachau, not really sure of what they would find. Two years and still Isaiah remembered every step. For miles, the sweet, rotten odor of death hung in the air, growing thicker and more suffocating until even such seasoned soldiers had been forced to tie handkerchiefs over their faces. Everyone had heard tales about the death camps, but who could believe that they were not some ridiculous exaggeration? Who could believe such things were true?

Even with the stench warning them, the railroad cars were incomprehensible. At first, Isaiah didn’t even know what was in them. His mind offered pictures it remembered: firewood, rolled up rugs, even newspapers.

But a hand dangled here, a foot there. Bodies, even as skinny as these, didn’t stack as neatly as firewood or rolls of carpet. They were piled all the way to the top of the boxcars, person upon person upon person, car upon car upon car.

Isaiah vomited. He wasn’t alone.

A few days later, standing by the ovens, he thought of Hansel and Gretel and how the story had terrified him as a child. Something inside of him had always been sure that no pair of children could outsmart a witch.

Staring at those ovens, Isaiah had felt God die. No god would allow his beloved people to suffer such indignities, such tremendous evil. Any god worthy of the name would have stepped in, sent an army of angels to cut down the enemy like a scythe. Any god that could open up a sea to let his people pass through it could have done something to stop this slaughter.

There was no good possible from this devastating evil. Standing there, his mind reeled back to his daddy’s murder, to his own beating in the woods, to all the things he’d been able to make right by believing God had a plan.

God didn’t have no plan.

For two years, he’d been living with the knowledge. His mother would cry a river if she knew. Now Angel wanted to cast him in the light of God’s hero. Mrs. Pierson, too, would lead him back to God if she could. Parker, had he lived, would have joined the fight to win Isaiah’s soul for Jesus.

He cursed.

And yet, as he climbed the steps to his mama’s porch, an odd thought struck him. He was mad. Furious. If there had been any way at all he could have understood what God had allowed to happen, Isaiah would have tried. He didn’t want to give up all those old dreams. He wanted back the God he loved as a child, wanted to believe God really was all-powerful, all good.

The loss ached in his chest. Another man might have wept, but Isaiah lifted his head toward the dark, silent sky and issued a challenge. “You show me,” he said aloud. There was no need to elaborate. If God existed, he’d know what Isaiah meant.

Angel awakened to pre-dawn twilight.
It was very, very early, even for her. Ebenezer still had his head tucked up under his wing, and the only sound was a pair of blackbirds whistling outside. As she lay there, waking up, a cool breeze washed over her face and she turned toward the window.

The shattered window, with shards still sticking in the frame. The night came back to her, and with it, a sense of pure exhaustion. Every bone, every muscle, every organ within her felt empty, as limp as unwatered grass. Her lungs felt squashed and her eyes were grainy. For one long, long moment, she stared at the deep lavender sky framed by jagged glass, and thought of all that had happened since her daddy died—Isaiah coming home, Gudren, the store’s business falling off, the loss of her Sunday school class, and the trouble with Edwin.

And last night.

Not just the broken windows and torn up roof. A part of her had been expecting something like that. But finding out that Mrs. Pierson and her father had been companions (for how long? how many years?) and sitting in the tree house with Isaiah, swamped with yearning (heat, lust, fear), hearing his laughter, hearing his pain.

A wisp of a dream passed over her mind, thin as a chiffon scarf. Isaiah. She pushed it away, not wanting to know what her dream had been, not when she knew she had to face him in the early morning with none of her defenses in place.