The Unfinished Angel Read online

  Sharon Creech

  The Unfinished Angel

  In memory of four sparkly ones:

  Dennis W. Creech

  Mary Crist Fleming

  Kate McClelland

  Kathy Krasniewicz

  Once upon a time there was an angel,

  and the angel was me.

  PEARL B. BENJAMIN

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Peoples

  What I’ve Been Doing

  The Invaders

  The Daughter

  My Tower

  Zola

  What Is an Angel?

  The Fashion of Zola

  Those Divinos

  Hairs and Feets

  The Matter Urgente

  A Puzzlement

  Vinny Explosion

  Il Beasto

  Mr. Pomodoro

  My Territory

  Swishing in the Night

  Pocketa

  Agitato

  Mad Peoples

  Where Are Parents?

  Inside the Mountains

  Permissions

  What It Means?

  What Is Time?

  Paradise

  The Nature of Papas

  The Nature of Signora Divino

  A Bigga Mess

  The Drums

  Ravioli

  Meatballs

  The Nature of Zola

  Transport

  What Zola Knows

  Goats

  More Peoples

  Eugenia

  Pigeons

  Lizards

  The Mayor

  Luigi

  Such a Day

  What the Angel Knows

  About the Author

  Other Books by Sharon Creech

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Peoples

  PEOPLES ARE STRANGE!

  The things they are doing and saying—sometimes they make no sense. Did their brains fall out of their heads? And why so much saying, so much talking all the time day and night, all those words spilling out of those mouths? Why so much? Why don’t they be quiet?

  What I’ve Been Doing

  ME, I AM an angel. I am supposed to be having all the words in all the languages, but I am not. Many are missing. I am also not having a special assignment. I think I did not get all the training.

  What is my mission? I think I should have been told. I have been lolling around in the stone tower of Casa Rosa, waiting to find out. I am free to come and go in the mountain villages, free to float along the promenade on the lake, free to swish up through the Alps to mountain huts, free to spend days and nights floating and swishing. This floating and swishing I like.

  It’s true I have my hands full from time to time with Signora Divino and her grandson, Vinny, neither of them the slightest bit “divino” these days: cranky and bad-tempered, raining soot on everyone else’s head. Signora Divino, she snip-snip gossips and causes trouble between the other peoples, and her grandson, Vinny, with the shaggy hair is causing the mischief and blaming the other boys, and he listens to no one, no one, you hear me? No one. I pinch him sometimes.

  But is that my purpose? Solely to look after the Divinos and keep them from heaping misery on the other people types and giving them a pinch from time to time? I don’t think so.

  Do the other angels know what they are doing? Am I the only confused one? Maybe I am unfinished, an unfinished angel.

  The Invaders

  SOMETIMES I WANT to throw pinecones at Divino heads, and more heads, too: those peoples—the American man and his daughter—who moved into Casa Rosa. Where they come from, out of the green? Who lets them come here into my casa?

  The American, Mr. Pomodoro, is tall and linky with a rubbery face that moves his cheeks and nose and eyes when he talks and even when he doesn’t talk. He says he is starting a school here, and not just any school, but “the best of the best.” He tells Signora Divino, his neighbor, “We will bring all the children from all over the world and we will live in harmony!”

  Is he kidding?

  “We will have Turks and Germans,” Mr. Pomodoro says, “Iraqis and French, Russians and Chinese, Swiss and Dutch, Koreans and Brazilians, Israelis and Swedes, et cetera!” He squinches his eyes and nose in happy thoughts of all these peoples.

  Signora Divino looks as if she has swallowed a goose. She does not seem to like the thought of all those peoples in this little village on the mountain. “Will you also have Americans?” she asks.

  “Americans?” Mr. Pomodoro glances up at my stone tower and moves his lips around as if he is tasting them from the inside and says, “Of course.”

  Signora Divino lifts one bent finger and aims it at him. “There are snakes at Casa Rosa,” she says.

  Mr. Pomodoro blinks. “Snakes?”

  “Many snakes.”

  “Many?”

  The Signora’s finger crawls through the air. “Many, many black snakes.” She smiles.

  Mr. Pomodoro smiles, too. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for that information.”

  The Daughter

  MR. POMODORO HAS a daughter. At least, I assume she is his daughter, arriving at the same time, staying in the same house, but she does not resemble him. Maybe this is a good thing. And where is the mother? I see no mother. And there is a picture of a young boy on the mantel. Where is he?

  I do not know about this daughter, what sense to make of her. She is called Zola and is skinny like a twig-tree, with hair chip-chopped in a startling way. Her eyes—gray with large black poppils in the middle—her eyes are big and round like a cow’s. She appears, overall—I don’t know how to say—like maybe a fawn who grew up with humans. Or a chickadee who was raised by crows. I don’t know. You are not understanding what I am saying, are you?

  While Signora Divino asks Mr. Pomodoro many questions, Zola scouts for snakes. Signora Divino wants to know why the Mr. Pomodoro creature came here, to this village. “Why?” she asks. “Why? Why?”

  “For a new start!” he says, with the happy rubber cheeks. Then his shoulders sag. “I am weary.”

  “Of what you are weary?” presses nosy Signora Divino.

  “Where should I start? I am weary of malls and merchandise and sales and rude drivers and cell phones and blasting music and big cars and fast food and you know those marshmallow candies that look like animals?”

  “No, I don’t know what you are saying.”

  “Well, I don’t like those.”

  “Oh,” says Signora Divino. “Anything else?”

  Zola, who is in the bushes hunting for snakes, seems to reply for Mr. Pomodoro with an air puff that escapes from her feet up through her whole body to her mouth. “Foof.”

  Signora Divino turns toward the foof and then returns her stare to Mr. Pomodoro, who says, “I am weary of incivility.”

  It is a precious-sounding word, and I hear another foof from Zola in the bushes.

  “You know,” Mr. Pomodoro continues, “bad manners, burping, crude language, that sort of thing.”

  “Uck!” Signora Divino says. “Idiots! Cretins!”

  My Tower

  MAYBE MY TOWER—the tower of Casa Rosa—is not the most attractiful or the most specialty tower in Switzerland. It is just a tower, after all, like so many other towers in the Ticino, this southern part of Switzerland. The casa is pink, like so many other casas, but the stone tower that rises three more stories above it is the color of its stone—how you call it? Tan? The color of straw in the winter? Of coffee with very much milk?

  It is a tower that stands tall and upending like a good soldier, for nearly four hundred years, not wobbling or falling down. At the top of the tower is an open balcony with a low wall al
l around and a tile roofling overhead. There are no windows. You reach out and there is the air, just there. You are high, high above the other houses and the only things as high are a few trees and, down the road, the tall stickly spire of the church. The only thing in this balcony is a gauzy hammock, a light and airful place for me to loll about.

  Beneath the balcony is a tiny square room, exactly the size of the balcony above it. In this room are two trip doors: One leads up to the balcony and one leads down to the room below. Also in this room is a narrow cot covered with a worn feather duvet, and a small desk with a candle on it.

  The room beneath that one with the cot is again a tiny square, exactly the size of the room and balcony above it. In this room is nothing but dead spiders and flies; the trip door in the ceiling which goes up into the room above; and a short door (for like a shrunken man) which leads out onto a narrow, narrow landing and to curving narrow steps down into the main house below.

  So, maybe you might think it is nothing specialful, this tower, but to me it is the finest of all the towers in all the world. From the balcony I can see mountains in a ring all around, a circle of mountains, and on the very top of those mountains most of the year is white, white snow, and below the mountains is a blue-green lake, and above the mountains at night is a blue-black sky all pokeled with blue-white stars. From my tower, I can see all the casas in the village and I can see all the peoples coming and going. I can see all the birds flying in the air and the creatures crawling on the ground.

  Only once in four hundred years did someone live in the room beneath the balcony, the one with the narrow cot. A servant girl lived there. She had summoned me, and I stayed in the tower watching over her until another angel came and took her away. I did not see that angel because I was outside collecting figs, but I heard the flooshing and saw the golden light. After that, no one ever stayed in that room except for me. Sometimes when the wind is blowering hard and bellowing like a bull, I slip through the trip door and into the bed with the feather duvet. An angel does not need a bed, but sometimes I think the bed needs an angel.

  I do not know what I mean. The words are maybe not right.

  Zola

  ON HER FIRST night in Casa Rosa, Zola climbs the narrow, ziggy stone steps to the tower and clambers through the tripping door up to the balcony. I am lolling at the time, draped over the windowsill, smashing figs. Below me are the blue hills slipping down to the lake, and above floats a chalky white balloon moon, which is sending light beams down to the deep blue lake.

  Zola does not seem afraid. I’m not in the definite that she can see me at all, but right away she says, “Ciao,” and leans over the sill, studying the smashed figs dripping down the stone. “An angel?” she adds.

  There you have it. She knows right away. Most peoples don’t. Sometimes young children seem to see or feel something, but they do not have the words for what they see. Usually those children blink or squint as if the light is too bright.

  One child once pointed right at me and said, “Pipple! Pipple!”

  His mother paid no attention, as if maybe the child said silly words all day long.

  The boy squinched his eyes nearly closed. “Pipple!”

  “What are you saying?” his mother asked. “Pickle? You want a pickle? You’ll have to wait until we get home.” As she tugged the boy along, he swingled his head around to see me. “Pipple? Pipple?”

  “When we get home!” his mother said, not very kindly.

  But now, in the tower, here is the Zola girl, and she seems not at all surprised to see me, and she is saying, “An angel?”

  “I live here,” I say.

  “Hmm. And you plan on staying here?”

  Honestly! Peoples, what do they think? They can barge in and move angels out?

  “Yes. I live here.”

  “Mmm. Well, then, if you are going to continue to live here, I assume you will help me.”

  I do not like her assuming that I will help her. I don’t have to do any such thing.

  “I bet you are a clever angel,” she says. “Extremely clever. You’re a bit young, but no younger than me….”

  Peoples think they know everything! I am maybe hundreds of years old!

  Zola smashes a fig against the wall, much as I do. “An angel in our tower is certainly better than snakes in our tower.”

  Our tower? Peoples!

  Zola smills, smuggles, what is that word? What is it, that word for the happy teeth?? Smule? Smale? Smile? Smile! She does the smile, showing her white teeth, mostly straight and enough large. In the moonlight, her crippy-croppy hair shines silver and blue.

  Zola says, “I guess we’ll be a team. I am truly and deeply honored.”

  Honored? Truly? Deeply? Well, that is a pinch better.

  As Zola turns to zag her way back down the steps, she adds, “Feel free to hover about”—she waves a fig-smudged hand through the air—“and get the feel of things. There will be a lot of activity around here. Intervene whenever you like!” With that, she disappears down the steps.

  Peoples! Hover? I do not hover! Feel free? Of course I will feel free, whether she tells me to or not. Intervene? Of course I will intervene…if I choose to.

  What Is an Angel?

  AN ANGEL IS supposed to be a happy being, no? Angels are supposed to float about bringing love and goodwill and protection and good fortune, no? I do not know where I got these ideas. Maybe they are wrong. Me, I am not feeling all that cheerful with all the peoples around, and I am not finding many peoples deserving of the splashes of love and good fortune, even if I knew how to splash and where to get the love and good fortune.

  I am only feeling floaty when I am swishing up into the mountains to see the goats. Goats do not talk. They mostly are chewing the grassy plants and occasionally saying Beh, beh, beh, in a low, cricky voice.

  It must be that I did not get the right training for the angels that work with peoples. Maybe I was supposed to be a different kind of angel, one of those that swoop down from above when peoples die and then lead them up to heaven. I think that kind of angel only does transport. Maybe I was supposed to be a transport angel but by mistake was dropped off as a ground angel.

  Maybe you think I should just fly up to heaven and ask some questions, but it is not that easy. I do not know where heaven is nor where the angel training center is nor where any other angels are. And yes, I have looked.

  Maybe I could wait by the bed of a dying person and then when a transport angel comes, I could follow the angel and the dead person up to heaven. I wonder if the transport angels ever make mistakes and take the wrong peoples, ones who are not actually dying.

  The Fashion of Zola

  I TELL YOU, Zola is not resembling other young peoples up here in the mountains. She wears many clothes on top of other ones, like this: three dresses, one atop each other, or sometimes two skirts under a third and layers of scarves around her middle and her neckle and in her hair. It is not even cold out, I am telling you. It is summer.

  Everything is very bright colors, some colors I do not know the names for, more than raspberry and emerald and turquoise and periwinkle (that is a color, right?), yellows like the sun and the birds, and oranges like the apricots and the tangerines and the melons. And rainbows of ribbons on her wrists and ankles and neckle and in her hair. I thought maybe she did not have the cupboard for to put her clothes in and so she had to wear everything she owns, but there is much space in this house. Maybe she cannot choose and just keeps adding clothing until it surpleases her.

  What to make of this peacock girl marching along swinging her arms and singing into the air?

  Today, on the path up to Montagnola, Zola passes Signora Mondopoco making her slow, hunched way down the hill.

  Zola stops to greet the Signora. “Ciao!”

  Signora Mondopoco peeks at Zola with all her clothes and colors and then she glances down at her own feets. It is not cold outside, but Signora Mondopoco is wearing short boots with a fringe of brown fur s
ticking out the tops. The Signora points to the fur and says, “Baa, baa, baa. Is real!”

  “Fur, fleece? From a lamb?” Zola presses her dainty hands to her chest. “How especially perfect,” she says, quite seriously, as if Signora Mondopoco has just offered a crucial fact of existence.

  Later, Zola clabbers up to the tower, sticking flowers in her hair and dancing about and singing, “Turenia, Bedenia, my name is Eugenia.”

  “Not Zola?” I say.

  “Today I am Eugenia.” She is moving in a slowly liquidy way as if her arms and legs were on long strings pulled by an invisible being. “Turenia, Bedenia, my name is Eugenia. Have you seen my Row-row-rowena?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Sa-la, then,” she says, swillowing back to the ladder hole.

  “Sa-la,” I say.

  Those Divinos

  FROM THE TOWER this morning just before the light crawls up behind the mountain, I spy Signora Divino in her housecoat and her muddy garden boots dragging a big black snake into the yard of Casa Rosa—my yard and the American Pomodoro yard now, too. She shoves the snake into our woodpile and says, “Ciao, ciao. Avanti!”