The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Leah looked at Philip Adger’s picture again. “Mr. Sample paid good money for this? Then he’s truly loaded.”

  Every assaulted nerve down the length of both Mabry’s legs was roaring now; and for the first time, he was fully convinced. Baxter Sample is gone.

  But the canvas held Leah more closely than further news about lawyers. She followed Mabry’s lead and felt the surface gently, intent as any blind girl in serious need of instruction. At last she looked up and said “Is there much of a picture under all this—fudge?”

  Mabry smiled. “Or peanut butter. But do they make either one in France? If Mr. Sample’s alive, he’ll have to see it before I decide on how to proceed. Between you and me, now that I see this, I’m not at all sure he’ll want to fork out my standard fee for a clean-and-varnish job. If it were mine, I doubt I would. I might just hang it somewhere in a half-dim corner of the kitchen and call it a dubious relic of a bibulous visit to a Left Bank hotel.”

  Leah said “So you don’t believe an American boy painted this while poor Mr. Van Gogh shot himself?” Plainly she knew a little, at least, about the event.

  Mabry registered that but pushed to tell her more. “It’s sometimes one of my jobs to be a stubborn doubter, when a client thinks he’s found a cheap treasure that’s just a cheap fake (and I’ve bought the occasional fake myself when it proved truly fine—I’ve got a fake Renoir that beats a third of the genuine Renoirs I’ve ever cleaned; and I’ve cleaned fifty thousand, or so it feels sometimes when I’m brought another adorable Renoir girl in Easter finery). All I know about Philip Adger at present—and I just read a new life of Van Gogh—is that Auvers did indeed sport a number of resident American would-be painters at the time of Vincent’s death. The old woman who runs the hotel told Mr. Sample that her long-dead father-in-law was the boy himself and that he’d kept the picture behind the hotel desk till his death some forty years ago. Then her own husband took it down and stored it in the cellar. Late one night, while Mr. Sample was staying there—he always stayed in little dark hotels where he tended to run across interesting souls or so he claimed—he and the woman somehow began to talk about Impressionist painters, and she told him the story of her father-in-law’s contact with Vincent. As a boy, young Philip had gone with his wealthy parents from steamy Charleston to cool Auvers, precisely to paint—the whole family were amateur painters, and the father was even more ambitious than the rest. None of them had the slightest knowledge of who Monsieur Vincent Van Gogh was or where he lived—I mean, nobody knew him, not even in France. You know he was Dutch; he’d never sold a painting and barely would, not while he drew breath. Anyhow Baxter Sample offered to buy this picture, sight unseen once he heard the story, and he gave the woman his trusting personal check on the spot. She told him she’d have to hunt it down but would ship it right away. It didn’t arrive for several months, which is when he asked me to turn up and claim it on my way home from Italy. I think he’d begun to suspect she meant to abscond with his funds and keep the picture. I met her all right. She’s the kind of monstrous crone of a sort Paris specializes in. I stood her down, though; and she coughed up the picture. But as you say, it’s hardly a picture.”

  Leah had already found a roll of masking tape and was setting the canvas back into its wrappings.

  Mabry stopped her for one more look at the painter’s card. “Philip Adger—” He said it in French first—Ad-jay—then in English, Adger to rhyme with badger. “It’s a Charleston name all right. I knew an Adger from Charleston in college, and I know his father was rich as Croesus; but they couldn’t have painted a basement door, much less a landscape.”

  By then the parcel was wrapped again. Leah was standing across the table, facing Mabry with a combination of a wary child’s What next? and a young woman’s frank readiness for whatever came.

  Mabry went so far—she was that lovely now—as to list in silence the dangers involved in reaching toward her. The table was narrow. Even without her reaching toward him, he could brush at least the back of her hand. But how could he stop that process if his interest was shared? He was not a firm believer (nor a full-fledged doubter); but he actually spoke his relief out loud—“No, thank God.”

  And Leah seemed partly to understand. Whether she’d offered him a single thing more, she nodded and looked to the watch on her arm. “Oh crumbs, it’s two o’clock!” In another three seconds, she’d opened the kitchen door to leave. At the final moment, she turned, faced him once more; and when he only waved, she blew him a kiss that likely meant no more than the XXs and OOs at the ends of school valentines.

  Yet, as she left, Mabry felt he’d made one more of the billion mistakes of his life—the stingy denials he’d learned to make in a Protestant minister’s household fifty years ago. Granted, I’m a year or two older than her father, but more than a few girls wouldn’t turn down a kindly cuddle with a substitute dad who’d promise to vanish in a day or two. Oh, go to bed, Mabry—your own safe bed, you sleazy bugger. You’re a fifty-three-year-old piece of damaged goods that the worst raddled whore wouldn’t stretch out for, much less this pure girl (maybe not pure as the driven snow; but when was the driven snow pure, here lately, traffic and pollution being what it is?). She could almost be your grandchild anyhow; and here you’re baying at her as if she were a harvest moon—and all at the end of a day when your country had its throat cut, right through to the spine.

  At least he was all but exhausted now, and going through the minimal rites of preparation for sleep had sandbagged him further. But once he’d finally switched off the pink-beribboned bedside lamp at 2:38, Mabry wasn’t too tired to feel what he’d felt at the end of his conversation with Tasker—an actual longing to see the old man and a sudden chill of fright that his father might die before Mabry reached him and said whatever he might find to say. Is there one last single thing that needs saying? As best he could, that near sunrise this far toward the Arctic, Mabry racked his brain. Nothing volunteered as remotely urgent—Which truly means nothing in a mind as wild as mine is now. Then, even on his thin hard Nova Scotian pillow, he was gone in a perfectly harmless dream—not murderous Muslims, not even a pit bull dog as unpredictable as his nearest neighbor’s (a bull named Rodney).

  Two

  9 . 13 . 2001

  9 . 14 . 2001

  As he turned his rented van over the tracks, Mabry waited for the comforting lift and thump of iron rails beneath him. But he crossed as smoothly as a rowboat on a pond. Damn, these new cars have got plush shock absorbers! When he slowed and looked back through the mirror, he reminded himself. Maybe five years ago the railroad had come through and torn up the tracks from here to Raleigh, more than sixty miles. They could ship the old iron to Japan for scrap and let these little railroad towns die.

  As he moved on forward, the Methodist church was there in place, with the tacky steeple his cousin had donated thirty years ago. It sat on the honest squat brick building like a well-earned dunce cap, but any one of the three new houses in the grove of oaks that stretched past the church—the site of his play in a childhood happier than he tended to recall—would make a feasible vacation house for occasional visits to the scenes of his youth. A hundred yards more, though; and Mabry braced himself for his goal.

  He hadn’t seen the homeplace in nearly three years; and he’d heard sad reports of neglect and rot and the depredations of migrant workers, here for a season of tobacco or pulpwood, renting the old place and mailing their savings back to families in Mexico or Guatemala. As he pulled into the drive, though, the first impression was better than he’d feared. The tin roof had rusted in broad streaks, some palings were gone from the long porch rail, and the porch floor seemed to be rotting in spots. Still, as he stopped, the low rambling house felt like the only home he’d known, despite the fact that—even since leaving his father’s various parish housing as he headed toward college—he’d lived in at least a dozen rented slots. Well, his father had more than hinted at that deep rootedness, two nights ago.

>   And in fact this was home. Though Mabry was born in a bright bedroom in the far west wing, and though his father brought the family here for the rare times he could leave his parishes, the only substantial stretches Mabry had spent in the house were a visit approaching two months each summer with Tasker’s mother, whom the boy loved without reservation—from maybe age five till the jaws of puberty closed around him, hauling him off to the fleshpots of Raleigh or Nags Head or Myrtle Beach. What made it home was a small set of things, most of them people—in addition to his Kincaid grandmother, there were always the black men and women who’d made it possible for her to live, and a small clutch of neighbors. The other vast component was solitude—aloneness and silence in the green fragrant depths that lay not more than five hundred yards in any direction from the bed he was born in: growths of oak and pine, hickory and sycamore, endless yards of honeysuckle and thickets of cow itch and poison ivy that often gripped the finest trees in vines as thick as a growing boy’s wrist. Mabry wondered, as he sat now, What child in ten million has such gifts today? Silence and lone time—ultimate blessings on Earth at least. For all his real errors, the ones that had left lasting hurt on his family, it was still the time in solitude here that had taught him whatever good he’d known and done.

  Then he killed the engine and waited another slow moment as the late sun crept through the window and bathed his face and arms, a private welcome. He could sit here till dark, easily, letting the jangles of a day in the air between Nova Scotia, Baltimore, and Raleigh-Durham bake away before he tackled the Reverend Kincaid, guns loaded (doubtless) and in a new wheelchair with an otherwise unknown woman at his side. Mabry took his new Italian eyeshades and looked through the thirty yards toward the front door.

  There in what looked like dark bell-bottom trousers and a man’s white dress shirt, with the tail hung out, stood a tall woman with skin the color of mocha ice cream and a long plait of black hair over one shoulder. She was holding a broom upright like a battle tool; and her big eyes were drilling the space between them with no apparent effort—the face was neutral, not smiling or frowning. Would the broom convert, with ease, into a shotgun or sprout with early fall red roses or four-inch thorns? Mabry tried to laugh but, when he reached to open his door, for the first time ever he felt uneasy to touch this ground. Some weird but unmistakable signal from the base of his brain seemed to say the ground wasn’t there or that he wouldn’t feel it if his foot went out. But when he put his whole weight on it—yes it was there, simple earth. Thank God.

  As he walked toward the porch, the woman came forward a slow two paces. Then she held her own. Within five seconds she looked like a handsome natural object somehow grown by the boards she stood on—that natural, in place, guaranteed to last. And by now her face had turned against him.

  When Mabry reached the white river rocks that paved a landing at the foot of the steps—the rocks that Mabry and his brother had brought here one Labor Day forty years ago—he felt a shock of the energy generated by this woman’s frown. Maybe a good fight could start here and now and clear the air. It was maybe what he needed, after all the suspensions and doubts of these recent days. He climbed the four steps, moved carefully over the few rotten porch planks and got to within almost an arm’s reach of the woman before he stopped. “Miss Thornton?”

  “Ms. Thornton, yes.” The face was a sturdy blend of the watchful strength of the local African genes and the local English/Scottish/Welsh with their forthright guile. The eyes were the killer.

  All his life, Mabry had heard of golden eyes. This woman’s eyes were a shade of old gold. Or numerous shades. The irises were larger than any he recalled; and from where he stood, the gold was edged with strokes of brown and what he thought were dots of an emerald green—he was that close to her. She held her place so he took a step back.

  The eyes were searching his entire body like an almost comically avid squad of the new police who were already gathering to frisk the country fiercely in the wake of its alien devastation.

  Mabry tried to smile but couldn’t. He said “You don’t seem to know me, do you?”

  “That’s correct, sir. Have you got some business here?” She lowered the broom that had been upright.

  It was the voice that had seemed so strange on the phone two nights ago. And coming from this blended face, even the few tense words seemed familiar, though more carefully schooled than nine-tenths of the whole population. But when her eyes hadn’t begun to relent, he finally said “I’m Reverend Kincaid’s only son, his only living child. Ms. Thornton, I’m Mabry.” He held out his right hand.

  She was in no hurry to take it, if ever. She studied it, though, through the distance between them. She might have been reading his creases and folds and finding only lies lies lies.

  Mabry had never touched a woman with the least thought of violence, but now he quickly assessed this woman’s standing position. She was only two inches shorter than he; but no question, she was lean as a finely polished gun-stock. Very likely her strength was an honest match for his, give or take a little gouging—especially with all his recent weirdness in body and mind. And she clearly saw herself as a paid security guard for the place and the wheelchaired man behind her indoors. Yet she had no pockets in her trousers. She couldn’t be packing any serious weapons. Mabry wondered Am I game for a few seconds’ tangling? But then he shook himself. You’re a full-grown white man, with a master’s degree in art conservation; and here you’re planning to tackle an impressive young black woman? You’re exhausted, boy, and more than half crazy—this woman didn’t even know you were coming.

  Still, this was his homeplace as much as his father’s. Audrey knew who he was; he’d claim his own rights. So he slowly walked past her, and she didn’t reach to stop him. He opened the screen door and stepped up the one step into Tasker’s dim front hall. Despite all the years, and the mixed lot of tenants in the recent past, the smells in the air were still familiar and surprisingly welcome—a likable bookish mustiness, the light-colored smells of flour and meal, maybe buttermilk and okra. But when he heard nothing, and when the woman didn’t come in behind him, he called out “Pa?”

  No answer at all.

  Once his eyes had opened to the indoor dark, Mabry slowly walked toward the back of the house. The hall was nearly thirty feet long, and the pictures on either side were windows into Mabry’s childhood. He’d often thought that his early plan to be a painter and, failing that, a patient caretaker of damaged old pictures had dawned in the presence of these few almost-amateur paintings—the five-foot lady-angel with her single impossibly long-stemmed lily offered to someone outside the frame, the inexplicably cross-eyed buck elk posed with would-be menace in a deep snowdrift at sunset, the piney branch with a cluster of cones and the state’s official toast—

  Here’s to the land of the long leaf pine,

  The summer land where the sun doth shine,

  Where the weak grow strong and strong grow great,

  Here’s to “Down Home,” the Old North State!

  Then came the wide span of family photographs that stretched back at least to the Civil War and paused with the beautiful face of his brother Gabe and the mother whom Mabry still bitterly missed every day of his life. The Latino tenants had been kind to the pictures. Aren’t country people always?

  Then he was at the open door of what used to be the kitchen. When he entered, it still seemed to be a working kitchen. And the air here was brighter, though no lights were on. Only now did the fullness of the fact press on him—This may not work out the way I planned. He hadn’t phoned his father to say he’d made this last-minute choice to fly here today instead of New York. After the one conversation with Tasker, Mabry had thought he’d check on the local situation and give Manhattan time to sort out at least a few strands of its present confusion before he faced whatever had happened to his studio (it was also where he’d lived and slept for the past four years).

  But oddly the thought of its total destruction—total seem
ed unlikely—didn’t hurt as much as he might have expected. On the contrary, when he’d paused to consider how he’d feel if he got reliable word that his entire building was ruined past salvage, he might feel remarkably younger and lighter. That was part of why he was standing here in Wells today. If anything remained of his loft—a few good sticks of furniture, a dozen or more admirable pictures, a life-size Roman copy of a Greek torso of the Venus Anadyomene (which he was still trying to believe was genuine but which a smart friend claimed had been made in Naples by yet another friend twenty years ago)—if any of that was still intact, he could give it to his daughter with the greatest ease. Tasker at least would applaud the gesture as conforming to the will of God, while others (even Charlotte) might see it as one more expensive show-off—an imitation Buddhist event.

  Again he said “Pa?” No answer. Well, if Tasker was alive and in this house, he’d hardly be angry to be surprised by his one close kinsman. Hadn’t the Reverend Tasker Kincaid long since earned an old-aged calm from a lifetime’s duty in sanctuaries where dead-drunk vestrymen keeled over at the altar rail, strewing whole plates of communion wafers, and buck-naked choir ladies occasionally lurked in the organ pipes to lure a beloved clergyman aside for a frantic merger? So this time Mabry raised his voice distinctly, broadcasting each syllable as if it were an urgent seed to feed starving children. “Reverend Kincaid, urgent help is required.” It was not an entirely untrue announcement.

  And in fact it worked. From closer by than Mabry expected, the most memorable voice in a lifetime of voices said “Pitiful Hotdog, how did you get here in this week of woes? God bless your sinful hide.” Then the usual chuckle.

  It seemed to come from the newest bedroom in the house, the one Uncle Buddy had built ninety years ago when his young wife died. Bereft, Bud meant to move in with his niece, Mabry’s grandmother; but when he was told the awful truth—that there were truly no available beds in the packed house—he turned up the next day with two black men. And in under three weeks they built him a sizable room with numerous doors and windows (Bud was claustrophobic and required as many fire escapes as the laws of stable architecture could permit).