A Cry of Angels (28 page)

Em seized Tio by the collar and marched him up to Birdsong's table. "You see this here, Birdsong? This is a nigger—what you tried to make me appear like. He is what he is, and I am what I am, and it's important to both of us that you know the difference."

"Do your war dance for him, Indian!" The fellow on Birdsong's left gathered a handful of beer bottles and shoved them across the table.

Lew Birdsong grinned and leaned back to scratch his chest. "Well, got to understand, we didn't have no red shoe polish. 'Course, if we'd knowed you was coming back we'd of made an effort to get some." That was followed by another round of laughter.

"Do your war dance, go on, show 'em," insisted the other fellow. He shoved the bottles again and one tipped over, pouring beer down the Indian's leg.

Em looked down at the puddle of foam dripping off the toe of his boot. "Uh-huh," he mumbled deep down, and grabbing the man by the neck, he plucked him from the chair. Back-stepping quickly toward the door, he gave a sideways turn and the man went over the porch rail with a startled yell that ended with a splash in the river.

Men were pushing up from everywhere. Em stood laughing, smacking his palm with his fist. Two men came at him and he wiped them down with a chair. Then he was at Birdsong's table, and as they started to rise he bounced them away from his fists as though he was shooting pool. The proprietor went down flat, and cold. I grabbed for Tio and we dived under a table. Somebody stepped on my hand and Tio helped me kick him off. It was a running jumble of legs and breaking furniture and the Indian's laughter. Somebody went through a window.

A lot of the customers were clearing out. I heard cars and out boards cranking. Birdsong's was not popular with the law. But there were others, Birdsong's regulars, who ran liquor for him, who were obliged to stay and put up a show. They circled and clubbed at the Indian, tried to get behind him. One of them did and got hurled headlong into the bar. A man wrapped himself around Em's legs, trying to trip him up; Em gripped the man's head between his knees while he knocked two more away, then freed the fellow's head with a piledriver fist. The bartender, a short, stocky fellow, ran down the counter and jumped on Em's shoulders and lifted a bat. Em laughed and dived headfirst into the wall, and came up unencumbered.

Tio couldn't stand it any longer. He ducked behind the bar and dealt a man a glancing blow to the head with a bottle. The man swore and gave chase and Tio crawled into a lower cabinet. But the man got it open and as he was dragging Tio out by the heels I tackled him from the rear. He turned in a rage and, grabbing me by the shirt, was lifting his fist when Tio's foot rose hard between his legs. The man froze in pain.

"Heah now!" Em had seen the man ready to strike and reached and snatched him across the counter, but when he saw the pale face before him and the man hanging limp with pain, he dropped him to the floor in puzzlement.

Em shook his head and downed a swallow from one of the bottles on the counter. "Damndest thing I ever saw."

The floor was piled with bodies. Some crawled in pain. A skinny backwoodsman sat holding the two halves of his broken false teeth. They were new. You could tell.

"All right, git moving now." Em walked around the room, shaking them awake, prodding the crawlers with his foot. "Clear out or drown."

"Come on, Em, let's get out of here," I said.

"Ain't done yit," said Em. "Come on, git up there, now!" He began dragging the crumpled forms out the door.

"Em, what are you doing?"

"I'm sick and tired of this place. Ever' time I've come here they've cheated me, ridiculed me, and served me bad liquor. I'm fed up."

When the last of them were dumped in the parking lot, Em rummaged around in the shed and came out with an ax.

"Em, are you crazy?" I tried to get it away from him but he brushed me aside. The man Em had thrown in the river was crawling up the bank, dripping. Em stepped on him on his way to the shack.

Tio and I watched in disbelief as he climbed down to the boat dock and started chopping away at the pilings. He worked through the first line, then crawled in a skiff and pushed under the shack, and, wedging himself steady with a brace of oars, set to work on the others. The flimsy building began to settle down over him.

"Em, get out from under there!"

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.

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.