Five Smooth Stones (124 page)

She stopped speaking then for a moment, and her body swayed back and forth. "God lef' us then," she said. "God lef' us then. There wouldn't be no ha'nt today if they'd gone on."

David reached a hand to Tinker's head, wanting to touch the warm life of it, the reality of it. His flesh felt cold in spite of the heat of the room.

"Simon, he went into Cainsville that day, and them boys, they figgered to go up yonder and get them a rabbit or two, mebbe a possum, bring 'em to us for dinner. Wan't no sun that day, and my daddy-in-law, he went to Angel Creek to get us some fish. They wuz a big cave there then, this side the creek; used to clean the fish there 'fore he brought 'em home, keep some of his gear there. It wuz hid real good with juniper, with a little sandy place in front. It ain't been there since the last flood. Didn't no one know 'bout that cave but us."

From the "little sandy place in front" Zeb Towers could look across the wide creek to the land it bordered, and northward to the scrubby woodland. He was cleaning fish when he heard the shouting and hoarse cries. They had already caught them; the whites had already caught the two young men the Towerses had befriended: the big, black man who laughed a lot and was gentle, and the smaller, brown-skin man, quiet and polite.

"He tried, my daddy-in-law tried, to tell us what happened; seemed like he couldn't give it no words, not for a long time. He wuzn't never the same after that day. He wuz always a good man, that don't change, but seemed like he wuz different after that."

Listening to the old woman, David Champlin felt the same cold fear in his belly that must have been in Zeb Towers's that day when there had been no sun and he had gone to catch fish for the family. He could see Zeb Towers slipping, a dark shadow not cast by any sun, behind the underbrush that hid the cave's mouth, then watching through branches not yet in spring bud, watching a horror he was powerless to stop. And praying. Zeb Towers would have been praying, and David cried silently, "To what God! To what God!"

"They wuz dragging the small man like he was a log, had him roped from his neck clear down to his feets so's he couldn't move. They wuz saving him for the last"

Like kids saving some of the icing on the cake so the sweetness would linger in their mouth; that was the way it would be with them.

The big man, the big, happy black man, said Miz Towers, looked half dead, and they were dragging him too, by the arms, and he was bloody, all bloody in the head and back, but "he wuz putting up a fight, putting up a fight—"

David knew what was coming, knew it and wanted her voice to stop, but withheld his own voice, knowing it would not be heeded, back there where her mind was now.

They threw the smaller man to the side, on the bank of Angel Creek, and he lay there like a corpse, unmoving. He was so close that Zeb Towers could see the rope cutting into purpling flesh; then he saw the eyes roll, saw a quiver in the chest and knew the man was alive, that he was "froze up in fright, looking like a daid man 'cepting for his eyes."

Zeb must have been trembling, thought David, must have been shaking like a man with ague. He was surprised when he saw that his own hands were steady, one on the table, one on the dog's head resting on his knee.

They forgot the small trussed-up man lying on the bank of the stream and went about their business with the big black man, turned their backs and went away from that small figure, knowing he could not move. The big black man had bellowed, twice, like a bull in agony, and the sound had roared out over the voices of the white men. After that there had been no sound from where he lay on the ground, still living, more blood on his body now.

"We seen the fire from here, from out back, seen the smoke and heered the noise, heered 'em laughing, 'fore we run for kiver. White laughing it was, loud." Miz Towers waited, quiet for a moment in the terror of that day so long before. "Whites sure laugh at things wouldn't no colored laugh at, even wuz a white man burning alive."

Stop! Now can you stop! For Christ's sweet sake, stop! But the voice of Belle Towers went on, old and thin and cracked: "My daddy-in-law he didn't get back till way late in the night. Me 'n' my husband and the babies, we wuz locked in the bedroom. Simon, after he come home from town, he didn't dast go hunting for his daddy. He knew it wouldn't do no good. Zeb Towers wuz either daid or he wuz alive and if he wuz alive he'd get back somehow. There wuzn't no moon that night, and when Zeb Towers come home, he wuz stark nekkid and he had that little man with him, slang over his shoulders like a sack of meal, the man they left on the bank."

The white men had been busy carrying the big man to the pile of logs that was in the middle of the field when Zeb Towers stripped off his clothes and crawled on his belly from

behind the bushes that hid the cave's mouth. There was no more sound than a fish makes rising to the surface when his body slipped into the water, scarcely more when he reached the other side of the stream and grasped the trunk of a small sapling growing from the bank, steadying himself against the current. It had taken only a slight tug by his free hand to roll the trussed-up body of the small man over, start it down the bank. He slowed its descent so there would be no loud splash. Getting him across the stream had been easy for a man to whom a river had meant food and sport and a place for games in childhood.

More than courage, thought David; something more than courage had sent Zeb Towers alone and naked across that water to rescue a man he scarcely knew from under the noses of a mob of jeering whites, happy with their horror.

Zeb had never let the other man's body touch the ground until they reached the cave, Miz Towers said. Because the man had been wearing light clothes Zeb stripped him, too, and buried clothes and ropes in a hole he dug in the floor of the cave. Zeb heard the cursing of the whites when they found the body gone and realized their fun was ended. Someone saw the place where he had rolled down the bank to the water and he cursed the others loudly for their carelessness. They said the nigger must have drowned and been carried downstream, and Zeb listened, not daring to breathe, as the sound of feet tramping downstream came to him from the opposite bank, not daring to stir as long as he could hear voices. He waited until far into the night before he carried the small man home with him.

"The big black boy, he wuz daid in the fire," said Miz Towers. "Didn't no one dast go near it. The whites, they come back next day when there wuzn't no danger of burnin' theirselves, and they dug a grave up yonder and they threw his body, what was lef, in it and kivered it over. Cain't no one tell where it is now."

David's mouth felt parched, and he ran his tongue over dry lips. "The ha'nt—"

"Folks been saying they seen it ever since. I ain't never been there after that. They say it move slow and big and dark 'cross that field, laughing. But they say it don't laugh like no living man; they say they hears it from up yonder, when the wind's right, sounding like it come from the grave."

When the wind's right; it would be the sound of the wind coming from the darkness of the wood, blowing across the field. It had to be the sound of the wind. Now David was oblivious to the passage of time, to the ticking of the clock.

"We kep' that pore boy here," said Miz Towers. "We kep' him here a week, and for four days he never spoke no word, jes lay like he was daid. We fed him like he wuz a baby. When his voice come back he didn't talk like he wuz in his right senses, but after a while seemed like he come to hisself a little, and Zeb, he hid him under a load of vegetables in the mule cart and he carried him to where he could hop a freight. Zeb seen him catch the freight, and then Zeb come home. That night we prayed for him. Right y'ere in the kitchen on our knees, babies and all. He said he'd send word, but we ain't never heered from him again. Never knew did he make it."

It was alive and present to her. "We ain't never heered," she had said, as she would have if Zeb and Simon and the babies were still here. She said now: "They never done nothing. They found out later them boys never done nothing. A white chile, she live north of here then, she come running home one day crying, telling 'bout some black snake she seen in the woods. She wuz skeered she'd git a licking for going away from home. They put the words in her mouth, her daddy and a friend, about black men. After it was all over, she tol' her mamma wa'n't no black men around, tol' her mamma she wuzn't even in the woods. My sister, she cook for them; she heered it, she heered it all. But them white men, my sister say, didn't seem like they wuz sorry, seem like they wuz jes as glad, said a good lesson never done the niggers no harm, kep' 'em keerful—"

David did not even realize that she had gotten to her feet until she started walking across the kitchen with uneven, rickety speed. The room was unbearably hot and close. From somewhere beyond he could hear a sticking drawer being opened. It was the only sound except the groaning sigh of Tinker as he sank to his belly, then brought a smoky muzzle to rest sideways on crossed, tawny forepaws.

The packet Miz Towers carried when she came back had for an outer wrapping an oiled silk tobacco pouch, cracked and dry with age. "The big black boy, he lef his coat here that day an' this wuz in the pocket—" She opened it when she sat down and took from it a cardboard folder that David knew contained a photograph. Before she could speak, he reached and gently took it from her hands, not opening it, letting it lie on the table before them, his fingers curled over its top.

"The brown-skin man made it, Miz Towers," he said. "He made it home. You didn't tell me his name, but I know. You named your youngest son for him, didn't you? Abraham."

"Lord Jesus! How you know? How you know?"

"Wait. There's nothing strange or spooky about it, Miz Towers. He lived in New Orleans, where I was born and grew up. It has to be the same man. He made it home. But that's all. Like you say, he wasn't in his right senses, and after a few days his mamma sent for a doctor. Abraham was sitting in the kitchen when the doctor came, and when he saw that white man come into the house he started to run. He never stopped, not even when he reached the river, and all the time he was running he was crying, 'I'm coming, Jesus! I'm coming, Jesus!' He ran into the river calling, 'Take me, Jesus!—' When I was a boy, there were still old folks who remembered. They used to say, 'Abra'm run to Jesus—'"

She was swaying again now, eyes closed, whispering. "Jesus done give him his res'. The good Lord Jesus done give him peace at las'—"

David put a hand on her wrinkled arm. "The big man, Miz Towers. The big, happy black man who laughed so much—"

Her eyes opened. "Y'all knows about him? You knows about him, too?"

"His name was David." He pressed her arm gently. "Wait, Miz Towers. Wait before you say anything." He curled his fingers between front and back covers of the folder, laid it open and looked at it, and Li'l Joe Champlin was beside him.
Never did get to see a picture of my daddy. Your Tant' Irene say the onlies' one they had he taken with him when he went away.
Now Li'l Joe Champlin's father was looking at his great-grandson, his namesake, from a faded photograph that was streaked and dim with age, in a close, stuffy kitchen on the outskirts of a small southern town, and the place where he had died in flames was just beyond the window, lying green and quiet under the morning sun. The chair on which he had sat, laughing, playing with the babies, was the chair on which his great-grandson sat now.

A big man, everyone said, and had not exaggerated. The camera techniques of the time had lightened the blackness of the skin, but in spite of the stiffly seated pose, the self-consciousness evident in the straightness of back and neck, the gentleness was there, in mouth and eyes, and the laughter.

Beside him stood his white-clad, veil-bedecked wife, a hand on her husband's shoulder. The sternness David remembered in Tant'Irene was not in that young face; in that face there was softness, even under the unaccustomed circumstance of being photographed, softness, and pride in the man she had chosen and now stood beside.

David freed the picture from the folder and turned it over, finding on its back what he knew would be there, the writing in Tant'Irene's clear hand, for years forgotten, remembered now:

Mr. and Mrs. David Champlin, October 10, 1885. "Whom God hath joined—"

He reached for his wallet, usually sure fingers fumbling and clumsy as he tried to unbutton the flap of the back pocket. He drew the wallet out at last and took a card from it. He laid the card on the back of the picture, beneath the inscription, edged his chair around until he was sitting beside Miz Towers, the picture in front of them. Carefully he spelled each name out for her, pointing with his forefinger first to the "D" of David on the picture, then to the same letter on the card, until he had gone through the entire name.

Her breathing was hoarse and loud as she listened, and she made small keening noises at the end of each exhalation. When he had finished she wrapped thin arms around her chest, rocking back and forth, a shrunken black figure, rocking, rocking. "Lord! Lord! An' you here carrying his name. Lord! Lord Jesus! A-a-a-ah, my Jesus!—"

CHAPTER 78

David walked slowly down the path from Miz Towers's house to the gate, Tinker padding delightedly alongside. He was keenly conscious that the old lady who had shuff-shuffed to the edge of the porch with him was standing there now, watching him. He carried in his mind the image of the frame house with its ungainly appendages of tacked-on rooms, its front porch without foundation, its crisp curtains so white and clean and brave. And of a field that stretched wide and green and wild beyond it, a field his people in Cainsville called "Flaming Meadows."

Halfway down the path he turned to wave at her, and she called, "Y'all give my son that message, hear!"

"Yes, ma'am." He stood, smiling. She was like ol' Miz Speck, only brighter, less victimized by the years. "I'll get him out here. You'll remember what I told you, Miz Towers?"

"Sure will. Sure will and that's a fact. Don't you worry, son. I keeps my land. Even if they sends the law, I keeps my land less'n I talks with you and Abra'm."