He did not turn back to David until he heard his voice. "No!"
The incredulous horror was still on the boy's face, but the look of sick shock was gone, and the eyes showed healthy anger.
"No!" he said again. "It can't be. It can't. They're saying that about me? That I'm a homo? A queer? Who's saying it? Who's saying it?"
Benford laid a hand on David's arm, took it away quickly. "I don't know, David. I intend to find out."
David was picking his duffel coat off the wall, folding it carefully, as though a wrinkle might ruin its disreputableness forever. Quiet now, he did not look at Benford when he said, "Thanks, Professor. I'll be going back to my room now."
He turned to walk away, and Benford shot out a long arm and sank bony fingers into the boy's shoulder. "Wait. Wait, David."
He did not loosen his grip until David turned and stood waiting for him to speak. He put his hands on the brick wall, leaning on them, looking toward the lake, the sun in his eyes. Why, he thought, why, why, why did an unkind God constitute me so that I must always and eternally be seeing, in the faces of these students, small brown children with round, dark eyes, standing in warm kitchens with a cookie in one hand and a ring of crumbs around soft defenseless mouths? Just once, just once, God, let me see them as I see my white students, with no past and a future about which I care little. When he turned back and leaned against the wall, his voice was tired. "You don't have to stay, David. I'm not trying to hold you here, to make you listen to me."
"It's all right," said David. "It's O.K.; I mean, I wasn't going to rush off and do anything crazy."
"If I had thought you were I wouldn't have tried to stop you. You must see now—now that you have the whole filthy story—why I would hate to see you leave the college?"
"I suppose so. I—I've got to think about it."
"Then let me talk. Perhaps something I say will mingle with your thinking, color it a little, help." Benford smiled. "We have to do such a hell of a lot of thinking. Small wonder that when we make it in the white world we so often surpass them." He hoisted himself to the wall again. "I've given you—given all the Quimbys—a rough time. If you don't know why, you haven't the intelligence I credit you with having."
"I guess—I think I know why. Now."
"You should. Have you ever thought, David, that those of us whose beginnings were in the South—not all of us, but so very many of us—share something inexpressibly good? That we hold in common emotional memories that the whites can never know?" He paused, and when he saw David was listening, he went on: "I was a country boy, you were not; that makes no difference. Within the four walls of whatever place we called home there was a security of love that passeth the understanding of those who have never known it. I've heard well-meaning, well-intentioned whites wonder out loud how the Negro has managed to stand up under more than a century of oppression and humiliation, not only stand up under these things but stay spiritually strong. Perhaps I don't have all the answers, but I think I have one. It's love.
"Negroes like you and me—and our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers—carry it back, David, to the slave mother who knew her child might be taken from her arms and sold at any time—I say, Negroes like these were cradled in a fiercely strong love. Money we did not have; hope we did not have; decent schooling was denied; we were not very old before we learned what the word 'nigger' meant in a white mouth, though we used it ourselves. But we had in our homes a love so protective, so great, that it created a world of its own in which we lived, walled off, a love like the love of the God our parents tried to teach us about. It was within the world of that love that we grew up, that our spirits developed, expanded. Within the microcosm of some of those ramshackle southern homes we learned something of the macrocosm of the universe, of God, if you will. Abiding love, swift and sure punishments, infinite understanding.
"I doubt that the Simmonses and the Dunbars of our people grew up in homes like that. And perhaps, for the future of our people, this may be good. Perhaps we need the Simmonses and the Dunbars, too. But they are not, mark my words, David, the hope of our race, its saviors.
"Do you know Browning? It's fashionable to laugh at Browning today, but the math professor I lived with during my high school years was what you youngsters call 'hooked' on Browning. In Saul, Browning puts in the mouth of David —by God, that's an odd one, in the mouth of David—the words: 'Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift—That I doubt his own love can compete with it?' My mother and father, your grandfather, would have bogged down trying to read that. But never doubt they knew its meaning."
Benford looked at the boy standing beside him, tall, straight, with strong, wide shoulders and dark head silhouetted against the sun. "You're wondering, aren't you, why old sourpuss Beanie Benford is talking like this? I'm not doing it to keep you from thinking about what has happened. I couldn't do that. But, David, there are two things I fear above all others for our people: pity for themselves as individuals, and pity from the whites. God deliver us, David, because we won't be able to do it for ourselves, if we let self-pity take over. And God deliver us ten times over from a white world that feels 'pity' for us, as I define the word. Pity for the sick, the hurt, the lost in mind or soul, yes. But we are not sick, not hurt, not lost in either mind or soul. If we were not the spiritual masters of those who oppress us, our race would have been wiped out long since in countless bloody revolutions. And in my opinion, our mastery is at its height in the people we sprang from, and its cradle was the passionate, fiercely protective love of millions of mothers and fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, all of whom saw the dark future of their children in their eyes and held it off as long as they could."
Benford drew a package of cigarettes from his pocket, accepted a light from David. "Boring you, son?" he asked.
"No, sir." David smiled, and Benford was glad to see the smile reach the eyes and warm them briefly. "But you're sure surprising the hell out of me."
Benford's face became again the benign death's-head. "Don't give me away," he said. " T spoke as I saw—I report, as man may, of God's work—.' When I came here there were several restaurants in Laurel that would not serve me. Once when a group of students went into a lunchroom in Laurel, I overheard one of them say—I was just in back of them on the sidewalk—'What's that poor devil Benford going to do? Where's he going to eat?' That was the first time I packed. No one, but no one, was going to feel sorry for Oscar Benford. Hate him—O.K.; feel sorry for him? No! I think that was the inception of my lousy disposition."
He saw David smile again. "Is it all right, Professor, if the other students in your class—the white ones—feel just a little sorry for the poor Quimbys you have?"
Benford laughed. It was a laugh that belonged to a man with heavy shoulders and a deep chest, not a long, gaunt, black heron of a man. "You can take it," he said. "You can all take it. They stop feeling sorry for you when they watch your grades."
He stood, stretched, wanted to put a hand on David's shoulder but put it deep in a pocket instead. "I'm not sure what all this has to do with your situation, David, not sure why I went into it, except that I wanted to help. Certainly I had no intention—have no intention—of trying to pull the old familiar line of how much you'd be hurting your grandfather if you quit, stuff like that. I think I know your grandfather as well as I knew my own father. It wouldn't hurt him. He might even feel relieved."
"Yes," said David. "He—well, he worries."
"I know," said Benford quietly. "I know. So do I. About all of you."
He looked at David and saw that the sickness had gone from his face and that it was impassive now. "It's not my business, David," he said. "You don't have to tell me now, but will you let me know, as you would a friend, what you plan to do?"
"Yes, sir," said David. "Of course. But I'm not going to pack, if that's what you're thinking. I'm not going to pack. And—well—anyhow, thanks; thanks a lot." He turned and limped across the brick of the li
ttle balcony, down the three shallow steps to the paved walk and away from the building, his back to the tall, thin man with the skull-like head and the black skin.
Benford watched him, seeing with the eyes of his memory the inside of a tiny shack in Georgia as it had looked years before; seeing his baby brother held close in their mother's arms, sobbing on her shoulder over some childhood's grief.
And he saw his father broken and weary beyond all complaining, looking down at the mother and son.
His own lips formed the words he had heard his father say then. "Lord Jesus, he'p him. He ain't nothin' but a chile."
CHAPTER 31
When David reached his room he shot the old-fashioned bolt on the door behind him. The campus, as he had crossed it, had been almost deserted. In a few minutes it would be full of students hurrying to lunch. He met no one in the outer or the main quadrangle except three freshmen, two girls and a boy, who looked at him with impersonal curiosity, no knowledge in their eyes that he was anything but another student loose before lunch for some reason. Evidently the rumor had not yet escaped from the confines of the sophomore class. One of the girls had a pink-and-white face and china-blue eyes. She was as blond as a Norse goddess is supposed to be, and David thought Wisconsin, and then found himself hating her, although he could not remember even speaking to her before, and only remembered seeing her from a distance. Then the hatred extended beyond her, became all-encompassing, took in every aspect of his life at Pengard for the past year and a half, concentrated on no one thing or person, but seemed to swirl around him until he was like a man in the eye of a tornado, in a still, small place made quiet and secure by invisible walls of deadly force and power.
When he was alone in his room, the door locked behind him, he felt that this was good: to hate with such intensity removed him from the hostile world to a place where nothing could hurt him, where nothing could reach him. He had been living in a foreign country, and now, at last, in the eye of his tornado, he was at home. He spent the day in his room, cutting classes. He tore up the letter to Gramp. He couldn't put his finger on any particular thing that Benford had said that had kept him from going to the rec hall and mailing it. All he knew was that something had changed and that he was going to play a waiting game. Time enough to write to Gramp when he was expelled. He ate cold luncheon meat, and crackers and cheese in his room, washed down with black coffee.
Peace, thought David. Peace, it's wonderful. It was a bitter peace, but a safe one.
He reached for his math notebook and flipped it open to the problem of that morning's class. He had made no effort to work the problem in class. He scanned it now, took a pencil from the beer mug on the card table, and resolved it quickly, easily. After that, still working in that eerie inner quietude, he organized his history notebook and started to make an outline from the paper Burbridge would expect at the end of the week. Three times, while he was working, there was a knock at the door; twice it was followed by a voice calling his name; the first time it had been Chuck's, the second time, Tom's. He did not know who had knocked the third time.
When he was two-thirds of the way through organizing his paper, he stopped, wondering at the exhaustion that swept over him, not recognizing it as delayed reaction. He found that he could not fight it, and stretched out on the couch.
Half an hour later he was still awake, wondering why he could not nap. How could he be so deadly tired, so sleepy, yet not sleep?—he who had always bragged that he could stretch out any time he wanted to and cork off for five, ten minutes, half an hour—and wake up wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
He knew he shouldn't try to think the situation out now; that it needed perspective. You got to take things like they come, son. There ain't nothing you can do about it.
Sweet Jesus! How did you go about proving a negative like this? Screw every chick on the campus and find out how fast lynch law could become civilized? Of all the accusations that could be brought, this was the one that could not be laughed off. He remembered the times he and Sudsy had locked the door of the room he lay in now, and he had labored until past midnight to pound Latin into Sudsy's head. "No, Stoopid! A deponent verb is not the same thing as a transitive verb. It just acts that way. Now, look—" If one of the knocks on the door that afternoon had been Sudsy's familiar rat-tatat, he would have opened the door, but that didn't mean—Who in hell? Who in the hell could have started that rumor? He thought of some of the students who had found it difficult to hide their dislike of matriculating with Negroes. There weren't many: a girl from Alabama, two boys from Georgia, a few others. There was a girl from Louisiana whose green eyes had always made him wonder how far back in her ancestry the dark woman was who had been impregnated by white lust. She made it a point never to walk alone with him across the campus or be seen alone with him talking, even in the rec hall. As a suspect she made sense, until he remembered someone saying she had gone home for Thanksgiving and had been operated on for acute appendicitis last Friday, must even now be convalescing in some mossy Louisiana town. This rumor had to have started sometime during the weekend.
He sat, finally, on the edge of the bed, swearing, elbows on knees, rubbing his head violently with strong, hard fingers. If he could not nap perhaps he could wake himself up enough to do some more studying. He did not hear the door open at the top of the little flight of stairs before he heard Chuck's voice.
"There's more'n one way to skin a cat, as my granmaw used to say, a puffin' on her ol' clay pipe."
David turned his head. Tom Evans, ahead of Chuck, was already on the lower step of the short flight, with Chuck looming behind him. Chuck looked at David and stopped with a suddenness that was almost recoil. Tom Evans did not look directly at David but walked without speaking to the chair behind the card table and sat down, picking up a ball point pen, twirling it in his square, small boy's hands.
"Look, David," he said in that surprisingly deep voice. "Look, you can't just hole up—" He let his eyes go to David's face, then stopped speaking.
David did not greet them or stand. "Which one of you guys," he said, "is chaperoning the other?"
"Stow it!" Chuck's exclamation was sharp, loud. He repeated it. "Stow it, David."
David did not answer, and Tom spoke again, inspecting the pen in his hands with the care of a foreman in a missile factory inspecting a crucial part. "Look, David, you can't just hole up. We were here earlier, separately. So was Travis, he says. Finally Chuck got the bright idea of trying the back way."
"If you were all that damned smart," said David, "you ought to be smart enough to figure out that if I'd wanted to answer the door I would have."
"Sorry," drawled Chuck. He walked toward the shelf that ran between washbasin and bookcase. "You-all got any coffee?"
"Plenty."
"Reckon it's all right if I make some for me and Tom?"
"Do anything you damned please."
"Only get the hell out and leave you alone?" Tom's eyes were extraordinarily adult in the childlike face. "Right," said David.
Tom did not move. The flame of the Sterno was sputtering beneath the pan. Chuck was standing over it, watching it as intently as though it were a laboratory experiment. David watched him and smiled suddenly, but it was not a smile either of his companions would have recognized.
"You're both having a tough time, aren't you?" he said. ' "I'll give you a hand. Everything's just fine. For the first time since I came here I know where I stand. Right where I belong—in my place. It's going to be a hell of a lot easier from now on. One hell of a lot easier. You guys stay out of my backyard and I'll stay out of yours, and nobody'll get hurt."
Tom slapped the pen on the table and started to speak, but Chuck was ahead of him. "Yeah," said Chuck. "That's what I thought you'd say. You think I grew up in Georgia for nothing?"
He stirred coffee in two mugs, handed one to Tom, said, "You're welcome to some of your own coffee, young Champlin. I'll fix it in your toothbrush glass. Mugs are for company."
Davi
d stood for the first time since they had entered. "Look," he said. "Look, you guys. Get lost, huh?"
"How you talk," said Chuck.
"I'm not going to get lost," said Tom. "I'm lost already. A little lost sheep, that's me. Chuck now, he's not as lost as I am because I guess he's more conditioned to it." Suddenly Tom exploded verbally, and the unexpected spate of invective penetrated even the quiet spot in the center of the tornado where David was dwelling. David looked at him with awe. The words, coming from a youth who would not have looked out of place playing sand lot baseball with a bunch of eighth-graders, had a breathtaking impact. Bull Evans's son knew his way around in Anglo-Saxon. When he had finished, David could not hold back the comment: "Congratulations."
"Yeah," said Tom. "Sure. Congratulations. I've heard my old man, when I was a kid, tell strikers about scabs and finks."
"And what, if I may be so bold, did he say to the scabs and finks?" asked Chuck. "If I'm not too young to hear."
"He didn't say anything to them. He just smiled. Like a wolf smiling at a lamb. He used to tell me he didn't want to catch me swearing unless I meant it; he said otherwise it was just obscene."
"My old man—and a fine old southern fanner he is, and meaner than they usually come—cusses the way he breathes, natural like, all the time," said Chuck.
"Look, David." Tom pointed the pen at him. "Now, look. I've been listening and watching my old man trying to fight discrimination all my life. So far he's lost, as far as the unions are concerned. And that's one hell of a note."
Chuck said: "Prejudice is the same difference, anywhere you find it. It doesn't have to be a rope or a fire or a knife. You want us to get lost, David. We're not going to get lost. Maybe we shouldn't have come here. Maybe we should have gone about our business first."
Five Smooth Stones Page 33
