Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Read online

  Not that he had. When he was twenty-seven he married Lib and had touched no other woman since, not with a purpose warmer than courtesy. That never stopped the joy or his ceaseless thanks. Hell, women had not only made him but named him—Will from his mother, Buckeye in childhood from his favorite sister. Now he fished out his pocket watch—quarter to five, Lib would be starting supper. He’d be half an hour late, no major crime. He folded the paper napkin with a care due Irish linen, and he said “I’m going to be late for supper.” But his legs didn’t move to stand and leave.

  Buck’s guess had been right; Nell jerked at the sudden sound of his voice and looked around, wild-eyed for an instant. But calm again, she said “You sure?”

  “Of what?” Now his legs were trying to stand.

  “That you can make it home?”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  She took the question seriously enough to move a step toward him and study his face. “You look all right. I just meant, you being dizzy on the road and sleeping so deep in the car when Gid found you—”

  He was upright now but his head was light. “I could drive this last stretch, bound and blindfolded.”

  She looked again and said “You may have to.”

  Buck meant for his grin to force one from Nell. But no, it didn’t work; she was solemn as church, though better to see. Could he look that bad? He tried to remember where his car was parked. Had he driven on here from where he pulled off? Had he left it there and walked here with them? And where was here? He looked all round him—a normal kitchen in a well-worn house, maybe sixty years old, a high dim ceiling, heart-pine floor, white walls smoked to an even gray. He said “Did we leave my car by the road?”

  Nell seemed to nod.

  So he looked to the door that Gid had walked through and aimed for that. At first he thought he crossed half the distance, but the final half then doubled on him and kept on multiplying the space till each further step was harder to take; and he thought his feet were sinking through the floor, then his calves and knees, his waist and chest, till even his mouth had sunk and was mute before he could call on Nell or God or the air itself for strength or rescue.

  It felt like a healing year of nights, endless dark with heart-easing dreams. But when his eyes opened, it looked to Buck no darker than when he had tried to leave the woman’s kitchen. He heard a clock tick, it was near his face, it said five forty—a black Big Ben, with the bone-rattling bell that he used to wake up early to beat. His mother solemnly gave him one, the day he left home for his first real job. But surely he’d told Lib to chuck it, years back. Or was he doing the thing he’d done so often lately—dreaming he was young, in his first big boarding house, strong as a boy, with the body to prove it in daylight and dark?

  He was lying on his stomach on some kind of bed, under light cover. With both dry hands, he felt down his length from the top of his butt to nearly the knees. All that skin was bare; and upward, the sides of his chest and shoulders were warm but naked too. And when he felt beneath himself, his dick and balls were warm and soft. Still what surprised Buck was the calm soul in him—no fear, no regret in a mind as fearful as any not locked in a state institution. He shut both eyes and gradually searched the sheet beneath him, far as he could reach. His right hand soon met a block that was big but soft. His fingers stopped against it.

  A woman’s voice said “You know you’re safe.”

  Buck’s eyes were still shut. In the hope of knowing whether this was a dream, he thought In three seconds I’ll open my eyes, I’ll look straight ahead, then shut them again. He counted to three, looked, saw the same clock—five forty-two—and shut them again. It proved he was alive, awake and sane, though apparently stripped in a woman’s bed. Nell, he finally thought of the name; then the memory of her face. He firmly believed he still hadn’t touched her. Two things may have happened. I fainted, somehow Nell got me in here, but why am I stripped? Or I’ve been here days, maybe years, and am sick.

  He had not been prone to wild thoughts, not in his life till now at least; and he halfway liked it. He suspected he smiled. But Gid—oh Christ. Is Gid on hand? Buck tried to see if his hand could lift off the pillow—yes. He held it up and listened to the house. No sounds at all, not even from Nell. He settled back, brought his right hand to his face and felt for beard—the normal stubble of late afternoon. So he told her “It feels very safe. Thanks, Nell. But did I collapse? Am I someway sick?”

  She had seemed to sit on the edge of the bed, facing out from him toward the door—Buck saw the open door and a blank hall beyond it. And now she gave no sign of moving, surely not toward him. She said “You had a little sinking spell. You may have blanked out, but you didn’t fall hard. I helped you in here. You slept half an hour.”

  “With you here beside me?”

  “I just got back,” she said.

  “From where?”

  “The phone. I called your wife.”

  “How do you know her?”

  Her voice was smiling. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I searched your pocket and found her number. I didn’t know what—”

  Buck said “Don’t worry. But what did you say?”

  “That you stopped by here, just feeling weak. That I thought you’d be back on the road soon, but did she know anything I ought to know?”

  Buck almost laughed. “Such as, am I a killer?”

  Her voice stayed pleasant. “Such as, do you have seizures? Are you diabetic?”

  “What did Lib say?”

  “Is Lib your wife? She said you were normal, far as she knew, just maybe exhausted.”

  Buck smiled but, on its own, his mind thought Exactly. Nobody but Lib’s allowed to be sick. Lib was having what she herself called “the longest menopause on human record.” Good-hearted as she was till five years ago, in the midst of that winter—with no word of warning—she suddenly balled up tight as wax till, for weeks on end, Buck could hardly see her, much less touch and warm her. Next she seemed to grow in-turned eyes, set all down her body, to watch herself—her own long stock of pains and self-pity, when he’d been the famous complainer so long.

  By now they could sometimes laugh about it; and everywhere else in her life with others—their sons, her friends—Lib seemed to be waking from a long hard dream. She’d yet to welcome him truly back. And even if she did, the harm was done now and might never heal. She’d turned from his care and need so often that Buck was permanently lonesome in ways he hadn’t felt since boyhood, roaming the deep woods north of his house and pressing his lips to dry tree-bark, just for something to lean his body against, some living thing to know that young Buck was clean and warm and could be touched with pleasure.

  His right hand had stayed where it found Nell’s hip. Three layers of cover kept them apart; he’d never probed or tried to stroke her, and she’d never pressed back into his fingers. As he went on waking, he began to like their balked contact. It gave him a trace of the friendly warmth of his sister Lulie, who was less than one year older than he and with whom he’d slept till his sixth birthday—pups in a box, warm and moving like a single heart.

  He thought the next question and asked it clearly, “Whose room is this?” Before Nell could speak, he thought of the several answers he dreaded—her husband’s and hers, even young Gid’s. Not that he feared their linen and blankets, he just hoped to be in an open space, one he could rest in from here on out. He felt that happy and it sprang up through him in a peaceful flow.

  Nell said “My father built this bed, oh sixty years ago. He and Mother used it, all their life together. She died and he came here to live with us, brought nothing much but his clothes and this bed. He helped us a lot till he went, last winter.”

  “He died?”

  “Pneumonia.”

  “So it’s you and the boy, on your own now?”

  “Seems like,” she said. She gave a little chuckle as if she sat alone on the moon and watched her distant amazing life.

  “How do you live?”
/>   She laughed out brightly. “Like squirrels in the trees! No, I sew for people. Gid works in the summer, on the next farm over. My dad left us a small piece of money. We do all right, nothing grand but enough.”

  Then the lack of a husband and father was sure. I’ll ask to stay. Buck understood that the thought should have shocked him. It didn’t. The calm poured on through his chest, and for several minutes he napped again. When he came to, his right hand was back by his side; and he spoke without looking, “Why am I naked?”

  She said “Remember? It was your idea. You had a little accident, when you blacked out.”

  “Oh God, I’m sorry.”

  Nell said “Forget it. It was just in the front, a spot the size of a baby’s hand.”

  “Did I wet my shirt too?”

  “Not a bit,” she said. “That was your idea; I tried to stop you.”

  Then I have to stay.

  She said “I’ve got you some clean clothes out.”

  “You’re a lightning seamstress.” But then he thought Her husband’s clothes.

  “My dad’s,” she said. “You’re his same size.”

  “I couldn’t accept them.”

  “Oh he’d be thrilled. He couldn’t bear to waste a half-inch of string. And Gid’ll be way too tall when he’s grown.”

  “You good at predicting the future?” Buck said.

  She laughed again. “Height runs in his family, most of the men—”

  Buck rushed to stop her before she clouded the good air between them with a useless name, “I’ll be much obliged then, for one pair of pants.”

  Nell said “They’re laid out here on the chair, khakis as clean as cloth ever gets and a clean pair of step-ins. I’m bound to go now and start our supper. You think you feel like trying to stand?” She seemed unhurried but as bent on leaving as if a walk to the dark heart of Africa faced her now.

  Never, no mam, I’ll lie right here. But he tried to move both legs and they worked. And his eyes were clear. All that refused was his mind, Stay here. You’re actually needed here. Not so, she and Gid are doing all right. Ask her though; just see what she says. Buck heard his voice say the reckless thing, “Nell, what if I said ‘Please let me stay’?”

  He expected she’d wait to think that through. And at once she rose from the edge of the bed and took three steps on the bare wood floor. Then she said “We had this time, here now. Your own supper’s cooking, up the road, this minute.”

  As her low voice moved, Buck knew she was right. She seemed to know much more than he remembered; whatever had happened, if anything new, it hadn’t changed the tone of her voice. So at least he could trust that he hadn’t been cruel or made a promise that he couldn’t keep. Then he saw his course clearly. The decent thing was to try standing up, getting dressed, saying thank you and heading on home. So he turned to his side and threw off the cover. He saw his bare body; then said “I’m sorry” and reached again for the sheet at least, to hide his lap. For the first time, that he remembered here, he looked toward Nell.

  She stood by a tall mahogany wardrobe and was half-turned away, lifting a bathrobe from the high-backed chair. She was naked as he and had been naked all that time she was near him. Before she could cover herself, Buck rushed to print her body deep in his mind. She was still young everywhere, with firm pale skin and no visible scars (Lib’s side was pocked by the cavernous scar of a ruptured appendix). And the hair of her crotch was the same high color of life and health that she showed the world on her striking head. Then she was hid in the faded robe; and with no further look or word, she brushed on past him and left the room.

  Buck went to the same chair, found his pants in a clean ragged towel, his shirt on a hanger—Nell had managed to iron it—a pair of blue boxer shorts and the khakis she mentioned. He put on his socks first, the shirt, then the pants. They were stiff with starch and two inches short. He thought of his mother’s old comic greeting for outgrown pants, “Son, I see you’re expecting high water” (they lived twenty miles from the Roanoke River, a famous flooder).

  Was this time-out, here under this roof, some high-water mark in all his life? With the tender mind and heart he got from his mother at birth, Buck had wanted an unadventurous life. And except for Lib’s three awful labors (two live boys and one dead girl), he’d virtually got it. His chief adventures had come in his head. Alone on the road, he sometimes lived through active nights with imaginary women. But mostly he still enacted each possible threat to life and limb, any time his family stepped out of sight. And his own body, strong till now, had always seemed a rickety bridge over too deep a gorge for a confident life in some place hard as the present world.

  So sure, whatever had happened here—if nothing but what Nell owned up to, a fainting spell and a half-hour rest—was like a splendid volunteer, the giant flower that suddenly blooms at the edge of the yard, where you least expect, from a secret hybrid in last year’s seed that has bided its time. When he’d tied his shoes, he stepped to the dark old mirror and smoothed his tangled hair. Nothing visibly changed, not to my eyes—and who knows me better? Well, Lib but she won’t see this time, whatever happened here. And if anything did, it was gentle and finished. He could hear Nell drawing water in the kitchen. In less than an hour, if fate agreed, he’d be in his own house, among his first duties. He bent again to the peeling mirror and awarded his face a final grin. Then he went out to thank Nell Abernathy for one happy day.

  In four months Buck will die from a growth that reached decisive weight in his body this full afternoon and threw him down.

  His elder son has made this unreal gift for his father on the eighty-ninth passing of Buck’s birthday, though he died these thirty-five years ago.

  THE WARRIOR PRINCESS OZIMBA

  SHE WAS the oldest thing any of us knew anything about, and she had never been near a tennis court, but somewhere around the Fourth of July every year, one of us (it was my father for a long time but for the past two years, just me) rode out to her place and took her a pair of blue tennis shoes. (Blue because that was her favorite color before she went blind and because even now, opening the box and not seeing them, she always asked “Is they blue?”) We did it on the Fourth because that was the day she had picked out fifty years ago for her birthday, not knowing what day she had been born and figuring that the Fourth was right noisy anyhow and one more little celebration wouldn’t hurt if it pacified my father who was a boy then and who wanted to give her presents. And it was always tennis shoes because they were the only kind she would put on and because with her little bit of shuffling around in the sun, she managed to wear out a pair every year. So now that I was doing it, the time would come, and Vesta, who was her daughter and had taken her mother’s place and who didn’t have much faith in my memory, would look up at me from stringing beans or waxing the floor and say, “Mr. Ed, Mama’s feets going to be flat on the ground by next week,” and then I would drive out, and it would be her birthday.

  My mother goes out very seldom now, so late in the afternoon of the Fourth, I took the shoes and climbed in the broiling car alone and headed down the Embro road where she lived with Vesta and Vesta’s husband, where she had lived ever since she took up with Uncle Ben Harrison in the Year One and started having those children that had more or less vanished. (My grandfather asked her once just when was it she and Ben got married. She smiled and said, “Mr. Buddy, you know we ain’t married. We just made arrangements.”)

  All the way out there the shoulders of the dirt road were full of Negroes dressed up in a lot of lightcolored clothes that were getting dustier by the minute, walking nowhere (except maybe to some big baptizing up the creek) slow and happy with a lot of laughing and with children bunched along every now and then, yelling and prancing and important-looking as puppies on the verge of being grown and running away. I waved at several of the struggling knots as I passed just so I could look in the mirror and see the children all stop their scuffling and string out in a line with great wide eyes and all those
teeth and watch my car till it was gone, wondering who in the world that waving white man was, flying on by them to the creek.

  There was still the creek to cross that I and a little Negro named Walter had dammed up a thousand times for wading purposes. It would follow along on the left, and there would be that solid mile of cool shade and sand and honeysuckle and the two chimneys that had belonged to Lord-knows-what rising from the far end of it and the sawdust pile that had swallowed Harp Hubbard at age eleven so afterwards we couldn’t play there except in secret and always had to bathe before going home, and then on the right it would be her place.

  About all you could say for her place was it would keep out a gentle rain, balancing on its own low knoll on four rock legs so delicate it seemed she could move once, sitting now tall in her chair on one end of the porch, and send the whole thing—house, dog, flowers, herself, all—turning quietly down past the nodding chickens and the one mulberry tree to the road, if she hadn’t been lighter than a fall leaf and nearly as dry. I got out of the car without even waking her dog and started towards her.

  She sat there the way she had sat every day for eight years (every day since that evening after supper when she stepped to the living room door and called my father out and asked him, “Mr. Phil, ain’t it about time I’m taking me a rest?”), facing whoever might pass and the trees and beyond and gradually not seeing any of them, her hands laid palm up on her knees, her back and her head held straight as any boy and in that black hat nobody ever saw her without but which got changed— by night—every year or so, a little deaf and with no sight at all and her teeth gone and her lips caved in forever, leaving her nothing but those saddles of bone under her eyes and her age which nobody knew (at times you could make her remember when General Lee took up my grandmother who was a baby and kissed her) and her name which my great-grandfather had been called on to give her and which came from a book he was reading at the time—Warrior Princess Ozimba.