— 6 —
“You just aren’t thinking with your right mind, Angel,” her aunt Georgia said. “Now your daddy’s gone, you can’t stay down here by yourself like this.”
Angel slid down on the worn chair, smelling the night air. Beyond the porch, pines bristled up against the east Texas sky, trees that stretched clear into Louisiana from this little store. A three-quarter moon washed out the light of the stars and she could smell the river. “Listen to all those creatures out there, would you?” she said, ignoring her aunt. “You always forget how noisy the summer is until it comes again.
Georgia sighed. If there had been a table to clean, she would have done it. As it was, she had to content herself with straightening the lavender-sprigged skirt of her dress. “You never have listened to a word anybody said. Just like your mama.”
Angel thought longingly of the cigarettes hidden away in her bedroom. “I wish,” she said quietly, “you’d just let it alone, Georgia.”
“How can I? You’ve got every tongue in town waggin’. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“It isn’t everybody in town, first of all. It’s the Walkers and a few others.” A lot of others, probably, if she was honest with herself. “I need the work. You’d think some those women would be standing up for me, anyway, instead of gossiping behind their hands about me all the time.”
“Oh, no one’s gossiping. It’s just natural conversation. Your daddy’s gone, Angel. It’s natural people will talk about what’ll happen to you now.”
“I’m not a child. I’m a full grown woman, a war widow. I’ve earned the right to make a living for myself.” She crossed her legs and wiggled a foot impatiently. “And I know it’s not like up North, but a lot of these women worked hard during the war.”
“That’s different, Angel, and you know it.”
“It isn’t different—I’ve run this store almost by myself for last two years. Why is it that I’m supposed to be helpless now?”
“The men need the work.”
“So does a woman alone,” she returned wearily.
“You’re alone by choice.”
Angel laughed bitterly. “No, I’m a widow.”
“Well, it’s been over three years. How long you gonna keep everybody at arm’s length?”
“Maybe always.” She shot a sharp glance at her aunt. “You can’t honestly expect me to even consider Edwin Walker.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I’ve never even liked him, for one thing. That seems reason enough to me.”
“You set your standards too high. Edwin Walker’s got medals and money, and you can’t tell me he’s not a good-looking man.”
“He’s also been crazy as a mad dog as long as I can remember.” Angel crossed her arms. “And I frankly don’t see that war did him a whole lot of good.”
“You’re strong. You could turn him around.”
“Aunt Georgia, stop it. I don’t want to. No.”
“Well, you could probably catch the preacher if you had a mind to. He’s a good man.”
“Yes, he is. And I like him. I don’t want to be the preacher’s wife, either. I’m not interested in having some man tell me what do all the rest of my life.” All she really wanted right this minute was a little peace and quiet, some time to have a wailing good cry and maybe start thinking about what was next in her life. “I just want to be alone for a while.”
“That’s unnatural, child. People are meant to be in families, in pairs. Don’t you want to be a mama?”
Angel stretched her neck back and closed her eyes. The night swirled over her face like a lover, bath-water warm and soft as talcum. “I’ve lived in this house since I was born—it’s all I know. I really can’t believe you want me to sell out and give up everything, just like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis. “My daddy hasn’t even been gone a week.”
“Oh, honey. It isn’t the store.” Now Georgia had something to do. She reached over to hold Angel’s hand. “I’m just worried about you living here without a man in the house.”
“What you’re afraid of,” Angel said distinctly, yanking her hand away, “is that some colored man is gonna come in here and ravish me.”
“Angel!” The retort was sharp and shocked and scolding all at once.
“Well, it’s true. That’s what you’re all afraid of.” Angel sighed. “Georgia, do you think you could listen to me for just a minute? One minute?”
“If you’re gonna talk like that, I don’t want to hear it. Makes me sick.”
“I’m not going to talk like that. That’s just the point.” Angel pulled her aunt’s hand to her face. “I want you to really hear what I’m saying. Please?”
Georgia relented, smoothing the fine pale hair from her niece’s face. “Go ahead, baby, speak your mind.”
“I know every single person that comes in this store, and their mamas and sisters and brothers. They’re as familiar to me as you are. Nobody’s gonna hurt me.”
“You never had to be out here all alone.” Her voice dropped. “You can’t trust these people, no matter what your daddy told you.”
Angel felt a thick stirring in her middle and she pushed Georgia away. “He was your brother. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“Don’t start throwing that in my face, Angel. Of course it does.”
“He wanted me to stay here.”
“Angel, honey, you’re just grieving. Maybe you’ll be able to think a little better when you’ve had some time—”
She jumped up. “I’m not giving up this store. Do you hear me?”
“Your daddy ruined you, Angel Corey.” Georgia rose, patrician in her tidy cotton dress. Her silver-streaked chestnut hair shimmered in the moonlight, and the little buttons on the front of her dress winked furiously as her considerable bosom heaved. “If you had any sense at all you’d marry Edwin Walker and have yourself some children, try to make yourself a normal life, instead of livin’ out here like some crazy spinster.” She moved toward the steps, but Angel knew there was more. “You know where to find me. I hope to God I don’t see you at my door in the middle of some night.”
Angel rolled her eyes, but she stayed right where she was as her aunt walked to the car. The ignition grated, then the engine caught and with a thunk of gears the car pulled out with a little spit of gravel.
Leaving her alone. Which was what she thought she wanted, but now the darkness moved close, pressing in with loneliness. Georgia, bossy and prim, was her only family, and Parker had always been there to intercede. “You gonna have to take care of things now, Angel,” he said when he got to the end. “Just remember you’re not ever really alone.”
But she felt alone, even in the coffee-rich Texas night—her life summed up in a long line of “withouts.” Without her daddy, a mama, a husband, children.
That was one thing Georgia had right. Angel mourned her lack of children. She had imagined she would have several by now. And tonight, in the gulf left by her daddy’s death, a child would have helped heal this emptiness, a child warm in her lap on this lonely night.
With a flap of wings and a strident squawk, a blue jay landed on the porch railing. He rattled off a series of whistles and chirps and screeches in a dizzying whirl.
Angel laughed. “Well, I didn’t mean I was totally alone,” she said to the bird. Ebenezer, mollified, meowed. Angel held out her hand and he flew to her, blinking. She stroked his neck. “You’re such a pretty baby. My sweet little companion.” He preened, his crest high, his feathers catching shimmers of moonlight.
“I reckon I could just go read,” she said. Ebenezer chirped and leapt to her shoulder. She gathered the ice tea glasses and carried them inside, her feet bare on the wooden slats of the store. She walked through the aisles and through a door to the living quarters. Five rooms, if she counted the bathroom; kitchen, living room with a radio, two small bedrooms. The kitchen table groaned with cakes and tiny white rolls curled in baskets. In the icebox was enough h
am for an army, and big pans full of fried chicken and potato casseroles, all gestures of condolence from lower Gideon, who had loved her father.
In the very center of the dazzling array of food rested a crystal vase full of wildflowers, left this afternoon on her doorstep. She touched the petals with the tips of her fingers, then turned off the light and went to bed.
The rain started the next morning, early. Started slow, a soft gray rain pattering on the trees and the gravel road in front of the store. Likely no one would arrive in such weather, so Angel turned on the radio for company and set about putting things in order.
She’d been nagging Parker for months to change things around. The bolts of cloth oughtn’t sit where the sun could get to them, and the cosmetics were scattered so hurry-scurry you couldn’t find a blasted thing. She lined up bottles of Breck and tubs of Dixie Peach pomade, ribbons and barrettes and combs. Toothpowder and brushes went with deodorants, cough drops and headache powders nearby. There were a few bottles of perfume in dusty boxes and some lipsticks in colors nobody would ever buy, even if they had the money. But she polished them up and left them, just in case. Some young girl might get a yen.
The bolts of fabric took longer, mainly because Angel couldn’t resist fingering them, imagining how this one would fall in a skirt, that one in a blouse. There was a long piece of gauzy green muslin that wanted somebody to do something. Be a pretty summer church dress, good for her eyes.
The rain started pounding hard by noon and the road out front puddled up. The leak in her bedroom at the back of the house dripped into a pot that she left in there for rainy days, and another leak in the bathroom dripped right into the bathtub. It turned into a waterfall before two. A spot in her daddy’s room started dripping like it did in the heaviest rain, so she carried a bowl in there, too.
Ebenezer flew from the store in the front to the rooms of the house in back, heading straight for the waterfall in the bathroom. Even over the pounding of the rain and the drops thunking into metal pans, Angel heard him fluttering and flapping under his shower. She peeked into the room. “Havin’ a good time, baby?”
He whistled.
By three, the rain had not let up and new leaks were springing open in the roof almost faster than Angel could find them. She moved her bed over and put another pot in the bathroom.
In the store, it was harder. A bad place opened up too close to the stock along the east wall, and then three spots dripped through the ceiling over the counter.
Laboriously, she moved the magazines to the kitchen table, then piled sacks of flour and sugar and beans into a pile in the middle of the kitchen floor, which by some miracle stayed dry. No miracle, she thought, glancing out the window. A tree, planted to shade the kitchen from the hard west sun in the late afternoons, had protected the roof as well.
At five, she ran out of containers to catch the water. She dumped all of them, then rearranged them so that the largest pots were placed below the worst leaks. Then she put on a sweater and escaped to the front porch.
Where, naturally, it was dry as a bone. Figured. Just beyond the protection of the shallow porch roof, the rain fell in torrents—a sheet of impenetrable gray. A fine spray of it touched her face and hands. The road had begun to run like the river that coursed past the back of the house. In the field east of the house, Angel could tell the garden she had planted a month ago had turned into a lake.
She sank into the familiar rocker and huddled into her sweater feeling like an island cut off from all humanity. The roof had been bad for a couple of years, but there’d been no materials to fix it.
How in the world would she fix it now? All her money had gone to the doctors and to medicines and to various and sundry other needs. Exhausted, she slumped forward on to her arms, crossed over her knees, and let go of a heavy breath. There were no tears, much as she would have welcomed the relief, only an engulfing, crushing loneliness.
“Now what, God?” she said aloud. “I’m worn out. You’re going to have to be very plain.”
The answer could not be Edwin Walker. She didn’t believe God wanted her to be miserable the rest of her natural life.
A dozen yards from her back steps, the river rushed by in swollen thunder. She wondered how her neighbors in Lower Gideon were faring. It looked like the river might flood.
All through the night, she stood sentry, wearily empting pots and mopping up the overflow as often as necessary. Her shoulders burned, and her eyes grew gritty, but finally the rain stopped just before dawn. Most of the stock was safe, and the furniture. The living room couch would have to be scrapped, but nobody ever sat in there anyway. Life had always been lived between the kitchen, the porch and the store. With grunts and heavings, she shoved the sofa onto to the back porch to dry, where at least the smell of the old stuffing wouldn’t stink up the rest of the place.
The river roared through the trees, white tipped and rough, a normally sleepy ribbon of gray where mosquitoes bred and catfish slept. Today it had edged over its banks a bit and branches floated on the current that hurried it to the Gulf, but the worst had passed. A weak morning sun pushed at the clouds, sparkling on the wet leaves of cottonwood and willow trees.
Angel breathed deep of the washed air. She stretched her fingers up toward the sky and felt her tired muscles ease all along her spine. She spoke again, “Thank you, God, for stopping the rain in time.”
She picked up a handful of branches thrown down by the storm and tossed them off the porch. Taking a last, long sniff of the heavy air, she went back inside to get coffee started and put things back where they belonged. There was no guarantee anybody would be able to get over the river or up the road, wet as everything was, but anybody who could, would.
Turned out to be a slow morning, for which Angel, exhausted by the long night, was grateful. Old man Younger passed on his mule, waving as he went by. His place was nearly five miles away, the farthest farm out in a string of cotton lands, most of it parceled out too small to make a decent living on nowadays.
When ten o’clock came and went, Angel knew the bridge to Lower Gideon was bound to be submerged. By nightfall, somebody would have rigged a way across so folks could get to their jobs tomorrow. Again she peered at the river, wondering what the rain had done to the homes across the stretch of water. She could hear shouts and saw a flash of red at the bend near Renden’s place. Hard to tell.
Her garden was ruined. The little seedlings, her pride the week before, were buried now under six inches of muddy water. With a sigh, she took off her shoes and splashed barefooted through the yard for a better look, keeping her eyes open for snakes.
The water was cool, the mud gritty on her feet, and Angel smiled, hearing Georgia’s howl should she drive up now. She glanced over her shoulder guiltily, then laughed out loud. “Look at me, Daddy. Scared already without you here to chase her off.
Shaking her head at her foolishness, she peered down at the seedlings—drowned corn and flattened tomatoes and demolished collards. Plant again as soon as it was dry, she thought, scanning the sky, which showed clear and blue now, not a hint of the storm left. But that meant another month till harvest, too.
No help for it. Wading into the mess, she began plucking out the obviously dead, measuring the possibility of recovery in others. She was no stranger to hardship, after all. A body did whatever was next. Today, this was it.
— 7 —
January 1, 1943
Dear Isaiah,
It has taken me much longer than it should have to get this letter written back to you, what with Christmas and all, but it’s quiet today and I ought to have enough time to get it done now.
Your letter about Solomon came just in time, because I really was feeling regretful about things I could have done better—like marrying him sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t, seemed like we drifted that way for years and years and years. I guess I thought I might really get out of Gideon, and Solomon didn’t want to leave. But then when the war started, I knew I was stuck
here, so I married him when he got drafted.
Now that sounds awful. But you know what I mean. You’re right. He was a good man, as patient and kind as anybody I ever met. And I know he understood about the two of you, that you knew, I mean, why he had to be like he was. Hard enough for him to hold up his head in town with that family of his (they all went north, by the way, to work in some airplane factory or something) without having to explain why his best friend was a colored boy. So, anyway, thank you for thinking of me. It’s sad to think of his body deep in the water somewhere halfway around the world. But my daddy said that war just goes like that.
He’s pretty worried about this war. Seems like it’s been going on forever, and now it’s getting harder and harder to get supplies of all kinds. Folks get mad when we don’t have this thing or that one in the store, but a lot of times there’s just none to be had. Coffee is hardest to get and keep right now, since you only get a pound every five weeks, but sugar’s been a problem for months. Don’t really think about how much you use until you have to be careful—iced tea and all my cakes take a lot more sugar than I thought. Guess I’ll bake bread more when I feel the yen to get fancy in the kitchen. But we hear it’s much worse over there. Do people have enough to eat? Can we send you anything?
How do you like England? (I have always, always wanted to go there, you know.) I would like to hear about it if you ever have time to write.
Was it hard to be so far from home at Christmas? Things went pretty much like always here. My Sunday school class did a good job on their part of the pageant and I knitted my daddy a sweater. I don’t know how he did it, but he got me a whole stack of books from Dallas and a silk scarf painted with bright birds.
He’s not well this winter. Coughing a lot and, though he doesn’t complain, I think he’s hurting. Lost some weight, too, though he swears it’s my imagination. But you know he’ll never go to the doctor. Worries me. Can’t be good for him living by this mucky old river, either, and it seems like things never get dry lately.
The Sleeping Night Page 4
