Cry of Angels

42

42 AS SOON AS THE MEN LEFT, YOUNG BOYS WHO HAD BEEN IDLING AT the door went running. In a matter of minutes people were stopping each other in the street, calling up to porches, shouting across the creek. "Lemme through there, get out of my way!" Em bellowed at those already crowding to the door. "Where you going, Em?" I said, catching up to him. "Down the river. Leave me alone." "When will you be back?" I asked anxiously. "When I'm drunk enough to stand gettin' killed," he said, and hove down into the road. The news of Mr. Teague's humiliation of Doc Bobo and his singlehandedly standing off the Flat Creek crowd swept through the Ape Yard with electrifying force, greeted everywhere with shock, disbelief . The story leaped from ridge to ridge, growing in the telling, and the store experienced a sudden upsurge in business. Mr. Teague was in no mood for them, and when they tried to pump him he shrugged 348 B O O K T H R E E them off and went upstairs. When pressed, I related what had happened as accurately as possible, sticking strictly to the facts, not trying to make Mr. Teague out a hero or anything, as I knew he would have wanted. Tio did the same, I suppose, to the best of his ability. He let it be known that this was a place of business, and he didn't have time to waste with idle rumor-mongers, but as long as bona-fide customers were buying or making token payments on long overdue bills, Tio had a story to tell. That afternoon people began pouring up the hills to Wolf Mountain . New faces appeared at the jobsite until the crowd numbered in the hundreds. It was rebellion now, blowing openly through the hollow. Jayell moved among them, confused, anxious, as happy people babbled at him. "Come to get my house started," shouted Speck Turner, "me and Loomis and Simon . . ." "I got some money, Mist' Jay," a man covered with rock shed dust was saying, "they puttin' me off my place . . ." "Shut up! Shut up! I can't think!" Jayell ran to a pickup truck where a half-dozen men were helping down battered shop boys: Carlos, grinning through his bandages, Skeeter with his foot in a still-moist cast, Jackie James, walking stiffly so as not to move his back and hollering at his mother to leave him alone. "There's too many!" cried Jayell. "We can't move!" "Then give 'em sump'n to do," said Carlos. "You organized crews in Abbeville for Smithbilt, you can line these niggers up!" "We need lumber, scraps of any kind," shouted Jayell. "You there, Loomis, get some people to bring axes and start clearing those trees . . . Carlos, get in that trunk I brought up from the shop. Pull out those plans, Skeeter! Get your shop boys over there, never mind . . . trim work, baseboards, start 'em on cabinets . . . we gonna, listen to me, everybody, we're gonna need hand tools, anything you got . . ." Jayell turned in circles, shoving aside those in his way. "That's it, we need materials and tools, anything, anything. Now, the rest of you just move over there until somebody tells you what to do. These fellas in the bandages will be in charge." Scraps of planking started coming up the slopes, a board from a truck bed, a hog pen. They came with hammers, handsaws, a pound of nails in a rolled paper bag. Through the afternoon and into the 349 A C R Y O F A N G E L S next day they kept coming, with jalopies loaded down with lumber, scraps of plywood and tin, rolls of rusted wire, never sure what would be of use to this builder. Pits were dug for barbecues, trestles laid on sawhorses. They brought messes of vegetables from summer gardens, hams pulled from boxes of salt; iron washpots of stews simmered under the oaks and black women ladled hush-puppy batter in skillets of boiling fat. The land was cleared, new houses started. I. V. Tagg sat on a stump with his old hand-cranked computer and cranked and figured, signed contracts and notes, and ran cash to the bank and came back to figure again. "It's chaos!" he cried. "It's madness!" "I thought this kind of thing was dead...