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

appeared he’d neither shaved nor changed his shirt. My mother said that nothing could crush a man’s spirit so much as telling him he could not help.
    Four days before Christmas, Gunther Kruger came to see my mother. Hans was ill—sharp elevations of temperature, relapsing fever, muscular pains, delirium. My mother called Dr. Piper and he examined the boy.
    “Streptobacillus moniliformus,” he pronounced sonorously.
    “In English,” my mother said.
    “Rat-bite fever,” Dr. Piper told her. “The boy’s been bitten by a rat. See here,” he said, and indicated a suppurating welt at the back of Hans’s ankle. “Rat bite.”
    “You can treat it?” she asked.
    “Sure I can treat it,” Dr. Piper said, “but there needs to be a program to rout out and destroy the rats.”
    My mother smiled and nodded. She turned to me. “Go,” she said. “Run to Reilly’s house and tell him that Dr. Piper needs him at the Krugers’.”
    Reilly started work on his own, but by the end of the following week there were seven men in all. The Augusta Falls Vermin Unit. That was the name my mother gave them, and Dr. Piper told them that if the infected rats were not found then every child in Augusta Falls was at risk. It was necessary for morale, for the well-being of the families, that this task be undertaken with efficiency, with military discipline, with speed. Reilly was the chief. He was to be addressed as such. There were to be .25-caliber rifles, all ammunition paid for from the town purse. There were traps, nets, heavy boots, other incidentals and requirements, all of it official, all of it—in its own way—vital to the war effort.
    Vermin Unit Chief Hawkins shaved every day, wore a clean shirt, patrolled routes that the children took to school. He carried a rifle on his shoulder, his pockets full of bullets, and he worked conscientiously to rid Augusta Falls of the rats.
    “There will always be rats,” Dr. Piper told my mother. “You can’t possibly believe that Reilly Hawkins is going to somehow clear the entire county of rats . . . and even if he does, I’ve heard rumor that the rats in Clinch and Brantley are far bigger and far uglier than any we might have in Charlton.”
    My mother smiled at him. “I never said such a thing was possible, Thomas, but go and see Reilly Hawkins when you have a moment, and then tell me he doesn’t possess a greater sense of self-worth and respect than he ever has.”
    Dr. Piper smiled. “Would that all the women of Augusta Falls were as sagacious as yourself, Mrs. Vaughan.”
    My mother bowed her head slightly. “Would that all the men were as easily directed to constructive action, eh, Dr. Piper?”
    Nothing further was said. Reilly Hawkins and his Vermin Unit went on finding and destroying rats. They kept a logbook, detailed and precise. By February of 1942, as the Japanese invaded somewhere called Sumatra, the Vermin Unit claimed responsibility for the deaths of more than four hundred and thirty rats. No quarter was given. No prisoners of war. An eight-foot-deep hole had been dug in the middle of a cottonwood and tupelo grove at the very edge of Gunther Kruger’s southernmost field, and dead rats were not only tipped down there by the bucketload, they were burned as well.
    That was the last time Gunther Kruger and Reilly Hawkins saw eye to eye on very much of anything, because once Christmas was done and we turned the corner into ’42 the color and pitch of everything in Augusta Falls seemed to change.
    It was the war that did it; perhaps not so much the war, but what the war began to represent. It told us that there was a difference between people; that someplace thousands of miles away our own people were dying for something that we didn’t even start. It told us that the German people couldn’t be trusted, that somehow America had been maneuvered into a conflict that was not of its own making.
    “Religious intolerance,” Miss Alexandra Webber told us. “Prejudice,