The Promise of Rest

by Reynolds Price

  “From what?”

  “For me to touch—my uncle Wyatt wasn’t safe when he died. They locked up the casket; said he was catching. I wouldn’t even go in the room where they had him.”

  Hutch said “Wade’s ashes are safe as sand. You do what you want.”

  Raven put out his right hand and set two fingers on the gritty surface. “That’s his finger ring?”

  “It should have been.”

  “You throwing it away too?”

  Hutch said “Maybe. What do you think?”

  Raven touched a single finger to the ring and pressed it deeper into the ash. “I think some child’ll get a nice finger ring when he finds it down here.”

  “Or maybe it’ll wash on down through the river and land on the ocean floor.”

  “A shark might eat it.” The idea lit the boy’s whole face.

  Hutch said “He might.”

  Then they both were silent a long time, seeing only their private needs—Hutch searched for a small still cove by the bank; Raven scanned the tree limbs for pythons.

  At last Hutch reached in, uncovered the ring and hooked it onto his right little finger. It hadn’t touched him in so many years, but it felt normal here. He said to Raven “You still want to help me?”

  “Yes, just say the word.” The boy’s face lit again with the solemn force it had in the chapel yesterday, not a ritual funeral look but the image of innocent awe at the final mystery left.

  Hutch said “Reach in then, take a good handful and spread it on the water.”

  Careful as a good young priest, Raven performed the gesture like something he’d learned years back and brought to effortless ease today.

  The tan ashes lay on top of the water for an instant, then sifted downward and on with the stream.

  Raven kept his eyes on their course. “Let me do one more.”

  Hutch waited with the urn while the boy spread a second handful.

  In a quick shaft of light, the ashes spread on the surface—rainbowed for a moment in their startling colors of tan, white, ochre, blues and purples. The bits of bone cast circles around them that rode out of sight.

  But Raven stood where he’d stopped and watched them, his dusty right hand held out from his side.

  Hutch had crouched through that. Now he stood, walking slowly upstream to scatter the rest. If he’d been thrown forward, dead of grief and regret in the dirt any instant here, he’d have felt no surprise. But his blood beat on, he stayed upright, and the ashes were gone even sooner than he’d guessed. He was left with the urn and a weight of loss—iron desolation—like none he’d ever borne till today. For half a minute again he thought he’d pitch to the ground. His heart contracted like a terrified fist and slammed at his ribs.

  It was then Hutch knew that, against all reason, he still dreaded Wyatt—Wyatt Bondurant here in this real day. Whoever had fathered Ivory’s Raven, there could be no doubt the child was Wyatt’s nephew. Wyatt may slam in here, any moment, to take this child. He’ll never let me know him. Wild as that tasted and felt in Hutch’s mind, he half believed it; half expected it in this real daylight on land his family had owned for so long and worked with the usable entirely expendable lives of others, all of them buried in long-lost graves within reach of his voice, if he’d raise his voice here.

  In Hutch’s crowded head, he even saw an image—the child crushed down, with blood on his lip, by the unseen weight of a famished dead man. We all end here—Wade, Ann and me; maybe even this child, whoever he is. And all my kin, back far as they go toward Eden and Gomorrah. The entire story (the little Hutch knew of it and all the hidden mass with its thousand feeders)—all the likable, darkening, execrable routes each private life had dug toward its goal, its hunt for care and heat in the world, the self’s desert triumph over others, over land and God; and the promise of some eventual rest: all the history of the world ended here, in no more than six or eight fistsful of ashes.

  Oh to roll it back and scotch it at the start. Absurd as that sounded in his head, Hutch flushed it away but then felt his mind lunge forward at the boy here, with more real threat than he’d felt toward anyone since the awful moments of balked lust and abandonment in his early manhood. He was literally helpless not to think End this child now, here, end him yourself. Spare him the slow and poisonous trek. He turned to the boy.

  Raven had followed three steps behind Hutch; he’d also watched the last of the ashes rest on the water and then sift inward. When they’d sunk and Hutch had swung round to face the boy—thinking any instant he must beg for help—Raven went on watching the creek as if the world harbored no threats stronger than pine trees and gangster jays. Then the boy said “Your Wade can enjoy himself from now on.”

  Hutch stood and took that, knowing not to ask for more by way of explanation. All right; he ought to. Hutch’s heart opened slightly; he drew a short breath, ready at least to believe they were safe again. “Let’s hope Wade enjoys the whole rest of things, as long as things last. God knows he paid for it.” Then a second breath offered itself and went deeper into his lungs and mind. So Hutch walked forward, found the lid on a flat rock and closed the urn. He hadn’t anticipated having a handsome empty pot to keep or destroy. Smash it on the rocks. Leave it here with the dust. That would break the enormous quiet around them. Give it to Raven. Hutch actually held it out before him to see if the boy would ask to have it.

  By then though Raven had seen a red salamander on the moss and was watching it closely.

  It eyed him back more urgently than any two eyes had watched him till now.

  Hutch gave the boy another few seconds, then said “We need to climb back and head for home.”

  Raven said “There’s four states between here and my home.”

  Hutch could smile. “Then we need to ball the jack.” Again he offered the boy his hand, and they climbed carefully up the steep valley and on through gradually thinning trees—through Hutch’s racing thoughts of a lifetime, long lifetimes behind him, the unseen future—till open ground was no more than fifty feet ahead, still flat under unblocked pounding sun. Hutch paused there, mainly to catch his breath.

  Raven waited beside him, staring ahead.

  Hutch finally said “You ready?”

  “For what?” The great dark eyes went to Hutch again.

  “Oh for life to start.”

  “Man, it’s started,” Raven said. “I’m near about grown.”

  There was more than a grain of truth in that, Hutch well understood. This boy might never come back here again; they actually might not meet again. However hard Hutch might want to see Raven through the years, that was Ivory’s choice and must never be seized without her full assent and blessing. Now, this instant, is all you know you’ll get on Earth. So Hutch bent and set the urn at the foot of a monumental beech, a giant elephant’s leg. He slid old Rob’s gold ring from his right hand, reached silently out, won Raven’s consent and slid it onto the boy’s left thumb.

  Raven studied the wide band, still several sizes too large for his hand. He turned it slowly as if he already knew its power, the rune that perfectly worked its strength to bind whole lives and outride time. Not looking to Hutch, Raven almost whispered “You trying to say this is mine to keep?”

  “Yours to keep or give away or fling in the sea.”

  “I live in Sea Cliff, you know that, right?”

  “I do,” Hutch said. “I’ll know it forever.”

  Still not looking up, the boy said “Thank you.”

  “You may want to let your mother keep it safe till your hand grows to fit it.”

  Raven agreed to that. “It won’t be long.”

  Hutch said “I bet it’ll feel like forever, but really you’re right. It’ll come very quick.”

  The boy’s smile broke out against his resistance, one of the last bursts of uncrossed joy he’d feel till his own middle age. He turned that actual beam on Hutch, said “Roll right on!” and pointed ahead.

  For the first time since the
line came to him last month at the crossroad mechanic’s, Hutch suddenly knew he’d build a poem from the first given words. A second, a third, and part of a fourth line clicked into place here.

  This child knows the last riddle and answer.

  They wait far back in these mineshaft eyes

  Till he concedes your right to know them,

  Which may be never.

  No other actual words arrived, neither riddle nor answer and no firm sense of a shapely life on a page of print or a possible length, just the strong assurance Hutch had barely known since his first mature poems—that a thoroughly sizable living creature was forming down in him, below his sight or natural vision. The creature would surface in its own time and cut its own path.

  Not that a single poem, however deep, would count for much in whatever scale his life hung from or would hang from at the end. An honorable piece of handiwork anyhow, a clean piece of carving to set in the long American gallery of cigar-store Indians and Abe Lincoln busts. That much, if no more. The only other thing Hutch knew, here on the final edge of shade, was that somehow the poem would resurrect Wade in words more durable than any of his kin and join him finally with this likable child. The prospect felt like strength enough for days to come; and Raven’s eyes were still fixed on him, still ready to guide.

  So whoever they’d be for one another in the years between here and Raven’s full manhood or Hutch’s death, the two of them went on, hand in hand, through the last of the shade and broke into blinding clean sunlight. Though their stunned eyes saw only wavering heat and the withering grass, all that lay beyond Hutch and his new kin seemed to them both their only goal—Grainger’s, the main house, the durable oaks, whatever people had waited them out, the car that would drive them south to the airport and part them again for months or for good. They could hardly see to walk toward shade and find the others to say they’d done one duty at least—one man’s return to the bottomless ground; maybe even a family’s end, its story told—but they looked on forward and took the first steps.

  REYNOLDS PRICE

  REYNOLDS PRICE was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated in the public schools of his native state, he earned an A.B. summa cum laude from Duke University. In 1955 he traveled as a Rhodes Scholar to Merton College, Oxford University to study English literature. After three years and the B. Litt. degree, he returned to Duke where he continues in his fourth decade of teaching. He is James B. Duke Professor of English.

  In 1962 his novel A Long and Happy Life appeared. It received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel and has never been out of print. Since, he has published more than two dozen books. Among them, his novel Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. His Collected Stories appeared in 1993; he has also published volumes of poems, plays, essays, translations, and two volumes of memoir, Clear Pictures and A Whole New Life. The latter is his account of a ten-year survival of spinal cancer.

  His television play Private Contentment was commissioned by “American Playhouse” and appeared in its premiere season on PBS. His trilogy of plays New Music premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1989; and its three plays have been produced throughout the country, as has a newer play, Full Moon, his sixth.

  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his books have appeared in sixteen languages.