Five Smooth Stones

by Ann Fairbairn

"I found out. Christ, yes, I found out."

  "You know damned well you'll never find those two cats. And when you've cooled off you'll know you don't want to. But you'll find what licked you, baby; you'll find that. Fear. Scared shitless, everyone. Except some of the kids."

  "I know. God, don't I know!" He got up and took two more bottles of beer from the refrigerator and handed one to Rudy. "There's two kinds of fear, Rudy. Ours—our people's —and theirs."

  "You can talk sense when you feel like it. Jesus, man, I'm not a good man, like Gramp was. I'm just a fair-to-middlin' smart one. And I think when it says "Thou shalt not kill' it's just good advice, and that's all. Because I'll be Goddamned if I'll go along that it's as bad to kill some of the ofay sons of bitches, like those guys, as it is to kill, well—"

  "Gramp. And people like him."

  "If it ever gets so we live in a reasonable world, if the time ever comes when killing one man's as bad as killing another, when a black corpse is as important as a white one, then— what the hell—there won't be any need running around looking for ofay bastards to kill quiet-like because they're going to think maybe three times before they go around making corpses out of Negroes."

  David felt the sharp dig of claws as Chop-bone reached up, got a purchase on his thigh, then leaped to his lap, pressing against his chest, purring. "You think that'll ever come? A reasonable world?"

  Rudy shrugged. Some trick of the overhead light made his skin seem darker and the freckles disappear, and the features and eyes were in that moment all Negro. "You ask me? You're the cat went away to college, studied law. Said the

  reason you went to Harvard, didn't you, was because it was the best in the country for constitutional law? You learn anything? Anything at all?"

  David was silent for so long that Chop-bone had time to settle down comfortably and, drifting into sleep, let the purr in his throat die out. "Yes," he said. "I learned something. Learned a hell of a lot. A lot sometimes I wish I hadn't. Learned the Constitution doesn't mean a bloody thing as far as parts of the United States are concerned. And if it doesn't mean anything for part of it, it doesn't mean anything for any of it."

  "Didn't learn it never will, did you?"

  David hesitated. "No. I didn't learn that. I found out that things have got to be changed. Somehow. And I know, myself, without any law to tell me, that we've got the power to do it."

  "How?"

  "For God's sake, Rudy, some other time, huh? It would take all night. Laws, voting rights—" He looked at the knife that lay on the table, then over at Rudy. "Take the damned thing with you, Rudy. Get it out of my sight. I don't want it—"

  Rudy reached forward, picked it up, and put it in his pocket. "I'll sell it Know a guy who wants one—"

  David's eyes had gone blank, looking inward; now he focused them on Rudy, frowning. "Sell it? You broke?"

  "Down to penny one—"

  "Jeez, I've been selfish, talking about myself, nothing else. What's with you?"

  Rudy shrugged. "Sticking my neck out. Trying to be a pioneer. Or maybe a martyr. Me and Corrinne. We thought we'd try and register our oldest girl for school—integrated, that is. I went down and they told me to come back. That was on a morning. At two o'clock that afternoon—man, not more'n three hours later—I got fired."

  "Jesus!"

  "I found another job real quick. That same day. Rudy's got a good name as a mechanic. I figured I wouldn't even tell Corrinne I'd been fired; I'd let her think I made the move on my own. When I got home all the doors and windows were locked and she was inside, scared. I mean scared. Calls had started coming in by three in the afternoon. Half an hour after I got in, a rock came through the window. Missed the baby's crib by a foot. Next morning when I got to the new

  job—it was gone. Another guy had it. I guess the word had spread because by then I couldn't have gotten a job in all New Orleans. Even where I live, the garage wouldn't hire me. And it's all Negro, David. Negro-owned, Negro-managed. See what I mean? About fear?"

  "Yes. Hell, yes."

  "I looked all that day and the next, and that night when I got home Corrinne was packed. Everything. I got a nice little house, David. It's rented, but we've been saving to buy. There's a cement walk. Someone had covered it with dog crap they must have shoveled out of gutters and off lawns— God knows where. There were two more busted windows, and busted eggs all over the outside of the house. And the kids were cryin'-frightened. She took the money we'd been saving to buy—I gave it to her—to go to her sister's in California. She left the next morning. After that—they let the house alone." His laugh was not a pleasant one. "Wasn't any woman or any kids left to scare and I was out of a job-why the hell bother to bust any more windows or dirty up the place?"

  David swore quietly and effectively, then said, "But look, fella, what're you going to do?"

  "Christ knows. I kept enough money to eat on for a while. There wasn't enough dough to get us both back there. And just then I was fighting mad; I didn't want to go. Now? I think a lot of those kids, David. They're damned fine kids. And they sort of like their old man."

  "Get out," said David. "Get out there with 'em. Get going, man. And money's what you ain't got, eh?"

  "Yeah. Money's what I ain't got. I was figuring on selling the car and hitchhiking."

  "No! You know something, Rudy? We've been hitchhiking for a couple of hundred years. I don't mean just on the roads. I mean all through our stinking lives. Hitchhike, balls! Take a train or a plane or a bus. Keep your car and drive. But don't hitchhike. Look, I haven't got a car here. Drive by tomorrow afternoon, latish. I'll have the dough—"

  "No! Hell, no, David. You've got troubles too. Why should you—"

  "Give me a reason, one reason why I shouldn't You heard about the Prof?"

  "Leaving you dough?"

  "Yes. You know what would happen if I didn't give you a hand? A ha'nt, that's what would happen."

  "I feel like I'm running away."

  "Don't feel like that. Better your kids should have you. Too damned many kids without a father. Let 'em bust up your house. Don't let the sons of bitches bust up your life."

  On his way to the gate with Rudy he said, "How'd you know for sure you'd find me here? That I'd get back?"

  "David Champlin? Been knowing you a long time, man. We ran around together for a long time. Never saw li'l David when he didn't make it back home—"

  ***

  He walked back into the kitchen, sat where he had been sitting before. Something of the pleasure he felt at being able to help Rudy lightened his mood, then passed, and the night of decision closed around him. He folded his arms on the table and laid his head on them, too tired now to sit upright and face what he knew he must: a future that could begin this day, could end God alone knew where—if he chose it. In the living room the telephone blared suddenly, and he did not stir except to raise his head and listen, his face tense with pain. "Tomorrow, baby," he whispered. "Tomorrow. For God's sake, stop now. I'll call tomorrow—I can't talk—I can't talk now—tomorrow I'll know—"

  Eventually it stopped ringing.

  ***

  The tension that was in the streets the next morning was like a sounding board for the uneven rhythm of his feet on the pavement. Clop-cloppity. He could smell the tension, almost touch it with his hands. The woman coming toward him, neatly, trimly dressed in starched work clothes, gray in the black of her hair: he knew her kind, she would say "Good morning" to a stranger—especially to a stranger—but this morning she did not speak. She was Gramp's kind of woman, Emma Jefferson's kind of woman, but today her eyes were on the pavement, and God alone knew where her thoughts were.

  The offbeat rhythm of his own steps came to David's ears like the sound of another man walking. There was a woman standing on the stoop of a house just ahead, leaning on a broom and talking to a man on the sidewalk below her. She was a tall, spare woman, bright-skinned and with straight hair, but too dark to pass. The man was a red-bone Negro from the Cajun country.


  The woman had a high-pitched, penetrating voice. "They'll be at it again," she said. The man, darker than she, older, said, "Sure will. Heered women're standing round now, waiting for that pore chile to get there."

  David slowed his steps to pass the man, who was saying, "Heered there's a white family gonna send their kids there, put 'em in the school."

  "Crazy," said the woman. "They're sure crazy."

  "Trying mighty hard to learn what trouble is."

  "They'll find out. What they doing to those women at the school? What's the law doing to 'em?"

  "Shucks, I don't know. Spose they'll do like they done yestiddy. Run 'em off, pick 'em up. Saying right out loud they don't like it because they has to do it; don't like it having to protect a little chile."

  Clop-cloppity. Clop-cloppity. They were behind him now, the half-white woman and the red-bone Negro. Two miles away a little child was hearing words she'd never heard before, was seeing red hate in the eyes of white women, white mothers. Even now, even as he walked along, the little girl might be mounting the steps of the schoolhouse, one small brown hand in the big white hand of a United States marshal, entering an echoing, empty building, where she would learn her lessons all alone.

  What had her mother and father said to her before she left the house? "Don't cry, baby; whatever happens, baby, don't cry. You'll be crying all your life, you starts crying now." Something like that. How strong, how invincible must be the wall of love they had built around her.

  He had heard talk last night that another little girl might enter the school this week. Two little girls in blue are we....

  Where are you now, Simmons? The days of the blues are over, eh, Simmons? Where are you now, Dunbar, blind, so damned blind and just as black as they are? Where are you now, Nehemiah? Were you there when they crucified my Lord? I'm here, Nehemiah. I'm here. Were you there, Father? Were you?... Nehemiah, think!... You want me to think, Father? There's more harm done by just thinking than you knows 'of, Father. Where are you now, Father McCartney, with your glib tongue and ready answers? Where? What was it you said, Nehemiah? They crucify my Lord every day, in the streets, in the houses. They're crucifying little children, Nehemiah, little girls in starched dresses, little girls in span-clean dresses, with little white gloves on chubby brown hands. Where are you, Nehemiah?

  There in the warm kitchen the morning he came back to bury Gramp the voice of Emma Jefferson had been shaking with emotion: Lady I work for says to me, "Oh, Emma, I hope the Negroes"—she don't ever say "nigra" and I never heered no one in that house say "nigger"—"I hope the Negroes know we aren't all like those dreadful people. That poor child. I hope the Negroes know there are lots of us want to see right done. It can't come overnight. Two hundred years isn't overnight; two hundred years is a long time, hanging on a cross. What I wants to know is what's she doing about it? What's her and all her lily-white friends doing about it? Moaning and groaning and carrying on about how dreadful it is. Where are you now, white-lady-that-Emma-works for? They talks about it all the time. Seems like they can't talk about nothing else, talking on the telephone, back and forth, saying it's so dreadful, saying how bad they making it out to be, worse than it is, in the papers up north and on the television, knowing all the time them pictures ain't lying.

  Where are you, friends-of-the-white-lady-Emma-works-for? Sitting at telephones, listening to the radio, watching television, talking, talking...

  Clop-cloppity; clop-cloppity. Now he was facing the door of the building he sought. On the front of the door a square area lighter than the surrounding wood showed where there had been a sign. No need to wonder why it had been removed. When he opened the door the stairs that faced him were worn, uncarpeted. Voices above him were blurred by closed doors, and even in the small lower entry he could smell the smoke of cigars and cigarettes.

  Can I go see the cartoon, Gramp? Can I, Gramp? Can I go see Popeye?... Reckon so, son. Reckon Gramp can get you up them steps.... I'll help you up them steps.... Don't act foolish, son; let Gramp help you.... You gonna hurt yourself, you don't let Li'l Joe help you. A big black man, his arms as hard and strong as oak boughs, had come along that day and picked him up and laughed as he carried him up the long stairway, Li'l Joe behind them. He could hear his own voice crowing with delighted laughter, see the whiteness of the cast on his leg, stiff and straight across the black man's arm. He could not remember why he was laughing that day, what the man had said that had made him laugh so loudly. The man had set him in a seat beside Gramp, way up high in the balcony, so high the figures on the screen were hard to

  see, and then the man had gone away, still laughing, and they had never seen him again.

  I don't -want to go back, Gramp. I can explain it to the Prof. He'll understand. There's other colleges, good ones, Howard, Dillard.... Whatever you say, son. You a man now. Many's the time, though, I've said: "Lord, I can't do it. I can't get down to them docks today. Lord, I'm a sick man." But I got there, and I could somehow. Man can do what he's got to do. Something helps him somehow.

  He was walking up the stairs now, first the good foot, then the other following after. I don't want Sudsy and Rhoda to meet us, David. I just want it to be us, David and Sara, coming into London town together.... You'll be there, David? Early, early...? God bless.

  (Sara. Dear almighty God, Sara! Little love, smallest love. Wait for me, Sara. Wait for me, baby. Sara, little love. I'll be over for a day—an hour—just to see you. I'll make you understand. Sara, baby, love me.)

  No one turned when he opened the door that bore on its ancient paneling the words "American League for Equal Citizenship." A girl whose creamy skin seemed lighter than it was because of the sleek, gleaming blackness of her hair sat at a desk facing the door behind a low railing that enclosed the central portion of the room. Even so early in the morning she looked harassed, tired, and there were purplish shadows under her eyes. She was speaking into a telephone, saying, "Keep trying, Operator; keep trying, please."

  A blue-gray haze of smoke hung over the room, and every visible ashtray was filled to overflowing. The girl at the desk turned in her swivel chair and reached tiredly for the ashtray on an old oak desk behind her, emptied it into a waste-basket, and replaced it on the desk just in time to catch the stub of Isaiah Watkins's chewed cigar. Isaiah was half sitting, half standing, one massive haunch on the edge of the desk, talking to a tall, dark young Negro wearing black-rimmed glasses and a Brooks Brothers suit. A white man was standing off to one side, talking to another Negro, and although his words were indistinguishable David recognized the accents of New York. There was a window in the far wall, opposite the door, and silhouetted against its cloudy pane was the tall, spare figure of Brad Willis, talking to a man perched on its sill.

  The girl at the desk noticed David at last and said, "Who did you want to see?" He shook his head. "I'll wait," he said. He walked to a window in the side wall at his right, and turned quickly at the sound of a familiar voice speaking his name. "Chuck."

  "Glad to see you, dad. Mighty glad. You had me worried plenty. Thought you were leaving—" Chuck looked at David's face, and the words trailed off.

  David said, "Remember the church basement in Laurel?"

  Chuck nodded. "Sure."

  "And the meetings? And Father McCartney?"

  "Sure. I hear he's still there."

  "Remember Nehemiah?"

  "Not likely to forget him."

  David looked around the room, then back at Chuck. " 'Were you there?'" he said. "That's all I could think of on the way up here. 'Were you there?' "

  "I know," said Chuck. "It's a question I can answer after this week. I can say, 'Yes.'"

  David turned from him abruptly and looked out the window, not seeing the people passing on the sidewalk below, seeing only the small yard of a shabby house opposite, and two fat brown children tumbling on its earth, looking like the Timmins twins of years ago. The voices behind him seemed softened by the thick haze of smoke, as the face of an agin
g actress is softened by chiffon veiling. A white-haired, dark-skinned man had stopped at the gate, and the two babies were standing on fat brown legs, solemn round eyes fixed on the old man's face. One thing makes me want to fight, just one thing now I'm old and come to my senses, and that's seeing somebody hurt a young un or an old person....

  Now, below him, the children had forgotten their shyness, and the white-haired man was carrying them, a child in one arm, and one on his shoulder. He was laughing, and the fat fist of the child on his shoulder was tight in the curly white hair. They must have known him, thought David; must have known he had strong arms and shoulders and that he loved them, because they were laughing with him as he walked up the steps of the house and knocked at the door and then disappeared within it.

  You don't need me to help you get down them steps, son. Just hang on and don't overbalance yourself.... Will you still love me, David, in that hellhole I can't go to with you?... You have to go to him now, this last time, when he needs you.

  ... And I like to think... that when our brother spoke

  the name 'of his beloved grandson he spoke not for himself alone but in... the name of all his people.... "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night..."

  "This last time." There would never be a last time. Now he knew. Gramp, quiet in his grave, his heart stilled by fear, would need him always. Gramp had said, "Need—needs David—" Every dark-skinned man and woman, every Luke with crippled spirit, every small brown child, and every aging man and woman wherever they might be—on the streets of the southern cities, on the country roads, in the fields, and far into the bayou country and the swamps—each, each of them was Li'l Joe Champlin's need. Theirs were the feet in the muck, theirs the nostrils sickened by the stench, of putrefying white minds, the smell of hate. There in the spiritual filth and corruption of bigotry and oppression was the need of Li'l Joe Champlin, not across the water, not in far places.

  Someone was calling to him, and he sensed the call had been repeated. He turned from the window and saw Isaiah walking toward him. As he limped to the railing he noticed that Brad had joined Chuck, and he heard their voices, low and serious.