The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Mabry also looked up. Though he’d lain on his back a good deal here lately, he’d failed to notice again one of the favorite stains of his youth—the perfect profile of Alexander the Great created on the ceiling by nothing more sinister than the gradual inward creep of rusty rainwater long decades ago. He pointed it out to Marcus. “Ever notice that man?”

  Marcus clearly hadn’t but now he studied it slowly. “Kin people of yours?”

  Mabry laughed, then thought it through. “Given what we’ve learned about human genetics and kinship lately, I’m trusting the answer is ‘very likely.’It’s an excellent profile of Alexander the Great.”

  Whether Marcus knew Alexander’s features as fully as Mabry, he still said “It is.”

  Mabry said “You know a lot about him, do you?” He’d hardly said the last word before he was ashamed.

  But Marcus merely said “I know he was a murdering drunkard who captured the known world and died at about the same age as Jesus.”

  Trumped! Mabry looked down again at Marcus’s parcel. “So this is safe to touch?”

  “Yes and it’s for you.”

  Mabry took it. It was lighter than its size hinted at. “Do I open it now?”

  Marcus said “It won’t open itself. Need some help?” But he smiled.

  Mabry motioned toward the rocker for Marcus to sit. Then he sat on his bed and slowly undid the very carefully bound-up parcel. At last he got down to what felt like a plywood panel, maybe ten by twelve, in numerous layers of green tissue paper.

  Marcus said “I know Christmas is a long way off, but that’s all the padding I could find for your gift.”

  Mabry said “My gift? Son, what have I done to earn a present from a man that works as hard as you do and has got a kid of his own to keep?”

  Marcus took up a shirt of Mabry’s from the rocker, laid it as gently on the bed as if it were a worthy living creature, and returned to sit. When he’d rocked himself a time or two, he looked to Mabry. “Two things about me to keep in mind, if you’re keeping me there—first, my daughter Master lives in Durham with her sweet mother, that wants to know as little as possible about me and mine; second, I stabbed my baby brother in a bad piece of business, right on the street in Baltimore; and third, don’t forget I’m a man that almost never had a father. Careful then about calling me son too many times a day. I might get out of line a lot faster than either one of us could handle—you or me.”

  The single phrase almost never had a father caught Mabry at once, even more than the word about Marc’s young brother; but he felt he shouldn’t lean on it, not yet—not after his own father’s claim in the graveyard today. So he started on the parcel, as carefully as Marcus had laid his shirt down. When he reached further layers of white tissue paper, his left eye suddenly began to flash within—the yellow and orange explosions that he couldn’t control. For the umpteenth time he thought a thing he mostly felt was silly—Signals from somewhere. But if so, he was a long way from knowing who was sending them and why and what they said. Mabry paused and looked up to the far wall—maybe distance would help him.

  Marcus said “Don’t stop. I got to know what you think here fast. Excuse me for not being able to wait.” With both hands he shooed Mabry onward.

  With the eye still beaming its likely meaningless but harmful beaconry, Mabry found the taped edges and worked them open with—by now—a lot of the expectation of a Christmas child, though a child in the grip of fear and pain which he knew he must hide from the nearest adult. What first appeared was the panel’s blank side—blank except for four short lines of writing, apparently in normal fountain-pen ink. As Mabry tried to read it, the bursts of light began to fade; and he was so nearly sure of his vision that he said out loud what he thought he could see.

  “Two grown men hoping they get better in time.

  From M. Thornton to M. Kincaid

  September 15th, 2001 with a lot of hope

  for help in both directions.”

  He looked up at Marcus. “Did I read it right?”

  Marcus grinned. “Word perfect.” But when Mabry simply kept staring at the words, Marcus said with a quiet impatience “Turn the sucker over.”

  Mabry did. At first it seemed almost like a monotone panel, three tones of blue on the light side of navy. He was all but certain he was missing something big but why? His eye wasn’t beaming. Am I going blind though? Still, something kept him from looking to Marcus for further guidance. So he brought the panel closer to his face, ten inches from his eyes. Ah there. It was a picture, yes—entirely in dark blues, of two grown men from the crowns of their heads to just above their waists. Neither one of them seemed to wear a shirt or jacket. It could easily have been a Wanted poster of two grown guys, except that they were bare to the waist for some unknown reason. Not looking to Marcus, Mabry tilted the panel to catch the late light. Oh Jesus, it’s us—Marcus and I. Then he did look up. “Christ, son, thank you. When the hell did you do this?”

  Marcus was solemn but mainly pleased. “I sat up most of last night to finish it, after we got back from Raleigh—once I could think about what we said, the worst we had done in our whole lives. I figured I’d paint a kind of police picture of the two of us together—Wanted, don’t you know?” He took a long pause, then burst out in helpless laughter.

  Mabry joined him but returned to the picture. The likeness of each face was remarkable; and if anything, his own face was more like itself than Marcus’s. How’d he manage that? He said “Were you working from photographs? Surely not just your memory.”

  Marcus said “No, my memory. I wouldn’t even let myself go to the mirror. It just seems like my right hand can see things, long enough to paint the outline anyhow. Then I fill in the details mainly by guessing.”

  Mabry said “You don’t need any help from me. You’re off and running, man. And thank you indeed.”

  Marcus stood. “I guessed you would be leaving soon to head back north. So I wanted to show you a sample of what I can do in case you meet anybody up there that could use my hands. I also wanted to show you my thanks.”

  “For what? I haven’t done a damned thing for you.”

  “No, but you gave me some faith in myself, just taking me seriously the last few days. And also giving my mom this good job, tending your dad.”

  Mabry said “Faith? Marc, I’ve known you—what?—seventy-odd hours? How did that help? And Audrey was hired by my independent pa, not me. I wish I could take some credit on either score but honest, I can’t.”

  Marcus waited to think it through carefully. Then he shrugged as inscrutably as if none of his suppositions had really mattered, or as if they’d mattered deeply but that he’d somehow survive their collapse. His young face was suddenly that masklike.

  Mabry hardly saw it; he was so genuinely interested in the painting. Nobody would call it brilliant, as a manipulation of acrylic pigments to produce a record of two men’s heads and faces. Yet as a pair of remembered likenesses it was startling, and Marc’s whole notion of producing a kind of Wanted image not only chimed with Mabry’s own first reaction but was also witty and more spot-on accurate in its aim than was immediately comforting. Mabry said “I think I’d better leave it down here till I find out how I stand in New York. My daughter’s letter, that I just got, says my neighborhood is in bad-looking shape.”

  Marcus said “I can take it back to Audrey’s place for safekeeping. Or we could just prop it up here on the mantelpiece till you get back.” While Mabry was grinning easily, Marcus was thinking again. Finally he lowered his voice as if any number of undesirable spies were just out of sight in the hall beyond them. “You’re never truly coming back here to stay, right?”

  Mabry couldn’t speak for a while—no question of tears or other deep feeling. He just didn’t know what answer was truest.

  So Marcus filled in. “Not a damned thing down here for you but a grave, not once your dad has passed on to his earnings—right?”

  His earnings? Mabry had never hear
d that phrase as a synonym for just deserts or Heaven or Hell, so he asked for a simple explanation.

  Marcus didn’t smile. “I think you know—whatever he’s earned from God or maybe just the ground he’ll lie in.” He pointed precisely in the direction of the white graveyard. “That ground’s mighty acid. I was down there one day when I was nine or ten and they were planning to dig a lady up and ship her to Philly where her grandson was living then. My uncle Whitlaw was one of the diggers, planning to get him a half a day’s work. But once they’d dug to the six-foot level and still hadn’t hit on any kind of coffin, they had no choice but to keep on going—it was mid-August and hot as cinders. Anyhow, they dug as far as eight feet down; and there was plain nothing. They’d buried that lady in a walnut box some thirty years before, and the ground had eat both her and the box. Nothing left but a handful of coffin nails and two gold teeth that the white man took—the boss that day. No bones nor nothing. So even if we niggers don’t have tombstones on most of the bodies in the black graveyard, at least I know that yall disappear as fast as us—underground anyhow.” When Marcus stopped, his face was lit in a way not shown in his painting.

  If an actual flame had sprung from his forehead and licked upward now for a moment, it wouldn’t have surprised Mabry at all.

  But then Marcus laughed again, not as uproariously as before but maybe sincerely. Even he may not have known at the time. He stood up then, took the picture from Mabry, and leaned it in the absolute center of the heart-pine mantel. There was nothing else there, so it spread its own force to all sides freely.

  Mabry said “A world of thanks, Marc.”

  Marcus couldn’t meet Mabry’s eyes at the moment; but he smiled to himself and said what came out more nearly as a thought than actual words—“Anything you say, Boss Man. It’s yours now.”

  Before Mabry could even turn and look, much less reject the old-time name Boss Man, Marcus was gone. When he looked, the rocking chair was utterly still, as though no one had sat there for days. It seemed a huge vacancy—a hole—in the room. Mabry needed company right at once. He also needed to phone Charlotte but not in the front hall, no chance of any privacy there. He’d drive into Sherwin, for that long at least.

  He left the house through the back-hall door, thinking he might get away unseen and maybe be back by suppertime—or maybe not. By the time he’d got almost to the car, he was more than half willing to hurt his father’s feelings. Tasker’s few words by Gabriel’s grave had only distanced Mabry more, by the hour, from a parent he’d only been able to honor—not to mention love—in short and uncontrollable bursts.

  When he got to the only pay phone he knew of in Sherwin, a black man was talking and a small mob of women were waiting to talk when the man was done (or were they yoked to him in some other way?—in his all-white wardrobe, he shined with a kind of magnetic chill, even in the warm late afternoon). It was five-fifteen; so Mabry decided to drive to the opposite end of town and loop back past his favorite houses, all ante-bellum and still in good shape, each no doubt housing a single white woman with just enough money to paint the white boards and the dark green blinds every five or six years and hire a black woman to fry her an egg and two strips of bacon by eight each morning, then make her an egg salad sandwich for lunch, then leave for the day once she’d washed a few “smalls” gently by hand and swept the porch.

  Why hasn’t the Holy Ghost burned every scrap of this town to the Earth, the way it burned Berlin and Dresden just three years before I was born? Alone in the car, Mabry laughed but then was far from sure the thought was crazy. Could anybody argue seriously that slavery had ended? And if not, then what about the devastation, four days ago, on Manhattan Island? Were we meant to read it—feel it, taste it—as partial payment anyhow on the nation’s accounts? Of course we were but who the hell would?

  Instead of turning back toward the pay phone, Mabry chose to roll on out of town; and in twenty minutes he was lying in deep grass by Dameron’s Mill Pond—not another soul in sight and no sound at all but the sliding water as it reached the low falls and occasional birds, settling in for the oncoming night. With both arms stretched out wide beside him, he shut his eyes and tried to confirm a strong suspicion that this was the place—the virtual spot, within a few yards—where at age fourteen he’d lost his virginity. His mind had always been a setter-of-scenes from his sexual past—down to the actual slant of light, the temperature of the room or space, the taste of the girl (her skin or mouth or whatever deeper entrances he’d managed to plumb), and then the rate and final reward of his rush toward joy.

  But lately he’d begun to wonder how honest his mind really was—with these scenes anyhow. As he lay there, though, with his eyes shut to the actual beauty on all sides, he told himself he was surely recalling the precise textures and feelings of that hour of elation and near-terror as Jeanette Walker—who was maybe four months older than he and whom he’d met in “daily vacation Bible-school” class—folded herself inward, step by step, to his ranging hand and the minuscule victories he steadily won.

  Did he fall asleep? If so, no dreams disturbed his rest—not even the faintest whiff of Jeanette or any of the other rare early girls, including Gwyn. But once he thought he’d opened his eyes, he was blind—entirely blind. Even the darkest night would have showed him more than this. Now though the sky was an unbroken sheet of black, a great iron bell clamped down above him. And nothing moved or made the least sound. Sometimes, in his boyhood, he’d have a bad dream and know it was a dream. Then he’d roll himself side to side in the bed to wake up fast and break the terror. He tried that now—and rolled so hard that he felt real pain in both arms and shoulders. But still no sun. He had to believe he was fully awake and had either slept way on into night or was suddenly blind. Blind.

  Not one of the doctors he’d seen in the past two months had warned of blindness as an early symptom of multiple sclerosis, if that’s what he had. They’d barely warned him of anything, however, even when he told them of the trip to Europe and asked for advice on whether to go or what to do if any symptom should waylay him there. In their several emotionless ways they’d all said something like “Go right on about your business. Have fun. We’ll see how you’re doing when you’re safely back and have worked off the ten pounds of pasta fat you’ll have gained in Rome.”

  He lay on still another long minute. Then he tried to stand up; and that plain action seemed to work, at least he thought he appeared to rise. And soon he could sense a change in the nature of the air—high up, it was warmer and the odors from the surface of the pond were stronger there. He extended both arms and turned in place, two or more full circles. But the perfect dark was perfect still. He couldn’t help laughing. If I’m suddenly blind, then what the hell next? Should he find some way to crawl to the pond and drown himself? Can a skillful swimmer drown himself? If he wants to, bad enough, no doubt he can. But do I, here and now?

  And if he didn’t, what next—alone as he was, at whatever hour of day or night, more nearly crippled than any quadriplegic in a wheelchair with two flat tires? For the first time ever, he saw the point in owning a cell phone. Now if he could manage to stumble toward his car and sleep in there, then surely somebody would find him somehow in the next twenty-four hours. But that’s assuming the traffic out here is as frequent as it was forty years ago, a shaky assumption. This was a world where sweet Jeanette Walker was fifty-three years old (still at least a few months older than he) and likely weighed, oh, thirty pounds more than the last time he’d seen her and had four children older than Charlotte and way worse-tempered, not to mention six or eight grandchildren. Mabry opened his mouth and actually howled, while he turned an even larger circle—and this time, not in desperation or fear of being lost and blind at his age but in active loathing of the mind he’d made inside his skull.

  Something behind him said his name, or a version of his name—not Mabry exactly but more like Maybe. It was surely a child’s voice, girl or boy, before the gouging tool of adol
escence had made the choice. What child did he know, down here anymore? He hardly knew a child in New York. Still, he froze in place and said “I seem to have lost my glasses, and I can’t see a thing.”

  Then a soft dry hand brushed across his left palm, and the voice said one more word, maybe Hurry?

  Mabry took a risky step and pitched flat forward to the ground on both hands. He said “I’m sorry” and tried to rise but, for whatever reason, held a hand out and said “Can you help me stand up here?”

  No voice, no help.

  So he lay where he was and slowly guessed that the Earth was no cooler than when he’d first lain down, however long ago. Had it all been a dream? Was it a dream still? He knew that the nails of both his hands were long (he hadn’t cut them since his first days in Rome), and he dug at the back of each hand with the opposite set of nails—genuine pain. You’re awake now at least. And slower than any actual dawn, in vertical strips of hazy detail, he began to see—through both eyes apparently and focused more clearly as true evening rose up out of the pond and the trees beyond it. When he looked to his watch, it said six twenty-eight (a little more or less).

  He felt a strong need to give thanks to something—maybe to the child, real or dreamed, that had brought him to life (if what had touched him was a child, not an adult with a high tenor voice). Or to his father’s God, whom Mabry had never quite denied. Bereft then of an immediate target for gratitude, he said the one word thanks to his watch. If nothing else, time—a few scary minutes—had brought him from total blindness to light, however temporary or threatened.

  But where next? He needed to get out of here before real night fell. The nearest emergency room was fifteen miles away, Tasker and Audrey were six or seven miles, the center of Sherwin was maybe two miles. And Gwyn’s house was ten long blocks from the center of town. Whether she was home or not, he’d better head there. If he made it alive, he could try to phone Charlotte, then phone his father to say where he was and then rely on Gwyn to know what he should do once night was on them (that would mean telling her about his fears, which he hadn’t laid out truly before now).