The Promise of Rest by Reynolds Price

Author:Reynolds Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC035000
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1995-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

21

TEN days later at Hutch’s house, on a bright dry June afternoon, Cam Mapleson stood up to leave Wade and Maitland. Cam was due at work in the hospice; Mait was going to stay on with Wade since Hutch was in Richmond to read his poems at a summer writers’ conference. When Cam had stroked Wade’s forehead by way of saying goodbye, he noticed for the first time the drawing that hung above Wade’s bed—Hutch’s childhood drawing of mountains and trees, the one Wade had wanted at the last moment as they left New York. Cam had spent a good part of his own childhood painting and drawing landscapes near Nag’s Head where he’d grown up, and Hutch’s drawing of Virginia mountains struck him as fresh and oddly impressive. It had the homemade but masterful quality of certain unique accomplishments—things done just once, got perfectly right, then never repeated. Cam said to Wade “Did you draw this?”

The head of Wade’s bed was cranked up high. He slowly groped back with one hand and found the picture frame; the feel of the gilded wood told him what was there. His crooked smile was a gauge of the pleasure he took in its memory. “Don’t you like this a lot? But no, don’t thank me—I couldn’t draw, even when my hands worked. This was done by Hutch, before he wrote poems. I think he was fourteen. I can look at it more or less endlessly.”

Both Cam and Mait silently noted that Wade had never mentioned his blindness to either of them.

Cam said “He had some serious gifts; has he kept up his art through the poetry years?”

Confused as Wade had begun to be lately, he treated the question with greater care than Cam intended. Finally Wade pulled his hand back off the picture and extended the fingers toward where he thought Cam stood.

Cam was nearby and took the hand, holding it as lightly as any moth wing—by now it was plainly that easy to ruin.

Wade said “My father is Hutchins Mayfield, born in 1930, month of May, twelfth day.” For a long moment that seemed his only finding. But he suddenly withdrew his fingers from Cam’s hand; his dead hot eyes found Cam’s face—its locus at least. “My father saw through the world long before he had me. When he drew that picture, he still believed something he’d thought of in childhood—that there was something buried, buried and worth finding—beneath the world: the part we can see, beneath the skin. Or so he told me when he gave me the picture; that was the Christmas I left home for good. The only other thing he said was he wanted me to have it as a memory of him and his mother Rachel Hutchins. She died just a few minutes after he was born, so he never really saw her, and God knows I didn’t.” Though still Wade hadn’t acknowledged his blindness, he gave a high laugh.

It took him awhile to refocus his mind.

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