Free A Cry of Angels by Jeff Fields Page B

hogback hills in row after row, to Sunflower Street on the north, and up across the railroad to the warehouses on the southern rim that marked the beginning of Quarrytown. On the east it was bordered by Wolf Mountain, overlooking the river, and to the west by the fairgrounds, where the main rain-gutted road led into the hollow. Scattered among the plum bushes and winding dirt paths stood the tarpaper shacks and fading clapboard houses with washtubs on the wall and old cars on jacks under chinaberry trees, none of them having seen repairs since Doc Bobo bought them. All shared the same look of ruin and decay.
    In the taverns there were men who would tell you they knew what was wrong with the mill, with the world, and could fix it in a day if they were in charge. They had made that payment, the company's books were at fault. The man read their meter wrong. Household bills came at them like a pestilence and their families were gluttonous maws of need. They spent their paychecks quickly, clutching at luxuries, before responsibility came to take them away. They believed every ad and bought with abandon, mumbled their sins in the finance company confessionals, promised to do better, and when the "repo" man came for the outboard motor they hid it among the neighbors.
    And there were those who accepted their condition as if it were divine appointment, and even found a kind of grace in it. They white-washed their picket fences and raised pretty flowers in painted truck tires, lived on religion and pinto beans, paid their bills and got their praise. They were the "good niggers," like Ralph Martin, a foreman at the mill, who lived three streets down. He had had a son killed in Korea and had kept a flag flying from a pole in his yard with a light to shine on it at night, until some pranksters tore it down. He wrote a letter to the Star and they printed an editorial about it. His wife came up and got Miss Esther's copy to send to her sister in South Carolina.
    There were the Lupos, below us on the curve that led around and up to the cemetery. Hobert Lupo lived on fruit-jar whiskey and headache powders and liked to slap his wife. They came down the road one Saturday afternoon and every few yards he would stop and slap her. She was drunk, too, and every time he would slap her she would stagger off a few yards and then come back and walk beside him until he stopped and slapped her again. I watched them go all the way home that way. One day another couple was visiting them and the four of them were out on the porch and suddenly Hobert slapped his wife and she would have gone over the rail if the other man hadn't caught her. Then the other woman said something about it and Hobert slapped her too, and the man laid Hobert out with a Coke bottle. It was weeks before Hobert was up and about again, and I never found out who that couple was because they never came back.
    And there was the saucy black woman named Clara Kitchens who had moved into a two-room shack that once stood across the street from us. "Hot Kitchens" she was called and after she moved in the crowd with the bright-colored, high-powered cars began to congregate heavily at night, and the boarders began to complain about the noise. It was said she drank anything, even liquid shoe polish strained through bread. Once, after an unusually quiet weekend, one of the boarders, Mrs. Bell, was sitting on the porch and heard crying from the shack. She found two infants alone in the house, a boy and a girl. They were under a baby crib turned upside down and the boy was almost dead. After the welfare people came and took the children, Miss Esther personally supervised Em's destruction of the shack and sat around for days waiting for the Kitchens woman's return. But she was never heard from again. Fortunately, for whatever reason, nothing was heard from Doc Bobo about the destruction of his property either.
    There were the young boys I grew up playing and fighting with, like Skeeter, Carlos and