Five Smooth Stones (21 page)

"I'd give him a whupping," said Li'l Joe Champlin. "Sure would if he was my bigmouth grandson."

David stopped in the dining room and stripped off his shirt, laying it across the back of a chair. He walked into the living room and sat on the overstuffed divan, balancing beer bottle and glass on its arm. He stretched out long legs, feet wide apart, and held the bottle of beer high, looking through it, smacking his lips, then opened it and poured it carefully into the glass, tilting the glass to control the collar. Li'l Joe had not spoken again, did not speak until his grandson had taken a deep swallow of the beer, sunk his long body lower on the divan, pushed wide brown shoulders against its back, and crossed his ankles. Then Li'l Joe smiled, just widely enough to deepen the long wrinkles in his thin cheeks, etch finer ones at the corners of his eyes.

"You sure a lot of boy," he said. "You sure one hell of a lot of boy."

"I'm a man now," said David. "At least that's what you're always saying: 'You a man now, son.'"

"Look, David." Gramp's voice was so low it scarcely carried across the room. "I'm sorry I got you so riled up."

David's eyes grew round. He hadn't expected that. He sure as heck hadn't expected that. He opened his mouth to say something, he didn't know what, but Gramp was talking:

"When you gets older, David, you forgets sometimes what it was like, how you thought when you was young. Then it comes back. Yessir, it comes back. Someday, son, you're going to find out fifty-nine ain't so old. Gawd knows, I feels a hundred and nine sometimes, but fifty-nine ain't so old. But when you're young, fifty-nine seems like the grave's yawning."

Li'l Joe Champlin straightened the square ashtray so that its edge was true with the edge of the end table beside him, and leaned back. "Well," he said, "the grave ain't yawning yet for Joseph Champlin. But it ain't right for an older man to brush off a young un, not paying any attention to what's troubling him. Because things troubles young uns worse'n they does us older folks. Wouldn't want you to think the old man didn't understand what was worrying you."

"Sure, Gramp," said David. "Sure. I know you understood. Only it seems as if things like—well, things like that damned Jim Crow balcony don't make any difference to you folks, seems as if they don't bother you. And they're bad."

"I knows that, son. Lawd, don't no one knew it better than what we does! You going to see changes, son. You can feel 'em coming. But there's going to have to be a coupla generations, yessir, a coupla generations white and colored die off before they's any
big
changes."

David sighed, took another long swallow of beer. Any way you looked at it, it was bad. It was bad talking about it too much, because that way you were like a chicken getting its

neck rung, just squawking. It was bad not doing anything about it, because that way meant you'd given up hope. The only thing that wasn't bad was doing something about it.

Gramp went on. "But seems like there's a difference now, some. Ain't no one hardly in my generation didn't have someone got lynched or treated bad. Like my daddy, burned alive. You can't fault the colored, David, if they was a frightened people, and they was. Wasn't no crime, wasn't nothing, to kill a nigger. Ain't no bad crime now. But it still seems like there's a difference, a feeling coming up that ain't fear, among the young folks. But it ain't different for us."

When David didn't answer, Li'l Joe went on, his voice soft as silk in the warm room. "It's like this," he said. "All your life you remembers what you was taught by your mammas and daddies, and you keeps hold of yourself. You knows what you got to take and you takes it. Then one day something comes along and you can't keep hold no longer. You're a human being and you ain't no color, and you acts like a human being. And the whites don't like that. Lots of colored gone to their Maker many a time because they acted like a natural man. It ain't right to be too hard on us older folks, son; we got memories of bad things, and bad things still happening."

Without speaking David got up and went into the kitchen for more beer for them both. A license to kill, he thought. That was what the whites had been handed in their cradles. And not only a license to kill; a license to rape, to rob, to break into a man's home, a license to ease their lust on a black woman's body and abandon their bastards like Rudy, half-Negro, half-white, all Negro in the eyes of their world. It was a license that said for everyone to read: "Know ye by all these presents that this man is in no way bound by any laws of decency, written or unwritten, and is free to go his way of evil without let or hindrance insofar as his relationships with those of the Negro race are concerned."

Gramp was right, though, when he said there was less fear; he could feel it, an undercurrent of something stronger than fear flowing deep, deep under the darkness of their lives, but a felt and real thing.

When he came back from the kitchen he sat again on the divan, legs outstretched, shoulders squared against its back, head on one of Tant' Irene's antimacassars. When he finally spoke, it was a single word: "Jungle," he said.

"That's what the whites think," said Gramp. "Really think, down deep. We nothing but jungle critters who can talk. Talking animals."

"That's not what I meant. I meant it the other way round. The Negro's not the critter from the jungle. Nope, it's the white. They're closer to it than we are. Way closer. Living off the weak. The lion on the veldt, he's got 'em all scared. That's why they call him the King of the Beasts. Living off the flesh of little animals. Getting fat on it. Teaching the cubs to kill."

Li'l Joe was quiet. When his grandson talked like that he listened, not always agreeing, but always with pride. Boy sure can study a thing out, he thought.

"But that's only half true," said David. "There's more. A lion's not scared of—oh, say an antelope. Not one bit scared. He doesn't know enough to know that when he's fattening himself up on a nice young antelope, the other antelopes could get together and kill him. They could tramp him to death in five minutes." David poured beer in his glass, watched the collar settle. "Hell of it is," he said, "the antelope doesn't know it either."

Joseph Champlin uncrossed the ankles he had propped on the hassock, eased the leather house slipper off one foot with the toe of the other, let the slipper drop to the floor. "Reckon so," he said.

"And," said David, head back again, "there's the difference. Right there's the difference. The white man has a different brain from the lion. The lion doesn't know the antelopes could kill him, but the white, he knows. The lion's the King of Beasts, he never doubts it; the white man wonders, worries—he sure as hell isn't going to give the antelope—the colored—a chance to find out that he's not. See what I mean?"

Joseph Champlin saw what his grandson meant; he had been seeing it for half a century. He had never defined the insight with words, because he did not have the facility with words. Those things were known the way it was known that rain was hovering, the way it could be told by the look of a stream that fish would rise to the bait. Now a seventeen-year-old who had, it seemed to Joseph Champlin, stood by his bed only a few nights ago and said, "If I bring my pillow, Gramp, can I sleep in your bed?" was putting these things in words, was defining instinct and insight, and a knowledge so hidden as to be almost arcane.

They couldn't answer it, the boy and the man, sitting together in the sweltering heat of a New Orleans summer night. But Joseph Champlin, whenever he talked like this with his grandson, had a feeling that there was an answer and that it was coming. He did not know why he had this feeling, but it was there.

Later in the evening Li'l Joe said to his grandson: "Never did get a chance to tell you what I started to say before we went lion hunting. I never said I wouldn't come away from here to see you, David. Never did say that. I wants to come see you. But I sure as hell ain't going with you. There's a difference. Lawd, boy, after you been there a while and settled in, I can get me a bus—"

"Train, Gramp. F' Gawdsake, train!" David had never told his grandfather how he had been Jim Crowed on the bus.

"You think train's best, I'll take the train. Always did like being on a train. Maybe a plane. Now
that's
something I
really
wants to do. We'll see how the money is. Plane or train, it don't matter." Gramp started to hum, then sing. " 'Tell 'em I wuz flyin'—Tell 'em I wuz flyin'—'" He looked at his grandson hopefully. "Feel like making a little music, son?"

CHAPTER 16

Two months later, Bjarne Knudsen stood before the tall window in his study, looking down at the boy in the big chair as he so often had looked down at Li'l Joe Champlin. But where Li'l Joe had been almost lost in the chair's depth, David Champlin filled it. "Your grandfather is a small, stubborn man," said Knudsen. "And you are a large, stubborn boy."

David, who had not looked directly at the Professor since he had come in twenty minutes earlier, clasped and unclasped his hands for the hundredth time and said, "Yes, sir."

"David! Stop saying 'yes, sir,' like a parrot that knows nothing else! What did the doctor say to you about Li'l Joe?"

"That—that he'd have to be careful. That he might have another—"

"Wait! He said, did he not, that the heart attack was not a major one? A critical one? That many people have had far more severe attacks and lived for many years? Did he not say this? Do not lie to the Prof—"

"Well—yes, sir—"

"So! He is not a fool, your grandfather."

"Yes, he is too. A hardheaded old fool. That's—that's what I'm saying. Going back to the loading gang on the docks, doing work he'd no business doing, little and old as he is—"

"Bah! Not quite sixty and you say he is old! And he will not do it again. Believe me, I am sure of this. A heart attack of that kind leaves a residue of fear. An instinctive thing. The doctor will tell you. Men will go back again and again to hazardous jobs on which they have received serious injuries. Few will court a second heart attack. Did the doctor not tell you that many people who have had such attacks actually live longer than those who have not because they do take care?"

"Something like that. But—"

"But! But! And you call your grandfather hardheaded!"

Knudsen felt the same pitying anger and frustration shake him inwardly that had shaken him so often with his friend Li'l Joe. He looked down at the boy who had grown to mean so much to him, at the bent head. They would turn to him for help, Joseph Champlin's people, even Joseph Champlin himself, in those things that were of life's exterior, never for help in those troubles of the inner world in which their inmost beings dwelt, to which they withdrew, as David had withdrawn; a world that no man with white skin might enter into, no matter how great his love, how strong his yearning to help.

His tone became gruffly wheedling. "David, there is something else the doctor told you. That your grandfather should not become emotionally upset. That he must be spared things that might upset or anger him. Yes?"

"Yes. Gramp's not excitable—"

"No? He gets what he calls 'upsetted,' does he not? And easily. Have you thought, David, how upset he will be if you tell him you are not going to Pengard because of his illness? Have you thought about that?"

David was quiet for a long time, then rose, hands in pockets, to walk to the fireplace and stand looking into the empty blackness of the grate. "He—he wasn't ever too happy about it. It worried him, me going away and all, to a—to a college like that."

"No. That is not so. At first, yes. But not now. Now he is proud. I meet his friends, the musicians, and they tell me how he brags about you—"

"Gramp doesn't brag—"

"I used the wrong word. How he talks about you. About the fine grades you made in the tests last spring. If you do not enter now, he will blame himself."

"He can't do that—"

"Be quiet! He will blame himself for the rest of his life. Upset! My God! David, there is nothing—nothing, I tell you —that could upset him more. And you would deliberately do this thing?"

"I'll—I'll have to study about it—"

Knudsen's sigh was so deep it might have stirred the heavy drapes hanging beside the tall windows. He looked at David, his brows drawn together in a fierce frown. "We have talked, you and I, about how countries are governed, and laws are made, about compromises. Study about this, my boy: it is a compromise I offer you. Listen carefully. I will write my brother, or better, telephone him, and I will tell him you must enter late. In a large university you could not do this, but Pengard is small and personal. Be quiet until I finish. He has told me how you impressed them all last spring. He will gain the support of the other professors; he carries weight, my brother, small as he is. The dean cannot refuse them all. Then he will—"

"Please, Prof—"

"Quiet! Then he will send me outlines of the work of the first semester, and we will go over them, study them, you and I. When Li'l Joe is strong again, in a month or so, then you will go—"

"Prof, it's too much. I—I'll think—"

"No! For once in his life, just once, Bjarne Knudsen says 'Do not think!'"

And then the boy before him was smiling. "Gosh, Prof, do I have to do all the compromising?"

David was David again, and Knudsen turned away to hide his relief, to keep from the boy any thought that he had been triumphed over.

"I'm going back to work on the laundry truck tomorrow," David said. "We'll need the money."

"You will not need—"

"Wait"

Suddenly Bjarne Knudsen laughed,
"Ja!
It is I who am interrupting now. And you are too polite to roar at me. I will be quiet."

"O.K. I'll go to work, and then when Gramp comes home next week—that's when the doctor says it will be—I'll take care of him and see how he gets along. And—and sort of feel my way. But I can't leave him, Professor; I can't leave him all alone if he's not all right."

***

"Stop clucking over me, son! Gawd's sake, you're worse'n a broody hen—"