Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  She’d been asleep. First time I saw her confused like that, a hurt child with a pale blank mouth. It cut me deep as anything yet; I felt like the cause. But then she surprised me.

  She said “Big stranger” but she still hadn’t smiled.

  In twenty more minutes we were back in the cemetery, parked by my graves. Eileen wanted to talk about school—how it was nothing she could use in the future; how she planned to quit at the end of this year, then make enough money to own her own soul and go to a secretary school in Raleigh. She saw herself in a clean single room in a nice widow’s house with a private door-key and kitchen privileges in case she wanted, every week or so, a softboiled egg or a slice of dry toast. Everything else good would follow from that.

  I listened and nodded long as I could. But once she paused I politely asked her to leave the car with me—till then we’d stayed shut up inside.

  She waited to think it carefully through but she finally nodded.

  So I came round, opened her door, led her over to Grandad’s plot and read her the tall old moldy stones.

  To be sure, she was bored as any teenager faced with death; but she tried to listen. I think she guessed I was up to something entirely new; at first she let me run it my way, just listening and nodding. I told myself the night before that if I could take her that near my kin and still feel like I needed her bones beside me for good—her skin and bones—then I’d tell her plain and ask for her life.

  I was reading my own grandmother’s stone—Her children rise and call her blessed—when Eileen came up quiet behind me and played an age-old playground trick. She bumped the backs of my knees with hers, and I came near to kneeling on Gran. First I was shamed to be ambushed and act sacrilegious (I never knowingly walk on a grave), but all I could hear was high clear laughter.

  I never heard Eileen laugh till then; we’d been so dead-down earnest and grim. But when I finally stood and turned and saw her leaning on a baby’s stone, lost in her fun, I still had to wait. I was stunned again. Nothing I’d seen from here to Asia, awake or dreaming, offered what looked like that full an answer to every question my life could ask. Till then I’d known I lacked a good deal; but seeing her there in possible reach, I suddenly knew my two big hands were empty and had been all my life. I wondered why; excellent women had tried to fill them—my mother, Lou and even young Robin. I’d somehow declined every offer they made.

  Now here was the fourth. I understood no offer was free, least of all from the hands of a girl with eyes like these dark eyes, that no Marine division could stem. If I reached out now and finally took, I estimated I’d feel and cause unmanageable pain. But before I thought another word, my mind made an actual sound like a tight boxlid that shuts with a click. I held my ground six yards away; and I said “Sweet child, run off with me.”

  I didn’t think Eileen heard my words. Her laugh calmed though and she wiped her eyes. Then she leaned out slowly and set her lips on the family name, cut deep in the stone. When she faced me, even her smile was gone. She said “You got us a full tank of gas?”

  I couldn’t speak. But I nodded hard, she came on toward me; and my life bent like a thick iron bar way back in the forge.

  THE COMPANY OF THE DEAD

  EIGHTY-SOME years ago when I was a boy, Simp Dockett and I were in modest demand as reliable and inexpensive all-night “setters.” I’m talking of the early 1900s in a small country town; and when people died and the corpse came home from the mortuary, a member of the family was expected to “set up” all night by the coffin and keep the dead company. The coffin lid was open of course, though in hot weather there would be a veil of mosquito net to keep off moths and flies. I could always see what the flies were after, but the moths had me stumped. They barely eat so it can’t be food; I eventually wondered if it might be light. Do some corpses give off actual light that we can’t see but moths love and flock to? Later below, I will give my witness, for what it’s worth.

  By the time Simp and I had our truly wild night—the one I must tell before too late—we were good-sized boys, fifteen years old. But we started our business when we were still twelve. I’d like to think that the fact we lasted through our first job says something about what guts we had, but I know it only describes our greed. We made a small piece of money that night, and we wanted more; so from that point on, we guaranteed gentlemanly conduct and no dozing off in the loved one’s presence. We even wore celluloid collars and silk ties. They made us look older and hurt so much they kept us awake.

  What happened the first night is something my own children always loved to hear. The corpse in question was an elderly spinster who taught us in Sunday school, at age three or four, and later in grade school—Miss Georgie LaGrange. All times of the year, freeze or swelter, she brought a great bowl of warm apple float each Sunday and made us eat it in thin china bowls that had been her mother’s. It was “good for our bowels,” she’d promise in whispers. Simp and I had grown well out of her class when the elders finally had to retire her. She’d started weighing the children each week and recording the figures on a chart by the door. Nothing wrong with that, but then a few children told their mothers Miss Georgie would make them to peel to their step-ins before she weighed them. So the elders let a grace period lapse; then after six months they gently removed her.

  Gentle to the elders; it killed Miss Georgie. Though well past seventy and too far-sighted to be helped by glasses, she advertised sketching and painting lessons—not a taker in town. So Jarvis, the yard man, found her cold at the wheel of her dead brother’s Packard in the shed one Monday morning. Though she’d never driven a mile in her life, the coroner said she died of heart failure, no hint of suicide, and had been stone dead since at least Friday night. Knowing Miss Georgie’s mind had softened, everybody believed it and I still do.

  My father was the lawyer that drew her will. The yard man knew that and had nowhere else to turn. Miss Georgie’s people were long since dead. Her only nephew was two states away; and everyone knew he was not in the will, given as he was to getting arrested in women’s clothes. So all my family were well into smothered steak and biscuits that cool spring evening when the back door rattled; and there stood Jarvis with tears in his eyes, though we already knew he was Miss Georgie’s heir.

  The next evening Father went out again to be with Miss Georgie as they brought her body home. When he got back to us, we four children were doing our homework on the dining table by two oil lamps. I think this country might yet revive as a place where decent people dwell if the government turned off all the lights every evening at dark. At least it would force everybody back home, the ones who aren’t already born-felons. And there, they’d gather in one or two rooms. It would be pressed on them by circumstance. Few people would have a great many oil lamps, and very few rooms in homes would be heated. All this mischief that’s done now in basements—fathers and daughters, mothers and sons—could seldom occur. The crimes would be honest crimes of public passion, murders in the midst of family and friends, not faceless stranglings near the trash compactor at city landfills.

  Anyhow Father stopped on the doorsill and called me—“Hubble.”

  I was his older son and worshiped his tracks. I still think he liked me, though he never confessed it. The sound of my name, even one odd as Hubble, was grand in his voice. I rose from my stool like mist from a pond and followed him out.

  He didn’t wait for me, didn’t look or turn till he got to a standing water spigot far back in the yard. These dirty days, you’d need to go high in the Grand Teton range to see skies black as our sky was then, any moonless night. But the three million stars were beaming so clear, I could see my father waiting as I came. He stood a whole moment, staring straight up. I thought the starshine was burning his skin.

  And seeming to confirm it, he looked down slowly, turned the spigot and waited. Then he washed his face in two hands of water.

  By the time he looked up again, I was with him. I touched the flap of the left-side pocket in
the coat to his suit.

  He said “Hub, I’ve got you a grown man’s job.”

  He asked me regularly, Sunday nights, what I planned to be. I’d always tell him some job he admired—a doctor or something to do with problems, like a civil engineer. So what he’d said wasn’t all that strange. I just said “Good” and stood there to hear it. Many boys back then quit school at fourteen and trekked up the road to the nearest real town for a regular wage.

  But then he veered, “How old are you, son?”

  “Twelve and four months, sir.”

  His enormous hands must have still been wet; he wheeled them around in the air above me and finally said “Are you too young, you think?”

  I should have said “For what?” but what boy would? I said “No sir.”

  He said “Then you and Simp can set up tonight with Miss Georgie’s corpse.”

  I understood at once and it truly thrilled me. I’d already been to at least a dozen funerals, which meant that I’d also viewed the remains as they lay, banked with flowers, in a cool parlor or dining room. I’d always wanted to touch the skin—it looked so fragrantly powdered and needy, so ready to wake up and thank you for warmth—but there were always adults at hand, with forbidding eyes. Standing with Father outdoors in the dark, my next thought was that Simp and I would be the bosses, alone all night with a whole dead body to use our way. A friend of ours named Baxter Wade, just one year older, had worked last summer at the mortuary. And the stories he told nearly curled our hair.

  He knew all about embalming fluid—how they pump it into a vein in your right arm and meanwhile drain out your blood on the left. The best news was, the fluid is green. So once the pickling replaces red blood, every inch of your skin is bright bottle-green. Then nothing is left but to make you up with flesh-colored paint and dusting powder. Every now and then, an embalmer slips and forgets a part. And family members have been known to fold on the parlor floor at the sight of a green earlobe on Mother. Baxter also said he knew one boy who claimed he fondled a pretty girl that died of the flu, and the boy didn’t catch so much as a cold (“fondled” is my guess; Baxter claimed more). My next thought was, we could look at some hidden part of Miss Georgie, under the collar, to check for green. We weren’t that sure we could take Baxter’s word.

  So I said “Yes sir. You can count on us.” I knew Simp didn’t have better plans; nobody we knew in those days had plans, for tonight or for life. Life was just forward motion, at the gentlest clip you could manage to take and still eat three meals a day and sleep dry.

  Father told me to put on my black suit and his gray cravat; and as I bolted, he called me back. “Miss Georgie’s estate will pay you, son—one dollar per boy.”

  The sum was handsome for those slim days, but I said “No sir.” I’d have paid a good part of my savings for the chance.

  He blared his eyes, the sign for Get serious. “You’re a paid employee, this whole night, Hub. Miss Georgie’s purchasing first-class care. Act according. Be respectful, no jokes; don’t loosen your tie. You’ll find some old biscuits in a bag by the stove, and I set out a jar of her fig preserves. Eat nothing else. Don’t touch the coffin unless there’s a fire, and don’t shut an eye till I come by to spell you just after daybreak.”

  I said Simp and I would set right on as long as he needed; forget about school.

  He smiled for the first time but said “There you’re wrong.” Then he motioned me onward to dress and find Simp.

  By the time we got to Miss Georgie’s porch, it must have been nearly nine o’clock. But a small group of mourners had already gathered. It turned out that Jarvis, the sudden heir, had barred the door till our arrival, telling the world that we were “the family” and would be here shortly. Meanwhile he stood in front of the door in his own black suit and a wine-colored tie. Neither Simp nor I shared a drop of blood with Miss Georgie, and the mourners knew it, but even Simp bucked up at Jarvis’s claim, and we took on the role. We’d known everybody in sight all our lives; they were loyal members of our church or were some of the older teachers at school. Miss Georgie had taught the second grade, including me and Simp, from roughly the year they invented fire till five years ago. So the two of us climbed up toward them proudly. Young as I was, I already liked standing tall and big-eyed with shoulders squared, daring all comers.

  At the top, Mr. Pepper—the drunkard school-principal—stepped over and personally shook our hands. Simp glanced at me and nodded to mean “You do the talking.” So I said “Everybody step in. Miss Georgie’s ready.” I don’t know what I thought she was ready for; and as Simp and I led the way to the door, I suddenly prayed it wouldn’t be locked. I had no key.

  In immediate answer Jarvis trotted ahead and turned the brass knob. Then he stepped inside what seemed a dark house and pressed his back to the open door to see us in. I consulted Simp’s eyes for an instant. When I saw they were scared, I took the first step of our manly job. And yes, she was ready.

  By ten-fifteen every mourner had seen the new Miss Georgie. The undertaker had painted her thick, the face and hands, which added a century or so to her age; but everybody said what they always say, “She looks so natural, just like she’s asleep.” I of course didn’t say what I thought at once. The real Miss Georgie had looked cold-dead since the day they made her quit teaching school. And the only place where the paint she now wore would look half natural was in a plush whorehouse for truly weird gents with serious cash.

  Jarvis hung around in the back of the house for another short while. We guessed he was starting an inventory of his new possessions. In fact we were wrong—he’d had no warning whatever of his luck; and after the funeral when my father told him he’d inherited everything, he poleaxed over on the floor, unconscious, and had to be revived. By the time he was ready to leave that night though, Simp and I were searching the room for a deck of cards or a checkerboard. I was on my knees, rummaging a cabinet, when I heard footsteps. I looked up and Jarvis was tall in the door.

  “What the hell you doing?” His voice was rusty but every word cut me.

  I instantly knew it had to be the first curse word these walls had heard since Miss Georgie’s brother died, so it struck me dumb, and I couldn’t answer.

  Simp said “He’s just hunting some kind of game to keep us awake. She got any cards?”

  Jarvis’s face went awful in a hurry. “She ain’t got nothing now, no more. And if there was something as sinful as cards under this roof tonight, you think I’d tell you?”

  By then I was ready to say “No sir.”

  Simp faced me and frowned; you didn’t call black men sir back then. So he took over and said “Look, Jarvis. We’re nothing but boys; we like our sleep. But we can’t sleep tonight. We need some help and you know where things are hid around here—”

  Jarvis stayed as dark as before. “You can goddamn well believe I know every curl of dust in the furtherest corners. So don’t touch nothing. Stay wide awake and watch Miss Georgie—don’t shut a damn eye. I’ll see you at daybreak.” Then he vanished. I truly mean vanished. I’d still swear to God he just disappeared. If he did, however he brought it off, I knew from that instant how Jarvis was still there with us in spirit, his big black eyes in the chilly air.

  Simp plainly agreed since he waited ten seconds and whispered to me “I bet his spirit will spy all night.”

  Both of us turned then, went to hard chairs and sat down firmly. I can’t speak for Simp; but as for me, to stay awake, I thought the hardest thoughts I could manage. Both my parents and the sister I liked were being dragged naked through a field of barbed wire by slow blind mules at a steady rate. And that was years before barbed wire came into its own in the First World War. But awful as it was to see and hear, the thoughts eventually had me nodding in a chair as rigid as any steel strut.

  I didn’t know at first what woke me; my eyes flew open on the mantel clock. It was twelve-twenty and my first response was pride to have finally passed midnight, alive and conscious. In a town sma
ll as ours, children barely saw moonrise, much less midnight. Then I heard a sound I recognized; I knew at once it was what had woke me.

  Simp was back in the corner by the open coffin. His right hand seemed to be reaching in; and two more times he whispered “Whoa, whoa.”

  I whispered “Hush and sit your butt down.” I’d already thought about Jarvis again and how I knew he was somehow with us like the Holy Ghost. Simp had agreed just awhile before, but now he was acting the fool again. I said “This all belongs to Jarvis now. He’ll burn us up.”

  Simp said “That nigger won’t burn dry cotton.” Don’t think exceptionally hard of Simp; back then we were less than a generation from the Civil War, something as common and flat-incredible as chattel slavery; and we lived in a town that had been scoured over, like hot lye-water flung in your eyes, by Sherman’s men not forty years past. We may have deserved it; but you don’t forgive rape, not in under a thousand years.

  All Simp did next was reach his left hand round behind him and beckon me on while he still said “Whoa.”

  I thought maybe something was wrong with Miss Georgie; so being half of her guard for the night, I had no choice but to come up behind Simp and face the facts.

  There were two hard facts. Simp had unpinned the cameo from Miss Georgie’s neck and opened three buttons. I might have paused to think it was doubtless the first time a man, or a boy at least, had touched her anywhere else but the hand. Yet the sight itself held me. Below the collar where the paint line quit, she was green as Ireland. Simp’s index finger was touching the ridge of her collarbone; he seemed to be stuck, like your tongue on ice. That was not the worst. After all we’d halfway hoped to see green. The worst part shone as new as creation, a dread to behold.