A Better Angel Read online

  “What’s your hurry, brother?” Tercin called to him as he passed. Peter didn’t reply but tore away down the path and past the smithy and into the empty fields, sure that the vision was just at his heels. He hadn’t thought such speed was in him—he’d been in bed for days, and just that morning the effort of cutting his breakfast ham had drained him. It seemed the faster he ran, the faster he could go. For just a moment it was thrilling, to sprint over the soft earth, to outdistance his illness and escape the vision. But it caught him before he was halfway across the field. The roar of the angel overtook him, and when he looked over his shoulder he saw its shadow rushing along the ground, though the sky above was empty even of birds and clouds. He found somewhere inside himself another burst of insufficient speed. When the shadow caught him it lifted him up, and then the field and the ringing forest were gone. Everything familiar to him was replaced by the blue sky and the shining towers, and he rushed toward them, part of the angel now, feeling angry and exultant and awesome and afraid.

  Dr. Herz’s potion tastes to me like a combination of rust and pine. Sam says gin and blood. Edgar Minton said pigshit and Sam asked him (all this by letter mind you) had he eaten pigshit, to know how it tastes? Edgar said he had smelled it and that’s how he knew. And so they launched a five page argument over whether to smell a thing is always the same as to taste it, and declared at last that someone was going to have to eat pigshit to know for sure, and vowed that as soon as they were feeling better they would force Reuben Claflin to do it. So must Eloise have written to Abelard! I get pages and pages of this—the pile from these two alone is six inches thick on my shelf and yours is only one. Not to scold, though.

  Father says the stuff is already helping. He tells me how much better I look, as if mere insistence could make it so. I feel the same, though the elixir helps me sleep, and isn’t that a blessing? Still, my lady comes more frequently than ever—five or six times a day now. Do the visions come so frequently for you? Your lady is not my lady, you said last week, but you know I am starting to think they all share a quality, whether your falling lady or my lady in the window or Sam’s burnt woman hurrying in front of the tide of ash. Maybe it was just elixir booze, but last time I thought I caught a glimpse in my lady’s face of all the others. She was there at the window, same as always, staring out into the smoke, one hand on the glass, and same as always I marveled that any glass could be flawless and smooth, but her touch was my touch and I knew it to be true. Peter, how strange, but not how horrible, to be looking at her face, and to be inside her touch, and even to be looking out from her eyes as the angel rushed in. And then I saw it, a common feature not amenable to description. But this last time I also discovered a distinctive sadness in her, quite removed from the burning of the neighboring tower, and quite apart from what she read in the oncoming angel. She knew it was her death and felt . . . relief!

  Well, it’s a mystery and not just a chore and an affliction. Eleanor cries like a baby every time she has one, but I feel as elevated as debilitated by them. Such thoughts! Such feelings! It’s almost worth the fevers and the pains. Dr. Herz says we shall all be well within a week, and looks to you to improve first as you fell ill first, yet he is also heartened by Sam’s sudden absence of bruising. I told him his theory of propagation was more superstition than science. He said the evidence would bear him out.

  Eleanor was here last night, borne on a litter like a queen by her brothers. They’re all strong but hardly of a height, so she rolled and shrieked as they made their lopsided way up the street. She talked of nothing for an hour and then decided, out of nowhere, to slander you with blame. I smacked her frog-lips, and cut her with my ring. “A spasm,” I said. I do get them sometimes.

  Father has relented, and so I’ll see you this Saturday. Be well, friend!

  Peter dreamed of health the way he had used to dream of flight. To climb slowly over the treetops, moving his arms as if he were swimming through the air, seemed like the most usual thing in the world until he awoke. Then he realized what he had been doing, and scolded himself for failing to properly appreciate it, and for failing to make proper use of it—he never climbed high enough, or showed Tercin what he could do, or floated to Sara’s window to take her out for a flight. So he awoke realizing he had been weeding in the salad garden again, pulling with his hands and his arms and his shoulders at a root that had wandered over from a beech, and when the bell had rung for school he had leaped up, dusted off his hands on his pants, and run full force down the path and through the woods that bordered on their farm. The school had been replaced by a half-scale model of the Colosseum, and that was what he wondered at in the dream. But when he woke it was the old usual strength in his hands and arms that he wondered at, which seemed as remote and miraculous as the gift of flight.

  He was in his own bed—he only stayed in the window seat during the day—and saw by the moonlight on the floor that he was already late. This late in the summer it never fell across his door before two, and he had meant to leave by midnight. He listened for a moment for Tercin’s snoring and for voices in the house, but it was so quiet he could hear the distant call of an owl in the woods. The effort of packing his bag had exhausted him earlier, and he had nearly been called out by Caryn when she saw him spiriting food out of the kitchen. “I’ll bring you anything you like,” she’d told him, and he’d said he got hungry in the very middle of the night.

  He walked carefully, partly to keep from waking anyone, and partly because his balance was off, and partly because he was sure that a sudden movement might bring on a vision, and to have one now would be ruinous. All day he had husbanded his strength, and made his mother think he’d grown sicker, though in fact he felt better than he had all week. The kitchen door was the closest to his room. He nearly upset a candlestick with the edge of his bag. It teetered but didn’t fall.

  Outside he considered for the first time the distance to the woods, and the distance beyond that to a cave where Thomas had taken him once. It used to be a morning’s walk, but now it seemed as far away as another country, far enough to make it a trip beneficial to all the others, if Dr. Herz was to be believed, and far enough to hide him from Mr. Hollin and his charitable intentions. Peter had heard them all talking in the kitchen two days before. They hushed their voices but he heard them plainly, as if the fever had sharpened his hearing, or some household wind was blowing their words directly to his ear. Dr. Herz spoke of a fulminating contagion, and argued passionately that the best thing for the other children in town would be a separation from the “index case.”

  “Then by all means take them away,” his mother had said. Dr. Herz said politely that that wasn’t what he meant.

  “I know precisely what you mean, sir!” his mother had shouted then, and they were all very quiet. Peter knew they were listening for him to stir. When they continued they whispered even more quietly, but Peter was sure he could have heard them from a mile away. They argued, tense and polite, for another half hour, Dr. Herz describing in detail the homey comforts of his hospital in Cleveland, and Mr. Hollin assuring them again and again that every expense would be covered. Finally his mother threw them out—she told them goodnight over and over again, in response to every question they asked, until they just left. Peter opened his eyes enough to see them walking off down the path, hats in hand, each of them taking turns shaking his head. He heard the door open from the kitchen and was conscious for a long while of his mother staring at his back.

  “Here I go,” he said, after he had closed the door quietly behind him. It all went marvelously well for the first few hundred yards. He felt stronger with each step, as if walking were something that he only had to practice a little to master again, and he thought he would have enough strength left when he got there to sweep the floor of the cave to make himself a neat place to lie down in. But he wasn’t halfway to the line of woods before he caught a hint of smoke in the air. Someone else is up late, he told himself, and has made a fire for tea. And belie
ving that bore him up for a dozen more yards, until he couldn’t ignore the alien quality of the smell. It wasn’t just wood burning, and he noticed that his feet were feeling heavier and heavier.

  Another few steps and he could not move his feet—though his legs were sturdy he felt stuck to the ground. His arms dropped down to his side and an apple he’d picked up off the kitchen table on his way out fell from his hand. Now the smoke obscured his vision, drifting across the smithy and obscuring the line of the woods. He felt a glow along his spine—something was forcing him to stand taller and straighter than he’d ever stood before in his life—and his eyes were lifted up. As if he were flying upward, the limits of his sight expanded: the school and Sara’s window and the store and the church and even the curve of the night sky and Hamilton, where they left their lights on all night long. He cried out just before he felt the little sting in his leg, and then a moment later another at his cheek.

  “It’s just a kernel,” Tercin said, stepping out from behind a tree, his slingshot dangling in his hand. “If I’d really wanted it to hurt I’d have used a stone.” He drew on his brother again, standing just before him and aiming right at his face. Peter laughed because Tercin seemed so small. He was looking down at him from a thousand feet high, yet he could see perfectly the confusion and disappointment on his face, and hear him clearly even over the noise of wind and flames. The other tower was burning next to him. “Even with a kernel, I could put out your eye,” Tercin said.

  “Get away,” Peter said. “The other angel is coming.”

  “Angels got no truck with me. I don’t fear ’em. You’re up late.”

  “Go away—it will strike you, too!” Peter said, though he wasn’t sure why it would bother with something as small and crude as his brother. With his high sight he could see it coming, still very far but flying with such speed that he knew it was only moments away.

  “Going for a trip!” Tercin shouted, finally understanding Peter’s obvious purpose and slapping his pack. “Well, bon voyage and good riddance. Maybe we can talk about something else now at dinner, and somebody’ll laugh again in that house. Even when we’re not talking about you, we’re talking about you!”

  “It’s coming,” Peter said.

  “There’s other people in the world besides you, you know. Other troubles besides yours. But you’d never know it. In that house nobody’d know it. Well, go on, then. You want me to carry you?”

  “Please,” Peter said, feeling very small despite his height, and vulnerable despite his bulk, and sure that the violent touch of the angel would finally kill him, and surprised as much to find himself begging mercy from his brother as at how easily he threw off the weary despair of the long sickness to discover how very much he wanted to live. “Brother . . . please . . . do not let it strike me!” He thought Tercin must have heard it, because he turned and looked around him just before it arrived, and when he couldn’t see it he turned back to his brother and looked in his face. Something he saw there must have overcome his natural animosity. He dropped his slingshot and turned and put his hands up and cried, “Get away!”

  He was no impediment. The angel flew high above him and through him—gleaming, roaring, and big as a church, it struck Peter right in his heart and started a fire there. As it burned he made the biggest noise of his life, bigger than anything he thought was left in him after being ill so long, and though he couldn’t walk, and Tercin had discovered his purpose, it was only then—imagining lights go on in his house and all through the town—that he felt he’d lost his chance of escape.

  Very far below, Tercin was looking up at him, wonder and fear plain on his tiny little face. Peter wept at the pain of the fire. It loosened him. He shrugged, and pieces of his shoulders fell to the earth. Look out, he tried to say to Tercin, but he couldn’t speak anything but sobs. People were falling from him, too. Leaping from out of his hair, dropping from his nose, squeezing like tears from the corners of his eyes—small as his brother they fell. He turned his head, shaking more from his hair, and saw that it was Sara standing next to him, just as tall and strong and ruined, but she had been struck first, and had been burning longer. Her bones were so hot he could see them shining through her skin. She spoke his name and then fell apart, her head riding a collapsing column of ashes and smoke to fall between her feet and shatter on the grass. The seizures took him then, and he didn’t have to watch anymore.

  The vision ceased for Tercin, too. While Peter twitched and moaned, Tercin lay prone with his hands over his head, and he didn’t dare look up until Peter grew quiet. He looked around at the woods and the quiet night: there wasn’t a burning youth or a falling body or a screaming angel in sight. He stood up and wiped his eyes and nose. “Look what you did now,” he said to his brother, peacefully asleep now on the ground. “Now you gave it to me!” He kicked him hard in the ribs, and thought he could feel one break even through his boot. Still he kicked him again. “You nasty leper, now you gave it to me!” He turned and ran away into the woods, then came back a moment later for his slingshot. He kicked his brother once more and was gone again.

  I saw you and I know that you saw me. I know you heard me when I spoke your name. I was about to say something else—something utterly important and wise. Now I forget it, of course, and I wonder sometimes if I spoke more than your name, if I actually gave voice to the feeling in me just before my burning bones gave out and I fell—I felt like I knew what it was about, that I understood the mystery beneath the affliction, and the reason that we are all suffering. A grand, high feeling—surely it would translate into unforgettable words. If I had spoken them I know you would remember them even if I didn’t—but now nothing but silence from you for fourteen days. Are you pretending to be dead? My spies are everywhere, dear friend. Little Abby Crowley saw you reading yesterday afternoon in your window. You drew a picture of an owl and showed it to her through the glass, and yet you cannot write a few words to me.

  Edgar is worse, perhaps you’ve heard. Maybe you have your own spies, or maybe your mother only tells you what she thinks it’s good for you to hear. He has not been properly awake all week now, and he choked last night when his sister slipped the gruel between his lips. Now he has a fever. Dr. Herz spends three hours a day there patting his chest and back with a crystal glass. Artificial coughing, he says, because Edgar won’t do it for himself. “He’ll perk up,” Dr. Herz says, “just you wait.” I imagine him saying that over the corpse. Just give him a moment, he’d say, and prod him with some very special kind of stick.

  I know what risk I run in telling you this. You will take it to heart in the wrong way, and say I was wrong when I said there was a strange and secret blessing in all this. It’s only death, you’ll say. Just another way to die, slower and more painful and more odd than most. Well, maybe for some.

  Your brother is living with Reuben Claflin in a cave. Abby took a dime from Reuben to steal a pie and bring it to them. She gave the dime to me, as if that would undo the theft somehow. I enclose it because I didn’t quite know what else to do with it, and surely Tercin owes you reparations for all the harm he’s done. Abby is a clever little magpie. She described their situation and even did a sketch—it is all very cozy and domestic, and Reuben’s hand is tender when he mops Tercin’s brow. I wonder a little what he sees—I have had four visions since he fell ill and never found him once. Perhaps a debased spirit only perceives the horror, and hides itself from every decent friend in that world as in this one. In any case you should tell your mother he is thriving.

  I am thriving too, Peter. Not that any ordinary person would notice it to look at me. The mirror me—the one that is all of this world and all surfaces—is spotted up and bruised and jaundiced and thin, and my hair, as Mother tells me, has lost its spirit. But beyond my body I am a growing giantess, and every time I enter another vision I get a little closer to an end that I know is not death. You are a giant too—I see it no matter how you seek to hide from me. We stand over all the others the way th
e towers once stood over us, before we became them. Don’t you understand the progression—from frail little person to soaring angel to monolith? What next, except the sky above it all, and a spirit that comprehends everything, and is apart from nothing? Never mind Reverend Wallop’s good news, here is mine: Something wonderful is coming, dressed in a raiment of fire and destruction and grief. We will be elevated, and understand, and returning to health will be such a small thing we’ll do it in a blink of the mind’s eye. So never mind poor Edgar. His ailing decline teaches a false lesson, one to be ignored. Come out, my love—come out of your depths. Maybe Edgar Minton is going to die, but we are going to live.

  A BETTER ANGEL

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she told me the first time we met. Six years old, I was digging under a log, trying to turn it up to look for worms underneath. This was back when my father still had all his property and I could walk for the whole afternoon without leaving his orange groves. I spent a lot of time amusing myself that way, playing games I made up, inventing friends to play with since I really had none of my own, or looking for buried Indian or pirate treasure. My sisters were all much older than me and hated to have me underfoot, and so they’d draw me false maps, age them by beating them in the sand with a baseball bat and burning them around the edges, send me on a quest. I fell for this sort of thing for years.

  She was sitting in a tree, gently pushing at an orange where it hung near her face, making it swing. My imaginary friends were not the kind you could see. I figured her for a smart-aleck picker’s daughter, since it was the end of the season and the groves were full of Guatemalans. She wore a sleeveless yellow dress with a furry kitten face on the front—I remember that very clearly, and remember wondering later how, if she didn’t exist, I could have made that up. Her skin was very dark. Her hair hung past her lap. She looked to be my age and like she could be in my grade. I ignored her.