Cry of Angels

38

38 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 323 A C R Y O F A N G E L S 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 324 B O O K T H R E E 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...