A Cry of Angels

by Jeff Fields

  I remembered too.

  I remembered the lady in the brown suit who brought me south on the train. I asked her about the angry red patch on her ankle, and she said it was ringworm, and it was killing her. And I remembered the dark, cavernous hallway and the curious, withered faces, and Miss Esther standing there in a polka-dot dress. She was thinner then, and wore a ring with an oval green stone—and I could tell from that first moment that my coming was a bother to her.

  And I remembered the long mornings in my room after Farette had made the bed, and the afternoons sitting by the bookcase in the hall, listening to the strange voices, or sitting in the powdery dirt under the house playing with match-box cars and watching rain drops plunk in the sandy puddles.

  But most of all I remembered the nights—and the dream. It was hell, right out of the picture Bible, with swirling flames, black smoke. There was crashing and thunder, the walls were shaking, my mother was screaming. A monster was there, and I thought he was killing my father. I could hear my father's screams of agony. I was coughing, I couldn't see. Flames were sweeping up the walls, across the floor. My father was dying, I could hear it, and then my mother was a demon herself; beyond the blackness and smoke I heard her screaming fiendishly, ". . . the boy! Get the boy!" And then the door crashed open and the instant it did my smoldering bed leaped up in flames. The devil was coming for me through the smoke, enormous claws reaching out, and when they touched me I felt flames climbing up my arm. I could smell my own flesh burning . . .

  Mr. Jurgen in the next room kept complaining to Miss Esther about the noises I made while I was dreaming and she put in a night light, but it didn't help. Finally I made a tent of the quilts so no one would hear me if I dropped off to sleep and started making the noises, and I lay awake sweating under the suffocating quilts until dawn.

  I was told I had to be quiet because there was someone very sick down the hall. It was the lady in the corner room. As the weeks passed she dissolved into a skeleton with heavy eyebrows and chin whiskers. And there was the smell. It stayed a long time after she died.

  Then Farette said I wasn't eating right, and Miss Esther scolded me for sleeping so much in the daytime. Late one night I felt sick but was afraid to tell anybody. The room went green under the night light and I tried to get out of bed but couldn't, and realized in half-waking horror that I had dirtied the bed. Miss Esther was calling me but I couldn't wake up. There were people around me in white coats pushing a sharp spike in my spine.

  When I awoke there was an elderly Negro man in a white coat and I tried to get away, but he held me and kept saying he hadn't hurt me and wouldn't hurt me, and yelling over his shoulder until Dr. Breisner came in.

  The Quarrytown hospital was a small building with only twenty beds, and they needed mine. Dr. Breisner said he would let me go home early if I would drink lots of fluids and stay in bed until he came to see me. I left with Miss Esther, avoiding her eyes because of what I had done to her bed. But she was all smiles and bought me a paint set and said she would spend more time with me. Farette made me a banana pudding.

  There was talk about prolonged stress and adjustment and brain dehydration, and Miss Esther was at the end of her rope. She didn't see anything left to do but send me to Tucker Village, the county orphanage. Dr. Breisner said they had a good clinic there, and being with other children might help me.

  When I heard that I grew quiet, and made every effort to cause no more trouble. I was too quiet. The boarders said I still wasn't "right." I tried not to think about that, or anything. In order to keep awake at night, I climbed out on the roof and huddled by the drainpipe in the cold, and slipped out after breakfast to sleep in a straw fortress I made in the gulley. As the weeks passed, senseless, meshing, it all went out of me; the ache, the longing, even the horrible dreams. There was only the gray wallpaper of my room.

  Then, in the early spring, two weeks before my sixth birthday, Em Jojohn came to the kitchen door.

  I wouldn't go near him for days, making it a point to stay out of his way as he went about his business of killing rats, but I began to feel those dark, evil eyes following me. He had a way of turning up places I was going to be, of being behind the corner I was rounding.

  One afternoon in the gulley I suddenly awoke with my nose and lungs on fire. I scrambled up the bank and came face to face with the Indian, squatting upwind of the garage.

  "What is that?" I said, wiping my watering eyes.

  "Burnin' sulphur."

  "What's it for?"

  "Rats."

  "Is that how you kill 'em?"

  The Indian looked at me. "Naw, that drives 'em out. Then I grabs 'em and bites their heads off." I couldn't tell if he was joking. He was such an ugly, scowling creature. "How come you sleep in that gulley?"

  "I-I can't sleep in my room."

  "Why not?"

  I shrugged.

  "You live here with your grandma?"

  "She's not my grandma, she's my great-aunt."

  "Where's your folks?"

  "Dead."

  The Indian pointed to the skin graft on my arm. "That how you got that?"

  I reached down in the gulley for my shirt and quickly pulled it on. The pink, pimply patch of grafted skin ran from my left shoulder to just above the wrist. I couldn't straighten that elbow out all the way, but otherwise it didn't bother me. That is, not until I started to school. I soon learned to wear long sleeves, even in summer.

  "How'd you like to help me kill some rats?"

  "Huh?"

  "If you can't sleep anyway, you might as well be helpin' out some. Come back tonight after supper?"

  "Tonight?"

  "Sure. Night's the best time to kill rats."

  "I ain't supposed to be out after dark."

  "You mean you're scared of the dark." He waited. I didn't answer. "Well, that's understandable, but if you know how to take keer of yourself there ain't nothin' to worry about."

  "Are you—scared of the dark?"

  "With all the things layin' wait to grab you, all the ghosts and ha'nts walkin' about? Hell, anybody with sense is scared of the dark! You just got to know how to deal with 'em." And the Indian gave me my first lesson on what were, to him and me, the very real creatures that lay beyond the dark.

  Up to that time they had been vague beings that inhabited the dark corner under the stairs, and waited under my bed for a hand to drop over the side. They darted for me just before I hit the light switch and made them disappear, and crawled along the weeds at the edge of the yard when I took out the garbage at night.

  But as the Indian began to sort them out for me, they became real working ghosts, with their own identities, character traits and working habits. And to my collection the Indian added those that cried in the wind when someone died, that hovered in the woods like fireflies, stalled cars at crossroads where they wanted to get out, and sat on buried treasure and made people sick that came too near. He knew the ones that sucked breath from sleeping people, the harmless ones that just liked to watch through windows, and those that, when angered, could snag and tear your flesh and make you think it was a splinter or a nail.

  I was awestruck. How, then, did a wanderer like him, a rat killer who actually spent his working hours in the dark, keep from being swallowed up by them!

  Simple, he said. His big weapon was Belief. A person couldn't lug around enough charms or chants to get by all of them, as different ones required different liturgy. But the one thing that stopped them all was simply believing in them. That was rare flattery. The worst of them couldn't stand up to that. He never slighted a spook by calling it a tree limb waving at the window, or a cat prowling on the garage. He knew what it was, and they knew he knew, and went away satisfied. They didn't have to prove nothing to him. Everybody wants respect, he said, dead or alive.

  Of course, that was the way you handled the really fearsome ones. There was another kind, the feisty little creepy ones that just liked to slip about and scare, and they had to be dealt w
ith differently. That crowd needed a firm hand. If you showed proper courtesy, and felt them still hovering about, then a good cussing, flat out and loud, was what took care of them. "It shames a ha'nt to be cussed at," he said, "tucks him right in and sends him away."

  And what impressed me most about this lecture was the conviction that the Indian wasn't fooling. He believed every word he said. He convinced me then, and I never had reason to doubt him later. He didn't know who was in charge of the other world, he said, and one lifetime wasn't enough to sort it out. In the meantime any superstition or religion was fine. He didn't trust any faith to tell the whole story, and hadn't the vanity for doubt.

  I sat thinking about it, in a glow of indescribable relief.

  "Well," he said finally, "what about them rats?"

  "Yeah," I said eagerly, "I'll come back." Then I had second thoughts. "At least, I'll help you catch 'em. I ain't bitin' no heads off."

  "Hey! You think I'd let you be gnawing 'em up without no experience? Hell, you ain't even got your teeth filed down." The Indian shook his head in a way that plainly put me down as the biggest fool, by far, he ever met. "Come after supper," he said in dismissal, and rose to check the garage.

  I came back, and tagged after him night after night, helping him set his traps and poison his biscuits, watching in macabre fascination as he lunged on a cornered rat the size of a rabbit and danced on it by lantern light. And, oddly, drenched in the horror of the whole ghastly business, in real ugliness, real blood, real striking out at the despicable shadowy creatures, my own night terrors began to pale. Each corpse laid something to rest.

  It was with considerable apprehension, however, that I watched him take that first live one from a trap, and I was greatly relieved to see that he did not, in fact, bite its head off.

  But, I must admit, there was disappointment in it too. And I gained a new respect for the ferocious survival instinct of rats. Once Em set a steel drum in the shed near a shelf that showed droppings, and filled it with water and poured on a layer of cottonseeds. The seeds rode the top deceptively, and each morning he pulled a drowned rat from the barrel.

  But one morning there was a recent catch, and as we entered the shed I could hear the rat squirming in the barrel. When we approached, our presence seemed to increase his fury. He bared his teeth and squealed at us and thrashed harder through the water, his claws scoring the sides of the rusty drum. We stood and watched as, ears twitching, he swam round and round, squealing, lunging, scratching at the steep metal sides. The minutes dragged by, his strength was going, but still he fought, raising his head higher as the fat little body sank deeper in the water, and he continued to fight, struggling fishlike with the stronger muscles of his back until there was only the head moving in the cottonseeds, giving violent shakes, snorting water.

  Far beyond the strength of the body was the will to that last instinctive spark, and only when that was used, and the powerful life force extinguished, did the blunt little snout sink below the surface. There was the unshakable feeling that the rat didn't drown. He was dead before that.

  With the Indian I wandered farther and farther from the yard. We met Tio and other black boys, went fishing with them and had maypop battles, dug caves in the red hills, scrounged the dump for scrap iron, and stole watermelons from the farms across the river, hiding in cornfields and gouging out the warm hearts with our hands. We slept when we felt like it, mostly in late afternoon, and ate on the same schedule. At the boardinghouse they took little notice of my absence, glad to have me out from underfoot and no longer running up doctor bills.

  After a night of rat hunting and breakfast before sunrise, we would burst from the garage for long, loping walks through the blue steel dawn, stopping in the Ape Yard to pass the time with a whitehaired old black man leaning on his gate, mumbling low, so as not to wake the village, trudging along the marsh grass, listening to the river discover morning, or up through town before anyone was about, clapping our bands to hear the sound bounce off the darkened buildings. Em was always feeling for echoes. We rambled and searched the surrounding hills shouting in the wind, stomping devil's huts, beating trash piles to flush a snake. Nothing of consequence but feeling air and motion, a breaking of time, something centering inside me.

  Em got me to climbing trees, despite my weak arm, claiming his weight made us even in the races. Once, on a dare I climbed to the top with my good arm tied to my belt. He could dare with such sarcasm, such persistence that you would kill yourself to prove him wrong. One dizzy June day, under his taunts and jeers, I actually crossed from one tree to another! Riding the limber top, swaying back and forth, rocking on the wind, I forgot myself in the giddy moment of exhilaration and anger and suddenly plunged away and crashed into the other's branches. Later when I looked at the height and realized what I had done, I was so shaky I had to sit down.

  He taught me to swim that summer in an abandoned quarry fed by springs. And again, as always, the goading, the challenging, bobbing below me and spouting like a whale: "Come on, Early boy, when you the most scared, that's the time to dive!"

  The pressure of leg muscles tightening, the vertigo, the far-away glistening water . . . the instant of almost committing myself . . . then settling back, to the safety of heels planted, giving up . . . and running and climbing down the side to a lower ledge and jumping off onto the jeering head, sinking it . . . the Indian bellowing and thrashing water, the sounds bouncing back from the granite walls, then both of us shouting, our voices ringing around us . . . echoings of joy.

  On winter nights we piled slabs in the heater until the flue sucked and roared and glowed bright red around the damper, and I shook the wire corn popper over the top while Em practiced his hand shadows on the wall, at which he was terrible. "Look, it's a rooster, don't you see it?" I saw nothing but the blobby shadow of locked hands, and said so. Waggling a thumb then, persisting, "There now, there's his comb—you see him now, then, don't you?"

  Other times he made things, at which he was better. With a broom handle, wire and tines from a discarded pitchfork he could turn out a better frog gig than you could buy at the hardware store, or whittle a wild cherry gun, a kind of plunger made from reeds that could fire a green cherry with enough force to raise a blister from across the room. But his masterpiece, bar none, was the leather belt he made for me, hand tooled and studded with the green jewels he shot from the bottoms of Mason jars with Tio's BB gun.

  Sometimes in the early fall afternoons I would find him sitting in the weeds behind the garage, his head against the clapboards and smoke curling lazily from his cigarette as he watched the sun build amber fires in the treeline. When I asked what he was doing, he would only say, "Washin'." In those times I left him alone.

  By Christmas I was sleeping through the night, and the Indian and I were friends.

  And now my friend Em Jojohn, who had found my demons and so deftly torn them from me, lay in his own night of agony, unable to articulate, nor I to understand, the dark terror that tormented him.

  5

  The next morning, still shaken from her visit to church and the chaotic scene with Em, Gwen skipped breakfast, pleading a faculty planning session at the school, where she would be teaching eighth-grade English and civics. When Miss Esther asked me if she was satisfied with our Episcopal church, I had to admit that we went to Four Forks. That worried her. "How'd she take all that shoutin' and jumpin' around?"

  "Oh," I said, "before it was over she was up and shoutin' too."

  Miss Esther seemed surprised, but greatly relieved. As soon as the breakfast dishes were cleared away I went by the loft for Em, hoping that the morning had done its job.

  It had. He was his old self, standing at the window railing at the birds that woke him, and he wolfed down the ham biscuits I brought him as though he hadn't eaten in a week. He was still reluctant to go to the Waugh place on Wolf Mountain to do the painting Jayell wanted done, though, and it was only after careful consideration of the fact that he was flat broke,
in debt to Jayell for five dollars, and of the many dry days ahead without booze money that he eventually got the best of his superstitious nature. He sighed and clamped on his hat, and we made our way down into the sprawling, gullied ruins of the Ape Yard.

  To know the Ape Yard, in its essence, you had only to know the Poncini quarry.

  At the very bottom of the hollow, down past the small block of stores that made up the Ape Yard's main street, on the last rise of ground before the final slope toward the river, sat the great maggoty hole of the original quarry. Abandoned when the Poncinis went broke, the quarry was three-quarters full of seepage, and sat still collecting rubbish, rainwater and outhouse drainage, and giving off a smell that had them complaining across town when the wind was right. The city had tried draining it and filling the bottom with granite slag and earth, but that only raised the smell closer to the surface. The old quarry seeped full again, and no ordinances could keep out the garbage and trash. In summer, trucks came with drums of chlorine and lye, but still the quarry remained what it was, a foul, gaseous sore in the earth.

  And around that quarry, in the larger basin of the Ape Yard hollow, was its counterpart in human life.

  Below the quarry, where twisting, rust-colored Twig Creek emptied into the Little Iron River, it was the worst. There the ground was mushy even in dry spells, and when the rains came down the slopes in spring, water stood at the porches for weeks on end. Children sat idly watching a stranger pass—spindly, clay-colored children with raw, expressionless faces, to whom play was a perpetual, listless roaming. If there was an egg in the house it went to the working man. Children sopped hoecake in the grease. Sometimes there was a can of dogfood to fry. Women brush-broomed the porches slowly, scuffling heavily on bare, callused feet. Their men sat in the yards and rubbed their hair, tinkered with machines, wandered off somewhere.