Five Smooth Stones (4 page)

"Ma," he said now. "Ma, Gran'Cecile's crazy, ain't she? She don't know what she's saying, do she, Ma?"

"You mustn't say such things about your grandmother. And try not to say 'ain't'—or 'do she.'"

Irene Champlin stood at the stove quietly, speaking to her son in even tones, correcting him—but not fooling him, only deepening his fear.

"Ma! Mamma!"

"Son." She turned to the stove without looking at him. "Look in Mother's bag. There are pralines."

He did not move. "Ma. Ma! My daddy didn't burn. Did he, Ma? Gran'Cecile is crazy, ain't she, Ma?"

"She has notions, son. Crazy notions."

It was not enough. "Ma, he didn't burn, did he? He didn't! It was a naccident. You told me he got hurted in a naccident!" Suddenly he was on her like a small brown fury, thin hands reaching for her, pulling at her clothing, thin feet stomping on the floor, thin voice rising, rising. "Mamma! Mamma!
Mammal"

Irene Champlin turned and held him with a grip so strong it hurt the tiny shoulders. "Yes! Yes, I told you! Be quiet. It was an accident!" She looked down at her son, and knew that for the first time he recognized the lie for what it was.

He was screaming now, and she caught him roughly into her arms, a hand at the back of his head, pressing his face into her breast to stifle his crying. "Be still. Be still, baby. Mother will let you go if you'll be quiet Mamma will tell you. It is not so bad."

She picked him up in her arms and sat in the only chair in the room besides the two broken kitchen chairs. She rocked him gently as she talked. "You must listen," she said. "Mamma cannot talk to you while you cry like that. Your daddy was a good man. Do you hear me? He was a great and good man. Everyone for miles around knew and loved your daddy. I have told you this often. He loved you. Even before you were born, he loved you although he never saw you. He loves you now. Baby. Hush. Be quiet. For the love of God, be quiet."

With a movement so quick she could not forestall it, he twisted the upper part of his body free of her arms, caught her blouse in a tight fist, almost pulling it from her shoulder.

"They didn't!" he cried. "They didn't burn my daddy! My daddy never done nothing bad. He never!"

"No," she said. "No, baby. He never did anything bad." She caught the fist in one of hers, held it tightly. "Never in his life. It was a mistake. They—they thought he did. It was a mistake, Joseph. Do you understand? It was as I told you —a mistake, an accident."

She kept him in her bed that night, holding him close. When she felt the small body was still awake, felt it shaken by tremors, she got up and fixed him laudanum she had bought for a toothache, and he slept at last, one hand holding a fold of her nightgown so tightly she dared not turn for fear of waking him, knowing if he did his first thoughts would be of the horror he had learned.

She blamed herself for the shock he was suffering. She had made David Champlin live for his son. There had been only one photograph of the man who had died on a bonfire on the eve of his son's birth, and he had carried that wedding picture with him when he left home. But she had painted a picture of him on the canvas of her son's mind that was more real than any photograph could have been. A big man, she told her son, and very dark, almost black. Joseph would not be so big when he grew up, she said; he would be more as she was, slight and small-boned, and his skin would be lighter. She told Joseph how she and his father had grown up together under the same roof, how her mother, Gran'Cecile, had taken him when he was only a few weeks old, and raised him and loved him as she would the son she had never had. And because he liked to hear the story, she often told him how she and his father had played along the riverfront when they were children and how one day they had promised solemnly that they would never be separated; that when they grew up they would be married in the Church of St. Augustine, and she would wear a long white gown and veil.

"Did you?" her son would ask each time she told the story.

"Yes, Joseph. In a white gown and a long white veil. We had a picture taken, but your daddy had it with him when he went away, looking for work. He—he carried it with him always."

"Was he big, Ma?" The boy would always ask this question too.

"Yes, son."

"Big, big, big like this, Ma?" The child's hand reached as far above his head as he could hold it.

"Big, big, big like that. So big he used to pick me up like this!" She would bend and catch the boy up in her arms, the moment he had been waiting for, and bring him to her shoulder. "We didn't have any baby for a long, long time, and when I used to cry about it he would hold me like this and say
he
had a baby if I didn't. He was always smiling. And when he laughed you could hear him two courtyards away. And kind and gentle; he was always kind and gentle."

Round eyes looked at her with solemn assurance. "My daddy wouldn't have spanked me."

She would laugh, speak in Creole. "Oh, but he would, or I would have known the reason why. If you were a bad boy, or impolite, or unkind, he would have spanked you, just as I do."

"I'm not, Mamma; I'm not."

"No, dear, you are not. You will be like your daddy. Not big, as he was, do not expect that. But kind and gentle."

Now, lying in the narrow bed with her son's body close to her, not moving for fear that any movement would waken him to a terror newly found, she wished she had never done these things, never taught him to love a man dead before his birth; never given him a dead father to cherish; never brought, by her words, the sound of that father's voice and laughter, the sight of his smile, into their room.

It would have been better never to have given the child the knowledge of his father's kindness and goodness; long ago she should have forgotten, or pretended to forget, the man who had been so close to her that he was like a part of every atom of her being—mind, body, and soul. It would have been better if she had married any one of the half-dozen men who had wanted her after David died, and given the boy a father. She knew herself for a selfish woman, loving a dead man so much she could not bring herself, even for her son's sake, to go to another; bringing the dead alive because it gave her comfort.

The child she held now would have learned the truth someday. If his father had been a dim, shadowy figure, never mentioned, if he had never lived in his son's imagination, it would have been easier for the boy to accept the truth. Now it came as a shattering thing, filling his small world with nightmare horror.

Her arms grew numb from holding him, and when he stirred they tightened round him, and when he whimpered she lay still as death, holding her breath, releasing it at last

with a whisper so intense it sounded like a loud cry in her own ears.

"Mother of God!" she whispered. "Blessed Mother, help me with this child!"

CHAPTER 4

The bank holiday of 1933 found Joseph Champlin and his wife with seventy-five cents left from the ten dollars he had found a few days before. They had spent their windfall almost immediately, a few dollars to a clamorous landlord, a funeral insurance premium, a small supply of coal, rice, beans, staples, and a dollar that Li'l Joe proudly gave his mother.

On the morning of March sixth he learned of the bank closings from a friend he met on the street, when he was setting out to find work. When he returned to the house and told Geneva, she said, "My Gawd! What they trying to do!"

"I don't know," answered Li'l Joe. "Swear I don't. Pete, he told me he's been working for a white family stays over by Metairie, and they told him it was going to save the country from bankruptcy, some dam-fool thing like that."

"Locking everyone's money up going to save the country? Going to make everyone bankrupt, that's what it's going to do.
Everyone,
white
and
colored. What we going to do? What's everyone going to do if they gets a day's work and there ain't no money to pay 'em? You going to hold still for doing a day's work and no money? How we going to feed that chile?"

"We ain't," said Joseph Champlin. "You going to have to see can you get more of that formula stuff by the hospital, and me, I reckon all I can do is walk around some when what we got's gone and see can I find someone, mebbe someone I done work for, can lend me some. If things keeps on like they is, we're going to have to get that chile to the country somehow, by Ruth's folks—Gawd knows how—and let them take care of him. They got cows and chickens and a little piece of truck garden. They can feed theirselves and him, too."

The fear he had seen in Geneva's eyes the first time he had made this proposal was not there now. The baby had been with them three days, and already her husband was fussing at her about the way she fixed the bottles, getting up in the night, climbing over her to get to the stove and ready the formula when the baby woke up crying. The sounds that came to her as he gentled the child and fed him would have been familiar to his first wife, Josephine. "So-so," he would say. "So-so, little man." Geneva had agreed to the dresser-drawer crib in the daytime, and he had found packing casings to stand endwise under it and make it firm, and it was Li'l Joe who made it up, constructing a mattress from an old blanket and a piece of sheet.

Geneva watched him when he did things for the baby, and let him instruct her, and when his back was turned winked at the occupant of the dresser drawer, saying to him, when his grandfather was out of hearing: "I can't do nothing with him. Hardheaded as a mule. But you just keep working on him, David. You just keep working on him, we got nothing to worry about."

The chaos that followed immediately after the bank closings made even Joseph Champlin realize the futility of looking for work. From their friends and from the newspapers they learned of unbelievable situations among the whites: millionaires caught with only a few dollars in their pockets, talk of paper scrip being printed, people making fantastic offers just for cold cash. Some stores were good about credit to a limited extent, but it could not be offered for long. On the second day Hank beckoned him mysteriously to the back of his barroom, and slipped him a paper bag with a quart bottle of homemade wine in it, because now more than ever he dared not be seen serving anyone on credit.

It was Geneva who suggested that he appeal to the Professor.

"I ain't going to do it, Neva," he said. "That man's probably no better off than what we are. We are all in the same boat, rich
and
poor. Where's he going to get cash any more'n anyone else? It ain't like he worked in a store. He's a professor in a college. I know he's rich, but I don't want—"

"You fixing to say you don't want to ask no favors," Geneva snapped. "That's what you're fixing to say. Since when's a colored person in this town got so Goddamned proud he

can't ask no favors of a white? Ain't nothing no white gives you any favor anyhow. You knows that."

Joseph Champlin did not answer, then wished he had. Silence on his part often irritated Geneva to the point where she would talk until it seemed she'd forgotten how to stop, prodding him to answer, then not giving him a chance.

She was always particularly talkative on the subject of the Professor. Li'l Joe had known him for three years. Odd and different people were common in New Orleans, a seaport whose docks knew the feet of men from every country, whose restaurants and bars and waterfront dives knew as many tongues as Babel had, but even in New Orleans the bristling red beard and hair, the vivid blue eyes, the huge bulk and booming voice of Bjarne Knudsen were conspicuous. Li'l Joe had been playing a gig in a small club when he saw the big man for the first time. It was a Negro club, and Li'l Joe and the other musicians were uneasy and uncomfortable at the presence of a white man. It could, and often did, mean trouble with the law. The man was with Kid Arab, who was without a job that night. Kid's assurance that the bearded stranger was O.K. was enough to admit him, but there were still uneasiness on the stand, and an attitude composed in almost equal parts of downright hostility and reserved, suspicious friendliness in the audience.

During the course of the evening the big man worked his way forward in the smoky, crowded room until he sat directly in front of Li'l Joe. Li'l Joe remembered watching him from the corner of his eyes, thinking he had never known a white man to respond to the music as this man did, hearing it not as something just to tap a foot to, bob a head to, clap hands to, but almost the way his own people heard it—as a tale to be told, a feeling to be passed on for other men to share. When Woodenhead Pete gave a mocking, laughing answer on the clarinet, the man would laugh aloud, throwing his head back until the throat beneath the red beard showed. When the instruments drew together, trumpet, trombone, and clarinet, blending tone and heart, when they moaned about it, told the folks about it, let go with the sadness and ache of it, the fire left the blue eyes of the man in front of him and they clouded, and when the band played a blues that had no name but came from their memories alone the eyes were shaded by a huge hand so that they could not be seen at all.

When the band turned loose with a stomp or march, Li'l Joe, watching the big man's feet and hands, thought, Sure make a fine drummer, that white man would; make a fine drummer.

Between numbers Kid told them the man was a professor at the university, that he came from over the water, a country called Denmark, and that he was wealthy. "He's all right," said Kid. "He's all right. He ain't been here long, but it wouldn't make no difference if he stayed here all his life, he'd still be all right."

The second time he came he asked Li'l Joe to give him banjo lessons. Li'l Joe could still remember the feel of the delighted thwack on the shoulder the big man had given him when he consented, a thwack that almost catapulted him out of his chair. "I am sorry!" the Professor had boomed. "I am sorry! You are so small and I am so big and I do not always realize how big I am. You will forgive me, no? And come to my house—when?" They agreed upon a time, and that night planted the seeds of a friendship Li'l Joe admitted he would once have said was impossible. He tried to discuss it with Geneva, and she was mocking and incredulous. He knew that none of his friends would understand it, not even Pop Jefferson, whose given name of Abraham had disappeared years before in the nickname "Pop." The friendship did not grow rapidly; Li'l Joe was hard put to remember just when the time came that he knew he could use the word "friend" in speaking of the Professor; it must have been a year or more.