The Tongues of Angels

by Reynolds Price

  Bright Day had decided that the centerpiece of closing night was to be a repetition of the Ghost Dance. The original dance had been the tragic hope of a Paiute Indian seer named Wovoka. Late in the 1800s he taught various tribes a peaceful dance to be performed in long white shirts that he said would render them impervious to harm. The dance, rightly performed, would result in the coming of an Indian messiah. And that wondrous creature would harmlessly dispel the cruel and wasteful white man. Then he’d establish a new order among his own people. The Ghost Dance spread rapidly through the plains and soon alarmed the ignorant U.S. Cavalry who attempted to suppress it. The Indian hope was too bright though. The dance and the struggle continued till both reached a ghastly impasse at Wounded Knee, North Dakota in 1890. There the scared soldiers killed more than two hundred Sioux whose white shirts proved all too pervious to bullets, though the dance continues even today among a dwindling group of the hopeful. Or so my Britannica says.

  The Indian lore boys then, two other counselors, Clara and I would sit quietly working through the sun-struck August afternoons, listening to the soft and cultivated voice of Bright Day as he described our roles in closing night. First would come the lighting of the small peripheral fires that each of the cabins had built beforehand. Then Rafe would dance, to draw the benign notice of the Great Spirit. Uncle Mike and Day would sing some appropriate songs and prayers. Then Chief would speak. And to end the summer, the rest of the boys in Day’s class would put on Clara’s ghost shirts and close the night by pressing on the Spirit for rescue.

  It didn’t seem to occur to anybody but me that the tortured past of the Ghost Dance made it a peculiar, if not a dangerous, culminating event. Who were we hoping to drive away? What kind of messiah did we have in mind? And what about all the blood that flowed at the start of the dance? Day was friendly, with the slow dignity of a member of a species closely related but not quite the same as mine. Yet despite the fact that I talked with him daily, I couldn’t bring myself to reveal my uneasiness. Somehow I knew that he wasn’t staging the dance as a straight historical recollection. He had some hope invested in it still. So I chalked the anxiety up to my brittle inner weather and kept it to myself, with one exception.

  On an afternoon when Day seemed unusually relaxed, I reminded him that there was a National Guard armory just down the road. And I said “What if the cavalry hears about this? We could end up dead.”

  Day very nearly laughed. But once he got his face composed, he said “We could also end up saved.”

  And Rafe, who was beading nearby, said “I don’t know which would be worse.”

  * * *

  So with art class and Indian lore, I spent time every day around Rafe. Up through the second week, he and I had no specially close relation. He was in Kevin’s group of senior boys, two cabins farther up the mountain from mine. The distance between Kev’s fourteen-year-olds and my younger boys was miles longer than the fifty real yards of ground. To be sure I kept my memory of Rafe’s eagle dance. I respected his odd compunctions in art class, and I was increasingly conscious of the other rare qualities I’ve mentioned. But so was everybody. A human being who steadily glows with something more than greeting-card light is not daily issue in anybody’s life, and all of us knew it.

  He dived, swam, wrestled and played baseball with good-natured abandon if not with the skill of his dancing. The fact that there were better athletes in every sport helped all of us like Rafe better. It assured everybody he was one of us. And I think he knew it. Whenever he failed to catch a pop fly or got knocked over in a boxing match, he almost overplayed the role of goofy loser. He plainly loved to think he was normal and would grow up to be nothing better or worse than a happy man. But however much he downplayed his dancing, if you remembered you hadn’t seen Rafe for a day or so, you could always loop by the campfire ring. Chances were, he’d be there dancing—dancing, not rehearsing.

  For he never broke off to correct himself or ever looked up at any spectator but went straight on with whatever urgent business his limbs transacted. On behalf of whom and with what for money and what were the stakes? He was always on the verge of becoming the golden boy of the summer, except that we saw how mercilessly he teased himself and how reluctant we were to join in laughing at a boy who understood this early that his was a sacrificial life.

  * * *

  One afternoon I’d finished my Thunderbird stint early and was poking around. The lake was full of the youngest and loudest boys, so I bypassed that and walked over to the ring to check. Sure enough Rafe was there, in khaki shorts and no shirt, dancing. I thought that, since it seemed plainly a rehearsal, I could talk. So at several points I commented on this or that step.

  Nothing showed I was bothering him. But without breaking rhythm, he finally said “Bridge, I’m dancing. Talk to me later.”

  I sat back chastened and waited while he ended whatever he was doing—something pertaining to the center of the ring, where fires were built.

  Eventually he worked his way to the center and wound up prostrate there, arms out, away from me. He stayed still a moment, then broke his own spell, leapt up, walked over and asked if I wasn’t playing hooky. There was sand all down his chest and arms.

  “Not hooky exactly. I’ve finished up the very next Thunderbird and am airing my brain.”

  Rafe said he’d send his brain with me next time, for ventilation.

  I recalled how he’d turned aside my question about his future, but I thought the air felt different today, and I risked a new question. “How did you learn the way to do this, Rafe?”

  He stared towards the lake for maybe ten seconds, raising both hands to his face for a moment. “Angel messengers,” he finally said. Then he turned back to me with both eyelids rolled inside out and a wide open grin, with dropped upper plate.

  * * *

  On the Sunday that began the third week of second session, a strong chain began to show its links. That morning we had a guest preacher up at the Pasture. He was a startling sight, with lank snow-white hair parted in the middle and hanging to his shoulders. There it was hacked off brutally even. If you’ve seen photographs of the old Franz Liszt, you’ll know the style. It made our preacher look far and away the oldest man I’d seen. If he’d had a beard, he’d have been a dead ringer for Santa Claus’s granddad.

  Yet though Father’s Day was behind us, he asked our permission to speak about fathers. I mean he literally gazed out at our many faces and focused hotly on one, then another. At last he said “Boys and counselors, I have a need to share my own heart’s burden with you. Chief Jenkins tells me that, as recently as June, he spoke with you on the subject of fathers. But I wasn’t here that blessed morning. I was at the bedside of my own dying father, deeper on up in the mountains near Glendale Springs. Since then at the great age of ninety-six, he has passed on over. I need to tell you about that. Will you grant me permission to talk about fatherhood and its divine blessings?”

  My cabin mates were huddled around me. All seven faces looked up with expressions of comic weirdness. His father’s got to be older than the wheel. Who does he think he’s fooling?

  So I had to join the feeble chorus of audible yeses. Everybody urged this mutant to speak.

  He gave his own age first, which was seventy-four. His father had made it to ninety-six in fine fettle, right up to this past May. Then the old gentleman took a mighty tumble down two flights of steps, down one and somehow right on across the landing and then down the second. Understandably he felt poorly for the experience. So he summoned his only live child—our speaker—and proceeded to weaken fast. On the second night he lapsed into a profound coma. More than one bystander said he was dead, but our guest preacher wouldn’t let them haul him out. He said there was hope, and he sat a loyal vigil at the bedside. Then after sixteen unbroken hours, sure enough, the old man opened both eyes, sat bolt upright and asked for a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits and fried Vienna sausages.

  When he’d eaten every mouthful, the
old gentleman took our preacher by the hand and said “Ottis, hear me. I wasn’t asleep. I was dead and in Heaven, whence I saw your patient devotion down here. The main thing to know is, Heaven’s not a place flooded with light like they say or with all that music and famous song. It’s restfully still and dim as a starlit Cuban night”—he’d been in the Spanish-American War—“but otherwise it’s far more wondrous than promised. I never would have left, but they sent me back since you’re a preacher. They said ‘Tell your boy and make him pass it on.’ So now I’ve told you and can go back to bliss.” With that the old gentleman fell back, truly dead.

  And that was it. Except for a few inadequate words of interpretation and local application, the sermon was over. The preacher thanked us for hearing his news. He said never forget it, and then he raised his long arms in blessing. Mike Dorfman rose to pitch the last hymn and could barely conceal a gorgeous grin. Even Chief, who rose to say the last prayer, seemed two degrees warmer with either delight or mortification.

  My boys of course all took it in stride. It was just outrage number two million, twenty-four by the adult race in the past two days. They did want to know at the lunch table if—it being in church and all—that meant the preacher’s story was true?

  By then the comic overtones were fading. Despite the fact that the preacher was sitting beside Mrs. Chief this minute, bolting down chicken, there’d been something in his exotic aura that was rising inside me now like iridescent oil or the pulsing colors of a hummingbird’s throat. I suddenly felt he’d been speaking to me, outrageous as he was with his hair and his loony unvarnished but oddly credible message. He’d at least thrown light on my own father’s life. That life, for the moment, was safe in the starry dark he described.

  That’ll seem unworthy now, a ridiculous deduction from a more than normally nutty pulpit claim. I can only trust that some of you—even in a time of almost universal hospital deaths—have experienced a similar loss, deepened by long hours of vigil on bitter sights. If so, you’ve probably shared my rocky equilibrium in succeeding months. You’ll recall the flashbacks, the endless heart-stopping dreams in which you discover your dead loved one, alive and well, on the far side of the room at a party. You say to yourself “Wait. Didn’t they tell me that Father had died? Of course they did but—look—there he is, laughing and strong. They must have been wrong. Can I dare to believe it?”

  Anyhow in the midst of seven boys, baked chicken, mashed potatoes and peas, I was suddenly moved. I opened my mouth to answer the question—maybe the old man’s guess about Heaven was good as any—but words wouldn’t come. I didn’t go on to howl or stream tears. I was just mute and a little misty.

  The boys all knew about my father, so, they halfway understood my reaction and treated me kindly, with a certain awe. Whoa, one more grownup is showing a feeling. Better watch this closely. The youngest boy, Battle Beecham, even managed to pat the back of my hand. No laughter, no questions.

  I’ll forever be grateful. And long before we finished dessert, I was clear again and laughing. I told the boys to run to the cabin and start their nap while I detoured to speak to the guest.

  I went to Chief’s table and shook the preacher’s enormously long hand. He was one of the old-fashioned Protestant handshakers who wouldn’t release your hand. This one’s hand was warm and dry; most hand captors are cold and moist. I’ve honestly forgot his last name, but I could sketch you a speaking likeness of his face and mimic his sepulchral voice.

  He insisted on standing and drawing off a quart or so of my energy through the eyes. Then at last he said “You especially wanted that news—am I wrong? Am I wrong?”

  I assumed that Chief had told him my background. I also knew that the only hope of escape was to nod, say yes and thank him again.

  He held my hand still, in the lengthening silence. That was another of the great Protestant emotional events, a not-blinking match. He was trying to return, through open eyes, all that he’d drained off me half a minute ago.

  So I took it, smiling.

  Then he said “Bridge—what a wondrous name! Bridge, you pass this news on too. It’s why I’m alive here, old as I am. That selfsame news will keep you alive, if you use it a-right.”

  At last I could feel his grip relax. My hand slid free, though bloodless and numb. I said again “Thanks” and walked away, grinning slyly at Meshach, the black busboy who’d watched my plight.

  He pointed to my hand and whispered “Go rinch it off quick, Bridge—real hot water—else it’ll wither.”

  I laughed and told him I would. But all the way uphill in sunlight, through white-clad boys playing tetherball and chisel- # ing grotesque totem poles to leave here behind them, I knew I halfway believed the story and would pass it on.

  * * *

  That night after taps, the counselors met in the parlor. That was a dim room off the dining hall, meant apparently for entertaining parents but almost never used. Chief had put up a note requesting our presence two weeks ago and rumors had flown. It was everybody’s fondest hope that this was to be Chiefs famous annual sex talk. But in view of the easiness of our work in the second session, and our running good luck with health and welfare, that seemed almost too good to be possible.

  Wrong. When all fourteen of us were seated—all male, all single, all under twenty-five—Chief rose with his usual high sheen of purpose. He began with an unusually relaxed paragraph of thanks for our help in the summer’s success to date. But being Chief of course he suddenly ended the relaxation with a realistic reminder—“As the good darkies say, ‘Don’t call yourself happy till you’re propped up dead in dry shoes and socks.’ “

  Then he went on to praise our health, the clarity of our skin, the forthrightness of our smiles and handshakes. Anyone our age knew that he was telling us, in the universal anatomical code of the time, that he believed us to have torn free—by sheer force of will and faith, here in the unmatched air of Juniper—of the ever-ready toils of masturbation. I’ve said before that he was wrong about me in that respect, among others. And the rapidly sinking level of confessional humor in the counselors’ cabin indicated that I was far from alone.

  Next he said it had come to his attention that two of us were to be married soon. It was his conviction that all of us would in good time join the Earth’s privileged band of the happily wed. Till then however his own experience gave him ample reason to know with what pitfalls and trials we’d be faced. And he therefore hoped that we could suspend our natural modesty and permit him to pass on to us his own gleanings from life.

  I won’t make further fun of an honestly but ludicrously out-of-touch effort to help. Suffice to say that Chief took us through an anatomy lesson that might have enlightened a five-year-old. Then he proceeded through the ethical and theological bases for chastity before and occasionally during marriage. And he ended in an effort to combine further information with a proof of his good-guy nature. He told the old salesman’s story of the innocent and overeager groom who terrifies his bride so badly with the sight of his aroused and ruddy glory that she only just permits his entry. But then as he nears the pearly effusion, she locks down with all her iron muscles and traps him so inescapably that the hotel doctor must be summoned with relaxing morphine before the groom can be freed.

  He’d delivered the body of his speech with blue eyes fixed on a stag’s head hung on the wall behind us. The fact that he now gazed down and met us head-on, eye by eye, surely meant he was moving toward an end. I was torn between relief and disappointment—thank God it’s over but don’t let it end. He again referred to the marriage of two among us. He trusted that the honeymoons of both would profit from this private hour. He trusted that the remainder of us would profit in time. That rich reward would inevitably follow if we pursued the principles outlined here tonight. Then and then only would our virgin bodies discover, with our God-given mates, “the highest joy this Earth can afford—the sight of your God-meant loved one’s eyes as she meets you, transfixed in ultimate union an
d joy by your pure tool.”

  * * *

  Or “poor fool” as we named it when we’d all rushed back to the counselors’ cabin for an incredulous recap. Reports from veteran counselors and years of rumor—nothing could have prepared us for the bonanza Chief unloaded. Being, as we were, a pivotal generation between the old and new brands of American sexuality, Victorian and free, we’d heard more than a few bizarre sermons on the subject. But to a man, we gladly conceded that Chief’s contribution, at one swell foop, had trumped all contenders. And in full awareness of early reveille racing toward us, we nonetheless sat up punitively late, fixing the evidence deep in our memories.

  Alone for a short two minutes though, on the pitch-black walk to my cabin, I knew I’d made a childish mistake. Too many older men had helped me, with their generous minds and affections—my father, my surviving grandfather, Mother’s two brothers, three of my college professors. In the cold night I saw Father plain, the last time I was home before his attack. He’d paid for a new dark blue suit for me and had phoned me at college to say the alterations were ready, he had it at home, come pick it up.

  A friend named Lisk rode with me for the pickup. We were due back at college for a banquet that night; we had to move. But when I ran downstairs with the suit on a hanger, Father’s face dropped—Mother was out shopping. I at once knew the problem but tried to skate past it. I said ‘I’ll come back this weekend and model it then.”