The Sleeping Night (6 page)

At the sight of the sheet, he looked puzzled. “What is it?”

“Just paper dolls. Look, here’s Paul.”

The child flashed his impish grin. “Thank you, Miss Angel.”

“You are so welcome.”

“See you.”

As they turned to go, Isaiah paused. “Miz Pierson asked me to tell you to come see her when you have a spare minute.” He cleared his throat. “Said this afternoon might suit her well, since the store’s closed.”

“Thank you.”

Isaiah nodded and walked away, the boy in his stead. Angel went inside to pour herself a glass of iced tea from the pitcher, and drank it with a deep thirst, hoping the cold would wash away the discomfort laying heavy in her chest. She stared out the kitchen window, watching sunlight play over the shiny leaves of a cottonwood, trying to tie the man Isaiah with the child she had grown up with.

Isaiah. She closed her eyes, pressed her hands to her cheeks.

Even without speaking a word, he bristled with presence. That wasn’t new. At sixteen, seventeen, the bristling had been anger, and had scared Parker half to death. Grumbling that history would not repeat itself, not as long as he had two legs, Parker had talked himself blue until Isaiah reluctantly joined the Army, one step ahead of the war.

She poured another glass of tea. As a boy, he’d always been quiet. Saw everything with those big dark eyes and showed nothing. That was after his daddy died. Before—Angel reached back, back to evenings on the porch of the store, when she and Isaiah had played hide and seek or tag while the grownups traded stories and took some time off from their hard weeks to chat. In those days, Isaiah had been sunny and laughing, full of riddles and jokes and surprises.

She smiled suddenly, remembering the mysterious gift of wildflowers. Isaiah must have left them. Some of the small boy was mixed in there, then. And some of that bristling older boy, too. And something else, found in battlefields and faraway lands.

A flat red tin in her bedroom held the dozens of letters that chronicled his war days, some quick little notes, written hastily as he waited for duty, others long, pages and pages and pages of people and thoughts and comments on the lands he visited.

Real, she thought now. In his letters, he’d been himself. Outside a few minutes ago, she hadn’t been able to find a cornerstone upon which they could meet. Not in childhood or in the letters they’d traded. Now he was like the seventeen-year-old Isaiah who had avoided the store at all costs unless his mama forced him to come help her carry purchases of one kind or another. On those rare occasions, Isaiah mumbled replies to Parker’s questions with his eyes lowered, his mouth sullen.

One afternoon when they were teenagers, Angel had been hanging out the laundry and had come around the side of the house to rinse her washtub at the pump in the garden. She’d surprised Isaiah sulking against a tree and she’d been pleased, so
pleased
to see him, out away from people where they could talk. But his only response to her cheerful hello had been a single, searing glance of purest hatred.

Angel had backed away, wounded but wiser. To make matters worse, her daddy had yelled at her from the back porch with a hard note in his voice, like she was five years old and poking holes in flour sacks to watch the white stuff flow out in a tiny stream.

“Get your bottom in here, girl,” he’d hollered, words rough with fury.

Now, so many years later, Angel knew it had been Isaiah her daddy had been worried over, worried sick that he’d get himself killed somehow. On that sunny afternoon, all she’d felt was a vague, thudding guilt.

A vestige of it lingered. For as she’d heard Isaiah offer to answer her prayers for a new roof, her first thought had been that her daddy wouldn’t be there, that there were times no customer would be shopping and Isaiah would be up on her roof, bristly and grown into his anger, and there was no place, no way for them to meet as friends.

March 10, 1943

Dear Angel,

I see you all over the place here—in the rain and the castles and the fog, in the girls who look like you with their soft complexions. If somebody asked me what place was made for Angel Corey, I’d have to say England.

It was real good to get your letter. Sometimes, even with all that I hated about it, I miss home, miss seeing all the people that know me without me having to say a word. I miss playing chess with Mr. Parker and visiting with the preacher and hearing the music from the juke joint come up river on the night wind. Funny. Big ole Isaiah High, homesick as a little boy.

[Never mailed.]

March 12, 1943,

Dear Angel,

It was good to get your letter. Thank you for all the news. Sometimes, a body does get homesick.

You asked me to tell you about England. It’s different. The weather, the people, the way things look and feel—all of it. I expected it to be like the States, but it ain’t.

I remember how bad you wanted to come to London. Well, that place sure isn’t the same place it was, I can tell you that. There’s big holes everywhere from the bombing, and all kind of buildings looking like they might fall down any minute. You probably seen the newsreels, but it’s something to see it in person.

There’s a lot of shortages of everything here, too, but you said you heard it was worse, and you were right. There’s just nothing, but people just go on and do what they usually do, only in smaller ways. They invite you to tea and go dancing and try to pretend nothing is different, much as they can.

Here’s something you’ll like—people have yards around their houses, but they call it a garden. I kept looking for some vegetables, but it’s just the yard. There’s a lot of flowers (not this time of year, naturally) and you’d like how people take it seriously, the flowers around their places. Course now everybody is growing vegetables, too, even right in the city. On my days off, I’ve been helping some folks in one neighborhood get the soil tilled and ready to plant. Most of them are old, cheery, and all they young people are soldiers and nurses and suchlike.

The people themselves are kind of funny. Like they have this thing about never being surprised, but I know I run into people who never saw a man as black as me in their lives, but they act like it’s natural. And they seem to like Yanks, as long as the soldiers (white or colored) don’t mess too much with their girls. Course, no Yank’s ever quite as good as a Brit. Funny.

I’ve made friends with an old lady who shares her tea with me when I can get there. I felt bad at first, cause she don’t have a lot and I didn’t want to take her share, but one time I said no and you could see she was crushed. So I go. What she wants is somebody to talk to and tell her stories to. Her husband was in the Foreign Service and they traveled all over “The Colonies” (that’s how she say it, like it’s in capital letters). He died a few years back. She’s old, but she’s sharp and I figure there isn’t too much she ain’t seen or heard. We have a good time. I take her cigarettes when I can, and my mama sent a batch of brownies a while back, so I took those, too. (Don’t tell Mama.) She brings me books and I been reading a lot. Just finished A Farewell to Arms, and it was a good book, though I still don’t like him much. What have you been reading these days? Anything good?

You asked if it was hard to be so far from home. No. I miss people, but I don’t miss Texas. It’s okay here. We work hard (just finished a
CENSORED
), but I’m used to that.

There’s been terrible stories in the paper about the rest of Europe, things I don’t know if I can believe. Rumors about what Hitler’s doing to the Jews, mainly, but they’re so bad—I just don’t know. There’s sick people on this earth, that’s for sure.

I gotta get to work now and mail this. Tell your daddy I said hey. You take good care of him now. Drag him to the doctor if you have to. Write and tell me what happens. I think about y’all a lot, specially since I knew without you telling me how bad you always wanted to go to England. I never did. Funny.

Your friend, Isaiah

PS If you wanted to send things, I’d take them to Mrs. Wentworth. Food of any kind, of course, anything you can ship. Tea if you can get it. These folks are living on little enough. Thank you.

Angel made her way to Mrs. Pierson’s house that afternoon. It was one of her favorite places on earth—gentility embroidered in every detail. The house burrowed near a grove of pines just past the southern edge of Gideon proper, a rambling, two-story clapboard painted white. Around the wide, low porch were planted roses in a dozen colors, yellow and red and white and combinations of all three. The blooms stained the air with a heady fragrance that mixed with the melon scent of grass from the lawns that spread luxuriously beneath the shade of pecan and sycamore trees. As if in anticipation of the coming heat, a handful of chairs were gathered in a cove beneath the thickest branches.

The house had been built at the turn of the century with invention money. That’s how people always said it: “invention money.” Nobody seemed to know exactly what had been invented, patented and sold for resultant fortunes, only that it had something to do with electrics and kitchens. Having made his fortune, the first Donald Pierson had settled his wife and son in the big white house and proceeded to write scholarly pieces for magazines nobody in Gideon ever read.

His son had traveled east for his education just before the Great War and turned to war reporting as soon as he finished his degree, hoping to make a name for himself. Instead, he’d been shot in France and returned to New York.

There, recovering, he’d met and married the present Mrs. Pierson, a refugee from somewhere in Eastern Europe. They traveled back to the family home in the midst of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The younger Mr. Pierson, weakened by his wounds, succumbed to the virus shortly thereafter, leaving his worldly possessions to his lovely, young and frightened wife. The elder Mrs. Pierson, bereaved beyond comfort at the loss of her only son, died shortly thereafter.

Gideon’s citizens, suspicious of strangers to begin with, certainly weren’t crazy about a foreigner in their midst, no matter how pretty she was. They clucked over her accent, speculated over the scandal of that young woman living in that big house with the odd inventor and circulated rumors of all sorts to explain her blindness.

Just as matters had nearly driven Mrs. Pierson insane, Angel’s mother had arrived, been wooed and married by Parker in less than three weeks. And the gossip machine whirred violently, changing direction.

Because of their outcast status, the two women had naturally become friends, and Mrs. Pierson had extended her friendship to Angel as well, providing odd extras in Angel’s life—books and magazines no one else read, stories of Europe before the wars, a sense of elegance that would otherwise have been missing.

On this deep spring afternoon, Angel knocked on the door and was admitted by a slim, dark woman. “Hello, Miss Angel,” she said. “Hear your roof got right tore up in that storm.”

“Well, it was going long before the storm, but that was the nail in the coffin.” She stepped inside and blotted her forehead with a handkerchief. “I just saw Isaiah High and he offered to fix it, praise God.”

“That so?” Angel caught a flicker of surprise in her face before the ubiquitous smile returned. “Go on in the parlor. Mrs. Pierson was hoping you’d come.”

Angel made her way through the polished hall and into a sunny, airy room. Lace curtains hung at long windows, and ferns in big pots thrived in corners and nooks throughout the room.

Mrs. Pierson, slim and tidy in a tailored dark blue dress, rose at the sound of Angel’s feet at the door. With her was a painfully thin young woman whose white-blond hair was cropped short, curling slightly around her ears. Angel caught a quick impression of enormous dark eyes before Mrs. Pierson’s hands caught hers.

“Angel!” she exclaimed and kissed her cheek. “I am so pleased you could come. My rheumatism has been snapping at me with all this wet weather, and I have worried about you. Come, sit.”

With her customary ease, she led Angel to the couch. “This is my niece, Gudren—you remember I talked about her? Showed you the photographs of my sister’s daughter? Here she is!”

Angel couldn’t hide her shock.
This
was the fat little girl, the rosy cheeked, black-eyed niece from Holland? “I remember well,” she said, quietly meeting her eyes. “I’m Angel.”

A smile broke the pale face. “Yes. My aunt and Isaiah have spoken well of you.” Her English was heavily accented but very clear. “I am happy to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Angel said. Yes, those were the snapping black eyes of the little girl, housed in a face whittled clean of any excess flesh. Her cheekbones arched over deep hollows and skin stretched tight over the bridge of her nose. “I just saw Isaiah a little while ago. He said he came back with you.”

“A kind man,” Gudren said with an inclination of her head. “I was not well and he waited for me to be well enough to travel. It was—”

Angel waited for the rest, but Gudren simply shook her head.

Mrs. Pierson spoke instead. “My niece was disturbed by our railway system.” She took a minute sip from her china cup.

“Ah.” There wasn’t much to say about that:
Yes, we should change that. Yes, it’s an ugly rule, Yes, there are other things, too .
 . .

In truth, though, Texas without segregation struck her as unlikely as a civilization on the moon. No matter how often her daddy had talked about it changing, she didn’t see that it ever would. “I reckon that was a shock,” she said finally, thinking of the Europe Isaiah had illuminated in his letters.

“A shock,” Gudren agreed. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

Gudren leaned forward to pour. On the tender white flesh of her inner arm, Angel saw a series of blue numbers tattooed. She lowered her eyes, as embarrassed as if she’d seen the accidental exposure of a naked breast.

After a moment, she raised her chin, fully aware that her cheeks must be the color of cherries. Gudren had folded her hands in her lap, and looked at Angel with a steady and somehow patient gaze.

With a gesture Angel knew she would not forget, Gudren held out her arm and brushed graceful fingers over the tattoo. “It must not be hidden.”

“No,” Angel whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“I am alive.” She poured tea. “Here I sit, with my aunt, and her guest.” She handed Angel the cup and saucer, and smiled. One day, she would be beautiful again. “Here we are.”

Angel raised her cup. “To life.”

Gudren laughed. “Yes. L’chaim!”

After that, the conversation turned to lighter subjects, to what was planned for vegetable and flower gardens, to the weather; to movies and books. As the afternoon deepened, they played parlor games and Angel joined them for a quiet supper of beef noodle soup and pie.

For Angel, the evening was restorative. She’d spent a lot of time with Mrs. Pierson through the war, visiting for an afternoon or evening, sharing books and ideas and conversations. Especially now, she was glad to have the refuge.

It wasn’t until nearly sunset that Angel took her leave, walking through the woods in a silvered dusk populated with the whistles and chirps of birds who were capturing the last of the day’s food. She loved these woods, the smell of needles and river, the peacefulness and, tonight, the weight of her grief and loneliness was easier to carry.

At home, she changed into a house dress, and walked barefooted to the front porch to call Ebenezer, imitating his strident squawk as well as she could. He hopped up to the porch railing and answered her with his series of gurglings and meowings. Angel held out her finger. “How are you, baby? Full day?”

A movement in the edge of the woods across the road caught her eye and she peered into the deepening evening. Edwin Walker stepped into the road. “Evenin’, Angel.”

“Evenin’,” Angel answered warily. “What brings you out so far tonight?”

“You do.”

She put Ebenezer down on the chair. He leapt with a flash of blue wings to the top of it and fixed tiny black eyes on Edwin’s approach. Angel squared her shoulders. “Is that right?”

Edwin climbed the steps and leaned lazily on the railing. He said nothing for a minute, fixing his neon blue eyes on the road before he swiveled them to her face. He smiled softly, showing no teeth. “You looked so pretty in church today that I’ve been thinking about you all afternoon.”

“Thank you.”

He cleared his throat and extracted a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Not if you’ll offer me one.”

He relaxed and extended the package. When Angel pulled one out, he lit it. “You never did make it easy for a man,” he said after a moment.

She exhaled gladly, watching the smoke weave through a bar of light coming from the window. “Easy how?”

“You know what I mean. Even in school, nobody could sweet talk you, not even me.”

“And I imagine that was a rarity, Edwin.”

“Oh, don’t make it sound like I’m conceited, now. I can’t help it if women like me.”

Angel looked at him.

“Everybody but you, that is,” he said.

“No use throwing myself in there in the competition.”

“Wouldn’t’ve been no competition for you.” Smoke circled his head, pale against the darkness of his Black Irish face. It was said the Walkers had Indian blood, too, and she could believe it of Edwin with his hawkish nose and fine lips. Too handsome for his own good. The eyes seemed almost to carry their own light, an eerie glowing where there should be nothing but reflection.

“And, you know, that’s the trouble.” She inclined her head. “It’s people’s nature to want what they can’t have, Edwin. I’m no more your kind of woman than you are my kind of man.”

“What do you know about men, Angel Corey?” He smiled, glancing over her figure lazily. “Solomon?” He raised his eyebrows. “You were married, what? A week, maybe two?”

“We went through this in high school,” she said with a sigh. “I’m not interested, Edwin. I like you fine, but I’m not going to be your girlfriend. I don’t want to be
anyone’s
wife.”

“School,” he said, lifting his cigarette, eyes fixed on her through the smoke. “A woman needs things a girl never thought about, and I reckon there’s a lot you still haven’t learned.”

She narrowed her eyes. “And you figure you’re the one to teach me?” she said, shaking her head. “Thank you for the offer, but just because you went off to war and won you some medals doesn’t mean I changed my mind.”

His nostrils flared as he exhaled and Angel watched a string of muscle draw tight from his jaw to his temple as he stared out at the creeping darkness. “All right, then, Angel,” he said in his rough voice. “I got time.” He flipped his cigarette butt away. “Take care now, hear?”

“Night, Edwin.” She watched his broad back disappear into the night.

Rubbing a foot over the other arch lazily, she smoked and considered the problem of Edwin Walker. “What am I gonna do about that man, Ebenezer?” Nothing she said seemed to make the slightest difference to him. He just kept coming back, like a boomerang.

And whatever he said about changing, those eyes had grown worse, not better, while he’d been gone. She didn’t care if he was a deacon at church—wouldn’t care if he was the preacher himself. Something had always been off-kilter with Edwin Walker and it was tipped clear sideways now.

Ebenezer whistled sharply and she held her hand out for him to perch on her fingers. “What do you think, baby? Maybe I oughta get me a guard dog or something.” He answered with a soft purring. She stroked the downy feathers of his breast. Edwin’s unearthly eyes burned into her mind.