A Quiet Belief in Angels

  I gave my story to Miss Webber on Friday the eleventh of February. On Monday she told me she’d typed it up and mailed it to Atlanta, and she showed me Atlanta on the map. It seemed an awful long way away. I wondered if my story would have changed at all by the time it got there.

  I thought about it a lot for some time, and then I forgot about it. Seemed to me that writing things down was a way of making them go away.

  “You could look at it that way,” Miss Webber told me. “Or you could look at it from the viewpoint that writing things down makes them last forever. Like that book I gave you last Christmas. That was written and it’s still here. There’s thousands of copies of that book all over the country, all over the world. Right now there might be someone in England, someone in Paris, France, someone else in Chicago, reading that very same book, and what they read and what they think is going to be very different from what you felt you were reading. A story is like a message that means something different to everyone who receives it.”

  I listened to what Miss Webber said because everything she said made sense.

  When spring came my mother got sick. She grew pale and anemic. Dr. Thomas Piper visited several times, and each time he looked concerned and important. Dr. Piper wore a dark suit with a vest and a pocket watch with a golden chain, and he carried a leather bag from which he produced tongue depressors and bottles of iodine.

  “You are how old?” he asked me.

  “Thirteen, sir,” I told him. “Fourteen in October.”

  “Well, that makes you a man as far as I’m concerned. Your mother has weak blood. Weak in nutrients, weak in iron, weak in most everything that should be strong. She must have bed rest and quiet, perhaps for as much as a month, and she must have a diet rich in green vegetables and good meat. If she does not do this you will not have a mother for very much longer.”

  I walked across to the Krugers’ house after Dr. Piper had left.

  “We will take care of her,” Mathilde Kruger said. “I will send Gunther every day with soup and cabbage, and when she is stronger we will feed her sausages and potatoes. Don’t worry, Joseph, you may have lost your father but you will not lose your mother. God is not that cruel.”

  Three weeks later, the day that Reilly Hawkins told me President Roosevelt was sending American soldiers to Greenland, Miss Webber had me stay after class.

  “I have a letter,” she said, and she reached into her desk and produced an envelope. “It is a letter from Atlanta, Georgia. Come sit here and I will read it to you.”

  I walked to the front of the classroom and sat down.

  “Dear Miss Webber,” she started. “It is with great pleasure that we write to inform you of our competition results. We were greatly impressed with the standard of material submitted this year, and though the adjudication of such a vast array of different styles and subject matter is never easy we believe that this year it has been harder than ever.”

  Miss Webber paused and glanced at me.

  “It is with a degree of commiseration that we must tell you that ‘Monkeyshines’ by Joseph Vaughan did not reach the final stage of judging, but nevertheless we wished to communicate to you our collective enjoyment regarding this most excellent piece. ‘Monkeyshines’ raised more than a few tears and a good degree of laughter amongst our readers, and when it was made clear that the piece had been penned by a boy of thirteen there were serious questions regarding the validity of authorial identity. Such a question was immediately refuted as we are, of course, more than aware of your own reputation and credibility as a teacher. Nevertheless, it still came as a surprise that a composition demonstrating such a natural narrative style and so astutely perceptive was the work of someone so young.”

  Again Miss Webber paused. All I understood was that I had won nothing. I felt little if any emotion regarding the matter.

  “And so, in closing, I would like to heartily commend Mr. Joseph Vaughan for his story, ‘Monkeyshines’: a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience, and evidence that we have in our midst, right here in Georgia, a bright and immensely talented young author who, we trust, will continue to go from strength to strength in his literary ventures. With our best wishes, The Atlanta Young Story Writers Adjudication Board.”

  Miss Webber turned to me and smiled. She frowned, then tilted her head to one side. I wanted to tell her she looked like half her brain was missing.

  “You are not pleased, Joseph?” she asked.

  I said nothing. I wondered what she thought I might be pleased about.

  “The Adjudication Board wrote to you, all the way from Atlanta, to tell you that your story had received a special commendation. They say that you are bright and immensely talented. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand that we didn’t win, Miss Webber,” I said.

  She laughed suddenly, and it was like a wealth of sunshine breaking forth. “Didn’t win? Winning is not the only reason to do something. Sometimes you do something for experience, or simply for pleasure; other times you do something to prove to yourself that you can do it, irrespective of anyone else’s viewpoint or belief. You wrote a story, only the second complete story you’ve ever written, and the Atlanta Adjudication Board sent you a special commendation and expressed their wish that you go from literary strength to strength. That, my dear Joseph Calvin Vaughan, is something of which to be very proud.”

  I nodded and smiled. It was fifteen minutes past the end of lessons and I wanted to get home. When I’d left that morning my mother had seemed particularly frail.

  Miss Webber folded the letter carefully and returned it to the envelope. “This is for you,” she said, and handed it to me. “You should keep this letter, and whenever you feel that your ability is in question, whenever you feel that you should do something other than write, you should read it once more and feel your purpose resolve. Writing is something that is a gift, Mr. Vaughan, and to deny its importance, or to do something other than use your ability, would be a grave and significant mistake.” She smiled once more. “Now go . . . home with you!”

  I thanked Miss Webber and left the room. I walked quickly, taking the High Road and staying close to the fence. Mr. Kruger had told me that after the rain the ground was too soft to bear the weight of a child, let alone a young man such as myself, and that if I walked along that way I was to stay close to the fence and away from the trees.

  When I arrived home I stood in the kitchen for several minutes. In hindsight, always our most astute adviser, I realized I had granted no importance to the letter from Atlanta. It was my first real acknowledgement, and yet it seemed to mean nothing. I took the letter from my pocket and read through it once more. The words were received but they were not absorbed. Later, the letter would mean a great deal, and in some small way it would act as an anchor amidst the storm of critical and trenchant self-doubt that would come, but then—standing in the kitchen—it was merely a message of failure. Miss Webber was not to blame. The letter told me I could do better, and perhaps, in some small way, I had already determined the standard to which I would aspire.

  It was then that I heard voices, above me I believed, and I was puzzled. My mother was alone and unwell in the house, and yet the voices sounded like a conversation. Had the disease she suffered driven her to madness?

  I tucked the letter into my pocket and backed up to the bottom of the stairwell. I heard nothing. Was I imagining things?

  I took the risers one at a time, my ears sharpened and alert. When I reached the upper landing I heard the voices again—my mother, her clear and distinct lilt, even a hint of laughter, and another deeper voice —perhaps accented?

  I walked down the hallway to her door. It was firmly closed, but it was undoubtedly from behind that door that the voices came.

  I knocked once.

  “Mother?” I asked.

  There seemed to be a moment of confusion, the sound of rustling, something else, and even as I reached out to turn the door handle she called out, “One moment, Joseph, o
ne moment, please.”

  I waited, perplexed and confused.

  Thirty seconds, perhaps more, and then the door was opened from within and Gunther Kruger stood there looking at me, smiling widely, his cheeks reddened.

  “Joseph!” he exclaimed, pronouncing it Yosef the way all the Krugers did. He seemed more surprised than pleased. “Hullo there. What a surprise!”

  I shook my head. Why would it be a surprise? I always came home from school.

  I looked around him to see my mother laid up in the bed, the covers pulled tight to her throat. She withdrew one arm and extended her hand toward me.

  “Come in, Joseph,” she said. “You are home early.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I always come home at this time.”

  She frowned. “But your extra tutorial with Miss Webber—”

  “Is on a Monday,” I interjected. “Today is Friday.”

  She smiled. “Of course it is. How silly of me. Mr. Kruger here was just bringing me some soup.” She glanced toward the dresser, and there—in the clay pot that Mrs. Kruger sent over almost daily—was the soup. It looked untouched, the lid still firmly set.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Well,” Mr. Kruger said, “I think it’s time I should be going. It was nice to see you, Joseph, as always. You should come over later and see Hans and Walter, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said, still a little mystified.

  Mr. Kruger snatched his jacket from the chair behind the door, and without putting it on he hurried past me and went down the stairs. I heard his footsteps as he crossed the tiled kitchen floor, and then the back door slammed abruptly. He had forgotten to say goodbye to my mother.

  “Come to me,” she said. “Come and sit by me on the bed.”

  I crossed the room. Everything smelled of lavender and boiled chicken.

  “Sit here,” she said, and patted the mattress with her hand. “How was your day, Joseph?”

  “I got a letter.”

  “A letter?”

  I nodded.

  “A letter from whom?”

  “From the people that judge the story competition in Atlanta.”

  She sat up, her eyes wide, her expression one of intense interest.

  “And?”

  I withdrew the letter from my pocket and showed her.

  She read it without speaking, and then she looked at me with tears in her eyes and reached out her hand. She laid her palm flat against the side of my face.

  “My son,” she said, her voice a broken whisper. “You have found your vocation it seems.”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t ever stop writing. This is the way the world will find out who you are.”

  For some reason I felt like crying, but I did not.

  I was thirteen, almost a man, and though both Miss Webber and my mother thought the letter a great deal more important than I did, it was nevertheless no reason to be sad.

  I gritted my teeth. I lay down beside my mother, right there on the patchwork quilt, and closed my eyes.

  She stroked the hair from my forehead, and then leaned down and kissed me.

  “Your father would have been so proud,” she said. “His son, the writer.”

  FIVE

  THE THIRD GIRL WAS ALL OF SEVEN YEARS OLD. SHE WAS FOUND ON Saturday, June seventh, 1941. Just as with Alice Ruth Van Horne and Laverna Stowell, she was left naked and beaten. Her name was Ellen May Levine. A wide and deep incision centered her body, as if someone had attempted to cut her in two. Perhaps they had started such a thing and could not bear to finish it.

  I had known her less than three months. She had come all the way from Fargo, near the Suwannee River in Clinch County, to attend Miss Webber’s classes in March that year. She was found in a shallow grave no more than half a mile from our house, there in the trees at the edge of Gunther Kruger’s boundary.

  Sheriff Haynes Dearing met with Sheriff Ford Ruby, and they drove over to meet with Clinch County Sheriff Burnett Fermor. Rumor had it that the three of them spent more than two hours together; they called for detailed maps of the three counties and at least two orders of sandwiches and coffee. When the meeting was done it seemed they were none the wiser than when they’d started, but at least they hadn’t argued about John Wesley and the scriptures.

  More than a dozen men were deputized. They came with pickup trucks and dogs and scoured the countryside from one horizon to the other. There were huddles of people talking in the street. Seemed that every day the newspaper had something else to say without saying very much of anything at all. Folks even mentioned the names of Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agents Carver and Oates, as if in bringing them back something would be different from their previous investigation. Carver and Oates never came, nor the man from Valdosta with a lie machine and a female assistant. Sheriff Dearing looked perpetually exhausted, as if sleep was a cohort of the killer and was evading him with great skill. There was talk of murder weapons, of knives, meat cleavers, other such suppositions. I watched it all, every single thing, and I wondered how someone would be found who had made it their business to remain undiscovered. Everyone knew they were innocent, and yet everyone knew they were a suspect, and would remain so until the guilty one was identified.

  He was not, and for some reason I believed it would stay that way.

  “This is a bad, bad thing,” Reilly Hawkins said. Once again he was seated in our kitchen. My mother had recovered from her illness, though Mr. Kruger still brought soup and sausages two or three times a week from his wife’s kitchen. I knew this was the case, because often, after school, my mother would send me over to the Krugers’ with washed pots and plates and her thanks.

  “This thing with these children—”

  My mother shook her head. “It’s not something I want to discuss, Reilly,” she said.

  “I want to talk about it,” I told her. “I’m old enough to know what murder is, and I’m old enough to know that there are crazy people. Miss Webber told us that the Germans are putting Jewish people in prison camps and that many, many thousands have died—”

  “Is she now?” my mother interjected. “I don’t know that that’s suitable material to be teaching young children.”

  “Not so young,” I said. “I know that the French police are arresting Jews in Paris and handing them over to the Germans, a thousand at a time. I also know that James Joyce died in Switzerland, and that Virginia Woolf drowned herself in a river—”

  “Enough,” my mother said. “So you know a lot of things, Joseph Vaughan, but that does not necessarily mean that we will discuss the murdering of young girls in our kitchen.”

  I looked at Reilly Hawkins. He looked away.

  “I knew all three of them,” I said. My voice broke with emotion. I felt tears coming. “I knew all three of them. I knew their names, what they looked like. I sat in Miss Webber’s class with them, and sometimes Miss Webber would have me read a story to everyone, and Ellen May would sit right up close like she wanted to hear every single word I said.” I could not hold myself. I stood up. “I want to talk about it! I want to know what’s happening and why we can’t do anything about these terrible things!”

  “Enough already!” she snapped. “You have chores to do. Go and clean the window in your bedroom, and then you can go over to the Krugers if you wish.”

  Anger rose inside me. I glared at my mother, and for a moment I saw through her determined expression. She was afraid, as afraid as I. She did not know what to say to make this thing any better.

  I felt I should reach out to her. I believed it would have been right to apologize, to tell her I was confused and afraid and I needed to tell someone how I felt. But that, in my small and narrow view, would have been tantamount to admitting defeat in the face of authority. I made a performance of stamping my way upstairs and along the corridor. When I reached my door I opened it and slammed it shut as if I had gone inside, then I turned back the way I’d come and crept along the hallway
to the top of the stairs.

  “—willful yes, but rarely disobedient,” my mother was saying. “He has a bright and inquisitive mind like his father, and once he has hold of something he will not let it go.”

  “I’m not one to judge,” Reilly said. “He’s the only boy I’ve ever been close to and I care for him a great deal. These recent things, these killings, are terrible things. Something like this happens, well, you cannot even begin to imagine how the parents must feel.”

  “I know the second girl’s parents, just as acquaintances mind,” my mother said. “Leonard and Martha Stowell. Sweet people. Never met their daughter. She was the youngest, I think. Seem to remember there were three others, two boys and a girl.”

  “A tragedy, a terrible tragedy. And to think, such a thing is the work of a human being.”

  “In the very loosest sense of the term. Barely a human being, I think.”

  Reilly cleared his throat. “I don’t know, Mary, it seems a terrible place the world is becoming, what with this war in Europe, the awful things we’re hearing about the Polish people and the Jews. I have heard rumor that the Germans are searching out and killing all the intellec tuals—musicians and artists and writers and poets, even professors and teachers—anyone who in any way opposes their views. They are searching them out and sometimes just executing them right there in the street.”

  “It is not the world, Reilly. It is simply a few insane men using their power over ignorant people. This propaganda against the Jews has been going on for twenty years or more. Adolf Hitler has been slowly poisoning the minds and hearts of the German people, and he was doing this long before he went to war. I only hope that this war is over before we are drawn further into it.”

  “I don’t know that such a thing can be avoided,” Reilly said. “As a free and democratic people it’s our responsibility to stand up against this kind of persecution.”