The fingers were colder even than the boy, though he thought he recognized the scrape of his father’s thick palm. Crawford said “I’m still not strong as you.” The man’s grip eased. Then suddenly he seemed to be gone, that strange and quick. Crawford waited for a clue and finally spoke as strong as he could, “Am I out here alone?”
From what seemed a far distance, the man said “You always were.”
The boy had roamed these woods his whole life and was all but sure he knew the way home, even in dark this heavy and close. But he thought that if he moved, any way, he might crash into his father’s body or whatever changed man waited out here. So he tried again to say a prayer, “Our Father … Lord, please—” Crawford knew the words—they gleamed in his head as hard as signs—but some new way the world around him, the actual air, refused to let words out of his lips. He’d read of men abandoned by God—young Crusoe himself for his worldly wrongs. Still what had he done, Crawford Langley, to pay like this? Had he someway caused his mother pain in broad daylight, alone in the yard? At the thought an arm of the night rushed the boy’s cold face and choked his words.
What felt like half his lifetime passed, though a real forty minutes; and then Crawford broke through the maze of dark woods. There set in a space that looked familiar was a house he guessed was his own old house, dark in every window and door. In all his years he’d never seen it completely dark. Hadn’t he and his father left it well-lit? The boy was past a child’s automatic fears—of falls and darkness—but it came to him now that, in this house, the man who left him alone by the river was hid and ready.
Crawford also knew there was nowhere else. He had school friends and their parents liked him; but he couldn’t turn back and run to them with such a wild story, not this late. All he could think was to set his face and volunteer for the rest of what was stored up for him, life or death.
He recognized the dent in the doorknob as he entered the kitchen; but from there on through, the dark was so thick he might have been walking on the far side of Venus. After four steps Crawford saw in his mind, as clear as fact, that his father was hid right now in his path. He saw a butcher knife in the hand that had never once punished him, so much as a slap. He saw the gray eyes wide as a wolf’s, fixed on a boy and perfectly aimed.
Still the boy put out both arms before him to grope his way toward the foot of the stairs. If he got that far and his heart still worked, he knew he must try to find his own room and wait on his bed for a key to the meaning of this fresh news. Like all sane children with baffling, even murderous parents, he understood that something he himself had done—some unintended but last-straw fault—had brought this fate down on him, and rightly.
Each individual stair creaked out; but once Crawford stood intact at the top, he paused to test the air for warnings. Never in all his life in this house had it been so absolutely silent. He held in place till he heard his mind want one of two sounds—either the final slash of his father’s vengeful knife or Crawford’s own voice promising, Dad, I’m sorry for my whole life. I swear I’ll be anything you say.
But still the boy was in one piece. So he crept on past his father’s door (no crack of light), found his own empty bed and stretched on his back. This time he never tried to pray. What he tried was a thorough backward search of his recent life. His mind was clear, and a thousand details marched past his eyes. But no fault showed, nothing worth much more than a “Goddamnit, Ford” from his tired patient father.
So the boy kept coming round to the fact that, as lately as two or three Sundays ago, he and his father had walked an hour out into the fields. There’d been a hard rain the night before; and that was always a lucky time for the hobby they shared—arrowheads, shot or lost by the Tuscarora ages past (no Tuscarora left in the state for two hundred years).
And when Crawford dug out a clear quartz knife, white as glass—a priestly knife they’d only dreamed of—he trotted to his father, held out his shut hands as in a child’s game and said “Pick one.” At once his father tapped the left hand. Crawford grinned, cried out “It’s Father’s Day!” and opened his palm on the stupendous find. Father’s Day was months ahead, but his father took it with a look that deeply underlined what he mostly showed and had said more than once—he prized this boy. Surely this moment the sacred point was on his father’s desk downstairs with the only other treasures he kept—a bullet dug from an ancestor’s leg and, locked in a tiny glass box, one curl of his father’s sister’s hair (she died at two weeks).
For a moment Crawford wanted to find the crystal knife. What else now under this strange new roof might bring him luck or help defend him? But then he thought in some terrible way it might be used in the night against his heart. He remembered how Aztec priests had cut the beating hearts from men with just such points to feed their gods. At the chance—almost the certainty—of that, Crawford spread his arms wide and shut his eyes. Still facing up now he only waited—balked as any mind can be but likewise ready, he told himself, though soon he slid into scrappy dreams, then exhausted sleep.
Crawford knew it was day, well before he woke. His last dream told him he’d lasted the night and that now he was fully a man but alone. His eyes came open—no, still night. Then as he lay in the ongoing quiet, he knew that yes a light was growing but not at the window. In another minute he saw a glow was actually blooming, a great slow flower of morning light till his ceiling was patterned with numerous leaves in shades of cream and gold like nothing he’d ever seen or heard of. He wondered if he’d already died and this was his next home, high or low. But the same old lighting fixture hung there and, on a short string, the one plane model he’d ever finished. Whatever then, the mild colors and gradual speed of the bloom were saying he was past the threat in the heart of the night.
He rose on his elbows and looked to the door. He’d left it half-open, and now he saw where the light came from. It streamed from the hall in a narrow shaft, then spread in these strange shapes through his room. In a long stretch from the bed, he could reach and carefully test the beam with his hand. It was not only fine to see but the same temperature as his skin. So he had to be safe. He’d get up and make his way to what caused it.
The time it took to walk up the hall through the streaming glow seemed longer even than the moment when he touched his mother this afternoon and knew he was somehow as changed as she. For the first full time, in his mind Crawford saw her welcome face and heard her voice that had been the better part of what he loved for his first six years. He thought the day was bound to come when he’d miss her bitterly—not yet tonight. This hunt he was on, through what still seemed his father’s house, was all his mind could manage now.
By now he stood at his parents’ door. Never before had he seen it closed (his father’s only dread was of traps). But the stream of light was coming from there, around the edges of the door and beneath it. The boy bent slowly and laid his ear on the wood to listen. At first he thought he could hear a whole crowd of friendly voices, but he couldn’t hear words. He waited till his ears adjusted. It was just two voices, a man and a woman—more likely a girl, that young and bright (he’d only begun to lean toward girls). Soon he knew the man was his father but younger too; the girl stayed strange. The boy never understood a word, though he knew from their tone and slowness they were peaceful.
A thing he’d always respected was privacy, even more now as his own body grew its secrets. But here this late on this big day, his heart had got so huge in his chest that he knew he had no other hope than to turn this knob and take what came at his eyes or mind.
After maybe two minutes his pupils narrowed enough to see, in the core of the glare, his father seated at the foot of his bed. His father wore his regular pajamas, cool sky-blue and neatly pressed. That much was normal. He sat like that each night of his life for five or ten minutes with both eyes shut, saying his prayers in a deep silence (his painful kneecaps kept him from kneeling). Now though his head was tilted up, and his eyes were halfway open in the
blaze. His lips were moving as if he went on saying whatever he’d said while Crawford listened outside at the door, but if words came they were swept away. Crawford thought his own body might also drown or burn past hope; but in his new bravery, he knew not to leave.
In another minute the boy’s reward began to rush him. Either she somehow came from above or had been there right along, too bright to see. Whatever, suddenly a girl stood clear and tall by his father: the single sight both boy and man could watch from then on. It took Crawford another slow wait to see her face and know it was someway kin to the face that hung in a frame by his father’s bed—Crawford’s mother before her wedding, lovely and strong as he still could see her in occasional dreams from his cradle days. The picture showed no more than her head, a graceful neck and the top of a yellow dress. But the girl here now wore the same dress which seemed to fall right down to the floor, though it drowned in light; and her dark eyes were surely the same.
The boy thought he was brave enough to say her name; at least he felt the powerful need. Let her hear his voice and then just laugh and call him Dub or Strut a last time. But before he stoked his courage for that, her face turned gradually in his direction and all but smiled before she faced his father again, closed his eyes with two long hands; and (like the mother she once had been), she helped him lie in place on the pillow before she was somehow gone again; and his father was covered with the old dark quilt, plainly asleep and harmless as any new pine in the woods.
The light continued long enough to see Crawford back to his own bed, then faded quickly. He sat at the foot and knew his father had surely prayed her back to life to tame him down and save her son. Then the boy slowly asked himself if he wanted to beg for a similar visit—now, he knew, was the only chance. But didn’t that girl’s face belong to his father, the girl he picked when he was not much older than Crawford tonight? The boy’s oldest memories rose—himself in his mother’s arms in a chair by the sunny window, consulting each other’s eyes for secrets, then laughing together at what they found. It was still the face the boy loved most; it would be that all his life on Earth. And though it was gone from his daily world, it was maybe changeless and better in dreams.
Next he thought he could steal downstairs, find the quartz knife and bury it deep in a moonless corner. That would keep it safe, and him and his father, and leave it ready as food again for the hungry gods, if they were there still watching man. But no, he was tired and knew he was rescued. He gave one thought to how his mother had looked this morning, cheerful and firm but calling him back from the edge of the yard, giving him one last kiss on the brow, thumping his skull with a healthy finger and saying “Strut, fly! or you’ll be late” when she was the one who’d flown in time.
So the tired boy stood, shucked his clothes (the room was still warm) and then for the first time entered his sheets as naked as he left her lovely body long ago in pain and blood. As his head lay back, he felt—again and for the last time—the hardness of that long black first trip to reach daylight. But the pain subsided and, through the rest of that short night, he slept like some boy thoroughly safe whose days hereafter will each be brave, whose nights will bring him—whenever he calls—the face and voice he understands are utterly gone: his only mother, lost forever, young and free for good and all.
THIS WAIT
THE FIRST few minutes after I died were the healing part. I’m fairly vague on what must have killed me, but I think I died in my own bed in my room at home and nobody with me—all upstairs asleep, my son and his boy, my one grandchild. I think that was it. I’d slept very soundly on a merciful drug, and I seem to recall waking up to die. I think my eyes came open in the dark, and I think a pleasant baritone voice said “Things are ready. Come on here now.” I think I understood that I had a choice. I could say yes or no for a few years more, not forever to be sure.
I took a whole minute to calculate. I think I was some years short of fifty, but I probably knew I’d used my time. I knew I was sick. The word radiation is one old remnant that’s clear in my new mind like luggage from a trip I’ll never repeat. And I must have weighed my will to stay and what I thought it would do to my few kin, my handful of friends that would see me through. I think I decided they’d had all of me they could fruitfully use, that more of me now would be far harder than they ought to bear. I know for certain I answered aloud. I said “I’m ready as you. Take over.” My last old thought was a single question—Who was you? Who had spoken? Who was I yielding to?
Till now, however much time has lapsed, I still lack answers but am calm in the wait. I won’t describe the life I have, since no one living possesses the terms to gauge, much less to understand, the goodness I feel here now alone. I can say this much, I’m entirely glad, though perfectly alone. And I was a man, I seem to know, who thought I needed people near me most hours of the day and all of each night—one person at least and I seldom went begging.
What more I can say is, I wait so calmly because I remember those first few minutes I mentioned above. One moment I was flat on my bed in the night, saying “You take over.” The next, I was sitting in tall green grass near a great beech tree with names that seemed familiar but weren’t, carved into the bark in careful handsome Roman letters—Anna, Walter, Sybil, Marc. My mind was entirely at ease in my head; my hands were hands I knew on sight, though my old wedding band was gone. Somehow I raised my long right fingers in the general direction of the tree and beckoned. I know I wondered if birds would sing or a kindly child step toward me with food. Food was my one wish; I seemed to be hungry. And fairly soon a girl looked out from behind the beech. I knew I had one more choice to make and I beckoned again.
So she came into full view and walked toward me. I was steeply downhill; she moved down slowly on bare tender feet—a tall girl, dark hair and brows and a constant smile in the shape of a long symmetrical almond below brown eyes that seldom wavered. I know I recall her long soft dress, which was summer blue. I know that, before she was three steps from me, I thought I’d never seen anything to match—not in girls, not this well-made and kind. I was thoroughly wrong. Her next few moves were more unlikely than endless love, but I know they happened and only for me.
She walked till the fronts of both her ankles touched my knees which were folded before me, and she met my eyes.
I chose again, Please.
That freed her to kneel and open her dress. The breasts were young as she, high and lifting, more welcome again than any past sight—a scarcely grown girl in need of me. But then she slowly pressed on toward me till she brushed my lips.
And warm milk bathed my needy mouth. Well before I drank my fill, I knew she was my young mother returned, the girl that built me from one merged cell and met my eyes the instant I left her dim safe harbor for the lighted world. I also knew I could wait forever for answers to who had called me here—why and what for and would this end too?
Any hand that took my agonized mother, who died enraged with her reason gone, and made her new and sent her to greet me, surely means me well at the absolute least, though once she’d filled my hunger and pressed me down to sleep, she left again and has not been seen, for all the ease and thanks I feel and long to show.
FOOL’S EDUCATION
1
The Happiness of Others
THEY KILLED two hours of the twenty remaining over lunch at the Lamb, chewing each bite as long and mercilessly as though their stomachs held ravenous babies, open-mouthed to suck in the stream of tepid pap. The work of eating also saved them from talk, that and their pretense of fervent eavesdropping on the two other guests as late as they (an apoplectic retired colonel and his, what? daughter? wife?—a colorless moony horse in flowers whose only words when the old man asked “Are you happy?” were “Thank you”).
Then when even the colonel had yielded to the waitress’s glare of perfect hate—it was half-past two; her life awaited—they finished their coffee and entered the sun, the day like a baby dumped on their doorstep, gorgeous but un
wanted, condemning as an angel. And gilding—it made Sara’s body seem gold, warm and workable. Even the black hair transmuting quickly, through bronze to gold. They stood a moment—Charles Tamplin seeing that, she knowing he saw it, both knowing its deceit.
She reached for his wrist. He gave her his hand. But she did not take it—“I was looking for the time,” she said. He extended his watch. She studied it carefully, returned it to his side, gave him the sum, “Eighteen hours till I rest on the bosom of the deep.” They both gave the brief statutory grin—they spoke of her sailing, their permanent parting, in jokes: “The Noble Experiment Ended Smiling”—then stood again, loose. “Where now?” she said.
“The church?” he said.
She nodded, stepped to go. “You can say me the poem. A final performance.”
He smiled, bowed slightly, double-stepped to take the lead; and they walked down the High Street, as separate as sisters, to the old stone bridge, short and narrow, at the bottom. She looked right to where the spire stood, tan and clear. But he pointed to the crossroads beyond the bridge, right to Shipton-under-Wychwood, left to Stowon-the-Wold; vital junction still guarded from Nazis by a pillbox smothered in roses now, its black slot empty, unarmed, unused, shielding only village lovers seized here by urgency or tramps in the rain. They had once crawled into it themselves, been amazed by its neatness—no garbage or excrement but well-pressed earth and a few penciled names.
She smiled, said “Ah-dew,” the word she had chosen all week for last views. Then she ran up the loud Windrush to the church.
He gave her the lead, loped behind in her tracks.
They had been through the church three or four times together; he more often, alone, or with college friends. But they trailed through its dark chill now as if discovering—the Lady chapel defaced by Roundheads, the lead font scratched with the name of a prisoner shot by Cromwell next morning in the yard, the tomb of the barber to Henry VIII; then the small painted bust of Lucius Cary (beside his wife’s with her breasts displayed), killed at Newbury, age thirty-three, Viscount Falkland, Lord of Great Tew, friend to Ben Jonson and mourned by him.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 34