“What about the light?” I asked.
Tempest dropped his head and moaned piteously.
“What’s going on over there?” a guard asked.
Tempest sat up trying to contain his grief.
“It breaks across me like water over stone for a million years,” he said. “I try to stay whole but I fall into smaller and smaller pieces until I’m just mud on the ground dryin’ out to the point where I’m dust floating off into nuthin’. And, and, and it’s like the dream be tellin’ me that that’s all I am—nuthin’.”
I shuddered deep down in my core. The simple proximity to Tempest’s mortal dilemma was enough to upend the foundation of eons of angelic bliss.
“Do you know what this nightmare is, Joshua?”
“Yes.”
“Do I wanna know?”
I laughed and then he did too. We were civilians in a small country that had the misfortune of sitting between two great warring nations. The combatants were coming from all sides and there we were, in a shallow hole, hoping beyond hope that we might survive this foreign war being fought on our soil, above our heads.
Four minutes left.
“Archangels are talking about you, Tempest.”
“Bob’s brothers?”
Basil Bob, Beelzebub, had once come to earth; first to force Tempest to deny and therefore destroy heaven and then, when Tempest refused, to try to sunder his mortal soul. Bob had failed in his task but it also became apparent that Tempest did not have the heart to rend the afterlife. He was happy with his mortality and only wanted to be left alone.
But heaven and hell had other notions. Tempest was the possibility of a threat. As long as he existed outside of the rules of the Infinite there was the chance that he would develop a following that would create an entire new system where the gods, demons, and angels of old would fade into the worn tapestry of the past.
“Yes,” I said. “Gabriel and Michael are talking about you. And because of the damage done to your psyche by being resurrected and then imprisoned, freed and then incarcerated once more—you are susceptible to their dominion. You hear their plans for you and therefore know dread.”
“You mean they don’t even know that I hear ’em?”
I shook my head and wondered.
“Man. What would happen if they came right at me?”
“I don’t think that they’d do that after you banished Bob from this plane. I realize now that they sent me to deal with you because I am expendable, a mere accountant. None of the archangels would dare face you directly and as long as they are in their heaven you cannot reach out to them—not unless you bring down the walls of the Infinite.”
“But if they even think about me, my soul is near ’bout ripped from my body.”
“This is a special circumstance, Tempest,” I said. “You have been weakened by your experiences of late.”
Tempest took a deep breath.
We had less than two minutes before he’d be dragged off into the hell of his own mind.
“You know I done asked you a hundred times to help me, Joshua. But every time I do you say that you workin’ for them, against me. But you know, brother, I ain’t nevah done nuthin’ to you. I ain’t nevah hurt nobody all that bad except maybe in here. But in here hurtin’ is like goin’ to work an’ doin’ your job. It’s a hurtin’ trade up in here. So you can hold it against me but you know I don’t deserve no nightmare inside of a nightmare because somebody scared that I’m me….”
While Tempest opined, his assigned guard was walking toward him, preparing to take him back to his cell.
There was no time to consider or think. Maybe if I had eternity I would have made some other choice. But Tempest was suffering through no fault of his own and I was there in front of him and there were only scant seconds in which to act.
Maybe it was because Gabriel and Michael were distracted that I was given back a sliver of my celestial voice, a voice that had sung out so proudly in the choir. It was probably a mistake but no one had prohibited me from singing.
I stood up.
This was against prison rules and so three guards from my side of the glass came toward me.
I opened my mouth and closed my eyes, and from somewhere, deep inside, a song of celestial sleep and forgetfulness came from me like a phoenix from the clay of its own corpse.
Everyone in the room turned toward me. What they could see I cannot say. But within seconds they were all slumped down in their chairs or on the floor, sound asleep, swathed in a sacred rest that few mortals have ever known. Even Tempest was affected, though he usually was proof against my powers. I believed, then and now, that he succumbed because of the weakness of his soul at that time.
Once the hymn began it was almost impossible to stop. I staggered from the visitor’s room, down the long hall toward the fifteen doors I had to pass through before exiting the prison. Singing all the way I laid low guards and visitors, vendors and felons.
I came out into the world singing and crying, running but unable to escape the feeling that my newly acquired human soul had been damned.
The Killing
After delivering the Hymn of Paradisial Rest in the visitor’s room of the state prison I was reluctant to go back there to visit the prisoner known to the State of New York as Ezzard Walcott #221-675-JG-17. I wrote Tempest a letter saying as much and he sent me a note saying thanks and that my song had quelled his nightmares.
Angel,
You know that song of yours seems to like have washed all over the whole penitentiary and made us all sleep like children. Nobody but me really remembers what happened but they feel different. I mean it’s still hard up in here but, for a while anyways, the edge has gone dull. Nobody’s been seriously hurt and a kind of respect has grown up between the tribes, such as they are.
I understand why you don’t want to come back and visit and that’s okay—for now. But I hope you can still find out something for me. Because you know as much as it feels good sleeping without them damn dreams I’m still in prison. It’s like being a wet towel on the floor of a janitor’s closet, moldering and choking on your own stink.
Your friend,
Tempest
I was moved by Tempest’s letter but I still couldn’t manage to get myself out to visit him. Branwyn went in my stead. She brought him five cartons of cigarettes and pictures of our son, whom we named after him.
I was nervous about Branwyn going to visit Tempest. He had saved her life and they were, at one time, lovers. The prison still had the conjugal visit program in operation and I’d avoided the topic of marriage with Branwyn because her mother wanted a church wedding and I was mortally afraid of that particular ritual.
“Don’t you worry, honey,” Branwyn said as she left to go visit our friend, “I’ma come home to you and the kids. Tempest might want me to move into his cell with him but I like our bed.”
“He asked you to stay with him there?”
“I’m just jokin’, Joshua. Don’t you trust me, baby?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s just I don’t even like the idea of you in there.”
“But I have to go,” she said tenderly, “especially now that you aren’t visitin’ as much.”
She had her arms around me but I turned my head away.
“What happened in there, Joshua? Why don’t you go visit Tempest anymore?”
“My emotions get away from me in there. I’m afraid of what I might do.”
“Are you afraid’a what I might do?”
We gazed into each others’ eyes then; she looking at a man but having no idea of his origins and I seeing the woman who had torn my heart out of celestial bliss into something fragile and yet much more profound.
“When I look at you,” I said, “I know that there is nothing in heaven that I would believe in more.”
“That’s blasphemy, Joshua,” she said in a light tone.
“I would go up against the Infinite for your love,” I said in a voice passe
d down from heaven.
—
Three weeks later, at 9:27 in the evening, the phone rang. The bell seemed especially strident. But Branwyn didn’t stir on the sofa next to me. She had spent the day with the children and was very tired. We were watching a television show about a man who somehow had a computer in his head. I didn’t understand TV comedies but they made Branwyn laugh and that was enough to keep me anchored there next to her.
The phone rang again. It sounded like a scream of agony and fear. But Branwyn slept on. Her head was on my lap and I didn’t want to disturb her by getting up and walking across the room to answer the fearful jangling. But after the fifth ring I did get up. Branwyn turned her back on the television and continued her rest.
“Hello?”
“New York State prison inmate number 221-675-JG-17,” a recorded voice said, “wishes to make a collect call to…” and then Tempest’s voice said, “Joshua Angel or Branwyn Weeks.”
Then a live operator got on the line and asked, “Do you accept the call?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
“Angel?” Tempest asked after a series of clicks and silences.
“Hello, Tempest.”
“I’m glad Brownie brought me all them cigarettes.”
“I didn’t realize that you were that much of a smoker.”
“A cigarette is worth two dollars up in here, Angel. I used ’em all for them to let me make this call. I got thirty-eight minutes with you.”
“What do you want from me, Tempest?”
“Them cops that murdered Landry,” he began.
“You mean the peace officers who shot down Mr. Landry seven years ago on that corner in Harlem.”
“One man’s killin’ is another man’s murder.”
We had had that argument a dozen times over the years.
“What is your question, Tempest?”
“Those cops shot Landry down—they’re all goin’ to heaven, right?”
“When last I looked.”
“So killin’ ain’t necessarily what they call a cardinal sin?”
“Not necessarily. Why do you ask?”
“I have a friend…had a friend, name of Jessup G. Peterson.”
“Yes?”
“Me an’ Jesse was tight, man. I mean we hung out in the yard an’ watched each others’ backs even from them that said they was our friends.”
“I see.”
“And there’s this guard,” Tempest said, “called Lew. Lew’s this light-skinned black guy think his doo-doo don’t stink.
“Now Jesse got a mouth on him. It’s not really what he says but the way what he says sound like. So whenever he saw Lew he’d say sumpin’ like, ‘There go True Lew Blue the black man where a screw done grew.’ ”
“And I take it that Lew didn’t like that?” I asked.
“No, he didn’t. He’d always be on Jesse until one day when Jesse made up one’a his rhymes Lew just smiled like he knew somethin’ an’ Jesse didn’t.”
“What was that?” I asked to stay in the conversation.
“One day Jesse’s ex-wife, Martine, come in to see him. She said she was worried about their sixteen-year-old daughter Lena because she was datin’ this older man. A man named Lewis Tyler.”
“The True Blue Screw,” I said.
“You got it right, Angel. Lew was takin’ Lena away for days at a time and she just told her mother and stepfather to mind their own business. Now if Jessup was home he’d’a taken care of business but the stepfather wasn’t willin’ to go all the way.
“Then one day Lew ended up escortin’ me an’ Jesse back to our cells because he had set up a spot check.
“You know, Angel, life in prison is like what it must’a been like ten thousand years ago when a man had to act in a instant. You know killin’ back then was second nature—maybe first. We turnt this corner an’ Jesse flashed back with a right hook that caught Lew right in the middle’a his chin. I mean it sounded like a gunshot. Lew hit the ground an’ Jesse come out with a shiv—”
“A what?”
“A homemade knife. Jesse jumped on top of Lew and was about to cut his throat. I knew that there was a camera runnin’ overhead and Jesse only had three more years before he could get out. I didn’t care about that guard. He could’a died for all it mattered to me. The Bible say, Thou shalt not kill, but it wasn’t me killin’ him and if anybody deserved it, he did. But I didn’t want Jesse to spend the rest’a his life behind bars so I pult him off’a the guard. By this time there was alarms goin’ off. Jesse had lost his mind with rage over what that man had been doin’ with his daughter and so he saw me as a enemy too. He jumped on me and started pressin’ that knife down at my chest. I tried to talk to him but he wasn’t listenin’. Finally, when no guard came, I pushed Jesse ovah an’ fell on top’a him. The knife pierced his heart and I saw him die right there under me.”
For three of Tempest’s precious minutes there was silence on the line.
“I’m sorry,” I said to break the hush.
“You should be.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Because now I know that I’m a sinner,” he said, stifling a sob. “I killed my best friend for nuthin’. Pretty soon I’ll be sucked down into hell and you will be released into heaven.”
“But you saved a life.”
“The life of a man didn’t deserve to live.”
“But you were trying to save Jesse from his own intentions.”
“Better life in prison than hell at the end of St. Peter’s line.”
“He might not be sent below.”
“He died tryin’ to murder two men,” Tempest said and I had no answer. I knew how I would have gauged Jessup G. Peterson’s sins.
“You are innocent, Tempest,” I said.
“How can I be innocent when I killed my friend?”
The weight of eternity suddenly came down on my human heart. I experienced, once again, the terrible pain that is, part and parcel, the conflicted nature of the human soul.
“I’ll come to see you this Saturday, Tempest. We’ll talk together and maybe we will come up with some kind of answer.”
Class
When an angel is discussed On High he hears it as the rumbling of distant thunder. On that sunny Monday afternoon, on the bus ride to the state penitentiary, I heard booming in a clear sky.
Another thing about angels is that they have persuasion over unsuspecting mortal minds—when the objective is impersonal and there is no relationship involved. This is why, when I first came to earth, I thought that it would be a simple task to convince Tempest Landry that he was a sinner deserving of hell.
I have so far failed to argue Tempest around to heaven’s point of view but I was able to convince the deputy warden of his prison to allow me to teach a literacy class at the joint (as Tempest calls it) and to allow my earthly charge to be my aide.
Even though I am charged with sending him to hell, I feel that his suffering, due to heaven’s conspiracy against him, is unjust.
Angels are united by the nature of our spirits but we are not compelled to agree with one another. So while the heavens above thundered I was led to a classroom replete with a barred window that looked out on a field where six black-and-white cows grazed. The bovines couldn’t hear the thunder but now and again one of them would toss a gaze at my window.
Dumb animals know angels for what they are.
Promptly at 2:30 seven prisoners were led into the classroom by two guards. The convicts were all shackled to make sure they didn’t revolt and take me as hostage.
Fourteen students were enrolled in my basic reading and writing class but there were always absences due to punishments meted out for infractions. A few times I had students that had been wounded in fights with other convicts or guards. One of my students, Terry Other, died of a heart attack—he was twenty-nine years old and weighed in excess of four hundred pounds.
—
“Hey, Angel,” Tempest, who led th
e line of learners, said as they entered the room.
His smile was only at half power. I knew that he still felt guilt over killing his friend, Jessup G. Peterson. This was one of the reasons I decided to teach my class. Tempest needed a friend and even though I was also his enemy I had come to understand that being mortal was a complicated, intricate dance that often allowed for contradictions such as this.
“Ezzard,” I said in greeting, using the name of the identity heaven had foisted upon the abused Landry.
“We’re all here and ready to learn,” he told me.
I smiled and the men seated themselves.
There were six black men and one white kid, Tony Anthony of Staten Island.
In spite of their chains the men liked my class. This attraction was partially due to the window, which was six feet wide and four high; an unusual gift in the dark halls of the prison. They also, though they didn’t know it, were moved by the angelic timbre of my voice. I am, after all, at least in part, a celestial being and a moment of grace in the wretched lives of men such as them.
The guards also subconsciously enjoyed my lectures on literacy.
The only one who was unmoved by my nature was Tempest. He was, usually, immune to the Voice of Heaven and had therefore been able to deny judgment when Peter sentenced him to hell.
—
“Anyone care to start?” I asked the class when they were seated and settled.
There was that moment of quiet when the class searched their hearts for the courage to speak out.
It is a misnomer to say that these men were illiterate. They were semiliterate. Knowing their alphabet and sounding out words I found that they were able to write—after a fashion—but at a very low level of craft, often with poignant results. I had them do assignments each week in which they would answer a single-sentence question with an essay of about a page in length.
While they had little ability in ways of spelling, grammar, and style—their stories were often captivating. Each week we would take one or two of these short essays and go over them sentence by sentence until the words and their meaning satisfied the expectations of the classroom.
The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Page 5