Average Joe and The Angel

"Oh you poor hen," Mrs Harris said in sympathy.

"I wrote to my cousin Connie a month ago and she said to come on out to Seattle where there was plenty of work in my line. But it took me two weeks to get there, part by train, part hitching, and the greater part walking. When I got to her address in Seattle, I found she had lost her job a couple of weeks ago when her company went bust and she had already returned to Chicago. She probably wrote me but I'd already left on my journey. I didn't know anyone there and had to turn back and this is as far as I got after I was attacked and the last of my money and possessions was stole."

"What work you used to do, honey?" Granny Harris asked.

"I worked in a bank as a ledger clerk in Chicago for six years, but they were cutting staff last year and when I started to show with the baby they sacked me."

"Maybe you could help out here by looking at Joe's books for the farm. His uncle, my brother, died suddenly of heart failure last year and he used to file the tax returns for the farm and our personal tax forms. Joe's done his best with the books this year but he can never get them damn figures to balance right."

"Yeah, sure, I'll look them over." I said, as I was happy to help. It's just that after all that food, I felt really sleepy again.

But Granny Harris could see that. "Hey, Joe, honey, see Anjelica gets back up to bed for a couple more hours, she's almost out on her feet, the poor sweetheart."

"Please call me Anjie," I said, "Everyone does."

"I'd call you Angel," Joe said almost too quietly for me to hear as he helped me up the stairs, but I heard him all right.

Chapter 2

1969

Joey Harris continues his eulogy

I asked Momma how they met. She was a heavily pregnant widow, Anjelica di Angelo, who hitched to Conrad to stay with her sister. But Aunt Connie had already left to go back to Chicago. The hospital nurse told her that Papa was looking for dairy workers and that being Friday she should wait in the general store and watch out for his motorcycle and sidecar. She didn't have any money left and stubborn as she is, she wouldn't wait in the warm store, she stood outside in the wind and snow. When she saw Joe pull up and limp to the steps, she looked into his eyes and fainted. It's all right, she was carrying me inside her and I turned out fine!

When she woke, she was in bed at the farm. I came along a couple of weeks later and soon Momma was Papa's right hand. She had worked in a bank, before she married my biological father, and she soon sorted out the farm books. Papa was no fool, but paperwork was his blind spot and Momma naturally filled in that gap. He didn't think he could afford to pay for farm hands to help, especially since the dairy here in the city had gone bust and his milk was going to waste. But Momma found out about Granny Harris's brother's nest egg in the bank, put away for a rainy day.

Well, she told him straight, 'Joe, it's sure raining on you now!'

She set up a meeting with the local bank which had foreclosed on the dairy. They had no buyers for the business, or any residual money in the accounts to clean up the milk which had gone sour and was stinking out Main Street, so Momma set up Papa to buy the place lock, stock and barrel for a dollar. She organised staff for clean-up, and to staff it, wrote to all the old suppliers and customers and new ones and they soon had the dairy back in full production. They took on more workers at the farm and they were soon making serious money.

The same bank had a branch 150 miles away that had foreclosed on a crop dusting business, with three planes, spares, several trucks including a fuel tanker. They asked Momma if they thought Papa with his wartime flying experience might take the business off their hands. Momma drove us down to the airfield to look them over. Papa again bought that company lock, stock and barrel for a handful of bucks. On our second trip down, Papa flew one plane back with Momma strapped in holding me in her arms. My first flight in an open aircraft and I was just a few weeks old, no wonder I took to flying like a fish to water. Papa had already prepared a field close to the house as the home airfield and arranged for a new barn raised over the weekend to be used as a hangar. The next trip he had some of the men drive back the tanker and other trucks, filled with barrels and drums of goodness knew what spraying chemicals. He even brought back Old Ernie Peterson, the aircraft engineer who managed to keep those World War One veteran planes in the air for the previous ten years. Old Ernie taught me everything mechanical about those planes, and he sure helped Papa keep those planes going for many years.

I learned how to fly from Papa in those old planes, even Momma learned to fly and she was out crop dusting during busy times as well as catching up with the dairy management and farm books. Soon, Papa, who never lacked for ideas, opened a milk bar in the town, where all my school friends hung out; for a long while it was the only place in town that sold ice cream and sodas.

It was a couple of years later that Momma got dispositions from her husband's relatives to declare that he and five other family members were bringing three trucks over from Canada, ladened with spirits to beat the Prohibition, and believed killed, so she was free to marry Papa, who was still a bachelor in his early forties. And Papa adopted he as his son.

Chapter 3

Angel casting her mind back to April 1936

Anjelica Harris

Listening to Joey talk about those old days, I I remembered that I had fond memories of that old dairy and the Milk Bar which was opened up in the front of the dairy in Main Street. We made small experimental batches of ice cream in the dairy and we needed somewhere to sell it. That milk and soda bar turned out to be a goldmine almost immediately and was the place to be seen in town from 1932 onwards.

Thinking about Joey and Joe, took me back to two events that changed my life in 1936.

We used to start early morning and finish early at the dairy, no shift working around the clock like nowadays. As the last one to leave the dairy office in mid-afternoon on a sunny spring morning, I, Anjie Harris, nee di Angelo, locked up the Conrad Dairy on Jefferson Street and drove my new Ford sedan down to the elementary school to collect my son Joe Junior. We were living well, working hard of course, but we felt we were building something for the future.

I couldn't stop smiling that spring day, but Junior was so full of what he had learned during the day. He was such a sweet kid, beautiful too, his looks taking after his father Gianni more than me. His skin was not as dark as mine, but with his straight black hair and square build, he had a strong Mediterranean look about him that I knew would drive the local girls wild in ten more years or so. Now, about to enter his fortieth year, Joey is a handsome man, still single as he seems 'married' to his service.

He was so full of what he was learning that Junior never even wondered why his Momma was even more cheerful than I usually was on that beautiful spring day. I loved my job running the financial side of the Conrad Dairy and loved my husband Joe Senior even more, so Joey Junior didn't notice anything out of the ordinary in my complete happiness.

Joe was still out spraying fertiliser from the air when we got back to the farm. Junior had a few barn chores to get through before washing up for dinner. Granny Harris was starting to lay the table and Junior took over the task, once Granny had checked the cleanliness of his hands and the state behind his ears, while she mashed the potatoes and stirred in the butter, we always had plenty of butter. Junior had heard the plane come in to land on the grass landing field up near the main road. While Junior was in the barn he knew his Papa would lock away the plane and the chemicals safely in the new hangar before he was home. There was water plumbed in at the hangar so he could wash up and change his clothes, isolating any chemical contamination to that one spot.

I had changed out of my office clothes but was still much more smartly dressed than I normally was in the evening, Junior may have thought if he noticed. Although the Harris farm was one of the best in the county, we were not accustomed to dressing for dinner like some more fancy folks did.

I waited until Joe parked his bike by the farmhouse before I headed him off from the kitchen to sit in the front porch for a quiet word with him before going inside together. Five minutes later we both burst through the kitchen to announce that Junior was going to have a brother or sister before the year was out.

It made me very happy, seeing all the smiles on my family's faces. My family. They were my family, but it had taken time to get here.

Joe always described himself as being born an 'Average Joe', when we were joking about, which we did pretty nearly all the time, we had a happy home life as Joe was always calm and collected, however excited Granny Harris or I got about anything. He would joke that with his missing half a leg and half of his ear, that he was now 'Less than Average'. But to me, Joe was a man better than any other man I knew up to then or since.

I was reminded of those first few weeks before my baby Joey was born, when I got to know Joe well and grew really fond of him in the shortest time, he was so attentive to me in the final weeks of my pregnancy so I knew he would be there for me when his first fruit of his loins was born. Back in those days there was no allowing the father to be present at the birth, it was the domain of the midwife and they would only have womenfolk present. But Joe regarded Joey as "our" baby and they had a wonderful relationship that sometimes reduced me to tears.

Back to when I arrived and was taken in by the Harrises,I was up and about the next day, with plenty of fresh food inside me that first breakfast, plus the catching up on my sleep. I was full of energy and I revelled in how friendly the two Harris's, both mother and son, were towards me. I helped out around the house for two or three hours a day, and for the first week I spent spent those hours each day going through all of his farm day ledgers and boxful of receipts going back a couple of years.

His books weren't so bad as he made out, but he missed off odd things, like cash paid for fuel and petty cash in general. Granny Harris confused him too with receipts that were mixed personal, like housekeeping, and business. A lot of the farm's customers were not paying invoices or only partly paying them in drips and drabs, so it was unsure which bills were paid and which were still outstanding. Joe had trouble chasing debts, he was just too nice a person to do what his uncle had had to do to get the knuckleheads to pay up their dues on time.

I wasn't too nice at all when going about chasing overdue payments and we soon had payments rolling in without threatening legal action, the embarrassment of pointing out what was owed was usually enough for most customers and the bad customers were forced to take their custom elsewhere or knuckle down and pay up in advance. Sure, there were some bad debts, but mostly they were people who needed to continue trading with us, so for the more reliable customers we managed to arrange spread payments. Some folks were not able to settle for years, but we couldn't let people starve and, in the long run, everyone got by, it was and still is that kind of friendly community.

The Harris family took me in as part of the family from the outset. They were from England and never seemed to have that inbuilt prejudice against anyone in terms of color that some country white people had. I was black, or half black through my grandma, bless her soul, so I was quite light skinned for a Negro, but working with the Harris's and dealing with them with their customers in Conrad, I never had no trouble with race. The area round about was all either white or native indian. When we took on workers, about a quarter of them were Indian and Joe never put up with any racialism directed towards them, he treated everyone alike and the Indians loved working for us and loved Joe particularly as a fair and honest employer. I think they admired him too because he never let his disability get him down or hold him back from doing what he wanted to do, he'd just work a way around it.

Meeting with the bank to firm up on lines of credit and transferring balances to investment accounts, we discovered that the farm business already had investment accounts with money available that his uncle had put away that Joe knew nothing about. That and the interest that had accrued put him in a position that the farm could employ more labourers on the farm and make it even more profitable.

The bank manager pointed out that the bank had foreclosed the dairy in town and were saddled with it, having no buyers, but they were willing to sell it for a dollar if the buyer would immediately clear it out, because the dairy was in Main Street opposite the bank and the smell of rotting milk was affecting the whole area.

That same day, Joe employed the fifty out of work ex-dairymen and women to come in and clean up the dairy and get it back up in production, taking in and selling what milk they could get from local farms and giving a lot away free to schools, the hospital and distributed free to the needy through the churches. Soon they had cream, yoghurt and cheese up and running and shipping out by train to an eager market in nearby towns and gradually further away.

Chapter 4, May 1936

Anjelica Di Angelo

The second thing that happened in the spring of 1936, also started at the dairy. I was reconciling the April accounts ready for the following Monday's board meeting. We had kept the dairy going as a separate concern from both the farm and the crop dusting businesses, so it could be sold off easier if we needed to. Anything over a dollar plus the clean-up costs were pure profit. But the dairy was going so well, especially with the new Milk Bar, that we kept it going, with just Joe, Granny Harris and myself as secretary, on the board. The telephone on my desk rang, so I answered. It was Suzanne in Reception saying I had a visitor. I wasn't expecting anyone, so I asked her who it was. The answer came back, "A Mister di Angelo is here to see you."

The only di Angelo I knew was my late husband Gianni, who I understood was killed in 1929 in Canada, murdered with his only brother by rival bootleggers. I asked Suzanne to send him up to my office. I got up out of my chair and met him at the doorway. I couldn't believe it! It was my Gianni, raised as if from the dead.

I pulled him into the office and, before I could stop him, he kissed me on the lips. It was like all the kisses I remembered, hot and passionate, and the last six years just melted away and I felt in my twenties again and still married to this man. Eventually he stopped his kissing and I was able to breathe.

"What happened to you, Gianni, your sister-in-law told me you and Georgio were shot dead in Canada?"

"We were all shot in a double by a rival group of runners who thought we was muscling into their business, including my brother, cousins and a friend of my brother's, Alberto Bianchi, a drifter from back east. They was all dead, me badly wounded and left for dead. I had a criminal record from before we married and faced a long jail term, so I swapped my papers with Alberto. I got five years instead of twenty."

"So when did you get out?" I asked.

"Two years ago."

"Two years ago? Why didn't you come looking for me?"

"I'm lookin' now, ain't I?" he retorted, "I never knew where you was until your cousin Connie came into my club last week."

"Connie? My Connie?"

"Yeah, large as life, came in with a party of girls from where she works. Done up real nice she was."

"Your club, is that where you work?"

"It's my night club, I'm the boss. Doin' real well too. Gotta nice apartment above it, too. Connie told me about the kid, Joey, so I got the second bedroom all done up nice for him."

"How did you manage to get a night club, you were in prison, right?"

"Yeah, but I kept my nose clean, told the cops I was just an outta work hired hand, knew nobody, knows nothing about the organisation. So when I gets out I'm in with the bosses, one of the trusted few, so I get a good job managing a speakeasy that's suddenly a goldmine when Prohibition gets lifted, so I'm doin' so well the organisation lets me buy a 50-50 partnership, which means we are sittin' pretty, sweetheart. So when Connie tells me where you are, I think, great, I'll come and fetch you and my kid and bring you home. You'll love it babe, we're set up for life and going places"

"But you were dead, everyone said so, and I have a life here now, Joey's just started school and loves it here in the countryside. It's all he's ever known. And Gianni, I'm ... I'm married."

"Sure you are, you're married to me. And if you like the countryside I'm a family man now so I can get us a place in the country. I go by the name 'Johnny' now, Johnny Bianchi, the Di Angelo name was too hot. Hey, I don't blame you for what you did to get by honey, shackin' up with a hick farmer, you was all alone here. That was my fault, the smuggling went wrong and you was left holding the baby, really left holding the baby, my baby boy. But now I'm back and we belong together in the eyes of God. That marriage here in Hicksville don' amount to a hill of beans, our marriage is the only one that counts. Besides, I want my kid back. When can I see him?"

"He's at school, I'll pick him up this afternoon."

"Great. Maybe I can take you out to lunch, you could show me the town, or I could show you my room at the hotel."

"I have to work, Gianni —"

"Johnny, Anj, remember I'm Johnny now. Can't we pick the kid up now and go play catch in the park?"

"No, he's got school, not kindergarten, he can't just get up and go. And I can't either, I have the monthly financial reports to finish."

"Hey, I understand business is business. What about lunch, huh? You need to eat and we need to catch up."

"I don't normally go out to lunch, I bring a sandwich and work through so I can pick up Joey."

"Joey? You didn't name my first born after me?"

"No, I thought you'd died, Johnny, I named our baby Joseph Gianni Mario Di Angelo. But, I have to tell you, I remarried and my husband adopted Joey, so he is now Joseph Gianni Mario Harris. And Joey calls Joe his Dad and Joe calls him Junior."

"Well, you're not really married to this fagiolo, I married you first, in church before God and wit—"

"But Johnny, we had a death certificate, according to the authorities in Canada you were dead. You could've let me know."

"I was in prison, pretending to be someone else. All letters in and out were censored. Also. I didn't know where you went. I thought you'd wait for me in Chicago. But no problem, I'm back now. I am a success, doing well enough that you will never have to working in an office nine to five ever again. I will come back here in three hours and we'll go pick up the bambino."

I couldn't concentrate on the figures. Just the thought, my husband came back from the dead. I loved Joe, he was the best husband. But Gianni, Johnny as he wanted to be called, was my first boyfriend, we had known each other for a long time. And he had fought for me when we were kids and I was being bullied. Life for a half-caste Negro girl in Chicago was hard, even for someone with as light a skin as mine, and Italians then married only other Italians, so Gianni got into a lot of fights over me. He was my hero. I loved him, I had always loved him and now he was back, and my life here in this small town, I had to admit, was over.