Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  And dozens more complete concords as fine and healing but in our hideous Cowley digs under framed chromos of waltzing dogs. They all persist in my eyes still as early now-proved guarantors of what’s ensued—these parallel lives that confound physics and manage to meet through five decades past the claims of others and with no hard word between us in all that nearness, not one bitter day.

  Stranger still—never, once we’d slept and waked, did we speak an actual audible word about our invention: total meeting, a secret fail-proof hanging garden of staggering opulence that wanted only night and quiet to float its full renewable gift toward us again till a Cunard liner hauled you down a pier at Southampton and out to lay an ocean between us.

  Young as I was through that first absence, I was either watching your latest picture (your eyes invariably met the camera) or mutely howling round the clock and scrawling poems of damp self-pity till twelve months later we dug our way through granite and water and joined again a final stretch of American years before, one summer night, we stood—replete now, thoroughly fed—and walked to opposite ends of the Earth with other aims in other arms.

  Still the thought of our transaction mends a surprising lot of current pain—the fact we’ve never ceased to meet, as aging friends increasingly hid in gray and girth; the fact I’ve stood at christening fonts and vowed to guard your elder son from the snares of Satan and all his works till they can meet him, eye to eye.

  No other human lives I’ve watched at pointblank range, and I’m a watcher, have yet disclosed a rival brand of usable reward and rest. Others can read this dense brief now, take fire from our enormous luck and simon—pure audacity, reaching as we once did to find their private food at will and eat its bloody fuel.

  A final sight—damp morning, Venice, near San Marco, we round a corner and crash against the fuming grandiose parade to Easter mass beneath the dome. We lurch back, wait and suddenly—alone in a globe of hollow space—the Patriarch of Venice walks, no palanquin or fanning guards: old bald Angelo Roncalli, round as a melon and cardinal-capped. His eyes the size of walnut shells look light years gone; but flanking us an arm’s reach off, he meets our monster heretic gaze and—not quite smiling but plainly focused and knowing all—his huge brown peasant hand lifts toward us and blesses the clean rejoicing air we then breathe in.

  Two years on, elected Pope, he’ll take the name John XXIII—as apt a pontiff as any since Peter.

  I never thought his gift was random; it scalds me still.

  SUMMER GAMES

  OUTSIDE, in our childhood summers—the war. The summers of 1939 to ’45. I was six and finally twelve; and the war was three thousand miles to the right where London, Warsaw, Cologne crouched huge, immortal under nights of bombs or, farther, to the left where our men (among them three cousins of mine) crawled over dead friends from foxhole to foxhole toward Tokyo or, terribly, where there were children (our age, our size) starving, fleeing, trapped, stripped, abandoned.

  Far off as it was, still we dreaded each waking hour that the war might arrive on us. A shot would ring in the midst of our play, freezing us in the knowledge that here at last were the first Storm Troopers till we thought and looked—Mrs. Hightower’s Ford. And any plane passing overhead after dark seemed pregnant with black chutes ready to blossom. There were hints that war was nearer than it seemed—swastikaed subs off Hatteras or the German sailor’s tattered corpse washed up at Virginia Beach with a Norfolk movie ticket in his pocket.

  But of course we were safe. Our elders said that daily. Our deadly threats were polio, being hit by a car, drowning in pure chlorine if we swam after eating. No shot was fired for a hundred miles. (Fort Bragg— a hundred miles.) We had excess food to shame us at every meal, excess clothes to fling about us in the heat of play. So, secure, guilty, savage, we invoked war to us by games which were rites.

  All our games ended desperately. Hiding, Prisoner’s Base, SlingStatue, Snake in Gutter, Giant Step, Kick the Can. We would start them all as friends, cool, gentle enough; but as we flung on under monstrous heat, sealed in sweat and dirt, hearts thudding, there would come a moment of pitch when someone would shout “Now war!” and it would be war—we separating, fleeing for cover, advancing in stealth on one another in terror, inflicting terror, mock death, surrender, till evening came and the hand of the day relaxed above us and cool rose from the grass and we sank drained into calm again, a last game of Hide in the dusk among bitter-smelling lightning bugs, ghost stories on the dark porch steps; then bath, bed, prayers for forgiveness and long life, sleep.

  Only once did we draw real blood in our games; and I was the cause, the instrument at least. One August afternoon we had gone from, say, Tag into War. It was me, my cousins Marcia and Pat, and a Negro boy named Walter (who played with us for a quarter a week) against older, rougher boys. They massed on the opposite side of the creek that split the field behind our house. We had gathered magnolia seed pods for hand grenades; but as the charge began and swept toward us, as Madison Cranford leapt the creek and came screaming at me, he ceased being Madison (a preacher’s son), the game ceased, the day rose in me, I dropped my fake grenade, stooped, blindly found a stone (pointed flint) and before retreating, flung it. My flight was halted by sudden silence behind me. I turned and by the creek on the ground in a huddle of boys was Madison, flat, still, eyes shut, blood streaming from the part in his sweaty hair, from a perfect circle in the skin which I had made. Walter, black and dry and powdered with dust, knelt by the head and the blood and looking through the day and the distance, said to me, “What ails you, boy? You have killed this child.”

  I had not, of course. He lived, never went to bed though a doctor did see him and pass on to us the warning that, young as we were, we were already deadly. My rock an inch farther down in Madison’s temple would have done the work of a bullet—death. Death was ours to give, mine.

  The warning was passed through my mother that night when she came from the Cranfords’, having begged their pardon, and climbed to my room where I feigned sleep in a walnut bed under photographs of stars. I “woke” with a struggle, oaring myself from fake drowned depths, lay flat as she spread covers round me and heard her question launched, tense but gentle. “Why on earth did you throw a rock when everyone else was playing harmless?” What I suddenly knew I held back from her—that the others were not playing harmless, were as bent on ruin as I but were cowards, had only not yet been touched hard enough by hate. So I blamed the summer. “It was so hot I didn’t know I had a rock. I was wild, for a minute. I will try not to do it again next summer.” She said “Ever again” and left me to sleep which, tired as I was, did not come at once.

  I lay in half dark (my sacred familiar objects crouched in horror from me against my walls) and thought through the lie I had told to save my mother—that summer was to blame. Then I said aloud as a promise (to my room, to myself), “I will tame myself. When the war is over and I am a man, it will all be peace, be cool. And when it is not, when summer comes, we will go to the water—my children and I—and play quiet games in the cool of the day. In the heat we will rest, separate on cots, not touching but smiling, watching the hair grow back on our legs.”

  Then sleep came unsought, untroubled to seal that further lie I had told to hide from myself what I knew even then—that I was not wrong to blame the summer, not wholly wrong; that wherever summer strikes (its scalding color), even in years of relative peace, something thrusts from the earth, presses from the air, compresses that in us which sets us wild against ourselves, in work, in games, in worst of all our love. Summer is the time wars live, thrive, on.

  A CHAIN OF LOVE

  THEY HAD observed Papa’s birthday with a freezer of cream even if it was the dead of winter, and they had given him a Morris chair that was not brand-new but was what he had always wanted. The next morning he was sick, and nobody could figure the connection between such nice hand-turned cream that Rato almost froze to death making and a tired heart which was what he had according to Dr. Sl
edge. Papa said “Tired of what?” and refused to go to any hospital. He said he would die at home if it was his time, but the family saw it different so they took him to Raleigh in Milo’s car—pulled out the back seat that hadn’t been out since MiIo married the Abbott girl and spread a pallet and laid him there on pillows with his head resting on the hand-painted one off the settee, the gray felt pillow from Natural Bridge, Virginia that he brought Pauline his wife six years before she died, off that twoday excursion he took with the County Agent to the model peanut farms around Suffolk.

  Much as she wanted to, Mama couldn’t stay with Papa then. (Mama was his daughter-in-law.) She made him a half a gallon of boiled custard as he asked her to, to take along, and she rode down to Raleigh with them, but she had to come back with MiIo in the evening. It worried her not being able to stay when staying was her duty, but they were having a Children’s Day at the church that coming Sunday—mainly because the Christmas pageant had fallen through when John Arthur Bobbitt passed around German measles like a dish of cool figs at the first rehearsal—and since she had organized the Sunbeams singlehanded, she couldn’t leave them then right on the verge of public performance. So they took Rosacoke and Rato along to sit for the first days till Mama could come back herself. Dr. Sledge said there was no need to take on a full-time nurse with two strong grandchildren dying to sit with him anyhow.

  And there wasn’t. From the minute Papa had his attack, there was never a question of Rosacoke going if Papa had to go—no question of wanting to go—and in fact she almost liked the idea. There was just one thing made her think twice about it, which was missing one Saturday night with Wesley. Wesley Beavers was Rosacoke’s boyfriend even if Mama didn’t like the idea of her riding in to town with a boy two years older every Saturday night to the show and sitting with him afterwards in his car—Rato there on the porch in the pitch dark looking—and telling him goodbye without a word. That was the best part of any week, telling Wesley goodbye the way she did when he pulled his Pontiac up in the yard under the pecan tree, and if it was fall, nuts would hit the car every now and then like enemy bullets to make them laugh or if it was spring, all those little rain frogs would be singing-out over behind the creek and then for a minute calming as if they had all died together or had just stopped to catch their breath. But Wesley would be there when she got back, and anyhow going to the hospital would give her a chance to lay out of school for a week, and it would give her extra time with Papa that she liked to be with. Rosacoke’s Papa was her grandfather. Her own father was dead, run over by a green pick-up truck one Saturday evening late a long time ago, almost before she could remember.

  But Rato could remember. Rato had seen a lot of things die. He was named for their father—Horatio Junior Mustian—and he was the nextto-oldest boy, nearly eighteen. He didn’t mind staying with Papa either. He didn’t go to school, hadn’t gone in four years, so he didn’t have the pleasure of laying out the way Rosacoke did, but seeing all the people would be enough for Rato. Not that he liked people so much. You could hardly get him to speak to anybody, but if you left him alone he would take what pleasure he needed, just standing there taller than anybody else and thinner and watching them.

  Dr. Sledge had called on ahead, and they didn’t have any trouble getting Papa in the hospital. He even had the refusal of a big corner room with a private bath, but it cost twelve dollars a day. Papa said there was no use trying the good will of Blue Cross Hospital Insurance so he took a ten-dollar room standing empty across the hall, and they wheeled him in on a rolling table pushed by a Negro who said he was Snowball Mason and turned out to be from Warren County too, up around Sixpound, which made Papa feel at home right away and limber enough to flip easy onto the bed in all the clothes he insisted on riding in. But before he could get his breath good, in came a nurse who slid around the bed on her stumpy legs as smooth and speedy as if she was on roller skates with dyed black hair screwed up and bouncing around her ears. She called Papa “darling” as if she had known him all her life and struggled to get him in one of those little night shirts the hospital furnished free without showing everything he had to the whole group. Everybody laughed except Rosacoke who had undressed Papa before and could do it in the dark. She gritted her teeth and finally the nurse got him fixed and stepped back to look as if she had just made him out of thin air. Milo said, “Papa, if you have somebody that peppy around you all the time, you won’t be tired long.” The nurse smiled and told Papa she would be seeing lots of him in the daytime and then left. Milo laughed at the “lots” and said, “That’s what I’m afraid of, Papa—you getting out of hand down here,” but Rosacoke said she could manage fine and wasn’t exactly a moper herself and Papa agreed to that.

  Soon as the nurse got out—after coming back once to get a hairpin she dropped on the bed—they began inspecting the room. There was a good big sink where Rosacoke could rinse out her underwear that she hadn’t brought much of and Rato’s socks. (Anywhere Rato went he just took the clothes on his back. ) And Mama liked the view out the window right over the ambulance entrance where you could see every soul that came in sick. She called Rato’s attention to it, and the two of them looked out awhile, but it was getting on towards four o’clock, and much as she wanted to stay and see what Snowball was serving for supper, she told Milo they would have to go. She couldn’t stand to ride at night.

  Practically before the others left the building, Rosacoke and Rato and Papa had made their sleeping arrangements and were settled. There was one easy chair Rosacoke could sleep in, and since Rato couldn’t see stretching out on the floor with his bones, he shoved in another chair out of the parlor down the hall. That dyed-haired nurse saw him do it. She gave him a look that would have dropped anybody but Rato dead in his tracks and said, “You camping out or something, Big Boy?” Rato said, “No’m. Setting with my Papa.” Then he went off roaming and the first thing Rosacoke did was open her grip and spread out her toilet articles all over the glass-top bureau. They were all she had brought except for two dresses and a copy of Hit Parade Tunes and Lyrics so she could get in some good singing if there was a radio and there was—over Papa’s bed, two stations. And at the last minute Mama had stuck in what was left of the saltwater taffy Aunt Oma sent from Virginia Beach that summer. It seemed like a good idea—nurses hung around a patient who had his own candy like Grant around Richmond, Mama said—so she took a piece and gave one to Papa and began to paint her face, trying it out. Papa gummed his candy and watched in the mirror. Mama would have jerked a knot in her if she could have seen the sight Rosacoke was making of herself but Papa smiled. He had always said Rosacoke looked like an actor, and since the only picture show he ever saw was Birth of a Nation—and that was forty years ago in the old Warrenton Opera House with a four-piece band in accompaniment—then it must have been Lillian Gish he thought Rosacoke looked like. And she did a little that winter—not as small but thin all the same though beginning to grow, with a heart-shaped face and long yellow hair and blue eyes. That was what Rosacoke liked the best about her face, the eyes. They were big and it was hard to say where the blues left off and the whites began because everything there was more or less blue, and out the far corner of her left eye came this little vein close under the skin that always seemed to Rosacoke to be emptying off some of all that blue, carrying it down to her pale cheek.

  But she couldn’t stand there staring at herself all the time—she wasn’t that good looking and she knew it already—so after the doctors began to ease up with the visits on the second day, Rosacoke got a little tired. That is, till the Volunteer Worker from the Ladies’ Guild came in in a pink smock and asked if maybe they wouldn’t want some magazines or a deck of cards maybe? She had a pushcart with her full of razor blades and magazines and things, and all Rosacoke had to do was look at Papa, and he—so happy with a lady visitor—pointed to his black leather purse on the table. The best thing she bought was a deck of Bicycle Playing Cards, and Mama would have jerked another knot if she could ha
ve seen Rosacoke right in Papa’s bed, teaching him to play Honeymoon Bridge and Fish which she had learned awhile back from town girls on rainy days at little recess. But she never mentioned Slap Jack, her favorite game. She knew in advance Papa would get excited waiting for a Jack to turn up and maybe have a stroke or something so they stuck to quiet games which Papa took to easily, and you could have knocked Rosacoke off the bed with a feather when he started teaching her and Rato to play Setback, playing the extra hand himself.

  They could count on the cards keeping them busy till Sunday, but they would have to do something with them then. Mama had said she would come down on Sunday to sit her turn with Papa. Milo would bring her after Children’s Day. Milo was her oldest boy and he pretty well ran the farm alone with what help Rato could give him. He would probably have to bring Sissie along for the ride even if Papa couldn’t stand her. Sissie was Milo’s new wife. Just try leaving Sissie anywhere.

  The doctors didn’t tell Papa what was wrong with him, and he didn’t tell them but one thing either which was that he wanted to die at home. He told them they had been mighty nice to him and he appreciated it, but he couldn’t think of anything worse than dying away from home. They said they would take care of that and for him to rest till they told him to stop and they would send Dr. Sledge a full report. And Papa didn’t worry. He had left it in their hands, and if a doctor had walked in one morning and said he had come to saw his head off, Papa would have just laid his neck out on the pillow where the doctor could get at it. But the doctors didn’t bother him for much of his time, and taking them at their word, he slept the best part of every day. That was when Rato would roam the halls, never saying “p-turkey” to anybody, just looking around. And when Rosacoke could see Papa was asleep good, she would tip over and listen to his chest to make sure his heart was beating regular before she would walk across the hall to the corner room, the one they had offered Papa. It was still empty. The door stayed open all the time, and she didn’t see any reason for not going in. There was reason for going—the view out the window of that room, a white statue of Jesus standing beside the hospital, holding his head bowed down and spreading his hands by his side. His chest was bare and a cloth was hanging over his right shoulder. Rosacoke couldn’t see his face too well, but she knew it, clear, from the day they brought Papa in. It was the kindest face she had ever seen. She was sure of that. And she went to that empty room more than once to look out at him and recollect his face the way she knew it was.