Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  She took three steps and stopped and stood in front of the oak door, taller than she would ever be, that said “Ledwell.” Behind it was where Mr. Ledwell was and his people that she didn’t know, where he had laid down that first day Rato saw him talking and laughing, where he had gone out from to take his operation, and where it was not his home. Rosacoke was nervous but she told herself she looked as good as she could, and she had the altheas in her hands to hide the shaking. She knocked on the door and she must have knocked too soft because nobody came. She knocked again and put her ear to the wood. There were dim sounds coming from the other side so she pushed the door open a little, but the room was dark and quiet as an open field at night with only the sky, and she was drawing back to leave when the moving light of candles caught her, streaming from a part of the room she couldn’t see into, drawing her on. So she went inside and pressed the door silent behind her and stood up against it, waiting till her eyes had opened enough to halfway see. There were five or six people in the room. Mr. Ledwell was a ridge on the bed that the sheets rose and fell over in gullies like after a rain, and his boy was by his head, holding one of the candles. In the yellow light the boy looked a way Wesley Beavers might never look, and the same light fell through a clear tent that covered his father’s head and chest. A little of it fell on three ladies off in a corner, kneeling on the hard floor, and on a man standing near the bed by a table with two candles on it. He was all in black and falling from his neck was a narrow band of purple cloth with fine gold crosses at the ends. He was talking in words Rosacoke didn’t know, almost singing in a voice that was low and far away because he was old with white hair and was looking down, but finally he looked up at Mr. Ledwell’s boy, and the two of them pulled the tent back off him. Rosacoke knew he was alive. She could hear the air sucking into his throat, and his eyes were open on the boy and on the yellow candle.

  The old man in black moved his hands in the air three times carefully, wide and long over Mr. Ledwell. Then he took a piece of cotton and waited for Mr. Ledwell to shut his eyes. He wiped the cotton over the lids, and they were shining for a second, wet and slick under the light before Mr. Ledwell opened them again and turned them back to the boy. The boy rolled his father’s head to one side and then to the other while the old man touched the cotton to the ears that looked cold, and all the time Mr. Ledwell was trying not to take his eyes off the boy as if that sad face in the soft light that came and went was what kept him from dying, and except for that same soft light, the walls of the room would have disappeared and the ceiling, and Rosacoke could have walked out through where the window had been that she used to stand by. It seemed to be time for her to leave anyhow. She didn’t know how long this would go on. She didn’t know what it was. She only knew they were getting Mr. Ledwell ready to die in their own way, and she had taken the first step to leave when the boy’s face turned and saw her through all that dark. His face changed for a minute, and you might have thought he smiled if you hadn’t known that couldn’t have happened now, not on his face. That was why Rosacoke didn’t leave. He had looked at her as if he knew why she was there, almost as if he would have needed her if there had been time. But the old man touched Mr. Ledwell’s lips, and Mr. Ledwell strained his head off the pillow and sucked at the cotton before the old man could pull it back. He thought they were giving him something to drink. And it went on that way over his hand that had to be pulled out from under the cover and his feet that seemed to be tallow you could gouge a line in with your fingernail. When they finished with his head, they put the tent back over him, and Rosacoke couldn’t hear his breathing quite so loud. From his feet the old man walked back to his head. He put a black wood cross that had Jesus, white and small, nailed on it into Mr. Ledwell’s hand. Then he shook a fine mist of water over him and made the sign again, and Rosacoke heard words she could understand. The old man told Mr. Ledwell to say, “Thy will be done.” Mr. Ledwell nodded his head and his eyes opened. He took his hand and tapped on the inside of the clear tent. When his boy looked at him, his voice came up in pieces—but Rosacoke heard him plain—“Don’t forget to give Jack Rowan one of those puppies.” The boy said he wouldn’t forget. Mr. Ledwell looked easier and when the old man reached under the tent to take the cross and Jesus away from him, he nodded his head over and over as he turned the cross loose.

  The old man went over to speak to the lady who must have been Mr. Ledwell’s wife. She was still on her knees, and she never took her face out of her hands. That was when Rosacoke left. They might switch on the light, and there she would be looking on at this dying which was the most private thing in the world. She had stayed that long because the boy had looked at her, but he might have forgotten by now. He had never looked again. A chair was by the door. She laid her flowers there. In the light somebody might see them and be glad that whoever it was stepped over to bring them, stepped over without saying a word.

  She waited in the hall for the sound of his dying because he had seemed so ready, but it didn’t come—nobody came or went but a colored girl, pushing a cartload of supper towards the ward—so she had to walk back into Papa’s room, dreading questions. The room was dim though and still with only the light over Papa’s bed that shined on nis hair and the cards spread out on his knees. But he was just turning them over now, not really playing, and when Rosacoke shut the door, he looked and put one finger to his mouth and pointed towards Baby Sister, asleep at last in Mama’s lap, and Mama nodding. Rosacoke thought she was safe and halfway smiled and leaned on the door, waiting for breath. But Papa stared at her and then tried to whisper“You are leaving me, ain’t you?”—and Mama jerked awake. It took her a while to get her bearings, but finally she said, “Where in the world have you been with Papa’s flowers?” Rosacoke said, “To see a friend.” Papa said, “I didn’t want no flowers. Who is your friend?” She said “Mr. Ledwell” but Papa didn’t show recollection. Mr. Ledwell hadn’t crossed his mind since the operation, but just to say something he asked was the man coming on all right? Rosacoke said, “He ain’t doing so good, Papa” and to Mama who had never had a secret, never wanted one, “Mama, please don’t ask me who that is because I don’t know. “

  Then she went to her grip and turned her back on the room and began packing in the things she had left till last. She was almost done when Rato walked in. Nobody had seen Rato since dinner. He walked in and said it the way he might walk in the kitchen and drop a load of wood in the box—“That man over yonder is dead. Ain’t been five minutes.” Mama said she was always sorry to hear of any death, and Rato said if they left the door cracked open they could see the man because a nurse had already called the undertaker to come after the body. But Rosacoke faced him and said “No” and said it so Rato wouldn’t dare to crack the door one inch. He just left fast and slammed it behind him. But Baby Sister slept through it all, and Mama didn’t speak for fear of disturbing her so the room was still again. To keep her hands busy Rosacoke rearranged the few little things in her grip, but she stood sideways to look at Papa and have him to fill her mind. Papa had his cards that he went back to, but he dealt them slow because he was thinking. He was so old himself you couldn’t expect him to be too sad. Lately he always said he knew so many more dead men than live ones that there wasn’t a soul left who could call him by his first name. And that was the truth. That was what took the edge off death for Papa-grieving over so many people, so many of his friends, burying so much love with each one of them till he had buried them all (everybody he had nearly) and pretty nearly all his love, and death didn’t hold fear for him any more. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know where he was going or what it would be like when he got there. He just trusted and he hoped for one thing, he tried to see to one last thing—for a minute he stopped his card playing and asked Mama could he die at home, and Mama told him he could.

  That was what made Rosacoke think so long about Mr. Ledwell who had died in that dark room. She wouldn’t be able to go to his funeral, wouldn’t even be asked. But t
hat wasn’t so bad. She had done what she could, being away from home, hadn’t she, and didn’t she know his name at least and hadn’t he died not cut up or shot or run over but almost in his sleep with his wife and his boy there, and with all that beautiful dying song, hadn’t he surely died sanctified? If he had to die wasn’t that as good a way as any, leaving his living picture back here in that boy? But she hadn’t ever seen him alive really. She hadn’t ever told him or any of his kind—out loud—that she felt for them. She hadn’t ever said it so loud she could hear her own voice—that Rosacoke Mustian was sorry to see it happen. That was why she spoke at last. She had been quiet so long, and now her slow lean voice cut through all the dark in the room. “It don’t seem right,” she said. “It just don’t seem right. It seem like I had got to know him real well.” And her words hung in the room for a long time—longer than it took Papa to pick the cards up off the bed and lay them without a sound in the drawer, longer even than it would have taken Rosacoke to say goodbye to Wesley if it had been Saturday night and she had been at home.

  TWO USEFUL VISITS

  BACK THEN your kin could lean down on you with the weight of the world and still not quite say “Get yourself up here to see Mary Greet; she’s dying fast, and it’s your plain duty.” So in mid-February of 1960, on the floor of my own despair, I got a postcard from my cousin Anna Palmer. It said “Aunt Mary is sinking fast and speaks of you.” I changed my plans for the next Sunday and made the two-hour drive to see her through clear warm weather that lifted a corner at least of my spirits.

  When I’d seen her last in August ’58, Mary claimed to be “somewhere way past my eighties.” And though she’d picked sixty pounds of cotton the day before—a great deal of cotton—the pictures of her I took on that visit show a balding head, eyes opalescent with the film of age and the fixed stance of an ancient sibyl, senior to God. So if she was, say, more than ninety in the pictures, then she might very well have been born a slave. Even in those years of frank segregation, I’d never been able to ask her the truth. My older kin never mentioned slavery, as if it were some much-cherished dead loved one, too painful to summon. And I’d hesitated with Mary Greet from a vague, maybe misplaced courtesy—you seldom ask men if they’ve been in prison. The time had come though. I had a need now, to understand pain, that licensed the probe. I’d ask her today.

  When I pulled up by her match-box house, she was out in the yard in a straight-backed chair, apparently searching an old hound for ticks. I knew she couldn’t see me till I got much closer; so I stood by the car and raised my voice, “Aunt Mary, dogs don’t have ticks in the winter.”

  She didn’t look up and I thought “Now she’s deaf.” But then she spoke to the dog clearly, “White man claiming it’s winter, Saul.” And when I walked closer, there in her lap was a rusty can with fat ticks swimming in kerosene. I said “Can you tell who I am?”

  Still picking at Saul, Mary said “You who you been every day I knowed you.”

  I admired her skill at staving me off, but I had to keep teasing. “Am I Sam House?” Sam was my younger brother, then twenty-six.

  She finally turned her long face toward me and shaded her eyes, “Fool, you used to be Hilman. Sit down.” That far, she’was right—the summer loss of my wife and daughter had reamed me out at thirtyfour; but could her eyes really see that well? She pointed to the sandy ground beneath us. It was good enough for Saul; who was I to decline on a warm dry day?

  I sat and, since she’d called me a fool, I thought “All right, I’ll ask her right off.” When Saul’s next tick hit the bottom of the can, I said “Aunt Mary, were you born a slave?” For the next still minute, I thought I’d struck her.

  But next she let out a dry chuckle. She lifted Saul’s droopy right ear and leaned down, “Tell him, Saul. You know.” She faced me again and said “Hilman, you feeling good as you look?”

  I said “No ma’m” but I felt some ease; and for nearly two hours, we sat in the last of that midwinter spring and asked each other aimless questions about our safe past, both dodging the traps of here and now.

  This much came clear, from her answers and my memory. Mary cooked for my mother’s parents from the week they settled here in 1882. And though she retired before I was born, she was in and out of my grandmother’s house all through my childhood. She took the rights accorded her age and always came in through the front door—no knock, just a statement, “It’s nothing but me.” Then she’d head for the kitchen and sit by the sink, a new addition since her days there. Most of my kin ignored her politely. They thought they knew all she had to tell. But early she won my affectionate awe. She treated me like the full-grown man I meant to be, that tart and dead-level, that unforgiving whenever I failed.

  One morning when I was maybe ten, she asked me a thing no black person had, “Hil, what you meaning to be, down the road?”

  I said “Aunt Mary, I’m busy right now” and pounded off to start some game.

  She said “Here, sir!” Then in sight of my mother, she said “You turn your back on this old a soul, and you’ll see a heap of backs turned on you.”

  “Mother nodded and I stayed in place to say I planned to be a doctor; by then it was already my great goal.

  She said “No sir, you waited too late.”

  Mother smiled behind her and we mutely agreed-Mary was cracked. But of course she was right; and many more times when she sounded wild to other bystanders, she thrust straight fingers deep into my quick.

  Even this afternoon in 1960, as I stood to leave, having said nothing about my loss, Mary finally said “When you setting up house and making your young uns?”

  I said “I’m trying to learn from you—you thriving out here with nothing but a hound and doing grand.” I’d yet to see any sign of poor health.

  Saul had loped off an hour ago, but Mary looked for him as though he mattered. Then she found my face again and tried to smile, but her eyes wouldn’t light. “Us mean old women, we free-standing trees—don’t need no trellis to help us climb. I estimate you ain’t that free.” She tried again at the smile and it worked. There were four good teeth.

  I gave her five dollars and drove back home, thinking she’d likely be standing free when I’d thinned down from loneliness and vanished.

  But late the next August, Anna Palmer phoned me. Calls from Anna were rare as blizzards; and before she finished expressing her delicate worries for me—I was known, in the family, to be still “blue”—I thought “Mary’s dead.” Strictly speaking, I was wrong. Anna said Aunt Mary was on her deathbed and refused to rise. I thought “By the time I drive up there, she’ll rise and be out pulling more cotton.”

  No, Mary was in the same one-room shack she inhabited alone long before I knew her. All the windows were covered with old cardboard, but there’d never been a lock on the door, so I’d tapped loudly and then stepped into punishing heat. You could have baked bricks in the palms of your hands, but you couldn’t have seen an inch ahead till you stood in the heat and let your eyes open. The one oil lamp was full but not lit. And as ever in all my visits here, there was no human with her. Today there was even no trace of Saul. She was in the far corner on a narrow cot, under three wool blankets; and she seemed asleep or already dead. But as I stepped toward her, her head tried to find me.

  Anna had said that she cooked Aunt Mary two meals a day and spoon-fed them to her and that Roy, Mary’s great-great-nephew, turned up to watch her every few nights and give her milk; she craved buttermilk. So maybe she weighed a scant eighty pounds, but her scalp was bald as any old man’s. And when her mouth gapped open to breathe, I could see that the last four teeth had dissolved. I drew up the chair, “Aunt Mary, it’s Hilman.” She didn’t look up so I said “Hilman House. You resting easy?”

  Then the huge eyes ransacked my face and found nothing. But she found the strength to say a fierce “No.”

  I thought she meant she didn’t recognize me; so I said “—Rosella Hilman’s son, that you used to like.”
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br />   She said “Not so” and waved a spider hand as if to cancel my presence.

  I leaned back. But the hand came on, took the edge of my coat and pulled me down, eight inches from her face.

  She whispered “They working me to death, Mr. Phipps.”

  I thought she said Phipps, though later I recalled a long-dead kinsman named Brownlee Fitts. But I said “No, I’m Hilman.”

  If she’d had her old power, she’d have snapped my neck. But she only nagged at my coat again, “You hear what I say and help me, else I be laid out dead at your feet by dark today. “

  So I said “Mary, where would you rather be?”

  She was eager as any child to tell me, “Lord Jesus, in bed. I’m tired, man. This last piece of work bout broke my mind—my back broke sometime yesterday.” Both hands were out of the cover now, busy with the work old doctors called “picking,” a reflex act of failing nerves.

  I drew off the blankets, smoothed her bunched nightgown, settled her flat. She was light to move as a locust shell, though the only woman I’d touched in months. I smoothed her pillow, a cast-off towel of Anna’s but clean in a linen case. Then I bent and said “Is that any help at all?”