The Day the Angels Fell Read online

  I looked to the north. “The vultures are circling again.”

  “They’re helping us,” Mr. Jinn said. “They’re searching for the Tree.” He paused. “You be careful about that Mr. Tennin.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He waved his hand at me as he did whenever we discussed things he didn’t think I would understand. “You be careful.”

  I looked all around the farm, and I noticed a lot of activity. I saw a groundhog in the far corner of the garden, standing up on its hind legs the way they sometimes do. Then I saw Icarus! He was walking along one of the rain gutters, high up on the second floor of the house. Icarus. My cat. He disappeared behind the house.

  I saw the vultures too, still circling.

  Up there in the tree, among the twigs and the leaves and the shattered branches, things moved all around me. Squirrels scampered from here to there. A trail of ants followed the scar up, up, up the tree. A large hawk perched in the uppermost branches, surveying the grounds.

  So many animals. So much going on around me. I wondered which side was good and which side was evil, because that’s how I thought of things—in pairs, with one thing on one side and the other thing on the other. I looked down at Mr. Jinn.

  Which side was he on?

  Then a small thought caught in my mind like a thorn. What if Mr. Jinn was the cursed angel, the one whose only desire was to possess the Tree? It wasn’t the first time that thought had perched in my mind, but it was the first time I had looked directly at it, considered it seriously. Mr. Tennin’s story might be real. The Tree might be here.

  I took a deep breath, and as I turned around and reached my foot down for the ladder, another question came into my mind, a question I realized I couldn’t answer.

  Whose side would I join?

  Mr. Jinn went back to his farm to, in his words, “Eat, take a nap, think, and call for more helpers.” And when he said the word helpers, it sounded like the name of something specific, as if it should have been a proper name with its own capitalized letter: Helpers.

  I went back into the farmhouse and thought about Abra, but I didn’t let myself think about her too long because it made me wonder again whose side I was on. How could I have ended up on a side that didn’t include her? It was lonely, facing an uncertain future without my best friend.

  I turned on the television and found a baseball game, but on second thought I left it and walked up to my bedroom. My window was open and somehow that warm July day managed to send a cool breeze in through the screen. Flies buzzed around the window, trying to get in. I lay down on my bed and thought about Mr. Jinn and Mr. Tennin, and I wondered what my father was doing. It was unusual for him not to ask for my help, especially during the summer when I was home from school and bored. Perhaps he thought I should have the day off, the day of my mother’s funeral. But I would rather be busy mucking out stalls or bottle-feeding the lamb.

  I heard the screen door open downstairs, and then it slammed shut. I knew it wasn’t my dad. He never let the door slam like that. He said it was lazy and worked the hinges loose. I heard someone walking up the steps, slow and heavy. Would Mr. Jinn come into our house without being asked?

  I walked out into the upstairs hall and waited. Just as the person rounded the stairs I remembered: Mr. Tennin had been going to get his car. He would be collecting his things and bringing them upstairs. And there he was.

  “Hi there, Sam,” he said in a friendly voice.

  “Hi,” I said, and it felt awkward having a strange man in the house. I felt like I had to be more careful, but I wasn’t sure why.

  “Is this my room?” he asked, motioning toward the first door on the right at the top of the stairs. His voice was timid and his eyes were hesitant, as if he was trying to figure out what I was thinking, where I was settling in the whole scheme of things. His eyes gave me the same feeling I got when I first looked at the stars after learning the light that came from some of them was thousands of years old.

  I nodded and pointed to the next door. “That’s my room. Dad’s room is there at the end. The bathroom is the door straight ahead.”

  “Thank you, Sam,” he said in a smooth, quiet voice. He carried his two bags into his room, turned on the light, and closed the door behind him. I heard the lock turn, the smallest click.

  I went back into my room and left the door open. Everything felt still, as if the house was holding its breath, but that’s probably because I was listening more intently than I usually did. I lay down in my bed. What was Mr. Tennin doing over there? And as I wondered if he knew the door to the attic was in his room, I heard it open.

  I knew it was the attic door because every so often my dad would go up there to look for something he couldn’t find, and whenever he opened that door, it made a long whining sound followed by a loud snap. When you opened the door the whole way, it popped up right at the end and collided with the door frame.

  Lying there on my bed, I heard the long, slow whine and the snap. Very far away, or what felt like it, I heard the slow thudding of footsteps as Mr. Tennin walked up the attic stairs. I didn’t envy him that. You couldn’t have paid me to go up there. All those spiders and boxes of mice-infested clothing and old keepsakes. My baby clothes were up there somewhere. And my old papers from kindergarten. My mom had kept a box up there with all of my old stuff in it. She could never throw anything away.

  I heard him walking through the attic. Soon he was directly above me. The only thing I moved was my eyeballs as I looked straight up above me. I heard him slide a few cardboard boxes around, and they sounded like sandpaper moving slowly over rough wood. Then he slid the boxes right back to where they had been.

  At first I didn’t know what to think. Is he going through our stuff? Is he here because he wants to rob us?

  But then I heard him walk back through the attic and down the stairs, and as I heard the door snap and whine all the way closed, I realized what was going on.

  He’s hidden something up there. He’s hidden something very important, because he’s worried that someone might snoop through his car or his room and he doesn’t want anyone finding it.

  He opened his door and walked out into the hall, then peeked his head around the corner of my doorway.

  “Have a good afternoon, Sam,” he said, nodding his head at me before turning and walking down the steps. I heard his footsteps again, and I was beginning to recognize the cadence to them, the particular rhythm of his movement. The screen door slammed shut.

  I darted over to my window, and while I couldn’t see him walking through the part of the yard hidden by the rest of the house, I saw his shadow stretching long and thin and moving toward the barns. I waited. I waited some more. I could hear the baseball game announcer still on the television, still talking about baseball in his slow, easygoing, summery voice. One thought took over my mind.

  I have to go up there and find out what he’s hiding.

  So I moved away from the window, walked into the hallway, and stared at his closed door. I reached over, and the knob felt cold in my hand. I turned it, and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges, but the breeze coming in the open window threatened to slam the door shut again. I went into the room and let the door close behind me.

  His small, single bed was against the wall that separated his room from my room. Directly in front of me was a window that looked out over the porch roof. Since his room was a corner room, there was also a window to the right. That was the window where I had watched my mom try to rescue Icarus. I had stood in that spot as Abra walked away from the house after my mother was gone. Now I stayed to the side of it and glanced out. No one was in the yard. No one was coming.

  There it was—the lightning tree, looking more wilted than ever. I didn’t know if a lightning strike could kill an entire tree, as Mr. Jinn claimed it could. Could lightning go all the way down and char the roots under the earth? I didn’t know anything about lightning or the life cycle of an old oak tree.

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p; I heard a small buzzing noise and looked up. A hummingbird hung in the air on the other side of the glass, no more than two feet from my face. It was a brownish gray, the size of my fist, and its whirring wings moved so fast that they were invisible. It cocked its head and seemed to be asking me a question, a simple question, one I could answer if I only spoke hummingbird.

  Or maybe it wasn’t asking me a question—maybe it was trying to read me, trying to figure me out, trying to find out what I was going to do next. I raised my finger up to my lips and said, “Shh.” I don’t know why, but I did. It flew away in fits and starts, darting here and there and disappearing in the distance. I had the strangest feeling that it had been sent there by someone, and that it would now report back.

  Still, no one was coming. I took a deep breath. I didn’t like going into the attic for normal reasons, much less to try to find an object hidden by a stranger who had just moved into our house. But I opened the attic door anyway. It whined slowly all the way to the end, where it gave that loud snap! I had terrible visions of the attic door closing on me and somehow getting stuck, trapping me in the attic until Mr. Tennin came back. So I pulled his suitcase over and used it to hold the door open.

  The stairwell was dark, but I knew there was a light switch at the top. The unpainted wood steps were worn smooth by many years of rough use, and they were steep and tall so that I had to reach my foot up with each step. A narrow handrail ran the length of the steps, but the screws that held it in place were loose, so if I pulled too hard on it for support, it wriggled in and out of the housings and felt like it would fall out.

  Under my bare feet I felt the smoothness of the wood, the way it had been worn down in the middle by a hundred years of footsteps. I stopped at the top and waited for my eyes to adjust, realizing that it was much, much warmer in the attic than the rest of the house. I started sweating immediately. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I found the light switch and flicked it on, but nothing happened.

  The bulb was dead. The only other source of light was a small, round window at the end of the attic, and it was covered in a thick layer of dust, like Mr. Jinn’s farmhouse windows, so the light that fell through was dim and filtered. I listened carefully, wondering if anyone had come into the house, but I heard nothing besides the normal summer sounds of the farm: some bugs buzzing and chirping, a bird singing, and a tractor engine lurching and working its way through a wet field. They all sounded far off, as if I were in the bottom of a well, listening to a world high above me.

  One main clearing formed a path down the center of the attic, and it was flanked by boxes, black trash bags, and huge plastic containers. There were cedar chests and old trash cans full of photos and memories and Christmas decorations. Ghosts from the past. Every so often a narrower cleared aisle led off the main one, an empty alley that gave access to the far corners of the attic. I thought Mr. Tennin must have hidden whatever it was he had hidden at the end of one of those narrow walkways.

  I tried to figure out where to walk so that I’d be directly above the corner of my room, where I had heard Mr. Tennin moving things around. I found a small path through boxes that led back into the eaves of the house, toward the corner of my room. I had to turn sideways at some places where the boxes jutted out or the dusty plastic bags reached out to grab me.

  The farther back I went down the row, the lower the ceiling, so eventually I had to duck down to avoid the beams. It was very dark. At the end, I had to get down on my hands and knees. Everything was covered in a layer of dust, and cobwebs, real and imagined, clung to my hair. I reached around with my hands, trying to find a few small boxes that I might be able to slide away, small boxes that might have Mr. Tennin’s secret stash hidden behind them.

  About this time the heat started to overwhelm me. The air felt unbreathable. I thought I should go back down to my room and get a flashlight.

  That’s when I heard a sound that sent a surge of panic through me. It was a far-off sound, but close enough and familiar enough for me to know that it was inside the house.

  It was the sound of the front screen door slamming shut.

  16

  THIS IS THE LIFE of an old man whose friends are gone, who lives alone on the farm his father rebuilt, miles north of town. I stare at the large calendar on my desk, the one with an empty block for each and every day of the year. Most of the blocks are empty, except a few with things written in them in pencil, phrases like, “Plant the last of the corn” and “Give zucchini to Jerry.” Most blocks, though, are empty white spaces, blank days that repeat again and again.

  The block that is tomorrow is filled with one word that I, for some reason, wrote in all capital letters.

  FUNERAL.

  I look up from the calendar and find my eyes drifting back and forth between two things. One is the beautiful day outside my open window, unseasonably cool for a summer day. I can see the oak tree and the lane and, if I lean to the right, the space where the church used to be. On some afternoons the beauty of this farm overwhelms me, and I can sit and stare at it for hours. Of course, this might also be because I am getting older, and because of all the blank-space days in my life.

  My eyes leave the window and focus on the box in front of me, the box I brought down from the attic just this morning, the box I haven’t opened for decades. It’s covered in years and cobwebs. I wipe some of the dust off the top and it sticks to my fingers, a fine layer.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  I hear a knock at the screen door. I sigh. It’s probably Jerry, and it’s no good pretending I’m not home because he knows I never go anywhere. I rise slowly and walk to the stairs. He knocks again.

  “Coming, coming,” I say, and I wonder again why everyone is in such a hurry these days, such a hurry. What are they hurrying toward? What is there out in front of every single one of them that they can’t wait to get to? What happened to this present moment?

  “Mr. Chambers?” he says again while I’m walking down the stairs. “Samuel? Are you there?”

  “For goodness’ sake, man.” I can’t hide the irritation in my voice any longer. “It takes me a while to get to the door. At least allow me that.”

  I get to the bottom of the steps and walk over to the door, and there I find Jerry standing up rather straight. His son Caleb is beside him, reluctantly. I stare at the boy, and his glance, which at first looked defiant and aggressive, darts away into some corner to hide.

  “Hello,” I say through the screen without opening the door. I’m not in the mood for people today. Caleb interrupting my pipe smoking the night before took me to the end of my rope. I needed a few days of solitude to gather my strength. Maybe a few weeks. Of course, the funeral is tomorrow, so there is no clear end in sight, and that makes me tired.

  Jerry moves his hand to open the door, but it doesn’t budge when he pulls on the handle. It’s locked. He looks first at Caleb, then at me, and finally back at Caleb.

  “I think you have something to say to Mr. Chambers,” he says.

  I roll my eyes. “Goodness, boy, what now?”

  But the boy stares down at the porch floor. His father nudges him with his elbow, but he refuses to look up.

  “Is that all?” I ask, moving from the door. “I have other things to do.”

  “Caleb!” his father says in a sharp voice. I’ve never heard either of his parents call him by his first name before. I don’t think the boy hears it much either, because he springs into full confession mode.

  “I climbed up on your roof,” he blurts.

  I look at his father. “Is that all?”

  His father nudges him again.

  “To spy on you,” he continues.

  I roll my eyes again and send out an exasperated breath. “Am I going to have to put an electric fence around my house?”

  “And I broke the downspout when I was climbing down,” he says, and I can tell he is finished talking because a wave of relief washes over his face.

  “Well, I’m s
ure your father will take care of that.” I back away again, trying to pry myself out of a conversation that is going nowhere.

  “No, no, Samuel,” Jerry says in a determined voice. “Caleb will make it up to you. Of course I’ll fix the downspout. But he needs to make it up to you.”

  Oh, these people and their endless quest to make it right. What scale do they measure by that must always be brought back to level? But an idea comes into my mind. I didn’t call for it. I’m not sure where it came from, unless perhaps I’ve been thinking about it without knowing.

  “Fine,” I say. “He can come with me to the funeral tomorrow. That can be his penance.”

  Jerry looks rather shocked. The boy looks terrified.

  “Well,” Jerry begins, “I’m not sure how that—”

  “I see,” I interrupt. “I need someone to help me with something at the funeral. But if your offer isn’t real, if it is, in fact, a false offer, I’ll be going back upstairs, thank you very much.” I say the last four words on their own, like a hammer striking a nail, and I turn to go.

  “Of course he’ll go with you,” Jerry blurts out. “Won’t you, boy?”

  I don’t even stop long enough to look at Caleb’s face. I’m afraid I may start laughing.

  “Eight a.m. sharp,” I say, and I leave the two of them standing at the door. But when I get to the bottom of the stairs, I change my mind. I turn around and go back to the door. They are already down the steps and walking through the yard.

  “Caleb!” I shout.

  The boy turns.

  “Come here.”

  He looks up at his father, Jerry nods his head, and the boy walks back to the door. I bend down as low as these knees will let me.

  “Now listen here,” I say, and he stares at me, his eyes unblinking. “I need someone at the funeral who can do something very brave for me. Very brave.”