The Day the Angels Fell Read online

  “Oh, I’ve got tons of money,” I said, and we both laughed.

  I wasn’t exactly rich, but I made five dollars a week mowing Mr. Jinn’s grass. Mr. Jinn owned the farm to the north of us, but I had never seen him in my life. Not ever. He was an old hermit and never left his house. His farm was all grown over with weeds, and the barns were falling in on themselves. He had a small yard that he kept mowed, though sometimes he called my mom and, in as few words as possible, asked if I could mow it for him. When I did, he left a five-dollar bill in an empty birdbath close to his house. Whenever I took the money from the birdbath, I could feel his eyes staring at me through one of the dark windows.

  “Well, I guess you can name him whatever you want to name him if you’re footing the bill,” she said. The car turned in to the stone driveway that led to our house. “Just remember,” she said as she turned off the car, “names are powerful things. Sometimes they can even form us into who we become.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about who I was becoming, or who the cat would become, because that’s how it is when you’re young and feel like you have all the time in the world.

  I tried to tuck Icarus under my arm when we got out of the car so that my dad wouldn’t see, but at that moment he came walking in from the barn. He strolled over to my mom and kissed her on the cheek.

  I murmured, “Gross.”

  They both laughed. My dad stopped laughing when he saw what I had under my arm.

  “What’s that?”

  “What, that cute little cat?” my mom said, moving over to stand beside me.

  Dad sighed. “As if we need another animal around here to feed.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, And what do you have to say for yourself, young man?

  I pulled the cat in tighter against my side and stroked his head. “I’ll take care of him, Dad, don’t worry. I’ll pay for the food. You won’t have to do a thing.”

  He looked back over at my mom.

  “He named the cat Icarus,” she said, as if that was her only argument on my behalf.

  “What am I going to do with you two?” he said, trying not to smile. He turned and walked away. When he was far off, he shouted without turning around, “I’m fine with the cat. But not in the house!”

  I looked at Mom and she smiled, and we walked to the house together. I put the cat down and waited to see what he would do. Without hesitating, he ran up beside my mom and walked with her, trying to move between and around her feet.

  “He likes you, Mom!” I shouted.

  “How do you know it’s a he?” she asked again.

  “Because his name is Icarus.”

  “Is that your cat?” a voice shouted to me from down the lane. Abra rode her bike up beside me. She had a goofy grin on her face.

  “I got a cat! Can you believe it? Meet Icarus!” I laughed.

  “Cats are for sissies,” she said, but I could tell she was jealous.

  “Abra, would you like to stay for supper?” my mom called from the house, and we grinned at each other.

  At about six o’clock I ran out to the barn to find my dad and tell him supper was ready. Abra stayed inside to help my mom set the table.

  “Dad?” I shouted into the dark barn, where he usually finished up before supper. “Are you in here?”

  My voice sounded thin and vanished quickly in the aisles between the pens and the holes in the ceiling that went up to the musty haymow. Sometimes we’d throw a few bales of hay down and then jump through the hole, landing on them. It was a good ten feet from the ceiling to the floor, and the rush took my breath away. Inside that old barn, when the sun was going down but we hadn’t turned on the lights yet, it was a dark place with a lot of deep shadows. It was the kind of place where you could believe in just about anything.

  I thought back to the old lady who had drawn a circle in the ground around me. Who was the man in the shadows? Why were they all in the back room? What did Find the Tree of Life mean? I kept expecting one of the three women to walk out of a corner of the barn, holding that stick, looking at me with those eyes.

  “Dad?” I shouted again.

  “Over here, Son,” he said. I walked through the half-light to the back corner of the barn, where he kept one of the lambs that had been rejected by its mother. “Hold this bottle for me.”

  It was warm in the barn, and flies buzzed everywhere. They dodged my steps and buzzed around me in a cloud. I grabbed the oversized bottle and stuck it between the bars of the gate, holding it with two hands. The little white lamb latched on and sucked, bucking its head and wagging its stumpy little tail a million times a minute. I reached out and petted the curly wool on its head.

  “Thanks, boy,” my dad said, ruffling my hair and smiling. “I’m going to go hook up the tractor. You finish up that bottle for me and I’ll meet you inside.”

  When he left, the barn felt dark and still. I jumped at every shadow. As I helped the lamb gulp down the last of the bottle, I stared into a corner where a beam of sunshine fell through one of the dusty barn windows. The light illuminated a spiderweb, and as I watched, a fly collided with the sticky strands. It fought and churned and spun until it was hopelessly entangled. A small black spider darted out from the shadows, hovered over the fly, and began wrapping it in a sticky cocoon.

  A strange sense of fear burned inside me, and I backed away from the lamb. But there was something else, some feeling I couldn’t identify. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was nothing. Or maybe I could somehow sense the coming storm, the fact that things were about to change.

  We ate supper together that night, our last supper together, though I didn’t know it at the time. New potatoes and green beans from our garden, and a roast my mom had cooked in the oven all day.

  We never spoke much at supper, the three of us. Sometimes Mom would try to get us going with simple questions: “What’s the best thing that happened to you today? What’s the worst thing?” And my dad and I cooperated, more or less.

  There was definitely more talking when Abra was there. My mom was always asking about her family—how they were going to spend their summer and how her baby brother was doing. My dad always tried to get information out of her about what crops her father was planting, how the animals were faring, that sort of thing. Her family’s farm was just to the south of ours, and we saw them a lot.

  Every once in a great while my dad would tell a story during suppertime, and when he did I would listen with wide eyes. They were normally stories from his childhood injected with fictional characters or fantastic events. It was usually difficult to strain the truth from the fantasy, but they were always wonderful stories.

  That night he cleared his plate and took a long drink of ice water. The outside of the glass was sweating because it was warm in the house, and it left a small, glistening ring on the table. He crossed his arms and leaned his chair back on two legs. When he sat like that he looked huge and old and wise, and I was reminded of how different a boy is from a man, how different I was from him.

  “When I was a boy,” he said, “there was a great big tree in the front yard of this farm.”

  “Like the oak?” I asked, looking over at Abra. But she didn’t even notice me—she just stared at my dad. We both loved when he told his stories.

  “Just like the oak,” he said. “Only larger. And taller. Some of the boys in my neighborhood said that if you climbed all the way to the top, you’d be up in the clouds, maybe even in heaven. But that’s a different story. In this story, I had a dog, a wonderful dog named Ike. Ike was a German shepherd my grandfather gave me for my tenth birthday. Ike was eight weeks old when he came to live at the house. He was a beautiful dog.”

  My mom stood up and took a few plates over to the sink, then came and sat down. She put her elbow on the table and leaned her face into the palm of her hand. She was a good listener.

  “Ike didn’t always know what was best for him, and one day he chased a rabbit around the barn as my dad was backing out the tr
actor. Well, my dad backed over Ike, and he died. I was very sad. I cried for hours. Finally, as it started to get dark, my dad and my grandpa came in and asked if I’d like to help them bury Ike under the old oak tree. I said I would, and we took turns with the shovel, digging the hole and burying good old Ike.

  “The next day it started to rain, and it hadn’t rained all summer. We’d been in a drought, and the farmers were happy to see the rain. Well, someone heard that we had buried Ike the night before out under that oak tree, and there were some superstitious people in the town. They started to think that old oak tree had the power to bring rain, and all you had to do was sacrifice an animal and bury it close to the roots.”

  “That’s weird,” Abra said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Me and my grandpa and my dad, we all knew this was hogwash, but someone kept coming out at night and burying animals under our tree. It got to be pretty bad, and the rain came down harder and harder until it looked like it might flood. So one night my grandpa went out there with a can of kerosene and doused the tree and burned it down. You should have seen the flames.”

  For a moment he stared at the ceiling as if he were watching a massive tree burn.

  “Everything went back to normal after that. But I was sad to see that tree go.”

  It was very quiet around the table as we sat there thinking about Ike and the tree and the generations of farmers that had come before us. I wished I knew how much of that story was true. You never knew with my dad.

  After dinner, Abra helped Mom with the dishes while Dad and I went back out for a few more hours of farm work. By the time I got back to the house, Abra had already ridden her bike home. We did that a lot, biked to each other’s houses, because there wasn’t anyone else who lived on Kincade Road once you got outside of town, and the ride wasn’t that far, maybe a mile or two. Well, there was Mr. Jinn, but no one ever saw him.

  I made a house for Icarus by cutting apart a cardboard box, and Mom donated one of her old sweaters for the bedding. I put the box under the huge, green front porch of our farmhouse. I sat there on the steps and looked out over the massive garden, and the cat weaved a circle around my legs, purring.

  The sun had gone, but there was still a bit of light in the western sky. The smell of cut hay filtered through the sunset. A few lightning bugs turned on and off and on and off, their yellow-green lights sharp like stars.

  I saw the storm rolling in from the east, the clouds heavy and flashing with lightning. It sounded like some kind of war in heaven, a vicious battle that would end only after one side had completely destroyed the other. I had always thought of thunder coming after the lightning, a natural cause and effect, but that night I saw it in a new way. It felt like Thunder and Lightning were two beings battling each other, Lightning always striking first, Thunder coming later with the counterpunch.

  The lightning and thunder grew close, and I thought again about what I had seen at the back of the antique store through the crack in the door. I remembered how the thunder had sounded, how the lightning had lit up the three women’s faces, pale and clear, and how the scratched-out words on the table had looked like an angry cloud.

  But that storm, the one coming in through the dusk, wouldn’t be like scratches on a table. That storm would bring death and set everything else in motion.

  5

  I SAT OUT THERE WITH THE CAT, and the storm drifted in. All the limbs started to dance and the bright green undersides of the leaves turned up, silver in the near darkness. Some of the tips of the branches blew off when the wind came gusting in, and because the storm arrived from the east and the sun was setting in the west, there was an eerie, low-lying light that stretched all the shadows in the direction of the storm. It looked like the storm was sucking the darkness out of everything, or maybe chasing away all the light.

  The lightning arrived in the valley, bright flashes followed by a moment of silence. Then, KABOOM! The thunder rumbled over the fields. It was right at that first peal of thunder that my little cat ran to the oak tree in our front yard, about forty yards from the porch. That crazy cat clawed its way up to where the first thick branches formed, about ten feet off the ground.

  I always thought that particular part of the tree looked kind of like the palm of a giant hand with five fingers branching out, as if the hand was going to pick a piece of fruit or catch something falling from the sky. There was a little hollowed-out place up there—I knew because sometimes I used a ladder to climb up and sit in that spot.

  I ran to the shed, and as I stepped inside to look for the ladder, the rain started to fall, tapping loudly on the roof and the walls and the small glass windows. I had to turn the light on inside the shed. I found the extension ladder buried under cobwebs and a thick layer of dust and dragged it through the rain to the tree. It banged on the ground and hit me in the knee a bunch of times—it was so long I could barely carry it. Eventually I propped the ladder up and leaned it against the rough bark.

  That oak tree was like an old friend. It was way older than I was. We had picnics under that tree. I had played with my toys all among its gnarled roots. I had helped Mom and Dad rake up all of its leaves every autumn and put them in a big pile so I could jump in them. Its bark was an old man’s skin, rough and peeling. That oak tree was practically a grandparent.

  I scrambled up the ladder, now slick with rain, and peeked into the small area where all the largest branches forked out from the trunk. There was that silly white cat. Its eyes glowed.

  “Here, kitty, kitty,” I said gently as the rain came down harder, soaking me for the second time that day. My hair clung to my forehead while huge drops fell into my eyes. I climbed up a few more steps into the darkness, into the shadowy heart of the tree. I knew you aren’t supposed to climb up onto the top step of a ladder, but I couldn’t reach the cat without going up as high as possible. I stretched again, now up on my tiptoes. The ladder shook underneath me as another bolt of lightning fell to the earth.

  KABOOM!

  “Here, kitty, kitty!”

  Still it wouldn’t come to me. It huddled under a tiny branch. If I wanted to rescue that cat, I was going to have to climb over and get it.

  I pulled myself up into the tree and stood in that area where all the branches started. I leaned over to grab the cat, but it jumped away and scampered out on one of the branches.

  “Icarus, you stupid cat!” I shouted. “Come back here!”

  Just then I heard my mom shouting from the porch. Her voice sounded worried and mad.

  “Sam, what are you doing up there? You’ll get struck by lightning! Come down this instant!”

  “It’s my cat,” I shouted through the rain. “He climbed out onto one of the branches.”

  “He’ll come down when it stops raining. Now listen to me and get down here!”

  As if to emphasize Mom’s words, the storm threw down a lightning strike that was followed quickly by an explosion of thunder.

  When the lightning flashed it was like everything became midday, just for a moment. I could see the yard and the grass and the house and the church across the road. But after the lightning, everything seemed darker than usual.

  I had second thoughts about the rescue mission. Maybe I should go back in the house. I stood there for a moment, trying to make up my mind about what to do. I decided to go inside, but then I saw my mom’s hands at the edge of the tree’s palm. She pulled herself up and scrambled into the nest of branches where I stood. Now we were both standing there in that hand, wet to the bone.

  “Where is Icarus?” she asked. I could tell she wasn’t happy.

  I pointed out the largest branch.

  My mom sighed and shook her head. “I am not doing this until you are safe inside. Do you hear me? Now go. I’ll take care of this.”

  She held on to me and eased me down until my feet found the top of the ladder. I looked up into her face. She had a sad, resigned look, as if she knew what was about to happen and had resolved to let it happen. But that
’s impossible. Right? She couldn’t have known, and if she had known, why would she have stayed there?

  I scrambled down four rungs and jumped the rest of the way. I ran into the house, up the steps to the second floor, and around the corner to a window where I could see the tree. At first I could hardly see anything. But as I stared into the darkness, the lightning flashed, and I saw my mom walking out that large branch and holding on to overhead limbs. I had never seen her do anything like that before.

  I couldn’t always see her, what with the rain coming down in sheets and the wind blowing the branches all around and the night having fallen. But once, when the wind held and the lightning struck, I saw her edging farther out on the branch, farther out. She bent over a little and put her hand out for the cat. Her fingers curled up as she sort of waved it to come over to her. Her wet hair hung heavy around her face, and her clothes stuck to her body. I imagined her saying the same words over and over again. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  That’s when the lightning bolt struck.

  KABOOM!

  It lit up the window so bright and close I could have reached out and touched it. The sound of the thunder shook me where I stood—the floor rumbled. In the moments that followed, I heard loud thuds as pieces of the oak tree rained down on the house and all over the farm. In the following days, as neighbors came to help us clean up, someone found a six-foot-long piece of that tree on the other side of the cattle barn, a few hundred yards away.

  I regained my senses and looked out the window. Darkness. I peered through the night and wondered if Mom was okay. I thought about my dad, what he was doing, why he hadn’t come running. A flash of lightning gave me another glimpse—the branch my mom had been standing on was shredded and hanging.

  My mom was gone.

  The ambulance arrived along with one police car, and they parked in our lane, their lights spinning and making me dizzy. I watched, never having moved from the window. I didn’t want to go down, because as long as I didn’t no one could tell me what I already knew.