Five Smooth Stones (34 page)

After a minute Hunter said, "You really still believe all that stuff, don't you? God and all."

"Oh, gosh—here we go again. I keep saying to you how the hell can you help believing?"

"That's no problem. I suppose your grandfather instilled—"

"Crap! What I keep trying to pound into that thick skull of yours is that Gramp wouldn't believe if there wasn't something to believe in that it's God that makes faith, comes first, not after. Even primitive people who hadn't had a damned thing instilled in 'em had it."

"So we have to stay primitive?"

David's face was somber; then suddenly he broke into a wide smile and took his eyes from the road to look over at Hunter. "You ought to start being all nigger and do a little believing yourself."

Hunter shook his head slowly. "Can't," he said. "Just can't make Godsville."

What David later described to Suds as "jitters, minor type" caught up with him when he started to play that night. At first he wisely paid no attention to requests, concentrating on numbers he knew best and had worked over the most, mixing them up nicely, rags, blues, stomps, and finally a little boogie. When he felt that he was easy and relaxed, he began playing requests.

The whole evening shook down to normal when he saw a party of four couples come in, and recognized two of them as habitues of a club in New Orleans where Gramp often played and where he himself had sometimes played during intermission. They greeted him with loud and slightly alcoholic shouts of delight. He gave a quick, sideways glance at Al Savoldi, standing at the bar, and could tell that the owner was definitely impressed. Nothing like a following, thought David, with an inner grin, even if it was only eight people. They stayed most of the night, drank copiously, and fed the kitty generously. At the end of the job David was dog-tired, and acknowledged then that he must have had more inner tension than he had realized, but he was reasonably certain the job was secure.

He had arranged to keep a small room to sleep in at the home of Nehemiah's uncle, a man named Zack Charles, in case he couldn't make it back to Laurel at night. He knew he would be staying in town some Saturday nights because he had promised the Charles family he would go to church with them and sing, if there was a special occasion.

On Saturday night the two New Orleans couples showed up again, and there were several other repeaters, and he remembered some of their requests and played them. He wouldn't admit to anyone that he got real pleasure out of playing numbers people obviously liked. A lot of guys he knew would call it Uncle Tom, but he couldn't see it that way. He played his own way, and if they liked it, that was a pleasant feeling.

But it was more than a surface pleasure when, waiting for Al to pay him after the place closed Sunday morning, he sat at the keyboard, tired and relaxed, running through blues chords, and heard from close at hand a low voice. "I hear you, man. I hear you—" He looked up to see the Negro janitor and clean-up man standing quietly beside the piano, leaning on a mop, old eyes bright with understanding. What he felt now was not the simple satisfaction of pleasing customers; the sound of that voice, the light in the old eyes, were the reasons for music, the source of the only real joy to be found in making music; they were the evidence of communication, the certain proof that the feeling within yourself had broken its bonds of flesh and reached out and found and awakened the same feeling in another, as two people will talk in darkness, understanding.

David smiled. "What you want to hear, old man?" he asked softly.

" 'Yellow Dog'? That other fellow, he never played it Heered Bessie sing it once, long time ago, back home. You know who I mean?"

"Sure I do. Got every record. 'Yellow Dog'—" and started it slow and easy, singing it low and rough, did not stop until he had played it out even though Al, the owner, was standing, money in hand, waiting at the far edge of the piano.

***

Talking to Suds, Tom, and Chuck on Sunday, he said, "Only one gruesome incident last night. Clevenger showed up for a while."

"Yeah?" said Suds.

"He would," said Tom. "I suppose we have to give the bastard credit for something. He likes the music. And knows jazz. He's got a keen collection of records, all kinds."

"You think I don't know!" said David. "That cat's been bugging me to come and listen all year so far. And last year, too."

Suds laughed. "Wonder he doesn't invite you to take a run up to dear old Richmond on vacation. He's got a sister going to have a coming-out party. You could play, special added attraction."

"Sure could," said Chuck. "I reckon they'd have a nice room over the garage for you."

"With bath," said David. "Gotta be with bath."

For quite a while now he had stopped being surprised at the casual, almost unthinking way he could join in with this type of kidding with whites; until his first day at Pengard, he had never discussed race with any white except the Professor All through his freshman year, and so far in his sophomore year he had shied away from ALEC meetings, knowing how hard it was for him to participate in biracial discussions of a gut issue. The few meetings he did attend only confirmed his attitude; he got so damned sick of talk, and so more than damned sick of the well-meaning, well-intentioned, but utterly uncomprehending minds of the whites. Only Sara Kent's, repeated urgings and, he admitted, the knowledge he would be near her for a whole evening, got him out to a meeting occasionally. But the kidding of a Suds or a Tom or a Chuck was far different; it was an open hand of fellowship, instinctive and sincere, far different from the self-conscious intellectual approach of the white ALEC-ites. Excluding Sara, he thought; always excluding Sara.

Sudsy's voice broke into his thoughts: "I don't dig that guy. I just don't dig him. The first day David's here, way back last year, he goes out of his way to be obnoxious—"

"He didn't need to go far," said David.

"O.K., so he was just doing what comes naturally. Then after that he starts getting in your hair, being nice."

"Not nice," said David. "You don't understand. Helpful. Friendly. Kind."

"He's a southern gentleman," said Tom. "Not same like Chuck."

"Gave him fits the other day, young Champlin did," said Chuck. "Pool."

"Aw, shucks," said David. "That wa'n't nothin'. Jes a li'l ol' practice game."

"Lawd, lawd," said Chuck, "deliver us from evil. I saw it. You guys haven't heard about it?"

Tom and Suds shook their heads.

"Champlin here wanted a little solitude. Said he had to do some thinking on the multiplication table—"

"Liar," said David.

"Mebbe it was subtraction. Anyhow, he moseyed along to the billiard room in the rec hall and starting knocking some balls around, easy like. Randy saw him go and waited a few minutes; then he moseys along too, and me, I get curious and go and stand in the doorway. Randy watches David, then he ups and suggests playing. I could tell David was riled, but he just said, 'O.K.'" Chuck began to laugh, until at last David joined in. Tom said, "Well, you baboons, what happened?"

"The slaughter of the whites, that's what happened," said Chuck. He shuddered. "It was right-down pathetic, it was."

"We got some of the best pool players in the country down my way," said David. "You gotta be good or stay home."

"I thought you'd tell him to get lost when he asked for a game."

"When I knew I could lick the damned pants off him? You think I'm nuts or something?"

"And young Champlin was so-o-o kind," said Chuck. "Yessir, he was real kind. 'You're just off today, Randy,' he says. 'Better luck next time.' And Clevenger, he doesn't say anything. Just crawls out, thinkin' black thoughts about white supremacy."

It was Chuck Martin who talked David into an ALEC meeting the week after he started work at the Calico Cat, although in all fairness he couldn't say he'd been "talked into it," because Chuck didn't operate that way. There was something compelling about Chuck's sincerity, and if he caught a guy in a weak moment there was no resisting.

Martin puzzled him: Why had a guy whose roots were so deep in the soil of southern thinking turned his back on a way of life that must have been damned close to a religion for his family? There was a concrete reason, and Chuck had told him about it one Sunday afternoon, sitting on the small beach beside the lake. Yet it had not entirely satisfied him. Revulsion against that way of life—yes, it would have brought that. But would it have brought dedication to the cause of fighting it?

The story had been a simple one. David knew what the outcome would be before Chuck was well into it. Chuck's best friend as a child had been a Negro boy, Jimmie Thornton. They had played together when they were very small, and Jimmie's father had brought his son along when he did gardening work for the Martins. Later, when they were old enough, Jimmie's father had taken them hunting and fishing. "He was the most wonderful guy with kids I've ever known," Chuck said. "Patient—Lord, I never heard him raise his voice or say an unkind word, and I never saw a little kid come up to him he didn't have a smile. But he got results. I couldn't get Jimmie to do anything hardly, unless his daddy said it was O.K. But he was strict. Really strict, rock-ribbed Baptist strict. Heck, I got more moral lectures from Jimmie's daddy in a year than I ever heard from my own in all my life."

Thornton had been a handsome man, Chuck said. A far-off Indian ancestor had given him high cheekbones and a high, proud nose, and Africa had bequeathed him grace and symmetry of body. "And sing!" said Chuck. "He could sing the hair right up straight on your head."

One of the town's most notorious "loose women"—that's what they called them in front of children, Chuck said—had been much taken by the charms of Jimmie's father. She was a white woman, and as nearly as Chuck could remember not much to look at, not enough to impress her image on him, which was vaguely of someone plump and blonde. And Jimmie's father, with his Puritan ideas, wanted no part of her. Somehow, maybe only a Southerner could understand just how, Chuck said, the rumor started that he had entered her home one night—object, rape.

David interrupted. "You know, don't you? How the rumor started?"

"Hell, yes. Now. I think even then, young as I was, I suspected. She started it."

"And they lynched him."

"Of course. Only they didn't kill him. They finally had to take him to the state insane asylum. He died there, I think. I don't know. I guess I don't want to know."

They were both silent until David, poking deep holes in the sand with a stick, said, "What happened to the kid—Jimmie?" Then he looked at Chuck, and what he saw made him add, "don't tell me if you don't want to—"

"I do. It's—well, this is the first time I've told it to anyone. Maybe it'll be good to get it off my chest, after all this time."

"Suit yourself, Chuck. I mean, I don't want you getting all riled and upset over something that happened years ago—"

"And still happens. That's it, David. And still happens. You see what's bad—hell, it's all bad, but I mean what's really been eating me inside all these years is that my old man could have stopped it. He knew Jimmie's daddy couldn't have been at her house then because he saw him himself, my old man saw him, ten miles away when it was supposed to have happened. And Jimmie's daddy didn't have a car. He couldn't have made it. My father didn't take part in what happened. All he did was not lift a finger to save the guy. That's all. That's damn all."

After that, Chuck said, no one saw Jimmie for a long time. He hadn't dared go to the house where the sick man lay, raving, but he roamed the woods and up and down the streams where he and Jimmie had been together, looking for his friend.

"When I finally found him he tried to kill me."

David, somehow, hadn't been expecting that, the stark simplicity of the statement, the quiet way Chuck said it, all emotion stifled but there, underneath. After a moment Chuck went on: "He had a hunting knife. I was bigger than he was, but he was quicker. Before I got it away from him he got me on one ear. You can see the scar if you look close. I told my family I got it from broken glass. I got the knife away from him somehow, and we had a fight. And then all of a sudden we were both crying, holding on to each other. All I cared was that Jimmie didn't hate me any more."

David's stick broke, hitting rock under the sand. "Is he still down there?"

Chuck shook his head. "I don't know where he is. I never saw him again. His mother managed somehow to scrape up a little bit of money and get him to St. Louis to an aunt. His mother—she wouldn't let me in the house. I never was able to find out what happened. I've even been to St. Louis to try to find him, but I can't. Someday maybe I will."

"I hope so," said David. "I sure hope so." It wasn't much to say, after a story like that; it was lame and faltering but it was something. Keeping silent made the whole thing unbearable.

On their way back to the campus, Chuck told him that it was then he knew that he was going to break away some day. "I stuck around for my mother's sake, went to the colleges they picked—and got kicked out of them both, as you know. Then that little legacy came along—"

"What little legacy?"

"I thought I'd mentioned it. Had an uncle, my mother's brother, who lived in Rochester, New York. He left me something, and that's how come I'm independent now. I got the income when I was eighteen. It's not much, but it means I can get an education, and stay the hell away from home. And that's O.K. by my old man. Mom knows where I am— she could come up here, but I guess the old man has her sold on the idea that I'm past redemption or something."

Chuck's story explained a lot, but not all. There was something else that drove him, something more than a dreadful wrong remembered from childhood. One of these days, if he kept his senses alert, maybe he'd be able to spot what that something was.

He tried to explain his liking for Chuck to Nehemiah once, and immediately wished he hadn't. Nehemiah's reaction was violent and profane. He wound up his tirade with: "You going to get yourself so Goddamned messed up, futzing around with these ofays. You want to kiss-ass the profs, O.K.; that'll get you somewhere. Mebbe. Just mebbe. But you never gonna make it with these other whites here. You think they like you? Sure they like you. It makes 'em feel good to like you. And that's why they like you, because it makes 'em feel good to like a Negro. Especially guys from cracker country, like this here Martin. You don't see any of 'em putting their money where their mouths is, do you?"