A Quiet Belief in Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

fidelity, for love.
    And the days I remember are days that have gone. Slipped away silently into an indistinct past. Not only gone, but forgotten. They are days I believe we will never see again. Not here, not in Augusta Falls. Not anywhere. Everything awash with the heady delirium of spontaneous celebration, a celebration for no other reason than being alive. And the sound of something familiar but distant—a baseball game on the radio, the clunk-snap-hiss of emerald Coca-Cola caps—and all of a sudden the past is there. Technicolor and Sensurround: Cecil B. DeMille, King Vidor. And then a welcome silence after an endless noise.
    And spiked through these memories, like rusty jags of metal, are other memories.
    The girls.
    Always the girls.
    Girls like Alice Ruth Van Horne, whom I had loved simply as only a child could.
    Their lives like twists of damp paper, screwed tight and tossed away.
    And then something would happen—something quiet and beautiful—and I’d start to believe there was hope that the world might set itself to rights.
    It did not. Not then.
    Perhaps in some small way what I have now done will redress the balance.
    Perhaps now the ghosts that have haunted me all these years will slip away.
    Their voices will fall silent—finally, peacefully, irrevocably.
    In my hand I hold a shred of newspaper. I hold it up, and through the thin paper, now smeared with my own blood, I see the light from the window, the silhouette of the dead man before me.
    “See?” I say. “You see what you did?”
    And then I smile. I am growing weaker. I perceive some sense of closure.
    “Never again,” I whisper. “Never again.”

THREE
    “ Y OU PICK A WORD,” MISS WEBBER SAID. “YOU PICK A WORD and then you think of as many words that mean the same or similar thing. They are called synonyms. You write them in your notebook, Joseph, and when you wish to make a sentence you look in your notebook and use the most interesting or suitable words you can find.”
    I nodded.
    She stepped around the desk and eased into the tablet-arm chair beside mine. The classroom was empty. I had waited behind on her instruction. It was two weeks before Christmas and the final days of school.
    “You have heard of the Monkey Trials?” she asked.
    I shook my head.
    “Some years ago, 1925 I think, there was a biology teacher called John T. Scopes. He came from a town called Dayton in Tennessee, and he taught his pupils about something called evolution. You know what evolution is, Joseph?”
    “Yes, Miss Webber. The idea that we were all monkeys in the trees a long time ago, and before that we were fish or something.”
    She smiled. “Mr. Scopes taught his pupils about the theory of evolution instead of the theory of creation as it is taught in the Bible. He was taken to court by the state of Tennessee, and the prosecuting lawyer was a man called William Jennings Bryan, a famous orator and three-time presidential candidate. The man who defended Mr. John Scopes was Clarence Darrow, a very famous American criminal lawyer. Mr. Scopes lost his battle and he was fined one hundred dollars, but at no time did he relinquish his position.” Miss Webber leaned a little closer to me. “At no time, Joseph Vaughan, did he say what he believed people wanted to hear. He said what he thought was right.”
    She leaned back. “You’re wondering why I’m telling you this?”
    I said nothing, merely looked back at her and waited for her to speak further.
    “I’m telling you this because we have a Constitution and the Constitution says we should say what we feel, and maintain our right to speak the truth as we see it. That, Joseph Vaughan, is what you should do with your writing. If you want to write, then you should write, but always remember to write the truth as you see it, not as other people wish it to be seen. You understand?”
    “Yes,” I said, believing I did.
    “Then, during your Christmas vacation, I want you to write me a story.”
    “About