The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  At that same moment, she faced him again and said “I think it would have hurt Mother too much to bring me down here.” But she also smiled.

  Then Mabry laid both his hands over hers—lightly, no pressure.

  And she let them rest there long enough to study them as if this man’s sinews and knuckles, and the old wedding ring he’d worn in the weeks he nursed his wife, might tell her as much as the lines of a palm could tell a good Gypsy. Then she slid them toward her, into her own keeping, for two or three seconds before recalling her hands to herself.

  Mabry said “Thank you kindly.”

  Audrey nodded. “Your room’s ready now. If it rains we’ll put a bucket under the hole—or you fix the roof.” Then as he turned to go for his bags, she said “You don’t seem worried at all about what’s happened to your hometown.”

  “In New York, you mean?”

  “Yes. And wherever else these men strike next.”

  Standing that close to the room he was born in, Mabry suddenly seemed to know a full answer; and it almost shocked him. He said “On a scale of one to ten for disaster, I guess this is—what?—maybe an eight?” His voice suspended at that point. What the hell can I mean? But before he could laugh, Audrey seemed ready to take him up on his foolery.

  Serious-eyed, she said “You think it’s truly the start of the Last Days?”

  He thought Oh God, she may be in graduate school; but she’s a Holy Roller. He couldn’t help a slight smile. “They’re not claiming that down here yet, are they?”

  She also smiled. “No, but your dad’s been speaking about it.”

  “You mean his talk about hydrogen bombs? I doubt those Muslims have got one yet. If so, why didn’t they use it this week?”

  Audrey said, as calm as the tree trunk behind him, “I thought about killing my son, while he was asleep two mornings ago. I could take him on out of this whole business.” She shut her eyes and again shook hard.

  Mabry thought Are we safe in a house with this woman? But he said “Audrey, is it truly that bad? Are you that sure?”

  She said “I was axing you, Mr. Mabry. You s’posed to tell me.” She blared her eyes open like terrified Prissy in Gone With the Wind, then batted them fast, then gave a high laugh and turned toward the house. “I don’t know nothing ’bout no H-bombs, Mr. Mabry.”

  As she left, the whole back of her head and body, her long legs, looked more than worth following to any destination. And Mabry felt mildly but rightly punished by her earnest joke. How much more of this has she got stored up? But he didn’t try to call her back, and he didn’t pursue her. He went for his bags. What was most important now was the hope to steal, between now and supper, a little of the sleep he badly needed.

  When he woke, deep dark was all around him; and the air felt chillier than Halifax this morning—odd for mid-September down here. September in eastern Carolina could be as hot as Lumumbaville. I’m down here, right? In the pitch dark and drowsy as he was, Mabry couldn’t guarantee his whereabouts—what day or hour, even what house. Or maybe he was somehow outdoors. As a first probe to test his location—not to mention whether he was living or dead—he spread both arms out straight at his sides. He was on a mattress, yes; but neither hand reached past the edge.

  He rolled to his right side and fumbled to find an absolute margin. When he found it, the mattress was hardly more than a dense pad—dense yet thin enough to pinch between his thumb and forefinger. The bed I was born in. All because his father had loved the place so much that he managed to persuade Mabry’s mother to come here—with the Kincaids’ old MD and a younger black midwife—and deliver her first child “at home” as late as 1948. It had gone without incident, as it did after all in most of the world. And here now he was, all but six decades later. Was it for good, for anybody?

  With all his recent weird symptoms, that possibility—or inevitability—hadn’t crossed Mabry’s conscious mind till now, not for maybe two whole days. If he was truly entering the long hallway of multiple sclerosis—anything from a lifetime of mildly annoying moments of numbness and double vision to eventual total and incurable paralysis—where better could he go than here, assuming of course that he put a big part of Frances’s legacy into restoring this house, making it wheelchair accessible and securing strong help? He tried what he hadn’t tried for an hour. He rubbed both thumbs and forefingers together hard. He could feel the pressure and the pain. There’s still a little time, at least. But then whatever symptoms he’d had were intermittent to the point of mystifying his doctors.

  There was no lamp near the bed, so he got to his feet and felt his way toward the string that hung from a single bare lightbulb far overhead. It worked. His watch said ten past six. He stroked his face, rough again with stubble. Then he found his shaving kit, went to the house’s only bathroom—well-preserved, considering the years of wear—and shaved for the second time today. Watching his face, for even that long, was somehow easier than it had been since the moment he held on to Frances’s wrist and marked her last heartbeat five months ago.

  In the kitchen Audrey was still by the stove. At the sound of Mabry’s footsteps, she turned and looked toward his father’s room. “He’s in there, guarding his gallon of whiskey.” But then she grinned. “The ice is in here, and all the glasses we’ve got are in the cabinet.”

  As Mabry looked round, he saw the new tan refrigerator. The cabinet was the old canary-yellow cupboard that had been here forever. Like the bathroom, it showed few signs of wear, though it had weathered tens of thousands of meals. Maybe those Mexican farm-boy tenants had been gentler than he’d heard. When he opened the cabinet, though, there were only five or six glasses—mostly chipped leftovers from the peanut butter and jelly of his childhood. He took the biggest glass and half filled it with the doll-sized ice cubes he hated from the automatic ice-maker. Then just before he crossed his father’s threshold, he thought to turn back and say to Audrey “How can I help?”

  She never looked up from the biscuit dough she was laying in discs on the old black baking tray. “I’ll let you know if something arises.” Smiling to herself, she made a big rising gesture with both arms, almost an orchestra leader’s crescendo.

  Mabry saw it as at least mildly strange, but he thought he knew better than to ask more questions. He looked round the corner to where Tasker had lurked the last time he saw him.

  And yes he was there, same clothes but nodding off in the wheelchair, the evening news droning on beyond him, obsessed as it was with downtown New York and however many thousand dead people and their desolate survivors.

  Mabry stepped forward, turned the TV off, then saw the bottles of Scotch and bourbon on the floor by his father. He chose the bourbon and poured a stiff portion before Tasker woke.

  As ever, he was wide awake, first pop. He aimed his pistol finger at Mabry and said “Bang. You’re right!”

  “How right, Pa? In my choice of potation?”

  Tasker said “Absolutely. I just keep the Scotch to test my visitors.” He motioned Mabry to the one other chair, then rolled himself to face it.

  Mabry sat and lifted the glass in a toast. “Nothing wrong with Scotch, though—half our family was Scottish, as I recall.”

  Tasker thought a long moment. “That’s a fact I’m struggling to suppress in my old age. The Celtic blood got us into this gulch we’ll never get out of—Scotch, Irish, Welsh, Huguenot, on and on.”

  Mabry said “I don’t recall hearing of any Celts lately flinging themselves into big jet planes and onward toward the World Trade Towers.”

  “Of course they were Celts, the real men who caused it. Who in hell runs the foreign policy of God’s Own Country, ever since redheaded Thomas Jefferson commenced it? We’ve rammed our country down every other throat on the planet till they all rightly hate us.”

  Mabry had traveled widely—with Frances—in all of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. On his own he’d been to China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. So his answer flipped out immedia
tely. “That’s not been quite my experience.” And the thought that followed was automatic, this near his father. But then I’m just fifty-three years old. What can I know? He couldn’t help laughing.

  And Tasker joined him, amazingly.

  When they’d quieted again, Mabry said “What was funny?”

  Tasker rattled his ice, then took a long swallow. “There were two good reasons for general laughter—first, you and I both know you don’t have much experience. Mainly, though, we’re laughing at you being home again—how right it feels.”

  Mabry thought he wouldn’t contest that yet. He said “You’re back here too, old pal. How right does it feel to be in a wheelchair and stalled in a leaking house you haven’t truly lived in since you were a child?” (for the past eight years, Tasker had bunked in a pokey set of rooms in Episcopal retirement quarters in Winston).

  Tasker knew at once. “It feels like I should never have left.” He searched his son’s eyes and the powerful hands that were copies of his own. “And neither should you.”

  As always, Mabry couldn’t tell how seriously to take his father’s words. So he turned and looked out the brightest window—the fig tree was still there, gigantic now and fifty yards beyond him, one of the leafy caves of his boyhood. Then he laughed again. “Maybe you’re right. But who would I be now, assuming I’d stayed?”

  Tasker said “A good man.”

  That stung. Then Mabry said “Like somebody’s harmless gentleman gardener or a truly hotshot crossroads mechanic?”

  “Yes, along those lines—with a wife that you’d have been loyal to and a daughter you wouldn’t have left like a dog in the midst of a very busy road.”

  Despite Tasker’s priestly duties, he’d hardly said ten words—in all the years—to blame his son’s choices in life and work. So these words seriously waylaid Mabry. He finished his bourbon in a last deep swallow and said “I was hoping you’d relish a visit from the last close kin you’ve got on Earth, but now you’re trying to drive me off. Another ten words in that direction and you’ll succeed. I’m full grown, you notice, with my own bank account. I can leave right now.” Then he found himself chuckling.

  His father said “I’m relishing you. But you’re getting deaf. You didn’t hear this, son—you should have stayed here. You can stay here now. It’s not too late.”

  “Pa, what in the world is waiting for me here? Have you looked around at the actual present? It’s a nearly dead village with half as many people as when I was born. What?—a hundred twenty people with a twelve-times-bigger county seat five miles away? And the main pipeline to the ongoing world is on that TV screen beyond us?”

  “You might yet find a soul here, Mabry—an actual soul for yourself anyhow.” Again, though, Tasker grinned, all but dismissing the chance he might have meant what he said.

  For the first time since the New York disaster two days ago, real fear struck Mabry. Through a long moment he couldn’t draw a rewarding breath. Then it came. He rose and bent to pour a second drink. Tasker’s hand stayed on his wrist all the while, though he knew that drinking was a problem this son never had. So Mabry knelt again beside his father’s wheelchair and faced the floor, not Tasker’s eyes which were bright as a lizard’s. “Pa, where are we headed, this country anyhow?”

  “The country’s going to come all apart.”

  “You truly believe that?”

  Tasker said “I believe it every minute I’m awake in the dark—and long before those crazy boys struck.”

  Mabry said “And me? What’s likely to become of me?”

  Tasker said “As you can easily guess, I think the big ruin started more or less when World War II shut down—that was the country’s likable hour, the summer of 1945. I was twenty-seven; you were not quite born. Several fine things have happened since then—starting to end American slavery was surely the best. But we’ve gone on claiming to be such loyal Christians and Jews while we’ve let the balance of mankind starve and tear each other to shreds like always—” His voice suspended.

  Since this was a sermon, Mabry waited for the ongoing thought. When nothing came he quietly asked “We’re compelled then to solve every problem on the face of the globe?”

  Tasker slowly returned from his pause. His right hand went to the back of Mabry’s neck and squeezed it lightly. “We could have fed every starving human and taught them how to farm or earn a decent wage. We could have stood between the howling packs of wolves called men. And women as well. We could have done all that—every penny—and had plenty left. Otherwise we shouldn’t have claimed to be Christian, which we still mainly do. Hell, old as I am, I’m starting to reach for my gun anytime a stranger tells me he’s a Christian—he or she (sometimes women are the worst). I’ve all but planned to become a Jew.”

  When the hand released his neck, Mabry thought it was time to come back to the business at hand. “So we’re being punished now, for all our sins?

  Tasker agreed. “Our crimes. I seldom think about sin anymore. But your big city? Sure, those servants of Allah will level New York yet. How can they help it? They’ll buy an atomic bomb somewhere or breed a plague virus; and within ten years, they’ll turn New York back at least six centuries—just rocks and maybe a few tough weeds, a dozen or so men as durable as the Manahatta Indians.”

  It sounded at least half sane to Mabry; but his fear had passed, for now at least. “Did that revelation come straight from God or the bourbon you and I are presently swilling?”

  Tasker couldn’t see Mabry’s face dead-on, but he knew he could hear a tease in the voice. “No, son, I got it from the last remains of my common sense. Get you a TV big as mine. It’ll tell you what to think, and it makes good sense.”

  Mabry stayed in place. “Say you really don’t believe that.”

  Tasker waited till he knew what it meant. “No, I really don’t believe it; but I think a good many of the pictures shown on any TV are bound to be true. How wrong is that?”

  Mabry finally heard he was serious. “Somewhere between maybe forty and a hundred percent. Notice—everything on that giant screen looks a million times too simple. Somebody’s always winning or dying, wailing or cheering—nothing else.”

  Tasker took his longest wait. “I can grant you that, but Fate sometimes thinks in idiot-straight lines, just like TV. Still, whatever happens to New York City or you or me may prove more interesting. The likely thing is, nothing will happen—nothing new.”

  What seemed newer to Mabry than daybreak was the sound of Audrey’s voice from the kitchen.

  “Supper for three grown people is ready.”

  Mabry had spread his napkin in his lap—an ample blue cloth napkin—before his father gently stopped his almost-reaching hand. “Son, I’ve recently learned a new blessing. It’s John Wesley’s blessing, a Methodist of course but likewise an Anglican priest to the end.” When all heads were bowed, Tasker said

  “Be present at our table, Lord;

  Be here and everywhere adored.

  These creatures bless and grant that we

  May feast in Paradise with thee.”

  The notion of feasting in Paradise was good enough for Mabry, with the Lord or whomever. And the spread before him was, to his eyes and mind, paradisal at the least. How had Audrey known his boyhood favorites? And when had he last eaten country-style steak (pounded round steak, dredged in flour and slowly simmered in onion gravy), mashed potatoes smooth as the butter and cream lavished in them, green beans cooked with tiny cubes of smoky pork, cold sliced ripe tomatoes from somebody’s carefully tended garden just down the road, cucumbers baptized in peppery vinegar, and thin pones of salty cornbread lightly fried with lacy edges? Just eating alone kept Mabry grinning but mainly silent for the first ten minutes. He’d loved good food all his life, though gluttony had never been among his major sins.

  Yet despite his pleasure in first-rate cooking, he’d never learned how to make anything more complex than a soft-boiled egg (no mean chore, in fact) or a baked potato. It h
ad been his luck—and sometimes his curse—to live beside women with caretaking genes, and they’d kept him well-fed, a part of the bargain to have and hold. But he couldn’t recall an earlier meal that had moved as benignly through his veins as this one. It was almost as if he could feel real damage—like hacked-out chunks down the arms and legs of a marble statue—being gradually filled, from the inside out. And it kept him from looking directly to Audrey or speaking to her yet. He didn’t want to blub, not this early in their acquaintance.

  In Mabry’s silence, Tasker and Audrey had talked ahead with the quiet ease of family members—a peaceful family, that condoned each other. Every few sentences they’d lapse into a plainly foreign language for a phrase or two; it was nothing Mabry had heard in his travels. At first he assumed it was some private tongue in which they were trading remarks about him, secrets anyhow. Finally, though, he couldn’t resist. First he laughed in his father’s direction. Then he said “Sir, am I really so bad yall discuss me in code?”

  Tasker paid him no mind but turned back to Audrey and reeled off a long calm strip of the code. Was it just a nonsense language of the sort small children manufacture? But then he faced his son. “No, darlin’ lad, it’s New Testament Greek. We’re showing off for you.”

  Mabry looked mildly stunned.

  So Audrey said “Father Kincaid is helping me learn my Greek. I’m a graduate student at Duke University, the Divinity School. Working on a PhD. I’ve finished my course work and am studying for my prelims—just five thousand books to read between now and next fall.”

  Tasker said “Truth is, she’s helping me. I haven’t read or spoken a word of Greek for a million years.”