The Sleeping Night (13 page)

Shivering in her wet dress, Angel headed for Parker’s room. In the closet, she found a green flannel shirt and tugged it off the hanger for Isaiah. The jostled clothes sent out a concentrated essence of her father, so tangible it was as if he had stepped into the room with her—his face, long and dark beneath its wreath of black curls, his sharp blue eyes dancing with Irish humor.

She grasped the shirt to her breast, breathless, and bent nearly double at the sudden surge of pain. It was sorrow that grew up from her intestines, filling every cavity within her until it reached her throat, where it threatened to choke her.

The red-painted words on the porch floated in her imagination, and she felt weak, unable to meet the long fight she saw yawning ahead of her.

Then, as clearly as if a movie was rolling out on the wall, she saw his face again, laughing with Jordan High late into the night, without whiskey or gin, laughing with the pure delight of the other’s company. Angel remembered, too, the weight of grief her father had carried when Jordan was killed for trying to organize farm workers. Parker’s faith had been tested then. As hers was being tested now.

Parker’s faith had returned, by degrees. Jordan had died for his beliefs, Parker figured aloud to his daughter. If Parker didn’t keep that dream of a better world alive on Jordan’s behalf, there’d be no good at all in his dying. Angel had been too young to grasp the violence, much less the complex circumstances that had led to it, but she listened quietly because she knew he needed to talk to somebody.

Now Jordan’s son waited in the kitchen for one of Parker’s shirts. Angel looked at the emerald cloth, thought of the red words on the porch, of the loss of the children in her class. She closed her eyes.
I’m not that strong!

Almost as if he were standing there with her, Parker’s voice said, “Oh, but you are, girl. You are.”

Maybe she was. At the moment, she was also freezing. Shivering, she took the shirt back to the kitchen, where Isaiah was measuring coffee. “Figured I could be of some practical help here.”

“Thank you.” She draped the shirt on the chair. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

In her room, she quickly shed her wet dress and the ruined stockings and donned an ordinary shirt dress, and pulled a sweater over her arms. For a moment, she dithered over her shoes, finally deciding Isaiah wasn’t going to care one way or another. She pulled on a pair of socks and combed her hair, laughing when she saw the big loop over her forehead.

“You must have been about to split a gut laughing over my hair,” she said, coming back to the kitchen. The heady scent of coffee oozed into the damp air. She inhaled it and remembered her cake. “You know what else? I made the most beautiful cake I have ever made this morning. Been waiting to bake it for ages! I could have made it for myself and Paul, and maybe even you would have had some of it.” She sighed, leaning on the counter, crossing her arms. “That’ll be the last one they ever get, I can tell you that.”

He held a fist in the air. “You tell it, sister!”

Angel laughed. He had changed into her daddy’s shirt, and it showed off how much he’d filled out during the war. The jeweled green pointed up the deep reddish tones of his skin. “That shirt looks right nice on you, Isaiah. I didn’t realize you and my daddy were of a size at all.”

He looked away, fiddled with the pot percolating on the stove. “It hurt my heart when I missed him by such a short time.”

“He wanted to see you.” She took cups from the cupboard, put the sugar on the table and fished milk from the icebox. “A minute ago, I was remembering how he and your daddy used to laugh on the porch. Remember?” She propped one foot over the other. Rain came down in buckets, sheeting over the window so hard she could barely see the cottonwood. “Talk about a broken heart. His was busted good when your daddy died.”

“Mine, too.”

She straightened and took the coffee from the stove. “I always thought he sounded like God.”

“Like God?”

“When he laughed. I thought God laughed like that.” She thought,
and you sound just like him.

“You ever tell the church folks that?”

“Lord, no. Even at five I had some sense. I don’t imagine they ever thought of God laughing.”

“That ain’t exactly what I was thinking of.”

“No, I guess not.”

“He didn’t do you any favors, Angel. Your daddy.”

She pulled mugs out of the cupboard. “Maybe not. But maybe that’s how the world changes, Isaiah. One father, one child, at a time.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

There was a thickness in the kitchen that had nothing to do with the rain-wet air. She couldn’t seem to look directly in his face, only along the edges of his jaw and the tip of his ear; skim the hard square of his chin and follow the length of his arm to where flannel met the sleek rise of muscle on his forearm.

With an odd sense of panic, she realized how wrong it was for them to be standing together in a house with no one but them in it. He was not Isaiah the child, or Jordan the father, but Isaiah the man, grown to a sturdy height and girth. There was something alarming in that, and in the anger she sensed in him.

Carefully, he picked up his discarded shirt. “I really ought to get back.”

Crossing her arms tightly, she nodded, poked at a mark on the floor with one toe. “Well, thanks for checking on me.”

He nodded. “It’s just so—”

She looked up at him. “I’m not stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were.” He made no move to go quite yet. “I’ll bring you bring a book tomorrow. Poems.”

“I’d like that.”

He cleared his throat, looked out the window. “I don’t guess your daddy had a hat in there.”

“Only a dozen or so.” She headed for the back bedroom and rummaged up a wide brimmed hat.

Isaiah plunked it down. “That’ll do.”

“Keep it. The shirt, too. He’d be glad to know you had something of his, Isaiah. He loved you like you were his own son.”

“Thank you.” He tipped his hat and left through the back door.

After he’d gone,
Angel was left again with herself. With her disquiet and loneliness. With her exhaustion.

She had so wanted Isaiah to stay, and she was so relieved when he left. Sitting in the kitchen with the coffee he had made, she realized what she needed. Out of the drawer, she took sheets of plain light blue stationary and a pen, and sat back down at the table, leaving the back door open so she could hear the roar of the rain. She began to write.

May 16, 1946

Dear Isaiah,

It’s raining cats and dogs here, so much rain you can’t even see across the road. It’s a lonesome sound, but I love the smell.

I’ve missed your letters like crazy. They connected me to the bigger world out there, and I liked knowing that one of us got outta here, got to see London and Paris, even if it wasn’t the most ideal conditions. I loved having a bigger world to think about. The minute you stopped writing, it disappeared, and I felt like somebody turned the lights off, and there I was, sitting in the dark again.

And listen to me, feeling sorry for myself when so many people in the world have lost everything. I have a roof over my head (well, sorta, thanks to you) and my good health and .
 . . I’m having trouble thinking of more things to be thankful for. I had a Sunday school class that gave me a lot o joy, but that’s gone. No family left, to speak of.
Looks like this whole store business is not going to work out. So what do I have?

I’m smart, that’s one thing. Very smart. I don’t even think you really know that, but I am. And that’s something nobody can take from you. It’s time, I reckon, to put on my thinking cap and figure out what I can really do to get out of Gideon, and find some other life.

You really didn’t have to quit writing with no explanation or anything. That was mean, and I’m mad at you for it.

Your friend,

Angel

She folded it and put it in her drawer with other letters she hadn’t had the nerve to mail. Like the others, it drained away some of her tension, gave her space to breathe.

She stretched out on her bed and fell into a half-doze, thinking of the tree house she, Isaiah, and Solomon had built when she was six, the boys eight. They assembled it form spare lumber they hunted up along the road to town and at the edges of the river, using a hammer and nails Parker gave them. It took two weeks to put it together according to Isaiah’s standards, who insisted the boards had to meet smoothly, had to be braced in a certain way against the tree. When it was finished, it was sturdy and strong, a wide platform high in the spreading boughs of a live oak, deep in the pine forest. From the ground, it couldn’t be seen, even at the beginning. As time passed, the natural growth of leaves and branches completely obscured it.

They had played there year round, bringing paper bags full of food to picnic, and pillows and books and toys of all kinds. They pretended, at Angel’s insistence, that the tree house was a ship, sailing to far ports. Isaiah liked to pretend the forest was a tropical island, as in Robinson Crusoe, and imagined the pines around them to be banana trees full of monkeys, or palms bearing hard knobs of coconuts.

Solomon, deprived in his early life of books and their wonder, didn’t read the stories that inflamed both Angel and Isaiah, and so was relegated to a secondary position. He steered the pirate ship while Angel and Isaiah sighted magnificent coasts, peopling them with flowers and trees of every description. They challenged one another on the grandest descriptions of coasts they could find. When they played the island game, Angel was a princess gone to visit a colony recently acquired, and Isaiah was her trusted earl. Solomon was the poor knave marooned with the royalty.

As a smaller boy, and entirely too aware of his status as the seventh child of his unmarried mother, Solomon didn’t complain. He was simply thankful to have friends of any kind. By the age of ten, he had grown secure in his place—even poor white trash had something on the colored. He wouldn’t allow Isaiah to hold a position higher than his own, and Angel was relegated to fetching and carrying. It was a slow, subtle shift, but the games had lost their glory after that. Solomon was autocrat and king, boss and master. If Isaiah had work to do and she and Solomon were there alone, she ended up feeling like Cinderella under the supervision of the evil stepsisters. She quit going with him if Isaiah was busy.

When Angel reached eleven, her father no longer let her go with the thirteen-year-old boys into the woods. Nor could she go with Isaiah anywhere. They visited in the backyard or on the front porch, trading stories of books they had read.

One afternoon, just past her thirteenth birthday, she had gone to the tree house to read. It was August. Heat circled the woods and clung to her neck. Even her feet were hot. She was too lazy to read and it was too hot to sleep, so she lay on the boards of the tree house, utterly still, waiting for stray breezes. She stared at the green and gold leaves above her. The sky was pale, as if the color had been sucked out by the heat. Within her chest, her heart beat lazily, even the effort of pumping blood almost too much.

Below her, she heard the feet of an intruder on the tree. Thinking it Solomon and too lazy to move, she frowned.

Isaiah’s voice surprised her. “I thought you might be here.”

“I was here first,” she said without opening her eyes. “You know I can’t be here if y’all show up. And I’m too hot to go anywhere else.”

“Don’t go, then.” Cold drops of water fell on her face and she gasped, looking at him. A single ray of sun angled down to set his wet head ablaze. His hair in summer bleached to a glittery auburn around the temples, and this year it was even more pronounced. He was soaked. “I ain’t gonna tell, are you?”