Five Smooth Stones

by Ann Fairbairn

  David began to worry about time, but he did not dare make the gesture of looking at his wristwatch or at the clock that ticked tantalizingly behind him on a shelf above the stove. He Should have left after the supplies were ready and come back later to talk. God knew what was going on at the other end of Calhoun Road. Still, if they needed him, Brad could call. A question from Miz Towers brought him sharply back to attention.

  "What they want with my daddy-in-law's land? You know?"

  Now she was questioning him, and that was good; it showed the establishment of a certain amount of trust. He outlined the situation carefully, not talking down to her, yet using phrases she would understand. Now that he had met her and could see for himself how adamant she was about not parting with the land, he questioned the necessity for their plan. Still, she had areas of vulnerability in Abraham, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  "Please understand, Miz Towers, no one is going to make any money on this, even if you sell the land. The only purpose is to protect you, make sure that you and Abra'm get a fair price. Not an outlandish one, with strings attached, but a decent, fair one. If you decide to sell. If you don't, we'll just keep the land optioned and there'll be no sense in anyone bothering you. We'll be the ones they'll turn the heat on."

  "They ain't going to get it. What Abra'm do after I'm gone, tha's his business. But they keeps trying. Worries a person. First it wuz sweet talk and doing things for us, me 'n' Abra'm. Then a few days back they wuz in-spectors. They say they wuz from the fire department. Said as how Abra'm's shop there it didn't come up to the law." Her laughter crackled suddenly. "They thinks we fools. Shucks, them wan't no in-spectors." She laughed again. "Tinker run 'em off. All I has to do is wiggle me a hand jes so, and Tinker, he know what to do. They didn't even see me wiggle it. They wuz too busy lookin' at him walkin' stiff-legged down the path, hair riz' up straight on his back, all them teeth-showin'. All I'da had to do wuz say 'Go' an' that dog would have been right in amongst 'em."

  "My own hair's riz' up thinking about it. You sit on your hands, ma'm, please, while I'm around."

  "Lemme get you some lemonade, boy. Got it cold in the icebox."

  "No, thanks, ma'm. You got buttermilk in there?"

  "Lawd, it's the mos' thing I got."

  He tried to forestall her and get it himself, but she was on her feet and walking toward the refrigerator she still called an icebox before he had a chance. When she came back with it, he said: "You study 'bout this land thing, Miz Towers. And you talk it over with Abra'm."

  "I been studyin' about it. Me 'n' Abra'm's been talking 'bout it. Cain't see no harm in it, offhand. Like you say, they kin be powerful worrisome. Ain't nothin' they won't do does they see a chance to cheat colored and make theirselves some money."

  He couldn't leave right away, and let her think all he was interested in was the land deal. He knew that fine hairline between trust and suspicion, and he settled back, hiding his restlessness as best he could.

  He took a long swallow of the cold, fresh buttermilk and said, "Umm, good!" then, idly, "Why'd you say nothing would be 'let to grow' on that field over yonder—Flaming Meadows, I think it's called?"

  She was seated again now, a glass of lemonade in front of her. He blinked at the directness of her answer.

  "Ha'nt," she said. "Plenty people say they seen it."

  There was a small bite of carrot left, and he chewed it now while he tried to think of what to say. All foolishness, Li'l Joe Champlin had said of ghosts and ha'ntings, all foolishness, but David smiled to himself, remembering that even as a kid he'd doubted if Gramp's words would have stood up to a test.

  "Ain't you heered about Flaming Meadows?" Miz Towers called it "medders."

  "I just got here yesterday. Guess there hasn't been time."

  "You stays round here long enough, son, come the dark of the moon, mebbe you'll see it. You got the look of one who kin see ha'nts."

  "Dark of the moon? I always thought ghosts walked in the full of the moon—"

  "Mebbe so. Mebbe so. Reckon it depends when they come to be ha'nts." Then she was gone, from this day into countless yesterdays, gone so suddenly he almost felt she should have said goodbye. He could see the past in her sunken eyes and hear it in her voice, and he listened without speaking, interested in spite of his impatience to leave.

  There had been no ha'nt when she and Simon Towers had gone there to live. The land known now as Flaming Meadows had been uncultivated, as it was today. Too small for cotton, too big to let he fallow, Simon and his father, Zeb, had talked of planting it to corn and potatoes.

  "I remembers it," said Belle Towers. "I remembers it good. They wuz talking 'bout building fences the day them two young mens come by, hongry. Fine young mens." She had told the story a hundred times, he knew, a thousand times perhaps, yet he felt that it had always been the same, not embellished with each telling. There was an eerie simplicity in her recountal; she told the tale as an unimaginative artist might paint a picture, the highlights harsh, the details clear as mirrored images.

  "They wuz fine young mens," she said again. One of them had been big, black, soft-spoken, quick to laugh; the other had been smaller, brown-skin, laughing not so often, quiet and polite.

  "Raised good, they wuz; anyone could see that." They had come from the Gulf region, riding the rods and flatcars because they had been told there was more and better work in the North. They had learned differently and now they were going home with what little money they had made in the fields and packinghouses.

  "Must've been way long before your daddy's time. Must've been your granddaddy's time. I already had me two babies running round and one in the grave. Abra'm, he didn't come along till near fifteen years later. Had me two more girls before him."

  Her father-in-law and her husband had asked the young men in, given them corn bread and chittlins and whatever else had been on their table. The house was only a three-room cabin then, the kitchen the focal point for the family.

  "The big boy, he was bigger'n you, he set where you're set-tin' now; he'ped my husband mend the chair you're settin' on. He set there laughing, playing with them babies. I kin see him good as my hand," said Belle Towers. "He wuz crazy for them babies of mine. Set 'em on his shoulders an' pranced around playing he wuz a horse."

  The big man had said: "Gonna have me one of these mighty soon. We been trying a long time and now we got one coming. Fixin' to get back so's I kin be the first to say howdy."

  Belle Towers added, "He wuz a happy man, a real happy man, and laughing mos' of the time. And gentle. Real kind and gentle."

  That afternoon the two men went hunting with her husband, and that night the Towerses bedded them down in a lean-to in the back, bringing them quilts and blankets because spring had not yet come and there was chill in the night air.

  They planned to leave the next day, but Zeb Towers told them he was taking the mule and going to Heliopolis the day after that; if they waited, he said, and went with him they'd probably be able to hop a freight as soon as they got there. Walking would take two days.

  She stopped speaking then for a moment, and her body swayed back and forth. "God lef' us then," she said. "God lef' us then. There wouldn't be no ha'nt today if they'd gone on."

  David reached a hand to Tinker's head, wanting to touch the warm life of it, the reality of it. His flesh felt cold in spite of the heat of the room.

  "Simon, he went into Cainsville that day, and them boys, they figgered to go up yonder and get them a rabbit or two, mebbe a possum, bring 'em to us for dinner. Wan't no sun that day, and my daddy-in-law, he went to Angel Creek to get us some fish. They wuz a big cave there then, this side the creek; used to clean the fish there 'fore he brought 'em home, keep some of his gear there. It wuz hid real good with juniper, with a little sandy place in front. It ain't been there since the last flood. Didn't no one know 'bout that cave but us."

  From the "little sandy place in front" Zeb Towers could look across the wide creek to the land
it bordered, and northward to the scrubby woodland. He was cleaning fish when he heard the shouting and hoarse cries. They had already caught them; the whites had already caught the two young men the Towerses had befriended: the big, black man who laughed a lot and was gentle, and the smaller, brown-skin man, quiet and polite.

  "He tried, my daddy-in-law tried, to tell us what happened; seemed like he couldn't give it no words, not for a long time. He wuzn't never the same after that day. He wuz always a good man, that don't change, but seemed like he wuz different after that."

  Listening to the old woman, David Champlin felt the same cold fear in his belly that must have been in Zeb Towers's that day when there had been no sun and he had gone to catch fish for the family. He could see Zeb Towers slipping, a dark shadow not cast by any sun, behind the underbrush that hid the cave's mouth, then watching through branches not yet in spring bud, watching a horror he was powerless to stop. And praying. Zeb Towers would have been praying, and David cried silently, "To what God! To what God!"

  "They wuz dragging the small man like he was a log, had him roped from his neck clear down to his feets so's he couldn't move. They wuz saving him for the last"

  Like kids saving some of the icing on the cake so the sweetness would linger in their mouth; that was the way it would be with them.

  The big man, the big, happy black man, said Miz Towers, looked half dead, and they were dragging him too, by the arms, and he was bloody, all bloody in the head and back, but "he wuz putting up a fight, putting up a fight—"

  David knew what was coming, knew it and wanted her voice to stop, but withheld his own voice, knowing it would not be heeded, back there where her mind was now.

  They threw the smaller man to the side, on the bank of Angel Creek, and he lay there like a corpse, unmoving. He was so close that Zeb Towers could see the rope cutting into purpling flesh; then he saw the eyes roll, saw a quiver in the chest and knew the man was alive, that he was "froze up in fright, looking like a daid man 'cepting for his eyes."

  Zeb must have been trembling, thought David, must have been shaking like a man with ague. He was surprised when he saw that his own hands were steady, one on the table, one on the dog's head resting on his knee.

  They forgot the small trussed-up man lying on the bank of the stream and went about their business with the big black man, turned their backs and went away from that small figure, knowing he could not move. The big black man had bellowed, twice, like a bull in agony, and the sound had roared out over the voices of the white men. After that there had been no sound from where he lay on the ground, still living, more blood on his body now.

  "We seen the fire from here, from out back, seen the smoke and heered the noise, heered 'em laughing, 'fore we run for kiver. White laughing it was, loud." Miz Towers waited, quiet for a moment in the terror of that day so long before. "Whites sure laugh at things wouldn't no colored laugh at, even wuz a white man burning alive."

  Stop! Now can you stop! For Christ's sweet sake, stop! But the voice of Belle Towers went on, old and thin and cracked: "My daddy-in-law he didn't get back till way late in the night. Me 'n' my husband and the babies, we wuz locked in the bedroom. Simon, after he come home from town, he didn't dast go hunting for his daddy. He knew it wouldn't do no good. Zeb Towers wuz either daid or he wuz alive and if he wuz alive he'd get back somehow. There wuzn't no moon that night, and when Zeb Towers come home, he wuz stark nekkid and he had that little man with him, slang over his shoulders like a sack of meal, the man they left on the bank."

  The white men had been busy carrying the big man to the pile of logs that was in the middle of the field when Zeb Towers stripped off his clothes and crawled on his belly from

  behind the bushes that hid the cave's mouth. There was no more sound than a fish makes rising to the surface when his body slipped into the water, scarcely more when he reached the other side of the stream and grasped the trunk of a small sapling growing from the bank, steadying himself against the current. It had taken only a slight tug by his free hand to roll the trussed-up body of the small man over, start it down the bank. He slowed its descent so there would be no loud splash. Getting him across the stream had been easy for a man to whom a river had meant food and sport and a place for games in childhood.

  More than courage, thought David; something more than courage had sent Zeb Towers alone and naked across that water to rescue a man he scarcely knew from under the noses of a mob of jeering whites, happy with their horror.

  Zeb had never let the other man's body touch the ground until they reached the cave, Miz Towers said. Because the man had been wearing light clothes Zeb stripped him, too, and buried clothes and ropes in a hole he dug in the floor of the cave. Zeb heard the cursing of the whites when they found the body gone and realized their fun was ended. Someone saw the place where he had rolled down the bank to the water and he cursed the others loudly for their carelessness. They said the nigger must have drowned and been carried downstream, and Zeb listened, not daring to breathe, as the sound of feet tramping downstream came to him from the opposite bank, not daring to stir as long as he could hear voices. He waited until far into the night before he carried the small man home with him.

  "The big black boy, he wuz daid in the fire," said Miz Towers. "Didn't no one dast go near it. The whites, they come back next day when there wuzn't no danger of burnin' theirselves, and they dug a grave up yonder and they threw his body, what was lef, in it and kivered it over. Cain't no one tell where it is now."

  David's mouth felt parched, and he ran his tongue over dry lips. "The ha'nt—"

  "Folks been saying they seen it ever since. I ain't never been there after that. They say it move slow and big and dark 'cross that field, laughing. But they say it don't laugh like no living man; they say they hears it from up yonder, when the wind's right, sounding like it come from the grave."

  When the wind's right; it would be the sound of the wind coming from the darkness of the wood, blowing across the field. It had to be the sound of the wind. Now David was oblivious to the passage of time, to the ticking of the clock.

  "We kep' that pore boy here," said Miz Towers. "We kep' him here a week, and for four days he never spoke no word, jes lay like he was daid. We fed him like he wuz a baby. When his voice come back he didn't talk like he wuz in his right senses, but after a while seemed like he come to hisself a little, and Zeb, he hid him under a load of vegetables in the mule cart and he carried him to where he could hop a freight. Zeb seen him catch the freight, and then Zeb come home. That night we prayed for him. Right y'ere in the kitchen on our knees, babies and all. He said he'd send word, but we ain't never heered from him again. Never knew did he make it."

  It was alive and present to her. "We ain't never heered," she had said, as she would have if Zeb and Simon and the babies were still here. She said now: "They never done nothing. They found out later them boys never done nothing. A white chile, she live north of here then, she come running home one day crying, telling 'bout some black snake she seen in the woods. She wuz skeered she'd git a licking for going away from home. They put the words in her mouth, her daddy and a friend, about black men. After it was all over, she tol' her mamma wa'n't no black men around, tol' her mamma she wuzn't even in the woods. My sister, she cook for them; she heered it, she heered it all. But them white men, my sister say, didn't seem like they wuz sorry, seem like they wuz jes as glad, said a good lesson never done the niggers no harm, kep' 'em keerful—"

  David did not even realize that she had gotten to her feet until she started walking across the kitchen with uneven, rickety speed. The room was unbearably hot and close. From somewhere beyond he could hear a sticking drawer being opened. It was the only sound except the groaning sigh of Tinker as he sank to his belly, then brought a smoky muzzle to rest sideways on crossed, tawny forepaws.

  The packet Miz Towers carried when she came back had for an outer wrapping an oiled silk tobacco pouch, cracked and dry with age. "The big black boy, he lef his
coat here that day an' this wuz in the pocket—" She opened it when she sat down and took from it a cardboard folder that David knew contained a photograph. Before she could speak, he reached and gently took it from her hands, not opening it, letting it lie on the table before them, his fingers curled over its top.

  "The brown-skin man made it, Miz Towers," he said. "He made it home. You didn't tell me his name, but I know. You named your youngest son for him, didn't you? Abraham."

  "Lord Jesus! How you know? How you know?"

  "Wait. There's nothing strange or spooky about it, Miz Towers. He lived in New Orleans, where I was born and grew up. It has to be the same man. He made it home. But that's all. Like you say, he wasn't in his right senses, and after a few days his mamma sent for a doctor. Abraham was sitting in the kitchen when the doctor came, and when he saw that white man come into the house he started to run. He never stopped, not even when he reached the river, and all the time he was running he was crying, 'I'm coming, Jesus! I'm coming, Jesus!' He ran into the river calling, 'Take me, Jesus!—' When I was a boy, there were still old folks who remembered. They used to say, 'Abra'm run to Jesus—'"

  She was swaying again now, eyes closed, whispering. "Jesus done give him his res'. The good Lord Jesus done give him peace at las'—"