The Sleeping Night (8 page)

He also had a chatty, silly personality, the side effect of being an only child, a situation she understood completely. Angel laughed at a joke he told, and when they made hills for the watermelon vines, she said, “When I was a little girl, my daddy let me have a whole patch of corn and sunflowers and pumpkins and melons. I just couldn’t wait for it all. Every single day, I asked him to check them for me. Seemed like it took forever.”

“Is it gonna take forever for mine?’

She laughed. “Probably will seem like it. But you know, at the end of the summer, you’ll have eaten the melons, and you’ll still have sunflowers, and then you’ll pick your pumpkin. It’s nice like that. You can roast the seeds and then, all winter long you can nibble on them and remind yourself of summer.”

After a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and sweet tea, they settled on the back porch. Angel left the doors between front and back open to hear the bell if it rang, then slumped in her rocking chair. Paul climbed in her lap. Ebenezer roosted on the railing, his mellow song underscoring the peacefulness of the day.

She rocked slowly, arms filled with small boy, his legs draped over the arms of the chair, his head nestled into the hollow of her shoulder. He smelled of sunshine and a clean wind and good, rich dirt, that smell of boys fresh from outside. His skin beneath her fingers was a little dusty. She hummed as she rocked, a nameless lullaby someone must have sung to her when she was tiny.

When she imagined herself with children, it was always with sons. She liked little girls, liked their seemingly innate sense of propriety and the natural order of things, liked their self-conscious hair-flinging and play cosmetics. But it was boys she imagined herself bearing and raising. Boys like Paul who smelled of sunshine, boys like Solomon and Isaiah who fished and climbed.

She loved the feel of this one settling sleepily into her, his weight and size as comforting as an answered prayer. On that warm thought, she dozed and dreamed the child was her own.

Isaiah found them there,
napping in the warm afternoon. Angel’s cheek had fallen against the ginger hair of the boy, who snoozed slack-mouthed and utterly secure. Such unconcerned slumber had become rare to Isaiah in wartime, where sleep came to a man in uneasy bits, and often not at all. He was loath to disturb them.

Silently, he let his unobserved eye wander over the curve of Angel’s cheek, where a spray of almost silver-pale hair drifted on a current of wind over her poreless complexion. Her reddened hands, clasped around Paul’s slim body, were fine of bone and raw with work. His gaze wandered down the cotton-draped thighs and lingered at her fragile ankles and bare, dusty feet. He smiled. A grown woman and still didn’t put on her shoes. Calluses showed on the heels and along her cracking big toe. Solomon had hated her barefootedness; had muttered and bullied her about it constantly. Angel had listened in her patient way and worn shoes whenever she thought Solomon might be coming around.

In some way, Isaiah must have made his presence known, for her eyelids lifted suddenly. For a long moment she regarded him sleepily, openly, in the way she had when they were children. She smiled, then pressed a finger to the oddly voluptuous lips. She rose, cradling Paul gently, and carried him inside.

She returned without him, shoes on her feet, careful politeness not quite able to erase the soft friendliness of her waking. Her cheek showed the mark of Paul’s hair, and she rubbed it self-consciously. “He’ll have a nice nap,” she said. “He worked hard in the garden this morning.”

Isaiah nodded, vaguely unsettled and at a loss for words. Angel, too, seemed nervous. She pressed a hand against her stomach.

He glanced at her feet. “You didn’t have to put on shoes for me,” he said without knowing he would. “I ain’t gonna tell nobody there’s a crazy woman down here.”

She let go of a small laugh. “Oh, well. I try to behave myself.” She stepped off the porch. When she stood next to him, her head rose no higher than his shoulder. “You seem so much taller now,” she said looking up to him.

Impossible, he thought, to keep himself aloof from her easy observations, from her long, clear knowledge of him, even though he had intended to. “You just shrunk.”

“I’m sure that’s it.”

It felt good to just look at her up close, in real time. So familiar, every detail remembered and imagined and re-imagined when she wrote to him through the war. Heavy-lidded, big eyes with such a softness of color, a mouth too big for the rest of her face. With a little more color to her skin or hair, she might have been a beauty, but she was as pale as the moon.

When she put on her lipstick, bold as a honk, that was a whole ’nother story. He’d forgotten that until right now, what lipstick did for that mouth.

A flush crept up her face and her eyes dropped. Isaiah shifted, realizing with discomfort that he’d been staring. Gruffly, he said, “Why don’t you show me where that ladder’s at, and I’ll take a look up there?”

She led him around the side of the house, pointing at the ladder beneath the old cottonwood. Stepping aside to let him pass, she said quietly, “Thank you, Isaiah.”

He forced himself to walk to the ladder and pick it up. “It ain’t nothin’.”

A pick-up truck pulled up in front of the store and Angel backed away. “Holler if you need anything.”

As she hurried around the house, he let go of the ladder, bracing himself against it for an instant, eyes closed.

He had missed her like an eye, like a thumb.

And standing here now in the hot sun, he had to tell himself the truth or be damned. He hadn’t come home to see his mama or deliver Gudren or any of the other things he’d told himself he had to do. He had come home because Angel was here. Every road always led back to her somehow.

But time hadn’t changed a goddamned thing, and he was much a fool as he ever had been. Didn’t matter if the world was shaking, if his life had shifted. No matter what he’d seen or learned or become in his years away, not one damned thing in Gideon had changed with him.

Want had no place here. Wishes were for children.

Arms heavy with anger and a very real fear, he lugged the ladder around the house and climbed the roof with purpose. The sooner the roof was done, the better. Quicker he was gone, the more likely he’d live to tell the tale.

Hank Crockett, a white farmer
from down the road, needed a handful of things that Angel rang up for him at the counter. “Shame your daddy ain’t here to see the crop this year,” Hank commented. “He’s the one been talkin’ up rotation. I only got a little bit of cotton this year.”

“I’m sure he knew you’d change your mind eventually,” Angel said, smiling. “Wasn’t a more stubborn man in all of Texas.”

Crockett cackled, his face breaking into a wreath of wrinkles. The deep blue eyes sparkled. “And his little girl’s cut from the same cloth, ain’t she?”

Angel lifted her eyebrows quickly and let them go.

Paul ambled out then, rubbing his eyes.

“Hello there, young fella!” Crockett boomed. “You sleeping on the job?”

“Isaiah’s outside, sugar,” Angel said.

“’Saiah?” Paul smiled eagerly and ran outside.

“Major case of hero worship there,” she commented, watching Paul leap from the porch.

“Good-looking little boy.” Crockett held out his charge slip, at the very end of his arm. “You’re gonna have to read that for me, darlin’. My arms just don’t stretch far enough these days.”

“Pair of glasses might do the trick.”

“Ah, hell no. Somebody might think I’m an old man.” He winked and gathered his purchases. “You’re getting your roof fixed, are ye?”

“Hope so. ’Bout time, I’d say.”

“Yep.” He patted his hat down firmly on his head. “Well, I better get this stuff on back to the wife. I am real sorry about your daddy, Angel. You need anything, you just let us know, hear?”

“I will. Thank you.” She lifted a hand in farewell, reassured somehow. Not everyone would shut her out, after all. Crockett wouldn’t. He was grizzled and set in his ways sometimes, but he was fair, always honest with his help.

She cut up a chicken and threw it in a pot for supper, then wandered outside. Led by Paul’s laughter, she rounded the house to the east, eyeing the smooth flat of her garden plot for a moment. Briefly, she imagined the plants that would sprout from the smooth earth in a week or two, pleased by the hidden life gestating there in the flat earth.

The sound of Isaiah’s laughter drew her around the side of the house.

He had climbed down the ladder and stood by it, his feet clad today in the heavy boots that had probably seen him through the war. With them he wore pressed, faded khakis and a soft work shirt that buttoned up the front.

He was laughing, standing just beyond the ribbon of deep shade that clung to the side of the house. Perched on his finger was Ebenezer, chattering in an almost earnest attempt to communicate. “This your bird?” Isaiah called, holding up his hand.

As she approached, his smile didn’t fade. It showed his white teeth and the dimple in the side of his face, and her skin rustled in a forgotten way, making her shy.

Ebenezer spread his jeweled wings, preening, and she focused on the flash of blue in his fathers. “He fell out of a tree and ruined one of his wings, so I kept him.”

“I never knew they could be friendly. He kept me company up there, chattering away.”

“He can’t fly very far, but he likes to be up high.”

“He sat on my shoulder,” Isaiah said in some wonderment, then extended his arm to give him to Angel. Ebenezer skittered up Isaiah’s arm to his shoulder, where he made soft, cooing sounds into Isaiah’s ear.

“Why, Ebenezer,” Angel said with her hands on her hips, “you traitor! See if you get the chicken scraps tonight.”

Isaiah laughed again and the sound moved through her very bones, settling in elbows and knees. She wrapped her arms around herself, cradling joints in the palms of her hands.

As Ebenezer cooed close to Isaiah’s ear, he ducked away. “Figures a woods gal like you would tame a bird.”

“Always wanted a squirrel. Never thought about a jay really.”

“You tamed enough critters for a zoo.”

“And my daddy always made me take them back.” She found she could meet his eyes when they were smiling. The unease in her chest softened although it didn’t fade entirely. For a minute, everything was normal, as it had been in their letters.

Before he abruptly stopped writing. She wanted to ask him why, but of course she would not.

He cleared his throat, looking back to the roof. “It’s going to take me a couple weeks to do this properly, but I can get it fixed up for you.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it takes.”

“I’ll get some paper and tools tomorrow.”

“Fine, Isaiah. That’s just fine. Thank you so much.”

“I’ll take Paul home with me now, then, and see you sometime tomorrow afternoon.” He didn’t meet her eyes again as he gently took hold of Ebenezer and set him on the ground.

“Tell Mrs. McCoy she can leave Paul tomorrow, too, if she needs to.”

“I’ll tell her.” He took Paul’s hand and led him away.

Angel whistled at her bird, forcing herself not to look after them.

May 16, 1943

Dear Isaiah,

I’m writing this from my favorite place, the tree house you built. Stands just as strong as it did the day you hammered in the last nail—how long ago now? Must be ten or twelve years. Seems more like a million sometimes.

Anyway, it shows what a builder you are, this little tree house in the woods. I hope when this war’s all through you’ll think about that again. God gives a man a talent for a reason, and if I ever saw a man who could build things, you’re him.

From up here in the trees, everything looks so peaceful. It’s just past suppertime and I can hear the river. Some birds in a tree next door keep looking at me suspicious-like, but I think they finally figured out I’m not gonna bother them. They’re singing a little. I worry sometimes about the birds over there, in the war. It must scare them when the bombs come.

From where I’m sitting, all there is to see is tree branches and sunshine coming low through the leaves. The cottonwoods are glittering like Mrs. Pierson’s gold-button earrings. It’s a little hazy because it’s been raining. It’s so beautiful it makes you imagine those trees could be hiding a magic kingdom or a deserted isle, just like we used to pretend. (Poor Solomon—he never did have an inkling of our games. Nobody ever read to him. We were lucky in that way, at least. Or maybe not—I don’t know, maybe it’s easier not to know anything).

Yes, it shimmers out there and I wish I could still play pretend.

Because under those trees is only Gideon. Three telegrams in the last week about boys killed. I go see their mamas and wives because I was the first one to lose anybody, and I probably know a little something about how they feel. It doesn’t help very much. Mrs. Allen said yesterday that she just can’t stop thinking about her Jim’s bottom when he was a baby—a little soft bottom, pink and white. I don’t know what that’s like. How can I say anything?

And without war, there’s the mean little uglies no-body likes to talk about. Somebody probably told you about Mabel Younger. Nothing but a child, beaten and God knows what else. Course no one is saying who did it, but I reckon it was the same one that’s been beating and hurting people in these woods as long as I remember.

Of course, no one tells me these things. Not any of them.

Even my daddy treats me like I’m simple. Gotta protect Angel. Keep her sweet. She might end up like her mama.

Like I can’t see what’s under my nose. Like I can’t hear. Like he hasn’t been after me since I was twelve. Like I don’t know he nearly killed you. I saw you that night. Bleeding all over. I stood in the doorway to my room and watched you and my daddy in the kitchen. Saw you shaking mad and hurt. Heard my daddy talking, talking, talking. Knew enough to stay where I was.

But you saw me. Looked right at me. Like it was me that had done something, had hurt you. Then joined the Army and went away and have the nerve to write me a letter like we’re friends. I wish we were, Isaiah.

Because you were always the only one that didn’t ask me to be somebody else, who looked into my eyes and saw me, who listened when I talked.

I hate Gideon Texas. I hate it. And I know I’m not ever going to get out of here. Not ever. It’s just gonna strangle me and bury me. At least you got out. At least one of us got a chance.

[Never mailed.]

May 17, 1943

Dear Isaiah,

Flowers are in bloom by now, I bet. Tell me, what kinds? Have you got to go to a play or anything? Tell me more about your older lady. Where did she go in the service? What’s it like to have tea? I know you’re there to fight a war, but I’m just so jealous I could spit.

I’ve sent along some cigarettes and other stuff we thought you could use. Wish it could be more.

Heard Edwin Walker (your old friend, ha ha) is going to England soon. Saw his mama at church and as usual she talked my ear off about him. I never saw a woman as blind about her child as that one is. She flat spoiled him rotten.

Daddy is doing a lot better now the weather’s turned warm. He’s still awful thin, but he works every day and I think he’s getting better. You know he won’t go to any doctor.

Have to go wash clothes, now. I’m enjoying your letters a lot. It’s like a serial in the newspaper or something. I feel like I have some inside information.

Angel