The Sleeping Night

by Samuel, Barbara

  Isaiah grinned, his dimple flashing. “That’s it, huh?” He kissed the baby’s smooth brown cheek. “Just hungry, ain’t you? These women don’t know a man’s got to have his food.”

  The baby gurgled seriously in answer. With one tiny hand, he reached out to touch Isaiah’s mouth. Isaiah pretended to gulp it.

  The baby laughed.

  “C’mon,” Isaiah rumbled in a mock whisper, “let’s go outside and I’ll tell you some more things about being a man.”

  As they left the kitchen, Geraldine shook her head. He needed a wife, and a half dozen children making a ton of noise. A family would ease the restlessness that sent him pacing like a housecat in the evenings.

  But he wasn’t going to take a wife. Wouldn’t even let a woman close. She thought, after the long years away, years in which adulthood had claimed him and women found him and taught him the power of his natural way with them, he would understand the uselessness of loving Angel Corey.

  Pure waste of a good father and husband. Geraldine could look out the door and pick out six women for him right now, good women. Good looking women to give him good looking children.

  But there he was, stuck on some foolishness. He thought she didn’t know that he’d written to Angel all through the war, that he wasn’t still crazy for her after all these years. It made her stomach burn.

  She cut the last strawberry in the pile with a sigh. Damn Parker Corey, anyhow. She wanted to damn Angel, too, but had no heart for it. God had laid his hand upon that child from the beginning, had given her some special task.

  The worrying burn worked into her chest. Not for her to know God’s way. It was for her to accept it in all its wisdom. What made her fret was the simple truth that God sometimes didn’t see things the way folks did. His reward had nothing to do with life on the planet He had created, beyond doing his work, but everything to do with the right work that had to be done.

  She could pray for mercy, she thought, and did. But she couldn’t stop herself from adding a prayer that Isaiah would never see what Geraldine saw in Angel’s clear green eyes, something even Angel herself had probably hidden and no longer knew.

  Please, Lord.

  — 21 —

  V-Mail

  February 6, 1944

  Dear Isaiah,

  I just read your letter about your trip to the castle, and I loved it! Please, please send me more of your travelogues! You have such a good eye for detail and you may not realize it, but your writing is getting better and better. It makes me want to work harder on writing good letters back.

  Mainly, I ache to see what you’re seeing. I know it’s not all roses and we’re at war and all of that, but while you’re walking around that ruined castle with a new friend, I’m scrubbing the floors or stocking the shelves or figuring out the new ration books and how to make the whole thing work out properly. Not exactly the most exciting thing in the world.

  I can hear that you’re changing with all these things you’re seeing and thinking about. You’re getting an “education abroad,” aren’t you? After you told me about the Romans in Britain, I went and looked it up at the library, and learned all kinds of new things! There are ruins of villas all through the country, and they built many of the original roads. Amazing to think about, isn’t it? Romans in togas and sandals building villas in England, so long ago.

  V-Mail #2

  (you’re so clever—I kept thinking I had to limit myself to one page. I’m still worried it might get lost, but today, I’m all fired up and don’t want to stop writing yet)

  Sometimes, I wish I had a time machine, like HG Wells, and I could jump in it and go visit whatever time I wanted. I’d go to the time of that castle (I believe it was King Edward the first who built those castles, but don’t quote me) and see what it looked like when it was new. I’d love to hear it and smell it and taste it. Eat roast pig at a big table and drink mead, like Guinevere. Then I’d hop back in it and go to the time of Ancient Egypt and watch them build the pyramids. Maybe I’d go to England at the time of the Romans.

  I’m reading science fiction lately. You never liked it, but I do. It’s fun. A person has to get adventures somehow! (wink!)

  Take care, and tell Mrs. Wentworth I’m finishing up a long letter to her, too. (She thinks Texas is interesting! I also think she might imagine that I’m colored. Imagine that. haha.)

  Your friend,

  Angel

  V-Mail

  February 22, 1944

  Dear Angel,

  If I had a time machine, I would go back to being six years old and reading books on the porch of the store with one father or the other rocking us to sleep. Or maybe to that one day in the tree house, remember? Or . . .

  [Never mailed]

  February 20, 1944

  Dear Angel,

  I’m so glad you enjoyed the tour around the castle. Wish I could give you another one, but we’ve been [CENSORED]. So tired I can’t hardly stand up some nights, but the boys in the RAF are making some real headway. Maybe this war will be over before much longer.

  Though not, of course, before the big fight, whatever it is, whenever it comes. You can feel the anticipation in the air, the sense of planning, but all I can figure is [CENSORED] and [CENSORED]. Not a lot I can say, anyhow, because they’re getting so careful about every little thing we say. I reckon I understand it.

  If I had a time machine, I would go to a Sunday morning breakfast my mama made, and I’d eat 12 eggs, a pound of ham, fried up in grease, and bacon, too, and then 16 biscuits with fresh cold butter and apple butter left kinda chunky with a bunch of cinnamon. Then I’d wash it all down with a gallon of milk and 7 cups of coffee, every last one with 3 spoons of sugar. Then I’d lay down on the floor and die happy.

  You should write me a story about one o’ your cakes.

  Your friend,

  Isaiah

  V-Mail

  March 6, 1944

  Dear Isaiah, Pls. disregard my cake story, which I mailed regular, not V-Mail. I got carried away. Angel

  V-Mail

  March 17, 1944

  Dear Angel,

  You got me so curious now! Can’t wait for the cake story.

  Working hard here. Rumors afoot.

  Isaiah

  March 3, 1944

  Dear Isaiah,

  A Cake Story

  First, I have to put on an apron. It’s my favorite, white with a bib to keep my top from getting all splattered, and little cherries embroidered all over it. I tie it and turn on the radio because I like to dance along as I measure things. I’m flipping through my best recipes, trying to decide what you’d like best. I consider chocolate, but as I recall, you’re a pineapple upside down cake man, so that’s the recipe I pull out. They just had some fresh pineapples at the market downtown, and I picked up a beauty—I can smell it right now, all sweet and juicy. When I slice off the outside, juice pools on the counter, and I’ve just got to have a little slice to test it, so I cut off a nice juicy sliver, all yellow and glistening, and pop it in my mouth, and it’s like an explosion of sunshine, all over my tongue and down my throat. It’s going to make a very good cake. I slice off rounds of it and put them in the bottom of a big cast iron skillet. I sprinkle it with brown sugar, which sticks to my fingers, and I lick that off, too, and the flavor of brown sugar with slightly tart pineapple makes the saliva glands in my mouth pinch just a tiny bit. Over the sugar and fruit goes a layer of butter. It’s my special trick that butter—I slice it real, real thin and lay it down like leaves over the sugar.

  Then I make the cake, which is a simple thing, just flour and sugar and eggs and baking powder and a tiny bit of vanilla all blending together to make a golden batter. I beat into a nice airy froth, and then pour it over the pineapple, and pop it in the oven. Of course, then I have to lick the spoon, which has sweet, sloppy batter all over it. Some gets on my chin, but I don’t care. It’s delicious. If you were here, I’d let you have the bowl, but since you’re not, I scoop the batter out
with the spoon until there’s nothing left.

  Meanwhile, that cake is baking, filling the air with that sugar scent, and I know the pineapple is getting all caramelized, the juice from the pineapple mixing with the sugar and the butter to make a hard, sweet crust. When the cake is baked, I take it out and let it cool just a little bit, then I put a plate on top of the pan, and flip it. This takes some doing, because that pan is pretty heavy, and I want it to land on the plate just right. So I wrap the handle up with a dishtowel and pick it up and turn it over and feel the cake settle. This is the test. Ever so easy, I pull on the pan, and there, on that crystal plate, is the pineapple upside down cake. I slice a piece for you, a big ole piece, with rings of pineapple soaking into the cake, and dark brown sugar caramelized on the edges, and the smell of heaven in every single molecule.

  Enjoy it.

  Angel

  April 14

  Dear Angel,

  Your letter took a long time, but it was worth the wait.

  I’m taking that plate from you, and for one long, long minute, I’m just looking at it, smelling it. My mouth is watering, but the anticipation is worth it. The smell is like a summer afternoon, and I can almost hear cicadas whirring in the branches, feel the humidity making my skin sticky. It’s a beauty, this cake. The pineapple is juicy, and the cake has those tiny, tiny holes in it that means it’s gonna be light and heavy all at once. I break off a piece of the sugar and the taste fills up my whole mouth, and I make myself take one small, small bite—cake and pineapple and sugar and summer and Texas and home—and put it in my mouth and close my eyes. The pineapple is still kinda hot against the roof of my mouth, and the cake is falling apart against my tongue, and then they all blend together sugarfruitflourheatbutter. And then, I just can’t help myself—I gobble it down, that whole piece, and then another, and another, until the whole cake is gone and I’m full. For once. For now.

  Mighty good cake. I knew it would be, from you.

  Thank you very much, my friend.

  Isaiah

  — 22 —

  In the warm Texas evening, Angel read a novel, fanning herself lazily with a pasteboard fan somebody had left on the counter a few days before. The mosquitoes had gnawed her ankles so bad outside she’d had to move into the store, to sit by the big front window where a breeze might catch her if she was lucky.

  It was a Heyer, a good romance, set in Regency England, comedy of manners, with clever women and droll men. She’d been reading Forever Amber, but it made her restless and hungry and there was just no point, was there? Reading Heyer made her laugh.

  She paused to light a cigarette, blew the smoke through the screen and watched it float in a pale blue stream into the darkness beyond her little pool of orange light.

  A vague, dreamy restlessness stirred in her middle, the same restlessness that had dogged her through her life. If not for books, she might have been perfectly happy with her life but, early on, she’d been infected by stories. At eight, reading about Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan, she’d wanted to be a dancer, had spun in circles around the kitchen floor while her daddy cooked supper, dreaming she was on stage in filmy costumes, admired by all.

  Then it had been Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson. By twelve, she had grown drunk on Shakespeare and King Arthur and Dickens, reading constantly, voraciously, insatiably, and English history captured her. England, with its moors and castles and fogs, its cliffs and seasides and chivalry; its customs and words and spirit. Never had she been more jealous of a human being as when Isaiah had been stationed there.

  His letters, filled with details of the faraway, had given her new things to think about, dream about. She read The Berlin Diaries and all the war news in the magazines, and grieved for losing a world she would never see.

  Lazily she smoked, her bare feet propped up on the ledge, and thought of Gudren, with her strange, huge eyes, who’d seen all of Europe, but didn’t speak of it. Isaiah either. It sometimes made her tremble with longing, to know what they wouldn’t say, to know what they couldn’t share. She wanted to ask Gudren about Europe before the war, about the old world before it had been broken, irretrievably. Had she ever gone to a ball, worn a long satin gown and long white gloves’? Her father, from what Angel could gather, had been an important man. Surely there had to have been balls?

  It was self-centered of her to think that way, she knew that, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

  Faintly, music poured down the river from the juke joint across the way. It was jazzy and upbeat and she imagined a crowded dance all with people laughing and drinking whiskey and dancing until they sweated. She thought of London and distant island paradises and Africa and New York City, and she was suddenly so sharply aware of all the things she would never see or know that she wanted to weep.

  Considering everything that happened, what point was there in ballets or swimming faraway seas or seeing Big Ben with her own eyes? She felt vaguely ashamed at her longings, but it seemed there was, somehow, a point. A point to afternoon tea with cucumber sandwiches and white lawn curtains and waltzes, even if she would personally never see any of them.

  She took a last sip of the cigarette and stubbed it out, folding her hands across her belly.

  Why not?

  The thought was unexpectedly mature, and she recognized that it had been brewing there in her mind for who knows how long. She would die if she had to stay in Gideon. Die of boredom and longing.

  Perhaps she would never attend a ball or sit in a gondola in Venice. But there was larger world outside Gideon that she could explore if she had courage enough. In the movie magazines, there was always a story of some plucky young actress who’d arrived in Hollywood penniless and friendless to make her way to stardom.

  Angel had no interest in Hollywood, but surely there was somewhere she could go, a place she would be happy. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be able to hang onto the store, and that had only been a fleeting loyalty to her father, born from grief. She wanted to honor his memory, but it was one thing for her father to buck the system. Quite another for Angel to do it.

  In a sudden flash of inspiration, she realized there might be another buyer—that if she found the right person to take the store, there would be no betrayal of her father. Then she could leave.

  But go where? And do what?

  She jumped up and paced up and down the aisle between hair supplies and Big Chief tablets. Go anywhere, she thought. Do anything. Well, anything within reason. She could work in stores, be a waitress, clean houses. Did it matter, as long as it wasn’t in Gideon, Texas?

  Filled with a ripe sense of excitement, went to stand outside in the humid night, and leaned on the porch post, idly rubbing a mosquito bite with one foot. Could she do it?

  It scared her to think of it. Going by herself out of Texas, when she’d only been as far as Dallas only once in her life? Where would she go, logically? California? New York? New York was closer to Europe, but maybe there were still too many refugees. Maybe she’d starve in New York.

  But maybe she wouldn’t.

  A crunch of footsteps on the road caught her attention and she found herself poised, nervous, afraid to see Edwin Walker emerging from the deep blackness. It was the heavy gait of a man; no woman would be out so close to ten on the road alone.

  Stubbornly, she stayed where she was.

  When Isaiah’s face emerged from the gloom, a wash of relief flooded through her. She smiled as she felt it settle in her knees, thinking this was the second time she had anticipated Edwin and found Isaiah instead. Funny that the one who should scare her made her feel secure and vice versa.

  “Hey, stranger,” she said.

  “Hey.” He paused at the foot of the steps.

  “Miz Pierson must be keeping you pretty busy.”

  He nodded, his face impassive as he looked off down the road toward something unseeable. “You shouldn’t be out here all alone, Angel.”

  “I live here,” she said. “I’m bored. A
nd it’s hot. I don’t remember a spring as hot as this in a long time.”

  “And there’s folks in this town who are not taking lightly you keeping this store. You’re also a woman alone.”

  “All true,” she said with a nod, then took in a long deep breath through her nose and let it out in a sigh. “Bet you got used to cooler weather while you were away.”

  “I liked the summers all right,” he said, and propped one leg comfortably on the stair. “Winters were something else again.”

  “I remember you wrote about the snow,” she said. That had been the last letter but one, the long, long letter about the snow and the cold and the forest as they pressed into Germany.

  “It always looked so pretty in pictures.” He shook his head ruefully. “Had no idea what it would feel like, not really.”

  “Is it pretty, though, anyway?” Somehow, tonight, he was different, not so hard, more like the Isaiah in his letters than the man who’d come back. Still, she tried to keep her voice calm, empty of the hunger she had to just talk with someone for a little while.