A Better Angel Read online

  “What’s that?” his mother asked.

  “I’m well,” he said. “I’m perfectly well. Can I take off the plasters and go help with the chores?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, but she relented two hours later, and he just had time before dinner to help Caryn finish her vanes. Then, except for the excitement and anticipation of Lammas, it should have been an ordinary evening. There wasn’t a touch of fever on him, and when he held his hand out in front of him there wasn’t even a tremble in it, but the lady stuck in his mind. When he closed his eyes he could see her, arrested in her fall: her legs up above her head and her face obscured by a dark curtain of hair. Caryn’s blue dress, the same one she’d been wearing all week, was suddenly the color of that sky, and when Tercin stuck his sausages in his potatoes, trying to sculpt a goat with horns, all Peter saw were the two burning towers. He reached over with his fork and knocked the sausages down.

  “What’d you do that for?” Tercin asked, and Peter only said one shouldn’t play with one’s food. But he thought he hid his discomfort well: he talked excitedly about the maze George was building for the coming feast, and though his mother had an appraising look about her whenever she caught his eye, and he caught his father frowning at him in the middle of the blessing, nobody mentioned his fit again, and his mother only put a single plaster on his chest before she said goodnight.

  “You got the creaky doom,” Tercin said, after their mother took away the light. “Everybody dies from that.”

  “Go to sleep,” Peter said.

  “I’ll go to sleep,” Tercin said. “But not like you. You will sleep the sleep of death. Nobody wakes up from that. Not until the last trump is blown. Goodnight, brother. Goodnight and goodbye!”

  “I’m not even listening,” Peter said. “None of your dumb talk matters.”

  “Yes, that’s a sign. The deafness and then the spots and then the feeling in your skin like you’re being flayed. Oh yes, I heard about another case down in Homer. A girl who took a month to die but she was suffering the whole time. Suffering!”

  “Can’t you just be good to me for once?” Peter asked, and then turned on his side and put his pillow over his head, not waiting for Tercin’s answer. His brother was quiet after that. Afraid to close his eyes, Peter took a long time to fall asleep. He was afraid the woman would be there, painted on the back of his eyelids, suspended in the blue air. Yet when he slept he dreamed not of her but of Sara. He was salting corn for her at the feast, sprinkling grains from a cellar and asking her, “Is it enough, my love?” and always she said, “Just a little more, my darling!” And he would have been content to salt her corn all night long, but he was woken out of the dream by a gentle tickling on his face. Tercin was standing above him in the square of moonlight from the window, a brush in one hand and a pot of ink in the other.

  “Aw shit,” his brother said, throwing down the brush in Peter’s bed, and slamming the ink pot down on the floor. He stormed out of the room. Peter washed his face in the bowl on their dresser. When he fell asleep again he dreamed of nothing at all, and when he woke the next morning he felt entirely well, no hint of fever and no ache in his bones, and even when he tried he could barely remember what the falling lady looked like. He was delighted to discover that he couldn’t even remember if her hair had been brown or black.

  His mother pronounced him well at the breakfast table, and no one tried to keep him from assisting with the final preparations for the Lammas feast. After lunch he helped George lay down the maze, placing the sheaves as his brother directed, pretending not to study it too much, because he would run the race with all the other children later that evening and didn’t want to give the impression of cheating.

  At the start of the feast, as Reverend Wallop blessed the corn and the meat, and during the marionette dance, a few people, Sara’s mother and Mr. Hollin and some others, gave Peter wary stares. It’s not a light thing, to have a fit, no matter Mrs. Clark’s airy theories of the cause. Everybody knew it was bad luck to have one, or be around someone who had one, and Sara’s mother had even suggested that they delay the Lammas feast by a week, so it wouldn’t be spoiled by the bad omen. And he saw Tercin whispering here and there, spreading fantastic lies, no doubt—he had twelve more fits since he came home from school, one every two hours, yes, with every even set of chimes from the kitchen clock. But his mother turned away the appraising looks with her own glare, and his father came up behind Tercin as he was telling a tale and slapped him in the head so hard he fell off a bench. Then everyone laughed at him, and someone pointed out that it wouldn’t be a proper Lammas if Tercin Damien didn’t suffer for his mischief. Tercin spat and slouched off with a chicken leg in either hand, no doubt to find Reuben, who never missed a feast or a celebration, but always inhabited the darkness just beyond the reach of the bonfires.

  Peter spared a thought for the fires, and how they had a thing or two in common with the burning towers in his dreams, but the vision seemed a hundred years away by then. And when Sara sought him out and lay down next to him, she took up all his attention.

  “Peter,” she said. “Do you know what I am thinking?”

  “You wanted more sugar on your corn?”

  “What? Who puts sugar on their corn?”

  “You smelled something foul when you passed by Mr. Hollin’s bottom?”

  “No. You’re awful at this game.”

  “Reverend Wallop says that only Satan knows the secret thoughts of girls.”

  “If you ever listened to the overblowing fool you’d know he says, ‘Only the dark one knows the darkest thoughts of man.’ It’s phrase number seventy-two of the hundred he learned in Bible school. I’ll give you one more try before you lose.”

  “And what’s the consequence?”

  “Something gruesome and surprising. Once more . . .”

  “Well,” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “Maybe it’s that . . .” He didn’t know what to guess, and he hated games, and he thought it was just bold enough to suggest that maybe she was enjoying herself. Before he could finish, George blew the Lammas horn, summoning boys and girls under the age of sixteen to run the bower. Sara was on her feet and halfway there before Peter was on his knees. “Maybe you are thinking that this is going to be a perfect evening,” he said, and chased after her.

  There was only a single torch burning at the center of the bower-maze, not light enough to make more than shadows of the children who were hurriedly picking their way toward the center. Whoever got there first would get a prize. Peter passed Sara when she got trapped in a blind end. “You should have stuck with me,” he said, and she only frowned at him.

  He noticed the brightness before anything else. Just when he was ready to break into a run—because he and Edgar Minton had both discovered the right path at the same time—he realized that he could see Edgar’s face very clearly, down to the pattern of freckles that broke over his nose in a shape like the Big Dipper. It was like Edgar’s face had turned into the sun, except it was ten o’clock at night and it had been full dark for two hours already. “Edgar,” he said, “what’s the matter with your face?”

  “I know what’s the matter with yours,” Edgar said. “It’s assugly!” And he ran off toward the prize, while the patch of sunlight he abandoned spread over the bower and the field, and blue sky washed out the night.

  “Oh no,” Peter murmured, and turned when he heard a hard thump to his left. There was a lady there broken on the ground. Another fell on his right, a man this time—Peter collapsed, sure that he was felled by the rushing flight of something escaping from the man’s body. He had never seen such a thing as a body twisted and ruptured like this, and he wondered if anyone ever had seen such a thing. “Help!” Peter said. “Help him!” But though he was not alone on this day, everyone else around was standing and staring at the burning towers. The maze had grown—it looked a mile across instead of a hundred yards—and the towers stood where the torch had, both shining in the bright sun but on
ly one of them on fire. Here and there Peter saw other boys, Samuel Finch and Caleb Borley and John Sterling, arrested in the maze, hands shading their eyes as they watched the tower burn.

  People were still raining out of the sky, but none fell so close to Peter as the first two had, and he couldn’t tell from far away if any of them were his lady. He got up and ran toward one, leaping over the sheaves or just running right through them, violating the law of the maze, but before he ran a few yards, another would fall a little closer, and so he would turn to them, shouting, “Help them!” all the while. He didn’t know how long he continued like that, running all over while everyone else was just standing and watching, until the noise came, something that broke in on the quiet burning, a roar and a scream that seemed the perfect sound to match the singular vision. Just as he was sure no one had ever seen such a thing as a body broken like that man’s, or a tower such as this burning in the sky, certainly no one had ever heard a noise like this. A voice familiar to him cried, “Beware the angel!” When he turned he saw that it was Sara, standing not twenty feet from him, pointing away south, where something enormous was rushing through the sky. He supposed it might have been an angel—surely they were this fast and enormous. It passed over in an instant, and the noise and presence of it pressed him to the ground. With his chest pressed against the bloody grass he lifted his head and saw it collide with the unburnt tower—quietly, its huge noise disappeared into the fire it made. Then the only noise was Sara’s screaming. The night came back in a snap, and only the torch and the bonfires were burning, illuminating a different chaos—twelve children caught in the maze, kneeling and weeping or screaming or trembling violently, their parents holding them or hopping and shouting at their sides. Someone was saying his name, not Sara but his mother, standing next to him. He became aware that her hand was on his shoulder and pushed it away. “That hurts,” he said, because suddenly it did, there was a wild aching there.

  You wrote that you are tired of being sick. Tired of your bones hurting and the mysterious bruises, and tired of Tercin. For someone so stupid his deprivations are clever, and he has a certain cruel genius. Sometimes I think he is not stupid after all, only distracted by laziness and spitefulness, and if he devoted but a quarter of the time he spends torturing you to studying, he would grow up to be President. But never mind him, dear friend, and never mind the fevers and the sores beneath your tongue. One day you will be free of him, and one day you will be free of this illness. Good or bad, brothers depart, and so must sickness. And I don’t mean either that we will be free of it in death.

  We missed you in church yesterday. Or I did, anyway . . . I do not think Wallop noticed your absence—for all that he prayed for us with increasing fervor all afternoon—Let this sickness be lifted, let it depart from them forever!—he hardly ever looked our way, as if it were catching at a glance, and as if it had made anybody sick yet who was older than nineteen years. I did miss you, though. All of us on two benches (Wallop said it was so the healing could find us all at once—does the hand of God need that help? I wanted to ask. We all knew it was quarantine). Eleanor sat between me and Sam Finch. We mortified her with our whispering, and she tried to quiet us with great vigorous shushes from out of the bottom of her belly, and made such a noise finally that Wallop turned to her and asked, “Ms. Crowley, can you tell me the meaning of this afflicting vision?”

  Eleanor blushed so hard I could feel my own cheeks burning from the heat in her face. In her panic she looked at me and then at Sam, and then clear across the church at her mother, but the lady only stared into her lap. Then she looked back to Wallop and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a tiny, frightened voice. He let her finish and said, “Indeed. Is there any other answer but prayer, in the face of such a question, and in the face of such an affliction?” I’ve never liked the man but never hated him till then, because I understood all of a sudden that my life (and yours, and Sam’s and Edgar’s and Aaron’s and Lily’s and Elizabeth’s and Connor’s and even Eleanor’s—unless she is faking!) depends upon the answer to that question. Wallop would have us paternoster on it but I think the answer will require a more vigorous and dangerous pursuit. Yet he was right about that one thing. It doesn’t happen for nothing—we are not transported so fantastically for no reason. The vision is a challenge and its meaning is a cure.

  “An upsetment in the blood,” said Dr. Herz, summoned all the way from Cleveland by Sara’s father. For her he prescribed opium and antimony and cinchona, and though Arthur Carter was the only man in town who could pay him, he visited every sick child—by August 20, a week after the Lammas feast, there were sixteen of them lying about in various states of torpor. He came to Peter last, and over the objection of his mother, who had already formulated and initiated a plan of treatment. “Does he know lady’s mantle?” she asked Peter, her captive audience, and anyone else who would listen. “Does he know motherwort or neem? And what’s a nettle to him but a weed and a nuisance?” But her husband insisted.

  “A grand and severe upsetment,” the doctor continued, stoppering up the little glass vials he’d filled with specimens—every fluid or ichor he could coax from Peter he sampled and stored for analysis back in Cleveland. “That explains the visions. Heaps of blood in the brain block up the sinuses that usually drain away overheated thoughts—hence a vision of flame. Didn’t you mention a burning tree, my boy?”

  “A tower,” Peter said, staring out the window at Tercin, seated on a rock and worrying a carrot with his nail.

  “Ah—no doubt it’ll be a tree in a few days, and then the other children will see a tree. It propagates, you see, like a ripple in a pond.” He made a motion to illustrate the spreading effect, pushing out with his two hands and then sweeping them apart so it looked like he was trying to swim through the air. “Do you see?”

  Peter said no, but his father nodded, and asked again, “How do we make it better?”

  “That’s simple enough,” said Dr. Herz. “I’ll have my elixir made up in a few days, and be back with it by Friday. Mr. Carter has kindly agreed to purchase enough to supply the whole town, though I suspect if we treat Peter the other cases will resolve on their own.”

  “God bless him,” his mother said blankly.

  “God bless us all,” said Dr. Herz, “when we are subjected to trials, and sickness is always a trial. But what’s a trial but a test, and how else do we become perfect except through examination, and what’s perfection except the accumulation of mastered adversity?”

  “We must wrap him in olibanum and meadowsweet flower,” his mother said, and Peter stopped paying attention when she and the doctor started to bicker back and forth. He watched Tercin instead, who suddenly ate his carrot in three huge bites, then leaped up to roll and tumble in the grass, turning cartwheels and somersaults and running to jump off the woodpile and turn a forward flip. It was a display of perfect health and freedom meant to gall, but it only made Peter sigh, and wonder at his brother’s malice. “It doesn’t hurt,” he’d tell him later. “You shouldn’t bother with it ’cause I don’t even notice.”

  Something popped in the room—there was a noise like a whip snapping, and then a rustle like heavy curtains in a strong wind, and a stab of pain in Peter’s hip. He winced and drew up his legs. His mother opened her mouth and put a hand on his chest. She opened her mouth and spoke a question to him, and even though he couldn’t hear a word of it he could tell what it was by the shape of her lips—“Is it the pain again?”

  “I’m deaf!” he said, looking to his father, who was moving his lips rapidly and silently. “But I’m not—I can hear me!” And when he knocked on the windowsill he could hear that, too, but his parents and the doctor were all jabbering at him silently, his parents’ faces twisted with worry and the doctor looking smugly calm. Peter thought he was saying, “Of course you are deaf! It’s all part of the upsetment, my boy!’

  Another snap, another twinge in his hip and a stab in his back, and then he was immersed in nois
e—his mother and his father and Dr. Herz were speaking, but in voices that were not their voices—from his mother came a man’s voice that sounded like his father when you just woke him up after his Sunday nap, and his father spoke with a lady’s voice, and Dr. Herz sounded like a little girl.

  “There’s a great deal of smoke billowing from the towers, Phil. We can see flame coming out from at least two sides of the building,” said his mother.

  “That looks like a second plane has just—we just saw another plane coming in from the side,” said Dr. Herz.

  “I don’t believe this!” said his father. “The second tower has exploded from about twenty stories below in a gargantuan explosion.” All of them were reaching now to steady Peter and calm him, because he was pressing himself against the wall and the window to get away from them.

  “Be quiet!” he shouted at them. “Just hush up!” He felt a fever growing, and had the idea, with them pawing at him, and the fever coming on like it was reaching to gather him up, that he could get away from the vision before it came, if he only tried. So he launched himself off the wall, and rolled through them, out of the bed and onto the floor. And before his father could even turn around he was through the kitchen and out the door.