The Sleeping Night (18 page)

No one was home, of course, when Isaiah got to his mama’s house. Maylene McCoy, Paul’s grandmother, would sti1l be working, too. Isaiah found the fishing poles in the closet and gave one to the boy. “You old enough to be quiet?”

“Yes, sir. But I ain’t allowed to go to the river, on account of the snakes.”

“Well, there’s snakes, all right, but we’ll be careful and I’ll explain to your grandmama it was time to teach you to get catfish.”

They walked through thick cottonwoods and shrubs, through clouds of lazy gnats, to a semi-circular clearing near a curve in the river. Isaiah sat on the hump of a boulder. “The trick to fishing for cat,” he said to Paul, “is knowing the river you’re fishing. This one here, it’s slow, but it’s got a lot of little pools. See where that big rock is out there? Next to it the water gets darker. That’s a big pool and those cats love it, because all kinds of things get swept up in there.”

His fishing line was weighted about ten inches above the hook, which Isaiah filled with soured cereal mash, automatically holding his nose. Paul coughed at the smell and Isaiah grinned. “Stink bait. Horrible stuff, ain’t it? But they like it.” He cast the line into the water, long practice landing it in the pool. “Here, boy, you take this. Hang on to it, now. You feel a tug, let me know.”

Paul nodded solemnly, big dark eyes full of the ominous responsibility of feeling a fish on the hook. His plump lips turned downward in concentration. It made Isaiah think of Parker, who’d been unable to turn a screwdriver, shovel dirt or ring up cash without some corresponding twitch of the lips. He thought of a day when he’d been no older than Paul, watching Parker dig earth with a small spade. Every time he’d poke the spade down, his lips would thrust out. When he paused to drop a seed in to the ground, his mouth would fall lax. Isaiah hadn’t quite dared to laugh out loud.

Just now, the thought of Parker made him furious, and he focused on fixing his own line, casting it into the water easily. They sat quietly in the long, gold sunlight that fell in bars through the trees, and listened to the swooshing and gurgling of the river. The sound reached under Isaiah’s skin and untied the knots gathered in his shoulders, and the spring sunshine eased away the other tensions in his body.

When he knew he could speak without scaring Paul even more, he said, “That man you saw in the store today.”

Paul looked up. “Yes, sir?”

“You stay away from him. Far away. He comes to the store again, you get out of there, fast as you can. Understand?”

Paul stared out at the water, chewing the inside of his lips “But what about Miss Angel?”

“Miss Angel is grown and big enough to take care of herself.” It was plain Paul didn’t buy it. Isaiah
tsked
. “I’ll see that Miss Angel can take care herself, okay? Now what you gonna do you see that man coming?”

“Run.” He smiled, showing his tiny white baby teeth. “Run all the way home.”

“That’s it.”

Quietly, Paul added, “Bad things happen when you’re disobedient.”

And even when you ain’t
, Isaiah thought.

After supper,
as the sky turned pale gray with twilight, Angel went to her garden. Ebenezer rode on her shoulder, his claws gentle against her flesh. When she turned the water on, he sailed from his perch to joyfully flitter and prance in the stream, little noises of satisfaction warbling from his cream-colored throat. He spread his wings. The blue of his feathers was deepened and intensified in the gray light.

Angel smiled. “You’re so pretty, Ebenezer.”

He cocked his head to level one black eye on her, then squawked once loudly in agreement. She laughed and moved the sprinkler back and forth over him to give the impression of rain, “The way you act, you’d think you’d been born a duck, silly bird.”

Ebenezer meant “stone of help,” and he was aptly named. Whenever she was tempted to think God was too far away to care much about little Angel Corey, all she had to do was remember Ebenezer and she knew it wasn’t true.

Almost four years ago now, a man in uniform had delivered and read a telegram to her. Solomon, barely six months into the war, had been killed when a Japanese torpedo hit his ship.
He died in the service of his country, ma’am.

Her first, bitter thought had been,
What did his country ever do to serve him?
Only the shock had kept her from saying it out loud.

The days following had been a dark blur. Nothing Parker, the preacher, or Georgia said helped at all, helped make any sense of that sweet, bright face being blown to bits. The only company Angel could bear was that of Mrs. Pierson, who offered no platitudes or false bits of patriotic cheer. She seemed to know how bitter and hateful Angel felt, and didn’t blame her for it.

One day about a week after the telegram, Angel had been sitting on the back steps at home. In spite of the beautiful day, her thoughts were grim, and she felt as if her nerves were wide open, as if she could hear the bombs exploding a half a world away in both directions, hear the screams of babies terrified by the noise, feel the dying agony of soldiers, like Solomon, who’d had their whole lives ahead of them.

A screech sounded from the wild grass near the river , eerily echoing her thoughts. Heart pounding, Angel went to investigate. At the foot of a tall cottonwood, cushioned by a pile of leaves, was a baby blue jay. His feathers weren’t quite in, and there was a gray fluff around his neck, but the black bands had come in on his bright blue tail and wings.

“Oh, you’re a beauty,” Angel said. She glanced around apprehensively. Any minute now, some parent would come screeching out of the sky to dive-bomb her head—she’d had that experience when she’d happened upon some baby jays just learning to fly.

This one was a tad younger, she thought. And mad. He looked directly at Angel and shrieked bloody murder. “Are you hungry, little one?” She glanced around for something to feed it and saw a shiny beetle crawling out of the leaves. Using a twig to pick it up, she tossed it to the baby bird. He pounced greedily, his beak crunching the beetle’s back. Angel backed away, still wary about the mother jay, “That’ll keep you until she finds you’re missing,” Angel said. She went back to her post on the steps. Blue jays had a special significance to her, or at least their feathers did. Parker said her need to find talismans was the Irish in her. Maybe. Whatever it was, she had a huge collection of blue jay feathers in a jar, tokens of answered prayers.

On that evening four years ago, she had waited for a mother bird to claim her lost offspring, hearing the tiny bird screech and call and beg for assistance. When full dark had fallen, Angel slipped on her gardening gloves and crossed the yard. “Guess your mama is lost,” she said to the baby jay and picked him up. He trembled in her palms, but he stopped squawking. She took him inside to show Parker and they fed him some bacon. It was obvious one wing was damaged, but Angel had no doubt that he would live.

That now-grown bird whistled in merry greeting at a figure on the road, indistinct in the twilight. But Angel didn’t need to see his face to know it was Isaiah, partly because Ebenezer wasn’t friendly with that many humans, but mostly because she recognized his rolling, graceful walk.

She looked back at her garden, her mouth setting. He joined her without a word, standing a few feet away. Angel moved the sprinkler slowly, back and forth, back and forth. Neither of them said a word for long moments.

Finally Angel said, “If you came to yell at me some more, you can just turn around and go home.”

“I didn’t come to yell at you,” There was apology in his tone, and from the corner of her eye, she saw him shift. “Came to make sure you’re all right.”

“You know,” she said, “this has always been my favorite time of day. I love to come out here and water and weed. You ever notice how bright the colors are at evenin’-time? Makes me feel calm.”

“Angel,” he said, “I’m sorry about this afternoon. “

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

“Paul’s worried you might be in trouble.”

“I wish he hadn’t been here. Maybe I ought to tell Maylene he should stay somewhere else.”

“No. He loves to be here and you like having him. Somewhere else it might not be so good.” His voice deepened. “I told him if he sees Edwin, he’s supposed to run home right away.”

Angel nodded. She gave one last swoop of water to the garden, then turned around and walked over to the pump to turn it off and shook drops of water from her hand. “Edwin Walker has chased me since I was thirteen years old. I’m not being vain—he only wants me because I never liked him, but there’s something weird about his eyes, especially since he came back .
 . .”

“I know.”

Even though she was angry with him, his presence gave her a sense of safety. She had never seen a man as strong—long muscles ran down his arms and over his chest under the light cotton shirt he wore. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him in combat, with a gun in his hand. But she also knew he hadn’t liked it, the business of killing. “You know, Isaiah, I don’t have a lot allies. I’m stuck and I’m lost and I really don’t need you to be so .
 . . mean to me. Do you understand? I can’t take it.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I just didn’t .
 . . it was such a bad situation . . .” He halted.
Met her gaze. “I’m sorry. I should’ve at least made sure he didn’t hurt you. Bad, I mean.”

A tinge of humiliation burned along her jaw, up to her ears as she thought of the bruises. “I’m fine.”

“After a fashion.”

She laughed quietly. “After a fashion,” she agreed, and let herself look up at him. They stood several feet apart. Ebenezer whistled between them on the ground as he pecked at worms soaked out of the wet earth. Isaiah’s eyes were grave and kind and steady, and there was suddenly between them a sense of knowing and history; all the Isaiahs she’d known melded into this one man, with his elegant bearing and rich laugh and troubled heart.

He shifted abruptly. “I brought you something.” His voice was gruff. “Let’s go inside.”

“All right. I made some coffee just a little bit ago,” she said, and led the way to the back door. “You’re welcome to some.”

As they entered the kitchen, he said, “I saw Edwin on the road and it scared me, thinking of you in here alone, and no telling what he’ll do, and then I came in here and you had that whole tea party going, and I just wanted to smash something. Didn’t really mean for it to be you.”

She listened and nodded. “Apology accepted.”

He reached under his shirt in the back and brought out a revolver. He put it on the table, “You know how to use this?”

She paused in the act of pouring a mugful of coffee. “A gun?”

“I believe I could use a cup myself,” he said.

Automatically, she took a mug off a hook and filled it for him. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.” She carried the cups to the table and put them down. “They look so evil.”

“No good for anything except killing,” he agreed. “But I ain’t gonna have a four-year-old out here trying to defend you. You gonna learn to do that yourself.”

She stared at the gun for a long moment, then recognized the truth in his words. “All right. What do I do?”

“First, you always figure a gun is loaded.” He flipped open the chamber and took the bullets out, piling them carefully on the oilcloth, then held the gun out toward her. “Go on. Get the feel of it.

It was a lot heavier than it looked, and it took both hands to hold it steady, but once she had it straight, she squared her shoulders. Isaiah showed her the mechanics, how to line up a shot, how to fire. His arm brushed her shoulder, his chest was warm behind her, and she knew she would think about it later. For now, she listened, practiced with the empty gun, tried to get the feeling of it.

“When there’s bullets in there, it’ll kick,” he said, “and there’s no way to show you how to make up for that. You’ll just have to practice. Take it outside and use a tin can or something when you got time.”

“All right. Show me how to put the bullets in.”

He loaded the first, then let her do the rest. “Go right now and put it someplace safe, high enough it’s out of reach of Paul. “

She picked it up, testing the heft, and looked at him dead on. “I will use it, Isaiah, if I have to. God helps those who help themselves.”

There was tenderness in his eyes as he looked at her, and she knew that the bruises were visible here, in this light.