No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer

now, saying nothing the whole time they were there to make them feel bad about his dying.
    â€œHe’s a lover of the Lord,” said Catherine’s mother after they left, and dissolved into tears.
    Bad times came upon the Lathams after Uncle Dick died. The bad times started out like good times, for a new oil field came in, this time on Latham land which had been turned over to cattle, but the cattle were going to have to be inconvenienced for a time before they could return to former pastures and graze among the derricks. Catherine’s mother remarked about this time that now the Lathams had their own oil they could have given the Hickmans those leases back after all. Since Mrs. Latham had been patiently echoing through the years everything Catherine’s father said about how unreasonable, foolish, jealous, spiteful, sinful and downright ridiculous the Hickmans were, the note so casually sounded indicated wrong-thinking to a degree nobody could even contemplate. Catherine’s father, who had been known to lose his temper over much slighter things, did not even go so far as to recognize that the remark had ever been made. Catherine herself could not believe her ears. Her sister Priscilla and her brother Edward were looking up from their plates and staring, but nobody spoke until Catherine said, “Why, Mother? Why give them back?” “Well,” said her mother, “what do we need with all that money?” Catherine’s father had never stopped eating, or even looked up. She might as well have been sick with high fever, talking out of her head. He presently got up to leave the table. “On Christmas?” the three children asked, and their mother said it, too. “Oh,” he laughed and sat back down. “I forgot all about it being Christmas.”
    Soon after the New Year Edward left home. He vanished. Troubles were upon them.
    Catherine always believed that the troubles started around the dinner table when her mother revealed she had never been heart and soul involved in hating the Hickmans. Christmas afternoon, which contained all the assorted boredoms and depressions of ten family Sunday afternoons in one, Catherine saw Edward out under the oak trees in the side yard, alone. She went out to him. He was a sullen boy who had possessed the turret from the first. The day they moved into that big house they had missed him, and by then he had it—a tower to himself. No one was allowed to enter there. Whenever Catherine thought of Edward it seemed to her that he had lived forever and had been frowning and disdainful while the pyramids were being built. He would work with cattle but didn’t like oil. Nobody could get any reason out of him. Lately, of all things, he had made friends with Alice Hickman. She was so plain nobody went with her, but Edward called himself helping her pass some kind of entrance examination to business school. “Don’t you know why she’s doing that? Don’t you know what everybody will say?” Their mother could use any weapon to keep them away from common people, so she gave Alice a dark motive: family revenge. But all she ever had against the Hickmans, it now seemed, was simply that they were common. “Better watch out,” their father warned her, behind Edward’s back. “He’ll marry her to spite you.”
    When Catherine came outside on Christmas afternoon, eating biscuit with strawberry jam, Edward threw an oak ball at an oak tree and said, standing on the damp ground (it was hard to get grass to grow in Texas) on the russet wet fallen oak leaves that spread evenly up the gentle slope of their yard, “I’ve got so I hate everything here.”
    That would be true anywhere, Catherine thought, for already she was getting to be a wise little girl and studied psychology 2B at finishing school and loved figuring people out.
    â€œWhy don’t you go off to college, Edward?” she asked.
    â€œI went