A Cry of Angels (10 page)

But Jayell's major problem was that he was simply no businessman. His operating capital was a drawer full of promissory notes, and payments when his customers could make them. He scoured the countryside for salvage lumber and used only the cheapest materials, secondhand when he could get it, but still he was running into trouble. Smithbilt Corporation, one of the large developers that fattened on the postwar housing boom, was interested in what Jayell was doing (they had openly copied some of his designs for lake retreats) and had tried to entice him to work for them in construction, promising that he could experiment at their expense, and that they would test the marketability of his plans. Sometimes Jayell seemed ready, questioning the possibilities in great detail. Later he would say he didn't have enough designs worked out, that he hadn't done enough experimentation on his own. Or, in the heat of some new creation, he might just order the Smithbilt representative off the job, shouting that the company only wanted to steal more of his ideas.

On our way to the Waugh place on Wolf Mountain, the truck lurched noisily through the rundown eastern edge of town. Suddenly Jayell remembered he had to stop at I.V. Tagg's office over the pawnshop. Tagg was a
CPA
who made a determined effort to keep Jayell's books in order. Still humming, Jayell scrambled up the stairs and burst into the office; seeing no one in the dusty, cluttered room, he shouted, "I.V., damn your rotten soul, come out here!"

The frail little man hurried out of the bathroom hooking on his glasses. "What is it, Jayell, for God's sake what is it this time?''

Jayell pulled an envelope from his pocket and waved it in the bookkeeper's face. "The Internal Revenue people, they say we've not paid our withholding. Will you put me out of business; is that your intention?"

The bookkeeper sighed. "Jayell, I can't pay your taxes from my own pocket. Have you checked the bank balance lately?"

"My God, are we flat again?"

"And three returned. I called Maudie Fisher at the bank and she's agreed to hold 'em until tomorrow noon, but she's getting tired of this."

Jayell slapped his pockets. "Here, wait a minute." He pulled a check from a wad of time sheets. "Here, that's the last on the college job. Will that clear us?"

Mr. Tagg looked at it. "Well, it'll take care of Maudie, but not the Internal Revenue."

"But they'll get their money. Don't they always get their money?"

"Eventually, but I've told you, Jayell, the taxes withheld from wages must be deposited monthly. They don't want you operating with government money. It should be put in a separate account."

"What the hell's the use of opening two accounts when we can't keep money in one? Talk to 'em, I.V., tell 'em we've got to have more time. They've got to bend with us a little."

"Jayell, you've got to remember who you're dealing with. This is the federal government, they don't have to bend with anybody. And how am I to figure taxes if you keep trading work for supplies and paying people out of your own pocket? You never withhold the proper amounts, you can't even get the correct social security numbers. I got a new list back from Baltimore this morning."

The veins stood out in Jayell's neck. "All I know is there are ragged sons of bitches all over these hills living in their own houses for the first time in their lives, put together with stuff most builders throw away, and we done it without red tape or any help from the federal government, and in the process a few black boys learned a trade who might otherwise end up on the welfare rolls. It seems to me the federal government ought to be told to remember who they're dealing with!"

"Jesus," said Jayell, clumping back down to the truck, "for every man who tries to do, there's a hundred to hold him back."

Em Jojohn sat up and looked around, and seeing we were not at our place of work, cocooned himself in his tarpaulin again.

"Look at him," laughed Jayell. "Would you believe he's the one who finally got me started on this? We were down at Dirsey's one night, right after I'd left the high school; figured I was washed up by that time, everybody thought so. And I was carrying on about the shape housing was in, how I'd like to just start a company to build houses like this, and he looked at me and said, '
Why don't you do it
?' Just like that: 'Why don't you do it?' Hah! Crazy son of a bitch." Jayell reached back and slapped the tarpaulin and slipped into a one-block short-cut up One-Way Street and headed out toward Wolf Mountain.

Lilly Waugh's farm was located at the very top of Wolf Mountain, which rose out of the rolling foothills at the back of Quarrytown and overlooked the town and the Ape Yard.

By driving back and forth between Quarrytown and Atlanta on the weekends during the summer he was at the college, Jayell had kept his construction business going as best he could. But the Waugh house, almost finished when he was called away, had been largely neglected. Building that house had been a pain. Since none of Jayell's black shop boys were allowed up there, Jayell concentrated on his other houses during those weekend visits and ran by to work on the Waugh house when he could. Now it was all finished except for the outside trim work, but Lilly Waugh said she wasn't moving in a stick of furniture until the house was completely done.

Pete Williteer, the elderly Negro sharecropper who lived on the Waugh place and looked after Miss Lilly, was waiting for us at the jobsite. He had talked a reluctant Jayell into building this house by promising him ten acres of Waugh land on the northeast slope, just above the Ape Yard, and agreeing that Lilly Waugh would not set foot on the job.

"Gon' finish up today, Mr. Crooms?" Pete Williteer asked, smiling.

"Just touch up the paint and be gone," said Jayell. "How's the old woman?"

"Fine. And she likes it, 'specially likes them high board fences. She sho' is anxious to get in it."

Privacy had been the central theme of the Waugh house. It was a miniature feminine fortress. Even the doors had blind entrances. "Yeah? What'd she say about it?" asked Jayell.

"Ain't said nothing. But I can tell she likes it."

"Well, just keep her away one more day."

Pete Williteer nodded. "I got to go over to Little Holland today. Need anything before I do?"

"No, we'll be okay." When Williteer had gone, Jayell got out the paint cans and rousted Jojohn.

The big old Waugh house sat on the crest of the mountain surrounded by tall, broken oak trees. The Waughs had been rich people before the Depression. Mrs. Cline remembered the parties they used to give, with the house all lit up and shiny new automobiles winding up through those trees. Miss Lilly brought her whole class home from finishing school one weekend for a houseparty. Then they lost it all, and Mr. Waugh shot himself. But Mrs. Waugh kept spending and donating money on the old grand scale until she died, and Lilly was left almost penniless, and subsequently became a recluse.

She stayed on at the Waugh farm, and with the help of Pete Williteer raised a few acres of cotton to keep them going, and to my knowledge, never set foot off the place.

I'd never seen her, but Em had; he said she walked straight and tall like a man, and had deep blue eyes that looked out of slits of waxy skin, and always wore an ankle-length white dress and bonnet.

It was obvious why she wanted to get out of the old house. It was literally falling in, and the roof was damaged in several places by falling limbs from those fire-gutted oaks. The fire department had tried to get Miss Lilly to have those trees cut down. They said the reason the trees had been hit by lightning so many times was that they sat on a hill surrounded by open fields. Miss Lilly ordered the fire chief off her place with a pistol. Her grandfather had planted those trees.

Em had, to me, a much more plausible explanation. He said it wasn't the trees drawing the lightning, it was Miss Lilly. God was trying to kill her because she was a witch.

Checking the fields and woods to make sure she was nowhere about, Jayell got a paintbrush and started to work. After half an hour or so, he grew impatient. "Hell, you two can finish this up, I need to get another one started. Just take it easy on the trim and don't get sloppy."

When he had gone, Em and I settled into a more comfortable working pace, taking frequent breaks with the water jar, and finally stopping to nibble on wild fox grapes we found growing along a pine log. At least I ate them. Em wouldn't touch anything that grew within a mile of the Lilly Waugh place. He lit a smoke and rummaged in his pocket, and began unwinding fishing lines from the spool he carried. "I wonder if that creek down yonder has got any bream in it big enough to eat," he said. I wondered about that, too, but I knew we really ought to stay on the house. "I know what we
ought
to do," he said, "but what do you
want
to do?" Naturally, we set off to see about the bream.

Moving downstream, we dropped our hooks around the wooden pilings of an old bridge where he was sure there were congregations. Em crooned to the fish and waggled his line, snatching out his hook every few minutes to check the worm. He was about the worst fisherman I ever knew, but how he loved to fish. We sat in the late-morning warm of creek rot and silence, broken only by the steady wash of current against the pilings and Em plunking his sinker from spot to spot, to get their attention, he said. By eleven o'clock I had hooked and thrown back two small perch. Em was playing his line from the bridge when suddenly he caught something that put up a terrible fight. It was an eel. Em forfeited the line in roaring frustration. "Well, damnit, then, I think I'll have a swim." And setting his Vaseline jar of matches on the rail, he somersaulted into the water. We had a good long swim, and, our wants taken care of to Em's satisfaction, returned once again to the unfinished ought.

The pine thicket behind the Waugh place was like an oven, and though our clothes had quickly dried when we came out of the creek, by the time we had finished touching up the final trim work we were soaked through again and steaming.

The Waugh house seemed docile enough sitting across the field, and I wondered vaguely if the old terror of the Waugh place wasn't just another of those time-embellished tales that grew up about eccentric people. She was probably just a quiet little old lady who talked to her flowers. I started to mention this possibility to Em, and found him frozen, a paper half-filled from his tobacco can, staring past me. I turned and saw her standing at the fence. And she was nothing like that at all.

At least six feet tall, feet apart, she stood glaring from the shadow of her bonnet, one fist against her hip and the other dangling a big revolver.

"Uh-huh," said Em, and he went crashing through the brush.

"Come here, boy," she ordered. The voice was harshly masculine, but with an unnatural squeak, like green shucks being pulled off corn. Steadying my legs, I cautiously approached the fence. Up close she was even more striking. Her hands were long and spidery, and seemed to leap about on their own. One sprang to a post and crouched there. She had too much hair for her small head, and there was something defiant about the way she let it stream down her back instead of tying it up in a bun the way old people are supposed to. But most discomforting to me were her eyes, flat little blue disks that alternately drifted unfocused, then ganged up and bore down on you. "What are you doing down here?''

"Jayell Crooms hired us to help on this house."

"Who's that hiding in the bushes?"

"Em Jojohn, he's helping too."

"He a nigger?"

"No," I said, "he's an Indian."

"Looked pretty dark to me."

"Well, maybe you got bad eyes."

The eyes zeroed in on me, burning. The revolver trembled in her fist.

"Run, boy, run!" came the voice from the woods.

"We're hired hands on Jayell Crooms's payroll," I said, "and you got no call to come around threatening us with a pistol."

"I never threatened nobody, and don't you go sayin' I did!"

"Then what you doin' with the gun?"

"Don't look her in the eye, Earl!"

"I was going to shoot some dogs when I saw somebody sneaking around down here, and come to investigate. There's been stealing lately."

"Well, I've never set foot on your property, and he ain't neither."

"See to it you don't. Now, get your work done and get on away from here." She turned and started back toward the house.

"Ma'am, wait a minute! What was that you said about the dogs?"

She stopped and turned around. A strange little smile touched the corners of her mouth. "My bitch got run over yesterday. I'm going to do away with the puppies."

"You're going to shoot 'em because they got no mama?"

"You tend to your business, I'll tend to mine."

I jumped the sagging fence and landed in front of her, a move so unexpected it startled everybody, including me. Em started out of the woods. "Give them to me," I said, "I'll take 'em off your hands."

"That's foolish. They ain't even weaned."

"I'll bottle feed 'em."

"They'll die."

"Well, at least I can try. It's better than shooting them before you even give 'em a chance!"

She hesitated, mulling it over.

"Give 'em to him," called Em. "Ain't no skin off yours one way or t'other." She shot him a sharp glance and he took an uncertain step toward the woods.

Miss Lilly took a lace handkerchief and pinched at the corner of her mouth, the blue disks floating. "What'll you give me for 'em?" she said.

"Give for 'em? What are they worth if you're going to kill them anyway?"

"Nothing
, to me. The question is, what are they worth to you?"

I couldn't believe my ears. "But, I've got no money, and couldn't get any to buy dogs with!"

The old woman eyed me cannily. "Then maybe you and the big 'un would like to do some work for 'em."

"Yes, ma'am," I said eagerly, "we could do that! I'm good at chores . . ."

"Got a few big pieces of furniture to move down here from the big house. Too much for Williteer. You-all do that and maybe I'll give you the dogs."