Free Tears Are for Angels by Paul Connolly Page A

wait for a truck," I said.
        Pretty soon it came along, rattly and slow, dust clouding behind it. It slowed down and made the turn and then the colored driver saw us and stopped. The Negro and I climbed into the back with the lumber and the stove.
        "Just a little way now," I told the driver.
        The truck shackled on through the scrub, and in a minute or two the bushes and small trees fell behind us. It's seventy miles from the sea, but the sea may have covered it once, for all I know. Those dunes, they shift sometimes in the wind. This sand won't grow anything at all. A man named Caldwell once thought oil lay under this geological freak of sand and hard white clay and scattered bunches of bladelike grass. So he bought it all and built a shack and a rickety derrick and went to drilling.
        He never struck anything, but after he died geologists came to make sure the old man wasn't just crazy, thinking there was oil under here. He may not have been crazy, but all the geologists found were old sea shells and the shifting, biding sand.
        And now it's mine. That day, we went on along the almost disappearing road and then we saw green again, the few sparse trees around that inexplicable spring of cool, sweet water. The four canted posts of the old derrick, it's superstructure gone with the years, were stark against the sky. Old Man Caldwell's cabin had long ago disappeared.
        "All right," I said to the driver. "Stop here."
        The driver and the Negro unloaded the truck and I paid the driver. He got in the truck, turned it around, and went back the way he had come, the truck moving more swiftly now.
        I went over by the spring and I looked around a minute and then I took a stick and drew a ten-foot square in the soft earth.
        "We'll build here, boy."
        "O.K., Cap'n."
        The rest of that day we worked and then we rolled into blankets from the trunk and slept till the sun called us and all the next day we worked and then slept again and finished it the third day. I was of little use as yet, with only my one arm, but the Negro was a hard worker.
        Then we had it finished, one room, square and un-painted, a small hole for a window, another larger one for a door, and one just large enough for the stovepipe, with a slanting shed roof and no porch. The floor was plain lumber, and we had built a bunk into one corner and some shelves along the opposite wall and a larger one against the blank rear wall for eating.
        I gave him the fifteen dollars, and his thanks, except for questions asked and instructions given, were very nearly the first words between us since the car had stopped on Hertford Street. He took a few steps along the road away from me and then he stopped and looked back.
        "You aim to live here, Cap'n?"
        "Yes."
        He shook his head. "Don't laugh at me, now, Cap'n, but there's sperrits here."
        "What spirits?"
        "Just sperrits. I heard 'em last night. Bad, Cap'n. This ain't no place to live."
        Anger flared in me as if a sudden storm had crashed in my stomach.
        "Get your black carcass off my land," I said.
        He turned around and walked off up the road, not hurrying, just plodding steadily away from there. I went back and sat down in the door of the cabin and looked at where my arm had been and swore out loud.
        But after a while the fury went out of me and I began to make plans again. An idea came to me and I thought about it, examining it carefully until dark, and then I found the flaw in it and discarded the idea and went on into the shack and got a can of beans off the shelf and hacked it open with the ax.
        

CHAPTER NINE
        
        But the Negro was right. Maybe there aren't any spirits. Maybe he just felt something in the air, the atmosphere. But whatever it was. he was right about it.
        Because something happened to my brain out there. Maybe I was a