Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  It went on like that till the summer of 1947. Then we moved again—sixty miles, to Raleigh, into a house with two good yards and a steam-heated basement room—and as my father arranged, Uncle Grant followed in a day or so. He had not volunteered to follow, even when my father described the basement room and the grass and privet hedge that, since it was August, were nearly out of hand, so my father asked him—“Would you come up and help us get straight?” and he said, “I’ll ask Miss Ida can I take off a week.” She gave him the week and we gave him the fare and he came. He started next morning at the ankle-high grass, and by sundown he had cut a patch about twenty feet square and sat in the kitchen, bolt-upright but too tired to eat. My father saw the trouble and saw a way out—he said, “I am driving to Clinton tomorrow. Come on and keep me company in this heat.” Uncle Grant accepted, not mentioning grass. And none of us mentioned it again. When they got back from Clinton two evenings later, he spent one night, and the next day he went to Macon for good. Busy as my father was, he took Uncle Grant by car and spent a night at my aunt’s. Then he came back to Raleigh and at supper that evening said, “He is older than I counted on him being. He won’t last long. So I bought him a battery radio to keep him company.”

  He was maybe eighty-two when he tackled our new lawn and lost. My father was forty-seven. Uncle Grant lasted eight years, working on my aunt’s yard till eight months before he died (no slower than ever and with nothing but a boy to rake up behind him), spending his evenings with nothing but his battery radio (Katie having drunk herself jobless and vanished), complaining of nothing but sometimes numb feet, asking for nothing but Brown’s Mule tobacco (and getting that whenever we visited, especially at Christmas). My father lasted six.

  He died in February, 1954—my father. Cancer of the lung with tumors the size of bird eggs clustered in his throat which nobody noticed till he thought he had bronchitis and called on a doctor. It went very quickly—twenty-one days—and my aunt didn’t tell Uncle Grant till she had to. Hoping for the best, she had seen no reason to upset him in advance, but when we phoned her that Sunday night, she put on her coat and went to the smokehouse and knocked. Uncle Grant cracked the door and seeing it was her (she had never called on him after dark before), said, “What’s wrong, Miss Ida?” She stood on the doorstep—half of a granite millstone—and said, “Will Price is dead.” The heat of his room rushed past her into the dark, and directly he said, “Sit down, Miss Ida,” pointing behind him to his single chair. She was my mother’s sister but she stepped in and sat on his chair, and he sat on the edge of his mattress. Some radio music played on between them, and according to her, he never asked a question but waited. So when she got breath enough, she said the funeral was Tuesday and that he could ride down with her and her son if he wanted to. He thought and said, “Thank you, no’m. I better set here,” and she went home to bed. In the morning after his breakfast, he stepped to her bedroom door and called her out and handed her three dollar bills to go towards flowers and she took them. He didn’t work all that day or come in again for food so she sent his supper by the cook who reported he wasn’t sick, but before she left Tuesday morning for Raleigh, he was stripping ivy off the lightninged oak, too busy to do more than wave goodbye as the car rolled down to the road.

  He just never mentioned my father, that was all—for his own reasons, never spoke my father’s name in anybody’s hearing again. My aunt came back from the funeral and gave him a full description, and he said, “It sounds mighty nice,” and ever after that if she brought up the subject—remembering some joke of my father’s for instance—he would listen and laugh a little if that was expected but at the first break, get up and leave the room. He went on speaking of others who were someway gone—Ruth his wife and Felix his son and once or twice even Katie—but never my father, not even the last time I saw him.

  That was Christmas of 1954 and by then he was flat on his back in a Welfare Home near Warrenton, had been there nearly four months. Six months after my father’s death, his feet and legs went back on him totally. He couldn’t stand for more than ten minutes without going numb from his waist down, and one night he fell, going to the smoke-house from supper—on his soft grass—so he took his bed, and when he didn’t come to breakfast, my aunt went out and hearing of the fall, asked her doctor to come. He came and privately told her nothing was broken—it was poor circulation which would never improve, and didn’t she want him to find Uncle Grant a place with nurses? There was nothing she could do but agree, being old herself, and the doctor found space in the house of a woman named Sarah Cawthorne who tended old Negroes for the Welfare Department. Then my aunt asked Uncle Grant if going there wasn’t the wise thing for him—where he could rest with attention and regular meals and plenty of company and his radio and where she could visit him Saturdays, headed for Warrenton? He thought and said “Yes’m, it is,” and she bought him two suits of pajamas and a flannel robe (he had always slept in long underwear), and they committed him early in September—her and her son—as the end of summer slammed down.

  We didn’t visit Macon in a body that Christmas. My mother wasn’t up to it so we spent the day in Raleigh, but early on the 26th I drove to Macon to deliver our gifts and collect what was waiting for us. I stayed with my aunt most of the day, and her children and grandchildren came in for dinner, but after the eating, things got quiet and people took pains not to speak of the past, and at four o’clock I loaded up and said goodbye. My aunt followed me to the car and kissed me and said, “Aren’t you going to stop by Sarah Cawthorne’s and see Uncle Grant?” I looked at the sky to show it was late, and she said, “It won’t take long and nobody God made will appreciate it more.” So I stopped by and knocked on the holly-wreathed door and Sarah Cawthorne came. I said I would like to see Grant Terry, and she said, “Yes sir. Who is calling?” I smiled at that and said “Reynolds Price.”—“Mr. Will Price’s boy?”—“His oldest boy.” She smiled too and said he was waiting for me and headed for a back bedroom. I paused at the door and she went ahead, flicking on the light, saying, “Mr. Grant, here’s you a surprise.” Then she walked out and I walked in, and the first thing I noticed was his neck. He was sitting up in bed in his clean pajamas. They were buttoned to the top, but they had no collar and his neck was bare. That was the surprise. I had just never seen it before, not down to his shoulders, and the sight of it now—so lean and long but the skin drawn tight—surprised me. He was not surprised. He had known some Price would turn up at Christmas, and seeing it was me, he laughed, “Great God A-mighty, Reynolds, you bigger than me.” (I was twenty-one. I had reached my full growth some time before, but he still didn’t say “Mr. Reynolds.”) Then he pointed to a corner of the room where a two-foot plastic Christmas tree stood on a table, hung with a paper chain but no lights. There were two things under the tree on tissue paper—some bedroom shoes from my aunt and the box of Brown’s Mule my mother had mailed without telling me—and he said, “I thank you for my present,” meaning the tobacco which he had not opened. I noticed when he laughed that his teeth were gone and remembered my aunt commenting on the strangeness of that—how his teeth had vanished since he took his bed, just dissolved with nobody’s help. So the Brown’s Mule was useless, like the shoes. He never stood up any more, he said. But that was the nearest he came to speaking of his health, and I didn’t ask questions except to say did he have a radio? He said “Two” and pointed to his own battery set on the far side of him and across the room to one by an empty bed. I asked whose that was and he said, “Freddy’s. The Nigger that sleeps yonder.” I asked where was Freddy now and he said, “Spending some time with his family, thank God. All that ails him is his water.” But before he explained Freddy’s symptoms, Sarah Cawthorne returned with orange juice for both of us and a slice of fruitcake for me. Then she smoothed the sheets around Uncle Grant and said to him,“Tell Mr. Reynolds your New Year’s resolution.” He said, “What you driving at?” So she told me—“Mr. Grant’s getting baptized for New Year. He’s b
een about to run me crazy to get him baptized—ain’t you, Mr. Grant?” He didn’t answer, didn’t look at her or me but down at his hands on the sheet, and she went on—“Yes sir, he been running me crazy to get him baptized, old as he is, so I have arranged it for New Year’s Day with my preacher. I got a big old trough in the back yard, and we are bringing that in the kitchen and spreading a clean sheet in it and filling it up with nice warm water, and under he’s going—ain’t you, Mr. Grant?” Still looking down, he said he would think it over. She said, “Well, of course you are and we wish Mr. Reynolds could be here to see it, don’t we?” Then she took our glasses and left. When her steps had faded completely, he looked up at me and said, “I ain’t going to be baptized in no hog trough.” I said I was sure it wasn’t a hog trough, but if he didn’t want to be dipped, I saw no reason why he should. He said, “It ain’t me that wants it. It’s that woman. She come in here—last week, I believe—and asked me was I baptized and I said, ‘No, not to my knowledge’ so she said, ‘Don’t you know you can’t get to Heaven and see your folks till you baptized?’” He waited a moment and asked me, “Is that the truth?” And straight off I said, “No. You’ll see everybody you want to see, I’m sure. Give them best wishes from me!” He laughed, “I’ll do that thing,” then was quiet a moment, and not looking at me, said, “There is two or three I hope to meet, but I ain’t studying the rest.” Then he looked and said, “You’re sure about that?—what you just now told me?” and again not waiting I said I was sure so he smiled, and I reckoned I could leave. I stepped to his window and looked out at what was almost night—“Uncle Grant, I better be heading home.” He said “Thank you, sir” (not saying what for), and I stopped at the foot of his bed and asked what I had to ask, what my father would have asked—“Is there any little thing I can do for you?” He said “Not a thing.” I said, “You are not still worried about being baptized, are you?” and he said, “No, you have eased my mind. I can tell that woman my mind is easy, and if she want to worry, that’s her red wagon.” I laid my hand on the ridge of sheet that was his right foot—“If you need anything, tell Aunt Ida, and she’ll either get it or let us know.” He said, “I won’t need nothing.” Then I stepped to the door and told him “Goodbye,” and he said “Thank you” again (still not saying what for) and—grinning—that he would see me in Heaven if not any sooner. I grinned too and walked easy down Sarah Cawthorne’s hall and made it to the door without being heard and got in the car and started the sixty miles to Raleigh in full night alone, wondering part of the way (maybe fifteen minutes), “Have I sent him to Hell with my theology?” but knowing that was just a joke and smiling to myself and driving on, thinking gradually of my own business, not thinking of him at all, not working back to what he had been in previous days, feeling I had no reasons.

  And went on till late last week—nearly seven years—not thinking of him more than, say fifteen seconds at a stretch, not even when he died just before his afternoon nap, the May after I saw him in December. Freddy his roommate told my aunt, “I was making another police dog and he died”—Freddy made dogs to sell, out of socks and knitting wool—and she and her son handled the funeral. We didn’t go, my part of the family (my mother had a job by then and I was deep in college exams and my brother was too young to drive), but my mother sent flowers and they buried him at Mount Zion Church which he never attended, a mile from my aunt’s, not in a Welfare coffin but in one she paid for, in a grave I have never seen.

  Yet because of an accident—stopping to buy postcards—I have spent a week, three thousand miles from home, thinking of nothing but him, working back to what he may have been, to what we knew anyhow, finding I knew a good deal, finding reasons, and thinking how happy he would be if he could know, how long he would laugh, rocking in his lacework shoes, if he heard what reminded me of him (a Hitalian face on a card—Amenhotep IV, pharaoh of Egypt in the eighteenth dynasty who fathered six daughters but no son on Nefertiti his queen and canceled the worship of hawks and bulls and changed his name to Akhnaton, “it pleases Aton,” the single god, the sun that causes growth)—and him the son of Negro slaves, named Grant maybe for the Union general (a name he could not recognize or write), who grew up near Chatham, Virginia, and made his one son Felix on a woman named Ruth and left them both to go south to work and somehow settled in Macon near us, finally with us (claiming he could make things grow, which he could), and tended me nights when I was a baby and our yard when we had one and for his own reasons loved my father and was loved by him and maybe loved me, trusted me enough to put his salvation in my hands that last day I saw him (him about ninety and me twenty-one) and believed what I said—that in Heaven he would meet the few folks he missed—and claimed he would see me there. And this is the point, this is what I know after this last week—that final joke, if it was a joke (him saying he would see me in Heaven), whoever it was on, it was not on him.

  TROUBLED SLEEP

  “Help was the first human thing it said after cracking down on me unseen and unnamed through the pitch-dark woods and the black honeysuckle and the snakes knee-deep surely on all sides, waiting to be waked up. “Help”—not crying or wanting but announcing calmly as if it knew what I needed most in all the world and was bringing it—to me, Edward Rodwell, nine years old, caught in terror in the August night alone with all around me noises I knew like my own name turned nameless new threats with dark for eyes and damp breaths that raked my bare neck and arms, and all because after supper I played Rummy with my cousin Falcon Rodwell on the porch while the light lasted and lost till I couldn’t stand to lose another game and called Falc who was cheating as usual a Cheater, and my father turned round in his chair and said in that case didn’t I reckon I ought to go to bed?—but not a word to Falc about wasn’t he sorry too and he grinning in hiding behind his solemn face as I marched away to sit in my empty room long as I could with only the sounds from the porch of them joking and remembering and, once, my mother’s voice calling out to Falc, “Falc, you look to me like a lighthouse.” I leaned out quietly to see what she meant, and she was right—there was Falc charging back and forth in the evening, happy with himself as if I had never been born, reaching out a hand here and there, closing it on the air and adding one more lightning bug to the jar he held, swarmed already with gentle syncopated light. So I slipped out the back and walked the half-mile to this Dark Ring of mine and Falc’s in the woods (for burying things and ceremonies) and sat down, thinking of nothing but ways to pay them back and win them back till full night came and caught me in dark close as gloves, and I could only wait, shivering in the heat for whatever would come to take me home where I was remembered no more or for the Devil to leap any minute into the Ring, dancing, or the Old Woman All Skin and Bones to lay a pale dry hand rattling on my shoulder and claim me for her own.

  But the one word came again—“Help”—held out like a hard pear I could take or leave and, coming closer, sounds like “Who” and “Whoop,” and I knew who it was and not seeing how or why, I thought things would get better from now on and that I could let loose the tears locked for fear in my eyes. They streamed down again hot as any acid, and I caught at them with my tongue and swallowed bitterly at the knot rising hard up through my chest and throat, laying all my misery at the back of my eyes because this was Falcon Rodwell, my cousin (though I had cause to wonder why) and my age, who had finally and under his own steam gone up to the bed we shared all summer and seeing I wasn’t there, had known where I was and had broken through to me for reasons of his own that he might never tell, asking nobody’s permission and coming in wide lost circles and seeing (and keeping to himself as his cross to bear) who knew how many things that never got into any book, the things he always saw the minute the sun went down and the reasons he never went out after dark without speaking The Shields nonstop—“Who” and “Help” and whatever else made him breathe out because with his warm breath, he claimed, came enough germs to hold off anything the night could offer—but coming and towards me
, convinced of arriving in time to do what he had to do and not worried once at being the only thing on earth to need half an hour to cover the path between our house and this Ring, considering he and I and Walter Parker (a Negro our age that we blindfolded sometimes and took with us) had worn a path to the Ring so deep you could have found your way there in total eclipse if you had made us tell you there was such a place, and you couldn’t have done that.

  So he stumbled into the Ring, not by the one right ceremonial way but tearing through the round wall of bushes, breaking every rule we had made, stepping on the graves of two frogs who died from eating B.B. shot we gave them, and looking like the night because the moon wasn’t up, black against black trees with only the pieces of light across his forehead that were the tails of lightning bugs stuck there still warm and pulsing. He stopped ten feet from where I stood and waited for his envelope of germs to clear, resting up for whatever he thought came next.