Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  I search it for a hero. For the first time. I have searched nearly every other face since last July, the final Sunday at camp when a minister told us, “The short cut to being a man is finding your hero, somebody who is what you are not but need to be. What I mean is this. Examine yourself. When you find what your main lack is, seek that in some great man. Say your trouble is fear—you are scared of the dark, scared of that bully in your grade at school, scared of striking out when you come up to bat. Take some great brave, some warrior—Douglas MacArthur, Enos Slaughter. Say your trouble is worse. Say it’s telling lies. Take George Washington—personal heroes don’t need to be living just so they lived once. Read a book about him. Study his picture. (You may think he looks a little stiff. That is because his teeth were carved out of cypress. A man makes his face and making a good one is as hard a job as laying road through solid rock, and Washington made himself as fine a face as any man since Jesus—and He was not a man.) Then imitate him. Chin yourself on his example and you will be a man before you need a razor.” I need to be a man hard as anybody so riding home from camp and that sermon, I sat among lanyards I plaited and whistles I carved and searched my life for the one great lack my foe. He had mentioned lacking courage—that minister. I lack it. I will not try to do what I think I cannot do well such as make friends or play games where somebody hands you a ball and bat and asks the world of you, asks you to launch without thinking some act on the air with natural grace easy as laughing. He had mentioned lying. I lie every day—telling my mother for instance that the weeks at camp were happy when what I did was by day whittle all that trashy equipment, climb through snakes in July sun with brogans grating my heels, swim in ice water with boys that would just as soon drown you as smile and by night pray for three large things—that I not wet the bed, that I choke the homesickness one more day, that these five weeks vanish and leave no sign no memory. But they were only two on a string of lacks which unreeled behind me that Sunday riding home from camp (unseen beyond glass the hateful tan rock turning to round pine hills where Randolph is and home), and on the string were selfishness to Marcia my cousin who is my main friend and gives me whatever she has, envy of my brother who is one year old and whose arms I purposely threw out of joint three months ago, envy of people my age who do so easily things I will not and thus lock together in tangles of friendship, pride in the things I can do which they cannot (but half pride at worst as the things I can do, they do not want to do—drawing, carving, solo singing. I am Randolph’s leading boy soprano and was ashamed to be till a Saturday night last August when I sang to a room of sweating soldiers at the U.S.O. I was asked by the hostess for something patriotic, but I thought they would not need that on their weekend off any more than they needed me in Buster Brown collar and white short pants so I sang Brahms’ Lullaby which you can hum if you forget, and if it was a mistake, they never let on. I do not mean anybody cried. They kept on swallowing Coca-Colas and their boots kept smelling, but they shut up talking and clapped at the end, and as I left the platform and aimed for the door blistered with shame, one long soldier gave me the blue and gold enamel shield off his cap, saying “Here you are”), and far graver things—wishing death nightly on two boys I know, breaking God’s law about honoring parents by failing to do simple things they ask such as look at people when I talk, by doubting they can care for me daily (when my mother thinks of little else and Father would no more sleep without kissing me goodnight than he would strike me), sometimes doubting I am theirs at all but just some orphan they took in kindness. I made that list without trying seven months ago, and it has grown since then. Whenever I speak or move these days new faults stare out of my heart. The trouble though is I still do not know my greatest lack, my mortal foe. Any one if I stare back long enough seems bound to sink me. So I seek a hero grand enough to take on all my lacks, but for seven months now I have looked—looked hard—and am nowhere near him. Who is there these days, who has there ever been broad enough, grand enough to stand day and night and ward off all my foes? Nobody, I begin to think. I have looked everywhere I know to look, first in books I had or bought for the purpose—Little People Who Became Great (Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Andrew Carnegie), Minute Lives of Great Men and Women (a page and a picture for everybody including Stephen Foster) and a set called Living Biographies of Great Composers, Philosophers, Prophets, Poets and Statesmen. I have not read books that do not show faces because I study a man’s face first. Then if that calls me on, I read his deeds. I read for three months and taking deeds and faces together, I settled on Caesar Augustus and Alexander the Great as final candidates. They were already great when they were young, and they both wore faces like hard silver medals awarded for lasting—I got that much from Minute Lives—so I thought they were safe and that I would read further and then choose one. But as I read they fell in before me—Alexander crushing that boy’s head who brought bad news and when they were lost in a desert and famished and his men found one drink of water and gladly brought it to him in a helmet, him pouring it out in the sand to waste, and Augustus leading the wives of his friends into private rooms during public banquets, making them do what they could not refuse. All the dead have failed me. That is why I study my father tonight. He is the last living man I know or can think of that I have not considered, which is no slight to him—you do not seek heroes at home. No, when the dead played out, I turned to my autographs and started there. I have written to famous men for over a year since the war began. I write on Boy Scout stationery (I am not a Scout), give my age and ask for their names in ink. I have got answers from several generals on the battlefield (MacArthur who sent good luck from the Philippines, Mark Clark who typed a note from secret headquarters, Eisenhower who said in his wide leaning hand, “I do not think it would be possible for me to refuse a nine-year-old American anything I could do for him”), from most of Roosevelt’s cabinet (but not from him though I have three notes from Miss Grace Tully to say he does not have time and neither does his wife), from Toscanini and a picture of Johnny Weissmuller on a limb crouched with his bare knife to leap, saying “Hello from Tarzan your friend.” But studying them I saw I could not know enough to decide. They are surely famous but I cannot see them or watch them move, and until they die and their secrets appear, how can I know they are genuine heroes?—that they do not have yawning holes of their own which they hide? So from them I have turned to men I can watch and hear, and since I seldom travel this means the men I am kin to. I will not think against my blood, but of all my uncles and cousins (my grandfathers died before I was born), the two I love and that seem to love me—that listen when I speak—and that have dark happy faces are the ones who are liable at any time to start drinking and disappear spending money hand over fist in Richmond or Washington until they are broke and wire for my father who drives up and finds them in a bar with a new suit on and a rosebud and some temporary friends and brings them home to their wives. My father has one brother who fought in France in the First World War and was playing cards in a hole one night when a bomb landed, and when he came to, he picked up his best friend who was quiet at his side and crawled with him half a mile before he saw that the friend lacked a head, but later he was gassed and retired from battle so that now, sitting or standing, he slumps round a hole in his chest and scrapes up blood every hour or two even summer nights visiting on our porch from Tennessee his home. My other male kin live even farther away or do not notice me or are fat which is why as I say I have come to my father tonight—my head rolled back on his lap, my ears sunk in his shifting kernels so I cannot hear only see, my eyes strained up through his arms to his face.

  It is round as a watch when he does not smile which he does not now, and even in warm yellow light of speedometer-amp meter-oil pressure gauges, it is red as if he was cold, as if there was no plate glass to hold off the wind we make rushing home. It is always red and reddest I know, though I cannot see, under his collar on the back of his neck where the hair leaves off. There is not much hair anywh
ere on his head. It has vanished two inches back on his forehead, and where it starts it is dark but seems no color or the color of shadows in old photographs. Above his ears it is already white (he is forty-two and the white is real, but five years ago when it was not, I was singing in bed one night “When I Grow Too Old To Dream,” and he heard me and went to the toilet and powdered his hair and came and stood in the door ghostly, old with the hall light behind him and said, “I am too old to dream, Preacher.” I sang on a minute, looking, and then cried “Stop. Stop” and wept which of course he did not intend), and each morning he wets it and brushes every strand at least five minutes till it lies on his skull like paint and stays all day. It is one of his things you cannot touch. His glasses are another. He treats them kindly as if they were delicate people—unrimmed octagons hooked to gold wires that ride the start of his firm long nose and loop back over his large flat ears—and in return they do not hide his eyes which are gray and wide and which even in the dark draw light to them so he generally seems to be thinking of fun when he may be thinking we have lost our house (we have just done that) or his heart is failing (he thinks his heart stood still last Christmas when he was on a ladder swapping lights in our tree, and whenever I look he is taking his pulse). And with all his worries it mostly is fun he thinks because when he opens his mouth, if people are there they generally laugh—with him or at him, he does not mind which. I know a string of his jokes as long as the string of my personal lacks, and he adds on new ones most days he feels well enough. A lot of his jokes of course I do not understand but I no longer ask. I used to ask and he would say, “Wait a little. Preacher. Your day will come” so I hold them mysterious in my skull till the day they burst into meaning. But most of his fun is open to view, to anybody’s eyes that will look because what he mainly loves is turning himself into other people before your eyes. Whenever in the evenings we visit our friends, everybody will talk awhile including my father, and then he may go silent and stare into space, pecking his teeth with a fingernail till his eyes come back from where they have been and his long lips stretch straight which is how he smiles, and then whoever we are visiting—if he has been watching my father—will know to say, “Mock somebody for us, Jeff.” (“Mocking” is what most people call it. My father calls it “taking people off.”) He will look sheepish a minute, then lean forward in his chair—and I sitting on the rug, my heart will rise for I know he has something to give us now—and looking at the floor say, “Remember how Dr. Tucker pulled teeth?” Everybody will grin Yes but somebody (sometimes me) will say “How?” and he will start becoming Dr. Tucker, not lying, just seriously turning himself into that old dentist—greeting his patient at the door, bowing him over to the chair (this is when he shrinks eight inches, dries, goes balder still, hikes his voice up half a scale), talking every step to soothe the patient, sneaking behind him, rinsing his rusty pullers at the tap, cooing “Open your mouth, sweet thing,” leaping on the mouth like a boa constrictor, holding up the tooth victorious, smiling “There he is and you didn’t even feel it, did you, darling?” Then he will be Jeff McCraw again, hitching up his trousers with the sides of his wrists, leading us into the laughter. When it starts to die somebody will say, “Jeff, you beat all. You missed your calling. You ought to be in the movies,” and if he is not worried that night he may move on through one or two more transformations—Miss Georgie Ballard singing in church with her head like an owl swivelling, Mrs. V. L. Womble on her velvet pillow, President Roosevelt in a “My friends” speech, or on request little pieces of people—Mr. Jim Bender’s walk, Miss Amma Godwin’s hand on her stomach. But it suits me more when he stops after one. That way I can laugh and take pride in his gifts, but if he continues I may take fright at him spinning on through crowds of old people, dead people, people I do not know as if his own life—his life with us—is not enough. One such night when he was happy and everybody was egging him on I cried to him “Stop” before it was too late and ran from the room. I am not known as a problem so people notice when I cry. My mother came behind me at once and sitting in a cold stairwell, calmed me while I made up a reason for what I had done. She said, “Let your father have a little fun. He does not have much.” I remembered how she often warned me against crossing my eyes at school to make children laugh, saying they might get stuck, so I told her he might stick and then we would carry him home as Dr. Tucker or Mrs. Womble or Miss Lula Fleming at the Baptist organ. That was a lie but it was all I knew, all I could offer on such short notice to justify terror, and telling it made us laugh, calmed me, stopped me thinking of reasons. And I did not worry or think of my terror again till several months later when he came in disguise. It was not the first time he had worn disguise (half the stories about him are about his disguises), but he did not wear it often, and though I was seven I had never seen him that way before. Maybe it is why he came that night, thinking I was old enough and would like the joke since I loved his other fun. Anyhow the joke was not for me but for Uncle Hawk, an old colored man who lived with us. I was just the one who answered the door. It was night of course. I had finished my supper and leaving the others, had gone to the living room and was on the floor by the radio. After a while there came a knock on the panes of the door. I said, “I will get it” to the empty room, thinking they were all in the kitchen, turned on the porch light and opened the door on a tall man heavy-set with white hair, a black derby hat, a black overcoat to his ankles, gray kid gloves, a briefcase, a long white face coiled back under pinch-nose glasses looking down. It was nobody I knew, nobody I had seen and what could he sell at this time of night? My heart seized like a fist and I thought, “He has come for me” (as I say, it is my darkest fear that I am not the blood child of Jeff and Rhew McCraw, that I was adopted at birth, that someday a strange man will come and rightfully claim me). But still looking down he said, “Does an old colored man named Hawk work here?” and I tore to the kitchen for Uncle Hawk who was scraping dishes while my mother cleared table. They were silent a moment. Then my mother said, “Who in the world could it be, Uncle Hawk?” and he said “I wonder myself.” I said, “Well, hurry. It is a stranger and the screen door is not even locked.” He did not hurry. My mother and I stood and watched him get ready—washing with the Castile soap he keeps for his fine long hands tough as shark hide, adjusting suspenders, the garters on his sleeves, inspecting his shoes. Towards the end I looked at my mother in anxiety. She winked at me and said, “Go on, Uncle Hawk. It certainly is not Jesus yet.” Not smiling he said, “I wish it was” and went. Again I looked to my mother and again she winked and beckoned me behind her into the hall where we could watch the door and the meeting. Uncle Hawk said “Good evening” but did not bow, and the man said, “Are you Hawk Reid?” Then he mumbled something about life insurance—did Uncle Hawk have enough life, fire, burial insurance? Uncle Hawk said, “My life is not worth paying on every week. I do not have nothing to insure for fire but a pocket knife and it is iron, and Mr. Jeff McCraw is burying me.” The man mumbled some more. Uncle Hawk said, “No” and the man reached for the handle to the screen that separated them. Uncle Hawk reached to lock the screen but too slow, and there was the man on us, two feet from Hawk, fifteen from my mother and me. Hawk said, “Nobody asked you to come in here” and drew back his arm (nearly eighty years old) to strike. My mother and I had not made a sound, and I had mostly watched her not the door as she was grinning but then she laughed. Uncle Hawk turned on her, his arm still coiled, then back to the man who was looking up now not moving, and then Hawk laughed, doubled over helpless. The man walked in right past him slowly and stopped six feet from me, holding out his hand to take—he and I the two in the room not laughing. So I knew he had come for me, that I was his and would have to go. His hand stayed out in the glove towards me. There were three lines of careful black stitching down the back of the pale gray leather, the kind of gloves I wanted that are not made for boys. Still I could not take his hand just then, and not for terror. I was really not afraid but suddenly sor
ry to leave people who had been good to me, the house which I knew. That was what locked me there. I must have stood half a minute that way, and I must have looked worse and worse because my mother said, “Look at his eyes” and pointed me towards the man’s face. I looked and at once they were what they had been all along—Jeff McCraw’s eyes, the size and color of used nickels, gentle beyond disguising. I said to him then fast and high, “I thought you were my real father and had come to get me.” He took off his derby and the old glasses and said, “I am, Preacher. I have, Preacher,” and I ran to circle his thighs with my arms, to hide my tears in the hollow beneath the black overcoat. And I did hide them. When I looked up, everybody thought I had loved the joke like them. But I had not. I had loved my father found at the end with his hand stretched out. But I hoped not to find him again that way under glasses and powder, mumbling, so when he came into my bedroom to kiss me that night, I asked would he do me a favor. He said “What?” and I said, “Please warn me before you dress up ever again.” He said he would and then my mother walked in and hearing us said, “You will not need warning. Just stare at his eyes first thing. He cannot hide those.” But he always warns me as he promised he would—except at Christmas when he comes in a cheap flannel suit and rayon beard that any baby could see is false—and even though I know in advance that on a certain evening he will arrive as a tramp to scare my Aunt Lola or as a tax collector or a man from the farm office to tell my Uncle Paul he has planted illegal tobacco and must plow it under or suffer, still I fasten on his eyes and hold to them till somebody laughs and he finds time to wink at me.