A Cry of Angels (44 page)

"
Hear you
!" There was a crash of the coal bucket spinning and Mr. Burroughs grabbed his cane and lurched into the middle of the floor, clutching his bowels and blowing with asthma. Towering over the startled woman, backing her away, he bellowed, "
Hear you
? You're deafening the Chinese! I've never
known
a human capable of such volume. You could shout down a thunderstorm!
Hear you
! Why, there ain't a fleck of paint on a house for miles! You've toppled a bridge somewhere! When you unpucker that volcano of a mouth you split the floors of heaven and ricochet angels off the walls!
Hear you, indeed
! I say bless the planet with a moment of
not
hearing you, and restore to us the whisper of hurricanes! Be still, woman—and
let the earth pass an audible quake
!"

When she recovered, the Bell daughter dissolved in sniffles and fled to the porch. Livid, Morris came forward to protest, and Mr. Burroughs aimed his nickel-mounted cane at his head. He missed but took down a lamp in the attempt.

Morris went to the porch to console his wife.

But Mr. Burroughs was not through. He rattled open the screen and charged again, and Morris took his wife on to the car. When he saw that the old man still had not given up, but was making heated progress past the flower bed, he cranked up and left. Mr. Burroughs followed them as far as his breath would take him, encouraging their departure with incoherent bellowings, flailing the trunk with his cane.

Presently he returned and burst into the parlor and circled the carpet, red-faced, white moustache working, looking for other takers. There seemed to be none. When his breath came again, he bawled with tremulous finality, "
We are your parents
,
by god
—
And we'll have a little respect
! Now, sit down! . . . We have a business proposition!"

He took his time, carefully outlining the plan as Jayell had proposed it, and filling in the details worked out among the boarders the night before. He sold hard. "When you are young you are under your parents, then you are bound by your children, and when they are gone your parents come in on you again. God, oh, God, when do you ever get free? Well, we're offering you that freedom. We want to break that miserable cycle and take our chances. Is that not worth something? Hell, there's more money than we're asking in the various property you've stolen from us!"

"Well, I'm against it," said the eldest Burroughs son flatly.

Mr. Burroughs leaned over him. "Shut up, Henry! We ain't askin' for a goddamned vote! We're telling you what we're going to do!" Henry started to protest and his father silenced him again. "And don't threaten me with Milledgeville again. You haven't the guts to lock me away. Furthermore, if any of us gets put away, you'll have to put us
all
away. That's our deal. Can you live with that guilt, my darlings?"

Alice Porter blew her nose. "It's like, like you're all going away somewhere to—to die."

"What have we been doing here?" snapped Mrs. Porter. "Quit pumping water, Alice, you'll be free to visit, but on our terms. No more of this family bickering and bossing around. You're going to treat us like people again! I feel good about it, better'n I've felt in a long time."

"All right," said Mr. Burroughs, "down to business. We've got six thousand dollars to raise. Now, Ruby and Farette have no families, so mine will assume their share, say, two thousand dollars for the three of us."

"What?" cried Henry, rising. "Where are we going to get two thousand . . ."

"From the sale of the homeplace you and my other heirs robbed me of," said Mr. Burroughs. "You never did cut the rightful owner in on the proceeds, if you'll remember."

"But, Papa, why should you have to foot the bill for these two?" Henry whined.

"It's my atonement," roared Mr. Burroughs, "for misbehaving in such as manner as to bring you peach-orchard boar-shoats into the world! Now shut up and sit down, Henry, or I'll pack and move in with you tomorrow! Would you like that better, Henry?"

Henry shut up and sat. "All right, who's next?"

"Well," said Mrs. Cline's daughter, "I'd be glad enough to get out of this hollow. If she wants to move up on the mountain where she'll be more comfortable, I suppose we could help out a little. Though, Lord knows, she's welcome to come and live with us . . ."

"For God's sake, woman, how much?"

"Four"—she glanced at her husband—"say five hundred dollars."

"Why, it costs more than that to board her here a year, and you figure your mother to live longer than that, don't you, darling? Remember now, this is a final payment. Make it eight hundred."

"But we don't have that much cash!"

"Then make arrangements with your bank. The Rampeys now, with the fine house in Marble Park."

Around the room the bargaining and pledging continued, the families figuring haltingly among themselves, branching off to other rooms for conferences.

"You're really going out on a limb, Papa," said Henry Burroughs.

"Why not," said the old man, rocking on his heels, "that's where the fruit is."

"You'll never make it work."

"We'll make it work. When one of us dies, we'll bring in some other old codger to take his place. We'll keep it going. That's the trouble with you young people, you got no faith in yourselves."

When the needed sum was met, Mrs. Bell voting a share for her absent daughter and son-in-law, Mr. Burroughs offered his arm to Mrs. Bell. "I believe, madam, it's time for breakfast."

And the other boarders, taking the cue, struggled to their feet and followed them into the hall, jaws set, rheumy eyes glistening, leaving those in the parlor to discover for themselves that they had been dismissed.

Later, when I went down to the garage, I found Em sitting on the comb of the roof, looking off toward the hollow. He sat with one foot drawn up, his head resting on his knee, turning a slice of lemon in his tea glass.

"Well, it's all settled," I said, climbing up beside him, "they got the money."

Em turned and looked at me for a moment.

"Boy," he said, "what you think about you and me just movin' on up the road."

Startled, I looked at him to see if he was serious. He watched me without expression. Dead serious.

"You and me?"

"You and me, just go on over the hill, see what the world's all about."

There it was. As simply as if he had asked me the time. The thing I had daydreamed about for so many years. And, although even as a child I knew I was not allowed to ask for it, I would gladly have given my soul for the offer, and followed him into the mouth of hell.

But now, almost as though it were another voice talking, I heard myself pulling back. "But—where would we go? What would we do?"

"Go any blame place we want to. Do whatever we like."

"Well—I don't know, Em . . ."

"What's the matter? I thought that's what you always wanted."

"Well, it is, or was . . . I just don't know. What about school?"

"School! Let me tell you sump'n, boy. When you're born, you're complete, and don't need nothin' else. After that, any changes you make in yourself you gotta strain and sacrifice. Little piece of you here in exchange for this, little piece there in exchange for that. Lose your health makin' a dollar, till you end up wise and rich. Then what happens? You die in a pile of clutter, with your head full of clutter. Kinfolks you never liked end up with your possessions and the worms get your brains. The thing to do is hold down your wants. In the long run it's less of a strain, and you get to keep more of what you started out with."

"Take me. I come from the largest tribe of Indians east of the Mississippi, and nobody knows their right name, even them. They was speakin' English when the first white man found 'em. They was livin' in houses, hadn't no language of their own, no religion, some had curly hair, some blue eyes. Belonged to no known tribe. They figured we must be Indians, but nobody knowed for sure. So we been called Croatans, the Indians of Robeson County, Cherokee Indians of Robeson County, and now they call us Lumbees. I never knowed who or what I was for sure. But down home they knowed what we was. We was trash. Nothin'."

"So I said, all right, I ain't Indian, I ain't white, I ain't black. I'll just be Em Jojohn. And I'll be free."

"And so can you be, boy. What's to keep you? You got no family to speak of. There ain't nothin' to hold you in this town. Get out there and get a good grip on yourself before they start moldin' you and shapin' you into what they want you to be. You got the rest of your life to go to school. In a couple of years, you get tired of travelin' and you want to go to school, you stop and go to school."

I shook my head. "I don't know, Em. I'll just have to think about it."

He studied me for a moment longer, then, throwing his leg over the comb of the roof, he slid down to the top of the shed, where he turned for a final glance toward the hollow. "You think about it," he called back up to me, and stepped in through the window.

The next morning before light, Em and I were startled awake by a horrendous ruckus on the stairs. It was Burroughs, Rampey and Jurgen, all decked out in their work clothes, beating on the steps and shouting for us to get a move-on.

"Will you sleep till they pull the place down around you?" hollered Mr. Burroughs.

"Farette's holdin' breakfast, boys," said Mr. Rampey.

After we were stuffed with sausage, grits and eggs until we could hardly walk, we were herded into the bus with the other boarders, and enough box lunches to feed a regiment, and carted off to Jayell's.

Jayell had already recruited his shop boys and was lunging among the piles of salvage lumber that stood in large mounds in the weeds around the shop. He poked through the stacks throwing back tarpaulins, pointing out the materials to be refinished; two-by's, four-by's, oaken beams salvaged from the Mayhorn plantation that burned; pile upon pile of odd bits and pieces of churches, country stores, sheds, barns and houses that had been collected over the years were now passed into the shop by his hustling workers to have nails pulled out, split ends cut off, rough edges planed to the seasoned heart.

The building site Jayell had chosen was a clearing among the oaks and maples on the lower edge of the land deeded to him by Lilly Waugh, just above the rim of the lower end of the Ape Yard where the hogback hills started the steeper incline up Wolf Mountain. The view faced east, away from town, with the Ape Yard on the left, and an access road that was once a pulpwood trail leading up from the Atlanta highway just south of the Little Iron River bridge.

We fell to digging the foundations along Jayell's string markers with picks and shovels, since we had no heavy equipment, and in the rocky hillside it was hard going. From first sweat, which came before the sun was full up, I saw that it was going to be no picnic. In addition to Jayell, we now had the boarders to contend with: Burroughs, Rampey, Jurgen and Woodall flailing wildly with picks and shovels, exhorting everyone to greater efforts, with the women bothering us on every turn with ice water. I was certain we would lose at least three to strokes before noon.

But at sundown they were still hard at it, and when Jayell finally called a halt and the haggard shop boys had drifted away, the boarders had to make a final check for tools left behind; they wanted to know from Jayell how the work had gone that day and what were the plans for tomorrow. And when they finally did pull themselves aboard the bus for the trip home, and lowered themselves stiffly into the seats with fatigue etched deep in their faces, they kept up a running banter with each other and us to cover it.

"I've never done manual labor before," said Mr. Jurgen, who sat primly holding a half jar of ice water between his hands. "I liked it." He turned to Mrs. Bell at the window seat. "It's good being outside, isn't it?"

"And you did well, too," she said.

"I thought I did," he nodded. "I thought I did right well. My father would have been proud of me today." The other voices on the bus gradually died and heads turned as the usually reticent Mr. Jurgen, his eyes fixed on the Ape Yard houses rolling by, babbled on about his past, about his years as a bookkeeper for the Blue Light quarries and how he had risen to the position of office manager with only a high-school education, and how he had hated the work. "I had wanted to work in a dress shop, is what I wanted, but my father would have none of that. He said it wasn't a fit occupation for a man. He was a very strict man, my father, but a wonderful man. A stonecutter. I made a dress for my sister once, and oh, did he hit the ceiling! I always had a flair for women's clothes—I'll bet I could have designed them if I could have got the education." Oblivious to the listening, swaying faces, Mr. Jurgen chatted on, about his life as a boy and how proud his father would have been if he could have seen him with that pick on the mountain today, tiny droplets of translucent, congealing blood inching through the sweat on the side of the cold glass of the ice-water jar he gripped between his hands.

The next morning we hit it early again, and every day thereafter. We got the foundations dug, the floorings down, and soon walls started going up, but the two houses, the larger of which was to be for the boarders with rooms for Em and me on the second floor, were still, to me at least, assuming no recognizable shape. Jayell was framing off into new directions, new dimensions, until even Carlos, the most experienced of the shop boys, was frowning at the plans and shaking his head.

"Never mind," said Jayell, "never mind. Come help me here." And he would put Carlos's hands to some task and rush off to confuse someone else.

"Look at him," said Phaedra, "look at the little rascal go."

After a couple of weeks the construction crew acquired a new member.

"Sure I can use you, Tio," said Jayell, "if you don't mind working cheap. But you sure Mr. Teague can spare you from the store?"

"Ain't nothin' goin' on down there," Tio said. "Ain't nobody but a few old ones left, and them's too sick to get out. Got to do sump'n. We ain't hardly breakin' even."