The Promise of Rest

by Reynolds Price

  Hutch said “Hart’s gone till the fall at least. No, save your cash; young Mait worked fine—he’s honest and careful. Wade told me so.”

  Ann said “Give me this much.”

  “You’ve scarcely seen Maitland; what’s so bad about him?”

  “You’ll say I’m a bigot, but I’m also Wade Mayfield’s only mother. He’s dying of the kind of life he chose; it seems very wrong to me that, in these straits, we should leave him alone with one more man who’s made the same blind and killing mistake.” It was literally the first time Ann had broached the subject with Hutch in all their years. For all the recognition she’d conceded, Wade and Wyatt might have been blood twins or orbiting astronauts, chosen by lot.

  Instantly Hutch felt bathed in the lights of a television panel show of idiot simplicity—Our Sexual Roles: Genetic Fate or Adult Choice? Choose one and justify. All he might have learned from Alice that morning flushed through him and vanished. He wanted to tear the phone from the wall; but he finally said “Yes, Counselor Mayfield, you’re right as always—your son and mine chose his own life and death exactly the way presexual children choose brain tumors or pediatric AIDS, just that freely—so has Maitland Moses. Christ, wake up, Ann. Or wise up, at least. You’re too smart to mimic some nineteenth-century Baptist deacon who thinks Jonah spent three days in a whale and that women who lie with donkeys must be stoned. I fear you’ve spent a few hours too many with the criminal element—or is it just Christian TV you’re watching? Whatever, it’s plainly dulling your mind and damning you to Hell.”

  Ann said “I haven’t mentioned a donkey yet, though the word jackass does come to mind often. But no, just because you ruined your and my life through cowardice doesn’t make me wrong.”

  “Cowardice?”

  “Hutch, I trust you’ve known for decades—God knows, I have—that you made a choice and made it wrong. You loved Straw Stuart but married me.”

  To his surprise, and shocked as he was by this delayed charge, Hutch had a ready answer. It came so smoothly that he thought, as he said it, This has waited for years. “Ann, I’ve loved Strawson nearly all his life. He’s a lot more loyal than the average collie—not to speak of humans including my mate, who abandoned me for nothing worse than the normal atmospheres of a marriage that’s lasted awhile. But I couldn’t have lived with him forty-five minutes—Straw or any other man I’ve known. So your brilliant diagnosis of my wrong turn is so inaccurate that I won’t dignify it with a full answer. From somewhere around age fourteen and onward, I’ve steadily done what I meant to, in my main choices, with you at least and in starting our son on his way to life.

  “I reached out and tried for a sizable life with a woman as different from me as a panther. And up till last year, I thought we had a life—a good-sized existence, give or take normal failures—till you skipped out for your experiment in radical secular hermitage. Anyhow, whoever ended our marriage, the main result of what we did is dying now, way past our help. That much is tragic; what’s left of you and me is ludicrous—you just made it so.”

  Ann held a long moment. “I told you the truth, and you well know it. What you wanted was wrong—and it’s caused our pain, all ours and Wade’s—but I wish to God you’d gone with Straw and left me free. There ought not to be anything left of us.”

  If Hutch could have found the energy for one more speech, his actual fury might have caused Ann harm, even at a distance. That at least would have been a true sign of what he felt. But finally he only said “Good night. I’m gone.” And he was; he hung up. He sat still a minute, in case she called back. No call came and, in ten minutes more, Hutch was on his own bed—stripped and out like a smothered child, desperately unconscious.

  Over again, till Wade called for him a little after dawn, Hutch dived and surfaced in a tangled continuous dream of paralysis. In all its parts, Hutch could see his real body, laid here on his bed and frozen to stone in every cell. On a straight chair against the wall beyond him, he could sense Wade’s presence—huge now and strong again but still blind and stunned. The one great need was for Hutch to make a simple request, a single demand of Wade, requiring an answer; but his lips couldn’t move. And a spot on the surface of his locked brain, the size of a stamp, was all that could think. In that small spot, on through the night, Hutch repeated the single request in silence, trapped in his skull but meant for Wade—Will you give me an answer? Whether or not it ever reached Wade through the air between them in the dream, no answer came, not all night long, though Wade sat on in reach of his father and had sufficient strength to free him.

  29

  AT five forty-five in the morning however, the actual Wade called Hutch’s name between their rooms; and Hutch came at once, not pausing to put on more than his briefs. In the doorway he paused and tried to see Wade’s shape, trusting he’d still be down in bed, weak as he’d been since the last pneumonia. But when Hutch’s eyes came open in the dimness, the bed was only a tangle of sheets.

  Wade had somehow got himself up and dressed in a flannel robe from his childhood, a remnant that fit him once again. He was crouched on himself in the one easy chair. When he sensed his father, he said “I’ve been up a very long time, sir, waiting for you.”

  Hutch said “I’m sorry; I must have been even tireder than I knew. You should have called me.”

  Wade said “I did, about five hundred times. You never heard me and I couldn’t walk closer.”

  By then Hutch had moved to the bedside table and switched on a lamp. The boy looked no worse than yesterday, but Hutch said “What’s wrong?” and sat on the bed.

  Again Wade took slow time to decide. The message would sink, then rise and hook at the base of his brain, then vanish again. Finally it rose for long enough to let Wade say “I’m a whole lot stronger suddenly.” To prove it, he did a physical trick the neurologists had taught him—shutting his blind eyes, extending both arms, then finding his nose with his straight forefinger—first one arm, then the other. Each time the finger found its way with no detour.

  Hutch said “No doubt about it; you’re better.”

  Wade put a silencing finger to his lips. “I know this means I’m close to dying. No, don’t shut me up. Hutch. I’ve watched it in others—we get a few of our faculties back, like a small tip from fate.” Wade chuckled deeply. “There’s something I need to tell you soon, before I’m gone.” He stopped and wiped his dry blue lips as if they were wet. He’d lost his subject.

  Hutch said “I’m listening.”

  Wade ran a hand down the length of his face as if clearing cobwebs but nothing more came. So he finally smiled. “Remind me every day from here on out. There’s something in me that you need to know.”

  The announcement of death was all Hutch heard, and he knew at once that Wade was right. He went to the bathroom, filled a pail with water, brought soap, a rag, and a small soft towel; then he went back, stripped and bathed his child where he sat in the chair as dawn progressed at every window.

  30

  THAT morning Ann drove the ten green miles to Hillsborough, the small county seat with its pillared old court house, the town green where the leaders of a protorevolutionary force called the Regulators had been ceremoniously hanged by the Royal Governor in 1771, the airy home of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a small jail that still looked like a holding pen for cutthroats dragged from a pirate hulk off the Outer Banks, which had been a bolt-hole for the dreaded Blackbeard, Edward Teach.

  Those facts—and the strata of pain they implied—were hardly foremost in Ann’s mind as she paused at the first stoplight in town; but the peace of the place, its slow air of entire self-confidence and serene faith in its chance of enduring centuries longer were parts of the ease Ann felt as she parked just off the main street. Today she and a younger woman attorney had had an appointment to talk with the law firm’s most urgent client; at the last moment, the attorney got sick; so Ann had come on her own, unruffled, to ask more questions of that dire client—the yo
ung man whom Hutch called the Hurdle Mills Strangler (Hurdle Mills was fifteen miles north, a quiet village).

  The man’s name was Walter Wilk, called Whirly or simply Whirl by all; and what he’d done—unquestionably, this past Easter morning—was strangle his mother with a Donald Duck necktie, a gift she’d brought him from her Thanksgiving trip to Disney World with the women of her church. Then two days later when no one had yet discovered his mother, who lived alone, Whirly suffocated his passed-out alcoholic brother-in-law with a pillow in the early hours of a Sunday morning as the drunk snored on beside his drunk wife, who never heard a peep, in their double-wide mobile home in the woods.

  In the weeks that Ann had worked with the killer—taking his increasingly hair-raising confessions and his simultaneous fevered mission to win her and all her colleagues to Jesus—she’d developed an undownable sympathy for what Whirly had endured in his thirty-six years (a father like something from the Brothers Grimm, a runaway wife as ravenous for love and money as any debutante, a string of early felonies involving drugs and break-ins, and the sight of his sister delivering a stillborn baby in her kitchen with nobody present but Whirly and her husband’s deranged pit bull).

  The day Ann had first seen Whirly in jail, three months ago, she’d noticed—as he turned to leave their cubicle, chained hand and foot—that the back of his head with its thick black hair beginning to curl, the wide level shoulders and rail-straight posture all but made him a twin to Wade Mayfield: a lost twin mangled by the hands of his kin but waiting still for some hope of rescue, a hope as surely futile as Wade’s.

  Now as the jailer led Whirly in to the same green conference cubicle, he still wore handcuffs but no leg irons. His hair was even longer, he’d thinned down further in the week since Ann had seen him, so even his eyes were now moving in Wade’s direction—the blank and unbearably helpless stare of the volunteer martyr, oblivious to his crime.

  Since Ann was part of Whirly’s defense team, the jailer was forced to leave them alone—checking at intervals through a glass slot to see if she was staying alive in such proximity to a known madman.

  As the madman faced her across a three-foot-wide oak table, Ann saw that his face had gone on clearing in the past eight days—a well-shaped landscape, purging itself of mountainous waste and a lowering sky. Ann opened her notebook, reminded herself He’s not Wade, Ann; he’s killed his own mother; you’re not his Aunt Jesus; and then she amazed herself by saying a thing she’d never mentioned before, not in this death house. As each word came, it sounded more unprofessional than the last; but she gave in and told him. “Whirly, my son’s at the point of death; so talk plainly please, fast. I need out of here.” At once she felt like fleeing in shame. She’d never so much as acknowledged being human, much less a sad mother—not in this awful room—but she begged no pardon and waited for his answer.

  Whirly said “It’s AIDS, right?” His eyes were as flat as aluminum washers.

  That he’d gone for the throat like that, in an instant, barely seemed strange to Ann. Somebody from the firm is bound to have told him. But surely not. “Who told you that?”

  Then slowly Whirly’s eyes went hot as an ermine’s at the throat of a mouse. “Mother Mary, in the night. She tells me a lot.”

  Whirly’s strain of Christianity, from what Ann had gathered, was a holy-rolling Protestant sect with a self-anointed woman bishop weighing three hundred pounds and called Sister Triumph. Sister’s theology, oddly, included a few Roman saints and the Virgin Mary in exotic doses—Whirly wore a black rosary around his neck every time Ann had seen him; he claimed to use it hourly at least. Now Ann said only “Ask her to pray for him then.”

  “Who?”

  “Mother Mary.”

  Whirly’s eyes were puzzled. “What’s your boy’s name then?” When Ann balked, Whirly said “I got to have his name—she don’t take nameless requests nohow.” Then he smiled broadly; his teeth were calamitous.

  “Wade—Wade Mayfield, Raven Wade Mayfield. As good a man as breathes.” Even more certain she was on crazy ground, Ann glanced to the window in the door—no sign of the jailer. I’ve crossed completely over, someway. I’ll never leave this room, not today.

  Whirly’s voice stayed level. “Young Wade’s a queer?”

  Of course it all but stupefied Ann. Now, like the rest of the hateful Christians, he’ll damn him to Hell (Ann’s own youthful Christianity had been scorched out, long since, by her notice that groups of Christians bigger than three, tend to grow scornful fangs and dream at least of executing God’s vengeance on their neighbors). But since she’d constantly stressed to Whirly that he needed to tell the full truth at all times to all his defenders, she couldn’t lie here. “Wade lived for some years with a man in New York, a black man that hated his father and me. No girlfriend ever, not that I ever saw—not since his college years at State. But nobody I ever met or watched in any brand of news was a kinder soul. Wade could watch you every day of the week and still act kind.”

  Whirly said “Was? Nobody else was. Ain’t Wade alive? You just said he was.” Whirly’s hands had joined on the table between them, making a flat empty pyramid against the dark oak. Big as they were, they could easily suffocate a Doberman, an ox.

  “Wade’s hanging on, yes, by the thinnest strand. Nobody yet has rounded a curve with AIDS and come back.” Ann could hear that, already, she’d said the word AIDS in this dim room more times than elsewhere. But then these walls had heard the worst the human race could dream or do, for well over two hundred years and counting.

  “There you go,” Whirly said. “Ain’t that everybody’s boat? Who gets back alive?”

  Helplessly honest again, Ann said “Well, you’re hanging on, my friend, in fairly good shape.”

  “Hold your phone here, lady. Everybody’s warming up the gas chamber—ain’t they?—making little signs that say ‘Whirly Wilk, die in your own shit and stink’; but I’m swimming for land.” Whirly raised both giant hands and stroked at the hot air, an Australian crawl.

  Ann pushed back a little from the table, tried to smile, and stroke a few yards of her own beside him.

  Whirly said “Where to?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Where are you headed?”

  Ann said “You tell me your destination.”

  Whirly likewise pushed back, some six feet from her. In a full minute’s wait, with his eyes shut calmly, what he came up with was “A piece of high ground. Plenty light, a cold spring, shady groves and music—deep banjo music all night and noon, not too near to drown you or upset your rest. No in-laws present, no blood kin but maybe a deaf old aunt, a few distant cousins—beg your pardon on that.” He smiled thinly but looked as sane as any magistrate, exercising pardon on a room of young children. “I’ll wait for him there.”

  “Him is my son, Whirl? Him means Wade?”

  Whirly smiled an entirely new credible smile, then ducked his chin in a fix-eyed surety. “Wade Mayfield, sure. He’ll be safe as trees.”

  Mad as she understood Whirl was, Ann half chose to trust him. Even so, she thought, that leaves me lost.

  31

  Two days later at the end of work, Ann came to the house, knocked at the front door and waited while Hutch put down his book and answered.

  His first sight of her, in the late oblique light, was the same fresh shock she’d given him often in the past forty years, the most reliable gift she gave—the jolt of her beauty even here, this far along; the depth of her eyes, her lustrous hair that was more than half white now, the delicate and tacit promise she’d always offered to join him in private acts of pleasure with a steady daring grace that could bring down immense rewards. It took Hutch a moment to raise his resistance to such a body and its intricate, forbearing, feral mind. Then he said the first two words that came. “Lose something?”

  Ann had lectured herself all the way out here to turn his first thrust, not to flare and explode. So in a low voice she answered him literally, then said what she planned. �
�I’m losing the same son you are; and, Hutch, I need to move back.”

  “Back where?”

  “My home, the legal address of my child and the man I’m still married to.”

  In its single blast, it nearly thawed Hutch; he was startled again to feel how hard he wanted her—not for anything but her frank handsome presence and the matrix of shared time and acts they’d laid down beneath them as food and shelter precisely for this late time in both their lives: the chance at a peaceful evening glide before full desolation and age. But he said “I can’t fall down here, Ann, and let you walk right over and past me suddenly. You dug this whole bizarre canyon between us; I can’t just ignore it and—”

  “I dug the canyon?”

  “We both did—sure, I dug along with you—but you chose to move to the far rim, right?”

  Ann yielded his point with her eyes, her best argument.

  So Hutch drew back from blocking the entrance and stood as she walked in.

  She went up the hall to the living room door and paused there, looking back for further permission.

  “You can go on to Wade’s room.”

  In her normal voice, not whispering to spare Wade, Ann said “I’m asking for the back bedroom—not for life, understand, but just the duration.” She pointed toward Wade’s room—the term of Wade’s life, she plainly meant. When Hutch failed to answer, she said “I’ll pay rent, my share of the groceries, the phone and lights, anything else you say.” By the end, when she understood she was begging, she’d begun to whisper. She was whispering now, though few other humans could have yielded so much and still looked upright and straight as an elm.

  Hutch pointed to the kitchen and also whispered. “Let’s talk back there.”

  For all their problems, neither one of them ever had leaned on alcohol. Generations of drunks in both their families had warned them off it. So Hutch knew not to bring out the wine or Ann’s preferred brand of unblended scotch; they’d need full clarity. There was ready-made coffee on hand by the sink. Hutch poured that out into two tall mugs, sugared Ann’s her way, heated the mugs in a microwave big enough to roast a grown pig, then sat opposite Ann at the breakfast table. When they’d each downed swallows, he said “You know it nearly killed me when you left?”