A Cry of Angels (15 page)

Em Jojohn chuckled. "You couldn't build a house that looked like a house."

"Here it is." Jayell snatched a picture from the stack. "This is what she really drooled over. A converted barn, that's what's big this year. A New England barn converted into a house. Je-sus, would you look at that thing!"

"You got a problem there," said Em. "Ain't too many New England barns around here."

Jayell slammed down his bottle. "My God, Em, don't you know anything? That's what makes it fashionable! People don't want the original thing, they want reproductions! Some slick advertising guy puts a gimmick like this in a magazine, and people say, 'Oh, ain't that cute?' And right away want one like it. Only when they find there ain't too many dairy farmers ready to evict their cows and fill their barns with fools, there's a new reproduction market created. Hell, it's the whole secret of the antique business. Yessir, we'll build her a barn first, and then convert into a house. Them Marble Parkers will be frog-ass green with envy!"

"Marble Park?" I said. "Are you really going to build up there?"

Jayell winked. "Made a down payment on a lot this morning. Don't say nothing to Gwen."

"How them folks going to take to having a barn up there in them ranch styles?" said Em.

"Oh, listen, no problem there. They wouldn't stand for nothing really good, of course. But some cutesy notion like this, why it'll just fit right in. Juice up the neighborhood just enough to look 'clever,' but not far enough from mediocre to make 'em uncomfortable. Be cheaper too, when you think about it. I got enough barn salvage to reproduce one
hell
of a
barn
!"

The lot Jayell had bought was at the end of one of the newly paved subdivision streets. We trooped up there, the three of us and the ragged crew from Jayell's shop, and he roved over the site, laying out the house. And from what I saw, Jayell was right; the plans he outlined would fit right in with the carefully contrived mood of architectural freedom in Marble Park. Mostly the brick split-levels predominated, plus the predictable Southern "mansions" with fluted wooden columns, but there were several scattered attempts at buttoned-down striving toward the avant-garde: two or three circular houses, a three-story obelisk with only ground-floor windows, and one fine attempt at a castle, but the sun porch gave it away. Marble Park housed the granite executives, textile managers, bankers and others of the town's elite. It was a world of frantic golf and determined bridge parties, of dollar-down cabins at Lake Lorraine. They were the country clubbers, the Little Theater boosters, symphony supporters, Friends of the Library, a scant generation from corn huskings and quilting bees, but in there solid as boat payments, Spocking their children, trying.

Slowly the house began taking shape, and it was plain from the start that this was to be the strangest house Jayell ever built. It was a perfectly conventional, heavy-beamed barn, so devoid of Jayell's usual touches, his bizarre shapes and flying angles, that it might have been lifted straight from a Grandma Moses painting, so old-timey that it seemed to age as it grew from the ground. But if the house looked simple enough to the rest of us, for Jayell it was a torment, a crucible. He was relentlessly on the move, searching out the tiniest flaws, remeasuring, tearing out and changing, yelling in frustration, scrapping whole sections and starting again.

It was always strange to watch Jayell work, the flarings of temper, the sudden peaks of happiness, the long periods of overriding confidence that dipped suddenly into melancholy, but for some reason this project seemed to challenge him as none before. He brooded over it, he began drinking more than usual when he was working, he sat in the falling night when the others had gone, slugging from the bottle he picked up each morning at Dirsey's and staring intently at the house. I crawled up on the wood pile beside him. He was wound tight, covered with sweat and grime, trembling from exhaustion, anxiety.

"Jayell, why do you suffer so?"

He spoke through gritted teeth. "God is jealous of anyone who attempts to create. It's the ultimate sacrilege."

"It is?"

"That's why artists are so miserable. It's their punishment."

"But how can you say that—you believe in God."

"You gotta believe in Him," Jayell said, "even when He's wrong."

"It could be they suffer because they don't eat and sleep right too."

He whirled around on me. "
Are you going home now
?"

"Yes."

And I got down and did.

Despite all the starts and stops and changes, the house moved along, and from the smoothness of its shape, the natural way it came together, no one would ever guess the strain it was to get it that way. It just seemed the only way that house could have been built. And it was a beautiful house. The rooms were of moderate size, but spacious and comfortable, and the kitchen, ringed with cabinets and little alcoves, was airy and full of light. Nowhere did a board lie even slightly out of line; windows and heavy oak doors moved at the touch of a finger; and the overhead beams joined with a seeming interweaving of grains with not a razor's thickness of gap in the joints.

The furniture was less trouble than I expected. From under his bed at the shop Jayell pulled boxes of drawings, and within days the designs were emerging from his boys' lathes and planers. The real time-consumer was finding the right fabrics and having upholstery made; for some of the accessories and ornamental hardware Jayell had to make trips to Atlanta.

Helping Jayell with the house after school and doing my homework while eating leftovers from the oven before toppling into bed, and spending as much time as I had to with Gwen Burns, was getting to be almost more than I could bear. The teacher kept her end of the bargain and never asked a word about the house, but as it occupied more and more of Jayell's time, she devoted more of her attention to me.

One night as I was pulling down the covers, bone-tired and already half asleep, she came to my room, eyes afire with excitement, and swiftly closed the door behind her.

"Earl, may I share a secret with you?"

I said of course, expecting a sure catastrophe, and trying to clear my head enough to meet it. She came and sat on the side of the bed, looked into my eyes for a moment, and whipped out a spiral notebook.

"I want to be a writer."

She waited, and when she got no reaction from me, she said, "What's the matter, don't you believe me?"

"Well, sure, but I don't see why you keep it a secret. Mrs. Cline wants to be one too, and she talks about it all the time."

"Mrs. Cline? The one with the detective magazines?"

"Uh-huh, she wants to write up a real murder for the magazines, but they don't happen that often around here, and when one does happen she can't get out to see about it. It's real sad."

"That nice little old lady. I would never have thought it."

"But she writes all the time anyway, and it's a nuisance. Miss Esther says she's about fed up with it."

The girl was shocked. "Why would she care about a thing like that? That poor, lonely little old . . ."

"Well, she wouldn't if Mrs. Cline would write somewhere besides the bathroom. But she won't; she sits in there and writes until her legs fall asleep and then somebody's got to help her to her room."

The teacher sat and looked at me. "Earl, I can't shake the feeling that you're somehow making fun of me."

"Oh, no, it's the truth. You can ask anybody."

"All right, never mind that now, here"—she opened the notebook and handed it to me—"now just read it aloud and tell me what you think. I don't expect you to grasp it all immediately, just let it seep in and see what it does to you inside, see if it evokes a response."

I looked down at the paper and could hardly believe my eyes. There were no capitals, periods or any kind of punctuation, not even paragraphs. It was all written in one big block, without a clue as to where one thought ended and another began. I looked at her to see if she was now making fun of me.

"It's all right," she said, "it's supposed to be that way. It's called stream-of-consciousness. Go on, read."

So I started reading, punctuating when I gave out of breath. As best I could tell, it was a dream of some sort, with the girl describing all the things she saw. There were some nice things, fields of yellow flowers and throbbing-throated birds and melting sunsets; but then the picture got disturbed, with "raging thoughts, like swirling bits of tissue paper, tumbling in the whirlpool of the mind." And finally the scene opened out on a meadow, with boys and girls, and it took on a decidedly different tone. Here things got down to specifics, with "great bronzed arms" and "hot ivory bellies" and "nymphs worshiping at the steeple of life." I stopped reading.

"What's the matter? Are you embarrassed?"

Embarrassed? At that age I still had trouble buying underwear from a lady clerk at Telk's!

"All right," she said, smiling, "but tell me, what do you think?"

"I—uh, I'm not sure, I'm afraid it's a little over my head."

She leaned close. "But tell me, did you
feel
anything?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am, especially there toward the end . . ."

"That's enough!" she said ecstatically. "It's enough that you felt something. I get so discouraged in that English class, nothing moves them! I plan the most exciting lessons, full of nuggets, I hit them with things that should make their hair stand on end! And they just sit there. Every day I come away drained, the blood sucked right out of me!"

"Well, maybe we just got a dumb class."

"No, it's the same with the other teachers, only they just seem to accept it, to go along every day drilling the facts into them, getting it back on tests, and moving them up a grade. Teaching has to be more than that, but where do you start?"

I opened my mouth, and then realized, hell, I didn't have an answer for her.

"Well"—she got to her feet—"thank you anyway, Earl, for listening—for trying." She rolled the notebook and looked at it. "It may never amount to anything, but I have to have this release. Sometimes I feel so bottled up inside. I can trust you with my little secret, can't I. You won't tell the others."

"Oh, no, ma'am, but they wouldn't care anyway—so long as you don't write in the bathroom."

It was the wrong thing to say. She stopped at the door. "Good night, Earl," she said coolly.

"Good night."

It was no use, I thought. With some people, no matter which way you step, it's wrong.

She let up on me with the poetry and literature after that, and I thought maybe she had gotten discouraged and given up on me, and I was going to have some peace. But as it turned out a few days later, she was only gearing up enthusiasm for the court system she was establishing in civics.

"Jayell, you're killing yourself." Gwen spread the sandwiches and potato salad on a sawhorse trestle. Since it was Saturday, Jayell, for once, had let the shop boys knock off at noon, but he had asked me to stay and help him salvage a small barn after we finished painting on the Ledbetter house. "Why don't you quit for the weekend? I never see you anymore."

"Promised to clear away a barn this afternoon." Jayell ate silently, his eyes scanning the nearly finished house.

"The Martins have offered us the use of their boat if we want to go down to the lake tomorrow. With cold weather coming, it'll probably be the last chance we'll get to go."

"Maybe, if I can get this one finished up this afternoon. Told Ledbetter I'd give him the keys Monday, else he's liable for another month's rent. That time in Atlanta threw everything off."

"Jay, what kind of life are we going to have, with you working eighteen hours a day . . ."

"Gwen, you know I barely scratch a living on these houses. Until I get the boys better trained and get some capital built up . . ."

"I know," she said, "and that's why I can't understand why you don't reconsider that Smithbilt offer. It sounds like a wonderful opportunity."

"How do you know about Smithbilt?"

"That man—Mr. Wyche?—was by the boardinghouse this morning. Jay, they've . . ." She stopped and turned to watch a blue station wagon pulling up to the jobsite. She looked at Jayell sheepishly. "I told him you'd be here this afternoon."

John Wyche, the Smithbilt vice-president, picked his way through the construction debris. "How's it coming, Jayell?"

"Hello, John," said Jayell, glancing at Gwen.

John Wyche was a large, energetic man who had a habit of hitching his pants as he talked. "Fine-looking house you've got there. Like I told this little lady, you get more done with a half-dozen nigger laborers than we can with a crew of skilled carpenters."

"You got too many," said Jayell. "We don't use two men to carry a two-by-four."

"Exactly," said Mr. Wyche, "absolutely right. That's what I want to talk to you about, Jayell. We're just getting too big—did I tell you we're starting a new development outside of Abbeville? New mill going up there and they want five hundred houses! Got the bulldozers in there now. We got to have help.
Got
to have help." He stopped and looked again at the house. "My God, do you ever build any two alike?"

"Ain't had to yet," said Jayell, munching a stalk of celery.

"Listen, Jay, I'll come right to it. We
got
to have somebody to coordinate construction in this area. The Miami office is on my neck constantly about this territory, and with the Abbeville thing coming up, I don't know what I'm going to do. I ought to be in the office right now. This whole area is booming, and indications are it's just getting started. New plants opening every day. That means people, Jayell, and people means houses. Now, the company sees yours scattered around the hills and they keep asking me, 'Who's this fellow with such originality—who builds houses like that with a handful of niggers and utility-grade lumber, and why can't we get him on our team?' And frankly, Jayell, I'm running out of answers."

Jayell smiled. "Like I've told you, John, I've got all I can handle."