Five Smooth Stones (143 page)

"A cup of your coffee, Miz Towers, and another raw carrot and I'll forget about it—"

They were sitting at the table by the window when Abraham came in. "Man, it's sure fine to see you," he said. "You looking good, man!"

"Considering," said David, and grinned up at Abraham. "Don't look so bad yourself."

"You-all heard? I'm a citizen now."

"God's sake! I missed out on that." David told the lie easily. Brad had told him about it, but he knew that Abraham wanted to tell him about it himself.

"I ain't saying we didn't have a time. There was eighty-five of us the first time we went up to register. Les Forsyte and some folks from ALEC in New Orleans, they took us over. Five of us made it, and I was one, and twenty made the jailhouse. But five's better'n none. Next time they was ten of us made it. But Ma, here, I don't reckon she stopped praying from sunup to sundown that first time till I come home all in one piece. Man could get hisself kilt even thinking about registering to vote fer as long as she can remember." He was pouring coffee from the pot on the stove, brought his cup to the table now. "This town sure got its belly full of quiet back there, nothing but a handful of colored crossing to the other side to work. Didn't make humans out of 'em, but they ain't hankering for another dose of it. Hear it's working good other places, too. This here boycott, that'll help, too—"

"Don't relax, Abraham," said David. He heard Miz Towers slip up beside him, saw a gnarled black hand holding a folded legal document and a photograph. He took them from her, and she said: "Mighty proud to put these in your hands, son. They been waitin' for you."

"Thanks." He did not look directly at her or at the others either, not wanting to show the emotion that was threatening his composure. "Thanks again, Miz Towers—" He slipped the photograph and the deed into the inner pocket of his coat, patting the coat lightly afterward, then looked directly into her wise, hooded old eyes, and smiled.

Abraham's voice broke the silence. "We all knows better than to lay back now. Ain't none of us doing anything that foolish. Registering ain't voting. Always did say that would be the day of reckoning. Always did say it. Still, times is changing. Even Ma notices it. Times is changing—"

As David maneuvered himself into the car after leaving the Towers house, he handed the deed to Brad. "Please. In your briefcase, Chief." When the motor started he said: "Look, Chief, run on down the road a bit, will you? We can spare five minutes. I've been hatching an idea. That wide place in the creek where I went swimming—I've been wondering if they could build a dam up above, or divert the stream or something like that, make a natural swimming hole for the kids who are ambulatory or who need it for therapy. Like a kid I know in New Orleans named Billy—"

"Still spoiling you, brat," said Brad and backed the car into the driveway of Abraham's garage, turning it westward. He pulled to the side of the road just short of the plank bridge that crossed the stream. "You aren't getting out, are you?"

"Sure I am."

Brad reached for the door handle beside him, and David said, "Get off my back, Grandmaw! I'm O.K. I can make it alone. It's not all that rough—"

He limped slowly away from the car, his cane making a hollow thudding sound on the worn planks of the bridge. Without turning, he waved his free hand at Brad when he heard the older man call, "Take it easy!"

Now he stood on the far side of the bridge, more than ankle deep in the spiky, coarse grass that lined the rutted roadway. The late-afternoon hush lay over Flaming Meadows, and no breeze stirred its lush greenness; there were no ripples now to change its colors in subtle movement. The only sound was that of swiftly running Angel Creek brawling against its bonds, hurtling over fallen branches, chuckling over rocks. David Champlin, standing there in the quiet, tried to take in, to make his own, the knowledge that here, where once had been flaming horror, there would be healing; here, where in fear-inspired fantasies imaginative minds heard the windblown eerie laughter of a "ha'nt," there would be the human sound of the voices of men and women and children who would come for help to a place once known as Flaming Meadows.

The words of a hymn he had last heard in the church in Roxbury came to him—"Lord, don't let my running be in vain"—and he began to hum softly; then the words and the melody were obscured by the wide river of his childhood's half-dream, its bank lined with people, all black, all singing —and his voice became more than a hum, became a song, the

words low and vibrant. It felt good to sing here in the open, in the quiet before dusk. "Pharaoh's army got drownded—"

***

The tree on the low hill that rose gently from the edge of Flaming Meadows was small and sturdy. One of its branches was of just the right height to give comfortable support to the folded arms of the tall, thin man in the green shirt, and he leaned on them now, waiting. Now and then he reached down to touch the rifle propped against the tree's trunk, making sure that it was steady, and twice he raised it to his shoulder and sighted experimentally at some distant object. When he did this the wide thin lips curled upward, parted just enough to show the edges of tobacco-stained teeth. Get a rabbit from here easy, he thought; a nigger ought to be duck soup.

He had a good feeling about it; folks could laugh, but he'd always known when things were going to go right for him, when his luck had changed and things were really going his way. He'd had it that noon when someone at City Hall told him the nigger they'd tried to get two years ago was back in town. If he'd been along the night they set out to get him, the nigger wouldn't be back; he wouldn't have bitched the job up the way those punk kids had. And they wouldn't bitch it up now; they'd been trained good now. But they'd sure bitched it up then.

He'd got the scrawny little preacher, everyone knew that, and those folks that hadn't congratulated him had kept their mouths shut. Even if they caught him for getting this one, he wasn't worried; maybe a little while in the jailhouse till his friends brought bail, but nothing serious. But it was a hell of a note when a God-fearing white man in the South even had to think about a spell in the jailhouse for getting a trouble-making nigger, a hell of a note when a man couldn't get credit, fair and square and in the open, for doing his duty by his people.

But those kids should have gotten this nigger that night they went after him; he had a personal score to settle with the black bastard. Wasn't no white man could get away with hitting ol' Clete in the balls, and this black son of a bitch had sent him sprawling, moaning, on the pavement. He mighta been hurt, lying there, all them folks running, not seeing where they was going.

And that wasn't all. He swore obscenely, thinking about how it wasn't all. This black ape had gone back north and marrried a white woman, come back down here from a white woman's bed—been in the papers, been on the radio, hadn't it, about his marrying some white bitch who'd ought to be turned over to the Klan? By God, ol' Clete was doing his Christian duty, that's what he was doing, his Christian duty, killing the black bastard.

He shifted his weight, muscles tiring now. That must have been their car, in front of the Towers place—and that was something else. Him and his mongrel friend, coming down here, buying land, tricking decent white people out of it. That must have been their car in front of the Towers house, and from where he stood he could see the house, the yard, and the car. Sooner or later they'd come out, and he was sure, certain sure, they'd drive down a piece to see the land the nigger had come back here and bought.

He straightened as the sound of a car starting came to him clearly in that tranquil twilight hush. He turned his head and saw the car in front of the Towers house pull away and travel down the road, stop at the edge of the plank bridge. He'd been right; his hunch had been right. He saw the big dark man climb awkwardly out of the car, thought fleetingly that even if the kids had bitched the job up two years ago they'd given the nigger something to remember them by. The man was limping across the bridge now, using a cane, then stopping in the grass beside the roadside, looking upstream.

He raised his rifle, brought the dark head to dead center in the cross hairs of his sight. It was a damned shame, a Goddamned shame, to have to kill a bad nigger quick like this. It ought to be done slow, so's the son of a bitch would know what was happening, slow so's the other niggers would know, when they found out, how he must have screamed and prayed. The bastards always prayed. This kind of hunting was for deer, for animals; it was too good, too quick for uppity niggers. It used to be different, in the old days when the South was let to be what God meant it to be, white man's country. Things were getting worse in the South, getting worse. Times were changing—things were getting bad—times were changing—

The dark head had moved, but now it was dead center again, thrown back a little, and he thought he saw the nigger's lips moving, could hear, faintly, his voice. Black bastard must be singing, the way the sound carried. There was no breeze to calculate; the cold eyes looking through the sight were keen; the finger on the trigger was steady. When the sound of the shot died out, he waited for the space of four breaths before turning away. Just to be sure. Just to be dead sure.

CHAPTER 91

Dr. Clifton Sutherland stumbled into an unoccupied room in the maternity ward of Endicott Memorial Hospital. He closed the door quickly behind him and leaned against it, fighting for control. There had been no time to think, to take the news fully into his consciousness when they had called him at home. "Dr. Frye is in surgery. Can you come immediately?" the nurse had said, and behind her voice he heard Sara's. He did what it lay within his power to do, gave her a few kind hours of oblivion, then checked and rechecked, calling desperately to Brad's office, to wire services, to radio and TV news editors. It had to be an unspeakable, macabre joke, the call to Sara, an obscenity of such horror the mind could not accept it, and then, at last, his mind was forced to accept it, and he almost stumbled down the corridor to the haven of the empty room, seeking solitude, like a wounded animal. Some one of those who gathered now in a knot at the chart desk, their low tones charged with shock and pity, might have touched him, he thought, might have said, "It's terrible. You were such good friends." Some other doctor might have put an arm across his shoulder, his father even, and there was already an arm across his shoulder. It was a strong, brown arm, and he was back in Laurel, in the cold gray bleakness of a winter afternoon, coughing, coughing, then standing, weak and shaken, feeling that strong arm, hearing a deep laugh, a deep young voice saying, "You tell your father you want David Champlin with you—" He was in a room, the only damned student's room on the whole damned campus with a fireplace, and that same voice was saying, "You think you've got the plague? There's millions of us were born with it," and then he was outside again in the bleak gray cold, and the strength of another's body was supporting him, and he could feel the strong and steady rhythm of the other's heart—the strong and steady rhythm of David's heart—Suds Sutherland, alone, leaned his head against the door, and tears ran unchecked down plump cheeks, gray now with shock and grief.

***

It was ten strides from one end to the other of the bricked terrace outside Beanie Benford's classroom. Ten strides, and he had made them a hundred times since his telephone had rung an hour before, and he heard Karl Knudsen's shaken voice. "We are sure now," said Knudsen. "I did not call to tell you until I was sure." Benford thought: I would not have doubted; I would have known the truth of it, but that is because I am black and you are white.

"For one thing only I am thankful," said Knudsen. "For one thing only. That my brother Bjarne did not live to know of this. David was—he called him his—the son of his mind—"

"Yes," said Benford. "Yes. Thank you, Karl, for calling."

And so he had walked, back and forth, while the shadowy form of a stunned, proud youth stood by the parapet and watched. The sound of his own voice talking to that youth came back to him now, but he could not remember the words he had said, except that he had meant them to bring comfort and strength, but he would not forget the look on the young face, the set of the wide shoulders, the hurt in the dark eyes —or the words: "One thing, Professor. One thing I'm not going to do is pack. I'm not going to pack."

Benford searched his mind again for his own words on that day; they might bring him the comfort and strength he had sought to give the boy. There had been something about courage, and the evils of becoming torpid, and about love and, somehow, about God. But all that came back to his mind today were the words he had whispered inaudibly as David Champlin limped, straight and tall, down the path away from him: "Lawd Jesus, he'p him; he ain't nothing but a chile."

***

The lounge of the London hotel where the former Dean Goodhue of Pengard College and his wife had been staying for two months had the hushed quietude of one of the city's older and fustier clubs. They chose the hotel because it was a favorite in those academic circles where Goodhue moved and tried to have his being. Today the outside fog made its dim interior seem almost warmly inviting. "Shabby old place," Goodhue would say. "But we enjoy it; feel more at home there, don't you know. And they serve a really proper tea."

Elacoya Goodhue was presiding over one of what her husband called the "really proper" teas, and with them, more by accident than design, were an angular professor from a Midlands university and a rounder, plumper one from nearby London University. The angular professor accepted a cup of tea from Elacoya, selected a sandwich, and said, "Shocking thing, eh Goodhue? Murder of that young man. Graduate of your college, wasn't he?"

Goodhue fumbled through pockets, one hand eventually emerging with pipe, the other with tobacco pouch. "I believe he was eventually graduated. After I left there. Yes, I believe it must have been after that."