A Cry of Angels (26 page)

Jayell was a long time coming out from under the anesthetic. Gwen put her hand on his forehead. "How do you feel, darling?" she said softly.

"Fine," he said groggily. After repeated efforts at shaking himself awake, he looked down at the leg. "Did they leave it on—or is that a dummy cast to cheer me up?"

"
Sssh
, just rest now."

"Give me a cigarette."

"You don't need a cigarette just now. Would you like some water?"

"How's a cigarette going to hurt my goddamned leg? Give me a cigarette!"

Gwen groped nervously in her bag. She lit the smoke and Jayell took a deep drag. "Thank God it was the good leg," he said sardonically, "would'a been a shame to bust up the one with all those rods and pins in it. They spent a lot of time rebuilding that baby. Got a whole erector set in there. Hey! Maybe they shortened this one to match! Earl, get my rule!"

"
Sssh
, Jayell, please . . ."

"But I might not have a limp anymore

"Jayell, stop it!"

"Stop! Hell, I am stopped, woman. If there's anything I am at this moment, it's
stopped
!"

Gwen fumbled for the buzzer. A nurse put her head in the door. "He needs something," Gwen said. The nurse nodded and disappeared.

"You bet I need something," Jayell said. "Early, you think you can find me a jar of stumphole?"

"You'd better go," said Gwen. It was more than a request."

"Go to Dirsey, boy, tell him I want the rottenest stuff he's got!"

"It's all right, darling," Gwen said soothingly, "it's going to be all right now. Everything's going to be just fine."

That night Tio came struggling up the gulley with a slab of fatback, some flour wrapped in newspaper, and a small jar of molasses. We fried the fatback and crumbled molasses in it and I sopped it with shards of the hoecake he made in the skillet.

"Did you go by the hospital?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"How is he?"

"I didn't get to talk to him. They said he got to raisin' so much hell the doctor had to knock him out again."

"Boy, what a mess," I said.

"That house for Ruben Johnson was the only one he had too, and now with him laid up in the hospital . . . Hey! I wonder if we could finish that house! I could round up Skeeter and Carlos and the shop boys and . . ."

Tio held up his hand, listening. He got up and went to the window and then I heard it too, the sound of a siren turning in by the fairgrounds.

"Well, you can forget that idea," Tio said.

It was a fire truck, roaring down the hollow toward a red glow over Fletcher Bottom.

Tio shook his head. "I'll bet everywhere that Bobo steps, he kills the grass."

I sat down at the table. "What's coming next . . ."

"I don't guess you've heard from Jojohn. Well, don't you worry, old papa Tio won't let you starve."

And he kept his word. Every night he came with sardines, a few sprouting potatoes, pigs knuckles, salt mackerel, and even a pork chop when he could snitch it. We both felt bad stealing from Mr. Teague, until we hit on the idea that Tio was just opening a secret account for me. We would keep a careful tally of everything he brought, and I would pay for it as soon as I was able. That relieved both our consciences, and when the stealing switched to simple debt, Tio started stealing a better class of goods.

But other problems began cropping up, things I'd never thought about before, such as laundry. At the boardinghouse my dirty clothes had always disappeared magically and turned up clean in the drawers. Now they just piled up in the corner and lay there. I tried putting them in the washtub and stomping around on them while I bathed, and tying bricks in the legs of my jeans to pull out the wrinkles while they hung from the limbs to dry. That worked fairly well for the jeans, but my shirts were stopping people on the street.

Gwen finally called me aside one day at school. "Earl," she said, "you've got to
do
something!"

Finally Tio brought me an old iron without a cord he had traded off of somebody, and I heated it on the stove and destroyed my one white shirt with it.

It was the infernal bleaching. I remembered Farette putting in Clorox with the whites, and I did that. What I didn't remember was the careful rinsing, and made do with a swish and a wring. When I put the iron to it, it developed large brown holes and the collar came loose at one end.

"For God's sake," cried Tio, "get what clothes you got left and let's take 'em to Grandma Tyne!"

"What'll I pay her with?"

"We'll think of something. But you go through another washday, you gon' be naked!"

Grandma Tyne was a knotty little black woman in a red-roofed house on the river with somebody's wash always drying on the porch rail. As usual she was on the back porch prodding in her old wringer machine with a boiled white stick, suds and bluing soaking through the floor boards and foaming off into the garden.

"Got your list of what you want from the store this week, Grandma?" Tio asked.

Grandma Tyne poked a ballooning overalls pocket under the rinse water and pursed her lips. "Better bring me some flour, a bag of dry beans—don't matter what kind—navy's all right. Need a can'a lard, some Peach snuff . . ."

"Wait a minute." Tio took his pencil out of his pocket and rummaged in her safe until he found a piece of paper bag. He looked in the oven and got us each a sausage biscuit from the pan she always kept there, and sat down at the table. "Wish you'd make a list," he said.

Grandma Tyne rapped the suds off her stick and stuck it carefully between the rafters. "You learn me to write, Mr. Smarty Britches, and I will."

He clamped the sausage biscuit between his teeth and noted down the items as she called them off. When he was done he folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. "Want to pay a little sump'n on your account this week?"

"Don't you come at me with none o' your mess, boy. Ain't I keepin' up that bill with y'all's washin'?"

Tio winked at me. "Not with me keepin' the books nowadays. You just keep gettin' further and further behind."

"Shoot!" Grandma stabbed in her machine. "If I could buy you for what you're worth and sell you for what you
think
you're worth, I'd be done retired!"

"Listen at that," Tio said, "and me comin' here bringin' her another customer. Earl's by hisself now, Grandma, and if he keeps washin' his clothes hisself he's gon' have to put 'em in a bag to hang 'em up."

"Sho', I'll do your wash, honey," she said. "That them there? Bring 'em hyeah."

"I haven't got any money, Grandma," I said. "Maybe I could do some chores or something?"

"Just run 'em in with ours and we'll put it on the groceries," Tio said.

"Sho-sho-that'll be fine," she said, "and I can always use a little coal. You get you a bucket and look along the tracks where the coal cars unload," she told me, "and pick me up a little coal from time to time."

"I'll do that," I said.

"Lawd," she said, "I wish ever'body could make do without money. But the light comp'ny and that insurance—they want the
money
. Doc Bobo says he can't carry me another week. Got to get that up somewhere. I dunno where."

"Can't carry you for what?" I asked.

"My burial insurance, honey," she said proudly.

"You've got burial insurance with Doc Bobo?"

"One thousand dollars' worth. Ain't lettin' the county put me in no hole out yonder behind the prison camp where nobody can't find my grave. Gon' have me a nice funeral, with flowers—just lots of flowers."

"You ready?" Tio said to me. I sopped the last smear of sausage grease off the oilcloth and folded the remains of the biscuit into my mouth. "You be sure and make that payment now, Grandma," he said, "'cause me and Doc Bobo done got it figured that when you kick off I'm gonna hide the body and we gon' split the thousand dollars."

He made a jump for the porch but she caught him behind the neck with a sopping shirt, and he circled down the hill in a crazy dance, laughing and shaking his collar.

Still, I had to have money, and the next day after school I started combing the town for work. It was to be one of the bitterest experiences of my life.

The classified ads turned up nothing, as did the state employment office. I went to Bobo's mill, to the quarries, the sheds, the gas stations, and found everywhere that the state was protecting me from serious employment because of my age.

After trying all the stores at Galaxy Plaza, I started on the north side of the square and made a canvass of the entire town: the hardware store, poolroom, department stores, the bank, the dry cleaning plant, the drugstore, the bottling plant—even the fire station and courthouse. I walked in every place that had a public entrance, and asked if they had any kind of a job for a boy. Some were polite and took up time, others simply shook their heads or waved me away. There was an ad in the window of the new bowling alley for a pin boy, but when I applied, the manager took me aside and explained that what he needed was another colored boy.

At the telephone office I thought I was on to something. A lady in cat-eye glasses with pearly rims handed me an application form and questioned me lengthily about my possibilities as a lineman. It went on and on, and I grew more excited by the minute—then the lady broke. There was other laughter, and then I saw a group of linemen crowded in the door of the day room, spilling their coffee. A secretary put her head down on her desk.

In the circus, I'm told, chimps have an instinctive hatred for the exaggerated smiles of clowns, and will attack on sight. For me, it's those cat-eye glasses with the pearly rims. I've never been able to overcome it.

Panic was beginning to set in. I saw the boarders from time to time; Mrs. Bell had come down to show me a letter from Miss Esther, raising general hell about my defection and demanding to know how I was getting on, but I always put up a big front and tried not to let any of them discover the truth. Tio continued to drop off food, but I saw less and less of him as he and Mr. Teague became engaged in a massive remodeling of the store. Mr. Teague had finally given in, and they were going to turn it into a regular supermarket, Tio said. He was scouting the Valley Farm store like an enemy agent, noting every facet of its operation.

Finally I decided to go and have a talk with Jayell, who had been moved back to the house in Marble Park. Admittedly, he was a poor prospect for practical advice, but he was the only one I had. I waited until an afternoon when I knew Gwen was at a faculty meeting, so that at least I could avoid seeing her. One of the reasons I had taken Tio's advice and reported back to school so promptly, even though it was going to be out in a couple of weeks, was because I wanted to finish the eighth grade and get shed of that woman altogether.

"Welcome in, come in!"

Jayell was sitting at the fireplace, cracking pecans on the hearth with his cast. He racked around in his chair to look at me with bleary eyes, and went back to shelling nuts. I knew it was useless. Jayell's spirit had been at low ebb ever since the accident. The bank had repossessed some of his equipment, refusing even to talk to him about an extension. They were living on Gwen's salary, which was barely enough to meet household expenses and the mortgage payments on the lot, and now had somehow to cope with the enormous medical bills. Jayell had bought accident insurance, he was certain of it; and sure enough, the box under his bed turned up policies protecting him against just about every possible catastrophe that could befall a man, but the half-dozen that still happened to be in force were all life insurance policies.

The man from Smithbilt homes had stopped by several times to renew his offer of work when Jayell was able to get about again, and Gwen frankly saw no other way out. Jayell refused to talk about it or anything else, for that matter. He sat brooding in the house at Marble Park, except for those times Carlos and Skeeter would come and lift him into the truck and take him to Dirsey's to get blind, falling-down drunk. He wasn't even drawing anymore.

Jayell sighed and threw a handful of shells into the fireplace. "Everything can go to hell overnight, can't it, Early boy?" He raised his head and looked at me. "How old are you now?"

"Fourteen."

He thought about it. "Well, you got a hard row to hoe, but you'll get by. I was fifteen when I got fed up with the old man and left home. You're young, and you're a little backward, but you'll come out of that. The thing you got to remember now is that you've got all the responsibilities of an adult, but none of the rights. Legally, you can't get credit, sign a contract, or even rent a post office box. People may do business with you, but if they cheat you there's nothing you can do about it, because no paper you sign will be legal. And they will cheat you, believe me, they'll overcharge you, they'll outbargain you, they'll take every advantage your lack of experience gives 'em, 'cause that's the way business operates, and it makes no allowance for age. In business as in everything else in this lovely world, the weak and the helpless are eaten first. Above all," he said emphatically, "don't you get in trouble of any kind. Don't even let the law know you're alive."

"Why?"

"'Cause for you, even hookey from school is a crime that can get you sent up. It makes people nervous to see a kid running around loose, and any chance they get, they'll put you away. Stay low, stay quiet, be respectful but firm where money is concerned, and when you get the short end, consider it tuition and try not to repeat the course. Anything else I can do to cheer you up?"

"Not unless you can tell me where I can find a job."

Jayell brought down the heel of his cast too hard and bent over, picking meat from among the shell fragments.

"You're asking the wrong person. I couldn't even get a job as a nutcracker. No, Earl, you've got it all against you," he said bitterly, "you're not even old enough to get married, so you could live off your wife."

"Jayell, what about you, you given up your dream? You not going to build anymore?"