Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  But lying in the dark was a big mistake. In that much empty black stillness, I slept. Any other boy, with a lipful of coffee and a brain aflame with imagined Joy—rosy girls astride hard boys—would have waited it out. So all I know, thus all I can tell, is what I’m still convinced occurred, and not just in the chemical-dump of my brain that night. No vision from dreams, no handmade picture, has stayed with me the way every line and color has stayed, every move and smell of what was showed me at some real point on the clock before dawn.

  What finally woke me was the voice again. By the time I knew I was conscious however, the pitch had risen till it seemed more like a separate flying thing, a small silver plane at a perilous height, than anything made by a human body. And it sounded farther away than before. I tested the air for any hint of danger. It felt well-intentioned so I got up, crept to the door and knelt.

  What was there was the feathered man again, a grander thing than I remembered—no man at all now. It was on its own knees, facing away; but this time at least I could see the head, if only its back. It bore a thick crest of peacock green that was laid down now, though it twitched with a feverish life of its own and threatened to rise like a giant cockatoo’s roused glory. The song was still in the air between us but was no more a song now than this thing was Simon Fentriss in feathers.

  I was almost sure the thing was working—eating slowly or dancing in place. Its arms or wings were wrapped round something beyond it, but its torso hid whatever they held. In ten more seconds, it began to shiver in graceful waves that it seemed to control and that caused no pain. Till then I’d never seen a hummingbird stall in place yet spin its wings too fast to see. When I finally saw one, I thought back to this night and this thing’s waves. As it went on trembling, I started wanting to see its face, if any such thing could have a face.

  And in another moment, the voice quit. As if my hope had just now reached it, the great head turned with a glacial slowness and looked my way. There were eyes, to be sure—they had to be eyes—and an open mouth that gradually made what human smiles attempt to make, a warning sign of joy so strong it threatens to spill and flood you both. But all the skin was covered with feathers the size of dimes, set like gilded scales on a fish.

  It was then I knew I was seeing an angel. Since it looked unlike anything I’d seen in pictures of angels, I must have been told somehow in the instant, some wordless way. Though I lacked the time and the words to think, I understand now that it was, past doubt, a being sent as a bridge to me from whatever god intended my life. Was it here to show or teach me things, or would those round eyes draw me now through the wood of the door and use me also?

  In a whisper but clearly, I said the word “Please.” I had no idea what I meant; but as scared a boy as I’d been for years, I now committed my first brave act. I gave in freely to what came next.

  I think it made the slightest nod; and then it moved a few inches to the right, still watching me.

  Both its arms were holding a woman, an actual woman of skin and hair. Whatever its mouth had done to her, it had not been harm, not where I could see. She was standing upright, aimed at my door; and I could see the whole midst of her body, from under her breasts to nearly her knees. She was young and firm and, while I knew she was as earthly as me, I also granted with wild delight that she was better than any girl I’d dreamed and loved when reading my book. The pyramid of curls in her groin was the same bright gold as the angel’s face.

  I never saw more of her body than that, for next the angel drew itself back against her. With occasional high recollections of song, the body resumed its waves that—for minutes longer—I went on understanding as joy. But soon in every plume and vane, it began to burn with light, not fire.

  Again I suspected I ought to be scared but I wasn’t. I held to my one fact—an angel was here, to give me this. If I burned away in sight of his dance, then at least I’d stayed like a man and borne it.

  I well understand that veterans of the movies will yawn at this as a down-home version of Star Wars, with sex. But when it happened next-door to me, Star Wars was more than thirty years off; and sex in space had not been invented, though angels had. What I saw, I saw. And now it was ending. The waves became eventual shudders; and with the one high soaring voice, there was now a second in skewed but winning harmony.

  I knew some destination was near. But the point it all was climbing toward was screened by light, no doubt with mercy to me. As the trembling angel and his real woman climbed, the light kept streaming from inside his body; the voices kept flying, till all I heard was one joined voice. And all I saw was a single great pulse at the core of the burn.

  I thought of the still-live heart of a dog I once saw hit in the road, too hurt to live but struggling on. I bore that too. I may have even spoken again; what I felt anyhow was all grades of thanks. Something huge, far past any power I knew, had done this for me. Or near me at least. And had kept me brave enough to stand and learn it. By the time I said what little I said, the flare was cooling and I was tired.

  But I stayed in place. No twelve-year-old I knew till then—even Jesus at the same age, preaching in the Temple—had been entrusted with this big a secret; if so, he kept it. I must see this finished. So over maybe the next three minutes, the light leaked off and my sight cleared. Then I could see what was left in the room, which was once again Mr. Fentriss’s bath—him and the same young woman, both real, both naked as newts.

  I wanted to know her name and face; I had a suspicion she might be the ninth-grade world-history teacher, Miss Watkins from Kansas (she’d washed up here as the war slowed down and let her out of the WACS at Fort Bragg). If so, Miss Watkins was as good to look at, by day, as here. Her face though far outshone her midriff, as I could attest to myself in private for the rest of the year.

  Their bodies looked understandably tired, with a few sweat trails. And their visible muscles were slack from whatever work they’d been part of. Was it them after all? Had they, two average public school teachers, been converted to heat and light as a demonstration for one hot boy and then cooled back to safe blood-heat, all in maybe five minutes in a wood hotel that somehow survived?

  Could be. Whatever the answer, they were there that night as sure as the angel. I knew when I stood up, went to my bed and switched on the lamp—the palms of my hands were bruised dark purple, though I’d felt no pain, where my fingernails gouged at the pitch of the act. And those eight cuts became my license to watch Mr. Fentriss the best I could. Like a starving hawk, I watched his movements every chance I got. The same with Miss Watkins but not so closely, since I couldn’t swear to her having been there near me that night. The only times I managed to see them were moments in the lunchroom, near-passes in the halls. But I never brushed either of them again, and even at lunch they never so much as glanced my way from their chilling plates of macaroni-and-cheese with green beans. And of course I never looked again through this fine door that had shown me so much.

  The coming Easter my parents planned to visit our friends in the Shenandoah Valley. I begged to stay home. I was thirteen by then, and what I dreamed of was taking ten dollars out of my savings and renting room 209 for a night and searching again. I had no expectation, or wish, to see a further round of wonder. They laughed in my face, and I drove off with them to watch chained bears at mountain gas-stations and a fat old Indian that charged to pose with you. But as long as we lived in that same town, it hurt my mind like a stove-in skull, how much I hoped to understand what the angel meant—I knew it meant, no question it didn’t. And was that girl a messenger too but allowed to look human to brace my courage?

  As I write this tale, I’m sixty years old—money in the bank and proud of my work that I pray to do till the night I die, a much-missed wife who died two years ago dreadfully of cancer, a son and daughter in driving distance with their own good children who bear my presence at Christmastime as if, in all they plan to do, their grandfather matters seriously.

  I know I do. And now yo
u know, having read this far. I’m the last man alive, so far as I’ve heard, to whom a god unquestionably came and showed the sacred joy that waits in any human body, if it has the wild courage to find its adjoining door and kneel to its chink or drill its own and wait there bravely—or scared to the bone—till at least one normal other body spreads its secret reckless beauty to taste and eat.

  A TOLD SECRET

  I DOUBT YOU KNOW how that hour ended, though it’s in your mind through this long pause. After we’d choreographed our limbs through so much perfectly aimed free-flight, we understandably slid off to sleep. And while we were out, the sun that had been so fine all day worked round to the window and found our bodies. Half an hour before, we’d have overmatched its glamor and heat. But sleeping, I cooled; so the light was welcome down my bare side. I woke at the touch and for maybe ten seconds was simply thankful, a frozen child, for unblocked light. Another pause and it came to me, plain and incontestable, Nothing will ever be better than this—thirteen years on, it’s true as it was.

  Then I heard your breath and—though I was on my side, turned left—I knew you were still out. I generally took any chance to watch you truly asleep (your eyelids seemed the thinnest scrims on the last few secrets you maintained; I spent long stretches, hoping to read them). But that afternoon I dreaded to see you frowning or worse. I’d read, thrust up in banner type, the blatant claim that our meeting had counted less with you than me.

  I even lay and punished myself the common way, inventing words for your shut mind and scrawling them on my own mockup of the back of your eyes—He’s crashed the last gate and ruined me. All I can do is beg for his death.

  I understand I’m more than half wrong. You’re a free adult; you’ve let me cross a full continent to be here. You own the keys to this room, not me—they lie in reach of both your hands, beside your pillow. I dumbly multiply the proof—your sheets and quilt; even the mice behind the walls above our nights are your guests here: you could trap them out.

  So maybe five minutes later, I turn, slow as the nearest glacier north. Ten inches apart from your face, I hold, hardly breathing but scenting at once the native health of your actual skin. Friends of Alexander the Great report that he gave off, day and night, the clean odor of mountain thyme—the natural gift of a generous soul, unknown on Earth till then except in the wake of a vanishing god. Twenty-two centuries, eight thousand miles west, I smell off you the same dry gift, a lure you’re helpless not to spread.

  Your still shut face defeats all fears—no frown, no smile: a peaceful, entirely unreadable calm. Behind this cabin, Mount Hokum above us, starved wildcats wait this instant for dark to scrounge our foulest rancid scrap. They’d tear and grind your peaceful hide to the final bone; but here you lie, serene as slate. And all my hawk-eyed apprehension can find no chink in such frank trust.

  I risk your name a time or two—not whispered, not loud—but you stay gone. And I wait, peaceful now as you, in hopes of nothing but your next breath, the sight of your eyes when your mind decides to see a world not made by you.

  A quarter-hour, twenty minutes, still gone, serene. My dry mouth starts to beg for water. Standing, walking, will surely rouse you. So I wait a last moment and know a last move. Entirely quiet, I rise to an elbow, reach and lift the old-gold hair from your right ear and say the best gift I ever gave. Silent, I say Because of now, this perfect day—because of what you are and spend, believe one fact if all else fails: you’ll live with me long past our separate crushing graves.

  Thirteen years on, I tell whoever reads these lines. Gone, unspeaking, still again, will you wake now, read and find the promise I planted then and say at last you know it’s true?

  WATCHING HER DIE

  MY FATHER’S last aunt moved in with us when I was ten and she was a thousand. Eighty-three, to be truthful, and virgin pure but sadly broke down. She’d lived near us, in her family home, all her life and mine. Only when she tried to rise one morning, stepped through a wormy board by her bed and stayed there trapped till my father found her just before supper, did she even consider giving up the old house.

  Pure as she was, she’d raised my father when his own mother died; but once he got her foot unstuck, even he had to put the truth to her plain. “Dear Lock, time’s up. You’ve outlived your house. We offer you ours.”

  Aunt Lock knew we did no such thing. Not if we included my mother, which it had to. Mother had dreaded Lock’s arrival from the moment my father proposed. She always said “He popped the question, then showed me the fly in his ointment—he was duty-bound to see Miss Lockie to the grave in kindness, assuming he or anybody outlived her.” To explain that my mother was known, statewide, as loving to a fault and a martyr to kindness is a quick way to say what Lock was like by then anyhow, that far gone in time.

  Her short legs were bowed as any hoop. She stammered every word; and she understood less than any two geese, though she didn’t know it. She thought she specialized in God and healing. You’d run in the house with a bleeding hand; she’d seize your wrist and say “Lick it, son!” When your mother protested that spit might infect it, Lock would tell her “Child, watch the animal kingdom. They lick everything that hurts and it heals.” She’d of course known several people who cured the last stage of cancer with timely licks from a warm wet tongue, preferably their own.

  With all the facts Lock knew about God, she was oddly silent in public with adults. It was mainly with me that she let them slip, when my parents were absent. I had the standard childhood way of avoiding my parents when I felt unhappy. Like other children I’d walk off alone or seek out somebody neutral but kind—like a maiden aunt in the dim back-room of the busy house. I’d lie on the hooked rug Lock set by her bed and let her pour what dammed up in her when my parents wouldn’t listen. It was frequently memories of my father’s boyhood. I asked for them often, not understanding I was near the age when I’d start being a man myself and would need to know how another boy managed to grow and make his own son.

  I doubt Lock comprehended that, having changed so little through the length of her span. But something would make her tell a brief story about Dad’s mischief and then let a quick strange moral appear in the empty air like a quirky motto stitched on a sampler. She’d tell about the time he stripped the setting from the supper table, plates and all, hid them in the sideboard and ran for the woods while the family were coming from the porch to eat. Once she described the empty table and the ten baffled faces, she might draw a feeble breath and say “God showed him tricks like that every day.”

  She’d never explain but move back to telling how warts were cured by words alone, in new-moon light. I doubt she expected me to think for an instant about God’s purpose in teaching Dad tricks, but of course I’d think of little else for the rest of that day. And the several times she let me know how “God has promised I will not die”—no explanation— I turned the promise over all ways from there on out, for her life and mine. I’d seen a child die on the street beside school, and I felt no need to share the fate.

  Those words about death were almost the strangest, except for the time I confessed to torturing a boy with a withered arm at school—I twisted it hard and watched his face. Lock heard me tell the whole miserable act; and when I expected at least a scolding, she almost smiled, looked far out the window and said “Keep it up if you need to—worse, if you must. You’re making him better than you by far.” So altogether from the day she joined us, Lock became even more a part of my mind than the rest of my family (I’ve acknowledged my parents, plus I had two sisters older than me).

  In addition, more than anyone else I knew, I could always find her. Her room was behind a dark brown door right off the kitchen; she was generally there in a green rocker or—on a dry day when her asthma let up—she’d be on a walk through the deep back yard that passed through carefully tended grass into thick ranks of scarlet sage and then into pines, far as any strong boy could hope to walk, much less an old woman on miserable legs.

 
; It was such a day, I’m recalling now. Mid-October, a spotless sky and air as dry as a bona-fide desert, though pleasantly cool. Despite all that, I’d had a miserable day at school. Because of the strange way Lock responded to my old confession of cruelty, I’d left the crippled boy alone. He’d even started bringing me gifts of dried fruit from his father’s store on the edge of town where white-trash houses shaded into black with no firm line except in blood when a trespass occurred. Peaches, apricots, pears and figs. I didn’t care for them; but I didn’t say so, just gnawed them at recess along with the boy and watched him grin.

  Yet on that grand October day for no discernible human reason—a day for brave deeds—I suddenly saw my hand reach out, take that boy’s arm and wrench it behind him till I heard a serious crack on the air. The boy said not a word of complaint, though silent tears rolled down his face; and his eyes never blinked. Then I watched him walk to the edge of the playground by himself and slowly test if his arm was broke. His back was turned but, just by the slowness of how he moved I could guess the pain and the tears still rolling. His arm moved finally, straight out beside him like the school patrol; and then he just walked down the sideline and turned at the street and headed home, a quarter-past noon. As it turned out he stayed gone four more days.

  By three forty-five on the guilty day, as I walked home, I knew I should climb to my white room, fall down on my back and beg the Lord, who’d memorized my meanness, to pardon me someway without demanding I find the boy and beg him first. His name was Zollicoffer Phipps, called Zollie. But since my path led through the back woods, I was deep in the cool shade, stroking through twigs and abusing my soul, when—Lord!—I heard my name out loud.