A Cry of Angels

by Jeff Fields

When the building began to lean down toward the water he came pushing out, climbed the bank, and ran out onto the porch and jumped up and down, furious at its slowness. "Slide, damn you, slide!"

  With a popping of joists the old shack shifted, the porch was almost touching the water. "Get off there, Em!" He lumbered along the porch, jumping, grabbing supports and leaning out over the water, shouting at it to move. When the boat dock was under water he lunged up the boardwalk, found a timber, and jammed it under the upper side of the house and got his shoulder under it. The Indian's moans piercing the night, inch by inch the building tilted, lower and lower, until the current got a grip on the porch.

  There was an enormous crash and slide of furniture and glass falling about inside. Then a rush of water and a sigh as the shack slid off the bank. It bobbed there in the stream, a big black thing of peculiar shape, shifting, twisting a little downstream, leaving stubs of pillars where it sat; power lines snapped and lay on the ground.

  Cars were cranking and driving away. Lew Birdsong sat propped on his hands, looking dazedly around. He was still sitting that way, looking around for his fish camp, when we lost sight of him through the trees.

  22

  Feeling better, Em decided he wanted a bath, and sat by the well singing softly to himself. I poured bucket after bucket of water over him and told him all that had happened, the cigarette in his mouth washing apart until only a strip of paper lay on his lip. He sat smiling and humming that wordless song as he watched the dawn drift in from the woods.

  "Not a thing to worry about," he said, pulling on his clothes. "We'll make out just fine. Damn, I'm hungry!"

  He walked up to pay his respects to the boarders (returning with a lard pail filled with hot food), and went out to see Jayell, and spent the next few days cleaning attics, basements, and doing whatever odd jobs he could turn up while I was in school.

  One day a lady whose Florida room he helped redo gave him an aquarium of tropical fish, with which he was delighted. He set it in the window and showed me how the sun striking the corner of the tank just right threw a lavish spectrum of colors across the wall.

  But all my arguing couldn't save the fish. He fried them up crispy brown and ate them on Ritz crackers.

  Pets? You got to feed and look after?

  Not for him!

  I don't know what he told the boarders about our condition when he went up there to see them that first day home—he swore he told them nothing—but he must have done some very broad hinting, be cause pretty soon they started having Mr. Teague, Tio, Em and me up to the house for Saturday night suppers. "To help keep the food bill equal to what we're being charged for!" said Mrs. Porter.

  And, they said, they wanted a chance to pump Mr. Teague in detail about all that was going on at the store.

  The boarders themselves, surprisingly, were doing remarkably well. Far from the collapse of spirit I expected when Miss Esther left, there was an activity around the house I had never seen before. They all turned out for yard work now, even Mr. Jurgen. The women were busy making quilts; they were doing some babysitting for members of Pinnacle church. Mr. Rampey and Mr. Woodall ventured down to help Wash Fuller overhaul his Plymouth. And they were all trooping off to Sunday services together—even Mr. Burroughs.

  Those Saturday night suppers were among the best times I ever had, a riot of reminiscing, with each of them outdoing the other in telling tall tales, often, as was their custom, with two or three of them going at it at the same time.

  And it was the first of these get-togethers that brought Farette's situation into the open at the boardinghouse and forced the boarders to face it, and make a decision. And having done that, they laid the groundwork for what came later.

  Farette was about the same age as the boarders, and although she protected her position as official cook and housekeeper with a sharp tongue and a watchful eye, over the years the work had plainly become too much for her to do alone, and it had become natural for Miss Esther and the others to help out in the kitchen at mealtimes and wash the dishes afterward, to take turns with the washing and ironing and general cleaning.

  In short, Farette had become just one more old person living in the house—except for two notable differences. One was that she still attended Free Rent A.M.E. church in the hollow while the others walked uptown—which I never thought much about; A.M.E. was closer, and Em and I preferred it to Pinnacle Baptist ourselves. The other, to which I had given a great deal of thought over the years, was that while I was confined to the thunder and roar of mealtimes in the dining room, Farette got to eat by herself in the serenity of the kitchen.

  The privacy, our invitations to supper cost her.

  Tio and I were sitting on the front porch that first night, flipping a little mumbletypeg with our knives and listening to the men's voices in the living room as we waited for supper, and when those wonderful words, "Y'all 'bout ready?" came from the dining room in Farette's clarion voice, there was a general scramble in that direction.

  As we passed through the living room Mr. Teague turned to Tio for clarification on a point he was making to Mr. Rampey.

  "The way we rearranged the shelves and the meat cases, how much floor space was it that we added to the store?"

  "A hundred and twenty square feet," said Tio.

  "A hundred and twenty square feet," said Mr. Teague proudly.

  "Plus that don't count the extra shelves we built up front," said Tio, "and when you figure we pyramid the canned goods now like they do, two four-foot squares—and that's extra, that was just walkin' space before, let's see that comes to . . ."

  During this time they had walked into the dining room where the others were already taking their usual places, and Tio, calculating rapidly on his fingers, sat down opposite Mr. Teague, just as he was accustomed to doing at home. "In all it comes to two hundred and thirty-eight . . ."

  Tio came to in the hush.

  What had stopped the talk was Farette, who, leaning over the table to set down the gravy boat, stood frozen, staring at him. Then the others turned to look, and Tio, his eyes widening in horror, scrambled to his feet.

  Up to that moment, no one had given a thought to Tio's presence, and now everyone was as dumfounded as Tio himself, who, unable to move or think, stood gripping the back of his chair.

  It was awful. No one could think what to do.

  And it was into that desperate silence that Mr. Burroughs, late to the table as usual, came harrumphing and clearing his throat from the bathroom.

  He swung through the door and stopped, focusing on what all the quiet was about. And when he perceived it he stood surveying it, the way he might a stalled car, his white moustache working. He looked at Tio. He looked at Farette.

  At last he stepped forward, lowered his long arms until his knuckles rested on the table, and roared:

  "Oh-what-the-hell . . . !"

  It was as though he had cut the strings on a lot of balloons; all the tension at once rose to laughter. Mr. Rampey and Mrs. Bell grabbed Tio and pulled him into his chair.

  "Farette!" cried Mrs. Metcalf, and she and Mrs. Porter and Mr. Burroughs all grabbed the frightened little woman at once. Mrs. Cline tottered to the kitchen for her plate.

  Laughing with the others at her discomfort, I jumped up and ran for an extra chair. When she was finally seated, I leaned across to her and said, "You didn't think you'd get away with it forever, did you?"

  But she was up to it. She carefully removed and folded her apron in her lap and, sitting stiff as a ramrod, pinched her lips and looked slowly around at all the grinning faces.

  Finally she snapped, "Well? Ain't nobody at this table gon' ax a blessin'!"

  But we couldn't live on that one meal a week. We cast about for every possible source of earning money.

  In the back of a magazine I found an offer to become solvent in my spare time by selling religious mottoes. It struck me that I could do worse than throwing in with Providence on a get-rich scheme, as there was bound to be a
little supernatural help in the selling of such a product. I would even tithe a tenth of the profits as an added guarantee. I had heard positive-thinking businessmen testify at Pinnacle Baptist that they owed their entire success to the practice.

  The mottoes were verses of Scripture written in glitter on an electric blue background that sold for a quarter apiece. Sure enough, Providence held up its end of the deal. They sold like hotcakes, especially in the Ape Yard. In fact, I was surprised to find that the poorest shanties housed the best prospects. When they were all sold I had collected a little over eight dollars, and a blue coating on my fingers that would take time to wear off. But then I found myself in a moral dilemma. With the money before me on the cot, I thought less and less of the tithing. It seemed a reckless commitment to a "silent partner" who had remained altogether too silent when the doors were slamming. I stewed about it. I even offered Him a chance to speak up, right then and there, and clear away my doubts once and for all. It's not often a person gets to pray while holding the trump card, and it gave me a glorious sense of power. All right, I said, stay silent this time and it's going to cost you something. I waited, but He didn't take the bait. Still, I was uneasy. Then I hit on what seemed to me a brilliant solution: I simply opened an account with Providence as I had with Mr. Teague!

  In the end I kept the company's share too.

  I got several threatening letters about an inspector—somebody who was in my area and would see that I got prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law if I didn't remit the company's money at once. But having brazenly put the Lord on the cuff, I wasn't about to be intimidated by some mail-order house in New Jersey.

  With my new wealth I paid three dollars on account to Tio, bought a new pair of tennis shoes, chipped in on another secondhand trash burner to replace the one I'd smashed ("What in the world happened up here?'' Em had asked. "I got mad," I said. "Well, next time you feel a mad comin' on, holler, so I can guy off the building!"), treated Em to a Saturday at the picture show with a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and brought home milkshakes for breakfast. The next morning I was still sick from the candy, and endured Em's snickers as I poured the curdled milkshakes out the window.

  That was foolish, I thought. I would have to guard against such childish splurges in the future. Suddenly I became very fearful for our money, and insisted that we keep it in a safe place. There was an old birdhouse on a pole mounted to the side of the garage. I worked it loose from its U-clamps and pulled it into the loft. Prying off the top of the birdhouse, I found that my coffee-can bank would just fit snugly inside. I put our money in it, replaced the top, and slid the pole back in the clamps. The birds would have to look to themselves.

  Flushed with the success of the motto business, I next sent off for garden seeds to sell, failing to note that agriculture, unlike religion, is seasonal, and most people already had gardens producing. After a few days I shelved my sales kit and gave up.

  Then Em saw it, and I wished many times over I had burned it.

  "That's what we ought to do," he cried, "plant us a late vegetable garden! Lord, how long has it been since I've tasted fresh vegetables right out of the ground!"

  I'd seen it happen many times. Once a person becomes overpowered by the ancient longing to put seeds in the ground, he can no longer be dealt with as a rational human being. He is a person obsessed. You can kill him, but you can't talk him out of it. He will find soil to plant in if he has to haul it; he will plant on solid rock, in clayey yards, on rooftops, in windowboxes, in cans, in paper cups, wherever a seed can put down roots and push a bud into the sun. I'd known people who would change their religion before they would see a spring come without breaking ground.

  It is a curious malady, and can strike suddenly and without warning, even after, as in Em's case, lying dormant for many years. The old lust came up in him that night, and the next morning before daybreak there he was out beside the garage ripping with a pick, dropping great clots of grass, the "hah! hah!" of his breath matching the slamming strokes.

  I trudged along behind him with a shovel, breaking up clods without enthusiasm, something telling me that I was in for a trying time.

  "Dig deep, boy, them roots gotta have room to grow!" When the ground was broken he sifted it, worried, and grabbed a sack from the garage and headed for the woods. "We gotta get some woods dirt to mix in."

  "You're gonna haul more dirt? We got a whole planet under there! What do we need more dirt for?"

  "Shut up and come on!'; he explained.

  After the area had been crawled over and picked free of every sprig it housed, Em permitted the planting to begin—and was even more impossible about that. If a package said three seeds to the hill, he put in five, just to be safe. I stuck the onion bulbs in too deep; he yelled I was choking them, and fell on his knees and brushed away dirt as though they were, indeed, gasping for air. I tried planting the tomato plants in their paper pulp cups, as the roots were already growing through, and got damned for being the ignorantest fool, by far, he ever met. "Just stand over there," he huffed in exasperation, "you're gonna mess up in spite a all I can do!" So I took to the shade, gratefully, picked my blisters and let him go.

  And he kept at it, from morning till night.

  "It's a nice garden, a fine garden," I ventured after a few days. "I hope Mrs. Bell doesn't come down to retrieve a few of the tools you've stolen from her and see it, because I'm sure the shock and envy would be more than the poor woman could stand. But, Em, until that plot of ground actually starts growing something, we got to figure some way to put some food on the table."

  Em stood leaning on his rake.

  "I been thinkin' about it!" He spied a caterpillar trespassing out of the grass toward his garden and leaned down to free it of its troubles. "Doin' this kind of work clears a man's head so he can think! Ain't a thing to worry about, boy. You get out of school tomorrow; the next day we'll just head for Cooper Corner."

  23

  Cooper Corner was a shaded, windswept corner up near the fairgrounds, the gathering place for day laborers from the Ape Yard. We settled ourselves under the umbrella oak and waited, and for a while it seemed no one else was coming. Then, with the first gray tinting of the air they began emerging from the shadows of the hollow. They drifted up the winding paths and settled around us with a rustle of crusted work clothes, the soft scrapings of leather. They all looked tired and sleepy, and smelled of the sweat of yesterdays in the sun.

  "Good mornin'," bellowed Em cheerfully. Most of them knew him and returned the greeting with easy familiarity. Old Aaron Tim, twisting wax from his ears with a matchstick and spreading it on his dried, cracked lips, shook his head and chuckled. "Come to do a little work, Em?"

  "We come to work, me and this grown man h'yere," said Em, and went over to engage the younger boys in a game of searching for echoes, their voices bouncing back from the darkened hollow.

  They were an elite corps, those morning hopefuls of Cooper Corner. They came each morning, sometimes whole families, and sat on the roots of the massive oak, on the curb, on the ground, and waited, sometimes all day. They came to pick cotton, to pull corn, to bale hay. They were there to spread asphalt, to dig ditches, to move furniture, to lay pipe and tend yard. They strung fences, killed hogs, trimmed trees; they cleaned basements, unloaded freight cars, and climbed shivering cold from their drafty shacks to fire the furnaces for the waking town. Whatever work there was, they were there to do it, their one goal each day: to put something on the table that night.

  With the grown ones came the young apprentices, some barely walking, to learn a trade in which—there was no promotion, and the pay was always the least they would take.

  After a while a pickup puttered to the curb with milk cans rattling in the back. A farmer in a sun helmet bawled out, "Need two hands to roof a barn."

  None of the black people moved, apparently in deference to us, who were first. Em looked about, and seeing this, stood up and dusted his pants. The farmer looked us
over.

  "What'chall doin' out here?''

  "Lookin' for work," Em said.

  "Bet I can get some of these niggers to work cheaper."

  "Then get 'em," Em said, "but don't go trying to bluff me down on price before we've even talked work."

  "Well, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a big 'un like you handling that tin. Get in." He looked at me. "Don't need no kids."

  "He goes where I go. He works like a man, and if he falls behind I'll catch him up."

  The farmer shifted gears. "I'll take your word on that." Em and I climbed in the back of the truck, but as we started off Em banged on the roof of the cab. The farmer slammed on the brakes. "You never said what you was payin'."

  "Seventy-five cents an hour for you, fifty for the kid."

  "That the goin' rate?" Em called to the crowd. Someone down front nodded. Em shook his head and settled himself in the truck. "Drive on," he said.

  The farmer, whose name was Hutchinson, ran a small dairy five miles out the Little Holland highway. Four men were already at work, hammering down the corrugated sheathing on a new milking barn. Fat, white-faced cattle grazed below an enormous poultry house where hundreds of leghorns clucked and shuffled behind the latticed walls. Over the hill came the deep-throated throb of a tractor.

  Our job was to haul the roofing from stacks by the farmhouse and drag it up swaying ladders to the men on the roof. Hutchinson furnished no gloves, and in minutes the skin was fuzzed between our thumbs and forefingers and angry red cracks opened in our hands. Hutchinson stayed with us the whole time, shouting instructions to the carpenters and stamping about impatiently as we worked the tin up the ladders. He seemed to grow more agitated with each trip I made up the hill.

  "You said he could do a man's work," he shouted up at Em.

  "He is doing a man's work," Em shot back. "You're judgin' him by me, and I'm doin' the work of four men. Now, stand clear of this ladder before you get your head split open." There was laughter from the other side of the roof. Hutchinson blew his nose furiously on the ground.