Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  Right, then. I’d try to rise in silence, find my shoes and hope the hill still waited below me, not to mention the car. First though my mind recalled the hours since Calvary and the tomb at least—the guiding monks, the line of offended faces and names, my life commencing, the black and radiant dream I’d undergone with Sam and was held in now. Or was I dreaming; was this my life at last, here now, and all my crowded past was the dream? I knew only one word, honest thanks, though still I expected my death was near. Then I raised to my elbow, shook the blanket off my arms and sat upright with eyes I knew were truly rested.

  To my left in the door to the back of the house, a new shape was standing; it trembled slightly on warmer air. I waited and saw it was Sam’s mother, loaded with something—not food again. No, her arms were up at her chest and bearing another dark wool blanket, more cover for me. Then behind her, a whole head taller, was maybe Sam—a man at least, white-faced and grave.

  I said “I must have fallen asleep.”

  They made no move, just the faint trembling like a thrill in the air.

  I said “The soldiers left us alone.”

  Sam’s mother turned back and smiled up at him.

  He gave her no answer, her or me, though maybe he shook his head a little—maybe a no.

  I said “You’re safe though? Nobody’s hurt you?”

  “Sir, yes, I have been hurt very bad but not by you or those young soldiers.” He pointed as though they were at the door.

  “Sam, what can I do?”

  “You have done it now. You trusted me.”

  I said I did and looked to see any blood or bruise on him, but his head was dim, and his body was hid. I said “I’m sorry, Sam—thank you both.” My trained American-tourist hand went to my pocket; I’d pay at least for what I ate and the life they’d spared me. But my mind refused the tidy command. I must try to leave as clean as I came. I braced my arms to stand and slowly got to my feet—I seemed intact. When I turned to fold the blanket though, the buried spasm in my thigh repeated itself, this time like a savage tear at the bone. It threw me back, crouching in place; and I looked to Sam. “Sorry, I’m stiff.”

  “Not sorry, no. You were welcome forever.”

  I noticed the were and wondered if I’d spoiled his gift (whatever it was, I thought I’d received it—I was more than half wrong).

  But then his mother came on toward me. Even upright her head was only a foot above me. She lowered her arms, shifted the blanket; and there was a child with wide dark eyes and strong black hair. How old—a month, two weeks, newborn, a boy?

  It gnawed its fist and watched me with Sam’s fearless gaze as if it already understood that children come as guardians for their older kin and are on duty always.

  Sam had gone to the lantern, raised the flame and stood beside it, watching me.

  Still unsure, I took the risk. “A fine new boy.”

  Sam nodded and moved to form a huddle with me, his mother, the watchful child.

  Again I said “A son.”

  The mother’s eyes were on me, beaming. However she smiled I had to be right—she was not the child’s mother; this child was surely not born tonight; Sam was truly her son.

  I wondered if his wife was still weak or, if young and pretty, was she hid from the sudden curious stranger? I said to Sam “Your wife is well?”

  He took a long wait. “Sir, no. My wife is gone. Her name was Ayisha. She was twenty years old. I loved her since I was five years old. One month ago she died in here.” He scrubbed at his chest with a slow flat palm as if she’d ended deep inside him.

  My mind knew not to say the word sorry; sorry would cover nothing now. The child’s strong head and learning eyes precluded sorrow and every other deep care but the now, his needy present. My hand went out and touched his firm warm cheek, then his forehead. I asked his name.

  The mother finally spoke—was it “Hassan”?

  The boy’s eyes blinked; then came back to me, rapt again. I thought “His life commences now.” How?—from my touch, this dim late moment in a feast not his, a foreign creed? “No,” I told myself, “tired fool, go find your rented bed and sleep.” When I stood I bent to kiss the child’s fast-pulsing head, the fontanel. It was there I’d loved my own sons most in infancy, the cusp of death, warmer than me.

  Sam faced me now with open arms; we clasped like long-lost biblical brothers, Jacob and Esau, friends at last.

  I tried to say thanks; his dry hand stopped me.

  He said “I take you now to your car. We have kept it safe.”

  We—who was we? “Where you and I left it?”

  He nodded once and moved to the door.

  “Sam, no, I can find my way. It’s near sunrise, you’ve got to be frozen, you really must sleep.” I didn’t think that—shortly, if I gauged the time—he was due back at his limping job (or would he limp?).

  He said “Bad dogs. I will take you past them.”

  I’d heard distant barks in the night, nothing close. Still I turned again to his mother to thank her.

  She’d already taken my place on the mat as if to claim my body heat before it failed. And of course she watched the child, not me.

  I could barely see the line of his profile, fixed on her, and his reaching hand that dug at her breast. He already knew who he needed and why, which was more than I’d known most years of my life.

  Suddenly then Sam led the way out, limping again but stronger than back at the cafe all those eons past. One shorthaired black dog stood on a rock ten yards to our left but he looked harmless. Below us was one low tree, bare and gnarled—a dead olive maybe.

  Sam silently went that far and stopped, then offered his hand.

  It seemed important to give him at least a small return on a night this strange and somehow useful. Surely he’d take a gift for the child; I had one fifty-dollar bill.

  Before I could reach in for it though, Sam shook his head and said

  “Bridge Boatner, you are welcome forever.”

  How did he know my full name?—I’d never told him, Jabril hadn’t known, my passport still was deep in my pocket. Leave it, Bridge. Don’t ask. Leave now. So I faced him then in the desert shine of another day, knowing that we were David and Jonathan in my child’s Bible or Jacob again and his nocturnal wrestler—an apt farewell to one of the crucial nights of my life. I said “You’re welcome in my mind, Sam, forevermore. You, your boy and any of yours.” There in place that moment, I meant it.

  He gave his gravest nod and bow, not quite an acceptance. He’d likely been struck too hard by death to trust anything not here in his reach and warm to the hand. He looked to the road. “Here, sir, see.”

  I followed his pointing arm—there, whiter maybe (was it ice on the roof?) but apparently whole, was my actual car with doors and wheels. I felt outlandish gratitude.

  When I looked to Sam though, he’d turned and started uphill home, no backward look at me or his desperate garden down the slope or the dawn in progress beyond this purple line of hills, the only brake between our bodies and the Dead Sea shore, Earth’s nadir, the pit. Still he’d left his strong welcome in place.

  Right. And he’d stay welcome with me. We’d managed to play our odd joint roles in one long curious Christmas Eve—played them out in fact, dead-true to ourselves and the world around us, the sky and light and other men’s plans. For Sam the night would almost surely shrink to an early memory, an American visitor one winter evening near his first wife’s death when his first son was fearless and eagle-eyed. For me it would literally be a commencement—the end of my first life, as I’ll explain, and the start of a new. I told myself what felt like a law—I’d never see Sam’s face again, never know his family name or his son’s. Our business was done.

  I turned the car, retracing our tracks; and the visible land lay as I’d guessed it—straight narrow pavement, an unmarked right, then on to the main road with its two choices: Hebron to left, Jerusalem right. I took the right, due north, and sped. The day leaked steadi
ly in beside me. As I bypassed Bethlehem again—the unlit houses, two-story flats, littered and crumbling—my headlights struck a single shape on the verge of the road in a pocket of mist, a short man wearing a long full cloak. Another monk bound back from mass.

  Only when I flanked him close could I see he wore a wine-red ground-length velvet coat with sheep’s-wool trim on collar and hat and a straight white beard that reached to his waist—an Arab Santa Claus loose on the road; a mislaid player from a Dickens Christmas, hunting snow. In his fist a bell hung slack to greet the coming day or end his openhanded rounds.

  I honked and waved.

  He wielded the bell, then gave the final Asian bow I’ve yet to see. It was solemn as Sam’s, and it looked deeply meant.

  I stayed in Israel ten more days, avoiding every place I’d touched that first strong night, all avoidable faces—I’d leave them at that high dark pitch. I managed to see the Bethlehem church at five on Christmas afternoon. It was no disappointment; for all its gold and garish trim, the birth cave gives off that same primal force as caves where mankind sheltered ages past and left the shadows of their small hands and the beasts they worshiped, hunted and ate. Around the silver star in the floor that marks the birth-site (a star whose theft caused the Crimean war), I smelled the high iron odor of blood as if a girl had labored here not long ago; and I touched my brow to the points of the star as an Arab child had done just before me.

  But afterward to balance my stay, I concentrated on the cooler Jewish and Muslim sites like the new dig south of Temple Mount where young King David’s tiny city (1,000 B.C.) was being slowly peeled to light—twenty acres of bleached limestone with at least one obvious toilet-seat observing its imminent three thousandth birthday. In the Muslim dome on Temple Mount, I brushed the rock on which old Abraham half slew Isaac, where the Temple altar would later stand and from which Mohammed’s horse soared to God.

  Nearby were the walls of houses lit by Roman legions to fire the first Diaspora, then Solomon’s cavernous underground quarry from which the Temple stones were hauled a few yards past that breach in the wall where the First Crusade would yet break through in howls for Muslim blood and lives. I took in all the right museums and the dome that covers the Dead Sea scrolls. But since in Poland twenty years past, I’d seen the remains of the camp at Auschwitz, I spared myself the modern shrine in New Jerusalem to six million dead at German hands, with our consent. The dead couldn’t need a brief call from me; and after fifty years with myself, I felt I had very little to learn about the monstrous scope of my kind.

  I did pass Shoeshine George a few times; his ulcer was drier but still looked killing. He never happened to look my way—or had long since done his part by me and let me pass—and that first free shine lasted well despite cold rain, so we had no occasion to speak. I even passed Sam’s cafe close enough to see guests chewing hummus and bread; but Sam never showed at the window or door nor Jabril kicking his ball again in doomed Jesus’ path.

  Right at the end I drove east down the world’s deepest rift through Jericho and its palm oasis, the oldest city, up past Gilgal where Samuel hacked Agag in pieces at Yahweh’s ark; then on up the winding Jordan valley to Galilee, hearteasing and green—Bethsaida, Capernaum, Magdala, Nain, the beautiful harp-shaped lake herself (no “Sea” at all) with fishermen trawling in boats like Peter’s family sloop, maybe eight yards long with a low mast and a wide red sail.

  I made myself eat “Peter’s Perch” at a lakeside restaurant empty of all but me and the waiter—another eager Arab boy with tragic eyes from over the ridge in Nazareth through the Horns of Hattin. On my used placemat he wrote me a fervent recommendation to his father back home (and the father fed me generously a half block down from where the girl Mary took an angel’s offered deal, a child to be named Emanuel). The perch, by the way, were smoky but mild like none I’d tasted before or since—small and flat as baby flounder, clearly primed to volunteer for multiplication at their next chance (on Judgment Day?). In all the risks I took on food, I never got a tasteless meal nor any clap of “Samson’s Revenge,” the local brand of tourist trots; and all the cooks and waiters I met—Arab or Jew—were proudly dedicated men who understood their job was equal in use and dignity with priesthood, soldiery or medicine, not to mention art.

  By the final night I knew my trip was more than over. I was well past ready to be in the home I’d made from my work. Right till then in the car alone, I could still mist-over at the thought of my sons and all the generous souls I’d lost, the thought of Sam’s dead wife and his courage, his workhorse mother beaming her joy, the dark-eyed child already on guard. But for the first time in twenty-some years, I smelled the salt air of new work forming well beyond me, barely waiting—new from the naked white spine out and loyal anyhow to what I’d seen in this deep navel-core of the earth.

  As I drove through pre-dawn dark to my flight, I crossed the plain of Aijalon where bully Samson romped his pranks on the Philistines till they sheared him bald and gouged his eyes. Dark as it was that long before day, my new eyes managed to see right into the fields beside me—thorny shrubs, with gray leaves small as a fingernail, that could outlast fire.

  At the airport a gray-eyed security woman asked if I’d paid the West Bank a visit. When I confessed, she asked the names of persons I’d met. I gave her names from my childhood book of Arabian Nights. She accepted them, straightfaced, and asked if I’d been “given things” by any such person, a gift to take home or a package to mail. At the last moment Sam had handed me an olivewood carving of an old-time shepherd and a slip of paper with his boyhood friend’s address in Portland—would I send it on? It was ten inches long and plainly wood, but what if it held a clever bomb to detonate at a given height? It was buried deep in my suitcase; so on the spot I chose to trust him. I told the woman I’d been given nothing but food and shelter for one cold night, which I chose to believe; she finally smiled and the plane did not disintegrate.

  Home, I worked and, sure, it was new. Like a learning child with spellbound hands, I ran through nine large pictures fast—dreams of the trip, dreams of that dream, likely the strong work of my life yet. As I started the tenth, my leg began to pain me hard in that same spot I’d felt in the tomb and later at Sam’s. Before the early pictures dried, I was partly lame and in some torment, denying my fears—cancer, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, curling arthritis: the reasonable nightmares of men my age who’ve spent a lifetime working in colors ground with lead, titanium and zinc.

  It was none of those. I forced myself; and three days after I finished the tenth and final canvas, a doctor loped to where I sat marooned in strangers in a waiting room. He was far too young to know his powers; and his first line was “It’s devastating,” that frank and innocent, maybe that vicious (I’ve learned too much about medical sadists, or moral idiots licensed to cut, to err on the side of giving them leeway).

  What I’ve got—what commenced that night in the tomb—is an astronomically unlikely mystery that has my flesh in unforeseeable hot revolts against itself, then long numb truces—bone and muscle slowly killed by their own blood, then left to cool before a new onslaught. The doctors said I might not have a year and added that, since I “worked in the arts,” I might enjoy knowing that Laurence Olivier, the great actor, shared my “syndrome.”

  I’ve had eight full years, working most days. I think I know why—the work itself, the good it brings me, my live hope of a fair return to that band of messengers, from a thin-lipped monk and young Jabril to Sam’s new orphan boy Hassan and a bleary Arab Santa at dawn on the Bethlehem bypass. And while I live in a wheelchair mainly with paid good help, my hands and eyes work on above the cooling ruins and make each day an art to match, in one respect, all art I know this side of Athens, Florence, Rome (Jerusalem proves how little art counts, being all but bare of intentional art). I match it, I mean—I’m not insane—in the driving will to show this world its visible likeness, front and back, crown to toe from where I’ve stood, in the clean new mi
rrors of honest pictures that mean to be guide lights usably placed in the frequent, sometimes permanent, dark. It’s a shameless dare for one gimp painter to try so much, but it runs my life; and on rare days I’ve almost told myself I’m there—my destination, however hopeless. So pounded nearer the ground each year, I likewise match every face I’ve known in mainly pure ungrudging thanks—every gram of my fuel on fire, burning high.

  REYNOLDS PRICE

  Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Reared and educated in the public schools of his native state, he earned an A.B. summa cum laude from Duke University. In 1955 he traveled as a Rhodes Scholar to Merton College, Oxford University, to study English literature. After three years, and the B. Litt. degree, he returned to Duke where he continues to teach as James B. Duke Professor of English.

  In 1962 his novel A Long and Happy Life appeared. It received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel and has never been out of print. Since, he has published other novels—Blue Calhoun (1992) was the ninth—and in 1986 his Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, translations from the Bible, a memoir Clear Pictures; and he has written for the screen, for television and the texts for songs. His television play Private Contentment was commissioned by American Playhouse and appeared in its premiere season. His trilogy of plays New Music premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1989; and its three plays have been produced throughout the country as has a newer play Full Moon, his seventh.