Flight of the Stone Angel Read Online Free PDF

other vehicle in sight. He approached the front door, already sensing the stillness of no one home. The sound of the engine stopped now, but suddenly, not tapering off down some road in the distance. It must be close by.
    He followed the curving driveway as it wound around the house and past a large chicken coop attached to an empty garage. The meandering road led him into the trees and ended at the heart of a grove. A brace of heavy branches concealed the upper portion of an old chapel made of large, rough-hewn blocks of gray. Only the religious arches of the windows and the open doors were not obscured by leaves. A large and blocky tarpaulined shape lay in the bed of a red pickup truck parked in front of the building.
    Charles rounded the truck and walked up a short flight of steps. He paused on the threshold and peered inside. Two massive skylights were set into the steep pitch of the high ceiling. Slow floating clouds of pink and gold seemed within grazing distance of the glass.
    The vast room was full of day’s end shadows. The pews and religious trappings were gone. At the back of the church, ghostly shapes in white drapes formed a circle on the raised floor where the altar had been. Uncovered sculptures stood about the room in a more casual arrangement and varying states of emergence from granite and marble. Many of these figures had wings and appeared to be flying out of their uncarved sections.
    A small, delicate man came out of the shadows to dance with the tall statue of a woman. The strange couple glided past a long worktable, and now Charles could see the feet of the man and the wheeled pallet beneath his stone partner as he rolled her to the wall.
    Charles would have called out, but remembered that Henry Roth only conversed in sign language and written notes. He came up behind the man as he was arranging a drape around the statue. With no hint of surprise, the sculptor turned to face his uninvited guest. Charles assumed the man had felt the warning vibrations of approaching footfalls on the wooden floorboards.
    This person was neither white nor black, but a stunning new race of golden skin and light brown eyes with sparks of green. His hair was pure white and tightly kinked about his crown. The sculptor truly belonged in this company of angels, for his smile was charming and gentle as he spread his hands on the air. His face was an open question.
    Charles fumbled for a moment, but the movements came back to him quickly enough. As a toddler, he had signed his words before he had ever spoken aloud. This was his first language, though he had abandoned it over the twenty years since his father’s death. With broad gestures and finger spelling, his hands said, “My name is Charles Butler. You are Mr. Roth?”
    The man nodded. Charles made more signs, his hands curving and pointing. When memory failed him, he spelled what he could not sign in a fluid movement. Here and there, he made a slip of the fingers and erred, but all the intricate nuances of tense and adverb were coming back to him as he stabbed the air and danced one hand in a circle. Facial expression gave depth to his feeling when he described his relationship to Kathy Mallory, whom Henry Roth would remember as young Kathy Shelley. He raised his brows to punctuate with a question mark when he asked for help. He tightened his lips for the sense of an emphatic exclamation point when he explained his dire need to see her again.
    Only the ignorant believed that sign language was dumb show, simple mime. This graceful three-dimensional voice of hands flying through space, this was the true art of conversation. One gesture flowed smoothly into the flight of a bird, and then he finger-stepped across the stage of midair to describe the details of Augusta’s ruse with Lilith – his role as Augusta’s agent. And then, after one last plea for aid, Charles’s hands fell silent.
    Throughout the long and involved explanation of events, Henry Roth had been extremely