Five Smooth Stones

by Ann Fairbairn

  "Something like that. But—"

  "But! But! And you call your grandfather hardheaded!"

  Knudsen felt the same pitying anger and frustration shake him inwardly that had shaken him so often with his friend Li'l Joe. He looked down at the boy who had grown to mean so much to him, at the bent head. They would turn to him for help, Joseph Champlin's people, even Joseph Champlin himself, in those things that were of life's exterior, never for help in those troubles of the inner world in which their inmost beings dwelt, to which they withdrew, as David had withdrawn; a world that no man with white skin might enter into, no matter how great his love, how strong his yearning to help.

  His tone became gruffly wheedling. "David, there is something else the doctor told you. That your grandfather should not become emotionally upset. That he must be spared things that might upset or anger him. Yes?"

  "Yes. Gramp's not excitable—"

  "No? He gets what he calls 'upsetted,' does he not? And easily. Have you thought, David, how upset he will be if you tell him you are not going to Pengard because of his illness? Have you thought about that?"

  David was quiet for a long time, then rose, hands in pockets, to walk to the fireplace and stand looking into the empty blackness of the grate. "He—he wasn't ever too happy about it. It worried him, me going away and all, to a—to a college like that."

  "No. That is not so. At first, yes. But not now. Now he is proud. I meet his friends, the musicians, and they tell me how he brags about you—"

  "Gramp doesn't brag—"

  "I used the wrong word. How he talks about you. About the fine grades you made in the tests last spring. If you do not enter now, he will blame himself."

  "He can't do that—"

  "Be quiet! He will blame himself for the rest of his life. Upset! My God! David, there is nothing—nothing, I tell you —that could upset him more. And you would deliberately do this thing?"

  "I'll—I'll have to study about it—"

  Knudsen's sigh was so deep it might have stirred the heavy drapes hanging beside the tall windows. He looked at David, his brows drawn together in a fierce frown. "We have talked, you and I, about how countries are governed, and laws are made, about compromises. Study about this, my boy: it is a compromise I offer you. Listen carefully. I will write my brother, or better, telephone him, and I will tell him you must enter late. In a large university you could not do this, but Pengard is small and personal. Be quiet until I finish. He has told me how you impressed them all last spring. He will gain the support of the other professors; he carries weight, my brother, small as he is. The dean cannot refuse them all. Then he will—"

  "Please, Prof—"

  "Quiet! Then he will send me outlines of the work of the first semester, and we will go over them, study them, you and I. When Li'l Joe is strong again, in a month or so, then you will go—"

  "Prof, it's too much. I—I'll think—"

  "No! For once in his life, just once, Bjarne Knudsen says 'Do not think!'"

  And then the boy before him was smiling. "Gosh, Prof, do I have to do all the compromising?"

  David was David again, and Knudsen turned away to hide his relief, to keep from the boy any thought that he had been triumphed over.

  "I'm going back to work on the laundry truck tomorrow," David said. "We'll need the money."

  "You will not need—"

  "Wait"

  Suddenly Bjarne Knudsen laughed, "Ja! It is I who am interrupting now. And you are too polite to roar at me. I will be quiet."

  "O.K. I'll go to work, and then when Gramp comes home next week—that's when the doctor says it will be—I'll take care of him and see how he gets along. And—and sort of feel my way. But I can't leave him, Professor; I can't leave him all alone if he's not all right."

  ***

  "Stop clucking over me, son! Gawd's sake, you're worse'n a broody hen—"

  "Doctor said you ought to keep your feet up whenever you could, didn't he?"

  "He didn't say I had to."

  "Said it was better, didn't he? Don't pick that hassock up! I'll carry it over there—"

  "Jesus have moicy! I ain't going to have no peace till you gets up there in Ohio. Then mebbe me'n Stumpy can settle down—"

  David looked sideways at his grandfather, seated now in his chair by the mock fireplace, feet propped on the hassock, and for the first time realized fully what the Professor had meant. To tell Gramp he wasn't going to Pengard because he thought there was need of him at home would send the little man into cat fits, pure cat fits. David was almost scared to tell him he had permission to enter late; he'd let the Prof do that; Gramp wouldn't fly off the handle with the Prof.

  He prayed as he had when he was child, not so much that Gramp would get well, because he seemed to be doing that, but that he would show sense. Look God, he prayed. Look. Make him have sense. Make him do what the doctor says so's he won't have another attack. Ever. Please. Until the night Gramp had been rushed to the hospital David hadn't prayed for a long time, except on the surface. Once in a while, after he'd asked the blessing at mealtime, Gramp would say, "You still say your prayers, son?" and David would answer, "Sure, Gramp. Sure do."

  But the night Gramp had the attack, it was all David could do—pray. He'd never seen pain like that in another human being; to see it contorting Gramp's gentle, quiet face into a twisted mask of agony was almost more than he could take. Sitting on the edge of his bed after he got home he kept saying, over and over, "Help him, Jesus! Help him. Help

  Gramp, Jesus!" He did not want to close his eyes because when he did all he could see was the twisted face, feeling at the same time the tight clutch of the slender hand on his own in the taxi, hearing the gasping whisper in his ears.

  The Professor had been swell. The night it happened, just after supper, the Professor was out, but David reached him after he returned from the hospital, and the big man's deep assurance quieted him down, got him breathing regularly again. The next morning he went to the Knudsen house. "If he hadn't done it, Prof, hadn't let them talk him into going back on a loading gang just because they wanted a workin' fool—"

  "It is past, David; it is past. Think now of when he will be well and home again—"

  And now that Gramp was home, David had to admit that the Prof had been right; Gramp didn't seem to have the slightest intention of going back to any heavy work, talked only of going back to grading coffee, or maybe even doing what he had done years before, help out in Zeke Jones's funeral home. "Onlies' thing about that," said Gramp, "the hours is too irregular." Another time he said: "Lucky I knows how to do some of these other things. Mighty lucky. Ain't too many of us could make a dime was they told they couldn't use their backs. Reckon there's a many of us ain't around no more, jes for that reason."

  David had a long cord put on the telephone so Gramp could take it with him wherever he went, but when he came home one afternoon and found Gramp napping in the bedroom and the telephone on the kitchen table, he had a bedside extension installed. He made elaborate and careful arrangements with the neighbors to check daily on Gramp, warning them against being too obvious about it, giving them the doctor's and the Professor's telephone numbers. He knew that all the Jeffersons, the Professor, Isaiah Watkins, others, would be checking too.

  After he came home one afternoon in late September, he realized the Prof must have been at the house, talking to Gramp.

  "I don't want no foolishness out of you about not going up there to that collidge," said Gramp. He spoke very quietly. "I haven't said—"

  "Not to me, son. You did to the Prof. He explained it to me. Anyone had told me you was going to enter late on account of me, I'da raised a sand, but no one told me. The Prof says it's all arranged and there ain't nothing to do about it now. But you going up there when the time comes long about November. They got it all arranged. Seems like you all mighta said something to me—"

  "You were too sick, Gramp."

  "Mebbe so. The doctor says I ain't to get upsetted.
Lemme tell you one thing: Li'l Joe Champlin's going to get plenty upsetted you does a damfool thing like not going to that collidge. I'll be all right. You think I'm crazy? You think I wants another bad spell like that? All them pains? Your Gramp ain't exactly teched in the head, not yet, less'n you makes me that way, r'aring back, not taking that scholarship—"

  "All right, Gramp, all right."

  But there was unease within him, a deep worry, the first of his life, and he carried it wherever he went, a burden that could not be lightened by sharing, a burden that was his alone, and its weight became part of his maturity.

  CHAPTER 17

  David Champlin's second train trip brought him into Cincinnati on the Humming Bird early Sunday morning. He had slept little during the night. His legs were too long for comfort in the coach seats, his mind too full for tiredness to quiet. At Gramp's insistence they had arrived at the terminal in New Orleans more than an hour before train time. Half an hour later they saw the Professor enter, hatless and wearing a long shabby raincoat. Rain gleamed on his hair and darkened the shoulders of the coat. He came directly to them, and Gramp said, "You knows better than that, Prof. This the colored section." They had walked to the doorway then, and stood talking. The Professor, more than either David or his grandfather, seemed at a loss for words. He stood looking at David, then into the terminal, then back at David, and now and then down at Li'l Joe. At last he took a package from a capacious pocket in his coat and gave it to David.

  "I know it will please you," he said. "It is what I would like to give my son if I had one. So I give it to you, the son of my mind. No—no. Do not open it now. Open it on the train if you must."

  David stumbled over words, and heard his grandfather saying, "You've given the boy so much. We sure thanks you."

  The Professor threw an arm around David's shoulders, heedless of stares. He tightened the muscles so that David smiled at the strength, then released him. "I must go now," he said. "Tell my crazy brother to write to me, David. Do not try to remember everything I have taught you. Only some of the things."

  "Yes, sir," said David.

  Before the Professor could reach the taxi stand, David was at his side. "Professor!" The big man whirled. "Ja?"

  "Professor—could you—I mean, would you keep an eye on Gramp? Let me know if he's not all right? Please."

  Bjarne Knudsen was standing looking down now, not at the face of an eager college-bound student, but into the eyes of a small brown boy standing behind a battered kitchen table, earnest, trusting, solemn, watching an adored grandfather repair a toy picked up in a secondhand store. "I will watch the stubborn old fool, David," he said brusquely. "You are not to worry. He is my friend."

  The Professor's hand touched his shoulder for a moment. David could scarcely hear the words—"God bless"—and the big man vanished into a waiting cab.

  On the train David opened the package. It was Vergil's Aeneid in the original. It was the same beautifully bound, expensive edition he had seen and admired in the Professor's library, the book from which the Professor had read to him, and from which he had used passages in teaching him Latin. He opened it, and on the flyleaf, in the Professor's strange handwriting, were the words: Homo Vitae commodatus non donatus est. Below it in—drat the man—Danish was an inscription he could not read, and the signature, Bjarne Knudsen. The Latin quotation was as close to a sermon as the Professor had ever come: "A man is lent, not given, life."

  After he left the train he drank two cups of black coffee and ate two stale doughnuts at a stand in the terminal. He did not dare tackle the counter in the restaurant until he could ask one of the colored porters if it was all right, and they were all busy. His mind was still full of the countryside he had seen from the train window, a world white with quiet snow. Even as early as seven o'clock people had been on porches and front walks clearing the soft, shallow white drifts away. If the weather was like this all winter, he thought, here was one way of earning a few dollars.

  He stood in the doorway of the terminal, looking out at a scene as strange as Venice or Baghdad would have been. The red brick of the old houses, the brown branches of the trees, bare except for the light fall of snow, the quietude that snow-fall brings were like a dream scene. Even a taxi that made a skidding turn into the side driveway, the driver's face showing red against a gray woolen scarf, was part of the dream.

  He wondered, on the train to Laurel an hour later, what it would be like to be in the North. He hoped he was not fool enough to count on it being much better. He had listened too many times to stories his grandfather's friends told of poverty and slums, jobs withheld, crime and evil among his people up North to have great hope that it would be much different. He remembered one of the Professor's better diatribes, when he had said: "But remember, no matter how bad it is—and as long as the darkness in the white man's heart equals the darkness of the black man's skin, it will be bad—remember it is not the law. Here, in the South, the oppression of your people is sanctified and made holy by the law.

  "In the North you may be looked down upon by the blind; many will not rent you a home or let you buy one where you will; you may be refused service in restaurants, but remember, it is not the law—it is the darkness of the heart of the individual. The darkness and the greed.

  "In a city in New York little children are taken to the home where Harriet Tubman lived out her latter years as though to a shrine; I could take you to a house in New Hampshire with false walls and hidden closets where they harbored runaway slaves on their way to Canada. Here in New Orleans they will show a thousand tourists old homes with slave quarters in the rear, show them with pride, and take them up the river to see old plantations that thrived and grew wealthy on slave labor."

  The Professor had waggled a huge forefinger at him, and David had bitten his lip and lowered his eyes to keep from smiling at the ferocity of the man. "Here there are laws," he said, "evil laws to keep alive oppressions they must perpetuate to save their way of life. In Virginia, the first to emancipate its slaves, they have never removed from the statute books the laws designed to keep down slave revolts. Do you wonder I say: Where is the God, what is the God this people pretends to worship?"

  David remembered it all now, between Cincinnati and Laurel, in the little train that smelled of hot dust and old plush. He remembered, too, and smiled at the memory, what the Professor had said when they had stood by the taxi and the big man had touched his shoulder gently. "God bless—" the Professor had said.

  ***

  The station was small and bleak-looking in the gray November light, different from the way it had looked in the spring, when there had been buds on the trees and pale green grass had been hesitantly testing the warmth of the sun before pushing all the way to life. This must be a part of the change of the seasons in the North, the different faces common things like stations and houses and trees put on, bleak and dour for winter, warm and glowing for summer, soft and young for spring. He heard voices behind him, farther down on the platform, toward the end of the train, and turned and saw a group of young men sprinting toward a battered taxi that stood at the edge of the asphalt that bordered the station. He wanted to shout, to call out to them to wait, but checked himself. He knew nothing of the taxis in this strange town, whether they had separate ones for white and colored as they had in New Orleans, knew even less of the reception he might receive from the students if he asked to share the cab with them.

  He watched the cab drive off, and limped down the platform, its pavement cold through shoes not made for northern climates. He had almost reached the entrance to the baggage room, at the side of the station building, when he heard running footsteps and his name: "Champlin! Hey, David Champlin!" A rotund, breathless young man skidded to a stop beside him. A small hand that just escaped pudginess was held out to him, and he took it. The face that looked up at him was round, and the cold made two red spots on the cheeks stand out against a skin paler than average. The eyes were blue, and from under a knit cap pulled
well over the ears a strand of nondescript hair straggled. David judged him to be about his own age. The boy let out a gusty sigh of relief and said: "Nearly missed it. I thought you might drive off in that cab. My name's Sutherland. Clifton Sutherland, but I keep quiet about the Clifton. Actually, the name's Sudsy. Incidentally, I'm glad to see you. I'm here to drive you to the campus."

  "I'm sure glad to see you," said David. "Looked like a long walk if I couldn't get a cab."

  "Four miles," said the rotund youth. "Four long, lonesome miles. You could have gotten a cab all right, in an hour or so. Hell of a way to hit school, though."

  They were in the tiny baggage room, and the stationmaster swung David's suitcase to the counter. The boy who claimed "Sudsy" for a name took it, and David said, "Hey!"

  "Make the most of it, man," said Sudsy. "It won't happen again. Standard treatment for midterm newcomers. Next time carry it yourself."

  That was good, thought David; that was very good. No hint the other had taken it because of his lameness. He was skeptical about the "standard treatment" remark. He did not believe new students, even midtermers, were met at trains; believed it to be at the instigation of the Prof's brother, a way of lessening the bewilderment of a new Negro student.

  David's suitcase weighed the other youth down and threw him off balance, but David did not insist further; met tact with tact. They walked to a waiting car, and Sutherland slid the suitcase into the luggage compartment. The car was a yellow so bright it screamed, and as they climbed into it Sudsy said, "Three guesses what they call this jalopy."

  David smiled, settling himself in the seat. "Yellow Peril," he said.

  "Yeah. Damned unoriginal bunch here. Too many brains. No imagination. Driving around town I hear 'em yelling 'Cab! Hey, cabbie!' I knock 'em down when I can. Painted the damned thing myself, too. Do you drive?"