Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

The man faced her, his smile a ruin. He managed to lift the cup of milk though and drink a short swallow.

  The waitress tapped Sam’s shoulder lightly. “Sit with him some. He never sees people; make him drink his milk.” As she left, she asked Sam if he was still hungry.

  He shook his head No; but when she was gone, he saw she’d left an idle fork and spoon on the table, bound in a napkin. He took out the clean spoon, stirred the milk, drank a spoonful himself; then slowly over the next ten minutes, he fed Richard Boileau the whole cup.

  BESS WATERS

  1863

  WHILE SHE chops cotton in the blistering field, her mother has hid Bess Waters from the sun in a thicket of low trees and covered her body with a clean sugar-sack. The child is awake now and pulls the sack away from her face to watch the sky. With her mother’s voice in the field beyond her, Bess thinks the whole broad hoop of her vision is all her own body, all hers to use—the white sky, leaves, a laughing low voice beside her mother’s in the hot safe distance, and her own brown arms and fists above her. That knowledge will serve her all her life, though she can’t yet see she’s a rickety baby that barely made it through the past mean winter and will be the property of Mr. Cobb Coleman for two more years, the last child born to his slave Nancy before the Freedom.

  Bess likewise can’t know she almost smiles as her hand shuts lightly on a carpenter bee that hovers above her, consulting the odors of milk and syrup. The bee accepts the dark cupped palm and stills his hum. Bess brings him down and sets him loose to roam her tongue. He waits a moment in the damp sweetness, tests his wings and bumbles away. Till the time her mother fetches her home, well on past dusk, Bess Waters will seldom fail to smile when she’s not dozing—the one good gift she has from her father, a long-gone runaway whose name she’ll hear five years from now and will then forget.

  1889

  THE EARLY fall days shorten fast, so Bess rises darker each morning to leave in time for the four-mile walk to where she works seven days a week in Macon by the railroad track. Mr. Jack Rodwell’s new house is finished; and he and Miss Liz will be in the separate cook-house when Bess walks in at seven. Mr. Jack is shaving at a round mirror, and Miss Liz has already rolled out biscuit dough. When Bess says “Morning,” Miss Liz says “Quick, go shake the boys. They’re already late and they’ll obey you.”

  As Bess goes back through the morning toward the sleeping porch, she never thinks of the curious fact that, even at twenty-six, her body is still untouched by any grown man—black, white or brown. She’s fought three strong men to earn that distinction (she cut one bad), so these two Rodwell boys she wakes are the only children she’s been near since her only sister died at eight of whooping cough in a howling snow. As she scrubs the slats of the boys’ thin sides with cold well-water, she says aloud “Thinking bout getting me some new young un. You boys know one I can steal or borrow?”

  They both yell “Me”; then together “Us, Bess.” Warm and laughing as their mother is, they both resent their older sisters’ airs and orders. And here last week in the bed they share, they made a pact to run away the day after Christmas and live back of Bess in a shed by the river. They’re both under ten; they can barely carve their meat at the table, much less in the woods.

  But they’ve already told Bess their plan, and she’s all but promised to bring them whatever scraps she can from their father’s pantry. She understands she’s a piece in a game they’ll never play; but more than once she’s half-believed these two white boys could somehow wedge down into her life the way she lives it and stay nearby her one-room house, for all their sakes.

  1916

  MISS LIZ is on her hot deathbed, a late August day. Her kidneys have failed and her body’s poisoned; nothing to do but try to cool her and ease the end. The boys, who are men now, have brought in three zinc tubs of ice to set round the bed. But through the hours, so many visitors have come in to kiss her or beg her pardon that the ice is useless; and nothing helps Miss Liz in her pain but Bess Waters upright by the pillows and steadily waving a palmleaf fan, muttering hope every minute or so.

  Toward sunset the room nearly empties, and Miss Liz motions for Bess to lean down. At the delicate ear, an old-gold color that Miss Liz never noticed till now, she says to Bess “Say you forgive me.”

  Bess hears it’s an order, however feeble; and she laughs a high note. “Forgive you what?”

  “My whole life, everywhere I’ve been.”

  “You been no further than me, Miss Lizzie.” Of all the white women Bess has known, Miss Liz has had the best disposition—she’d get right down and work beside you, tired as she was with her eight children—but still Bess can’t quite find the word pardon.

  So Miss Liz darkens around the eyes. “Help me, woman. I got to leave.”

  Bess bends till her lips touch the purplish forehead. “You do, Miss Liz; you leaving fast but I ain’t your help. Ain’t mine to give.” Bess feels no taste of hate in the moment; she’s never listed the wrongs of life to herself or others, not all in a row. She only sees the full truth, stood up there a little beyond her and Miss Liz both, like a man that just now strode through the door and waits tall and big-eyed, made out of flames. She points straight at him and tells Miss Liz “You ask the man to pardon you.” It comes out reckless and bristles her hair.

  But Miss Liz also sees the man; his eyes shine at her like a cat in moonlight. She says “Oh please” and ends that instant, partly grinning as her last breath fades.

  1927

  BESS’S ONE child, a skinny grown daughter, comes up to her at the well this evening, a mild mid-April. “Am I just dreaming you told me once that Derb was my father?”

  “Em, you dreaming, day and night. I don’t need to tell you nothing.”

  “But is he?”

  “Why you need to know this late?” (Em was born when Bess was past forty).

  Em looks at the blank air as if at a mirror; she’s fine to see and knows it keenly. “Derb barking up my tree again.”

  Bess has hauled up a bucket of water. Slowly she bends and wastes it on purpose on the ground between them. “Derb old enough to be your grandpa.” She feeds the bucket back down the well. “Is that my answer?”

  Bess nods. “—For this evening.”

  “Maybe you don’t know. “

  Bess brings the new full bucket up and sets it beside her in young spring weeds. Then she turns on Em a face as fierce as a snake on coals. “I know every inch of your skin, mean child. I made it myself; no name on it nowhere but mine.”

  Em nods but has the gall to say “You won’t be beating my head in the night then if Derb come round?”

  Bess smiles. “Oh no’m. Tell him ‘Come on, Derb.’”

  “Can he eat here tomorrow night if I cook it all?” Bess says “He can eat these pine walls down. Don’t let me stop you. Just have him gone when I get home—it’ll be past dark; they having a feast.” She points through the woods toward where she works, still four miles away, for the Drakes now—the Rodwells’ second daughter Ida, her husband Marvin and two strong boys. Ida is feasting her baby sister Lizbeth, who married a few months back and is home with her husband Buckeye, a drunk out of work but pitiful and funny.

  It’s Buckeye that takes Bess home from the feast at ten the next night. She’s cooked and served a table of eight, washed every dish and scoured the kitchen ready for morning. Every separate bone in her long body hurts her; and when the car stops in sight of her house, old as she is, she prays a barely audible sentence, “Let this white man be tired as me” (Mr. Buckeye, she means).

  He is. In a minute he’s slipped her a quarter—serious money this terrible year, for the extra work he and Lizbeth cause her—and he’s backing out the narrow track.

  In the house right off, Bess knows she’s very far from alone. Somebody’s skin and bones press at her through stifling dark. She feels for a long match and lights the lamp. Before it reaches the edge of the room, Bess is forced down as if by hands; she sits at her table—this
raw new company is crushing her mind. When her eyes are open to the dark, she can see the shape of two bodies, still but breathing, on Em’s low cot. Bound to be Em and Derb Sweetwater; no other man will touch poor Em. But didn’t Em swear she’d have Derb out of here? Now he’s not just here and asleep, but his liquor jar stands on Bess’s table in reach of her hand and less than half-full.

  Her hand goes out and uncorks the bottle; in all her years she’s yet to drink a drop of liquor. But her head falls back, and she drinks a halfinch of that pure fire. It goes down her so slow she feels its path to the pit of belly. Before it can reach her mind though she rises—her mind has got to be clear for this minute and maybe the rest of the life it leaves her, if any at all. On the stove Em has left one dirty skillet and one iron cooking-fork at least a foot long.

  When Bess has stood by the cot a good while, she bends and touches a body through the sheet—no heads are showing, just shoulders and legs. Nothing moves. Bess says Em’s full name—“Emily Waters”—in a normal voice. Nothing again. But two mouths are breathing; Bess hears the sigh. They’re asleep, dead-drunk. Her hand feels out the line of a back. Broad and strong, it has to be Derb’s. She sees a man’s pants folded neat on the floor. Derb’s good brown pants.

  So Bess bends again and, calm-eyed as any mother at a cradle, she works the two strong tines of the iron fork through his left shoulder, from backward past his shoulder blade into gristle, then soft meat, then the rind of his heart. Slowly her hand comes off the fork handle; she takes a step back. Derb barely moves and never wakes, but his foul breath moans on a while till it quits in midair—a shot-down bird.

  The rest of the night, Bess sits at her table. The lamp burns out before daylight; but she stays up, too tired to think. And when day breaks with Em still asleep, Bess barely looks to the cot but picks up a silver spoon (a spoon Old Mistress gave her mother) and tries to see her own face deep in the back of its shine. She’s there unchanged but then at sunrise she looks again and sees, not herself but her mother’s face. A face dead—Lord—since Bess was a girl. It’s smiling though.

  1938

  EM’S ONLY child lives with just Bess now (Em struck out for Maryland, three years back, and has sent no more than a few postcards that Bess can’t read but keeps by the stove). The boy’s lean and tall, named June, aged eight; and Bess always says he’s lucky to be here. Alive, she means. She’d stood over Em for most of a hot day’s labor on the cot and finally hauled June out of her narrows by main force. “You come here spitting coal,” Bess tells him; and June sees it literally—dry chunks of coal rolling out of his throat—when what Bess means is, before she could wash him clean of his mother, he chucked out a mouthful of coal-black tar that must have been old clotted blood.

  Today in school June’s drawn a picture of himself as a baby, sprawled in midair with nobody near him; and all around his scrawny body, he’s set chunks of coal the size of his head. He brings the picture home for Bess and leaves it on the table near the lamp in case it’s dark when she gets back and he’s out hunting with his slingshot (he’s caught a few birds but never a rabbit or squirrel, his main targets).

  And when he walks in well after dark with one muskrat he killed at the pond, Bess is already there at the table, trying to see by low lamplight. As he stands in the door, she turns to him slowly. “June, fling that nasty rat in the woods.” Her long hand makes a fling at the air.

  “People say muskrat good eating, Mama.”

  “I ain’t your Mama, and peoples died all over the Earth when I was a girl from eating such filth.”

  So June backtracks, hides the muskrat twenty yards from the house in a briar bush—he’ll skin it at least and sell the hide if a fox doesn’t drag it off in the night. By the time he’s in the house again, he’s forgot he’s mad; and when he goes to stand back of Bess and feel her heat across a gap the width of his hand, he sees her dry face pressed to his school drawing, studying close.

  At last her finger picks at the coal chunks round his picture. “They won’t that big, you won’t that skinny, but you was sure-God pretty to see. This baby here is ugly, child.” Again her finger scratches the paper, the baby’s face. She gives a dry laugh.

  June’s hand reaches toward her neck and waits in the air. He can smell her old thick blood through her skin. But he stops short of touch; they seldom touch unless she’s scrubbing him or searching his hair.

  Then, while she never turns back or looks, Bess says “Swear, June. Don’t never leave me.”

  He thinks I’ll leave, though it scares him to think it. He knows he loves her, strong as a blade; in his mind the feeling tastes long-lasting, a feeling he’ll never say in words but will hold close for years. When he leans to turn the lamp wick higher, he sees that Bess is sound asleep, bolt upright in her ladder-back chair. She looks cold-dead. June knows death well enough to clamp his teeth and pray this old woman outlasts him.

  1949

  JUNE HAS killed a girl, a girl Bess warned him about years back when the girl’s tan titties were flat as your hand but both her eyes were snagging on June already, asking. Killed her outdoors by the rim of the pond with a knife he bought from a store in Weldon. And dragged her wren-sized body deep down in the willows and reeds; then woke up Bess past five in the morning, “Mama, come on out here and help me.”

  Bess is easy to wake as a cat, but her joints seize up anytime she’s still. (Eighty-six years old, she’s long since lost real track of time. If white people ask, she honestly says she’s “creeping on eighty.” Black people are way too polite to ask.) Flat of her back she looks round the room. The lamp is lit so she lies flat and waits to see who’s calling for help and from what world. Bess deals with numerous worlds here lately; what chance is there that this one is Heaven? Her eyes clear finally and show her June’s face, all ashy and skewed in the mouth and eyes. “Oh Jesus. What you showing me?”

  June says the flat truth—Mincie is dead and back in the bushes.

  By the time Bess dresses and walks behind him all the awful way he leads her, the girl is cold but still smiling. Bess tries to shut the eyes but they stick.

  The lids are frozen and the great brown pupils fix on June—life itself couldn’t give her enough but she’s happy now.

  Bess takes June’s hand and makes him touch his handiwork. “She eating you up, son. I told you she would.” But once Bess works the eyelids down on the curly lashes, she knows the next move. She cooked for the Drakes till her eyes failed; the Drakes tend her still. Now she must send June to Mr. Drake, ask him please to call for the sheriff and lead him out here with his men and the funeral hearse.

  When she says the words, June never looks up from Mincie’s face—he can barely recall her, moving against him—but his head nods Yes.

  If Bess can think of how to put it, she’ll beg him now to find his knife and finish her too—they can’t electrocute him but once, whatever he does. And she waits a long minute. When no more words volunteer on her tongue, she turns and heads on up toward the house. Everything she cared five cents about in the world is gone—worse than gone. Somebody got to cook some breakfast though and somebody eat it.

  1951

  IT’S A sweltering morning in mid-July, and Bess has walked every step of the way to Miss Ida’s kitchen with a bucket of blackberries picked at sunrise. While Bess takes a chair by the sink, to breathe and clear her eyes, Miss Ida starts in washing berries.

  “Bess, these are beautiful—where’d you pick them?”

  “Just be glad you know me and eat em.”

  “—Well over a quart.” Miss Ida’s voice is light with the pleasure.

  Bess gave up smiling twenty years back but she nods. “More to come.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  Bess looks out the window to the shady yard. What seems like a tall bear stands by the oak tree. Her mother had a picture of a bear nailed up on the wall beside her bed (something Old Mistress had thrown out as ugly); and through her mother’s strangling last weeks, Bes
s had fixed on the bear to watch as something that anyhow wasn’t in pain.

  “What you looking at?” Miss Ida watches you like a hawk, though she treats you fair. She got the Public Assistance for Bess that’s her only money; and Mr. Drake drives Bess to town every month or so if she needs salve, her one concession to the rheumatism that’s clawed her hands.

  Bess blinks, the bear is standing there, she knows not to say so—he can’t be real. “Nothing. Cool shade.”

  They stay on quiet for a soothing while. Miss Ida covers the berries with a white cloth and sets them in the icebox. When she rises, not looking to Bess, she says “There hasn’t been any mail at all.” Bess’s rare mail comes to the Drakes; they read it to her.

  Bess takes a long time to say “No ma’m. I knew you’d bring it to the house if it come.”

  “I certainly would.”

  By now Bess feels her full strength back—strong as it gets. She looks again at the shady yard. “It was this morning, won’t it?”

  Almost too low, Miss Ida says “You know it was.”

  “Mr. Drake at the prison? I axed him to watch it. “

  Miss Ida stands, both hands at her sides like somebody’s tied her. “That was too much, Bess—driving down there to Raleigh and watching that sadness. You didn’t mean that. He sent the undertaker.”

  Still talking to the yard, the wide oak tree, Bess says “You know where my mama’s buried?”

  “On the Coleman place somewhere by the river, but that’s just snakes and brambles now. You don’t want June buried way up there. I spoke to your preacher; there’s plenty room for June at Mount Zion. And I ordered the stone just like you told me.”

  Bess faces around, stunned past all reach. “June - Thorne - Fitzpatrick.” She draws what feels like the shape of the name on the sweet damp air.

  Miss Ida frowns. “You told me Waters was June’s last name.”

  Bess eventually nods. “Ne mind, nobody but me try to read it.”

  1963

  BESS HAS lain flat of her back all day on her own bed dozing, then coming to without getting up, talking in peaceful snatches to her mother, even thanking the dog for his high bark at what sounds like a car outside—“Keep at it, old gentleman. I’ll feed you directly.” She thinks she’s said it, though it stays in her mind. She’ll feed him extra when she gets up—all that buttermilk she can’t drink, that Miss Ida brought her. She slides back to sleep.