Free A Cry of Angels by Jeff Fields Page A

wild cherry gun, a kind of plunger made from reeds that could fire a green cherry with enough force to raise a blister from across the room. But his masterpiece, bar none, was the leather belt he made for me, hand tooled and studded with the green jewels he shot from the bottoms of Mason jars with Tio's BB gun.
    Sometimes in the early fall afternoons I would find him sitting in the weeds behind the garage, his head against the clapboards and smoke curling lazily from his cigarette as he watched the sun build amber fires in the treeline. When I asked what he was doing, he would only say, "Washin'." In those times I left him alone.
    By Christmas I was sleeping through the night, and the Indian and I were friends.
    And now my friend Em Jojohn, who had found my demons and so deftly torn them from me, lay in his own night of agony, unable to articulate, nor I to understand, the dark terror that tormented him.

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    The next morning, still shaken from her visit to church and the chaotic scene with Em, Gwen skipped breakfast, pleading a faculty planning session at the school, where she would be teaching eighth-grade English and civics. When Miss Esther asked me if she was satisfied with our Episcopal church, I had to admit that we went to Four Forks. That worried her. "How'd she take all that shoutin' and jumpin' around?"
    "Oh," I said, "before it was over she was up and shoutin' too."
    Miss Esther seemed surprised, but greatly relieved. As soon as the breakfast dishes were cleared away I went by the loft for Em, hoping that the morning had done its job.
    It had. He was his old self, standing at the window railing at the birds that woke him, and he wolfed down the ham biscuits I brought him as though he hadn't eaten in a week. He was still reluctant to go to the Waugh place on Wolf Mountain to do the painting Jayell wanted done, though, and it was only after careful consideration of the fact that he was flat broke, in debt to Jayell for five dollars, and of the many dry days ahead without booze money that he eventually got the best of his superstitious nature. He sighed and clamped on his hat, and we made our way down into the sprawling, gullied ruins of the Ape Yard.
    To know the Ape Yard, in its essence, you had only to know the Poncini quarry.
    At the very bottom of the hollow, down past the small block of stores that made up the Ape Yard's main street, on the last rise of ground before the final slope toward the river, sat the great maggoty hole of the original quarry. Abandoned when the Poncinis went broke, the quarry was three-quarters full of seepage, and sat still collecting rubbish, rainwater and outhouse drainage, and giving off a smell that had them complaining across town when the wind was right. The city had tried draining it and filling the bottom with granite slag and earth, but that only raised the smell closer to the surface. The old quarry seeped full again, and no ordinances could keep out the garbage and trash. In summer, trucks came with drums of chlorine and lye, but still the quarry remained what it was, a foul, gaseous sore in the earth.
    And around that quarry, in the larger basin of the Ape Yard hollow, was its counterpart in human life.
    Below the quarry, where twisting, rust-colored Twig Creek emptied into the Little Iron River, it was the worst. There the ground was mushy even in dry spells, and when the rains came down the slopes in spring, water stood at the porches for weeks on end. Children sat idly watching a stranger pass—spindly, clay-colored children with raw, expressionless faces, to whom play was a perpetual, listless roaming. If there was an egg in the house it went to the working man. Children sopped hoecake in the grease. Sometimes there was a can of dogfood to fry. Women brush-broomed the porches slowly, scuffling heavily on bare, callused feet. Their men sat in the yards and rubbed their hair, tinkered with machines, wandered off somewhere.
    From there the crumbling shanties climbed the