Five Smooth Stones (129 page)

"Why hasn't Anderson been in touch with him?"

"He's been trying all day. He can't get through. They say he's been in surgery. Maybe he has. I don't care who calls him. If you can get to Chuck, let him do it. But it seems ad-

visable to have one of our group call him, in addition to Anderson. Just get it done, for God's sake!"

David was leaning against the piled-up cartons, hands in pockets, uncomfortably sure that he was acting—and looking —like a sulky child. He started to speak, but before he could get words out Brad was across the room, hitting one of his shoulders with a clenched fist, making him wince and cry, "Hey! I'm a sick man!"

"That's just the important stuff," cried Brad. "This is the world-shaker. We're going to have a baby!"

"Yeah? Who? What d'you mean 'we'?"

"You ape! You stupid ape. We—Peg and I—the Bradford Willises—she just told me—"

David let his body slide limp along the stacked cartons until he was sitting on the rolling, splintered floorboards. From there he looked up at Brad, knowing now what the expression on Brad's face when he first came in had meant. "Sweet Jesus—" he gasped.

Brad looked down at him, green eyes warm. "Get up, brat Didn't you think we could do it?"

"You damned fool, of course I thought you could do it. But did you have to do it now—with all this— My God, Brad!" He was on his feet now, clapping the other man on the back, laughing with him. "Best damned news I've heard since sixty-three—eighteen, that is."

"All right," said Brad. "I've got to get going. Treat me with respect hereafter. I'm in an interesting condition." At the door he turned back, sober now. "Effie—" he said. "And that girl on the bench in Little Rock. Maybe this kid'll be a girl—"

"O.K., dad. I'll call your Goddamned ofay doctor if I have to. Don't worry about a thing except how many heads it'll have and whether it will look like you."

"If it's a boy we'll name it David Champlin Willis."

"I hope to God it's light-skinned—"

"You better hope so, you brown-skin so-and-so!"

"Love to Peg when you call—"

***

On his way to the door after Brad left, David peered behind another high stack of cartons opposite the window, then threw the door open, and called, "Couple of strong backs needed!"

With the help of the three men who responded, the stack of cartons was moved and a battered, upright piano revealed in all its promise, complete with stool tucked under the keyboard. David flipped the cover up, struck A, then B-flat, then C-natural, and shuddered. One of the men laughed. "Nev' mind. It won't sound so bad outside."

"Will that porch hold it?"

"That porch got cee-ment foundations. It'll hold."

The piano was on casters, and they maneuvered it to one of the front corners of the porch, setting it at an angle so that when he sat at it David could see across Main Street to City Hall on one side, and the front ranks of the now restlessly stirring crowd on the other. He wished Sweeton were there to call a meeting in Salvation Hall on the other side of the section. Anything to move the people around, give them a new perspective; then they could return to their vigil. Yet Sweeton had been so close to collapse that he must be allowed, forced if necessary, to rest

As he sat at the piano, chording tentatively, he realized for the first time in weeks how mind-weary, bone-weary, heart-weary he was. He had thought, less than a week ago down in New Orleans, that he had reached a peak of fatigue, knew it now to have been only a stopping place on the way to the peak. Mind and body had both been pushed past the limits of endurance, yet, he reflected, they were managing to cling together like two drunks supporting each other on the brink of a precipice. "Brinksmanship," he said to himself. "By God, now I know what it really means. We're the ones who know what the hell a brink really is."

The past weeks and months and years seemed as unreal as a nightmare dreamed by another man, not lived by a flesh-and-blood David Champlin. The real David Champlin had come to life again that morning, looking out a kitchen window across a wide green field called Flaming Meadows, remembering a gentle man who had been known as Li'l Joe Champlin.

Now that David Champlin sat at a scarred, out-of-tune piano on the porch of a general store in a town called, with uncanny foresight and accuracy, Cainsville, and felt on his shoulders the burdens of a hundred years, of millions of his people, feeling, under those burdens, as old as his race, with none of its spiritual strength, none of its power. He was conscious on the physical plane of bruises on a man-handled body he had not felt before because it had been the body of another man they scarred, the body of a man dreamed in a nightmare. That other man, who had been a character in a dream, had been somehow able to go on. The man sitting at the piano on the porch of Haskin's general store wondered if the flesh-and-blood David Champlin could.

Sweat drenched the blue cotton-mesh sport shirt. He wished he had thought to tell Brad to have Abraham bring back fresh clothes. Life and death, violence, horror, bloodshed, frightened children and a desperately ill girl in a crowded jail tank—and he wanted fresh clothes, felt them to be important. He supposed he should feel shame at himself but he could not; he felt nothing but the overwhelming weariness, the ache of fresh bruises and stiffening muscles, the clamminess of sweat trickling over sore ribs, and now the reawakening of a too familiar pain in the pit of his stomach. He rubbed wet palms across the front of his shirt in an instinctive gesture to soothe pain; then his hands fell on the keyboard. He cocked his head at the sound of the chord they struck, followed that chord with another, and another. People in the crowd were calling out to him, and he knew that word of the story he had told inside had spread to every man and woman out there, passed from one person to another, from group to group, exclaimed over, talked about, by the men and women standing in grim patience under a blazing sun.

The chords came more strongly now, and a woman in the front row began to sing. "Going home... going home..." and a man in the center of the crowd picked it up. "Shouldn't have played this," David told himself. "Should have played something up-tempo. This'll bring down our guys over there in City Hall."

He had been so absorbed in his own thoughts he had paid no attention to sounds behind him. Now he felt rather than heard the beat beneath his playing. He looked over his shoulder and saw a small man seated at the shabbiest set of drums he had ever seen, and for a moment he was startled at the drummer's resemblance to Nehemiah. David grinned, and his weariness receded a little. This was what he needed, someone to give him the beat, the beat for his music, the beat for his life; he had lost that somehow.

"Hi'ya, man!" he said. The drummer, hands apparently moving without volition, head nodding in unison with the floor pedal of his bass, smiled and said, "Let's go, man." David tapped the floorboards with his good foot, and suddenly the minor strains of "Going Home" became a call to arms. There was a bugle in the sound and a trumpet, and a dozen rhythms came to life, interwoven, held, and solidified by the drum and his piano, varied, syncopated in the clapping of hundreds of pairs of hands. The voice leads changed a score of times, and no man could tell where or when. The woman in the front of the crowd who had been the first to sing took over commandingly, and the others followed, their voices a turbulent sea of harmony, the high-rising single voices the white foam that capped its waves. "Thank you, God," said David, and scarcely knew he said it.

He did not give them time to fall silent at the end of the song but made a quick slashing run on the piano, tapped his foot again, struck a crashing chord and let his own voice roll out: " 'Just a little while to stay here... just a little while to wait... just a little more hard trouble...'"

The songs they were singing now had once been songs of defeat, in spite of the triumphant message of their words. They had been songs that invited death as the only way out, called to it, beckoned to it. Then they had been songs that meant freedom would come only when a great chariot came down from Heaven and carried them away to rest and release from soul burdens grown too hard to bear, to a place where they would be seemly in the eyes of a color-blind God. Now the songs had a different meaning; even to the ears of the old people they carried a different message.

He thought suddenly of Simmons and Dunbar, could almost see them standing in front of him, their faces looking at him over the top of the piano, blind faces with deaf ears tacked on them. Did they know, had they learned, that these of their people whom they despised had found new songs to sing in the same old words, with the same old compelling rhythms, songs with a new meaning that substituted life for death, that did not beckon to death but beckoned instead to a freedom that could come in life, need not wait for chariots from Heaven to carry them to it?

He knew the people on the other side of the barricades would not hear what he was hearing in the voices that must be coming to them, clear and strong. He saw the head of one of the troopers bobbing to the rhythm, and doubted that the man even knew he was doing it. If God had given them the ears to hear the music—and He had not, thought David—what they would be hearing now would send them running for the hills, like a mob running before rising, pursuing floodwaters.

Out of the past, out of a gray day when he had stood outside a cemetery in New Orleans, the music he wanted to play came to him, and he finished "Just a Little While," whirled on the piano stool and asked the drummer a question and, when the drummer nodded, he turned back to the keyboard, tapped his foot. The opening chords were like a fanfare from the lead trumpet of a marching band on its way back from releasing a brother to the freedom of eternity. He kept the opening verse clearly stated in melody and verse, because he did not know whether the song was familiar to them, but knew that give them one or two verses and it would be theirs as much as it would be if they had been singing it all their lives.

" 'Sing Hallelujah! I'm walking with the King....'"

The drummer knew it, and his voice was filling in responses from behind, and the people in the crowd knew it because a man's voice rose rich and strong, making the air vibrate and tingle: "'Praise His holy name....' " and a woman's voice answered him, " 'Walking with the King!' "

Now they were with him in unison: " 'Oh, the devil tries to get me... But I'm walking with the King,' " broke away from him..." 'Praise His holy name..."' and were with him again, " 'Walking with the King!'"

And then they were not with him but he with them, walking with them on the highway, walking with the King, marching—marching—marching, and the ache of bruised muscles was gone, the soul-destroying weariness, the burdens of a hundred years and a million people, and he was walking with them, marching with them, invincible, walking with the King. There had been a day in church many years before when a child seated with his grandfather had soared high over the heads of the people to Gloryland as his grandmother sang.... Now the child was marching.... It was his own voice cutting into the harmony of the others: '"Praise His holy name....'" And then it was the voice of the unknown man and the unknown woman, " 'Walking with the King!' "

"That's right!" he called, and changed tempo, bringing it down just a little, the drummer following him without a falter, making the tempo easier for feet to follow that were marching on a long highway..... " 'Walking with the King'"... Giving it the steady beat of a march, and the clapping of hundreds of pairs of hands was the sound of the marching feet.

He did not feel Topper's hand on his shoulder until the older man gripped it tightly, shook it. Then he looked up and saw, in Topper's eyes, trouble. Topper did not speak, only nodded his head in the direction of the store. David let the chords die out unobtrusively, quietly, left the people singing, and followed Topper.

"We got trouble," said Topper when they were inside. "We got trouble. And we got a little wiggle of life from over yonder. They going to let one of us go in with Reverend Chuck and talk with Scoggins about Effie."

"Thank God for that much," said David. "Now what kind of trouble you got for me?"

"Mr. Brad, he just called from Miz Towers'. They got held up."

"Car trouble?"

"You wait, son. It's worse'n that. Him and Abra'm got out to that house out there you-all call Tether's End and they found Winters in bad shape. I mean, it was real bad. Beat up till he was near dead; reckon them that done it thought he was dead. They seen a car driving off just as they come round the turn. Mr. Brad says they was two fellas and one of them had on some kind of green shirt and did I know who it might be. I got a hell of a good idea, but that ain't knowing. Anyhow the house was all tore up, including the telephone. They done ripped that out by the roots."

"Christ! Where's Winters now?"

"They took him to Doc Anderson's in the station wagon. Doc was over here with Ruby, but he went on back over there. Didn't you-all hear that old jalopy of his a-stompin' and a-snortin' up the road?"

(Walking with the King...
I was walking with the King; hell, I didn't hear anything.)

"Anyhow, Mr. Brad says to tell you him and Abra'm just now got some kind of paper signed and he's going to burn up the road to Heliopolis. Abra'm's coming back here. He says to tell you he's going ahead with the plans you-all talked about and that he'd be back this evening." Topper scratched his head, frowned. "I guess that's all. Don't think I've forgot nothing."

"It's enough, Topper. Sweet Jesus, it's plenty!"

***

A few minutes later, as he slipped between two sawhorses and started across Main Street, he heard a trooper say: "That's the Oxford nigger. Ah mean Oxford, England." He heard the trooper's companion answer, "Yeah? Too bad you don't mean Mississippi. They know what they're doing there, comes to niggers—"

Behind him someone else had taken over at the piano, and the deep, muted voices of the people singing "We Shall Overcome" followed him for a few steps, then changed to the song he had led when he stood on a chair in Haskin's back room. (A wide river, he remembered, its banks lined with people, all black, all singing.)