Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  It went on like that another year—him working the yard off and on and staying with me odd evenings—and then my father changed jobs (got a job after six years of failing to sell insurance to wiped-out farmers) and we left Macon, going west a hundred miles to Asheboro, still in North Carolina, where we lived in a small apartment. Uncle Grant of course stayed on in Macon—he still wasn’t ours and we had no lawn of our own, no room for him—but before long my father sent bus fare to my aunt and asked her to put Uncle Grant on the bus (Uncle Grant couldn’t read), and soon he arrived for his first visit. He spent the nights in a Negro boardinghouse and the days and evenings in our kitchen. There was nothing he could do to help except wash dishes (he couldn’t cook), but help wasn’t what my father wanted. He wanted just to talk and every evening after supper, he stayed in the kitchen and talked to Uncle Grant till almost time to sleep. I was too young then to listen—or if I listened, to remember the things they said. They laughed a good deal though—I remember that—and the rest of the time they talked about the past. My mother says they did but she didn’t listen, and now they are dead and nobody knows why they sat there night after night at a hard kitchen table under a bare light bulb, talking on and on, and laughing. Unless they loved each other—meaning there would come times when they needed to meet, and they never explained the need to themselves. My father would just send bus fare through my aunt or there would be a letter from her saying Uncle Grant was ready for a visit and had asked her to say he was coming, and we would go meet the bus, my father and I—five or six times in the two years we lived in three small rooms.

  Then we bought two acres of land in the country near Asheboro and built a house. Or began to. The land needed clearing first—of loblolly pines and blackjack oaks and redbugs and snakes—so Uncle Grant came and spent the weekdays supervising that. He spent the nights at the same boardinghouse and as far as we knew went nowhere and had no Negro friends, but he spent his Sundays with us. We would pick him up in the car after church—my father and I—and drive out to look at our land. He would tell us what trees had gone that week and beg our pardon for, say, sacrificing a dogwood that had stood in the carpenters’ path. But what I remember about those mornings—I was five—are two things he did which changed my mind. One Sunday when the clearing had just begun, the three of us were walking around the land—I in shorts and what I called Jesus-sandals—and as we came to a pile of limbs and weeds, six feet of black snake streamed out. It was May and black snakes go crazy in May so he headed for me and reared on his tail to fight. My father and I were locked stiff in surprise, but before the snake could lash at me, Uncle Grant took one step sideways like lightning and grabbed the snake’s tail and cracked him on the air like a leather whip. Then we all breathed deep and looked and laughed at two yards of limp dead snake in Uncle Grant’s hand. The way that changed my mind was to make me see Uncle Grant, not as the nurse who sat with me nights or talked on and on to my father, but as a fearless hero to imitate, and I never saw him in the old tame way again, not for eight or nine years. Then another Sunday morning we were walking—the land was clear by this time and building had started, but there wasn’t a blade of grass, only mud and thousands of rocks that looked identical to me—and Uncle Grant leaned down quick as he had for the snake and came up with a little rock and handed it to me. It was a perfect Indian arrowhead, and in my joy I said, “How in the world did you see it?” and he said, “I’m three parts Indian myself” which deepened the feeling I had had for him since the snake and also made our two rocky acres something grand—a hunting ground of the Occoneechees or a campsite or even, I hoped, a battlefield (though we never found a second head to prove it).

  When the house was finished and we moved in, he came with us. There was one small room off the kitchen where the furnace was, and his bed was there and a little low table to carry the things he owned—in the daytime his shaving equipment and his extra shirt, and at night his precious belongings—an Ingersoll watch and a pocket knife. In the daytime he worked to grow us a lawn, and gradually, single-handed, he grew us a beauty. And once it was strong, he began to cut it—with a small hand sickle and his pocket knife. We had a lawn mower and he tried to use it but stopped, saying rocks were too plentiful still—the real reason being he could cut grass better, cut it right, by hand and if that meant bending to the ground all day at age about seventy-five and trimming two acres with a three-inch blade, then that was all right. It was what he could do, in spring and summer. In the fall he raked leaves, not waiting till the trees were bare and taking them all at once but raking all day every day. It was one of our jokes on him (a true joke—they were all true) that we once saw him run a few yards and catch a dead leaf as it fell, in the air, and grind it to dust in his hand. In the evening after us he ate at the kitchen counter and washed all our dishes and then went into his room and sat on his bed and looked at picture magazines. Sometimes my father would sit with him and I would fly in and out, but most of the time he sat in silence, thinking whatever his private thoughts were, till we gave him a radio.

  That was Christmas 1939 and there wasn’t much to hear except grim war news, but nothing we gave him ever pleased him more. Not that he had seemed unhappy before—I don’t think he thought about happiness—but now he would sit there on into the night. I would sit beside him long as my mother allowed in the dark (the only light was the radio dial), hearing our favorite things which were short-wave programs in German and Spanish with Morse code bursting in like machine-gun fire to make us laugh. We didn’t understand a word and my father who thought we were fools would step to the door and shake his head at us in the dark, but Uncle Grant would slap his thigh and say, “Listen to them Hitalians, Mr. Will!” Hitalians was what he called all foreigners, and “Great God A-mighty” was his favorite excited expression, the one he used every time some Spaniard would speed up the news or “The Star-Spangled Banner” would play so before long of course I was saying it too—age six. At first I just said it with him when he laughed, but once I slipped and said it in front of my mother, and she asked him not to curse around me and made me stay out of his room for a while. With me being punished my father filled the gap by spending more time in the furnace room, and it was then the jokes piled up. Despite all the war news, he would have a new joke every evening—my father, that is, on Uncle Grant. One night for instance after they had sat an hour listening, they switched off the radio to let it cool and to talk. They talked quite awhile till my father said, “Let’s switch it on. It’s time for the midnight news” so they did, and there was the news, waiting for them. When it had finished and music had begun, Uncle Grant said, “When does they sleep, Mr. Will?” My father said “Who?” and he said—pointing through the dark to the radio—“Them little peoples in yonder.” My father whose work was electrical supplies explained about waves in the air without wires and Uncle Grant nodded. But some time later when they had sat up extra-late, Uncle Grant asked if it wasn’t bedtime. My father took the hint but was slow about leaving—standing in the door, hearing the end of some program—so Uncle Grant stood and unbuttoned his collar, then thought and switched off the radio. My father said, “How come you did that?” and he said, “I can’t undress with them little peoples watching, Mr. Will.” So my father never tried explaining again.

  Then after three years we lost the house and all that grass and had to move to another apartment in Asheboro. By then I had a year-old brother named Bill so again there was no room for Uncle Grant and nothing for him to do if there had been, and my father explained it a month in advance—that much as we wanted him around, we couldn’t keep paying him three dollars a week just to wash dishes and that if he stayed on in Asheboro he would have to find someplace to sleep and hire-out to other people to pay his rent. He told my father he would think it over, and he thought that whole last month, asking no advice, sitting by himself most evenings as I was in school and busy and my father was ashamed in his presence, and giving no sign of his plans till the day we moved. He he
lped that day by packing china and watching how the movers treated our furniture, and when everything had gone except his few belongings, my father said, “Where are you going, Uncle Grant?” He said, “I’m sleeping in that boardinghouse till I get you all’s windows washed. Then I’m going to Macon on the bus. I ain’t hiring-out in this town.” (Asheboro was a stocking-mill town.) My father said, “You might break your radio on the bus. Wait till Sunday and I’ll carry you.” Uncle Grant said, “I been studying that—where am I going to plug in a radio in Macon? You keep it here and if I wants it I’ll let you know.” My father said, “Maybe when I get a little money I can trade it in on a battery set,” and he said “Maybe you can” and two days later went to Macon by bus, saying he would stay with a Negro named Rommie Watson till he found a house. But somewhere in the hundred miles, for some reason, he changed his mind and when the bus set him down, he walked to my aunt’s back door and asked could he sleep in her old smokehouse till he found a place of his own? She knew of course why we turned him loose so she told him Yes, and he swept it out and slept on an army cot, coming to her kitchen for meals but not eating well, not looking for a house of his own, not saying a word about work. My aunt finally asked him was he all right, and he said, “I will be soon as I get my bearings.” In about two weeks he came in to breakfast with the cot rolled under his arm and his bag of belongings. When he had eaten he said he had found a house at the far end of Macon—a one-room house under oak trees in the yard of a Negro church. Then he left and was gone all day, all night, but my aunt looked out in the morning and there he was, trimming her bushes, having got some sort of bearings, enough to last two years.

  We had turned him loose in 1942. He lived on thirteen years and he never let us take hold again. We stayed in Asheboro three years after he left—two years in that apartment and a year in a good-sized house—but he didn’t come to visit in all that time. I don’t know whether we asked him and if we did, what reason he gave for refusing. He just didn’t come and he might have said he was too old. But he worked for my aunt every day, strong as ever, still trimming what he grew with a pocket knife, and the only way he showed age was by not taking supper in my aunt’s kitchen. In summer he would stop about six, in winter about five—before dark—and put up his tools and come to the back door, and my aunt would give him cold biscuits and sometimes a little jar of syrup or preserves, and he would walk home a mile and a half and spend his evenings by a kerosene lamp, alone. But that was no change for him, being by himself.

  What was a change was that after he had been back in Macon two years, he fell in some sort of love with a girl named Katie. She was not from Macon but had come there as cook to a cousin of ours who returned so she had no Negro friends either, and though she was no more than twenty, she began to sit with him some evenings. My aunt didn’t know if they got beyond sitting, but she didn’t worry much, not at first. Uncle Grant was pushing eighty and it seemed at first that Katie was good to him in ways that made him happy. My aunt did say to him once, “Uncle Grant, don’t let that girl take your money away,” and he said, “No’m. Every penny I lends her, she pay me back.” But then it turned bad. After six months or so Katie began taking him to Warrenton on Saturdays (the county seat, five miles away), and they would drink fifty-cent wine called “Sneaky Pete,” and every week he would have the few hairs shaved off his head (to hide them from Katie as they were white). For a while he managed to keep his drinking to Saturdays and to be cold-sober when he turned up for Sunday breakfast so my aunt didn’t complain but finally he slipped. One Sunday he came in late—about nine—walking straight and of course dressed clean but old around the eyes and with his hat still on. He said “Good morning” and sat by the green kitchen table. My aunt said the same and, not really noticing, gave him a dish of corn flakes. He ate a few spoonfuls in silence. Then he sprang to the floor and slapped his flank and said, “What is the meaning of this?”—so loud she could smell the wine and pointing at his bowl. My aunt went over and there was a needle in his food. Thinking fast, she laughed and said, “Excuse me, Uncle Grant. I was sewing in here this week and somebody came to the door, and I stuck the needle in the cereal box, and it must have worked through.” That was the truth and, sober, he would have known it, but he stood there rocking a little and then said, “Somebody trying to kill me is all I know.” My aunt said, “If you are that big a fool, you can leave my house” so he stood another minute and then he left.

  That was in late October—he had just started raking leaves. His shame kept him home the following day—and for two months to come. My aunt reckoned he would come back when he got hungry but he didn’t. What food he got he bought from his neighbors or maybe Katie sneaked him things from our cousin’s kitchen, but he didn’t show up at my aunt’s, and every leaf fell and thousands of acorns, and she finally hired boys to clear them. He still hadn’t showed up by Christmas when we arrived for three days. That was the first we knew of his shame. My father said, “To be sure, he’ll show up to see me,” but my aunt said, “You are the last one he wants to see, feeling like he does,” and my father saw she was right. We had brought him a box of Brown’s Mule chewing tobacco. He surely knew that—we gave him that every Christmas—and we waited but he didn’t come. When we left on the 27th my father gave my aunt the Brown’s Mule and told her to save it till Uncle Grant showed up. She said in that case it would be bone-dry by the time he got it.

  But for once she was wrong. About two weeks later in a hard cold spell his house burned down in the night from an overheated stove. My aunt heard that from her cook in the morning and heard that he got out unharmed with the clothes on his back so she packed a lard bucket with food and set our tobacco on top and sent it by the cook to where he was, which was at some neighbor’s. The cook came back and said he thanked her and that afternoon he came. My aunt was nodding but the cook waked her and said, “Mr. Grant’s out yonder on the porch, Miss Ida.” She went and told him she was sorry to hear of his trouble and what was he going to do now? He said, “I don’t hardly know but could I just sleep in the smokehouse till I get my bearings?” She thought and said, “Yes, if you’ll stay there without having company.” He knew who she meant and nodded and spent the rest of the day cleaning the smokehouse and getting the woodstove fit to use.

  He stayed there without having company, working on the yard by day and on the smokehouse by night. It was just one room, twice as tall as wide, with pine walls and floor. He scrubbed every board—cold as it was—and when they were dry, tacked newspapers around the walls high as he could reach to keep out wind. And as winter passed he kept finding things to do to that one room till it looked as if he took it to be his home. So when spring came my aunt hired a carpenter, and he put plasterboard on the walls and linoleum underfoot and a lock on the door. Then she took back the army cot and bought an old iron bed and a good felt mattress and gave Uncle Grant a key to the door, saying, “This is your key. I’ll keep the spare one in case you lose it.” But he never lost it and he lived on there, having got the bearings, somehow or other, that lasted the rest of his life.

  We moved back to Warren County in 1945. My father got a job that let him live in Warrenton (or travel from there, selling freezers to farmers), and we lived in a hotel apartment, still with no yard of our own. But Sunday afternoons we would drive the five miles to Macon for supper with my aunt. When we got there we would sit an hour and talk, and then my father would rise and say he was stepping out back to see Uncle Grant and who wanted to come? That was a signal for me to say “Me,” and for a year or so I said it and followed him to the smokehouse. Uncle Grant would have been waiting all afternoon and talk would begin by him asking me about school and what I was doing. I was twelve and wasn’t doing much but keeping a diary so my answers wouldn’t take long, and he would turn to my father, and they would begin where they left off the week before in the circles of remembering and laughing. Old as I was, I still didn’t listen, but soon as they got underway, I would stand and walk round the r
oom, reading the papers on the walls till I knew them by heart. (What I did hear was, week after week, my father offering to take Uncle Grant on one of his Virginia business trips and detour to Chatham so he could look up Felix his son and Ruth his wife if she was alive. Uncle Grant would say, “That’s a good idea. Let me know when you fixing to go.” But he never went. He rode with my father a number of times—down into South Carolina and as far west as Charlotte—but whenever they set the date for a trip to Virginia and the date drew near, Uncle Grant would find yard work that couldn’t wait or get sick a day or two with rheumatism.) But a year of such Sundays passed, and I slowed down on the smokehouse visits. My father would rise as before and ask who was going with him to Uncle Grant’s, and more and more my brother volunteered, not me. He was going on six, the age I had been when Uncle Grant cracked the snake and found me the arrowhead and we listened to Hitalian news together, so he stepped into whatever place Uncle Grant kept for me and gradually filled more and more of it. But not all, never all, because every time my father came back from a visit he would say, “Uncle Grant asked after you. Step out yonder and speak to him, son.” I would look up from what I was doing—seventh-grade arithmetic or a Hardy Boys mystery—and say, “Soon as I finish this,” and of course before I finished, it would be dark and supper would be ready. But I always saw him after supper when he came in to eat and to wash our dishes—little fidgety meetings with nothing to talk about but how he was feeling and with gaps of silence getting longer and longer till I would say “Goodbye” and he would say “All right” and I would hurry out. (Occasionally though, he would move some way that detained me—by dropping the dishrag, say, and old as he was, stooping for it in a flash that recalled him reaching bare-handed for the snake to save me—and I would find things to say or look on awhile at his slow body, seeing how grand he had been and knowing how happy I could make him, just waiting around.)