Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  The fingers rested gently on her wrist for a good long while. Then he seemed to shake his head in sadness. But next he drew back and almost whispered “Dear Lock, it’s me.”

  I’d never heard him say dear till now. Mother told me once “He’d die for us both, but he won’t say darling like everybody else.” All I could think was If he’s glad she’s gone, why’s he trying to wake her? I thought he was trying to pay his respects, to show he was there and honored her body. Then I knew we would have to call for help, strong men with a stretcher. I stepped on to Dad and quietly said “Before much later, we need to get help.”

  He waited a moment and said “We may have the help we need.” With his hand still on her, he whispered “Dear Lock, now answer me.” Then he said “Please. This moment.”

  And over what felt like the next ten years, Lock came on back. Almost no daylight was reaching us, but I thought I could see the color of blood creep back through her face. I knew I could hear the creak of her breath till finally her eyelids quivered fast, and then she was looking up at Dad.

  He didn’t speak but offered his other hand.

  At first she didn’t take it. Her eyes searched round till they located me. She didn’t quite frown, she surely didn’t smile, she gave a slight nod. Then she took Dad’s other hand and gradually stood. He looked and acted like the olden beau she never had or the ideal son she claimed he’d been from the day he was born. They passed right by, touching me nowhere, and walked till they reached the thicket again. Lock stopped there and, facing just the woods, she spoke out plainly “Are you taking me home?”

  Dad said “I am.” They both moved on and I fell in behind them.

  But I stayed close enough to hear that, every few yards, Lock would speak—short phrases about the leaves, the light, the weather. I’d never heard her say so much when she and I walked; her breath was too precious.

  It seemed her breath was sufficient now, though she stammered some. We were all the way out the far edge of the woods with the house there before us—the kitchen lights—when Lock stopped once more and said a whole sentence. “It’s bound to be time to eat and I’m hungry.“

  Till then I’d never heard Lock mention hunger; she ate a lot less than a hand-sized bird. So I stood in place and watched Dad lead her on to the house and up the back steps, slow as ever.

  I was baffled beyond description of course. But I had the bare minimum of sense to wait and fix their picture deep in my mind—a son and his mother somehow alive and certainly changed. At the time I wasn’t thinking I’d need the picture ever again. I didn’t plan to store it buried in hopes it would bloom someday with news and hope. But here this instant I could take up a pen and draw them for you—Lock and my father—clear as I saw them, though full dark had very nearly fallen between us. All these years later I bring it up on the screen of my eyes more times than most memories.

  Whatever happened, what changed in Lock from that night onward was seen by nobody else but me. All her worrisome traits stayed with her right on—the stammer, the ugly marks of age, the draining worship she paid my father were strong as ever. With all the strangeness of those dim hours in a single day, neither Dad nor Lock ever brought it up in conversation, public or private. It might just have been a long dream I had to punish myself for the vicious maddog kenneled inside me, hot to lunge. Did Lock really suffer some brand of death? I had no medical implements with me of course, but even now I’m ready to swear that she wasn’t breathing when I left her upright that afternoon. Or was she merely fooling to curb a boyish tendency in me?

  Was it all Lock’s idea, or was she truly driven on by an unseen judge? If it was some brand of practical joke, it was the first and only such in a long solemn life. If death truly seized her, the way I saw it, then who brought her back—my dad with a touch and one loving word or the unseen judge maybe changing his mind? Dream or fact, it serves Lock’s purpose of punishing me, to this minute now when I tell the story; and I’ve had maybe more occasions than most men to punish myself, again and again for common meanness, by simply calling back to mind the sight of a woman dying for me.

  There is one fact I can still bring forward to prove that afternoon’s story true, a chain of actions and deeds that happened to sane human creatures other than me. From that time forward, though she’d talk with me as before in public—at meals, in rooms with my parents or sisters—Lock never addressed me in private again, not so much as a yes or no. Even in public where she often addressed me as before, she never spoke my name, not once. I’d come home every day from school at four, turn on the radio and lie on the rug. Lock would hear the sound and come in from her room—slow and creaky, rolling on her bowlegs like some old sailor—to take her chair and hear our shows with no single word. She’d smile, laugh or frown in accord with the story. She’d meet my eyes as often as ever, always kindly. She’d darn any wornout sock I brought her; she’d still lean down and scratch my scalp as the plots tensed up in our radio shows.

  But that was the only way we touched, from then till her second and last departure. I was never again compelled to kiss her powdery whiskers; never smelled her musty neck again, for all our laughter—and we laughed a lot. At first I thought of ways to scare her—to call the firetruck or claim my head had burst into pain like a gasoline fire and would split any instant and scald us both. I held back though and learned to respect her, the way you’d trust a St. Bernard that saved your life but was naturally mute.

  That much of my great-aunt was dead to me, shut up and gone. It made me think of a thousand questions only she could answer. They all pertained to my father’s youth, things he’d never tell me—what he was weak at, ways he failed before he got so strong and fearless. Finally though I had to believe Lock had told me the last hard thing to know. And she’d told it plainly in real daylight in actual woods the final day I was outright fierce. You can somehow choose to pay the debts of a needy boy or other grown soul if you have that much to give and are willing.

  Lock died again, for what I assume was the final time, eight quick years later when I was away—my first year of college. Dad’s letter said she went in her sleep, no trace of a struggle, ninety-one years old. At first I thought it was the worst kind of death; no living soul could truly mourn her. For years the thought seemed perfectly sound. But then I got my adult life and the ones I cherished, my daughter chiefly.

  And the year I was fifty, a business trip took me back to my hometown for several days. The last evening, with time to spare, I found our house. We’d sold it fifteen years before when Mother died. Still it was in better shape than me, fresh-painted though empty—a weathered sign For Rent in the yard. I had the good sense not to look in the windows, but I found myself walking straight for the woods.

  For whatever reason they were very much changed. Contrary to the general rule of memory, the trees were a good deal taller than before with serious girth way past my reach and a thickness above that shaded out the old thicket and briars and left a clean floor. My legs at least recalled the path; and dead though it seemed those forty years since, Lock’s fallen oak was still where she left it the night Dad roused her. Some of the bark had peeled away, but the sturdy trunk was hard as ever. And the small limb that Lock’s hand gripped was waiting still. I’m no great keeper of souvenirs; but suddenly there in the quickening dusk, I thought I’d snap off the limb and take it—my great-aunt’s anchor in a world she surrendered. And I made two tries, but the limb refused and then I was glad.

  Lock Burke blazed up there instantly before me—in my mind, understand—and the sight of her vanishing face and life repeated, clear as the long-gone voice that counseled me, a truth I hold ever close to my heart and mean to enact when my own chance comes.

  I’ve doubted an awful list of things in my long life—the truth of my wife, my friends and God, even my all but flawless daughter. I’ve doubted that the Earth itself should last or my tragic race, all humankind. But since Aunt Lockie paid all for me—alone in dark woods with night comin
g down, that she couldn’t navigate if we hadn’t saved her—I’ve never since doubted my place in the world or my endless duty to find at last the needful heart for whom one day I lay my own life down and depart.

  SERIOUS NEED

  I WAS THIRTY-SIX years old, with all my original teeth in place, most of my hair and my best job yet—furniture sales on Oak Park Road, the rich-lady trade with occasional strays from the poor east end. Now that our girl Robin was twelve, Louise my wife had gone back to nursing at the county clinic. She worked the day shift; so that wasn’t it, not my main reason, not lonely nights. And by Lou’s lights, which are strong and fair, she was nothing less than a good woman my age that tried hard, wore time well and hoped for more.

  I wasn’t too badly destroyed myself, according to her and the mirrors I passed. So I didn’t crawl out, wrecked and hungry, to chase fresh tail on the cheap side of town. But honest to Christ I saw my chance after three and a half of what suddenly felt like starved decades that had stalled on a dime. I knew it on sight—a maybe last chance to please my mind that had spent so long pleasing everybody else that was kin to me or that had two dollars for a sofa downpayment.

  She came in the store one Saturday afternoon that spring with her mother—a heavyset woman and a tall girl. I thought I had a hazy notion of who they were, a low-rent family from up by the boxmill, most of them weasel-eyed and too mean to cross. The mother had one of those flat raw faces that looks like it’s been hit broadside with a board this instant—none of which meant you’d want to fool with her; she had prizefighter arms and wrists.

  Both of them stayed near the front door awhile, testing a rocker. Then they headed for me; and before I got my grin rigged up, I saw I was wrong and remembered their name. They were Vaughans; the mother was Irma Vaughan—she’d been in my same class at school, though she quit at fourteen. I remembered the day; she sobbed as she left, three months pregnant (the child was a boy and was now in prison, armed robbery of a laundry).

  I said “Miss Irma, you look fresh as dew on a baby’s hand.” I had no idea what I meant; words just come to me.

  Her face got worse and she stopped in her tracks. “Do I know you?”

  “You chased me down one Valentine’s Day, when the world was young, and kissed my ear.”

  For a second I thought she’d haul back and strike, but she hunted around my face and found me. “Jock? Jocky Pittman? I ought to knowed!”

  After we laughed and shared a few memories, she said “Here, Jock, you’ve bettered yourself—good job like this, that old crooked smile. See what I done, my pride and joy.” Big as she was, Irma skipped a step back and made a neat curtsey toward the girl. Then she said “Eileen, this is one smart man. He can do long division like a runaway car. You listen to him.”

  Eileen looked a lot like Ava Gardner in schoolgirl pictures (Ava grew up half an hour south of us). Like a female creature in serious need that you find back in the deepest woods on a bed of ivy—a head of black curls, dark doe eyes that lift at the ends and a mouth that can’t help almost smiling, night and day. Almost, not quite, not yet anyhow.

  I estimated she was near fifteen. So I held my hand out and said “Here, Irma, you’re not old enough to have a girl eighteen.”

  Irma said “So right. She’s sixteen and what?—” She turned to Eileen.

  Eileen met my eyes straight-on and said “Sixteen and four months this Wednesday noon.” She met my hand with her own soft skin; those eyes found mine and stayed right on me like I had something she roamed the world for and had nearly lost hope of.

  With all my faults, I know my mind. Ask me the hardest question you got, I’ll answer you true before you catch your next full breath. I met those steady hazy eyes, volt for volt; and told myself Oh Jocky, you’re home. She felt that right, that custom-made, with two feet of cool air solid between us.

  Not for long. Not cool, not two feet apart. That evening my wife and I were trying to watch some TV family story, as true to life but sad to see as a world-belt wrestling match in mud; and Lou said “Jock, you’re dreaming upright. Go take you a nap. I’ll make us some fudge.”

  Robin was off at a friend’s for the weekend; the house was quiet enough for a snooze. But I said I was fine, just a touch dogeared.

  Louise could sniff my mind through granite. She came up grinning, took my face in her hands, studied my eyes at point-blank range and said “I hope you’re dreaming of me in there.”

  Both my eyes went on and shut of their own free will and stayed shut awhile. For a change Louise didn’t start on one of her Interpol hunts for the secret locked in me, but just the feel of her firm hands stayed on my skin, and in two seconds I knew I’d find Eileen Vaughan someway before midnight, or I’d keep driving till the rainbow ended in a pot of lead washers.

  She was on her porch in an old-time swing with one dim light bulb straight overhead; and she faced the road, though I guessed I was too dark to recognize. I didn’t want to drive unusually slow; but I saw enough to know I was dead right, back in the store. A socket to hold this one girl here had been cut deep inside my heart before I was born and was waiting warm.

  Her dress was the color of natural violets exposed to black light, that rich and curious anyhow. The rest of the house looked dark behind her (I vaguely knew there were no more children). Irma was likely playing bingo at her crazy church, the hollering kind. But I drove past to see who might be parked out back. Then I recalled Irma’s husband had died some years ago. Like so many drunks, for some weird reason, he lay down to sleep on the train tracks at night.

  And by the time I’d gone a ways onward, turned and pulled to the shoulder out front, I told myself Eileen Vaughan’s young enough to be your first daughter. You don’t know who’s got hooks in her or even who she’s hoping for now. Go lay your feeble mind on the tracks. It’ll be a lot quicker and will hurt just you.

  But what Eileen said when she saw me was “I guessed it would be you before you turned.” Not said like she was the Earth’s big magnet that drew me in but like the next nice fact of the evening—lightning bugs, the sweet crape myrtles and Jocky Pittman.

  Dark as it was, her eyes got to me, even stronger now. I said “Miss Vaughan, my actual name is Jackson Pittman. Nobody yet ever called me that—will you be the first?” I reached from the ground up toward her swing and gave her the great ball of deep red myrtle I’d picked in the dark.

  She disappeared down in it awhile. Then her eyes looked out. “Mr. Jackson, reach inside that door and switch off the light. Let’s swing in the cool.”

  The fine and terrible thing is this. It is in the power of one young woman still in her teens to cooperate with your orphan mind; and inside a week, she can have you feeling like you’re surrounded by kind ancestors, crown to toe, all waiting to do your smallest wish with tender hands. I’ve already said I had a good wife that tried the best she understood and a thoroughly satisfactory child. I hadn’t exactly been beat by fate; but like a big part of the married men I knew in Nam, many nights of my life, and a good many days, I felt as hollow as a junked stovepipe. That is, till Eileen Vaughan took me that same mild night, saying she warmed the way I did, on sight at the store that same afternoon which felt like two lifetimes ago.

  From there it went like a gasoline fire. If I could give you one snapshot of her face and mine, close together, you could spell it all out in however much detail you needed. We burned that high in every cell; we taught each other ways and means that even the angels barely know, though for six fast weeks we never moved a step past the three-mile limit from the midst of town. At first, to be sure, it was all at night on past her house in the heart of a thicket behind the mill.

  But by the third week we were wild enough to meet by day, every chance we got. On three afternoons she babysat her brother’s kids (his trash wife had skipped); but otherwise she’d get out of school and walk a straight line to the old cemetery where I’d be waiting by my paternal grandfather’s plot—he lies among three exhausted wives and nine chil
dren, having outlived them all.

  On weekdays nobody passed through there except black boys heading to swim in the creek; and they didn’t know either me or her, though after a month, when boys passed too near the car more than once, Eileen sat up, buttoned her blouse and said “Mr. Jackson, if this is your best, I’ll thank you and leave. Don’t look for me here, not after today.”

  I asked what she meant, If this was my best. Turned out, she meant the swimming kids. She thought they might be seeing her skin. I’d lived long enough to estimate she had almost as fine a skin as God had produced; and while she was not conceited a bit, every move she made showed how steady she meant to treat herself with respect. “Nobody else has” she said that day.

  I asked who she meant.

  “Every goddamned man and boy in space.” She was still half-smiling but I knew she was mad by the crouch in her eyes.

  I laughed and said “I don’t think Eaton’s quite the same thing as space.”

  But she knew her mind like I knew my own. She said “So long and best of luck,” then got out slowly and aimed through trees toward her mother’s house a long mile off. When she vanished she looked like my last hope.

  I let her leave though and said out loud in my thick skull Thanks, kind Lord. You cleared my path.

  He hadn’t of course. Or I strowed mess and blocked it again by that weekend—my old path here, a dependable worker, husband and father. Eileen had left the car on a Tuesday. By that Sunday evening, bright and dry, I was truly starved out. So I crept on toward her house again. It cost me almost all I had to climb those sagging steps and risk a knock. I felt like some untold crossbreed of the world’s worst junkie and a child molester of the saddest stripe. The porchlight was on and burned my mind.

  But knock I did, a single blow, and nobody answered. I waited a long time, in plain sight of slow cars passing behind me, knowing my name. Then I knocked once more and finally begged out plain through the wood, “Eileen, I’m pleading with you. See me.” In another few seconds, I heard bare feet.