The Tongues of Angels

by Reynolds Price

  I said “Day, it was half the boy’s life.”

  He moved away, back to the window. He said “Oh no. You’re kind but wrong. Nothing helped Ray.”

  How was I going to leave it at that? Who, with white skin, could stand it? Yet I saw Day had finished. He believed himself. He’d built that fine tall dancer in vain. Now it amounted to nothing at all—for the Spirit, the dancer or the dancer’s own people. I put my right hand out again.

  Day took it briefly and said he hoped my paintings never stopped.

  I’m glad to say I told him he’d taught me more than anybody else all summer. I meant it too, except of course for Rafe. And Day knew that, more than anyone else.

  The other farewells were almost silent, no empty promises to stay in touch. Some of us even waved across space, no pretense of more. And literally nobody said “I’ll write” or “Come on to see me.” If Rafe had lived, he and I anyhow might have swapped Christmas cards a year or so. As it was, we all slunk out like dogs. Good dogs to be sure but caught out of place, with our dignity down. Within two years I’d lost contact with everybody there, and now I don’t know a single whereabout or even who’s alive.

  Kevin, I heard, joined the CIA and sank out of sight in that bottomless hole. About ten years later I happened to be at an airport near his mother’s home and called her on impulse. She claimed to recognize my name and said that Kevin was “military attaché” at the embassy in Finland; they’re invariably spies. Chief and Mrs. Chief, I know are dead. Alive, they’d now be pushing a hundred. Good Mike Dorfman is dead as well. Sam’s in his eighties, retired in Asheville.

  I’ve recently seen brochures and posters that say Bright Day still works for his people. I’ve made no effort to make contact; but apparently Day now tours the college circuit with a young male dancer, his adopted son. Day “lectures, recites and chants the Old Way.” The son dances. On the latest poster he wears eagle wings. His name is Beau Fitzhugh, but he looks like an Indian.

  I guess they’re riding the modest wavelets of national guilt for the red man. Maybe I’ve said it too many times here; but once more, it’s a guilt that is still unthinkably slight for the national sin that outshines slavery, if you’re measuring sins— which is always our favorite pastime after sports. At nearly sixty Day must look grand as old Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, surrendering at last after fleeing with all his women and children through ice and snow so that white Montana could now sleep safe, all thousand or so palefaces in cabins—

  It is cold and we have no blankets. Our little children are freezing to death. I want time to look for my children and see how many of them I may find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

  Till I started this I’d fought no more, not that old fight of Rafe’s last days. Now I’ve written it down because Rustum Boatner, my younger son, is majoring in art history at Colgate. Three weeks ago towards the end of spring vacation, he told me he was planning a senior thesis next year on my early work. It turned out his teacher knew a lot about my things, especially the early pictures; and he encouraged the project. Once I’d recovered enough to speak, I showed Rust the messenger sketchbook again. Both boys were attracted to it as children. Children have a lot of evidence, pro and con, as to angels.

  We even looked at the old Smokies landscape over my bed, “The Meaning of Things.” It had also been a favorite of Rust’s since childhood, and he got it down to dust and measure. At which point he saw Rafe’s name on the back—Kinyan in umber, which started me talking. That led Rust to questions. They went so deep that, to my surprise, they gouged raw meat. To be sure, I’d known that parents open their pasts to children at dire peril. And whenever I’ve dared it, I mostly wind up slamming the door in under three minutes.

  But Rafe had never come up here before, so when Rust started I didn’t plan to balk. But after three rounds of painful questions—who was Kinyan, what had he meant and where was he now?—I had to call a hasty quits. My son’s curiosity was so apparent though, and his courteous need for help was so genuine, that I agreed on the spot to a deal. I’d try to describe it all for him, as true as I could, in some bearable form. He and his brother Hugh could file it.

  I say I hadn’t fought, not the old inner fight about why Rafe died. What I mean is, the intervening years were no darkling struggle with inner blame. But my work, as I said, has been partly shaped by it. The drawings of imaginary messengers became a series of tempera paintings that were my introduction to success. Some of them hang in surprising places, surprising because I hadn’t thought that sort of visionary thing could be communicated in Eisenhower’s and Nixon’s pastel fat-cat America. I’ve made almost yearly painting trips back to the North Carolina mountains—the Blue Ridge, the Smokies and sometimes on up into Virginia towards the Shenandoah. But I’ve never gone back to Juniper itself.

  Two years ago a student of mine, who’d been a counselor well after my year, was driving nearby and decided to check. The Chiefs were long dead, and their whole life’s work is slowly rotting in weeds and saplings. Some of the older cabins are already roofless. Cedars are growing in the archery ground, where the Ghost Dance was. The lake is choked with waterplants now, the result of nitrogen pollution in the streams. Only the campfire ring is unchanged. Some of the wooden benches are rotting, but the hemlocks above have thickened considerably, and their shade keeps the dancing floor bare and ready. Knowing nothing of my story or Rafe’s, my student even clawed his way up to the prayer circle and reported that, to his surprise, dozens of prayer sticks were still upright. His among them.

  Of course I didn’t ask about mine. He wouldn’t have looked that carefully. Anyhow the stick would be thirty-odd years old. Surely it’s gone. As you now see, I’ve got memories of the place that are clearer than any confirming snapshot. As much surely as any man alive, I know what a burning glass Juniper could focus on susceptible minds—the beautiful place coaxed from a wilderness, Chief himself with the blue flame eyes and all they foresaw, Mike and Day on the ramparts of a noble dead cause, Sam and Kevin both sane as judges, the girl at Thomas Wolfe’s house in Asheville, so much and so many more.

  * * *

  And Raphael Patrick Noren. I learned his full name from the obituary in the next year’s first Thunderbird. Chief sent it to me with the briefest note in his masterful hand, “I wrote this myself, hoping to make it worthy of the boy.”

  In conclusion the obituary said

  No one can know Ray’s final prayer. I rest in the certainty that it was not selfish. To an unbelievable extent for one his age, he was involved with life beyond himself. He had not understood it fully yet, but he loved his neighbor. And his rich endowment as an Indian dancer sprang partly from that, his knowledge of other rooms in creation. An eagle in flight, a dying stag, the lord of fire!—that all these things and a myriad more were in easy reach of the mind of a boy so young and untraveled! Surely his last breath was for another soul.

  And surely Raphael Patrick Noren will last in the hearts of all who were lucky to cross his path and share it a ways. More than many old men I have known, Ray had seen most of life. A happy marriage and satisfying parenthood may have been the only omissions from a rich run of years. That knowledge alone may help us now in the diminished natural world he cherished.

  A day seldom passes that one of us here—Michael Dorfman, my wife, my niece, myself—doesn’t say “I thought I heard old Ray just now.” No doubt we have heard him and will do so always.

  To my surprise the word old rang true. Rafe was an old soul in all good senses and some of the sad. But when Chief said he’d hear Rafe’s voice always, he slipped uncharacteristically. A man of his faith should have known to say “I hope to hear him, as long as I live” and Chief is dead. Bridge Boatner’s alive awhile longer, to be sure. He works most days to copy things that count in the world. So far the things are mostly people, some noble animals, a few natural objects a
nd occasional disguises of God. Whoever God is, he or she or it still intends to keep Rafe Noren alive on this Earth till Bridge Boatner stops. Only the pictures may last awhile longer.

  So now I’ve told both my sons about him and asked that they keep my first earnest landscape in the family after me. They’ve promised they’ll draw peaceful straws at my death and keep it in three-year relays thereafter. Even my great-grandchildren et cetera may have Rafe’s name in place on their walls, though hid on the back of a young painter’s picture and disguised in the one strange word Kinyan.

  Maybe these words will also last—not till the sun burns out of fuel, begins to swell and then ends Earthly life. Even back at Juniper I wouldn’t have claimed that. But a few of them might outlast me awhile. I mean also to give this to friends. More than most people I’ve watched through the years, I’ve had miraculous luck with friends, more friends in fact than I can maintain. The days and nights aren’t long enough to keep up with them and thank them for kindness. Many of them like Rafe are heavy with gifts to give the world outside them. They’re painters, sculptors, composers, poets, dancers, actors, singers, priests, saints and one actual demon who managed to freeze every life he touched, though he wrote grand music. I’ve had the further luck to know many of them in their youth.

  I said at the start, I hoped I learned the right thing from Rafe’s death. I think it was this. Inspiration is the Holy Ghost’s business, not mine or the Pope’s or this month’s mistress. We humans can say things like “Never use blue in your shadows.” Or “Yellow, not black, is the color of death. Think long and hard before using yellow.” We can offer bed and board to the gifted young or careful praise. With extreme care and caution, we can even offer to please their bodies.

  But with young artists now—and most other people, if the truth be told—I take a strict care that in my ignorance I didn’t take with Rafe. I don’t go sounding off in their hearing with odes to the Muses, the thrills of high art and the endless joy of self-realization. I don’t throw gasoline on anyone’s fire, however thirsty or feeble it looks. The keeping, feeding and fanning of flames is nobody’s business but the gifted youth’s and his or her God’s. Any help I give beyond patient witness is likely to be mischief, whatever the light.

  No young person known to me, now or past, has thrown a stronger light than Rafe Noren or farmed more corners of the world he touched with serious laughter. Young as he was, it was laughter launched with open eyes in full sight and knowledge of the final jaws. All he left was memory in a few dozen minds, some of them dead also. I make that dubious claim of course without really checking. If I could only find a handful of veterans of Rafe’s years at Juniper, we could raise a memorial to him, there on the cliff in sight of that valley. For whom to see? A few passing hawks. No, human minds are what he touched. And surely I’m not the last soul alive who still remembers that strong a signal.

  Even I though, with a painter’s sight, can no longer see Rafe clearly, face-to-face. The odd thing is—and I just discovered it, writing this—I can see Rafe out of the corner of my eye, in peripheral vision. It’s only when I try to stare straight ahead and catch him full-face that he steps aside and will not be caught. No doubt his father had a few snapshots. Is he still alive, with his latest wife? Where would they be now?

  I once felt tempted to contact the man and ask for a picture to draw from, while I still had enough live memory to help me. But then I knew that the simplest contact would start me telling white lies again. So I kept my peace, not even a courteous sympathy note. Mr. Noren had never seen me. Who was I to wade out into his life when he had taken one more cold shaft through the midst of his heart? Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe it was more like a business loss, regrettable but soon behind him. To find that out would be worse still. And since I can no longer see Rafe’s face in the necessary light, I can’t even try to paint his portrait. He was too solid, too much a real boy, to risk guessing at as I guessed at another real brand of messenger.

  I kept my peace, as I said, till now. Whoever else in fourteen years he managed to reach, Rafe Noren marked me. Not a wound or a scar but a deep live line, like the velvet burr in the darkest shadows of Rembrandt etchings, the ones I’ve mentioned where demons lurk. Let this be clear—never have I let myself for one instant think that Rafe died so that I might work with his rich fertilizing life behind me. William Faulkner said once that Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was worth any number of maiden aunts. In the first place there were no maiden aunts in Keats’s way, so he didn’t have to grind up any old ladies in his short gorgeous run. In the second place it’s as nearly criminal a claim as any artist ever made; and if I should mouth anything so shameful, I hope somebody blots me out by sundown. That sort of talk makes me wish all art could vanish tonight to save the life of a single threatened child.

  All I meant was, Rafe Noren’s life enabled me. And now I’ve lived to say so. The fact that, in dancing, he sought people’s eyes makes me hope that nothing here offends his ghost. Absorbed as he was, he knew people watched him. They were part of his goal—them, himself and the eye of God. What maker ever worked for more?

  I’ve tried to lay out the story we made in his last weeks, only one of the several tales he told in that short a life. Having come this far I’ve learned at least one usable fact. You can leave me out. It was childish selfishness to think till now that I harmed Rafe badly or caused his death. He had been flung down more times than one, before I knew him. He fed his own fire, he and people long before me and his destiny in general. He made that final killing climb for his own ample reasons, to fill his own needs. And he died in a place devoted to hope.

  The thing that seems worth seeing from here is, Raphael Noren watched his life and changed his story in ways that kept it from closing in fear or waste. Didn’t he end as a Ghost Dancer still, calling down peace with grave self-possession, alone but calm? How many old men can say as much? How many like me, who’ve plumbed the reaches of physical pleasure and heard the word love on many lips? So leave me out but, long as you can, recall his name and some kind of picture against the light —a boy becoming an actual eagle or the generous giver of fire and warmth or laughing his way through mortal trial, denying his fate a few more days.

  REYNOLDS PRICE

  Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. He was reared and educated in his native state, taking his A.B. from Duke University. In 1955 he traveled to Merton College, Oxford where he studied for three years as a Rhodes Scholar. He then returned to Duke and began the teaching which he continues as James B. Duke Professor of English.

  In 1962 his first novel A Long and Happy Life appeared. It received the William Faulkner Award and has never been out of print. In ensuing years he has published seven more novels. In 1986 his Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, translations and a memoir, Clear Pictures. His television play Private Contentment was commissioned by American Playhouse for its first season, and in 1989 his trilogy of plays New Music premiered at the Cleveland Play House.

  He is a member of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His books have appeared in sixteen languages.

  Jacket painting: Near Floyd by Vic Huggins,

  courtesy of Somerhill Gallery

  ATHENEUM

  Macmillan Publishing Company

  866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

  Copyright © 1990 Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

 

 

 
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