Five Smooth Stones

  "Lemme show you how these chairs work, sir," he said, and saw the boy's eyes widen, the red anger in them die away a little. He showed him how to let the seat back, and how the leg rest came out. "Ain't quite long enough for them legs of yourn," he said, smiling. "Better'n nothing, though. Lemme get you a pillow so's you can relax good and res' yourself. Come night I'll fetch a blanket. Anything you wants, you ask for, y'hear?" He kept up a low murmur of conversation, brought the pillow, saw the boy's face soften, and thought, Ain't right, boy as young as that, looking like he done when he got on.

  In a few minutes Henry Sampson returned. He had gone back to his own seat but had been unable to sit there, thinking of the boy. He put a hand on the back of the seat in front of David, leaned over the empty aisle chair, and said in a hoarse whisper, "How about a cup of coffee, son?" Not "sir" now. Boy needed gentling. "Man just been through here with the coffee and sandwiches; he ain't coming back for a while. I got me some coffee and a sandwich or two back here. You feeling peckish?"

  Wasn't no doubt about who the boy was, now that he was smiling. Henry Sampson had been knowing the Champlins for a long time; he'd known Li'l Joe since they were boys, and known Evan and John, before John got killed, and it would be John who was this boy's father. He knew that Champlin smile good as a book.

  When he brought the coffee and two sandwiches—that was a big boy—he smiled at the boy's thanks and said, "Shucks. Couldn't let Li'l Joe Champlin's grandson go hungry on my car."

  The boy was grinning now. "How'd you know?" Then he glanced down at his feet. "Guess this gimpy leg gave me away."

  "Never took no notice of that. Seen you in Beauregard lots of times. Knowed your granddaddy in New Orleans 'fore you was born. Knowed your Uncle Evan and your daddy, too. Thought I knowed you when I seen you get on. Soon's I seen you smile I was sure. Stretch out now, son, and take your rest—"

  ***

  David Champlin stretched out as best he could, but he wasn't tired, just sick, the sickness he had come to know would always follow anger. It was a nausea, a gagging in the throat. He'd been subject to it ever since he was a kid, and the only thing he could do was ride it out.

  Eventually the sickness slipped into the background in the novelty of train travel. All that remained was a determination not to go through with this business of a scholarship to Pengard College in a town called Laurel, Ohio, even if the Prof and his brother did have their minds set on it, even if the Profs brother was a nice guy and one of the big shots there. He thought of the Profs disappointment if he backed out now, and stopped thinking about it as quickly as he could. Maybe he wouldn't pass anyhow, on this trip up there; maybe he'd flunk the tests and not have to go there next fall. The Prof had said he was ready for second-year Latin, but he was lousy in math, and he supposed you had to be good in everything. "Not a white college." That was what the Prof and his brother had said. They'd said it was a college for everyone who wanted learning more than anything else; that there were students from Africa and Thailand and China and Japan—what the hell, it was still a white college, and he didn't want it.

  Gramp had told the Prof and him that his grandmother had wanted him to learn to be an undertaker, and the Prof had blown up a Danish gale. "Better watch out for them windowpanes, Prof," Gramp had said, and laughed, and never mentioned the subject again. Now David wished Gramp had stood up to the big man. There wasn't anything, not a damned thing, wrong with being an undertaker. Maybe it was backing out on being a lawyer, what he'd wanted to be ever since he was a kid, but it would sure do what Gram had said: keep him away from the whites, even the dead ones.

  There weren't many people on the bus, not even many colored in the back with him. He'd had two cups of coffee before he left home with Gramp in the morning, and two cokes on the ferry crossing and another cup of coffee in the bus station. By the time the bus slowed for the first "rest stop" he was gritting his teeth against the urgency of a full bladder. It was rough waiting for the whites to get off, and he didn't even notice that none of the Negroes he was sitting with stood up to leave. He heard one of them say, "Wait, son—" as he started down the aisle, but his discomfort was so great he paid no attention. Then just as the last white person, a man, stepped to the ground the driver said: "Get on back there and sit down, boy. Ain't no facilities for colored here —" and the bus doors closed.

  "Jeez!" he gasped. "Look, I've got to get off—"

  "Ain't no nigger on my bus got to do anything he ain't allowed to. Get back there like I said. You don't, you'll be using the can in the jailhouse. You make any trouble, boy, I'll call the police."

  He turned from the door, dizzy with rage and discomfort. The driver was not looking at him, was counting change. David thought: "I'll kill you. Someday, you white son of a bitch, I'll catch up with you and kill you." No one in the back of the bus was going to help him. Trouble was stirring and they were all middle-aged and older people, and they did not look at him until he made his way back; then there were murmurs of protest and sympathy, but they were low and cautious, wouldn't carry to the front of the bus. David looked toward the front and saw the driver's face in the rear-vision mirror. It was a face with small, close-set eyes and a mouth so narrow the outer corners seemed even with the nostrils, and the face was smiling. He felt as though he had been touched by, smeared with, something inexpressibly filthy.

  Twenty agonized minutes later, the bus began to slow down, and ahead of them David saw a railroad crossing. He saw nothing else, not even the little town off to the right or the railroad station at its outskirts, a quarter of a mile away. He knew only that the bus would have to stop at the crossing, and when they were almost there he was standing behind the driver, overnight bag in hand.

  "You better let me off here." His voice was low. "You better let me off. I'm standing right behind you and I can't hold out much longer." He saw the back of the driver's neck redden, and the bus lurched as brakes were applied with vicious force. The doors opened, but closed again when he had only one foot on the ground, and he leaped forward, his game leg failing him at the last moment so that he sprawled headlong, hearing the driver's words, "Get out, nigger!" He knew the driver was saving face, making the passengers think he'd ordered a troublemaking nigger off his bus.

  He relieved himself when the bus left, and, half sobbing with rage, limped toward the railroad station in the distance. But when he entered the station he was composed, the dirt from the highway brushed from his clothes, lips tightly set. At the ticket window he said, "I'm going to Cincinnati. Can I get there from here?"

  "Humming Bird'll be along in about an hour. One way or round trip?"

  "One—no. I want to go to Cincinnati, then back to New Orleans."

  "Sell you round trip from here, boy, one way to New Orleans on the return." The wizened old man behind the ticket window might have been talking to a five-year-old, and he was kindly in the same manner he would have been to a five-year-old.

  David paid for the ticket, thankful he'd won out in the humbug the night before between him and Gramp. He had said he was going to take most of his money with him, all he'd saved from jobs during fall and winter, and Gramp had objected strenuously.

  "S'pose you loses it? Then what you got?"

  "I won't lose it. Then if anything happens or I have to stay longer or something, I won't have to send for it."

  He picked up his change—a ten and a one and some loose coins—and tucked the bills in his wallet. There better not be any more trouble, he thought: he'd never make it. He walked out to the platform, a tall boy with skin the color of light milk-chocolate, a small, well-shaped head with close-cropped hair that was well cared for and frequently disciplined by stocking caps, straight shoulders, slender hips, seeming to be relaxed, except for his eyes. He was wearing gray slacks and a blue pullover, with a fresh blue shirt open at the neck, the collar turned back over the sweater, and brown loafers. He looked as though he could run the mile in good time, snake a football through a line, pull them down from outer
space in center field—until he walked, one leg a little shorter than the other, the foot and ankle stiff, but still covering ground with long strides, straight-backed, square-shouldered, somehow graceful in spite of the limp.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Professor had sneaked up on him, thought David; as far as education was concerned he had sure sneaked up on him. It had begun way back when he was in the hospital the first time, right after the accident. The Prof had brought him picture books with just enough text within his power of reading to make them intelligible, then brought him harder ones to make him curious. There were rewards and surprises when

  he learned to put words together by letters and meaning. Some spelling he learned by rote so that he memorized "height" and "weight" and was roared at in an inside-a-hospi-tal roar when he couldn't understand why "wait" and "weight" sounded the same and "late" was pronounced like both, while height was something else again.

  Damned smart, these Danes, thought David, and smiled, there in the train heading toward his examinations for the scholarship he had been maneuvered into over the years.

  He remembered that after he left the hospital at last, his leg straight and stiff in a cast, Gramp beside him in the back seat of Ambrose Jefferson's taxi, the Prof let up for a while, giving him time to adjust and be happy with Stumpy and the Timmins kids across the road and, at night, with Gramp. The cast was shortened gradually, and when his knee was freed and a metal peg set in the sole of the shorter cast he was able to go back to school, but by that time the term was nearly over and he was ahead of his classmates. Except in arithmetic. Everyone, even Gramp, had sweat with him in arithmetic.

  He started going to the Professor's house for lessons the first summer after the accident. It was the first time he had ever been inside a white person's home. He did not like it much, he decided. Only the staircase with its long curving banister appealed to him. It would be better to slide down than the rickety old metal slide in the school playground.

  Shyness paralyzed his tongue that first morning in the high-ceilinged study on the first floor, and he sat, straight and scared, on the edge of the chair by the Profs desk, his good leg wound around the chair's leg. This big man sitting at the desk was never, never, never the man whose beard he had pulled irreverently, crowing with laughter at the howls of mock anguish. This man was a stranger in a strange world, and he, David Champlin, wanted to go home. Fast

  The Professor had roared his refusal of money or of services in exchange for his teaching; but David knew, when he was older, that the sessions had cost Gramp just the same, because Li'l Joe had paid Ambrose to pick him up each day at Pop and Emma Jefferson's house where he had been left by Gramp in the morning, and where he was picked up by Gramp in the evening. He did not know when or how he had absorbed the knowledge that you took anything a white offered, but meticulously paid your own people; it was something you just knew. But always there was the exception: the Professor. One day the Prof had said to him: "You said once when you were very small, while your grandmother was still alive—your grandfather has told me of it—'The Prof is white, but he's not New Orleans white.' For that, young David, you will always be loved."

  Gramp didn't baby him in those days. Gramp sure as hell didn't baby him because he was hurt. Heck, sometimes it seemed like Gramp was tougher on him then than he had ever been, but there were times when he would see something in Li'l Joe's eyes that brought him thump-thumping across the room to climb on the thin knees and scrootch close to the thin hard chest as he had done when he wasn't any more than what Gramp called "nothin' but a li'l piece of a chile."

  Uncle Evan came over often in those days, almost a stranger at first because before the accident they had seldom seen him. Uncle Evan fascinated him, brother to the father he had never seen. Everyone told him Evan and his father were as different as two brothers could be. Evan was black, almost jet black, heavy-shouldered, bullnecked, short, his face sullen and unsmiling most of the time, marred by two evil-looking scars. John, they said, had been tall and brown-skin, with wide shoulders and a fine figure, and had laughed and smiled a lot. Evan was in trouble most of the time, John seldom, because, they said: "John, your daddy, he got along with everyone, black or white. He didn't fight with no one less'n they got on to him real bad, rather walk away from a fight; but John he never run away from no fights; he could take care of hisself if he had to. Evan, now, seems like he's always sticking his neck out, getting hisself on spots he's got to fight to get off of."

  Evan was clumsy looking, the muscles of a boxer beginning to lard up with fat, but he was quicker than a cat with his fists and even quicker with a knife. There must have been a couple of times he hadn't been quick enough, David would think, looking at the scars on his face. David knew, but never told Gramp that he knew, of the knife Evan carried with him; he'd seen it one day when his uncle brought out the contents of a pocket, searching for something. He slid it back so quickly David scarcely saw the movement, but after that he was always conscious that the knife was there.

  The old punching bag Uncle Evan brought was hung on the back porch. When Evan showed up with a pair of boxing gloves for him, Gramp displayed rare emotion toward his only living child. "Sure nice of you, Evan," he said. "Them gloves is new." Then his eyes clouded "Where'd you get the money?"

  "I got 'em honest," said Uncle Evan. "I got 'em honest. You got no call to look like that. We got no kids of our own and if we wants to do it, ain't no one's business, even yourn."

  When Evan shadowboxed for David, the heavy clumsiness disappeared. He was as quick and fast with his feet and hands as Stumpy when he was playing with a wad of paper, throwing it into the air, catching it. When his uncle used the punching bag, David watched in awed silence as it became blurred and formless under the speed of the black fists. The first time David tried, the bag knocked him down, and Evan showed him how to use it, starting easy as a beginner, and how to compensate for the lack of balance his stiff ankle caused. "Ain't nothing too bad about a gimpy leg," he said. "You get them shoulders strong, get that little belly good and hard, and you learns to react quick, shucks, boy, you ain't never gonna have to worry. You going to be a fine big man like your daddy was. Ain't no one gonna be able to pick on you, nossir!"

  As his leg grew stronger he pitched on the five-man Timmins baseball team—the Timmins Terrors they called themselves—and when it was his turn at bat, the oldest Timmins girl ran for him. Gramp used to watch them on Sundays, and when Gramp was watching he pitched as hard and mean as he could, and for a long time his nickname around the house was "Satch."

  Now, an aging seventeen, he thought he must sure have been a trial to Gramp, always wanting something, usually getting it, but getting his share of discipline too. He remembered one Sunday when his leg was still in a cast he had begged Gramp to take him to the movies. "Gramp, can I go to the cartoon? Can I, Gramp? Huh? Can I go to the Mickey Mouse?" And Gramp, tired and wanting to rest, had finally said, "Reckon so, boy. Reckon Gramp can carry you up them stairs."

  "I can walk 'em, Gramp. Honest. Please, Gramp. I can walk "em."

  "Mighty long flight, boy. Nev' mind. Gramp'll take you, you wants to go all that bad."

  Later, at the theatre, when he had struggled up the first few steps on the way to "nigger heaven," refusing help, Gramp said: "Don't act foolish, son. Let Gramp take you up them steps. You gonna hurt yourself, you don't let Li'l Joe help you." Then suddenly he found himself in the air, picked up by strong big arms, looking into a smiling black face he had never seen before. The man almost ran up the stairs with him, and David remembered laughing aloud at something the man said about "li'l black angels ascend up." Gramp had thanked the man, who laughed and went away, and they never saw him again.

  Kids were selfish, he thought now. But when Gramp took him fishing and hunting in the country back of Mandeville where Li'l Joe had gone to stay with his auntie sometimes when he was a kid, Gramp enjoyed it as much as he did. Gramp showed him crab netting, and shrimping, and they came
home with rabbits and possums, and river catfish with meat as sweet and white as any fish in the world. He'd bet there wasn't anything as good anywhere in any city in the world as river cat the way Gramp fixed it.

  The white world, except for that part of it inhabited by the Professor, was remote, and without much interest to him. The white family who had lived down the road when he was little moved away, and Zeke Jones's relatives moved in, and then the neighborhood was all his own people. Sometimes some white family would call Gramp to do a job of work, and if Gramp felt like it he'd do it if he had the time. He took David along now and then in the little piece of a car he'd picked up from one of the men who used to come "visit" Miz Timmins, one of a succession of visitors David had given up trying to keep track of. All he knew then was that things picked up at the Timminses when there'd been a visitor around; sometimes there was steak and the kids blossomed out in new suits and shoes and dresses, and the oldest, after one visitation, got braces on her teeth. Now, a sophisticated seventeen, he smiled at the memory, thinking of the visitors and at the same time of the parade of Timmins children, starched, scrubbed, marching two by two to Sunday school. When Gramp took him with him on the jobs he did for whites now and then, the whites always went out of then-way to be nice to a little lame black boy, smiling, patting his head, making him squirm as his own people never did. These were foreigners.

  "Don't you never let me catch you asking for nothing," Gramp said. "I catch you begging or asking for something I'll whup you good; I'll tear you apart if I catch you."