We wrote him twice but four weeks passed and nothing else came, not from France. I had any number of letters myself and the legal limit of boxes (which was one a week) that I wanted to share with just Michael but had to share with everybody, Robin Mickle included. Worse than the sharing, I dreaded my boxes because I kept thinking they would make me homesick, but with Michael and all the things to do, they never bothered me, and before I expected it, there was only a week of camp left and we would go home. That was why we were playing the semifinals that day—so the winners could be recognized at the Farewell Banquet on the last night of camp. The Colossians were going to play the Ephesians after rest period. We were all in the cabin trying to rest, but everybody was too excited, everybody except Michael who was almost asleep when the camp director walked in and said that Michael Egerton was to go down to the Lodge porch right away as he had visitors. Michael got up and combed his hair, and just before he left he told everybody he would see them at the game and that we were going to win.
The Lodge wasn’t too far from our cabin, and I could see him walking down there. A car was parked by the porch. Michael got pretty close to it. Then he stopped. I thought he had forgotten something and was coming back to the cabin, but the car doors opened and a man and a woman got out. I knew it was his mother. He couldn’t have looked any more like her. She bent over and kissed him. Then she must have introduced him to the man. She said something and the man stepped up and shook Michael’s hand. They started talking. I couldn’t hear them and since they weren’t doing anything I lay back down and read for a while. Rest period was almost over when I looked again. The car was gone and there was no one in front of the Lodge. It was time for the semifinals, and Michael hadn’t showed up. Robin, who was in charge of the Colossians, told me to get Michael wherever he was, and I looked all over camp. He just wasn’t there. I didn’t have time to go up in the woods behind the cabins, but I yelled and there was no answer. So I had to give up because the game was waiting. Michael never came. A little fat boy named Billy Joe Moffitt took his place and we lost. Everybody wondered what had happened to Michael. I was sure he hadn’t left camp with his mother because he would have told somebody first so after the game I ran back ahead of the others. Michael wasn’t on his bed. I walked through the hall and opened the bathroom door. He was standing at the window with his back to me. “Mike, why in the world didn’t you play?”
He didn’t even turn around.
“We lost, Mike.”
He just stood there tying little knots in the shade cord. When the others came in from the game, I met them at the door. I told them Michael was sick.
But he went to the campfire with me that night. He didn’t say much and I didn’t know what to ask him. “Was that your mother this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“What was she doing up here?”
“On a vacation or something.”
I don’t guess I should have asked him but I did. “Who was that with her?”
“Some man. I don’t know. Just some man.”
It was like every night. We were sitting in our place by the tree. The others were singing and we were listening. Then he started talking very fast.
“My mother said, ‘Michael, this is your new father. How do you like having two fathers?’”
Before I could think what to say, he said he was cold and got up and walked back to the cabin. I didn’t follow him. I didn’t even ask him if he was feeling all right. When I got to the cabin, he was in bed pretending to be asleep, but long after Taps I could hear him turning. I tried to stay awake until he went to sleep. Once I sat up and started to reach out and touch him but I didn’t. I was very tired.
All that was a week before the end of camp. The boys in our cabin started talking about him. He had stopped playing ball. He wouldn’t swim in the camp meet. He didn’t even go on the Sunday hike up to Johnson’s Knob. He sat on his bed with his clothes on most of the time. They never did anything nice for him. They were always doing things like tying his shoelaces together. It was no use trying to stop them. All they knew was that Michael Egerton had screwed their chance to be camp baseball champions. They didn’t want to know the reason, not even the counselor. And I wasn’t going to tell them. They even poured water on his mattress one night and laughed the whole next day about Michael wetting the bed.
The day before we left camp, the counselors voted on a Camp Spirit Cabin. They had kept some sort of record of our activities and athletic events. The cabin with the most Good Camper points usually won. We didn’t win. Robin and the others told Michael that he made us lose because he never did anything. They told everybody that Michael Egerton made our cabin lose.
That night we were bathing and getting dressed for the Farewell Banquet. Nobody had expected Michael to go, but without saying anything he started getting dressed. Someone noticed him and said something about Mr. Michael honoring us with his presence at dinner. He had finished dressing when four of the boys took him and tied him between two bunks with his arms stretched out. He didn’t fight. He let them treat him like some animal, and he looked as if he was crucified. Then they went to the banquet and left him tied there. I went with them but while they were laughing about hamstringing that damned Michael, I slipped away and went back to untie him. When I got there he had already got loose. I knew he was in the bathroom. I could hear him. I walked to the door and whispered “Mike, it’s me.” I don’t think he heard me. I started to open the door but I didn’t. I walked back out and down the hill to the dining hall. They even had the porch lights on, and they had already started singing.
THE LAST NEWS
ANDREW,
Long as it’s been since you left me here, I wonder if you recall the last thing you said to me. I was strapped, hand and foot, to that rusty gurney. And you said “Pa, live long enough to pardon this”—I knew you meant committing me, against my will, to a drunk-tank worse than Hell’s cesspool. Before I found the words I wanted, the black man rolled me through those doors. So you didn’t hear what I tried to say. It was some hot version of “Damn your soul for evermore.” Anyhow I said it and even now I mean it, more than once per day.
But against my will, they’ve brought me onward to where anyhow I know what I’ve done and mainly who to. And one of the things I’m told to do is make my peace with who I hurt. You know, well as me, it’s too late now to make amends to the one I hurt the actual worst. I’ve tried to beg your mother’s pardon in prayers every night, but no answer comes and I’m giving up. You know prayer never meant much to me. Deep down, I doubt that Whoever set this world to spinning gives a plugged copper dime for my little errands—He, She, It or Whatever’s there has sure-to-God kept itself scarce around me.
But here you are and while I can, I’m saying, Drew, excuse me. Is Excuse too weak? Is it more like forgive? Maybe I’m asking you more than a man can ask another man.
I stopped there, son, to let the night pass and a good part of daybreak. I needed to think, could I push on with this mean homework I’m told to do? There are women I strongly suspect are living all down the road from Raleigh to Nags Head, waiting for me to say I’m sorry. There’s a child you don’t even know exists, that’s your half-brother, on the outskirts of Clinton, a good mechanic. He knows my name but not much else. I owe him the world. Or so my mind reminds me in dreams, black as he is. But after your dead mother, you come first—the oldest blood-child I helped to cause. So if I can make this terrible deal work out with you—Christ, I might have cut me a one-lane track anyhow out of here, not the same mean rut I’m circling in.
You’re a sweet-natured man, Drew, have always been. I know you’ve already wiped your eyes and said “I forgive.” And Christ, I’m grateful but this old Hell goes deeper than that. A whole lot deeper than you still know. I stretched last night on that hard cot and asked myself and the dark air around me if—any way on God’s green Earth—I could keep my worst trespass still a secret.
I bet myself, and am betting this mornin
g, that you don’t even know what I mean. You were nineteen months old, I know that still. You were walking strong, could look at your mother like water in a drought. You even could call my full name plain and did so, any night I got home conscious before she shut the door to your room. If it’s not known to you now, then why must I tell it? Why poison the well for the rest of your life?
They say I got to, if that’s an excuse. They say it’ll keep on eating its way from out of my heart; and I’ll keep trying to drown it down, if I don’t reach in here today and tear it loose and hand it to you. For you to recognize and then bury, if you’re that strong. With all the mess you know you’ve seen, I tell myself you’ve got a cup full, your cup runneth over and I should die dumb. But after last night, I’m betting they’re right. And here’s this news.
Andrew Henderson, I your human father forced your mother to grovel cold-naked beside your bed and do my body every sick brand of pleasure my mind could picture, for the worst part of one whole deep night hour—October the 19th, 1963. You were wide awake. You stayed on your side but turned toward us, and you watched every move. There were times her head got so close to you, you reached through the rails and touched her hair.
That just made it worse. Made me run wilder and punish her more. I knew I was doing it to ruin her for you. You loved her too much, she loved you ways she never loved me and never could now. And why she followed my will that night, every order I gave, was—I was holding my loaded pistol the whole sad time.
She ought to just grabbed it and finished me. I was most likely too drunk to fight if she went for my hand. She never said a word, not one low moan. She was protecting you, I guess. I know, if I know any one fact still.
So I won’t call you son again. I won’t even say so much as your name, from here on till you say I should. If you want to kill me once I’m out of here, be my guest. I’ll lay this head on the rock of your choice in the back of that cave in the farthest woods, you drill my brain and walk on out, and I’ll have a letter inside my pocket saying “I, Paul Henderson, paid this pittance on my big debt to the living and dead and am proud to be quit.”
The mail still works. I’m waiting to know your answer, sir.
THE ANNIVERSARY
ALL THAT WEEK every time Miss Lillian Belle got still and cool, she knew she was waiting for something, the way little leathery country boys wait on their porches in the evening, not knowing what for, their work done, holding their knees and looking out towards darkness and the road. But it didn’t worry her. It would come in a little (something she had forgot that was already gone or something that was coming), and if she never remembered, well, she was seventy-two years old, and she couldn’t get herself upset every time her memory failed, and anyhow she had work to do—her Brother’s meals to cook. Betty their cook was out of the kitchen for the fifth straight day, grieving for Henry her husband, holding him out of the ground that whole rainy week to bury him right, in sunshine, and everybody knew Lillian Belle Carraway couldn’t make a thing but mints. Still, she did her best. She forced herself through the suffocating heat, and all that happened to remind her of what was forgotten didn’t remind her at all, not even the dove mourning by night in the silvered eaves of the house or Brother’s dogs with all their barking at the moon or Pretty Billy’s mustache cup she had dusted twice already that week without seeing any more than if she hadn’t painted them there herself, forty-five years ago, the plain gold flowers and the words she had chosen then with such shy care, “Forget Me Not, Forget Me Never.” And it might have gone on that way another week or longer—those pieces of the past riding by her no more noticed than old cars on the public road—if Brother hadn’t said at dinner, “How are you holding up under this heat?” (His voice was cool and faraway as a medical doctor’s.)
She told him, “Brother, I am not as strong as I look.” And she wasn’t, though sitting there under those grand cheekbones, round, high and pure white as china doorknobs, and her thick hair black as night still, she looked for all the world firm and impassable as a good privet hedge. (“The Indian blood,” Papa used to tell her and laugh—“Very little, to be sure, and what there is from Pocahontas.”) But strong or weak, how could she say what she had thought all morning?—that she had no business at Henry Twitty’s funeral in the heat—when everybody knew she and Brother still owed Henry that great debt of thanks which dying didn’t cancel for being the Negro of all they knew who offered to chauffeur their father in the very last days when his blood rose higher than science could record and all that would cool him off was to send for Henry, day or night, and say, “Take Papa to ride” and watch them sail off into the wind at sixty miles an hour, glasses rolled down and Papa like a statue on the seat till he felt relief and when that came, saying, “Much obliged, Henry. I’m much obliged”? Facing such a debt, how could she say “I’m staying home”? Letting Henry down, even now, would be like letting Papa down, and she couldn’t do that of her own free will.
So Brother did it for her. He laid down his knife and fork and said, “You stay at home. Every Negro on the place will be there and every Elk from Warrenton.” He took out the silver toothpick, and they were both quiet a minute. (He was right about the Elks. Henry was something big in the Elks and died dead-drunk on his own front porch. He had often told Betty never to let him lie down drunk or else his heart would float, but she didn’t get home that evening till late and it had floated.) Then Brother stood and said, “Betty won’t miss you in the crowd.”
“That’s a lie,” she said. “You know there’s a pew waiting empty for nothing but two Carraways.”
He said, “I’m one Carraway and that’s what they’ll get today. You stay home and rest.” He stepped to the porch and sat awhile, and she went back to the kitchen to finish there. When it came time to go, Brother walked through the hall and said “Goodbye” and went to the funeral, not letting her speak a word. She watched him awhile out the open kitchen window, pulling at her fingers, drawing the blood, slow and violet, back into them, standing that way till the dust of his truck had settled. Then she turned towards the parlor for the first time in months as it would be cool in there.
She sat and thought about fixing Brother’s supper, rocking on Mama’s green velvet carpet easy as if Mama herself was there in the door, looking long and saying, “Lillian Belle, would you tell me what you think this is? Sunday? You’ll cut through to China in less than an hour that way.” (One time she had answered, “Mama, me and Brother will just move to the Thorntons’. They let you rock till you’re blue in the face and slam doors!”) The air of the parlor felt her all over like the coolest kind of hand, and when she caught her head bobbing foolish as a hen’s, she said out loud, “If I’m going to sleep I might as well give up now and go to the bed and stretch out.” She stood and walked to the mantel where her glasses were. She always laid them there when she rocked. Rocking in her glasses made her dizzy. She put them on and looked up to get them adjusted. And there it was, hanging a little too high and almost out of her sight now but familiar and stinging still. Remembrance took her from her head down to every part the way a breeze will take itself straight down the hall of a house when you had almost given up hope for it, cooling every room as it goes.
Not moved once and barely dusted since Papa had it made for her up in Petersburg and it came down through the mail without even breaking the glass. A splendid likeness of Pretty Billy—eyes faded a little but still so deep in his head it seemed you could never come near them, not if you set out this minute and walked in that direction towards him, not eating or drinking till you dropped. And who in the world, was the first thing she always wondered when she saw it, had ever kept him still that long? And wasn’t it funny after all? (though she never thought that till Papa died)—Pretty Billy Williams set there in a border of black with doves in gentle flight around him, thin white streamers in their crossed pink mouths falling over his head after so much time, curling in and out of the poem.
Death our dearest ties can sever,<
br />
Take our loved ones from our side,
Bear them from our homes forever
O’er the dark cold river’s tide.
In that happy land we’ll meet them,
With those loved and gone before,
And again with joy well greet them
There where parting is no more.
“All the time,” she said, “that was what it was.” And she would have touched the frame to straighten it if it hadn’t stained itself in that one place Papa gave it all those years ago.
She came out on the back porch and shaded her eyes and tried to see down that way. She had missed getting the proper eyes, the Carraway eyes to go with the face, and the ones she had, narrow and dun, could only make out the large things now that hung on the sky flat and swaying as clothes on a line—the perfectly round oak tree people still drove miles to look at and where Aunt Dorcas Simpson’s place had gone, leaving its chimney alone and old already as Aunt Dorcas was at death and getting older, and Liney Twitty’s place huddled to the ground, cowed-looking and yet, you knew, as strong as a hound dog when you call his name and make him come. All the other things that belonged there were gone. At least to her eyes, and from here.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 12