Cry of Angels

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1 "EARRR'UHL . . . EARRR'UHL . . ." The voice sang softly in my ear, wafting on the scent of Tube Rose snuff. It was Farette, the boardinghouse cook, waking me up. "Aw, Farette, no ... please." "I got a dipper of cold water," came the voice coaxingly. "You set up and drink it, it'll wake you up. You lay dere, and I'll po' it down yo' back. Dat'll wake you up too . . ." I pulled the pillow around me. "I was up late, Farette, I had to bring . . ." "I was up late myself! I don't need no excuses. What I need is you outa dat bed and wakin' folks up." It was no use. I threw off the pillow and sat up. "Dere he is . . . !" Farette stood beaming, a wiry little black woman with an assortment of pigtails laced across her skull. She handed me the dipper. "Now hurry and go get 'em up, and don't forget about the new boarder." She closed the door. The new boarder! The schoolteacher! I jumped out of bed and climbed hurriedly into my clothes. 9 A C R Y O F A N G E L S Like everybody else in the boardinghouse, I had been aching to meet the girl who had come to marry Jayell Grooms. She had arrived the night before to begin her stay with us until Jayell could get them a house built, which was to him as important a prerequisite to a proper marriage as the wedding ceremony, if not more so. All we knew about her was her name, Gwen Burns, that she and Jayell had met that summer while he was on the campus of the girls' college she went to in Atlanta, designing a small art center, and that she had already been hired to teach at Quarrytown High. All the boarders were puzzled by the abruptness of Jayell's engagement , coming so quickly as it had on the heels of his broken romance with Phaedra Boggs. Jayell and Phaedra had courted for two violent years before they called a halt, and now, a mere three months after the end of that tempestuous affair, old Jayell was committed to another girl. One of the boarders, Mrs. Metcalf, an incurable romantic, said there was no accounting for true love, it just blooms, and two people can know at first glance that they are right for each other and nobody else. It had happened that way with her and her late husband. At a house party given by a mutual friend, they had met one morning on the path to the privy, and he had tipped his hat and allowed her to precede him, and she knew in that moment that that man was made for her! Miss Esther, more practical, said Jayell was just on the rebound from his breakup with Phaedra Boggs. It was as simple as that. Why else would he have taken the commission to design that art center in the first place? Despite his wild reputation he was still known as one of the most brilliant young architects in the state, and his services were constantly in demand, but none of the previous offers had lured him out of town, had they? No, sir, he was just so tore up over the Boggs thing he had to get away for a while, and when he got there he was ready for the first skirt that swished at him. Fine, said jaunty little Mr. Rampey, cocking his derby, that answered for Jayell all right. Hell, it was just like Jayell to get carried away in the heat of the moment. That's the way he had joined the Marine Corps! But what about the girl? Unless she was too ugly to walk the streets in daylight, or too dumb to read a newspaper and know that a truce had just been signed in Korea and pretty soon the place would be swarming with eligible young men, what kind of girl 10 B O O K O N E would latch onto Jayell . . . give up what Atlanta had to offer to move to Quarrytown? That stumped them all. Quarrytown was a granite-producing center in Georgia, a cluster of bleak buildings around a town square on a southern finger of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It drew its life from profitable holes sunk in the profitless cotton fields of the surrounding...