Five Smooth Stones Read Online Free PDF

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