The Sleeping Night (22 page)

She touched her mouth, traced the shape of her lips, rubbing the pads of her fingers against her own flesh. Overhead, a moon shone down, dappling the ground with pale light. It was very quiet. She walked as if in her dream, imagining Isaiah in a way she had never before dared.

July 30, 1944

Dear Angel,

Here I am, touring a new country on my round the world journey.

Never worked so hard in my life, nor felt so lucky to do it. We could use whatever you can send, dry socks and the like especially. We just got our first shower in five days and a hot meal that’s not out of a tin and enough coffee to fill a belly for the first time. I will have a lot of stories to tell you when I get home. Censors aren’t going to let it by. Gotta go, sorry to be so quick. Keep writing, will you? Just cuz I don’t have much time doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy your letters.

Your friend,

Isaiah

Isaiah let Angel get a head start before he took his leave. Pausing at the door, he said to Gudren. “Better now?”

“Yes, thank you. Mostly, I am always better now, but there are times .
 . .”

He nodded, willing to listen if she needed to share her demons, but also anxious to follow Angel. She wasn’t safe out there in that forest. “I understand,” he said.

Gudren smiled. “Good night.”

Her eyes were full of knowing, the same knowing that had made her offer to teach him to play piano. In this instance, the knowing disturbed him a little. She saw too much.

Now, he simply hurried into the night, nearly running until he caught sight of Angel in her pretty blue dress, ambling like Snow White or somebody through the trees, some fairy tale girl without a lick of sense. As he watched, she reached out to caress the leaves on a cottonwood, ran her fingers over the deeply grooved bark. He shook his head, swearing under his breath. Couldn’t she feel the weight of evil in these dark woods? Didn’t she know how death hung in the branches of these trees? Couldn’t she hear the echo of screams and grunts here? It was a haunted wood, so haunted that he never walked through here at night, only in the full light of day.

He pressed his mouth together, feeling the gulf between them as he had all those years ago when she approached him in the side yard of Corey’s store. Her face had been open, guileless, her pale eyes filled with happiness at seeing him. Without even pausing to put down her washtub, she’d come across the yard, calling his name.

Isaiah had still been aching with the beating he’d taken in these very woods. His eye had not yet healed, and his ribs hurt when he breathed. And here came Angel, sweet as a clover flower, untouched and innocent as ever.

It had made him furious, and only Parker hollering at her at her from the back door had saved her from the tongue lashing that had been gathering in Isaiah’s mouth.

He was mad that she wanted to be friends, wanted to smile at him like they were still children reading storybooks. He’d glared his hardest stare that afternoon so long ago, and in the brief instant before she turned away, he had seen how he’d wounded her. It satisfied something in him, evened things out.

The same fury boiled in him now, had boiled this afternoon. She didn’t walk carefully in these woods and couldn’t hear the ghosts wandering through the trees because it wasn’t her people crying and dying here.

Damn her. She had no right to look at him like .
 . . that. With all that softness on her mouth, all
trembling surprise. Had no right to still be writing him a letter like she gave him last night, every word slicing his belly a little bit and a little bit more.

He had half a mind to teach her a lesson about these woods, teach her to fear them. But as he tried to form a plan, the sound of several voices came through the shadows. He froze, trying to pinpoint the direction. In front of him, Angel did the same thing, her head cocked to listen. A high, whinnying laugh floated through the stillness.

Edwin.

Angel knew it, too. Soundlessly, she melted in to the shadows, leaving the path for the darker shelter of the trees. But even there, moonlight fingered her pale hair as she moved. The idiot-sounding laughter rang out again, closer this time, and Isaiah reacted like the soldier he had so recently been. Moving as silently as possible, he dashed toward her, seeing her freeze at the sound of his steps just before her reached her.

In a single move, he leapt, capturing her from behind and covering her mouth with his hand before she could scream and alert Edwin and his wolves to their presence. She flung herself against him violently, stabbing his gut with her elbows, twisting fiercely. Terror gave her movements ferocious strength. Finally he snagged her arms against her body. “It’s Isaiah,” he said almost soundlessly in her ear. “Be still a minute.”

Her struggles ceased and he let her go, expecting her to sag in relief. Instead, she looked toward the sound of the voices and pointed toward the left, waving for him to follow. Isaiah caught her hand, frowning, and in that instant, a gunshot exploded into the quiet, followed by the hooting calls of drunks. Angel tugged Isaiah’s hand urgently, mouthing
now.
She turned, yanked him behind her, and let go, melting into the darkness.

It was not difficult to keep her in sight, even though she was darting through the forest like a fox, her white collar and pale hair gleaming in the faint light.

When she paused at the foot of a huge, old oak with gnarled branches, she spared an instant to look back to make sure he had followed, then scrambled up the branches as nimbly as a child. He looked up, but all that could be seen was a drape of leaves and branches. The tree house was as invisible as ever. As he had designed it to be.

Isaiah climbed up behind her, conscious of the voices behind him, the laughter and hooting. By the time he reached the railed platform high in the old tree, Angel had already fallen to her belly to peer over the edge. Isaiah fell flat beside her, and she pointed to a small clearing to their left. Fifteen yards away or so, a fire burned, the orange light showing the figures of six or seven men. They were passing around a bottle. Isaiah saw no evidence of the gun they’d heard.“Drunk as skunks,” Angel said in n a voice so quiet he had to strain to hear it. “All of them. I hear them sometimes late at night. I think they’re hunting possum or something.”

“Why the
hell
you come through the trees then?” His voice was as quiet as hers. “Ain’t you got one brain in that head of yours?”

“No place to hide on the road.”

He looked away. She was right, but it didn’t shake the knot of fury in his belly. The last thing in the world he wanted was to be up here in the dark alone with Angel Corey, but he couldn’t exactly leave her to wait out Edwin’s crew on her own. Easing away from the edge of the platform, he sat down with his back against the trunk of the tree, and rested his forearms on his upraised knees.

Angel scooted over to him. “How long since you been up here?”

He patted his pocket for cigarettes and took one out, bending his head as if in combat to hide the flame of the match. Cupping the cigarette in his palm to shield the tip from sight, he exhaled. “I followed that collar of yours all the way through the woods. Anybody look up, they’d see it too.”

“They’re drunk, Isaiah. Can’t see two feet in front of them. I’d go now, except I feel safer here than home sometimes.” Still, she turned the collar inside her neckline and spread her hands as if to say,
happy now
? She still spoke in a soft voice, inaudible two feet away. “Somebody’s always doing their business in the trees, too, and I don’t want to get peed on by accident.” She tucked her feet under her skirt as it to protect them, and he grinned.

It broke some of the tension. He was a grown man; he’d wanted women before and hadn’t died of it. Angel wasn’t some witch armed with magic spells to seduce him against his will or make him do something he didn’t want to. He knew all the folklore, the stories men told each other about women who put menstrual blood in a man’s food, or put their hair in his clothes, but the fact was, resistance was just a matter of mind over flesh.

As if settling in, Angel shifted, crossing her legs Indian-style under her dress, her eyes trained on the flickering fire in the clearing. She seemed content to just sit quietly, so he smoked in silence, admiring his boyhood handiwork. It was still nice, this little tree house. Solid. He’d spent hundreds of afternoons here, winter and summer, sometimes alone, sometimes with Angel and Solomon or even, when they were younger, Angel alone.

The last time had been with Angel. He remembered it very clearly, much more clearly than he thought she would. She’d been in love with Solomon by then, going to church suppers with him, holding hands on the road to town. It had only been by chance that Isaiah had found her in the tree house that day. He sucked on his cigarette, blew out the smoke. “Last time I was here was the day I had to quit school.”

“I remember,” Angel said. Her hands were motionless in her lap. “You gotta admit it’s held up. Can’t believe you built it so well when you were only ten years old.”

“Come on, now. We all built it.”

“Me and Solomon did some nailing and things like that, but you were the one giving orders.”

“Y’all were gonna just put up a little shack in this beautiful tree. I couldn’t let you do that, not when we could make it solid.”

“You always were a bossy child.”

He flashed a grin. “Look who’s talkin’.”

“I never had a chance between you and Solomon. You’d holler about one thing, he’d holler about something else.” She shook her head and rubbed a palm over the floor of the platform. “Have you thought about going on with your education now, Isaiah?’’

“I know how to build things. Don’t need schooling for that.”

“I don’t mean nailing and hammering—you can do more, and you know it.”

He shook his head. “You never stop dreamin’, do you?”

“You have a gift, Isaiah, as much as a singer or a painter. God gives you something like that for a reason.”

“Girl, I ain’t gonna be no architect. If that’s what God wanted, he oughta have given a little more thought to the external difficulties.” He stubbed the cigarette out on the floorboards. “Just a childish dream.”

“That wasn’t a dream,” she said, leaning forward earnestly. “It was an ambition. There’s a difference.”

He sighed, looking away from her to the sky overhead. As far as he was concerned, those childhood hungers were about as attainable as the starlight glittering up there—he’d just been too dumb to see it then. He was so intent on his thoughts that he missed the warning signs until she leaned forward and started talking in a quiet, fierce sing-song.

“Poor Isaiah. Poor poor boy. Born poor—” She drew the word out like a song, and he glanced at her sharply, realizing too late that she was mad. “—and colored and all alone.”

“C’mon, Angel,” he said. “Don’t start.”

“You think you’re the only one ever had to put something on hold? To suffer or do without?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You might as well have. What’s wrong with you, anyway?” she asked, but didn’t give him a chance to answer. “That day up here, when you told me you had to quit school, I remember thinking we were both fools forever believing we could be anything but exactly what the world said we were.” She narrowed her eyes. “I remember thinking that I wasn’t ever gonna get out of here, that I’d end up being buried in the same little cemetery that I pass every Sunday on my way to church.”

He shifted uncomfortably, and she whispered furiously, “Look at me, Isaiah High.”

When he did, she said , “You know what changed it? You did. You left here. You got out.” She was still whispering. Fiercely, quietly. “And my daddy—God rest his soul—helped you do it, but he never would do one damned thing to let me go. Help me get somewhere, do something.”

“Angel—”

She held up a hand. “When he died, I realized I don’t have to stay here anymore. That if he pushed you out of here, he knew it wasn’t a good place to be, and I can go, too.”

“Amen, sister,” he said, inclining his head. “Maybe you ought be a preacher.”

He’d meant to goad her, and almost succeeded—she opened her mouth, then clamped it tight again. He’d never seen a woman preacher any more than he’d seen a black architect.

She lifted her chin. “Maybe I will be, yet. ‘Bout time a woman talked about some other God that wasn’t always so interested in wars and such things.”

From the corner of his eye, Isaiah caught movement from the clearing and he held up a hand to still her. The figures were dousing the fire, moving away, the whole wild tone of their party turning to something quiet and purposeful. One of them carried a torch in his hand, making their progress easy to trace.

“That’s trouble if I ever saw it.” Isaiah shifted forward on his knees and swore. He looked back at Angel without speaking.

She stood up, watching the torch flicker through the trees, eerie and evil. When the sound of shattering glass carried on the air, she folded her arms over her chest. There was no question at all of exactly what was being broken.