Father stood and, with a brand new seriousness, said to Lisk “You’d think a fellow might get a glimpse of the suit he’s worked to hang on his only son.”
Lisk said a nervous “Yes sir.”
And I said something about rush traffic.
We left and, halfway to college, Lisk said “You feel like a goddamned heel, I know.” He’d lost his own father in the Second War.
I said “Not really. I’ll see him, like I said.” But we knew I was lying. And before a month could bring me home again, my father had been struck down and was dying.
And here tonight I’d howled in baboon glee at another kind elder who had meant me well. It’s a not untypical quandary of youth, but I still don’t think I was being sentimental. Even then I knew the difference between smiling at Chief’s unworldliness and branding him an idiot and buffoon as we just had. I was deeply ashamed and knew I wouldn’t sleep. I’d lie in the sound of seven sleeping boys and torture myself. But I was sane enough to realize that I couldn’t go down now and wake Chief up, explain my guilt and beg his pardon. Lord, was he locked in Mrs. Chief’s arms, cherishing the gleam he’d brought to her eyes?
No, I went to Cabin 16 and checked on the boys. With my flashlight I checked individual faces. All were out cold in various postures, all adding the din of confirmed mouth breathers to the peaceful night. I got my warmest sweater, my flashlight, a sketchbook and a box of colored pencils and headed back out.
A fat night watchman named Claiborn Hayes patrolled the grounds after midnight. He had every symptom of the abject pervert. One look and you’d easily have believed any mild charge against his stuffed white face—peeper, flasher, ladies’ underwear thief, though he’d got through years with no complaint at Juniper. I thought for sure I’d run across him and need to explain. But otherwise I knew the place would be empty of all but me and raccoons, snakes, an occasional bobcat, owls, bats, a theoretically possible panther or bear and more than a hundred sleep-suspended souls, all known to me by face if not name—and all of them, trusting Bridge Boatner to spare their throats in the vulnerable dark.
Their trust was well placed, and I never came anywhere near seeing Claiborn. I’ve never since felt more soundly chastened for normal self-doubt. I know I’ve never felt more well intended toward humankind. I went at first to the campfire ring. It was even darker there. I took up the flashlight to guide myself, then thought better of it and left things dark. I felt my careful way to ground level, the first row of benches, and settled in to say a few prayers. My prayers then were just people’s names, as I said. But also by then I’d been so lucky I knew a lot of people worth naming. So the litany took maybe six minutes. Then I switched on the flashlight and tried to add to my angel sketchbook.
At that point in my work, I’d pared my art down to two things. There was a mainstream of more or less realistic pictures of places, things and people. And then there was a smaller branch of imaginary places peopled by creatures of the mind, my mind to be sure. All my life, not just since the recent encounter with death, I’d been fascinated by the fairly worldwide idea of angels. The English word comes from the Greek angelos, and angelos translates the Hebrew word for messenger. So an angel, in the sacred sense, is a messenger from and to a divine center.
Since for years I’d been sure that my work came from such a supremely powerful and knowing center, I’d taken to keeping a sketchbook devoted to it. In special moments, like tonight here alone, I’d try to set down quickly and with a minimum of forethought a guess at the face of an angelic messenger. Not that I really thought they have faces. I was making my own contribution to a line of glorious-to-silly guesses that stretch from at least the Ark of the Covenant down to those American primitives who even now portray the flaming message and the messenger through whom it reaches their minds and guides their hands.
I tried a Grecian-type profile, my usual first gambit. But nothing more would come. I clicked off the light and waited. Even in the night like this, I could only think of angels in color. Every color on any known prism. That was why, in dark thick as tar, I had my rainbow pencils in hand. In another black minute I imagined an eye, round as a marlin’s, that blank but knowing. Then I opened the book and tried to draw it. It looked more like a doll’s glass eye. I was too hemmed in—this circle, these close trees muffling me.
So I moved a short fifty yards to the lake, the far end of the pier. There I huddled down low and at once felt better. There was clear sky overhead, with stars so bright they were searing. Beyond was the distant splash of the falls off the mountain and the odd cavorting sleepless fish, whatever it knew. It was warmer here, with the deep lake holding yesterday’s warmth. In a few more minutes, I switched on my flashlight again and turned to my book. And in maybe five minutes, I’d finished a face so filled with news, and all of it good, that I thought at once I’d finished nothing better since Father died. Again I doused the light, but the face still burned before me. Its eyes were wider than human eyes. Otherwise it looked like your finest friend, tuned to perfection in every cell. The lips were parted on the glowing coal of news on its tongue, and a widening banner streamed from the mouth. I meant that to be the meaning of life in some angel dialect, not yet known to me.
Then I lay flat and watched the stars. I’d been an avid consumer of popular astronomy since childhood. And for years I thought of someday combining astronomy and art, as a joint life’s work. But then in high school, the hope went smash on the reefs of algebra and geometry. I couldn’t plot the movement of a point on a line, much less the luminous gears of the sky. Still from age eight on, I could find the more famous constellations and some of the planets. So I spent a few minutes now, scanning their light and speculating grandly. Was anything new? Some new Child born?
And then I fell asleep, cold as it was. However long I stayed unconscious, I had no sense of the chill or the strangeness of where I was. I suppose I might very well have stayed there till lifesaving class began at nine. Some numb boy with his blue nuts cringing would find me, apparently dirty and dead.
But after maybe twenty minutes, I felt vibrations. Footsteps were bearing down on the pier. It had to be Claiborn, the harmless deviant. Not that he’d care but my best true alibi had to be sleep. I’d come out here with a case of insomnia. The stars had worked their usual spell and I’d fallen asleep.
The steps reached my head, then stopped and stood. I heard the crack of knees bending and finally a voice that at first was strange. “You’ll be dead in a minute.”
I really was on the vague boundaries of sleep, so I didn’t respond with words or acts.
And again the voice said “Mr. Boatner, sir, we got rules here. Don’t go die on us.” The vowel sounds in the word die lasted the better part of ten seconds—some Georgia cracker. Who but Rafe Noren?
I looked up and back and at first saw nothing, black empty space. Was I also hearing things? I sat up, stiff as a cripple, and looked again. And finally he appeared, a camper rambling alone in the night. Talk about rules!
I said “Is it morning?”
“Depends on your meaning. It’s three A.M.” Rafe stood a long moment, then dropped down a couple of yards away. ‘I’ll tell you my secret if you’ll tell me yours.”
I accepted his deal. “You tell first though.”
He said “I’m the only living child with insomnia. I lie down at lights-out with my whole cabin. Everybody tells jokes in the dark for a while. They try to talk sex, but they get it all wrong. And I don’t know all that much more, to set them right, so I’m pretty bored. Then they slip on off, one by one. All but me.” He seemed to be finished.
Again the strength of his voice surprised me, a firm baritone. All my boys were reedy sopranos. And the drawn-out vowels improved his effect. He could linger down low and, if you weren’t looking, sound forty years old. So I tried to keep him talking. “What’s got you awake?”
Rafe waited so long I thought he’d left. Then he said “You’re bound to know.”
“I do
not, no sir.”
He fumbled in his dungarees and found some object, which he hurled at the water. It made an earnest thunk.
I said “Was that your watch?”
He laughed a note, neither yes nor no. And then he said “I thought you counselors shared all your problem boys.”
I said “Not always.” Maybe I was still half asleep and dreaming. Anyhow I didn’t feel urgently curious. I just didn’t guess that Raphael Noren had a long hard story behind his eyes.
He said “Well, damn. I thought I was famous.”
I told him he was—for dancing and wit, for general good sense.
Then his arm hurled again. But nothing hit the water. He said “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” I begged his pardon. “Honest to God. This is my first year.”
Rafe laughed more fully. And that too deserved its local fame. The laugh was a joyful uphill rush, against his better wishes.
I thought we’d have half the camp down on us. But no light showed and nobody else came.
Eventually he said “I’m the richest boy in Georgia.”
“Good,” I said. “Put me in your will.” If I hadn’t known how unlikely it was, I’d have guessed he’d had a stiff drink or two.
He said “Let me get that absolutely right. I’m the richest boy in Georgia, south of Atlanta. They don’t keep records for the rest of the state, the white-trash part. But I’m undisputed, statewide—let me tell you—for the sadness crown. Saddest boy, statewide. And if you know Georgia, that’s a title worth having.”
I waited but, when he didn’t say more, I sang two bars of “Marching Through Georgia,” with all its memories of Sherman’s rampage from Atlanta to the sea, ninety years ago.
Rafe said “Not that, more recent than that. See, my mother died four years ago. My dad’s not home, always on the move, propagating our cash. Negroes raised me up, Negro men and women. Thank the Lord, I guess.” It had come straight out of his mouth, slow and grave with no trace of self-pity. He might have been speaking to a bus tour of old folks, cruising the state.
I was way too tired and cold to disbelieve him, though I guessed I could hear the fascinated gaze of the born taleteller beneath his words. I’d check it with Kevin sometime tomorrow; he had Rafe’s file. I said “You know I ought to send you to bed.”
Rafe said “You try it. All I’d do is torch your cabin, and you’d be responsible for seven fried boys—little barbecued white boys, all your fault.” In that voice it sounded like a real possibility.
I said “You’re a lot too kind for that.”
The laugh again. “You don’t know me.”
So I asked to hear the rest of his record. Was it arson, manslaughter, first degree?
He said “Calm yourself. You’re planning to check my camp file, ain’t you? Spare yourself the try—young Noren’s records are sealed by law. Underage, don’t you know?”
I said he was giving me the fantods now and he liked that. Then I asked how much he knew about sex. Sober though I was, and recently shamed, I was already hunting new people to regale with Chief’s recent talk.
Rafe held off awhile. And then he coolly asked if I planned “to get funny”? If so, he’d wish me good luck in life and run like a dog.
I assured him funny was the last thing I was. And then because I was still feeling burdened, I went on and summarized the evening’s events—Chief’s talk, our laughter and my present regret.
Rafe Noren could listen as well as he talked. His face watched you keenly but with no flinch of judgment. For all you knew he planned any instant to hand you a wreath of deathless praise or lasting blame.
By then I was upright, leaning on a piling. The upper air was cold now, to taste of. I’d hoped to find such air all summer, a genuine surprise.
By the time I finished describing Chief’s speech, Rafe had moved farther off still, three or four yards. But his watchfulness drilled through the dark between us. When I finished with what a worm I was for mocking at Chief, Rafe said “Chief well knows every bit of that, Bridge. Don’t tell him a word.”
“Of what?” I said.
“Chief knows that you all laugh at him. He’s too good to care.
I asked how he knew.
Rafe said “He’s told me. See, I’ve known Chief for countless ages, since before I was born. My dad came here in the 19-and-30s when this place didn’t even have running water. They sent me up here when my mother died—two summers in a row, ten weeks every time. I tore the place up, I was so damned mad. Set a bonfire in the infirmary one night, smoked the nurse up bad and scared her even worse. So Chief decided to take direct charge. He moved me down to live in his house, just him and Mrs. Chief and that pitiful Clara. Clara lost about ten pounds, my first week there, just cold fear of me.
“And Mrs. Chief—Lord, bless her fat heart—called me aside and said ‘Ray, we love you. Don’t doubt that we do. But you got to live in the world that’s here. Don’t go try to ruin it. It’ll just wreck you worse.’ I knew she was right and told her so, and I meant to change. But the second week I threw a firecracker right in their commode—split the sucker in two! Chief didn’t do a thing but politely ask me to step back in there and clean up the mess.
“It turned out I needed to mop the whole bathroom, about the size of the Everglades. Then he made me crawl up under the house, to see if water had got under the tile and soaked the subflooring. Talk about scared! It was darker than this whole night under there, and I wasn’t more than ten years old. Seemed like the place for a snake convention. I found out the subfloor was bone dry though and the ground underneath. Then he let me come on back to daylight. Last summer I asked Chief why he made me do it, young as I was then and so fouled up. He just said ‘Ray, nobody that can walk is too young to follow their deeds to the source.’ ” Towards the end of the sentence, Rafe switched to a voice that was almost identical to Chief’s.
I said that sounded too tough to me, on too young a child. “But you said Chief knew about us laughing at him.”
Rafe said “He mentioned that last summer too. Said something like ‘Ray, do what you think is right and the whole damned world’ll fall down laughing in the dirt. But pay it no mind—you plow right on.’ ”
“Chief said damned?”
Rafe said “I may have just thrown that in. I say it a lot. Makes me feel like an outlaw—Dammit to Hell! Goddammit to Hell and you go with it! And hell, it’s about all the cussing a child can get away with.”
I asked if somebody had been laughing at him, to provoke that strong a response from Chief.
Rafe said “Not but everybody, day and night. They laugh at my peculiar name, my dancing, my accent, my scary face.” “Where did your name come from?”
“My mother’s favorite painter. I wish she’d liked somebody closer home—Winslow Homer or John Singer Sargent. Singer Noren does sound fine.”
I debated telling him that Raphael was first and foremost the name of an archangel, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to open that kettle of fish, so I just said Raphael was a perfectly good name. Then I asked “What’s wrong with your face?”
He laughed. “I forgot you can’t see in the dark like me. Cast your mind back to art class. Remember the monster that sits by himself and draws those simpleminded outlines?”
Long ago here I mentioned his premature manly look, so I thought he was angling for a compliment. I said “Poor lad, there’s plastic surgery though. With his pa so rich, he can get fixed up when he’s old enough.”
Rafe waited so long that I suspected I’d again misjudged his age and endurance. I was about to say “Just kidding” when he said “I’m waiting till my looks come back in style, the year 3000.”
Also in silence I realized he was right. They were otherworldly looks, swept back as if by a hot wind but strong enough to endure the blast. I said “Would you let me draw your picture?” He was the first human being I’d wanted to add to my messenger file. Not that he looked like a winsome cherub, at the edge of on
e of his Italian namesake’s madonnas. He was just a credible Angel Gabriel, as Gabriel enters a real room ten-foot square and greets the girl rising to face him in the dim far corner, “Hail Mary, full of grace!” By that point I was ready to tell him. But without saying more I switched on the flashlight and showed him my sketchbook.
He turned every page, not saying a word, just little growls and grunts that seemed to indicate pleasure. After the first four or five pages, he got into the sexier angels.
I’d noticed that in Genesis 6 it says how the angels fell in love with some good-looking women. They came down to Earth and boarded the women. Nine months later here came children that grew to be giants. William Blake had apparently noticed the same passage and illustrated it. So I was following Blake in drawing a few angels with enthusiastic genitals.
Rafe didn’t especially linger over those pages but pushed on steadily through all. Then he handed me the book with nothing but “Thank you.”
I waited a little, then asked if he thought they were foolish.
“I think they’re the best thing I’ve seen since that albino deer.”
I had to laugh. “When was that?”
“Hunting with Pa and his drunk friends. They were all out in their thousand-dollar hunting suits, shooting up the woods like World War III. I was about ten seconds away from giving it up and heading on home when, all of a sudden, here’s a pure white doe. Just there, standing there, looking at us, not scared. Even the biggest jackasses shut up for a minute. And everybody watched like she was a ghost. I was pretty confused myself— I still think her eyes were brown, not pink. Whatever, anyhow I was speechless as a rock. I was storing her up in my mind for life. But one of Pa’s friends fired a shot—the moron asshole of all south Georgia. Buckshot and broadside. Course he couldn’t hit a fat chained-up elephant, thank Jesus. But I hit him, slapped his idiot face. Much to Pa’s regret. When I got calmed down, the doe had naturally evaporated.”
The Tongues of Angels Page 9
