Tongues of Angels

by Reynolds Price

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened 34 years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try." Set in a summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the deceptively tranquil 1950s, The Tongues of Angels is a story of the 21-year-old painting teacher, a superbly gifted boy, and their advance toward a startling fate. As the now-older man looks back at on that summer, he reflects on the meanings he thought he had learned on the threshold of manhood from the perspective of full maturity.

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 208

Sample

Chapter 1

I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try.

I was twenty-one, an official man. I could almost surely have held him back; he deserved to stay. It wouldn't have taken a hero to do it, just a person with more common sense than I had at the time and, as I said, more attention to things. Half the mistakes I've made till now are mistakes of attention. I haven't really watched or I watched too close. And the only consolation I've had, for his death at least, is the hope that I learned a necessary lesson and that -- from his short life, short not small -- I made a part of the work I've done.

I'm a painter, of pictures not houses. From the time I started, back before grade school and down till now, everything I paint tries to look like the world, not just the world behind my eyes. And since I've been lucky and determined enough to support myself with mainly representational pictures, right through the abstract expressionist years, I've used the place and hour of his death a good many times -- the actual air and light of that evening.

It happened the summer of 1954 at a boys' camp in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. I was a counselor there for ten weeks between my third and fourth years of college. He was a camper, age fourteen -- Raphael Noren. That was two syllables, pronounced RAY-field with the d silent. Fourteen was the oldest you could be at Camp Juniper, pending a dispensation in the event of arrested development. All this was two decades before the nutritional boom of the postwar years excited all the hormonal clocks and made us a nation of sexually precocious giants. But even back then, after age fourteen you were too hot to handle and likely to be more of a bad influence than not.

Rafe was a lot of things; but whatever else, he was not a bad influence. Not intentionally, not on boys his own age. He laid down around him, and several steps ahead, the grave and pleasing air of a generous heart. Most children look out, grab a sight or two, run home and think about what it means for them. Rare was the only outward-looking child I ever knew or heard of. Somehow he felt safe enough to watch the world. One way or other, everybody felt that trait as somehow unnerving. And we all responded according to our natures. A surprising lot of Rafe's elders laughed. Though they couldn't admit it, he was plainly too grown. But the one thing nobody did was ignore him.

Rafe's draw worked in all directions, and that too came from his watchful ways. Very few people think that they've been noticed enough, and they almost always rise to the bait. They tend to think it means you like them. And Rare was all but factory-set to believe the best about everybody and everything. Not that he liked everything he saw. But if you were human, Rafe hoped he could please or at least amuse you. And besides his face, he'd already got his grown man's voice. It was a substantial baritone with none of the hints of embryonic preacher, politician or other fund-raiser that some boys get with premature manhood. It helped him a lot.

His face was also well advanced in its walk towards the uncluttered dignity it might have had at forty. And though his body was still supported on the compact bones of childhood, he was taller than his age -- maybe five foot nine -- and the skin of his calves and lower belly had grown the gold hair of first manhood. I'd grown it myself, only seven years before. But young as I' was, I could already see it wearing away on my ankles and losing the metallic luster that makes you feel more like some brand of ram with gold fleece than a helpless boy.

Rafe was so far ahead of most boys his age that he seemed a little pained at the institutional Saturday night mass shower jamborees. We counselors were supposed to make them sound like major entertainment events. But of course they were just a stab at insuring one bath per week for the many reluctant. I never thought Rare was embarrassed for himself; he worried about the others. They'd fix on his plumbing with helpless amazement. And the key to their feeling was, nobody laughed. I suspect he thought his precocity would shame them and he hated that. Since one of his surprising qualities was wit -- most of the good-looking young people I've met have all the wit of a basement door -- he at first tried to joke about it in public.

At the first jamboree of his session, for instance, when Rare saw them staring, he stretched his member to its limit, strummed it like a banjo and sang "You Are My Sunshine." But he must have seen that it saddened the other boys, like standing by helpless at a vandal act. From then out anyhow he took a far corner and kept himself hid. Better samples of his wit will surface later. But I need at the start to warn you against rejecting him early as a sober saint. That he was not. Any hour in Rafe's presence would let you see a dozen ways in which he was still a boy. But what I ask you to see at the start is something difficult. For surprising lengths of time most days, Rafe Noren showed stretches of majesty. And everybody around him knew it, not just the painter in residence, me.

In republican America, majesty's a trait seen mostly in photographs of Yosemite Valley or statues of Lincoln; so I'm hard put to give you parallel examples. Imagine a tall girl stepping towards you from a Botticelli "Spring" with your name on her lips, not knowing she's grander than the life all around. Or try thinking of a tall lean diver who honors the air turning down, slow motion, from a ten-meter board and vanishes sooner than you might hope. Or the eighteen-year-olds on ancient Greek tombstones. They wave you in with what may be the start of a smile towards absolute rest.

But I've run way ahead. Rafe Noren won't appear for some time yet. I need to explain what brought me near him and why I may have a part in his ending. Like all real stories, this one starts with my parents. They had excellent practical sense but were not highly educated. My father was denied college by a lack of family money, the last of eight children. Mother stayed at home because gifts then mostly did, but also her parents died before she was sixteen. Father had aimed to be a civil engineer; Mother dreamed of being an actress.

That may have made them too generous with me, who was their only child. So I have to admit that I got through my first twenty years without ever holding a real job. I made little pieces of money here and there by mowing yards, refinishing furniture and drawing portraits of children and dogs. But summers were mine for loafing, reading, playing with friends and dodging polio. Those were the standard dreamy times, much written about and featured in movies, when middle-class children in green suburbs invented their lazy heedless way, minus money and jobs, between their well-behaved winters in school.

And the reason I got a job when I did had nothing to do with virtue or vigor. My father had died the previous winter, the kind of heart attack that downs you in the midst of trying to phone your wife and say goodbye. And that was followed by more than a week of lingering agony with congestive heart failure. Mother and I weren't penniless yet; but three weeks after we buried Father, she took a job in an office supply store. And I saw that if I really was going to seize my fate and study in Europe after I finished college, then I'd better put shoulder to wheel as well and see if it moved.

Even in 1954 there weren't many jobs for clean white boys with slim common sense and no practical experience. In the late winter as I was beginning to worry, Mother's minister came up with a letter from Albert Jenkins, a famous youth leader and founder-owner of old Camp Juniper up beyond Asheville. In those days the North Carolina mountains were strewn with camps -- all firmly segregated as to gender and race, though few of us noticed the fact that early. They were generally named for things Indian or things in nature. And none was more highly regarded than Juniper.

A few weeks later "Chief" Jenkins, maybe sixty, spent an evening in Winston and met with a small group of young men like me in search of an easy summer's work in no more than semiwild conditions with pay so low that it seemed Errol-Flynn-buccaneering of Jenkins to state his case. But of course he did, from just below the pulpit of our Presbyterian church, to three dozen men more or less my age one late winter evening.

This is pretty nearly what he said. "I like to think that, for whichever ones of you are earnest tonight and meet our standards for ten weeks at Juniper, you won't be working but reaping a harvest of lifelong gifts -- three fine meals a day, your bunk in a cabin with boys whose minds you're expected to inspire, thrilling religious and musical programs, Indian dancing, woodcraft training, all our entertainment facilities, one day a week off to visit Asheville or climb in the mountains for your spiritual needs and as a token of my personal thanks -- three hundred and thirty dollars on the final day."

Even in 1954, $330 for ten weeks of six-day round-the-clock work was less than joke pay. And when there was a dazed pause between the preposterous offer and the interviews, half of the candidates slumped their shoulders and melted up the aisles. For practical reasons I should have joined them; I needed a lot more money than that. But whether it was the blindness of immediate despair or a sudden fascination with the old man's heat, light and gall, I was one of the six who stayed.

I'd grown up in a wide spectrum of Protestant churches, from the chilled Presbyterians through the sweaty fervor of Tar River Baptists through the politer Methodists and on out to pasture. So I was more than familiar with the generation of dear-eyed thigh-squeezing ex-YMCA types who populated the church and youth field. No denomination was safe. But Chief Jenkins blazed like a nova in their firmament.

He was ramrod straight in a Spartan chair when I entered the preacher's study. The only vacant chair almost touched his. He waved me towards it and gave me the first of his shot-down smiles -- an instant grin on ivory false teeth; then an instant end, as if shot down. Another trait of the youth-leader class in those trusting days was a tendency to proximity. They were hell-bent to crowd you and press the flesh, in Lyndon Johnson's perfect phrase of a decade later. It seemed your flesh was a fuel they needed. They'd rub your palm or the back of your neck or any other part you'd freely concede. I'd long since learned how to go glass-eyed and flaccid in their grip. It cooled their fires and they let you drop. So with Chief's ice-water pupils nailed on me, I took the chair, expecting at least a thigh massage.

I'd read him wrong. He was all but stone deaf and wouldn't admit it. Our meeting lasted maybe four minutes. He said he'd heard of my father's death; was I now the man of the family?

I was.

He'd also heard I was on the college paper. Did that mean I qualified to edit The Thunderbird, the camp's mimeographed weekly?

I hoped it did.

I'd want to cover inspirational news and to make good efforts to use each boy's name once in the weeks he was present in camp. They hadn't taught art for a number of years in the crafts program, an early artist having died of diabetes after the annual watermelon feast. Would I like to organize a sketching class with real substance to it?

I didn't probe the word substance for fear it meant Bible illustrations, but I agreed in principle.

Chief drilled me a final stare in the eyes -- today it would constitute assault. Then he jerked upright on spastic puppet joints. They were the clue to his other secret, which was bad arthritis. He asked if I'd wait outside with the others. And far from making a final grab, another common tactic, he seemed momentarily shocked when I offered a forthright parting handshake.

The last man came out a quarter hour later. All six of us were young enough to lapse into the dumb patience of youth, so we loosened our ties for the standard wait on the grownups. And the cockier three, not I, knocked together some easy jokes about the old guy. "What does he use when he nicks himself shaving? -- Plastic Wood." But they laughed too soon.

In less than three minutes, Chief's door flew open; and the blue eyes bore down on us again. Precisely on me. We'd all stood up, to be sure. But with not one word of regret to the others, he rapped my tie at breastbone level -- my brain felt the thud -- and he said "You're my man. I'll write you a letter." With that he was gone, no farewell handshakes and not a dry crumb for the five stunned losers.

That confirmed my hunch. Wilder than ever and in the teeth of a salary that was less than a tip -- less than a fifth of what I could have made in construction work -- I was bound to accept. I checked with Mother. All her life she saw no point in doing anything that was not your heart's hunger. And I'd inherited her tendency to impulsive choices; so of course she said if it's what I wanted, that was all she needed to hear -- just go. A few days later when Chief's formal letter came, I signed on readily and added an acceptance that was more Pentecostal than I generally manage to be on paper. I didn't quite shout or speak in tongues, but I said something like "I promise you an abundant harvest for your trust in me." I had that glowing a view of myself, though only a Chief could make me admit it.

The time of my boyhood was a far more fervent time than many now believe. Today anybody whose eyes glint fire, and who sees himself as a gift to the world, is likely to be a flimflam man or an out-of-state strangler, maybe both. But don't forget, we boys born in the early 1930s had watched our parents body-surf the Depression and in some cases wipe out. We'd been too young to fight in the Second War but just old enough to hear the news and understand what an all-time evil genius had brought on the conflict. And we got a thrilling dose of patriotism and high moral expectation from our participation in scrap metal drives, old bacon grease drives (to grease shell casings), paper drives, war bonds.

In short we lived through the grandest long entertainment event in human history, with the gleamingest heroes and villains. Our standards for the future were immensely and rightly high. Show me a later villain with the black radiance of Hitler or brighter heroes than Roosevelt and Churchill. And the fact that not one of us had fired so much as a single live shot left us with high hopes of our own chance at grappling with a demon someday. Chief's eyes then had stirred that tender wound inside my mind. I've said it yearned for rousing touch and a call to action but maybe not then.

Anyhow I navigated the final months of my classes, concentrating less on my studies than on the manufacture of adequate reasons for not spending weekends at Mother's -- she lived two hours from my dormitory room. I must have understood that I was beginning an effort to bury my father. To be sure, he was decently interred under gray Vermont granite, with vacancies beside him for Mother and me. Bury him in my life, I meant.

The sights I'd witnessed in his last few days are, to this day, the worst I've seen -- and as an artist-journalist, I saw Vietnam. But even the sights don't begin to match the domino set of mental dilemmas. You are now the man at bat in your home, plus you've suddenly got the woman you envied him all your life. Nothing stands between you and her, except God of course and a Heavenly host with flaming swords. But that spring and summer, I was slaving full-time to blind myself to the fresh home movies that were scalding my mind. Not remembering my father meant not seeing Mother. I tried it, as I said, and she let me -- to a point.

But I did spend ten days at home in early June. Mother left the house for work at eight-thirty every morning and never got back before six. That freed me to sleep as late as I wanted. Then I'd get up, slip on some old shorts and draw or paint watercolors in the steamy yard. Or I'd write the endless illustrated letters I was noted for among my friends. I'd tell them my news, inch by inch, with semicomic marginal drawings. The sketches would burst now and then into my equivalent of visual nuclear war, a careful bird or flower they might want to frame or risk blaspheming the Holy Ghost. It was what I could do that none of them could, just that one thing; but they all seemed to like it. After supper Mother and I would sit in the den and watch the television that Father had introduced into the house only two years before.

Those were the good days of Jackie Gleason and live drama and of Liberace's epicene debut. A good index to my father's kind nature lies in his first response to Liberace. The three of us sat in dumbstruck silence through the whole candlelit hour of the entertainer's TV debut. When it ended I really couldn't guess my parents' reaction -- their musical taste ran to Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians -- but when Mother rose to make more popcorn, Father looked at me earnestly, "Son, couldn't something be done for him?" Not with him, notice, but for him.

And there Mother and I sat through most of my ten nights at home. We were a good way too far gone in life before TV to become the instant zombies that most later Americans are, at a flicker of the tube. Still we were glad of the lazy diversion and the excuse not to talk. One of the hundred things we'd agreed not to mention was how I planned to get to Juniper. I had a dozen friends with cars, and buses were thick on the roads.

But three nights before my departure, Mother brought me a dish of lemon ice cream and said "I apply for the chauffeuring job."

I drew an honest blank.

"To drive you to camp. I'd enjoy that if you would."

I knew she was struggling for nonchalance, but her face couldn't have looked anymore like a wound if I'd struck her a blow. I asked if she could take the time off.

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She said "If we left Saturday morning, I could be back by dark Sunday. I've already asked for Saturday off. I'm still the best driver you know."

The last claim was true and still is. She drove the way Fred Astaire danced, as if her fingers were putting out green leaves with no pain or work. I sat there spooning cream, trying to deny what I entirely understood. This woman had manufactured me after all. I'd lived inside her body nine months. I saw and felt every atom of pride it cost her to ask that. I'd all but bought a bus ticket that day, but I said "I'd be honored."

Now it's a brisk two hours on the interstate, but then Asheville was a hard uphill four hours. The whole way we both held in. There'd be long stretches of silence. And if either one of us spoke, it was mostly a reference to sights on the roadside. Thirty years ago once you were in the mountains, there were numerous craftsmen's displays by the road. You could see fine baskets and hooked rugs, salt-glaze crocks and churns of the good old kind, and chenille bedspreads in poisonous chemical colors. Peacocks strutting, dawn in the Smokies, the whole Last Supper down to the spilled salt. We stopped at several of those. And at the last one, I unthinkingly bought a three-by-five cornucopia hooked rug for the vestibule at home. The pattern was primitive but the colors were worthy of a Persian weaver. And that did it.

Mother was not a hair-trigger weeper, so there were no tears. But the silence right after I bought the rug was deeper than before. And at last with Asheville in sight, she said "Bridge, let me say it now and don't stop me. You buying that rug was the most help anybody's given me yet."

Again my lifelong blood share in the depths of this woman's mind rescued me. She stopped there, thank God. But I suddenly knew the truth she'd beat me to. Her house was my home; in the face of my marriage a few years off, it would be my home till the day she died. One of the few things I'll say for myself here is this, I had the guts then to spell it out for her and say she was right.

Juniper was forty-five minutes past Asheville in thick green country. You turned off the paved road and followed a narrowing dirt trail up through small cedars and junipers, then on till the normal trees were shrubs beside the huge-waisted two-hundred-foot hemlocks. And then you broke out of dark into sunlight -- the camp itself. It covered the equivalent of a long city block with the Jenkins home, the dining hall and the lodge. Then scattered up the hill were the crafts and Indian lore cabin, some other log buildings, a field for archery and tetherball and all other sports. Then climbing steeply for two hundred yards was the wide horseshoe of residential cabins and bathhouses.

Mother and I had a prior understanding, a lot like the ones adolescents force on their parents. She was going to drop me off at the lodge. We'd say our goodbye and she'd drive off, with no looking around, no introductions. Childish as it was, it turned out to be a good idea. I was almost the last counselor to arrive; and dungareed young men were loping all around us -- they weren't called Levi's or jeans for years to come. A few of the urban types even had new axes, well on their way to woodsmanship.

I'd been an Eagle Scout, with palms. So I didn't have that much to learn about chopping and sawing, axe sharpening, fire building and such open-fire delicacies as dough on a stick and pork and beans, heated. The classes were conducted on a broad rock shelf near the top of the mountain to the north of Juniper. On Monday it too would be the site of a camp, an elite survivalist outfit for boys from fifteen to eighteen. The empty campground consisted of little more than a clutch of ramshackle tree houses from the previous year. The first task for this year's boys would be the erasure of last year's work and the building of their own tree houses. They called it Tsali after a hero of the nearby Cherokees, and a good deal of the curriculum involved an effort to recover Indian skills that our great-grandfathers had lied, cheated, stolen and killed to eradicate.

As I said, I marked time through the woodlore classes, thinking such unproductive thoughts. But after we'd eaten the good beans, bacon and biscuits, Chief Jenkins stood in the midst of our circle, closer to the fire than I could have managed. With his unpredictable but always wooden gestures, he gave us an orientation speech that was just a warmer version of his Winston talk. I've mentioned that he shone among others of his kind. It was on two scores. He had no fleshly designs on his staff, and he burned the hottest brand of spiritual gasoline I'd ever seen. But that first night I understood something I'd missed before. Half of Chief's intensity and power came from his brevity and his boxy gestures.

He might be outrageous in his vision of excellence, but he was never boring. His weird little jerks of arm or head proved he meant all he claimed. And no hot-gospel liar could have raised a dime with a body that awkward. But the blue eyes worked even better by firelight. And he ended with something like "Think about this, my young friends tonight. Go lie on your cots in the black mountain clark and think this over before you rest. You've agreed to take on, for ten whole weeks, the healthy future of numerous souls. Never once doubt it -- these loud wild bodies, these knockabout boys that will try to craze you with pranks and noise are nothing less than souls from God that you must tend and send forth from Juniper, better than they came, on the high road to manhood. Think. Please think."

Generally Chief seemed to quit, not finish, any speech he gave, so he sat down then. The head counselor took over -- Sam Baker, another sane enthusiast. During the school year Sam taught at a nearby boys' school; and his slightest move revealed his foundry, which was the U.S. Marines. He followed Chief's spiritual generalities with a cool rundown on problems to expect. In declining order they were homesickness, cursing, bedwetting, exhibitionistic masturbation in boys over twelve and constipation. And that was about it for problems apparently. Sam finished by mentioning the camp infirmary, with its nurse. But he issued no special warnings on health, despite the fact that we were barely clinging to the flank of a granite mountain in untamed forest stocked with bears and panthers, bobcats and rattlers.

Then Sam sat down and I could see I was not alone in feeling the powerful wash from his wave. All of us counselors looked at each other and shook our heads. They were entrusting each of us -- none of whom was a father or even a husband -- with fourteen live human children, seven every five weeks. And this was it for orientation?

Once he sat down Sam did add the word that he'd be underfoot around the clock for on-the-spot advice.

I'd been nursing an inward smile of superiority to all this fervor. But at that point I remember it dawned on me, They're taking me seriously. That was a raw experience for me, the standard sheltered child of my time and place. Wasn't my generation the first that middle-class America decided to keep in childhood well beyond the age of twenty? Till that night anyhow no one else but my dying father had turned to me and said You're it. It thrilled me more than not.

And the final hour only tuned me higher. We didn't actually toast marshmallows, but we sat in a loose circle around the big fire. Sam asked us to introduce ourselves, so we went around the circle and heard each man. The oldest was Roger the swimming counselor, and he was not yet twenty-five. Most of us were sophomore or junior students at small colleges in the Carolinas. Some were bound for the service; Korea was still in arms and hungry for every boy it could get. Two were engaged to be married, one at the end of these ten weeks and the other at Thanksgiving. We were children who thought you should streak out of childhood as fast as you could, and we were the last such American generation.

The immediately remarkable person was Kevin Hawser. With one year to go at Yale, and in a tight race to graduate first in his class, Kevin was the Robert Redford among us. He was six foot three -- built strongly with a frank open face. He was also an expert pianist in all brands of music and a jaw-dropping magician. Not that he spoke that self-servingly on the first night. Those were facts that transpired in the course of the summer. But there at the campfire, I saw that Kev was likely to be my nearest friend.

I told them I was Bridge Boatner from Winston-Salem, that I had a year left at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and that then I was hoping to get a Fulbright and study art in Europe, preferably France or Italy. Somebody asked if I wasn't worried about the draft? I was able to say truthfully that, as the only son of a widowed mother, I was exempt.

Several sang out "Lucky!" and laughed. Since that was what I'd secretly felt since we knew Father was dying, I was still touchy about it.

But Chief said "A thoroughly merciful provision," and attention passed to the man beside me.

After that Chief rose a last time. Again he thanked us; again in general terms he reminded us of our high privilege and duty. And then he added a revelation. "Up there, high over Tsali on that ledge, is the well of Juniper's sacred strength. It's an Indian prayer circle scraped in the ground, packed by dozens of grown men's feet and ringed with dozens of crude sticks. Each stick is the sign of one man's pilgrimage. It is my fondest hope that, whatever your denomination, each of you will find your own way there before summer ends and pledge your life to the sacrificial service of all mankind. Some of you may think it looks a little high. Some may even think the idea is childish. It's not the most accessible spot -- that was intentional. But eat this plentiful simple food, drink this spring water, firm your limbs in weeks of service; and you'll find the climb seems far more possible. It's not a secret we share with campers. That is vital for you to remember. They're not yet strong enough in limb or spirit. But before ten weeks has finished here, each one of you will have the limbs to do it. The only question will concern your spirit. Will you need to and want to? The place is waiting." He drilled us a final blast from the eyes -- Chief invented the laser years early -- and sat back down.

Then Uncle Mike Dorfman, a genuinely skilled musician and anthropologist, led us in singing old camp songs. Any of the millions of Americans who are veterans of the camps of the 1940s and '50s are likely to join me in saying that very few later experiences ever match the shivering joy that can well up at such a time, in such a circle. Maybe there was a whiff of Hitler Youth muscularity in the tradition, though weak and awkward boys were not reviled. But the fact remains that, at the right time and in the right place, campfire singing equaled Handel for laughing grandeur against the night -- "Tell Me Why