A Cry of Angels (42 page)

"Now, Carlos! Let her
g-o-o-o
!"

Carlos threw down his line and streaked for the road. Jayell lay down on his line, churning the ground with his heels.

A loud, steady popping filled the air. The gigantic tree listed, then stood motionless for a breath, defying gravity, as though held by ancient roots in the wind. Then with a shift on its severed trunk, a shudder that traveled up its branches like a wind of shock, the great oak twisted and began its slow, floating fall toward the earth.

Gwen's face was clouding, darkening to scream, when Jayell her arm and dragged her out of the yard.

The great trunk knifed through the roof and main bearing wall with an explosion of timbers, the upper floors gave way, adding to the distortion of weight, and the entire house crumbled inward with a convulsive spasm of heaving walls and splintering windows.

The neighborhood was deathly quiet. There was no movement but for the Indian turning slowly in the road, mumbling his rumbling chant.

"Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh."

Jayell climbed up the sloping trunk and looked down into the devastated rooms, an insane smile jerking at the corners of his mouth. "Broke its back," he said, "just busted it all to hell." I edged up for a look. It was like something out of a nightmare. Parts of the roof still hanging sloped crazily inward, and shingles and bits of plaster littered the rug. The glass china cabinet was crushed flat, pictures and lamps lay on the floor, furniture and appliances stood out from the walls, overturned, smashed, covered with debris. Water spouted from the upstairs bathroom.

Jayell stood up and addressed the crowd. "Well, that's it folks. The show's over. I don't know what to tell you about the mortgage, Harry, you'll have to get with Charley of Insurance. Oh, and tell Christine we won't be over for bridge Tuesday. Wendell of Good Works, I'm afraid I'll have to withdraw from your Rabies Immunization Drive, and I will no longer canvass for the Community Chest. Eleanor and Harold, I hereby resign from the Marble Park Recreation Association; you can have the boat, the fishing gear, and anybody who can get to the closet can have the golf clubs. You can dig up those blue-ribbon roses and take 'em home if you like, your honor, they never grew worth a damn for me, even though I gave 'em water purified through my very own kidneys. Em! You son of a bitch!"

He bounded down the tree. Em backed away, then broke and ran. Jayell chased him across the yard, lunged and tumbled him to the ground, Em uncertain at first, fighting him off. Then they were both laughing, pummeling each other, rolling in the road.

Eleanor Henderson led Gwen away. Someone was fanning a lady on the grass.

Jayell leaped on the bike and romped the starter. "Come on here, we got drinking to do!" Em grabbed his hat and tumbled in the cart and the two of them went careening over the hill and out the winding streets of Marble Park.

Gwen stayed with the Hendersons for two days, under the care of Dr. Breisner, and then packed a suitcase and left for Atlanta.

It was more than two weeks before Em and Jayell were heard from again. One Thursday, at suppertime, Em came wandering up the steps. Alone.

And to all questions about Jayell, or where they had been, he would only close one eye and answer, "Shhhhhhhh."

Phaedra Boggs must have been keeping a close watch on our place from her house, because Em was hardly in the door and scratching around for his supper before she came bounding in behind him.

"Where's Jayell?" she panted breathlessly.

Em casually rummaged in the ice bucket and filled his tea glass.

"Well—what did you do with him!"

"Done nothing with him," Em said. "'Course, the blue boys up in Carolina, now they done sump'n with him." He made a to-do over selecting a piece of ice.

Phaedra snatched the glass from his hand and hurled it out the window. "I'm in no mood for you, Indian!"

"Ain't nothin' serious, fer God's sake! We was at a dance up in Greenville and he got in a scrape over some little tow-headed gal and they locked him up, that's all."

"And you just went off and left him?"

"Well, he hadn't no more use for me, had he? Wasn't no point in goin' to jail with him. So when the cops come, I climbed out of there. 'Sides, what are you pityin' him for? He's gettin' his three squares a day, and here I can't finish one meal without somebody throwin' my tea glass out the winder!"

"Three squares a—how long has he been locked up?"

"Oh, three, four days, I forget. I ain't been eatin' regular. South Carolina's hard on the stomach. What they need over there . . ."

"Why didn't you come and tell somebody!"

"Well, I hung around—tried to make bail—get the damages took keer of. But the bondsman couldn't get hold of his wife, and I couldn't make 'em understand about his house gettin' mashed, and him bein' a little tore up over that, and back and forth, and oh—it was a general mess, I'll tell you—till finally they just told me to be gone from there." Em shook his head sadly. "It's always like that with me. I was just tellin' the boy here . . ."

The screen door banged shut and Phaedra was squeaking the stairs.

"I tried to get him to bail hisself out," Em continued to me, "he had the money. But the truth is, old Jayell just didn't want to come home." He poked through the dirty dishes in the sink, looking for a glass. "'Course, I figures if the right one was to go after him. . ." He cocked his head to listen as the bike cranked and roared out of the garage. "I swear, boy, there ain't another clean glass on the place. If you ain't gonna wash dishes but once a week you can just get up here and rinse me out that mayonnaise jar!"

The next day Phaedra brought Jayell home, home being the abandoned shop on the edge of Twig Creek. Em had rousted the shop boys and we spent all morning cleaning it up. There wasn't much in the way of furnishings, but they didn't seem to care. If ever there were two people who didn't care about anything but each other, it was Phaedra and Jayell.

When Mr. Wyche of Smithbilt Homes learned of Jayell's return, he came down to the shop, and he and Jayell talked a long time. Jayell never moved from the steps, never raised his voice. And he let his former employer walk away with his golden future as though he might have been an itinerant pot salesman.

Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Rampey rattled into the yard and unloaded quilts and canned goods from the bus. "Since you're living in sin the ladies didn't feel it altogether proper to come themselves," Mr. Burroughs explained with a chuckle. "Talkin' about propriety—and them up there eatin' with niggers." Phaedra nearly fell off the steps.

"Which reminds me," Mr. Rampey said. "Farette's expectin' y'all for Sunday dinner."

Skeeter's mother brought down two dresses she had made for Phaedra, and the other shop boys' families contributed an assortment of kitchenware and whatever they could spare from their pantries. Those moving across the hollow dropped off odds and ends they said they couldn't use anymore. People stopped in every day to shake Jayell's hand, to leave a little something, or in one way or another make them feel welcome, and let Jayell know they were glad he was home.

Jayell and Phaedra rarely went out. Sometimes I would see them, returning from a late afternoon walk along the river, stopping to chat with an old man on a porch, and once at a fire in the yard at dusk frying cracklins and baking sweet potatoes Tio had brought, and calling in children from the street. Em and I stopped by from time to time, and one night the four of us piled in Jayell's truck with a crock of buttermilk and a couple of shoeboxes of fresh fried doughnuts and went to a country music show at the fairgrounds.

But mostly we left them alone.

It was more than a month before Gwen returned. She had written several times, but I doubt that she ever received a reply. I was slingblading the early crop of weeds off of the creek bank the afternoon her car screeched to a stop in front of the shop.

Phaedra met her at the door.

"He's not here," she said. "Why don't you just go away somewhere."

"So, this is his new arrangement! They told me Thoreau had returned to Walden, but it seems they left out something."

"Don't try to talk over my head, you overeducated, ill-tempered bitch. Just get the hell away from here."

Gwen folded her arms. "Oh, yes, I think I see it all quite clearly now. The realization is somewhat late in coming, but blinding in its clarity. Enter the little blond gutter slut, Rebecca of the Ape Yard, and new light shines on our troubled hearth."

"Aw, flush it," said Phaedra. "If you had any real sense you wouldn't have to spout that bookish doubletalk all the time. But I'll tell you something we can both understand: you don't deserve Jayell Crooms and I'm taking him away from you. It's as simple as that."

"Oh, really? Can you be that sure of yourself—an ignorant, back-lot brat with nothing going for you but a good body?"

Phaedra put her hands on her hips. "A girl with a good body's always sure of herself. It's your big-brained broads with the butterbean asses that's got to worry. Maybe that don't make book sense, but as you get old, you look around and see who's havin' the best time."

"I learned long ago not to try and argue with stupidity," said Gwen. She started to turn away, and Phaedra suddenly stepped out the door and grabbed her arm and spun her around.

"I hate your guts," she said evenly, " so I'm gonna tell you something. You didn't lose Jayell. You never had him. You're no different than those ladies who bring Christmas baskets to the Ape Yard so they can get a peek inside the shacks. Jayell was a novelty to you, a wild thing you had to prune, cultivate, put in a hothouse and make it grow your way. Well, Jayell Crooms sucks his beauty from want, from barrenness, from need. Ape Yard mud nourished him. Struggle makes him grow. You and Marble Park were smothering him."

Gwen looked at her. She started to say something, but couldn't—the thoughts changing. Perplexed, she drew herself up. "I've had about enough of this. Tell my husband that if he has anything further to say to me, I can be reached at my father's."

"I'll tell him nothing," said Phaedra. "You got anything to say to Jayell, write him a note. And you better be sure and sign it. Another night with me and he may not remember your name."

Gwen shouldered her bag and surveyed the scene around her, the girl, the weathered shop, the wind picking leaves in the yard. Squirrels darted among the creek trees, making question marks with their tails. She turned on her heel and walked back to the car. One of Quarrytown's better days, I told myself, watching her go.

The straggling exodus continued from the little tin-roofed houses on the sloping acreage surrounding Teague's store. Once, sometimes twice a week one of the poor black families could be seen loading their belongings into a pickup or one of the trucks from Bobo's mill and descending the winding dirt road to the raw, hastily constructed little shacks on the south side of the hollow, many of them merely shells, still unfinished on the inside when their occupants moved in.

"I don't like it," said Em, as we stopped to watch Speck Turner, the black plumber, loading his household goods into the back of his van. His girlfriend came down the steps lugging a trunk. "I don't like what's brewin' down there."

"From what I hear, them that's got to move don't like it much either," I said.

It was no secret that many of them, especially those who had spent years scraping money from their subsistence-level wages at Bobo's mill to pay off their little clapboard homes, were bitter about being moved to the baking, treeless red ridges of the opposite slope, to become renters again. Bobo was selling no more Ape Yard property. There were grumblings. But in the end they sold and moved. No one said no to Doc Bobo.

"What you movin' away for, Byrd?" Mr. Teague asked a retired mill foreman who had lived down the road from him for more than twenty years.

The elderly black man bit off a plug of Brown Mule and looked away. "Doc Bobo made me a good price." He hesitated. There was something else. Finally he fumbled out his stringy wallet. "Better pay up my bill while I'm here."

"In the middle of the month? Hellfire, you ain't movin' out of the state, you know. Come on back over when you get your pension check."

The other man looked at the floor. "I don't 'spect I be comin' back," he said. "You unnerstan'."

Mr. Teague understood. And as the days went by, he became aware with growing alarm that it was to be the same with the others. Business slowed to a trickle.

There was one other white man with a vested interest, and that was Paulie Mangum, who lived in the decrepit mill shanty next door. And, of course, he was champing at the bit to sell. "Damnit all, Alvah, I got fifty by a hunerd foot on that rock. Wasn't worth a tinker's damn before, but you know what he's offered me for it?"

"Probably a lot more'n he's offered the others," said Mr. Teague.

"But he says it ain't worthwhile to buy ours unless you sell, too. Now, you know I can't pass up the chance to get out of here! Tell you what, you match his offer and I'll sell to you. Druther, in fact, than to that nigger."

"I wouldn't want your property even if I had the money, which I don't. And I sure couldn't match his offer 'cause bein' the only other white man, naturally you'd get a blowed-up figure to help put the pressure on me. So you make a few dollars on the sale—at the same time everybody else stands to lose—includin' me. Bring me one witness to say you're worth it, you drunken lint head, and I'll make the deal!"

"That's spite talk," said Paulie, "'cause you and me's had words from time to time; I'm talkin' business here, Alvah."

"I'm talkin' business! My business! One I've spent fifty years buildin' up. The question is whether I'm to give up my business so another man can make a profit. His is big business, mine is small, does that mean I have less rights? The chains ain't done it, neither is Bobo and the tombstone people—nobody's going to eat me up!" Mr. Teague pulled a bill off the spike. "Now, unless you want to catch a little sump'n on your account, we got no further
business
to talk about."