A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory Read Free Book Online Page A

hateful about the Jews, about traveling people, about people who don’t look the same or talk the same or go to the same churches. He’s forcing his own views on a country, and that country is going mad. That’s the kind of thing that travels like an airborne virus, and if good people, honest people—people like us—if we don’t do what we can to stop it then we’ll find it everywhere. That’s why I’ll go if they ask me.”
    The following day I asked Miss Webber about the war, about what Reilly Hawkins had said about the Jews and the traveling people.
    For a moment she looked surprised, and then there was something in her face that spoke of grief, of suppressed tears perhaps.
    That’s when she spoke of the competition. She changed the subject—suddenly, unexpectedly—and I forgot all about Adolf Hitler and how he was getting folks all fired up and hateful.
    “What competition?”
    “A story competition, a competition for people to write and submit stories.”
    I leaned my head to one side.
    “Don’t do that, Joseph Vaughan,” she said. “It makes you look like you have only half a brain and your head’s lopsided.”
    I set my head straight.
    “So write a story,” she said. “It can be about anything at all, but like we discussed before it is always better to write about something you’re personally interested in, or something you have experienced. It should be no longer than two thousand words, and if you write it neatly enough I will set it correctly on my Underwood typewriter and we will send it all the way to Atlanta.”
    I didn’t say a great deal. I don’t remember the moment too well. I think I had my eyes wide and my mouth slightly open.
    “What?” Miss Webber asked. “Why are you standing there like that?”
    After a moment I shook my head. “No particular reason,” I replied.
    “Now you look like the sort of boy who needs his mouth wiped every fifteen minutes . . . go sit down at your desk, Joseph.”
    “Yes, Miss Webber.”
    “And start working on some ideas. Deadline for your story is a month from today.”
    Three days later I came across a word, monkeyshines. I don’t remember now how I came across it, but I did. It was from the late 1800s, and it meant tricks and japes, the kind of things kids do when they’re in a mischief-and-mayhem mood. The word pleased me, made me smile, and so I used it as the title for my story.
    I wrote about being a kid, because that’s what I was. I wrote about being thirteen and having no father, about the war in Europe and some of the things that Reilly Hawkins told me. Alongside that, I wrote about the things I did to keep my mind occupied, to make me forget that my mother was tired, that Hitler was a madman, and somewhere some thousands of miles away people were being killed because they thought different or spoke different. I wrote about practical jokes me and the Kruger boys had done. About the time we found a dead raccoon and buried it. We dug up some mountain fly honeysuckle and planted it on the little grave, and we said some words and wished the raccoon would find Alice Ruth and Laverna and keep them company in Heaven. I wrote about these things and signed it neatly at the bottom—Joseph Calvin Vaughan—and I put my age and my date of birth because I figured the story people in Atlanta might want to know such details.
    I gave my story to Miss Webber on Friday the eleventh of February. On Monday she told me she’d typed it up and mailed it to Atlanta, and she showed me Atlanta on the map. It seemed an awful long way away. I wondered if my story would have changed at all by the time it got there.
    I thought about it a lot for some time, and then I forgot about it. Seemed to me that writing things down was a way of making them go away.
    “You could look at it that way,” Miss Webber told me. “Or you could look at it from the viewpoint that writing things down makes them last forever. Like that book I gave you last Christmas. That was