A Cry of Angels

by Jeff Fields

From there the crumbling shanties climbed the hogback hills in row after row, to Sunflower Street on the north, and up across the railroad to the warehouses on the southern rim that marked the beginning of Quarrytown. On the east it was bordered by Wolf Mountain, overlooking the river, and to the west by the fairgrounds, where the main rain-gutted road led into the hollow. Scattered among the plum bushes and winding dirt paths stood the tarpaper shacks and fading clapboard houses with washtubs on the wall and old cars on jacks under chinaberry trees, none of them having seen repairs since Doc Bobo bought them. All shared the same look of ruin and decay.

  In the taverns there were men who would tell you they knew what was wrong with the mill, with the world, and could fix it in a day if they were in charge. They had made that payment, the company's books were at fault. The man read their meter wrong. Household bills came at them like a pestilence and their families were gluttonous maws of need. They spent their paychecks quickly, clutching at luxuries, before responsibility came to take them away. They believed every ad and bought with abandon, mumbled their sins in the finance company confessionals, promised to do better, and when the "repo" man came for the outboard motor they hid it among the neighbors.

  And there were those who accepted their condition as if it were divine appointment, and even found a kind of grace in it. They white-washed their picket fences and raised pretty flowers in painted truck tires, lived on religion and pinto beans, paid their bills and got their praise. They were the "good niggers," like Ralph Martin, a foreman at the mill, who lived three streets down. He had had a son killed in Korea and had kept a flag flying from a pole in his yard with a light to shine on it at night, until some pranksters tore it down. He wrote a letter to the Star and they printed an editorial about it. His wife came up and got Miss Esther's copy to send to her sister in South Carolina.

  There were the Lupos, below us on the curve that led around and up to the cemetery. Hobert Lupo lived on fruit-jar whiskey and headache powders and liked to slap his wife. They came down the road one Saturday afternoon and every few yards he would stop and slap her. She was drunk, too, and every time he would slap her she would stagger off a few yards and then come back and walk beside him until he stopped and slapped her again. I watched them go all the way home that way. One day another couple was visiting them and the four of them were out on the porch and suddenly Hobert slapped his wife and she would have gone over the rail if the other man hadn't caught her. Then the other woman said something about it and Hobert slapped her too, and the man laid Hobert out with a Coke bottle. It was weeks before Hobert was up and about again, and I never found out who that couple was because they never came back.

  And there was the saucy black woman named Clara Kitchens who had moved into a two-room shack that once stood across the street from us. "Hot Kitchens" she was called and after she moved in the crowd with the bright-colored, high-powered cars began to congregate heavily at night, and the boarders began to complain about the noise. It was said she drank anything, even liquid shoe polish strained through bread. Once, after an unusually quiet weekend, one of the boarders, Mrs. Bell, was sitting on the porch and heard crying from the shack. She found two infants alone in the house, a boy and a girl. They were under a baby crib turned upside down and the boy was almost dead. After the welfare people came and took the children, Miss Esther personally supervised Em's destruction of the shack and sat around for days waiting for the Kitchens woman's return. But she was never heard from again. Fortunately, for whatever reason, nothing was heard from Doc Bobo about the destruction of his property either.

  There were the young boys I grew up playing and fighting with, like Skeeter, Carlos and little Jackie James, who now worked for Jayell. There was Grandma Tyne on the river, who traded Em and me peppery sausage biscuits for fresh-caught perch. And old Aaron Tim, ninety years of age and still climbing the slopes each morning in search of day labor to support his retarded daughter.

  But the one thing all of the people in the Ape Yard had in common was that they were trapped, caught in that basin of poverty and servitude to Doc Bobo in the hollow, and held in place by the weight of the white structure beyond. For them, escape seemed futile at the outset.

  Without education there was no horizon, no plan, no organization to their lives, and consequently no hope of dealing with the world beyond the Ape Yard rim. There was only the dullness of the hollow's endless days, the brutal terror when Doc Bobo's "dog boys" came in to bring a troublemaker into line, the murderous release of a Saturday night, lashing out at home, unleashing their fury with moonshine, devouring their own.

  And Monday morning, once again treading the paths to the aged brick building of shuddering looms, lint-matted windows and fiberglass slots of sky, while the elderly, the women and the children climbed to the shading oak at Cooper Corner to wait for odd jobs in town or in the fields. All of their faces once again masked in that look of grief, of ancient, ingrown, hopeless anger.

  That was the Ape Yard. Its color the unrelieved red of the sunbaked slopes. Its sound a clatter, the ragged burr of old engines, a fight somewhere in the squat gray houses, a curse, a calling, an unexplained wail in the night. Its mood, eternal despair.

  Of course, that vision of my world came later. At the time I saw it through the eyes of a boy, in that half-remembered time when we were dreamers.

  Jayell Crooms's shop on Twig Creek was a small wooden building surrounded by mountainous piles of scrap and salvage lumber. It was only about nine o'clock, but a dozen boys were already at work as Em and I approached. In the dust and din Jayell lunged among them shouting above the saws and planers, seizing work from them in despair and impatience.

  "Wood butchers! You're nothing but a bunch of wood butchers! Look at this . . ." He shoved aside a small boy in floppy overalls and dragged a gleaming maple secretary to the middle of the floor. "You got tired of sanding, you piled on a little extra varnish, huh, Jackie? That will not go, gentlemen!" He snatched a nail from his pocket and walked around the secretary, raking deep X's in the surface. "Now, after you sand out those marks we'll try for a proper finish."

  He stopped beside skinny Skeeter, a boy so thin he looked about the same from front or side. "Not a bad-looking coffee table, Skeeter." He picked it up and turned it over in the light, running his hand over the finish, sighting the joints. "Not bad, not bad at all." The boy adjusted his glasses with a sigh of relief, then his face clouded in sudden horror as Jayell spun and hurled the table against the wall. It fell to the floor with one leg hanging.

  Jayell shook his head. "Not a bad-looking coffee table, but it's really a piece of junk! You know why?" He poked a finger in the boy's ribs. "Bad glue-joints! I've told you, the wood better break before your glue joints! That's like the damned stuff you buy in stores; it looks good but falls apart the minute you get it home. You will not put junk in my houses!" He roamed the floor, exhorting, condemning, explaining: "Feel the wood, feel what it wants to be. Measure twice, cut once, that's the rule, huh? But think, think, think, many times, before you even measure!"

  He stopped at the lathe and put his arm around the heavy shoulders of Carlos. "You know how the Eskimos carve, Carlos? They believe the thing they're carving, the image, is already locked inside the ivory, and when they carve they just let it out. Huh? So, a stick of wood can be a fine table leg, or just a club to beat people over the head with, can't it? You make me a table leg, Carlos. You make me a club and I'll beat you over the head with it, huh?"

  He was determined to make builders of them. He would take these poor black boys from the Ape Yard and build his dream. There was no more sense in people living in monotonous shacks just because they were poor than in two wealthy people sharing a mansion. There were materials enough if used properly, the cost could be controlled, and if he could develop enough designs and show what could be done with "only a minuscule of imagination," he could redirect the housing trend in this country away from opulent, unused space for the rich and small wooden cells for the poor.
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  "Look at automobiles!" he would say. "Every year they get bigger, for people who stay the same size. The same thing's happening in housing. Only the poor can't afford those big cars, any more than they can afford the big houses, and they're the ones with the larger families. So what's the solution? Simple! The Japanese discovered it centuries ago. You make imaginative use of what you've got. They use rice-paper walls to create illusions of extra rooms, of added space; they paint, they decorate. If five little black kids have 'got to share an eight-by-ten room, do you just throw 'em in there like animals in a cage? No, you disperse some colors, you put in little plywood partitions. A little girl won't mind bein' cramped in an isolated corner if she gets to crawl to it through a bright-colored tunnel; it becomes her own little hidden, secret place. But these goddamned builders have got to care! They've got to use a little imagination! And, hell, they can still make a profit. These things can be produced on a mass basis the same as those match-box things they stick in the suburbs. And once I get enough designs developed, I'm going to show them how to do it. Houses are being priced right out of poor people's hands. In twenty or thirty years they're all going to be living on the government, and that's a crime. It's a crime! I'm going to tap that market. I'm going to show them what can be done. Let other people build the goddamned mansions."

  That was the dream Jayell had come home to pursue after visionary thinking of that kind had brought his architectural career to so abrupt an end in Atlanta.

  He had started out promisingly enough. At Georgia Tech he was a straight-A student. He devoured his courses, sat in the library until it closed, then spent most of the night in the offices of the architectural firm to which his major professor had recommended him. His college years passed quietly enough. The only explosion of impulsive behavior had come the night after final exams of his sophomore year. He had just turned eighteen, and to celebrate that and the end of the term, he got gloriously drunk, went to a rousingly good war movie, and shortly thereafter, still in a fever of patriotism, joined the Marine Corps.

  He was discharged a year later after winning a bet, in another state of intoxication, that his barracks building at Parris Island was so flimsy that he could drive a tanker truck straight through it. With a left leg two inches shorter than his right and a healed fractured skull (which many were convinced only added to his later troubles), he returned to finish his studies at Tech.

  After graduation he went to work full time for the architectural firm in Atlanta, and somehow managed to stay with them three years until he got his license. As long as Jayell stayed at the drawing board there was no trouble. His knowledge of engineering and his artistic talent amazed and delighted his employers, and as he was assigned to work on the new, modernistic buildings going up in the rapidly growing city, his reputation grew among other architects. But his first love was residential architecture, and he returned to it whenever he could. The only problem was Jayell couldn't get along with people, in the office or out of it. In his final year, when he was doing more outside supervising and dealing more directly with contractors and clients, he managed to antagonize everyone.

  If a change was needed, he wanted the contractor to implement it; he didn't see the need for meetings and consultations, no matter how often he was lectured. And if an addition a client wanted would ruin the design, Jayell told him so, in no uncertain terms. Added to that was Jayell's barely concealed, and growing, animosity toward people who could afford hundred-thousand-dollar houses, who only wanted something gaudier and more expensive than what their neighbors had—an extravagant waste, brought home hard whenever he drove through Atlanta's mushrooming slum sections. Finally, Jayell infuriated contractors, clients and his bosses when it was discovered he was stealing leftover materials from jobs and doing a nonprofit weekend home-improvement business.

  The final break came when one "ghastly monstrosity" of a home for a city councilman kept growing in deformity before him, his ideas for it aborted, twisted, discarded as too outlandish, the firm bowing to meet the demands of the councilman's wife, until one midnight driving past it, Jayell, again drunk, suddenly stopped and made what alterations he could with a sledgehammer. Then, still not satisfied with his work, he succumbed to the desire to repeat his Marine Corps performance, and was wresting control of a tanker truck from the startled man refueling a nearby service station when a patrol car picked him up.

  The councilman agreed not to press charges if Jayell's firm assumed all damages, which they did, seeing no point in suing or jailing the departing Jayell. Indeed, they forgave him enough to later recommend him to the college that wanted an art center and didn't have the money for what they envisioned. Jayell Crooms can give you what you want on the money you've got, they were told, if you can get him, and if you'll grant him complete autonomy on the final design and stay the hell out of his way. They had, and they had been delighted.

  Jayell had lost no time in returning to Quarrytown. First he tried teaching high-school shop for a year, but his unorthodox methods caused him trouble from the start. He taught a curriculum of his own devising, refusing to check rolls or give written tests. Instead of lecturing safety, he would simply pull a cigarette from a student's mouth and drop it down his collar. On his desk he placed a jar of formaldehyde in which a human thumb hung suspended from a string, contributed by a man he once worked with, he explained to the class, who got careless with power tools.

  Still bitter from his experience in Atlanta, he refused to concede an inch to the school system. He ignored policy and principal alike, dismissed the school board as America's Club of Fools, would not file reports or attend meetings of any kind, refused even to speak to a parent, and would throw a sassy student bodily out the door.

  When at the end of the year he decreed only two items built in the shop of even acceptable quality, and methodically smashed the others to kindling, both Jayell and the school agreed that they had had enough. He returned to the Ape Yard and the shop by the creek, where he taught high-school dropouts and chain-gang graduates like Carlos a trade in exchange for their labor.

  Jayell saw me and came down the shop, scowling. "Well, you decided to show up today, did you? Look where the sun is! We could have done a half-day's work!"

  "You said to get Em if I could; well, it took some doing but I got him. Now you can work us or send us home, but don't point no suns to me!"

  Jayell clapped me on the head and laughed. "I swear, Early boy, you get more like Em every day. Let's go paint a house."

  Em was already in the back of the truck dozing under a tarpaulin. Jayell leaped in the truck and I barely pulled in beside him before we were bounding down the road. Jayell was in high spirits; he hummed a country song in the blast of air that whipped over the shuddering windshield, the points of his collar fluttering like bat wings in the breeze. Jayell had chiseled the top off the cab when he bought the truck from Speck Turner. It was useless against the rain anyway, since Speck, a high-living black plumber who subcontracted work from Jayell, drove it home drunk one night, firing holes through the roof with his .44 Magnum.

  "Look at that!" Jayell nudged my arm and pointed to a triangularshaped house against the hillside with a slanting roof. A small stream meandered down the hill, poured across the slate roof and fell in a sheeting waterfall past the staggered front window. The young couple who lived there had wanted a honeymoon house under a waterfall. Every contractor in the county had laughed. "They said I'd never waterproof that roof! Huh!"

  Building mostly for the poor had advantages other than allowing him to experiment on small structures and use salvage materials, Jayell said. Wealthy people had to have houses that looked pretty much alike; it wasn't safe to deviate too much; and in certain cases, like in suburban developments, they couldn't deviate at all, but had to preserve a certain community look. But poor people didn't have that problem, or a reputation to worry about, or a job they might lose for being considered peculiar. Besides, they had the worst lots: a patch of swampy bottomland, a craggy
half-acre on the side of a hill, and that offered a greater challenge, and provided for wider experimentation.

  Jayell's guiding principle was to shape the house to fit the terrain. He built toad-stool houses on pilings in the middle of swamps, wedge-shaped houses in ravines; he arched rooms over a stream on a farm in Lenox County, and made a flowing, bladderlike thing without steps, inserted with dozens of tiny windows, for the old Patterson woman who was going blind. He ran roofs to the ground, fitted beam supports into the hills, cantilevered porches toward the Georgia sunsets, and for a large crowded family, counterweighted whole walls that could be shifted by hand. And every step of the way he drove his shop boys brutally, excusing no mistakes, inciting them to learn with a force that the white boys making desks and what-nots in the high-school shop had been able to tolerate only a year.

  But Jayell's major problem was that he was simply no businessman. His operating capital was a drawer full of promissory notes, and payments when his customers could make them. He scoured the countryside for salvage lumber and used only the cheapest materials, secondhand when he could get it, but still he was running into trouble. Smithbilt Corporation, one of the large developers that fattened on the postwar housing boom, was interested in what Jayell was doing (they had openly copied some of his designs for lake retreats) and had tried to entice him to work for them in construction, promising that he could experiment at their expense, and that they would test the marketability of his plans. Sometimes Jayell seemed ready, questioning the possibilities in great detail. Later he would say he didn't have enough designs worked out, that he hadn't done enough experimentation on his own. Or, in the heat of some new creation, he might just order the Smithbilt representative off the job, shouting that the company only wanted to steal more of his ideas.

  On our way to the Waugh place on Wolf Mountain, the truck lurched noisily through the rundown eastern edge of town. Suddenly Jayell remembered he had to stop at I.V. Tagg's office over the pawnshop. Tagg was a CPA who made a determined effort to keep Jayell's books in order. Still humming, Jayell scrambled up the stairs and burst into the office; seeing no one in the dusty, cluttered room, he shouted, "I.V., damn your rotten soul, come out here!"