The Day the Angels Fell

by Shawn Smucker

  Abra didn’t say anything, but she stared hard at me, and her eyes asked the question, Why won’t you tell him?

  I shook my head. “Do you know what ate that animal in the field?” I asked Mr. Jinn.

  He squinted those dark eyes, and when he nodded his entire body moved forward and back, forward and back, and the chair he sat on creaked under his enormity.

  I sighed. I thought he might know a lot of things that I needed to know, and we wouldn’t get anywhere if we stayed stuck at this part of the conversation. Reluctantly, I let the words escape in a whisper.

  “I thought the words on the table said, ‘Find the Tree of Life.’”

  At this Mr. Jinn leaned forward and stared at me. “Is that right?” he asked. “Is that what you saw?”

  There was something eager in his face, something hungry. I wondered how he had missed it, why I had seen it but he hadn’t. I nodded slowly, feeling as though I had told him something I shouldn’t have. It was a feeling I would always have around him, that I was letting things slip, that I was saying more than I should.

  “‘Find the Tree of Life,’” he said quietly to himself. “So it is finally here.”

  He stood up and paced back and forth in the kitchen. When he passed by me, his overcoat flapped, and it smelled like mud and summer. He snapped out of that short reflection and looked at me again, saying matter-of-factly, “It was an Amarok.”

  At first I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “What?” Abra said in a sharp tone. She sounded almost angry, as if she believed Mr. Jinn was trying to make her look silly.

  “You heard me.”

  “An Amarok?” I asked. I didn’t even know what that was.

  “Is that even a real animal?” Abra asked.

  “What is real?” he asked. “What is true?”

  Abra jumped to her feet, her chair shooting out behind her. “I want to go look at that dead animal,” she said. “Let’s go right now.”

  Mr. Jinn didn’t look upset or bothered. “It won’t be there any longer,” he said, shaking his head and pulling his comb from his pocket. “They’ll have taken it.”

  “The vultures?” I asked.

  “The vultures may have come back,” he said. “Or maybe the black dogs.” He gave me a knowing look. “Maybe the Amarok came back for it. If it did, you probably won’t make it home through the field. But that’s not likely in the day. The Amarok prefers, shall we say, the shadows.”

  I remembered the combined voices of the three old women, and a chill swept through my body.

  Protection from what lives in the shadows.

  He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, and his mouth showed regret. His voice hardened. He stared first at me, then at Abra, who was still standing.

  “Do you know what it means to ‘Find the Tree of Life’? Do you want to know why the old women wrote those words on the table?”

  He paused. Abra looked at me. I nodded.

  “Your mother and that oak tree were killed at the exact same moment by that lightning strike.”

  “The tree’s not dead,” I interrupted. “It’s still green.”

  “That tree won’t survive the year,” he snapped. “Your mother substituted her life for yours. Her sacrifice, combined with the death of the oak tree, brought something wonderful into the world.”

  I stared at him. All of his talk about my mother made me angry. Who was he to talk about her? What did he know, this man who never left his house, this man who wore overcoats in the summer? But he just kept talking.

  “Now the Tree is here, somewhere.” He waved his arms around. “The war is beginning. They are gathering and taking sides.”

  When he said “the Tree,” he sounded like he was talking about something very holy or very dangerous or both. And he liked it. There was a lust for blood in his voice, a desire for destruction. He seemed excited at the idea of war.

  “Who’s taking sides?” I asked.

  Abra backed away from the table. “Let’s go, Sam,” she said. “We need to go.”

  “What do you mean by sides?” I asked him again.

  “You would do well to heed the words you read on the table,” Mr. Jinn said, his eyes piercing me. “You would do well to find the Tree.”

  “You still haven’t told us what an Amarok is, or what it was doing in the field, or what that animal is that it killed.”

  “The Amarok being here, it’s a sign,” he said, and in his voice was a pleading for us to understand, as if a greater understanding would lead to our being on his side. “A sign! Just one of many signs that prove what I told you about your mother is true, and that the Tree is close. The Amarok is drawn to the Tree. It is always drawn to the Tree. It’s how we know the Tree is here.”

  His voice sounded more and more like a plea. We stared at him, and I wondered if he was sane.

  Abra pulled at my shoulder and I stood up.

  “She’s right,” Mr. Jinn said, looking at the window in the kitchen. “You should go. Before it gets too late in the day. You don’t want to be walking by yourselves at night anymore.”

  We walked quickly out of the kitchen and across the porch. The sun was already dropping behind the western mountain. I saw small black specks against the darkening sky, some of them flying, some of them perched in the highest branches of faraway trees. Vultures? Or my overactive imagination?

  We half walked, half jogged through the weeds to the cornfield. We stopped for a moment where the white animal had been, but Mr. Jinn was right. There was nothing, not even any blood. Only broken cornstalks and feathers, some black, some white.

  Mr. Jinn shouted to us from his house, “Don’t worry. I’ll come to your house tomorrow, after your mother’s funeral. We have a lot to talk about and even more to do. Remember, find the Tree! Now run! Run! The darkness is coming!”

  The sun was barely over the mountain as we ran through the corn, our shadows dashing along beside us.

  12

  I HAD A DREAM the night before my mother’s funeral.

  I’m standing at the window and the rain pours down, battering the glass. The sky is a greenish-gray and the clouds bubble like a pot of boiling water. I wonder if the barns will be okay, or if the wind will tear them into small pieces and drive them up against the house.

  I see my mom. She’s up in the oak tree, walking out on the branch. Her wet clothes whip around her and her hair dangles down in her face. I suddenly wonder if I might be able to warn her. If I run out to the tree and tell her to get down, will she be spared? Will the lightning miss her?

  Before I know it, I am running through the warm summer rain. The dream is so real that I can feel the squishing of my shoes in the muddy ground. I get to the base of the tree, but I’m too late. The lightning strikes. The tree explodes. I see a bright light.

  But something changes. The weather goes from stormy to sunny, with the bluest sky ever. I climb the old oak and it is perfect. No missing branches. No long, white scar from the lightning. And it’s bearing fruit! It’s not an oak anymore, or at least that’s what I think. I climb higher and higher, and I look off in the distance and see my mother in a white dress, sleeping on the green grass.

  Sleeping? Or dead?

  I realize that the fruit of this new oak tree will bring her back. I grab a piece and it’s soft in my hand. It’s speckled, a mixture of red and orange and yellow, and oblong like a pear. But by the time I get to the ground, it is rotten in my hands, and it smells terrible. So I climb the tree again, grab a new piece, and race back down.

  The bark is like sandpaper on my knees and my hands. My legs start to feel dream-heavy, nearly impossible to lift. And every time I climb down, the fruit rots. I look over at my mother lying in the grass, and I feel so sad that I cannot take her any fruit.

  I hear a loud growl behind me. I turn. It’s the largest wolf I’ve ever seen, much bigger than any of the three dogs. It’s black with brown paws, and its teeth are like white daggers. Its nose wrinkles back in
a snarl, and it speaks in an angry voice.

  “That fruit does not belong to you.”

  The wolf springs at me, and just as its jaws are about to close around my face, I wake up.

  My window was open and the early morning sun shone in, fresh and new. Personally, I had hoped for rain. It was the morning of my mother’s funeral, and I didn’t think sunshine was appropriate.

  My dad knocked on the door, and even his knock sounded tired. I walked over, rubbing my eyes. The day didn’t seem real. I thought that maybe if I rubbed my eyes and didn’t open them, it wouldn’t happen. None of it would happen. But as soon as I opened the door, I knew it was real. All of it.

  “Time to get ready, boy,” my dad said. He turned and walked back downstairs.

  I liked hearing his voice. I turned around and pulled some clothes from my closet, though I didn’t have very many dress clothes. Most of what I owned had been slightly ruined from working and playing and living on a farm my entire life. But I managed to find a nice shirt, a pair of slacks, and some black socks buried at the bottom of my drawer.

  My dad made breakfast for both of us, and as I sat there waiting for the eggs to fry, I found myself running my index finger along a scratch on our dining room table. That reminded me of the table in the antique store, and of Mr. Jinn, and of all that he had said the day before.

  Find the Tree.

  And what was an Amarok?

  “What’s an Amarok?” I asked my dad as he put two plates of eggs and toast on the table and sat down beside me. I hadn’t really thought about the question. The words escaped from my mouth before I had a chance to check them out, and if I could have, I would have chased them down and swallowed them again. I was too tired of not getting a response from him. I was weary of the one-sided nature of our new relationship, the one created in the wake of my mom’s death.

  But he surprised me.

  “Where did you hear about that?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want him to know that I was sneaking all over the valley, visiting with Mr. Jinn and being attacked by vultures. And everything else. He’d think I was losing my mind. He’d never believe me.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I think we might have talked about it at school or something.”

  He nodded. “There are a lot of great stories out there. The Inuit people have legends about the Amarok. Do you know the Inuits?”

  I shook my head and kept eating, trying not to scare him back into his silence with too much attention. It was like watching a snow leopard in the wild.

  “The Inuits, I guess they’re a type of Eskimo. They have legends that the old men pass down to the young,” he said. His voice was musical again, if only for a few moments. Stories will do that for us, bring beauty back even in the midst of such overwhelming darkness. “They’re wonderful legends. Terrifying stories. Some of them involve an Amarok.”

  He took a bite of breakfast, then continued with his mouth full. If my mother had been there, she would have given him a look that said, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” But she wasn’t there. So much was changing. I was running around the fair with only Abra. I had met the mysterious Mr. Jinn. Dad was talking with his mouth full.

  The entire world felt upside down.

  “The Amarok is a legendary wolf, as big as a horse and black, the color of a shadow. Unlike normal wolves, it hunts on its own. Not in a pack.”

  I shuddered. What if there was an Amarok prowling the valley right now? My dream swept back into my mind, and suddenly I wasn’t hungry anymore. I remembered the black wolf that had stared at me in my dream and told me in a growling voice, “That fruit doesn’t belong to you.” Was that an Amarok?

  “But there’s one thing to remember about the Amarok—it only devours those who are foolish enough to hunt alone,” Dad chanted in a voice that made it sound like he had memorized that phrase once, long ago.

  He shrugged, and the music fell out of his voice, and it was just me and him again—no stories, no legends, eating breakfast a few hours before we buried the body of someone we loved more than anything else.

  “Or at least that’s how the legend goes.”

  I had been alone in my dream. I shuddered again, and Abra’s words echoed in my mind, the words she had said before we had walked into Mr. Jinn’s house.

  We have to stay together.

  “You don’t have to worry,” my dad said. He must have seen the fear in my eyes. “Amaroks aren’t real.”

  And once again I heard a voice in my head, but this time it was Mr. Jinn’s from the day before.

  Some people are so blinded by what’s real that they’re not ready for what’s true.

  My dad and I walked down the lane. My fancy shoes rubbed around the bottom of my ankles, and the shirt tugged under my arms. The sun refused to go behind the clouds, and the sky was a beautiful blue. The recent rains had turned every plant and crop and tree a deep, lush green. The oak, however, didn’t look quite right. The edges of the leaves looked black, and the branches drooped like a wilting plant. The lightning scar that went all the way down the tree and disappeared at the roots had gone from bright white to a sickly yellow, like someone’s last, decaying tooth.

  We crossed the street and walked into the church. The parking lot was full. My mother was well loved by many people in the neighborhood, and her passing was a great tragedy in Deen. The main auditorium of the small church held maybe two hundred people, and it was standing room only. Ushers walked my father and me to the front row, and we sat down. My mother’s casket was there in front of us. I couldn’t believe she was in there.

  The pastor across the street had agreed to have the service there. He was a tall man, mostly thin but with a little round ball for a belly. His nose was sloped, and his eyes were sad and eager to show you that sadness. His voice had a wavering quality to it, the way it sounds when you’re talking to someone underwater.

  We sat there, listening to him drone on and on about my mom, someone he barely knew, and my attention began to fade. I wanted it to be over and done. I wanted this part to be in the past so I could focus all of my energy on the future and figuring out how to bring her back. This all seemed like an unwelcome distraction that I didn’t have time for.

  I heard the sniffles and quiet crying around me more than I heard the words the pastor said. But there was one verse he read from his black book that caught my attention.

  “Our final reading today comes from Revelation.” He paused and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he read the passage with a somber, reverent voice that somehow swept me up and carried me to a far-off place.

  “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

  The Tree of Life. Healing for the nations. Again, the phrase echoed over and over in my mind.

  Find the Tree.

  Find the Tree.

  Find the Tree.

  My father had petitioned the county to allow him to bury my mom in the graveyard in the forest at the end of the Road to Nowhere. It had taken some convincing, but eventually they gave in, not wanting to have a public fight with a grieving man. So the hearse drove away from the church and headed north on Kincade Road. It was one of the first cars to drive that way for a very, very long time.

  I caught a glimpse of Abra as we walked from the church to the graveyard. I wondered if the pastor’s words about the Tree had caught her attention too. She wore a long black dress and had a black ribbon in her hair. A thought entered my mind, something I had never considered before: Abra was pretty. Prior to that funeral, I had only ever seen her as a friend, someone to run around with, to have fun with. It seemed strange to me that I would notice her beauty at my mother’s funeral, but I did, and I kept
stealing glances at her, wondering if she thought I looked handsome in the clothes I had managed to rummage from the bottom of my drawer.

  Because the road didn’t go all the way to the cemetery but stopped beyond Mr. Jinn’s driveway, a group of my father’s friends and fellow farmers served as pallbearers. They bore the coffin from the hearse and over the crumbled-up pavement where the road ended. They forged through the weeds and wound in and out among the trees, trying not to stumble on the roots. Finally, they arrived at the ancient cemetery, the one close to the cave, my hiding place. The river was loud there, rushing as it did through the green forest.

  The funeral director had managed to erect a small white canopy over the open grave. The men brought my mother’s coffin through the forest, passed it over the low iron railing that surrounded the mossy headstones, and set the coffin on straps that lowered her slowly into the summer earth. I looked toward the river but could barely see it through the trees. It was still full to overflowing and muddy. It raced along even though I thought it should stop and pay its respects.

  How could the world keep going? Why didn’t everything stop, as my life had stopped, and watch as my mother vanished from the earth?

  We stopped by the stone, and I stared at the letters. I knew by the phone conversations I had overheard that my father had paid a lot of money to have that stone ready for the day of the funeral.

  Lucy Leigh Chambers

  Wife and Mother

  Meet Me at the Edge of the World

  Below that was a picture of a tree. I thought it looked like the oak tree in our yard, and it filled me with a strange sense of awe. It seemed appropriate that my mother and that tree would be joined together forever, or at least as long as that gravestone could withstand the passing of time.

  It’s a tradition in our town to fill in the grave by hand, so people who knew my mother took turns using the shovels provided by the church and scooped in those dark brown shovelfuls. The clods made a thumping sound as they fell into the hole.