Five Smooth Stones (114 page)

"Just on the other side of the jail is a street that runs east to the center of town. On the opposite corner of that street on the same side you can see the Grand Hotel. There are some offices in a couple of old, reconstructed residences next to that, then Third Street. That's the main drag of the city; it peters out here, but farther on, in town, it's the location of the principal stores and buildings."

"What happens to Main Street south of there?"

"It peters out, too, curves westward through the edges Of the colored section. The paving ends, and in some places colored have moved over, without objections from the whites. A lot of the streets on this side of town end at Main Street, of course. Including Cottonwood Road, our principal business street. It runs parallel with Calhoun. Turn right at this little cross street just ahead and we'll go over that way. I'm supposed to see Dr. Anderson anyhow and get checked."

The houses in the area nearest Main Street were closer together and of better quality than the jerry-built homes and tar-paper-patched cabins that had straggled, widely spaced, along both sides of Calhoun Road; these had obviously once been the homes of whites. The lower end of Cottonwood Road, where it debouched into Main Street, still had a semblance of paving and sidewalks, and the stores and little restaurants were clean and well kept up.

"Zion Church, where Hummer went this morning, is west of here. There are several other churches scattered between here and Calhoun Road, and a big community hall known as Salvation Hall also lies between Cottonwood and Calhoun, about a quarter mile west."

They turned into a side street, and Brad directed David to stop in front of a house larger than any they had passed, a sample of pre-Victorian architecture whose beauty of line no shabbiness could hide.

"Anderson would fix the place up if he had more time. And money. He's the only Negro physician for miles around. I don't see how in hell he does it. He's poorly equipped. He has an old X-ray machine and a 'new' secondhand electrocardiograph machine of which he is mighty proud. Does his own laboratory work, of course."

They walked up the steps to the wide porch running across the front of the house, its roof supported by graceful pillars from which the paint was peeling in scrofulous patches. As they crossed the porch, the front door opened and a woman came out with her arm around the shoulders of a girl whom David judged to be about fourteen. One of the girl's eyes was almost obscured by a large bandage on her forehead. Behind them, in the doorway, stood a tall man with broad shoulders, wearing a starched white coat, who greeted Brad warmly. Brad indicated the woman and the girl with the bandaged forehead, who were now down the steps. "Sunday night?"

"Yes. I wonder if the time will ever come again when it will just be falling out of trees or getting hit by baseballs."

Brad introduced David, and the doctor said, "Come in, come in. Honored to have you here, Mr. Champlin."

Dr. Raymond Anderson had graying hair, abundant, and with wide waves. It had not been artificially straightened. His skin was dark from years of southern sunshine, but David knew that had he lived in the North the skin would have been lighter, and he could have passed for a native of some Mediterranean or Far Eastern country. He looked like a man who had adjusted to trouble, had subdued his devils but not eliminated them.

They sat in a cool, high-ceilinged office and drank lemonade brought by a thin, brown-skin woman in a nurse's uniform. There was a pin on the pocket of the uniform and a black velvet band on the wide-winged white cap. After she had passed the lemonade Anderson reached out and took her hand. "My wife, gentlemen. Also my surgical assistant, my anesthetist, my floor supervisor, and night and day nurse."

After he had checked Brad's wound and pronounced him in good shape, the doctor took them through the building. Upstairs three large rooms had been converted into four-bed wards, a male, female, and children's. The beds were old, some of them the standard hospital type, a few of them just cots. The other furnishings of the rooms were shabby, and some of the bedside tables were obviously handmade. Everything was scrupulously clean. A girl in a white uniform, but without cap, was making up a bed with fresh linen in the male ward.

"One of our Sunday-night casualties was just released," said Anderson. "A fifteen-year-old. He came here directly from jail with a broken wrist. He wasn't in very good shape, so we kept him overnight."

"Do you do any surgery?" asked David. He didn't want to talk about, think about, a fifteen-year-old boy with a broken wrist who "wasn't in very good shape" after spending the night in jail under conditions David knew only too well.

"Emergency only. Appendectomies, caesarians, things like that, when there isn't time to get the patient to the county hospital."

"And only you and Mrs. Anderson?"

"And the girl you just saw, plus a young lad who's going to enter Howard next month, and is hoping to take up medicine. I'm losing them both. The girl is going into nurse's training. Brad here is helping out on the scholarships for them."

They were downstairs again now, and David glanced at Brad, grinning. At least the Chief had the grace to look embarrassed at this revelation. "I didn't know," said David, and Brad snapped crossly, "There hasn't been time."

When they got in the car David said: "Tell me about him. I liked him."

"Born in Capitol City, made it to—and through—the University of Illinois, and then University of Michigan medical. Decided on California, interned, and then had a residency in a county hospital in the San Joaquin Valley. Dust bowl refugee country. Once it was all right, but each year it has received an increasing influx of Southerners. Now, I understand, it's not much better than some states in the South. His colleagues didn't give him any trouble, he says. It was the damned patients. It can't be very inspiring to a doctor to sweat it out trying to save the life of an ignorant white, and hear him say to a ward mate, 'That's the way the poor gets treated here: nigger doctors.' So he decided to come South, stick with his own people exclusively. His wife came with him."

"When you got it to do, you got it to do," said David.

"He's by way of being an authority on cardiac and hypertensive diseases. He's consulted frequently—on the phone, of course—by doctors on the other side of town. He tells me the Negro past a certain age in the Deep South who doesn't have hypertension is almost a novelty. That the first experiments in drugs designed to help high blood pressure were done in a clinic for Negroes in, I think, Mississippi."

"It figures," said David. "Any of the white doctors take colored?"

"A few. On an off-hours, in-the-side-door, basis. Why?"

"Because some of the people in the South, with a better than average doctor with a dark skin to consult, will go cross town, go in side doors, De patronized, just because it's a white doctor."

"Yes. Why?"

David shrugged. "That's us." He glanced over at Brad, smiled. "Not criticizing, Chief, not criticizing. Just accepting."

***

They drove back to Calhoun Road and headed east, for Haskin's store. As the high fencing of the stockade came into view, David slowed to a crawl, watching the pedestrians on Main Street as they passed it. Almost all stopped to look. Two men stood together talking, then slapped each other on the back and laughed; one or two passed it looking straight ahead, the set of their heads showing they were as conscious of it as those who had stopped, but in a different way.

The motor of the car stalled just before they reached the Haskin store. David said, "Damn!" and Brad said, "Let's get moving. It's hot—" David reached for the ignition key but did not turn it. "Watch," he said. "Watch."

As they had drawn nearer to the stockade a wide gate, not discernible the first time he had seen the fence, became clear. Now a car drove along and parked in front of the gate. It was a green convertible, top down, about four or five years, old. The stars and bars of the Confederacy flew from each side of the front bumper. The back seat held what appeared to be hunting gear, and two rifles were racked behind the front seat. The man driving the car was middle-aged, rangy, with a ruddy, thin-lipped face. He wore a green sport shirt. His passenger was a youth in jeans and green striped shirt, his tow-colored hair brush cut on top, swept back in duck wings on each side. As Brad and David watched, the younger man flung open the door of the car and ran to the stockade's gate, a large square of cardboard in one hand. When he turned to run back to the car the square of cardboard was fastened to the steel links of the gate, its message easily read by David and Brad: niggers only. The lettering was not crude, had been worked on carefully, and below it had been drawn the figure of a man hanging from the bough of a tree, head grotesquely bent, face painted black, kinky hair depicted by exaggerated scrolls.

When the youth returned to the car the green-shirted man gunned the motor, and the convertible sped out of sight, screaming around a curve just past City Hall.

Brad said at last: "There go two happy citizens. And the older is involved in the Towers land deal."

"Sweet Jesus!" breathed David.

"That driver," said Brad. "One of the Twelve Just Men."

"One of the
what,
for God's sake?"

"There's so much that's vile, one forgets." David had never heard so much emotion in Brad's voice. "To take vileness for granted, and forget it. Christ!"

"Brad," said David. "Snap out of it. Tell me about these —what did you call them? Twelve Just Men?"

Brad's voice was a monotone when he answered. "A while back, probably while you were in jail or you would have heard about it, a new organization was formed in this county. 'Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition—'"

"Brad."

"All right, brat. It's a Klan-type thing, perhaps an offshoot of the Klan. They called themselves the Twelve Just Men because that was the number involved in its founding. It's spreading throughout the state. All of the original twelve wear green shirts, and don't ask me why green. I suppose black or brown or yellow didn't seem appropriate. Or red either. And blue's too damned wishy-washy. As I say, they wear green shirts, except of course the two or three who are state troopers. The junior members, like that kid we just saw, wear green somewhere, green stripes, tie, scarf, something." Brad laughed, a bitter sound. "Poor Haskin is stuck with a couple of dozen green shirts he ordered three months ago. Not a Negro would dare wear them."

David tried to keep it light. "Be sure and tell Luke so he'll get rid of that horror he wears."

"I will."

"Twelve Just Men." David scratched his head reflectively. "Sort of blasphemous, isn't it?"

"Now you mention it, yes. I hadn't thought of it in that light. The thing that struck me was its horrid parody of 'twelve good men and true.' It's so damned
adolescent."

"That's what they said about Hitler." David was quiet for a moment. "Green. What a lousy stinking trick to play on the Irish."

CHAPTER 73

As David crossed the long porch of the rectangular wooden building that housed Haskin's store, he noticed a structure on the other side of Main Street he had not seen before. It must once have been a huge barn, perhaps the barn of a large dairy; now it apparently was used as a warehouse. Under the sloping roof wide, closed doors indicated the former hayloft, and these doors overlooked the length of Main Street and the area in front of City Hall and the stockade. David remembered a novel he had read once, the scene laid in the time of World War I, and an incident that told of American soldiers entering a small French town and being picked off, one by one, by snipers in the loft of an abandoned barn. "Sure wish we could burn that place down," he said to Brad.

Now he had a clearer view of the Grand Hotel, where men who would have been lobby loungers on a cool or rainy day sat now in comfortable rockers on its wide veranda.

Inside the store the air was kept moving by a window fan set high in the wall above a counter behind which a short, slender dark-skinned man was wrapping a package for a stout gray-haired woman. When he gave her change, she put the coins in an old-fashioned coin purse that she snapped shut and dropped into a huge and shabby handbag. She turned from the counter, almost bumping into David, and smiled up at him. "Evenin', son. How you doin'—" and without waiting for an answer she bustled on, a stranger, still smiling, not knowing him but reaching out for a bright moment in the universal communion of his people. Steady, Champlin, he told himself. Steady. God, but he was shot, brought down, when for even a brief moment he could want above all things to follow a gray-haired kindly woman to whatever warm and shabby home she lived in, and there stay.

Brad, beside him, was leaning on the counter, and he heard the slender dark man behind it say, "Evenin', Lawyer Willis. How you making it?"

"Fine. Fine," answered Brad. "Everything all right here, Haskin?"

"Near's I can tell."

Brad introduced David, who saw immediately why Haskin was the community leader, why he had been selected as top man in the upcoming project. There was a sharp, discerning intelligence in the small dark eyes that, without being in the least shifty, seemed to move constantly, taking in everything that was happening in the big room. The grip of the wiry, thin hand was strong and sure; the lines in the middle-aged face were those of a man who has fought hard for a living, but fought clean. Enough Haskins, thought David, enough men like him, and we'll make it. All the way.

He stood to one side, waiting while Brad and Haskin talked between the demands of customers, enjoying the smell of the big room, a smell composed in part of old wood, beer, lunch meat, cheese, produce fresh from the earth, tobacco smoke, heat, and people. There was far more space in the Haskin General Department Store than there appeared to be from outside. Across the main room, opposite the counter against which he was leaning, half-open floor-length curtains hung in a double doorway, and through it David could see part of a smaller room with notion counters and dress racks. In the rear two doors led to what must be storerooms and the rear entrance.