A Quiet Belief in Angels Page 4

  “Joseph, however, would be thrilled,” she said. “I have promised Mrs. Amundsen that I would do the butter-churning with her, and if we miss it today the milk will turn—”

  Mr. Kruger, ever the gentleman, raised his hand and smiled widely. He saved my mother the embarrassment of explaining her refusal. “Perhaps next time,” he said, and then told me that they would be leaving from the Kruger house at six in the morning.

  “Do not send any food,” Mr. Kruger told my mother. “Mrs. Kruger will make enough to feed the five thousand and most of their relatives.”

  The following morning it was raining, lightly at first, and then heavier. Nevertheless, we drove along the edge of St. Mary’s River all the way to Fernandina Beach, and by the time we arrived the sun had broken forth and the sky was clear.

  It was a rare day. I watched the Kruger family and they seemed to represent some ideal, some standard against which all families should have been judged. They did not fight or argue, instead they laughed frequently, and with no clear reason to laugh. They appeared as some symbol of perfection in an indiscriminately imperfect world.

  By the time we left the sun had softened its temper and was considering retirement. The haze of late afternoon hung like a ghost of warmth around us, its arms wide and embracing, and when we carried the baskets and blankets to the car Mr. Kruger walked beside me and asked if I had enjoyed the day.

  “Yes, sir, very much,” I said.

  “Good,” he said quietly. “Even you, Joseph Vaughan . . . even you must have some memories to cherish for when you grow older.”

  I did not understand what he meant, and I did not ask.

  “And Elena,” he said.

  I turned and looked up at him.

  He smiled. “I want to thank you for your patience with her. She is a delicate child, and I know you spend time with her when perhaps you would rather be roughhousing with Hans and Walter.”

  I felt awkward and embarrassed. “I-it’s okay, Mr. Kruger, no trouble at all.”

  “You mean a great deal to her,” he went on. “She speaks of you often, Joseph. She has found it difficult to make friends, and I thank you for being there for her.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, and set my eyes straight to the road ahead.

  For more than nine months I had watched the wound heal. I believed there would always be a scar, right there beneath my skin, invisible to anyone but myself, and the scar would remind me of what had happened to Alice, that winter of 1939—the things I’d overheard from the landing as Reilly and my mother spoke in the kitchen.

  For more than nine months Augusta Falls had made believe that what had happened was a dark and awkward dream. Something had happened somewhere else, not here in their own town, and they had heard rumor of this terrible thing and thanked God that it had not happened to them. They had dealt with this thing in such a way, and they had survived. They had made it through the shadows and come out the other side.

  For nine months they told themselves everything was going to be okay.

  But it was not.

  Laverna Stowell was found murdered in the late summer of 1940. She was nine years old, would have been ten on August twelfth, three days after the discovery of her body in a field near the outskirts of Silco, Camden County. She was found on a Friday, just like Alice Ruth Van Horne. She was naked, nothing but her socks and a single shoe on her right foot. I knew this because I read a newspaper report the following Wednesday. I cut out her picture and the article beneath.

  CHARLTON COUNTY JOURNAL

  Friday, August 9th, 1940

  Second Girl Found Murdered

  On the morning of Friday August 9th, the citizens of Augusta Falls were once again witness to a terrifying discovery. The naked body of Laverna Stowell, daughter of Silco couple Leonard and Martha Stowell, was found naked but for her socks and a single shoe on her right foot. The second murder follows the November death of Alice Ruth Van Horne. Camden County Sheriff Ford Ruby refused to comment, but did allow that a dual-county operation would be established by himself and Charlton County Sheriff Haynes Dearing. Miss Alexandra Webber, teacher at the Augusta Falls School where Laverna Stowell was a student, said that Laverna was a bright and outgoing child who had no difficulty making friends. She said that the children had been informed of this situation, and prayers would be said at each morning roll call for the forthcoming week. Already citizens of Augusta Falls and Silco have met, and a town meeting to discuss the possibility of united action will be arranged. Sheriff Haynes Dearing once again stressed the importance of citizens in both towns and surrounding areas remaining calm. “There is nothing worse than panic in such situations. I am here to reassure everyone that there is a police procedure employed in any murder investigation, and it is the duty of the police to establish and carry out this procedure. If people wish to assist they can be alert to any strange or unfamiliar individuals, and also take care to ensure the safety and welfare of their own children at all times.” When asked if any progress had been made in the investigation of the killing of Alice Ruth Van Horne, Sheriff Dearing refused to comment, saying that “all details of an ongoing investigation need to remain confidential until the perpetrator has been arrested and charged.”

  I held the cutting in my hands and felt my eyes fill with tears. I imagined how I would feel if it had been Elena. I cried again, but this time there was something else beneath the sense of loss: fear. A bone-deep jag of fear that pierced me, and around it was a sense of anger, of near hatred for whoever had done this thing. Laverna had come each day from Silco in Camden County, and though I’d shared no more than half a dozen words with her outside of Miss Webber’s class, I still believed that somehow I had failed her. Why, I did not know, but I believed that both of them—Alice Ruth and Laverna—had been my responsibility.

  “You can’t blame yourself,” my mother told me when I explained my feelings. “There are people out there, Joseph, people who do not see life the way that we see it. They grant it no importance, no value, and they are almost incapable of stopping themselves when it comes to such terrible things.”

  “There must be something we can do.”

  “We can be watchful,” she said. She leaned closer to me as if imparting a secret not to be shared with the world. “We must take to watching for ourselves, and watching for everyone else. I know you feel responsible, Joseph, that is your nature, but responsibility and blame are not the same thing. You should be responsible if you feel it is your duty, but you must never blame yourself. You cannot punish yourself for the crimes of another.”

  I listened. I understood. I wanted to do something, but I did not know what.

  Two men came. They wore dark suits and hats. My mother told me they were from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, that they had been assigned to assist Sheriff Dearing. They crisscrossed the state asking forthright, indelicate questions, and from what I overheard from the kitchen it seemed that people quickly began to resent their presence. Dearing had apparently requested that he accompany them, but agents Leon Carver and Henry Oates declined his request, said it was Federal business, that objectivity was the key. I saw Carver once, a tall and imposing man, whose nose looked like a clenched fist scattered with purple veins. With eyes set back far into his head beneath heavy brows, he appeared to be squinting out of a permanent shadow. I did not speak to him, nor he to me. He watched me like I could not be trusted, and then turned his back. They stayed in Augusta Falls for three days, then they headed south, made a wide clockwise circuit through the surrounding towns, and then disappeared. We heard no more, and they were never mentioned.

  Later I spoke to Hans Kruger.

  “Boogeyman,” he said. “There’s a boogeyman out there and he comes to eat children.”

  I snorted in contempt. “Who told you that?”

  “Walter,” he said defensively. “Walter told me it was a boogeyman, someone who’s come back from the dead and needs to feed off living people to stay alive.”

  “An
d you believe that horseshit?”

  Hans hesitated for a moment.

  “And he says these things to Elena?” I asked.

  Hans shook his head. “No, he doesn’t say these things to Elena. I have to tell Elena so she knows—”

  I grabbed him suddenly by the collar of his shirt. He tried to step back but I held on tight. “You don’t say anything to Elena!” I snapped. “You leave Elena alone. She’s frightened enough as it is without you telling her horseshit stories about things that don’t even exist!”

  Walter appeared around the corner of the house. “Hey! What is this here? You boys should not be fighting!”

  Hans ducked away, wrenched himself free of my grip and ran back to the front of the house.

  I stood there feeling ashamed, a little frightened by Walter.

  “What’s happening here?” he asked.

  “I told him not to tell boogeyman stories to Elena,” I said. “I don’t want her to be frightened. Hans said he was going to tell Elena about the boogeyman.”

  Walter laughed suddenly. “He did, did he? Let me sort that out, okay?”

  “Don’t hurt him, Walter.”

  Walter placed his hand on my shoulder. “I won’t hurt him, Joseph. I’ll just teach him a lesson.”

  “It’s not a boogeyman. It’s a person who’s doing these things, a terrible person.”

  Walter smiled understandingly. “I know, Joseph, I know. Let the police take care of it, okay? The police will find out who is doing these things and stop them. You let me take care of Hans and Elena.”

  I said nothing.

  “Okay?” he prompted.

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said, but I did not mean it. Walter was out with his father, working the farm, earning keep for the family. I had decided to look after Elena, and nothing would change my mind.

  “Now go,” he said. “Home with you. I will speak to Hans and make sure he doesn’t frighten his sister.”

  I turned and ran back to my house. I said nothing to my mother. I stood at the window of my bedroom and looked across at the Krugers’ house. I believed that if anything happened to Elena I would never be able to forgive myself.

  After the Federal people left, sheriffs from each county—Haynes Dearing, a man in his mid-thirties, already looking older than his years, and Ford Ruby—had a sit-down meeting at the Quinn Cumberland Diner, a respectable and clean establishment on the north side of Augusta Falls owned and run by two widows.

  Haynes Dearing was a Methodist, attended Charlton County Methodist Church. Sheriff Ford Ruby was Protestant Episcopal and frequented the Communion Church of God in Woodbine, but despite their differences regarding John Wesley and scripture interpretation, they considered that the death of a little girl was more important than religious distinctions.

  The death of a second little girl brought them together, and they pooled their resources. There was even talk of a man coming from Valdosta, a government man with a lie machine and a female assistant, but no one ever showed. Sheriffs Dearing and Ruby, deputizing pretty much every man that could walk a straight line unaided, searched the woods and banks around Silco, even went back and searched the far end of the High Road once more, just to see, just to be sure. Of what, I did not know, and I did not ask, for once again there were hushed conversations in the kitchen of my house.

  Nothing ever came of the searches, and finally, inevitably, Haynes Dearing and Ford Ruby went back to arguing about John Wesley and the scriptures, kept on arguing until they concluded it had been a mistake to work together, to even think they could work together, and they vowed such a thing would never happen again. By the end of August I no longer heard mention of Laverna Stowell. Perhaps she was an angel too, she and Alice Ruth Van Horne, and maybe my father, if he’d managed to keep his hands clean and worked hard enough to make the grade, was sitting right alongside them. Perhaps I convinced myself that the nightmare had now really ended. Perhaps I believed that some itinerant vagabond, crazy and brutal and vicious, had passed through our lives and now had disappeared. For some unknown reason he had visited twice, but this I did not consider. The truth and what I imagined might be the truth were not the same thing. I wondered if some other county, some other state, was now losing its children to this boogeyman. I kept my eyes wide and my ears alert, even at night; the sound of animals moving between our house and that of the Krugers sometimes woke me, and I would lie there chilled and afraid. After some time, steeling myself for what I might see, I would slip from beneath the covers and make my way tentatively to the window. I saw nothing. The night unfolded before me in a cool, static monochrome, and I would wonder if my imagination wasn’t feeding my mind with small and fragile lies. I hoped with all I possessed that the nightmare had passed, but deep down, right there inside my heart, I knew it had not.

  FOUR

  FIVE MONTHS HAD PASSED SINCE THE DEATH OF THE STOWELL GIRL, five months and another Christmas.

  Christmas had been hard on my mother. She and Mrs. Kruger, whose name I now understood to be Mathilde, had volunteered their services to assist in an influenza epidemic that had broken out amongst the Negro families. For many days she came home late and left early, and I spent much of my time at the Krugers’ house. I was thirteen years old, a few months older than Hans Kruger, a few years younger than Walter. Nevertheless, despite our similarity in ages, there was little we held in common. There were as many opinions as there were words about the war; there were rumors that Adolf Hitler was a madman, that America would be drawn into the fighting. Roosevelt was inaugurated for the third time, and already there was talk of the British using American arms and equipment, the cost of which would not be requested until after the conflict was over. Some—Reilly Hawkins in particular—said that it was the first step on a short road to collaboration.

  “They’ll call for us,” he said. “They’ll call for us to go and fight in Europe.”

  “And would you go?” my mother asked him.

  “No question about it,” Reilly said. “You gotta die for something, right? Seems to me it’d be better to die in a field in Europe fighting for something you believe in than die out here in the swamps from nigra influenza.”

  “Reilly,” my mother admonished.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said sheepishly. “Beg your pardon, ma’am.”

  “What is it you believe in?” I asked Reilly. “You believe in war?”

  Reilly smiled and shook his head. “No, Joseph, I don’t believe in war. I’ll tell you what I believe in—” He stopped suddenly and looked at my mother as if for permission to speak.

  “Go ahead, Reilly, I’ll let you know if you’ve gone too far.”

  “What I believe in,” Reilly said, “is the freedom to think and believe and say what you feel is right. This man, this Adolf Hitler, well he’s nothing but a Fascist and a dictator. He’s getting those German people all fired up and hateful about the Jews, about traveling people, about people who don’t look the same or talk the same or go to the same churches. He’s forcing his own views on a country, and that country is going mad. That’s the kind of thing that travels like an airborne virus, and if good people, honest people—people like us—if we don’t do what we can to stop it then we’ll find it everywhere. That’s why I’ll go if they ask me.”

  The following day I asked Miss Webber about the war, about what Reilly Hawkins had said about the Jews and the traveling people.

  For a moment she looked surprised, and then there was something in her face that spoke of grief, of suppressed tears perhaps.

  That’s when she spoke of the competition. She changed the subject—suddenly, unexpectedly—and I forgot all about Adolf Hitler and how he was getting folks all fired up and hateful.

  “What competition?”

  “A story competition, a competition for people to write and submit stories.”

  I leaned my head to one side.

  “Don’t do that, Joseph Vaughan,” she said. “It makes you look like you have only half a brain and yo
ur head’s lopsided.”

  I set my head straight.

  “So write a story,” she said. “It can be about anything at all, but like we discussed before it is always better to write about something you’re personally interested in, or something you have experienced. It should be no longer than two thousand words, and if you write it neatly enough I will set it correctly on my Underwood typewriter and we will send it all the way to Atlanta.”

  I didn’t say a great deal. I don’t remember the moment too well. I think I had my eyes wide and my mouth slightly open.

  “What?” Miss Webber asked. “Why are you standing there like that?”

  After a moment I shook my head. “No particular reason,” I replied.

  “Now you look like the sort of boy who needs his mouth wiped every fifteen minutes . . . go sit down at your desk, Joseph.”

  “Yes, Miss Webber.”

  “And start working on some ideas. Deadline for your story is a month from today.”

  Three days later I came across a word, monkeyshines. I don’t remember now how I came across it, but I did. It was from the late 1800s, and it meant tricks and japes, the kind of things kids do when they’re in a mischief-and-mayhem mood. The word pleased me, made me smile, and so I used it as the title for my story.

  I wrote about being a kid, because that’s what I was. I wrote about being thirteen and having no father, about the war in Europe and some of the things that Reilly Hawkins told me. Alongside that, I wrote about the things I did to keep my mind occupied, to make me forget that my mother was tired, that Hitler was a madman, and somewhere some thousands of miles away people were being killed because they thought different or spoke different. I wrote about practical jokes me and the Kruger boys had done. About the time we found a dead raccoon and buried it. We dug up some mountain fly honeysuckle and planted it on the little grave, and we said some words and wished the raccoon would find Alice Ruth and Laverna and keep them company in Heaven. I wrote about these things and signed it neatly at the bottom—Joseph Calvin Vaughan—and I put my age and my date of birth because I figured the story people in Atlanta might want to know such details.