The Sleeping Night (20 page)

The following afternoon, Angel swept up the dust the wind blew through the screen door, a chore she’d done every day since she’d been old enough to hold a broom. Something about the light angling through the trees to fall on the wide wooden planks of the floor transported her to childhood, and she was again a little girl sweeping this very spot as she waited for Isaiah to come in with his mother and daddy. In those days, he had been her best friend.

Lost for a moment in childhood, she remembered the dream. It was one she’d had many times over the years. Usually it came to her just before she awakened, so that it lingered with sweetness as she opened her eyes, leaving her warm and sleepy with thoughts of Isaiah. In the soft dream, she was high in the trees with him, talking and laughing as the gold-washed leaves around them shimmered with summer heat. Safe and high, they sometimes held hands or hugged each other as they had long ago.

Last night, she had dreamed it again, and it surfaced now with curious force. Holding the broom in one hand, she stared at a row of combs on the shelf, seeing instead the dream, feeling it, the warmth of the day, the scent of the air, Isaiah’s eyes shining as he smiled at her. But this time—her stomach tightened painfully as she remembered—this time he had leaned over to press his mouth against hers.

Complete invention.

She closed her eyes, awash with it. Isaiah, Isaiah, Isaiah. It was pure torture having him here again. A hundred times harder than she would have imagined.

Suddenly she felt foolish and vulnerable, as if anyone who looked at her would know that she had dreamed a sinful and forbidden thing, as if her expression might show that calculating hardness she had seen sometimes on the faces of women who lived alone for one reason or another, women known to seduce travelers and boys a shade younger than they ought to be; sometimes even a colored man from Lower Gideon, but not too often anymore, not since Maude Sweeney had been killed right alongside the man she’d tried to blame her seduction on.

A car outside the store brought her thoughts back to earth. Smearing tears off her face, she saw Mrs. Pierson’s big black car had stopped in front. She could see Isaiah’s strong brown hands on the wheel, and something trembly moved along her arms, the back of her neck. She thought of him, last night, standing behind her as she typed, and all the things—

A flush crept hot over her cheeks. How could she even look at him? How could she possibly meet his eyes?

Thankfully, someone else was climbing out of the back seat, laughing—Gudren, with her smooth cap of gilt hair. She smiled at Isaiah as she shook her skirt free, making a joke Angel couldn’t hear, one Isaiah appreciated. His loose chuckle rang into the still day.

Angel propped the broom against the door as she headed outside, hiding her trembling hands in the skirt of her dress. The two of them didn’t see her. They were still chuckling together, a fact that made Angel want to cry all over again. She glanced off toward the tendrils of morning glories beginning to crawl around the porch railings. Taking a deep breath, she looked back to them, “Hi, y’all.”

Gudren came forward cheerfully, “Angel! What a beautiful dress!” She took both of Angel’s hands and kissed her on the cheek, and Angel immediately felt ashamed of her jealous thoughts.

“Thank you. I just made it. It’s such a treat to get some different kinds of fabric in. Still not much but it’s sure better than it was.” She paused. “But I reckon you .
 . .” She shook her head.

“Yes, I know how you feel,” Gudren said smoothly. “I am happy every day to put on a real dress, with flowers and lacy collars.” She grinned, a strangely impish expression. “The men, they never understand about these things.”

Angel laughed, and it untied her strung-tight nerves. “Have you come to shop or visit?”

“I’m visiting today, until Isaiah finishes with his work. My aunt asked me to bring you back for dinner. Will you come?”

“You betcha.” She tugged open the screen door and waved Gudren in ahead of her. “Come on in. Let’s have a glass of tea.” At the door, she paused, not able to quite look at Isaiah’s face. “You need anything, Isaiah?”

“No, ma’am.” His voice was low.

She looked at him, sure he was making a joke, but his eyes were trained studiously upon the dirt beneath his feet, and his jaw was hard. After a long moment, he looked up and there was fury in his dark eyes. Stung, embarrassed, Angel swallowed and followed Gudren inside. “What’s the matter with him, I wonder?” she said as they reached the kitchen.

Gudren shook her head, a curious smile playing around her lips. “He will be better when he works hard, I think. Many times, he arrives at my aunt’s house with a big frown, but after he works, he-” She whistled, illustrating, moving her head back and forth in an uncanny imitation of a much bigger person. “You know?”

Paul burst into the kitchen. “Can I go outside and watch ’Saiah?”

“Sure, baby. Just stay out of his way.”

As the child ran out of the kitchen, Gudren lifted a thin, worn volume from out of her bag. “Isaiah asked me to give you this.” She put it on the table.

“Why didn’t he bring it in himself?” She crossed the linoleum to pick it up. The lettering was nearly worn away, the binding frayed along the edges, the pages gone soft with many readings.
The Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar
.

She opened it at random, reading a line here and there, and a sense of excitement whispered through her chest. She put it down next to the typewriter, knowing she would read it later, when she was alone. “Thank you.”

“He said there is another book, but first you must read this one.”

Angel frowned a little, but nodded. Who ever knew why Isaiah did things? That she would learn something she had no doubt, but would she read what Isaiah had meant? “We’ve traded books for a long time,” she said. “Don’t always agree on what’s good and what’s not, but it’s nice to trade anyway. Do you like to read?”

Gudren settled at the table. “Oh, yes. Very much.”

Angel poured tea into glasses, puzzling over the contradictory anger and offer of the book. Last night, it had been the same—his anger, then his return to apologize and give her a gun and teach her to use the typewriter. Blowing a wisp of hair out of her eyes, she put the tea back in the icebox and turned to serve the cold glasses of tea to her friend and herself. She had to stop spending so much of her time thinking of Isaiah. It wasn’t getting her anywhere except in a muddle.

“Tell me what you like to read,” she said to Gudren, and the two whiled away the afternoon in that way. Angel hardly thought of Isaiah at all except when his hammer fell on the roof, bang bang bang, bang bang bang, all afternoon.

Isaiah drove Angel and Gudren
back to Mrs. Pierson’s house. It was odd for Angel to sit in the back and look at his head while he drove, staring straight ahead, bristling with the same hatefulness she’d seen at the store. No one said a word as the car bumped over the road to town, then Isaiah smoothly pulled the car into the half-circle drive in front of the house.

Angel got out without looking at him. As the two women walked toward the house, Gudren took Angel’s arm in hers. “My aunt misses your father very much. She will be happy you have come.”

“She does?” Angel asked, puzzled.

“Of course,” Gudren replied. “It is to be expected, is it not? He was her husband in all but name.”

For an instant, Angel was thunderstruck. Her feet froze on the grass and she literally gaped at Gudren, who finally seemed to sense the bomb she had dropped.

“You did not know.” She pressed fingers to her lips. “Oh, Angel, I am sorry.”

She shook her head, clearing it. “I don’t mind or anything. It’s just a surprise.” But all the signs had been there, if Angel had just opened her eyes. The nights Parker wandered off on his own, not coming back until very late. The mid-week visits from Mrs. Pierson, the dinners the old woman had cooked for them.

Behind them, Isaiah closed the doors on the car, and Mrs. Pierson stuck her head out. “Isaiah, when you’ve put the car away, will you come inside for a moment, please?”

“Yes, ma’ am.” The engine roared to life, purred around the back of the house.

“Ah, my girls,” Mrs. Pierson said, holding open the screen door. She kissed Angel’s cheek. “I am so glad you could join us, my dear.”

Inside the parlor, the radio played softly. Angel sat on the small settee near a bay window and looked out to the vast expanse of trimmed lawn and carefully tended flowers. “Your garden is coming right along,” she said, thinking of her father, of Mrs. Pierson. When had it begun? Five years ago? Fifteen? “The honeysuckle’s blooming like the devil.”

“Is it beautiful? I am grateful that Isaiah is tending it so well.” Mrs. Pierson answered from the dining room, divided by an arch from the parlor. Opening a heavy walnut sideboard, she began to take out plates and silver. “Will you help me set the table, my dear? I have already sent Fern home for the day.”

“Of course.”

“Do I have all the same napkins here?”

Angel plucked a floral print from the midst of the plaids, and took the correct one from a starched set of freshly laundered napkins on the shelf.

“Water glasses, will you, Angel?” Mrs. Pierson said, putting the plates down. She turned her face toward the sound of Isaiah’s footsteps in the kitchen. “In here, please, Isaiah.”

He pushed through the swinging door between the dining room and kitchen. “Yes, ma’am.”

Catching his servile tone, one he’d never used in the presence of this woman, Angel looked at him with narrowed eyes. He stood in the doorway, bristling like a porcupine, all needles and annoyance.

“Isaiah,” Mrs. Pierson said. “Will you stay and have supper with us?”

“That’s kind of you, ma’am, but I’m going to have to be getting home now, if you don’t need anything else.”

Mrs. Pierson turned regally, leveling her sightless eyes directly on his face. “Isaiah High, whatever in the world is wrong with you today? You are among friends here and you know that. If you choose to go home, I will understand your wishes, but I would very much like to have your company at my table.”

For one long moment Angel held her breath. Holding water glasses in her hand, she waited for his response, and was surprised to see a wry smile ease the tense look of his face.

“I’ll stay,” he said finally in his deep, rumbling voice. “Thank you.”

“Good, then,” Mrs. Pierson said briskly, brushing a stray wisp of hair from her face. With one hand, she reached around to find the forks. “You may help Angel with the table, then, while Gudren and I see about the food.”

Angel smiled to herself. Of course her father had loved this woman. Of course they had loved each other—two outcast and honorable souls marooned in a place that didn’t understand them. How could they have avoided it? Rounding the table, setting glasses out, she felt a settling pleasure in understanding that neither of them had been as alone as she’d imagined them to be.

She gathered cups and saucers from the sideboard as Isaiah laid the silver. “Better turn the knife blades toward the plates or she’ll have your head.”

“Don’t correct me, Angel.”

“You got a bug in your ear? What is wrong with you today?”

He didn’t even look at her.

She lifted a shoulder. “Do it your way then. You’ll see. I’ve set this table a hundred times, and she’s a stickler for details. Seems to me you’ve been scolded once already this afternoon and you don’t need another.”

He suddenly and completely softened, giving Angel a single, amused shake of his head. “She can do it, can’t she? Don’t yell, don’t curse, don’t even try to make you feel bad.”

“Like your mama.”

“Mama?”

“She used to scold me to a puddle in about three seconds flat and hardly even say a word.”

He laughed.

Mrs. Pierson came back, carrying a bowl of fruit salad she placed on the table, Gudren following with a straining platter of fried chicken.