Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  She took down her yard hat and put it on—lacquered black straw with plaster fruit like bullets on the brim—and in her right hand were flowers from the vase in the hall. She went down the steps to the yard, taking each step careful as some altogether new place, and began her walking by a fence that traveled in curves far as anyone could see, walking her age gently but worriedly the way an old mother dog must walk straddling gray and swollen dugs, and the white dirt powdered under her feet and sifted away in the occasional breeze. (It was dry already from the rain.) Then she came to where the dirt was hard and packed. That was Liney Twitty’s yard, swept by brush brooms till it shone like Liney’s own ivory hand. Any other day she would have gone in and sat awhile with Liney who was her own age, but Liney to be sure had a front seat at the funeral. She slacked up to rest just the same, and what had looked like a black fence post turned into General Washington standing by a chinaberry tree, breaking waxy berries with a dusty toe. He was Liney’s grandchild who lived with her.

  Miss Lillian Belle said, “Good afternoon, Wash. What in the world are you doing in the broiling sun—frying your brains?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “but waiting till the funeral lets out.”

  “Well, come on then and help me do what I’ve got to do.”

  “What you got to do, Miss Lillian Belle?”

  “I’ve got to go to the graves. Three days ago was Mr. Pretty Billy’s anniversary and I forgot.”

  Going to the graves they passed where the first house had been, the one Mr. Idle Carraway her grandfather had built and called Antaeus Hill (because its earth sustained him) till his wife changed it to Roman Hill (because nobody but Idle, she said, had ever heard of Antaeus before). Miss Lillian Belle told people who asked that she never saw Old Roman Hill “in person” because it burned from lightning while Mr. Idle was in Mississippi with his wife and children, selling race horses which all the Carraways raised back then. Somebody sent him the news and right away he telegraphed a poem to the Raleigh paper, and they printed it on Easter Monday. Every Carraway since got to know the poem by heart, including children, as Mr. Idle sent it in to the paper every anniversary of the fire until he died, and Miss Lillian Belle and Brother and all kinds of little Negroes used to climb in the old black bones of the house, dodging flaming clusters of cow itch and screaming their grandfather’s poem so loud that lizards broke off their tails in fright and scattered for the dark.

  March 12, 18—

  The Hand of God did cloud the day

  To chasten Idle Carraway,

  For out the Blue a sizzling blast

  Hath laid to waste a Proud Man’s past

  And all his hope to build on land

  A mansion that would ever stand

  To give sweet witness to his name

  And send through Carolin’ his fame …

  They passed on by it in no time now, even walking slow as Miss Lillian Belle did with Wash spinning and flinging himself like a limber dishrag. He went by without looking once—just turned up to Miss Lillian Belle and said, “Big Mama have seen right smart dead peoples over there,” and because she hadn’t been there in over a year and because she had to stop to catch her breath, Miss Lillian Belle looked to where a few bricks and a beam or two were wrapped in yards of honeysuckle, and what she thought of was the nine upright beams that stood there through her childhood—to yell the poem to—till the Negroes commenced cutting at them by night for kindling, cutting at the base of each beam till all nine stood like pencils somebody was trimming patiently year by year. After that they fell too and were dragged away by whoever wanted them and used for things Mr. Idle Carraway, who was a strong man, would have wept to see.

  She turned back to say to Wash, “I expect she has, Wash. I expect she has,” but she said it to herself—Wash had flung to the end of the path and opened the wrought-iron gate. She couldn’t see him but his high voice came to her through the heavy air, “Here he, Miss Lillian Belle. Here he be.”

  There were eighteen graves, seventeen of them Carraways who had died—the biggest number in bed back in the house—knowing this was where they would come. (One or two had been shipped in—one boy from Shiloh and one they knew very little about, a distant cousin from Walkerton that just turned up one day, boxed, in the Express Office.) And inside the fence there was periwinkle crawling everywhere to set the place off from the field all around and the rows of tobacco that came to the fence in order and stopped. With all that greenery you couldn’t say where one grave stopped and the next one began, but they were there—all of them—the way they knew they would be, together. Miss Lillian Belle’s Papa had lived long enough to plan it right, long enough to see that Lillian Belle and Brother were the last, and when their mother took the next-to-last place in the old plot and Brother suggested maybe they could buy a little piece for him and Lillian Belle in the church cemetery, Papa opened the fence and took in a few more yards of field and said, “I had just as soon you were buried upright in the State Museum as in a public graveyard where the ones that cut the grass over your head don’t know any more about you than what can be got on a tombstone” which in Papa’s case was

  J. B. CARRAWAY

  A BAPTIST A DEMOCRAT

  But Wash stood on another grave, square and still for the first time on the one place that wasn’t a Carraway, with his feet hid deep in the vine and his legs growing up like narrow black trees to the mouth that kept singing, “Here Mr. Pretty Billy, here he, Miss Lillian Belle!” to the dry little tune he patted with his hand on the stone that said in small letters, WILLIAM WILLIAMS—A FRIEND.

  The place was in full sun so under her broad-brimmed hat, Miss Lillian Belle stood in the gate while her head and her eyes finished swimming, and to stop Wash’s singing she said, “What do you know about him?”

  “Big Mama tell me things about him,” he said.

  Then she saw things plainer and went towards the grave. There was one fruit jar by the stone, half-full of rusty-looking rainwater. She bent over and put in the flowers, and the white skin of her breast fell down on itself in a host of involved wrinkles like a handful of crepe myrtle laid in there, and Wash said, “They won’t last ten minutes in that.”

  She straightened up and studied them. “No, I don’t reckon they will.”

  But Wash was back to the question she asked. “I know about them dogs,” he said, “and him getting his neck broke.” Then he danced off the grave and fell down in the periwinkle and said to himself, “I’m the onliest Nigger I know who ain’t scared of snakes.”

  Miss Lillian Belle had given up trying to follow him with her eyes. She said, “You didn’t ever see him did you?”—and laughed at her own foolishness.

  Wash didn’t answer right away but in a little he said, “Did he have red hair?”

  “No, black as ink.”

  “I ain’t seen him then.” And again he waited—what he was thinking was his own business, but what he finally said was, “How old he now, Miss Lillian Belle?”

  “That would take more figuring than I care to do,” she said. There was a long minute while she looked round to confirm she was there at last before she took her seat sideways and slow on Pretty Billy’s stone. “All I can say right off is I was twenty-six when he came down here for the first time to Mary Jane McNeill’s wedding. Her name was just Mary. I was the one added on the Jane. And that made me the last one of my friends to be single. Papa was beginning to fidget about it, had been for several years so when this very fine-looking young man turned up the week before the wedding to be Best Man, Papa sat up and took notice right away. He was introduced to all as Mr. William Williams from Hamlet who was a telegrapher with the Seaboard Railroad, but Mary Jane and I called him by the name he offered us and then blushed—Pretty Billy. No need to blush. He was the prettiest-looking boy I think I ever saw—because that’s what he was, a boy. When your Big Mama took her first look at him, Wash, she said, ‘That gentleman must be a policeman to look all that fine in his something-to-wear.’ (D
on’t ask me where she had seen a policeman before.) The wedding week was a right active one—the McNeills had money if nothing else—and Mary Jane paired me and Pretty Billy off together for several of the functions. At the candy pull he tried to teach me some of the Morse code. I could see right away that it required speed which I have never had, but I let him go on all evening because of the way he kept taking my finger in his hand—he had a surgeon’s hands, that fine and narrow with nothing but a plain gold ring. Well, he kept taking my finger and saying, ‘Guess what this means’ and tapping out a message on the table and when I asked him what it was he had made me say, just smiling back behind his eyes and not telling me. The wedding was a big success, and Pretty Billy and I carried Mary Jane and her husband to Norlina to take the train for the wedding trip to Washington. I know it was the coldest night of the fall—it was November—and I believe I still had on my Maid of Honor dress (though all I can really remember is I wore a hat with ragged robins on it) so with the wind whipping through the curtains of the car, I was frozen to a polka dot in five minutes and sat there with every pore of my skin standing on end like flagpoles. Pretty Billy and I didn’t speak a word till we got to the station and barely spoke one on the way home till I said, ‘have always said, just let me get in an automobile and the wind starts blowing’ and he laughed. That finished the wedding and there wasn’t anything else to hold him in Macon so he headed back to Hamlet the next day, and I never thought or even hoped, I guess, that I would lay eyes on him again. When Papa asked me what I thought of him, and I said I guessed he was right pleasant, you could see Papa’s feathers fall a mile. I don’t think I could have cared less. I just went back to my duties—teaching Sunday school and painting china and singing here and there—and every now and then I would go visit Norah Fitts who everybody knew was already an old maid. We used to sleep in this high bed of hers and tie our toes together in hopes one of us would forget and get up in the night and drag the other one out on her head. (I have done a number of silly things, but I have generally managed to laugh at myself before others laughed at me.) Then out of a clear sky comes this postal card from Hamlet with a picture of the jail on it—some of Pretty Billy’s foolishness—which struck me as being a little forward at the time as he asked me to exchange greetings with him, but anyway the next trip I took into Warrenton, I bought a supply of cards and sent him one. That went on for weeks. Papa met every mail train, it looked like to me, and I had gotten to anticipating them myself. So when summer came Norah and I went down to Augusta for a month to visit the Bridges sisters, and I got a card nearly every day I was gone. (Norah said he must be manufacturing the things.) By the time we started home, I had so many I almost had to pay Excess Baggage on them. When I got back I pulled out all the cards, and of course Papa had a fit and so did Mama, and they bought me an album to keep them in with mother of pearl all over the cover. I hadn’t been home any time when Pretty Billy wrote a letter at last. (By that time I had several views of everything in Hamlet. It’s a small place.) He asked me to meet him in Raleigh at the State Fair. Somebody must have told him I hadn’t ever missed a fair in my life—they just couldn’t have one without me—so I wrote and said Yes, I could meet him, and Mama nearly had a stroke. ‘The idea,’ she said, ‘of you Lillian Belle traipsing off sixty miles to Raleigh to meet a very-nearly rank stranger!’ As if she didn’t know for a fact he was Mary Jane McNeill’s husband’s bosom friend and from good folks in Moore County though his father and mother were not living. Well, Mama had put her foot down, and I was almost resigned when Cousin Florence Russell heard about it the way she heard about everything—right out of the empty air—and upped and volunteered to act as chaperone. (Cousin Florence was every bit as fond of fairs as I was and had been attending a whole lot longer.) I was humiliated. She looked like a tomato and belched at the drop of a hat, but she satisfied Mama so that was that, and we took the morning excursion train to Raleigh. It was held up I don’t know how long waiting for some Negroes—none of ours—who had reserved a car to themselves and then at the last minute didn’t turn up because they couldn’t raise the money. I died a thousand deaths the whole way to Raleigh. I had wired Pretty Billy when I would meet him, and here we were going to be hours late, and he would more than likely give me out and leave, and there I would be with Cousin Florence laughing, because that’s exactly what she would have done, and going back home to tell for the rest of her life how Lillian Belle and her beau hadn’t made connections. Before long though it was clear we were going to pull into Raleigh almost on time after all. The engineer was handling the train like it was an express wagon, and in no time both of us were dizzy as guinea hens—Cousin Florence a good deal dizzier than me however, so much so that she suddenly took down the box of dinner we had brought and said we wouldn’t be needing that and handed it to a little big-eyed boy who had anyhow been looking up at it ever since he boarded the train like he expected any minute for the lid to fly off and reveal—pistols! So I sat the rest of the way in hunger and misery, worrying that I might not even recognize Pretty Billy, but when we stepped off the train in this huge burst of steam that wilted me something awful and just made Cousin Florence redder, there he was on the platform with a little derby hat sitting on his ears and grinning like a possum. There wasn’t any question about not knowing him on sight. And oh, we had the grandest time at the fair—took in everything right down to the pigs and managed to lose Cousin Florence in the prize oil paintings. (She waited happy for hours in front of “The Alps Mountains Under Snow’ because it cooled her off )”

  Wash said, “Big Mama say I can go to the Littleton Fair this year, Miss Lillian Belle, if there be anybody will take me.” He was nearly out of sight in the vine, but you knew he was listening—he was so still a butterfly had lit on his shining forehead and moved there softly like breathing.

  “Well, I hope you can get there,” Miss Lillian Belle said, “but I won’t fool you. It can’t touch the State Fair with a forty-foot pole. In particular the fireworks. Pretty Billy wanted me to stay over for the grandstand fireworks display at midnight, but I had promised Mama I would be on the eleven o’clock train—and even that was daring enough to curl half the hair in Sixpound Township—and of course Cousin Florence had collapsed long since and was sitting by the fountain eating peanuts (of all things to come to the State Fair and eat when she had a bushel of them right on her own back porch). So he saw us to the train, and I cried off and on all the way to Macon for what Cousin Florence described as ‘an unknown reason.’ But it wasn’t so unknown to me or to Papa either who met us at the train. One look—by lantern light—was all Papa needed. He knew me like a book. So what happened after that wasn’t much surprise to any of the family (though it took right many outsiders off guard, and Cousin Florence went around telling everybody, ‘Lillian Belle’s got a beau from “off.” ‘ ’ I don’t know where she thought Hamlet was—Europe?). There commenced a grand exchange of sealed letters between Pretty Billy and me, and Papa talked Mama (without much trouble) into asking him to spend Christmas with us. He accepted post-haste, not having any other place to go, and Mama and old Aunt Dorcas your great-grandmother and Liney turned the house wrongside-out, washing curtains that froze on the line and generally stirring up dust until they had sent Brother to bed nearly dead with asthma. I took it all right calmly—a lot calmer than Papa liked—and sat in the parlor making a whole series of Christmas presents for Pretty Billy, most of which Mama decided were too intimate. I spent half my time ripping W. W. monograms off of things Mama said just wouldn’t do. Finally Papa told me to give him a mustache cup and that’s what I did, but I didn’t paint the sentiment on it for the longest kind of time after that. It didn’t take much imagining to know that being naturally nervous, he would arrive on the wrong train—at least two trains earlier than he had said and so early in fact that he almost caught Mama in her shimmy which you would practically have to get up before day to do. Every once in a while I remember that Christmas as the brightest time we e
ver had. Pretty Billy couldn’t stand the dark so Mama kept enough lamps going to light the Governor’s Mansion, and he stayed with us nearly a week. Of course he had presents for every soul on the place. Mine was a gold cross and chain. Aunt Dorcas took one look at it and said, ‘That man means business.’ Even at Christmas it was quiet here, though nothing like now. Everybody I knew was married and had stopped having parties, and there wasn’t much to offer him in the way of entertainment (and there’s always been a limit to the time I can sit and talk to one person) so he and Papa went off hunting a lot—neither one of them could hunt worth ten cents—and I sat at home mortified for fear Papa was going to force his hand but he didn’t. And when all of us saw him off on the train back to Hamlet, him waving and smiling out from under that little mustache, my youngest brother Doc, who died, asked him, ‘Are you Lillian Belle’s sweetheart?’ And he said, ‘I hope I am.’ And by that time he was, I guess.”

  “I been asking Big Mama if it ain’t time I’m getting me some sweethearts,” Wash said. His butterfly was gone now.

  Miss Lillian Belle gave a little laugh.

  “Well, I’m nine years old and, Miss Lillian Belle, when am I going to get any bigger?”

  “Time will tell,” she said, and because he had rolled on his stomach and laid his face in the periwinkle and started whistling, she asked, “Are you hearing what I’m telling you, Wash?”

  “Yes’m,” he said without looking up, “you going on about Mr. Pretty Billy, and you say time will tell.”

  “It will too. It will. There were some claimed I had seen the last of him when he left after Christmas just because he spent so much time hunting and because I didn’t fall all over him with love and care. But that’s not my nature, never was, and he knew it and honored me for it though he was inclined to want to touch people all the time in spite of everything I said. Still he wrote as regular as clockwork, and his letters were just like his talk. You would read them, sitting right by yourself on the porch, and laugh like a nitwit. I suppose my replies encouraged him, and in February he wrote and wanted to know if he could ask Papa for my hand. It certainly wasn’t a new idea to me, but coming from Pretty Billy towards the end of one of his foolish letters, I nearly had an attack. I slept on it several days and took out his picture and studied it a good many times before I answered to tell him he could. His letter to Papa came in about a week, and if Papa could have run all the way to Hamlet to say Yes, he would have. You would have thought I was a hundred years old. I was just pushing twenty-eight. So it all went very smoothly. Most of our plans were made by mail—setting the date, I mean, and arranging about the honeymoon at Old Point Comfort and deciding where to live in Hamlet (he suggested we stay at the Seaboard Hotel till I got adjusted)—and I only saw him one more time before the wedding week, and that was when he came down for three days at Easter and spent most of his time riding out alone because horses gave Brother asthma and Papa was having his spring rheumatism. I had no intentions of turning it into a tremendous wedding. I was never the bride type anyway so we were going to keep it small—small as Papa would let us with him charging around telling everybody in sight, white or black, and inviting them. We had decided on September the fifteenth in hopes it might be cooler by then and we could decorate the church with the last of the roses and leaves. The ceremony was to have been in the evening. I’ve always loved the dark. It’s so sad. Pretty Billy arrived a week in advance. Papa and Brother met his train and brought him to the house. That was the only time he ever kissed me, saying it was about time for that now, didn’t I reckon? There wasn’t much entertaining for us and that suited me fine. I had miles of sewing left to do. After breakfast every morning I would step in the parlor and start to work, and Pretty Billy would come trailing after me. It never seemed to dawn on him that I might not want him watching me make my own step-ins and all but I never mentioned it. (He was the nervous type—always had to be poking up the fire or fiddling with something in his hand. Early in our acquaintance he broke the lacework skirt off of a china ballet dancer Mama valued because it was sent to her from some capital, and when I looked up at him holding out the pieces in his hand and making no attempt to hide them, he said, ‘See here, Lillian Belle, what I’ve done, just fiddling with it’ and I said—and laughed—‘It seems to me if you are so much of a fiddler, you had better invest in a fiddle before you cause real trouble.’) But he never bothered me long, and from the second day after he arrived, he was riding off every morning to hunt by himself. Most of Papa’s dogs would follow after him. Mama would pack him some dinner, and we wouldn’t see him again until late evening just before supper. I thought I would be seeing enough of him in the future so I never asked him not to go. He never brought any game or anything back with him except some lovely leaves to decorate the church, and once I asked him, ‘Pretty Billy, what is it you are after out there all day long?’ and he laughed and said, ‘Most anything I can scare up.’ (Lord knows what he was hunting at that time of year unless it was a breeze or a cool place to lay his head.) Before I could catch my breath good, it was Thursday morning—Saturday was the wedding—and I was getting more fidgety by the minute. I would jump out of my skin if you halfway looked at me, but Pretty Billy rode off that morning before I even got downstairs. Mama had taken over the sewing because I was so trembly, and I spent the entire day making mints on a marble-top washstand—one of the few things I do well. I looked for Pretty Billy to come in for dinner since it was Thursday and folks were beginning to call but he didn’t. And he didn’t show up at three o’clock either when Preacher Burton came to discuss details so I had all that to handle alone, and I have never been any sort of manager. It was a cool afternoon and bright, and I decided to sit on the back steps and wait for him, but he didn’t appear and dark was fast coming on and the chill so I went in, but I couldn’t eat a mouthful of supper. Papa and Brother were worried too though they made out like they weren’t. ‘He’s a splendid rider,’ Papa would say every few minutes. ‘He must have met up with a friend.’ Well, of course he was a great talker, but who, was what I wanted to know, did he know out there in the middle of nowhere?”