A Cry of Angels Read online

  I opened Mr. Woodall's door and shook him awake. He was too deaf for the bell.

  The last door on the hall was Mr. Jurgen's. I stopped and got ready. Look sharp here or get a cracked skull.

  Mr. Jurgen was the type who would say, all right, he was awake, then roll over and go back to sleep. Then he would grumble the rest of the day about not being waked for breakfast. So I had strict orders from Miss Esther to get his feet on the floor before I left. A dangerous assignment, but one I secretly relished. It almost made the early rising worth it. Mr. Jurgen, an old-maidish retired bookkeeper, behaved as if age had distilled his faults alone, and he had arrived a nuisance, a bother, a tattler, and a snippity nag. He and I never got along.

  "Breakfast, Mr. Jurgen!" I gave the door a kick and started the bell in a hard, steady rhythm.

  Finally a muffled voice said, "All right, I'm awake."

  I kept the bell swinging. "Breakfast, Mr. Jurgen. Time to get up, sir."

  "I heard you! I'm awake!"

  With my unemployed hand I took up a knocking on the door. "Get up, Mr. Jurgen. Time to rise and shine, sir."

  The voice was a screech. "I said I'm awake, I'm awake for Christ's sake!"

  Phase three. Propping a knee against the door, I let my toe alternate with the knocking of the fist, both still backed by the full orchestration of the bell.

  "Get-away-from-that-goddamned-door!"

  Aha! Backing off now, keeping an eye on the doorknob, I matched my voice to the Salvation Army persistence of the bell.

  "Break-fast! Break-fast! Don't want-a miss your break-fast! Breakfast! Break . . ."

  The door jerked open and his metal trash can scored another dent in the opposite wall. I was already taking the stairs three at a time.

  I had forgotten to ask Farette which of the empty downstairs rooms had been assigned to the new girl, but I had no trouble finding it. She was leaning in the doorway in a white and gold kimono, her arms crossed, staring at me.

  A strikingly beautiful, red-haired girl, she was a glorious sight to come upon in the dark, cavernous hallway of our boardinghouse.

  She leveled cool blue eyes on me. "Don't tell me. It's Midsummer Night's Dream, and you're Puck. Right?"

  "Ma'am?"

  She snapped her fingers. "No, it's some kind of initiation for me. You don't really do this every morning."

  "Yes, ma'am, every morning. Miss Esther's orders."

  "Well, I may get used to it, but I doubt it. Morning's not my best time."

  "Some don't," I said, smiling. "There was one lady said she'd sooner take a room at the asylum and commute."

  She didn't laugh.

  "I'm Earl," I said. "I was supposed to get a taxi and meet you at the bus station last night, but something important came up."

  "I understand. It's all right, I managed to get a cab all by my little self—although it wasn't easy convincing the driver that this was where I wanted to come. He seemed to think I was crazy."

  I shrugged. "Don't mind that, people uptown have funny ideas about the Ape Yard. It's not so bad after you get used to it."

  "I couldn't see much at night, but what is that awful smell?"

  "Oh, that's the old Poncini quarry down the hill, but you'll get used to that too. Those of us that have lived down here awhile don't smell it at all."

  She lifted an eyebrow. "What a strange kind of community pride."

  "Jayell says you'll be teaching eighth grade. I'll be in your class this year!"

  "Oh . . . really."

  I nodded. "I'm only thirteen. I guess you figured me to be a little older."

  "No, not really."

  "Oh. Well, I know I'm taller than average. I've got this friend, Tio, and I'm taller than he is. Tio's about average. I guess bein' skinny makes me look smaller."

  "Tell me, are you always this talkative?"

  "No, I'm usually pretty quiet," I said. "Oh, I almost forgot, Jayell said to tell you he couldn't meet you himself because he got tied up out at the Fundeburk place and couldn't get away. They're tryin' to get a roof on and this rain is giving them a fit."

  "Oh, well," she said, "as long as it's something—really important . . ."

  "Ma'am?"

  "Yes?''

  "Are you really going to marry Jayell?"

  She looked at me. "What do you mean by that?"

  "Ah, well—it's just hard to picture somebody like you coming all the way from Atlanta to marry Jayell, I guess. You know, a lot of folks figure old Jayell to be a little—looney."

  "Oh, do they now?"

  "You know, the way he is, and the houses he builds. People say, the houses are crazy, he's got to be a little crazy. 'Course, I don't think so at all."

  "My, what a comfort to have your confidence in my fiancé's sanity."

  "No, I was talking about the houses. They're sound as a dollar. I help him build 'em sometimes. Jayell is a little crazy, and no doubt about it, but everybody thinks a lot of him."

  She put her fingers to her temples. "I'm still asleep, that's what it is."

  "Ma'am?"

  She swung her head slowly. "None of this is really happening. I'm dreaming. It's the result of a wild send-off party, a long bus ride, the ghastly specter of this dismal town looming up at me out of the dark, and a restless night in this barn of a house. That's what it is, right, Puck?"

  It was my turn to look at her. Maybe I was wrong about her. She sounded just like Jayell.

  Her eyes drifted to Mrs. Cline's crippled fern across the hall. "I just need time to absorb it all: what I've done, what it means . . . the change from Atlanta, the new life, the town, moving from a sorority to this place . . ."

  "Sure, it'll take time. It was hard for me to get used to it too. But you'll get to like us. You know, you were kind of a pig-in-a-poke for us too."

  Her shoulder came off the doorjamb. There was a hard, flat edge to her voice. "As for you, I've had just about enough. Now you listen to me. I know Jayell has some strange affinity for this place, but I only came here to humor him, and only until I can get him out of here. Personally, I find nothing romantic about living in a slum, with Negroes for my neighbors. This house is utterly depressing, and old people get on my nerves"—she leaned so close I could tell she smoked—"but not merely so much as nosey kids who chatter about things that don't concern them! Do we have an understanding!"

  "Ye-yes, ma'am."

  "'Ma'am' is a professional Southern term that is outdated, shopworn and phony. My name is Gwen at home, Miss Burns at school—preferably neither, whenever you can manage it. Do you have that too?"

  "Yes—Gwen."

  "Then-why-are-you-still-standing-there?"

  I started away, then came back. "Uh-well, there was something . . . oh, I know what it was. Farette said to be sure and ask how you wanted your eggs."

  She sighed. "A piece of cinnamon toast will be fine."

  "I don't think Farette knows how to make that."

  "Is that it, then? Eggs? Have we no other choice?"

  "Well, you get to pick bacon or sausage, and there's other things like grits, fritters, sliced tomatoes . . ."

  "Please, I have a weak stomach in the morning. Just plain toast. Plain toast and coffee, okay?"

  "We don't have loaf bread. Farette makes drop biscuits."

  She pointed a red fingernail at my nose. "One egg! Poached!"

  I shook my head.

  "She doesn't know how to do that either."

  I nodded.

  "Help me, Earl!"

  "Well, you can get it scrambled or fried. Most people take fried."

  "All right! My God, I wouldn't want to completely disrupt the household. Tell Farette I will happily accept a fried egg and be most grateful! Now, if you will kindly disappear from my sight I'll get dressed and try to start this day!"

  She closed the door and I started away, then stopped. I came back again and knocked. She peeked out, clutching her robe.

  "Hard fried or gooshy?"

  Her mouth tightened
into a fine white line, and she slammed the door in my face.

  "Ear-r-r-r-l!" Miss Esther's voice crackled through the ceiling. I dashed into the kitchen and gave Farette the teacher's order. "Hard fried," I ordered for her, "definitely hard, with crinkledy edges," and I looked around for Miss Esther's coffee. Miss Esther had to have a cup of coffee in the morning while she dressed. Farette stood at the stove sullenly stirring a bubbling pot of grits.

  "Farette, where's her coffee?"

  Farette rapped her wooden spoon on the edge of the pot. "Ain't had time to be studyin' no coffee. I been on my knees wipin' up the mud I just foun' on that floor that somebody tracked in here last night!"

  Ay, Lord. I forgot.

  One of my great-uncle Wylie's last acts of drunken extravagance was to buy Farette a new kitchen linoleum, a white one with cabbage-sized roses she picked out herself. And no one, not even the immaculate Mrs. Bell, approached it from outside without carefully scrubbing their feet.

  "Farette, I'm sorry. I was so beat after I got home I guess I just forgot. Please, just give me the coffee. I'll mop the whole floor tonight, I promise."

  Farette grudgingly pulled down a cup and poured the coffee. "Don't see why we don't just bring in pigs to raise and be done with it."

  "Ear-r-r-r-r-l!"

  I dumped in sugar and gave it a stir, splashing the hot liquid on my fingers in the process.

  "G-d-d . . ."

  "Watch now, you don't cuss yo'self out of breakfast! You know I don't feed no blasphemous mouth."

  I grabbed the coffee and ran for the stairs.

  Miss Esther was sitting up in bed, waist deep in her bulbous feather mattress with pillows shocked up behind her.

  "Running late this morning, Mr. Whitaker."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Mr. Burroughs?"

  "He's on his way."

  "Mr. Jurgen?"

  I grinned. "Most especially."

  "Well, maybe he'll arrive by dinnertime. Don't suck your thumb, you're too big for that." I took my scalded thumb out of my mouth. Having heard the morning report, Miss Esther sniffed with satisfaction. The morning was right, the day on course. She elbowed her pillows into order and prepared to taste her coffee.

  It was strange to me even then that a dilapidated house of off-cast old people could be run with such discipline and order. And probably no one could have managed it but Esther Whitaker Cahill.

  I had been brought to live with my great-aunt when I was a little over five years old, after my mother and father were killed in a tenant-house fire in North Carolina. There were other relatives scattered nearby, and many of them far better off than Miss Esther, but she was the only one who showed an interest in taking me in.

  There was no family tree, as such, among the Whitakers. It was more like a plant bed, with each member springing from common soil, but having little else to do with each other. A disjointed clan of farmers, carpenters, mill hands and preachers, given to wasteful living, bad marriages and early deaths, their one shared family trait was a tendency not to do very well at whatever career they chose.

  Esther Whitaker had high hopes of escaping that crowd and starting a new line when she took Wylie Cahill out of Duke University and eloped with him to Morehead City. Wylie was flunking his way out anyway, and she saw no cause to delay the vice-presidency awaiting him in his father's insurance company.

  But Wylie never became the insurance tycoon his father and bride envisioned. Wylie was an outdoorsman who preferred hunting partridges to selling policies, and he spent his days rambling the countryside in his roadster, slapping backs at church barbecues and swapping stories over a bottle of shine at country stores, completely forgetting appointments to snatch his shotgun from the boot if he saw a sharecropper in the field with a hunting dog that looked like it knew its business.

  Miss Esther would put her hands on her hips, mimicking him:

  "'Insurance is a hell of a game to sell folks anyhow,' he would say! 'You got to get a man to bet you the price of the premium that he'll die before the next premium is due. It's hard to get a man to bet you he'll die before the month's out. Then he gets tired of losing month after month and having to pay the premium, and pretty soon chucks it altogether.'"

  With that business philosophy and his natural habits, great-uncle Wylie managed to lose every agency his father gave him, each loss causing him to be banished farther south, and when his father finally died and he inherited the company, it was no real challenge to him to lose that too.

  By the time they were reduced to the storefront independent agency in Quarrytown, Miss Esther was hardened to the fact that instead of escaping to the Cahills, she had simply naturalized another Whitaker. As their financial condition worsened they began trading houses, living on the profits as they traded down, until they ended up in the two-story house with the shaded yard in the mill village hollow. Then the mill changed hands and the blacks started moving in and they were stuck. There was no profit in a sale after that.

  They had one son, Vance, and his mother started in on him early, with piano, special tutoring, careful selection of his friends—but again the Whitaker genes came home to roost. Vance grew fat, took to wearing loud clothes and shied away from the daughters of prominent granite families to hang out at the square dances at Taylorsville. Urged to join social clubs in high school, he became a Future Farmer and talked artificial insemination at the table. In time he traded his piano in on an electric guitar, his years of lessons serving only to make him the only member of the Quarrytown Troubadors who could read music.

  When, as a second-string lineman, Vance inadvertently recovered a fumble and scored the touchdown that gave Quarrytown its first Class-A Championship, and his father his fatal heart attack, Miss Esther threw up her hands.

  Inconsolably grieved, Vance dramatically announced that he was quitting school to understudy a tobacco auctioneer in North Carolina. Miss Esther packed his bags without a word.

  Vance had since married, and now lived with his wife and their twins in Durham. They had only been to visit Miss Esther once in the eight years I had lived with her, but every year Vance did send a Christmas card, sometimes with a five-dollar bill inside, sometimes with a picture of the twins. Sometimes both.

  On Wylie's death Miss Esther found herself in the classic widow's bind: too old to remarry, too young for a pension, too inexperienced to work, and too proud for welfare. All she had was the peeling two-story house in the growing Negro section and a good name in the community. It was one of her friends at a missionary-circle meeting who first asked Miss Esther if it wasn't lonely for her in that big house, and whether it wouldn't be a comfort to her to have the woman's aging mother occupy one of the empty bedrooms. She would be compensated, of course. Miss Esther did indeed find that a comfort, and Mrs. Deedee Cline moved in.

  That let down the gate. It seemed half the church had an aging relative crowding them out of bedroom space, and the siege on Miss Esther's was mounted. Before long it was an informal nursing home, though Miss Esther preferred to call it boardinghouse, and Farette was hired to do the cooking and cleaning.

  All her life a battler, and surrounded by nothing but weaklings, Miss Esther now found charges worthy of her energies. Old people. People forgotten by those who run the world, people with nothing going for them but their wills. This kind of battle Miss Esther understood, and she threw herself into it, with fire.

  At Miss Esther's there was stroke and hum to a day, clash and conflict, a baiting of personality to keep its anger, its vanity, its pride alive. It was never allowed to become one of those places where old people sit and listen to the ticking away of their lives. At Miss Esther's there was humor, there was individuality, there was respect, all radiating from her own bullfiddle personality. "Don't you lay down on me!" was her threatening bedside manner, and she got them up, time and again.

  Into this atmosphere she accepted me as she accepted the death of one of her boarders, a fact to be dealt with, to be fitted into the total
thrust of order. But I was young, and needed little attention, so she tucked me away in the household and left me to grow, so long as I caused no trouble.

  I did cause trouble at first, and a good deal of it. For a while Miss Esther thought she was going to have to ask the state to take me off her hands, and she couldn't be blamed for that; even Dr. Breisner thought I was going to need treatment.

  But, of course, that was all in the first dark, turbulent winter—before that magical time when the giant Indian loomed in the doorway—with his fierce, scowling eyes, skin the color of old china, and dried rat's blood on the soles of his boots.

  "Well," Miss Esther was saying, "did you meet the new schoolteacher?"

  "Did I? She's the reason I'm late." I raised the shades.

  She blew on her coffee, watching me closely. "What'd you think of her?"

  "I'd say she's made to order for Jayell Crooms. She couldn't even make up her mind on what she wanted for breakfast!"

  Miss Esther chuckled. "Yep, Jayell marries that one, he's in for a lively time."

  "What'd Jayell want her to stay down here for? I'd think somebody like that would be a lot happier in an apartment uptown."

  "Well, of course she would! I'd be a lot happier uptown! Anybody would but Jayell. He said he knew she wouldn't, so he's looking for a lot over in Marble Park, but since he's goin' to keep his shop down here and keep on buildin' houses for these blacks and country folks, he says it won't hurt her to get to know the kind of people he's goin' to be dealin' with. And too, I think he's testing her a little."

  "Testing her?"

  "Rubbing her nose in the kind of life she's going to have if she marries him. Jayell comes from a mighty poor family, and it's poor people he's wantin' to help. She might have just a little too much gloss to suit him."

  "Hnh! I'd say he's goin' to have a time rubbing any of it off."

  Miss Esther smiled. "Could be you're right, Mr. Whitaker. Could be you're right."

  "It's sure hard to figure, a girl like that falling for Jayell Crooms."

  "Well, I hear he caused quite a stir up at that college, had 'em all flocking around him. The head of the school made a big to-do over the building he drew up for him, had other architects over to look at it, trumped him up for some kind of genius, had him speak to the art classes, that kind of thing. And you know Jayell, the way he talks, the way he looks, I expect he was quite a change from all those professors with the button-down collars, especially at a girls' college where there ain't a whole lot of competition. It ain't too hard to figure them little small-town gals goin' crazy over him. At that age they'll fall in love with anything strange."