Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  “I don’t remember that far. Maybe it was. How is your sister?”

  He leaned farther in. “Sarah, I didn’t mean you harm. Sister’s alive—old like me. Not old enough to shut up though, not yet.” He held his arm across Ella, his hand palm down; and Sarah Wilson took it a moment. “You did what you had to, Sarah. I hope you have got satisfaction in life. God knows you deserved it.”

  She thanked him and he withdrew his hand, touched Ella again and took four steps. Then before they moved he turned and said, “I never did ask could I help you tonight?”

  Sarah Wilson said “No. Thank you, sir.”

  He said, “Well, I guess you know what you’re looking for” and went across the road toward his home and his sister, using the beam of Sarah Wilson’s lights as path.

  She noticed that—that he walked in her lights—so she waited and watched him, then realized the lights were dimmed and pressed with her foot to raise them; but he was gone, sooner than she’d counted on. She thought, “That is somebody else I will never see again”; and the new way was suddenly there—what to do, how to fight, maybe win, maybe save their lives. She looked to the clock, then to Ella. “We have got forty minutes. We might as well see this through.”

  Ella said, “I have said all I mean to say, Mrs. Wilson. Don’t ask me no more questions tonight.” She stared at her lap.

  “I’m not. I’m not. What I know already will keep me sick long enough. But you say you have listened to Nathan so much. Now sit there and listen to me, to what you don’t know, what Nathan wouldn’t tell you if he talked ten years.”

  Ella stared on downwards, rocking the heel of one hand in her groin. She had said her say. Forty minutes was left and she could not walk eight miles tonight. She said, “I’m listening.”

  Beyond the station a dirt road cut back into the dark. It was one way—the old way—to Ogburn. It was also the way to Sarah Wilson’s chance. She aimed them there and at once they were in total night, loud weeds pressing from the ditches, low pines choked with kudzu pressing above, boxing their lights. They sped through that till the sides opened out and the lights fell flat on fields of gapped dry corn that in nine hours would take the sucking sun again. The corn, the land were Holt Ferguson’s, would be his for the next quarter-mile—and the dark oak grove, the house set back which they came to slowly on Ella’s side. It was blacker than the sky behind it and so stood clear—a long low house hunched against the road.

  Sarah Wilson stopped, not pulling to the edge, and leaned toward Ella to look. Then she drew back and made a small sign with her hand to the house. She hung that hand on the wheel and began, meaning it to be her life, the truth, that would speak for itself. “You can’t see it now. There’s no reason why you ever should; but when I was your age, I would sit in my room and press my head for relief, and what would come was the fact that I had this house, that if somebody would have me, we could come here and make as good a life as my parents had had. I thought this house was as surely mine as the soles of my feet. But I didn’t even own the bed I was born in—a white iron bed behind that far big window on the right.“

  She pointed again, no hope of Ella seeing. “The house belonged to my father then—built for his marriage on land his father left—and that was their bedroom, his and my mother’s. They slept there six years before I came. There was one boy before me who died, but I lived easily and I was the last. I never knew why. I used to ask Mother for brothers, company; and she would say, ‘Sarah, I thought we were happy. Why aren’t you satisfied?’ I would think and decide I was. We were not rich—Father made eighty-five dollars a month as station agent plus half-shares on his farm—but we had what we needed, we valued each other, never stopped talking except from fatigue.

  “Then when I was twelve they did try again on another child and that killed Mother. She lived four months after losing the child, but it poisoned her heart and she died one morning by the front porch swing. I had fallen at school and torn my skirt, and the teacher had sent me home to change. It was early November and warm, and she was out in the swing in her robe. Jane Phipps, her nurse, was sitting on the steps and Jane saw me first. I must have looked bad—dirty and torn—so Jane yelled, ‘Sarah, what have you done?’ and Mother stood up. I ran toward her to show I was safe, and she dropped at my feet. Thirty years ago and I know every second, could draw it if I could draw. Nobody told me. I saw it.

  “I saw the next three years too, but I barely remember them. They were the happiest—after the shock, when Father and I were here alone. I’ve thought about that—not remembering those years—and I know it’s because we were happy. I have never forgotten one painful thing. So we had three years. I say we. I was happy and I thought Father was. I thought we were sufficient to one another and would go on being; but when I was fifteen one June morning, I was sweeping the yard and a Negro boy ran up and said, ‘Yonder—they are rolling your father home.’ I ran for the road and met them on that last curve. They had him on a two-wheeled mail cart—black Ben Mitchell and Mr. Whitlow who was Father’s help. They stopped when they saw me, and Ben waited in the shafts while I looked. Father couldn’t speak. He had had a stroke, forty-eight years old.

  “It didn’t kill him, not more than half. But that was when Holt saw his chance—Holt Ferguson, Aunt Alice’s husband. She was Father’s half-sister—his mother’s child older than him—so the Shaw land was Father’s; and he let it out on halves to tenants. Well, when Father could sit up and halfway talk, Holt came and said he and Alice would move here and keep house and farm as long as they could be of service. I was in the room. Father thought ten seconds; then he turned to me and said ‘Sarah, how about it?’ It killed me to think he would welcome them when we had done so well alone; so I said the house and land were his, that he could ask in gypsies or Negroes, that I would be gone in two more years. He caught at his breath but he managed to tell me to calm myself; then he turned to Holt and said, ‘Come ahead. We need you. I thank you and so will Sarah when she understands.’

  “But I never understood—only that the Fergusons came and went to work, on the farm and on Father; and from that day I recall every waking minute till now. I have slept very little. Father and I had the right side of the house, but we crept around and cleaned up after ourselves like cats. So did Holt and Aunt Alice—I give them that. She never did an unkind deed in her life, and Holt was working till late most nights. It was the boys I minded. They were younger than me and the house was their home in fifteen minutes, every rock in the yard. I grieved myself to sleep every night, but I never spoke another word to Father about asking them here. I got through the worst by telling myself, ‘This place is Father’s and will someday be mine.’ And when Father was working—he limped around part-time—I fought for my own, thinking I knew what was my own.

  “But I didn’t, not till Father died. He lived till I was seventeen. Then the second stroke came and took him at the station on the floor, with no time to tell me what he had done. What I knew was what Aunt Alice told me after the funeral—that no plans were changed, that Father had arranged it with Holt, I was going to college and should think of this as home. So I lived through that last summer, sleeping in the bed I was born in, thinking I would go and come back and teach and marry—I was not in love; I had friends but no one I needed—and give the Fergusons the old Shaw place and start my life. September came and Tim, Holt’s oldest boy, drove me to the station. I bought a round trip ticket from Mr. Whitlow; and when we could hear the train in the rails, I said to Tim, ‘I will see you Christmas.’ He said, ‘I’ll meet you. You might not know the house.’ I said ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘After we put on that new kitchen.’ I said it was odd that Holt hadn’t told me; and over the whistling train Tim said, ‘guess since it’s his, he didn’t think to tell you.‘ That was the first I knew, first hint. There was nothing to do but ride the train and wait for a letter.

  “It came a week later—from Aunt Alice begging my pardon, saying Holt and the boys thought I knew, that she was supp
osed to tell me but failed. Father had sold Holt everything. He had seen he was dying, he must have remembered me saying those things, and he saw only one way to get me to college. Holt had got it—house and land—for the price of college and his word to give me a home if I needed one. I didn’t then. I redeemed what was left of that roundtrip ticket. Then I went four years without seeing Kinley. In the summers I stayed at school and worked to pay for my clothes. I make it sound bad. It did seem the worst of all my luck, but once I got breath I was not that unhappy. God knows I wasn’t happy, but I had work to do and friends to visit in my few vacations. One was Martha Hawkins in Ogburn.

  “I went to her on Christmas night of my last year in college. I had spent three days in Kinley, here. Aunt Alice asked me, saying I had broken her heart, so I came. I had had four years to show my feelings and I made up my mind to do my share of healing wounds. So had they. We grinned through a lot of food and presents, and she put me in Mother and Father’s room; but I thanked God hourly that I had arranged to leave Christmas day for Martha’s. When I left, Aunt Alice said they hoped I would come here to live and teach. I thanked her and said I would take the best offer wherever that was. Then again Tim drove me away, to Ogburn. That time he hardly spoke so I rode alone with what I had after those three days, twenty-one years—a suitcase of clothes, three Christmas gifts, three-fourths of a college diploma. Not one other thing and I knew it.

  “Well, I took the first offer, not the best. It came from Nathan Wilson. Martha was giving a party that night; and when I walked in, he was the first thing I saw—Nathan—and within an hour I was telling him this same story. Because he was drunk. I don’t make a policy of sharing trouble; but drunk as he was, he read my face and when we were half alone, he said, ‘Who knocked the props from under you?’ and I told him, whispering so no other human would hear. He said, ‘She was right. You must come here and live and make peace or you’ll die on the run.’ I had seen from the first that he was running—drunk two states north of his home—but I asked him what he was running from and he told me. Himself of course and what he had done to people that loved him—his dead mother and the first girl that offered him her life. But you know all that if you’ve listened like you say. I listened then—listen now if he asks me to—and when we were done, I had offered him my life too. Not that night, not openly, though before I slept I could feel he had stuck himself in my mind like a nail, being like me—running from wrecks, needing someone to halt him, plug up his chest.

  “The next afternoon he came back to Martha’s and begged my pardon for anything out of the way he had done—out of the way when he was already what I needed. We took a ride that afternoon and he said there was something he had meant—that I must come here to teach—and he offered me a job. He had come to Ogburn as principal three years before. Being what he was, he made me think he was right; and I accepted, already back in my mind, making peace. Then he drove me to Kinley to tell Aunt Alice. She said to Nathan, ‘If you are the reason, I am grateful to you.’ I laughed but he was and I was so grateful I married him. He had come to see me most weekends; and by May when he asked me, I knew everything I would ever know—that his past was people he had let down and left—but I needed him and I thought he needed me. He never said so but he acted like need, still does— coming to me tonight like a child, not even trying to hide your note. So I said Yes, eyes open, and we married in June, here.

  “Holt gave me away which was not easy, but we said it was part of our new beginning. Beginning when in two years it had died on my hands—Aunt Alice dead and Holt alone going harder and harder; Nathan and I crammed in rooms in Ogburn teaching all week, then taking long dark Saturday rides to buy his liquor, watching him pour it down secret from everyone but me, watching him tear on past me in this race I can’t stop, can’t slow, taking the best part of me with him through his hot quick dirt as you call it. But not killing it—the need I have to gouge out the drinking and women and calm him. The women anyhow. They started six years after our marriage when we finally knew we could not have children. It wasn’t me that wanted them—things going so badly—but during those years I would sometimes say, ‘Nathan, when will you stop?’ and he would say, ‘When I have a child to hide from.’ He had never had to hide a thing from me. Then we found it was him at fault. There was one more hole through the middle of him. He was really no good—”

  Ella said “Stop.” She had heard every word looking down, not moving, giving Sarah Wilson that chance; but she pointed now to the lighted clock—the dim lights were on. “I have got twenty minutes. What are you trying to tell me please?” Then she faced Sarah Wilson.

  It took her awhile to know. “I have just now told you. Nathan Wilson is no good to you, no good on earth to anyone but me. What do you want out of half a man, young as you are?—when the half has been mine twenty-one years, is grown to me and must never tear loose. Will not.”

  “I was not tearing nothing—I wish I had been. I do not love your pitiful husband. What I said tonight—about not turning loose—I said it wild. You made me say it, digging so ugly. Mr. Wilson is yours and I thank God for it. But I need to see him one more time.”

  “No Ella, please. Just end it now.”

  “You are too late, Mrs. Wilson. Two days too late. I have turned loose already, torn loose. I have ended the little we had, myself.” She took up the note from the seat beside her, held it between them. “But I told him here I had something to say.”

  “Then say it to me. I’ll see that he knows.”

  “He knows, he knows. Oh—” Ella shut her eyes, clamped her teeth, said, “Say to Nathan, to Mr. Wilson, that Ella has done what she promised to—” Breath and force refused, sucked back into her, grated her throat. Her hand wadded in on the note; her head faced the black grove, the house. Then noise came in chunks from the pit of her neck.

  That saved Sarah Wilson, gave her strength to crank the car, turn it, aim for Kinley, the highway, the quick way to Ogburn—thinking she had won and numb from winning, from not breaking down. Past Kinley she steered on quickly through fields darker now, insects thicker and dazed by the heat, no other car in sight and only one man in the eight fast miles—a Negro stalled, beside his old truck in open white shirt, one hand on a fender, the other flapped once like a wing as they passed, signing for help he did not expect (as if she could help an angel of light after this night’s work, could speak again, even think, before morning). Yet they were nearly back and soon she would have to speak-whatever awful last thing to Ella, to calm her, thank her, find the end of her message to Nathan. Sarah Wilson slowed to plan her speech but too late—her lights had nudged the first ranks of mill huts coiled so dense they would flash in a trail if one spark dropped, dark in the windows but each throwing naked hall-light into dwarf dirt yards through open doors. She checked the time. Five more minutes and Ella’s father would wait in one door, ready to lock. Not wanting to know which house was Ella’s, she took the tracks; and when Ella looked up puzzled, she said, “I will put you out where I met you—here.” They were there again at the foot of the bank and Sarah Wilson stopped.

  Before they were still Ella reached for the door.

  Sarah Wilson touched her, her cool bare arm. That was the thanks. Then she said, “Ella, wait. I did not mean to press you to tears. What I meant to do was tell you my life and let that speak as a warning to you. But I went too far, telling that secret. That is our grief, mine and Nathan’s. I had no right to give it to you. I beg your pardon and, bad as what you have done may be, I thank you for promising to leave him now. I’ll hold you to it. So give me your message and go on home where your father is.”

  Ella opened the door, slid from beneath Sarah Wilson’s hand, then leaning in as she had at the first—but her hair caved down on her bloated eyes—she said clearly, “I have not promised you nothing, Mrs. Wilson. I won’t need to see your husband again, but that’s not because of a promise to you or because of what you thought up tonight. The promise I made was to Nathan Wilson; and
I went to Raleigh this week and kept it—went on the bus and ditched a baby in a nigger kitchen for two hundred dollars. Tell him that and tell him I said I will pay him back my half when I can work.” She said that three feet from Sarah Wilson’s face. Then she turned and walked toward the tracks, leaving the car door open. She went slowly purposely to show she was free; that whatever her debts, she owned herself.

  Yet slow as she was, she reached weeds and bank before her meaning reached Sarah Wilson’s mind, entered through still open mouth, spread through palate, skull. Her head had turned forward while Ella spoke; and it stayed there rigid, seeing Ella walk, then quicken in the weeds and take the bank running, stumbling on top to her hands and knees but rising at once, sinking on the far side slowly again. Sarah Wilson shut her eyes, struggled to shut her mouth; but it hung apart—taut not slack as if it would speak of its own will, free and pure. Yet no words came, only the strength to move the car, give it signals to take her home—at least to where Nathan slept (if he slept, if he was not gone), breathing aloud on the bed they shared.

  The car obeyed and turned beneath her toward Ogburn. There would be one mile of air to breathe before the town streets exhaling day, the houses she knew, that knew her, knew all but this night and would soon know this—if it was true, had been and would last beyond morning. That hope, simply, sent her on—that it all was lie, would end when Nathan woke and eased her. But the car reached Ogburn. It did not slow. It mounted the hump where paving began and threw light left on the first open yard, scalding a rabbit with sudden discovery. Tan and quick it was sucked toward Sarah Wilson, beneath her wheel. In the bones of her hand—her fine bones gripped to swerve—she felt its brittle death. Too late she braked, slewed in the street, halted. Then her mouth spoke freely its waiting threat. “How could I, why should I tell the truth when I thought I could save what was left of our life— that had stopped.” Her lips sealed down. Grunts like steam rammed her heart, her teeth.