“Big Mama know if you want to ask her,” Wash said—but only to the hot air around. Miss Lillian Belle had gone on to tell it before she forgot.
“When he hadn’t come by bedtime, I was all to pieces and nobody could begin to think of sleeping. We all sat there and waited and tried to find little tasks to do, little quiet things that wouldn’t jar the air, till the only noise left was Mama’s needles knitting Pretty Billy a goingaway scarf for his long neck, when out of the pitch dark came this high sad voice that was one hound barking at the moon. And off in the woods the others commenced to answer, and they sounded half the world away. Papa rose up and said ‘It’s my dogs’—like it might have been dragons. All of us knew enough about those dogs’ voices to know they hadn’t just now wandered in at Pretty Billy’s heels. Papa and Brother went out but they couldn’t quiet them down. They stayed out there till I thought I would scream, and when they came in it was to get their coats and lanterns and their guns to ride off looking, taking Uncle Smooth with them—your great-granddaddy—on a mule, and all those crying dogs. I sat by the window with a light till way past midnight. Then Mama made me take off my shoes and rest till we heard some news. That wasn’t before nearly seven when Uncle Smooth rode up in the yard on Papa’s horse and told Mama that Papa said Miss Lillian Belle was to come to where he was right away. I asked him if they had located Mr. Pretty Billy. All he said was ‘Yes’m, they did.’ I put on my coat and climbed on the horse behind him (we only kept three riding horses then) and didn’t say a word till we got to where we were going. I just prayed to myself and Uncle Smooth took us crashing off through the woods. Where we finally stopped was at the Pitchfords’. You don’t know them, Wash.”
“Yes’m, Big Mama use their name sometime in stories.”
“Well, the Pitchfords I’m talking about were farming a piece of Papa’s poorest cotton land over beyond the creek bottom. There are some of them back there right now—the sort of folks you will have to knock in the head on Judgment Day. They had a little house very much like Liney’s except darker and dirty, and when Uncle Smooth and I flew up in the yard there was nothing in sight but eight or ten peaked-looking children standing in stairsteps by the door staring at me. Papa said many times afterwards that if there had been any way in the world to spare me the shock of walking in like that, he would have done it. But as it was, they had had to lay Pretty Billy out on a bed pushed close up to the fireplace, and he was the first thing I laid eyes on when I walked in that house. It didn’t help one bit either that after I had stood in the door a long time, he rolled his eyes over towards me as far as he could and tried to smile and said, ‘Look here, Lilly, I’ve messed up your shirt.’ He had just recently been calling me Lilly, and the shirt was one I had made for him. Papa was there and what seemed like a hundred of those Pitchfords creeping around and looking at me out of their big squirrel eyes and saying ‘Howdy-do, lady. ’ Brother had gone on the other horse to get a doctor. I didn’t ask but Papa volunteered they had found Pretty Billy thrown down beside the creek a little way from the Pitchfords’. After a while old Mrs. Pitchford came up to Papa and said, ‘Major Carraway, it’s his neck, ain’t it?’ and Papa said ‘I know that.’ They offered me a chair by the fire, and I sat there for the rest of the time about four yards from Pretty Billy’s head as I reckoned it. I never went a step closer, and when he died he died just that far from me. Brother and the doctor didn’t come and didn’t come, and nobody knew anything to do for him except Nettie Pitchford—she was their oldest girl, about seventeen—and she stood there by him and mopped off his forehead with cool water and fanned him whenever the flies settled. He looked at her most of the time and nowhere else. Papa said he couldn’t turn his head. It looked like we might be there a long time, and Mrs. Pitchford came over and asked me if I wouldn’t take a glass of her tomato wine. I said I didn’t believe that was what I needed, and it was then that Pretty Billy called for Papa. Papa leaned over him and Pretty Billy tried to whisper, but in that room there wasn’t such a thing as whispering. What he said was, ‘Give her something she wants.’ He was looking at Nettie and smiling.”
A thin useless cloud passed over the sun, splotching the graves with shade, and a little breeze commenced waving round in the tobacco—nothing to get your hopes up about—but in the brief dark and under the brim of her hat, Miss Lillian Belle’s eyes went on getting brighter. “I’ve always known Pretty Billy meant for Papa to reward that girl for hanging over him faithful like she did with water. Then a fly landed on his nose. He laughed and a thin stream of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth, and he gave this little last sound twice—not a word, but like a dove makes, round and alone, and I couldn’t listen to a dove for the longest kind of time after that. I ought to have cried right then before it was too late. If somebody had laughed at me or said, ‘Lillian Belle, I’m sorry’ or ‘Lillian Belle, you will never be asked to bear a heavier load than this’ then I might have broken down like any woman should. But I didn’t see it that way. The only person that said anything was Papa, and all he said was, ‘Lillian Belle, don’t let me down.’ It just seemed like he was counting on me to hold up. It was the first time I had ever been counted on for anything so I held up. His brother came that same afternoon, short and scared-looking. Nobody had given him a thought. He had come to be Best Man. Papa asked him what was his wish about burying Pretty Billy, and he said he thought it would be the sensible thing to bury him in Macon. That was what Papa had hoped for so he offered Pretty Billy this space here and did every bit of the bathing and shaving and dressing himself, using my one photograph to locate the part in all that damp black hair. When he had finished the laying out, he led me in to say goodbye or whatever I wanted to say. The casket hadn’t come yet and Pretty Billy was lying on the bed he generally slept in with one pillow under his head so the edge of his nose and lips and chin and his eyelids were raised up into the light from the window and seemed to be shining from inside. Papa had shaved off part of his mustache by mistake, and what was left wasn’t too much like Pretty Billy. The only thing I could think to do was touch his hand once and then leave. But when I stepped forward to do it, I saw how the fingers of his right hand had curled inwards to make a cup like a sea shell waiting for water, and I didn’t want to disturb that. So I turned to Papa and said ‘I’m ready’ and he took me away. It was to have been a small wedding, and it was a small burial. Papa stopped our Virginia cousins by wire, and there was just Mama and Papa and Brother and Doc, and the preacher, and Mr. Williams’ wife joined him for the service, and little Loyce Rodwell and I, and Nettie Pitchford and her folks turned up but kept their distance. Liney and Aunt Dorcas and Uncle Smooth and some of the others watched from the porch. It was a nice afternoon. Papa had turned the goats loose in the front yard to eat down the tallest weeds, and some little Negro boys had spent that whole morning rolling down all that was left with great big logs. Aunt Dorcas went out a dozen times, I know, and told them to hush up their laughing. Mama had asked Liney to sing a song, and she sang ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ with no piano or anything, just that clear voice she used to have that carried to the road. Then the men put him on the wagon and brought him down here for the commitment. Loyce Rodwell, who was to have strewn rose petals at the wedding, sprinkled some in over the casket, and Mama and I walked back up to the house. Papa stayed behind, and Brother, to see that the rest was done. Everybody did their best and with time and a mild winter, things had pieced back together nearly when one evening Aunt Dorcas looked out of the kitchen window and said, ‘Here come that Pitchford child.’ Papa went out to meet her, remembering Pretty Billy’s last words that I hadn’t ever forgotten. She had walked all that way—four or five miles easily—to ask Papa if as her present she couldn’t have that little gold finger ring of Mr. Pretty Billy’s. Papa told her it was buried with him, which it was, so she said, ‘Well, there ain’t nothing else I don’t guess’ and turned and set off to walk back home in the night.”
She had stopped and
she sat on the stone, picking at any spot on her dress as was her habit. In a little Wash raised up from his greenery—“That’s all you remember, Miss Lillian Belle?”
She nodded. “I’m a mighty good forgetter.”
Wash took a small rock and scraped at the moss on the modest stone Major Carraway had felt compelled to buy for that Walkerton cousin. Miss Lillian Belle stood and looked round her again. It had once been her wish to see the graves from the air because Dormn Spivey had passed over in a plane on his way to war and reported that the Carraway cemetery was the one thing he recognized in all Warren County. Then she said, “Wash, I’ll need your hand back up the path,” and as if he had been doing it forever, he took her arm and a good part of her weight on his shoulder, and they started—the old woman looking towards where she knew the house was and the little boy studying the ground and leaning into his work with his pink tongue just showing between the dark purple lips.
Soon they would be close enough, and the house would swim into plain view through the heat. Miss Lillian Belle said, “Hold up a minute, Wash, and let me catch my breath,” and from there she looked up, but all she could see of it was the silver paint streaking over the eaves and down the east side where Buxton Bragg, a jack-leg roof painter, had spilled it early in the spring. Brother should have seen to that long ago. “I’ll speak to him about that this evening,” she said, “if I don’t forget.” Wash was still beside her, plowing little furrows on the dust with his toe and humming. “I’m all right now, Wash. You run on home. Liney and the rest of them will be there directly, and they can tell you about Henry’s funeral.”
“Yes’m. Then you want me to come tell you, Miss Lillian Belle?”
“Thank you, no, Wash. Brother will be telling me all I can say grace over.”
So he said he would be seeing her tomorrow if the Lord was willing and he didn’t die, and she moved on towards the house, towards what she could see—the light, that was all, the sun on the spilled paint, the sudden flashing reaching out to her even down here, shining like Christmas all those years ago or like her own old eyes as bright now in remembering as some proud mountain yielding the sun its flanks of snow or some white bird settling its slender wings with the softest cry into dying light.
INVITATION
for Jessie Rehder 1908-1967
THE GIFTS that you gave me (presents, not love nor entire loyalty; they were daily issue) were few and small (we all laughed—you hardest—at your chinchery)—from your Caribbean Christmas, a dishtowel-map of the West Indies; from your California summer, a butcher’s apron; from my last sight of you, a white hyacinth. (My thirtyfourth birthday. You’d called me to your house, too low to visit me; and when I’d gone, climbed your yard—littered now—and found you hunched at the living-room table, stroking accurate as a rhino at a paint-by-number canvas of yellow roses, and when you’d stood to show the pounds you’d lost since your little heart spell—slacks and jersey flapped round you, an idle tent—when you’d shown me your face bound for death like a ship, then you said “Many more!” and gave me my present—a hyacinth blooming in a cardboard pot. Did you see?—as I did at once—the petals were browning, the odor a furious final exhaling? Yet it outlasted you by a week of warm days; and its dry leaves are out my kitchen window now, bulb committed to my hard starved garden.)
But the two emblems of you which I possess (which, barring fire, will outlast me though their meaning may not) were not gifts but begged—I pestered you for them. Two photographs. The first of you at about twenty-three (say, 1930; three years before my birth). We came across it in your crammed scrapbooks one hot night last summer on your plastic sofa (after cold crab salad and peach ice-cream which, since we survived, surely showed us immortal). I was shocked by its sudden still loveliness among all your decades of prank-shots, gags (you a Viking chief in your senior play, you in rhinestones and tank-suit on the Riviera, you at ninety-five pounds after your breakdown, in a ballet pose—a camera was your signal for self-vandalism); and I said with our usual tactlessness, “You were lovely, Jessie,” then bit my tongue.—“That day,” you said. “It was Aunt Mary’s fault. She had found me a husband, a millionaire widower. He’d never seen me and this picture was meant to be his first look. Aunt Mary worked on my wardrobe for days, would dress me like a doll, then strip me, try again—new coat, hat, scarf; best photographer in town, shot through foggy lenses, all haze and glow. Then I saw the proofs and stopped her there, wouldn’t let her contact her rich prospect.”—“But why?” I said. You studied the face—“She had covered me up.” She had—silk scarf to your chin; soft Garbo hat shading all your high forehead, half your huge right eye. You peer from a cave and, shyly but firmly and permanently, you issue your message and invitation—I will come, for the asking to your generous heart; be your laughing servant as long as I live. No takers, not one. And the last day I saw you, you knew that at last. Your terrible offer was down; gate had crashed. Now we talked through a grill, you unlikeliest of cloistered nuns; I what?—parent, friend, lover, gently abandoned? Both of us free and sentenced now—you to your death in less than two days, propped reading in bed, the maid five steps away unwarned (autopsy found no cause—blood, lungs, veins entirely clear; heart simply reneged) and I to what?
—To, among unknowns of time and face, the other picture I begged from you, other message you grudged me. A blurred Kodachrome from your summer in France two years ago; from a Norman church, a peeling mural, four figures from a medieval Dance of Death—two elegant skeletons, wasp-waisted, prancing; between them two persons. A tall stout lady entirely in red—red cloak to the throat, red wide-brimmed hat, red veil round her face (an abbess? in red?) and a gray young man; face, cap, doublet, hose one shade of gray. Each is attended by a skeleton, is gripped at the wrist by an icy bone. Each gestures with the free hand, palm upraised—not a frantic “No” but a calm “Not yet.” In vain. The forward rhythm is set. Their feet are performing what their hands refuse. You had had this enlarged for your livingroom wall. I asked for a print. You firmly said “No.” The request had been idle, my answer unthinking—“Tightwad,” I said, “I’ll gladly pay.”—“Not that,” you said,“Ask for anything else—take the leopard skin.” So, baffled now and mildly peeved, I dropped the request. But a few days later you brought me my print, much smaller than yours (half-a-dollar saved!), laid it on my sofa with no comment. I thanked you but asked “Why so reluctant?”—“Look at it,” you said, “You have not really looked.” I had not, for all my famed eagle-eye. The lady in red was a likeness of you—swathed, all but smothered, in her bright tent of clothes—beseeching time from her only companion, loyal, smiling, ready death. I said, “Never mind—just art not life” and you went off fishing.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 14