The Tongues of Angels

by Reynolds Price

  In short we lived through the grandest long entertainment event in human history, with the gleamingest heroes and villains. Our standards for the future were immensely and rightly high. Show me a later villain with the black radiance of Hitler or brighter heroes than Roosevelt and Churchill. And the fact that not one of us had fired so much as a single live shot left us with high hopes of our own chance at grappling with a demon someday. Chief’s eyes then had stirred that tender wound inside my mind. I’ve said it yearned for rousing touch and a call to action but maybe not then.

  Anyhow I navigated the final months of my classes, concentrating less on my studies than on the manufacture of adequate reasons for not spending weekends at Mother’s—she lived two hours from my dormitory room. I must have understood that I was beginning an effort to bury my father. To be sure, he was decently interred under gray Vermont granite, with vacancies beside him for Mother and me. Bury him in my life, I meant.

  The sights I’d witnessed in his last few days are, to this day, the worst I’ve seen—and as an artist-journalist, I saw Vietnam. But even the sights don’t begin to match the domino set of mental dilemmas. You are now the man at bat in your home, plus you’ve suddenly got the woman you envied him all your life. Nothing stands between you and her, except God of course and a Heavenly host with flaming swords. But that spring and summer, I was slaving full-time to blind myself to the fresh home movies that were scalding my mind. Not remembering my father meant not seeing Mother. I tried it, as I said, and she let me—to a point.

  But I did spend ten days at home in early June. Mother left the house for work at eight-thirty every morning and never got back before six. That freed me to sleep as late as I wanted. Then I’d get up, slip on some old shorts and draw or paint watercolors in the steamy yard. Or I’d write the endless illustrated letters I was noted for among my friends. I’d tell them my news, inch by inch, with semicomic marginal drawings. The sketches would burst now and then into my equivalent of visual nuclear war, a careful bird or flower they might want to frame or risk blaspheming the Holy Ghost. It was what I could do that none of them could, just that one thing; but they all seemed to like it. After supper Mother and I would sit in the den and watch the television that Father had introduced into the house only two years before.

  Those were the good days of Jackie Gleason and live drama and of Liberace’s epicene debut. A good index to my father’s kind nature lies in his first response to Liberace. The three of us sat in dumbstruck silence through the whole candlelit hour of the entertainer’s TV debut. When it ended I really couldn’t guess my parents’ reaction—their musical taste ran to Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians—but when Mother rose to make more popcorn, Father looked at me earnestly, “Son, couldn’t something be done for him?” Not with him, notice, but for him.

  And there Mother and I sat through most of my ten nights at home. We were a good way too far gone in life before TV to become the instant zombies that most later Americans are, at a flicker of the tube. Still we were glad of the lazy diversion and the excuse not to talk. One of the hundred things we’d agreed not to mention was how I planned to get to Juniper. I had a dozen friends with cars, and buses were thick on the roads.

  But three nights before my departure, Mother brought me a dish of lemon ice cream and said “I apply for the chauffeuring job.”

  I drew an honest blank.

  “To drive you to camp. I’d enjoy that if you would.”

  I knew she was struggling for nonchalance, but her face couldn’t have looked anymore like a wound if I’d struck her a blow. I asked if she could take the time off.

  She said “If we left Saturday morning, I could be back by dark Sunday. I’ve already asked for Saturday off. I’m still the best driver you know.”

  The last claim was true and still is. She drove the way Fred Astaire danced, as if her fingers were putting out green leaves with no pain or work. I sat there spooning cream, trying to deny what I entirely understood. This woman had manufactured me after all. I’d lived inside her body nine months. I saw and felt every atom of pride it cost her to ask that. I’d all but bought a bus ticket that day, but I said “I’d be honored.”

  Now it’s a brisk two hours on the interstate, but then Asheville was a hard uphill four hours. The whole way we both held in. There’d be long stretches of silence. And if either one of us spoke, it was mostly a reference to sights on the roadside. Thirty years ago once you were in the mountains, there were numerous craftsmen’s displays by the road. You could see fine baskets and hooked rugs, salt-glaze crocks and churns of the good old kind, and chenille bedspreads in poisonous chemical colors. Peacocks strutting, dawn in the Smokies, the whole Last Supper down to the spilled salt. We stopped at several of those. And at the last one, I unthinkingly bought a three-by-five cornucopia hooked rug for the vestibule at home. The pattern was primitive but the colors were worthy of a Persian weaver. And that did it.

  Mother was not a hair-trigger weeper, so there were no tears. But the silence right after I bought the rug was deeper than before. And at last with Asheville in sight, she said “Bridge, let me say it now and don’t stop me. You buying that rug was the most help anybody’s given me yet.”

  Again my lifelong blood share in the depths of this woman’s mind rescued me. She stopped there, thank God. But I suddenly knew the truth she’d beat me to. Her house was my home; in the face of my marriage a few years off, it would be my home till the day she died. One of the few things I’ll say for myself here is this, I had the guts then to spell it out for her and say she was right.

  Juniper was forty-five minutes past Asheville in thick green country. You turned off the paved road and followed a narrowing dirt trail up through small cedars and junipers, then on till the normal trees were shrubs beside the huge-waisted two-hundred-foot hemlocks. And then you broke out of dark into sunlight—the camp itself. It covered the equivalent of a long city block with the Jenkins home, the dining hall and the lodge. Then scattered up the hill were the crafts and Indian lore cabin, some other log buildings, a field for archery and tetherball and all other sports. Then climbing steeply for two hundred yards was the wide horseshoe of residential cabins and bathhouses.

  Mother and I had a prior understanding, a lot like the ones adolescents force on their parents. She was going to drop me off at the lodge. We’d say our goodbye and she’d drive off, with no looking around, no introductions. Childish as it was, it turned out to be a good idea. I was almost the last counselor to arrive; and dungareed young men were loping all around us—they weren’t called Levi’s or jeans for years to come. A few of the urban types even had new axes, well on their way to woodsmanship.

  I’d been an Eagle Scout, with palms. So I didn’t have that much to learn about chopping and sawing, axe sharpening, fire building and such open-fire delicacies as dough on a stick and pork and beans, heated. The classes were conducted on a broad rock shelf near the top of the mountain to the north of Juniper. On Monday it too would be the site of a camp, an elite survivalist outfit for boys from fifteen to eighteen. The empty campground consisted of little more than a clutch of ramshackle tree houses from the previous year. The first task for this year’s boys would be the erasure of last year’s work and the building of their own tree houses. They called it Tsali after a hero of the nearby Cherokees, and a good deal of the curriculum involved an effort to recover Indian skills that our great-grandfathers had lied, cheated, stolen and killed to eradicate.

  As I said, I marked time through the woodlore classes, thinking such unproductive thoughts. But after we’d eaten the good beans, bacon and biscuits, Chief Jenkins stood in the midst of our circle, closer to the fire than I could have managed. With his unpredictable but always wooden gestures, he gave us an orientation speech that was just a warmer version of his Winston talk. I’ve mentioned that he shone among others of his kind. It was on two scores. He had no fleshly designs on his staff, and he burned the hottest brand of spiritual gasoline I’d ever seen. But that
first night I understood something I’d missed before. Half of Chiefs intensity and power came from his brevity and his boxy gestures.

  He might be outrageous in his vision of excellence, but he was never boring. His weird little jerks of arm or head proved he meant all he claimed. And no hot-gospel liar could have raised a dime with a body that awkward. But the blue eyes worked even better by firelight. And he ended with something like “Think about this, my young friends tonight. Go lie on your cots in the black mountain dark and think this over before you rest. You’ve agreed to take on, for ten whole weeks, the healthy future of numerous souls. Never once doubt it—these loud wild bodies, these knockabout boys that will try to craze you with pranks and noise are nothing less than souls from God that you must tend and send forth from Juniper, better than they came, on the high road to manhood. Think. Please think.”

  Generally Chief seemed to quit, not finish, any speech he gave, so he sat down then. The head counselor took over—Sam Baker, another sane enthusiast. During the school year Sam taught at a nearby boys’ school; and his slightest move revealed his foundry, which was the U.S. Marines. He followed Chief’s spiritual generalities with a cool rundown on problems to expect. In declining order they were homesickness, cursing, bedwetting, exhibitionistic masturbation in boys over twelve and constipation. And that was about it for problems apparently. Sam finished by mentioning the camp infirmary, with its nurse. But he issued no special warnings on health, despite the fact that we were barely clinging to the flank of a granite mountain in untamed forest stocked with bears and panthers, bobcats and rattlers.

  Then Sam sat down and I could see I was not alone in feeling the powerful wash from his wave. All of us counselors looked at each other and shook our heads. They were entrusting each of us—none of whom was a father or even a husband—with fourteen live human children, seven every five weeks. And this was it for orientation?

  Once he sat down Sam did add the word that he’d be underfoot around the clock for on-the-spot advice.

  I’d been nursing an inward smile of superiority to all this fervor. But at that point I remember it dawned on me, They’re taking me seriously. That was a raw experience for me, the standard sheltered child of my time and place. Wasn’t my generation the first that middle-class America decided to keep in childhood well beyond the age of twenty? Till that night anyhow no one else but my dying father had turned to me and said You’re it. It thrilled me more than not.

  And the final hour only tuned me higher. We didn’t actually toast marshmallows, but we sat in a loose circle around the big fire. Sam asked us to introduce ourselves, so we went around the circle and heard each man. The oldest was Roger the swimming counselor, and he was not yet twenty-five. Most of us were sophomore or junior students at small colleges in the Carolinas. Some were bound for the service; Korea was still in arms and hungry for every boy it could get. Two were engaged to be married, one at the end of these ten weeks and the other at Thanksgiving. We were children who thought you should streak out of childhood as fast as you could, and we were the last such American generation.

  The immediately remarkable person was Kevin Hawser. With one year to go at Yale, and in a tight race to graduate first in his class, Kevin was the Robert Redford among us. He was six foot three—built strongly with a frank open face. He was also an expert pianist in all brands of music and a jaw-dropping magician. Not that he spoke that self-servingly on the first night. Those were facts that transpired in the course of the summer. But there at the campfire, I saw that Kev was likely to be my nearest friend.

  I told them I was Bridge Boatner from Winston-Salem, that I had a year left at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and that then I was hoping to get a Fulbright and study art in Europe, preferably France or Italy. Somebody asked if I wasn’t worried about the draft? I was able to say truthfully that, as the only son of a widowed mother, I was exempt.

  Several sang out “Luck-y!” and laughed. Since that was what I’d secretly felt since we knew Father was dying, I was still touchy about it.

  But Chief said “A thoroughly merciful provision,” and attention passed to the man beside me.

  After that Chief rose a last time. Again he thanked us; again in general terms he reminded us of our high privilege and duty. And then he added a revelation. “Up there, high over Tsali on that ledge, is the well of Junipers sacred strength. It’s an Indian prayer circle scraped in the ground, packed by dozens of grown men’s feet and ringed with dozens of crude sticks. Each stick is the sign of one man’s pilgrimage. It is my fondest hope that, whatever your denomination, each of you will find your own way there before summer ends and pledge your life to the sacrificial service of all mankind. Some of you may think it looks a little high. Some may even think the idea is childish. It’s not the most accessible spot—that was intentional. But eat this plentiful simple food, drink this spring water, firm your limbs in weeks of service; and you’ll find the climb seems far more possible. It’s not a secret we share with campers. That is vital for you to remember. They’re not yet strong enough in limb or spirit. But before ten weeks has finished here, each one of you will have the limbs to do it. The only question will concern your spirit. Will you need to and want to? The place is waiting.” He drilled us a final blast from the eyes—Chief invented the laser years early—and sat back down.

  Then Uncle Mike Dorfman, a genuinely skilled musician and anthropologist, led us in singing old camp songs. Any of the millions of Americans who are veterans of the camps of the 1940s and ’50s are likely to join me in saying that very few later experiences ever match the shivering joy that can well up at such a time, in such a circle. Maybe there was a whiff of Hitler Youth muscularity in the tradition, though weak and awkward boys were not reviled. But the fact remains that, at the right time and in the right place, campfire singing equaled Handel for laughing grandeur against the night—‘Tell Me Why the Ivy Twines,” “Cocaine Bill and His Wifey Sue” and the endless and mystical “Green Grow the Rushes.”

  At the very last Mike taught us the Indian words and melody for a prayer to the Great Spirit. I’ve never since attempted to look it up and discover which language it’s in or whether the chromatic melody is authentic or was harmonized for paleface ears. But this much is in my memory still, in crude phonetic spelling—

  Wakonda day do, wap-a-deen aton-hay. (Repeat)

  All I remember is, Wakonda is the Great Spirit; and the prayer asks for blessing. But there in the cold thin air under starlight, with a dying fire and a band of brothers, it shivered my timbers the first time around, and we sang it twice. Then everybody rose for the trip down to bed.

  More than one of us paused and tried to make out the prayer circle in darkness. I thought I could see the line of a crag. Whatever, I knew that, since I was burdened with a lifelong stock of awe, I’d climb to that circle and pledge my father the rest of the life denied to his brave weak body. Or pledge it to God, one or the other. Back then to be sure, I was thinking with some of Chiefs wide-eyed fever, though for my generation I was no fuming zealot.

  My bed was an upper, just inside the door of Cabin 16. It consisted of a piece of canvas stretched between two boards. There were mattress pads piled on the bunk below me, but a quick inspection by lantern light showed concentric stains from decades back. So until I could sun them, I decided to sleep on the bare canvas, however cold. The mountain nights could freeze, even in June. And with no more preparation, I vaulted up fully dressed with a single army blanket and listened to the night. There was not the usual summer din of frogs, cicadas and the whine of bats. Instead there was silence of such a brown depth as to make me feel a warning twinge of the all but lethal sickness I suffered the one time I was a camper. I longed for home.

  For years I’d been convinced that I’d outgrown the problem. Children of the Depression and Second War years seldom went far from home. If your parents had the money, they didn’t have the gas or vice versa. So at age eleven my first camp experience ambushed me
. After the first few days of novelty, I began to watch this great sink hole open in my heart and spread. By the end of the first week, I couldn’t even remember how my parents looked, much less sounded. I strongly suspected they wouldn’t show up to get me at the end of the month. This taste of freedom I’d been tricked into giving them would have turned the tide. Why would they want me back in their midst?

  By the fourth and last week, I was so hungry for their faces that I’d have eaten a picture of them if you’d brought me one. When the month ended and they reappeared smiling—and at the farewell banquet, I won a Best Boy shield, one of seven— I realized with amazement that I’d managed to conceal my misery. But if I look back and weigh the terrors of a lifetime, I come across very few times more painful than those weeks of wanting my home as the desert wants rain.

  But that was ten years behind me. I was grown. I’d traveled meanwhile and lived alone through six semesters of college. So what was this ambush, at Juniper tonight? It came anyhow as a need for the place—the actual two-story, cool frame house with my hermit’s cave high up in the back. I saw no visions of Father’s or Mother’s faces. I heard no keening cries, but I felt a famished craving—Take me back. I’d never reneged on a promise as big as I’d made to Chief, but God knew how I would last ten weeks in this ludicrous job.

  I recalled I hadn’t prayed. College religion courses, with their demonstrations of what a grab bag the poor old Bible is, had pushed my childish faith to the edge of agnosticism. And my prayers by then were mainly a list of the names I loved. Luckily my two parental families were huge. So with selections from their names and with the addition of friends my age, I had another fifteen minutes of meditation. As they mostly did, the names soon turned into handholds on life. They were people who watched me with expectation and whom I hoped to amaze. Just turning their names back and forth in my mind, like smooth creek stones, was a kind of prayer.