A Cry of Angels (7 page)

His wife had been working the knobs of the powerful guitar amplifiers, sending warbling tones reverberating, and on the cue electronic screams crescendoed to ear-splitting frenzy.

A side door opened and a small boy sprang onto the platform, bringing a rush of gasped ooh's and aah's.

He was about seven years old, dressed in a shimmering white sequined outfit with buckskin fringes, gold shoes and a gold bow tie. His long hair was bleached as white as his clothes, and around his neck hung a gold banjo hardly bigger than a ukulele.

Mrs. Hooper made an ecstatic gesture to her mouth. "Did you ever?'' she gasped.

"Never," said Gwen.

Little Timmy propped a foot on a pulpit chair and struck a chord, the light sparkled on little gold crosses on the ends of his shoelaces.

"Let's go home to Je-sus!" he cried, and he cut loose with "I'll Fly Away," singing in a high, ringing voice, his parents accompanying him on piano and guitar, and joining in on the choruses.

Now the crowd really shook itself loose. Little Timmy picked up the tempo, raising the banjo high on his chest, his amplified voice climbing like a siren. He dipped and ducked and danced and bobbed, his white hair flying, fingers tearing at the banjo. When he approached the last verse his father lifted him and stood him on a disc mounted on the top of the piano, then flipped a switch; revolving under a colored spotlight, Little Timmy had added tap dancing.

The crowd was beside itself, eyes closed, heads shaking. The clapping and shouting was joined by stomping and murmuring, starting up front and working its way back to us, and the murmuring built to a roar.

"They're talking in tongues," Jayell explained to Gwen.

Em sat clutching the back of the pew, rolling his eyes aloft, the rumbling chant deep in his throat.

Gwen clutched a hymn book to her breast and stared at Mrs. Hooper, who was developing a twitch. Her husband, still clapping, roamed unmolested up front. All around us the chorus of voices grew.

Abruptly Mrs. Hooper closed her eyes and issued forth a long, low moan. Gwen pushed closer to Jayell. Suddenly the woman gave a cry and lurched on her side and commenced thrashing about in the pew. "The Ghost is on her!" I yelled excitedly.

Gwen racked her hymn book and shoved us toward the aisle. "Then let's get out of here," she said, "and give them room to work!"

"Wasn't that something?" I cried, breathless with exhilaration, as we came down the steps. "Let's see your Episcopalians come up to that!" Then I stopped, the elation breaking, as I saw Em already outside by the truck.

Arms outstretched, he was deep in the throes of his dance, a silhouette slowly turning in the moonlight.

Em said nothing on the way home. He sat, in the heavy brooding silence, watching the country roll by. I had hoped that going to church that night would make a difference, maybe distract him some from that awful black mood of his first couple of days home, but it hadn't. If anything, it had only seemed to make it worse. As soon as he touched ground at the boardinghouse he demanded a five-dollar loan from Jayell and struck out straight for the river.

Jayell was saying something about it being so early he was going to take Gwen for a drive and to tell Miss Esther to leave the door unlocked, but I was only vaguely listening, and made no answer.

I got down and followed Em, bracing for another bad night.

"Come on, Em, somebody's going to call the law!" The Indian tore loose from my grip and hurled himself back at the squeaking fence. In the glare of streetlight on the other side, the big collie dog was frenzied with fury, fangs bared, climbing the wire. Jojohn howled back at him, waving his arms, the great blubbery face taunting, tormenting. The dog leaped to bite and Jojohn reached over the fence, grabbing for the bristling neck. The collie snapped for the extended hand and the Indian snagged his collar and lifted high the startled animal, swinging around and holding him firmly at arm's length.

"Let him go, Em! Turn him loose!" I pushed and shoved and pleaded, but it did no good. He stood watching the dog plunge and kick, snorting for breath in the strangling collar. Lights came on in the house and the Simmons woman came running. She beat at him with a rolled newspaper. "Put him down! You put Sonny down this minute or I'll call the police, you crazy . . ." With a sudden twist of his body Em hurled the big dog against the side of a passing truck. The truck slowed down, the perplexed driver looking around. The yelping animal scrambled to his feet and disappeared over the hill full stretch, shaggy coat heaving, not looking back.

I got Em pulled away and turned into the rutted clay of Sunflower Street. The Simmons woman was still screaming, following us along the wire.

The porchlight came on at the boardinghouse, two houses down, and boarders were crowding to the rail. As we approached the house, Em turned and started straight for the front yard. "No, Em, come on around this way." He shook me off and tried again for the steps.

Miss Esther pushed through the boarders and leaned over the banister, waving us off. "No, no, not up here! Take him away, take him on around!"

Em stopped before them, wavering, uncertain. I shouldered him off the steps. He stumbled to the corner of the porch and stopped to catch his breath. With a foot braced against the bricks I got him pushed away and moving again. He staggered, tripped over the spigot and we both went down the bank.

"As long as there are drunks, there'll be little boys to lead them home," said Mrs. Porter. "It's a pity."

"Come on, Em, get up." I pulled on his arm and he rolled over with a groan and got to his knees. "Come on, get up from there!" He struggled to his feet and jerked away. I reached for him again and he put a hand against my face and shoved me into the hedge.

"My God, somebody do something!" It was Gwen's voice.

"Keep away," said Mr. Rampey. "When he's like that, can't nobody handle him but the boy."

With the blood hot on my face I scrambled out of the prickly hedge and rammed him hard as I could from the rear. He lurched, then suddenly whirled and lifted me high in the air. Beneath me those wet black eyes glistened in the porchlight. The quivering fingers sank deeper and deeper in my ribs. I was fighting for breath. "Em," I gasped, "for God's sake!"

He dropped me and turned away. I got to my feet and held my aching ribs. "Come on. All right, come on now." I took his arm gently, and he let me lead him around the hedge to the garage in the woods.

When I returned to the boardinghouse Gwen was in the hall with the others. She looked a little pale. "Well, he seemed dangerous to me," she was saying. "Earl, are you all right?"

"Fine," I said, trying to smile. I coughed and felt a sharp pain in my side, and wondered if Em had cracked a rib. He had never hurt me during those spells, but he was coming closer. I brushed past everybody and climbed to my room.

"Aw, he gets on a tear like that every time he comes home," said Miss Esther. "I don't pay no attention to it."

"Well, I don't know why you even put up with it. He's liable to hurt somebody," Gwen said.

"
Pshaw
, he's all bluster. It's an aggravation, I'll grant you, but the boarders have got kind of attached to him. They feel better having somebody like that around with the sorts we got in this neighborhood, if you know what I mean. And, I got to say, he's been good for the boy. I remember what he was like before the Indian came."

I remembered too.

I remembered the lady in the brown suit who brought me south on the train. I asked her about the angry red patch on her ankle, and she said it was ringworm, and it was killing her. And I remembered the dark, cavernous hallway and the curious, withered faces, and Miss Esther standing there in a polka-dot dress. She was thinner then, and wore a ring with an oval green stone—and I could tell from that first moment that my coming was a bother to her.

And I remembered the long mornings in my room after Farette had made the bed, and the afternoons sitting by the bookcase in the hall, listening to the strange voices, or sitting in the powdery dirt under the house playing with match-box cars and watching rain drops plunk in the sandy puddles.

But most of all I remembered the nights—and the dream. It was hell, right out of the picture Bible, with swirling flames, black smoke. There was crashing and thunder, the walls were shaking, my mother was screaming. A monster was there, and I thought he was killing my father. I could hear my father's screams of agony. I was coughing, I couldn't see. Flames were sweeping up the walls, across the floor. My father was dying, I could hear it, and then my mother was a demon herself; beyond the blackness and smoke I heard her screaming fiendishly, ". . . the boy! Get the boy!" And then the door crashed open and the instant it did my smoldering bed leaped up in flames. The devil was coming for me through the smoke, enormous claws reaching out, and when they touched me I felt flames climbing up my arm. I could smell my own flesh burning . . .

Mr. Jurgen in the next room kept complaining to Miss Esther about the noises I made while I was dreaming and she put in a night light, but it didn't help. Finally I made a tent of the quilts so no one would hear me if I dropped off to sleep and started making the noises, and I lay awake sweating under the suffocating quilts until dawn.

I was told I had to be quiet because there was someone very sick down the hall. It was the lady in the corner room. As the weeks passed she dissolved into a skeleton with heavy eyebrows and chin whiskers. And there was the smell. It stayed a long time after she died.

Then Farette said I wasn't eating right, and Miss Esther scolded me for sleeping so much in the daytime. Late one night I felt sick but was afraid to tell anybody. The room went green under the night light and I tried to get out of bed but couldn't, and realized in half-waking horror that I had dirtied the bed. Miss Esther was calling me but I couldn't wake up. There were people around me in white coats pushing a sharp spike in my spine.

When I awoke there was an elderly Negro man in a white coat and I tried to get away, but he held me and kept saying he hadn't hurt me and wouldn't hurt me, and yelling over his shoulder until Dr. Breisner came in.

The Quarrytown hospital was a small building with only twenty beds, and they needed mine. Dr. Breisner said he would let me go home early if I would drink lots of fluids and stay in bed until he came to see me. I left with Miss Esther, avoiding her eyes because of what I had done to her bed. But she was all smiles and bought me a paint set and said she would spend more time with me. Farette made me a banana pudding.

There was talk about prolonged stress and adjustment and brain dehydration, and Miss Esther was at the end of her rope. She didn't see anything left to do but send me to Tucker Village, the county orphanage. Dr. Breisner said they had a good clinic there, and being with other children might help me.

When I heard that I grew quiet, and made every effort to cause no more trouble. I was too quiet. The boarders said I still wasn't "right." I tried not to think about that, or anything. In order to keep awake at night, I climbed out on the roof and huddled by the drainpipe in the cold, and slipped out after breakfast to sleep in a straw fortress I made in the gulley. As the weeks passed, senseless, meshing, it all went out of me; the ache, the longing, even the horrible dreams. There was only the gray wallpaper of my room.

Then, in the early spring, two weeks before my sixth birthday, Em Jojohn came to the kitchen door.

I wouldn't go near him for days, making it a point to stay out of his way as he went about his business of killing rats, but I began to feel those dark, evil eyes following me. He had a way of turning up places I was going to be, of being behind the corner I was rounding.

One afternoon in the gulley I suddenly awoke with my nose and lungs on fire. I scrambled up the bank and came face to face with the Indian, squatting upwind of the garage.

"What is that?" I said, wiping my watering eyes.

"Burnin' sulphur."

"What's it for?"

"Rats."

"Is that how you kill 'em?"

The Indian looked at me. "Naw, that drives 'em out. Then I grabs 'em and bites their heads off." I couldn't tell if he was joking. He was such an ugly, scowling creature. "How come you sleep in that gulley?"

"I-I can't sleep in my room."

"Why not?"

I shrugged.

"You live here with your grandma?"

"She's not my grandma, she's my great-aunt."

"Where's your folks?"

"Dead."

The Indian pointed to the skin graft on my arm. "That how you got that?"

I reached down in the gulley for my shirt and quickly pulled it on. The pink, pimply patch of grafted skin ran from my left shoulder to just above the wrist. I couldn't straighten that elbow out all the way, but otherwise it didn't bother me. That is, not until I started to school. I soon learned to wear long sleeves, even in summer.

"How'd you like to help me kill some rats?"

"Huh?"

"If you can't sleep anyway, you might as well be helpin' out some. Come back tonight after supper?"

"Tonight?"

"Sure. Night's the best time to kill rats."

"I ain't supposed to be out after dark."

"You mean you're scared of the dark." He waited. I didn't answer. "Well, that's understandable, but if you know how to take keer of yourself there ain't nothin' to worry about."

"Are you—scared of the dark?"

"With all the things layin' wait to grab you, all the ghosts and ha'nts walkin' about? Hell, anybody with
sense
is scared of the dark! You just got to know how to deal with 'em." And the Indian gave me my first lesson on what were, to him and me, the very real creatures that lay beyond the dark.

Up to that time they had been vague beings that inhabited the dark corner under the stairs, and waited under my bed for a hand to drop over the side. They darted for me just before I hit the light switch and made them disappear, and crawled along the weeds at the edge of the yard when I took out the garbage at night.