The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Mabry walked past the kitchen table to the door that opened on the bedroom. Compared to what he’d seen of other rooms, passing through the hall, the atmosphere here felt habitable. The walls were unstreaked by rain or age, the old tan rug was mainly intact, Uncle Bud’s engravings of scenes from the tales of Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton were in their places trapped behind wavy glass. There were—Mabry counted—six windows that ran from floor to ceiling. No curtains or shades, so the evening light fell mercifully in. Bud’s old iron double bed, still painted white, was made up to strict hospital standards. But Mabry looked all around and saw no trace of any live human. He turned to face the kitchen again. “Sir?”

  At last Tasker said “You’re way too old to call me sir.” He was tucked in the farthest corner in his wheelchair—a clean pale-blue shirt, open at the neck (a major concession to slacker fashion), and dark gray trousers. He was almost smiling, a far better sight than even his only child had expected.

  Mabry went straight toward him and dropped to his haunches to be at eye level.

  Tasker reached for his son’s neck—the too-long hair—and pulled him inward. For a long time, he rocked his chin in the crown of Mabry’s head. Then not releasing him, Tasker said “Which one of us now is the Prodigal Son?”

  It puzzled Mabry. He knew the famous parable, and he’d more than once thought of himself as the son who ran out on his father and surrendered himself to riotous living. But Tasker had never been remotely riotous, except in his wit. So what was his father’s uncertainty now? When Tasker’s grip slackened, Mabry leaned back and said “Prodigal’s hardly the word for you, Pastor.”

  Tasker said “Did you know pastor means shepherd in Greek?”

  “I think you’ve mentioned that before, a few thousand times.”

  Tasker smiled. “Does that make you a sheep?”

  Mabry said “A lamb anyhow—a tough old bunged-up lamb but still learning.”

  Tasker laughed. “I very much hope you are. A few times you’ve tried to impersonate a ram. I’ve heard that rumor anyhow. Am I badly wrong?”

  Mabry ignored the ram joke (too true to discuss) and pushed ahead on the prodigal line. “How have you turned prodigal, Pa?”

  Tasker took his time, deciding whether to answer. Then he pointed behind him toward the kitchen and grinned his patented grin, the live equivalent of sunrise over Bryce Canyon or Yosemite. And then he whispered “Audrey was sleeping in your old room, but we had a deluge while you were in Rome, and she woke up soaked—the roof sprang a leak. So I urged her to move her bed closer by. She sleeps in the kitchen now, in sound of my voice. I really needed that. See, once you lay me down at night, with this broken ankle, I’m like an upended turtle on the Interstate—” He paused as if for some subtle effect, then grinned again.

  Mabry was still hunkered down by the wheelchair. He hadn’t noticed a cot in the kitchen, but now he was actually testing his brain. Is this as peculiar as it sounds? Can the old fellow mean what I think he means? Mabry’s mother had died twelve years ago, ending an apparently ideal marriage. Tasker had never so much as hinted at subsequent rumpy-pumpy with the church ladies, however fervently devoted to his welfare several had been.

  And Tasker was among the few Protestant ministers in the whole upper South, not to mention the Deep, who’d steadily spoken from the pulpit against racial injustice. He’d lost two churches—and been forced to move his family—for that indubitable brand of Christianity. Surely now he hadn’t somehow persuaded this woman to join him after dark. But what else could these recharged grins begin to suggest?

  Mabry leaned forward again, took his father’s earlobe, and asked a question that was maybe forty percent serious. “Who’s the president of the United States—today, right now?” He knew that was often the first question asked in emergency rooms to test a patient’s sanity.

  Tasker plainly knew the same. But with a suddenly blank face, he said “Grover Cleveland, praise the Lord.”

  Mabry said “I voted for him too and proud to have done so, even if he did have a bastard child.” Before any more could pass between them, both men heard ice rumbling in the kitchen. Mabry stood and took a minute to look round the room again. At his first look, he’d failed to check for any signs of Audrey in the room. And now he saw nothing, not till his father noticed him checking and pointed toward the mantel.

  There, on the dark honey-colored heart pine, were two photographs, maybe six by eight, in dimestore brass frames—two teenage boys who were clearly kin to Audrey, one maybe three years older than the other. Despite the fact that they were plainly school pictures, in the saturated colors of mass-produced photos, Mabry could see that their skin matched hers for color and grain; and their eyes were an even brighter gold. The younger boy’s picture had a small Christmas sticker in the lower right corner, a thorny rose with a deep crimson bloom, all but funeral-black. The only thing that might have made him wonder about the boys’ genes were their outright smiles. They were both grinning, broad and easy, with heads tilted slightly back. But he’d yet to see Audrey part her lips except in the taut words she’d said on the porch.

  And between the two pictures was the only object which Mabry recalled as belonging to his father, the crucifix Tasker had bought on his college trip to Palestine in 1938. It was maybe nine inches tall, pale olive wood with the body of Christ in handcarved ivory. No other corpus known to Mabry in all his studies of Western art, even the terrible Grünewald Christ, could compare with what this anonymous carver had made to clarify the plain fact that a human body can be forced to suffer almost to the limits of imagination—almost but not quite. This six-inch-tall man, pegged to real wood, was being asked—through the past sixty-three years at least (and counting)—to bear an agony to end all agonies.

  Then behind Mabry, a fine voice spoke. “Mr. Kincaid, will you be dining with your father?”

  Dining was not quite what Mabry had in mind. But he turned toward the woman’s voice; and before he could say so again, his father said “Audrey, this man is my beloved son.”

  Mabry registered the word beloved with some surprise, so he didn’t offer his hand again, but Audrey came forward offering hers.

  He took it then gladly—a warm dry palm and the faint smell of maybe rosemary (could it be?). Whatever, she was plainly at home in this room, this pleasant air. Otherwise, why are her sons’ pictures in here?

  Tasker said “Of course he’s eating here. He’s staying here too, as long as I can hold him. Where can we bunk him though? We got a dry bed?”

  Mabry suddenly thought to say “Oh Pa, I’ll bunk at the Creech Motel. I can see things here are in fairly bad shape.”

  Audrey smiled for the first time, the same broad spread that her two sons showed in the pictures behind her. The smile partly sweetened what she chose to say next. “Bad shape? Mr. Kincaid, you ever see my grandmother Cooter’s house in the years she worked here?”

  Tasker’s voice went into a tender pitch that Mabry could hardly remember hearing. “That’s ancient news. That’s behind you, Audrey.”

  And Audrey took it, for now at least. Her eyes shut, hard.

  Mabry thought I very much doubt she’s flushing that away. But he said “Yes ma’m. I recall Cooter’s house vividly. No hyena should have had to live there.”

  So she faced him. Remnants of her smile were still in place, and she said “I’ll fix you a private room. The mattress is old but you know that—you were born on it, weren’t you?”

  Surely she was too young to know such a fact. “I was,” Mabry said, “but how did you know?”

  “Old Cooter,” she said.

  Mabry said “You can’t have known Cooter, young as you are.”

  But by then she’d turned to face Tasker; and all she said was “Supper at the regular time, Father?”

  Tasker asked Mabry “How starved are you, son?”

  Mabry said “Those airline snacks are thinning out.”

  Audrey said “It’s four-thirty now. Is six still OK?”<
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  Her jaunty OK seemed to trigger a glitch in Mabry’s vision (in Mabry’s boyhood the word OK was frowned on by his father). So he saw two images of Audrey, both clearer than a moment before, though slightly overlapping. He waited to study the lines of her face.

  So Tasker said “Son, is six too early for a metropolitan like you?”

  Mabry came back to normal. “Oh no, Pa. Please. Any time’s good with me.” He looked to Aubrey again and said “Ms. Thornton, I hope you’ll be joining us. I’d like to know you.”

  Her chin tucked down in a firm assertion of her prior place here. “I plan to, Mr. Kincaid. Your father wants me.”

  As she moved out of sight, Tasker cleared his throat theatrically. When Mabry looked toward him, he gave a blank wink.

  Mabry couldn’t read it. Or wouldn’t let himself. If, again, it meant to loop him into some collusive knowledge of hijinks between this aged priest and a young black woman, with ties to this family’s ancient error, then Mabry wouldn’t bow to the loop. He said “Is there anything I can do for you, Pa, before I find this room Ms. Thornton is setting up for me?”

  Tasker spread both hands before him in the air, as though he’d levitate in a moment. But he stayed in place, gaining power by the instant in his son’s needy eyes. And the hands did beckon to Mabry once. Yet before Mabry could choose to go toward them, they slipped back down to the arms of the wheelchair. Tasker had only meant, again, to bless his first child. But that could wait till bedtime or, no doubt, morning when Mabry might leave him, likely forever. As his son left though, Tasker tried to whisper—whispering was almost impossible now for a long-term priest—“You smell mighty sweet. Nothing wrong with you. You’re not a sick man. I can see that from here.”

  Mabry wanted to believe him; so he said “Thank you, sir. I wish you were a doctor.”

  Tasker said “I’m better than a doctor.”

  They left it at that.

  For now, while Audrey was making the bed, which he’d helped her move from under the leak, Mabry went to the front hall and dialed a New York number. It was neither his daughter’s nor Baxter Sample’s nor the friend’s who lived above him on Rector Street but the number that—if it was working again—would instruct him to punch in a short set of codes. Then it would tell him, in canned tones, his current savings balance. He’d tried it last night from Nova Scotia but got the same automaton’s voice, saying “By tomorrow we hope to be up and running. Please call us then.”

  Mabry took his time now, got the numbers right, and yes the bank was running. His checking balance was $838.76, and his savings balance was $796,443.32.

  It’s actually come through. Christ, she truly did it. When the bank’s voice gave him the further option of pressing #1 and hearing the balances one more time, Mabry took the chance. The figures were the same, no hallucination. It was far more cash than he’d owned at one time in his whole past life, and the news left him stunned. Before he went to Europe, he’d paid all the taxes and arranged this deposit for future investment; but this was the first time he heard the net sum. All but frozen, he sat in the straight chair by the phone table. Mabry had never lived for money, not for five straight minutes; but the news crashed down on him now, a hot wave. He understood it could drown him in six weeks or bear him onward through whatever transformed hard new life would face him soon and everyone he honored in this newly bent world, only two days old. When he looked up, he could hear Audrey working in the bedroom he’d use. His bags were still in the car in the yard. He’d go get them.

  Once he was out of the front door, though, he was drawn toward the big tree standing straight ahead, almost at the road. Before he was born, lightning had struck it and stripped a wide tongue of bark off the trunk from top to bottom. Everyone told his grandmother to cut it down fast; it was sure to die. She’d said “So am I. Chop me down and haul me off at the same time then. You’re bound to save money.” More than fifty years later, the tree was healthy. The leaves were only beginning to redden for the winter rest. His grandmother saw him once in early childhood, straining to stretch his arms round the trunk, a hopeless ambition. She told him to quit. “But once you’re a man, then maybe you can ring it. That’s a reason to last.”

  Now he knew his arms would never grow another quarter inch; and they still couldn’t circle this solemn girth, though they tried it again. He stepped back to look at the lightning scar; and recalling how often he’d come here in boyhood and stroke the healing edges of the burn, he thought this was surely his introduction to the fact that the bland sky concealed real havoc. Was it one more reason the twin New York catastrophe, so near his loft and all he owned, seemed natural to him—as it plainly didn’t to so many of his countrymen? By now he’d sensed that neither his father nor Audrey Thornton, nor anyone he’d met in Nova Scotia, had shown any sign of really deep involvement in the huge event. Despite the big new TV in the corner, the awe hadn’t truly reached this house at least. And would it ever? Though New York called itself the Capital of the World, it was five hundred Interstate miles from here—maybe twenty minutes in a new fighter jet but numerous light-years otherwise (it was doubtless also the solar system’s capital of narcissism).

  Mabry himself, even he had yet to register the past few days as tragic, despite his still unmeasured losses. Forget his loft, who did he know who was dead in the rubble? And how many months or years would go on, bruised from this? How much callus was involved in his present numbness? How guilty were they all of simple indifference and normal self-absorption? Tasker and Audrey could tend their own consciences. Mabry had fewer genes for converting others to his own opinions than almost any human he knew; he very seldom gave a damn in that department. People in general could go their own way, just a good way out of his please. But his old first sureties were boring up from his heart to his mind as he stood here now. I’m nothing still but a soft-brained ex-hippie, aging and alone and with no more banners or placards to carry. As a joke for himself alone, he hugged the tree and, sure enough, found he’d need at least one good-sized child to fill the space he couldn’t engulf. He laid his head against the warm bark and hoped he could hear the kind of life he could hear in plants—and the rest of nature, local non-human mammals included—when he was a boy, staying here in the summers. No sound at all now, not at first anyhow.

  Then a deep welcome voice came from a distance—“Mr. Mabry?”

  Tired as he was, he knew it couldn’t be coming from the tree. But he tried to think of the very few people still alive here who even knew him, and it didn’t sound like any of them. The use of Mister with just his first name seemed to mean some older black person, surely not proud Audrey. His head and body were concealed from the house, though his hands might show; but some trace of playfulness had seeped into him. He pulled his hands back, meaning to hide.

  Then the voice said “I see you. I can see through almost anything but rock.” It had also risen to an almost playful pitch.

  He looked and it was Audrey after all. She was on the porch, at the outside door that led straight to his bedroom, and was spreading an antique blanket on the railing. He remembered it from way back, a dark green favorite from his early boyhood. Though she hadn’t smiled yet, she seemed to be waiting for him.

  He trotted on toward her, paused ten feet away and said “Did you know that’s my world’s-favorite blanket? Is something wrong with it?”

  “Not a thing,” she said. “I just washed it this morning. Let it lie here till bedtime, to get good and dry. Can’t have you sleeping under any damp cover. My grandmother said that would give you arthuralis.”

  At the sound of Cooter’s word for arthritis, Mabry recalled her saying it a thousand times when she was surely past eighty years old—bending over at the woodstove door as she watched a blackberry cobbler bubbling or stooping to a puppy’s mess on the porch. When did Cooter die? He knew he hadn’t attended her funeral, and he couldn’t recall the last time he saw her. He said “You got any idea when old Cooter died?”

&nb
sp; Audrey barely paused. “August twenty-seventh, 1966. Four-thirty in the afternoon, hot as boiled Hell.”

  “Surely you can’t remember.”

  Audrey looked down on him, shook herself hard as if ditching a burden, then smiled toward the empty road beyond them. “I remember. I was there, playing paper dolls at her feet. By then she thought I was her own baby, though I was at least her great-grandchild. I think I was three or four years old. She was over a hundred. Nobody really knew how much over.”

  Mabry’s math was always weak, but now he felt sure his sum was right. Audrey had to be near forty years old, though she looked in good shape for five years younger. Surely then he’d known, or seen, her in her childhood. He said “Aren’t we bound to have known each other long before now?”

  She shook her head slowly. “I very much doubt it. My mother was compelled to raise me in D.C. We didn’t get down here except for short visits, and I don’t think I ever set foot in this house till two fast weeks ago. At least I don’t recall it.” She actually turned then and looked at the length of the house behind her, as if trying to place it in her early life. Her hands had stayed on the railing though, atop the green blanket.

  By then Mabry had moved almost within reach. He was suddenly driven to take the last step and cover her hands. Not that he knew what the gesture meant. God knew he was lonesome. In Rome he’d had one long but fairly chaste night in bed with an old friend from graduate school, a woman from Texas who’d risen so far in art conservation that she managed to make a good living in Italy, an all but incredible achievement. But she was the only woman he’d touched in anything resembling outright desire since awhile before his ex-wife needed his presence by her deathbed. He’d made a silent vow, there beside Frances Kincaid, to lay off sex till he’d seen her through to death (his infidelities had ruined their marriage). And somehow the vow had extended now through nearly half a year. So nothing in Audrey—fine as she was—had stoked sex in him, not yet anyhow.