In the first night after my third long surgery, which spent nine hours inside a foot-long stretch of my spinal cord with lasers and knives, I was on morphine; but it helped very little. My previous times on strong doses had all been dreamy womblike days of absolute safety and dreamless nights of deep brown rest. Only when the drug was withdrawn after three or four days would I dream again, mostly nightmares as though my mind must suddenly splurge on terror after its long pause. But this third time the opiate flew on through me helpless as fruit-juice to touch my pain. And all that night I woke fairly often and told my tape recorder the dream I just had. Most were stories.
Listening now to the halting tape, I can still be held by two of the dreams, both thoroughly pleasant. The first was a poem about a piece of music that, more than once, had helped me survive.
One of the palpable reproducible pleasures of the race—
To lie in a dark room and hear Bach’s third orchestral suite Build and destroy, assail and regale its golden pavilions
In the air of one’s ears:
The healing light of utter power,
Utter content, actual promise.
In the second dream my mind took the urinary problems of a bedridden paraplegic and wove them into a full-dress imitation Bible story. On his deathbed an aged patriarch bade farewell to his grieving sons by explaining the useful symbolism of the shape of a large pee stain on the sheet. The name of the stain, he said, was Djibouti; and somehow to me that seemed good news, worth storing at least.
But then as the pain continued to mount, sometime near dawn I underwent my old boyhood dream of total paralysis. I noticed two big differences at once—I’m now a grown man on a hospital bed, not a boy in a tent; and at first I seem entirely alone. The fear of my body’s total stall is as high as ever though. I don’t give a thought to Little Frances; she left my mind too long ago. Yet when I fail to wake myself, my frozen eyes begin to catch a rising light on the bed to my left. I do my best to watch it, and what I finally manage to glimpse is a woman my age in a standard-issue hospital gown—blond hair but streaked with gray. Her eyes are clamped shut; can it be my cousin Marcia?
But then as I watch, her whole body gives a terrible shake as though an awful fist has struck her. Next her fine head jerks back hard; and still not opening her eyes or turning, whatever afflicts her draws her whole shape up from the bed till she makes an awful hoop in the air. I hear the sickening crack of bones as her head and heels meet beneath her. Then she turns one slow revolution above me till her face meets mine. Her eyes split open and of course it’s Frances—grown, even older and worse off than me.
I try to think of a way to thank her, to beg her pardon for using her name to punish Stooks—his face sweeps past me for the first time in years, falling in on itself as it did when I hurt him. No way I can reach out and bring him back. I only think that maybe here in my own ordeal—if I bear it more bravely—I can somehow reach back and lighten Frances own long crucifixion. Someway I can suffer, here and now, to lighten her pain all those years past.
But when I find that my lips can open, my tongue can move, Frances starts to fade above me. Not before she speaks two words. Just as she’s almost gone from the room, her parched lips move; and she says “Stay here.” I understand she’s heard my offer, silent as it was, to suffer for her. So I stay as she goes; and then I try to draw my mind back down inside me and wait in dignified calm, if not peace.
In general I’m readier than most of my friends to share the ancient human belief that some dreams may well come from outside us, as warnings or omens or practical aids from whatever made us and watches our lives. So even now I’m not prepared to swear that Frances didn’t really arrive in my mind that night on a useful mission. Likewise I stay openminded on what her two words meant. “Stay here”—stay where? In a hospital bed in driving pain? Or stay on Earth till she comes back and leads me again? But where to and how? Is part of the trouble I’ve recently known intended to do what I guessed in that dream—to give some backward help to Frances; some sharing and thinning of her ordeal, her dreadful knowledge?
Whatever it meant and goes on meaning, I obeyed her. I stayed, that night and till now. When I woke at daylight after she’d gone, the upper half of my body could move. My legs were still frozen, useless as logs screwed onto my hips. But three years later my hands still work and have told this story. When Marcia and I and all our generation are gone, at least this picture of one good child’s burning death will stay behind us.
No one could help Frances Rodwell back then, even there at her bedside with cool compresses. How much less can I reach her now, a boy cousin not even born when she died. But strangely now I can hope to save her simple name a few years longer by fixing her fierce ordeal in words that may or may not move a few readers to look her way in their own short spans—a golden child clawed down by the dark but ready to live again any year in a patient mind that pauses a moment and gives her room.
TRUTH AND LIES
GUESSING THE SIGNAL Sarah Wilson flashed the car lights once. Nothing came or moved, only a rabbit close to the car, tan and quick in momentary light, eye congealed in terror. So she signaled again. Then dark and alone she said, “I will not break down. If she comes, if she’s who I think she is, I will not give her that satisfaction.” She shut her eyes to test her strength, to probe again the hole at the core of her chest. Then she hung her hands on the wheel, gripped till her ring ground loud on the grinding of crickets outside, and spoke again, “Don’t let me break down now.” That much was prayer to whatever might help—offered up through clear August night or ahead through glass to weeds of the railroad bank ten yards away where a girl had risen and stood now giant on the tracks and, seeing the second light, ran toward it. The crickets stopped as she split the weeds (safe down the bank from nights of practice), and her face stayed hid (a smile surely curled in the rims of her mouth). But she shrank as she came. That much made her bearable and when she crossed the last few feet and opened the door and lit the light, she reached her natural size; and Sarah Wilson could look and say, “Ella. I hoped it would not be you.”
There had been no smile. There was none at their recognition. “Yes ma’m. It’s Ella.”
“And it’s been you all this time.”
Ella straightened into the dark, then leaned again. “I don’t know how much time you mean, Mrs. Wilson.”
“Oh I mean since before you were born, I guess.”
“I am eighteen, Mrs. Wilson. It has been me since last December twentieth. Whoever was before me, I don’t know her name.”
That was true and saying it, hearing it, drained what was left of Ella’s smile, Sarah Wilson’s starting courage. So they hung in dull creamy light, picking each other’s familiar faces for something to hate or forgive. But nothing was there, not yet, nothing they had not known and seen hundreds of times the past four years—Ella Scott’s that had narrowed and paled beneath darkening hair to the sudden hot papery looks that all her sisters wore from the time they slouched through Sarah Wilson’s class into a mill to watch loud machines make ladies’ hose till the day they won boys who set them working on babies and the looks dried in as the skin drew yellow to their bones. And Sarah Wilson’s that had never won praise even twenty years ago when she came here from college, had only won Nathan Wilson and then watched his life with no sign of cracking, yielding, except on her lips that did not close, that stretched back always to speak (speech being something that held back conclusions).
Sarah Wilson said, “I know. Sooner or later I know every name. But I didn’t know yours till he came in at seven, drunk, and fell on the bed asleep and I undressed him and found this note.” She took up a folded note from the seat, opened, studied it again—I have got something to tell you and will be on the tracks tonight at nine o’clock. No name. Then she looked to the girl. “Well, your writing has improved.” Then “Ella, if you don’t mean to run now and never come back, never see Mr. Wilson or me again, will you get in here and talk to
me? You know I don’t mean you harm.”
“I know that, Mrs. Wilson.” Ella still leaned in the open door, a hand on the seat-back. “I don’t think I mean you no harm either; so if you need to talk—yes ma’m, I can listen.”
Sarah Wilson’s throat closed at that. Then she could say against her will, “I don’t need anything you’ve got to give”; but she smoothed the cloth of the empty seat and Ella slid in. “Shut the door please. We have got to ride. We’ll burn up here.”
Ella nodded—ahead at the glass. “Yes ma’m. But I got to be home by ten o’clock. My daddy’s home tonight and he wants me back.”
“Whoever you’re with?”
“Daddy knows who I’m with, who I come to meet anyhow.”
“And he didn’t stop you or warn you?”
“Mrs. Wilson, you know I have paid my way since I was sixteen.” The engine ignited, the lights struck dust, weeds, the crest of the bank. “I have stood in that dimestore thousands of hours ringing up Negro quarters for some plastic nothing that lasts as far as the door. Daddy just owns the lock on the house—or rents it. He don’t own me, if he ever did. Looks like nobody owns me now.” She faced Sarah Wilson and managed a smile.
But Sarah Wilson missed it. She had taken the wheel and turned them slowly toward the road; and they went two miles in silence—flanking the tracks at first and, beyond, the huddle of mill-owned huts where Ella would sleep; then across on a road that narrowed soon to a damp dirt swath through tobacco, cotton, black pine. They did not look beyond open windows. It was all their home, their daily lives. Ella stared forward. Sarah Wilson drove and felt the questions stack in her forehead; but the air swept cooler over them, bearing the cold sound of crickets again, and when they had passed a final house (its single light well back from the road) and nothing lay ahead but eight miles of burnt field, wild woods, Sarah Wilson started. “Ella, I think you have told me the truth so far and I’m grateful; but I’m asking you to answer some things I need to ask. You may say it’s none of my business—”
“—It’s your business, yes ma’m. And I come on this ride of my own will, so you got a right to ask anything; but I got a right not to answer what hurts.”
Sarah Wilson set that against what questions were waiting, said to herself, “She is nothing but an ignorant child Nathan tinkered with. I knew her, taught her before she had power to hurt a flea much less break my life. Don’t let me hurt her now.” She waited a minute to strengthen that purpose. Then she started from the edge. “You say it’s been you since December twentieth. That was the Christmas program. “
“Yes ma’m. After Mr. Wilson carried you home, he come back to check on us and close the auditorium. Everybody was feeling good and it took awhile to clean up the stage, and by then it had started sleeting. None of the others were headed for the mill so Mr. Wilson took me.”
“—And started his Christmas drunk.”
“No ma’m. Mr. Wilson don’t drink where I am. I never have seen him take a drink. I have smelt it on him and known what it was—I have got brothers—but he has been nice about that with me.”
“Well, he started it after he left you then and brought it to me next morning for Christmas. The drinking is something he saves for me.”
“Yes ma’m. I noticed that was it. Marvin is that way—Aleen’s husband. He’ll be gone whole days at a time, but let him get tight and he heads for home and hands Aleen a drunk like his pay.” It had come to her naturally—Aleen’s trouble. But once it was out, she guessed it might slow Mrs. Wilson, win her a rest; so she faced the open window.
And it worked. Aleen was the first Scott girl, Ella’s senior by nine or ten years. Once a student left Sarah Wilson’s class, she lost count of dates, age, their work. But she often retained the thought of their faces. Years later they would rise when she saw in the paper their weddings, children, by now even deaths (faces full for that year with premature life knocking beneath still formless noses, jaws); and Aleen’s came to her now as it had a month before when she read Mrs. Marvin Maynard has returned to her home after two weeks in Baptist Hospital. So slowing a little she said to Ella, “I saw Aleen was sick again. Same trouble?”
“Yes ma’m. Third time. They fixed her though so she couldn’t go through it again—her heart’s affected. This one lived four days but they said he wouldn’t never be right. Then he died, which I guess was a blessing.”
“Poor Aleen. Tell her I sent my sympathies to her.”
“Yes ma’m. Aleen has not had a easy life. I thought it would work this time. She took things easy, wanted it so bad. To calm things down, she said.”
The hole fell open in Sarah Wilson’s chest. Her foot weighed down on the gas; and she said, “You slept with Mr. Wilson that first night, didn’t you?”
“Yes ma’m.”
“And you’ve gone on sleeping with him—eight months nearly?”
“Yes ma’m, I have.”
“And you don’t think that’s a sin?”
“Yes ma’m, I do.”
“Then why didn’t you stop? Just stop?”
“I don’t know. Because Mr. Wilson was nice to me, I guess. I don’t mean to say he gave me things. He didn’t—oh a Pepsi now and then, and we drove twenty miles for that so nobody wouldn’t recognize him—but he talked to me. He told me once he needed me to listen. So I just listened.”
“To what?”
“You know it already—the times he had when he was a boy and being in the Army and coming here to teach and jokes his classes play on him—”
“—And marrying me.”
“No ma’m. He don’t speak of you. The one time I mentioned your name, he said ‘Stop.’ I was just saying how good you had been when you were my teacher, talking me into finishing high school and helping me get that job.”
“So you could hang around four more years to sleep with my husband.” She held back because they had come to a junction, then stopped, thought, turned to the left. Then, “Was he the first man you slept with, Ella?”
The road they were on was paved again, concrete joints thudding under the wheels at a regular count of three; and shortly they met a car. Its light struck Ella’s turned face and its horn tore loudly past them. Ella swung toward it and watched it away—four ducking heads, two laughing girls, two boys. Then facing backwards she started, flat and sudden, turning as she went, “I ain’t slept anywhere near your husband. All him and me has had is a dozen or so twenty-minute spells on this dirty seat.” She slung her thumb toward the dark back seat, looked to confirm the vacant place, rushed on—“No ma’m, he was not the first. He was just the nicest. Still is. He is the only person in my whole life who asks me what I want to do—and waits for me to decide. What we have done is what I wanted to do; and look what it’s been so far”—her thumb stabbed again—“a lot of quick dirt. But I’m not turning loose. Not now. Not with the little I’ve got. No ma’m.” Still half backwards she laid her head on the top of the seat, her eyes toward Sarah Wilson but shut, dry.
Sarah Wilson managed to drive through that; and when Ella finished they were on the outskirts of Kinley, Sarah Wilson’s birthplace, hardly a town. She drove through it slowly, the car lights dully slapping two strips of wooden buildings that lined the road, three general stores, post office, gas pump; then, set back, the squatty houses that held what was left of the dozen white families who owned the stores, the farms, still owned the best part of whoever lived in the broken ring that lay in the dark, farther out behind this road (tenants, field hands, nurses, cooks). Beyond that far ring was Sarah Wilson’s home, the place she dreaded. She was numb to the rest of Kinley; and she passed it thinking only, “I have gone too far. I will turn at the station and carry her home and ask her to quit.”
The station was at the end of town. Only two trains a day came now, except for the freights that gathered pulpwood; and the evening train was surely gone, so the station should have been dark. But when she turned in, a last light showed in the passenger office, then vanished. She swun
g the car round on a cushion of pine bark; and just as she straightened to pull away, a man appeared in the station door and came down the steps, old and careful, not seeing till he reached the bottom. But then he waved and hurried toward them. It was Mr. Whitlow, the station master; and though he had been here always, Sarah Wilson had not seen him in the twenty-five years since he sold her the tickets that took her from Kinley to teacher’s college. So she waited now and he came to Ella’s side and said, “Train’s left. Nothing on it but Negroes. Were you looking for somebody?”
Ella said “No” and looked to Sarah Wilson.
Sarah Wilson said, “It’s Sarah Shaw, Mr. Whitlow—Sarah Wilson. I haven’t seen you in twenty-five years.”
He stared across and said, “Sarah Shaw. Has it been that long? Why don’t you come to see us sometime?”
She said, “I keep busy. I do come down every once in a while to see Holt, but since Aunt Alice died I don’t come much. She was the last I had down here.”
He said, “I know it. I saw Holt today, walking past here. Straight as a rail and about as hard. Too mean to die. Is anybody out there with him now?”
“Not a soul and he says that’s how he wants it. The others are gone— dead or in Richmond.”
“Just Holt and the devil.” He touched Ella’s shoulder. “Sarah, is this your girl?”
“No sir. We don’t have children. This is Ella Scott. She was my student four years ago.”
“Was she a good one?”
“Good enough to finish. She finished this spring and is leaving for Raleigh, to business school.”
He said “Good for her,” looking past Ella to Sarah Wilson.
But Ella said, “I am thinking about it.”
He studied her and said, “Go. If you’ve got good sense you’ll get out of here. Your teacher yonder had the sense to leave. If she had stayed here she’d have died in misery twenty years ago. Trouble was, she came more than halfway back. Love, won’t it, Sarah?”
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 43
