Five Smooth Stones (12 page)

CHAPTER 10

The Professor had sneaked up on him, thought David; as far as education was concerned he had sure sneaked up on him. It had begun way back when he was in the hospital the first time, right after the accident. The Prof had brought him picture books with just enough text within his power of reading to make them intelligible, then brought him harder ones to make him curious. There were rewards and surprises when

he learned to put words together by letters and meaning. Some spelling he learned by rote so that he memorized "height" and "weight" and was roared at in an inside-a-hospi-tal roar when he couldn't understand why "wait" and "weight" sounded the same and "late" was pronounced like both, while height was something else again.

Damned smart, these Danes, thought David, and smiled, there in the train heading toward his examinations for the scholarship he had been maneuvered into over the years.

He remembered that after he left the hospital at last, his leg straight and stiff in a cast, Gramp beside him in the back seat of Ambrose Jefferson's taxi, the Prof let up for a while, giving him time to adjust and be happy with Stumpy and the Timmins kids across the road and, at night, with Gramp. The cast was shortened gradually, and when his knee was freed and a metal peg set in the sole of the shorter cast he was able to go back to school, but by that time the term was nearly over and he was ahead of his classmates. Except in arithmetic. Everyone, even Gramp, had sweat with him in arithmetic.

He started going to the Professor's house for lessons the first summer after the accident. It was the first time he had ever been inside a white person's home. He did not like it much, he decided. Only the staircase with its long curving banister appealed to him. It would be better to slide down than the rickety old metal slide in the school playground.

Shyness paralyzed his tongue that first morning in the high-ceilinged study on the first floor, and he sat, straight and scared, on the edge of the chair by the Profs desk, his good leg wound around the chair's leg. This big man sitting at the desk was never, never, never the man whose beard he had pulled irreverently, crowing with laughter at the howls of mock anguish. This man was a stranger in a strange world, and he, David Champlin, wanted to go home. Fast

The Professor had roared his refusal of money or of services in exchange for his teaching; but David knew, when he was older, that the sessions had cost Gramp just the same, because Li'l Joe had paid Ambrose to pick him up each day at Pop and Emma Jefferson's house where he had been left by Gramp in the morning, and where he was picked up by Gramp in the evening. He did not know when or how he had absorbed the knowledge that you took anything a white offered, but meticulously paid your own people; it was something you just knew. But always there was the exception: the Professor. One day the Prof had said to him: "You said once when you were very small, while your grandmother was still alive—your grandfather has told me of it—'The Prof is white, but he's not New Orleans white.' For that, young David, you will always be loved."

Gramp didn't baby him in those days. Gramp sure as hell didn't baby him because he was hurt. Heck, sometimes it seemed like Gramp was tougher on him then than he had ever been, but there were times when he would see something in Li'l Joe's eyes that brought him thump-thumping across the room to climb on the thin knees and scrootch close to the thin hard chest as he had done when he wasn't any more than what Gramp called "nothin' but a li'l piece of a chile."

Uncle Evan came over often in those days, almost a stranger at first because before the accident they had seldom seen him. Uncle Evan fascinated him, brother to the father he had never seen. Everyone told him Evan and his father were as different as two brothers could be. Evan was black, almost jet black, heavy-shouldered, bullnecked, short, his face sullen and unsmiling most of the time, marred by two evil-looking scars. John, they said, had been tall and brown-skin, with wide shoulders and a fine figure, and had laughed and smiled a lot. Evan was in trouble most of the time, John seldom, because, they said: "John, your daddy, he got along with everyone, black
or
white. He didn't fight with no one less'n they got on to him real bad, rather walk away from a fight; but John he never
run
away from no fights; he could take care of hisself if he had to. Evan, now, seems like he's always sticking his neck out, getting hisself on spots he's got to fight to get off of."

Evan was clumsy looking, the muscles of a boxer beginning to lard up with fat, but he was quicker than a cat with his fists and even quicker with a knife. There must have been a couple of times he hadn't been quick enough, David would think, looking at the scars on his face. David knew, but never told Gramp that he knew, of the knife Evan carried with him; he'd seen it one day when his uncle brought out the contents of a pocket, searching for something. He slid it back so quickly David scarcely saw the movement, but after that he was always conscious that the knife was there.

The old punching bag Uncle Evan brought was hung on the back porch. When Evan showed up with a pair of boxing gloves for him, Gramp displayed rare emotion toward his only living child. "Sure nice of you, Evan," he said. "Them gloves is new." Then his eyes clouded "Where'd you get the money?"

"I got 'em honest," said Uncle Evan. "I got 'em honest. You got no call to look like that. We got no kids of our own and if we wants to do it, ain't no one's business, even yourn."

When Evan shadowboxed for David, the heavy clumsiness disappeared. He was as quick and fast with his feet and hands as Stumpy when he was playing with a wad of paper, throwing it into the air, catching it. When his uncle used the punching bag, David watched in awed silence as it became blurred and formless under the speed of the black fists. The first time David tried, the bag knocked him down, and Evan showed him how to use it, starting easy as a beginner, and how to compensate for the lack of balance his stiff ankle caused. "Ain't nothing too bad about a gimpy leg," he said. "You get them shoulders strong, get that little belly good and hard, and you learns to react quick, shucks, boy, you ain't never gonna have to worry. You going to be a fine big man like your daddy was. Ain't no one gonna be able to pick on you, nossir!"

As his leg grew stronger he pitched on the five-man Timmins baseball team—the Timmins Terrors they called themselves—and when it was his turn at bat, the oldest Timmins girl ran for him. Gramp used to watch them on Sundays, and when Gramp was watching he pitched as hard and mean as he could, and for a long time his nickname around the house was "Satch."

Now, an aging seventeen, he thought he must sure have been a trial to Gramp, always wanting something, usually getting it, but getting his share of discipline too. He remembered one Sunday when his leg was still in a cast he had begged Gramp to take him to the movies. "Gramp, can I go to the cartoon? Can I, Gramp? Huh? Can I go to the Mickey Mouse?" And Gramp, tired and wanting to rest, had finally said, "Reckon so, boy. Reckon Gramp can carry you up them stairs."

"I can walk 'em, Gramp. Honest. Please, Gramp. I can walk "em."

"Mighty long flight, boy. Nev' mind. Gramp'll take you, you wants to go all that bad."

Later, at the theatre, when he had struggled up the first few steps on the way to "nigger heaven," refusing help, Gramp said: "Don't act foolish, son. Let Gramp take you up them steps. You gonna hurt yourself, you don't let Li'l Joe help you." Then suddenly he found himself in the air, picked up by strong big arms, looking into a smiling black face he had never seen before. The man almost ran up the stairs with him, and David remembered laughing aloud at something the man said about "li'l black angels ascend up." Gramp had thanked the man, who laughed and went away, and they never saw him again.

Kids were selfish, he thought now. But when Gramp took him fishing and hunting in the country back of Mandeville where Li'l Joe had gone to stay with his auntie sometimes when he was a kid, Gramp enjoyed it as much as he did. Gramp showed him crab netting, and shrimping, and they came home with rabbits and possums, and river catfish with meat as sweet and white as any fish in the world. He'd bet there wasn't anything as good anywhere in any city in the world as river cat the way Gramp fixed it.

The white world, except for that part of it inhabited by the Professor, was remote, and without much interest to him. The white family who had lived down the road when he was little moved away, and Zeke Jones's relatives moved in, and then the neighborhood was all his own people. Sometimes some white family would call Gramp to do a job of work, and if Gramp felt like it he'd do it if he had the time. He took David along now and then in the little piece of a car he'd picked up from one of the men who used to come "visit" Miz Timmins, one of a succession of visitors David had given up trying to keep track of. All he knew then was that things picked up at the Timminses when there'd been a visitor around; sometimes there was steak and the kids blossomed out in new suits and shoes and dresses, and the oldest, after one visitation, got braces on her teeth. Now, a sophisticated seventeen, he smiled at the memory, thinking of the visitors and at the same time of the parade of Timmins children, starched, scrubbed, marching two by two to Sunday school. When Gramp took him with him on the jobs he did for whites now and then, the whites always went out of then-way to be nice to a little lame black boy, smiling, patting his head, making him squirm as his own people never did. These were foreigners.

"Don't you never let me catch you asking for nothing," Gramp said. "I catch you begging or asking for something I'll whup you good; I'll tear you apart if I catch you."

"Yes, sir."

The dimness of the train became less as a man several seats in front snapped on the reading light above him, picked his way carefully over the feet of his seat companion, then came sleepily down the aisle toward the men's room. The man's eyes were half closed, and David thought he smelled liquor. He could hear a low, hoarse, half-awake humming: "Glory-land." Miz Timmins sang "Gloryland" all the time around the house until the kids made fun of her. He remembered the first time he'd ever heard it. He and Gramp were in church, Gramp on Gram's insistence. Miz Jones, old Zeke Jones's daughter-in-law, was at the piano and Gram was in the choir, really letting out. They sang "Gloryland," and he could see the little brown boy that had been himself sitting beside Gramp, black head bobbing, small body bouncing in time to the music, feet that couldn't quite make the floor knocking together to the beat, thin hands clapping. Then suddenly the boy had been way up there over everyone's head, in Gloryland itself, like a kite on a golden cord, and the cord was the music and Gram's voice.

When they got home from church he was still in Gloryland, still singing, and Gram said, "Tell 'em 'bout it, baby!" and he walked around the kitchen singing it with Gram and Gramp clapping it out for him. After dinner Gramp got out his banjo, and Gram played piano and they sang hymns until Miz Timmins and the whole Timmins tribe came from across the road to sing with them.

After he got out of the hospital Gramp taught him basic chords on the banjo, and also on the guitar that he sometimes played, and later on the old piano that still stood against the wall in the dining room. He learned rapidly, and then Miz Jones from down the road took over and gave him piano lessons. After a year he and Gramp were really swinging, Gramp so small and gentle in every way except for his touch on the banjo, a hard, insistent, running touch that could drive a band like a good drummer's beat. Listening to him a few nights before he left, David thought, It's as if everything inside of him only comes out when he plays.

***

He was restless by midnight, and got up and went toward the rear of the car, looking for the porter, for someone to talk to, and found Henry Sampson in the drawing room of the car, head tilted against the window, mouth half open, snoring gently. David sighed in disappointment and meandered down to the men's room, where he washed his face and peered closely into the mirror. He decided he didn't need a shave, and grinned derisively at his reflection. "You're sure an optimist," he told it. "Long about Wednesday you can start worrying."

He almost wished now, swaying in the dimly lit, fusty men's room, that arrangements had been made for him to travel to Pengard with Nehemiah Wilson, instead of the plan to space their visits two weeks apart. The Professor had told him four weeks ago that Nehemiah also had been chosen as a candidate for a Pengard scholarship. "Do you know this boy, this Nehemiah Wilson?" the Professor asked.

"Ne'miah? Sure. Him and me—"

"David."

A grin, then, "He and I was in—"

"David!"

The grin became a laugh. "Shucks, Prof, I was kidding. Just getting you upsetted, like Gramp says."

"
As
Gramp says."

'That's what I said."

"No, you did not. You said 'like Gramp says.'" The Professor's eyebrows were twitching balefully.

"Oh. Well, gosh, maybe I did. 'As Gramp says.' O.K.?"

"O.K."

"Gee! Even Gramp gets on me. He keeps saying, 'You ain't saying it right. Maybe I don't talk like I should, like your Tant' Irene tried to teach me, but that don't mean you can't learn better."

The Professor's finger shot out. "Remember," he said, "always remember that the way your grandfather speaks is a good way; it is not bad; it does not make him any less a man, and the way he speaks is often clearer, more meaningful because it is the speech of a folk who have learned to handle words as they do musical notes, in their own way. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir. Sure I do."

"I 'get on' you, David, because I am thinking of the future. You have not changed your mind? You must still study law, become a lawyer?"

"Yes, sir. Why? You think now I shouldn't?" He was nervous; it would be a real bring-down if the Prof withdrew approval now of the career he'd chosen.

"No! No! For God's sake, no! You should, you must. It is something of which I am very proud, that of your own ac-