Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

Our emotions are different but we have them. We never cast a cold eye on life or death. Don't misunderstand our seeming serenity. After all, we live in a world of perfect trust in The Maker, and we are keenly aware that humans often do not, and we feel an active sorrow for them.

But I couldn't help but notice, as soon as I began to investigate Toby O'Dare as a boy, anxious and burdened with countless cares, that he liked nothing better than to watch on late-night television the most brutal of detective shows, and they took his mind off the hideous realities of his own crumbling world, and the firing of bullets always produced a catharsis in him just as the producers of those shows wanted to do. He learned to read early, to finish his homework in study hall, and for pleasure he read the books they call "true crime," also, sinking easily into the well-written prose of Thomas Thompson'sBlood and Money orSerpentine.

Books on organized crime, on pathological murderers, on hideous deviants, all these he picked up from the bins of a bookstore on Magazine Street in New Orleans where he lived, though in those days he never dreamed, never for a moment, that he would one day be the subject of just that sort of story.

Loathing the glamour of evil inSilence of the Lambs, he'd thrown it in the trash. The nonfiction books weren't written till the killer was caught, and Toby needed that resolution. When he couldn't sleep in the very small hours, he watched the cops and killers on the small screen, oblivious to the fact that what drove these shows was the committing of the crime, and not the sanctimonious anger and actions of the artificially heroic police lieutenant or genius detective.

But this early taste for crime fiction and fact is just about the least important thing about Toby O'Dare, so let me get back to the story to which I helped myself as soon as I fixed my inalterable gaze on him.

Toby didn't grow up dreaming of being a killer or a cop. Toby dreamed of being a musician and saving everyone in his little family.

And what drew me to him was not the anger churning inside him and devouring him alive in this present time, or in time past. No, on that darkness I find it as hard to look, as a human might find it hard to walk into an icy winter wind that cut at his eyes and his face and froze his fingers.

What drew me to Toby was a bright and shining goodness that nothing could completely efface, a great glowing sense of right and wrong that had never been forfeit to the lie, no matter where his life had taken him.

But let me make it clear: because I choose a mortal for my purposes, that does not mean that the mortal is going to agree to come with me. Finding such a one as Toby is hard enough; persuading him to come with me is even harder. You'd think it was irresistible but it's not. People swindle themselves out of Salvation with great regularity.

However there were too many aspects of Toby O'Dare for me to back away from him and leave him to the guardianship of lesser angels.

Toby was born in the city of New Orleans. He was of Irish and German descent. He had some Italian blood but he didn't know it, and his great-grandmother on his father's side was Jewish, but he didn't know that either because he came from hardworking people who never kept track. There was some Spanish blood in him also, on his father's side, dating from the time the Spanish Armada crashed along the coast of Ireland. And though there was talk of that as some in the family had jet-black hair and blue eyes, he never thought much about it. No one in his family ever spoke about lineage. They talked about survival.

Genealogy belongs to the rich in human history. The poor rise and fall without leaving a footprint.

Only now in the age of DNA investigation are the common people enamored of knowing their genetic makeup, and they're not sure what to do with the information, but a revolution of sorts is happening as people seek to understand the blood that runs through their veins.

The more Toby O'Dare became the contract killer of underground fame, the less he cared about who he'd been before, or who had come before him. So as he gained the means that might have made possible an investigation into his own past, he drew further and further from the chain of humanity to which he belonged. He had after all destroyed "the past" as far as he saw it. So why should he care about what had happened long before his birth to others struggling with the same pressures and miseries?

Toby grew up in an uptown apartment, just a block away from prestigious streets, and in that dwelling there were no pictures on the walls of ancestors.

He had cherished his grandmothers, stalwart women, parents of eight children each, loving, tender, and with calloused hands. But they died when he was very young, as his parents were their youngest children.

These grandmothers were worn out from the lives they'd led and their deaths came swift, with the smallest amount of drama, in a hospital room.

Yet gigantic funerals followed, filled with cousins and flowers, and people crying because that generation, the generation of the great families, was passing from America.

Toby never forgot all those cousins, most of whom went on to great success without ever committing a crime or a sin. But by the age of nineteen, he was completely disengaged from them.

Yet the hit man now and then secretly investigated thriving marriages, and used his great computer skills to track this or that impressive career of the lawyers, judges, and priests who came from his related families. He'd played a lot with those cousins when he was a very little child, and he could not entirely forget the grandmothers who brought them together.

He'd been rocked by his grandmothers, now and then, in a big wooden chair that was sold long after their deaths to a junk dealer. He'd heard their old songs before they left the world. And now and then he sang to himself bits and pieces of them.See Saw, Marjory Daw, Catch Behind the Steam Car! or the soft tormenting melody ofGo tell Aunt Rhodie, Go tell Aunt Rho oh di, the old gray goose is dead, the one she was saving for Fatty's feather bed.

And then there were the black songs that the whites had always inherited.

Now, honey won't you play in your own backyard, don't mind what the white child say. For you've got a soul as white as snow, that's what the Lord done say.

These were songs of a spiritual garden extant before the grandmothers departed the earth, and by eighteen Toby had turned his back on everything about his past, except the songs, of course, and the music.

Ten years ago, or at age eighteen, he left that world forever.

He simply vanished from the midst of anybody who knew him, and though none of those boys and girls or aunts or uncles blamed him for going away, they were surprised and confused by it.

They imagined him, with reason, to be a lost soul somewhere. They even imagined him mad, a street bum, a gibbering imbecile begging for his supper. That he'd taken with him a suitcase of clothes and his precious lute gave them hope, but they never saw or heard of him again. Once or twice over the years, a search was made but, as they were searching for Toby O'Dare, a boy with a diploma from Jesuit High School and professional skill with the lute, they didn't have the slightest chance of finding him.