Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Read online

  BOOKS BY

  REYNOLDS PRICE

  THE COLLECTED STORIES 1993

  FULL MOON 1993

  BLUE CALHOUN 1992

  THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE 1991

  NEW MUSIC 1990

  THE USE OF FIRE 1990

  THE TONGUES OF ANGELS 1990

  CLEAR PICTURES 1989

  GOOD HEARTS 1988

  A COMMON ROOM 1987

  THE LAWS OF ICE 1986

  KATE VAIDEN 1986

  PRIVATE CONTENTMENT 1984

  MUSTIAN 1983

  VITAL PROVISIONS 1982

  THE SOURCE OF LIGHT 1981

  A PALPABLE GOD 1978

  EARLY DARK 1977

  THE SURFACE OF EARTH 1975

  THINGS THEMSELVES 1972

  PERMANENT ERRORS 1970

  LOVE AND WORK 1968

  A GENEROUS MAN 1966

  THE NAMES AND FACES OF HEROES 1963

  A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE 1962

  THE COLLECTED STORIES

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Some of these stories appeared in American Short Fiction, The Archive, Encounter, Esquire, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project, Playboy, Prairie Schooner, The Red Clay Reader, Shenandoah, Southern Exposure, The Southern Review, Story, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vogue, and Winter’s Tales. Some appeared in limited editions published by Albondocani Press and by North Carolina Wesleyan College Press.

  Copyright © 1993, 1992, 1991, 1990, 1989, 1987, 1986, 1982, 1970, 1969, 1968, 1967, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1962, 1961, 1959, 1958, 1954 by Reynolds Price

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Atheneum Macmillan Publishing Company 866 Third Avenue New York, NY 10022

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  Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc. 1200 Eglinton Avenue East Suite 200 Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1

  Macmillan Publishing Company is part of the Maxwell Communication Group of Companies.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Price, Reynolds, 1933-

  [Short stories]

  The collected stories / by Reynolds Price.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-689-12147-4

  eISBN: 978-1-439-10605-1

  I. Title.

  PS3566.R54A6 1993 92-36807

  813′.54—dc20

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  FOR GRANT TERRY AND MARY LEE PARKER AND MARY GREEN

  CONTENTS

  TO THE READER

  FULL DAY

  THE WARRIOR PRINCESS OZIMBA

  THE ENORMOUS DOOR

  A TOLD SECRET

  WATCHING HER DIE

  SERIOUS NEED

  THE COMPANY OF THE DEAD

  GOOD AND BAD DREAMS

  A Sign of Blood

  Rapid Eye Movements

  Twice

  Washed Feet

  Sleeping and Waking

  Morning Places

  MICHAEL EGERTON

  THE LAST NEWS

  THE ANNIVERSARY

  INVITATION

  LATE WARNINGS

  My Parents, Winter 1926

  The Knowledge of My Mother’s Coming Death

  Life for Life

  Design for a Tomb

  ENDLESS MOUNTAINS

  LONG NIGHT

  A NEW STRETCH OF WOODS

  THE LAST OF A LONG CORRESPONDENCE

  DEEDS OF LIGHT

  WALKING LESSONS

  HIS FINAL MOTHER

  THIS WAIT

  FOOL’S EDUCATION

  The Happiness of Others

  A Dog’s Death

  Scars

  Waiting at Dachau

  THE GOLDEN CHILD

  TRUTH AND LIES

  BREATH

  TOWARD HOME

  THE NAMES AND FACES OF HEROES

  NINE HOURS ALONE

  NIGHT AND SILENCE

  SUMMER GAMES

  A CHAIN OF LOVE

  TWO USEFUL VISITS

  A FINAL ACCOUNT

  UNCLE GRANT

  TROUBLED SLEEP

  GOOD NIGHT

  AN EVENING MEAL

  BESS WATERS

  AN EARLY CHRISTMAS

  TO THE READER

  EXCEPT FOR three related stories published in 1991 in The Foreseeable Future and one college story never published, the fifty stories gathered here are what I’ve written in adult life by way of fiction shorter than the novel. Like many children raised among books and compelled to write, I began with the story in adolescence—“The Ring,” a supernatural tale finished and illustrated with a snaky death’s-head in 1948. The oldest story here though is “Michael Egerton” from 1954; the newest is “An Evening Meal” from 1992. Half of the fifty appeared in my prior volumes, The Names and Faces of Heroes in 1963 and Permanent Errors in 1970; then for almost twenty years I attempted no stories. Apparently the narrative and lyric forces that had surfaced in stories moved instead into poems and plays; and by a principle of mental physics, those forms consumed the available energy. But once I needed—for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life—to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance.

  It’s often remarked that, while the story’s technical and emotional demands are more strenuous in some ways than the novel’s, its short distance is paradoxically the event first entered by most young narrative writers. The choice is understandable. A young writer’s perspective and stamina, his literal breath, are short and can hardly sustain a longer trek. The knowledge and reflection over which he has sufficient depth of command are recent, often unconfirmed by repetition and are mostly deprived of the long submergence which fiction wants in the shaping dark of the unconscious mind.

  So while the good story is a hard event, its prime needs prove to be the young writer’s birthright since first it demands a shortsighted eye, an eye set on the foreground, and a close-bounded subject. If for me the broad subject of novels has been the action of time—its devastation and curious repair—the story has charted briefer stretches of concentrated feeling, and it always speaks an intimate language. Because of its single-minded intent and the narrow ground from which it looks, the story is more likely than the novel to issue straight from a writer’s home—the crow’s nest from which, at the rates of his body, he gauges the riptides between him and land. So the story shorter than, say, fifty pages is the prose narrator’s nearest approach to music—duo, trio, quartet, serenade, dance or the deeper reaches of song: the lean lament or ballad of hunger, delight, revulsion or praise.

  A collection like this then, from five decades, will show a writer’s preoccupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose—the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keats’s assertion that “the excellence of every Art is its intensity” has served as a license and standard for me. From the start my stories were driven by heat—passion and
mystery, often passion for the mystery I’ve found in particular rooms and spaces and the people they threaten or shelter—and my general aim is the transfer of a spell of keen witness, perceived by the reader as warranted in character and act. That aim inevitably feeds a hope that any sizable group of stories will be consumed by the reader at a measured pace—one that grants the form’s tendency to fever and its risk, in the hands of any writer, of inducing exhaustion (a reason the story has often been unpopular with American readers; however limited their time, they mostly choose a less probing novel).

  To sort old stories is to meet selves, lost or long-since abandoned. Like a search through old snapshots, such a look back soon calls for change—temper that young man’s burdened frown and the dialect of his early compulsions, the words and grammar that once were common as lines in his hand but that now look strange. Far more closely than in the novels, these stories clung to the shape of the ground my life was crossing at a given time. Some of the ground was rough underfoot and tested whoever I was that month. I’ve resisted the chance to remake those selves. The man who wrote half these stories is no longer me, but I was once him. He did what he meant, and I’ve left him at it.

  With only a few corrected proof or spelling errors—and with no attempt to reconcile my evolving attempts at a clear minimal system of punctuation—the older stories stand as they first appeared in volumes. Throughout, at this late point, I note the recurrence of a few indelible sights, names and actions, that struck me early and have followed me always. Most of the recent stories have undergone the useful discipline of magazine appearance and stand here, minus editors’ quirks. All of them stand in a new order—one which attempts an alternation of voices, echoes, lengths and concerns that would prove unlikely if I held to the order of prior volumes or set the stories by date of completion. My hope is the reader’s well-tended pleasure.

  Finally the seven stories in The Names and Faces of Heroes were dedicated to the memory of my father Will Price, to my mother Elizabeth Rodwell Price and my brother William. The eighteen stories in Permanent Errors were dedicated to Eudora Welty. The force of those thanks is strong with me still. In its new order, and with many new stories, this volume bears its own dedication.

  R. P., 1993

  FULL DAY

  EARLY AFTERNOON in the midst of fall; but the sun was behind him, raw-egg streaks of speedy light from a ball-sized furnace in a white sky. Buck even skewed his rearview mirror to dodge the hot glare that would only be natural three hours from now. Am I nodding off? He thought he should maybe pull to the shoulder and rest for ten minutes. No, he’d yet to eat; his breakfast biscuit was thinning out. One more call; then he’d push on home, be there by dark. But he took the next sharp bend in the road; and damn, the light was still pouring at him, redder now.

  Buck shrugged in his mind and thought of a favorite fact of his boyhood—how he’d searched old papers and books of his father’s for any word on the great Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883. He’d heard about it years later in school—how an entire island went up that August in the grandest blast yet known to man. The sea for miles was coated with powdered rock so thick that ships couldn’t move. And for more than a year, sunsets everywhere on Earth were reddened by millions of tons of airborne dust. Buck’s mother would tell him, each time he asked, that the night before her wedding in 1884, the sunset scared her worse than his father did.

  Like boys in general, he’d consumed disasters of all shapes and sizes but only from books and the silent movies of his childhood. Otherwise he often thought of himself as an average tame fish, safe in his tank. He’d missed the First War by only a month and was several years too old at Pearl Harbor; so even now, at fifty-three, he’d never witnessed anything worse than a simple crossroads collision, one death with very little blood. He suddenly saw how the light this afternoon was similar to that, though hadn’t he watched the wreck in springtime? Early April maybe—surely dogwood was blooming.

  Buck had sat at the Stop sign in what felt like a globe of silence and watched, slow-motion, as an old man plowed his toy Model A broadside into a gasoline truck, which failed to explode. Buck had got out and joined the young truckdriver in trying to ease the trapped old man (a country doctor, named Burton Vass, crushed by the steering wheel). Awful looking as he was, pinned into the seat, Dr. Vass wouldn’t hear of their trying to move him till an ambulance came. But a good ten minutes before it appeared, the doctor actually grinned at their eyes. Then he said “I’m leaving” and left for good. So yes, Buck was maybe a fish in a tank. Whose tank? he wondered. But since he mostly thought about God in his prayers at night, he dropped the question now. God knew, he spent his life in a tank, this Chrysler gunboat, working to bring electric ease to country wives—stoves, steam irons, washers, freezers, fans.

  He turned the mirror down again and tried the sun. It was now even stranger; and the leaves, that had only begun to die, were individually pelted by light till they shivered and flashed. Buck slowed and pulled to the narrow shoulder by a tall pine woods. He’d pushed too far but, on the back seat, he had a wedge of rat cheese, a few saltines and a hot bottled drink. That would calm his head.

  The next thing he knew, a voice was speaking from a great distance, toward his left ear. It’s nothing but your name. You’re dreaming; dream on. But the voice was only saying Sir? Eventually a second voice, young and hectic, echoed the word—Sir? Please wake up. Something in the pitch of the please helped him rouse. But he didn’t reflect that the tone of the voice was much like the younger of his two sons at home.

  It was almost night; he thought that first. But then he realized his eyes had cleared. It was dimmer, yes; the sun was tamer. He glanced at the clock—a quarter past four.

  Then from as far off as in his sleep, the older voice came at him again, “Are you all right?”

  He looked to his left and was startled to see a woman and a child. Young woman, boy child—maybe thirty and ten. They were two steps back from his side of the car; but at once their faces made him want them closer, though both were tense with doubt and fear. He lowered the window. “Good afternoon.”

  The woman was the one who retreated a step.

  Fearless, the boy came on to the car.

  Buck could have touched him. But he settled for touching the brim of his hat, a worn World War II bomber’s cap. “Was I snoring too loud?”

  The boy said “I’m Gid Abernathy. No sir, I just thought you were dead.”

  It struck Buck cold. He actually put a hand out before him and flexed his fingers; then he worked them quickly one by one as if at a keyboard, running scales. He smiled at the boy. “Thanks, Gid, but not yet.”

  Gid’s worry wasn’t spent. “The schoolbus sets me down right here. Ten minutes ago, when I got out, I saw you slumped at the wheel and all; so I knocked on your glass and you didn’t budge. I even tried to open your door—”

  Buck noticed that oddly he’d locked it on stopping, a first time surely. It didn’t strike him as brave or risky that a child tried to help so trustingly. This time and place—1953 in the coastal plain of North Carolina—were slow and safe; everybody knew it and moved accordingly. Gid was curious and very likely kind, not heroic. Still Buck thanked him and started explaining how tired he’d got from skipping lunch. He should have known not to mention hunger in a woman’s presence, not in those times. Maybe in fact he did know it and, half-aware, brought down the rest of the day on himself.

  The woman was wearing a clean house dress with short sleeves that showed her strong, but not plump, arms. Her face was an open country face; surely she also had never met with harm or deceit. While Buck thought that, she stepped up slowly through his thoughts and rested a long hand on Gid’s bony shoulder. “I’m Gid’s mother, Nell Abernathy. He always eats an after-school sandwich. I’ll fix you and him one together, if you like.” It seemed as natural, and she seemed as ready, as if they were in a cool kitchen now and she were slicing homemade bread and spreading butter that her own hands had chur
ned.

  Buck fixed on the best of her homely features. She had an amazing abundance of hair, not the new rust-red you saw so often now since the war but the deep auburn you imagine on women in daguerreotypes, the hair that looks as if each strand bears a vein that pipes blood through it. He’d never seen the like in his time; and he wanted to say so but thought it would sound too forward, too fast. He felt he was smiling anyhow and that now was the moment to say his own name, open the door and stand up at least. But while his eyes had cleared in the nap, he suddenly wondered if his legs would obey. They felt long gone, not asleep exactly but not all there. He tried it though.

  A half-hour later he’d drunk buttermilk, eaten a thick tomato sandwich on store-bought bread and said what he thought would be goodbye to Gid. Gid said he was due at a touch-football game a mile due north in the woods from here. As he shook Buck’s hand, the boy made his plan sound natural as any town child’s game. Only when his thin short gallant frame had shut the porch door and run down the steps did Buck recall his own country boyhood. Whoever played football in the woods? But he quickly imagined a clearing big enough for two pygmy teams. And for the first time, he thought of a father, Who’s the man around here? Is he dead, run-off or still at work? But it didn’t seem urgent to ask for him yet.

  So he looked to Gid’s mother, here at the sink four steps away. Her back was to him, and he knew on sight that now she’d literally forgot he was here. Plain as she was, she was that good to see, that empty of wishes for him to perform. All his life he’d tried to show women the boundless thanks he felt for their being. From his long-dead mother on the day he was born, to Lib his wife just yesterday morning, Buck tried to tell each woman who helped him the strongest fact he knew in life, You’re reason enough to stay on here. He honestly felt it and toward most women. To be sure, he knew there were bad women somewhere; he’d never met one. So he always meant the praise he gave them, mostly selfless praise with no hopes of any dramatic answer. And here past fifty, still he fell in love several times a month, with a face in a diner or crossing the street ahead of his bumper or dark on his back in a hot hotel room, staring at nothing better to see than a ceiling fan and old piss stains from the room above. He knew, and still could cherish, the fact of love-on-sight whenever his mind saw a winning girl; it would gently lie back on itself and tell him, Buck, rest here for good.