The Day the Angels Fell

by Shawn Smucker

  “Look,” I said to Abra, pointing west, away from the fire and the river, over the fields of deep green corn now approaching waist height. A long, straight line of vultures flew out of the valley and disappeared over the mountain.

  My father took us to the hospital, but I remember very little about the drive. There was the rough road we bounced over, and the loose gravel pinging up under the car. There was the smell of smoke coming through the open windows, mingled with the heavy moisture of a wet July morning. There was the smooth hum of wheels on the highway, the gradual slipping in and out of sleep. There was Abra and me leaning against each other, exhausted, relieved.

  The time I spent in the hospital was also a blur.

  “Smoke inhalation,” the doctors said. “Third-degree burns.”

  I guess the leaves hadn’t healed me completely.

  Abra was in worse shape, and the two of us had trouble explaining her injuries: a series of deep punctures in her chest, in her abdomen, and down her back. A broken rib. A sliced foot. In the end, our parents and doctors chalked it up to two children who had nearly been killed in a forest fire, who had injured themselves while fleeing the oncoming flames. We were okay with that. There seemed very little benefit in explaining the details of what we had been through, and even less chance that anyone would believe us if we did.

  But I do remember one thing now. Something I had forgotten for many, many years.

  I remember lying in my hospital bed that first night after everyone else had left. I knew Abra was in her own room, recovering. I was thinking about how close we had come to death, and I realized I was both relieved and disappointed not to have made that journey. I missed my mom, but I realized I loved life. I wasn’t quite ready to die.

  The doctor came in. I say she was a doctor, though in hindsight I have very little idea who the woman actually was. At first I thought I was dreaming because she looked so much like my mother. I thought I was having another one of my nighttime visions, and I settled into it, believing. I had come to enjoy those moments with my mother, even if they weren’t strictly real. One of the machines I was connected to let out its rhythmic beep. Another hummed on into eternity.

  But then she spoke, and I knew it was no dream.

  “Sam,” she said, and she even carried herself like my mother, so that I lifted myself up on my elbows and stared closer.

  Could it be? I wondered if the Tree, during its brief time beside the river, had leached its life into the ground, enough that it brought her back. Maybe the roots of the Tree had reached far enough into the forest, all the way to the small cemetery and my mother’s grave. Maybe this was the beginning of some new era, when all the once-dead people in our valley would come to life, walk among us, reunite with the people they loved. For a moment I imagined the celebrations, the surprise, the joy.

  But it was only the late hour talking, or the medication, or my last hopes, because when she got closer I looked into the woman’s eyes and recognized immediately that this was not my mother. The blue was not there. The humanness was missing. This person’s eyes were dark and endless.

  If you’ve ever looked into the eyes of one of them, you’ll know what I mean. Her eyes were exactly like those of Mr. Jinn and Mr. Tennin—eternal, like the space between the stars.

  I suddenly realized what she was.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. I stared hard at her. She was dressed like a nurse, but she didn’t have a name tag on. “Who are you?” Before, when I thought she was my mother, I had wanted to get as close as possible, but now I pushed myself backward in my hospital bed, as far away from her as I could get.

  She looked sad for me, as if I would never understand.

  “How are you feeling?” She held up a clipboard, writing a few notes on it, and for a moment I was confused. Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe she was only trying to do her job.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “It’s the middle of the night. Can we do this in the morning?”

  She nodded and scribbled a few more things on her clipboard. “Your appetite okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you feeling achy at all? Sick to your stomach? Trouble breathing?”

  “No,” I said. She made me feel tense, uneasy. It wasn’t the questions she was asking. It was her. It was her presence.

  “Exactly what happened in the forest beside the river?” she asked, eyebrows arched, as if it was a completely normal question for a doctor to be asking a patient.

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “I believe there was a gentleman there with you in the woods?”

  I closed my mouth tight, bit my lip.

  “Isn’t that right?” She bent closer. “I believe he worked for your father.”

  “Mr. Tennin?” I whispered, and for a moment it felt like I didn’t have any control over my mouth. It felt like my lips and tongue were going to say whatever information was in my brain. She would ask, and my mind would tell her whatever she needed to know.

  I shook my head. Maybe I was trying to clear the cobwebs. Maybe I was trying to wake up.

  “What happened to Mr. Tennin?” she asked, and I could tell that for her, everything rested on the answer to this question.

  “He fell,” I whispered.

  She sighed, but I could not tell if it was a sigh of sadness or relief, or the kind of sigh when someone tells you something you already thought to be true but didn’t know for sure.

  “Do you have it?” she asked, and I knew she was talking about the sword.

  I couldn’t help it. I shook my head, hoping that would be enough to protect me.

  “Do . . . you . . . have . . . it?” she asked again.

  “No,” I said.

  “Does your friend have it?” she asked.

  I shook my head again. I remembered seeing Abra retrieve the sword after Mr. Jinn disappeared, and I remembered that it had seemed suddenly small, almost insignificant, like a pocketknife, as she tucked it back in her waistband. It took a great amount of willpower not to answer the woman’s question. It was like trying not to respond to someone who says something untrue about you. Words started escaping, but instead of holding them in, I turned them into my own question.

  “Who are you?” I asked again.

  I sensed a great tension rising in her, and it spilled into the air between us. It was a cloud of anger and resentment, and for a moment I thought she had been sent to avenge Mr. Jinn.

  Whose side was she on?

  “I need to talk to your friend Abra.” She said the words as if explaining something to a very small child who might not understand.

  But I shook my head once again. “Who are you?”

  She leaned forward and whispered her name. Her breath was ice-cold against my ear, and she lingered there a moment longer than necessary, seeming to enjoy how uncomfortable she made me. Her name was one I had never heard before, but it filled me with darkness, the kind that you can feel closing in around you.

  I slept.

  When I woke up the next morning I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, though her name was etched in my mind. I doubted for many years if it had actually even happened.

  I never told Abra.

  Koli Naal. That was her name. Koli Naal.

  33

  IT WAS A SUNDAY MORNING in the fall. The fire had ravaged the valley. The trees that lined the eastern ridge of mountains had been scorched all the way along the river, all the way down to Deen. The town had nearly caught fire as well, but the townspeople had fought it, and the wind had changed, and that storm had finally come in. Mr. Jinn’s farm was reduced to ash, as were our house and barns and most of the fields. It was a fire unlike anything anyone had ever seen, and even the green things had caught.

  But small signs of life reappeared: tractors had dug out new foundations, and structures rose from the desolation. My father had decided to rebuild, and the new farmhouse was taking shape. It seemed like my father knew more than he was letting on—there was no other
explanation for his lack of questions. Why didn’t he ask about my injuries? Why didn’t he talk about Mr. Tennin’s sudden disappearance? In any case, it looked like our new home would be finished before winter. The leaves of the trees on the western mountains, unaffected by the fire, had turned red and yellow and orange, as if the whole mountainside was ablaze.

  Abra came to the partially rebuilt house as she had been in the habit of doing on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes we would walk out to the Tree of Life and sit there with our backs against the hard wood, surrounded by the blackened poles of burned trees and the smell of an old fire. But every Sunday that we went out, we found more and more signs of life. The animals returned, creeping through the barren trees, and the tiny green plants created a haze over the gray ash. The trees would be replaced. Life would come up out of that dead ground in the spring.

  Everything felt like recovery. Everything, that is, except the Tree of Life. It somehow looked even more lifeless than the other burned trees.

  We never said much when we went out there. Mostly we just waited for something, although we weren’t sure what.

  On that particular Sunday afternoon, about three months after the day the angels fell, Abra and I looked through Mr. Tennin’s box again. We sat on the porch and examined all the articles, paged through the atlas. We tried to find the pattern in the appearance of the Tree of Life, but it all seemed so random, those strange trees that sprang up all around the world and then were killed or died under mysterious circumstances.

  “Look!” Abra said, pointing toward the church.

  Icarus meandered along the road, his tail tall and curling.

  “The cat,” I said, and the strangeness of that entire summer seemed somehow summed up in those two words. We watched as he disappeared behind the church, walking slowly through the decimated forest toward the river.

  “Maybe there isn’t a pattern,” Abra said, her attention back on the articles and the atlas. “Maybe there’s no way of telling where it will appear again.”

  I shook my head. “But Mr. Jinn knew. He knew it was coming here.”

  Mr. Jinn’s farm was a mystery. When no one showed up to claim it, he was officially declared dead and the farm was eventually auctioned off. We never found out what had happened to the real Mr. Jinn—the man, not the angel who took his name. New people moved in, strange people nearly as private as Mr. Jinn had been. But their neatness extended outside the house, and as the years passed, the grounds of the farm eventually looked immaculate. Silent and lonely, but immaculate.

  We studied the contents of Mr. Tennin’s box and made maps and charts and long lists of numbers, but we didn’t get any closer to figuring it out.

  I walked with Abra all the way out the lane. My dad must have been burning debris somewhere, because there was smoke in the air—the smell of fall, the warning of winter. It took me back to the day the angels fell. The smell of wood smoke always did after that.

  “Let’s go say hi to Lucy,” Abra said. In those months after the fire, she had taken to calling my mom by her first name, and something about it seemed right, as if she was one of us, a friend, walking right there beside us.

  So we went up Kincade Road, into the forest, all the way to the cemetery, and as we meandered among the stones, Abra let her hands rise up from her sides as if she was flying.

  At my mother’s grave, we sat down. I told Abra all of my favorite stories about my mom, and she listened, even though I had told them all to her before. I felt that sense of peace again, a peace I couldn’t explain, that what had happened would be okay, and anything that wasn’t all right would be made right before The End.

  I remembered Mr. Tennin’s words, and I tried hard to believe them.

  Death is only a passage.

  Death is just the exchanging of cloaks.

  Death is not a destination.

  Death is a gift.

  I grabbed a red leaf and held its stem in one of my scarred hands. The wind had blown it all the way from the western mountain, where the trees were still alive and in their full autumn glory. Suddenly, a cloud of those leaves from the other mountain swept into the woods and swirled around us, red and yellow and orange, like fire.

  34

  “WAIT,” I SAY TO JERRY. “Keep driving.”

  He looks over at me, confused. “But there’s nowhere to go from here,” he says.

  “Just keep going. Please.”

  The word “please” sounds strange coming out of my mouth. I can’t remember the last time I used that word. Jerry drives straight past the lane to my farm, past the old cemetery on the right, the one that used to have a church right beside it. He drives all the way back to the Road to Nowhere, as we used to call it. He passes the lane to Mr. Jinn’s old farm, then stops the car when he can go no farther.

  “Okay. Thank you,” I say, getting out of the car with my cane and the box Abra’s husband gave me.

  “Should I wait here?” he asks.

  “No, no, I’ll manage.”

  “Where are you going? There’s nothing back there. No road. No path. Nothing.”

  I push the cane down into the soft ground and look over my shoulder through the open car window. “Things aren’t always the way they appear. I’m going to see an old friend.”

  Jerry and Caleb glance at each other, and I know that look. They think my mind has wandered off without me. But it is the privilege of old age not to care when people look at you as if you’re going crazy. And anyway, who knows, maybe I am. I turn away from the car and pick my way through the trees, my cane in one hand, the box in the other.

  The old path is gone. It’s as if it never existed. But I know the general direction, even after all these years. Everything is green and overgrown, and it makes me feel old that I have been alive long enough to witness the regeneration of an entire forest, one that was, in my lifetime, charred and lost. It says something, I think, about the heaviness of patience, the power of waiting.

  The ivy snags at my cane and it’s slow going. I push branches away from my face and walk through spiderwebs.

  Eventually I come to the cemetery where my mother was buried. The old iron fence still surrounds the small space, though it’s rusty, like an orange weed, and leans over so far in some places that it looks like it might topple. The gate is stuck open. Someone must have opened it a long time ago and never closed it. Some of the headstones have fallen over—broken teeth—but others are still in one piece, drowning in weeds.

  My mother’s gravestone still stands, and I wonder why it has been so long since I’ve come this way. I remember her funeral. How long ago that day seems! It feels more like something I read about in a book than something I saw with my own eyes. I place the box on top of her grave, then put my hand on the stone and close my eyes. It’s warm in the summer heat.

  I have never forgotten the verse the preacher read in the church. I looked it up many times as a child until the words were etched in my mind.

  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.

  How I hope that is true.

  But I haven’t come here to stand at my mother’s grave site all day. No, this is not my destination. I turn away and walk through the narrow gate and continue back through the woods. The going is even more difficult, and for a minute I’m not sure if I can make it over the rocks and the roots, through the weeds and the soft earth. But I get there, my black shoes pinching my feet.

  I see it. It’s still there.

  The Tree of Life.

  The outside of it is smooth like worn leather, and it’s the color of a cloudy sky, a slate gray that’s just beyond white. The bare branches are tangled in the leaves of other, living trees. I sit down with my back against it and lay my cane down on on
e side of me, the box on the other. I lean my head back against the old trunk and close my eyes. I can still feel the amazement I felt that morning when I looked up into its branches and saw all that glistening, almost-clear fruit. I feel a burning in my hands, or imagine I do.

  I wonder what would have happened if I had taken a piece of that beautiful fruit and planted it in the loose earth of my mother’s grave.

  Would she be with me today?

  Would we have been able to save the Tree?

  Would she go on to live forever as I wasted away and eventually died, leaving her here alone? Or would I have eaten from the Tree too, sealing our fate, forcing us to roam this old world forever, never to see the other side of that vast water?

  In the midst of all these thoughts, I hear the river.

  I open my eyes and lift the box up onto my lap. I remember the other box, the one from the attic, the one I had kept for so many years without looking inside, the one that is now inside Abra’s coffin and will soon be buried under the ground. And now another box, another mystery.

  What could Abra have left me?

  I lift off the lid and am not surprised.

  The small sword is sitting over to one side, the same dull gray color of unpolished metal. I reach toward it carefully, but when my finger glances against it, it is still terribly hot. It would burn me again if I held on to it. Again, the burns tingle in my hands. I can see the Amarok again, and the fire raging in the forest, and the angels streaking through the sky.

  I look beside the blade and see a kind of leather journal tied closed with a thin leather strap. I lift it out and untie the knot and gently ease it open. A breeze blows through the trees and flaps the pages. A few leaves drift down to the ground. It’s the sound of fall in the middle of summer.

  Then, there it is—something like a title page, written in Abra’s childhood scrawl.

  The Adventures of

  Abra Miller:

  My Many Quests to Destroy