A Quiet Belief in Angels (15 page)

Sheriff Dearing raised both his hands, looked like he was surrendering up on something, and he backed away a step and started shaking his head. He told Kruger that there was nothing to be gained from such inflammatory accusations, and that if Kruger was of a mind to be so slanted, well, there wasn’t a great deal of anything gonna be accomplished by Sheriff Dearing standing there talking. They could talk ’til the sun went down and neither of them would be any further forward.

“But at least if you stayed until dark we might see another American violate my home and my family,” Kruger said, stuttering his words out rapid-fire, dimes from a slot-machine jackpot, and that was pretty much all that was needed to see Sheriff Dearing in his car and off down the dirt road to the highway without glancing back.

I wondered if someone had seen Gunther Kruger out that night, the night I saw him from my window. Seen him out there and made five out of two plus four.

Sheriff Dearing should’ve said nothing, but it was Saturday night, and Clement Yates, who’d once been temporarily deputized and helped Dearing catch a runaway from the juvenile home in Folkston, was having a birthday. Clement possessed a flat and unremarkable face, aside from his right eye which was slanted up at the corner with a neat scar, like someone had caught his brow with a fish hook and finally tugged it free. More than that, he was a little slow, and the slope of his mouth, the slackness of his jawline, gave the impression that he had in fact swallowed that hook, the line and sinker too, and was even now waiting patiently to consume the rod. When Clement had an idea, there was a dawning light in those dull eyes, a light like St. Elmo’s fire, and more than likely there would be an announcement on the wireless.

There were a good few men down at the Falls Inn, which was nothing more than two beer tables, one pump, a corner booth for couples, a plank board table for sitting and eating, a sawdust-and-spit floor and a moose head on the wall with its right eye missing. The name of the place was a pun. The owner was Frank Turow, and the first day he opened he slipped and fell down the cellar steps and near busted his back. Frank carried a strange face, as though his skull had never hardened; a sharp push, a backyard tussle, something such as this had brought undue pressure to bear against his face. Features yielded, stayed such a way thereafter. Neither handsome nor ugly, but the indecisive middle ground inhabited by all those enduring double takes and puzzled glances.

Attending Yates’s birthday, aside from Sheriff Dearing and Yates himself, were Leonard Stowell and Garrick McRae, Lowell Shaner—the one-eyed Canadian who’d walked with the seventy-man line in March after the murder of Garrick McRae’s daughter, Frank Turow, who was all of sixty-eight years old and tough as a floorboard, six feet of stringy muscle and agile enough to bury any of them who had a mind to dare him, and finally Gene Fricker, father of Maurice, fellow Guardian. Gene Fricker worked at the grain store, smelled like a canvas sack of damp seed; he was heavy-set, slow like Yates, but slow in a methodical and diligent kind of way, never stupid, but selectively ignorant of those things that didn’t interest him. Seven men, two kegs of rough beer that tasted like yeast dissolved in raccoon piss, and tongues loosened by camaraderie, one-upmanship and, most of all, unhinged by a bottle of Calvert that Turow had preserved for the occasion.

“It’s not an American,” Yates said.

“What’s not?” Leonard Stowell asked.

“This one here who’s doin’ these things to these kids.”

Haynes Dearing raised his hand. “Enough already. I’m still the law, and I’m layin’ it down. This here’s a birthday party for Clement Yates, and that’s all it’s gonna be. We ain’t rattlin’ our cans about nothin’ like that this evenin’. We got Leonard Stowell and Garrick McRae here, both of them lost little ’uns.” Dearing raised his eyes and then nodded at each man in turn. “Different news for a different day, agreed?”

“Didn’t come here to say nothin’ about nothin’,” McRae said, “but while that pie is on the table I’ll cut a slice . . . I agree with Clement, birthday or no birthday, it ain’t no American.”

“Last one was a Jewish girl,” Frank Turow remarked.

“Ain’t important what kind of girl she was,” Lowell Shaner said. “Fact of the matter was that she was someone’s daughter, and I was out there on the line after Garrick’s daughter was murdered . . . I was out there watching grown men who’d never even seen her before, and I saw those men darn near break down in tears. They went out there ’cause they wanted to help . . . and I’ll tell you something right here and now Sheriff—”

Dearing leaned forward, his head set between his hunched shoulders like some kind of fighting dog. “And what’re you gonna tell me, Lowell Shaner?”

For a heartbeat Shaner looked doubtful, but he glanced at Garrick McRae, could see the grim line of the man’s tense jaw, the flinty hardness of his eyes, and the dense substance of that expression seemed to give him the resolve he needed.

“That if something ain’t done sharpish—”

“Then you good ol’ boys are gonna get yourselves a lynching party all soaked up with spirits, pour yourselves into the back of a flatbed, and go haring off down to St. George or Moniac and hang yo’selves some poor, dumb, defenseless nigra. Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll give ya each a dollar.”

An awkward silence joined the party.

“Nigras is Americans,” Clement Yates said quietly.

“Well, right enough,” Dearing said. “I’m sorry, I missed the drift of this thing. What you’re talking about is finding some
foreign
child killer . . . like an Irisher perhaps, or maybe one of them Swedes that came through here on the way to the logging camps . . . or hell, what about a German? We got plenty of Germans here. Germans are causing all this war trouble, killing our boys in Italy and God only knows where, and they’re killing Jews over there too, and the last little girl that got killed was a Jewish girl. Hell, how could we have forgotten that? That means it has to be a German. It
must
be a German.”

“Haynes,” Gene Fricker spoke up. “You’re gettin’ all riled and wound for no reason. No one’s sayin’—”

“A deal of anything that makes any sense at all, Gene,” Dearing stated matter-of-factly. “That, my friend, is what no one is saying.” He sort of leaned back in his chair and straightened the hitch on his gun-belt. It was an insignificant action, would’ve gone unnoticed at any other time, but at that point it seemed to serve a purpose; reminded everyone present that Dearing was the law, that he was the only one carrying a gun, and he carried it because the law said he could.

“We’re not gonna have any trouble here in Augusta Falls,” he said quietly. He leaned forward once more and laid his hands flat on the table, palms down. “We’re not gonna have any trouble here, and it ain’t gonna be because I said so, it’s gonna be because what we got here is some straight-thinking, sensible citizens, all of you more than capable of stringing some words together into a short sentence, all of you wise in the ways of the world, all of you suffering a little with the heat, the bad crops, perhaps . . . but none of you suffering from the hot-headed and foolish malady called witch-hunting. We agreed on this point?”

There was a moment’s hesitation as each man scanned the faces of the collective remainder.

“Are we agreed on this point?” Dearing asked a second time.

A murmur of consent traversed from left to right.

“I heard word there was trouble made for Gunther Kruger,” Dearing said. “I’m trusting to a man that none of you had anything to do with it, and I ain’t askin’ for confessions nor denials. I’m telling you that whatever trouble might be made for Gunther Kruger is all spent and over, and it’d be an ill-advised and foolish man who didn’t take that message to whatever neighbors he might find around him. Hide-bound I might be, a little too conventional and rooted, but I’ll not be happy cutting folks down from trees this summer.”

“We got it all,” Gene Fricker said. “You’ve built the wall, Haynes, no need to go shoring it with two-bys. The thing will stand by itself.”

“Just so’s we have an understanding boys . . . just so we do in fact have an understanding. People are frightened, and when people are frightened they don’t think straight. This thing has changed how everyone sees everyone else. You may have your complaints about how we’re handling this, and I can’t say I blame you, but the fact of the matter is that we are all good citizens here and none of us want to see this thing happen again. You keep your eyes open. You look for anything out of the ordinary, and if you see something you come tell me and I will investigate it forthwith and without delay. You get me?”

And that seemed to be all that was said, or so it went from mouth to ear to mouth again, because that meeting was talked over and over, even by Reilly Hawkins some days later. Perhaps none of those present had a mind to cause further trouble, but trouble came, and it came fast and furious. The following night, Sunday, August thirtieth, was a night that would mark a watershed in my life, and the lives of many people in Augusta Falls.

Perhaps I should have seen it coming, for there was tension about, tangible electricity. Maybe I convinced myself that there was in fact nothing. I even recall the Saturday night, lying there in bed while Sheriff Dearing, Leonard Stowell, the others at the Falls Inn, celebrated the birthday of Clement Yates. The world revolved, people went quietly about their business, I read Steinbeck until my eyes closed, and it seemed that the next day would be the same as any other Sunday that had been or was yet to come.

Had I known then what I knew later—hindsight ever the most astute and cruelest adviser—I would have fetched the Guardians from their beds, and together we would have stolen the girl from the house ourselves and hidden her somewhere until it was all over.

But I did not know, and my mother for all her wisdom was ignorant too.

Death came back to Augusta Falls, walked all the way along the High Road; workmanlike, methodical, indifferent to fashion and favor; disrespectful of Passover, Christmas, observance or tradition; Death came cold and unfeeling, the collector of a debt forever in arrears.

I saw Him take her, saw Him up close, and when I looked in His eyes I saw nothing but a reflection of myself.

NINE

T
HE SOUND WAS LIKE A FIST THROUGH GLASS, A FIST WRAPPED IN A towel, like a dull
crump
of sound, a
hot
sound somehow, a hot, tight sound that pushed its way into my mind even though I was sleeping.

The heat was close too, the skin a snake aches to shed; the heat of Georgia in late August, a gorgeous heat that challenges you to sleep despite it, and once sleep is gained you don’t want to surface out of it, into the hot crump sound from outside, which becomes something like knives and glasses, all bunched together in a leather bag and shaken . . .

Someone is shaking me.

Slurring muscles, unlocking themselves as if from premature rigor, each nudging the next, alerting it, the domino effect from neuron to synapse to nerve to resistance as sleep threatens to burst open like a water-filled balloon. Give itself up, surrender, but all unwilling, for once lost it will not be recovered. Like Johnny Burgoyne at Saratoga: gentleman or not, he still surrendered.

“Joseph!”

An urgent hiss.

“Joseph! Wake up!”

Dreams perhaps, dreams of Miss Webber, her wide-jowled open prairie of a face, cornflower blue eyes, simple and uncomplicated.

Joseph!

Sounded like my father—sudden and urgent, not mad, not angry, just insistent. I was fighting something, something heavy, something pressured, like drowning perhaps.

The sensation of movement, hands beneath me, and then I was opening my eyes and Reilly Hawkins’s face looked down at me, my mother right beside him.

“Hurry, Joseph!” she urged.

“Come, Joseph, get dressed quickly, we need to be out of the house!”

It was then that I could smell the smoke—acrid and bitter. I believed I could feel the heat through the walls, but perhaps that was imagination embellishing memory.

I hurried on my clothes, uncertain, but understanding that speed was of the essence. My mother and Reilly Hawkins went on ahead of me. I heard their footsteps clattering down the wooden stairs, like a stick dragged across a picket.

Once downstairs I found the kitchen floor flooded with water. There were buckets and saucepans scattered across the tiles and out of the door into the yard, and suddenly Clement Yates appeared from outside, his face reddened, his shirt soaked with sweat and water, his eyes wide, his skin grayed and streaked with black.

“A bucket, boy!” he yelled at me. “Get a bucket of water and hurry! Hurry, for God’s sake!”

The bucket was heavy. I almost skidded and lost it as I left the door and headed into the yard.

It was then that I saw the flames, bright fists of orange clenched on the roof of the Kruger house, and then lunging out toward the sky as if in anger. The smell was thick and claustrophobic, a smell of burning wood and cotton, of wool and scorched stone, of earth baked in the intense heat; it was like nothing I had smelled before, because caught beneath like a deceptive undercurrent was the smell of Death.

How many people were out there, I did not know. Gunther Kruger’s house was on fire, and it seemed all of Augusta Falls had rushed to help him extinguish the flames. The roar and spit was brutal, the dull
crump
as windows gave against the heat, the creaking yaw of stretched beams finally yielding to the furnace, the hot
snap
of clay tiles like whip cracks, the smell of juniper and yaupon bursting into orange life behind the house, the screams, the fear, the pounding feet, the two lines of men—one from our kitchen to the back of Kruger’s house, the other from the gully; two lines of men passing buckets hand to hand, and in amongst those men were Gunther, Hans and Walter Kruger, Clement Yates, Leonard Stowell, Garrick McRae and Gene Fricker. Sheriff Dearing was there too; I could hear his voice but didn’t see his face. Later, I heard he was the one in the raw, red guts of the building, the one breaking doors and fighting back the smoke. Eyes too blind to see a thing, he could hear voices, and stumbled through gray and darker gray acrid filth, all to no avail.