A Quiet Belief in Angels (2 page)

“The fever took him,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “It came down here, winter of ’29. You were naught but a babe, Joseph, and your father was racked with phlegm and spittle sufficient to irrigate an acre of good soil. Once the fever grips your heart, it weakens it so you can never recover, and there was a time, maybe a month or more, when we were biding the hours until he died. But he didn’t go then, Joseph. The Lord saw fit to leave him be for a handful of years more. Maybe the Lord wanted to wait until you were grown.” She reached into the pocket of her apron and took out a gray rag to wipe her eyes. My mother possessed the hangdog demeanor of a ruined bare-knuckle fighter, broken-spirited and defeated on a Saturday night. “The fever was in his heart, you see,” she whispered, “and we were lucky to keep him for the years we did.”

But I knew that the rheum hadn’t taken him. Death took him, coming down from the High Road, heading back the same way, leaving nothing but His footprints in the dirt by the fence.

Later my thoughts of my father would be fractured and distended with grief, thinking of him as Juan Gallardo perhaps, as brave as that character in
Blood and Sand
, though never inconstant, and never as handsome as Valentino.

The farmers from adjoining tracts, Kruger the German amongst them, drove his body along the country blacktop on a flatbed truck where my father was buried in a plain, warped coffin. Later they congregated, dour and suited, in our kitchen, amid the smell of onions fried in chicken fat, the aroma of Bundt cake, the scent of lavender water in a pottery jug by the sink. And they spoke of my father, airing their reminiscences, their anecdotes, telling tall tales within wider narratives, each of them embellished and embroidered with facts that were fiction.

My mother sat wordless and watchful, her expression one of artless simplicity, her eyes deeper than wells, dilated pupils as black as pitch.

“One time I watched him all night with the mare,” Kruger said. “He lay there ’til sunrise feeding the old girl handfuls of crow corn to stop the colic.”

“Tell you a story about Earl Vaughan and Kempner Tzanck,” Reilly Hawkins said. He leaned forward, his red and callused hands like bunches of some dried foreign fruit, eyes going this way and that as if forever searching out something that held a purpose to evade him. Reilly Hawkins farmed a tract south of ours, had been there long before we arrived. He welcomed us like long-lost even on our first day, raised our barn with my father, and took nothing more than a jug of cold milk for his trouble. Life had sculpted him a patina, features crazed with fine wrinkles, eye whites close to mother-of-pearl, kind of eyes washed clear and clean by tears for fallen friends. His family, too, was gone and nearly forgotten, from war, or fire or flood, others from accident and foolish misadventure. Ironic now, how impulsive moments—in and of themselves nothing more than efforts to affirm and grace existence with a rush of vibrancy—resulted in death, like Reilly’s younger brother, Levin, all of nineteen years old, at the Georgia State Fair. There was a half-drunk and garrulous stunt pilot who owned a Stearman or a Curtiss Jenny and crop dusted in season. Reilly had goaded and cajoled Levin into taking a flight with the man. Words went back and forth between the brothers like some
pas-de-deux
, a precision two-step, a tango of dares and provocations, each phrase a step, an arched foot, a bowed back, an aggressive shoulder. Levin didn’t want to go, said his head and heart were built for ground-level observation, but Reilly kept at it, worked his fraternal angle despite knowing better, despite the haunt of sourmash around the pilot, despite the closing evening light. Levin conceded, went up on a wing and a prayer for a quarter dollar, and the pilot, braver than he was adroit, attempted a bunt followed by a hammerhead stall. The engine died its death at the apex. Long breathless silence, a rush of wind, and then a sound like a tractor hitting a wall. Killed the pair of them, and left the pilot and Levin Hawkins like two helpings of scorched roadkill. Plume of smoke three hundred feet high and still a ghost of it come morning. The assistant, a kid no more than sixteen or seventeen, walked around for some hours with no expression on his face, and then he too disappeared.

Reilly Hawkins’ folks died soon after. He tried to keep the small farm together after they passed on, both of them brokenhearted after Levin’s death, but even the hogs seemed to look sideways at him like they understood his guilt. Never a word of blame in Reilly’s direction, but old man Hawkins, chewing ceaselessly on his Heidsieck champagne tobacco, would watch the older brother, watch him like there was a debt to be repaid and he was waiting for Reilly to offer up. His eyes would twitch back and forth like a quit smoker in a cigar store. Never a word spoken, but the word always present.

Reilly Hawkins had never married, some said because he couldn’t give children and had no shame to admit it. I believed that Reilly never married because his heart was broken once, and thought that to have it broken a second time would kill him. Rumor said it was a girl from Berrien County, pretty as a Chinese baby. Figured not to risk such a venture as he had other reasons to live. Choice between some wide-mouthed girl from an over-stretched family, girl who wore cotton print dresses, rolled her own cigarettes and drank straight from the bottle—that, or loneliness. Seemed to have chosen the latter, but of this he never spoke directly, and I never directly asked. That was Reilly Hawkins, the little I knew of him at the time, and there was no guessing his purpose or direction, for more often than not he seemed a man of will over sense.

“Earl was a fighter,” Reilly said that day in our kitchen, the day of the funeral. He glanced at my mother. She didn’t move much, but her eyes and the way she glanced back was permission for him to continue.

“Earl and Kempner went up beyond Race Pond, over to Hickox in Brantley County. Went up there to see a man called Einhorn if I remember right, a man called Einhorn who had a roan for sale. Stopped in a place on the way just to take a drink, and while they were resting a brute of a character came in and started up hollering like a banshee in a warbonnet. Upsetting folk he was, upsetting them and getting people riled and ornery, and Earl suggested the man take his business outside and into the trees where no one could hear him.”

Reilly looked once more at my mother, and then at me. I didn’t move, wanted to hear what my father had done to calm this brute of a character near Hickox in Brantley County. My mother didn’t raise her hand, nor her voice, and Reilly smiled.

“Cut a long story down to size, this brute tried to level Earl with a roundhouse. Earl sidestepped and sent the man flying out through the doorway into the dirt. Went after him, tried to talk some sense into the devil, but the man had a fighting heart and a fighting head and there was no reasoning with him. Kempner went out there just as the man came up again and went for Earl with a plank of wood. Earl was like one of these Barnum & Bailey acrobats, dancing back and around, fists like pistons, and one of those pistons just connected with the big man’s nose, and you could hear the bone break in a dozen places. Blood was like a waterfall, man’s shirt was soaked, kneeling there in the dirt and howling like a stuck pig.”

Reilly Hawkins leaned back and smiled. “Heard that the old boy’s nose never did stop bleeding . . . just kept on running ’til he was all emptied out.”

“Reilly Hawkins,” my mother said. “That was never a true story and you know it.”

Hawkins looked sheepish. “No disrespect, ma’am,” he said, and bowed his head deferentially. “I wouldn’t want to be upsetting you on such a day.”

“Only thing that ever upsets me is untruths and half-truths and outright lies, Reilly Hawkins. You’re here to see my husband away to the Lord, and I’d be obliged if you’d mind your language, your manners, and keep a truthful tongue in your head, especially in front of the boy.” She looked over at me. I sat there wide-eyed and wondering, wanting to know all the more gory details regarding my father: a man who could right-hook a brute’s nose and deliver death by exsanguination.

Later I would remember my father’s burial. Remember that day in Augusta Falls, Charlton County—some antebellum outgrowth bordering the Okefenokee River—remember an acreage that was more swamp than earth; the way the land just sucked everything into itself, ever-hungry, never satiated. That swollen land inhaled my father, and I watched him go; I all of eleven years old, he no more than thirty-seven, me and my mother standing with a group of uneducated and sympathetic farmers from the four corners of the world, jacket sleeves to their knuckles, rough flannel trousers that evidenced inches of worn-out sock. Rubes perhaps, more often uncouth than mannered, but robust of heart, hale and generous. My mother held my hand tighter than was comfortable, but I said nothing and I did not withdraw. I was her first and only child, because—if stories were true, and I had no reason to doubt them—I had been a difficult child, resistant to ejection, and the strain of my birth had ruined the internal contraptions that would have enabled a larger family.

“Just you and me, Joseph,” she later whispered. The people had gone—Kruger and Reilly Hawkins, others with familiar faces and uncertain names—and we stood side by side looking out from the front door of our house, a house raised by hand from sweat and good timber. “Just you and me from now on,” she said once more, and then we turned inside and closed the door for the night.

Later, lying in my bed, sleep evading me, I thought of the feather. Perhaps, I thought, there were angels who delivered and angels who took away.

Gunther Kruger, a man who would become more evident in my life as the days went on, told me that Man came from the earth, that if he didn’t return there would be some universal imbalance. Reilly Hawkins said that Gunther was a German, and Germans were incapable of seeing the bigger picture. He said that people were spirits.

“Spirits?” I asked him. “You mean like ghosts?”

Reilly smiled, shook his head. “No, Joseph,” he whispered. “Not like ghosts . . . more like angels.”

“So my father has become an angel?”

For a moment he said nothing, leaning his head to one side with a strange squint in his eye. “Your father, an angel?” he said, and he smiled awkwardly, like a muscle had tensed in the side of his face and would not so easily release. “Maybe one day . . . figure he has some work to do, but yes, maybe one day he’ll be an angel.”

TWO

A
LONG THE COAST OF GEORGIA—CROOKED RIVER, JEKYLL ISLAND, Gray’s Reef and Dover Bluff—roads that were more half-bridges and causeways wishing they were roads, every now and then skipping stretches of water like flat stones spinning from the hands of children; a flooded swell of islands, creeks, sounds, salt marshes and river inlets, trees shrouded in Spanish moss, split logs bound together to navigate a corduroy track across the deeper swamps, while the flatlands in the southeast rose gradually across the state to the Appalachians. The Georgians grew rice, and then Eli Whitney came with the cotton gin, and field hands harvested peanuts, and settlers tapped the pines for curing rope, caulking the seams of sails with pitch and turpentine for paint. Sixty thousand square miles of history, a history I learned, a history I believed in.

A tablet-arm chair; a one-room schoolhouse; a teacher called Miss Alexandra Webber. A wide-jowled open prairie of a face, eyes cornflower blue, simple and uncomplicated. Her hair was flax and linen, and forever she smelled of licorice and peppermint, and something beneath that like ginger root or sarsaparilla. She gave no quarter, expected none in return, and her depth of patience was matched solely by the spirit of her anger if she felt you had willfully disobeyed her.

I sat beside Alice Ruth Van Horne, a strange, sweet girl I found myself caring for in some inexplicable way. There was something simple and affecting in the way she twirled her bangs as she concentrated, every once in a while glancing back at me like I had the answer she couldn’t find. Perhaps I gave her the impression I understood this thing she sought, perhaps for no other reason than appreciating her attention, but when she was absent I was aware of that absence in some manner other than physical presence. I was eleven, soon to be twelve, and sometimes I considered things that would not have been appropriate to share with others. Alice represented something that I did not fully understand, something that I knew would be altogether too difficult to explain. For the four years I had attended the school, Alice had been there, ahead of me, beside me, for one term seated at the desk behind. When I looked at her she smiled, sometimes blushed, and then she would look away, only to wait a moment and look at me again. I believed her sentiment was uncomplicated and flawless, and I knew that one day, perhaps, both of us might recall it as a perfect memory of who we had been as children.

Miss Webber, however, represented something else entirely. I loved Miss Alexandra Webber. My love was as clear and simply defined as her features. Miss Webber conducted her classes along
Robert’s Rules of Order
, and her voice, her silence, everything that she was and everything I imagined she would ever be, was an anodyne and a panacea following the death of my father.

“Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne . . . who has heard of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne?”

Silence. Nothing but the sound of my heart as I watched her. Seventeen of us were crowded in that narrow plankboard room, and not one raised their hand.

“I
am
disappointed,” Miss Webber said. Apparently she had come all the way from Syracuse to teach us. People from Syracuse breathed different air, air that made their heads clear, their minds sharp; people from Syracuse were a different race.

“Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, born in 1722, died in 1792. He was a British general during the Revolution. He found himself surrounded by our troops at Saratoga on the seventeenth of October, 1777. It was the first great American victory and a truly decisive battle of the war.”

She paused. My heart missed a beat.