The Good Priest's Son by Reynolds Price

Author:Reynolds Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2005-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

When he got to the only pay phone he knew of in Sherwin, a black man was talking and a small mob of women were waiting to talk when the man was done (or were they yoked to him in some other way?—in his all-white wardrobe, he shined with a kind of magnetic chill, even in the warm late afternoon). It was five-fifteen; so Mabry decided to drive to the opposite end of town and loop back past his favorite houses, all ante-bellum and still in good shape, each no doubt housing a single white woman with just enough money to paint the white boards and the dark green blinds every five or six years and hire a black woman to fry her an egg and two strips of bacon by eight each morning, then make her an egg salad sandwich for lunch, then leave for the day once she’d washed a few “smalls” gently by hand and swept the porch.

Why hasn’t the Holy Ghost burned every scrap of this town to the Earth, the way it burned Berlin and Dresden just three years before I was born? Alone in the car, Mabry laughed but then was far from sure the thought was crazy. Could anybody argue seriously that slavery had ended? And if not, then what about the devastation, four days ago, on Manhattan Island? Were we meant to read it—feel it, taste it—as partial payment anyhow on the nation’s accounts? Of course we were but who the hell would?

Instead of turning back toward the pay phone, Mabry chose to roll on out of town; and in twenty minutes he was lying in deep grass by Dameron’s Mill Pond—not another soul in sight and no sound at all but the sliding water as it reached the low falls and occasional birds, settling in for the oncoming night. With both arms stretched out wide beside him, he shut his eyes and tried to confirm a strong suspicion that this was the place—the virtual spot, within a few yards—where at age fourteen he’d lost his virginity. His mind had always been a setter-of-scenes from his sexual past—down to the actual slant of light, the temperature of the room or space, the taste of the girl (her skin or mouth or whatever deeper entrances he’d managed to plumb), and then the rate and final reward of his rush toward joy.

But lately he’d begun to wonder how honest his mind really was—with these scenes anyhow. As he lay there, though, with his eyes shut to the actual beauty on all sides, he told himself he was surely recalling the precise textures and feelings of that hour of elation and near-terror as Jeanette Walker—who was maybe four months older than he and whom he’d met in “daily vacation Bible-school” class—folded herself inward, step by step, to his ranging hand and the minuscule victories he steadily won.

Did he fall asleep? If so, no dreams disturbed his rest—not even the faintest whiff of Jeanette or any of the other rare early girls, including Gwyn.

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