A Cry of Angels

by Jeff Fields

Suddenly Doc Bobo was beside them. "Get out of here, Fay." He put a hand on the giant's arm. "Fay! You hear me? Go on, wait outside."

  There was a movement of broad shoulders under his jacket; a spring, taut to the breaking point, easing its tension. He retrieved his cap and Doc Bobo's hat and tapped softly across the sloping floor. At the door he turned briefly and glanced at Mr. Teague, then slipped into the sunlight.

  "You have made a mistake, Mr. Teague."

  Mr. Teague nodded. "A mistake," he said bitterly, "that sums it up. I spent my whole life in a business I never liked, because it was my father's business, and he was proud. That was a mistake."

  "And I stayed with it, even when I seen others move away, because I thought people needed me. I thought they were my friends, and a man had an obligation to his friends. I thought they would remember the sick baskets, the bills I let go by when they was out of work, the rationed goods I let 'em have when they'd gambled away their stamp books. In the Depression, grown men stood at this counter and cried like babies, beggin' enough food to stop their kids from eatin' clay, and I gave it to 'em."

  "But it was all a mistake. Some of the kids from those families are standin' behind you this minute—lookin' to see blood spilled in my store."

  "Finally, when I was old and by myself, there comes a colored woman. She liked to laugh. She made me laugh. She ironed my shirts and put a shine on my floors and made me fried pies and coffee with honey in it. And we'd sit in the afternoon and talk. She was a good woman. It was a good time."

  "And when she died I took in her child. I thought I could at least raise him the best I knew how, give him an education—and since I hadn't any family, I figured to leave him the store. Maybe give him an advantage these other poor black kids'd never have."

  "But now that all my friends have left me, there won't be nothing to leave him."

  "So I see that, too, was a mistake."

  "So you go on sucking blood out of misery in the Ape Yard, Doc, but you leave that boy alone. He's all I got left in the world. And don't come draggin' a bunch of white trash in here expectin' to throw a scare into me. I'm too old. I've made too many mistakes, and my life ain't amounted to nothing."

  "Get out of my store."

  When they had filed out, Mr. Teague crawled weakly onto his stool and wiped his face with his apron.

  He looked ready to faint.

  42

  As soon as the men left, young boys who had been idling at the door went running. In a matter of minutes people were stopping each other in the street, calling up to porches, shouting across the creek.

  "Lemme through there, get out of my way!" Em bellowed at those already crowding to the door.

  "Where you going, Em?" I said, catching up to him. "Down the river. Leave me alone."

  "When will you be back?" I asked anxiously.

  "When I'm drunk enough to stand gettin' killed," he said, and hove down into the road.

  The news of Mr. Teague's humiliation of Doc Bobo and his singlehandedly standing off the Flat Creek crowd swept through the Ape Yard with electrifying force, greeted everywhere with shock, disbelief. The story leaped from ridge to ridge, growing in the telling, and the store experienced a sudden upsurge in business. Mr. Teague was in no mood for them, and when they tried to pump him he shrugged them off and went upstairs. When pressed, I related what had happened as accurately as possible, sticking strictly to the facts, not trying to make Mr. Teague out a hero or anything, as I knew he would have wanted.

  Tio did the same, I suppose, to the best of his ability. He let it be known that this was a place of business, and he didn't have time to waste with idle rumor-mongers, but as long as bona-fide customers were buying or making token payments on long overdue bills, Tio had a story to tell.

  That afternoon people began pouring up the hills to Wolf Mountain. New faces appeared at the jobsite until the crowd numbered in the hundreds.

  It was rebellion now, blowing openly through the hollow.

  Jayell moved among them, confused, anxious, as happy people babbled at him. "Come to get my house started," shouted Speck Turner, "me and Loomis and Simon . . ."

  "I got some money, Mist' Jay," a man covered with rock shed dust was saying, "they puttin' me off my place . . ."

  "Shut up! Shut up! I can't think!"

  Jayell ran to a pickup truck where a half-dozen men were helping down battered shop boys: Carlos, grinning through his bandages, Skeeter with his foot in a still-moist cast, Jackie James, walking stiffly so as not to move his back and hollering at his mother to leave him alone.

  "There's too many!" cried Jayell. "We can't move!"

  "Then give 'em sump'n to do," said Carlos. "You organized crews in Abbeville for Smithbilt, you can line these niggers up!"

  "We need lumber, scraps of any kind," shouted Jayell. "You there, Loomis, get some people to bring axes and start clearing those trees. . . Carlos, get in that trunk I brought up from the shop. Pull out those plans, Skeeter! Get your shop boys over there, never mind . . . trim work, baseboards, start 'em on cabinets. . . we gonna, listen to me, everybody, we're gonna need hand tools, anything you got. . ." Jayell turned in circles, shoving aside those in his way. "That's it, we need materials and tools, anything, anything. Now, the rest of you just move over there until somebody tells you what to do. These fellas in the bandages will be in charge."

  Scraps of planking started coming up the slopes, a board from a truck bed, a hog pen. They came with hammers, handsaws, a pound of nails in a rolled paper bag. Through the afternoon and into the next day they kept coming, with jalopies loaded down with lumber, scraps of plywood and tin, rolls of rusted wire, never sure what would be of use to this builder.

  Pits were dug for barbecues, trestles laid on sawhorses. They brought messes of vegetables from summer gardens, hams pulled from boxes of salt; iron washpots of stews simmered under the oaks and black women ladled hush-puppy batter in skillets of boiling fat.

  The land was cleared, new houses started.

  I. V. Tagg sat on a stump with his old hand-cranked computer and cranked and figured, signed contracts and notes, and ran cash to the bank and came back to figure again.

  "It's chaos!" he cried. "It's madness!"

  "I thought this kind of thing was dead and gone," said old man Burroughs, watching people build their neighbors' houses, "and to see it, in this day and time . . ."

  Through it all Jayell flapped about like a mad martin, bouncing on ladders, leaping through skeletal walls, shouting orders, measuring, changing plans in mid-construction, running from the woods with his pants at half-mast to scream at the alignment of a roof and dashing back to finish his business.

  The struggling laborers mixed mortar with their hands; they held timbers at unaccustomed angles, waiting for the nod; they asked again about this window, the slant of that partition—was this the right mixture of paint? They gathered in silence to watch a plumb bob settle, as though on this job even the center of gravity might be different.

  The structures climbed through the blistering July heat, forms defying all known symmetry and the common requirements of stress and design. New angles emerged, curving walls, cantilevered porches and steep-winged roofs, domes from which staircases spiraled down to circular rooms.

  Jayell's contractor friend, Werb O'Connell, came and stood aghast. Mr. Wyche drove up with a couple of executives of Smithbilt Homes. They wanted to look at Jayell's plans.

  "Most of 'em are up here," said Jayell, tapping his head.

  "I can't tell if it's a lot of little houses, or one big house sprawled out over the mountainside," said Werb O'Connell.

  Local architects poked through the houses with levels and rules, they sighted down the hill with instruments. They squatted with sketch pads and tried to pick arguments with Jayell.

  "It is what it is!" Jayell said. "For thousands of years man found his shelter in the earth, in trees and caves, gentlemen, the most natural structural environment, and a damned sight better than those boxes w
e put him in today. A man's environment should free him, not box him in. As Wright said, it's the space that counts, not the walls. Can you beat a tree for living space? Can you sketch a freer, more natural floor plan than a cave? Excuse me."

  And as the various houses grew, the master plan emerged, each small building merging into a graceful conformity with the whole. From the foot-thick supports that bit into the hillsides to the freeflowing upper rooms of sunlit airiness, they all swerved and molded together, growing with perfect shape and balance—not imposed upon, but emerging naturally from the existing terrain, their bright colors quilting the summer mountain.

  Traffic slowed on the Atlanta highway. People parked and watched from their cars. A retired couple from Florida on their way to see Stone Mountain, which was part of their sightseeing itinerary, stopped and took each other's pictures on each of the porches and turned south again, saying Stone Mountain be damned.

  "We're running short of lumber!" Jayell cried. "We've got to have more lumber!"

  And the deserted shacks around Teague's property began disintegrating, whole houses disappearing in the night. Word came that there had been rebellious flare-ups at Doc Bobo's sawmill on the Little Iron River, that the convicts were growing careless, letting lumber get away from them.

  Each night bundles of lumber came floating down the river, and farther down, along the pulpwood logging trails, pickups and jalopies sat waiting. The next morning fresh stacks of stock sat drying at the jobsite.

  At last, the quiet of a Sunday afternoon, when Jayell only allowed work until noon. Mayor Crowler, Mr. William Thurston of Blue Light Monuments, who was also chairman of the centennial commission, and three other board members of the commission drove up to Jayell's new house. Jayell left Phaedra and pushed off the steps and limped down to the car, carrying his Bible in one hand and the bottle of whiskey from which he had been sipping in the other.

  "That's quite a combination," said Mayor Crowler, getting out.

  "Unbeatable, I've found. One seems to enhance the enjoyment of the other. What can I do for you?"

  The men stood looking at the unfinished houses that loomed above them on the craggy mountainside. Seen up close, in detail, the houses looked even more startling than at a distance. "It's like something out of a dream," said Clarence Winthrop, president of the Three Angels sheds.

  "It is," said Jayell without inflection.

  "Mr. Crooms," said the mayor, "what you're doing here is attracting a great deal of attention, the wrong kind of attention, at the worst possible time. Do you realize that next weekend is the windup of our centennial celebration . . . do you know who will be coming to our town?"

  "We're just building houses, Mayor, just building houses."

  "A great number of people have put in a great deal of work to see that—"

  "There's been a lot of work put in up here, too, Mayor," said Jayell evenly. "There's been people up here that ought to be takin' it easy in a rockin' chair, workin' like I've never seen people work before. Drop by that boardinghouse over yonder . . ."

  "You know that's not what I'm talking about," said the mayor curtly, trying to control his anger. "It's down there," he said, pointing to the hollow, "that place is in a turmoil!"

  "Because of you and that son of a bitch Bobo! If you'd left old man Teague alone and hadn't shoved people around like a bunch of cattle, this place wouldn't be here, Mayor! You people made this happen, not me!"

  "Those people are being provided for. Houses are being built up the hollow . . ."

  "You call 'em houses, not me!"

  " . . . and plans are being made for a project for those displaced by the dam."

  "Another Ape Yard, with you and Bobo scoopin' off federal cream! Build all the dams and housing projects you want, Mayor, I'm moving as many as I can up here in the breeze!"

  Mr. Thurston broke in. "Your people are stealing lumber now, you know."

  "I don't know about that—I got people huntin' scraps all over the country. They could be pullin' it off the courthouse for all I know. You catch 'em, you put 'em in jail."

  "We helped you, Jayell," said the mayor. "This whole town helped you. Why won't you help us?"

  "But I am helping you! Don't you see? I am helping you!"

  The mayor sighed. "Well, there's no use belaboring the point. All we ask is that you just stop and let things cool down for a week or so, at least until the centennial festivities are over. While the news media, and the people from the capital and Washington are here, let's just keep our feet on the ground and sit tight. Will you do that for us?"

  Jayell's frown turned to a quizzical look, then the wrinkles broke into an unexpected grin. He stood clutching his whiskey and his Bible, he started shaking, looking from one to the other of the surprised faces.

  "Mayor, that's the attitude of a man in an outhouse! I can't"—Phaedra started breaking up behind him—"I can't do that a whole week!"

  I started laughing then, at the looks on the men. Phaedra put her hands on her hips and bent over, snorting like a mule; Jayell, laughing at her then, turned and put an arm around her, and the more she laughed, braying and sucking wind, the more tickled he got.

  The men started gathering toward the car, watching us like we'd gone insane. Doors slammed, the engine started, and the three of us, beyond control then, sank to the dirt in hysteria, at the foot of the slope of the strange, soaring silhouettes, and laughed and laughed and couldn't stop.

  When Wednesday night came with still no sign of Em, I began to get worried, and decided I'd better go looking for him. So Thursday I took off work and spent the day on the bike searching for him along the river. He was in the area; he had been seen at almost every river joint I came to, from Dirsey's all the way up to Shady Point, with stories of drinking bouts that grew rowdier the farther I went. But he was nowhere to be found. It brought to mind one of the rare "Indian" things Em ever said about himself: "If I want to find somebody, there ain't no place he can hide that I can't smell him out; I'll get him if he's a thousand miles away. But If I don't want to be found, there ain't nobody can find me."

  And it was plain that Em didn't want to be found just now. But he was still around, I was sure of that. It was enough. I turned around and headed home.

  Driving back in through Quarrytown I could hear the band practicing in the Granite Bowl behind the courthouse, and when I turned into the square I was amazed at the transformation that had taken place. Banners crossed the streets at every intersection, a wooden reviewing stand was built in front of the courthouse, firemen were hanging pictures of the Poncini brothers from every lamppost. Horses stood hitched to an old mail-delivery wagon on the lawn of the post office; old yellowed maps and photographs of the Poncini quarry in operation were pasted in the window of the Star. Out-of town license plates were everywhere; a traffic cop in a rented turn-of-the-century policeman's uniform did his best to keep cars from running into the mobile unit of an Atlanta television station that was stringing cables across from the reviewing stand and trying to mount a camera on the top of the bank on the corner for the parade. Crowds milled through the granite association's display of early granite-working machinery under a striped tent on the square, along with striated, poor-grade monuments produced by the Poncini quarry. Derby hats, string ties and canes were featured in the windows of every clothing store; newly sprouted beards were in abundance; ladies stood fanning their long skirts in the July heat.

  I waved to Mrs. Porter and Mrs. Cline, who were selling quilts and "antiques" out of the bus in a vacant lot filled with such hawkers next to Daisy Riley's beauty shop. On a grassy traffic island at the main approach to town from the north side, I passed Miss Minnie Copeland, the spinster music teacher, who sat at a harpsichord wired to a public-address system feeding 1890s tunes into the air. The excitement building toward the impending celebration was roughly equivalent to that of a fireworks display at a carnival during an electric storm.

  At Wolf Mountain it was somewhat quieter, but not one d
egree less intense. The houses grew at a staggering pace. Cars on their way into town were still stopping and turning in to see what was going on. Jayell had to assign the boarders to take turns meeting them at a turnaround place on the access road and explain that this was not a pavilion for the centennial.

  Through it all, there was a block in the Ape Yard—the one housing the two-story white building back behind the willows and magnolias with the neon clock sign—that maintained an ominous silence. Bobo's Funeral Home sat quietly in the eye of the storm.

  43

  Friday night I was alone in the loft eating supper. It was a beautiful, clear July night. Stars sparkled out the window, through which a cool breeze worried the flame of the lamp on the table.

  I would miss the loft. There could be no substitute at Wolf Mountain for its comfort, its smells. I looked around at it, with its splintery ribs, its stains, the empty fish tank, and recalled what it meant to me in those early days in comparison to the boardinghouse—that frightening boardinghouse with its strange rooms, its shadows, its curious old faces, the pomp and thunder of Miss Esther . . .

  Miss Esther.

  I looked at the letter that lay partially unfolded on the table. Mrs. Bell had given it to me that morning. I picked it up and read again the sparse, scrawled sentences:

  . . . another of my spells a week or so back and have been in hosp. since. Doctor says I am doing better. He says that every day so I guess I am. Says I might be able to go home next week. It don't matter to me whether I go back to that house or not . . .

  I stiffened, listening.

  It wasn't the wind, the sounds of the loft—I sorted through them quickly. It was even, crunching sounds—running feet, coming up the gulley. There were scrapings up the bank, a rattle of brush, then footsteps on the stairs so heavy the loft felt it, and I knew who it was.

  Em burst through the door, panting, his eyes wild with fear.

  "What is it? Who's after you?"

  "Bobo's men! I got word they're searchin' for me along the river!" He jerked down his canvas bag and threw open the footlocker. "I'll grab some clothes. Get the bike started."