The Sleeping Night (26 page)

He gave her a nod. “You’re welcome.” It took everything he had to climb in to the truck and pull out of the driveway, and even after he had returned the vehicle to Harold, and went home to eat supper with his mama, the picture of Angel standing alone in her yard stuck with him.

V-Mail

December 1944 (don’t know the exact date anymore)

Somewhere in France

Dear Parker,

I been thinking so much about you and my own daddy while I’m out here in France. I think about y’all in the trenches. Must have been terrible, but I reckon I’m starting to understand what y’all saw here, too. How it changed you. As we move through the villages, the people bring us food and hard cider and call out welcome. L’Americanz! L’Americanz! Never felt so welcome
in my life
. A white man came right up to me and hugged me like I was his own child, kissed my cheeks, pushed a bottle in my hand. Vive L’American!

Never knew how much Jim Crow I was still carrying around until I stood straight up under those kisses. I reckon you might know what I mean. Got my daddy killed, I guess, knowing what I’m finding out, but as long as I stay out of Texas, I’ll be all right.

One more thing. I been busted down to private again (and you know that hurt my heart, hard as I been working) but for a good cause—I’m infantry, now, combat ready. Guess they found out in Italy a black man could be a good solider. Orders came down from Eisenhower himself. No sense in telling the womenfolk, of course. Just between you and me. You take care now,

Isaiah High

V-Mail

December 1944

Dear Angel,

I got your package, you sweet thing, and all the men in the squad are now thinking you are the queen of the world. You just don’t KNOW how bad we need socks. You see I’m writing with this fine fountain pen. Fine, fine Christmas present. Thank you.

Can’t even
tell
you how cold it is. The Jerrys sure know how to deal with all this weather, but I ain’t got the hang of it at all. I’m mainly thinking of days so hot the air shimmers. Remember how it used to be in the tree house sometimes? Like if you stepped out you could walk on that shimmer, way up in the middle of the treetops.

Different kind of forest here. Big pines and spruce, full of snow. If it wasn’t for what we’re doing, it’d be like a fairy tale. I can see Hansel and Gretel holding hands, walking to Grandma’s house.

Now the Christmas rush is over, men here could use any number of things. Soluble coffee, if you can get hold of any, and whatever food you can send and more socks and mittens and salted peanuts. Not if it causes any hardship, of course.

Just heard had a letter from a friend in England who said Mrs. Wentworth got killed by a V-2 last August. Got through so many raids she never blinked an eye about sirens, and she gets it from one of those robot monsters. Don’t seem fair. I sure will miss her.

Thanks for all the things you sent her, Angel. She was real good to me.

Your friend,

Isaiah

V-Mail

December (still) 1944,

Gotta be getting close to Christmas. Wish I could be in Texas eating my mama’s roast turkey and macaroni and cheese, instead of freezing out here with cold toes. (No frostbite, tho—socks dry out pretty good if I take them off and put ’em next to me at night.)

Hell, Angel. This is hell. I wish everybody could just see one time what happens when a man steps on a mine.

Too cold to do this now.

(Next morning)

It’s morning now. Real early. Sky like cotton balls, falling right down on top of the trees. Cold, but not so bad as yesterday. It’s snowing. Fella from New York say that’s why it’s warmer. Has to be warmer for snow. Ain’t that something.

Wish I could tell you more about what I been seeing, thinking, but the censors will just cut it out, so I’ll save it up for when I get home. I will tell you the battalion is integrated now, and hasn’t been near as much fuss over it as you might imagine. How about that?

You’d like the snow. It slips down from nowhere, from that big, heavy sky, so quiet, like a blanket. And it’s true about all the snow flakes being different. I think sometimes they’re like people, so different, even though there’s so many.

So quiet right now. Just the snow and me and this piece of paper. I woke up cuz there was a rock in my shoulder. Always a rock somewhere, no matter how you try to brush the ground smooth before you go to sleep. Think you’d get used to it, but you don’t. Body keeps remembering how it used to be to sleep in a soft place.

I just ate my last praline. Sucked on it till there was nothing left but sticky fingers, and then I cleaned them up, too. Been eating just one every now and again. Kept them in my shirt pocket, shared a few with some people I know—what few are left, anyway. Faces change so fast you don’t know who’s gonna be there the next day. Keep wondering how God picks which one to take when there’s so many of us out here, all jumbled up like a pile of firewood. How can somebody right beside you .
 . .

Never mind. I liked the candy, girl. Don’t know how you got the sugar to make pralines, but you were a hero the day they came. How’s your daddy? Still poorly? You tell him Isaiah said he gotta get well. I got a few words to say to him. Him and his big ideas.

Naw, you just tell him I miss him, allright. You, too. Keep up them prayers. We need all we can get.

Love,

Isaiah

After dinner, Isaiah went outside to smoke, looking across the river. Crickets whistled in the undergrowth and a haze of gnats hung near a trumpet vine. Briefly, he considered getting his pole and going fishing, then rejected the idea. Too restless.

All day long, a ghost of Angel had been clinging to his body, an echo of her against him this morning, crying her eyes out. His heart had nearly broken when he’d come upon her, looking poor and broken in her old, thin robe, with sleep-mussed hair. Even then, when she was as ordinary as a glass of milk, she did something to him, just like she always had, as long as he could remember. In that minute, he just hadn’t cared anymore about anything except letting her know that as long as he walked the earth, she had a friend.

In the darkness, he smoked and listened to the river swishing against the bank, and thought of her arms around his neck, slim and strong as rope. She’d clung so hard, so tight, that he bent his head and buried his face against her warm neck and sat down and rocked her. He should have done it sooner.

Because that very minute, with Angel curled up in his arms, his own sense of being constantly, eternally, forever solitary had evaporated. Angel had always been the only one. The only other human he could be himself with, the only person he couldn’t stand to think of living forever without—although he had really tried, once upon a time, when Solomon had married her. He thought he’d written her to offer condolences.

An excuse, he saw now. He’d just wanted to hear from her, be in touch with her, remember that there was one person who knew him. He wanted to hear her voice in the words she put on the paper, wanted to think about her pretty laugh and sharp mind. Through the war, her letters sustained him.

Best friend. That’s what he’d told her last night. You couldn’t hate your best friend. And she was that, all right, his best friend in the world. But a man didn’t want to do things to a friend that holding her for five minutes this morning had brought to his mind. A man didn’t think about slipping the old, tired robe from the body of his friend, think of touching the fresh, supple skin below. A man didn’t ache all day with hunger for a friend.

And God help him, he ached. No matter how busy he’d kept himself, no matter how often he made himself think of something else—songs or war or books—the ghost of her body clung to him.

A gunshot sounded in the still air. He leapt to attention. Another. It came from the direction of the Corey store, and for an instant, Isaiah was frozen in horror. Then came another shot, and the faint ping of metal. He smiled to himself. She was practicing. “Good girl,” he said aloud and went inside to find a cache of bullets. He slipped them in his pocket and headed through the kitchen.

His mama called out in a tired voice from her bedroom, “Isaiah?”

“Yeah, Mama.”

“You going somewhere?”

“Just down to the juke joint for a minute.”

“Isaiah High.”

He went to the doorway of her room. She was stretched out on her bed, a blue chenille spread beneath her, feet bare, ankles swollen. She looked tired. “Just gonna holler at Sam Reed,” he lied. “Won’t be but a minute.”

She scowled. “What you need to do is come back to church with me. Everybody’s been asking.”

He drew the curtains over her window, picked up a pillow that had fallen on the floor. “Maybe one of these Sundays.” He kissed her head. “You need anything?”

She waved a hand. “I’m fine, son. Don’t you get in any trouble out there.”

He grinned to himself. He’d been halfway around the world, waded across a hundred battlefields with bullets and mortar flying around his head, and his mama still wanted to warn him about the players down at the juke joint. “I’ll be all right.” He paused a moment more, feeling guilty. He’d find her some sweets tomorrow.

Walking over the bridge and down the road to the store, he called himself nine kinds of fool, but the minute he laid eyes on Angel, that nasty voice halted. She was in back of the store, still wearing the dress she had worn to town that morning. It was blue-bonnet blue, with little sprigs of white flowers all over it, buttons up the front and a lacey white collar. Her feet were bare. In her hand was the gun, which she aimed at a can set up on a tree stump near the river. As he gained the yard, she straightened, held up her arm and fired. The bullet hit its mark.

“Getting pretty good with that thing,” Isaiah called. Angel glanced over her shoulder as she headed for the stump.

She waved, then picked up the can, put it back on the stump and walked back to Isaiah. “What brings you out tonight?”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of bullets. “I heard you,” he said. “Figured you’d be needing some more ammunition.”

“Just in time.” She aimed and fired. This time she missed. “Obviously I need more practice.”

“Can you load it?”

She gave him an impish grin and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Yes, sir, I can.” To illustrate, she flipped open the chamber and, taking bullets from the cradle of his palm, demonstrated how very efficiently she could load the gun.

It gave him a strange feeling to watch her fine-boned fingers handle the bullets and revolver with such confidence. When the gun was reloaded, she took aim and fired once more, her attention completely focused, her hand steady. She hit the can square center—and laughed with throaty delight.

He stood there in the gathering dusk, holding bullets as Angel practiced. She made him think of the women he’d seen in France, young women from little villages with rifles and ammunition belts wrapped around their sweaters, jaunty smiles on their mouths. They were good soldiers, quick and intuitive. A lot of them had died.

“Do you have a cigarette with you, Isaiah? I left mine inside.”

“You’re doing real good, Angel,” he said, reaching in the pocket of his shirt for the pack of Chesterfields. She took the cigarette and bent her head to the match he struck for her before she answered.

“I got good reason.” She inhaled. “I told him I’d kill him if he came near me again. When I got home I decided I oughta be able to back it up.”

“It’s not the same, firing a gun and killing a man, Angel—no matter how much you hate him.”

She looked at him steadily. “It beats the alternatives, though, doesn’t it?

He lifted his eyebrows in agreement. She practiced some more, cigarette dangling in her left hand while she fired with her right. Something about her was changing. Her step was firmer as she strode over the grass to prop up another can, and her arm swung comfortably at her side. She’d always been much stronger than her frail appearance would have led him to expect, and there was a grit about her that he forgot sometimes, but this change went deeper. The sweetness of attitude that made her seem so innocent was receding, replaced by something solid and knowing.

Isaiah liked it. He sat on the steps and watched her firing and smoked, grinning to himself.

“You better not be laughing at me, Isaiah High,” she said as she returned.

“No, baby, I’m not laughing. I’m proud of you,”

For an instant, a flash of heat showed in her eyes and she glanced away, tossing her cigarette on the ground. With a glance at the rising dark, she said, “This’ll be my last round, I guess.”

He crossed his arms on his chest, the ache back where it had lived all day. He waited in silence as she emptied the chamber, waited as she pivoted and met his eyes. He waited out the powerful urge to touch her, run his fingers over her ears and the dip of her waist. It buzzed in his ears.

She looked away before he did and he saw her swallow.

Flustered, he took the cigarettes out of his pocket, but couldn’t get hold of one with the shells in his hand. “Hold these things, Angel,” he said gruffly. She crossed over to him and held out her hand. Darkness surrounded them. Crickets whirred in the grass.

As he gave her the bullets, he found himself trembling— trembling!—like he was ten and scared to walk past Edwin and his bullies in town. Then he tried to shake a cigarette from the pack, and dropped it on the ground, and both of them, probably aiming to dispel the tension, bent to retrieve it at the same instant. His forehead slammed her cheek, hard enough to knock her sideways, hard enough his hand flew up to the spot on his head automatically. At the same instant, they both made the same, swallowed noise of pain.

“Angel, girl, I’m so sorry,” he said, reaching out for her arm to steady her. “You all right?”

“I’m fine—it was just a little bump.” She let her hand drop from her face and a dark red mark showed on the pale skin.

Now he could smell her lily-of-the-valley talcum. Such an ordinary scent, he thought vaguely, but it always made him lose his train of thought. He moved his thumb on her arm, gently, just feeling the texture of her skin. Lost in a place without thought, he lifted his other hand to brush a lock of fine pale hair away from the bruised spot on her cheek. His fingertips skimmed her ear, and she didn’t move away, looking up at him gravely. He heard her breath catch as he touched her cheek, traced the line of her jaw, pressed his big palm to the curve of her small face .

Time stopped. Dusk was so thick that only the pale gray stones under the trees were visible. A cool breeze blew in from the river. Isaiah, caught in some madness he couldn’t halt, took one step closer, feeling the slight warmth of her legs through her dress. Her hair floated over the back of his hand as he moved his thumb on her chin, traced the edge of her eye. And still she simply looked up at him, her breath as airy and uncertain as his own.

She lifted a hand and touched his face in return, looked at his mouth. Said his name in a quiet whoosh, “Isaiah.”

After twenty years of dreaming and wanting, never daring, Isaiah tucked his thumb beneath her chin, took the last step toward her, bent down.

And kissed her.

A soft noise came from her throat as she kissed him back, moving into him, pressing close. Her lips were full and giving, as ripe as grapes. He breathed it in, every detail—her soft cheek against the tip of his nose, the generosity of her movements, sliding closer, angling her head to accommodate him. Her body brushed against him, and her palms fell flat against his chest.

Only a sip, he promised himself, feeling something huge moving and growing in his chest. But she edged ever so slightly closer, and her lips parted and he pulled her closer, feeling her small breasts barely press into his chest, and the twilight no longer existed, or the world, or anything but the sense of whirling he felt as he kissed her, as their tongues tangled, met, curled—

When she broke away, violently and urgently, Isaiah was left dizzy and bewildered. Angel stumbled away, her hand pressed against her chest, and his first, pained thought was that he’d been wrong—she was disgusted at his touch.

And then he heard the sound of an engine passing on the road in front of the store, rumbling into the secret invisibility of the backyard. Reality returned, cold and bleak as a January moon.

He could dream all he wanted, fantasize if need be, take his lust to women who could ease the ache. What he could not do, not ever, was forget what could happen to Angel if he let himself move those dreams and visions and hungers into reality.

There was a glimmer of tears in Angel’s eyes when she looked at him, a look full of sorrow and entreaty.

He spoke gruffly. “I’ll be back early to get going on things around here.”

And then, he forced himself to turn and walk away from her. He didn’t dare look back this time.

The next few days passed
in an almost supernatural state of quiet. Summer bloomed in the heat of the afternoons, afternoons that moved as slowly as high white clouds.

There was no sign of Edwin. The first night after uttering her challenge, Angel had not slept well, starting awake at every creak and snap. The next morning, she carried a blanket out to the tree house, just in case she needed it sometime, and after that, she slept all right again. Customers kept her busy, and she was grateful to them on two counts. She could no longer keep Paul, of course, and she missed him. And, as long as there were customers in the store, she didn’t have to think of Isaiah.