Five Smooth Stones (139 page)

Brad was silent for a moment, frowning. "Yes, we did, I think. I'm not going to make it a flat, triumphant 'yes.' What has been promised—apprenticeship training programs, quicker action on the schools, noninterference in voter registration, other things—will result in betrayal. You know that. Except we may have a chance to get apprentice programs because that bottling company has experienced a region-wide boycott and been hurt. But—and it's a big one, David—Chuck has been in Washington, and there's a strong consensus that both a civil rights bill and a voting rights bill are inevitable. With another work stoppage possible, and Federal enforcement procedures that are tough enough, we'll make it. And if they go back on every promise—well, whatever our people learned of betrayal we learned from them. I think we're on our way in one of the outposts of bigotry, anyhow. We may not make it by morning but we're on our way—"

"I'll bet Peg's busting at the seams with pride—"

"She is. And you should hear Abraham. He was laughing for the first time since he picked Hummer's body off the pavement. 'And we ain't done nothing, Lawyer Willis. Ain't that a beauty? We ain't done nothing. We ain't fired a gun; we ain't heaved a rock; we ain't even marched. And we ain't even prayed. Out loud, that is. And we got 'em crying like babies. Cain't no one point a finger at us, and we got that town daid, plumb daid. Be sure now you tell Mr. David, y'hear?' We can do it again, David. By God, we can."

A nurse came to the door, looked around the screen, frowned at David, then smiled. "All out," she said. "Patient has to rest. Doctor's orders—"

"Hell—" said David, then smiled up at Sara, who had come to the side of the bed. He laid his hand over hers where it lay on the cast over his chest.

"I'm glad they didn't put you on a rotisserie spit," she said. "It's easier to kiss you this way—"

"Rotisserie spit!"

Brad was laughing. "It's a new method for treating spinal fractures. No cast. Suds will tell you about it—"

"Don't mention it to him, for God's sake. Or that bone man. Maybe they forgot about it." He drew Sara's hand to his cheek, then across his lips. "You'll come back tonight, sweet?"

"Of course—"

"You can look through those files after you've had your little nappie," said Brad, and ducked at David's growl. "The news media went all out."

"Thanks, Brad. Thanks for livin'—"

At the door he heard Brad stop, saw his head come around the screen. "I'll be back for a few minutes tomorrow morning. Then after Cainsville I'm going to New Orleans. My car's there. I'm bringing Chop-bone back with me. Sara's making me. Write me an order for release to custody to show Miz Timmins, huh?"

David listened to their footsteps die away down the corridor, and closed his eyes. He was very tired now. Sleep was going to come almost immediately. "Them there antelopes, Gramp," he murmured. "They're learning. Them there antelopes are sure closing in."

CHAPTER 87

All morning he had been looking forward with the delight of a child to spending part of the afternoon in the hospital's sun lounge. When the nurse and orderly maneuvered the bed through the wide doorway, he felt as he had the first day he set foot on a Liverpool dock and entered a new world. On his right he could see half-a-dozen white-uniformed nurses at the chart desk, and a patient in a wheelchair, all watching. The nurses waved, and the patient, a young woman, smiled. "I feel like a guy who's just hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth and won the game," he said to the nurse. "Whole darned team comes out." He grinned widely and waved back at the nurses with his good arm; then his bed was turned and wheeled away from them, toward the lounge at the far end of the corridor.

Sunlight engulfed him as they entered, warmed him, was bright to the point of pain, and very beautiful. "Man!" he breathed.

"Nice, isn't it?" said the nurse.

"Very nice," said David. "Oh, very, very nice."

He closed his eyes against the sudden brilliance. When he opened them they were filled with the glowing red and russet and gold of a tree whose topmost branches were level with the wide window before him. There had been sun in his room in the morning, whenever the sun was visible anywhere, for weeks—God, it must have been years!—but not this sun. That had been another sun that just shone in windows and said "Good morning" and went away. This sun that greeted him now was an everlasting sun. the sun that warmed the world and powered it. The red and gold and russet leaves of the tree outside the window danced obeisance to it, and he understood their worship.

The nurse and the orderly placed his bed so that the rays of this almighty sun would fall across it and not shine directly in his eyes. As the nurse left she patted the plaster cast that encased his body and said, "No gymnastics now."

His was the only bed in the lounge. On the far side of the room were three patients in wheelchairs, and a man in bathrobe and slippers sat reading in a big chair, back to a window. One of the wheelchair patients, an elderly man, raised a hand in greeting, then turned and said something to the others, and their heads swung toward David. He lifted his hand and returned the old man's greeting, and smiled. The man propelled himself across the room to the side of David's bed.

"Hell of a thing," said the man. "Glad to see you out."

"Thanks," said David.

"I've only been here a week," said the other. "Damned prostate. I was home when all that trouble was going on down there. The wife and I watched the papers every day to see how you were getting along. Never thought then I'd be meeting you. Want the wife to meet you too, next time she comes. You'll make it all right. All it takes is gumption, and you've got that to spare."

"Yes, sir," said David. The man in the big chair by the window lifted his head and looked across the room with eyes that held no more than cold curiosity, then returned to his reading. The old man in the wheelchair winked a faded blue eye. "Takes all kinds," he said. "Guess you know that."

A nurse came in, smiled at David and said, "Hi, Tiger!" then walked to the back of the old man's wheelchair. "Doctor's here, Mr. Gilman." As she pushed him past David's bed he said, "Play cribbage?" and, when David nodded, smiled delightedly. "Take you on next time," he called as the nurse wheeled him through the door.

I'm alive again, thought David; an old man wants to play cribbage with me and another man hates my guts clear through the damned plaster cast, and the world is all around me once more. He closed his eyes for a moment and opened them in time to catch, full on his face, the eyes of the man who had been sitting in the big chair. He was walking to the door and turned his head away quickly, but not so quickly that David did not catch on his face an expression that seemed like wondering distaste, and a puzzlement at the will of an inscrutable Almighty that would permit the recovery of a Negro guilty of—what? What was he supposed to be guilty of? The hell with it. David closed his eyes again, the better to enjoy the feeling of the warm sun on his skin, and carried into the darkness behind his lids the picture of the gay, bright leaves that danced outside his window.

Damn it, he was tired. A journey of maybe seventy feet down a corridor, a few words with a stranger, and he might have been wrassling bales of cotton on a dock. He remembered the elder Dr. Sutherland's words when he had asked that rotund character how long it would be before he could resume at least halfway normal activities, tackle the mounds of paper work, the complaints to be briefed, Luke's pictures to be captioned and sorted, the strategy meetings to attend. "You've a way to go yet," the doctor had said.

That was true, but not as Sutherland had meant it, because Sutherland knew nothing of the distance a man must travel on a battlefield. It was a distance not to be measured by time, by the days and weeks and months it would take shattered bones to knit, or an exhausted body and mind to mend, to build reserves. It was a distance to be measured only by the strength of the spirit; as far as that strength would take you, as far and beyond, that was the distance you had to go.

He could wait. He could wait until his body caught up with that spirit, would have to, if going from one room to another, wheeled like a baby in a crib, could tire him.

He did not want to be tired when Sara came. She would be there soon and would know that he was tired even before he had a chance to speak. She would stand beside his bed, laughing down at him with her eyes, loving him, knowing how he felt before a word was spoken.

If he kept his eyes closed he knew he would doze for a few minutes, perhaps sleep, and afterward the tiredness would be gone. He felt himself drifting away from the big lounge and the sun, into a friendly darkness. Then the darkness was made less by a shimmer of light on a wide river; and the sound of the voices of the people on its banks was like hearing old friends, not seen for many years but always dear.

When he awakened it was with the feeling that he was returning from a long journey home. Gramp had been there, and Gram, and even Tant'Irene. The sun was still warm and comforting on his body, and he lay quiet, eyes on the autumn glory of the tree outside his window. He was almost afraid to breathe; even that movement might dispel the knowledge he had brought back from his dream, and it must be captured —captured quickly or it would be gone.

It had not been an ordinary dream, in which people are seen and heard and places recognized. It had been a mere sensing of place and presences, a dream of feeling, utterly subjective—and then he had it in his grasp and did not let it go. It was so simple; as simple as an old man standing in the doorway of a French Quarter bistro saying, "Au 'voir!" He had returned, when he awakened, from a journey home and had felt no sadness because he had not said "Goodbye" at the end of the journey; he had said, and brought back with him the feeling of the words, "Au 'voir!"

Now he could breathe, deeply, drawing a certainty into his mind and heart with the breath. There would be no end to going home. The thoughts and feelings of the years since he had first left New Orleans—Gramp's typewriter in his hand and the Profs book in his pocket—that the time would come when he would not have to return, these thoughts and feelings were gone so completely they might never have been a part of him.

And he had brought back something more from that short, deep sleep: the knowledge that he was no longer afraid, that he no longer feared his luck and an inevitable reckoning for it. There would always be an account owing to life, but now he could pay it. He would never know when a payment on that account would fall due, but the funds would be there, although there would never be a receipt marked "Paid in Full."

Brad and Chuck and Hunter and Sudsy—they had been so sure, so loving sure, when they had said, each in his own way: "You've had it, dad. Now you can relax and stay up here and work. You're not damned fool enough—not even David Champlin is damned fool enough—to go back now."

They had not known what he knew now, finally and unequivocally, that when he had been at Pengard, in Boston, in Oxford, when Europe and Africa had lain just ahead of him, even when the plane that brought his shattered, unconscious body here was high above the earth—that he had never left; he had only been away.

He and Sara would be married and their marriage would be a good one, but it would not be like other marriages, rounded, whole. He had run from this imperfect marriage, wanting the perfect, wanting the impossible. Now he accepted its inevitability, and with new insight realized that Sara had always accepted it, had not run from it but toward it, not wanting the perfect, the impossible, wanting only love.

There would be loneliness for them both, buried, unspoken. "Needs—needs David," Gramp had said. It would always be a need he would have to answer, as he had answered it the morning he said to Isaiah Watkins, "Heard you say, didn't I, that you could use an extra hand?"

There was no place in all the country where Gramp's need was not present, and there would be those of his race to serve the need in the North, the East, the West. But Gramp had died with an unused passport in his pocket; he had never seen his Tiger, Tiger. This was the need that Li'l Joe Champlin's grandson must answer. God giving him the strength and time, he must do what he could to put in the hands of his people their passports, their tickets to a downstairs seat at Tiger, Tiger—there, in the region of his birth. These were the men and women who lined the banks of a wide river, singing; of them Gramp had said, "I know my people's voices."

Now he accepted and did not fear that he must break himself in two time and again to return to the little white house in Beauregard with its funny narrow living room where a shabby divan still had antimacassars pinned to threadbare upholstery. Now he knew he would climb, again and again— with a cane to help what would be then a labored, doubly crippled step—the worn stairway that led to a room where dedicated men and women mapped strategy and laid plans for the freeing of his people.

Sara would be here soon. When he heard her steps far down the corridor, he would see her in his mind's eye, half walking, half running, to him. Her eyes would be bright and soft when she saw him, her touch on his cheek gentle. "So thin," she would say, smiling. "So thin. Such a thin, thin love he is!"

Sara, little love, hurry! Sara, baby, come a-running! We must hoard every minute of every day together; they're the bright and shining coins with which to make the payments on a debt that will always be due; they'll be my strength and power in that world you cannot enter with me. He closed his eyes again, and he did not know whether the words that came to him were in a dream or whether he spoke them to himself:

"You'll have but one home, David Champlin—the one that's part of you, has always been and always will be. You cannot tear it or its people out of you; not even Sara can take it from you or replace it with another. There will be many payments on your luck; make this one without whimpering —whenever you go home, you will always go home alone."

CHAPTER 88

Sara Champlin broke five eggs into a bowl, seasoned them, and began beating them vigorously with a fork. "Always use a fork," David had said. "Those damned electric mixers are all right I suppose for mashed potatoes and cake batter, but they're pure murder on scrambled eggs." Even so, she knew that when she had finished they wouldn't come within a mile of tasting as good as David's always did.