Five Smooth Stones

  "Great," said Suds.

  "Once in a while," said Frye, his eyes on David again, "one finds an obstetrical case in which the patient is, quite literally, in a state we can only call euphoria, without drugs. It is not too unusual. It's almost a state of ecstasy. Your wife was angry because we had to put her under."

  Peg said, "I've been trying to tell him—"

  "I believe I told you when we first met that I follow the in-room policy? Your baby will be in the room with his mother. They'll have a chance to get acquainted. And while some obstetricians send their patients home practically from the delivery room, I keep my patients hospitalized five days. A little rest and coddling does no harm. She'll be up and have bathroom privileges in the morning. I'll talk to you both before she goes home." The doctor walked over, held out his hand, and David looked at it dazedly for a minute, then shook it, grinning. Best obstetrician in New England, Suds had said, and by God, he'd been right Not a bad guy, either.

  "Thanks, Doctor," said David. "Thanks a million."

  The doctor hurried out, and Brad lit a cigarette and said, "Would anyone like to know that I'm here?" He looked at David, his eyes quiet and unsmiling, affection deep within them. "You know how I feel, brat. Everything's going to be fine."

  David smiled his thanks and turned to Suds. "I want to see her the minute she's awake. Tell her I'm glad it's a boy."

  "You will. As if she didn't knew, Stoopid."

  "She doesn't," said David. He went to one of the room's big armchairs and let himself down into it with a thud. "Suds, my wife—"

  "Sara?"

  "Quit clowning, for God's sake. This is serious. Maybe a matter of life and death. Sara told me you once rustled up a drink for her here. Man, I could sure use one—"

  CHAPTER 89

  David always tried to handle with tact his knowledge of Brad's dislike of flying. When he could take a train, Brad did so and reveled in the trip; when time pressed he flew. And suffered, thought David, settling himself in the aisle seat beside the older man, trying to bring his stiff leg as far under the seat in front as he could so the stewardesses wouldn't trip over it. If his stiff leg had done nothing else, it had provided him with a valid excuse for spending the money to travel first class. Which he had always done anyhow when he was alone, putting up the extra money when he checked in at the ticket counter, thereby preventing reprimands. Brad's first experience with travel hadn't been on a southern bus with a redneck driver; his own reaction was still adolescent, he knew, but he got a lot of satisfaction out of it. And, he reflected, so did his legs, both of them.

  He glanced sideways at Brad, trying to decide whether this was one of the times when he would welcome distracting conversation or one of the times when he wanted to be let alone to turn green in peace. Their plane trip always started with a stock phrase from Brad. "No statistics, please."

  David let his seat back a notch and said, "What you ought to do is take a nice long trip in a bus, southern route. You'd be yelling for a plane."

  "Hrrmph."

  If I talk to him I won't, so help me God, I won't mention the baby again. The poor guy's had it. David took a newspaper from his pocket, flipped it open.

  "Been a long time since anyone could say there's nothing in the paper. Vietnam, South America, Louisiana. Ever been in Bogalusa? I have. Remind me to call Isaiah from Cains-

  ville.... That five-day hospital stay worked out fine. I wouldn't have left Sara alone at home with the baby, that's for sure...."

  "You certainly underestimate that young woman.... We're taking off—"

  "I was trying to keep it from you.... How the devil do they manage to get them so perfect? Hands and feet, right number of toes and fingers, ears.... It's early to say, but I think he's going to be about your complexion... Hell, I forgot to cable Hunter.... Remind me to call Isaiah Watkins from Cainsville, huh?... Did I tell you Sara's going to nurse the baby? Says maybe she'll finally get a figure.... It's a lot better for the baby, Frye says.... Oh, God, I wasn't going to mention the baby again.... Here comes the gal with the breakfast. You want?"

  "No. Yes. Just coffee. You can have the food. Go on, talk about young David. I gave you the routine for months after we had Carolyne."

  David looked at his tray and drew a deep breath. He couldn't remember having an appetite like this since he'd been at Pengard. It had started with Sudsy's drink in the hospital and grown inordinately ever since. "That tray bothering you, Chief? I'll call her and have her take it—"

  "There's nothing wrong with me two feet on the ground won't cure. I'm not airsick. Just hurry up and finish your tray and then take mine and I can get some work done on this table thing."

  David choked back a laugh and tackled his breakfast. If he'd stop thinking about the baby, he'd stop talking about him. "Remember that psychiatrist Cloninger we had on the Sampson case? He told me that every time he got on a plane he froze solid."

  "Just proves it's not true that psychiatrists need their own therapy."

  The stewardess poured more coffee, and David said, "I've always gotten a bang out of flying. But I don't believe I'll encourage young David to take it up as a career—"

  "Eat."

  "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

  What had changed his attitude, he wondered? The change hadn't come about all at once, when he had first seen his son. He had been far too limp with reaction, too preoccupied with the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. That night he and Brad and Suds had gotten fairly well polluted and he had been asleep almost before he got into bed, yet the change had taken place by the next day when he sweet-talked his way upstairs outside visiting hours and found Sara's bed empty, with the sound of a shower coming from the bathroom, and the laughter of two women, Sara and a nurse.

  He stood by the bassinet,, looking down at the baby, not touching or wanting to touch, afraid to touch, just wanting to communicate, knowing he couldn't, but willing it with his mind so hard he thought the words must be audible and comprehensible even to a mind just eighteen hours old. "We'll make out, kid. I can't do it the way Gramp did, but I'll try. That's a promise. It's too bad you had to miss out on Gramp. He'd have known the answers to a lot of questions you'll ask." Reckon me'n' Gram's got to teach you about God some more. Come on, li'l man, right now we gets ourselves some ice cream. Now David reached out and touched a soft cheek with a gentle finger. "Your mother won't always understand. And I won't either. But don't you ever forget, youngster, we love you." He smiled suddenly and whispered aloud, "Sorry, son, about not wanting you before."

  Sara had come in then, smiling, glowing, wincing with funny little grimaces as she walked, "David, darling—"

  In about two seconds now he'd be talking about his son to Brad again, and he resolutely pulled his mind away from the bassinet in the third-floor room at Endicott Hospital. There were half-a-dozen things he should be thinking about, problems that his thinking and planning could affect materially, and that small scrap of male humanity back in Boston could —damn! When the stewardess picked up the trays he let his seat back to the last notch. Sleep was never far when he was on a plane, was very close when he had had to get up at five thirty in order to catch it. There had been little enough of it the night before, waking what seemed like every hour on the hour, something within him shouting: "You've got a son! You've got a son! You and Sara have a son—" Turning, twisting, punching pillows, he said to himself: "Sunday morning I'll go to Roxbury before I get Sara and the baby. Go to church, do a little singing. Yes, Lawd! They'll know I'm there Sunday.... Damn, why can't I sleep?"

  He had left the bedroom door open, and sometime during the night he felt Chop-bone's quiet, considerate jump to the bed, the soft maneuverings as the cat settled down beside him. "Don't stomp," he'd said. "And stay off my back—"

  In the plane he stretched a little more and settled his head more comfortably on the back of the seat. When he awakened he did not open his eyes at first and as he sat there quietly a memory dislodged itself from somewhere and floated t
o the surface of his mind and he saw an enraged, humiliated, sickened boy taking his first train trip and the porter who had known so well how to handle him. Shucks. Couldn't let Li'l Joe Champlin's grandson go hongry in my car.... Thought I knowed you when I seen you.... Soon's I seen you smile I was sure.... Stretch out now, son, and get your res'.

  Good people, he thought; my people are good people, with quick eyes to see and quick hands to help another's hurt, and how could their own in other places let them down, how isolate themselves within the cocoon of their own bitterness and frustration until they could neither see nor comprehend the warm and secret comradeship that had drawn their forefathers together and given them strength? The handkerchiefs were coming off the heads now; even grizzled, gray heads were held a little higher, uncovered; and aged, rheumy eyes held a vision of the future of their race they had never held before. Each trip home that he had made since he had been well enough, each visit to a smaller town, had lifted his heart. Selma, Alabama, had sent him home silent and remote for days, the far horizons he had seen filling him with an awed wonderment, giving him strength for the harder, more grueling struggle he knew lay just ahead before those horizons could be reached. Lord! be thought now, and his lips moved in a half-smile, Lord, you better let my people go, because if You don't, they're going anyhow.

  He glanced sideways at Brad, and the half-smile became a full one at the expression of determined concentration on the thin face bending over the contents of a Manila folder. The Chief wasn't going to let a li'l ol' airplane bug him. The cover of the folder was marked "Hospital," and he felt he ought to discuss the contents with Brad, then decided against it. Maybe the guy was really engrossed, and conversation would bring him back to the unpleasant realization that he was thirty thousand feet up.

  He didn't want to become too involved in the hospital project that had been started by Lloyd Litchfield when Litchfield, breathing fire, had visited him while he was still in Endicott Memorial. Brad and Chuck had been there, and during a general discussion of the use of the land he had said, "Whyn't you take that meadow off my hands anyhow, Lloyd? I can't give it away—or sell it. Old Miz Towers would die of a broken heart. I can lease it to you—ninety-nine-year lease—for free, if you want."

  Chuck had leaned forward in his chair suddenly. "Hospital," he said, beaming, and before any of them had realized it, Litchfield had talked to architects, had plans drawn up, and launched—with Chuck and Brad's help—a full-fledged campaign for the building of a hospital on Flaming Meadows. Money had come almost unasked in the aftermath of the publicity the Cainsville troubles had received. It would be a hospital that would serve the whole area, without discrimination, with a large children's annex. "Call it the Effie Brown Memorial Annex," said David.

  Plans for this trip to Cainsville had been made when Brad said ol' Miz Towers had been dead set on giving David the deed to the land with her own hands. "Says she won't die until she does it. And even Miz Towers doesn't want to live forever. That deed represents the land to her now, in a sort of transubstantive way."

  And David had understood, and known, and agreed to come. "O.K., Chief. We'll go after the baby's born, eh?"

  Brad was closing the folder now, looking gingerly out the window. "Say, David! That's ground down there."

  "Well, hallelujah! Don't worry about a thing. We'll hit it slow and easy, on wheels."

  CHAPTER 90

  It was like coming back to a place in which he had spent a long time. Surely more than two days had passed on that first experience of Cainsville; surely a larger part of his lifetime had been spent among these familiar buildings, these familiar rooms, these friendly faces.

  There was still an upturned nail keg near the counter in Haskin's store, and he awkwardly lowered his body to sit on it as he had the afternoon of his first day there. He could see few changes, none significant; even the smell was the same— old wood, beer, lunch meet, cheese, vegetables fresh from the earth, tobacco smoke, and people. Only the feel of the humid heat of that August day was missing.

  As it had been then, the room was well filled, but not crowded. And if there was nothing absent that had been there then except the heat, there was something added: the sound of easy laughter, of the lightning-quick banter of his people when there is no outsider present, the sound, the feel of the vital rhythm of their being.

  The greetings between him and Haskin were over and he waited now, as he had waited that first time, for the storekeeper to finish with his counter customers, relaxed, letting the feel of the place take over his mind, responding to the warmth of the inevitable, innumerable handclasps; feeling himself grow slower, easier, answering in kind the familiar phrases of welcome and concern, knowing himself as whole and not divided, his body loose and easy, his mind content, at peace.

  His eyes lighted as he noticed a stout gray-haired woman at the front counter, and he watched her and waited for Haskin to give her change, sure she would put the coins in an old-fashioned change purse, snap it shut, then drop it into the huge, shabby bag she carried, the same bag she had carried on that other afternoon. This time she did not see him on her way out because he was seated, and as she passed him he said, "Morning, ma'am—" and she looked down at him and smiled. "Mornin', son, mornin'. How you doin'?" then hurried on, still smiling, reaching out to him today, as she had then, for a bright moment in the universal communion of his people. He did not need to steady himself today, as he had needed to then, against an almost overwhelming urge to follow her to whatever warm and shabby home she lived in, there to stay. Today he would have liked to follow her, to stop a while with her in the home he could visualize so well, sit and drink the lemonade or soft drink sure to be stored in her icebox. But it was not the sick longing of a spent mind and tortured soul. He had seen her once, and then again, and now she was gone, and it might well be he would never see her in the future, but he had known her all his life. He had heard her voice among the voices of the people who had lined the banks of the wide river of his childhood's fantasy, had known her in the friendly corner stores of New Orleans' Vieux Carre, kind to a little boy, watched her bustle down the aisle in the small weather-beaten church Gramp took him to in Beauregard, seen her sit, talking to Gram, in their kitchen.

  He did not realize Brad had come over and was standing close to him until he heard, "David. Wake up. Onward and upward—" He pulled himself to his feet with the help of his cane. All around him there were dark eyes, warm with compassion; but no tactless move to help him.

  Drinking beer in Haskin's kitchen later, he learned that Gracie and Shad had gone to California to visit her sister and that she was settling there for good; that Willy was in Chicago, had been there, since a couple of months after leaving Anderson's hospital.

  "How's he doing?" asked David.

  "Says he's doing fine," said Haskin. And added, "That's what he say."

  That's us, thought David; got to see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, know it by our own senses to believe it—if it's good. But if it's bad—it's true. He had heard it so often, the story of another's good fortune tagged with "That's what he say." It was one of the paradoxes of that "Negro character" others mouthed about so freely, a reaction part jealousy, part antagonism toward his own race; one of the imponderables that made the Negro wary always, yet in spite of that wariness bound to his fellows, with bonds of common suffering, bonds whose very strength sometimes bred secret hatred of such humiliating fetters. Yet his race had given to its people a Martin Luther King, a Hummer Sweeton, a Dick Gregory, a Mahalia Jackson, because there was a greatness in its blood and bone and heart. Where was the greatness beneath the pettiness, the all-too-frequent sabotage? Where was it in the lost and lonely defiance of the ghetto-born, the bitter aloofness of the intellectual? Crushed, twisted, broken, racked; still, it survived in all his people more often than it died; it was there for all the world to see and take account of in the massed thousands of a march on Washington, the singing hundreds on the road from Selma to Montgomery; immortaliz
ed, witnessed to by the corpses of the Medgar Everses, the Hummer Sweetons, the shattered, tortured body of a brown youth found beneath an embankment.

  Now, in retrospect, he asked himself if it had been the knowledge of his people's need that had kept him with them, or an instinctive homage to an emergent greatness impossible to turn from. It did not matter; he would never know the answer, just as he would never know the answer to the riddle of the paradoxes of his people—of himself.

  He jumped, startled, at Mrs. Haskin's voice. "Penny," she said. "Penny for your thoughts."

  "Gosh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Haskin!"

  Jim Haskin looked at him closely. "Ain't upset, are you? Coming back down here after all that happened?"

  "Lord, no! I'm glad to be here. I was thinking, back there in the store, that I'd only been here two days on that other trip, yet I felt as though I was back with old friends."

  "You are. You sure are and that's a fact—"

  Later, said Haskin, when Brad and David had finished their business with Miz Towers, they could come back for supper and talk about the present situation and future plans. "Voting rights bill, it'll get us registered now," said Haskin. "But it ain't got us in the ballot booths yet. Not by a long sight, it ain't. We got a ways to go yet—"

  He and Brad were leaving for the Towers house when Luke Willis called, long distance, for David.

  "Hi, boss! Congratulations!"

  "Thanks, kid. Where you calling from?"

  "New York. I couldn't make it down there. Man, it seems like a year since I saw you."

  "Two months."

  "Yeah. And now you're a daddy. When you sending him to school?"