The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  “His whole left side is paralyzed at present. He’s pressed my hand with his right hand though. I think he tried to say my name, but after a while he could say Marcus clearly.” Her voice had stayed firm; she was not breaking up.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Five-fourteen, today. I looked at my watch when I heard him fall.”

  “Who took you to the hospital?”

  “The regular men, paramedics from Sherwin, nice young fellows.”

  “Is his doctor nearby you?”

  Audrey said “No, he’s not in sight.”

  “Then tell me please everything else you know.” She was proving less resourceful than Mabry would have guessed.

  Audrey took a slow breath. “It’s serious business, I know that much. I’ve told you about his left side and his speech. I truly don’t think he’s in real pain. He doesn’t seem distressed at all. He’s even smiled a time or two—I think it’s a smile.”

  Mabry needed to say Do you think he’s dying? But he couldn’t make himself, for whoever’s sake. He thought of his own appointment on Friday—that could surely wait. He said what he dreaded. “Has he asked for me?”

  Audrey waited to think. “No, not yet.”

  “But you can’t imagine him ever improving, not this far along?”

  Audrey said “I’m trying not to think that.”

  Mabry said “Then you’ll understand that there’s nobody left but me to think it.” When she didn’t reply in five seconds, he said “I’ll be there then. Can you or Marcus be with him till I come?”

  “I’m signed on, yes.”

  “Is Marcus with you now?”

  “He will be any time.”

  Mabry looked to his own watch—7:20 p.m. “Audrey, tell my father I’ll be there just as soon as I can. I’ll start calling airlines the minute we hang up. I may not make it before tomorrow morning. Give me a number where you are, and I’ll let you know.”

  She read out the number. Then she said “Maybe you don’t have to come now. He’s in good hands.”

  “I don’t doubt that, not at all; but Audrey, Tasker Kincaid is my only father.” It was no attempt to trump her authority, only the truth and a truth he hoped his father might care to hear.

  A half hour later Mabry had a reservation that would get him into Raleigh-Durham at noon tomorrow. Then just as he picked up the phone to call Audrey, his own mind crashed. I can’t fly down there alone this time. Maybe Audrey can count on me, but I sure-God can’t count on myself. He dialed Baxter’s number and Miles answered promptly. It took no more than a hundred words between them for Mabry to realize Miles was politely bailing out of any thought of signing on for duty with a man who might be gravely ill, even for two or three days farther south. When he tried one further word of persuasion, Miles finally said “As you’ll understand, sir, I need to be here if Mr. Sample rings this bell.”

  Increasingly impossible as that ring was, Mabry understood; and he sat through as much of his supper as he could manage to eat, trying to think of any escort—even a doorman or bellman from downstairs (Charlotte couldn’t handle a physical crisis if one should descend; and though Malcolm could, he wouldn’t ask for her this soon in their acquaintance, not unless everyone else should fail him). Marcus dawned on him next. Hadn’t Marcus said he’d never been to New York? In any case, Marc was clearly the right man, if Audrey could spare him for the time it would take to fly up here, then fly back with Mabry and drive him on to Tasker’s bedside or wherever Tasker would be by then.

  Five

  9 . 20 . 01

  9 . 22 . 01

  It worked. Mabry met Marcus at security in LaGuardia, precisely on time. The passengers around them were much like any day’s airport crowd, a little more nervous-eyed maybe than usual but surely not bizarre; and after a very smooth flight to Raleigh-Durham, they’d driven on the final two hours and were outside Tasker’s door by midafternoon—Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, a textile-mill town on the cruel Roanoke, a river that had flooded farmlands and houses for more than three centuries till a dam was built in the 1950s. Mabry set his one bag down by the shut door and asked Marcus to step in and bring Audrey out, if she was there.

  She was but, when she came out to meet him, her whole body was dead-beat tired; and she said “Thank God” as her right hand came out and pressed Mabry’s chest—the first time, surely, she’d ever touched him purposely.

  Marcus walked past her on into the room.

  But Mabry waited outside with Audrey, thinking she might have some news for him or at least a signal to follow her in.

  She stood on, dazed, apparently waiting for the same thing from him.

  So he said “Is it all right to go in now?”

  She seemed to think it through. “I believe he already knows you’re out here.”

  “You told him I was coming?”

  Audrey said “I tried to. I haven’t been sure he’s understood a word I’ve said since he fell down yesterday.”

  “Has he said anything else, last night or today?”

  “I don’t think he’s tried, no. Not while I was with him, and I’ve hardly left the room. But as I told you, he’s been mainly calm.”

  Mabry said “Then I’ll go in.” When Audrey didn’t move, he picked up his bag and gently moved past her.

  The blinds were closed against the strong sunlight, but a single lamp shone over the bed; and Tasker was laid out straight as any parade-ground soldier with only the cover folded back above his bad ankle.

  A sort of invisible clean glass wall stopped Mabry halfway toward the bed, and while he stood there silently—with Marcus smiling on the far side of his father—Tasker turned to face him. Mabry even took a single step forward, but again he was stopped. What’s stalling me here? Then it came to him, something that seemed too absurd to be the answer. He’ll prove he can speak by calling me Gabe. So still in place, five yards from his father, Mabry said “I’d have picked a cheaper place for a rest.” When Tasker blinked hard, Mabry said “It’s Mabry, Pa. Your main bad penny has turned up one more time.”

  Tasker blinked again, glanced backward to Marcus—Marcus tapped him on the hip—then set his still powerful eyes on Mabry. The eyes were half wild, but his voice was normal—“Alec, Alec.” Then he freed his right hand and arm from the cover and beckoned slightly toward him. Alec was Tasker’s awful father’s name, from Alexander. Tasker had wanted to name Mabry that, but his wife had prevailed (Mabry was her own father’s name).

  Well, hell, it beats any other name but mine. The intervening wall dissolved, and Mabry answered his father’s invitation inward. Only when he got there and took Tasker’s hand—it was warm as ever—could he say “Mabry, sir. Anything on Earth you need from Mabry?”

  The eyes had lost not one amp of power, but they filled with tears.

  Mabry slowly leaned and pressed his forehead against his father’s hand.

  By then Marcus had brought a chair which Mabry could sit in beside the bed.

  It was no surprise that the doctor proved to be a dot Indian (as opposed to feather Indian, a Native American). They were mostly found in small hospitals now but were likewise frequent in towns and cities—thirty years ago, Southern towns this size often had no doctors or only a single aging and impossibly burdened Anglo. Mabry had asked for him at the nurses’ station shortly after he arrived.

  It was nearly sunset, however, before the young doctor entered Tasker’s room—white-coated, grave, darker-skinned than Audrey or Marcus or more than half the Afro-Americans in the hospital and almost alarmingly young in the face. Audrey and Marcus had gone back to Wells to check on the house and collect a few things; and Mabry was still seated close to his father, though Tasker seemed to have drifted off. Every few minutes his eyes would open and search round for Mabry; but since he’d said Alec, he’d tried nothing else.

  Dr. Sharma, by his name tag, apparently didn’t see Mabry’s offer of a handshake. Instead he made his own offer, a narrow smile so quick it seemed to
have flown in and out on hummingbird wings. Then he raised his naturally soft voice and spoke to Tasker. “Reverend Kincaid, how is your day progressing, sir?”

  Tasker’s eyes were open and they found the doctor’s face, but he gave no sign, and he said no words.

  Dr. Sharma said “We can be pleased that your son is here, can’t we?”

  Before the doctor had even reached the end of his question, Mabry could hear the note of exhaustion. This man was needing to get home for dinner, if he had a home; or was he an unwed medical resident who was working the usual forty-hour shift? So Mabry stood and nearly whispered “May we step outside?”

  In the hall Dr. Sharma seemed even more drained. At best, he was half a head shorter than Mabry; but now he spoke first. “You know that your father has suffered a stroke?”

  “I understand that, yes. His assistant, Ms. Thornton, phoned me in New York last night and told me. I got down as fast as I possibly could.”

  Dr. Sharma tried to look pleased at the news but offered nothing more.

  Mabry said “How bad is the damage? What can we hope for?”

  Before he replied, Dr. Sharma seemed to summon a powerful memory. I’m the physician here. Stand fully upright and summon all your powers. Then he said “Mr. Kincaid, I cannot answer that. Please remind me, how old is our father?”

  “He’s eighty-three.” I’ll ignore the our.

  Dr. Sharma said, with the certainty of any Brahmin priest, “He could live another twenty years and move about slightly, if you have such genes in the family line. He could have another stroke in the next five minutes and die before morning or here and now. But so could I, Mr. Kincaid. So could you.” At last he smiled fully—authority asserted.

  Mabry wanted to slug the little man or, at the very least, welcome him to small-town North Carolina with a bouquet of the local racist epithets. All he said was “Is my father likely to sit up again? Will he speak freely?”

  “Ah Mr. Kincaid, who am I to know? If you asked me to guess, I should say ‘Not likely’ to either question. But if you’d like me to hope that he will, then I’ll hope for him—and your family—strongly.”

  Mabry had encountered more than several doctors in recent months, all Anglo or Jewish. However smug Dr. Sharma’s delivery, though, his last few sentences were far more humane than any other recent medical sentiment Mabry had met with. He’d offered a half-amusing mix of Western hyper-certainty and Eastern fatalism. So Mabry grinned. “How much longer can you help him here?”

  Dr. Sharma didn’t understand.

  Mabry said “I’m asking, when should we take him home?”

  “Ah.” The doctor looked down at his hands, his almost tiny fingers, beautiful nails surely armed with skill. Then he faced Mabry squarely for the first time yet. “Please leave him with me another day or two. Let him rest here with these very kind nurses. Then I will try to tell you, very truly, where his best chances are.”

  In a mere three sentences, Sharma had further unveiled a human heart. So Mabry came very close now to asking for this young doctor’s attention to his own hard and pressing concerns.

  That evening, which was September 20th—tired as Mabry was from the sleepless prior night in New York—he wouldn’t hear, from Audrey or Marcus, of returning to Wells for a solid rest in his old bed there. He sat in the dark of Tasker’s room, in a crazily awkward reclining chair, and stole snatches of rest between the clattering entries of nurses and orderlies in search of necessary temperature readings, blood-pressure levels, and taps on the intravenous bag that was channeling some unlabeled liquid into Tasker’s arm.

  After each such maddening visit—Mabry had to assume Tasker thought they were nothing but willful blunders—he’d go to his father’s side and speak to him quietly, explaining what had only just happened and offering him a minute or so of calming talk. He gave him carefully edited scraps of a cheerful account of his days in New York—of his good time with Charlotte (omitting any mention of Malcolm), his lunch with a woman as attractive as Blair, and the fact that he’d found his loft in uninhabitable state (for reasons even Mabry didn’t search, he omitted the plan to have the super clean up his space).

  He even offered Tasker stretches of verse that he knew his father was bound to welcome—odes by Keats, Shakespeare sonnets, poems of Tennyson with heavy stress on death and immortality: all of which Mabry had learned as a lucky veteran of the last generation of American schoolboys who’d had long hours of memorized verse drilled into their skulls. Whether his offerings reached deep enough into his father’s brain to work even brief consolation, he’d never know. What seemed clear was that once he’d whispered his way through two or three sane minutes, Tasker’s eyes would close and his breathing would slow to almost nothing.

  The following day was hardly different—Tasker offered no other word to add to yesterday’s Alec—so when Audrey and Marcus arrived in early afternoon, Mabry let them persuade him to drive to Wells and rest himself. He went to Tasker and asked for permission (Tasker gave no sign of refusal at least). He gave the nurses his best phone numbers and asked that Dr. Sharma be told how ready he’d be for news of any downslide in his father’s condition. Finally he asked that Audrey and Marcus give him a minute alone with his father. They calmly agreed and again he went to his father’s right side, the side that still worked.

  Tasker’s eyes were on him like searching black lasers; and his lips seemed, for more than a minute, on the verge of speech. But no words came, no sound at all.

  So Mabry told his father where he’d be for the next few hours—either at the house in Wells or in Sherwin with Gwyneth Williams. And he said “Is there anything at all you want me to know or do? Just say the word, Pa; and I’ll do my damnedest.”

  Next came a long preparation for speech; and this time actual words came clearly. “Good night, officer.”

  Pure late-summer sunlight was pouring through the window beyond the bed—it was just past one in the afternoon—and Mabry was wearing no sign of any officer’s uniform, but he quickly decided not to alter his father’s sense of time or his hope of identifying live faces. He couldn’t conceal, though, his pleasure to hear that primeval voice—a father’s, a priest’s, the voice he’d hope to hear at the portals of any afterlife that might lurk. So he said “Pa, I plan to sleep till next dawn. But you get Audrey to call the house any instant you want me.” He heard how much of the bitterness he’d carried north to New York had stayed up there. Well, he had no plans to flag it southward. He laid his hand beneath Tasker’s hand, spread broad on the sheet. And Mabry would have sworn in a court of law that Tasker Kincaid tapped the back of his palm, very strongly, with one or two fingers but no more words.

  Mabry found Audrey and Marcus in the little waiting room near his father’s door. He told them he’d go straight to Tasker’s house and try to rest there; they should phone him if there were any changes whatsoever in his father’s condition. He could see, from the set of Audrey’s face, that she felt two ways—a little offended that he took such a dug-in air of command but also mildly amused that such a prodigal son had returned so boldly.

  Marcus himself was likewise amused, and he showed it more plainly. He even said “Since you’re trusting my mom pretty fully, maybe I can get on back to Sherwin and do a little lucrative work of my own. I got my cell phone.”

  Mabry told them both he’d try to be back by midnight at least. Could one of them manage to be here till then?

  Audrey said “I can be here till Hell freezes over. Father Kincaid’s been too good to me to fail on him now.”

  So Mabry told them what he hadn’t planned to tell—that his father had spoken one more time. He quoted the two first words—Good night—but for whatever reason he kept the third word officer to himself. And he asked Audrey please to write down anything else his father might say.

  Audrey patted her big shoulder bag. “I’ve got pen and paper enough to write down the entire Bible if necessary.”

  There was a genuine pause in the roo
m—was her voice truly angry?—but then all three of them broke out laughing.

  An ancient woman, white and wearing a faded wash dress, had entered and was sitting in the far corner chair. At the laughter she dropped her magazine to the floor beside her and said “Oh please help an old country woman join your fun.” Her eyes were as dark and bottomless as if she’d borne every human pain of the past thousand years.

  Audrey and Marcus silently deferred the reply to Mabry. Let the white man answer.

  Mabry was stumped, though. He stayed in place and tried to look away.

  So at last Marcus felt someone had to speak. “Ma’m, we’re just fools—so tired we’re fools.” He stepped on toward her and bent to retrieve her magazine.

  She reached out, took his wrist, and found his face. Then she finally said, in a voice that might have come from any tobacco field in the eighteenth century, before the Revolution, “Son, I’ve met a fool or two down the years. You’re way too smart, in the face and ears, to claim that title.” Then she offered a curious laugh of her own, more nearly a strangling.

  Marcus leaned and kissed the absolute center of her small head, right on the ruled-straight part in her hair.

  She craned back and, once more, turned her bruised eyes on him. Then she said “I can thank you.” But as Marcus turned toward his own mother, the woman said to the three people standing before her, “Do yall understand that my own daddy would have killed this boy for less than that?” When all three agreed, she said “Thank Jesus my dad’s been dead and cold for eighty years, though he still gets to me some full-moon nights.” And again she gave her terrible laugh.

  Since Mabry was leaving, he thought he’d include the old woman in his parting. “Ma’m, is some member of your family a patient here?”

  She nodded. “My son. Last drop of living blood I’ve got on the Earth.”

  Mabry said “Is he doing any better?”