A Quiet Belief in Angels Read Online Free PDF

what?”
    She smiled. “That is something you have to decide. Choose something that has some meaning for you, something that you feel provokes an emotion, a feeling . . . something that makes you angry or hateful, or something that makes you feel excited perhaps. Write a real story, Joseph. It doesn’t have to be long, but it has to be about something you believe in.”
    Miss Webber rose and stood over me. Once again she touched my cheek with the flat of her hand. “Have a good Christmas, Joseph, and I will see you at the start of 1940.”
     
    Gunther Kruger was the richest man in Charlton County. The Kruger house was twice the size of ours. In the parlor they had an Atwater Kent crystal radio, and the Kruger family—Gunther, his wife, their two sons and one daughter—would sit before it with headphones and listen to music and talking that traveled from Savannah, all the way through Hinesville and Townsend, Hortense and Nahunta. Those sounds crossed the Okefenokee Swamp and did not sink. It was magical and strange, an aperture into a world I could not fathom. In the kitchen they had a Maytag washing machine and a Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Mrs. Kruger, who wore coarse woolen skirts, would make wienerwurst and potato salad and talk to me in her pidgin-English accent.
    “You are a sceercraw,” she would say, and I would frown and tilt my head and say, “Sceercraw?”
    “For sceering buds,” she said. “Like he is med of stigs and olt clodes, yes?”
    “Sticks and old clothes,” I repeated, and then smiled widely. “A scarecrow!”
    “Yes,” Mrs. Kruger chimed. “Like I have set, a sceercraw! Now eat before the buds come or you weel sceer them. Ha ha!”
    I started visiting with the Krugers a week or so before Christmas. Oftentimes Mr. Kruger would not be there, and my mother would tell me to stay only until Mr. Kruger returned from whatever business he was engaged in. “The man has enough children around his feet,” she said. “He returns home, you say your thank-yous and come home, understand?”
    I understood. I did not wish to outstay my welcome. Besides, Elena Kruger, all of nine years old, with too many teeth for her mouth and ears like spinnakers awaiting a Gulf Stream, seemed to have her heart set on goading me into violence each time I was there.
    It took the patience of Job to restrain myself from horsewhipping Elena Kruger for her catcalls and slanderous indignities. Her brothers, Hans and Walter, seemed oblivious to her invasive behavior, but she was there—needling and hankering, baiting and badgering—from the moment I arrived until I heard Mr. Kruger’s rich tones of welcome when he came in back through the kitchen.
    She was a sweet enough child I’m sure, but to a twelve-year-old boy a nine-year-old girl seems the worst kind of harpy. Her voice was shrill, like a rusted spike jabbing my ears, and though later she would mellow and soften, and in her own way become really quite sensitive and beautiful, at the time she was like bitter-tasting medicine for an illness long gone. Elena Kruger was as welcome as a pitcher of fizzy milk, each belch a little more sour.
    Only once did I see her bruises. It was late afternoon, days before Christmas, and Mr. Kruger was not yet back from the fields with Walter. Mrs. Kruger called for her daughter to help her in the kitchen, and Elena went. I stood in the hallway that separated the parlor from the back half of the house, and from there I could see through the doorway.
    Elena was told to turn up the sleeves of her blouse, and turn them up she did, all the way to her shoulders, and there, in numerous colors—purple, sienna, yellow, and carmine—bruises were punched and painted along the upper halves of her arms. The impression given was of some forceful and terrible grip placed on her, large hands holding her upper arms, perhaps shaking her, perhaps doing nothing more than keeping her still.
    “Epilepsy,” my mother said when I told her what I’d