Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  "What's the next move, Chief?"

  "I think we should head for Tether's End. I don't like leaving that place alone. We left correspondence, memos, everything. After this, stuff gets locked in car trunks or Haskin's safe."

  "Yessir."

  "The others can come along later. It's better if we keep that as headquarters. Safer. Les climbs the walls every night to make sure they aren't bugged. I suggest that you go on out to Miz Towers and pick up some supplies. I've got the list made out. You'll have a valid excuse for meeting her, and she'll have a chance to size you up. And don't think she won't do it. Abraham came in after you went to bed last night. He's going to call her this morning and tell her you're coming, also tell her something about you."

  "You want me to mention the land deal?"

  "If you can do it without forcing the issue. Abraham will have primed her. Don't let Tinker scare you."

  "Who's Tinker?"

  "The dog. You'll see. You go on out to Tether's End, see if everything's all right, then go on to Miz Towers' and get back to headquarters if you can by ten o'clock. Here's the supply list—and don't ask me why I haven't got beans on it because

  we've got closets full of them waiting for you. So. As soon as you leave I'll have to rouse Hummer and the others for a council of war. We may just have to do a wee bit of adjusting on our time schedule for the gone-fishing project You know, like pushing it up a bit."

  "There's not much time—"

  "There's enough, I think. Hummer and Les know this town like a book. If they start out at seven, or send someone out, they can reach a hell of a lot of people who work over there, and who aren't in the group out front. If we need more time for talk, Haskin can take the committee over at eleven instead of ten."

  "Nobody asked me what I thought, but I don't mind saying that for the first time since I heard of this project I feel good about it. Now these people have something more at stake than abstractions."

  "And don't forget, the other side has leverage, too, that they didn't have before."

  "Brad, get Chuck. Get him on the phone or something. Tell him to get in touch with all the press and radio and TV media he can. This situation can stand being aired to the public."

  "Right. Another thing: we may be short on supplies, but not very much, and we'll get hell's own amount of support from outside under these circumstances."

  "I'll go now—" David started again toward the door, and Brad called him back. "David!"

  When David turned Brad said: "I almost forgot. Hunter Travis called this morning at four o'clock. You'd think, all the traveling he does, he would have learned about time zones."

  "Whyn't you call me—"

  "You were asleep, and needed to be. It wasn't anything special. A sort of routine inquiry. In anticipation of other routine inquiries."

  "What inquiries?"

  He knows damned well, thought Brad; knows damned well what inquiries. Suddenly he was sick of playing games. We spoil the guy, he thought; we all spoil him, men, women, all of us. Once in a while he would ask an outright question about Sara, as he had in New Orleans, but not often. Most of the time he'd wait, knowing someone would tell him. Why didn't he give up? Why didn't the poor damned unhappy devil give up? For a moment Brad forgot the pressing problems of Cainsville.

  " 'What inquiries!' Don't be an ass. Sara got in from Düsseldorf, and Hunter hoped to have dinner with her."

  "Oh. What did you tell him?"

  "That you were all right."

  "Thanks. Say, are you sore because he called or what? Because you're sure as hell sore about something."

  "Hell, I'm not sore. I'm just disgusted, fed up with your gutlessness, David. Give up. Let go. Start living another life, one life. Pull that damned sore tooth out! It's the only way you'll stop biting on it."

  "Well—I'll—be—God—damned." David spoke slowly, spacing the words, and Brad looked away, suddenly ashamed, yet angry at the weakness that made him ashamed.

  "Get lost, youngster. I snapped because I'm tired of seeing you in pain, that's all. O.K.?"

  "Sure," said David. He sounded like a hurt child, puzzled at an unprovoked slap from an adult. "Sure, I guess so. See you later—"

  Brad listened to the uneven steps as David went down the short hall to the side door, heard the door close with exaggerated quiet, then heard the steps on porch and drive. "Hell," he said. "Damn it to hell." His own steps were slow, his face somber as he walked to a closed bedroom door and knocked. "Hummer. Hummer. You awake? It's Brad Willis. There's something important I want to talk to you and Les about."

  ***

  There was a smaller double gate in the rear wall of Haskin's loading area, and David headed for it now in the car. It must, he figured, lead to some back road or drive that would take him away without having to face the people in front of the store, spare him possible questions that he couldn't answer. He was sensitive about his position as a newcomer, afraid they might look upon him as a possible instigator—or at the least, supporter—of the previous night's trouble.

  The gate was open, and Haskin's nephew, the boy who had been standing on the porch the night before, cursing, was just inside, changing a tire on a pickup truck. He wore blue jeans and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. David slowed to a stop and leaned out. "Morning, Willy."

  "Morning, Mr. Champlin. You feeling all right, Mr. Champlin? I heard what they did to you."

  "Hell, yes, I'm all right. You've got to take things as they come, Willy. Don't let them get you."

  "We just going to sit here and take it, Mr. Champlin?"

  "No, Willy. But it's not going to help those kids if we all get our brains beat out. They can lick us that way. Just as long as they can beat our brains out, break our bones, keep us running, they've got the upper hand. Remember, Willy, they're the guys with the guns."

  "What we doing now if it isn't running? Standing still can be running." He threw the tire iron to the ground with vicious strength. "I'd rather be shot than take it. If I had me a gun—"

  David restarted the car's motor, but before he let his foot down on the accelerator, he said: "Look, Willy. I'm with you. But they'd be too well off dead. One dead white isn't going to do any good. Ten of 'em dead isn't going to, either. I'd rather see 'em sick and helpless. And that takes doing."

  Willy spat on the ground, made an obscene gesture with one arm, spat again.

  "That's what we're trying to do, son; that's what we're trying to do."

  ***

  The talk with Willy had taken the edge off his reaction to Brad's surprising outburst, put the words in the back of his mind until he drove through the gate and turned left on what he supposed passed for a road. He knew he shouldn't be surprised or hurt at Brad's attitude. God knew, Brad had tried hard through the years to straighten him out emotionally, get him to stop doing what Brad called "living on two planets." Subtly, but not so subtly David couldn't spot it, he tried to urge on David the advantages of marriage, the stabilizing influence of a home and children. Once when he was being outspoken about it he said: "Maybe you wouldn't be split in two the way you are now. It takes a whole man to try and accomplish what you're after down here."

  "Even if I could, Brad, even if it were possible to cut out the whole damned past like a worrisome appendix. I don't think I could go on from there the way you want. Know why?"

  "No, I don't 'know why.' And I think any reason you give will be rationalization."

  "That's a hell of an attitude for a supposedly astute attorney. The trouble is, Brad, I'm not an Ivy League Negro. I just look like one. I'm still nothing but the brown-skin grandson of Li'l Joe Champlin who happened to have the savvy to get through Pengard and Harvard and Oxford. With the help of a great guy from Denmark. I'm not screaming loud screams of self-pity. I'm a Negro, close to my roots, and proud of it. You'd damned well better be proud of it if Gramp brought you up. And what happens when some of the women of our world that I've met who have been seeing an Ivy League Negro suddenly discover what's u
nderneath? Jeez! They go into shock. And when they find out I'd rather be what I am than what they've been thinking I am, that's it, brother. That's it. Li'l ol' Uncle Tom Champlin might as well go back to the tall cotton. And as for the whites! When they scratch that utterly-charming-young-Negro-lawyer-and-brilliant-my-dear, and find me it jolts the hell out of them. A sentimental brown-skin slob who likes old-time blues piano, who'll sing in a Negro church service at the drop of a hat— looks for 'em, by God—and who gets more feeling of accomplishment out of registering a middle-aged Negro sharecropper who's been scared witless all his life than he'll get out of arguing his first case before the U.S. Supreme Court—that guy they can't dig; that guy they can't dig."

  "You poor devil," said Brad. "You just aren't sick enough."

  CHAPTER 77

  Now as he drove out to Miz Towers, the memory of his conversation with Brad slipped away, replaced by a warmer one—that of Gracie.

  He remembered waking in the night and finding her gone. She shouldn't have left him, he thought; shouldn't have taken her soft, all-encompassing comfort away from him. He had reached for her, there in the dark, and his groping hand had found only emptiness. He murmured, half asleep, "Gracie... Gracie..." and he remembered the impression he had that she was still in the room, standing somewhere in its darkness. When she had not answered, he had gone back to sleep to be half awakened later by the sound of a ringing telephone and then Brad's voice in the kitchen answering it, the words indistinguishable. He realized now that it must have been the call from Hunter. And even in that second awakening there had been loneliness and a hope that Gracie would return to lie beside him for what was left of the night.

  He realized abruptly that he had passed the Towers house, was almost at the plank bridge across the stream, and he braked quickly, fought the skidding wheels into a full turn, and started back.

  He was reaching over the gate for the hook fastening when he saw the dog come around the corner of the house. He drew his hand back slowly, let his arms hang loosely at his sides. Never, so help him, had he seen a more magnificent specimen. Or a bigger one. The damned dog's as big as a pony, he thought. It was all strong grace and swift muscle and power, the great granddaddy of all the German shepherds that had ever been whelped. I love dogs, he thought; yes, Lawd! I love dogs, but I'm no damned fool. The dog had stopped and was standing motionless, halfway between house and gate, and in the immobility of deep chest and sloping flanks there was still a flowing grace of motion and power, and the upright ears were evidence of complete awareness. David cleared his throat, said "Hi, Gorgeous!" There might have been a slight movement of the ears; he couldn't tell. He looked anxiously and saw that the fur along the back lay smooth and sleek, with no upright hackles. But, he thought, he couldn't see any movement of that damned great tail either. "If you think I'm not chicken enough to get back in that car, you're nuts, Gorgeous," he said and was rewarded by seeing the tail move slowly, back and forth, in a wide arc. Then its speed increased, and David looked beyond and saw Miz Towers step from the porch and start down the path. He remembered then. Tinker. That was the dog's name. He said, "Hello, Tinker. Good morning, Miz Towers." The dog did not move until she reached its side, then strode along with her, the lean, strong back almost level with her waist.

  Past ninety, that was what Brad had said was the general estimate of her years. It couldn't be far wrong, and was probably accurate. The grizzled hair was controlled in tight, short braids pinned down on top of her head. The skin was almost blue-black. The eyes were far back in sockets rimmed with wrinkled skin, the upper lids drooping over their brightness, half veiling their alertness. Only the structure of the bones beneath the webbed seaminess of the skin gave indication of what she once had been; that and the full lower lip and the carriage of the head, straight and unbending over a body age had made shrunken, yet a body that refused to be slowed by time or by the thought or intimation of eventual dissolution..

  As she drew closer David felt the familiar sense of humility that had come over him so often with so many of his people whose paths he had crossed through the years. "There's greatness in them," he had said to Luke once. "And don't you forget it, youngster. There's greatness in them."

  "Morning, son. Morning! No call to be skeered of Tinker here—" She unhooked the gate for him, talking so rapidly and in such rich idiom and accent David had trouble catching all she said. As soon as he was inside the yard the dog greeted him, not graceful now, but clumsy in his joy at making a new friend, rearing his great body upright, resting enormous paws on David's chest, ears flat in ecstasy at David's mauling caresses.

  "Tinker down! Git down, boy! Quit worrying the man, y'hear! Reckon you was skeered at that, you being strange and all. Ain't no one around here don't know Tinker ain't going to hurt no brown-skin man. Less'n I tells him to—" Her cracked laughter showed her age more than did the high quick speech. "You the young man my son spoke about? Called a bit ago... Y'all seen that boy, Abraham? He ain't been home in three days... ain't been in the bed or et a meal far's I know.... You see him when you gets back you tell him to git along home...."

  By the time they reached the house and went inside, David's mind was at full gallop, trying to keep up with her. She was evidently under the impression that he had already met her "boy" Abraham, and David said nothing to change that impression. She had not seemed to look directly at him since her first hooded, piercing appraisal at the gate, but David knew she had not missed a detail of his appearance or personality, that she was feeling him over with the fingers of her mind as she would a vegetable, seeking soft spots or rot, not trusting him for a moment until she felt she had reason to trust. When they entered the living room, she urged him to sit down, but he did not want to put himself in the position of a guest sitting on one of the best chairs in that seldom-used room, and ignoring her urging, he followed her into the kitchen.

  He sat in a straight chair at a table by the west window, glancing out past the side yard to the smooth flowing waters of Angel Creek and the rough, wild greenness of Flaming Meadows beyond.

  Miz Towers had poured coffee, given him a cup without asking. Now she was still talking, and David grinned down at Tinker, seated beside him, massive body pressed against his leg. It was beginning to seem as though he'd never hear the sound of his own voice again. "Abra'm sure thinks a heap o' that dog," she was saying. "Tinker's pappy, Abra'm say, he one of them dogs the po-lice got over in the town. Man what raises 'em, he stay over by Otisville, he give Abra'm the dog. Runt of the Utter, he say. Ain't no runty li'l pup now, Tinker ain't."

  "Sure ain't," said David. Man's got to make his voice heard once in a while, he thought, even in church. But how in hell was he going to check that spate of talk, the talk of the old and often lonely, long enough to discuss her land? He knew her kind too well to force the issue, thereby destroying any faint burgeonings of trust and confidence, seeds and all.

  She did stop long enough for him to read off the list of items Brad had given him. She had anticipated most of them and was packing them into a carton on the table in front of 'him, gnarled and knobby hands extraordinarily deft and quick. She had put carrots in, although they hadn't been included on the list, and David reached into the carton and took one. "May I?"

  "Go ahead, son. Seems like when my babies wuz growing up never wuz a time one of 'em wuzn't chomping on a carrot. We ain't had no boughten vegetable on the table since we had the flood, and that's way back."

  "You've got a lot of land to grow them on, Miz Towers."

  "You-all fixin' to talk about my land. I been waitin' for it—"

  David checked a laugh and tied the grin he hadn't been able to check into his play with Tinker. "Yes'm."

  "Abra'm says you'd give me an understanding of it. Why them white folks wants it. Cain't see what good it would do 'em. They uses it now, hunting and fishing. Ain't no one going to stop 'em. And Flaming Meadows yonder, it cain't be no good to 'em. Ain't nothing going to grow there. Ain't nothing going to be let
grow there."

  "I sure feel lonesome, drinking coffee all by myself. Can't you get yourself a cup and sit with me, res' yourself a while? You been on your feet ever since I got here."

  "Lawd, soil, I don't mind. These bones wuzn't made for settin'. Too hard gettin' up again." Still she did as he asked, brought a full cup to the table and sat at the chair David pulled up for her, facing the window. She was looking at him directly now, something she had not done since after he had entered the gate. Deep in their sockets the eyes were black and bright, and he was acutely conscious that behind them lay the mother-wit and wisdom of nearly a century. Tinker went briefly to her side, glowed almost visibly at her touch, wagged an apology, and returned to David's side, laying a huge paw on his knee until ear-scratching began again.

  "We owns this land legal," she said. "Been ownin' it since my daddy-in-law bought it after the war."

  There had been only one "war" for the Miz Towerses of the land, David knew: the Civil War, the only war in which her people had a stake. The wars that had followed had been "their" wars. "They fixin' to get theirselves into another war," Gramp had said when Korea came along.

  He was afraid that she would bog down in detail, but there was not too much of it. He learned that her name was Belle, that her husband's name had been Simon, and her father-in-law was called Zeb. She hadn't been "nothin' but a chile," she said, when she and Simon had gone to live together in the little cabin on Zeb Towers's new property. She guessed she'd been about fifteen, Simon maybe five years older. A year later Zeb's wife had died, and Zeb had come to live with -"" them. "He wuz a good man," she said. "He wuz a mighty good man. Good to me as my own daddy. I never knew my daddy. Never even knew who he wuz." She and Simon had produced six children, three in the first three years of their marriage, with the firstborn dying in infancy, then, after a long time, three more. Abraham was her youngest, the man she still called her "boy" and who must be in his mid-fifties.