Five Smooth Stones (137 page)

"Indefinitely. Which has been one of the great surprises of my life. Brad, we're taking chances. I don't want him put through any emotional pulling and hauling."

Chuck said: "Suds, will you let me tell him? It's not a job I relish, but I think I can handle it. If, of course, you think it's safe." He made a quick hand movement toward his hair, then checked himself, grinning. "Trying to keep it civilized." He waited a moment then prodded, "How about it, Suds?"

"It's 'safe' enough. It won't endanger his life, if that's what you thought I meant. But I'm shying away from adding emotional wounds—or opening old ones—with a guy as sick and suffering as he is."

"I've had some experience with human beings myself, Suds. And a lot with David."

"Why don't we wait till he asks?"

"He won't," said Brad. "Not because he's too stubborn or proud but because if he really wants to see her he'll be too afraid of being hurt."

"All right," said Suds. "I'm not convinced, but all right. Nothing sudden, Chuck. Sound him out. No sudden, gladsome whoops of joy, no 'Goody, goody, Sara's here!' stuff."

"You blasted imbecile! Do you think I'm that stupid? When can I go up?"

"In about an hour, after rounds. If they do anything cute like mess with the knee through the cast window, I'll page you and call you off. Call everyone off." Suds got to his feet slowly. "What a damned stinking mess the world is—"

Chuck looked up at the unimposing, tubby, troubled figure of Suds Sutherland. "I wouldn't say that, dad. I honest-to-God wouldn't. Not as long as there are guys like David who can be 'triggered off.' That's what counts, not what happens afterward."

Suds reached a short arm out, brought his hand across Chuck's head from front to back, as he had done years before at Pengard, smiled at the wrath on Chuck's face, at the hair so rudely freed from subjection.

"You win, Reverend; you win."

***

The nurse wheeled the bed-table so that it stretched across the bed a little way below David's chin and laid a pile of opened telegrams and cards on it. "Read what you can," she said, "until you get tired. Reading is more tiring than talking when you've been sick."

"Thanks for the past tense. Hey! Here's one from the U.S. Attorney General!"

"And a lot of good it does," she observed tartly.

"Mustn't be like that." He picked up another wire, but before he read it, he said, "We could use your disposition down there. How's about joining the fight?"

"I'd kill 'em all, Mr. Champlin. If I couldn't shoot 'em I'd —I'd needle 'em to death."

"And that's the truth." He squinted his eyes at blurring print. "This one's from—damned if it isn't from Beany Ben-ford—" There was a sound, and he looked toward the door as Chuck's head appeared around the screen, the face solemn and concerned.

"Pax," said the face.

"Be damned! Pax yourself, Reverend! Man, come in! Pull up a chair. Res' yo'se'f!"

After they had shaken hands, Chuck flexed his fingers and looked at them doubtfully. "They said you'd been sick."

"Just have to stay off my feet, that's all. Fallen arches."

The nurse smiled a red-haired, freckle-faced young smile as she left, and said, "No wrestling, now."

Chuck settled back in the big chair, and David said, "How long did they give you? Ten and a half minutes?"

"No one said. The way they're watching over your battered hulk, they'll throw me out when the time comes."

David looked at the big blond man sitting quietly beside him and could find no words. What was there about the guy, he wondered, that always made something inside himself feel warm and good, a guy so naive in some ways, so wise in others, so far removed from reality at times, yet at other times so close to the suffering of every man that his own pain called for comforting? David could remember times when Chuck had irritated him almost past control, as he had when the hatchet-faced man, Elmore, said the kids in the stockade would only be fined. And he could remember times when Chuck's strength and understanding had been like a strong arm holding him upright.

He found himself saying inanely: "What're you all dressed up for? A wedding or something? I'm not used to it—"

"Who me? Dressed up?" Chuck grinned. "It's my hair. And no thanks to a young quack named Sutherland they permit to roam these halls. I've reformed. I'm trying to civilize this stuff on my head."

David touched the thick, no longer closely cropped nappi-ness of his own hair and said, "You reckon I could get me a barber?"

"Why not, chum?"

"No white ones. For gosh sake, no white barbers. They don't know what to do with this stuff."

"I'll get Brad on it You want some of Peg's old stockings for caps?"

"You'd have made a swell Negro, Chuck. Sometimes I wonder—"

"The universal mind, that's me—"

Chuck talked quietly for a while, filling him in on details Brad had forgotten, telling him in low, uninflected tones that the man who had gone to the Veterans Administration Hospital with Fred Winters had been named Jason Patterson, that he had been a young man whose first child was just two weeks old, and that he had died before noon the next day. "Suds will scalp me," he said.

"It's all right. What Suds doesn't realize, because he can't, is that the telling and hearing can never equal the reality. If we lived through Hummer's death and didn't lose our minds, Chuck—"

"Right."

"Eddie, Chuck?"

Chuck shifted his weight uneasily in the big chair before he spoke. "They bombed his house four or five days ago. No serious injuries. His wife and baby had some minor cuts from flying glass. He's going to Philadelphia, too. Murfree's going to give him a hand in getting a job."

"They must think this brotherly-love bit is more than skin deep. Why Philadelphia? It's no shining example—"

"Murfree's in-laws are there. It's not completely strange to him. Remember, chum, they're both white."

"It makes a difference. Luck to 'em both—"

"Here's something else, David, only it's not bad. ol' Miz Towers—" Chuck paused, shook his head and grinned over at David.

"What about her? She all right?"

"Bright-eyed and lively as a collie pup. I think she thrives on this sort of thing now. What really threw her, though, was what happened to you. Abr'am had a time with her, David. She made him call here three times a day, and hang the expense. She's going to deed that piece of land known as Flaming Meadows over to you."

"Oh, my God!" David closed his eyes, opened them, and tried not to laugh. "I don't want it. For gosh sake, stop her, Chuck! What in hell do I want with thirty acres of ground in the middle of nowhere! I was afraid I'd get stuck with it when we worked out that option deal. Stop her if you can."

"How you talk. Stop that old lady when her mind's made up? The last thing our friend John Murfree did before he moved to Philadelphia, day before yesterday, was fix up a codicil to her will leaving it to you. Then she decided she wanted to live to see you own it. She says it's yours by right. Says once you own it that ha'nt will be at peace. Says that ha'nt's been waiting for you. You can't reason with her, David. She just knows what she wants and sticks to it. And she thinks you ought to own that land, and do something with it. What, she didn't say. Just, 'Tha's his land by rights—!'"

David gave a short, strange laugh that came from somewhere no deeper than his throat. "If I could take a deep breath I'd sing it: '... Land where my fathers died'—"

After a moment Chuck said: "Did Brad tell you there was a goodly amount of mail with contributions for you? One postmarked Cainsville, absolutely anonymous, five one-hundred-dollar bills, in a heavy envelope."

"Good God!"

"Exactly."

"We can't keep it, Chuck. Give it to Effie's mother. Maybe that's what Brad was—no, it can't be."

"What can't be what?"

"I had the feeling he was holding something back, not telling me something. I didn't get the impression it was anything bad, but it's been bugging me." David was silent again, eyes closed. Chuck waited, letting him rest, knowing that in a minute he would tell him about Sara. This man was strong. He knew David, and in spite of trauma, suffering, the knowledge of crippling, in spite of the years of fighting a bitter, cruel evil, this was still the David Champlin—basically and so far as his mental well-being was concerned—who had eaten his first meal at Pengard at a card table across from him. The man is indestructible, he thought. There is that in him that will not be destroyed; there is in him that core of indestructible spirit that has brought his people to an unflinching confrontation of their dark history and has given them the strength and power to lay the foundations of a new and brighter one.

Chuck rose quietly and came to the foot of the bed, and David opened his eyes. "Don't go now," said David. "I just became a southern landowner. You better stick around and get to work on my soul."

"There's something else, David."

"Something else? That I can't take. I'll report you to Suds."

"I think you can take it, David. But I want you to tell me the truth, so help you God. Will you?"

"What the hell—of course I will."

"Then listen, David. Within a few hours after she heard about you, Sara Kent was on a plane to Boston, from London. She sweated out the night with us when you were in surgery. Suds let her see you twice while you were unconscious. After that, he refused to let her see you again because he was afraid, and rightly, of any emotional shock for you. David, the chips are pretty much down. Whatever has happened in the past must not happen again. I would pick Sara up bodily and put her on the first plane leaving the country if I thought that you would refuse her commitment again now. You've had more strain and suffering than God usually calls on one person to take. But so has she, David. So has Sara. And she didn't choose the path that led to it as you did. She's waiting. She's been waiting a long time with a love and devotion as patient and unselfish as any I've ever seen. May I tell Suds to call her and ask her to come to you? Do you want to see her?"

After an interminable pause, a pause so quiet the faint whirring of the small electric clock on the bedside table could be heard distinctly, Chuck turned slowly to leave. Sudsy had been right, and he had been wrong. Damage was possible, and he—blundering, well-meaning Chuck Martin—had done it. Only at the sound of Chuck's movement did David speak. Chuck looked down at the dark head turned away from him now, at the closed eyes in the tired face.

"Yes," whispered David. "Yes. Oh, dear God, yes."

***

She wouldn't be running when she came down the corridor, not even Sara would run down a hospital corridor, but he would know her step. "After three o'clock," the nurse said. "Cryptic, isn't it? Mr. Martin telephoned and just said 'Tell him after three o'clock.*" Chuck would have done that, timed it for after the nurse had left.

There was only one special nurse now, the red-haired one, and she would be through the next day. "Can you leave the door open when you go off duty, Miss Riley? So I can hear the rest of the world go by?" (So you can hear Sara's steps coming closer, know that much sooner, those few seconds sooner, that she's here.)

"I can't, Mr. Champlin. People go popping into the wrong rooms by mistake, and some people are just plain nosey, and we fought reporters off for a week, and one of those might be lurking. Like the photographer who walked in and got your picture with me sitting right here."

There were times when he could get around her and times when he couldn't. This was one of the latter. He submitted docilely to being fed his lunch, and being settled down for another Goddamned "nice nap, now" which he had no intention of taking and which, at quarter of three, he realized with astonishment he had taken.

"The door?" he said to the nurse as she was leaving.

"No." She smiled at him. "After tomorrow perhaps, when I'm not here. Now, no."

After five minutes his eyes felt dry and stary. He had not taken them from the door, and he closed them for a moment, which was why, when he opened them, he first saw Sara standing by the screen, the door closing silently behind her.

She was so still, so quiet, she seemed to be a statue of warm flesh, a tiny statue with dark, shining eyes. She was like a small and hesitant child, half afraid, not running or appearing to run now, but waiting like a child at a strange door. He saw her lips move and saw the sound defeated by the emotion that was crowding her eyes.

His own voice failed him, and he had to call on it twice before it came out, cracked and faltering.

"Sara."

Those were hours that were passing as she came forward slowly, almost as though she would turn at every step and run back and through the door, hours before his outstretched hand could take hers, feel the smallness of it lost in his, feel her lift their joined hands and hold them against her heart.

"Sara. Smallest. Little love—"

CHAPTER 86

Suds Sutherland alternately clucked over and bullied his patient, rationing visitors with care, telling them "If you haven't anything cheerful to say, stay home" until David protested. "Look, Stoopid, the whole damned world hasn't changed just because I've got a cracked skull. There has to be something bad going on—rape, arson, murder, epidemics, muggings, race riots—stuff like that there. Interesting stuff—"

"Sure there is. Only not for you. It's not your skull. That'll take anything. It's your nerves and your stomach ulcer. I'm trying out a theory—"

"F'cris'sake! I'm sorry I told you. Better a bellyache than a vacuum."

A week after Sara's first visit, Hunter tiptoed into the room with the obviously cheerful expression any patient's visitor assumes to cover concern. David greeted him with the loudest "Hey!" he could manage. Hunter, after releasing his hand from David's grip, dropped into the chair beside the bed, saying, "I ought to belt you right in the nose—"

"What in hell—"

"Who believes a doctor, even if he is a good friend, when he says someone who's got everything wrong you have is O.K.? For three weeks every time your name's been mentioned around the family scatter it's been in hushed tones—"