If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  “Then, after I had escaped and been recaptured and brought back to my owner, She appeared again and told me what to do. When I awoke, I followed Her command.

  “With the chains that bound my hands, I broke the neck of one who came to feed me. With that one’s knife, I killed him who bore the keys. With the machete he dropped, I made the others flee. My left leg carried me well. My right was weak. I did not run as I once had.

  “In the forest, hunters chased me. But the goddess drew me into a mist and they passed by. Beside a stream, a hare came down to drink. I killed her and drank her blood. That morning, hunters went to my left and to my right. I slipped past them as before.

  “Then it was past mid-day. I stood in shadows on the edge of a glade. And all was silent and still. No leaf moved. In the sky directly above me, the sun and a hawk stood still. And I knew gods were at work here. I heard no sounds of hunters. For I was at the heart of the forest.

  “I saw the lodge made of wood and stone and I knew it was mine for the taking. If I killed the King of this place. I said a prayer to the goddess and let her guide me.

  “Not a leaf moved, not a bird sang. Then I saw the silver mask and knew the Rex was looking for me. My heart thumped. I commanded it to be still. The head turned one way then another. But slowly. The Rex was complacent, maybe, expecting to find and kill me easily. Or old and tired.

  “My goddess protected me. Made me invisible. Balanced on my good leg and my bad, I stood still as the Rex crossed the glade. I studied the wrinkled throat that hung below the mask. And knew I would have one chance.

  Just out of range of my knife, the priest hesitated for an instant. And I lunged. One great stride. I stumbled on my bad leg. But my arm carried true. The knife went into the throat. And I found it was a woman and that I was king in her place.

  “The shrine has existed as long as the gods. Along one of the paths some day, will come the one who succeeds me,” he told her. “When the gods wish, that one will do away with me.”

  The Rex could speak of his own death the same way he might about a change of the seasons. But some time after that, on a visit to the Still Room, Julia noticed derricks and steel tanks on the rocky island. When she asked Alcier about the destruction of another shrine, he seemed to wince, shook his head, and said nothing.

  4.

  At night in Old Cottage years later, Julia looked out the windows into the dark. And saw Mount Airey by daylight. The cabin and the grove were gone. The bare ground they had stood on was cracked and eroded. She told Mrs. Eder that she was going to visit Stoneham Cabin next morning.

  Falling asleep, Julia remembered the resort as it had been. As a child, she had learned to swim at Bachelors’ Point and heard the story of Mount Airey being spun. Men tamed and in trunks, women liberated in one piece suits, swam together now and talked of the useful Mr. Coolidge and, later, the traitorous Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  When she was fifteen, her father died in an accident. Nothing but the kindest condolences were offered. But Julia, outside an open door, heard someone say, “Ironic, Flash Garde’s being cut down by a speeding taxi.”

  “In front of the Stork Club, though, accompanied by a young lady described as a ‘hostess.’ He would have wanted it that way.” She heard them all laugh.

  By then, cocktail hour had replaced afternoon tea at Baxter’s. In tennis whites, men sat with their legs crossed, women with their feet planted firmly on the ground. Scandal was no longer whispered. Julia knew that her mother’s remarriage less than two months after her father’s death would have been fully discussed. As would the decision of this mother she hardly ever saw to stay in Europe.

  Julia’s grandmother attended her son’s funeral and shed not a tear. Her attitude was called stoic by some. Unfeeling by others. No one at Baxter’s or Bachelor’s Point had the slightest idea that the greatest love of Helen Garde’s life had, over their twenty years together, given her hints of these events yet to come.

  After her father’s death and her mother’s remarriage, Julia visited the Rex. From behind the silver mask, Alcier spoke. “The gods find you well. You will wed happily with their blessings,” he said. “The divine ones will shield your children.”

  Much as she adored Alcier, Julia thought of this as fortune teller stuff. She began, in the way of the young, to consider the Rex and the Shrine of the Twelve Portals as being among the toys of childhood.

  That fall, she went to Radcliff as her grandmother wished. There, the thousand and one things of a wealthy young woman’s life drove thoughts of the gods to the back of her mind. They didn’t even re-emerge on a sunny day on Brattle Street in her senior year.

  Julia and her friend Grace Shipton were headed for tennis lessons. At the curb, a young man helped a co-ed from Vassar into the seat of an MG Midget. He looked up and smiled what would become a well-known smile. And looked again, surprised. It was the first time he had laid eyes on the woman he would marry.

  Before this moment, Julia had experienced a girl’s tender thoughts and serious flirtations. Then her eyes met those of the young man in the camel-hair jacket. She didn’t notice the boy who watched them, so she didn’t see his mischievous smile or feel the arrow. But in a moment of radiance her heart was riven.

  When Julia asked Grace who the young man was, something in her voice made the Shipton heiress look at her. “That’s Robert Macauley,” came the answer. “The son of that lace curtain thug who’s governor of New York.”

  Julia Garde and young Robert Macauley were locked in each other’s hearts. All that afternoon she could think of nothing else. Then came the telegram that read, “Sorry to intrude. But I can’t live without you.”

  “Until this happened, I never believed in this,” she told him the next afternoon when they were alone and wrapped in each others’ arms.

  Robert proposed a few days later. “The neighbors will burn shamrocks on your front lawn,” he said when Julia accepted. She laughed, but knew that might be true. And didn’t care.

  Polite society studied Helen Stoneham Garde’s face for the anger and outrage she must feel. The heiress to her fortune had met and proposed to marry an Irishman, A CATHOLIC, A DEMOCRAT!

  But when Julia approached her grandmother in the study at Joyous Garde and broke the news, Helen betrayed nothing. Her eyes were as blue as the wide Atlantic that lay beyond the French doors. And as unknowable.

  “You will make a fine looking couple,” she said. “And you will be very happy.”

  “You knew.”

  “Indirectly. You will come to understand. The wedding should be small and private. Making it more public would serve no immediate purpose.”

  “Best political instincts I’ve encountered in a Republican,” the governor of the Empire State remarked on hearing this. “Be seen at mass,” he told his son. “Raise the children in the Church. With the Garde money behind you, there’ll be no need to muck about with concrete contracts.”

  “There will be a war and he will be a fighter pilot,” Helen told Julia after she had met Robert. Before her granddaughter could ask how she knew, she said impatiently, “All but the fools know a war is coming. And young men who drive sports cars always become pilots.”

  It was as she said. Robert was in Naval Flight Training at Pensacola a month after Pearl Harbor. The couple’s song was “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

  Their son, Timothy, was not three and their daughter Helen was just born when Robert Macauley sailed from San Francisco on the aircraft carrier Constellation. Julia saw him off, then found herself part of the great, shifting mass of soldiers and sailors home on leave, women returning after saying goodbye to husbands, sons, boyfriends.

  On a crowded train, with sailors sleeping in the luggage racks, she and a Filipino nurse cried about their men in the South Pacific. She talked with a woman, barely forty, who had four sons in the army.

  Julia felt lost and empty. She reread the Metamorphoses and The Odyssey and thought a lot about Alcier and the Still Room.
It had been two years since she had visited Mount Airey. She felt herself drawn there all that winter.

  Early in spring, she left her children in the care of nurses and her grandmother and went by train from New York to Boston and from Boston to Bangor. She arrived in the morning and Mr. Eder met her at the station. They drove past houses with victory gardens and V’s in the windows if family members were in the service.

  A sentry post had been established on the mainland end of Wenlock Sound Bridge. The Army Signal Corps had taken over Bachelors’ Point for the duration of the war.

  The bar at Baxter’s was an officers’ club. On Olympia Drive, some of the great houses had been taken for the duration. Staff cars, jeeps, canvas-topped trucks, stood in the circular drives.

  It was just after the thaw. Joyous Garde stood empty. Patches of snow survived on shady corners of the terraces. The statues looked as if they still regretted their lack of clothes.

  Julia found a pair of rubber boots that fit and set off immediately for Stoneham Cabin. In summer, Mt. Airey was nature in harness, all bicycle paths and hiking parties. In Mud Time, dry beds ran with icy water, flights of birds decorated a gray sky, lake-sized puddles had appeared, the slopes lay leafless and open.

  Julia saw the stranger as she approached the cabin. But this was her land and she did not hesitate. Sallow faced, clean-shaven with the shadow of a beard, he was expecting her. When she stepped onto the porch, he came to attention. She knew that sometime in the recent past he had murdered Alcier.

  “Corporal John Smalley, Her Britannic Majesty’s London Fusiliers,” he said. “Anxious to serve you, my lady.”

  In the Still Room, when they entered, Julia looked around, saw wreckage in the desert shrine, smashed tanks on the sand. Dead animals lay around the oasis, and she guessed the water was poisoned.

  The murderer put on the silver mask and spoke. His voice rang. Julia felt a chill.

  “It’s by the will of the gods that I’m here today. By way of a nasty scrap in the hills. Caught dead to rights and every one of us to die. Officers down. No great moment. But the sergeant major was gone. A spent round richoted off my Worsley helmet and I was on me back looking up.

  “I lay still but I could hear screams and thought it was up and done with and I would dance on hot coals for as long as it took. For cheating and philandering and the cove I stabbed in Cheapside. And I prayed as I’d never done.

  “Then He appeared. Old Jehovah as I thought, all fiery eyes and smoke behind his head. Then He spoke and it seems it was Mars himself. I noticed he wore a helmet and carried a flaming sword. He told me I was under His protection and nothing would happen to me.

  “Good as His word. No one saw when I rose up and took my Enfield. He lead the way all through the night, talking in my ear. About the shrine and the priest that lives here.

  “A runaway slave it always is who kills the old priest and takes over. And I choked at that. Not the killing, but Britains never will be slaves and all.

  “Lord Mars told me enlistment in Her Majesty’s Army came close enough. New thinking, new blood was what was needed. Led me to a hill shrine before dawn. Left me to my own devices.

  “The shrine’s that one through that portal behind your ladyship. A grove with the trees all cut short by the wind and a circle of stone and a deep pool. When I was past the circle and beside the pool, the wind’s sound was cut off and it was dead still.

  “A path led down to the pool and on it was a couple of stones and a twig resting on them. And I knew not to disturb that. So I went to ground. Oiled my Enfield. Waited. Took a day or two. But I was patient. Ate my iron rations and drank water from the pool.

  “When he came, it was at dusk and he knew something was up. A formidable old bugger he was. But . . .”

  He trailed off. Removed the mask. “You knew him. Since you were a little girl, I hear.”

  Julia’s eyes burned. “He had a wife and children.”

  “I’ve kept them safe. He’d put a sum aside for them from shrine offerings and I saw they had that. Got my own bit of bother and strife tucked away. We know in this job we aren’t the first. And won’t be the last. Living on a loan of time so to speak.”

  He pointed to the ruined shrines. “The gods have gotten wise that things will not always go their way.”

  The corporal told her about defense works and traps he was building. Like a tenant telling the landlady about improvements he is making, thought Julia. She knew that was the way it would be between them and that she would always miss her noble Alcier.

  Just before she left, Smalley asked, “I wonder if I could see your son, m’lady. Sometime when it’s convenient.”

  Julia said nothing. She visited her grandmother, eighty and erect, living in Taos in a spare and beautiful house. Her companion was a woman from the Pueblo, small, silent and observant.

  “Timothy is the whole point of our involvement,” said the old woman. She sat at a table covered with breeding charts and photos of colts. “You and I are the precursors.”

  “He’s just a child.”

  “As were you when you were taken to the shrine. Think of how you loved Alcier. He would have wanted you to do this. And you shall have your rewards. Just as I have.”

  “And they are?”

  “At this point in your life, you would despise them if I told you. In time, they will seem more than sufficient.”

  Julia knew that she would do as the Rex had asked. But that summer Robert was stationed in Hawaii. So she went out to be with him instead of going to Mount Airey. The next August, she gave birth to Cecilia, her second daughter.

  The year after that, Robert was in a naval hospital in California, injured in a crash landing on a carrier flight deck. His shoulder was smashed but healed nicely. A three inch gash ran from his left ear to his jaw. It threw his smile slightly off-kilter.

  He seemed distant, even in bed. Tempered like a knife. And daring. As if he too sensed death and destiny and the will of the gods.

  When the war was over Robert had a Navy Cross, a trademark smile and a scar worth, as he put it, “Fifty-thousand votes while they still remember.”

  Over his own father’s objections, the young Macauley ran for congress from the West Side of Manhattan. The incumbent, one of the old man’s allies, was enmeshed in a corruption scandal. Robert won the primary and the election. His lovely wife and three young children were features of his campaign.

  Julia paid a couple of fast visits to the cabin. On one of them the Corporal told her, “I know it’s a kid will be my undoing. But it will be a little girl.” On another he said, “The gods would take it as a great favor, if you let me speak to your son.”

  Thus it was that one lovely morning the following summer, Julia left her two little daughters in the huge nursery at Joyous Garde and brought Timothy to Stoneham Cabin. As if it was part of a ritual, she had Mrs. Eder pack lunch.

  Julia stuck a carton of the Luckies she knew the Corporal favored into the basket and started up the hill. Her son, age seven and startlingly like the father he rarely saw, darted around, firing a toy gun at imaginary enemies.

  The corporal, tanned and wiry, sat on the back porch, smoking and cleaning his rifle. Tim stared at him wide-eyed. “Are you a commando?” he asked after the introductions were made and he’d learned that their guest was English.

  “Them’s Navy,” Smalley said. “And I’m a soldier of the Queen. Or King as it is.”

  Julia stared down at Mirror Lake. Except when Smalley spoke, she could imagine that Alcier was still there.

  Something even more intense than this must have happened to her grandmother after the death of Ki Mien.

  “Have you killed anybody?”

  “Killing’s never a nice thing, lad. Sometimes a necessity. But never nice,” Smalley said. “Now what do you say that we ask your mother if I can show you around?”

  Later, on their way back to the cottage, Timothy was awestruck. “He showed me traps he had set! In a jungle! He told me
I was going to be a great leader!”

  As her grandmother had with her, Julia demanded his silence. Timothy agreed and kept his word. In fact, he rarely mentioned the cabin and the shrine. Julia wondered if Smalley had warned him not to. Then and later, she was struck by how easily her son accepted being the chosen of the gods.

  Fashion had passed Mt. Airey by. That summer, the aging bucks at Bachelors’ Point drawled on about how Dewey was about to thrash Truman. And how the Rockefellers had donated their estate to the National Parks Service.

  “What else now that the Irish have gotten onto the island.”

  “And not even through the back door.”

  That summer, Helen Stoneham Garde stayed in New Mexico. But Joyous Garde jumped. “Prominent Democrats from the four corners of the nation come to be bedazzled,” as Congressman Macauley murmured to his wife.

  Labor leaders smoked cigars in the oak and leather splendor of Simon Garde’s study. Glowing young Prairie Populists drank with entrenched Carolina Dixiecrats. The talk swirled around money and influence, around next year’s national elections and Joe Kennedy’s boy down in Massachusetts.

  Above them, young Macauley with his lovely wife stood on the curve of the pink and marble stairs. Julia had grown interested in this game. It reminded her of her grandmother’s breeding charts and race horses.

  The following summer, Helen Stoneham Garde returned to her estate. Afternoons at Baxter’s were drowsy now and dowager-ridden.

  “Carried in a litter like royalty.”

  “Up the mountain to the cabin.”

  “Returned there to die it seems.”

  “Her daughter and son-in-law will have everything.” Shudders ran around the room.

  On an afternoon of warm August sun and a gentle sea breeze, Julia sat opposite her grandmother on the back porch of Stoneham Cabin. “Only the rich can keep fragments of the past alive,” Helen told her. “To the uneducated eye, great wealth can be mistaken for magic.”