Street of Angels

by Joe Derkacht

  Giving up in defeat, Cedric trudged around the corner of the building, to its Bougainvillea Street side. The lights were burning in John’s office. He saw them through the windows. He reached above his head and knocked on the glass. When there was no response, he shouted Willimon’s name.

  Was the man deaf? Had he died of a heart attack? Was he, along with his board of deacons, rudely ignoring him? Were they huddled in a corner, hiding from him? Though 68 years old, he felt tempted to jump up, see if he could peek through the glass. There must be something he could stand on, maybe a ladder inadvertently left outside?

  Conscious of the passing traffic and inquisitive stares, he decided to try the parsonage, which was further on down Bougainvillea, just past the church. As he made his way along the fence to the gate (the pickets matched the church’s brown trim), he wished he had phoned Willimon at his home before bruising his knuckles on the church’s steel doors. It could be the man had simply neglected to turn out his office lights.

  Halfway up the flagstone path to the house, he saw the front door unexpectedly fly open. A young blonde woman, a baby crying in her arms, rushed out to meet him.

  “Oh, thank God it’s you, Reverend Champion!”

  “Is something wrong with your baby?” He asked, instantly alarmed.

  “No, no!” She said, on impulse reaching out with one hand to touch his arm. “But Johnny was called to the hospital on account of one of our people having a heart attack and all, and I just now had a call from my neighbor, that something terrible’s happened to her son.”

  “Who?” He asked.

  “Sister McIlhenny,” she said. “She sounded awfully scared--something about Angel put his eye out.”

  He ran for the gate, with no thought of thanks or goodbye, or a glance behind him, and no thought at all, other than a single drawn out prayer for help, until he reached the McIlhenny’s and ran into their yard.

  Angel’s voice pierced the air with heartrending shrieks. Stella, or Sister McIlhenny as he usually addressed her, was bent over him, struggling with him while he thrashed beside one of his statues.

  “Brother Angel!” He said, addressing him in a commanding voice. “You must lie still, son, and keep your hands away from your eyes.”

  Stella looked up, startled to find him standing there. Angel, as though hearing the voice of God, immediately lay inertly on the ground, letting his hands fall to his sides, his shrieks reduced to awful groans.

  “Sister, go call the hospital. Tell them we’re bringing the boy into Emergency.”

  “But--but--” she stammered.

  “Go, now,” he commanded. “We’ll drive him ourselves. It’ll be faster than calling an ambulance.”

  She ran up the path to the stairs. Dropping to one knee, Cedric bent over Angel and told him he meant to have a look at his eye. Angel whimpered, as Cedric placed first one hand on his brow, and the other on his cheek, to spread the eyelids.

  “I can see it, son,” he said, privately shuddering at sight of the jagged piece of metal. Fleetingly, he marveled that the boy had not hurt himself years before. He’d often found him bent over his sculptures, either a wooden mallet or hammer in one hand and steel chisel in the other, face pressed mere inches from the stone or wood surface he was working.

  A hammer lay next to Angel. A chisel lay several feet beyond, where he must have reflexively thrown it in reaction to his pain.

  “You must lie absolutely still and not touch your eye. I’m leaving you for a moment to fetch my car, and when I’m back, I’ll carry you myself.

  “Do you understand?” He demanded. “Absolutely still, that’s the only way we can help you. Will you do that?”

  “Ye-esss,” Angel moaned through gritted teeth.

  “I’ll be right back for you, son,” he said, using his most reassuring sounding voice. How grateful he felt, that he had providentially parked his car in front of Flowers Baptist instead of leaving it at his own church and walking over.

  Seconds later, he backed his Cadillac down the street. Jerking the vehicle onto the sidewalk in front of the house, he left the engine idling. In the brief moments since he had run from the McIlhenny’s, a handful of neighbors had gathered at the fence. He ignored them, as he ran to Angel’s side.

  “It’s Reverend Champion, son,” he spoke softly, afraid of startling him. “Are you ready?”

  “Unnhh,” he moaned.

  “They’ll have everything ready for us at the hospital,” Stella called out, as she descended the stairs from her house with an old, olive-drab army blanket in hand.

  “Good,” Rev. Champion said. He bent to one knee, and in one smooth motion gently lifted Angel in his arms.

  “For shock,” she said, gesturing with the blanket.

  “I’ll put him in the back seat,” he told her. “Once you’ve the blanket over him, make sure you keep his head completely still and he keeps his hands away from his eye.”

  “Is he killed?” A young white boy piped up.

  “No, son, just hurt, thank God,” he answered. The growing crowd parted like the Red Sea for them to walk through, and Cedric gestured with his head for Stella to duck into the back seat through the open door. Bending over, he gingerly installed Angel, careful to lay his head across her lap.

  “Keep his head absolutely still, Sister,” he said warningly. “I won’t be racing any, but you know how the chuckholes can be around here.”

  Ioletta, seeing the commotion from her yard, managed to make it to the middle of the street just as the black Cadillac eased its way from the curb.

  “Lord Jesus! Lord Jesus!” She cried. “What can be happenin’ now?”

  She halfway ran, halfway waddled, one hand to her dangerously heaving bosom, to Stella’s. The crowd of onlookers was dispersing.

  “Is someone deaded, is someone kilt?” She cried out.

  “It’s Brother Angel,” a young black girl remarked, riding by on a banana-seat bicycle. “There was blood drippin’ down his face, and he wasn’t movin’ none.”

  “It’s true,” a woman neighbor said, nodding her agreement. Seeing Ioletta’s eyes widen in fright, she quickly added, “Now don’t you worry none, sister, Reverend Champion done took ’em to the hospital.”

  Still gasping from her exertions, Ioletta leaned up against Stella’s fence and buried her face in one hand. The world seemed to be spinning around her head.

  “Lord oh Lord,” she groaned in prayer. “How much can one person suffer?”

  Whether it was Angel, or Stella Jo, or herself she was praying about, it’s difficult to say. Perhaps it was all one and the same to her.

  #

  In spite of the odd, hostile glances Rev. Champion and Stella were initially given, they stood together in the hospital lobby, holding hands, praying fervently, as the ER doctors worked over Angel’s wounded eye. While you might feel self-conscious at such moments, praying in a public place, the self-consciousness tends to bleed away, once others start coming around to ask for prayer or even to rally to your support. That’s what happened to Cedric and Stella. By the time an hour and a half or so had gone by, what with the needs of so many other people surrounding them, their anxieties over Angel had become shared anxieties, like a burden made lighter by so many more hands. Besides, there were people asking about the church fire and making sympathetic noises, offering their moral support. One of the men, whose face Cedric vaguely recalled from early in his ministry, even offered how he would be back in church, once it was rebuilt.

  “Mrs. McIlhenny?”

  Stella looked up, startled to hear her name called. Angel’s accident came flooding back into her mind, his shrieks of pain and Rev. Champion’s miraculous arrival upon the scene. A doctor in green surgical scrubs looked inquiringly at her, glancing sideways at Cedric, who in a consoling gesture took one of her hands in both of his.

  “Faw-tha Champion?” He said, his speech broad with the vowels of Boston. “You’re the one wh
ose church burned down, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he answered, ignoring the doctor’s Catholic appellation for him. Somehow, his church seemed a million miles away and as many years in the past. “Mrs. McIlhenny is a neighbor. How’s her son, Doctor?”

  “He came through the surgery quite well. He’s in recovery and you’ll be able to see him in a few hours.”

  “H-his eye?” Stella asked.

  The doctor took a deep breath before answering. “You have much for which to be grateful. If the sliver had gone deeper--well, I wouldn’t like to think about that.”

  He fixed them with a stare. “Whose idea was it, by the way, to drive him here without waiting for the ambulance? You do know his head should have been properly immobilized, don’t you?”

  A wave of shock rolled over Cedric and Stella. Stella spoke while Cedric attempted to pull what seemed like a knife from his heart.

  “Ambulances don’t always make it to our side of town,” she said.

  The doctor’s gaze wavered. His lips, pursed into a hard line, pulled down into a frown of resignation. Turning from Cedric and Stella, he disappeared through the hospital ward doors.

  Sensing Stella’s strength was about to give way, Cedric helped her to a seat.

  “His eye,” she muttered.

  “We can’t worry about his eye, sister,” he said, kneeling beside her and patting her on the arm. “All we can do is thank the Lord he’s okay.”

  Covering her eyes with one hand, she leaned wearily back in her chair. “Do you ever tire of thanking God?”

  “Like when somebody burns down my church or accuses me of something terrible?”

  “Like--like everything,” she said, letting her hand fall, revealing tears.

  A sense of inadequacy seemed to envelop him. At the same time, he knew his presence there was more important than words.

  “You know what I know?” She abruptly asked. “Whatever happens, if I look hard enough, I can see God behind it.”

  “Even when eyes are blinded?”

  “Even when churches are burned down--oh, not that the Lord causes it,” she hurried to say. “But it’s like He’s there, looking over the devil’s shoulder, winking at me, letting me know that no matter what the old rascal throws at me, God is ultimately in control. Everything will work out fine, trials and heartaches and all.”

  “Especially through trials and heartaches,” he said, adding an “Amen.”

  “You know,” she said, smiling wearily, “I think I’m finally growing up.”

  He nodded agreement, knowing there were very few people in the world who could really appreciate what she had said. In spite of the fact God seemed intent on working it more deeply into his life through the occasional reminder, he was grateful he had learned that lesson for himself a long time ago. For her, it was God winking over the devil’s shoulder. For him, it was God’s hand guiding him past burning churches and blinded eyes and the rest of life’s disasters as if they were obstacles on the way to a final, better destination. It wasn’t as if the Lord’s hand made him impervious to pain, or sorrow, or shock; but for many years, now, it had given him the confidence to come through. There was a Bible passage from the Psalms that described it perfectly: Lord, you have laid your hand upon me, you hem me in, behind and before.

  Cedric patted her arm and smiled, and with a jolt remembered that he had failed to secure Flowers Baptist for his Sunday services. God’s hand meant everything, made all the difference in the world--which he hoped he would remember and appreciate when preaching from atop the steps of his church tomorrow. In his mind’s eye he saw his flock crowding the sidewalks and spilling onto the street, faces turned upward for comfort and inspiration. He prayed it wouldn’t rain too hard. Few of his parishioners ever used an umbrella.

  ****

  Chapter 23

  The hospital corridors, with their yellow lights and highly waxed floors, seemed narrower and darker, on the day following Angel’s accident, than Stella remembered. The door to his wardroom was open, the interior darker still, except for sunlight peeping through closed venetian blinds. The sounds of a basketball game, barely audible, wafted from an invisible radio.

  “Angel?” Stella called timidly. The 3-bed ward’s privacy curtains swathed each of its patients in deeper darkness.

  “Angel?” Ioletta added her voice.

  “Here,” a woman answered quietly. The privacy curtain, suspended from a ceiling track, was pulled noisily aside. The nurse, a tall, slender blonde, motioned them in.

  “Is he all right?” Stella asked, unnerved by the sight of her son’s bandaged eyes.

  “His vitals are fine,” the nurse told her, as she shook down a thermometer. “But it’s hard to say more, when he won’t talk to any of us.”

  “He don’t talk,” Ioletta blurted. “The boy’s mute.”

  “Oh--” she faltered. “No one told me, and it wasn’t in his chart. Is he deaf, too?”

  Stella didn’t answer, instead reaching for one of Angel’s hands. On the opposite side of the bed, Ioletta shook her head at the nurse and grasped his other hand. They were fine, strong, calloused hands but lay unresponsive to either woman’s touch.

  “Angel?” Stella whispered.

  There was no twitch of recognition from him. The women exchanged glances.

  “Something’s wrong,” Stella said. “He’s not humming. Have you heard him hum at all, Nurse?”

  “Hum?” She asked, obviously perplexed. “How do you mean?”

  “The boy hums all the time,” Ioletta said. “He has a gift for it.”

  “I can’t say I’ve heard him,” she answered. “But we can’t be with any one patient all the time. There’re too many others.”

  “Angel, honey,” Stella said. “It’s me, your momma. Can you hear me?”

  Except for the warmth in his hands and the pulse at his throat, the women might have thought he was dead.

  “I could find the doctor for you,” the nurse offered helpfully. “He is making his rounds.”

  At Stella’s nod, the nurse left.

  “I wouldn’t worry none,” Ioletta commented, staring anxiously at Angel.

  “I’m not,” Stella said, patting her son’s hand. “Angel, it’s your momma. I love you and Jesus loves you. Can you hear me, honey? Everything will be fine.”

  Ioletta clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Don’t you jist hate hospitals?”

  “They are a necessary evil, at times.”

  Startled, both Stella and Ioletta glanced toward the foot of the bed, where the doctor stood, smiling pleasantly, having entered the room in soft-soled shoes.

  “Oh!” Ioletta blurted from embarrassment.

  “I’m Dr. Everson, Mrs. McIlhenny. I’m sure you remember I operated on your son’s eye. The nurse tells me you wanted to speak?”

  The doctor withdrew to the open doorway. Stella lowered Angel’s hand to the bedcovers and gave it another pat.

  “I’ll be right here,” Ioletta told her.

  “His eye--” Dr. Everson began. “The eye socket, I mean, is healing nicely. There were no real complications from the surgery. Other than the problems your son had prior to his accident, Mrs. McIlhenny, he really is quite healthy.”

  “But he doesn’t respond, he doesn’t seem to know I’m here.”

  “The nurse tells me your son is mute,” the doctor said. “How does he normally communicate with you? Does he know sign language?”

  “He...” she began, her voice and her gaze trailing off. How could she explain that her son was not really mute, that for some reason unknown to her and to anyone else, he simply chose not to speak? How could she explain there were other ways in which he communicated, that speech between them was not necessary like it was for most other people? To answer him, she simply shook her head.

  “Put yourself in his place, ma’am,” he said. “You can’t speak and you’re mostly blind, and then you lose one o
f your eyes in a terrible accident.”

  “Yes?” She said, looking hopeful.

  “The boy is fragile. He’s gone away for a while, if only in his mind. Eventually, he’ll come back.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Allow his body to heal, and I think he’ll come back. Even most perfectly normal people require time to adjust to losing a limb or an eye, or a breast to cancer, as far as that goes. Sometimes people have to be allowed the grief of losing part of themselves. It can be an enormous emotional shock.”

  She nodded, understanding far better than he guessed.

  “Can I take him home?” She asked.

  “In a few days, perhaps. Are you and your husband able to care for him there?”

  She nodded, not wishing to explain that she had been widowed for more than a dozen years.

  “If you have any other questions, please call me at my office,” he said. He hesitated, smiling grimly, obviously wanting to say more.

  “Yes?” She asked.

  “You won’t always find me as discourteous as yesterday,” he said. He briefly offered his hand for her to shake, and turned and walked away, as she stared in mute surprise.

  “Is he comin’ home with us?” Ioletta asked, still holding on to Angel.

  “Not now,” Stella said, recovering herself. “In a few days.”

  “Did you ax the doctor why he ain’t hummin’?”

  She again took Angel’s hand into her own, and pressed it to her cheek. “The doctor says he’s just gone away for a little while.”

  Ioletta’s eyes grew in alarm. “Gone away? Is he comin’ back?”

  “One thing I know to do is wait,” Stella said.

  “Better at it than I am,” Ioletta muttered.

  Stella gazed lovingly at her son. The hospital seemed, for the moment, to have grown miraculously silent, so that her ears heard nothing other than her own heartbeat--no rattle of bedpans, no radio ballgame, no sound from the corridors. A deep sense of peace invaded the room, forcing out all fear and anxiety.

  A Bible verse ran through her mind: Those that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not grow faint.

  “Amen,” Ioletta whispered.

  “Amen,” Stella agreed, knowing without it having to be said that the exact same passage of scripture ran through both their minds.