A Quiet Belief in Angels

  “You think?” Daniel asked. His sister had been dead a little more than six months, but he carried her shadow wherever he went. From a distance he looked like he was being followed. Sometimes I caught Miss Webber watching him when he wasn’t looking.

  It had been eighteen months since the Guardians had first met, and I recalled that day as if it had been no more than a week before. Already we had lost Ellen May Levine, Catherine McRae and Virginia Perlman. Elena was gone too, and despite being the one to find Virginia, it was the death of Elena that had hurt me the most. Perhaps she followed me. Perhaps I too looked like I was carrying a ghost. Perhaps such things were visible only to others.

  “I think,” I said. “I think that’s what happened.”

  “My dad has a gun, you know,” Maurice Fricker said.

  “Everyone’s dad has a gun, Maurice,” Ronnie said. “My dad stands out back in the yard and shoots stupid kids. Maybe you better walk home a different way.”

  “I’m serious,” Maurice said.

  “I . . . I could get one too,” Michael said.

  “Christ, no,” Daniel said. “Give you a gun, hell, the way you fidget you’d kill anyone standing.”

  “Enough already,” I said. I stood up, buried my hands in my pockets. “This is just crazy talk. No one’s getting hold of any guns, all right?”

  “So what’re we going to do?” Daniel asked.

  “We’ve got to arrange some kind of system,” I said.

  “System?” Maurice said. “A system for what?”

  “To patrol the town and make sure that we see everything that’s going on.”

  “Remember what happened last time?” Ronnie interjected. “Dearing came to the school. My dad was so pissed he could barely breathe. I sure as hell ain’t doing that again.”

  “I don’t mean like that,” I said. “I’m not talking about sneaking out in the dark. I’m talking about arranging some way to keep track of people’s movements.”

  “The five of us?” Michael asked. I could see he was nervous. His fidgeting was even more pronounced at such times. “How the hell are five of us going to watch a whole town?”

  I stepped forward, turned and looked at the four of them sitting there against the wall.

  “Who’s got paper?” I asked. I took a pencil from my pocket.

  “I have,” Ronnie said. He stood up, pulled a wad of small pages from his back pocket.

  “What the hell is that for?” Daniel asked.

  Ronnie looked awkward, glanced at me as if I might have some answer for him. I shrugged.

  “You know,” Ronnie said. He wiped his bangs out of his eyes. “If I’m out . . . you know?”

  “Out?” Daniel asked. “Out where? What are you talking about?”

  “Goddammit,” Maurice said, and started to laugh. “It’s if he needs to take a shit when he’s out.”

  Daniel briefly tried to hold himself together, but with another look at Ronnie erupted into sputtering hysterics.

  Ronnie threw the bundle of paper at me and I caught it. I held it for a moment and then dropped it, almost involuntarily.

  “Christ, it’s only paper,” Ronnie said.

  “But it’s shit-paper!” Daniel shouted, and I stood and watched the three of them—Maurice, Michael and Daniel—as they fell sideways in fits of laughter.

  Ronnie just stared at me through the curtain of bangs. “Darn it, Joseph . . . will you tell them to stop, please?”

  I leaned down to retrieve the paper.

  “Don’t touch it!” Maurice howled. “Don’t touch the shit-paper!”

  I stood looking at them. I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. For Ronnie’s sake, but more for the sake of why we were there. I sat cross-legged on the ground, held the paper and my pencil ready, and waited for them to settle.

  “Like darn children,” Ronnie said, and he sat down as well.

  Not so far from children, I thought. I was a month from fifteen. The Guardians were all I had. It seemed that Augusta Falls was not the town where I had grown up. This town was a shadow of itself, its own darker half, and I sat in that field with a wad of paper on my knee and I looked at the only real friends I had that were still alive. Ronnie, Michael, Maurice and Daniel. I had wound up the unelected leader and spokesman. I was perhaps more afraid than any of them, and as I watched them laugh I knew their laughter was an escape, a release, a brief respite from the onerous burden that was burying us all.

  “So who do we know for sure?” I said. “Who do we know that couldn’t possibly be the killer?”

  My words stilled them.

  “My dad,” Daniel said.

  “And mine,” Maurice echoed.

  “And mine,” Michael and Ronnie added.

  I wrote down the names. If my father had been alive his name would have gone down on the list as well. If my father had been alive there would never have been a second girl. I wanted to believe such a thing, and so I did.

  “Sheriff Dearing, Lowell Shaner, Reilly Hawkins,” I went on. “And Dr. Piper.”

  “Dr. Piper is weird,” Daniel said. “He gave me a medical check one time. Made me drop my pants and he held my balls and told me to cough.”

  I smiled at him. “That,” I said, “is one of the very unfortunate duties of a doctor.”

  “Seriously,” Michael said. “Who else do we know that couldn’t be doing this?”

  “All the family members of the murdered girls,” Maurice replied. “Their fathers, brothers, any of those people. I mean, for Christ’s sake, you just don’t go murdering your own kin, do you?”

  I wrote down the surnames of the ones, besides Catherine McRae, that we’d lost—Van Horne, Stowell, Levine and Perlman.

  “Frank Turow,” Ronnie said. “Clement Yates, Gene Fricker.”

  Their names went on the list. They were all people I knew, had known all my life. They were amongst those who’d walked the seventy-man line after the death of Daniel’s sister.

  “This is just people from Augusta Falls,” Maurice Fricker said. “I don’t believe it’s someone from here.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “We’re eliminating people. We’re taking out of the equation anyone we know it couldn’t be. Then we know who we’re not looking for, right?”

  “And we pay attention to everyone else,” Ronnie said. “We can’t watch a whole town, but we don’t have to, right, Joseph?”

  I nodded. “That’s right. We just look out for everyone who isn’t on the list.”

  “But it could be anyone at all,” Michael said. “It could be someone from Camden or Liberty or Appling. Anyone could come from anywhere around here, and we wouldn’t know.”

  “We have to,” I said. “That’s why we’re doing this. We keep diaries. We meet once a week, right here, and we go over anything that seems odd, anything that’s out of place. We do what we always said we were gonna do . . . we keep our eyes open, we look out for one another, and most of all we look out for the little ones.”

  “It’s not going to happen again,” Daniel said.

  I turned to look at him and there were tears in his eyes. The memory of laughing at Ronnie Duggan belonged to some other life altogether.

  “It can’t happen again,” I said, and I prayed—prayed with everything I possessed—that I was right.

  October became November became December, and we met each week as planned. We spoke of who we’d seen, where and when. We tried to find anomalies and oddities in schedules and routines. We went down to the edge of the disused railroad track one afternoon and found a man sleeping in a ditch near the edge. He smelled like a dead raccoon, and when he woke and saw us standing there he hollered like a stuck pig and went haring into the trees and across Lowell Shaner’s fallow field. Our collective spirit was dulled and blunted with each new meeting. We knew we were accomplishing nothing. We made believe that the killer had long since left Charlton County, perhaps been killed himself, maybe fallen down a ravine, drowned in a swamp, even committed suicide from
shame and guilt and the horror of what he’d done.

  Even the silhouette on the posters started to look like something from the imagination of frightened children. Sometimes we would have nothing to report, and we’d look at each other a little lost, a little desperate. Times like that, I felt at sea without anchor, as if the focus I willed myself to give them was just not there anymore. I wanted to be their fearless and forthright captain, full of guidance and positive direction. Finally though, I canceled a meeting because I couldn’t face them again.

  I believed that we all understood our failure. Elena had died, and though we knew that she had not been taken by the killer directly, she had still been taken. We had elected ourselves responsible for the children of Augusta Falls, and I myself had promised to keep her from harm, whatever the cost. As individuals we had failed, as a group we had failed, and after a while our meetings became nothing more than a constant and painful reminder of that failure.

  Nothing was said directly, but by tacit agreement we drifted apart and the Guardians ceased to exist. Perhaps we believed that we had in some way contributed to Elena’s death. I did not know then, and I imagined that in looking back I would be none the wiser. I thought of Michael Wiltsey, of Maurice Fricker, of Ronnie Duggan and Daniel McRae. I thought of Hans Kruger who must have felt worse than all of us combined, for he had been there inside the house when the fire started. He could have done something. I imagined he believed he should have done something. Perhaps he tried, and in trying he failed. We all felt that way. We had done our best, but our best didn’t even come close to the mark. The Guardians were finished.

  With Christmas on its way, we just seemed to be watching and waiting for Death to take another.

  TEN

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ORDERED A FREEZE ON RENT, WAGES AND FARM prices; the Allies routed Rommel at El Alamein; one hundred and forty thousand American troops landed in North Africa to fight the Vichy French; we could no longer buy coffee or gasoline; and the Germans surrounded in the devastated city of Stalingrad finally surrendered to the Russians. They had survived for three weeks by eating the Romanian Cavalry Division’s horses.

  My mother gave me a fountain pen for Christmas, Reilly Hawkins gave me a book in which to write, its pages of thick, watermarked paper, the cover embossed leather. I wrote my name inside, the date, my age, and then closed it.

  A new year was on its way. The war had not ended. Many things had changed since the death of Elena Kruger and the departure of her family. I did not see Reilly so often, and one time I overheard someone saying that I was her child. Later I would learn that the rumor about Gunther Kruger had continued, though now it had grown to include my mother, that my mother had not only consorted with Gunther Kruger, but had been aware of the terrible violations he had inflicted on his daughter, and had done nothing. Sheriff Dearing came to visit her, and they talked in hushed tones in the kitchen. Seemed to me she was no less worried when he left than when he’d arrived.

  “Words are merely words,” Miss Webber told me. I voiced my thoughts frequently. Often I would stay late to have her read something I had written, and if I seemed distracted, perhaps disturbed, or if I had failed to show her something new for several days, she would take me aside and ask me what was happening.

  “Words are not actions. Words spoken are forgotten just as quickly as they’re uttered.” She told me this in all sincerity, but what she told me wasn’t true. Words were not forgotten. Words were remembered, and time seemed to give them nothing but strength. Dark thoughts seemed to mature and grow with age, and the more they were shared, the more influence and validity they possessed.

  My mother heard them. She saw the way people shunned and excluded her. She was not oblivious to the whispering that she encountered, how some women would turn and leave a store when she entered. She was told that credit was no longer available at the town mercantile. Reilly Hawkins did his best to help us, but there was no denying the fact that money came slow and short. My mother made it known that she would take in washing, mending, other such chores, but with ever-increasing rarity people came to see us.

  Christmas gone, it seemed that the Vaughan lot was a small and distinct ghetto surrounded by a picket fence in dire need of paint. Augusta Falls had isolated my mother. She had lost her husband, her livelihood, her sense of community, her friends. Whatever small measure of companionship she may have shared with Gunther Kruger had been taken from her also. Seemed all that was left was me; she could not lose me because I did not plan to do anything but stay. So she lost her mind. Little by little, inch by inch, the slow deterioration of sense, of judgment, gave way to outright dementia.

  “I am not an alienist,” Dr. Piper told me.

  It was the third time I had spoken to him, the second time he had visited my mother. The first time I had called him out, she would not leave her room. I could hear her in there, sometimes crying gently, sometimes silent, and nothing I said or did resulted in her unlocking the door from within. I hurried across to the grain store and asked if Gene Fricker could reach Dr. Piper on the telephone. By the time Dr. Piper came she had come out of the room and was standing in the back lot looking at the memory of the Kruger house. Dr. Piper appeared and she was as clear-minded and rational as she’d ever been.

  The second time, I spoke to Dr. Piper on the telephone directly. He said he couldn’t come out. He was on his way to deliver a baby.

  The third time, I got Gene Fricker to call him because my mother hadn’t eaten for the better part of a week. I knew this because there was little enough food in the house. When I returned from school each day none of it had gone. I knew she hadn’t left to eat elsewhere because I wedged a small piece of paper in the door lock, back and front. Those papers were still there when I returned. When she spoke to me she spoke of things that had happened many years before, gave them far greater consequence than they deserved, acted as though they’d occurred most recently. She asked if I’d been across to the Krugers; she asked after Walter, Hans and Elena.

  “When you see Miss Webber next you must tell her to pass on my regards to Mr. Leander . . . you know, the old man who lives next door to her?”

  I nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I will.”

  She knew all too well, as did I, that Mr. Leander had died in the winter of ’38. They found him on his knees stiff and frozen in his backyard, his mouth wide open, his hands fixed on the back door handle.

  I told Dr. Piper everything I could remember of the things she’d said.

  “She is suffering some sort of mental stress,” Piper told me, “but like I said, boy, I’m no alienist. Colds and coughs, delivering babies, high temperatures, pronouncements of death. That’s what I do. I don’t look no further than what I can see, and whatever your mother’s got I can’t see it. Best I can do is make arrangements for her to see one of the head doctors at the nervous hospital in Waycross, up there in Ware County. They got people up there who’ve got more letters after their names than letters in ’em. Them’s the folks you’ll need to be speaking to.”

  I talked to Reilly Hawkins. I spoke with Alexandra Webber. They were good people, kind people, but they knew nothing of mental illness.

  Dr. Piper made arrangements. Reilly Hawkins drove us. My mother sat silently beside me, a feeling of tension present that I’d never experienced before. I missed my father. I missed the warmth of Mrs. Kruger’s kitchen. She would have seen to my mother. She would have made broth and sauerkraut; gotten her talking about children and making clothes, about useless husbands and defiant sons. Mrs. Kruger would have been there for my mother, regardless of what she might have suspected about Gunther and his infidelities.

  Tuesday, February tenth, 1943. Waycross Community Hospital, Ware County, state of Georgia. I was fifteen years old, perhaps older in my head and heart. I stood beside my mother at a large desk in the hospital’s entrance foyer. I could smell medications, that bittersweet alcohol-infused combination of astringents and anodynes. I was scared, overawed by the size and pr
esence of the place. The people were white-coated, white-faced, stern, seemingly indifferent and dispassionate. Had I not possessed a voice, had Dr. Piper not arranged an appointment for us to see a Dr. Gabillard, I believe we would have stood right where we were for the remainder of the day.

  My mother said nothing of consequence. She asked if I’d left the sandwiches she’d made in Reilly Hawkins’s truck. She asked if the doctor was going to make her headaches disappear. She reminded me to tell my father that we promised Haynes Dearing a lunch on Saturday, that a chicken would be good.

  I waited patiently, all of two hours alone. Sat on a plain deal chair in a corridor on the third floor while my mother spoke with Dr. Gabillard. Gabillard was younger than I’d imagined, perhaps thirty-five or forty. Figured anyone who understood the human mind would need to be at least a hundred. But the doctor’s hair was gray already, thin on top, and through the windswept mess of recession I could see how shiny his scalp was. Could’ve seen my own face reflected had he leaned over. Figured perhaps he buffed it with a French polish, made it shine like a Sunday shoe. He smiled too much, like he was trying to reassure everyone present that everything was gonna be just fine and dandy.

  It wasn’t.

  I knew it wouldn’t be even before she went in there. I wanted to go out and wait with Reilly Hawkins, or have him come in and wait with me, but I didn’t want to leave in case she came out. Reilly wouldn’t come in, said that if a head doctor took one look at him he’d be consigned to the institution in Brunswick.

  “That’s where they send crazy people,” he said. “I mean, real crazy people, the kind of folks who put things on their heads and bark at streetlights.”

  I asked him and he laughed. “No,” he assured me in his most certain and assured tone. “Your mother will not be going to Brunswick.”

  I waited in the corridor. I figured by five p.m. I would pee myself.

  “She’s sedated,” Dr. Gabillard said. “We’re going to keep her here for a little while and let her take some rest.”