Cry of Angels

3

3 TRUE TO HIS WORD, JAYELL ARRIVED PROMPTLY AT SEVEN O'CLOCK. Gwen Burns swirled into the parlor in a crisp white dress, complete with hat and gloves. When she saw me waiting on the couch, all decked out in my sport coat and clip-on bow tie, she looked surprised but said nothing. When I followed them out and got in the back of the truck, she looked even more surprised—and said something. "All right, what the hell's going on here?" "Oh, him?" said Jayell. "It's all right, Miss Esther said he could go." "Jayell! This is our first time together since I arrived. I've already seen more of him than I've seen of you!" "Aw, what's it going to hurt to give the boy a lift to church? He don't go enough as it is. Wasn't for me and the Indian he'd probably never darken the door." Gwen sighed. "Whatever you say, dear." She would find that Jayell took his fundamentalist credo seriously. Unpredictable as he was, his wildnesswas just as often counterpointed 39 A C R Y O F A N G E L S with the beliefs his mother instilled in him as a child. He had taught shop at the high school, and although he kept a whiskey bottle under his desk, he submitted to a request by the Holiness preacher's boy and started the whole year's classes with devotionals. He slept on a cot in the rear of his workshop, sometimes with a woman, once with two, limped along the streets in unironed clothes, gambled and caroused with the worst kinds of people, black and white, drank and fought with Em and the quarry ledgehands along the river joints, but he never, ever missed church. He turned down a lucrative contract to build a guest cottage for a rich quarry owner's wife, and instead built a beautiful little Catholic chapel, free of charge, for the Italian stonecutters at Glenshade. He devoted an entire summer to crafting animal bunk beds, again without pay, for the orphans at Tucker Village, but while the Jaycees were waiting at the banquet to name him "Man of the Year," he was being hauled drunk and naked from the post office platform with a lady who traveled with a gospel quartet. I saw that Gwen was carrying a Book of Common Prayer. "Are you Catholic?" "Episcopalian"—she slammed the door until it caught—"and you're all Baptists, I suppose." "All but Mr. Rampey. He's a lapsed Lutheran. Oh, and Mrs. Metcalf, she's a Christian Scientist. She takes a drink now and then, but she swears it's not for medicinal purposes." "I should hope." "Myself, I've never joined any church." "I'll pray for you." "Oh, that ain't to say I don't attend. I attend a lot, thanks to Jayell and Em. Miss Esther don't care which ones, as long as they're fairly hardshell." Actually I'd never spent enough time in any one church to develop a preference. Mostly I went with Em, and that exposed me to quite a variety. Usually we visited the off-brand tabernacles out in the country, crossing denominational lines without favoritism, except for those with a little extra whoop and holler, or maybe an all-night sing. At Miss Esther's church uptown, historic Pinnacle Baptist, it was tame as bathwater. The minister spoke softly, the congregation listened politely, and when somebody joined the church they just strolled 40 B O O K O N E down the aisle and shook the preacher's hand and the congregation voted them in, and, well, there just wasn't anything to it at ail. Whereas at our churches a man had to wrestle the devil to get his salvation, with tears and self-denunciations, and when he got down the aisle the preacher struggled with him, and then the congregation came for a turn, and when it all got done, that man knew he was SAVED. The only part of services Em couldn't take was Communion. Whether it was the pomp and silver of historic Pinnacle Baptist or the grape Kool-Aid and oyster crackers of Lamb of God Pentecostal, it sent Em away fighting the heaves. "I hope," said the schoolteacher, "there is an Episcopal church in town." "Oh, yeah," I...