A Cry of Angels (29 page)

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."

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.

By twelve o'clock the job was finished and the carpenters went home. He hadn't
said
it was a full day's work he was offering, but he hadn't said otherwise either. Nevertheless, I was glad it was over. Em and I stood waiting at the pumphouse for our pay while Hutchinson busied himself in the house. It finally occurred to us, from the sounds coming from the kitchen, that he was having his dinner. He kept us waiting for over an hour. At last he came shuffling across the yard, his face sour with the prospect of paying out money. "Let's see now," he said, thumbing through his time book.

"Six twenty-five," Em said.

Hutchinson's head jerked up. "What?"

"Five hours, at seventy five for me, fifty for the boy."

"You started at eight o'clock! I looked at my watch the minute we drove in the yard."

"I seen you did, so I checked it too. It was a little before seven."

"I'll be damned!" shouted Hutchinson. "You ain't comin' on my place and skinnin' me, you goddamned-gypsy or whatever you are! Here's five dollars, and that's twice what you're worth, the both of you!"

Em was trembling, his breath growing erratic.

I stepped in front of him and took the money.

"Em," I spoke quickly, keeping my voice down, "I know you want to hit him, but if you hit him right now you'll kill him, and they'll put you away and I don't need you put away. I need you with me right now. And besides, it wouldn't be worth gettin' put away for killing the likes of him. A lyin', cheatin', robbin' son of a bitch like him. But he needs hittin', somebody ought to hit him, but not somebody that'll kill him, so I guess it ought to be me!" And with that I turned and smacked the startled farmer as hard as I could across the mouth.

He staggered back a few steps and touched his bleeding lip in amazement. Em was even more amazed, so much so he forgot his anger. "Well, I'll be damned," he said. Hutchinson, a little pale under his whiskers, lost no time retreating to the house. "I'll be damned," Em said. He said it over and over as we walked back to town, looking at me from time to time, his dark eyes shining with pride.

"He done what?" laughed Jayell that night at Dirsey's, and as Em told it again he broke up, pounding his casted leg on the floor.

"Said, 'Don't
you
hit him, Em, you'll get us in trouble.' Then—
whap
! right in the chops. Surprised me more'n it did old man Hutchinson!" Em doubled over with laughter.

Jayell fought down a coughing fit and ordered more beers. "He's Esther's blood all right," said Dirsey. "By the way, what you hear from her lately?"

"We got a letter here from her yesterday," I said. I fished it out of my pocket. "And there's something in it about you, Dirsey."

"Yeah," said Em, "read him that part.''

"It's at the bottom, but I'll come to it," I said.

"Got to do things in order, of course," Em said. "He's her blood," he said, nodding.

"
Ssh
, Em," said Jayell.

I read:

Dear Everybody, Farette and Earl,
Rec. your letter Mrs. Bell, and so glad to hear. Hope this finds you all well. I am about to get over the summer cold I had—from the change of climate I guess—and am ready to go again. It is awful hot here now. I was surprised at it being this hot in North Carolina, but Vance laughed at me and said N.C. and Georgia wasn't that far apart in their weather. I guess I just forgot. It's been so long. Well I'm really glad to hear Earl is getting along well. I could still skin him for running off like that, but if he wants to stay on a while I guess it's all right. I know you all will look after him. Any expense he causes you now, you send me the bill and I'll see Vance pays it. We'll see if he laughs about that. Ha! ha! Must close now as Lucille is not feeling well and I have to fix dinner for the twins. Oh, and I was really tickled about that good for nothing Jojohn planting him a garden. I never thought I'd see the day he'd raise anything besides h—. Anyhow, anything that may keep him from spending so much time at that sorry Dirsey's can't do him anything but good. Pls. keep well and write soon.
Love to all, Esther."

"Can't do him anything but good!" laughed Dirsey, relishing it. "Oh, there ain't but one of Miss Esther. I remember the night she come down here after Wylie. Come through that door hotter'n a two-dollar pistol and, brothers, I mean she lit'ally cleaned house! Grabbed that deer up there"—Dirsey turned and pointed over the bar to the buck's head, which had one antler broken off—"I had it hanging over by the door then, and she commenced to swing it this-away—like a sickle, don't you know—and didn't she have those gentlemen climbin' the walls! In two minutes flat there wasn't a bottle left standing nor a customer on the place but Wylie, and she left here behind him—goosin' him with that damned horn! He told me she probed him all the way home!"

Dirsey leaned on the bar until the laughter subsided. "Yessir, that Esther was sump'n else. I'm gonna miss her. I guess the old folks miss her too. What's become of them now?"

"They're stayin' on at the house," said Em. "The son of a bitch that bought the place has upped the rent on 'em, but they're toughin' it out as best they can."

"The hell you say—upped the rent! Who bought it?"

"Who the hell knows," said Jayell. "One or another of them blue-blood bastards that owns every other square inch of this town! You know how they do, buy up little bits and pieces of property here and there on the quiet until they get a big enough chunk to put up a big business or development and turn a whopping profit. Did you know they bought the Blue Light quarry property off an old colored woman for fifty dollars an acre?"