Angels Unaware

by Lisa Deangelis

  5.

  Like Snow Upon the Desert’s Dusty Face

  I guess I have no medical aptitude. All along I’d thought Jewel had a bad heart because of the trouble she had breathing sometime and the sudden pains that made her wince. But it wasn’t her heart at all.

  I could almost feel sorry for the young doctor who told us that Jewel’s lungs were being eaten away with disease and that there wasn’t a whole lot they could do for her. He seemed embarrassed, like it was his fault.

  Jewel didn’t even blink when he told us. She listened politely when he suggested we take a room close to the clinic where they could at least try to do something for her, and she nodded and said that it was an excellent idea. Then the doctor reminded her that she must stop smoking at once, and Jewel wholeheartedly agreed. But that young doctor didn’t know Jewel, and not knowing her, he believed what she said. I knew better.

  As soon as we were clear of the clinic, Jewel lit herself up a smoke. “Don’t you believe a word those doctors say, Darcy. They always exaggerate so as they can charge more. All I’ve got is bronchitis, and it’ll pass just like it always has. Now swear to God you won’t say anything about it to the girls.” Reluctantly, I swore. “They might be sympathetic and the worst thing for the sick is sympathy. Makes a person that much sicker because they’ve got to be worthy of it.”

  Caroline came home that summer engaged. She had really come through for us this time. Her betrothed was a freshly graduated lawyer who would be joining his father’s practice in Connecticut. Of course, he had not gone to the same school as Caroline, which wouldn’t have been nearly good enough for him, but a prestigious one in his home state. (Prestigious was the first word Caroline had ever mastered that was more than two syllables, and she managed to use it at least fifty times during the first week she was home.) Caroline had met her lawyer at a tennis match, when his prestigious school had condescended to play Caroline’s. He sounded like a sissy to me, but he was a monied sissy, and Caroline, who never could look out for herself, would need somebody with money. Caroline would be leaving college as soon as they married. There was no point to it anymore.

  Results with Jolene were less satisfactory, but I could have predicted that. She had chosen to attend classes straight through the summer. Journalism was her major, and Caroline, a natural tattletale if ever there was one, told us that Jolene was sleeping regularly with her married journalism professor. My youngest sister was nobody’s fool though. The professor had promised her a job working for a friend of his on a newspaper in New York as soon as she graduated. Jolene wanted to be a foreign correspondent and go all over the world corresponding. I wondered if she would ever get to go to Kathmandu and the possibility made me heartsick.

  Originally, Caroline and the lawyer had planned to get married the following spring. But Jewel, who never did trust to long engagements, convinced them to do it in the fall. Luca agreed. He said, “Macaroni and matrimony have to go fast.” I guess it was some Eye-talian saying.

  After the wedding, which we didn’t attend because Jewel wasn’t well enough, Caroline moved into a big new house in Connecticut. We never did get to see it, but she sent us pictures of every angle and view.

  For a girl who wanted to be a correspondent, Jolene hardly ever wrote home. She came back to Galen exactly twice during her stretch at college, and I could have slapped her face the first time she returned, acting so bored with us all, as if we were morons in comparison to her college friends. The second time she came back, it wasn’t to see us at all but to cover a story for her school newspaper. It’s hard to believe something newsworthy could happen in Galen, but it did. Naturally, it was a disaster story, and Jewel and I were some of the first to know about it.

  On a February night, as we sat close to the fire because we couldn’t afford heat that year, somebody started banging at the door, and just from the way they banged, you knew the person on the other end had nothing good to tell. A man stood on the threshold carrying a lantern that turned his face yellow. He wasted no words.

  “You got a foreign boy staying here with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s one of them. Been an accident at the mine. You better come.”

  Jewel came with me even though I wanted her to stay home. The cold could only make her condition worse. But since she never believed she had a condition, she didn’t believe that anything could make it worse. Made me wonder if after she died, she would believe she was dead, and if she didn’t believe she was dead, would that make her a ghost?

  The collapsed shaft didn’t look any different to me. The entrance hadn’t been damaged, but one of the tunnels inside had fallen in. A lot of men were running around yelling orders to each other while a small group of women huddled together against the cold. Unwillingly, I followed Jewel to stand with them. It was like standing in a graveyard. Not one of them spoke, not even to each other, and they were too scared even to be snooty to us. A child clung to the skirt of one girl and she neither picked him up nor pushed him away. I don’t think she realized he was there. Every eye was fixed on the mine. An old woman who could stand no longer, sat down on the frozen ground, and rubbed her bony hands together.

  By and by, one of the hurrying men must have noticed how wretched the women looked because he came over and lit a fire in a metal can. But the women didn’t notice the man or the fire and not a one went over to warm herself.

  There was something that set Jewel apart from the other women, and I suppose it was surprise. She was surprised that such a thing could happen. They were not. They had been expecting disaster all their lives, and this was my only link with them.

  “Why don’t you go home? You can’t do anything here,” I said, when I saw Jewel’s lips were blue.

  She shivered but otherwise didn’t move. “You can’t do anything either, but I don’t see you going.”

  “Well, there’s no reason for both of us to be here.”

  “Then you go home,” she said stubbornly. “I’m staying until they bring him out alive or…. Either way, I’m staying.”

  The whole night passed like that. The cold, the mute women, the urgent men. Toward daylight, they brought out one of them, and the women surged forward and scanned the blackened face. No one had to tell them he was dead. His head tilted at an impossible angle, his eyes unnaturally half open, slits of white against the black. He didn’t look at all like Luca, and so I was spared that moment when you think it just might be someone who belongs to you. The corpse was the son of the old woman. She came forward to wipe his face just to make sure, a few seconds of false hope. Then a single deep shudder, but not a tear . Maybe she’d lost others like this. She was old enough to have lost a husband or a brother. Accidents were not rare. Or maybe she’d wait to get home to cry. Whatever, she walked away ramrod straight.

  Somebody started a soup pot and I got some for Jewel, whose face was by now as ashen as her cigarette butts. I knew it was useless to tell her to go home. All her life, she had seemed to give in, but I know, looking back, that she had never given an inch.

  Two of the rescuers had to quit because of frostbite, but there were others to take the places of those who looked as dead as the dead man.

  Soon some newspaper people started coming and we were really taken aback to see Jolene come up beside us. She had been chosen to write about the accident because Galen was her hometown. Jolene never could stand to be uncomfortable and she lasted about forty-five minutes before she went back to the inn. “I’ll interview the survivors,” she said in a sprightly way, “if there are any.”

  A few hours later, they reached the place where the four remaining men were trapped. One by one, they were carried out, the first with a blanket over his head. It was not Luca. Luca was the last to be taken out, and when I saw it was him, I felt my heart stop, just like when you sneeze. He was so still, so still. I took his cold, limp hand and pressed it to my mouth, and then
I saw something that made my heart rise. Steam. Vapor rising from his nose and mouth in the cold air.

  They let me get into the ambulance with him, and I held his hand and whispered to him the whole way. I could say anything I wanted because he couldn’t hear. So I told him that I loved him, that I had always, always loved him, long before I had known it myself and that if he would live I would never be mean to him again.

  They kept him in the hospital for a week and on the day he was to come home, I was nervous, wondering how I should act around him. I sat by the front window with my Rubaiyat in my hand, but I couldn’t read. I kept listening to hear him come up the walk.

  When I heard his step, I went to the window and parted the curtain and saw him climbing the steps clumsily, with one leg that didn’t bend at the knee. He held a cane in one hand. If I craned my neck, I could see his face. He kept blinking and swallowing, and his jaw was working, as if it took courage just to knock.

  I didn’t wait for his knock. I threw open the door with a gladness too strong to hide. But as he stood before me and I could see him up close for the first time since before the accident, the gladness drained out of me. Without meaning to, I recoiled from the sight of him. It was a stranger at the door, and not the familiar stranger I remembered. Who was this stooped man leaning on his cane, I wondered, and what was this terrible manhood that had settled on his features and made them leaden? How much more had been lost to him than the full use of his leg?

  My eyes shifted awkwardly. For a split second, I moved to take his arm and then just as suddenly, withdrew it.

  “Well, don’t just leave him standing there,” Jewel said, approaching from behind. “Let him in so I can look at him.” She put an arm around him and led him into the parlor. That had always been Jewel’s part to play with the guests, to soothe them. Mine was to discomfit them. She looked him up and down appraisingly. “Why, you’re fine, and none the worse for wear,” she pronounced, but her eyes lingered a moment too long on his leg and even from across the room, I saw him flinch. “Now you just sit down and chat with Darcy, while I go in and see to dinner,” she said, as if either one of us had ever been capable of chatter.

  Our eyes met for a second before we looked away. I heard him seat himself with difficulty. I’d never thought about it before, but it must be hard to sit down when one leg doesn’t bend right. After he’d managed it, he pressed each of the five fingertips of one hand against the tips of the other and studied them. Then he stood up just as awkwardly as he’d sat down and went to poke the fire. After he had poked all the life out of the fire, he sat down again. The room had been quiet for so long that I startled when he said, “How is she, Darcy?”

  “Jewel? She’s all right,” I told him because that was the answer she’d sworn me to give.

  “You’re not a stupid girl. You know better than that.” He shook his head slowly and his voice was grave. “She’s very sick. I can see it and so must you.”

  “What about you?” I said. “Are you all right?”

  He seemed unprepared for the question, but he nodded, and while I still had my nerve, I spoke again. “What will you do now that—well, now that you can’t work anymore?”

  He sighed. “I’ll be getting some money from the accident. It’ll be enough to live on for a while and when I’m ready, I’ll go home.”

  “Home? I thought this was your home.”

  “No,” he said, in way that made me think he’d given it great thought. “Once, it might have been. Not now.”

  He looked away from me and continued as if he was directing his words to someone else in the room. “…All I’ve known here is death and pain and strangeness. I want to go back where there are people who know me, who speak my language and understand me.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any family left in Italy.”

  “An uncle. A few cousins. But there are others, people who knew my father who will welcome me when I get there. Had you never thought of that, Darcy?”

  His voice was even but I could tell that something had made him angry. I didn’t answer directly. “Well, don’t let me keep you from going home to all those people who are waiting for you with open arms.”

  He looked at me. “It’s not you who keeps me here.”

  “I never thought it was. Probably one of those tarts in that house in the woods you were always visiting.”

  “No.”

  “Then who? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Jewel, obviously. I’d have thought you’d have known, but I forget how insensitive you are about anything other than food or shelter. She’s the one I stay for.”

  “Jewel?”

  “She was the only one in Galen who was ever really kind to me. Now that she’s dying, I won’t leave her. At the end, she may need me.” He inclined his head. “I don’t see Caroline or Jolene coming back here for anything. And even you may need me at the end— Oh, don’t be so quick to refuse. You think you are so strong. And maybe you have been, but it was only because you had her behind you.”

  “Behind me? Jewel never once—”

  “She didn’t have to,” he anticipated me. “You always knew she was there, whether you called on her or not. And when she’s not there anymore, you’re going to need someone.”

  “I wasn’t the one who needed a wife to stay in this country. You were. Jewel and me got along fine long before you came and we’ll get along fine long after you’re gone.”

  “Just the same,” he said, the anger gone out of his voice, “I’ll stay until the end…for her.”

  Then, Jewel called us in to dinner.

  It took her months to die, her lungs rotting away slowly in her chest, and even then, when she got back a little of her strength, she’d ask me for a cigarette. I always lit it up for her. It was too late to matter now, but I thought that I had never seen anything more obscene than the sight of her using her last bit of wind to suck on it. Then again, at least she’d never chewed.

  Luca went in to see her every day, but he could never force himself to stay for long. He was the kind who could stand pain, but not to watch it. Having to watch it takes a different kind of fortitude. Soon, he would always leave her room, white-faced, to go back to his chores. Hard work seemed to purge him somehow, and the exhaustion that followed dragging that bad leg around with him all day, I suppose, gave him some kind of peace.

  My conversations with Jewel went down some peculiar byways in those last months and it drove the point home to me how much we are ever to remain strangers to each other on this earth, no matter how close the connection. But some of the mystery that was Mary Margaret Willickers was solved for me. For one thing, I’d always assumed she was the only child of the reverend and his wife simply because she had never talked about any brothers or sisters. Turns out she’d had a brother all right.

  “His name was Henry,” Jewel told me, “but we called him Joss. He was five years older than me. I adored him. So did my mama before she died, and I guess that was what the reverend had against him. When he was sixteen, he left home and stowed away on a ship for England. There were some of Mama’s people still in Cornwall and he wanted to know them. He promised one day he would send for me and we’d be together again. He said he would write to me and I should be sure to meet the postman first because the reverend was sure to tear up the letters if he got his hands on them. He didn’t write for a long time and when he did it was to tell me that he’d joined the army with some cousins we had over there. He thought it was going to be a wonderful adventure, going to war. He’d just been in a big battle in Belgium in August, his regiment and a French one. He’d gotten hurt bad and was in a hospital in Paris. But he wasn’t really writing to me about that. He wanted me to know about something that had happened to him in case he died. He said that they’d been retreating because they were being slaughtered by the Germans, and being overrun, they didn’t see any way out. But that w
as when they all saw a tall man with yellow hair, covering their retreat. Well, Joss was six feet five inches in bare feet. In fact,when the circus came to town one summer, they’d invited him to go with them. So I couldn’t imagine how Joss could be describing anybody as ‘tall.’ All of humanity was pretty short from his perspective. Joss said the man was riding a white horse and carrying a sword, and crying, ‘Victory!’ Well, I still didn’t think it was that unusual. But when Joss said the man with the yellow hair was about thirty feet tall, I knew something was amiss…”

  I stood near her bed, folding clean linens. Though our washing machine hadn’t worked for years and all our laundry had to be done by hand with a washboard, I changed her bed sheets every day so as they’d always smell fresh. There was so little else I could do for her now.

  “…Well, Joss died a few days later. A nurse from the hospital wrote to tell me. I figured he was out of his mind with fear or pain when he saw that thirty-foot yellow-haired man with the sword on horseback…”

  “Of course, he was,” I agreed absently. I was used to her saying odd things. The morphine worked on her pain, but it also worked on her mind, and there were times when she thought she was a little girl again in Texas. I never had any trouble picturing her as a child. Rather, I’d always had trouble picturing her as an adult.

  “But now I’m not so sure…”

  “About what?”

  “About the yellow-haired man.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the last couple of days, off and on, there’s been a Negro with feathers standing beside my door watching me.”

  Reflexively I looked to the door.

  “Do you see him?” she asked.

  I didn’t, of course, and I’d just given her a whopping dose of morphine, but I didn’t see the point in arguing with her either. “Yes, I see him,” I said agreeably.