The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  By the time Mabry drove on through the few streets of Sherwin that bore any serious memories for him, it was nearly dark. He’d eaten nothing since the sandwich at home, and his stomach was starting to claw at itself, so he drove toward Gwyn. As ever, all her lights were on; but when he parked in the back yard and reached the kitchen door, there was a taped-up manila envelope labeled—in Gwyn’s most elegant hand—To Whom It May Concern (If Any Such Creature Should Materialize). Around the words, she’d drawn stars and whorls in green and red ink. All things considered, maybe he mattered as much as any other local; so he opened the envelope. A full-sized sheet of white paper said, in a smaller version of Gwyn’s script,

  I’ve gone to Randy Baynes’s office in town. Even on Sunday he’s meeting me there to finalize a plan to bring this Lovely Old Home back into some sort of use. Maybe that’s a thing my parents could tolerate anyway if either ghost should chance to drop in while I’m still alive and can hear their opinions. Back in time to offer a helpful beverage to any legal-aged friend.

  Mabry thought I’m legal but is this for me? When he’d left her last night, he hadn’t known firmly what his next plans were; but he’d said he might well see her today. So he added a P.S. in his own green ink.

  I might try to find you later tonight, but now I need to get home and scrounge a little supper—my knees are weaker than any six kittens.

  The note about food was not a white lie. His recent symptoms sometimes came in relation to hunger. He aimed for home, helplessly thinking of the Kincaid house as his actual home, whoever might live in those burdened walls.

  It was deep dusk when he stopped in Tasker’s drive. The house was even darker. If any light at all was on, Mabry couldn’t see it. But then the kitchen side was hid, so maybe his father and Audrey were there. One car was in sight—Tasker’s, not Audrey’s. Had she gone off somehow and left Father Kincaid here alone? She no doubt had emergencies of her own, but leaving an ancient cripple in a wheelchair was borderline behavior for a paid caretaker, furthermore one in theological graduate school.

  Even the front hall was pitch dark; and while he stood waiting for any trace of sound, he could hear nothing, not even the normal creaks and groans of so much lumber after so many years. It was too much like being blind again, and he’d almost turned back toward his car when he gambled on a last chance. “Anybody home?”

  No immediate answer.

  “It’s Mabry. Who—?” You’re not an owl, fool. But he couldn’t say more.

  Then a man’s dim voice said “Tasker Kincaid.”

  Mabry was almost glad to hear it, and he felt his way down the hall till a faint light showed from the kitchen. When he stopped in the door, he could see two candles on the dining table and two sets of hands—his father’s and Audrey’s. They seemed to be near the end of eating. Some sort of holy service here? He said he was sorry if he’d interrupted.

  Audrey said “Not really. The power’s gone out.” No invitation to step any closer.

  He did, though. I was born here.

  Tasker didn’t speak and barely looked up from his seashell pasta with the Bolognese sauce.

  So Mabry spoke to Audrey. “You must have had power to cook this meal.”

  By then she was at the stove, an empty plate in her hand.

  “I did. It just went out—what, Father?—twenty minutes ago.”

  Tasker chewed on.

  Mabry sat at his accustomed place, though no one yet had asked him to do so.

  And in another minute, Audrey set a full plate down before him.

  From then on, he ate—an excellent pasta, despite the iceberg lettuce in the salad (pale green wood)—and questioned Audrey about her work, a subject he’d hardly broached till now. If he’d had to guess, he’d have said she was working on something to do with Christianity and what it now meant in the wake of the various revolutions in civil rights. But no. She was aimed at understanding what Jesus’ teachings about the family had done to subsequent human behavior in the Middle East, Europe, and eventually America.

  When she’d talked for maybe three minutes about the subject of her dissertation, Tasker broke in without so much as a word of pardon. “Jesus said the human family was the biggest roadblock of all to anyone hoping to lead a good life—or his kind of life.”

  Audrey accepted the silence Father Kincaid had assigned her.

  But Mabry said “Why was I never told?”

  Tasker said “Told what?”

  “—That your friend Jesus condemned the human family. I thought every church that ever existed all but worshiped the family—family life, family values.”

  Audrey nodded, still silent.

  Tasker said “That’s why you notice I’ve quit the church.”

  Mabry said “Please quote me some words of Jesus on the subject.”

  Audrey reclaimed her ground. Before Father Kincaid could cite any scripture, she raised both hands and made little quotation marks in the air—Here come the true words. Then she said “‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’”

  Tasker said “Gospel of Luke, chapter fourteen, verse twenty-six. We professional Christians conceal that as much as possible, along with everything Jesus says about rich folks—how they’re all, every one of them, doomed to the blue-hot heart of Hell.”

  Audrey smiled at last. “Gospel of Mark, chapter ten, verse twenty-three and following. That particular passage always gives me extra pleasure, especially when I was a penniless child in Baltimore and all the lady-pillars of the church wore hats that cost at least a hundred dollars; and the few men who ever showed their faces in the sanctuary wore the finest wool suits—or pale cotton seersucker in the summer. I knew that saying and I’d think of them frying in a deep-fat cooker while Mama and I would be lounging in Heaven with a brand-new window-unit air conditioner and us in our own cashmere sweater sets and new leather pumps with heels so high we’d fall down and break our cotton-picking necks, except that we were in Heaven; and you can’t fall there—or if you can, you don’t break nothing.”

  Everybody at the table managed to agree in a round of unforced laughter for Audrey’s memory.

  But before they’d stilled, lights came on above them in a scary rush—the power was back, at an unwelcome moment.

  Audrey even said “Shoot.”

  And quicker than he usually responded to anything now, Tasker said to Audrey “I’m finished, thank you, lady.” He laid his knife and fork on his empty plate, then turned in a majestic arc toward his own room. Audrey rose to help him; but he said politely “I’m capable, notice.” He even managed, once over his threshold, to reach behind him and shut the door nine-tenths of the way. In another few seconds his TV was telling the world the only news it had told for the whole past week—lower New York City in ruins, New Yorkers assuming the rest of the world cared as much as they.

  Mabry wouldn’t let Audrey shoo him off from helping with the dishes. But once they were done, she lowered her voice and said that Marcus would be here early this evening, to lay Father Kincaid down (being exhausted, he’d told her to call for Marcus early). With the preliminary bath and toilet chores, that could take a full hour. She asked if that would be too late to come to Mabry’s room for the further talk he’d requested?

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  When he went on back, his imitation Rolex (bought on the Via Veneto from a cheerful black African for five dollars cash) said nine-fifteen. So he packed his one bag in the careful way he’d learned from his mother the first time he ever left home overnight—a summer trip, at the age of four, to this same house. It even occurred to him to wonder now, for the first time ever, if the conquest of such a meticulous skill might have set his otherwise unruly mind on the path to a lifetime’s care for precious objects and damaged paintings. All the clothes he wouldn’t need tomorrow morning were packed before he recalled Baxter Sample’s painting, w
hatever it was. Should he take it north now? TV had said that airport security was screwed down tight; such a parcel might cause considerable delay. He could leave it here; and if Baxter turned up, he could send for it quickly (but if Baxter proved certifiably dead, then what?). Now, though, Mabry lit the overhead bulb and the bedside lamp, unwrapped the painting, and studied it patiently one more time.

  In the past few days, the firm hints of a sketch he’d discovered by removing the liner and washing a few square inches lightly was tempting at the very least. Something else had lain, for a patient century, under a Charleston boy’s awkward daub. He’d shown it to Leah in Nova Scotia and to Gwyn down here—nobody else, not even Marcus. Strictly speaking, it was not his to show to anyone. And now—whatever had happened to Baxter Sample—if Baxter’s butler was still in the duplex, he could simply stop off and leave it with him, no further involvement.

  Gwyn’s certainty, though, that something by Van Gogh lurked beneath the surface had snagged immovably in his brain. Not that he thought Gwyn had any expertise in the matter, but her hunches about a number of not insignificant things had turned out true. For instance, she’d laughingly turned down his offer of marriage when they were fresh from college almost thirty years ago—an early bit of wisdom—and when she met Frances, shortly after he did, she’d only said “That girl’s got your name all over her. Speak for her hand right now, and behave your mean butt.”

  In a sudden hot instant, Mabry was struck by an impulse to take the canvas to New York tomorrow, have it X-rayed and—if there truly was something under Philip’s effort—then he could proceed with the painful process of removing the daub, millimeter by millimeter.

  But Audrey’s voice spoke at his shut door. “I’m free for a little while when you want to talk.”

  Well, maybe she’s saved me. Or saved young Philip’s whole legacy anyhow. He hadn’t mentioned the picture to her, so he leaned it face-down behind him on the bed and went to the door.

  When she was seated in the rocking chair, he returned to the bed. And she spoke first. “Father Kincaid says you were born on that spot.”

  To his amazement, Mabry couldn’t answer—his throat had closed. Finally, though, he could say that was true.

  In the unexpected silence Audrey said “Those old iron bed frames are mostly gone now. You know what happened—when they went out of style and white folks threw them out, black folks took them. My mother had two, and she tended to paint them both every spring—different colors each year. Even now, they’re wearing thick inches of her paint; and I need to strip them back to the bare iron and start all over. You hang on to this one; your daughter should have it some day anyhow, to remember you by.”

  That freed Mabry to speak about Charlotte. “I’d have said you were wrong about that till just yesterday. Remember I got a letter from New York? Believe it or not, it was from Charlotte Kincaid, sounding kinder to me than ever.”

  Audrey said “Of course I’ve never met her, but I know she contacts her grandfather frequently, and he counts on her to buck him up. That was all that worried him this past Tuesday when the awful news broke on TV. He knew you were safe in France or on a safe plane.”

  “Right. For all he cared.”

  Audrey was wearing the same tan slacks she’d worn to church. For all the work she’d done today, they were spotless still; but she pressed at them now with both hands. “You and I scarcely know each other, Mabry; but let me say one thing I believe I have good evidence for—your dad has talked about you steadily, day and night, ever since I moved here. Every word of it is trusting, funny, curious, and loving . I’m a person who’s had damned little love in her life, so little I could write down the whole story of it right here in my hand.” She held up her left hand and drew a tight circle in the midst of her other palm. Then she brought that palm to her nose and mouth as if to smell and taste again the little she’d known. “He loves you more than anybody left.”

  Mabry thought So what does that amount to? and what he said was “Doesn’t that just mean he’s old and sick enough to think he may just need me soon—some close blood kin to find him a decent bed in a full-care place that likely won’t beat him but will, after all, leave him snoozing out in a wheelchair before a TV next to other mindless abandoned folks that slobber all day and shit their pants?”

  Audrey swallowed hard. “Partly, I guess. But don’t forget I’ve signed on with him—not on paper, understand. We’ve got no contract but I mean to stay as long as he needs me. I’ve already learned a world of good from him.”

  Mabry said “That’s welcome news but Pa could last another twenty years. His own father made it to ninety-eight, mean as pluperfect sin—he was ‘too mean to die’ as my pa used to say. I was with the old bastard once when he reached in his underwear, pulled out a turd the size of a black-marble Ping-Pong ball, and rolled it toward me, saying ‘Eat that for dinner. Full of nutritious minerals.’”

  Audrey said “Again, I’ve got my own evidence in that department—you mentioned old Cooter. She lasted forever and got mighty confused. We were all her enemies in the depths of what little mind she brought up north. We’d moved her to Baltimore by then. Nearly drove me crazy. Maybe it’s why I’m working so hard to get a partial grip on God.” Her face was wrenched but then she laughed somehow at the memory.

  Mabry had to join her. “Teach me that grip if you ever learn it.”

  “It’s a promise,” Audrey said.

  “Meanwhile, let us say—” It took Mabry a good pause to know what he meant to say. “I’ll call you from New York as soon as I’ve got a permanent phone. Pa’s got Charlotte’s number, and I’ve left the hotel number here on the table. I have no idea when I’ll get in my loft, if I even discover it’s reclaimable. I think you know, too, that I may be ill—on a scale from, say, four up to ten and a half. If it’s bad, who knows where I’ll need to go and when? In spite of Charlotte’s very kind letter, I doubt she’s ready for the revelation that her dad’s an invalid, failing by the day or the minute, even if she is the most sincere form of Buddhist alive.”

  Audrey said “Buddhists are the best—aren’t they?—when they’re not too hippie-dippie to see.” Since Mabry couldn’t answer at once, she said “Forgive me please—and don’t think I’m asking in connection with my duty to your father; he and I’ve settled all that—but you said you’re fairly well fixed for money: savings and insurance, I mean, and all such concerns—right?”

  Mabry hadn’t told his father, but now he said “Right. If I’ve got M.S., it won’t last forever; but as long as my eyes and hands still work, I can pay the insurance. Surely they can’t cancel me now that I’m sick.” His word surely suddenly felt absurd. Of course they could cancel him—could and likely would.

  “I doubt any heart as kind as yours is going to wind up alone aboveground.”

  Mabry thanked her. “But I’m not hunting a wife.”

  Audrey smiled slowly. “I wasn’t proposing.”

  “Forgive me please. I hope you know I meant no offense, but you of all people can understand what I may be facing.”

  Audrey said “Thank you, Mabry. But me of all people? What does that mean?” In her face there was no clear sign of anger.

  He waited, then said “You’ve mentioned your childhood in Baltimore, your memories of Cooter—”

  Audrey raised a hand to stop him. “Friend, you’re stuck with more guilt about black folks than I’d estimate is appropriate—for you anyhow, here and now in this one house. You are not your family, not your family a generation or two ago anyhow.”

  That much was a welcome stopgap at least. He had to push a step further on, though. “I have no idea what your salary here is, and I don’t mean to ask you. But if you feel you’re underpaid, please just quietly let me know. I can help out, for a while if not forever.”

  “Thanks but your father’s being very fair to me.”

  Mabry said “Good. But let’s stay in close touch. Tell me if you start feeling overworked or if you need
something Pa can’t help you with.”

  Audrey nodded and made the OK sign with her fine hand.

  The morning was clear and warm before the sun had climbed above the oaks. Mabry skipped breakfast—he’d still not worked off his pre-travel nerves—and by nine he and Marcus had got his one suitcase in the trunk of the car and were ready to leave. Mabry’s anger at his father had nearly subsided—even his disappointment seemed irrelevant—but once he stood alone in the midst of his oldest room, looking round for any last leavings, he faced a fairly surprising final question. How much of a farewell do I owe here? To be sure, he knew there was no way to leave without some at least brief visit to Tasker’s room—or wherever he was.

  He was back in his bedroom with the door half shut (Marcus and Audrey were out on the porch—Mabry heard them talking mildly). So he tapped on his father’s door. No answer. More taps.

  At last Tasker said “You’re generally welcome. Presume I said yes. Step on in.”

  When Mabry crossed the threshold, his father’s back was turned; and the TV of course was pumping out its endless repetition of no further news. Since he’d bought the damned TV only weeks ago, he took the sizable liberty of walking over and turning the volume almost off. When he looked to his father, he expected some sort of response to the liberty. But no, nothing.

  In fact, there was something approaching a grin on the face that was still remarkably firm—no major sags. Tasker even gestured toward the screen. “Kill it all. I’m learning nothing.”

  Mabry obeyed and took a seat. When it was clear his father was waiting for him to speak first, he managed to say “Pa, I’m sorry to leave in the wake of this badness.”

  “You’re referring to New York?”

  “You’re bound to know I mean the graveyard—what you told me there.”