The Promise of Rest

by Reynolds Price

  “Mr. Grainger?”

  “Him.”

  “This is Wade, your old friend.”

  “Younger than me. Everything else alive is younger than me.”

  “Well, except for a few trees, I guess you’re nearly right.”

  “You said you were Wade? Don’t sound much like him.”

  “It’s me—guaranteed. I’m just getting younger.”

  “Your eyes improving?”

  “I think maybe Yes. Some days anyhow, minutes at a time, I can see moving things.”

  “It’s the still ones that kill you.”

  “Don’t make me laugh please. I’m sore all over.”

  “Somebody beating on you?—I still got my gun; just say the word.”

  “The word? The word. Grainger, I can’t think of but one word most days.”

  “Your mind failing on you?”

  “No, never been clearer. But all I think about is one word, Wyatt. Wyatt Bondurant—remember him?”

  “Can’t say I do, thank Jesus Above.”

  “He was hard on you, I well recall—hard on most everybody but me.”

  “Ain’t he killing you now? Ain’t that fairly hard?”

  “He thought so at least—Wyatt thought so. It killed him to know it. But no, I blame nobody, live or dead. I walked, eyes open, into one big set of blades, grinding live meat. Still I liked my time on Earth, short as it’s been.”

  “You lucky as a racehorse.”

  “Want to tell me how?”

  “You leaving on out while you’re still yourself.”

  “You’re who you’ve been since the day I was born—that long anyhow.”

  “No, child, Grainger Walters turned into this warm corpse, oh, fifty years ago—when did Gracie Walters die?”

  “I never knew Gracie, I’m sad to say. Recall she was gone well before I came.”

  “You missed a good sight.”

  “I’ll miss a lot more.”

  “Child, you’ve seen every bit of the story. Nothing much to it that you hadn’t seen once you tried your body on one other soul.”

  Wade took a long wait. “I thank you for that.”

  “And it’s true as a knife—” Grainger hung up then, high in midair.

  April 24, 1993

  Dear Emily,

  I was so grateful for your kindness and sympathy in phoning last evening; be assured I won’t speak of it to anyone. The whole situation here is harder than anything I’ve been in, except for the long months of silence from Wade when he was in New York, refusing most calls and accepting nothing by way of help. Those months were the nearest I’ve ever come to losing all grip. Now that Hutch and Strawson have brought him back south, what the new problem comes down to is terribly simple. Hutch wants as little of me as ever. He lets me stop by with food and clean clothes for Wade and, those times, he mostly manages to be polite. But I know he’d rather I vanished today and left no traces, surely no claim on Wade.

  Even more painful, as I tried to tell you before I broke down, I can’t be certain Wade wants my visits either. Oh he thanks me for favors and answers small questions; but more than not, he’s silent and pulled back—dozing or pretending to, though I well know he’s tired from the moment of sunrise onward.

  All I’m trying to do is keep my loving presence in his mind. I tell myself that’s my minimum duty, however much less it amounts to than I hope for. I try to believe that, somewhere in his mind, there’s a memory of having a mother that cherished him above all others and, that if I keep up a gentle persistence beside him, he’ll connect who I am with the memory of me in his earlier days. I’m the same girl anyhow. Do you feel that as strongly as I do—that you don’t get any older inside but are always who you’ve been since birth? I generally feel like me at the age of about eleven, smarter some ways but the same general girl; and it’s only when I wander past mirrors and see the changes that I shiver and think “Who’s that old stranger in here with me?”

  I’ve got to get back to work right now, but let me just ask one thing in closing. I think you know that, all these years, I’ve asked you to press Straw for help with me and Hutchins. And I wouldn’t today, if time weren’t almost certainly short. But if you can find a natural way to say to Strawson that Ann is Wade’s mother—and never was less, in spite of his refusals—then maybe Straw could find it in his heart to see Hutch and ask him to find a way to give me natural rights in this sadness. If you think it’s too awkward, then thanks all the same. I wouldn’t want to tread into tender ground.

  Any chance you could ride down here one day soon and eat lunch with me? I hate myself for still needing food; but I do eat lunch, though very seldom dinner.

  Keep us there in your prayers.

  And love from,

  Ann

  April 25, 1993

  Dear Ann,

  Your letter is just here. Since I’m heading into town for groceries in a minute, I’ll jot a quick word and mail it myself, to prevent suspicion.

  Rest your mind on one subject at least. Strawson has said to me at least once daily that Hutchins is walling you out of this and that that’s less than fair. I’ve told Strawson that fair is not the word, and he agrees to that too. But you know how much he reveres Hutchins Mayfield and all H’s plans, so I cannot hold out a great deal of hope that Strawson knows any way to help right now.

  If he forgets that he saw your writing on the envelope an hour ago when he brought in the mail, then tonight I’ll slip in a word along the lines you suggested. The sooner the better but I can’t let S think you have coached me in this—you understand.

  What I don’t understand is, where are you finding the strength to watch the sights you are watching? You asked for my prayers and, Ann, they are yours. The last thing Strawson would admit to me is that he prays too, but I know he does, and you are high on his list. He has always said you were “Very top-grade,” which is far as he goes in human praise!

  I will phone again soon. Till when,

  The best love,

  Emily

  April 29, 1993

  My dear Ivory,

  I am dictating this to a man who is helping me come to life the best I can hope to. His name is Hart and he has plenty of it’heart, I mean. He is working on his doctor’s degree in English literature and has studied with Hutch, so this will all be spelled correctly and in proper grammar. Not that it needs to be all that proper to say what I mean. Not that you don’t know all I mean already. Or so I trust, God knows, God knows. I asked Hart to write those words down twice.

  What I mean is, you have been better to me for nine years now than anyone else ever was in all my time. Everything I ever did to hurt you is clear in my addled brain this instant as any needle stuck in an eye. You said more than once that you pardoned me, and I more than half believe you have. But since I’ve been down here, I wake up in the night—most every night—and see your face that awful day I turned on you, when you were needing help I didn’t know how to give. Or so I thought. I was full grown though, as you pointed out and had nobody but me to blame for the preservation of terminal adolescence.

  Don’t feel like you need to call me up and say any words. Don’t think I’m asking for written forgiveness. But sometime soon, when you find yourself in a quiet place and the light feels right, see if you can manage to say inside your head “I wish a peaceful rest for Wade Mayfleld, I and my kin, through all time to come.” Just those few words, between you and the air, will very likely reach me and help me on, wherever I’m headed, however soon or late.

  Again, dear friend, you are matchless in the world. Long love to yourself and all you care for

  From your hopeful

  Wade

  2

  WHEN Hart had finished transcribing the letter and addressing the envelope, he brought it to Wade who signed it the best he could, folded it carefully, then gave it back to Hart and said “You lick the envelope please.”

  Hart laughed. “Lazy dude, your tongue still works.”

&n
bsp; Wade said “Too true. No, my spit’s infected—I already warned you. I try not to export the virus to friends.”

  Hart said “Eureka!”

  Wade pointed a finger in Hart’s direction. “Everything you write for me’s a deep secret—swear to that please?”

  “Absolutely,” Hart said. “I’m the dark grave of secrets.”

  Wade said “I’m glad I’ve met him at last.”

  Only then did Hart hear the tactlessness of his metaphor. He laughed. “I’m sorry to bring up the grave!”

  “That goes without saying” and Wade laughed too.

  They were in Wade’s room in strong morning light, Wade was dressed in a sweat suit and lying on his bed, Hart was at the small desk Wade had used in childhood. When the letter was sealed and stamped, Hart said “I’ll walk this down to the road and leave it for the postman.” He stood to go.

  Wade agreed, then quickly said “No, wait.” His hand came up on the air like a painter’s, and he drew a complicated line that copied the outer boundaries of Hart—his head and trunk at least. When it was finished, Wade lapsed into silence.

  Finally Hart said “Wait for what?”

  Wade said “Just stand still another ten seconds—I can suddenly see you.” In fact he could. Wade’s eyes had slowly clarified as they wrote the letter; and now Hart Salter was here before him, the first entirely visible creature that Wade had seen in three or four months. Only at the outer limits of Hart, a kind of flickering silver aura that clung to his outline with small explosions, was there anything less than honest facts. Maybe six foot five, with a full head of thick chestnut hair and a long ingratiating face with a Jesus beard—all so real and pleasing to the eyes and mind that it sent a terrible bolt through Wade, like a single blow from a battering ram. I’m leaving this. I’m worse than dead. He even shut his eyes and spoke the knowledge aloud, in a whisper. “Let me be really blind.”

  Except for occasional shaves and trims, Hart had never spent more than an hour, all told, in front of a mirror, regarding himself. Like most well-put-together creatures, he’d been told often he was no eyesore. In fact everybody important in his path, except for his wife, had sooner or later praised his looks. But the news had weighed very lightly on him; he’d all but never relied on his looks in any exchange. So now he was mildly puzzled by Wade’s wish. “I’ll stay, sure, if you’re hurting any.”

  Wade said “I am. But you can’t help.”

  “No, try me. Say the word.” Since Hart got here at nine o’clock, he’d already helped Wade bathe and dress.

  Wade’s eyes opened and saw Hart again almost as clearly, blurring slightly at the edges like a spirit materializing before you or slowly leaving. After a long time Wade grinned and took his biggest gamble in maybe three years. “Would you just strip and stand right there—oh, for one whole minute?”

  It took Hart less than five seconds to find sufficient permission. I’ll be four thousand miles from here in another few days. Before I’m back, this boy will be dead (he’d always thought of Wade as a boy since the first day he saw him). So Hart smiled slightly and said “You bet.” Then he laid the sealed letter on the desk, briskly slid off his frayed jeans, T-shirt and underpants and stood in place where the sun was brightest. In general, he was always at home in his body—no excess modesty, just a real ease in the amplitude of the irreducible skin and bones in which he’d met the world from the start.

  There were no more than ten feet between him and Wade; and after a moment when Hart felt a little more like a target than he’d planned to feel, he shifted his weight to his broad right foot and hung his right hand like a hinge at the crest of his massive left shoulder. Unthinking, he’d assumed the stance of a thousand athletes—dead for two thousand years—in shattered Greek and Roman marble, unthinkably generous in offering the world their private portion of eternal perfection.

  Wade took in the sight in full awareness of both its blessing and what he guessed was its bitter finality. The splendor of the pale taut skin of the chest and belly, the smiling wings of muscle suspended from the corners of the groin, the full heavy sex—strong as they all were, they looked alarmingly fragile to Wade: one more thing he’d failed to protect and now must abandon. One more last thing. Even as he thought it, Wade’s eyes were clouding. Hart’s arms were already swimming in a vague light. Ask to touch him once quick, only one touch.

  At the same instant Hart thought Take the four steps forward; put his hand on your chest. For the first time, Hart saw the face of Stacy his wife, who was four miles from here at her greenhouse job, still hungry for far more than Hart had to give—he or any man he’d yet known. Well, she’ll never know anything that passes here. This is between just Wade, me and death. Hart took two steps.

  Wade’s hand came up, palm out toward the shield of his new friend’s chest. New friend and last. Then the hand drew back of its own accord; and Wade told Hart “There. Many thanks but no, just there forever.” Nothing had ever looked liner than this—worth a whole life’s service—and Wade well knew that he’d watched the world more closely in his three decades than anyone he’d known, maybe barring Hutch. Nothing had ever looked farther away than this present goodness. Nothing—that Wade could recall at least—had ever brought his mind more joy or the weight of more desperate loss than this sight here, this kind young man. Wade’s hands went flat on the sheet beside him; and he lay on watching, still saying “Just there.”

  So Hart stayed there, entirely at ease in the unblocked light of a day in progress far beyond them on the actual Earth, till Wade’s eyes shut and he fell back to sleep—gone quicker than any feverish child.

  3

  THERE were fourteen members of Hutch’s class in Writing Narrative Poetry—eight men, six women. The oldest were two postgraduate renegades, moonlighting from the Law and Divinity Schools. The youngest was twenty-one, named Maitland Moses, a senior burdened with talent and a mind as attentive as a small threatened creature, though he seemed fearless and undownably cheerful. By four that afternoon they’d all assembled at Hutch’s place in Orange County, four miles from campus in the evergreen fringes of Duke Forest. The forest itself was eight thousand acres of pines and cedars, streams, lost ponds and the odd deserted farmhouse biding its time with plentiful deer, foxes, crows, hawks, wild turkeys and herons, the raccoon and snake and indomitable beaver, even the occasional Madagascan lemur escaped from the high-fenced Primate Center just up the road. And Hutch’s twelve acres abutted the woods on three sides.

  The late afternoon air buoyed itself on a unique slanting amber light native to Hutch’s corner of the county, a ridge that his oldest neighbor called Couch Mountain, the highest point for many miles around. Hutch and Ann had built the house in the 196os on an outcrop of rock at the ridge of Couch Mountain. It was ten spacious high-ceilinged rooms, a small greenhouse, an old-fashioned basement stocked with nothing more valuable than prehistoric paint cans and exhausted appliances, and a wide brick terrace facing due south from which on clear days you could see farther than Chapel Hill, which was ten miles away beyond the broad pasture where a neighbor’s cattle still grazed in monumental stupor broken only by unpredictable mountings, couplings and outraged bellows.

  By five o’clock, four of the pleasant but talentless members of the class had read their final installments of verse. Hutch had listened quietly through the criminally flattering student comments on one another; then he’d offered his own slightly keener observations and was near to calling on Maitland Moses to end the session with what promised to be the concluding part of either a long verse memoir he’d been writing all term or a newer attempt at a truly bizarre tale. Hutch had even asked Mait to start reading when it came to him suddenly that he’d failed to tell the group about Wade—he details anyhow; he knew they’d heard the rumors.

  Earlier in the day, Hutch had told Wade to join them outdoors at any point if he felt up to it; and now through the open door behind him, Hutch could hear Wade shuffling somewhere inside. So he faced the stu
dents, kept his voice down and briefed them honestly. “My son Wade Mayfield moved back in with me three weeks ago. He’s been an architect in New York for some years but has been ill lately and is resting up here in the house where—strangely for a modern child—he was actually born. His mother went into fast unexpected labor; and yours truly birthed him on the living room sofa, not ten yards back of where we’re seated. By the time the rescue squad arrived, he was wailing strongly. I’ve told Wade to join us if he feels the urge, so at least you’ll know him if he chooses to join us.” Hutch ended even softer. “His eyesight is bad.”

  And while young Mait was clearing his throat and giving his usual abject rundown of what he’d reached for and failed to grasp in this final installment, Wade chose to appear. He’d dressed in a pair of his boyhood jeans that fit his narrow waist again and a long-tailed black shirt that swallowed his shrunken shoulders and chest; and as he came toward them, Wade paused in the doorway to brace himself against the full light.

  Mait saw him first and, with premature courtesy, said “Join the firing squad.” When Wade was plainly confused by that, Maitland tried again. “I’m about to spill my last mile of guts here. Listen at your own risk.”

  By then Hutch had risen and gone toward Wade. “You and I’ll sit over here in the shade where it’s cooler.” Hutch made his elbow available for guidance.

  But Wade had been seeing better all day, never so well as he’d seen Hart Salter but snatches of what seemed visual fact. He said to Hutch “Let me try the sun first” and took slow steps on toward a broad flat rock that rose in the midst of the paving bricks and took the steady light. Wade sat there carefully and looked round the smeared and jittering faces. By some kind of instinct he settled on Maitland Moses’ face and said “I’m the dying homo son.” Then Wade gave a grin to the whole wide circle. In the light he looked a good deal less thin—he barely weighed a hundred pounds—and in three weeks of short sunbaths, he’d replaced his pallor with a yellowish tan.