Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Ingersol had not given up. He made himself a scotch and soda and was searching Jimmy’s room for the rest of the LSD. “They said three hits,” he kept saying. “There’s another one somewhere.”

  The reason we had put the boys in the guest room was so we could search Jimmy’s room, but I almost didn’t have the heart to do it. Once I had found a syringe in Malcolm’s drawer and was so horrified I threw it away and never mentioned it. The idea of anyone giving himself an injection was so terrible my mind would not let it in.

  “Come on,” Ingersol said. “Don’t just stand there. Start looking.” He was in the closet with the gerbil cages. Jimmy had about forty gerbils. Eric bonded with him by buying him pets, another item I tried to keep out of my conscious mind. Eric helped him clean up after them and feed them and I tried never to go in the room where they kept the cages.

  Eric was behind me now. We moved into the room and began to search the dresser and the desk and the closet that held Jimmy’s clothes. Ingersol had already searched the clothes he had been wearing but I searched them again. Way down inside a pocket of his pants I found it. A tiny pink square of paper with another paper folded over it. So small that it was stuck in a wrinkled corner of the pocket. I fished it out and laid it down upon Jimmy’s bed, right in the middle of his University of Mississippi victory quilt that my brother had given him for Christmas. It was lying on top of the score of the Ole Miss–Alabama game of 1972. Ole Miss, fourteen, Alabama, thirteen.

  We just stood there looking at it. “What should we do with it?” I asked.

  “Take it to a laboratory,” Eric answered. “They have a place at the police department where you can have things analyzed.”

  “I want a drink,” I answered. “I can’t even stand to look at the goddamn thing.”

  “Let’s take him hunting,” Ingersol suggested. “I have a friend who owns an island in the Mississippi. Let’s get him off where we can reason with him.”

  “There should be someone to kill,” I suggested. “I want to kill every drug dealer in the world.”

  I went upstairs and got the glass of vodka I’d been wanting for several hours and Eric and Ingersol and I sat in Jimmy’s room and talked for a while. We put one of his phonograph records on the turntable and listened to the lyrics of the songs. One of them was a really good song, “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.”

  It wasn’t all loss. The next morning I got up early and took some aspirins and a Dexedrine and finished writing my poem. The drummers opened the spillway. They walked over the bridges, carrying the knives, the neckties, the uniforms, the candles, the matches, the children.

  Mississippi

  She sat in her cell awaiting her death. Death was imminent. They had done it, they had been caught, tried, and convicted, and unless the governor of Mississippi called in the next two hours they were going to be put to death. Larkin and Steven and Isaac too, although Isaac had not pulled a trigger. It would be the first triple execution in Mississippi in twenty years. If the governor didn’t call. He won’t call, Larkin decided, and I don’t give a damn. I’m tired of all this. Tired as I can be but I wish they wouldn’t kill Isaac. He didn’t want to be there. He shouldn’t have to die. He wouldn’t have killed Jacob if he had been alone. He would have chickened out.

  Larkin sat back on the bed. She was thinking about the night they danced at the Grace post office to raise money for the Red Cross. About the gray-and-white-striped nurses’ dresses her grandmother had made for them to wear, Larkin and her sister, Charlotte, and her cousin Donna and her cousin Baby Sugar. She thought maybe she was still there, on a hot summer’s night, in the Delta, with the mosquitoes and gnats and sweet smell of cotton and earth and DDT and her grandfather driving her to the post office in his Buick and all the ladies sitting around on chairs and her cousin Baby Sugar getting scared and her having to tell her all the words again. “Way down yonder in New Orleans. In the land of the dreamy dreams. There’s a garden of Eden. That’s what I mean.’’

  The starch in their dresses was as fragrant as honeysuckle. Delicios had ironed all afternoon on them, making the hats as stiff as cardboard and the sashes as crisp as toast. As each dress was finished, Delicios had laid it carefully down on the side of the big double bed. Larkin was propped up on the bed watching her iron.

  “Are you going to have a baby, Delio?” she asked. “Aunt Estelle said you were going to get a baby even if you don’t have a husband. Is it true?”

  “It might be. I don’t want to talk now. I want to get these dresses ironed and start on supper. Where are your cousins if they’re going to wear these dresses? When are they coming over?”

  “I don’t know. Some men were here from town and Granddaddy and Uncle Flan went to talk to them. I guess they’ll get Baby Sugar and Donna when they get done with that. Or their mother might bring them over. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Go out in the hall and look at the clock and come tell me what it says.”

  “I will in a minute. It’s too hot to get up. I want to go on and put on my nurse’s dress. Is that it you’re ironing?”

  “I don’t know one from the other.”

  A little brown-skinned boy about five years old came walking into the room. He was wearing an old washed-out coverall and he was barefooted.

  “There’s Someral,” Larkin said. “He woke up.”

  “I’m hungry,” he said. He walked up to the dress that was being ironed and felt it with his hands. Then he buried his face in the smell of ironed starch.

  “He’s the cutest little boy who ever lived.” Larkin was laughing now. “Look at what he’s doing, Delio. He’s eating the dress.”

  “Take him into the kitchen and give him a piece of cake if you want these dresses ready for tonight.”

  Larkin got up from the bed. She was a nine-year-old girl who ate too many mayonnaise sandwiches and fried potatoes. She didn’t move as fast as her sister or her cousins. She got up from the bed and went to Someral and took him by the hand and started down the long dark hall to the kitchen. “Come on, sweet little old boy,” she was saying. “Let’s go round up some cake.”

  His hand was as warm and moist as a puppy. They walked down the hall together past the painting of Lake Washington made by Flan’s old girlfriend from Aberdeen, past the faded reproductions of English hunt scenes, past the butter churns and the icebox dripping ice and on into the kitchen where Larkin’s great-grandmother was making mayonnaise by the sink. Someral’s grandfather was beside her dripping in the oil as she turned the beater. Neither of the old people seemed to notice as they went straight to the pantry and found the pinch cake and cut two pieces and put them on plates. They sat down at the table and began to eat the cake with their fingers. “Get a fork,” Someral’s grandfather said over his shoulder. “Don’t be eating cake with your fingers.”

  When she thought of Someral it was of that summer day. His big eyes looking up at her, his hand in her hand, the newness of him before the world began to use him up. Before they found out how smart he was and all the things began that led to him being at Millsaps College in Jackson at the time of the troubles and standing out on Woodrow Wilson Avenue when a crazy man decided he wanted to kill a nigger. If she started to cry, Larkin thought about the long dark hall from her grandmother s room to the kitchen and the treasures that were there, the smells and the cypress floorboards that had come from the heart of trees that grew in the lake where they swam in lightning storms and dared the gods to strike them. In the end the gods won, didn’t they, she would tell herself and then she’d go on and cry.

  At the very end, when she was standing by the hospital bed watching him die, after the car had thrown him across the street and into the lamppost and the killer, Jacob Miley, had gone driving off down the street, after she rode to St. Vincent’s Hospital in the ambulance, not knowing he was going to die, thinking he was going to live, not knowing she was going to have to drive to the Delta and tell Del
icios that Someral was dead and the hope and promise and two years of college education were all dead now and all the hope everyone had had for everything, she remembered his small hand in hers, more than anything she remembered his hands.

  Then she and Isaac told the police who it had been and months went by and nothing happened and Jacob Miley was not arrested and then she and Steven and Isaac went and killed him, only Isaac should not have gone with them, not even just to drive the car.

  Her keepers walked by the cell again. The minister and the lawyers and her sister and the ones she was not going to talk to anymore no matter what the governor of the State of Mississippi didn’t do or did. She was through with all of them and their courts and their law and she closed her eyes and tried not to think about the death room or Someral crumpled up against the lamppost or Isaac in his cell with his family and two rabbis or anyone crying anywhere in the world over anything at all and instead she thought about shooting Jacob and how much she had loved killing him and did not regret it any more than she regretted knocking a clay pigeon out of the sky on a Sunday afternoon down by Rosedale in her cousin’s field. Not as much as a clay pigeon. Less. She had shot him in the face and Isaac watched and Steven shot him in the chest and stomach and then they tried to run away but the police caught them on the back road to Greenville, ran them to ground by the Wayside store.

  It was the nineteen fifties when they danced at the post office to raise money for the Red Cross. It was to help American soldiers all over the world. Because Granddaddy’s brother had been a general and cousin Dan Hotchkiss was still one and was in charge of helping the Red Cross in its drives. Cousin Dan Hotchkiss had killed twenty Japs in the Second World War and been decorated at the White House. He had sent Granddaddy a photograph of the ceremony and it sat on Granddaddy’s dresser beside his photograph of his mother. We love the armed forces, Larkin thought. We are violent people and full of ire and venom. All of us, all the people of the earth, take revenge, we always take revenge. We do not wait on the vengeance of the Lord. I am sorry I killed him because now I am going to die, but I’m glad he’s dead. Someral didn’t even want to be there at the march. He wanted to go on a dig. All he really wanted to do was have a job and an education and go on a dig and not at our old mounds on Esperanza but far away in another country, where no one would even notice he was colored. So, what time is it now? Don’t think of it. Think of us in our striped uniforms and our starched white hats and the red crosses made out of seam-binding tape that Miss Teddy sewed on our white aprons. Jimmy Turner was at the dance with his new bride. In his air force uniform, although he was home on leave, and his bride, Miss Courtney Isabel, in a light-colored dress with roses that melted into the folds when she walked. They danced the waltz alone on the floor in front of everyone. “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed. We vowed our true love though a word wasn’t said.” Then we did our dances and we sang, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary, to the land of our dreams, where the nightingales,” what?, I have forgotten the rest of the song. Miss Laura Manchester from Dundee played the piano for our songs. The piano belonged in the Episcopal Church reception room but Grand-daddy sent three men to haul it down to the post office for the fund-raiser.

  The white people were inside the post office but, except for the women serving cakes, the black people were on the porch. Granddaddy never let the black people be left out of anything because he helped them and he loved them and his father had been a teacher and a lawyer and a Greek scholar and had not come to Mississippi until after the Civil War. On Esperanza black people were appreciated and educated and treated with respect.

  It’s Granddaddy’s fault I’m going to die, Larkin decided. I have thought of that before. I’m glad he’s dead and doesn’t know what he did to me. No, it’s my own fault for getting Someral to come to the demonstration. That was the selfish act. I should have let him stay at Millsaps College. I shouldn’t have gotten him involved in that. He was the only hope Delicios had. Maybe the only hope any of us had. I let him come. I got him to come. I egged him on to do it. So here he came, in his little crooked glasses and his skinny arms and legs and bookworm smile and he stood out in the crowd. He stood out anywhere he went. So maybe Jacob took him for a Yankee. I wish I could have asked him that before I shot him.

  To twenty-one, that’s how long Someral lived. To twenty-eight for me. To hell with it. I know death. I’ve seen it before. I saw Someral die. I saw Jacob die. I saw Granddaddy die.

  Now they are going to kill us too. Steven first, then me, then Isaac and it’s Granddaddy’s fault and Big Momma’s too for teaching us to respect all men and Momma and Daddy’s for dying when I was five years old and leaving us to be raised by old people who read Greek at night and didn’t believe in hating anyone.

  Then why did Granddaddy teach me to shoot guns? Why did he take me out on Sunday afternoons to the clay pigeon field and pull the machine himself to fly the tablets and yell out, Here comes one, Larkin, get ready. Tell me why he did that if he didn’t know one day I’d have to shoot Jacob Miley in the face and at short range too, so what was all the bother with the shooting range?

  She looked at the watch they had let her have back that afternoon. It was still four o’clock. Not a minute had passed since the last time she looked at it.

  Someral was studying anthropology, which was so new at Millsaps they didn’t have a textbook. All they had was a young man from Harvard with a beard and a lot of copies of papers people were writing all over the world and some charts of where things were being dug up. “He goes to the NAACP like you do, Larkin,” Someral had reported. “He doesn’t bathe. He’s a hippie. He said there’s no call to use all the water for bathing when lots of people don’t have good water to drink. He said the water in the Delta, in our well, isn’t any good because of the DDT. Do you believe that?”

  “And he wants you to dig in our Indian mounds?” They were sitting on the Millsaps campus, down by the bookstore where there was a bench and where Larkin came to meet him every Wednesday afternoon from the time he started there. She had graduated the year before and had a job as secretary to Charles Evers and had quit talking to anybody she knew. But she took care of Someral. She had made out all the papers to get him the scholarship and she went to see him every Wednesday and paid for anything the scholarship left out. She paid for it out of the money her granddaddy had left her and the money left from when her mother and daddy died. She had a lot of money in the Deposit Guaranty Bank but she never used it. She was ashamed of it because it had come from cotton and DDT. She just left it in the bank and lived on the money Charles paid her. If he didn’t pay her she got some out of the bank and when Someral needed it she got it out too. This Wednesday stuck out in her mind because the head of the Anthropology Department walked by while she was sitting on the bench with Someral and nodded to them and she thought he looked as crazy as Someral had said he was. His beard was down to his chest and he was wearing corduroy pants on an April day. He was the head of the Anthropology Department and also the only professor in it.

  “He wants to come down there with me, down to Esperanza, and look at it and decide if we should dig.”

  “Did you tell him there’s no one there now? No one lives in the house. Did you tell him that?”

  “He doesn’t care. He wants to see Momma and Man and Big Jess and all of them. He wants to talk to Mr. Coon Wade and ask if they can dig in the mounds and then he has to write to Washington to the main place and get permission from the Indian tribes that were there.”

  “No one knows who made the mounds.”

  “Yes, they do. He told me about it. They know just which Indians were where. That’s why he has to look at the mounds. You can come with us, Larkin. He’d like to know you. I told him about you.”

  “I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him at meetings. I didn’t know that was Mr. Hirsh. I thought he taught science.”

  “It’s him.” Someral sat back, watching her. He didn’t understand Larkin anymore. Ever s
ince she went to work for Charles Evers she was changed. She was thinner and she pulled her hair back with a barrette and looked older. She was always looking around, like something was after her, even when she was just sitting with him on the bench or out somewhere getting something to eat. Even when they were in the colored part of town and safe as toast.

  “You need anything? There’s plenty of money, Someral. I want you to tell me what you need. Is your car working okay?”

  “It’s good. I don’t need it much. I walk over here from the apartment and then I go to classes and the library. I have to write papers for Mr. Hirsh and all the classes. I think I’m doing well now, Larkin. I think I’m doing good work for all of them.”

  “Of course you are. You have a brilliant mind. You just got scared at first. Too many people we don’t even know. I felt the same way the first year I was here. I don’t trust any of them. People are nuts, Someral. I hate to tell you that but you’ll find it out anyway. Bobby Kennedy’s coming here next week. Did you know about it?”

  “Mr. Hirsh knows him. They were buddies up north. Is he going to be the president, Larkin?”

  “We hope so. Yes, he is going to be. If they don’t shoot him first. I hate him coming to Mississippi. I was against it. I told Charles not to let him come.”

  “It wasn’t up to Charles Evers. It was the university that invited him.” Someral looked away from her. It was hard to look at Larkin if you disagreed about anything. Since she worked for Charles Evers she was worse than when she was little and everyone had spoiled her to death to make up for her momma and daddy dying. Now she was the worst she had ever been in her life. Someral didn’t want to go to the NAACP and do all that stuff she was doing. He wanted to keep on going to his classes and get a college degree and right now he wanted to get back to his apartment to a little girl from down by Tupelo who was a nurse’s aide at Saint Dominic’s and had met him one night at a café and had come home and stayed ever since. Her name was Lily and she was nineteen years old and could stay up all night making love then get right up and put on her uniform and go on off to her job.