Five Smooth Stones Read Online Free PDF Page 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