Five Smooth Stones (93 page)

"You know it."

" 'Suffer little children'—"

"As long as they're white—"

David changed the subject abruptly. "Chuck, I've been puzzled ever since the services. That minister—"

"He did a fine job."

"All right, he did a fine job. But why go into all that business of 'David'? Embarrassed the hell out of me. And the business of Gramp being taken in the 'midst of his fear.' Why couldn't he leave all that out of it, at a funeral anyhow? I wish Gramp had stuck with Catholicism or been an Episcopalian. No talk at all at those funerals. All that about God's hand being on his shoulder. And about calling out for help in the name of all his people. It shook me up, and something—I can't put my finger on it—something about it puzzled me. Gramp went quickly, Ambrose said."

Chuck's round, open face looked thinner, even drawn, when he answered, "Perhaps he shouldn't have brought it up; at a funeral anyhow." He stirred his coffee slowly, absently, did not look at David. "Better to have kept away from it with all the tension there is here now. Your grandfather's fear couldn't have lasted long, seconds maybe. He must have known, even after the heart attack, that those hoodlums had run off."

The room and everything in it receded, vanished, and left him alone with Chuck. There was a ringing in his ears, in his head, like the brazen clanging of bells; then the bells were gone and he was in, the midst of a great silence that was edged around with tiny sounds: the clatter of dishes, a laugh, the sound of a car's horn in the roadway outside, sounds that in no way intruded on the silence, were no louder than a tack hammer might be, tapping away in a great cathedral. His own voice was an echo from the center of the silence.

"What hoodlums?"

"The ones that came out of the alley that night and frightened your grandfather, of course. I suppose all they wanted to do was scare him, make him jump. Maybe the little rats— the little white rats—wouldn't have done it if they'd known about his heart, if they'd known that instead of just giving him a scare they'd—frighten him to death."

David was not conscious of getting to his feet.

"David—I thought you knew—"

Chuck saw a fine tremor in the brown hand that tossed coins on the table. He touched his friend's arm, felt it pull away, and was looking up into the face of a stranger. He rose and came round the table to stand beside the stranger, but he was too late. The voice that came back to him from the man limping through the door—"Sorry, Chuck"—was unrecognizable.

***

Pop Jefferson looked at the younger man standing in front of him. "Hell, David, it wouldn't have done no good to tell you."

Behind them, from the kitchen, they heard Emma's voice. "I told you, Pop Jefferson. I told you wasn't any use trying to keep it quiet. Told you there wasn't no such thing as a secret in New Orleans, the boy'd better get it from a friend."

Without turning or taking his eyes from Pop's face, David said, "I got it from a friend."

"You hush up, Emma. David, them white boys never laid a hand on Li'l Joe."

"They murdered him."

"Look, lemme fix you a drink. Sit down, son. Gawd's sake, sit down."

"No. What did they look like?"

"I didn't see 'em good. Not real good. Just a quick glimpse. They was running like striped-assed apes."

"Are you lying to me? You didn't tell me what happened, nobody told me. Not a Goddamned soul told me what happened to Gramp. That was lying. You let me think Gramp died a natural death. Are you lying to me now?"

"Swear to God I'm not, David. He did die a natural—"

"Who did see them? Someone saw them."

"David, you got to understand. Things was mighty mixed up and confused. Reckon maybe somebody may have seen 'em good, but I couldn't say who. Look, David, Li'l Joe wouldn't want you getting all upset—getting into—"

"Who was there? Who might have seen them good?"

"Lawd! I don't—"

Emma came to the doorway that led to the kitchen. "Rudy Lopez was there," she said. "Rudy run to Li'l Joe first before Pop and Ambrose got to him. Pop pushed him away a little so's Ambrose could get to your grandaddy. Ambrose got First Aid train—"

"Where's Rudy?" David turned and was looking at her now. "Where's Rudy living now?"

"I don't know—and that's God's truth, David. After his folks died and he got married he moved off somewhere. That's the first I seen of him in more'n three years—"

"Emma, will you shut up—"

"Let her talk. Let her tell me. Who else was there, Emma?"

"Ain't no one else I can call to mind—wait. Placide Smith. You know Placide?" David shook his head.

"Li'l Joe's been knowing Placide a long time. Since they was kids, I guess. Placide's older'n your Gramp. I remember now, he come around the corner, looking back over his shoulder like maybe those white boys had bumped into him when they was running away. Then I heard Ambrose calling to get an ambulance, and I run for the house, and then the po-lice come. But Rudy Lopez, he picked up the knife before the law got there."

"Knife! What knife?"

"Look, David—" It was Pop, almost tearful, breathing" heavily.

"What knife, Emma!"

Emma came into the living room now and stood by the table with the stiff crocheted doilie in the center and the leg trued up by a little pile of cardboard match clips. There was flour on her hands, and the rich, spicy smell of okra gumbo, coffee, and baking biscuits filled the house. "The knife one of them whites threw down when they started running." She tried to wipe the flour from her hands with a corner of her apron. "All I could figure was if the po-lice caught 'em they was going to say your Gramp pulled the knife on 'em. Anyhow, Rudy, he snatched that knife up quicker'n a cat and put it in his pocket. I seen that myself. But Pop's right, David. They never laid a finger on him. Just jostled him and I guess talked bad to him, trying to scare him. All this trouble with the schools and all. Whites'll do anything once colored starts coming up."

Pop said, "Just a coupla punks, out to get a nigger. Half drunk."

"High-sperrited," said Emma. The bitterness of centuries was in her tone. "They killed him."

"They never teched him, son."

"They killed him."

"Mebbe so," said Pop resignedly. "Mebbe in one way they did. Whites've been killing colored more'n a hundred years, never teching 'em. But it's done now, son. It's done now. F'Gawd sake—"

Emma and Pop Jefferson watched him go, helpless to stop him. As the quick, limping steps were heard on the banquette outside, then not heard because they had gone too far, Emma began to moan.

"Jesus have mercy!" It was not an exclamation. It was a prayer. "Oh, Lord Jesus, have mercy!"

***

Rampart, St Anne, Ursuline, St. Peter, down one side, up the other. Bourbon, Burgundy, St. Philip, down by the waterfront and up to Canal, grief left behind, hate walking within him. Little neighborhood saloons, colored only; bigger saloons, colored screened off at one end of the bar, Coke shops and juke joints, restaurants and lunch wagons, and often when he entered there would be a sudden silence. In Cy's Place he heard a man say, "Lawd! Here comes trouble" and David walked to the cluttered table where he sat, recognizing him as someone Gramp had known. "Man, I don't know
nothing;
I was home eating supper—" and David left.

He went no place where there was not a friend of Li'l Joe Champlin's, no place Gramp wasn't known. Not all of them —Christ! not
all
of these people—could be a part of some nightmare conspiracy of silence; at some place some one of them must be able to answer the questions
"Did you see them?"

"Do you know where I can find Rudy Lopez?"

He did not walk off the hate and rage, but at last he banked their fires so that the glow of their flames did not show in his eyes, so that he could enter a bar and there would be no sudden silence—the talk would go on, and the noise. There were hate and rage on the streets and in the bars to match his own that night, but he was only vaguely conscious of it, only obscurely aware that the hate of those he met had fear for a running mate, until it came to him that this was the reason his questions went unanswered, and for the first time he realized that there were as great evils abroad as the one that had sent him on his blind search—greater.

On Burgundy Street he leaned for a moment, tired, against the corner of a building and felt in his pockets for cigarettes. A pair of policemen walked along the banquette toward him and looked at him with smoldering contempt. They slowed their steps, seemed about to stop, eyes alert and seeming almost hopeful that he would make an overt move; then they passed him slowly, a threat in every measured step. It must have been like this in Nazi Germany, thought David; it must have been like this in what the rest of the world liked to call "civilization's darkest hour." They were everywhere he looked that night, police in uniforms and men in plainclothes he knew to be police. "Ask them," he said to himself. "Ask them, David Champlin. You're a lawyer—and they're the servants of the people. Ask them. You went to Harvard. Remember? And Oxford. Remember? You're a Goddamned great lawyer, going to work for the Department of State of your country, going to show other countries how to do it, how to build a government, how to build a government so there'll be enough men to spare to take a little child to school, to protect a little child from spittle; you're going to show 'em, by God, you are! Ask the next cops you see. Tell 'em who you are, ask 'em if they know about the ofay bastards who left a little brown man named Joseph Champlin dying of fright in the street. Walk right up and tell 'em who you are and ask 'em." He began to laugh, not loudly, not the laughter that could be heard three courtyards away, but soundlessly.

He had drunk little; two or three whiskies at the most, spaced over the night. The others he had ordered were left on bars and tables when he had found himself cut off from communication, cut off by his own people, walled off as completely as though he had been white; faced by a blank, bland friendliness that had beneath it the wariness of the jungle animal who knows itself to be the prey of stronger creatures. Gramp would have done what these people had done: curled up in the hollow of the tree of his being, where it was deep and dark and secure, until the smell of danger was past.

He had not been to Hank's Place yet, and he limped down the banquette and around a corner, conscious of an ache of tiredness in his gimpy leg, made worse by the damp cold of the night. Hank's Place had changed since he was a child and Geneva had sent him scampering down there to fetch Gramp home for dinner or to answer a call for work. The original owner, who had so often given credit to Li'l Joe because he trusted him, was dead, and the new owner had enlarged the place keeping its name. Although it was not crowded on this night, it gave the impression of being full, its blue, fuzzy atmosphere vibrant with sound: the blare of a jukebox, the laughter and loud talk of the young people milling around in its center, some dancing, some sitting at tables, some hanging around the jukebox. A woman was singing, and her voice had a flat, strident quality that hurt David's ears yet drove as true as a well-placed knife into his mind and heart. The big room smelted like the other places he had been that night—of stale smoke, beer, whiskey, and human bodies.

He cursed himself for not looking up Rudy on his trips home the last few years. He knew so few, almost no one now, of his own generation in New Orleans. The persons he recognized were either of Gramp's generation or their sons and daughters, old or middle-aged. No one of them knew where Rudy was; only a few even recognized the name, and they said, invariably, something like: "Stays someplace over the river, Beauregard, maybe, or Algiers... ain't seen him in a long time.... Mebbe he was over here the first of the week, like you say. I wouldn't know... ain't sure I'd know him if I seen him."

The bar in Hank's Place was in a recessed area at one side, and the quiet, older people sat there, the ones who had come to drink and talk. He slid onto a stool beside a copper-skinned man, an old man who, in spite of the nappiness of snow-white hair, could have passed for a southern European in the North. David could not remember ever seeing him before. He tried the same opening gambit he had tried with others earlier in the evening.

After he had ordered a drink he said, "I think we're acquainted." The man was obviously a Creole, and David chose a Creole name. "Aren't you Alcide Guesnon?"

The copper-skinned man smiled. The Creole accent was so thick David had difficulty understanding the rapid-fire words. He was not Alcide Guesnon, he said; his name was Placide Lafitte Smith.

"Got the name wrong," said David. (Placide Smith had been there the night Gramp died; Emma Jefferson had said so. Easy does it, David; take it slow and easy.) "Knew I'd seen you, though, with my grandaddy, Li'l Joe Champlin."

Two men were sitting on the other side of Smith, and David felt rather than saw them stir. Smith smiled and said, "I knew Li'l Joe. Heard about you."

A wrinkled black face like an aging crow's peered around the Creole's shoulder. "Lawd!" said the face's owner, "Li'l Joe's grandbaby. How you been, boy? Ain't seen you since one night on the ferry, long time ago. Had us a sing."

"Sure," said David. "Sure!" He knew that his lips were smiling.
When we get to Heaven gonna sing and shout—
That was the night Gramp gave him the typewriter. "I remember it well. How you been?"

"Fine. Fine. Getting older. Man's always getting older." He laughed a high, aged laugh. "You getting way up there. Li'l Joe told me about it." He turned the wrinkled blackness of his face to the man on the other side of him. "Was you acquainted with Li'l Joe Champlin?"

"You getting old, you sure getting old. I was here the night he come in, last week. I remember Li'l Joe from when I was a kid." The man had skin the color of light chocolate, and his eyes were gray.

David signaled the bartender, indicated the three men on his right. He did not want Placide Lafitte Smith to leave, but he knew he must not seem too anxious. A young Negro shouldered his way to the bar on David's left, jostling him, saying stridently, "The same identical only make it double."