The Trial of Fallen Angels

by James Kimmel, Jr.

  “Really?” I said skeptically.

  “Yes,” Haissem insisted. “Would you like to see?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But how? The trial’s already over.”

  Haissem turned toward Luas. “Do you have any objection to me presenting the rest of Toby Bowles’s life?” he asked. “I think we have a few minutes before the next case begins.”

  “I think it’s unnecessary,” Luas replied, “but suit yourself.”

  “Very well,” Haissem said.

  Haissem used his golden key to reopen the doors to the Courtroom.We walked back in. Haissem retook his position at the center chair, raised his arms, and the Courtroom vanished.

  What I saw next was an entirely different side of Toby Bowles, one I would never have imagined existed from the side that Haissem had presented earlier. For example, when Toby’s train stopped at the Altoona rail yard, he changed into the Sunday clothes he had packed into his bag and hitchhiked up into the mountains to visit with his sister, Sheila, who lived in a beautiful private home for mentally disabled women on the shore of a small mountain lake. She lived at this home instead of the wretched public asylum to which she had been confined since a child, because every month of every year since the war, Toby Bowles paid the bills that allowed her to live there—even though he would never own a new car or a home as grand as Paul and Marion Hudson’s.

  Sometimes Toby and Sheila played together, walking through the rooms of the home on imaginary journeys she created. Toby would be her customer in a store selling only hugs, or the passenger on an airplane flying to the ends of rainbows. They would climb trees and relax in the clouds, or paddle across to the shore on the opposite side of the lake, which she thought was the most exotic place on earth. He was always patient with her, and Sheila would always take Toby up to her room before he left and show him the black-and-white photograph of their mama and papa with their forced smiles on the day she was born, holding their baby Sheila not too close because of the deformities in her face and limbs that are the clinical signs of Down syndrome.

  I learned that Toby suffered many injustices during his life as well. He was eleven years old when Sheila was born and that black-and-white photograph was taken. It was the last photograph they had of their father, Gerard Bowles, who came home from the hospital that day with his face dark with disgrace and loathing. He told Toby that his mother had done something very wrong and that God had punished her for it and he must leave and never return. Toby was actually relieved by his father’s departure at first because Gerard Bowles had been cruel to Toby and his mother, sometimes beating them with his belt while quoting passages from the Bible about sin and the purification of the soul.

  But Toby soon learned what the loss of a father meant when his mother wouldn’t stop crying and packed up their things to go live with his grandparents. This was when his new sister, Sheila, was taken away as a ward of the state. Lying in bed late at night, Toby worried for Sheila’s and his father’s safety. He prayed for their return and asked God to please forgive his mother for whatever she had done wrong to cause their family to split apart.

  In his teenage years, Toby’s unrequited longing and love for his father turned into hatred of the man who had never once written a letter to let them know he was still alive—or to ask if they were still alive. At his most violent moments, Toby fantasized about meeting his father on a street, introducing himself as his son, and pulling a revolver from a pocket and shooting him dead between the eyes. At other moments, when the possibilities of the future seemed expansive and bright, Toby imagined becoming a great success and one day being stopped on the street by his father as a beggar and shoving him aside without recognition or pity.

  There were few times in Toby Bowles’s life when he did not feel the pain of his father’s abandonment. But Sheila became the beneficiary of this broken relationship, receiving the love Toby would have given his father. She desperately needed such a champion because her mother blamed Sheila for all that had gone so terribly wrong. When the time came, Ester Bowles gladly handed Sheila over to the state as though she were handing over a carrier of typhus. Toby became as protective of Sheila as he was of his own daughters. He would have gladly gone to jail or bankrupted himself to win her escape from the asylum. He nearly did both in extricating her. All the money he raised by stealing and selling supplies on the black market during the war went to Sheila, not for his own use—not even to feed and clothe his own young children.

  The only other photograph in Sheila’s room, next to her bed, was taken by the director of the home on the day Toby brought Sheila a terrier puppy she named Jack that went to heaven a year later when it crossed the road. Arm in arm, Sheila and Toby stand grinning for the camera with the furry bundle—proud sister and wealthy businessman from the big city (for who else, she thought, could afford such an extravagant gift?).

  Sheila Bowles died in her sleep one year before Toby’s affair with Bonnie Campbell began. Toby buried her on a brutal February morning in a small cemetery near the house by the lake, not far from the tiny wooden cross with the word “Jack” carved into its surface by her hands. In a voice breaking with grief and love across the windswept knoll, Toby handed his sister over to her Creator, and he told her Creator, his family, and the few mourners from the home, that the earth would never again be graced by such innocence.

  “But God heard none of this!” I protested to Haissem, interrupting the presentation and momentarily restoring the Courtroom. “The moment of truth arrives for Toby Bowles, but his life unspools from bad to good instead of good to bad and he’s hurled into hell without appeal . . . without a trace? What kind of God would conduct such a trial?”

  “A just God,” Luas replied. “The God of the Flood. Haissem presented the case through Mr. Bowles’s own thoughts and actions. Could any of it be denied?”

  “No,” I conceded. “But only his sins were presented.”

  “Then only his sins were relevant,” Luas answered, irritated by my challenge. “It was the Judge who ended the presentation, Brek, not Haissem. Who are we to weigh the gravity of Toby Bowles’s offenses and determine what is just and unjust? I warned you earlier not to speculate.”

  “Wait, Luas,” Haissem interjected. “It’s appropriate that Brek is concerned. This shows that she takes her job seriously, which is exactly what we want. Understanding the mistakes and triumphs of Toby’s life may help her when she enters the Courtroom on behalf of her first client.” He turned to me. “There’s more to the story. Would you like to see the rest?”

  Luas wasn’t willing to let it drop. “My point wasn’t that the other parts of Toby’s life are irrelevant,” he said. “I only meant to say that justice is God’s, not ours, and that justice will be done.”

  “I understand, Luas,” Haissem said, curtly. “And my point is that justice has nothing to do with the trial of Toby Bowles at all.”

  Luas regarded Haissem suspiciously. “Then I respectfully disagree,” he said.

  Haissem ignored the comment and turned back to me. “Let me finish the presentation,” he said. “You haven’t even seen the most important part yet.”

  The Courtroom vanished again, and Haissem took us back to when Toby was a soldier in the war.

  To avoid a court-martial for stealing medical supplies in Saverne, Toby was forced to leave the Quartermaster’s Corps and “volunteer” for a frontline combat unit. Out of eight men initially assigned to his unit, all but one, Toby, were shot dead or drowned in the Elbe River in eastern Germany on the final push of the Allies to Berlin. Toby himself was hit in the leg while carrying his dying sergeant up the riverbank. He limped away, bleeding and stunned, and collapsed outside a small cabin in the woods near the burg of Kamenz.

  When Toby awakened the next day, he found himself inside this cabin, delirious from loss of blood and an infection and surrounded by the family who lived there: a father, a mother, a teenage daughter, and two younger sons. They bandaged his wounds and gave him food and water, and
he slept another twenty-four hours until he awoke again, this time to the sound of gunfire and shouting as the mother and children fled into a tunnel beneath the floorboards of the cabin and the father ran from the house with a shotgun.

  Toby was strong enough to hobble along after the man to help. He had left his rifle behind at the river and had only his sidearm. They came to the edge of a clearing where they could see a very large house through the misty afternoon rain. They kneeled behind some bushes and watched as a platoon of soldiers with red stars on their sleeves drove the inhabitants from the house and out into the driveway: an elderly man, two middle-aged women, a teenage girl, two younger boys, and two younger girls, all dressed in party clothes.

  The leader of the platoon barked a swift order in Russian, and the soldiers responded by quickly separating the old man and the young boys from the others and shooting them on the spot. When the women lunged toward the victims, they too were cut down in cold blood. Now only the teenage girl and the two younger girls remained standing. It all appeared to Toby as in a dream, through the fine mist, distorted by fever from the infection. Bodies dropping like shadows into darkness, continuing the savage nightmare that had begun for him earlier along the banks of the Elbe River. Suddenly, the man from the cabin, still kneeling beside Toby, jumped up and charged the platoon, firing his shotgun wildly into the air. The platoon returned the fire, killing him instantly and nearly killing Toby.

  Toby started crawling back through the brush toward the cabin but realized that he would almost certainly be seen and that he would be leading the soldiers to the man’s family. To save them and, perhaps, himself, he stood slowly with his hands over his head. He limped back out through the clearing, calling “American! American!” The grass was wet and the water soaked through his pants, stinging his wounds. All the while he was thinking not of himself but of Sheila and who would care for her now, and of his mother and how news of his death would plunge her deeper into despair, and of his father and how news of his death might haunt him with regret for the rest of his life.

  Two Russian soldiers came forward cautiously with their guns raised, but as they neared Toby and saw his uniform, they lowered their weapons. “Amerika! Amerika!” they cheered, embracing him. But one of the soldiers saw the cabin in the distance and began advancing toward it. Toby knew the only hope for the family was for him to convince the soldiers that he had already taken the family as his prisoners.

  He stumbled along behind the soldiers as fast as he could. When they reached the door, he slid past them, pulled out his sidearm, and motioned for them to stand back. One of the soldiers grabbed the pistol from Toby’s hand, but Toby pushed the door open, yanked up the floorboards, and ordered the frightened family out of the tunnel. They were white and shaking fear. They glared at Toby for having betrayed them after they had saved his life. Toby pointed at them and then himself and said to the soldiers: “My prisoners! My prisoners!” He grabbed the mother and slammed her violently against the wall, then the daughter and the two boys. He pointed to a medal on one of the Russians’ chests and then to his own chest, where a new medal would be placed if he brought them in.

  “My prisoners! My prisoners!” he said again.

  The Russians finally understood. They smiled, slapped him on the back, and returned his gun. Toby put the gun against the temple of the mother, completing the charade. The soldiers lowered their rifles and laughed.

  “Amerika! Amerika!” they said, shaking their heads as they walked away.

  When they had gone, Toby winked and grinned at his captives and, to their astonishment, put his gun in his holster and gave the mother a hug. When she realized that he had saved their lives, she broke down in tears.

  But the celebration ended quickly when the mother and her children realized that the father hadn’t returned. They wanted to go out searching for him, but Toby restrained them and, using crude sign language to warn them of the dangers, convinced them to stay.

  Late the next day, after Toby first checked to be sure the Russians had left the area, he led the mother back to the clearing to retrieve the body of her dead husband. Despite the language barrier, he attempted to comfort her as best he could, pointing out the corpses of the people from the house in an attempt to explain that her husband had been brave to confront the soldiers and try to save their lives. The mother finally understood, and only then did she begin to comprehend just what Toby himself had done to spare her family the same fate.

  Despite his wounds, Toby himself carried the lifeless body of the man back to the cabin and helped the boys dig a grave. The family’s anguish overwhelmed him, and at times he cried with them because he too had lost a father, just as they had. But Toby wept also out of a desperate and mournful jealousy of these children, who had at least known their father and could bury him, and would remember him as a father who had loved them enough to sacrifice his life for them and others.

  Although Toby couldn’t understand their strange prayers, when the sons placed yarmulkes upon their heads and nobody made the sign of the cross, he realized these were Jewish prayers, spoken in Hebrew. For the first time, he realized that the family had not been hiding from the Russians, but from the Germans. He made the sign of the cross anyway, whispering a prayer for the dead man and for his own father, and for the entire world as well. Upon seeing Toby cross himself, the daughter, hysterical with grief, began wailing, “Amina! Amina! Amina!” over and over. She removed a small golden cross of her own from her pocket and made the sign on her own chest. Horrified, the mother reached over to slap her, but suddenly a deep and profound comprehension flashed across her face. She bowed her head and began to weep even more violently. Toby did not understand what had happened between the mother and daughter but helped them fill the grave.

  The group began walking west toward Leipzig, where Toby hoped to find Allied troops. At Riesa, they came across an American infantry unit. With a small bribe, Toby was able to get the family all loaded onto a truck headed farther west into Allied territory. They rode together as far as Nuremberg, where they were taken to a field hospital and Toby finally received the medical care that saved his leg from amputation.

  At the moment of their parting at the hospital, the mother was embarrassed because she had no way to repay Toby’s generosity. But suddenly her eyes brightened. She whispered something to her daughter and made a gesture, asking a nurse nearby for a pen and a piece of paper. The nurse gave these to the mother, and she carefully copied Toby’s last name from his shirt, B-O-W-L-E-S, on the paper. Then she spoke to Toby in German, saying: “Mein erstes Enkelkind wird nach Ihnen benannt werden.” Toby obviously could not understand her, so she held the paper with his name on it against her daughter’s womb and raised her index finger in the air as if to say “first.” Then she held her arms as if she were cradling an infant and tucked the paper into her daughter’s hand. Toby finally understood what she was trying to say. He hugged them both good bye and wished them farewell.

  The hospital suddenly vanished and the Courtroom reappeared. I was astonished by what I had seen.

  Luas led Haissem and me out of the Courtroom. Standing in the corridor while Luas closed and locked the Courtroom doors, Haissem said, “So you see, Brek, Toby Bowles did lead a noble life. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

  “But what about the trial of his soul?” I said, alarmed by the gross injustice of the proceedings. “None of this evidence was presented during the trial. Obviously the verdict is unjust. Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “As I said before,” Haissem replied, “justice has nothing to do with it.”

  “Again, I disagree,” Luas interjected. “Justice has everything to do with it. Justice has been served. It is not our place to judge.”

  “But can’t we file a motion for a mistrial or take an appeal?” I pleaded. “We can’t just do nothing. If this verdict stands, the Final Judgment would be nothing but a sham. What kind of place is this? The accused isn’t present for his trial, which
takes place before a tribunal that nobody can see, attended by witnesses the accused can’t confront, while being represented by a lawyer who is also his prosecutor, and the entire thing is ended by the judge before a defense can even be presented? Surely there can’t be less due process in heaven than we have on earth.”

  Luas glared at me. “Never say anything like that again, Brek,” he warned me. “This is the way of Divine Justice, not man’s justice. We have no right to question it. God and justice are one.”

  Haissem touched my arm to calm me down. “I understand your concern, Brek,” he said, “but you can be assured that the trial of Toby Bowles’s soul was performed properly and that the correct outcome was reached. This will all become clearer to you after you’ve handled your first case. I must leave you now, but we will meet again. You’re in good hands with Luas, despite our occasional disagreements.”

  Haissem and Luas bowed politely toward each other, and then Haissem walked away. After he had gone, Luas said to me: “He’s the most senior presenter here, but I sometimes wonder whether his time has passed. The things he says sometimes are very dangerous.”

  12

  My one solace in Shemaya was visiting the places that had been dear to me when I was alive. They were all there, exact replicas of my house, my town, my world. The only things missing were the people; it was like walking through an empty movie studio lot. These were lonely visits, but I found this loneliness, at first, to be a comfort. I needed to get away from Luas, the Courtroom, and Nana. I needed to get away from other souls’ memories and other souls’ lives. So I went home. But I didn’t go there to grieve. I didn’t dare look in Sarah’s room or Bo’s closet. I knew I would break down. I just wanted to be happy again.

  So, trying to put my death behind me, the first thing I did when I got home was go shopping—my favorite pastime when I was alive. I decided that if God was going to strand me in this sadistic netherworld where everything reminded me of life’s lost pleasures, I might as well indulge in some of those pleasures and enjoy myself a little.