Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  Much older than I’d guessed. So I took his lead and also lapsed and was well away in thoughtless peace when Kamil bolted to his feet and waved at a bus that was struggling to park. I wanted to stop him, but he had his job so I nodded “Go.”

  He gave a quick but sweeping salaam like a movie sheik. Then the grin resumed and he jogged toward the bus that obligingly needed serious guidance. As ever, once the motor died, Kamil took his place by the door and met each tourist, dead in the eyes. He never appeared to expect a tip, and I never saw him get one. It seemed enough to search their faces—maybe news from where he’d never go.

  I lapsed off again and watched the dance of some evening birds high over the church. They had the curved-wing shape of swallows but were twice the size of swallows at home. They went on tumbling with the fixed intent of carnivorous raptors. So as a further aid to calm, I chose the smallest bird and watched her weave through all the rest. Her rapid patterns calmed me too well. For actual minutes I never thought once of the son I’d lost five months ago, not to mention my present aim in a town that was known for births. And when the flock dissolved in space and I came to Earth, it was nearly dusk. The church would shut at the last trace of light. The square was empty of all but children. Kamil was nowhere in sight, surely gone. Another American charity foiled.

  The church was open but the inside was dark and looked utterly empty. I’d walked a good halfway up the nave before I thought I might get locked in. By then I was reckless and pushed ahead. Any healthy person could do a lot worse than spend a night on the cold cave-floor. And the farther I went, the darker things got till, up near the altar, I was feeling the air itself for directions. I’d never longed for a Greek monk before, that surly breed, but I almost did. And then the precipitous stairs were at me—slick stone, no railing—and I almost fell.

  The cave though was lighted, the usual candles and hanging oil lamps secreting a moist enfolding heat. Still no other human in sight. There are no chairs or benches, so you have two choices of respectful posture, standing or kneeling. I have a trick knee and in any case am not given to kneeling. I also have a nagging tendency to awe at the ancient sites of any faith that doesn’t advocate a slaughter of the faithless, but prayer and prostration are matters I retired from in junior-high.

  Still, there alone for maybe ten minutes, I came as near a physical bow as I’d come for decades. The thing my mind kept going back to was, some brand of touch. I’d bend my good knee and press my forehead—forehead, not lips—on the famous star. I told myself I could do the same at a few other places, like Keats’s tombstone or the sill of a hut at the back of my grandfather’s vegetable garden where an old black man, born a slave, had died after tending my childhood with well-meant patience. And I did step forward and start to crouch before I heard footsteps on the stairs. This would be the mad monk with beard aflame. Instead it was Kamil—unsmiling, bareheaded again, even older. He came straight toward me and took my right hand; his gloves were gone.

  He had never followed me before. I was glad of course and pressed his palm.

  But his head shook hard. Then his face came down; and with lips so dry they scraped my skin, he kissed the heel of my hand by the thumb.

  I thought that was more than a fair return on one cup of coffee; and next I laid my other hand on the crown of his bowed head, the kind of blessing you see in paintings of Abraham or Isaac and Jacob. I knew I would never do it elsewhere above ground in daylight, but here it felt apt.

  When he stood back up, Kamil still hadn’t smiled. He moaned a low note, no word but no grunt. And he turned to leave.

  I may be a hack but I can be moved, every year or so. I called his name in two clear syllables, “Ka - mil.”

  He stopped in his tracks but didn’t look round.

  So I thought “He can hear.” And I covered the ten feet of cave between us, pressed my gift in his hand and shut his fingers on it. He looked down slowly, then carefully opened the dingy wad of shekels. On his fingers he counted meticulously. Then grinning wide, he folded them back and thrust the wad into my breast pocket.

  I said “No. For you, my friend.”

  He kept on grinning but shook his head.

  When I reached to my pocket and tried to insist, Kamil pointed to the star and raised a hushing finger to his lips. Many Arabs in Bethlehem are Maronite Christians, and Muslims honor Jesus as a prophet, so I understood him to mean “Pipe down.” By then I had the money out again.

  But his head shook hard; and when I said “Please” in a lower voice, his eyes went fierce and his dry right hand came up and covered my offensive mouth. Now he’d muted me, he still didn’t smile. But a sudden idea lit in his eyes. The hand came down and he moved past me toward the end of the cave, waving me on like a smoking bus. By the time I joined him, he’d shouldered aside a leather curtain and pointed to a low door set in the rock.

  It looked as old as the smoky stone. But closer by, I saw it was wood with an ancient iron latch and lock. Any instant a monk would howl down on us or burst through the door with a flashing blade.

  Kamil paused to test the silence. We might as well have been on Neptune. Then he fished in his trousers and brought out a key, four inches long, as black as the door and older looking. It turned the lock, and the door crept open at its own slow rate on a blacker space than any I’ve seen in years of walking through nights in the mountains with no city lights for fifty miles.

  But when Kamil took my elbow to guide me, I didn’t resist and didn’t feel strange. The cave itself was country as strange as the back of Tibet. In three short steps we were in the deep dark, and the door shut behind us. We stood there awhile.

  Kamil kept a strong grip on my arm, but that and the wide-spaced sound of his breath was all that let me know he was with me. For a second I thought of movie theaters in childhood summers—how I’d enter from a sun-drenched street and be blind at the top of the aisle, groping my way and sometimes sitting on a lady’s lap before I could see. But as long as we waited, maybe two minutes, my eyes never widened enough to find light.

  Then Kamil nudged me forward again and brought my left hand down onto something. Dry wood apparently, the edge of something that felt manmade, some two feet long. I didn’t want to go past the edge to explore. My hand must have stiffened; and still pitch-dark in a voice that resembled his parking grunts, Kamil said something. Someway, this time, I thought it was a word. I said “Beg your pardon?”

  He waited in place and again repeated what was surely a word, though I still failed to hear it. Then he turned my arm loose and fumbled in his clothes.

  That was when I balked. What in God’s name would come down next? I wouldn’t stay to watch. I turned back toward what I thought was the door.

  But a quick light flared. Kamil had struck a long kitchen-match and was holding it out. We were in a walled-off deeper niche of the same birth cave. It was ten feet long with raw stone walls and a random huddle of junk on the ground. I could make out oil lamps, a stack of icons and whatever thing I’d just now touched on a shelf at waist level. I walked back toward it.

  It was coated with an even layer of dust except where Kamil and I had disturbed it. But at first I could only think of a boat. It looked like an antique child’s canoe, roughly gouged from a straight tree-trunk and a good deal longer than my hand had guessed, maybe three feet long by two feet wide. Oddly I pictured the infant Moses afloat on the Nile in his bulrush boat.

  The match burned down; Kamil lit a second.

  In the moment of dark between them, I managed to guess this was some kind of manger, something the monks kept hid away for processions upstairs. I met Kamil’s grin with a grateful nod—an average tourist seldom glimpses the family junkroom of Jesus’ birthplace.

  Again he took my hand and thrust it to the scooped-out bottom of the manger. I felt it and, this time, thought of my mother’s old breadkneading bowl, a fine smooth oak but sold at her death for under a dollar. I even paused to want it back. The second match was dead by then.r />
  The voice that had made Kamil’s dumb grunts now said a word.

  I thought it was real. He had said the word real, and he somehow meant this wood trough here. We were back in absolute dark again; and the trough was still not glowing or pulsing, nothing my eyes could read as uncanny. But too much was coming at me too fast—this changing man and his awful place, the thick taste of dark and whatever wooden worn old thing my fingers touched. I only knew I must not ask Kamil to speak again. I must leave here now. I tried to slide my hand from his grip.

  Strong as anyone I’d ever known, the man that held me rung my wrist with a huge warm hand and said again “Real”—the same one word, many times through the night.

  A NEW STRETCH OF WOODS

  MY MOTHER was down for her afternoon nap, so I was taking my second aimless walk of the winter day. Then we lived way out in the country. Three sides of our house were flanked by woods—deep stands of pine, oak, poplar and hickory that you could walk beelines in for hours and meet nobody, no human being. But the ground teemed with foxes, raccoons, possums, squirrels, snakes, occasional skittish but kingly deer and frogs, salamanders and minnows in the narrow creek, not to speak of the birds who’d learned to trust me as if I could also fly and worry, which were their main gifts.

  I was sure I’d formed an intricate union with each and all, even the snakes. I’d managed to touch one live wild bird. I’d handled three nonpoisonous snakes. But even when they hid, I could sit by their haunts and talk my sorrows out by the minute; and childhood sorrow is bitterer than most, being bare of hope. As often as not, my mournful words would charm them. They’d edge into sight, then cock their heads and fevered eyes and wait till I finished. Often they’d stay on a long last moment, in silence that I could read as their answer, before disappearing. They generally managed to vanish like fog. Since I never scared them, they at least never ran.

  But the strangest time began with the dog. My Boston bullterrier had died that fall; and with Mother pregnant, Father had told me to wait till the baby was settled in. As a man, I can see his practical wisdom— Mother didn’t need one more job now, a messy pup; and once a rival child arrived, I’d need a tangible private possession to share the trials of learning that I was no longer the fulcrum of household love. We had two housefuls of neighbors on the road and they had dogs, but the dog that found me that afternoon was not one of theirs.

  It was an odd pale shade of gray with solid gray eyes that seemed to lack pupils, as if it saw without using light. Those traits today would make me think of a Weimaraner, but the dog then was half the size. It was also sleek as a greyhound or whippet; and though it never actually spoke, of the animals I was to meet that day, the dog came nearest and triggered the others. Those eyes alone plainly yearned to say what it knew so well but could not deliver.

  And I know it was real, an actual thing with hair and bone, weight and heat. When it broke in on me at the Indian Round, I thought at once that it meant me well. I stooped to stroke it, then hefted it onto my lap for a moment. It bore those attentions with quiet ease; but it gave me none of the wild affection small dogs mostly give, the desperate kisses that put all human lovers to shame. So I set it back to the ground and watched. (I call the dog it since, that day, I never thought to look for its sex. But for years I told myself it was male—it came at a time when female friends mean little to a boy—but now I feel the need for precision.)

  The Round was a secret name I’d given to a natural cleared ring in the woods where, for whatever reason, no trees or weeds grew. At once I felt that the Indians made it or found it countless ages before me. In any case I knew on sight that it had sacred power. I’d given very little close attention to God, but I knew when the ground gave off a force no human could name or overcome. And through the years we’d lived nearby, I brought any fine or mystic object I found back here and set it in the midst. A big white rock, three real arrowheads and the skull of what I guessed was a wolf with a crest of bone to which the mighty jaw and throat muscles had once been attached.

  What I made, and was making, was more a museum than an altar or temple. I never prayed here or enacted rites. I recognized a fact. This spot on the Earth was clearly magic; it gave off invisible force like a god and therefore deserved my childish tributes of care and beauty. The only private thing I did was sometimes to strip and lie on my back, staring at the hole of distant blue sky and telling myself all others were dead now, the whole world empty of all but me and the beasts I knew were watching me from secret lairs in reach of my voice and the smells of my body. I’d only begun to love my body late that summer, when I turned ten. So I already knew how dangerous my own loving hands could be, even then when I’d touched no body but mine and, rarely, the public parts of my parents.

  But that first day, when I set the dog down, I suddenly knew that it came as a guide. And next it walked to the far north edge of the Indian Round where the woods began again, thicker still. At every few steps it would look back toward me and give a hook of its avid head, calling me on. Then it entered the thicket.

  In my mind from then on, I called it Scout and thought of it as male. And I followed him close as the woods would let me, the briars and vines, the stinging limbs against my eyes. Scout stayed in sight, just glimpses and sounds, till we came to the stream. At first I thought it was my old creek, the one I explored in all kinds of weather, wading and probing under rocks with sticks or lying on the bank and going silent to watch its surface and deeps for long minutes as one by one the ghostly transparent crawfish or toads the size of your little-fingernail offered their private acts to my eyes, their brute and merciful transactions, finer and surer to last than ours.

  But I quickly understood I was elsewhere. This was not the same creek I’d known before, no part I had seen. It was twice as wide and way too deep to see into. With a running start I just might jump it, but how would I get a running start in such dense undergrowth? And was that Scout’s intention for me?

  He was gone anyhow. I stood entirely still to listen. Even in winter no live stretch of woods is thoroughly silent. If nothing else, the drying hearts of the trees themselves will groan and crack. But now I was sunk in a well of stillness that was not only new to me but scary, though my favorite virtue was bravery. The trees and bushes were normal species, the water was wet and cold to the touch, only the air between us had changed. I doubt I’d heard of a vacuum, but I knew I was in peculiar space and that, all around me, the air was thinning in a quiet rush to leave me entirely unimpeded, more naked than ever, though I wore my leather jacket and aviator’s cap.

  Scout never returned. But in the new thin air around me, in my bald fear, his message sounded plainer than words, Cross this water. I retreated the few available steps, turned my fear into reckless strength and tried the leap—which I made, and to spare. I landed an easy yard past the water on ground I could feel was new to my feet. And before I was firm upright on my pins, I called myself brave.

  Then came the bird, a perfectly normal golden eagle. The strangeness dawned only two days later when I learned that golden eagles were unheard of in the coastal plain of where we lived. It stood on a pine limb four yards above me and kept its head in rigid profile like something Egyptian fixed on me the way nothing can but meat-eating birds with the talons and beaks to do their will. For the better part of two or three minutes, it never so much as shut an eye.

  I tried to freeze my body in respect; but after a while I needed to prove it was still alive, the ferocious bird. So I bent right over and touched the ground, just to make a move—I didn’t plan to pick up a rock to throw.

  Before I was back upright, it raised off its limb on wings the size of a black four-door new roadster.

  If I’d been thinking clear and fast, I might have feared it was aimed at me and covered my eyes. But it went on skyward so straight and fast, with so much perfect power to burn, that I know I actually laughed a high note and followed with some such word as “Lord!”—I hadn’t yet got to the harsher cries. O
nly when it had also vanished did I understand the words it left me, silent as the dog, Stay still right here.

  I stayed till the sun was nearly gone, and an evening chill was taking my feet. I hadn’t interpreted the eagle strictly. A few minutes after it disappeared, I went to a bent tree-trunk near the stream and waited there but facing the woods, the strange territory, not the way back home. Something had let me know all along that I wasn’t lost, that home lay behind me the way I’d come. All I had to do was leap that stream a second time, while I still had daylight, and wind my old trail back up beneath me like a thread I’d laid behind me or crumbs.

  The only question was, what would come next? And would it come before night fell and Father got home and started calling my name to the dark and scaring Mother, tender as she was these last weeks? For all I knew, Scout might come back and guide me in or onward to some whole other new life, elsewhere than here. I turned that last thought over awhile and knew I would go wherever he led, whoever wound up with a broken heart if I too vanished and no trace of me was found on Earth, no thread of my clothes. Most honest men will own to similar vengeful thoughts in late childhood.

  Then the black snake streamed on out of the woods, crossed the narrow bank six feet beyond me, poured itself down the slope, swam most of the stream in a straight line across; then sank a few inches short of land and never surfaced, nowhere I could see. Like the eagle, it had all the normal traits of its kind. Only it was thick as a plump young python; and where I lived then, all snakes are deep asleep in winter and would no more enter an ice-cold stream than a raging fire.

  But when I’d thought my way through that, I got the final news of the day. It stuck up mean in the quick of my mind like the snake itself, that strong and rank, The baby your mother wants to make is a boy. It would be your brother, but it will not live.

  The news itself didn’t hurt at first, but I wanted to stay for amplification. Had I caused the promise? Was it good or bad? Would I be blessed or punished next? Did it mean I must act thus or so from here on? And I did linger there on the tree till I knew I had five more minutes of light, then freezing dark with its own business that I couldn’t yet face. I thought if anything, good or evil, was using me, it could follow me home and tell me there. I thought I’d say at least a short prayer for strength to make the leap again and bravery to see me back through the woods. But I found my mind would simply not pray; all I heard was the last news again, It will not live.