—Your faces of course. The Greeks, again—faces are what we succeed in making (barring burns, cuts, pox, enemies with blades); triumph or mess, our one personal product. Therefore tombs should be portraits—smooth runner or bride taken young, gravely vapid; wife, husband, parent. The unique face, the hair often mantled—in prospect of journey—an arm almost always crooked toward the shoulder, palm toward the eyes. “Farewell”? or “Follow me”?
I’d set over you your faces—coarse stone, veined, soluble in time— your bodies to the waist; arms down however (you have not beckoned me, or have only begun).
But your faces when?
—Not in grace of youth (which I never saw) nor as stunned by your endings but as, say, six weeks before your deaths you met your days (work, sons, selves) filled, runnelled, pouched with all you’d learned— self-steerage, laughing charity, as yet unappalled by your readiness to die.
ENDLESS MOUNTAINS
THE SHOT went through the white inside of my right thigh on Wednesday near noon. I lay in a little sweetgum thicket to the west of the battlefield the rest of that day and the sweltering night. Men worse off than me were dying all round me, telling their Jesus they could barely see him but were coming anyhow, or calling out long menus to the air for their mothers to cook, who were worlds away. I may have lain on, a very long time. Anyhow I remember the one night passed; and next it seemed like late afternoon with long light the color of brown clover-honey before the redhead scavenger found me, rummaged my pockets, read my papers, balled them up and threw them aside, saying “Well now, Trump, it’s your goddamned birthday.”
Weak as I was, I said I could drink to the goddamned part.
But he just said “And it looks like your last, son”; then he bent towards me. That had to make it September fourteenth unless he was lying, which I doubt he was. Tall as I am, he picked me up like a backbroke doll, kissed my forehead and strode on towards the bloody tent I’d nightmared about since the day I left home.
It must have been that night or the next, I managed to get upright on my feet. They held up under me long enough for my arms to feel out slow in the dark—empty around me. Had I dreamed there were other boys moaning near me, packed close as a flock of starlings in the snow? Maybe—I was dreaming from the morphia, steady. All my hands found now though was air, hot empty air; and both my legs still bore my weight. I reached down far enough to find my thigh and the crusty hole, size of an onion and hotter than all the rest of me; and then I thought I recalled a man’s voice, maybe the surgeon’s, saying I’d get two choices next dawn—I could give him that leg or take it to God myself by dark.
It was already dark. Was I already dead? If so, time had left me two long legs—one of them pierced deep (what I call time, most people call God). All right, I’d trust I was meant to use them. I took five short steps into the night, expecting something to stop me each instant; but no, and then my face seemed to cool—I was maybe outdoors again. The air was dry and a light breeze moved to call me on. For the first hundred yards, I barely hurt. Then a fire blazed up where my right leg hinged onto my body—the leg wouldn’t take real steps from there on. Ten yards later the pain had plugged my head so full, I stopped and thought “Fall here in your tracks; and if you’re still alive at dawn, let them cut you into however many pieces it takes to stop this pain.” My eyes were likewise failing fast.
But something told me I had to go, I was meant to leave (not to save just a limb but the rest of my life); so my left leg took a long step on its own, dragging the right. Then it took three more—by now I could see the coals of small fires and occasional tents not twenty yards off—and I let it pull on down a slope till it dragged me into full dark again where I could smell what had to be water, the first clean water I’d smelled after drinking hot slop for days. Upright I groped before me with my hands, knowing that—close to water so clean—I might just slide into enemy arms or hoist myself onto some warm bayonet waiting to end me. Christ, please let it.
But no, I was next at what I could feel was the verge of the stream. I wondered if I could manage to kneel—the pain by then was like continuous lightning through me. It was more like falling. Still I got to the ground; and when I’d scrabbled forward on my fists, I found I could take one long reach down into moving water, cold as the night (we were near the mountains). Just the feel of its kindness—unspoiled water, the fact that it bore my touch without shrinking—gave my mind the first firm thought I’d had since my wound. Deep in me, it said They mean you to last. You find out how. It didn’t tell me who they was that meant my life to go on ahead, though I someway knew it was not my people back at home, not the waiting women; and it never said where it would lead nor when the actual end would come.
But I chose to believe them, step by step, though next I slid into thick black coma and lay there bathing that one hand till a cloudless first-day cracked my eyes. I rushed to crawl upright on my feet before some boy less mangled than me could spot me and drill my head clean through or some of my own boys could haul my ruins on back uphill and into that reeking flyblown tent where I’d be stunned like a beef in the stall, quartered with a blue-iron handforged cleaver, then parceled out for all I knew to waiting cripples hungry as me. I was dreaming half-awake by then—long scary visions of children that looked like offspring of mine, whom I’d never known till now they were caught in an attic fire that would eat everything they’d loved or trusted. They anyhow blanked the actual pain of the world I was in.
I must have walked that whole bright day, using only my own two legs and the dogwood stick I found by the path, a handy crutch. I think I remember speaking to several women I passed as they stood at stone gates holding their children or leading a horse no taller than me and scared nearly dead by the thunder beyond us—it was fresh killing surely but not for me, not now, no more. One of the young girls with no baby yet must have fed me something and found clean water that I could drink—I kept the strength to creep on forward—but who it was and what she might have asked from me, all that’s gone completely now. What I remember is the ground beneath me. A whole lot smoother than I’d expected and always up, a gradual rise that even my bad leg managed to drag itself along.
It was night again with a hair of a moon—and the hole in my thigh scalded hotter than any outcry—when it dawned on me I was past all reach and truly alone. When that thought came down back of my eyes, I’d got to a ledge near the foot of what was all but a mountain. For a long time I’d strained not to rest, and I seldom stopped—rising and starting were still straight agony. But that new idea of being thoroughly on my own with nobody else in the whole world with me, that new idea sat me down hard on a cold flat rock; and it left me happy in tall waves of joy that rushed up through my legs and chest. It felt like I was the last live soul on a planet swept of the human race except for me, a lone man normal as milk in a bucket but the lord of all—nobody to owe, nobody to fail.
I may have sat there awake till day, a long time anyhow. And what I thought as the night died out was how the eyes I’d left might look if they were still living—my young wife and both our daughters, my pale strong mother and the brother I’d left to keep her alive through war and bone-deep deprivation (my father had been dead numerous years). Other eyes and faces flickered past me—some of them calling their full three names, some of them too far back to see or never glimpsed except in darkness and secret rooms—but of course my family’s stayed with me longest. They were, every one of them, good to watch from this far off. They’d been good to know, give or take some hot silence and then cruel lies and the meanness they triggered (way over half the meanness was mine). But someway I knew my people were gone. And towards daybreak I knew their absence caused my joy—that sense I was new now, however near dead. Someway the entire Earth was mine to make from scratch in the time I had, which might be minutes.
At the first sight of the actual sun, I managed to stand and brace my knees. Right in the cold hard teeth of the light, I said my own name clear to the day
and vowed my purpose. “Trump Ferrell,” I said, “this time, get it true.” Then by some means on a near-gone leg that steadily blanked my eyes in pain, I climbed on higher. Anybody could do it if the need arose as it had for me.
It was well past noon when I got to the ridge, and I’d lain down and dozed awhile in another bleak dream before I really looked at the place and saw it was more like an endless green table than a peak. I recalled several places I’d seen on maps that were called Table Mountain or maybe Flat Dome—western Virginia came to mind and down in the Smokies nearer my birthplace. But the fact was, I had no clear notion where I’d got to. I asked myself if I even cared whether this was ours or enemy country. Any cause for war I might have felt in my own mind—that had been fading for long months and seemed to have run out completely now right through my wound. So you might have guessed I’d be begging to die.
The cut of the light on these trees though and the dry ground deep in pinestraw beneath them—someway it threw me a thin thread of hope that I managed to catch. Holding just that much in my hand, I lay on through a chain of new dreams; and each dream had a lighted window in it—something to flee through to my new world or something to wait by till time showed a path. I thought I’d wait. I hadn’t tried my leg again, and now I couldn’t bear to see it. I stayed where I was in a pinestraw ditch in the ground in full glare and waited for what the sky intended.
The next I knew, and it may have been hours, I was moving steadily over ground—in the air, I mean, suspended someway. This time I truly took it for death and shut my eyes. The air felt cooler and smelled like far-off honeysuckle, and the pain was easing as I went. It seemed a long way. Then things got darker. Through my shut lids I understood the light was fading. It crossed my mind to wonder if my destination was up or down, Heaven or Hell, bright or black (I’m no churchgoer but no big fool; I believe in justice and I’d earned its toll). I even guessed that some tall man was bearing me in ample arms for his own purpose to a good dry place or a slaughter pen. But again slaughter seemed like a thing I’d gone through more than once and come out whole.
So I calmly figured that my fate anyhow was out of my hands. Whatever held me now would know wherever it needed to take my remains and how it would use me once we were there. The last clear thought I had for hours was He knows it’s me anyhow, knows it’s Trump. Some curious way I knew it was a he that bore me forward—likely because I’d been in the war and was just barely freed from its long mannish dream of glory, though I passed out again in the moving air and knew flat nothing for what turned out to be several more days.
Far as I know, the next human being that touched me was a woman. Whatever day of the year it was, it was late afternoon—the shine that fell in on me from a window was slanted and gold as a fall-in of old coins across my body. I seemed to be laid on my back on a table, long and narrow, with something comfortable under my head that felt like a folded sheet or sack. No fear, not even when my eyes first opened. The thing that said I was safe was the light, pure ripe late light. I’d slept a long time and was still myself, whatever good that was to the world. Next I felt down both my sides to see how much of my body was left. And that was when I heard the first certifiable voice I’d heard in what seemed weeks—a human voice, most likely a woman’s.
It said from somewhere back of my head “Sir, you’re in one piece anyhow. I can tell you that much, but this leg stinks and the other one’s angry as any shot bull.”
It had to be a woman, by the pitch and feel of how she cared. I shut my eyes in a flush of thanks.
And before I could speak or try to rise, she spoke again. “I’m praying you live though. Autry—he’s gone now to make you the salve.” I could almost hear her pointing towards Autry, marking the air where he’d last stood. She said “Old Autry’s a healing soul. Hang on for him.”
I understood her to mean my right leg was gangrened now and spreading to the other and death was close. By then it seemed just the next piece of news—the state of the weather, the casualty rate. My head must have nodded to urge her on.
But she said “No, you hang on here. Autry’s planning to save you and he seldom fails.”
I nodded again in courtesy.
Then I saw her face bend close—a pretty young face, sixteen or seventeen, perfectly heart-shaped with hazel eyes and chestnut hair. A face that in my former life I’d have risked at least one whole leg for. Her full lips were set in a hard line though; and while she tried to gentle her brow and steel my patience, she held up a stick of fresh fatwood and said “Chew down on this for the pain.” She pulled my chin down and put in the stick.
I managed to say I wasn’t in pain. I wasn’t—it had gone past pain long since.
She said “You will be when I lance this pus.”
I carefully spat the stick from my mouth. “You got any kind of license for this?” I had no idea what I meant.
But it set her back. She took a deep breath, then renewed her purpose. “I can’t ask you to see this leg; but if you did, you’d know I’m bound by God to cut.”
I raised my head and saw the bright razor she held like a torch. She brought it onward then—somewhere on the lower half of what had been my body for thirty-two years, the half that had given me plentiful fun far back as I knew, whoever it harmed or disobeyed.
With the use I’d made of women’s bodies, I might have seen this as fair revenge. But weak as I was and addled with pain, I had one instant of seeing her hand as tame and welcome. All my grown life the sight of a woman’s willing hand aimed towards that lower half of me had been the sight I’d struggled time and again to get, my permanent aim. And while I told myself as the razor met my skin, This can’t hurt worse than what I’ve known, it hurt, Christ yes. A white-hot ramrod seared through my heart on into my mind, over and over for endless minutes. I’d long since gnawed the stick in two before the fire began to shrink, and then the girl was standing near me—younger still—laying a strong hand under my skull and lifting my head to help me drink from a shallow bowl. It was something cool, which was all I tasted; and in a few seconds I knew it had to be a powerful calmer.
Still I never felt a moment’s fear, though I thought a drink as welcome as this might be merciful poison. And only when it had me addled and ready for sleep did I look round at the room I was in. A low small space walled with pine boards, no trace of whitewash; by the high rock fireplace, an eating table with two tin plates, a small stove, a clean wide bed, a pitcher and bowl with fuming water—all someway looking airless and untried as tombs in the hearts of granite hills waiting for God on Judgment Day with a firm chair ready to bear His weight and a cot for His rest.
The girl leaned on nearer down. “You got any message you want me to know?”
I tried to laugh but was too content. I said “No ma’m, I’m no kind of prophet.”
She actually laughed then, clear as rung glass. It left her face as beautiful as any dawn I’d known (I’d risen at dawn since before the war). She said “I mean, you got any last instructions in case you pass on soon?”
I tried to tell her my wife’s full name and where we’d lived. I know I managed my first daughter’s name, which was Stella Dene.
The woman said “Look, I can’t write a word; but I can remember— I’ve already memorized your keen eyes—so I’ll tell Autry. He’ll tell the world whatever you say, even if you pass before he’s back. But you won’t pass on from me, now will you?”
It felt like I was aimed right there, at restful death. Still I think I told her I’d enjoyed my stay, and I know that meant my entire life up till that time (give or take some hours when I got caught red-fisted in wrong). Anyhow by then it felt like I’d enjoyed every instant, though what I should have recollected was how much pain I’d leave behind in every head and heart that knew me, from my hard mother right on through every woman I’d touched and my smart daughters. But then I sank—no word, not a dream.
Then it was dark outside in the world; the windows and farthest walls of the room wer
e nearly black. Around me though was a warm shine that clung tight to me, so close it was nearly hot to feel. I could smell lamp oil; but when I craned up to hunt for lamps or company near me, what I saw was the same sparse room surrendered to night. In my weak state and after so long with nothing to eat but that one drink, I took what came without strong question, not to speak of complaint. I even wondered calmly again if this didn’t have to be the deep hereafter. If so, in my case it seemed to consist of lying still on a long pine table (I could smell it by now)—I’m more than six foot.
The next thing told me I was close to right. My hands went slowly down again and found I was naked below the waist, far as I could reach at least. I hadn’t thought of it when the girl worked on me, but now my warm hands found my privates all in place and safe to the touch like birds in a nest. Recalling how Jesus bore his wounds past resurrection, I didn’t let myself hunt for mine—I someway trusted the girl had drained me and left my tenderest skin a lot cleaner. I still wore my old canvas shirt though.
Would saved souls lie around in Paradise hid to the waist but stark naked downward? Would that be all we learn in bliss—that, against our teaching, the belly and chest is our shameful half, where black hearts beat and the offal steams? Apparently I laughed at the thought— I heard a sound resembling a chuckle—and then my mind decided I was live. If this was late September though and I was in the lower mountains, why wasn’t I cold?—I could just make out that the fireplace was dark too, no sign of a blaze. My mind made the words Thank Christ I’m dead. I’m nearly certain I didn’t say them aloud in the room. But an answer came.
A low voice said “You feeling the chill?”
My head stayed down. “No sir, I’m not.”
He said “You got to lie this way.”
I knew I hadn’t really tried to rise, not since I got here (and was he the one that brought me?); but I gave it my best and rose to my elbows. There was no big outcry from anywhere in me, no pain worse than before my leg putrefied. Still it wasn’t my leg I tried to find. However strange I felt up here in this new world, what I yearned for was company; and it seemed a fair bet that this voice now belonged to a man, not a demon at least. My eyes settled on him, and I asked for his name.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 16