Five Smooth Stones (133 page)

"When." Brad finished his drink with one swallow. "When Luke comes out of it. What does Anderson think?"

"He wouldn't say. That's why I have to go over, unless we can reach him by telephone."

"David, he may need brain surgery."

"For God's sake, you think I don't know! But where? How? By Anderson? With only his wife to assist? Or by a couple of interns at County in Capitol City?"

"A plane, David, a plane. Chartered. I understand that Fred and the other man who was in bad shape are both on their way to the Veterans Hospital in an Army ambulance."

"By God! By God, that's good! It's sure a wonderful thing to have worn a uniform! When the guys you wore it for damned near club your brains out while you're defenseless' and alone as Fred was—you get to go to the hospital for free. Sure makes a guy feel good. Secure like."

"Easy, brat, easy."

David took his jacket from' the back of a chair as Brad asked, "What about Willy Haskin?"

"Anderson says he can handle Willy's case there. Lucky he was hurt early. There was still a bed. Now the Army's here, they'll help with supplies and stuff, I imagine. They doing first aid?"

"Yes. All that we can channel to them. I suppose Anderson still has his hands full, though."

"About that plane?"

"I'll call Shea. I don't know what chance I'd have in Capitol City."

"Shea have 'em on tap?"

"No, but he's a fast worker when his Irish is up. And I'll get through to Luke's magazine, have them line up hospital and surgical care."

"I'll phone from Anderson's."

"Better take someone with you." ' "I'll go alone."

"I wouldn't—"

"God damn it, I'll go alone!"

"Right, David." Brad spoke easily; only his eyes, as he watched David leave, showed worry.

***

The streets were quiet and dark, the yards and porches empty except for an occasional group talking at a gate or on a porch, but there was no laughter, and from open windows no music, only the stylized syllables of a radio reporter's voice, telling the rest of the country about the night's events in Cainsville. "Tell 'em about it, boy," muttered David. "Tell 'em about it. Tell 'em all about the southern way of life."

He was stopped three times by soldiers, explained his business and where he was going, and was waved on. Their faces were impassive, the not-to-reason-why impassivity of the trained military man. Only the Negro patrol who stopped him showed any sign of cognizance of the situation.

"Glad you're here," said David.

"Me, too. I come from Otisville, twenty miles north of here."

"The hell you say!"

"Man, this duty's doing my li'l black soul good. Really strengthifying it. Here's the Sarge. Get going, friend—"

There was more semblance of order in the hospital when he entered it now than there had been when they carried Luke in. Minor injuries were being cared for at a first-aid table set up in the waiting room by a young man in heavy horn-rimmed glasses wearing a blood-stained white doctor's coat over levis and cotton undershirt. The boy, thought David, must be the one who was headed for Howard, whom Brad was helping out on the scholarship. All of those with major injuries must have been put to bed by now, either upstairs or in the "front parlor" where Luke had been put because Anderson had not dared to have him carried up the stairs.

Mrs. Anderson came from the back of the house, face set and taut with strain, eyes preternaturally bright. "Mr. Champlin—"

"I came to find out about Luke Willis."

"Doctor's dressing a bad bite wound now. He'll be free—"

"Mrs. Anderson, can't we forget the hospital-type formalities? The doctor-will-discuss-it-with-you routine? You must know as much as he does about it."

She nodded, and for a moment he saw weariness take over her body, saw the straight shoulders sag. Then she became taut again and walked past him toward the front room. "Let's go in and you can see him."

Luke lay on an Army cot in the dimly lit room, eyes closed in what might have been a deep sleep. David's throat tightened in fear and he pushed past Mrs. Anderson. Her hand on his arm stopped him before he reached the cot.

"He's alive, Mr. Champlin." She bent and took one slack wrist in her fingers, nodded, and straightened up.

"How bad?"

"Pretty bad. We're trying to think of some way—"

Outside the room a man called, "Ada!" and she hurried to the door. Anderson entered when she opened it, closed it carefully, then leaned against it, eyes closed. "That kid's leg, Ada. That kid's leg was bitten clear through. Muscles and all. And all he was doing was running, looking for his parents." He opened his eyes, saw David and said, "Hummer and that kid, the very young and the old. It doesn't matter, does it?"

"Not to them. But it does to us, Doctor. We've got a feeling for kids and old folks—"

Dr. Anderson shook his head violently, said, "Bah! It's just as well none of their wounded came here this night. If they had any."

"They did. A few. One of 'em was hurt by his own. Hit over the head, they tell me, when he tried to stop a half-dozen guys from beating up a couple of colored kids. Young police sergeant."

"Eddie? Hell, no! He was—never mind." Anderson walked to the cot where Luke lay, took the pulse as his wife had done, pulled back the lids of the eyes.

"Doctor, if he needs surgery, Brad Willis is getting a chartered-plane standby."

'There's no question about it. It may not be the only hope, but at the moment it seems to be."

"It will take a little times—"

"That's not even a calculated risk. It's an inevitable one."

"I'll go phone Brad and I'll go along to wherever they take him."

As Anderson walked to the front door with him a few minutes later, David asked, "How's Willy Haskin?"

"I think he'll do. There are internal injuries, but he and Luke have one good thing going for them. They're both young."

"Not now, Doctor. Not anymore—"

When he talked to Brad from Anderson's office, he told him he would go to Tether's End and pick up enough clothes to take north.

"You're going with Luke?" asked Brad.

"Yes. Till we see what's what." He thought he heard Brad say, "Thank God."

"Right. Can you get back here to Haskin's in, say, three quarters of an hour?"

"Sure. How we going to get Luke out of here?"

"Army ambulance, and the Army just told me there's an emergency field ten or fifteen miles east."

"You mean you've ordered the plane already?"

"Shea's going to. He'll either get one or the magazine will. Probably out of Capitol City."

"See you later. Good going—"

He drove slowly at first after he left the hospital, drawing the quiet of the night into his lungs, wondering if his bloodstream could distribute the quiet, like oxygen, to his jangled insides. Every house was lighted, and he could hear in his mind the endless talk behind the windows, in kitchens, and bedrooms, over coffee, over beer. With some the talk would be fearful, but not so fearful as it once would have been. With others, the talk would be angry, but not so angry as it once would have been, because now anger was no longer futile, a tortured, helpless thing, impotent. The chains had snapped tonight in Cainsville. Anger, freed, had brought men and women strength and hope. They had dead to bury, blood to staunch, but that night had shown them nothing they dared not face again, and thinking of it David felt his own being grow stronger, the sick weariness lessen.

At Tether's End he groaned aloud at the shambles that was the main room of the house, and at the blood that spattered floor and walls. Fred Winters, quiet, elegant Fred Winters, must have put up one hell of a fight, and David smiled in spite of his shock.

He gave up the idea of a quick shower; the homemade, tricky mechanism of that Rube Goldbergish arrangement in the lean-to might result in trouble and delay. Instead he satisfied himself with a once-over-lightly at the kitchen sink. There was fresh milk from Miz Towers's cow in the refrigerator, and he drank it slowly, knowing that in a few minutes the cramping pangs in his stomach would ease. As he changed clothes and packed the few things necessary for the trip, he thought again of the people of Cainsville, and of the new dimension of living into which they had traveled that night. They would not seek another horror such as the one they had just passed through, but they would meet it if it came. It had not been of their choice, had not, God knew, been planned. It had been set off by the young people, impatient at their elders, not knowing with any exactitude what they had been fighting for, any more than Billy, the wide-eyed boy at the picnic, had known because they had not lived the decades of oppression and poverty that their elders had. Yet, at the scream of a woman whose child lay dead of neglect and indifference, those faceless decades had been obliterated and the people who had poured in fury through the barriers had been human beings, no longer anonymous, no longer just "the nigras," but men and women made conscious of their birthright in the blinding, deafening sounds of a woman's screaming grief.

A Murfree, an Eddie; David wondered how many generations must be born, grow old, and die before there would be enough Murfrees and Eddies, and answered his own question without hesitation. There would never be enough, not in North or South, and the Negro who faced that fact, who, while acknowledging his debt to them, continued his fight in what would always be a climate of lonely alienation, was the strong Negro. He would always face an enemy; only the ranks of the enemy would change, grow less, become so weak by the infiltration of the Murfrees and the Eddies it could not hold him back. And that would take a hell of a long time. Not all of Pharaoh's army would be drownded; there would always be those who escaped the waters and lurked in the hills to wage guerrilla warfare from generation to generation.

There should be a new mind born, he thought as he walked down the steps and toward the car, a new mind for the human race; a clean new mind, oh, God, a fresh new mind on the altar of the Lord, a clean new mind all freshly polished—

He had not reached the car when he saw the headlights turn into the roadway from the south, and seconds later a searchlight blinded him. The first shot cut his legs from under him; the next slammed into his shoulder before he hit the ground, spinning him around. He fell face down, his one good arm outstretched, hand grabbing at the unyielding ground, trying to pull his body forward, toward the house, away from the running feet, the shouts, the insensate laughter. There was no pain yet from the bullets, but now there was pain from blows and kicks on head and spine and face, and there was rage at his own helplessness. Terror mingled with his rage at a new sound, the low, fury-filled snarling of dogs, very close. The shouts of the men took on new tones. There was a crashing blow on his skull, then darkness.

CHAPTER 83

Sara slept intermittently, with maddening indeterminate spells of half-wakefulness, thinking bitterly how easy it was for Hunter Travis to say "Get some more sleep, luv—" The city beyond her windows was taking form in gray light when she forced herself to full wakefulness, sitting up in bed, legs drawn up and held by tensely folded arms, chin on knees. She felt without identity: "an unidentified object in a waste place," she told herself. She knew she would have felt the same in Paris, New York, Rome, Chicago; she was in London, where she thought she had established a branch of her being and it made no difference. Düsseldorf? Would she be feeling the same if she were in Düsseldorf with Chris, a Chris whose eyes had not yet shown the pain and shock of her rejection of him? Was this feeling of complete aloneness, of being without living ties to the rest of the world and the people in it, one of simple loneliness that could be quickly, easily banished by a sleepy, maybe grumpy breakfast with a man who knew she wanted a little cream and lots of sugar in her coffee, whose only intrusion on her mood would be light words, a light kiss, because he loved her. "It would be hell," he had said. "Sheer hell. For me. For you... Go, my dear, quickly."

She rested her forehead on her knees, rocking her head back and forth. "Please, God, make it the right thing that happened, make it be the right thing. Make me know it was right and be content—" Yet how could she be content when no place was home; for the likes of you, she told herself, there is no home place; even a hungry alley kitten has a dark, secret hole where it feels secure, where it can tuck in its paws and rest. She had told herself this so often before, so damned often, and fought the self-pity off, fought back to reality and work.

Work. And more work. And the anodyne of creating. These would answer the needs of the moment, even if the greater need of a whole life remained unanswered.

While she was waiting for Hunter the afternoon before, she had telephoned the woman who cleaned her studio for her. She would meet her there at nine, and together they would tackle the job, sweeping, dusting, scrubbing, and before the day was over she would shop. She needed canvases. Itemizing things she needed always made her sleepy, and she straightened out in bed, punching the pillows as though they were bitter enemies, settling back. Canvas, cleansing cream, washing powder, shampoo, toothpaste—the kind Chris— Hell! Oh, hell!—toothpaste, the kind
she
liked, some of those sweet biscuits to nibble on in the studio—

The news was in the paper they brought with her tea at seven thirty, the headline snatching her attention from all else, a headline containing the words: "U.S."—"Riots"— "Dead."

Two known dead, the story said, in a racial disturbance in a small southern town, several more on the critical list, including a former Oxford student, David Champlin, who had given up a promising career with his country's State Department to aid in the struggle—

The cry her clenched fists tried to muffle at her lips was dry and hoarse. She could hear herself whimpering, feel her whole body trembling, and fought for control as she snatched the telephone receiver from its cradle on the shelf above her head. She seemed to be in some fourth dimension of fear, watching her own small body rocking back and forth, receiver at her ear, like someone in pain too great for voicing. "Sorry, Miss Kent, the Travel Bureau in the lobby will not be open for an hour and a half.... Yes, madam, I'll try the main office.... Sorry, madam, there seems to be no answer.... BOAC? Certainly, madam, I'll try.... TWA..."