Five Smooth Stones (20 page)

David stood for a long moment without speaking. His spine felt cold, and the skin on his body prickled with fear for Gramp, while a searing flame of sick rage started at the pit of his stomach and seemed to consume him. He tried to stop his legs from shaking, fought to keep his hands steady. "Sons of bitches," he said.

Joseph Champlin turned to him. "Ain't no use talking like that, David. No use at all. There's nothing you can do about it."

"I can get out! So can you! Gramp, come with me. Huh, Gramp? You can get work in Laurel. I know—I've been there. There's colored working all over. Easy work. And if you can't get work, I can take care of you. I'm going to work. How bad were you sick, Gramp? How bad? Whyn't you tell me when you came home? Whyn't you
tell
me! I'd have taken you to a doctor. I'd have
made
you see a doctor!"

"So-so, David, so-so. You was up there in Ohio. Go in and turn on the radio so's it'll warm up. I wasn't took too bad. Just a pain, and I had the shorts for a few minutes, trying to breathe. That's all it was. Mygawdalmighty, David, I wouldn't of told you if I'd known you was going to raise a sand like this."

"Answer me, Gramp! Why can't you come with me?"

"You going to do them dishes, boy?"

"Later. I'll do 'em later."

David's anger was turned on bis grandfather now. He was infuriated by the implacable stubbornness of this little man who wouldn't give a straight answer, would only shunt him off. Gramp had always been able to anger him this way, irritate him to the point of shouting. It was as though the old man didn't hear him, but David knew he did. Sooner or later he would answer, but David knew it would not be until Li'l Joe felt his grandson's temper had cooled.

Gramp, the dishes stacked and rinsed, said, "You turn on the radio?"

David shook his head, still angry, still irritated, and limped to the radio in the living room. As he switched it on, he muttered under his breath, "Stubborn old goat, stubborn old goat."

He emptied the ashtray on the end table beside his grandfather's chair, wiping it out with a Kleenex from a box beside it. Gramp's got the sniffles again, he thought.

Li'l Joe came in, as he always did, carrying a bottle of beer in one hand, glass and opener in the other. He put them beside the radio on the table and before he sat down took his cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of his shirt and laid them beside the ashtray, on a spot carefully calculated to need the least reaching. "Always make it easy for yourse'f," he'd say. "Ain't nobody else going to do it for you." He sat down, and with the sides of his feet maneuvered the battered old hassock into the exact position that would give him maximum comfort. He glanced at his watch. "Too early for the news," he said. He started to unfold the evening paper.

"Gramp," said David. "Gramp, did you think I was kidding when I said why didn't you come with me to Ohio?"

"Didn't think you was kidding. Just thought you was talking foolish."

"Why! Why was I talking foolish?"

Joseph Champlin sighed and laid the paper half unfolded back on his knee. "Look, David. You know Jim Stacey? Stays over by St. Anne Street?"

"Sure I know him. What's that got to do with anything?"

"Him and me went to school together. Near where the Ursuline Convent is now. Every morning his ma would bring him to the school, and every evening she'd come and get him. My own ma told me how all during the first week he was there she used to stay round the school-house all day till going-home time. Us kids gave him a bad time. Had to have his mamma bring him to school and take him home. What you-all think those other boys up there at that collidge going to think? Big lummox like you bringing your grandaddy with you! You just ain't got real good sense, boy."

David, standing by the mantel, looked down at his grandfather's face and said: "You've been studying about it,

Gramp. Even before I said anything, you'd been studying about it."

"S'pose I had?"

"Then I wasn't talking too foolish."

"Mebbe so, mebbe not." The long wrinkles on Li'l Joe's cheeks bracketed his mouth as he smiled. "Besides, who'd take care of them chickens?"

"Chickens! Sweet Jesus, Gramp! Chickens! You could sell those chickens! You're too chicken yourself to kill 'em and eat 'em. You could sell 'em. Sell the house, too."

"Reckon I could, son. Sell them chickens, I mean. Lots of good dinners out there in that yard. Smothered. They too old for frying. Still, I makes a pretty fair piece of change out of them eggs now and then. But I ain't going to sell no house, David. You're mighty young, son, to try and tell an old man coming on for his social security to sell a house he saved pennies for. You'll see someday, David. You're going on for a grown man now, but some ways you still ain't nothing but a chile."

"But suppose you got sick? You're too damned hardheaded and stubborn to call a doctor. If you had a heart attack or something, you'd rub yourself with b'ar grease and think you were O.K., I swear you would. Look what you just told me. Getting the shorts climbing those Goddamned Jim Crow stairs. And a pain. How do you know you haven't got heart trouble? Hard as you've worked all your life, it's a wonder you've
got
a heart. What were you telling me the other day about that foreman who keeps wanting you to quit grading and come back on the unloading gang? One of these days you're going to be just stupid enough to say 'yes.' What you weigh now? Hundred and ten?"

"Look, son—"

"You just let
me
talk. 'Ain't nothing but a chile!' You know the Bible a hell of a lot better than I do... you know where it says out of the mouths of babes and stuff. All right, you just listen to
this
babe."

Gramp laughed. "I'm listening, son. Swear to God I am."

"But you're not
hearing
me. You don't
want
to hear me. What did you tell me the guys say on the docks about mules and niggers? Kill a mule, buy another; kill a nigger—"

"It's just a saying, David. Just an old-time—"

"Saying! Shit! It's true and you know it. If I ain't nothing but a chile, you ain't nothing but a nigger—a two-legged mule—on the docks. Now you've got a chance, now in your old age, to be something besides just a two-legged nigger mule on the damned New Orleans docks—"

"Nigra, son. You ain't got it quite right."

David slammed his fist down on the mantel so hard that pain shot up his arm. "One way they're right. One way they're right! You're a mule!"

Joseph Champlin laughed again, not unkindly but with genuine amusement. David tried to hold his anger and his irritation back, to keep calm for a final spurt of entreaty. Gramp might be softening.

"Look, Gramp, look. It makes sense, it does make sense. It's not foolishness."

Gramp leaned forward, ran a long finger under the vamp of one leather house slipper, eased his foot out, then slipped it back in. "Getting me a blister," he said.

"Oh, God!" said David. "Oh, sweet Jesus!"

CHAPTER 15

He did not really hear the slam of the front door behind his furious charge to the street until he was on the ferry. Then the sound of the door and the memory of the typewriter came all at once, and he was sick with shame. He wondered what the little man sitting in the house in Beauregard had that could fill him with shame for slamming out in a fit of anger. Perhaps it was because he could still remember, young as he had been, the sound of a low voice that said "So-so, little man, so-so—" when he had awakened frightened and crying in the dark.

On the New Orleans side he did not leave the ferry, but turned in his ticket and remained on board. On the upper deck, on the colored side, he stood leaning on the rail, watching a big Negro down below as he directed the cars that came aboard. Funny, he thought, a white man will take orders from a Negro when the Negro is doing something like that; obey like a heeling dog the "This way, that way," the directions of an imperious black hand, no time for "sirs" or "ma'ams."

When the cars were all parked, the gates closed, and the ferry groaning reluctantly away from the slip, the man below leaned for a moment on the rail, looking across the wide river. The cars seemed like well-trained circus animals, quiet in the places allotted to them. David looked again at the big man below, and wondered if he had seen the animal picture at the Lyceum or if he, like Gramp, got "the shorts" when he climbed the Jim Crow stairs to nigger heaven. Or if maybe he was planning to go to the late show when his shift was over.

There was a glow on the town they were leaving, and ahead of them a brighter glow was drawing closer. David had not known where he was going when he had stormed out of the little white house.
Part yours now, boy, part yours.
Gramp had sounded proud when he said that. He knew he wasn't going to that movie.
Seems like when colored gets old they ain't supposed to want to see no good movies.
It was the last time he'd spend his good money, money he'd worked for, to help a damned son-of-a-bitching Jim Crow movie house get rich.

Under his feet the ferry groaned and complained. People were saying there'd be a bridge over the river one of these days. What kind of a bridge? Bridge a colored man could walk across? Bridge a colored man could drive across? It would have to be a long bridge, thought David, an almighty long bridge, and there would have to be an almighty lot of men working on it, white and black, to make a bridge across the river that would take a colored man and his grandson to a good seat in a movie.

"It's coming," said David. "It's
gotta
come."

"You speaking to me, son?"

He whirled, the blood hot in his cheeks because he had been caught talking to himself when he had thought he was alone, leaning on the rail of the ferry, watching the dark water, listening to his own thoughts, and trapped into talking out loud to himself.

The man leaning on the rail beside him was a man about Gramp's age, wearing work clothes. On the deck beside him was a lunch bucket just like Gramp's. The smell of liquor was strong on his breath, but his eyes were as bright and alert as a squirrel's.

"No, sir. I'm sorry, sir. Guess I was talking to myself. Got to be crazy to do that."

"I don't know," said the old man. "I don't know 'bout that Go crazy if you don't sometimes."

"Hope I didn't scare you."

"Me? Scare me? Lawd, son, it'd take more than Li'l Joe Champlin's grandbaby to scare Henry Clay. Now, if you'd been one of these here delinquents, these here teens, all hipped up, smelling of weeds, mebbe I would of been scared. Soon hit an old man or cut him and take everything he's got as spit. But I ain't scared of Li'l Joe's grandson."

"How come you know me?"

"Seen you with your grandaddy, plenty of times. I been knowing Li'l Joe more'n forty years. Worked with him plenty. Just never happened to meet you. He said you was a fine boy. And I sez, 'You saying it, Li'l Joe; you the one saying it.' " He laughed. "Damned if he wasn't right."

David squirmed. It always made him squirm when people said things like that, unless it was a girl. There was quiet for a moment, the boy and the man leaning on the rail of the boat, looking across the widest river on the continent, and David remembered his childhood's half-waking, half-dreaming fantasy of a wide, flowing river, its banks lined with people, all black, all singing. The banks were lined with people now, he thought, in broken-down old houses with slave quarters in the rear, in rat-ridden rooms, in shacks, and he wasn't a child anymore and they weren't singing.

He forgot the old man, began to hum, patting his hand on the rail in time. "Oh, Mary, don't you weep—" In a moment the old man took up the tune, singing the words while David hummed. The old man can sing, thought David. That old man can really sing. When David joined the other in the words, the big Negro below heard them and looked up and smiled, teeth showing strong and white and clean in the dark face.

***

David had finally convinced his grandfather that the overhead light with the pink glass shade wasn't enough to read by. Protesting every inch of the way, Joseph Champlin had bought a gooseneck lamp at a secondhand store. It was on the end table now, its light coming over his left shoulder the way David said it should. He had read the paper from front to back, trying to dispel the small devils of worry that dwelt in the back of his mind those nights when his grandson was away from home. He had lingered over the sports news, wishing again that his first wife hadn't been the ruination of their son Evan, thinking that if she hadn't, Evan's name might have been in the sports pages, and he wouldn't have to look for it, half fearfully, in the crime roundup.

The rattle of the paper as he was folding it covered the sound of David's entrance. The soft click of the latch as the boy closed the screen door made him jump. "Lawd, David! Might as well shoot a man to death with a gun as scare him to death! Wasn't looking for you. Not till way late."

David turned his eyes away from the shining relief in his grandfather's. Now that he was home, there was a lot he wanted to say, nothing that he could say.

"You forget something?" asked Gramp.

"Nope. Just didn't want to go anywhere once I got started. I got a lot of studying to do."

"You already done that, David. Young fella like you can study too much. You going to get up to that collidge with your mind all tuckered out. Get yourse'f a beer and set a while. Does a man good just to set sometimes. Too damned hot setting outside, listening to Bucky and that woman of his fighting. They still fighting when you come up the street?"

"Some. Didn't sound too bad."

" 'Bout time they got to bed. Reckon that's what they fight for. Going to bed's better for some after a good fight."

David laughed. The shame was gone now; he was easy, relaxed. "You sure know a lot for a little guy," he said.

"Watch yourse'f, boy! Watch what you're saying. I ain't so little I can't take you on."

"Aw, come on, Gramp." David was in the kitchen now. The muted slam of the refrigerator door sounded good, and the chill of the bottle of beer felt good in his hand. "You wouldn't hit a guy with a gimpy leg." He was walking toward the living room.