A Quiet Belief in Angels

  I took the thing gingerly, smelled it.

  She laughed. “Try it,” she repeated.

  I tasted something warm, a little like cinnamon. It tasted quite wonderful.

  She tilted her head to one side. “Good, huh?”

  I nodded. “Real good.”

  “That’s why they’re separate. You don’t taste them so much if you leave them on the sandwich.”

  She was found naked in a field at the far end of the High Road, where Death must have begun his journey when He came to collect my father. Seemed that Death had not come to take Alice—she’d saved Him the trouble by walking out to meet Him. Her lunch pail was found beside her. It was late in the day, long after school, and there was nothing inside the pail but empty wrappers and the smell of crusts.

  She was eleven years old. Seemed someone had stripped her and beaten her, done things to her “that no normal human being would do to a dog, let alone a little girl,” Reilly Hawkins said in our kitchen, seated there beside Gunther Kruger who’d brought a clay pitcher of lemonade from Mrs. Kruger, and my mother told him “Hush, Reilly, I don’t want to be talking about such things while the boy is here.”

  Later the boy they spoke of went to bed. I waited until the house had ceased its creaking and stretching, and then crept away from my room and hung like a ghost amidst the shadows and memories at the top of the stairs.

  “They raped her,” I heard Reilly say. “Little girl, nothing to her. And some animal raped her and beat her and choked her to death, and then left her in the field at the top of the High Road.”

  “Seems to me it’s gotta be one of them nigras,” Gunther Kruger said.

  My mother turned on him, her words firm and unrelenting. “Enough of such talk, Mr. Kruger. Even as we speak your countrymen are allowing a tyrant to push them into a war that we have all prayed would never happen. The Polish government is exiled in Paris. I heard that Roosevelt will have to help the British to buy guns and bombs from America. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people are going to die. All because of the German people.”

  “Such a viewpoint is unjust, Mrs. Vaughan . . . not all Germans—”

  “And not all Negroes, Mr. Kruger.”

  Kruger fell silent. The wind had turned and collapsed his sails. He drifted aimlessly toward the shoal of embarrassment and did not look back toward the opposing vessel.

  “And I frown on such talk in my house,” my mother said. “We’re not ignorant people. Adolf Hitler is a white man, just as Genghis Khan was a Mongol and Caligula was a Roman. It is not the nationality, nor the color, nor the religion. It is always just the man.”

  “She’s right,” Reilly Hawkins said. “She’s right, Gunther.”

  Kruger asked if Reilly or my mother wanted more lemonade.

  I crept away to my bed and thought of Alice Ruth Van Horne. I remembered the sound of her voice, the way she smiled at the most foolish things. I remembered a game we had once played in the field with the broken fence, a game where she had fallen and scuffed her elbow and I had walked her home to her mother.

  She was a sweet-tempered girl, always cheerful it seemed.

  I remembered the way she looked at me, the way she smiled, turned away, looked at me once more . . . always waiting for an answer that I never gave.

  I cried for her.

  I realized that my memory of Alice, a memory I believed would always be flawless, would now be nothing more than a shadow on my heart.

  I tried to imagine the kind of human being who would do such a thing to Alice Ruth. Whether such a person was a human being at all.

  When I woke my pillow was still damp. I believed I must have cried in my sleep.

  I figured that God made Alice an angel immediately.

  The following morning I cut an article from the newspaper, and hid it in a box beneath my bed.

  CHARLTON COUNTY JOURNAL

  Saturday, November 4th, 1939

  Local Girl Found Murdered

  On the morning of Friday November 3rd, the body of a local girl, Alice Ruth Van Horne (II), was discovered in Augusta Falls. Alice, a student of the Augusta Falls Junior School, was discovered by a local resident. Sheriff Haynes Dearing was quoted as saying, “We are at once alert for the presence of any vagrant or unknown person in the area. With immediate effect we are implementing a county-wide state of emergency for any suspicious person or persons. The murder of a young girl, a member of our own community, in such a brutal fashion, has given us all a reason to be aware of any uncommon or noticeable occurrence in our midst. I would ask all citizens to refrain from panic, but to be alert to the whereabouts of their children at all times.” When asked for more details of the investigation into this horrific murder, Sheriff Dearing refrained from making further comment. Arthur and Madeline Van Horne, the murdered girl’s parents, have lived in Augusta Falls for eighteen years. They attend the Charlton County Methodist Church. Mr. Van Horne farms his own property within the Augusta Falls town limits.

  I tried not to think about how it would feel to be beaten and choked to death, but the more I tried not to think the more it filled my mind. After a few days I let it go, which seemed to be what everyone else in Augusta Falls wanted to do.

  And there are times I remember—summer days mostly; hazy, fat with air and sunshine, and Mr. Tomczak dragging his Victrola gramophone out into the yard, and Bakelite records as heavy as plates; and the adults kind of unbuttoned themselves, and despite the fact that no one had any money, and more than likely never would, it didn’t matter because there was a richness in friendship and community.

  And the kids out in the fields playing catch-and-kiss, and someone had a crate of beer for the dads, and someone else made watermelon juleps for the ladies.

  My mom would put on a summer frock, and one time she waltzed with my dad, and he wore his smile like a medal he’d earned for valor, for fidelity, for love.

  And the days I remember are days that have gone. Slipped away silently into an indistinct past. Not only gone, but forgotten. They are days I believe we will never see again. Not here, not in Augusta Falls. Not anywhere. Everything awash with the heady delirium of spontaneous celebration, a celebration for no other reason than being alive. And the sound of something familiar but distant—a baseball game on the radio, the clunk-snap-hiss of emerald Coca-Cola caps—and all of a sudden the past is there. Technicolor and Sensurround: Cecil B. DeMille, King Vidor. And then a welcome silence after an endless noise.

  And spiked through these memories, like rusty jags of metal, are other memories.

  The girls.

  Always the girls.

  Girls like Alice Ruth Van Horne, whom I had loved simply as only a child could.

  Their lives like twists of damp paper, screwed tight and tossed away.

  And then something would happen—something quiet and beautiful—and I’d start to believe there was hope that the world might set itself to rights.

  It did not. Not then.

  Perhaps in some small way what I have now done will redress the balance.

  Perhaps now the ghosts that have haunted me all these years will slip away.

  Their voices will fall silent—finally, peacefully, irrevocably.

  In my hand I hold a shred of newspaper. I hold it up, and through the thin paper, now smeared with my own blood, I see the light from the window, the silhouette of the dead man before me.

  “See?” I say. “You see what you did?”

  And then I smile. I am growing weaker. I perceive some sense of closure.

  “Never again,” I whisper. “Never again.”

  THREE

  “YOU PICK A WORD,” MISS WEBBER SAID. “YOU PICK A WORD and then you think of as many words that mean the same or similar thing. They are called synonyms. You write them in your notebook, Joseph, and when you wish to make a sentence you look in your notebook and use the most interesting or suitable words you can find.”

  I nodded.

  She stepped around the desk
and eased into the tablet-arm chair beside mine. The classroom was empty. I had waited behind on her instruction. It was two weeks before Christmas and the final days of school.

  “You have heard of the Monkey Trials?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Some years ago, 1925 I think, there was a biology teacher called John T. Scopes. He came from a town called Dayton in Tennessee, and he taught his pupils about something called evolution. You know what evolution is, Joseph?”

  “Yes, Miss Webber. The idea that we were all monkeys in the trees a long time ago, and before that we were fish or something.”

  She smiled. “Mr. Scopes taught his pupils about the theory of evolution instead of the theory of creation as it is taught in the Bible. He was taken to court by the state of Tennessee, and the prosecuting lawyer was a man called William Jennings Bryan, a famous orator and three-time presidential candidate. The man who defended Mr. John Scopes was Clarence Darrow, a very famous American criminal lawyer. Mr. Scopes lost his battle and he was fined one hundred dollars, but at no time did he relinquish his position.” Miss Webber leaned a little closer to me. “At no time, Joseph Vaughan, did he say what he believed people wanted to hear. He said what he thought was right.”

  She leaned back. “You’re wondering why I’m telling you this?”

  I said nothing, merely looked back at her and waited for her to speak further.

  “I’m telling you this because we have a Constitution and the Constitution says we should say what we feel, and maintain our right to speak the truth as we see it. That, Joseph Vaughan, is what you should do with your writing. If you want to write, then you should write, but always remember to write the truth as you see it, not as other people wish it to be seen. You understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, believing I did.

  “Then, during your Christmas vacation, I want you to write me a story.”

  “About what?”

  She smiled. “That is something you have to decide. Choose something that has some meaning for you, something that you feel provokes an emotion, a feeling . . . something that makes you angry or hateful, or something that makes you feel excited perhaps. Write a real story, Joseph. It doesn’t have to be long, but it has to be about something you believe in.”

  Miss Webber rose and stood over me. Once again she touched my cheek with the flat of her hand. “Have a good Christmas, Joseph, and I will see you at the start of 1940.”

  Gunther Kruger was the richest man in Charlton County. The Kruger house was twice the size of ours. In the parlor they had an Atwater Kent crystal radio, and the Kruger family—Gunther, his wife, their two sons and one daughter—would sit before it with headphones and listen to music and talking that traveled from Savannah, all the way through Hinesville and Townsend, Hortense and Nahunta. Those sounds crossed the Okefenokee Swamp and did not sink. It was magical and strange, an aperture into a world I could not fathom. In the kitchen they had a Maytag washing machine and a Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Mrs. Kruger, who wore coarse woolen skirts, would make wienerwurst and potato salad and talk to me in her pidgin-English accent.

  “You are a sceercraw,” she would say, and I would frown and tilt my head and say, “Sceercraw?”

  “For sceering buds,” she said. “Like he is med of stigs and olt clodes, yes?”

  “Sticks and old clothes,” I repeated, and then smiled widely. “A scarecrow!”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Kruger chimed. “Like I have set, a sceercraw! Now eat before the buds come or you weel sceer them. Ha ha!”

  I started visiting with the Krugers a week or so before Christmas. Oftentimes Mr. Kruger would not be there, and my mother would tell me to stay only until Mr. Kruger returned from whatever business he was engaged in. “The man has enough children around his feet,” she said. “He returns home, you say your thank-yous and come home, understand?”

  I understood. I did not wish to outstay my welcome. Besides, Elena Kruger, all of nine years old, with too many teeth for her mouth and ears like spinnakers awaiting a Gulf Stream, seemed to have her heart set on goading me into violence each time I was there.

  It took the patience of Job to restrain myself from horsewhipping Elena Kruger for her catcalls and slanderous indignities. Her brothers, Hans and Walter, seemed oblivious to her invasive behavior, but she was there—needling and hankering, baiting and badgering—from the moment I arrived until I heard Mr. Kruger’s rich tones of welcome when he came in back through the kitchen.

  She was a sweet enough child I’m sure, but to a twelve-year-old boy a nine-year-old girl seems the worst kind of harpy. Her voice was shrill, like a rusted spike jabbing my ears, and though later she would mellow and soften, and in her own way become really quite sensitive and beautiful, at the time she was like bitter-tasting medicine for an illness long gone. Elena Kruger was as welcome as a pitcher of fizzy milk, each belch a little more sour.

  Only once did I see her bruises. It was late afternoon, days before Christmas, and Mr. Kruger was not yet back from the fields with Walter. Mrs. Kruger called for her daughter to help her in the kitchen, and Elena went. I stood in the hallway that separated the parlor from the back half of the house, and from there I could see through the doorway.

  Elena was told to turn up the sleeves of her blouse, and turn them up she did, all the way to her shoulders, and there, in numerous colors—purple, sienna, yellow, and carmine—bruises were punched and painted along the upper halves of her arms. The impression given was of some forceful and terrible grip placed on her, large hands holding her upper arms, perhaps shaking her, perhaps doing nothing more than keeping her still.

  “Epilepsy,” my mother said when I told her what I’d seen.

  “You mustn’t say a word. Not a word, mind,” she stressed. “Elena Kruger has epileptic fits, grand mal seizures they are called, and both her mother and father have sometimes to hold her tight to the mattress or the floor to stop her injuring herself.”

  I asked why she had fits; my mother smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Why does one man have a crooked leg, or an eye that doesn’t work? Who knows, Joseph . . . it is the nature of things.”

  I imagined strong hands holding Elena down, hands that would prevent her shuddering and trembling across the floor, how her skirt would soil, how she would perhaps bite down on six inches of rough-hewn leather belt to prevent her severing her own tongue.

  After that Elena’s needling and name-calling never bothered me as much. I just had to picture the terrifying violence of such a physical affliction and my heart, small and insubstantial though it was, went out to her. She already hurt more than she could ever hurt me, and I believed if I took some of that hurt she might get better. I was naïve, foolish perhaps, but it seemed to make sense at the time. I believe that was the point at which I began to see her in a different light, and though she had two elder brothers—Hans at twelve, and Walter at sixteen the better part of a man—I felt some fraternal pull toward her. She seemed fragile and disconsolate, adrift in a world where the words of her father, her brothers, seemed to hold sway. I imagined her as some gentle, lonely soul, a soul without tether or anchor, and I determined that I—in some small way—would attempt to make her life somehow happier.

  Christmas came and went. I wrote my story, “The Broken-Field Run,” about Red Grange, and how he used to catch the ball and take off down the field like a long dog after a short rabbit. I had seen him at the movies one time, a Saturday afternoon matinee with my father: an RKO Radio Pictures newsreel, a half-hour Pete Smith Specialty, and then a short before the main feature. Red Grange, perhaps the greatest runner in football history, legs like steam pistons going one after the other. I used words like fleet and mercurial, athletic and Herculean. Miss Webber changed them to words she thought everyone would understand, and then she stood ahead of the class and told everyone to close their eyes.

  “That’s right,” she said quietly. “Close your eyes, and don’t open them until I’m done.”

  She read my
story to the class. I wish she hadn’t. My heart, thundering like a traction engine, could have powered a steamboat all the way from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a feeling I would never forget, and it almost served to dissuade me from pursuing my dream to write.

  When she was done there seemed to be a small chasm of silence into which I fell. No one said a word. Miss Webber reached out her figurative hand and rescued me from that chasm.

  She did not compliment the story, nor negate it. She did not hold it up as some sort of example to the other children in the class. She merely asked who had been able to see Red Grange as he struck out on his broken-field run.

  Ronnie Duggan raised his hand.

  So did Laverna Stowell. Virginia Grace Perlman. Catherine McRae, her brother Daniel.

  I kept my head facing forward and my eyes inside it. The color swelled in my cheeks.

  Soon there were more children with their hands up than those without.

  And then Miss Webber said, “Good, good indeed. That is called imagining, and imagining is a vital and necessary ability in this world. Every great invention came about because folks were able to imagine things. You should nurture and cultivate your ability to imagine. You should let your head fill up with pictures of the things you think about and describe them to yourself. You should make believe . . .”

  I listened to her. I loved her. Years later, a very different time, I would think of stopping my work, and then I would remember Alexandra Webber and let my head fill with pictures.

  I would make believe, that’s all, and somehow things would seem less dark.

  February came. The weather turned. Gunther Kruger visited with my mother, told her that they were driving the length of St. Mary’s River to spend a day at Fernandina Beach.

  “We would very much like it if you would both accompany us,” he said, and my mother—barely glancing at me—explained to Mr. Kruger that she was most grateful, but unfortunately would not be able to come.