Five Smooth Stones (99 page)

Klein drew his hand over his face. "Better you than me, David." He shivered, then straightened up in his chair and said: "There's another difficulty. The cloud-no-bigger-than-a man's-hand type of difficulty. An inevitable one, I suppose. Recently, within the past twelve months, I'd say, there have been definite stirrings of dissension among the different civil rights groups. It's not serious yet. It will be. I'll make that a flat statement."

"And I'll accept it," said David. "Chuck Martin will tell you the same thing. He's been around, really around, this past year."

"He already has told me," said Klein. "In the eyes of the younger and more militant groups, ALEC and the N-double-A are dragging their feet. Which is damned nonsense, of course. You'll be meeting a chap in Jackson, Mississippi, named Medgar Evers. An hour with him and you'll find out for yourself that it's damned nonsense. We're lawyers, we three, and we know that the heartbeat of freedom is the vote. And equal justice in the courts. But a seventeen-year-old, just coming into manhood, into self-realization—what the hell, you can't expect him to hold his fire while his elders futz around with legal technicalities. He wants to fight, and I say God bless and God help him. But things have been made damned tough on us a few times. And they're splitting up among themselves. And we've got too damned much work ahead of us down there to get involved in any intergroup warfare."

David said quietly: "Save your breath, Joe. You don't have to defend the militant Negro to me. I think I'm perfectly capable of understanding how it feels to have it be your hand that holds the rock for a change."

"I was getting preachy, wasn't I? It's just that voting rights—"

"Now, don't get too starry-eyed over voting rights alone. Voting rights weren't the issue in Montgomery in fifty-five— but the Negro community bankrupted a whole transit system. Now we've got integrated buses in a hell of a lot of scared cities in the South. New Orleans, for one. And where was ALEC while Montgomery was happening? Looking out the window, watching empty buses rolling by. When we tackle the voting-rights situation in Montgomery, we'll probably have an easier time, because the blacks had guts back in fifty-five. What about those four college kids in North Carolina and their sit-ins? They started something, and you damned well know it. It's only just begun. What I'm getting at is, the things these kids are fighting for are essential forerunners. They'll mess up, sure, and they'll get fouled up, here and there, and make wrong moves, and that's the way it is, and we'll work with it as best we can. Help as much as we can. Our trouble, Joe—Brad—has been that we've wept and beaten our breasts about voting rights, thinking that if every Negro acquired the right, overnight all the other obscene oppressions would vanish. They wouldn't. They won't." He drew a deep breath. "For God's sake, someone take me off this soapbox. Brad?"

"I pass. All I am right now is a pilgrim and a stranger. Learning."

Klein said: "I'm agreeing with you, David. But I'm saying that these kids who are part of the revolution now are powerless and will be powerless for several years to get one lousy, crumby, prestige-bound, senile southern senator out of Washington. And as for the State legislatures! Take Virginia. Have you followed the actions of its state lawmakers over the past few years? They're appalling. Horrifying. Who knows about it? Damned few. That's part of our job, too. To get these barbaric legal atrocities, as well as the physical atrocities, before a thinking public."

"A
what?
If we had a thinking public, Virginia, Mississippi, the whole stinking, putrefying corpse of law in the South would have been buried a long time ago. Don't, for God's sake, give me that 'thinking public' routine."

"Then somehow they have to be made to think."

"Sure. These younger groups are doing that—insofar as it's possible to replace complacency with thought. I'm not so damned old yet that I can't know how they feel. Twenty-seven isn't senile. Anyhow—I'll guarantee one thing: Luke will get you the kind of stuff we need—he's got a feel for it. You know, even the complacent moderate may feel activity in his gray cells when he sees a picture of white kids pouring maple syrup on the head of a young Negro girl sitting at a lunch counter. That's more apt to produce the miracle of thought in those people than cops exercising their mandate to preserve law and order and attacking kids with dogs. God help us all, it's easier for people to identify with a scared, brutal cop than with a punk pouring syrup on a quiet girl. And that's a damned fact."

Brad said, "Are you two arguing or agreeing with each other?"

"Both," said Klein. "Sometimes Isaiah and I go on like this for hours." He looked at his watch. "Let's think about lunch. Remember Les Forsyte, David? You met him a couple of summers ago."

"Youngster? Or looks like one? He was at Columbia Law then."

"Right. He still looks like a youngster, but he has his degree now. He'll be headed for Memphis in a couple of weeks to work with Brad. And Fred Winters is lunching with us too."

"Fieldwork supervisor for the N-double-ACP? Attorney? He came to our house in Beauregard once with Isaiah. The quiet type, but I remember thinking he'd probably be damned effective."

"He can be murder. And he's a tremendous organizer and administrator. Yet if I saw him in a demonstration with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it. But he has a cold courage in a courtroom that's particularly telling. Like Brad's. I sat in on a trial in southern Georgia with him once. He's like a rattlesnake, even though he knows he's licked before he walks in the door. Damned if even southern judges aren't leery of him. And it's sheer joy to watch him in a Federal court. He's due for his first U.S. Supreme Court appearance in a few weeks."

"His own people down there don't always understand him," said David. "Even 'Saiah has doubts at times."

'There's hardly an advance in any area where he's worked, or had workers, that doesn't have Fred Winters's name on the cornerstone. And precious little thanks he gets for it. Even as you and I." Klein stood up, stretched. "Wonder what we'll be hassling about next time we get together? Let's get moving, my learned colleagues—"

CHAPTER 63

Rain blinded him, ran in rivulets down his neck, whipped wet trouser legs against shins and calves, found its way into his shoes, and its pounding, perpendicular rivers obscured the light in the windows of the Timmins house, making its glow a distorted image seen through flawed glass.

David did not hurry up the uneven brick path to his own little white house; even in the short distance from car to gate he had become so wet that hurry wouldn't help, and he was too weary to call on the extra energy needed for a faster pace. He had the aggrieved feeling that rain had greeted him every time on his return home throughout the past two and a half years. On the porch he scraped mud from his feet, knocked the rain from his hat, slapping it against his leg, then unlocked the door and set his typewriter down inside.

The living room was dim, gray in the half-dusk, muggy from the early August heat. He turned on the gooseneck lamp on the table beside the big chair flanking the fireplace, then walked through the house, lighting each room as he passed through it, the dining room, the kitchen, his own room, even the bath. Only the door of the front bedroom remained closed, the room unlighted. He would open it for airing tomorrow, not acknowledging even to himself that even now he did not like to open it unless the sun was shining, and that he shied away from its emptiness when the house was dark or semidark.

He came back through the kitchen and lighted the water heater and released the hook on the cat entrance cut low in the door that led to the back porch. Miz Timmins or one of the children or grandchildren would see the lights and lei Chop-bone out, and the cat would scamper home across the street through the rain. He'd never failed yet when David returned. "Come in, Chop-bone," David would say. "I'm in residence. You saw the flag?" Usually the cat would ignore him huffily for as much as an entire evening, reproaching him for his absence, but always, when it came time to go to bed, Chop-bone would forgive him and curl beside him while he slept.

David poured himself a drink from the bottle he always kept hidden where not even a curious Timmins could find it, and carried the drink to the table beside the big chair. When he sat down, the chair's back and arms were like an embrace, and he leaned his head against its worn upholstery, not sighing, not moving. In a little while he knew the ache in his ankle would subside; in a little while he could call up enough energy to take off his shoes. In a little while, an hour, a week, a year, a lifetime, the tiredness might abate and he would soak in a hot tub, letting the warm water on the outside and the whiskey on the inside do what they could for angry, screaming nerves, tired muscles, a mind and body at bay against the need to live.

He wanted the bath more than anything else, more than the food he had wired Miz Timmins to stock in for him, more than the drink at his side, more than the dim soft comfort of the familiar house. Thirty-four days in a stinking, rat-ridden, vermin-infested Jim Crow cellblock of a southern jail, and a bath had become an obsession. God damn them, he thought, and did not stir in his chair. And God damn, too, those three earnest workers who met him on his release and whirled him away, not to a bath, not to rest and respite, but another trouble spot a hundred miles away, riding over rutted, potholed roads, talking, talking, trouble, trouble. God damn them and God bless them and God keep 'em away from me just for tonight. Just for tonight let me rest, for no man can be so tired, yet live and function and fight.

He would soak in the tub, then lie down in his own bed, and he would sleep, please God, he would sleep, and then it would be morning and he would curse because it was morning, but he would acknowledge morning at last because he would have to, and he would broach the battlements of its gray horror with nerves sick as from a beating, a body heavy with fatigue, and a mind that worked in spite of that body, like the exposed mechanism of a shattered clock, still ticking, ticking. He knew that was the way it would be because that was the way it had been for so long he could not remember any different beginning to a day.

At least tonight there would be no voices, unless the sound of those voices heard outside his cell night after night dwelt so deep in his brain that they would follow him here. They had followed him on his first three nights of freedom to small, hot rooms in motels or homes, but that was to be expected. They had come to him from the back seat of his car after he had gone back to the town where he was jailed and picked it up, and that was to be expected too. But not here. Not here in his own home, in his own bedroom, with a friendly cat purring beside him and an ancient calico tiger on the bureau. If Chop-bone couldn't exorcise them, the tiger would, and if the tiger couldn't, the bottle would, and he would suffer through a hell of belly pain tomorrow, but one way or another the voices would go.

When he had been alone on the road he had missed Luke whenever the boy was busy elsewhere, or was in the North, but here he missed no one, not now, not tonight. Later the loneliness would come, but now, at this moment, solitude was benediction.

Still, he couldn't help wondering where in hell the kid was. And Brad. And Chuck Martin. Hadn't they known about the thirty-day sentence with no reduction for four days served in the tank cell? He had been incommunicado—no mail, no newspapers, no letters, no messages, no visitors—and when he left there he had made only brief inquiries of the three white students who met him. "Where's Bradford Willis?" he had asked, and one had replied: "I heard he was in Boston. He might be in Cainsville. He's O.K." Chuck Martin, they said, was definitely in Cainsville, and they thought Luke Willis was also. "They've got some kind of a thing going there," said one of the boys. David didn't ask any more questions, certain the answers would be vague and inaccurate; these kids were so earnest, so Goddamned earnest, so Goddamned dedicated and so on fire with a sort of enraged enthusiasm that he couldn't trust them to give a simple answer to a simple question.

They said: "Look, we'll stop for food. Don't you want a steak? Something fit to eat? We won't force the issue of serving you. We'll bring it out to you."

He said, "No. Thanks. Milk." It was all he wanted: huge, vast, white oceans of soothing milk, and he drank it in great greedy gulps wherever they could find it.

The trouble they were taking him to was over when they reached the town; the third bombing in a month, the boys said. It had happened two days after they arrived. Now the people were holding back, not willing to demonstrate.

"You want me to make them?" He snapped the words out.

"No. Of course not." They spoke soothingly, these youngsters, as though he were old and senile. "Only, well, this apathy is hard to take."

"It is not apathy. It's fear." He made a desperate effort to be patient. "Look. Let the thing rest for a while. Come back later with more support. It's not fair, you know. You come down here, there are reprisals, and for a while you're here to give some kind of protection. Then you have to leave, and the Negro is left alone with the men with the guns, God help him. The colored people in this town are old and settled— and afraid. There aren't enough young people to make any movement effective."

The boys were hurt and resentful when, dog-tired and half sick, he left by train for Heliopolis to pick up his car; Luke had stashed that away before he'd been arrested. The boys apparently had expected him, as God was his judge, to stay and defy a whole town single-handed. Which is what it would have amounted to with only their inexperienced help. He could do a better job alone or with Luke, working secretly among the people, talking to them, qualifying them, bringing them quietly to the courthouse to try to register them, with Luke standing by, looking as stupid as he could, a tiny tape recorder hidden under his voluminous sweatshirt, a mini-camera palmed in one hand.

Now that he was home and beginning to let down, he decided to wait until morning before he started tracking down Brad. He couldn't talk, not even to Brad, tonight. If he had known what was coming after that four days in the big tank cell he would have gotten a message out by one of the kids who had shared the cell with him, one of those who had been released early. Now he stirred in his chair, shook his shoulders as though trying to throw off a burden, remembering one hundred and fifty-odd youngsters in a cell designed for fifty. In one jail, he knew, in another city, three hundred and sixty-five had been crammed into a cell designed to hold sixty-five. They'd been lucky, he and Luke.