He took a long wait and then didn’t speak; and he wasn’t a man— a boy maybe fifteen, to tell by his eyes, but taller than me. In the light that cupped us, he had black eyes set slant in his head like a wild bobcat’s that met me, not shying. His hair was nearly the girl’s fine color, darkest auburn (the warm light came from a glass lamp beside him on the lid of a keg—no razor, no knife, no bandage in view). His eyes were mainly what told me that he and the girl were closer kin than married. Brother or sister, father and child. No, they had to be too young for that—even too young to marry anywhere but back in these hills, lawless and hid.
I asked him if his name wasn’t Autry.
His white face made a try to smile, but his heart wasn’t in it. “She tells people that.”
“Told me, for one.”
By then my eyes had opened enough to see he was dressed in parts of my uniform—the black wool pants that were clean of my blood and what was left of a black hunter’s coat I’d brought from home. In the dark they blanked out his whole body but the burning face.
That was set on me, not wild-eyed but earnest. And then his hands moved into the shine. They were brown from work with fingers long as bamboo canes, knobbed at the knuckles from toil or age. But he looked so young just now, just a boy. He finally said “I got to ask you to lie back down and trust my work.”
I recalled the salve the girl had mentioned—if this boy had any salve or balm, it was not in sight. And then I took the first look at my leg. It had not been washed since three hot days before the wound when I dipped up water from a muddy spring at the edge of a burnt-out wheelwright’s shop and washed myself the best I could. Where the girl had cut across my wound, a thin pale track of the razor showed (was it already healed?). Round the bullet hole my skin was flooded with vicious blood and puckered to a near-black purple. Worse still, red streaks ran up past my crotch and belly—the poison reaching towards my heart. And across my privates the same thick color was spreading over to my left leg. I’ve seldom been a praying man, not for my lone self; but at that sight I said what must have sounded like prayer—God spare me or something equally weak.
Whatever the words, they made the boy smile, full at last on firm white teeth, and it left him looking like a son any father would gladly welcome (I had no sons and had given up hoping). He said “I’m not nobody’s God, Captain; but if you trust me, I’ll do my best.”
I was nobody’s captain either, never would be; and I figured he was either ignorant or crazy. But I was in no state of mind to shy from help, even here at the hands of a boy who—if he was truly a human and not some useless child of my fever—could scarcely do more than wash me clean and lay me into a deep enough grave by dawn or whenever the sure end came. I lay back flat and waited through what felt like a year, lifting my head by two or three inches every week or so to test his progress. It felt that slow.
To strain for memory, I figure his hands stayed on me, holding, till towards daybreak—well over an hour—him still as a shaft of upright rock with his old-man fingers round my ankles and sometimes sliding as high as my knees but, far as I know, never touching the wound, pressing hard but always steady. So I never felt he’d slacked or was gone. It seemed he was certain that honest pressure by one careful soul could turn death back from another live body far gone as me and friendless to boot. His eyes stayed shut a good part of the time, though his dry lips moved every now and then in what I tried to read as words, whole sentences—were they prayers or spells? But I never recognized one whole syllable and never felt like I was in danger or even in the wasteful hands of a fool.
I just stayed wide awake every minute and again took the chance to bring up the eyes I’d known and left—the usual family members, my girls, my staunch friend Ray that fell beside me (drilled through the eye) the day before I took my bullet and a few of the bodies I’d loved in darkness, moaning my name. All moved past me, bright as I’d ever seen them in life or dark and twisting; and they all nearly smiled. Still for the first time since I left, not one of them spoke to call me back. They each looked satisfied where they were and gave no sign of needing or hoping to see me again.
And when the first sun made its slow cold way through the window and reached us both, I felt so free from my old moorings that again I thought I was borne through the air well off the ground and onward through the mountain dawn like some kind of messenger skimming the Earth to do good will for no other master than God on high. That finally tired me; and the last I saw before my eyes shut down on the light was Autry easing up on my legs, then laying a heavy quilt across me and slowly moving away with his lamp. And what I figured I knew was a sentence that ran, like a big child’s alphabet, behind my eyes—These people are saving your flesh to eat. Wild as it sounds, that dawn it left me calmer yet and eased me into a sleep so deep that all I knew for days to come was fitful dreams of war and blood, real as my life but harmless to watch.
Turned out the girl and boy had failed. Her lancing razor and the drink she gave me, his praying hands—they’d poured right into my sucking wound, a precious food it brewed and spread like perfect poison through my body. I was scarcely a rack of skin-tarred bones that were hot enough to cauterize a field hospital of bleeding men, but I stank with maggoty meat and the readable news of death. By the time I plunged to the pit of those fears in shuddering fever, I couldn’t have kept but a slim two thirds of my old size (which was near two hundred). All I took for nourishment was warm and cold drinks brought by the girl and, night after night, the boy’s close hands and his dry lips moving through whatever code he used to whatever god.
I lay on, locked in further hard visions far past the point either one of my keepers thought I’d draw the next safe breath. They told me later they gave me up more times than one. And in every vision, staring again, stood a person I’d failed in the world—the old place everybody said was peaceful before the war but still the world I made my mess in, my sins of faithless greed I forced on any woman that would grin my way and let my starving mind inside her final secret to gorge itself.
It would be long months before I was safe enough to know how far into death I went, and then I only knew what they told me. They claimed I’d sleep through stretches of days, then wake up clawing at whatever came near. They said I’d make them promise me death with the white-hot blade (they swore I always called it that) or how other times I’d beg them to put their promise in writing and sign it plain before my eyes—that they’d keep me the rest of my days and alter my story so no one from my old life could find me.
And nobody found me; but down I went on rushing towards death till one cold midnight I howled for the boy to take some gouge—one big enough to serve—and dig my stinking leg off at last at the deep hipsocket and burn it before it killed us all. By then I knew it had poisoned the air. I have a memory I think I can trust of howling the dreadful words in his face and then of seeing him go for a cleaver and bring it right to the edge of my side (I’d long since lain in an ample bed, the clean bed I’d noticed at first). I didn’t feel a trace of fear; and I know my actual voice calmed down to confident peace as I said “Come on. Oh Autry, help me or fry in Hell.”
He thought that through for a stunned minute, and I saw his eyes go darker still as the plan came on him like a dense bright veil that would have scalded any soul not chosen to do time’s will. He gave one nod, accepting his duty. Then he laid the cleaver flat by his feet and quickly shucked his entire clothes, every layer of his and mine that had hid him. He stood there naked a long minute more, then turned the single quilt back off me and laid his clean length down my bones and the thin dry flesh that clung to me yet.
At first touch I thought he was on some private errand of his own that I couldn’t help; but as he began to move and work, I guessed it might be purely a last hope of saving me. Far gone as I was, I saw the picture in my mother’s Bible—Jacob wrestling a whole black night with the Angel of God and winning at daybreak.
And however long he truly stayed stretched on
me there, however gone and weak I was, it felt till the end like a desperate fight between at least one human creature and something else like the will of God or even the evil face that lurks in the heart of a world run by any two sets of men as bent on havoc as the men I’d fought with, likewise the man I’d been till now. Wildest of all, at no one moment did I ever think it was strange or killing—what we did. It always felt like a deed we were doing. It felt like something planned for us (whoever he was) since time got started, and I always bet I’d end alive.
So in memory I guess there was new light near us, to show me we were still indoors with a roof above and a live world beyond us. The light could have come from the oil lamp or, Christ knows, maybe some shine from our struggle. It had the nature of fire in water, from old sea timbers, or far in the woods from slow decay. It played along my arms, his sides, his vise-grip legs, my straddled bones, his arms that were strong as any blacksmith’s and what rode hot from the pit of his belly—his tall man’s root that seemed as much a part of his work, whatever he meant, as the toiling face and open eyes that moved above me, dark and near, and never left my own dazed sight. I recall I only thought two words that I kept silent—Hurry, son, by which I meant I guessed he was killing or healing or maybe just hoping to warm my chill; so end it fast—I sure-God felt he was using me up, though all he said was (time and again) “Captain, Captain, this is nothing but help.”
I knew if he worked on many more minutes, he’d be alone in the bed by day—there’d be no sign of me left but the stain of my last sweat, and that would be mist on the chill of morning. It must have been then I faded again for God knows how long—a long fit of dreams or actual life too strange to recall. It did seem though that Autry—or whatever Autry turned into—was back on me for a black string of nights and that I never doubted, every time we struggled, how he was bent on curing me finally just with the force of his own body, on driving death back with nothing but skin and the hot intention of a boy as fevered as I’d ever been (and far more desperate, for his own reasons and the orders he’d got from whatever power).
So time and again I still believe he lay down on me, burning to pass his young health to me or—failing that—to grind my pitiful scraps of bone to an ashy powder he could strow to the wind and then move on with his warm girl to a life they’d won through kindness to me. Over and over anyhow I’d sleep through baking fits of heat where dreams were nothing but coals banked on me, and then I’d wake soaked through to the bone with cold salt sweat from broken fever—proof his help was somehow working.
Her name was Ruth and when I finally swam towards light, it was her again that met me first—her face above me backed by a flood of shine from the window. She said “It’s snowing. You ever seen snow?”
Close as my family lived to the coast, there’d only been one snow that lasted long enough to mark my mind. I’d been a young boy myself, sixteen; and the night before the weather turned, I’d joined another human body for the first full time, close and deep into joy. It had been with the girl I later married, made two daughters on and left in tears. She was a younger distant cousin who came to us when her own people died of the red consumption that awful year when so many fell right where they stood—in fields, on horseback—foaming blood at their smiling lips (they mostly died smiling, strangest of all).
Anyhow when she’d been living with us for three long months—my distant cousin—she came to the loft where I slept one March night and dredged me up from a happy dream and asked without a single word for whatever comfort I could give her loss. Being my age then all I could think was to roll down on her and raise her shift the gentlest I could and visit her deep in the quick of her sorrow.
It did seem to help—her sleeping face was all but smiling when daylight woke me, blazing white at the frozen pane. At first I thought it was Judgment Day from the strength of the glare; still that didn’t scare me or turn me against what she and I’d done. I calmly shook her arm to wake her and said “Something’s new; look out here with me.“
Together we crawled on our knees to the window; and all downhill from my old home, the better part of a mile towards the road, was untouched snow as pure as the hope we shared by then. I said to her “See, I knew we did right.”
But bathed in the shine, she couldn’t do more than say “Please, please.” I understood she’d either spoken to the snow or me. She was telling the splendid sight to let up, it was too fine to watch; or she might have said it mainly to me, “Please keep me near you for good, here on.”
I never could ask her to say more though, in explanation; and when she told me four months later she was toting my child in painful secret, I hitched a pony to Mother’s green cart and drove us hard to a Baptist church six miles from home and married her legal, young as we were. Snow had done that to us, I always knew—the glare and the sheen like fire off the seraphim as they meet you, bent on either declaring pardon or haling your soul to postponed justice.
It was that bright anyhow when I came to with young Ruth near me in that same room I’d suffered in. So I managed to tell her that yes I’d seen one genuine snow.
She said “You feel like sitting up then? If you do I’ll call him.”
Him? By then I barely recalled my strong night visitor’s name, but I said “Where is he?”
She pointed to the window. “Out melting snow. See, our spring’s nearly two miles off; but Autry’s out there now with a big fire, melting enough snow to warm you in if you mean to bathe.”
If Ruth had said they were souls of the damned sent here to scorch me back to my home, I couldn’t have felt any stranger than now. It was strangeness too that made me lie. I said “My name is Cullen, Cullen Duffy” (I’d someway remembered the redhaired man on the battlefield taking my papers; I’d come here nameless).
She was over by the fireplace poking logs. She said “I was hoping you’d live to tell us,” and she threw a broad smile that reached me clear as the window shine.
I said “So I lived?”
“Sit up, man, and look.” She came halfway back towards me on the bed.
I told myself not to reach down and feel, just try to get to my elbows and see what was left of my body. Weak as a drowned cat, I managed it slowly. The same quilt was on me, dark green and red; and beneath it there seemed to be two legs and feet. Then I noticed I was in a thick nightshirt, coarse as linen and clean as a shroud; and when I smelled my hands, they were sweet with maybe pine tar.
Ruth came the rest of the distance towards me and reached for the quilt. “You’re way too feeble but let me show you.”
The quilt spread back on her full arms, and there still on me were both my legs. The left leg was cloudy still near the thigh but normal size for a man that had starved through maybe long months. The right leg had shrunk to the size of an arm, and the wound hole was ugly but plainly closing with tender flesh. I knew I ought to be relieved; I figured I ought to burst into praise and gratitude. But what I found the strength to say was more a question than anything else, “This means I’m alive?”
She said “Either that or I’m in Heaven.”
I mean to tell, I studied her slow and careful then. She looked as good as what I still guess Heaven contains if it’s there at all. So I reached my right hand out and found her—just her wrist that was small but wiry as cable. I said “Sweet child, accept my thanks.”
It seemed to shock her. She took a step back and looked behind as if for help or a quick retreat. Then she said “Oh we do.” A frown crossed her brow, and it finally made her change her meaning. “It was Autry that saved you, Captain. Thank Autry.”
I said “Your brother?” and when she looked puzzled, I mentioned how much they favored each other.
That nearly helped her to smile—not quite.
So I went further. “You might be twins.”
She said “No, sir. We’re not no kin on Earth to my knowledge.”
“Husband and wife?”
Her whole face colored and again she looked towards
the brilliant window. We could hear somebody outside chopping wood, and her eyes got urgent as she pointed that way. “We’re trash. Just orphans scared of the killing.”
By now I’d got enough strength back to prop myself on the high headboard. The room looked bigger than I recalled, still as clean as any picked bone, with no real signs of habitation but the coals of fire and her and my breathing eight feet apart. It was someway the emptiest place I’d been—there might not have been a roof and walls; the air was that vacant.
She caught my train of thought. “We don’t stay here—” Her hand waved round; she meant the room.
“Who does?”
“Just you since the day Autry found you.”
“But this is your home—”
“Oh no indeed. We stumbled on it when we’d been running so long we had to stop or die.”
I said “You’re saying you don’t live here?” I meant I’d never seen them sleeping or eating in here, just working on me.
“No sir, when Autry found your body, we moved out yonder to give you air.” She pointed again.
“But near, close by?”
She finally smiled and nodded behind her out the window. “In sound of your voice. Autry would hear you howling at night and run to help you.”
Before I could say my thanks for that, the single door swung open on us; and there stood Autry taller maybe than I recalled but in my black clothes and finer across the brow and eyes than any son I’d dreamed of spawning and teaching the little I’d learned and could give. In his arms he strained to hold a copper tub that smoked like a cooking pit; but he stalled in place—facing me, not speaking.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 17