A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  Dearing leaned forward, his head set between his hunched shoulders like some kind of fighting dog. “And what’re you gonna tell me, Lowell Shaner?”

  For a heartbeat Shaner looked doubtful, but he glanced at Garrick McRae, could see the grim line of the man’s tense jaw, the flinty hardness of his eyes, and the dense substance of that expression seemed to give him the resolve he needed.

  “That if something ain’t done sharpish—”

  “Then you good ol’ boys are gonna get yourselves a lynching party all soaked up with spirits, pour yourselves into the back of a flatbed, and go haring off down to St. George or Moniac and hang yo’selves some poor, dumb, defenseless nigra. Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll give ya each a dollar.”

  An awkward silence joined the party.

  “Nigras is Americans,” Clement Yates said quietly.

  “Well, right enough,” Dearing said. “I’m sorry, I missed the drift of this thing. What you’re talking about is finding some foreign child killer . . . like an Irisher perhaps, or maybe one of them Swedes that came through here on the way to the logging camps . . . or hell, what about a German? We got plenty of Germans here. Germans are causing all this war trouble, killing our boys in Italy and God only knows where, and they’re killing Jews over there too, and the last little girl that got killed was a Jewish girl. Hell, how could we have forgotten that? That means it has to be a German. It must be a German.”

  “Haynes,” Gene Fricker spoke up. “You’re gettin’ all riled and wound for no reason. No one’s sayin’—”

  “A deal of anything that makes any sense at all, Gene,” Dearing stated matter-of-factly. “That, my friend, is what no one is saying.” He sort of leaned back in his chair and straightened the hitch on his gun-belt. It was an insignificant action, would’ve gone unnoticed at any other time, but at that point it seemed to serve a purpose; reminded everyone present that Dearing was the law, that he was the only one carrying a gun, and he carried it because the law said he could.

  “We’re not gonna have any trouble here in Augusta Falls,” he said quietly. He leaned forward once more and laid his hands flat on the table, palms down. “We’re not gonna have any trouble here, and it ain’t gonna be because I said so, it’s gonna be because what we got here is some straight-thinking, sensible citizens, all of you more than capable of stringing some words together into a short sentence, all of you wise in the ways of the world, all of you suffering a little with the heat, the bad crops, perhaps . . . but none of you suffering from the hot-headed and foolish malady called witch-hunting. We agreed on this point?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation as each man scanned the faces of the collective remainder.

  “Are we agreed on this point?” Dearing asked a second time.

  A murmur of consent traversed from left to right.

  “I heard word there was trouble made for Gunther Kruger,” Dearing said. “I’m trusting to a man that none of you had anything to do with it, and I ain’t askin’ for confessions nor denials. I’m telling you that whatever trouble might be made for Gunther Kruger is all spent and over, and it’d be an ill-advised and foolish man who didn’t take that message to whatever neighbors he might find around him. Hide-bound I might be, a little too conventional and rooted, but I’ll not be happy cutting folks down from trees this summer.”

  “We got it all,” Gene Fricker said. “You’ve built the wall, Haynes, no need to go shoring it with two-bys. The thing will stand by itself.”

  “Just so’s we have an understanding boys . . . just so we do in fact have an understanding. People are frightened, and when people are frightened they don’t think straight. This thing has changed how everyone sees everyone else. You may have your complaints about how we’re handling this, and I can’t say I blame you, but the fact of the matter is that we are all good citizens here and none of us want to see this thing happen again. You keep your eyes open. You look for anything out of the ordinary, and if you see something you come tell me and I will investigate it forthwith and without delay. You get me?”

  And that seemed to be all that was said, or so it went from mouth to ear to mouth again, because that meeting was talked over and over, even by Reilly Hawkins some days later. Perhaps none of those present had a mind to cause further trouble, but trouble came, and it came fast and furious. The following night, Sunday, August thirtieth, was a night that would mark a watershed in my life, and the lives of many people in Augusta Falls.

  Perhaps I should have seen it coming, for there was tension about, tangible electricity. Maybe I convinced myself that there was in fact nothing. I even recall the Saturday night, lying there in bed while Sheriff Dearing, Leonard Stowell, the others at the Falls Inn, celebrated the birthday of Clement Yates. The world revolved, people went quietly about their business, I read Steinbeck until my eyes closed, and it seemed that the next day would be the same as any other Sunday that had been or was yet to come.

  Had I known then what I knew later—hindsight ever the most astute and cruelest adviser—I would have fetched the Guardians from their beds, and together we would have stolen the girl from the house ourselves and hidden her somewhere until it was all over.

  But I did not know, and my mother for all her wisdom was ignorant too.

  Death came back to Augusta Falls, walked all the way along the High Road; workmanlike, methodical, indifferent to fashion and favor; disrespectful of Passover, Christmas, observance or tradition; Death came cold and unfeeling, the collector of a debt forever in arrears.

  I saw Him take her, saw Him up close, and when I looked in His eyes I saw nothing but a reflection of myself.

  NINE

  THE SOUND WAS LIKE A FIST THROUGH GLASS, A FIST WRAPPED IN A towel, like a dull crump of sound, a hot sound somehow, a hot, tight sound that pushed its way into my mind even though I was sleeping.

  The heat was close too, the skin a snake aches to shed; the heat of Georgia in late August, a gorgeous heat that challenges you to sleep despite it, and once sleep is gained you don’t want to surface out of it, into the hot crump sound from outside, which becomes something like knives and glasses, all bunched together in a leather bag and shaken . . .

  Someone is shaking me.

  Slurring muscles, unlocking themselves as if from premature rigor, each nudging the next, alerting it, the domino effect from neuron to synapse to nerve to resistance as sleep threatens to burst open like a water-filled balloon. Give itself up, surrender, but all unwilling, for once lost it will not be recovered. Like Johnny Burgoyne at Saratoga: gentleman or not, he still surrendered.

  “Joseph!”

  An urgent hiss.

  “Joseph! Wake up!”

  Dreams perhaps, dreams of Miss Webber, her wide-jowled open prairie of a face, cornflower blue eyes, simple and uncomplicated.

  Joseph!

  Sounded like my father—sudden and urgent, not mad, not angry, just insistent. I was fighting something, something heavy, something pressured, like drowning perhaps.

  The sensation of movement, hands beneath me, and then I was opening my eyes and Reilly Hawkins’s face looked down at me, my mother right beside him.

  “Hurry, Joseph!” she urged.

  “Come, Joseph, get dressed quickly, we need to be out of the house!”

  It was then that I could smell the smoke—acrid and bitter. I believed I could feel the heat through the walls, but perhaps that was imagination embellishing memory.

  I hurried on my clothes, uncertain, but understanding that speed was of the essence. My mother and Reilly Hawkins went on ahead of me. I heard their footsteps clattering down the wooden stairs, like a stick dragged across a picket.

  Once downstairs I found the kitchen floor flooded with water. There were buckets and saucepans scattered across the tiles and out of the door into the yard, and suddenly Clement Yates appeared from outside, his face reddened, his shirt soaked with sweat and water, his eyes wide, his skin grayed and streaked with black.

  “A bucket, bo
y!” he yelled at me. “Get a bucket of water and hurry! Hurry, for God’s sake!”

  The bucket was heavy. I almost skidded and lost it as I left the door and headed into the yard.

  It was then that I saw the flames, bright fists of orange clenched on the roof of the Kruger house, and then lunging out toward the sky as if in anger. The smell was thick and claustrophobic, a smell of burning wood and cotton, of wool and scorched stone, of earth baked in the intense heat; it was like nothing I had smelled before, because caught beneath like a deceptive undercurrent was the smell of Death.

  How many people were out there, I did not know. Gunther Kruger’s house was on fire, and it seemed all of Augusta Falls had rushed to help him extinguish the flames. The roar and spit was brutal, the dull crump as windows gave against the heat, the creaking yaw of stretched beams finally yielding to the furnace, the hot snap of clay tiles like whip cracks, the smell of juniper and yaupon bursting into orange life behind the house, the screams, the fear, the pounding feet, the two lines of men—one from our kitchen to the back of Kruger’s house, the other from the gully; two lines of men passing buckets hand to hand, and in amongst those men were Gunther, Hans and Walter Kruger, Clement Yates, Leonard Stowell, Garrick McRae and Gene Fricker. Sheriff Dearing was there too; I could hear his voice but didn’t see his face. Later, I heard he was the one in the raw, red guts of the building, the one breaking doors and fighting back the smoke. Eyes too blind to see a thing, he could hear voices, and stumbled through gray and darker gray acrid filth, all to no avail.

  They got them out—Gunther and Mathilde, Walter and Hans.

  She didn’t make it: Elena Kruger, with her bruised arms and her seizures. Eleven days from her twelfth birthday, and she died somewhere on the basement stairs, heading down into darkness to escape the heat.

  I remembered the promise I’d made, standing on the hill where I’d found Virginia Perlman, the promise to watch over Elena and ensure no harm came to her. Broke that promise like it had never meant a thing. I knew . . . knew deep inside, that somehow I had made this happen.

  My mother was there, her voice cracked from shouting, her clothes filthy, her hands and knees caked in wet charcoal and mud. Reilly Hawkins had to drag her back when the roof finally gave, for they all knew that the girl was lost. Before that moment there had been hope—misguided, optimistic, but hope nevertheless. When the upper timbers shuddered down one after the other, when those huge, roiling arcs of flame billowed out through each door and window aperture, they all knew there was nothing they could do. Elena Kruger was still inside, and then the walls hitched sideways and leaned inward drunk enly, and anyone venturing beyond the limits of the plot would have burned from inside out before they’d even reached the blackened brickwork.

  I stood and watched, my heart red and hot, a bloody stampede of rhythm, my fists clenched tight, my teeth gritted until they hurt, and tears running down my face, tears from smoke and painful breaths—and devastation, as I realized what had happened.

  Someone had fired the Kruger house.

  It was later that I saw Death. Nothing more than a shadow, a specter, but He was there. The same one that took my father.

  All of us were awake until the early hours of Monday morning, delirious from the heat and grief. The flames were dead, the Kruger house nothing more than a black shadow, here and there studded with the memories of walls like broken teeth jutting from the gums of the earth. I could see where the kitchen once stood, could almost smell the wienerwurst and potato salad Mrs. Kruger had made to feed the sceercraw.

  They brought Elena up then. Her father, Sheriff Dearing, one-eyed Lowell Shaner and Frank Turow. They found her lying on the steps of the basement, her body burned beyond recognition. They wrapped a blanket around her, carried her up into the thin shadows of impending dawn. Mrs. Kruger stood back and watched, beyond all hope, beyond emotion, incapable of crying anymore. At some point she seemed to fold effortlessly into the ground, and my mother was there, and Reilly Hawkins, and they held her up and guided her away to the back of our house and into the kitchen.

  I watched from the window of my room that overlooked the Krugers’ yard. I saw Him then, alongside the crude funereal procession that ghosted its way between the trees and down toward the River Road. Frank Turow had a flatbed truck, and there they would lay the body of Elena Kruger for the drive to Dr. Piper’s house. Death was there, neither walking nor floating, for He was in the shadows between the trees, the shadows of the men that walked with Elena, in the sound of heavy boots crushing wet leaves and broken sticks, in the sound of gravel on the hot top, in the mist that issued from their mouths as they cleared throats and whispered words, as they hoisted the body upward and laid it on the truck. He was there. I knew He could see me, that I was watching Him. For some strange reason I felt He was as afraid as I.

  It was then, the moment before they carried her away, that I felt the tension and disturbance of my own worst fears.

  Just as had occurred with Virginia Grace, the thought came.

  The thought that He knew what we were thinking, that He knew what had passed through our minds, and in allowing Elena to know of us, in promising I would protect her, I had consigned her to this terrible, terrible fate.

  He was taunting me.

  He was as good as inside me, and I shivered uncontrollably and could not still myself.

  The engine started. The truck pulled away with Frank Turow and Sheriff Dearing up front. Gunther Kruger knelt in back beside the dead body of his only daughter, his head bowed, his spirit broken. Lowell Shaner stood at the side of the road. He didn’t move until the truck had vanished from sight, and then he sat down in the dirt, right there at the side of the road, his forehead on his knees, and he didn’t move for a long, long while.

  Had I known, I would have called out Mr. Kruger’s name, even though he would not have heard me. Had I known that Gunther Kruger would be gone for so long, I would have shouted something, some word of comfort, of hope, something that might make him feel that the world and all it owned was not against him. But I did not know, and was silent.

  Mrs. Kruger and her two sons stayed with Reilly Hawkins that night. The following day Mr. Kruger came to collect them, and took them and the clothes they had slept in, for that was all they possessed, and Frank Turow drove them north to Uvalda in Toombs County. There was a farm up there, a farm owned by Mathilde Kruger’s cousin’s wife, a widow, but still maintaining some land, some pigs, and a modest livelihood.

  I did not ask after the Krugers. Perhaps they had been cursed, and I was afraid it was contagious. Their land, the footprint of their house, was washed clean by rain and the shift of seasons. The basement was filled in and covered over with deep sod and the tramp of feet. Someone planted a tree, a small thing no more than three or four feet high, but it shifted in the breeze and made me think of Elena and the terrible sufferance of her brief, extinguished life.

  The Krugers were there, as much a part of our lives as anyone we knew, and then they were gone.

  Sheriff Dearing did not ask questions about the fire. He did not want to know. I felt he too was afraid of what he might discover. There was talk, as there would be, and people’s minds turned to explanations and justifications as to why such a thing might have happened.

  Rumors began about Elena’s bruises, and some said that her father might have inflicted them on her, that she’d been abused, violated maybe, and that such things had taken place over many years, before finally her father was forced to do something to stop her from speaking. I remember Sheriff Dearing visiting my mother. I did not hear the words they spoke, but I sensed the atmosphere. He was warning her, telling her that he had suspicions, that Gunther Kruger was gone and that she should refrain from making any contact with him.

  Why had all the Krugers survived, all of them but Elena?

  Why had she been found in the basement when all the others had been upstairs?

  Was Gunther Kruger guilty of the things that had been sugg
ested? Were Elena’s bruises caused by his hand after all?

  Was there any possibility that Gunther might have killed his own daughter to stop her talking?

  I remembered the night I had seen Mr. Kruger standing on the road, standing silent and unmoving, his long coat like a shroud, the fear I had felt when I’d imagined who he might have been.

  How I’d seen him as nothing more than a shadow.

  I heard the things that people said, but tried my best not to believe them; dark minds always generated darker thoughts. Possibly because it was easier than thinking that someone set the Kruger fire motivated by prejudice. Maybe because the human mind sets things to rights any which way it can, and if Kruger himself was guilty, that would make it all the easier to categorize and resolve. Besides, he was a foreigner, a German, and if the Germans were in fact responsible for the atrocities in Europe, then surely it was in their blood, some hereditary affliction that prompted acts of violence and abuse. Augusta Falls was a small town. The Krugers left behind nothing but the memory of their daughter.

  The Guardians, once six, were now five. Hans Kruger was gone, and in some way I was relieved. I did not believe I could have faced him each and every day.

  The rest of us didn’t meet for a month, and when we did the mood was somber and reserved.

  “You think the killer set the Kruger fire?” Michael Wiltsey asked.

  We sat in a line, backs to the old stone wall at the edge of Lowell Shaner’s field. It was the last day of September 1942, a Wednesday, and while the rest of the world would remember that month for the killing of fifty thousand Jews and Hitler’s offensive against Stalingrad, the five of us would remember that day for another reason entirely.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Ronnie Duggan said. He wiped his bangs out of his eyes and squinted at me.

  “Maybe it was someone who thought Gunther Kruger was the child killer.”