Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  But that didn’t go on long because on the third day Rato came in from sitting in the hall all morning and said they had just now put some fellow in that empty room. Rosacoke was sorry to hear it. It meant she wouldn’t get to go over there in the afternoon any more but she didn’t say that. She would rather have died than tell Rato how much time she spent there, looking out a window. Papa wanted to know who it was that could take a twelve-dollar room, and Rato said it was a big man. Papa was disappointed too. He had got it figured there was something wrong with that room, lying empty three days or more. Rato said the man’s wife and boy were with him—“I expect it was his boy. Looked like he was anyhow. The man hisself didn’t look a bit sick. Walked in on his own steam, talking and laughing.” Rosacoke wanted to know if they were rich, but Rato couldn’t say, said he didn’t know. You couldn’t ever tell about Rato though, how much he knew. He wasn’t anybody’s fool. He just liked the idea of not telling all he knew. Keeping a few secrets was everything Rato had. So Rosacoke said, “Well, he’s getting a beautiful room” and then walked over and buttoned Papa’s night shirt. She made him stay buttoned square up to the neck all the time because she couldn’t stand to look at his old chest. Papa said he was hot as a mink in Africa and that his chest had been that hairy ever since he shaved it to be Maid of Honor in the womanless wedding Delight Church put on when he was seventeen years old.

  The night before, when the lights were out but they were still awake, Papa asked Rato to name the best thing he had seen since arriving, and Rato said, “That old lady with all the cards in the big ward down the hall.” Rosacoke said, “What sort of cards?” “Every sort there is— Mother’s Day, Valentine, Birthday, Christmas …” Papa said, “GetWell cards?” “She ain’t going to get well. She’s too old.” Rosacoke said “How old?” and Rato said, “What’s the oldest thing you know?” She thought and said “God.” “Well, she’s something similar to that.” Rosacoke and Papa laughed but Rato said, “I’m telling the truth. Go take a look if you get the chance. She sleeps all the time.” Then they went to sleep but Rosacoke knew he was telling the truth, and anyhow he spoke of his doings so seldom she thought she would take his advice. So the afternoon the man took the twelve-dollar room, she went down while Papa was nodding, and at first it looked the way Rato promised. There was a lady older than God in the bed by the door (saving her a walk past nine other beds), covered to the chin and flat as a plank with no pillow under her head, just steel-colored hair laid wild on the sheets. Rosacoke stepped close enough to see her eyes were shut, and thinking the lady was asleep, she looked up towards a sunburst of greeting cards fanned on the wall over the bed, but she hadn’t looked fifteen seconds when the lady shot bolt-upright and spoke in a voice like a fingernail scraping down a dry blackboard—“Praise my Jesus.” Rosacoke said “Yes’m” and the lady smiled and said, “Step here, honey, and take a seat and I’ll tell you how I got saved at age eighty-one in the midst of a meeting of two hundred people. Then I’ll show you my cards—sent by my Sunday school class and my many friends”—and commenced scratching her hair. But Rosacoke said, “No thank you, ma’m” and walked out quicker than she came. She went a few feet outside the door and stopped and thought, “I ought to be ashamed, getting her hopes up. I ought to go back and let her talk.” Then she heard the lady’s voice scraping on to the empty air so she said to herself, “If I went for five minutes, I’d be there all afternoon, hearing about her cards. Papa is my duty.” And anyhow she didn’t like the lady. It was fine for your friends to send you cards, but that was no reason to organize a show as if you were the only person in the hospital with that many friends and all of them with nothing in the world to do but sit down and write you cards all day. She thought that out and then headed for Papa.

  She was walking down the mile-long hall when she saw him—not right at first. At first she was too busy looking at people laid back with their doors open. She didn’t know a one of them, not even their faces the way Rato did. The only thing she knew was Snowball Mason in one room, talking to some old man that looked so small in his little outing pajamas with his legs hanging off the bed no more than an inch from the floor like thin dry tan gourds swinging in a wind on somebody’s back porch somewhere. Snowball saw her and remembered her as being from Warren County and bowed. She stopped to talk but she happened to look towards the left, and there he was—Wesley—sitting way down across from Papa’s door, dressed to the ears and watching the floor the way he always did, not studying people. Still he had come sixty miles to see her so she whispered to Snowball she had to go and went to meet Wesley, holding back from running and trying not to look as if she had seen a ghost which was close to what she had seen, considering this was the last hope she had. He hadn’t seen her yet and she could surprise him. She hadn’t really missed him so much till now, but when she got nearer she knew how sorry she would be to miss this Saturday with him, and she speeded her steps but kept them quiet. She was almost on him and he put his hands across his eyes—it would be Wesley all over to go to sleep waiting for her—so she came up to him and smiled and said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Beavers, is there something I can do for you?”

  But it wasn’t Wesley at all. It was somebody she hadn’t ever seen before, somebody who didn’t really look very much like Wesley when she thought about it. It took whoever it was a little while to realize she was speaking to him, and when he looked up he looked sad and nearly as young as Rosacoke. He looked a little blank too, the way everybody does when you have called them by the wrong name and they don’t want you to know it. In a minute he said, “Oh no ma’m, thank you.” “No ma’m”-as if Rosacoke was some kind of nurse.

  It just about killed her to have done that like some big hussy. The only thing left to say was “Excuse me,” and she almost didn’t get that out before shutting Papa’s door behind her, the hot blood knocking in her ears. Papa was still asleep but Rato was standing by the window, having some Nabs and a Pepsi for dinner, and when she could speak she said would he please peep out and see who that was sitting in the hall. As if Rato had ever peeped in his life. He had done plenty of looking but no peeping so he just pulled open the door as if he was headed for dinner and gave the boy a look. Before he got the door closed good, he said, “Nobody but that man’s boy from across the hall. That man they moved in today.” Rosacoke said “Thank you” and later on that afternoon she wondered if since he looked like Wesley, that boy could say goodbye like Wesley could.

  If they didn’t do anything else, those people across the hall at least gave Papa something to think about. They kept their door shut all the time except when somebody was going or coming, and even then they were usually too quick for Rato to get a good enough look to report anything. Something was bound to be wrong though because of all the nurses and doctors hanging around and the way that boy looked whenever he walked out in the hall for a few minutes. Rato reported he saw the man’s wife once. He said she was real pretty and looked like she was toting the burden of the world on her shoulders. Even Rato could tell that. So Papa couldn’t help asking Snowball the next time he got a chance what was wrong with that man. Snowball said he didn’t know and if he did he wouldn’t be allowed to say and that made Papa mad. He knew Snowball spent about two-thirds of his time in the man’s room, taking bedpans in and out, and he told Snowball at the top of his voice, “That white coat you got on has gone to your head.” Rosacoke could have crawled under the bed, but there was no stopping Papa once he got started. You just pretended hadn’t a thing happened and he would quiet down. She could tell it got Snowball’s goat though and she was sorry. He walked out of Papa’s room with his ice-cream coat hanging off him as if somebody had unstarched it.

  But that evening when it was time for him to go home, Snowball came back in. He didn’t have his white coat on, and that meant he was off duty. He had on his sheepish grin, trying to show he had come on a little social call to see how Papa was making out, but Rosacoke knew right off he had come to apologize to Papa who
was taking a nap so she shook Papa and said Snowball wanted to speak to him. Papa raised up blinking and said “Good evening, Snow,” and Rosacoke couldn’t help smiling at how Snowball turned into a snake doctor, dipping up and down around Papa. He said he just wondered how Mr. Mustian was coming on this afternoon, and did they have any old newspapers he could take home to start fires with? Papa said he was tolerable and hadn’t looked at a newspaper since the jimsonweeds took over the Government. What he meant was the Republicans, and he said, “The bad thing about jimsonweeds, Snow, is they reseeds theyselves.”

  Snowball hadn’t come in on his own time to hear that though, and it didn’t take him long to work his way to Papa’s bed and lean over a lot closer than Papa liked for anybody to get to him and say it the same way he would have told a secret. “Mr. Mustian, they fixing to take out that gentleman’s lung.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “That Mr. Ledwell yonder in the room across the hall. He got a eating-cancer. That’s what I hear his nurse say. But don’t tell nobody. I just thought you might want to know so soons I found out …”

  “A eating-cancer? That’s what it is?”

  “They don’t seem to be no doubt about it. I done already shaved his chest for surgery. He taking his operation in the morning at eight. “

  Papa wanted to know, “Is he going to live, Snowball?”

  “Can’t say, Mr. Mustian. He spit the first blood today, and alls I know is they ain’t many lives past that. They ain’t many. And if they lives you almost wish they hadn’t. That’s how bad they gets before it’s over. “

  And Papa remembered that was the way it was with Mr. Jack Rooker who swelled up to twice his natural size and smelled a long time before he died. “I can recollect sitting on the porch in the evening and hearing Jack Rooker screaming clean across two tobacco fields, screaming for his oldest boys to just let him rest because there won’t nothing nobody could do for him, not nothing. And I’d say to Pauline, ‘Pauline, it don’t look like Jack Rooker is ever going to die, does it?’” But that was a long time ago when Papa was a lot younger and a lot farther away from dying himself. That was why he could feel so for Jack Rooker back then. It had just seemed as if Jack Rooker was going through something wouldn’t anybody else ever have to go through again.

  Snowball was nodding his head up and down, saying, “I know. Yes sir, I know,” but Rosacoke could tell he had made his peace with Papa and was ready to leave so she stopped Papa from running on about Jack Rooker and told him it was time for Snowball to go home. Papa thanked Snowball for coming in, as if he had never been mad a minute, and said he would count on him keeping them posted on all that happened to that fellow across the hall.

  Rosacoke followed Snowball out. “Snowball, what’s that man’s name again?”

  “Mr. Ledwell.”

  “Is he really going to die, you think?”

  “Yes’m, I believe he is. But Miss Rosacoke, you don’t have to worry yourself none about that. You ain’t going to see him.”

  “I know that. I just wondered though. I didn’t even remember his name.”

  Snowball said he would be stepping along and would see her in the morning. But Rosacoke didn’t hear from him till way in the next afternoon. Papa was taking his nap and she was almost asleep herself when Snowball peeped in and seeing Papa was asleep, whispered that the gentleman across the hall was back from his operation.

  “How did it come out, Snow?”

  “They tell me he doing right well, Miss Rosacoke.”

  “Has he waked up yet?”

  “No’m, he lying in yonder under his oxygen tent, running on about all sorts of foolishness like a baby. He be in some pain when he do come to though.”

  “Are his people doing all right?”

  “They holding up right well. That’s his two sisters with his wife and his boy. They setting there looking at him and waiting to see.”

  She thanked Snowball for letting them know and said she would tell Papa when he woke up. After Snowball left she stepped into the hall herself. The door over there was closed, and for the first time it said “No visitors.” She wanted to wait until somebody opened it. Then she could at least hear the man breathing, if he was still breathing. But there wasn’t a sound coming through that oak door thick as her fist, and she wasn’t going to be caught snooping like Rato so she went back in to where Papa was awake, spreading a game of Solitaire which that dyed-haired nurse had taught him to play. That was all she had done for him.

  Since they were away from home, they went to bed around ten o’clock. That is they cut out the lights, and Rosacoke would step in the closet and undress with the door half shut. The first evening she had shut it all the way, and Papa told her there was no use to be so worried about him seeing her as he had seen her stripstrod naked two or three hundred times before she was old enough to walk, but she kept up the practice, and when she was in her nightgown, she would step out and kiss Papa and tell Rato “Sleep tight” and settle in her easy chair under a blanket. Then they would talk a little about the day and home till the talk ran down of its own accord though Papa was liable to go on another hour in the dark about things he remembered. But it would all be quiet soon enough, and Rato would be the first to sleep. After Rosacoke’s eyes had opened full to the dark, she could look over and see her brother stretched sideways in his chair, still dressed, with his long hands caught between his drawn-up knees and his head rolled back on his great thin neck and his mouth fallen open. Most people seemed to be somebody else when they were asleep. But not Rato. Rato went to sleep the way you expected he would, like himself who had stopped looking for a while. Then Papa would fall off, sometimes right in the middle of what he was remembering, and Rosacoke could see him too, but he was different—sweeter and with white hair that seemed in the night to be growing into the white pillow his dark leather head rested on, holding him there forever.

  After Papa slept Rosacoke was supposed to but she couldn’t this night. She kept thinking about it, the man and his boy. Papa had forgotten all about Mr. Ledwell. She hadn’t told him anything about the operation, and she had asked Snowball not to tell him either. She didn’t want Papa to start back thinking and talking about that poor man and asking questions and sending Rato out to see what he could. She had it all to herself now. Snowball had told her Mr. Ledwell’s boy was staying there with him through the nights. Mr. Ledwell had made the boy promise him that before he would go to the operating room, and the boy would be over there now, awake maybe with his father that was dying and she here on her chair trying to sleep with her Papa and Rato, her Papa turned into something else in the night.

  Still she might have gone on to sleep if she hadn’t thought of Wesley. If she was at home she could go to sleep knowing she would see Wesley at seven-thirty in the morning. He drove the school bus and went nearly four miles out of his way on the state’s gas to pick her up first so they could talk alone a few minutes before they looked up and saw all those Gupton children in the road, knocking together in the cold and piling on the bus not saying a word with purple splotches like thick cobwebs down their legs that came from standing by an open fire, Mama said, and in winter afternoons Wesley would put her out last into the cold white yard that would be nearly dark by five, and she would walk on towards the light that was coming already from the kitchen windows, steamed on the inside like panes of ice stretched thin on frames. And huddled there she thought how Wesley had said they would go to Warrenton this coming Saturday for a traveling show sponsored by the Lions Club—an exact copy of the Florida State Electric Chair with some poor dummy strapped in it, waiting for the end. Wesley was interested in anything mechanical, and she would have gone with him (no charge for admission the paper said, just a chance to help the Club’s Blind Fund) if that was how he wanted to pass time—striking up friends with the owner of the chair whoever it was and talking till time to head back home. But that would have been all right with Rosacoke. She would have waited and been glad if sh
e had got the chance, but she wouldn’t now and like as not Wesley would take Willie Duke Aycock which was what Willie Duke had waited for all her life. That was just Wesley. Let her miss school even two days at hog killing and he practically forgot her.

  It was thinking all this that kept Rosacoke from going on to sleep. She tried once or twice to empty her head the way she could sometimes at home by closing her eyes and thinking way out in front of her, but she couldn’t manage that tonight so she listened till she heard slow breathing from Rato and Papa. Then she got up in her bare feet and felt for the closet door and took down her robe from a hook and put it on. It was peach-colored chenille. She had made it herself and it had been honorable mention at the 4-H Fall Dress Revue in the Warren County Armory. She took her shoes in her hand and opened the door. The hall was empty and the only light was the one at the nurses’ desk, and that was so white, shining into both ends of the long hall and against the white charts hanging in tiers. The two night nurses were gone or she could have talked to them. She hadn’t ever talked to them, but they seemed nice enough not to mind if she did want to talk. She guessed they were out giving sleeping pills so she walked towards the big ward to pass time.