The Sleeping Night (9 page)

By Friday, the days settled into a comfortable pattern. Isaiah worked mornings for Mrs. Pierson, tearing up her former yard and putting in a new one, a whim she could well afford and he suspected she had invented to give him work. He took it in the spirit it was intended.

When he finished around two or three, he walked back to the store, eating a sandwich or some cold chicken. At Corey’s, he climbed the ladder and got to work on the roof, working straight through until about suppertime, when he would climb down, refuse Angel’s offers of tea or cake, and take Paul home. He ate with his mother and sister, then went out to read and think on the porch.

His strategy was to keep to himself, only speak when spoken too, avoid contact with everybody as much as possible. His mama dragged him to visit with neighbors now and again, but he avoided them the rest of the time. Women came, one pretty, one smart, one both, all three angling for his attentions. He gently deflected them. Friends from childhood stopped by, eager to hear his stories of the war, of the world beyond East Texas. He ducked them, too, unwilling to find attachments that would snare him into staying in Texas.

The results were that nobody in upper Gideon much noticed Isaiah High was back home. In lower Gideon, he gained an unpopular reputation. He was satisfied with both.

The only time keeping his distance was hard was with Angel Corey. On Tuesday afternoon, when he climbed down from ladder, she had called to him. “Isaiah, you about finished up there today?”

He wandered to the back door where she stood with Paul. Her dress was the pale green of new leaves, touching the color of her eyes, and she smiled at him in her open way. “Why don’t you sit and have some chocolate cake before you go?”

“I reckon not. Thank you.”

“You can’t have grown up out of chocolate cake, Isaiah High. I remember when you could eat a whole one by yourself.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“You gonna tell me you don’t like it anymore?”

“No.” He didn’t smile. “We ain’t children no more, Angel, and I don’t want to sit on your back porch and eat chocolate cake.” He set his jaw. “Wouldn’t be seemly.”

“I see.” There was an airy breathlessness to her words. “You can have Isaiah’s piece, Paul. Come on inside. I’ll get you some milk with it.”

Now, on Friday afternoon, he ripped shingles from the roof with vigor and he could smell cake baking again. She was famous in three counties for her cakes, which she baked for church socials and potlucks and just on general principles. The smell of this one was making his stomach grumble.

Parker Corey had been a good man, but he hadn’t done right by Angel. She was as likely to get killed as Isaiah was, unable to shake the Biblical injunctions her daddy had given her.

Parker had taken “Feed the hungry” literally, had greeted every man, woman, and child as Jesus incarnate, white or black, rich or poor. Never had gone to any church, though he had a good reputation among the preachers on both sides of the river, had just read the Bible and done his own interpretation. He said he’d had a vision in the war, his feet half-gone with gangrene. Jesus had come to his bedside in the hospital in France, and put his hands on the putrefying wounds. “Go among them,” Jesus said, “for these, too, are my children.” There had been no doubt in Parker’s mind about just exactly who Jesus meant.

Isaiah had heard the story from his father, who had heard it told in town while he worked. And Jordan had thought all the more highly of Parker for his silence.

Thinking of the old man, Isaiah felt a prick of sadness. He’d really wanted to see Parker again. Seemed a crying shame that he’d missed him only by a few days.

Below him, he could, hear Angel humming as she waited on customers, swept the porch, rattled around doing something.

That cake.

This time the sweet hot smell might be pineapple upside down cake. Damn. And as if he was in a battlefield, thinking about food to distract himself from the harsh reality of life, he found himself imagining it in detail—steaming yellow cake and hot, juicy pineapple, the edges crisp with sugar.

He ripped a nail free. Food was his weakest spot, always had been, and after six years of Army food, he didn’t know how he could turn down a slice of cake again.

Not likely she’d offer, he thought, thinking of Tuesday. Could be the cake was for a church supper or for a sickly neighbor.

But once the thought of it was in his mind, Isaiah had trouble loosening it. He cursed himself all the way down the ladder. When his feet were planted on the ground, he glanced at the sky, figuring the time until supper. Seemed like all he could smell was that sweet cake, heavy in the air. He walked around back, intending to ask for a glass of water.

Angel met him at the door, a curious expression on her face.

“‘You done already?”

He cleared his throat. “Just hot. Can I trouble you for a glass of water?”

“I’ll be right back.”

When she returned, Paul tagged behind her. They came through the screen door together, Paul carrying two plates of cake, Angel with glasses of tea. Ebenezer appeared as well, squawking a welcome to Isaiah as though he hadn’t seen him in a year. He flew right to his shoulder and perched there.

Isaiah couldn’t help himself. He laughed, shaking his head. “Crazy bird.”

Angel extended the glass and looked at Paul. “You give it to him.”

Isaiah looked the plate. His mouth watered. He thought of her letter about cake, and shot a glance at her. She remembered, too.

“I knew you couldn’t stand to smell it cooking and still say no,” Angel said.

He said nothing, holding the cake in his hands, his appetite gone to dust. He glanced up at Angel. She met his eyes steadily, and for the first time he saw that she was no longer a girl, any more than he was a boy. The weariness of time showed in her eyes, and at the corners of her mouth were the slightest lines.

She met his eyes steadily, soberly, and tucked a lock of hair round one ear. “Your letters where so full of food I’d have to go have a snack when I finished one.”

Letters. He still had all of them, every one she’d written, stuffed in a canvas bag tucked in the bottom of his duffle. Sometimes those letters were the only reason he could think of to keep going.

“Go on and eat, Isaiah,” she said. “I’m gonna go get me some.”

Hell. The porch was shaded and cool. Isaiah sat down and measured the cake, savoring the scent of it, then took a bite. It was exactly what he had imagined, warm and syrupy and spongy all at once, melting on his tongue before he could taste enough of it. He ladled up another forkful and glanced at Paul, who was watching him as if he were the end product of some experiment. “What you lookin’ at, boy?”

“You like cake?”

“Course.”

“How come you didn’t want no chocolate?”

Isaiah took another slow bite. “Just partial to pineapple, I guess.”

“Not me.”

Angel stepped onto the porch, letting the door slam in place behind her. “That’s what makes horse races, my daddy always said.” She sat in the rocking chair. Isaiah could feel her motions behind him as she shifted, and now he could smell her over the scent of the cake, a simple flowery smell he remembered from childhood. He didn’t turn.

No one spoke for a minute. They sat in silence, eating. Then Angel said, “You know, I’ve won prizes for my baking. I wonder if I could write a cookbook.”

Isaiah laughed. Her voice was the same as the younger Angel’s, huskier than it should be, slow enough it hid her sharp mind, and he found himself responded to the memory of her. “You been saying you were going to for a hundred years.”

“I never had a typewriter.”

“You could’ve found somebody to loan you one.”

“I reckon I still could. And I bet people would
buy
it, too. Everybody likes my cakes.”

He swallowed a mouthful, able to smile freely as long as his back was turned. He pressed crumbs into his fork. “That’s why you had to make this one, cuz you couldn’t stand to have somebody turn you down.”

“You’re eatin’ it, aren’t you?”

He stood and turned to look at her, curled on the couch with her feet tucked up under her. “Ate it,” he corrected. “And it was exactly what I thought it would be. Thank you.” She made him think of a cat, curled so luxuriously and comfortably—a silky cat with long eyes and graceful limbs. His eyes lingered a moment on her mouth with its strange, ripe lips, plump as late grapes. Thought again of waxy red lipstick.

Swallowing, annoyed with himself, he put his plate carefully on the step and backed away, eyes on the ground. “I’m gonna go finish up now.”

The legacies Angel’s mother
had left her were few. No grandparents; no uncles or aunts or cousins, no stories of her girlhood. Wraith-like, Lona Corey had just appeared one day in Gideon. She had been a fragile, breathtakingly beautiful woman, and some said she had come from the brothels in New Orleans. Not even Parker had been able to extract her story, one that had died with her when Angel came into the world after three days of screaming labor. She left behind a green velvet dress, a pearl necklace, a box of cake recipes, and a single photograph. Nothing else. Lona was formless in Angel’s mind, a vague personage as ethereal as the soft white heads of dandelions gone to seed.

On Saturday morning, Angel baked another chocolate cake, this one taken from her mother’s box of recipes, for a potluck at the church the following day. It was flavored with the bushels of mint coming up around the house. In a burst of creativity, she topped it with swirls of thick chocolate frosting and pretty clusters of leaves.

Once it was tucked away in a cake safe, Angel mopped the wood floors of the store and straightened the stock, making notes for her orders Monday morning. Then she went through the outstanding customer charges likely to be paid that evening, swept the front porch, watered the garden and the flowers. Meantime, customers drifted in and out, and Angel attended to them, glad for the hard work.

When business lulled, she slipped outside to do some gardening. Morning glories sprang up on the east side of the porch, vines that would creep over the railings and wind up strings Angel tied to the roof. In front of the porch were snapdragons and chrysanthemums; around the side grew holly hocks and chives and mint. There were even rosebushes, sheltered from the heat of the Texas sun by the slanting shade of the back porch. All of them had been planted, in a frenzy of digging, the only summer Lona lived in the house.

The photo Angel had of her mother was taken in late summer in front of the morning glory vines. Her pale hair was swept back into a ponytail and she wore a pair of Parker’s trousers. The expression on her face was distant but pleased, an expression that embodied for Angel the mystery of her mother.

As a little girl, Angel had prodded Parker over and over again about some hint of where Lona had come from, or who she was before she appeared in Gideon. He had nothing to give her but the same stories he’d repeated a dozen times—the meeting in front of the feed store, the first date they had (at a dance sponsored by the First Methodist Church), the whirlwind courtship that made Lona his bride in three weeks’ time. And then her death a scant year later, her serene baby daughter in her arms. “Parker,” Lona had said, stroking the headful of cotton candy hair, “she looks like an angel, don’t she? Like she come to tell me God’s waitin’.” In two hours, bled pale, Lona died.

On this sunny afternoon so many years after her mother had planted the flowers, Angel pulled stubborn weeds between the vines and wished she had known her. Or maybe that was just loneliness talking.

Because if she told herself the truth, there it was. She was desperately, painfully lonely out here by herself. Nobody to talk to. No one to share her days with. Everything just blended together in a blur of not talking to anybody much.

Maybe Georgia was right and she ought to just throw in the towel, give up the store and go live in town. But that idea made her feel so claustrophobic she’d rather drown herself in the river.