A Cry of Angels Read Online Free

families to hang out at the square dances at Taylorsville. Urged to join social clubs in high school, he became a Future Farmer and talked artificial insemination at the table. In time he traded his piano in on an electric guitar, his years of lessons serving only to make him the only member of the Quarrytown Troubadors who could read music.
    When, as a second-string lineman, Vance inadvertently recovered a fumble and scored the touchdown that gave Quarrytown its first Class-A Championship, and his father his fatal heart attack, Miss Esther threw up her hands.
    Inconsolably grieved, Vance dramatically announced that he was quitting school to understudy a tobacco auctioneer in North Carolina. Miss Esther packed his bags without a word.
    Vance had since married, and now lived with his wife and their twins in Durham. They had only been to visit Miss Esther once in the eight years I had lived with her, but every year Vance did send a Christmas card, sometimes with a five-dollar bill inside, sometimes with a picture of the twins. Sometimes both.
    On Wylie's death Miss Esther found herself in the classic widow's bind: too old to remarry, too young for a pension, too inexperienced to work, and too proud for welfare. All she had was the peeling two-story house in the growing Negro section and a good name in the community. It was one of her friends at a missionary-circle meeting who first asked Miss Esther if it wasn't lonely for her in that big house, and whether it wouldn't be a comfort to her to have the woman's aging mother occupy one of the empty bedrooms. She would be compensated, of course. Miss Esther did indeed find that a comfort, and Mrs. Deedee Cline moved in.
    That let down the gate. It seemed half the church had an aging relative crowding them out of bedroom space, and the siege on Miss Esther's was mounted. Before long it was an informal nursing home, though Miss Esther preferred to call it boardinghouse, and Farette was hired to do the cooking and cleaning.
    All her life a battler, and surrounded by nothing but weaklings, Miss Esther now found charges worthy of her energies. Old people. People forgotten by those who run the world, people with nothing going for them but their wills. This kind of battle Miss Esther understood, and she threw herself into it, with fire.
    At Miss Esther's there was stroke and hum to a day, clash and conflict, a baiting of personality to keep its anger, its vanity, its pride alive. It was never allowed to become one of those places where old people sit and listen to the ticking away of their lives. At Miss Esther's there was humor, there was individuality, there was respect, all radiating from her own bullfiddle personality. "Don't you lay down on me!" was her threatening bedside manner, and she got them up, time and again.
    Into this atmosphere she accepted me as she accepted the death of one of her boarders, a fact to be dealt with, to be fitted into the total thrust of order. But I was young, and needed little attention, so she tucked me away in the household and left me to grow, so long as I caused no trouble.
    I did cause trouble at first, and a good deal of it. For a while Miss Esther thought she was going to have to ask the state to take me off her hands, and she couldn't be blamed for that; even Dr. Breisner thought I was going to need treatment.
    But, of course, that was all in the first dark, turbulent winter—before that magical time when the giant Indian loomed in the doorway—with his fierce, scowling eyes, skin the color of old china, and dried rat's blood on the soles of his boots.
    "Well," Miss Esther was saying, "did you meet the new schoolteacher?"
    "Did I? She's the reason I'm late." I raised the shades.
    She blew on her coffee, watching me closely. "What'd you think of her?"
    "I'd say she's made to order for Jayell Crooms. She couldn't even make up her mind on what she wanted for breakfast!"
    Miss Esther chuckled. "Yep, Jayell marries that one, he's in for a lively