Five Smooth Stones (142 page)

Sara had come in then, smiling, glowing, wincing with funny little grimaces as she walked, "David, darling—"

In about two seconds now he'd be talking about his son to Brad again, and he resolutely pulled his mind away from the bassinet in the third-floor room at Endicott Hospital. There were half-a-dozen things he should be thinking about, problems that his thinking and planning could affect materially, and that small scrap of male humanity back in Boston could —damn! When the stewardess picked up the trays he let his seat back to the last notch. Sleep was never far when he was on a plane, was very close when he had had to get up at five thirty in order to catch it. There had been little enough of it the night before, waking what seemed like every hour on the hour, something within him shouting: "You've got a son! You've got a son! You and Sara have a son—" Turning, twisting, punching pillows, he said to himself: "Sunday morning I'll go to Roxbury before I get Sara and the baby. Go to church, do a little singing. Yes, Lawd! They'll know I'm there Sunday.... Damn, why can't I sleep?"

He had left the bedroom door open, and sometime during the night he felt Chop-bone's quiet, considerate jump to the bed, the soft maneuverings as the cat settled down beside him. "Don't stomp," he'd said. "And stay off my back—"

In the plane he stretched a little more and settled his head more comfortably on the back of the seat. When he awakened he did not open his eyes at first and as he sat there quietly a memory dislodged itself from somewhere and floated to the surface of his mind and he saw an enraged, humiliated, sickened boy taking his first train trip and the porter who had known so well how to handle him.
Shucks. Couldn't let Li'l Joe Champlin's grandson go hongry in my car.... Thought I knowed you when I seen you.... Soon's I seen you smile I was sure.... Stretch out now, son, and get your res'.

Good people, he thought; my people are good people, with quick eyes to see and quick hands to help another's hurt, and how could their own in other places let them down, how isolate themselves within the cocoon of their own bitterness and frustration until they could neither see nor comprehend the warm and secret comradeship that had drawn their forefathers together and given them strength? The handkerchiefs were coming off the heads now; even grizzled, gray heads were held a little higher, uncovered; and aged, rheumy eyes held a vision of the future of their race they had never held before. Each trip home that he had made since he had been well enough, each visit to a smaller town, had lifted his heart. Selma, Alabama, had sent him home silent and remote for days, the far horizons he had seen filling him with an awed wonderment, giving him strength for the harder, more grueling struggle he knew lay just ahead before those horizons could be reached. Lord! be thought now, and his lips moved in a half-smile, Lord, you better let my people go, because if You don't, they're going anyhow.

He glanced sideways at Brad, and the half-smile became a full one at the expression of determined concentration on the thin face bending over the contents of a Manila folder. The Chief wasn't going to let a li'l ol' airplane bug him. The cover of the folder was marked "Hospital," and he felt he ought to discuss the contents with Brad, then decided against it. Maybe the guy was really engrossed, and conversation would bring him back to the unpleasant realization that he was thirty thousand feet up.

He didn't want to become too involved in the hospital project that had been started by Lloyd Litchfield when Litchfield, breathing fire, had visited him while he was still in Endicott Memorial. Brad and Chuck had been there, and during a general discussion of the use of the land he had said, "Whyn't you take that meadow off my hands anyhow, Lloyd? I can't give it away—or sell it. Old Miz Towers would die of a broken heart. I can lease it to you—ninety-nine-year lease—for free, if you want."

Chuck had leaned forward in his chair suddenly. "Hospital," he said, beaming, and before any of them had realized it, Litchfield had talked to architects, had plans drawn up, and launched—with Chuck and Brad's help—a full-fledged campaign for the building of a hospital on Flaming Meadows. Money had come almost unasked in the aftermath of the publicity the Cainsville troubles had received. It would be a hospital that would serve the whole area, without discrimination, with a large children's annex. "Call it the Effie Brown Memorial Annex," said David.

Plans for this trip to Cainsville had been made when Brad said ol' Miz Towers had been dead set on giving David the deed to the land with her own hands. "Says she won't die until she does it. And even Miz Towers doesn't want to live forever. That deed represents the land to her now, in a sort of transubstantive way."

And David had understood, and known, and agreed to come. "O.K., Chief. We'll go after the baby's born, eh?"

Brad was closing the folder now, looking gingerly out the window. "Say, David! That's ground down there."

"Well, hallelujah! Don't worry about a thing. We'll hit it slow and easy, on wheels."

CHAPTER 90

It was like coming back to a place in which he had spent a long time. Surely more than two days had passed on that first experience of Cainsville; surely a larger part of his lifetime had been spent among these familiar buildings, these familiar rooms, these friendly faces.

There was still an upturned nail keg near the counter in Haskin's store, and he awkwardly lowered his body to sit on it as he had the afternoon of his first day there. He could see few changes, none significant; even the smell was the same— old wood, beer, lunch meet, cheese, vegetables fresh from the earth, tobacco smoke, and people. Only the feel of the humid heat of that August day was missing.

As it had been then, the room was well filled, but not crowded. And if there was nothing absent that had been there then except the heat, there was something added: the sound of easy laughter, of the lightning-quick banter of his people when there is no outsider present, the sound, the feel of the vital rhythm of their being.

The greetings between him and Haskin were over and he waited now, as he had waited that first time, for the storekeeper to finish with his counter customers, relaxed, letting the feel of the place take over his mind, responding to the warmth of the inevitable, innumerable handclasps; feeling himself grow slower, easier, answering in kind the familiar phrases of welcome and concern, knowing himself as whole and not divided, his body loose and easy, his mind content, at peace.

His eyes lighted as he noticed a stout gray-haired woman at the front counter, and he watched her and waited for Haskin to give her change, sure she would put the coins in an old-fashioned change purse, snap it shut, then drop it into the huge, shabby bag she carried, the same bag she had carried on that other afternoon. This time she did not see him on her way out because he was seated, and as she passed him he said, "Morning, ma'am—" and she looked down at him and smiled. "Mornin', son, mornin'. How you doin'?" then hurried on, still smiling, reaching out to him today, as she had then, for a bright moment in the universal communion of his people. He did not need to steady himself today, as he had needed to then, against an almost overwhelming urge to follow her to whatever warm and shabby home she lived in, there to stay. Today he would have liked to follow her, to stop a while with her in the home he could visualize so well, sit and drink the lemonade or soft drink sure to be stored in her icebox. But it was not the sick longing of a spent mind and tortured soul. He had seen her once, and then again, and now she was gone, and it might well be he would never see her in the future, but he had known her all his life. He had heard her voice among the voices of the people who had lined the banks of the wide river of his childhood's fantasy, had known her in the friendly corner stores of New Orleans' Vieux Carre, kind to a little boy, watched her bustle down the aisle in the small weather-beaten church Gramp took him to in Beauregard, seen her sit, talking to Gram, in their kitchen.

He did not realize Brad had come over and was standing close to him until he heard, "David. Wake up. Onward and upward—" He pulled himself to his feet with the help of his cane. All around him there were dark eyes, warm with compassion; but no tactless move to help him.

Drinking beer in Haskin's kitchen later, he learned that Gracie and Shad had gone to California to visit her sister and that she was settling there for good; that Willy was in Chicago, had been there, since a couple of months after leaving Anderson's hospital.

"How's he doing?" asked David.

"Says he's doing fine," said Haskin. And added, "That's what he say."

That's us, thought David; got to see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, know it by our own senses to believe it—if it's good. But if it's bad—it's true. He had heard it so often, the story of another's good fortune tagged with "That's what he say." It was one of the paradoxes of that "Negro character" others mouthed about so freely, a reaction part jealousy, part antagonism toward his own race; one of the imponderables that made the Negro wary always, yet in spite of that wariness bound to his fellows, with bonds of common suffering, bonds whose very strength sometimes bred secret hatred of such humiliating fetters. Yet his race had given to its people a Martin Luther King, a Hummer Sweeton, a Dick Gregory, a Mahalia Jackson, because there was a greatness in its blood and bone and heart. Where was the greatness beneath the pettiness, the all-too-frequent sabotage? Where was it in the lost and lonely defiance of the ghetto-born, the bitter aloofness of the intellectual? Crushed, twisted, broken, racked; still, it survived in all his people more often than it died; it was there for all the world to see and take account of in the massed thousands of a march on Washington, the singing hundreds on the road from Selma to Montgomery; immortalized, witnessed to by the corpses of the Medgar Everses, the Hummer Sweetons, the shattered, tortured body of a brown youth found beneath an embankment.

Now, in retrospect, he asked himself if it had been the knowledge of his people's need that had kept him with them, or an instinctive homage to an emergent greatness impossible to turn from. It did not matter; he would never know the answer, just as he would never know the answer to the riddle of the paradoxes of his people—of himself.

He jumped, startled, at Mrs. Haskin's voice. "Penny," she said. "Penny for your thoughts."

"Gosh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Haskin!"

Jim Haskin looked at him closely. "Ain't upset, are you? Coming back down here after all that happened?"

"Lord, no! I'm glad to be here. I was thinking, back there in the store, that I'd only been here two days on that other trip, yet I felt as though I was back with old friends."

"You are. You sure are and that's a fact—"

Later, said Haskin, when Brad and David had finished their business with Miz Towers, they could come back for supper and talk about the present situation and future plans. "Voting rights bill, it'll get us registered now," said Haskin. "But it ain't got us in the ballot booths yet. Not by a long sight, it ain't. We got a ways to go yet—"

He and Brad were leaving for the Towers house when Luke Willis called, long distance, for David.

"Hi, boss! Congratulations!"

"Thanks, kid. Where you calling from?"

"New York. I couldn't make it down there. Man, it seems like a year since I saw you."

"Two months."

"Yeah. And now you're a daddy. When you sending him to school?"

"Next week."

"Be seeing you then maybe. I'll be down your way. Just wanted to call today and send my regards to the folks there, and congratulate you."

"Thanks, kid."

"See you soon, boss. Hey, wait—does the baby look like you or Sara?"

"Who can tell! Looks like a baby to me. A real fine one—"

"See you—"

As Brad and David drove away, Brad said, "Well come back the long way round and stop for a minute to see Anderson and his wife, maybe bring them back with us to Haskin's. Mrs. Haskin would rather, I swear, she'd rather cook for a dozen than a few."

"Listen, Chief, there's one thing that absolutely must not get loused up. Anderson's to be top dog on this hospital thing. You got that straight with Litchfield?"

"Don't worry. We're keeping control. Anderson may give some of the white doctors who are volunteering a bad time."

"You think so?"

Brad shrugged. "He's a bitter man now, David. He's never gotten over Effie Brown, and the things that happened the night you were hurt." He swung the car around a chuckhole and continued on slowly. "If it sickens laymen, decent laymen, to see people die for lack of care, to know the color of a man's skin opened the pearly gates for him, mustn't it be hell for a doctor?"

"Up till now it hasn't been hell for most of the ofay doctors in these lily-white southern hospitals." David gave a short laugh. "On the other hand, maybe it has, and they just feel at home there."

After a few jolting moments they came to the house that had been Tether's End. David noticed that the yard was strewn with battered toys, the house occupied now that ALEC had taken over a back room in Haskin's store.

"It must be just about here that Tinker did his bit for his country," said Brad.

"Notice this package I'm carrying? Juicy soupbones."

Suddenly his mood changed, and bitterness mingled sourly with remembered terror; he felt again the sickening blows on spine and head, his own prone helplessness, heard again the shouted obscenities and sadistic laughter, the vicious snarls of unseen dogs, not known then as rescuers.

Tinker was on Miz Towers's porch when they parked outside the gate, and came slowly toward them, stopping and sitting, motionless, at the halfway mark of the path. David said, "Hiya, gorgeous; hiya, Tinker," softly, and the powerful body came bounding toward them. David handed the soupbone package hastily to Brad, steadied himself on his cane, saying "Down, Tinker, down," as the big paws hit his chest. Brad said, "My God, he's a fearsome thing at first sight. Scared the hell out of me even now."

Miz Towers was on the porch as they approached the house, brought there by Tinker's heralding barks. David saw marks of age that had not been there before, even the two years had bent the shoulders, put a tremor in the gnarled black hands, sunk the eyes even deeper into dark sockets, yet left untouched the life behind the eyes. She talked as she had before, incessantly, as she led them into house and kitchen and there, for the first time, seemed to take in David's limp and cane. "Lord Jesus!" she said. "They hurted you bad—"