Angels Unaware

by Lisa Deangelis

  “I don’t give up,” Luca told him haughtily. “Give me one more clue.”

  Joseph Gibbet tapped out his pipe, annoyed. “Pretty sure of yourself for a foreigner with no right reason to be in these parts.” Luca’s face was impassive. “…but all right….my name. My name’s a clue.”

  Joseph Gibbet, Joseph Gibbet, Joseph Gibbet, I repeated to myself silently. I thought it was a silly sounding name and wondered if he had a silly job.

  “You are a hangman,” Luca stated. Gibbet’s face contorted with rage and for a moment I thought he might stamp his foot through the floor like Rumpelstiltskin.

  When moments passed and nothing was said, Jewel finally spoke: “Well? Is he right?”

  “Yes,” Gibbet said grudgingly.

  “Have you hanged anybody in Pennsylvania?” I asked.

  The others looked at me. Jewel had often said I was morbid, and maybe that was true, but I couldn’t help being curious.

  “Nah, they give ’em the ’lectric chair now. But my father hanged a man here in Schuylkill County back in ’11, and my grandfather some more back in the days when hangings was public the way they should be. Now it’s all hush-hush behind prison walls. Takes all the joy out of it.”

  “Joy?” Jewel said, frowning.

  “That’s right. The joy of knowing I’m riddin’ society of the scum of the earth. Man I’m on my way to hang now in Concord killed a ten-year-old boy—did things to him first, if you know what I’m getting at. World’s got no use for somebody like that, and I’m proud of what I do. There’s an art to it too. Not many folks realize that. ’Course I have to depend on the wardens not to let the bastards cheat me and hang themselves before I can git there. Then, when I do, I set up my own scaffold—don’t trust nobody’s but my own—and I measure ’em. They gotta fall just so many feet and not further. Otherwise the head pops off and makes the witnesses vomit. Happened to my grandfather long time ago. And it was a woman yet. If you measure right and they’re lucky, the neck breaks and it’s over quick. But sometimes God seems to want to extract a special punishment and the neck don’t break, like the man back in ’11. Noose slipped around the back of his neck and he was strangled. That can take minutes. Don’t bother me. I got no place else I have to be. But it ain’t too pleasant for him.”

  “You owe Luca a dollar,” Jewel said coldly. She seemed to feel that was quite enough for us to know about hanging. “He earned it.”

  “The hell he did! He asked for an extra clue. That’s cheating.”

  I hadn’t often seen Jewel angry and I was surprised to see her so then, and over something so ridiculous as guessing an occupation. “Give that boy his dollar or get out of my house!” she said, and he wouldn’t and he went, and that was the first and the last time I ever met a hangman. When I look back on that evening, I wonder if it was Jewel thinking of the orchard and who was buried there that made her so inhospitable to Joe Gibbet, never mind the dollar bet. I also think that Luca really had earned the dollar, because Gibbet never said anything about a player being disqualified for asking for a final clue. The rules should be made clear before the game begins if it’s to be fair and that’s, at bottom, why life’s unfair. You just get thrust into the game whether you want to play or not and without being made aware of the rules, which you only come to understand later when it’s already too late.

  That summer was godawful. Hot as hell and making people mean—and by people, I of course mean me. Then September came and with it that peculiar exhilaration that comes with the first chill. At dusk, my favorite time of day, I used to sit out on my porch in my wicker chair all by myself. Jewel and the girls knew I liked to be alone with nobody but Old Sam, asleep under my chair, for an hour until the sun went down. It was really the only way I indulged myself and they knew better than to disturb my solitude or try to join me. Being around people all day and having to listen to them and respond to them, even if they are your family, can be exhausting. Being alone for that short time was my way of reconciling myself to the sociability that dinner would again demand of me. Only once did anyone bother me and that was when the stove caught fire, and even then, Jewel came out real timid of approach and only after all attempts to bribe Jolene and Caroline into getting me had failed.

  What I thought about when I was sitting out on my porch was, I knew, an enduring mystery to everybody. I’d just sit there rocking, gazing out across the fields, past the broken fence to where the land sloped up and away, to the dense foliage of trees and shrubs. Everything was so still, so perfectly still at that hour, that the quiet was like a balm on all the day’s scrapes. I liked the smells of autumn, the decay of what weeks before had been at its peak, the hay bales lying in the field, the smoke of a distant burning. And I liked to think about things, things that had happened and things that maybe would. My family would have been shocked to know the plans I made, plans that never included them. Someday I would travel to places they could not imagine. Exotic and savage places. I would send them postcards. (I’d gotten a postcard once. From Mrs. Gulliver who’d gone to Pittsburgh for three days.) Sometimes, I could see myself so clearly, with suitcase in hand, poised to step on a boat or a train, and my heart would start to beat real fast, so fast it slammed against my ribs, and I’d have to put my hand on my chest to make it stop. Then my hour would be up, and a voice belonging to its own time would call me in. But for that hour, no one dared to intrude on my private wanderings and wonderings—except for Luca.

  He’d walk right up onto my porch as bold as brass and plop himself down in the chair beside me. “Come sta, Darcy?” he’d say, just so as to be annoying. And I would always shoot back, “Speak English!”

  His dimples would retreat into a frown. “Why have you been away from school for so many monse?”

  “Mon-ths,” I would correct him. For all his linguistic prowess, some sounds still announced that he was no native. “And you won’t see me in school for many more monse, so stop looking.” I gave him a sideways glance. “Besides, not all of us are as popular as you and want to go to that stupid hillbilly school for stupid hillbillies.”

  He laughed, unoffended. “I should teach you to speak Italian. Then you could be sarcastic in two languages.”

  “There’s nothing you can teach me. I’m older than you, and I know more.”

  “Only one year,” he said. “I know something I could teach you. I could teach you how to hunt, how to use that shotgun you have in the barn.”

  “How do you know about that?” I demanded.

  “I saw it there. Why? Is the gun a secret?” he whispered, as if willing to be a part of the conspiracy.

  “No. I know how to hunt just fine.”

  “You don’t. I mean you could probably hit an elephant if it agreed to stay still long enough. But I mean deer, squirrel, something you could eat.”

  I hesitated and hesitation is weakness.

  “Tomorrow we will get up before the sun,” he said, “and we’ll walk until we find a proper place.”

  I didn’t say anything. Not then. Not all through dinner that evening. I did not want to go with him. I did not need to learn anything from him. I did not like his company. I particularly did not want to be alone with him. And yet, when he came down the next morning wearing all the clothes he owned because it was a very cold morning and still dark, I was waiting for him. And if you had asked me why, I would not have been able to answer. Not then. Not yet.

  We walked north. I didn’t know what we were looking for and didn’t want to ask him. So I just walked behind him and observed the silence. It was the only time I ever remember walking behind him and it felt natural and uncomfortable at the same time.

  Finally, he stopped and pointed to a ridge. “See that? That’s a natural funnel, a space between the mountain and the road. The deer can’t get to the creek without passing this way.”

  I nodded and he took my arm, leading me to a thicket where
we crouched down behind the thick trunk of a fallen tree. “Keep your ears above the trunk or you won’t be able to hear them approach,” he said. “This gun only shoots one bullet at a time. We’ll only have one chance. If we miss, the animal will be in Wilkes Barre before we can reload. I’ll hand the gun to you when the deer’s in sight. You look down the barrel and squeeze very slowly. Now all you have to do is listen and be very quiet. No talking.” He laughed a little in anticipation of his own joke. “I know you can go without talking, sometimes for days on end.”

  We sat there for what seemed like hours. My fingers and toes had long since lost feeling, and I was just starting to wonder whether they might be lost to amputation when I heard a faint rustling. Luca’s hand gripped my thigh in a quick squeeze, then swiftly, silently he pivoted the gun to his left so that his face, staring down the barrel, was so close to my own that I could feel his breath on my eyelashes. Something happened to me in that moment. I felt a rush of warmth, where I had been freezing only moments before and I wondered vaguely if that was a sign of frostbite. My heart pounded in my ears, as if I’d been winded from running, and my head swam. Time slowed or stopped or simply wasn’t—I can’t explain it any better than that—but I could look at him as if from a distance, though his face was mere inches from mine, and I thought how very beautiful he was, more like a painting or a sculpture of a man than a man himself and how fine his hands were, not coarse like farmers’ hands but not soft either, just perfectly formed hands. Then, as if it were coming to me in a dream, I felt him pressing the gun on me and murmuring, “Squeeze slowly.” But my arms were heavy and limp and I could not lift them to take the weapon. A gunshot sounded so close to my ear that I was deafened. I felt his shoulders heave back from the recoil, and he lowered the gun. “He’s going to run. He’s dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.” Luca motioned me to follow him and I did. “He’s looking for a place to die. We must allow him that much. All we have to do is follow the blood trail.”

  Luca walked with his eyes to the ground. I supposed there was blood there and I supposed we were following it, but I couldn’t say for sure because my eyes were fixed upon him, held there by some mysterious gravitational pull like the moon on the tides.

  We found the buck in a sheltered spot under a thicket. A hunter who could not read the signs of its flight would have never found it. Luca took a knife from his belt and cut the animal from throat to tail, then reached his hands within its body and removed organs that steamed in the cold air, all the while keeping up a narration of anatomy: “Heart, the best to eat….Liver…Intestines, we’ll make sausage…” When the entrails had been deposited in an old feed-sack he’d brought for this purpose, he tied a length of rope around the buck’s antlers and handed me the sack with the entrails. We made our way out of the woods and back home, him dragging the deer and me walking behind him carrying the sack still dripping blood.

  I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point, on our walk home, I felt a fury rising within me. I had no valid reason to be so angry at him, but the invalid one I had was this: We had gone into the woods and killed a deer and were returning with it. That much we could have agreed on if called to account for our time that day. But other than these skeletal facts, we might as well have spent the day across the world from each other, so different it seemed had been our experience. The woods had changed me. I felt as if some kind of communion had taken place. For me. Not for him. The woods had not changed him. And because I had never had time to brood on anything, so immediate and urgent always were the demands of basic human comfort, I did not question myself further. I knew only that I could not risk my eyes meeting his ever again.

  When we got home, it was already dark. Luca displayed his kill proudly and the girls and Jewel oohed and aahed over the buck. Jewel declared she’d nail the antlers over the mantel, and Luca proclaimed he’d cook the heart and liver for dinner. Everybody went into the kitchen to watch, but I resisted, saying I had no appetite and was going to sit on the porch for a spell. Jewel protested that it was too cold, but I snapped that it was nearly the shortest day of the year and the stars were more brilliant than ever and worth watching from my porch rocker. This was the last thing I should have said, because they all joined me.

  “Let’s all go out and watch the stars,” Luca said. “I’ll put the meat on to simmer and come.” Jewel and the girls piled on coats and hats and came out, with Luca a few minutes after. He sat on the porch steps as far away from me as possible, so maybe he had sensed something of my discomfort. It never occurred to me that he was feeling a discomfort of his own. Jewel sat near the railing and Jolene next to her. Old Sam, faithful even in the bitter cold, took up his usual spot at my feet and every so often, I’d bend down to scratch his ears. He was the only member of my household with whom I felt truly at peace. Caroline sat herself next to Luca, looking pert and pretty in a blue hat she’d knitted for herself. The color matched her eyes and she knew it.

  For a while, none of us talked but for Caroline and Luca, who murmured between themselves. I wasn’t paying much attention to their talk until I heard him say, “…then you’ll go to the Christmas dance with me?”

  “I’d like that,” Caroline replied, so coyly I could have slapped her face till feeling came back in my fingers. “But you’ll have to ask Jewel.”

  Luca glanced at Jewel, but before she could open her mouth, I said, “Caroline is too young to be going out with boys, especially foreign boys. Besides, I’ve seen Luca panting after Cathleen Haddock with his tongue hanging around his ankles.”

  “Darcy!” Jewel rushed to his defense. “Luca’s love life is his own business.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and started rocking furiously. “That’s true. It’s his pecker, and I suppose it’s his business where he puts it.” Luca blushed down to his hair line.

  “Darcy, shush. You’re embarrassing him.”

  “Oh, shush yourself. It’s true and you know it. He’ll have his fun with Caroline and then he’ll go back to Italy and marry some Eye-talian virgin with purple feet and a moustache.”

  “That’s not fair,” Jewel said. “I trust Luca like family, and I’d be proud to have him take your sister to the dance.” Caroline was beaming, but Luca didn’t seem to be feeling triumphant.

  “How can you know who to trust?” I said back. “Every derelict comes down the road is family to you.”

  “I can just tell,” Jewel insisted stubbornly, and the porch was silent for a while.

  Jolene was the one to break the quiet. She sighed loud and long. “I wish I was old enough to start college. I can do all the high school work. I’m bored to tears with it.” (Jolene went through life generally bored and would eventually become bored with boredom. But then it wasn’t easy being the smartest person in the world.)

  “You just be patient, little girl,” Jewel told her. “You and Caroline will both go to college. Darcy will fix it.” Her brow furrowed. “Somehow, I don’t know how, but she’ll fix it so you can go.” I harrumphed. She’ll fix it, indeed—just as it was with the fixing of the stove, or the mending of the fence, or the hiding of the bodies. Darcy would fix it.

  Luca leaned back against the porch post. He never added much to conversations, at least not while I was around. His eyes came to rest on me. “And you, Darcy. What will you do?”

  Startled to have him direct words at me, I looked back at him, or more accurately, a fraction to the left of him. But I didn’t have a chance to reply before Caroline piped up: “They’ll have to take old Darcy out of here in a box. She’ll never leave any other way.” Caroline hardly ever said anything remotely clever and she giggled, pleased with herself to no end.

  I gave her the evil eye. “You’re mighty lucky to be sitting out of my reach, little sister. That’s all you know about it anyhow. Won’t you be taken aback when you get my postcards from faraway places.”

  “Sure thing, Darcy,” Jolene joined in. �
�As far away as Scranton, I’ll bet.”

  Everyone laughed, except for Luca. I tried to read his face, but he leaned back into the darkness of the porch where the winter moon’s light didn’t penetrate.

  “You can all go to hell!” I exclaimed angrily, but that only amused the girls all the more, so I quit the porch and left them laughing at me.

  It was real surprising the next day to find out that Reverend Hamilton had hanged himself in his own house. Or I should say, all of us, excepting Luca and Jewel, were surprised; Luca, because he had never met the reverend; and Jewel, who just nodded when I told her, as if it was something she’d been expecting all along. I just couldn’t figure it out, but like all things I couldn’t figure out, I didn’t dwell on it, but let myself be happy that there was one less person in the world to be making trouble for us. My only worry was that the old bastard’s suicide would mean Aaron and Seth would return to be with their mother, and Aaron might come after me again. But I needn’t have worried because when they buried the reverend a few days later, we heard that neither Aaron nor Seth had been in attendance. Maybe they were too embarrassed to come. The Christian cemetery would not take him, pastor or no pastor, because he’d died a suicide and he would have to rest—if God let suicides rest and common wisdom held he did not— in the unhallowed ground next to the cemetery where Galen buried its indigents and others without bonafides.