A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  “Daniel,” I said.

  Daniel seemed to jump inside his skin.

  “I need you to go back to your house.”

  His eyes widened.

  “What’s going on?” Hans Kruger asked.

  The others gathered around us. We’d been stumbling about in the dark for more than an hour. We had seen nothing, believed now that there was nothing to see, and perhaps all of them were hoping that some sort of reprieve had been granted, that they were going to be sent home.

  “I need Daniel to go back to his house,” I said.

  “Why?” Maurice Fricker asked. “Why should he be allowed to go home?”

  I looked at Maurice, and then each of them in turn. “Daniel’s the only one who’s lost a sister,” I said. “I’m concerned that the man who murdered his sister might be watching the rest of the family. I need Daniel to go and make sure they’re okay.”

  It was a foolish and shallow reason. All of them knew that, but no one dared challenge Daniel McRae, because he had lost his sister, he had been the only one to lose a family member, and I knew they would give him some sort of leeway because of that.

  Daniel’s eyes were wider than ever. He looked as if he was holding his breath.

  “Yes,” Hans Kruger said. “He should go.”

  I looked at Hans. I could tell from the way he returned my gaze that he understood what I was doing.

  “Go,” Hans said. “Run quickly, and on the way you can look around my house and make sure there is no one after my sister.”

  Daniel moved—suddenly, unexpectedly. He tried to smile at me, tried to say something, but it seemed that every muscle in his body was geared for running and nothing besides. He took off—Red Grange on a broken-field—and we stood there watching as he vanished toward the end of the road and finally disappeared.

  A handful of minutes later we heard it.

  The sound came from out amongst the trees to my right. Hans heard it too, Maurice Fricker, Michael Wiltsey also. We stood breathless and silent, and then—almost like an afterthought—I caught a flicker of something within the trees.

  My heart stopped dead. My whole body stopped a second later.

  I wondered if I’d imagined something, if the strength of my fear had projected something into the darkness, something that existed solely in my imagination.

  “You see that?” someone hissed, their voice a rush of desperate sound.

  I wondered how many frightened children it took to create a ghost.

  The light again, this time for sure. I took a deep breath. I felt my eyes widen. A feeling of abject terror worked its way out from the base of my gut and trembled through my entire body.

  I heard Ronnie Duggan’s voice then, nothing more than a petrified whisper.

  “Jesus Christ almighty . . . it’s him . . .”

  I backed up. Hans was beside me. I turned and started toward the low wall that bordered the edge of the field. I felt for the handle of the knife in my waistband, gripped it firmly, wondered whether I would have any chance at all to inflict damage on this thing if it came for us.

  Ronnie dropped the lantern. I heard the glass break. It sounded extraordinarily loud. “Oh shit,” I heard him say, and I knew it was not because he’d broken his father’s lamp, but because now we had made it undeniably obvious where we were.

  “Behind the wall,” Hans whispered, his voice like a hiss of steam escaping from a tightly lidded pan.

  Five of us, falling over our own feet, each of us trying desperately to reach the wall.

  I looked back, and where we had heard something—out amongst the trees—I saw a sudden flicker of light. My heart thumped violently in my chest, and even as we reached the rough stone wall I had wrenched the blunt knife from its sheath. I crouched there with my thudding heart, a film of sweat varnishing my entire body. All I could hear was the sound of five children trying their damnedest not to breathe.

  I tried to pretend the killer had not seen us, that he would pause for a moment, glance along the road, see nothing, turn and walk back the way he’d come.

  In less than a minute I knew this was not the case. I saw the beam of light bounce along the trees and come to rest on the road no more than fifty feet from where we hunkered down against the wall.

  I began to pray, and then I knew there was no point. All of them had prayed. Every single one of them had prayed, if not for themselves then for one another. Miss Webber had had us pray for Alice Ruth Van Horne, for Laverna Stowell. She had us pray to God that He would see fit to prevent this killer from taking any more children. And what good had it done? It had accomplished nothing. Instead I gripped the knife. I turned and looked at Hans, and I could see in his wide, white-staring eyes, that he was as scared as me.

  Heard the sound of footfalls. The glow of the torch illuminated the road no more than thirty feet from where we hid. Down behind the wall, five kids, frightened as hell, and a killer on the road, torch in hand and eyes waiting to catch sight of any one of us . . . perhaps could smell us, perhaps was fast enough to outrun us, strong enough to hold all of us, both arms stretched wide, and crush us wholesale.

  Ronnie Duggan let out a cry. A tiny, whimpering, terrified cry, but it was enough.

  The torchlight was still. The footfalls stopped.

  Could hear his breathing, more like rasping, like something huge with blood bubbling in his chest . . .

  Could smell the rank and poisoned haunt of his breath, the smell of leather, of a rusted metal cleaver . . . could hear his thoughts, sense what he wanted, see myself strung upside down from a tree and flayed alive, stripped of every inch of my skin . . . I would take hours to die, and every second would be a living Hell . . .

  When he spoke . . . when those first words were uttered by the killer on the road, Michael Wiltsey screamed loud enough to be heard in Camden County.

  Remember the Guardians.

  A welcome memory, like a cool silence after endless noise.

  Remember their faces. Ronnie Duggan with bangs that his ma never saw fit to trim. Michael Wiltsey, the King of Fidget. Maurice Fricker, spit of his dad, and how he could cross his eyes and then send them sideways like he was looking left and right both at the same time. Scared kids we were, each and every one of us. And then there was Hans. Remember Hans for the first time in as long as remembering can get. Seems like I pushed him out of my mind, because thinking of the Krugers was altogether too painful. Too painful by half. The night we were caught by Sheriff Dearing, the way we believed we’d been cornered by the killer. The trace of his torch as it bounced along the edge of the wall where we’d crouched, each of us white with terror, dry-sweating, teeth chattering. Skin raised like chicken flesh, and nerves tighter than tourniquets for bleeding wounds. Me holding onto my blunt knife as if it would have served some purpose.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted.

  Michael had screamed, loud enough to be heard in another county.

  No one dared move, not a twitch.

  And Sheriff Dearing’s voice hadn’t sounded like anyone I knew. But we knew one thing . . . one thing for sure. Knew we were all done for. Done and dead twice over and then some.

  Caught us hiding down there behind the wall, his torch illuminating our stricken faces, the momentary sense of relief that seemed to wash right through his features like water through paint, as if he’d been scared too, real scared, as scared as us, and then he was mad, mad as hell, shouting at the top of his voice in the darkness, hollering about how we were all going to be grounded, that our mas and pas would be waiting for us with a darn good thrashing . . . kind of thrashing we’d never forget.

  Bundled us wholesale into the back of his car, drove half an hour to ferry us all back home, and when my mom saw me climbing from the back of that police car she started crying. Crying like she did when my dad was buried, but somehow different.

  Madder than anything she was, as mad as I’d ever seen her, but wouldn’t let me go, holding me tight until I couldn’t breathe, telling
me I was the worst kind of child a mother could ever have—willful, disobedient, ornery, cruel even. But still hugging me, hugging me and crying, saying my name over and over and over.

  “Oh Joseph . . . Joseph . . . Joseph . . .”

  Sheriff Dearing came to the schoolhouse the following day. He didn’t identify us by name, but as he spoke he looked at each of us in turn, pinned us with a steely eye right where we sat and said as how there’d been some trouble, that things were getting out of hand, and how he’d imposed a curfew on us kids.

  Home by six, no later. Home, and locked up tight where we could-n’t be causing any trouble. For our own good, he said, and then he stood there silently while Miss Webber nodded in agreement.

  We met after school, the Guardians. Stood in a huddle and tried to pretend to one another how we hadn’t been that scared, that if it had been the killer we’d have overpowered him, brought him to the ground, kicked him left, right, up, down, north, south and sideways. Kicked him so far down to Hell he’d never come back.

  We knew we were kidding ourselves. We knew just exactly how frightened we’d been that night.

  Frightened like little girls.

  SEVEN

  WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE AT THE BATTLE OF CORAL SEA, AND THEN at Midway. Churchill came from England and talked to Roosevelt. Eisenhower went to London as commander in chief of all American forces in Europe. More and more often there were reports on the radio about the war. Each week Miss Webber would tell the class of another child’s father, another mother’s son having gone to fight. Some of them would come back broken, defeated-looking. Some of them didn’t come back at all.

  Time, in some small and narrow way, seemed to heal the rift that had existed between myself and my mother. I went back to visiting with the Krugers. I even learned how to look Mrs. Kruger in the eye without thinking of her husband and my mother in the biblical sense. Routine and predictability brought acceptance. Some of the things I wrote then even suggested there was a sense of happiness within me. I was approaching fifteen years of age. I looked at girls differently. I thought about Miss Webber until I grew too embarrassed. But it seemed not to matter. Nothing seemed to matter. We heard enough of the war to realize that any hardship or awkwardness we might suffer was inconsequential and irrelevant in the face of the real suffering that was taking place. Miss Webber told us that we were old enough to understand the truth of what was happening. She said that there were more than half a million Jews in the Warsaw ghettos; that medical supplies were denied to anyone under five or over fifty; that all Jewish children were made to wear the Star of David on their coats; that the Nazis had murdered seven hundred thousand Poles, a hundred and twenty-five thousand in Romania, and more than a quarter of a million in Holland, Belgium and France. She showed us where these places were on the globe. We looked on in silence. Some of the girls cried, Elena Kruger amongst them. I reached out to hold Elena’s hand, but she smiled awkwardly and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. She said she was fine. Miss Webber said that often the men of the village were forced to dig many graves, and then those same men, their wives and children too, were executed by squads of German soldiers. I thought of the girls that had been murdered right here in Augusta Falls. I thought of how evil men could be. I sometimes took out the newspaper clippings and pored over them, trying hard to make the monochrome faces come to life in my mind. But I never could. I felt like those girls had passed away into some vague and indefinable netherworld. Perhaps they waited for redemption, for salvation from their pain. In truth, I hoped they were angels, but it seemed my faith was as insubstantial as their memory.

  Late that month I went home and started to write a story. It had no title, and seemed to me that it didn’t need a title until it was done. I felt awkward writing the story, trying to see through the eyes of a Jewish child in Paris wearing a Star of David and a mournful, broken look. I sat at my window, chin almost touching the sill, and looked out into the night at a sky as hard as flint, with scudding clouds thin and fragile, like the ghosts of day, backlit afterthoughts to remind you of morning. The morning gone, the morning on its way—which one it didn’t seem to matter. In the air the crisp snap of lodgepole pine and bitter juniper made the taste of breath sour. Stars looked down at me, maybe angels too—Alice Ruth Van Horne, Laverna Stowell, Ellen May Levine. I remembered the McRae girl, how they’d found her head lying in the cottonwoods and tupelos, her body in the stream gully. Men from four counties had looked hard and long for any sign of the killer, through daylight and then after dusk with torches. People came with dogs—dogs no more scent-quickened than a cat—and yet they brought them, and there was noise enough to raise the dead, but they found nothing. Those people had homes and jobs, they had children, all manner of livelihoods, but they dropped their livelihoods like fire-bottom potatoes and came running. Did they come out of fear? Fear that it could be their own children next? No, I didn’t believe so, because many of them left their children unminded in their houses, unminded even after nightfall so they could walk out and help. No, it wasn’t so much fear that drove them, it was something altogether more generous and compassionate.

  We believed that what we were feeling was real fear. In truth, we had seen nothing as yet. In truth, we had no idea how bad it was to become. The real fear came with the fifth girl. That’s when it came. Came just like Death along the High Road. Like the mailman, like the windmill-pump salesman, like anyone else walking into Augusta Falls with wares to sell, snake-root oil or self-lubricating tractor gears, ready to catch people who should’ve known better on a bad day with a short fuse. And just to get him away from the door they would take whatever was offered and only slow up and make time to curse themselves later. But by then the man would be gone. Gone like the narrow whirlies that sprang up along the horizon with force enough to swallow a cow, and not some sick, rubber-legged calf, but a steer, full of horns and slobber and bad manners. Tornadoes, whirlwinds, whatever they were—you saw them, and then they were gone.

  Real fear came fast, moved right in like there’d been an invitation to visit family. Times were it seemed that Death had come to collect all of us, every single sorry one, and had merely started with the children because the children didn’t have the mind to fight back.

  The fifth girl was the one who sat beside me in Miss Alexandra Webber’s class, so close that I knew how she drew the number five backwards. Hell, she sat so close I knew how she smelled.

  I found her Monday, August third, 1942.

  Or, to be precise, I found most of her.

  The bad dreams came. Always the same, perhaps small variations in time and place, but always the same.

  They started with a sound.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Like the sound of a heavy pole dragged along a picket fence, or down the stairs, but heavier than that, like somebody whacking something, giving it a goddamned good whack for all it’s worth.

  And a sound in back of it, almost like an echo, but not an echo because it wasn’t the same sound, because the sound that followed the BANG! was a wet sound, like something bursting, like a watermelon maybe, but sour and soft and gone too yellow, the sort of watermelon you hurl off the porch just for laughs, just for kicks, just for . . . monkeyshines!

  And then I would see her.

  Lying down like she was taking a rest.

  A long rest. Rest-of-her-life kind of long rest.

  I could see the soles of her shoes.

  Coming up toward the brow of the hill, just a little hill, it couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty feet of hill, and just over the brow of the hill I saw the soles of her shoes. New white soles of new shoes facing me, and for a moment there was a ghost of embarrassment haunting my cheeks because I figured that if I could see the soles of her shoes, then I could’ve seen right up her dress to her little white—

  I tried not to think of anything, except: Why was she lying down?

  Why would someone, a girl, a lit
tle girl . . . why would a little girl come up here and lie down on the hill, lie right there so’s anyone coulda come walking on up and see the white soles of her new shoes?

  Didn’t seem to be any kind of answer to a question like that.

  And then I heard Miss Webber’s voice, and she was saying, “The sour contradiction of doing everything you can to succeed, and then apologizing for it when you did . . . what kind of life is that?”

  Over my head there were fall leaves curling up on their branches like children’s hands, infants’ hands: some final, plaintive effort to capture the remnants of summer from the atmosphere itself, and hold it, hold it close as skin, for soon it would be hard to recall anything but the brooding, swollen humidity that seemed to forever surround us. Winter in Georgia was a bold and arrogant enormity of a thing, like some bilious and uncouth relative, come to stay and charging into private moments and conversations with sourmash breath, and all the etiquette of a firing squad.

  Miss Webber again: “This is not Aristotle, Joseph Calvin Vaughan. This is not black and white without a single shade of gray in between . . . this is life, and life happens, and life will keep on happening whatever you might do to stop it.”