Five Smooth Stones

by Ann Fairbairn

  ***

  There didn't seem to be the sound of anything in the streets, and the faces of the people passing were blurs. He knew only that behind him, close to one of a thousand windows, a little boy lay in a high bed surrounded by strangers, in pain, lonely. If David had to lose his foot, he had to, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it, but Li'l Joe didn't believe he had to; didn't believe God would do it to a li'l chile, yet knew He could and had and that David Champlin was no dearer in God's sight than Ambrose Jefferson's grandson Henry, who had lost both his legs under a trolley car. For the first time in his life he bumped into a white man on the sidewalk. The man snarled, "Watch where you're going, nigger!" but it did not snap him out of his preoccupation.

  He did not know where he was going, only that he was seeking help and advice. He headed for the French Quarter because his friends were there, but he did not know to which one of them he could turn. His old friend Isaiah Watkins might be the best. Isaiah knew something about the law; Isaiah had more education than most, and at night, when he had finished his work on the docks, he was trying to start a little insurance business. Ever since it had started he had worked with the N-double-ACP, and along with that he was lying to found a local chapter of a new group, the American League for Equal Citizenship, ALEC, they called it He had even been to Boston several times to national headquarters. Geneva had not been optimistic about the activities of Isaiah and the others who were working with groups to help their people. "Fat lot of good it'll do 'em," she would say. "All these N-double-A's and ALEC's. Ain't nothing going to change the whites but a slow fry in hell."

  "Meantimes," Li'l Joe had said, "Meantimes, till they fries, I can't see as it hurts us none to try." Still, Neva had paid her dues and he had paid his and taken out a membership for David in each when he was still crawling over the floor in diapers.

  Li'l Joe knew he wouldn't be able to see Isaiah until nightfall, and his need was urgent.

  Suddenly his steps quickened, and when he reached Rampart Street he turned left instead of going on into the French Quarter. He'd never liked to ask favors of the Professor, but this was one time, he thought, he'd have walked barefoot to Washington and asked the President.

  Bjarne Knudsen saw Joseph Champlin walking down the path that led to the rear of the house as he drove his car up to the front door. He bellowed, bull-like, and the slender figure halted, turned quickly, and retraced its steps to meet him. Together they entered the house, and as he closed the front door behind them Knudsen realized that it was the first time his friend, Joseph Champlin, had entered by this door. In the study he laid his portfolio on his desk and turned on Li'l Joe.

  "So! What is it? For God's sake, Li'l Joe, what is it that makes you look like death?"

  Li'l Joe, his knees giving way, sank into the big chair by the fireplace. "It's David," he said. "And he's hurted, real bad."

  Knudsen had not expected this; had expected some "worriment" or financial difficulty that could be solved by advice or other help. His voice sank, became low and gentle. "Tell me about it, Li'l Joe. It cannot be as bad as you think."

  At the end of his halting story Li'l Joe said: "I ain't signing no paper says they can cut David's foot off. I'd rather carry him out of there unless somebody more'n that little piece of something what calls hisself a doctor says it's right. He ain't more'n a chile hisself."

  Knudsen thought: I never before saw that black head bent, the shoulders bowed, not even after Geneva's death. He tried to find words, and knew that the ones he heard himself saying were stupid and poor comfort. "Perhaps, Li'l Joe, it must be done to save the boy. It is not so bad today, to lose a foot. In one of my classes I have a young man with both legs paralyzed."

  Li'l Joe looked up at him, and what might have been a smile flickered across his face. "He ain't David," he said.

  After a moment Knudsen spoke softly. "Ja," he said. "Ja, you are right."

  His voice changed, became the more familiar half-roar. "Ja!" he said again. "We must try. We must try, Li'l Joe." His hand was on the telephone, and he did not miss, as he waited for his call to go through, the sudden relaxation of Joseph Champlin's body, the letting go of taut muscles as though an invisible rubber band had snapped. He felt like God, and hated the feeling because he was not; if he had been God, he thought, he would be a most disturbed and unhappy man. When he said into the telephone, "Ja, I would like to speak to Dr. Fricke, if you please; you will tell him Professor Knudsen is calling and it is an emergency." His eyes were still on the man in the chair, and he saw the body freeze, every fiber listening as a small woods animal in its den would freeze and listen at a strange sound.

  Li'l Joe heard only one side of the conversation that followed, but even in the midst of his worry what he heard brought a smile: "There is a boy you must see in the hospital, Joel.... Ja, I know, but he is badly hurt. There is talk of amputating his foot... A truck crushed his ankle... Ja, ja, ja, he is colored... I have no chip on my shoulder.... I know he is getting good care, but he must be seen by you.... The hell with your regulations! You must examine him. If you do not I will raise... I am not excited, not yet.... What can you do! What can you do! What can the great Joel Fricke do for a boy who may lose his foot? You can save it.... Bah! You know what the hospital can do with its regulations.... You are the great bone man, the great Joel Fricke; they will be honored at your presence...." Li'l Joe heard the voice change, lower, become almost wheedling, but it was a wheedle with a menace. "You would do it if I were lying there, Joel. You would do it then, no? Then pretend it is I... Ja! Good! I will be at your office in twenty minutes.... No! You will not go alone.... I will go with you.... I trust no one, Joel, and I must see the boy, too, "and I must know quickly, very quickly, what can be done.... You will wait for me, my friend."

  Knudsen looked down into the face that had turned to him as he hung up the receiver, then quickly looked away. There was too much nakedness in it. He clapped his hands together briskly, said loudly: "So! We go together, my friend Joel Fricke and I, and we see. He is the best, the very best. He teaches at the university and he is a consultant on the staff at the hospital. If he has not the guts to take over the boy's care, like Sampson I will pull the hospital down about his ears. Where will you be so I may call you later? At home?"

  "Lawd, no! I can't go that far away, not now. You call me at the Jeffersons'. I'll stay there till I hear."

  ***

  When Joseph Champlin left the Professor's house that evening there was some difficulty with legs that seemed to belong to someone else. He had finally let himself be persuaded to drink schnapps with his beer. Schnapps had always held, in his eyes, great peril, ever since his first taste, but this evening had been a real occasion, and the Prof had been like a child in his pleading that he try Denmark's favorite drink. "The news is good, Li'l Joe," he said. "It is not perfect but it is better than the news you brought to me earlier. The odds are good that your boy will not lose his foot, but he will be lame. You must face that. He will be lame. And there must be surgery. Not once but several times. He must be patient, and you too. He is a good boy. They let me see him, even though it was not visiting hours. Oh, I raised a sand, I tell you!"

  Li'l Joe chuckled. He always did whenever the Prof's Danish accent accommodated itself to one of the colloquialisms of Li'l Joe's people. He felt a relief that came close to making him sick, and he drank the schnapps in haste to account for gathering tears.

  ***

  Three days after his grandson's first operation Li'l Joe went to the Professor's house again. It was late evening, damp and drizzly, and he knew that there would be a fire in the little grate in the study and that the Professor would have a drink ready, because he had called and asked if he might come over.

  He stood in front of the fire for a minute, warming his legs, and apologized for his work clothes, then sat in the big chair beside the grate, rubbing his palms together nervously.

  "You are upset, Li'l Joe?" said the Professor. "You are not su
re about your boy? He is doing splendidly. I have it from the great Fricke himself."

  "I ain't worrying about the leg now, Prof. Not anymore. I trusts what you say."

  "You are still worried about something, Li'l Joe. You come in here looking like a troubled chipmunk; you forget the drink I have so carefully prepared. That can only be worry."

  Joseph Champlin twisted uneasily in his chair.

  "How long the doctors say that boy's going to have to lay up there in that bed?"

  "Several weeks."

  'Then he's going to come out with his leg in a cast?"

  "I'm afraid so, Joe. That is the way it was explained to me. And, as the doctor told you, he will have to return for more surgery."

  "And each time he goes back in there for this surgery, he's going to be there like he is now, mebbe weeks? Two, three times for the next two, three years? With casts and all?"

  "Yes."

  Joseph Champlin was quiet for a long time. The drink remained untouched. Knudsen shuffled papers on his desk, rumbled in his throat, wished himself in Denmark. When the small brown man in the big chair finally spoke, there was despair in the low voice.

  "He ain't going to get his schooling. He ain't going to get his education right. I'd most rather he'd lost both his feets than lose that."

  Knudsen whirled, glared at Li'l Joe, drew in a deep breath and roared when he spoke.

  "That's it! That is what is worrying you!" The roar died, the eyes softened. "You are being a damned idiot, my friend. Of course he will get his schooling. Perhaps a little late, but he will get it."

  Joseph Champlin shook his head. "No. You don't understand. Chile like that, he needs schooling when he's young. That boy thinks all the time; I mean, all the time. Thinks too damn much for a young un his age. Worrying me all the time about stuff I can't explain good to him because I only had a little bit of education. I ain't going no place now, but mebbe he could have, thinking the way he does, quick like he is."

  "Is he doing well in school, Joe?"

  "He's doing fine, just fine. I tried to teach him a little myself, best I could, before he even went to school. I taught him his alphabet and how to spell little words like 'cat' and 'dog' and 'God.'"

  Knudsen's lips twitched. "In that order?"

  "Sort of. A chile knows a cat and a dog, chile just learning about God. Seemed like if I could make him see a cat and a dog had names you could spell out, then seemed like if I could make him see God did, too, why then God would be more real." He smiled apologetically. "He caught on quick. My mamma always said I caught on quick, too; only in them days schools for colored weren't as good as they are now, and Gawd knows they ain't much now. And she was working all the time, and I had to start rustling up money before I even got out of the fourth grade." He hesitated and went on: "They tells me my daddy was like that. Taught himself to read and write, with my mamma helping him."

  "Do you remember your father, Joe?" Knudsen was sparring for time, trying to get the other man's worry into some kind of perspective, trying to find an answer to the problem, knowing it was not nearly so great a problem as Joseph Champlin believed it to be, but respecting Li'l Joe's concern over it.

  "No," said Joseph Champlin. "No, I don't remember my daddy. Ain't no one alive now remembers him excepting one or two of the real old folks in the Quarter, ol' Miz Jefferson, folks like that."

  "He died when you were small?" It occurred to Knudsen that he had never heard Joseph Champlin mention his father before. He did not know what drove him to ask further questions. He pressed the questions as he would have with no other Negro but Joseph Champlin, and he could sense that even with him he was endangering a friendship that must always remain fragile.

  "He died before I was even small," said Li'l Joe. "He died before I was born, while my mamma was carrying me. He died away from here, not even in Louisiana." There was no sound in the little room except Knudsen's breathing. Joseph Champlin did not seem to be breathing at all. "My daddy's name was David, too. He was a real good man, but they burnt him; burnt him alive on a pile of logs in the middle of a field. Made them a bonfire out of David Champlin."

  Bjarne Knudsen felt the room sway around him, could for a moment see nothing, not even the man in the chair in front of him. He tried to speak, but emotion clogged his throat. He choked on his own horror. He felt the house in which he sat, with its high ceilings, its classic grace, its perfect proportions, fall away from him and leave him alone and shuddering at the edge of something unknown.

  It was Joseph Champlin's voice that came to him, called to him, brought back the walls of the room, set his house around him again with its galleries and lacy ironwork, its staircase, its grace, its slave quarters in the rear. He knew it would never be free again of the evil he had just glimpsed.

  "Prof," said the gentle voice of Li'l Joe, "Prof. I'm sorry. Swear to Gawd I didn't mean you to get upsetted like that. You asked me, Prof. I thought you knew till you asked me."

  He had spent years in the United States, but now Bjarne Knudsen's adopted language failed him. He spoke in Danish briefly, profanely, not to Li'l Joe or to himself, but to what was in the room, and then, in English, said, "You have lived with it. All your life you have lived with it."

  "Wasn't nothing I could do about it," said Li'l Joe reasonably. "It's in the past now, Professor. Don't do no good thinking on it too much. Things like that happened. Still happening, here and there, if you wants the truth."

  "Always, Joe? Do you believe they will always happen?"

  Joseph Champlin did not answer at first; then he shrugged. "Always will, I reckon, less'n we gets help, less'n we gets educated, learns how to fight it with law and stuff. Far as I can see, ain't nobody going to help us but ourselves, and we ain't got what it takes. Not here, not now."

  "That is why, Li'l Joe, you want your David to have an education. Underneath that is why. Because of the first David Champlin."

  "Mebbe so. Mebbe way back in my mind that's it."

  Knudsen moved so quickly Joseph Champlin did not have time to stop him or offer help. He took their glasses, and in the kitchen poured out the stale drinks, and pulled open the refrigerator door with ill-controlled violence. He ran warm water over the ice-cube tray and wished he had never come to Louisiana. It would have been better if he had taken a professorship in the Northeast—or as his brother Karl had done, in the Midwest. The evil in some form would have been there too, but it would not have been an evil sanctioned and somehow made holy by tradition.

  He had not asked his friend why the first David Champlin had died on a bonfire in a far-off field. He did not need to; there was always and eternally the One Reason, the Big Fear.

  "Prey from the day they are born," said Knudsen aloud. He had often thought how every male Negro born in the South was marked for hunting. Even after he had been domesticated, he must be tamed like a pet lion cub, caged at maturity because of fear of its strength. Their maleness was an unsigned death warrant, its signature, the inadvertent glance, the mischance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or merely the tinder of suspicion sparked by nothing more than the flint of hate and fear. Let a white woman, be she whore or housewife, maiden or crone, strip herself naked before him, crawl into his bed, lay the white skin of her body against the brown of his, let her do it in fact or with her eyes and the movements of her body that her blood's heat dictated, then let her cry rape and he was for burning. Let a white man violate her and let her cry out the truth—that he had been white—yet a black was marked for burning because rape was abroad in the land.

  Bjarne Knudsen thought: If I were a Christian I would think of the fear in the minds of the burners; I would pity them. But I am not a Christian. I am a nothing, yet I must stand before upturned white faces and try to teach them something they have never known, and will never know until their minds and hearts are changed—civilization.

  When he returned with the drinks, he crossed the room to Joseph Champlin's chair, placed a hand on the other man's shoul
der when he started to rise, and put the drink on the low table before the fireplace. He carried his own drink to the desk, but did not sit down; instead stood looking at the man almost lost in the big chair.

  "You will believe me if I tell you something, Li'l Joe?"

  "I always does," said Joseph Champlin.

  Knudsen thought: You will not commit yourself utterly, not even to me, not even if committal imposes no obligations; the habit of noncommittal is so strong it is almost a reflex.

  "Then believe me now. I promise you our boy in the hospital, your grandson, the great-grandson of the man who died so horribly, shall have his schooling. But it must be planned. We Danes are a methodical people, for all some call us overgrown pixies. He will not, in the long run, lose an inch of ground, I promise you. I do not know children, but I feel today I know this boy of yours, this David, par coeur. No child will have better tutoring—if he is up to it. Tell him this. But he must be up to it, Li'l Joe."

  "He's up to it, Prof; he's sure up to it." The smile on the thin face drove some of the evil from Bjarne Knudsen's room. "You tell me what you wants done, Prof, and I'll do it Means working day and night, it don't matter. I'll do it."

  CHAPTER 9

  The porter on the Humming Bird watched the tall boy with the straight shoulders and gimpy leg settle himself into the seat by the window of the Jim Crow car. He had smiled at the boy when he boarded, but the smile had faded quickly. There was that in the boy's eyes that did not take to smiling, that did not smile back, although the lips formed a smile and the white teeth showed strong and clean in the tan face. The porter, Henry Sampson, puckered his forehead as he watched the youth make his way to his seat. Damn, it had to be Li'l Joe Champlin's grandson. He'd been seeing him around Beauregard for a helluva long time; lots of times when he went over the river from his home in New Orleans to visit his mother he'd see the boy, and he'd always be smiling, pleasant as you please; a polite boy, anyone could tell that, well brought up by his granddaddy. What was he doing on the Humming Bird headed for Cincinnati, not even getting on in Louisiana? Plenty of reason for him to get to Cincinnati— everyone knew the boy was planning to go to some college up that way—but why was he getting on here? Henry Sampson figured he could give a guess, he could give a helluva good guess after seeing the boy's face. "Them buses," he said to himself. Them damned Crow buses. The boy took hisself a bus and run into trouble. Lawd! It was plain as day the boy'd never been on a train before. Henry Sampson went over to the seat.