A Quiet Belief in Angels (7 page)

She frowned. “But your extra tutorial with Miss Webber—”

“Is on a Monday,” I interjected. “Today is Friday.”

She smiled. “Of course it is. How silly of me. Mr. Kruger here was just bringing me some soup.” She glanced toward the dresser, and there—in the clay pot that Mrs. Kruger sent over almost daily—was the soup. It looked untouched, the lid still firmly set.

“Oh,” I said.

“Well,” Mr. Kruger said, “I think it’s time I should be going. It was nice to see you, Joseph, as always. You should come over later and see Hans and Walter, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, still a little mystified.

Mr. Kruger snatched his jacket from the chair behind the door, and without putting it on he hurried past me and went down the stairs. I heard his footsteps as he crossed the tiled kitchen floor, and then the back door slammed abruptly. He had forgotten to say goodbye to my mother.

“Come to me,” she said. “Come and sit by me on the bed.”

I crossed the room. Everything smelled of lavender and boiled chicken.

“Sit here,” she said, and patted the mattress with her hand. “How was your day, Joseph?”

“I got a letter.”

“A letter?”

I nodded.

“A letter from whom?”

“From the people that judge the story competition in Atlanta.”

She sat up, her eyes wide, her expression one of intense interest.

“And?”

I withdrew the letter from my pocket and showed her.

She read it without speaking, and then she looked at me with tears in her eyes and reached out her hand. She laid her palm flat against the side of my face.

“My son,” she said, her voice a broken whisper. “You have found your vocation it seems.”

I shrugged.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t ever stop writing. This is the way the world will find out who you are.”

For some reason I felt like crying, but I did not.

I was thirteen, almost a man, and though both Miss Webber and my mother thought the letter a great deal more important than I did, it was nevertheless no reason to be sad.

I gritted my teeth. I lay down beside my mother, right there on the patchwork quilt, and closed my eyes.

She stroked the hair from my forehead, and then leaned down and kissed me.

“Your father would have been so proud,” she said. “His son, the writer.”

FIVE

T
HE THIRD GIRL WAS ALL OF SEVEN YEARS OLD. SHE WAS FOUND ON Saturday, June seventh, 1941. Just as with Alice Ruth Van Horne and Laverna Stowell, she was left naked and beaten. Her name was Ellen May Levine. A wide and deep incision centered her body, as if someone had attempted to cut her in two. Perhaps they had started such a thing and could not bear to finish it.

I had known her less than three months. She had come all the way from Fargo, near the Suwannee River in Clinch County, to attend Miss Webber’s classes in March that year. She was found in a shallow grave no more than half a mile from our house, there in the trees at the edge of Gunther Kruger’s boundary.

Sheriff Haynes Dearing met with Sheriff Ford Ruby, and they drove over to meet with Clinch County Sheriff Burnett Fermor. Rumor had it that the three of them spent more than two hours together; they called for detailed maps of the three counties and at least two orders of sandwiches and coffee. When the meeting was done it seemed they were none the wiser than when they’d started, but at least they hadn’t argued about John Wesley and the scriptures.

More than a dozen men were deputized. They came with pickup trucks and dogs and scoured the countryside from one horizon to the other. There were huddles of people talking in the street. Seemed that every day the newspaper had something else to say without saying very much of anything at all. Folks even mentioned the names of Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agents Carver and Oates, as if in bringing them back something would be different from their previous investigation. Carver and Oates never came, nor the man from Valdosta with a lie machine and a female assistant. Sheriff Dearing looked perpetually exhausted, as if sleep was a cohort of the killer and was evading him with great skill. There was talk of murder weapons, of knives, meat cleavers, other such suppositions. I watched it all, every single thing, and I wondered how someone would be found who had made it their business to remain undiscovered. Everyone knew they were innocent, and yet everyone knew they were a suspect, and would remain so until the guilty one was identified.

He was not, and for some reason I believed it would stay that way.

“This is a bad, bad thing,” Reilly Hawkins said. Once again he was seated in our kitchen. My mother had recovered from her illness, though Mr. Kruger still brought soup and sausages two or three times a week from his wife’s kitchen. I knew this was the case, because often, after school, my mother would send me over to the Krugers’ with washed pots and plates and her thanks.

“This thing with these children—”

My mother shook her head. “It’s not something I want to discuss, Reilly,” she said.

“I want to talk about it,” I told her. “I’m old enough to know what murder is, and I’m old enough to know that there are crazy people. Miss Webber told us that the Germans are putting Jewish people in prison camps and that many, many thousands have died—”

“Is she now?” my mother interjected. “I don’t know that that’s suitable material to be teaching young children.”

“Not so young,” I said. “I know that the French police are arresting Jews in Paris and handing them over to the Germans, a thousand at a time. I also know that James Joyce died in Switzerland, and that Virginia Woolf drowned herself in a river—”

“Enough,” my mother said. “So you know a lot of things, Joseph Vaughan, but that does not necessarily mean that we will discuss the murdering of young girls in our kitchen.”

I looked at Reilly Hawkins. He looked away.

“I knew all three of them,” I said. My voice broke with emotion. I felt tears coming. “I knew all three of them. I knew their names, what they looked like. I sat in Miss Webber’s class with them, and sometimes Miss Webber would have me read a story to everyone, and Ellen May would sit right up close like she wanted to hear every single word I said.” I could not hold myself. I stood up. “I want to talk about it! I want to know what’s happening and why we can’t do anything about these terrible things!”

“Enough already!” she snapped. “You have chores to do. Go and clean the window in your bedroom, and then you can go over to the Krugers if you wish.”

Anger rose inside me. I glared at my mother, and for a moment I saw through her determined expression. She was afraid, as afraid as I. She did not know what to say to make this thing any better.

I felt I should reach out to her. I believed it would have been right to apologize, to tell her I was confused and afraid and I needed to tell someone how I felt. But that, in my small and narrow view, would have been tantamount to admitting defeat in the face of authority. I made a performance of stamping my way upstairs and along the corridor. When I reached my door I opened it and slammed it shut as if I had gone inside, then I turned back the way I’d come and crept along the hallway to the top of the stairs.

“—willful yes, but rarely disobedient,” my mother was saying. “He has a bright and inquisitive mind like his father, and once he has hold of something he will not let it go.”

“I’m not one to judge,” Reilly said. “He’s the only boy I’ve ever been close to and I care for him a great deal. These recent things, these killings, are terrible things. Something like this happens, well, you cannot even begin to imagine how the parents must feel.”

“I know the second girl’s parents, just as acquaintances mind,” my mother said. “Leonard and Martha Stowell. Sweet people. Never met their daughter. She was the youngest, I think. Seem to remember there were three others, two boys and a girl.”

“A tragedy, a terrible tragedy. And to think, such a thing is the work of a human being.”

“In the very loosest sense of the term. Barely a human being, I think.”

Reilly cleared his throat. “I don’t know, Mary, it seems a terrible place the world is becoming, what with this war in Europe, the awful things we’re hearing about the Polish people and the Jews. I have heard rumor that the Germans are searching out and killing all the intellec tuals—musicians and artists and writers and poets, even professors and teachers—anyone who in any way opposes their views. They are searching them out and sometimes just executing them right there in the street.”

“It is not the world, Reilly. It is simply a few insane men using their power over ignorant people. This propaganda against the Jews has been going on for twenty years or more. Adolf Hitler has been slowly poisoning the minds and hearts of the German people, and he was doing this long before he went to war. I only hope that this war is over before we are drawn further into it.”

“I don’t know that such a thing can be avoided,” Reilly said. “As a free and democratic people it’s our responsibility to stand up against this kind of persecution.”

“So it is,” she said, “but first it is our duty to protect the children of our neighbors and friends against the monster in our midst.”

Later I crept back along the hallway and went into my room. From my window I watched as Elena Kruger helped her mother hang washing in the backyard.

Three days later Elena Kruger began attendance in Miss Webber’s class. She sat one row to my left, one desk down.

She sat where Ellen May Levine had sat before someone cut her in half.

It seemed an injustice to me, the affliction Elena Kruger suffered. I was never witness to her grand mal episodes, but the bruises on her arms and shoulders were clearly visible when we went swimming in one of the small tributaries that escaped from the Okefenokee. June was hot, but July went off the barometer sufficient to split stones, and when school finally broke for the vacation in the first week of August it was all we could do to stand straight in the brutal temperature. The sun broke high and bright, hard like a fist, stayed resolute until nightfall and then rested to gather strength for the next day. Reilly said it was the hottest summer on record; Gunther Kruger said Reilly had access to no such records, and how would he know such a thing anyway. Seemed to me it didn’t matter what any other summer might have been like, the one we had was enough to go around, and more besides. Walter Kruger worked much of the day with his father, and so the three of us—myself, Hans and Elena—we took to crawling beneath the Kruger house and hiding from the heat. Beneath the house it was cool and damp, almost another world, and despite the scritching of bugs and the sensation of moist crawling that was always on our skin, the shade it afforded was far more tolerable than the harsh and unrelenting sun.

“I think . . . I think if this goes on for another three weeks the swamps will be hard enough to walk on,” Hans said. I considered Hans a little slow—well-meaning, yes, but somehow a little dense, as if all his thoughts had a prearranged time for arrival and yet managed to be overdue. He worshipped Walter, however, and looked upon his older brother as the fountainhead of all wisdom and truth. If Walter uttered it, well then it was gospel. A little of that carried through Hans to Elena, and I later felt it my duty to defend her against their pranks and pratfalls. One time, years before, Hans had told Elena she was to eat a worm. He said that Walter had given him the message, that it was a definite instruction from Walter that she eat a worm. A whole one. She didn’t ask questions, and had spent a good four or five minutes looking for one until Walter luckily appeared and happened to ask her what she was doing. Perhaps it was a Germanic thing, the view that one should always obey one’s elders. If anyone had told me that Walter instructed me to eat a worm, I would’ve told them to go stick that worm where the sun didn’t shine, and I wouldn’t have meant beneath the Kruger house.

The heat didn’t continue for another three weeks, it continued until the latter part of September, and by then the Okefenokee was struggling to make it as far as the county line. We never did discover if the swamps dried out sufficiently to walk on. The equine encephalitis came and infected horses as far north as Winokur, as far south as St. George. Lines were drawn on maps, and those maps were handed out at town meetings right across the state. The lines were territorial divides, and people were forbidden from crossing those lines in case they carried the infection into new areas. Oddly enough, though we were neighbors, one line ran right between us and the Krugers. I could not visit with them until Christmas was on the horizon, but each week my mother would sent me to the end of the High Road, and there—wrapped in a cloth and tucked beneath the same rock—was a package left by Mr. Kruger. Countless times I went for that package, nothing more than a piece of leather rolled up and tied with a string, and each time I ferried it back to my mother without a question. Finally my curiosity took a hold and wouldn’t let go. I fetched the leather from beneath the stone, and knelt there in the dirt for a moment. I thought of what my father would think; whether he had worked hard enough to become an angel, and even then could see right down into my thoughts. The question in my mind was greater than the threat of censure, and I untied that string, remembering each turn so I could tie it once more when I’d looked inside.

Seven dollars.

A five and two one-dollar bills.

It seemed strange to me that Gunther Kruger would send seven dollars to my mother each week.

I tucked the bills back and rolled the leather around them, and then I ran home.

I gave her the money and never said a word.

For some reason I felt like Judas.

December of 1941.

In October we had heard that Adolf Hitler was near the gates of Moscow; that an American battleship—the USS Reuben James—had been attacked while on convoy duty west of Iceland. Seventy sailors died, forty-four were rescued. We held our breath, afraid to move perhaps. Reilly Hawkins said something bad would happen, that he’d been seized by a premonition while on an errand to White Oak.