A Cry of Angels (22 page)

Farther down we spotted a big convict working on the bank, a great broad-shouldered giant with a hideous scar that ran from his scalp down across one clouded eye. He saw us and stopped and leaned on his ax. Em lazily paddled closer, appearing to doze, but keeping a sharp eye out. When he was within range, he pulled two bottles of beer from the cooler and sent them arcing toward the bank. The Negro nodded slowly and smiled.

Cloudeye Pollock was boss con at the mill. He had once saved Em's life when Em first hit town, ran afoul of the law and pulled a six-month sentence there. Em had quickly run afoul of the dog boys too, and landed in solitary confinement.

" . . . throwed me in this twenty-foot hole in the ground, and said they's going to let me starve. Liked to done it too. There was water down there, if you could drink it, but it was even too deep to find worms you could dig out of the bank. Well, sir, after I don't know how long, weeks, whatever, when I was figurin' that was about it, old Cloudeye killed a bulldog and dropped him down to me one night. It was tough as shoe leather, but it kept me alive till they decided to let me out of there."

We lazed along through the afternoon, all three half asleep by the time we made the final mile before home. As we drifted around the bend at Castle's mill, I became dimly aware of singing. Far off, but coming closer. I was just too groggy to care. Suddenly Em's voice shook me wide awake.

"
Great God A'mighty
!"

Rehobath Pentecostal was situated near the river at that point, and as I looked up I saw upwards of a hundred people filing down the hill toward the water.

"It's a blessed baptizin'!" said Tio, and the three of us began frantically back-splashing and hauling on the cord of the clothes bucket. But in our furor the line got loose and the tube carrying the bucket drifted away. Thrashing and bumping against each other, we eddied farther out into the swifter current, and soon we were so far out in the middle of the river there was danger of being seen. We reversed ourselves and struck hard for the cover of the bank.

The singing was growing louder, and it seemed certain the three of us, naked, would coast directly into their midst. There was a fallen tree that stretched out from the bank and lay half submerged in the water, and the preacher and the initiates were gathering behind it in the milder current. We could hear the preacher's voice coaxing his flock out into the stream. We slipped into the water, and clinging to the tubes, and steering and ruddering as best we could without splashing, drifted in among the opposite branches. It was too late to try and climb out; with the crowds just yards away and children romping about there was no way to sneak up the bank and into the trees without being seen.

We watched as the baptismal candidates filed along the other side of the tree, pulling themselves through the waist-deep water by groping the branches. A pair of deacons brought up the rear, steadying between them an enormous middle-aged lady who was obviously terrified of the water. They inched along, the two men speaking soothingly as she jerked and splashed, punching down her cotton dress and grabbing back at her supporters. Tio snickered and Em gripped him still.

"Don't you worry, sister Alford," the pastor was saying, "they won't let you slip." He went back to help them calm her down. "Look now, see, it's only waist deep, and this is as far as we're going. Now, we'll just take you first and get it all over with."

"What? Oh, no! I just couldn't, brother Reese. Let me wait till last! I'll be all right if you'll just let me rest a minute!"

"Very well, sister," said the reverend soothingly, "you just wait here and we'll show you there's nothing to worry about."

The preacher took the first man and folded his arms on his chest, and the service began. "I baptize thee, Walter Ethridge, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," and he leaned the man down and quickly brought him up. "There, you see how easy it is, sister Alford?" But from the look on her face, sister Alford was growing even more frantic as the water swirled around her. The preacher continued, and finally they were all in a state of grace except sister Alford, who was in a state of near hysteria: "I just can't, brother Reese! I just can't put my head under that water!"

"Now, sister, you're not going to make us send you over to the Methodists, are you?" There were chuckles among the deacons. "Just close your eyes and it'll be over in a minute." But when he tried to position her, sister Alford went rigid. He couldn't budge her. "If you'll give me a hand, brother Smith, brother Wiggins . . ." They came and stood by her side as the preacher prayed, and then they tried to immerse her. They might as well have tried to duck the rock of Gibraltar. She was fixed. They leaned and pulled. Sister Alford stood. Another brother came over and the four of them tried to wrestle her down. Tio put his mouth under the water and bubbles started coming up.

Two other men splashed down into the river and added their efforts. Brother Smith was lifting himself on her shoulders and brother Wiggins struggled to trip her; all to no avail. They could have built a bridge on her. Laughter was breaking out along the bank.

Suddenly sister Alford lost her balance, just enough to startle her out of her trance, and with a screech she threw off her attackers and bolted, tripped, and went under the surface, and somehow her flailings managed to become ensnared in the submerged branches of the tree. The preacher and the brothers clambered over each other, grabbing for the thrashing feet.

"My God," muttered Em, "she'll bring the whole crowd down here! Let's try to push her out!" He slipped under the water, and I followed him, with Tio, clamping a hand on his hat, right behind. We groped along through the branches until we found her, wedged in the limbs, eyes locked open and staring.

She stared at us through the sunstreaked water, hanging before her in all our naked glory.

Em smiled.

Tio lifted his hat.

At that sister Alford freed herself.

As we surfaced she was erupting on the other side of the tree in a violence of churning water. She whooshed straight up, bellowing at the top of her voice and plowing down deacons as she made for the bank. The others dived aside as she thundered by them in a storm of white cotton and foaming spray. The crowd on the bank cleared a path for her, and she charged through them and up the river road, honking and slinging water like a great white goose, until we lost sight of her through the woods.

Through the silence came brother Reese's voice.

"Praise God!" he shouted. "Sister Alford has seen Je-sus!"

And the river bottom resounded with hallelujahs.

Luck was with us, and we found our bucket of clothes eddying against a hummock of trash about a mile farther down the river. We pulled out and dressed at the trestle below the Ape Yard, and stumbled up the railroad, worn out and ravenous. Tio offered to feed us, but we said we'd take a chance on leftovers at home and came on up the hill.

As we cleared the patch of woods above the garage I felt a mild twinge of alarm.

Dr. Breisner's car was parked in the driveway. He made regular visits to the boardinghouse, but a Sunday visit was out of the ordinary. Then, as we neared the yard Mrs. Porter suddenly burst onto the porch, veins standing in her neck, and stopped me cold.

"Be brave, boy! Be brave! It's your Aunt Esther—Lord God, honey, she's dying!"

I fell against the door, breathing hard. Miss Esther was sitting up in bed buttoning her gown. Dr. Breisner stood beside her in his baggy seersucker suit, shaking down what looked to be, in my excitement, a large black thermometer, but turned out to be his fountain pen. His heavy brows knitted in concentration as he tried to get it to write. Miss Esther was staring at me.

"Mr. Whitaker, what is this commotion?"

I tried to get my legs to stop quaking. "They said—what is it? How is she, doctor?"

Miss Esther snorted. "You might as well talk to that wall. Doctors don't talk, they just like to poke and feel."

Dr. Breisner tried a few marks on a prescription blank, tore it off and stared at his nib. "Heart," he said.

"What?" Miss Esther was leaning half off her bed. "Speak up, Huff, I can't hear you."

"Heart attack," he said, "plain, old-fashioned heart attack."

Miss Esther's spine stiffened. "Heart attack! Why there's never been heart trouble in my family! My daddy lived to be ninety-two and worked like a horse till the day he died. The Whitaker tickers are sound as a dollar!"

"Be that as it may . . ."

"It was the Cahills ran to bad hearts . . . look at Wylie!"

"I know about Wylie, but the fact remains . . ."

"Cancer . . . ! Now there was three or four took cancer. But not heart trouble!"

"I don't care about that . . ."

"Did you check for cancer? Maybe it was cancer and looked like heart trouble."

"Damnit all, Esther, will you shut up a minute!" Dr. Breisner leaned over her as though he might strike her if she interrupted again. "It's your
heart
! And besides that you've got high blood pressure, and the last thing you need is to have me shouting at you!"

Dr. Breisner sat on the edge of the bed. "
I've
got high blood pressure. I don't need the shouting either." He turned to her. "Now, listen to me." Dr. Breisner knew he had to be simple and direct, else he would be there all night. "That spell this afternoon was serious, and I think you've had these before." He held up a hand to shush her. "Never mind, I'm not interested. The fact is, you've had enough. Your chasing around days are over. You run up those stairs one more time, you lift anything heavier than a chamberpot, and you're going to be looking at Jesus. That's as plain as I can put it into words."

Miss Esther pinched her lips. "Well, that just about makes me out to be an invalid; is that what you're saying, doctor?"

Dr. Breisner was serious. "You ought to be in a hospital right now. At any rate, you can't stay here. You keep running after these old folks and one day—" He snapped his fingers.

"Can't stay here! Can't—well, just where do you think I can go? Tell me that!"

"You've got a boy up in North Carolina . . ."

"
Pffft
!"

"Either that, or the county home."

Miss Esther looked at him. "Huff, you're serious about that thing, ain't you?"

Dr. Breisner didn't answer. He wrote out two prescriptions, tore them off and handed them to me. "I'll drop you by the drugstore. I want her started on these tonight."

"How much longer do you give me, doctor?"

"You take your medicine, stop playing mother hen, and stay off those stairs, and I'll get you married again."

"Well," she said, "if all I got to worry about is heart trouble, I'll count on it. Hah! Hooo—what say,
doctor
?"

Dr. Breisner bit the edge of a smile and picked up his bag. As we came out on the porch she threw open the upstairs window. "I'll count on it for sure! Don't forget your bill now, Huff, I want to pay for this visit! Hah!"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Dr. Breisner was stepping over missing planks in the steps.

When I got back from the drugstore she was downstairs repeating it for the others, embellishing, talking a mile a minute, rocking and harking in the best of spirits; any traces of fear or anxiety were hidden in the vagaries of those incessant vocal thrashings, buried under that rock-hard surface of humor.

Miss Esther followed the doctor's orders for the whole of two days, then she was up again and running, chenille housecoat flying, supervising a complete housecleaning, leaf-raking, hedge-trimming. And she even had Em clean and paint the gutters, and repair the steps. We worried, the boarders pleaded, all to no avail. I was puzzled. I had seen the boarders do that: take an almost childish delight in defying the doctor, whispering behind their hands that they hadn't been taking that new prescription. But for Miss Esther it was completely out of character. True, she wouldn't want the doctor to know she was taking his advice, but she would. She was too sensible.

Then, as I watched her moving among the boarders, it hit me for the first time, and hard, a thing that had never occurred to me would happen.

Miss Esther, too, was getting old.

"Em, I'm worried."

"Hell, that old woman will be around to supervise all our funerals."

"She's not herself, I can tell."

"Seems more herself than ever, if you ask me," he said, leaning the ladder against the house.

"And she's up to something, I can't figure out what, but she's got something cooking."

"She's always up to sump'n. Time she ain't, that's when you want to worry."

"No, I mean something serious. A couple of times I've caught her on the telephone late at night, and she ran me off, acted real funny about it. One time she was talking to the operator, like it was long distance."

"Yeah?" That got Em's interest. The two absolutely unjustifiable extravagances in Miss Esther's household were steak and long-distance phone calls.

One Friday morning, three weeks after her attack, I was making the rounds with the bell when Miss Esther called me into her room. She was sitting up in bed, looking tired, drawn, as though she hadn't slept. Only her voice had the old brusqueness and strength.

"Well, it's all settled. Vance will be here Thursday."

"Ma'am?"

"Going to North Carolina, you and me. Stay with Van and Lucille. They've got a big place outside of Durham, plenty of room. How about that, hah?"

"We're—leaving here?" I felt my blood pounding, a distant feeling. Unreal.

"I didn't want to say anything till it was all settled. But it ain't no percentage laying around here. If I got to lay back, I'll lay back on Mr. Vance. He's got it coming, the hateful thing."

"But, you don't have to do, we'll take care of you."

"Who? These old folks? Pshaw! Can't hardly take care of themselves. No, sir, there ain't no invalids in this house. I never let 'em lay down on me, and I ain't going to show 'em how." She took off her glasses and looked at me. "How long you been with me, boy?"