Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  As I fasten on them now heading home. He travels of course as himself tonight in a brown vested suit and a solid green tie so I see him plain—what is clear in dashboard light—and though I love him, though I rest in his hollow lap now happier than any other place, I know he cannot be my hero. And I list the reasons to myself. Heroes are generally made by war. My father was born in 1900 so the nearest he got to the First World War was the National Guard and in October 1918 an Army camp near Morehead City, N.C. where he spent six weeks in a very wrinkled uniform (my mother has his picture) till peace arrived, so desperately homesick that he saved through the whole six weeks the bones of a chicken lunch his mother gave him on leaving home. And when I woke him a year ago from his Sunday nap to ask what was Pearl Harbor that the radio was suddenly full of, he was well and young enough to sign for the Draft and be nervous but too old to serve. He does own two guns—for protection an Army .45 that his brother brought him from France, never wanting to see it again, and for hunting a double-barreled shotgun with cracked stock—but far as I know he has never shot anything but himself (that time he was a boy) and two or three dozen wharf rats, rabbits and squirrels. Nor is he even in his quiet life what heroes generally must be—physically brave. Not that chances often arise for that class of bravery. I had not seen him face any ordeal worse than a flat tire till a while ago when we had our first mock air raid in Randolph. He took an armband, helmet, blackjack and me, and we drove slowly to the power station which was his post and sat in the cold car thinking it would end soon, but it did not and I began to wonder was it real, were the Germans just beyond hearing, heading toward us? Then he opened his door and we slid out and stood on the hill with great power batteries singing behind us and looked down at the smothered town. I said, “What will we do if the Germans really come?” Not waiting he pointed towards what I guessed was Sunset Avenue (his sense of direction being good) and said, “We would hightail it there to where your mother is liable to burn down the house any minute with all those candles.” He did not laugh but the siren went and lights began and we headed home—the house stinking tallow on through the night and I awake in bed wondering should I tell him, “If you feel that way you ought to resign as warden”? deciding “No, if Hitler comes let him have the power. What could we do anyhow, Father with a blackjack, me with nothing?“hold off steel with our pitiful hands?” (the hand he touches me with again now, his wounded hand but the wrist so whole so full, under its curls so ropey I cannot ring it, trying now I cannot capture it in my hand so I trace one finger through its curls, tracing my name into him as older boys gouge names, gouge love into trees, into posts—gouge proudly). But with all the love I mentioned before, I do not trace proudly. I know him too well, know too many lacks, and my finger stops in the rut where his pulse would be if I could ever find it (I have tried, I cannot find it, maybe could not stand it if I did). I shut my eyes not to see his face for fear he will smile, and continue to name his lacks to myself. He makes people wait—meaning me and my mother. He is a salesman and travels, and sometimes when school is out, I travel with him, hoping each time things will go differently. They start well always (riding and looking though never much talking) till we come to the house where he hopes to sell a stove or refrigerator. We will stop in the yard. He will sit a minute, looking for dangerous dogs, then reach for his briefcase, open his door and say, “Wait here, Preacher. I will be straight back” I will say “All right” and he will turn back to me, “You do not mind that, do you, darling?”—“Not if you remember I am out here and do not spend the day.” He of course says he will remember and goes, but before he has gone ten yards I can see that memory rise through his straw hat like steam, and by the time a woman says, “Step in the house,” I am out of his mind as if I was part of the car that welcomed this chance to cool and rest. Nothing cool about it (being always summer when I travel with him), and I sit and sweat, shooing out flies and freezing if a yellowjacket comes, and when twenty minutes has gone by the clock, I begin to think, “If this was all the time he meant to give me, why did he bring me along?” And that rushes on into, “Why did he get me, why did he want me at all if he meant to treat me the way he does, giving me as much time each day as it takes to kiss me goodbye when I go to school and again at night in case we die in each other’s absence?” And soon I am rushing through ways he neglects me daily. He will not for instance teach me. Last fall I ordered an axe from Sears and Roebuck with my own money, asking nobody’s permission, and when it came—so beautiful—he acted as if I had ordered mustard gas and finally said I could keep it if I promised not to use it till he showed me the right way. I promised—and kept my promise—and until this day that axe has done nothing but wait on my wall, being taken down every night, having its lovely handle stroked, its dulling edge felt fearfully. And baseball. He has told me how he played baseball when he was my age, making it sound the happiest he ever was, but he cannot make me catch a fly-ball. I have asked him for help, and he went so far as to buy me a glove and spend half an hour in the yard throwing at me, saying “Like this, Preacher” when I threw at him, but when I failed to stop ball after ball, he finally stopped trying and went in the house, not angry or even impatient but never again offering to teach me what he loved when he was my age, what had won him friends. Maybe he thought he was being kind. Maybe he thought he had shamed me, letting me show him my failure. He had, he had. But if he knew how furious I pray when I am the outfield at school recess (pray that flies go any way but mine), how struck, how shrunk, how abandoned I feel when prayer fails and a ball splits hot through my hopeless hand to lie daring me to take it and throw it right while some loud boy no bigger than I, no better made, trots a free homerun—he would try again, do nothing but try. Or maybe there just come stretches when he does not care, when he does not love me or want me in his mind much less his sight—scrambling on the ground like a hungry fice for a white leather ball any third-grade girl could catch, sucking his life, his time, his fun for the food I need, the silly clothes, sucking the joy out of what few hopes he may have seen when his eyes were shut ten years ago, when he and my mother made me late in the night. That is the stuff he makes me think when he goes and leaves me stuck in the car, stuck for an hour many times so that finally sunk in desperation I begin to know he is sick in there—that his heart has seized as he knows it will or that strange woman is wild and has killed him silent with a knife, with poison, or that he has sold his stove and said goodbye and gone out the back in secret across a field into pines to leave us forever, to change his life. And I will say to myself, “You have got to move—run to the road and flag a car and go for the sheriff,” but the house door will open and he will be there alive still grinning, then calming his face in the walk through the yard, wiping his forehead, smiling when he sees me again, when he recollects he has a son and I am it (am one anyhow, the one old enough to follow him places and wait). Before I can swallow what has jammed my throat, my heart in the previous hour, he will have us rolling—the cool breeze started and shortly his amends, my reward for waiting. It is always the same, his amends. It is stories about him being my age, especially about his father—Charles McCraw, “Cupe” McCraw who was clerk to the Cope-land Register of Deeds, raised six children which were what he left (and a house, a wife, several dozen jokes) when he died sometime before I was born—and he needs no crutch to enter his stories such as “Have I told you this?” He knows he has told me, knows I want it again every time he can spare. He will light a cigarette with a safety match (he threw away the car’s lighter long ago out the window down an embankment, thinking it was a match) and then say, “No sir. If I live to be ninety, I never want to swallow another cigarette.” That is the first of the story about him at my age being sent outdoors by his father to shut off the water when a hard freeze threatened. The valve was sunk in the ground behind the house, and he was squatting over it cursing because it was stiff and pulling on the cigarette he had lit to warm him—when he looked in the frozen grass by his hand and the
re were black shoes and the ends of trousers. He did not need to look further. It was his father so while he gave one last great turn to the valve, he flipped his lower lip out and up (and here at age forty-two he imitates the flip, swift but credible) and swallowed the cigarette, fire included. Then he may say, “How is your bladder holding out, Preacher? Do you want to run yonder into those bushes?” I will say “No” since I cannot leak in open air, and he will say, “Father had a colored boy named Peter who worked round the house. Peee-ter, Peter called it. The first day we had a telephone connected, Father called home from the courthouse to test it. I was home from school—supposed to be sick—and I answered. He did not catch my voice so he said ‘Who is this?’ I said ‘Peee-ter,’ and he thought he would joke a little. He said ‘Peter who?’ I said ‘Mr. McCraw’s Peee-ter,’ and he said, ‘Hang up, fool, and don’t ever answer that thing again!’ I waited for him to come home that evening, and he finally came with a box of Grapenuts for me, but he did not mention Peter or the telephone so I didn’t either, never mentioned it till the day he died. He died at night …”

  But tonight. This hard winter night in 1942 and he is silent—my father—his eyes on darkness and road to get me safely home as if I was cherished, while I rush on behind shut eyes through all that last—his size, his lacks, his distances—still threading my finger through curls of his wrist, a grander wrist than he needs or deserves. I find his pulse. It rises sudden to my winnowing finger, waylays, appalls, traps it. I ride his life with the pad of flesh on my middle finger, and it heaves against me steady and calm as if it did not know I ruled its flow, that poor as I am at games and play, I could press in now, press lightly first so he would not notice, then in and in till his foot would slack on the gas, his head sink heavy to his chest, his eyes shut on me (on what I cause), the car roll still and I be left with what I have made—his permanent death. Towards that picture, that chance, my own pulse rises untouched, unwanted—grunting aloud in the damp stripes under my groins, the tender sides of my windpipe, sides of my heels, the pad of my sinking finger. My finger coils to my side, my whole hand clenches, my eyes clamp tighter, but—innocent surely—he speaks for the first time since begging my pardon. “Am I dying, Preacher?”

  I look up at him. “No sir. What do you mean?”

  “I mean you left my pulse like a bat out of Hell. I wondered did you feel bad news?”

  “No sir, it is going fine. I just never felt it before, and it gave me chills.” He smiles at the road and we slide on a mile or more till I say, “Are you scared of dying?”

  He keeps me waiting so I look past him through glass to the sky for a distant point to anchor on—the moon, a planet, Betelgeuse. Nothing is there. All is drowned under cloud but I narrow my eyes and strain to pierce the screen. Then when I am no longer waiting, he says, “It is the main thing I am scared of.”

  I come back to him. “Everybody is going to die.”

  “So they tell me. So they tell me. But that is one crowd I would miss if I could. Gladly.”

  I am not really thinking. “What do people mean when they say somebody is their personal hero?”

  It comes sooner than I expect. “Your hero is what you need to be.”

  “Then is Jesus your hero?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You say you are scared of dying. Jesus is the one that did not die.”

  He does not take it as funny which is right, and being no Bible scholar he does not name me the others that live on—Enoch, Elijah. I name them to myself but not to him. I have seen my chance. I am aiming now at discovery, and I strike inwards like Balboa mean and brave, not knowing where I go or will end or if I can live with what I find. But the next move is his. He must see me off. And he does. He tells me, “I think your hero has to be a man. Was Jesus a man?”

  “No sir. He was God disguised.”

  “Well, that is it, you see. You would not stand a chance of being God—need to or not—so you pick somebody you have got half a chance of measuring up to.”

  In all my seeking I have not asked him. I ask him now. “Have you got a hero?”

  Again he makes me wait and I wait. I look nowhere but at him. I do not think. Then he says, “Yes, I guess I do. But I never called it that to myself. “

  “What did you call it?”

  “I didn’t call it nothing. I was too busy trying to get through alive.”

  “Sir?”

  “—Get through some trouble I had. I had some troubles and when I did there was generally a person I could visit and talk to till I eased. Then when I left him and the trouble came back, I would press down on him in my mind—something he told me or how he shook my hand goodbye. Sometimes that tided me over. Sometimes.”

  He has still not offered a name. To help him I hold out the first one at hand. “Is it Dr. Truett?” (That is where we are coming from now tonight—a sermon in Raleigh by George W. Truett from Texas.)

  The offer is good enough to make him think. (I know how much he admires Dr. Truett. He has one of his books and a sermon on records— “The Need for Encouragement“—that he plays two or three nights a year, standing in the midst of the room, giving what wide curved gestures seem right when Dr. Truett: says for instance, “‘Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the Lord; and be strong O Joshua, son of Josedech, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work: for I am with you, saith the Lord of hosts: according to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.’” And here we have come this long way to see him in January with snow due to fall by morning.) But he says—my father, “No, not really. Still you are close.” Then a wait—“You are warm.”

  “Does that mean it is a preacher?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Barden?”

  “I guess he is it.”

  I knew he was—or would have known if I had thought—but I do not know why. He is nothing but the Baptist minister in Copeland, my father’s home—half a head shorter than Father, twenty years older, light and dry as kindling with flat bands of gray hair, white skin the day shines through if he stands by windows, Chinese eyes, bird ankles, a long voice for saying things such as “Jeff, I am happy to slide my legs under the same table with yours” and poor digestion (he said that last the one day he ate with us; my mother had cooked all morning, and he ate a cup of warm milk)—but he is one of the people my father loves, one my mother is jealous of, and whenever we visit Copeland (we left there when I was two), there will come a point after dinner on Sunday when my father will stand and without speaking start for the car. If it is winter he may get away unseen, but in summer everybody will be on the porch, and Junie will say, “Jeff is headed to save Brother Barden’s soul.” My mother will laugh. My father will smile and nod but go and be gone till evening and feel no need to explain when he returns, only grin and agree to people’s jokes.

  But tonight, has he not just offered to explain? and to me who have never asked? So I ask, “Mr. Barden is so skinny. What has he got that you need to be?”

  “Before you were born he used to be a lot of things. Still is.”

  All this time he has not needed his hand on the wheel. It has stayed heavy on me. I slip my hand towards it. I test with my finger, tapping. He turns his palm and takes me, gives me the right to say “Name some things.” I fear if he looks at me, we will go back silent (he has not looked down since we started with his pulse), and I roll my face deep into his side, not to take his eyes. But they do not come. He does not look. He does not press my hand in his, and the load of his wrist even lightens. I think it will leave but it lifts a little and settles further on like a folded shield over where I am warmest, takes up guard, and then he is talking the way he must, the best he can, to everything but me—the glass, the hood, the hoop of light we push towards home.

  “I have done things you would not believe—and will not believe when you get old enough to do them yourself. I have come ho
me at night where your mother was waiting and said things to her that were worse than a beating, then gone again and left her still waiting till morning, till sometimes night again. And did them knowing I would not do them to a dog. Did them drunk and wild, knowing she loved me and would not leave me even though her sisters said, ‘Leave him. He won’t change now,’ would not even raise her voice. O Preacher, it was Hell. We were both in Hell with the lid screwed down, not a dollar between us except what I borrowed—from Negroes sometimes when friends ran out—to buy my liquor to keep me wild. You were not born yet, were not thought of, God knows not wanted the way I was going. It was 1930. I was thirty years old and my life looked over, and I didn’t know why or whether I wanted it different, but here came Mr. Barden skinny as you say, just sitting by me when I could sit still, talking when I could listen, saying ‘Hold up, Jeff. Promise God something before you die.’ But Preacher, I didn’t. I drank up two more years, driving thousands of miles on mirey roads in a Model-Á Ford to sell little scraps of life insurance to wiped-out farmers that did not have a pot to pee in, giving your mother a dollar or so to buy liver with on a Saturday or a pound of hominy I could not swallow. And then that spring when the bottom looked close, I slipped and started you on the way. When I knew you were coming—Preacher, for days I was out of what mind I had left myself. I do not know what I did but I did things, and finally when I had run some sort of course, your mother sent for Mr. Barden and they got me still. He said, ‘Jeff, I cherish you, mean as you are. But what can I do if you go on murdering yourself, tormenting your wife?’ I told him, ‘You can ask the Lord to stop that baby.’ I told him that. But you came on every day every day like a tumor till late January and she hollered to me you were nearly here. But you were not. You held back twenty-four hours as if you knew who was waiting outside, and Dr. Haskins told me—after he had struggled with your mother all day, all night—‘Jeff, one of your family is going to die but I don’t know which.’ I said, ‘Let it be me’ and he said he wished he could. I went outdoors to Paul’s woodshed and told Jesus, ‘If You take Rhew or take that baby, then take me too. But if You can, save her and save that baby, and I make You this promise—I will change my life.’ I asked Him, ‘Change my life.’ So He saved you two and I started trying to change my life, am trying right now God knows. Well, Mr. Barden has helped me out every once in a while—talking to me or just sitting calm, showing me his good heart. Which, Preacher, I need.”