Five Smooth Stones (55 page)

"Yes. I know you're not exactly crazy about him—"

"He's O.K."

"He's helped me a lot. And I talked with the dean yesterday about realigning my schedule and—well, that's it. O.K. with you, Papa Champlin?"

David grinned at him over the hood of the car. "It's fine with me, Chuck. I—well, honestly, I'm not surprised. It doesn't shake me up or anything. Maybe I've sort of expected it ever since—" he hesitated, awkward with the words, and started again—"ever since that night at the ALEC meeting when Nehemiah sounded off. I saw you afterward—"

"I guess I made up my mind, sort of, that night. Only, I didn't know it. Seemed as though it came gradually, but I don't think it did. Sometimes I think we make decisions in our subconscious minds and don't know it, like going into the ministry or committing murder or something. Then for a long time our conscious mind fights 'em and then one day something comes along and the conscious mind gives up and there's the decision—all made and ready for action. Maybe Nehemiah was what did it."

David inspected the shields over the headlights intently, not looking at Chuck. Just talking about Nehemiah made him half sick with a kind of frustrated anger, and it didn't do any good. There was a rage inside and nothing to rage at, nothing to hit out at. Nehemiah, just nineteen, dead someplace in Korea after the Army took him. And the hell of it, the damned hell of it, was that the Army hadn't really taken him; he'd walked in like a damned fool and said, "Here I am." Nehemiah!

He'd done everything but get down on his knees to the crazy ape. "Man, you're out of your mind!" He'd almost been yelling. "I'm telling you, man, telling you—hell, I've been telling you for two years—that I'll work with you all summer and in vacation, help you catch up. God damn it, you ought to have known that just math wouldn't do it, should have studied more! It's not too late. Who told you you'd flunk out?"

"Beanie."

"Oh." David's face fell. "You're his favorite guy as far as math is concerned. He must have felt bad about it himself—"

"I guess he did—"

"But didn't he tell you if you'd catch up on the other stuff you could come back in the fall—get deferred if your grades were good enough then? I'll do everything I can, man—"

"Cool off. It's too late anyhow. I already put in for the Army."

"Oh, my God! Oh, Chrisalmighty! How crazy can you act! I'm asking you—why!"

Nehemiah shrugged, sank lower in his chair in David's room and looked up at David under lowered eyebrows. "Because I'm just plain sick of the place, that's one reason. Look what happened to you. If I never see another Goddamned ofay face I'll be too happy to stand it. Anyhow, I started too late; I couldn't make it anyhow. It's not a bad deal, the Army. They train you. Hell, man, I'm a hot mathematician. You think they won't use that? They got a lot of soft jobs in the Army, technical jobs and stuff, for a guy who can handle mathematics like I can. And this way I'm not flunked out

And the Army's waiting until the end of the term, till I get in two full years here. The Army's got its little khaki tongue hanging out, waiting for Nehemiah. Come a war, don't matter how much they hate us, they gotta have Sam—"

"Why the Army? Why not the Air Force? That's a helluva lot better deal—"

"Maybe they'd put me in a plane—"

"You no like? And Gramp's going to be wing-walking next trip. They fly you everywhere in the Army, man. Everywhere—"

"They doing it, not me. Anyhow, it's too late now. It's Army—"

"You've gone out of your mind, you've flipped, you're— you're—what the hell, you some kind of a patriot or something?"

"Christ, no! Are you?"

"No. But I'm not saying if I live long enough and things change I couldn't be. I mean I'll take a crack at making things so I could be. As I said, if I live long enough—"

"Long enough to see a white man swing for killing a Negro? You'll be living so long you'll be tired of living. You think it'll hurt to know how to use a gun?"

"You were going to be some kind of technician a few minutes ago."

"I still am. But I hear everybody learns how to shoot. Look, blabbermouth, what would you do, huh? I mean would you join up, I mean if it wasn't for your ankle and your damned A-plus grades?"

"You think I'm stupid or something? Why the hell should I? If they drafted me, sure, I'd go. It's a lot better than five years in jail or whatever. And I'd wind up killing Koreans and Chinese and people who never did a damned thing to me—"

"Compared to what the whites in your own country have done—"

"Well, yes—"

"To you and yours, daddy-o. You and yours. And me and mine. Hell, you know anyone down our way hasn't had two or three in the family what hasn't caught it? Strung up or shot or thrown in jail or some damned thing like that just because they're black? Do you? Or someone who can't tell you about a grandmother or an auntie or a sister didn't have something happen like—like what happened to my mother? Your Gramp—what about his daddy? And it wasn't enough just what happened to my mother. Long before that happened they found her own brother floating in the river upstate with a rope around his neck. Didn't anyone even bother to find out was he strung up or drownded. Her baby brother what she brought up—"

"You're going in circles again! And still you joined up, you knucklehead?"

"Like I said, it ain't going to do any harm to learn how to fight scientific. And besides, they'd of had me two weeks after I flunked out. This way I get a better deal. Get out faster—"

"If it's too late, I suppose it's too late. But look, people get dead real fast in the Army—"

"Hell, man, they get dead real fast, our people, in Natchez and Bogalusa—and anywhere at all, just anywhere at all, in Plaquemine Parish. And they going to finish off this war before they get around to sending Nehemiah over. I'm telling you, I'm as safe in the Army as I would be in Plaquemine Parish—"

But he hadn't been. On July first he went to basic training. David had three postcards and a couple of letters. The last letter said, "They haven't waked up yet to the fact that the great man's in the Army. They sure take their time—" A card two weeks later said he might be taking a trip soon.

The first week in October, Gramp called him on a Saturday just as he was leaving Quimby House for work, and told him Nehemiah had been killed in action. His family, Gramp said, were upsetted real bad.

That night after work David got drunker than he'd been since the night after he put Sudsy on the train for Boston. And drunk or sober, it didn't make sense.

The next morning he pulled himself together and took Nehemiah's aunt and uncle to church, and sang, standing by the piano, three of the hymns Nehemiah had always liked. And all the time he was singing he was seeing Nehemiah in the recreation room of the church, hearing him:...
Were you there?... The words, Father. You hear 'em?... You wasn't there, but my daddy was there... Were you there?...
remembering how he'd walked toward the tense, half-hysterical boy, suddenly wanting to pick him up as he would a child and carry him away from any hurts that he had suffered, was suffering, and the hurts that lay ahead as surely as life and the living of it lay ahead.

When church was over and he drove toward Laurel, still nothing made any sense, nothing, not a Goddamned thing, made any sense.

***

Now as he sat waiting, back in the balcony again, for the ceremony to end and the V.I.P. bishop to pronounce his benediction, Nehemiah had been dead for almost two years; Chuck was all set for the ministry; he, David Champlin, was all set for Harvard Law; Hunter Travis had finished a book; Tom Evans and Margaret Benjamin were both taking their Master's at the University of Chicago next year; Simmons and Dunbar were headed for some kind of literary venture; Clevenger said he was going in for scientific farming, which was all the funnier because he kept saying he wanted to take graduate work at Oxford first—with a B-minus average. And Sara Kent was leaving for Paris to study art. For how long? David didn't know, told himself it had to not matter for how long, or even where, because Sara Kent was Pengard, and Pengard was finished, and he and Sara had known that more than just four college years were over, last week after their last talk together. At least he had thought she knew, but something kept telling him that perhaps she didn't.

When he came out of the auditorium, Gramp and. the Prof and Doc Knudsen were ahead of him, talking to Hunter and his mother and father near the auditorium steps. He walked over to them, slid an arm around Gramp's shoulders and gave a strong squeeze, so that Mrs. Travis said, "Gracious, David, I heard bones crack!" He held out his hand to take the Prof's, then hit Hunter's shoulder with a fist. "All over, man!" And Lawrence Travis said, "All God's children got diplomas—"

They talked for a moment, and David said, "I have to run and make sure they aren't letting the beans stick—" and Gramp frowned in worry.

"You sure they going to be all right? You ain't forgot nothing?"

"Always been all right at home, haven't they?"

A quiet voice said with exaggerated formality, "Are you referring to red beans, David Champlin? Louisiana style? Red beans and possibly rice?"

"Sure am, Mr. Travis. At Quimby House."

Lawrence Travis turned to his son. "Is there any law that says we have to eat a cold buffet at your hall, Hunter?"

"Only unwritten. Want to break it?"

"I most certainly do. Marcia, my dear—Dr. Knudsen, Professor, shall we follow David and his grandfather? I promise manna—"

All through the evening, with people coming and going and confusion in all directions, David's eyes went time and again to the door, looking for Sara, not seeing her. He blamed himself for hoping she would come; she had said she wouldn't, said that when they said goodbye at the auditorium that would be it. She wasn't waiting until morning to leave the campus; she and her father and Bull and Tom Evans were driving partway to Chicago that night, the rest of the way the next day. They were going to start right away after the ceremonies. Just when he saw them, in his mind, driving into Cincinnati, he looked toward the doorway to the main hall, and she was there, and Chuck was calling, "There's baby! Beans, Sara, but you'll have to hurry!" She was all in blue, blue coat with a little round collar, fitted over the small perfect bust to the tiny waist, flaring below, darker blue shoes and bag, and a little blue hat with a sailor brim that made her look like a schoolboy straight from a print in a Victorian novel. David did not care whether anyone, anyone at all, thought that he was staring, even Gramp, because this was the way he was going to have to remember her after tonight and he wanted the image clear, down to the last button. She made a quick round of the room, kissing Mrs. Knudsen, hugging Doc and the Prof, was kissed soundly on the cheek by Chuck and Hunter, hugged Gramp, who looked startled to the point of shock, and when Lawrence Travis said, "I'm sorry we've just met—" hugged him and Mrs. Travis also. Then Tom Evans was in the doorway calling, "Sara! Your life's ahead of you—that's what the man said this afternoon— you going to spend it here? We're waiting—" and Sara was standing in front of David, hat askew—Sara, Sara, always with your hat askew—her hand out, but when he took it she did not shake hands but drew him after her into the hall. "Go tell them I'm on the way, Tom—"

In the hall she looked up at him, and one small hand banged the top of her hat and it miraculously straightened, making her the Victorian schoolboy and a Vogue model of the well-dressed modern child all in one. Her eyes were intent and dark, fixed on his. "I'm not going to kiss you, David. That would embarrass you. But you heard what Tom said, and the man said—our lives are ahead of us and stuff. Mine isn't. Mine's here. Mine isn't ahead of me without you. And yours isn't ahead of you without me. And you know it David, will you write—"

"Sara, it won't be right—Sara, please—"

"I'll see you, David. I don't know when or anything, and I'm not being corny, but I'll see you—maybe you won't even know it—"

And then she was running, really running and not just seeming to, across the hall to the door, forgetting to close the inner door so that through the outer screen door he could see Tom leaning out of a big car, see him pull her in with comradely roughness, then heard the door slam and saw the car drive off.

***

He dreaded going to his room, stripped and bare now, and going to bed this last night at Quimby House. He went into the Laurel Inn with Gramp and the Prof and sat talking with them over a drink in the cocktail lounge until Gramp yawned abruptly and, eyes watering from the yawn, apologized. He left then, after arranging for the drive to Cincinnati the next day where they would board a train and, to Gramp's twinkling delight, share a bedroom suite to New Orleans. He would follow in the Peril. It wasn't a trip to which he looked forward.

He'd had the foresight to leave a paperback novel out to read, but it might as well have been in Sanskrit. He should have left something out to translate, so he'd have to concentrate, and a hell of a lot of good that would have done either. Sara would have been there—no concentration could have banished her—just as she was there now, in every corner of that empty, bare room, looking at him, laughing, maybe crying. As, God damn it, he wanted to do.

For a long time he'd thought that if he hadn't taken that walk the Sunday he returned from Christmas vacation in sophomore year none of it would have happened. Now he knew it would have because nothing could have stopped it. For some damned, contrary reason known only to an unfeeling God the whole thing had had to be, starting with Sara catching up with him that day on one of the paths to the lake.

It had been late in the afternoon, the winter sunset a pale gold farewell to what warmth there had been in the day that was dying. He had arrived in Cincinnati on Friday from New Orleans, going directly to the home of Nehemiah's uncle, where he had left his car. Friday and Saturday night he remained in Cincinnati, playing at the Calico Cat, and on Sunday morning drove to Laurel. Saturday night, at work, he learned of Goodhue's resignation when a classmate who lived in Cincinnati came into the club with a party and made directly for the piano, grinning, saying, "Let me be the first to congratulate us—"