Tongues of Angels: A Novel - Couverture souple

Chapter 1

I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try.

I was twenty-one, an official man. I could almost surely have held him back; he deserved to stay. It wouldn't have taken a hero to do it, just a person with more common sense than I had at the time and, as I said, more attention to things. Half the mistakes I've made till now are mistakes of attention. I haven't really watched or I watched too close. And the only consolation I've had, for his death at least, is the hope that I learned a necessary lesson and that -- from his short life, short not small -- I made a part of the work I've done.

I'm a painter, of pictures not houses. From the time I started, back before grade school and down till now, everything I paint tries to look like the world, not just the world behind my eyes. And since I've been lucky and determined enough to support myself with mainly representational pictures, right through the abstract expressionist years, I've used the place and hour of his death a good many times -- the actual air and light of that evening.

It happened the summer of 1954 at a boys' camp in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. I was a counselor there for ten weeks between my third and fourth years of college. He was a camper, age fourteen -- Raphael Noren. That was two syllables, pronounced RAY-field with the d silent. Fourteen was the oldest you could be at Camp Juniper, pending a dispensation in the event of arrested development. All this was two decades before the nutritional boom of the postwar years excited all the hormonal clocks and made us a nation of sexually precocious giants. But even back then, after age fourteen you were too hot to handle and likely to be more of a bad influence than not.

Rafe was a lot of things; but whatever else, he was not a bad influence. Not intentionally, not on boys his own age. He laid down around him, and several steps ahead, the grave and pleasing air of a generous heart. Most children look out, grab a sight or two, run home and think about what it means for them. Rare was the only outward-looking child I ever knew or heard of. Somehow he felt safe enough to watch the world. One way or other, everybody felt that trait as somehow unnerving. And we all responded according to our natures. A surprising lot of Rafe's elders laughed. Though they couldn't admit it, he was plainly too grown. But the one thing nobody did was ignore him.

Rafe's draw worked in all directions, and that too came from his watchful ways. Very few people think that they've been noticed enough, and they almost always rise to the bait. They tend to think it means you like them. And Rare was all but factory-set to believe the best about everybody and everything. Not that he liked everything he saw. But if you were human, Rafe hoped he could please or at least amuse you. And besides his face, he'd already got his grown man's voice. It was a substantial baritone with none of the hints of embryonic preacher, politician or other fund-raiser that some boys get with premature manhood. It helped him a lot.

His face was also well advanced in its walk towards the uncluttered dignity it might have had at forty. And though his body was still supported on the compact bones of childhood, he was taller than his age -- maybe five foot nine -- and the skin of his calves and lower belly had grown the gold hair of first manhood. I'd grown it myself, only seven years before. But young as I' was, I could already see it wearing away on my ankles and losing the metallic luster that makes you feel more like some brand of ram with gold fleece than a helpless boy.

Rafe was so far ahead of most boys his age that he seemed a little pained at the institutional Saturday night mass shower jamborees. We counselors were supposed to make them sound like major entertainment events. But of course they were just a stab at insuring one bath per week for the many reluctant. I never thought Rare was embarrassed for himself; he worried about the others. They'd fix on his plumbing with helpless amazement. And the key to their feeling was, nobody laughed. I suspect he thought his precocity would shame them and he hated that. Since one of his surprising qualities was wit -- most of the good-looking young people I've met have all the wit of a basement door -- he at first tried to joke about it in public.

At the first jamboree of his session, for instance, when Rare saw them staring, he stretched his member to its limit, strummed it like a banjo and sang "You Are My Sunshine." But he must have seen that it saddened the other boys, like standing by helpless at a vandal act. From then out anyhow he took a far corner and kept himself hid. Better samples of his wit will surface later. But I need at the start to warn you against rejecting him early as a sober saint. That he was not. Any hour in Rafe's presence would let you see a dozen ways in which he was still a boy. But what I ask you to see at the start is something difficult. For surprising lengths of time most days, Rafe Noren showed stretches of majesty. And everybody around him knew it, not just the painter in residence, me.

In republican America, majesty's a trait seen mostly in photographs of Yosemite Valley or statues of Lincoln; so I'm hard put to give you parallel examples. Imagine a tall girl stepping towards you from a Botticelli "Spring" with your name on her lips, not knowing she's grander than the life all around. Or try thinking of a tall lean diver who honors the air turning down, slow motion, from a ten-meter board and vanishes sooner than you might hope. Or the eighteen-year-olds on ancient Greek tombstones. They wave you in with what may be the start of a smile towards absolute rest.

But I've run way ahead. Rafe Noren won't appear for some time yet. I need to explain what brought me near him and why I may have a part in his ending. Like all real stories, this one starts with my parents. They had excellent practical sense but were not highly educated. My father was denied college by a lack of family money, the last of eight children. Mother stayed at home because gifts then mostly did, but also her parents died before she was sixteen. Father had aimed to be a civil engineer; Mother dreamed of being an actress.

That may have made them too generous with me, who was their only child. So I have to admit that I got through my first twenty years without ever holding a real job. I made little pieces of money here and there by mowing yards, refinishing furniture and drawing portraits of children and dogs. But summers were mine for loafing, reading, playing with friends and dodging polio. Those were the standard dreamy times, much written about and featured in movies, when middle-class children in green suburbs invented their lazy heedless way, minus money and jobs, between their well-behaved winters in school.

And the reason I got a job when I did had nothing to do with virtue or vigor. My father had died the previous winter, the kind of heart attack that downs you in the midst of trying to phone your wife and say goodbye. And that was followed by more than a week of lingering agony with congestive heart failure. Mother and I weren't penniless yet; but three weeks after we buried Father, she took a job in an office supply store. And I saw that if I really was going to seize my fate and study in Europe after I finished college, then I'd better put shoulder to wheel as well and see if it moved.

Even in 1954 there weren't many jobs for clean white boys with slim common sense and no practical experience. In the late winter as I was beginning to worry, Mother's minister came up with a letter from Albert Jenkins, a famous youth leader and founder-owner of old Camp Juniper up beyond Asheville. In those days the North Carolina mountains were strewn with camps -- all firmly segregated as to gender and race, though few of us noticed the fact that early. They were generally named for things Indian or things in nature. And none was more highly regarded than Juniper.

A few weeks later "Chief" Jenkins, maybe sixty, spent an evening in Winston and met with a small group of young men like me in search of an easy summer's work in no more than semiwild conditions with pay so low that it seemed Errol-Flynn-buccaneering of Jenkins to state his case. But of course he did, from just below the pulpit of our Presbyterian church, to three dozen men more or less my age one late winter evening.

This is pretty nearly what he said. "I like to think that, for whichever ones of you are earnest tonight and meet our standards for ten weeks at Juniper, you won't be working but reaping a harvest of lifelong gifts -- three fine meals a day, your bunk in a cabin with boys whose minds you're expected to inspire, thrilling religious and musical programs, Indian dancing, woodcraft training, all our entertainment facilities, one day a week off to visit Asheville or climb in the mountains for your spiritual needs and as a token of my personal thanks -- three hundred and thirty dollars on the final day."

Even in 1954, $330 for ten weeks of six-day round-the-clock work was less than joke pay. And when there was a dazed pause between the preposterous offer and the interviews, half of the candidates slumped their shoulders and melted up the aisles. For practical reasons I should have joined them; I needed a lot more money than that. But whether it was the blindness of immediate despair or a sudden fascination with the old man's heat, light and gall, I was one of the six who stayed.

I'd grown up in a wide spectrum of Protestant churches, from the chilled Presbyterians through the sweaty fervor of Tar River Baptists through the politer Methodists and on out to pasture. So I was more than familiar with the generation of dear-eyed thigh-squeezing ex-YMCA types who populated the church and youth field. No denomination was safe. But Chief Jenkins blazed like a nova in their firmament.

He was ramrod straight in a Spartan chair when I entered the preacher's study. The only vacant chair almost touched his. He waved me towards it and gave me the first of his shot-down smiles -- an instant grin on ivory false teeth; then an instant end, as if shot down. Another trait of the youth-leader class in those trusting days was a tendency to proximity. They were hell-bent to crowd you and press the flesh, in Lyndon Johnson's perfect phrase of a decade later. It seemed your flesh was a fuel they needed. They'd rub your palm or the back of your neck or any other part you'd freely concede. I'd long since learned how to go glass-eyed and flaccid in their grip. It cooled their fires and they let you drop. So with Chief's ice-water pupils nailed on me, I took the chair, expecting at least a thigh massage.

I'd read him wrong. He was all but stone deaf and wouldn't admit it. Our meeting lasted maybe four minutes. He said he'd heard of my father's death; was I now the man of the family?

I was.

He'd also heard I was on the college paper. Did that mean I qualified to edit The Thunderbird, the camp's mimeographed weekly?

I hoped it did.

I'd want to cover inspirational news and to make good efforts to use each boy's name once in the weeks he was present in camp. They hadn't taught art for a number of years in the crafts program, an early artist having died of diabetes after the annual watermelon feast. Would I like to organize a sketching class with real substance to it?

I didn't probe the word substance for fear it meant Bible illustrations, but I agreed in principle.

Chief drilled me a final stare in the eyes -- today it would constitute assault. Then he jerked upright on spastic puppet joints. They were the clue to his other secret, which was bad arthritis. He asked if I'd wait outside with the others. And far from making a final grab, another common tactic, he seemed momentarily shocked when I offered a forthright parting handshake.

The last man came out a quarter hour later. All six of us were young enough to lapse into the dumb patience of youth, so we loosened our ties for the standard wait on the grownups. And the cockier three, not I, knocked together some easy jokes about the old guy. "What does he use when he nicks himself shaving? -- Plastic Wood." But they laughed too soon.

In less than three minutes, Chief's door flew open; and the blue eyes bore down on us again. Precisely on me. We'd all stood up, to be sure. But with not one word of regret to the others, he rapped my tie at breastbone level -- my brain felt the thud -- and he said "You're my man. I'll write you a letter." With that he was gone, no farewell handshakes and not a dry crumb for the five stunned losers.

That confirmed my hunch. Wilder than ever and in the teeth of a salary that was less than a tip -- less than a fifth of what I could have made in construction work -- I was bound to accept. I checked with Mother. All her life she saw no point in doing anything that was not your heart's hunger. And I'd inherited her tendency to impulsive choices; so of course she said if it's what I wanted, that was all she needed to hear -- just go. A few days later when Chief's formal letter came, I signed on readily and added an acceptance that was more Pentecostal than I generally manage to be on paper. I didn't quite shout or speak in tongues, but I said something like "I promise you an abundant harvest for your trust in me." I had that glowing a view of myself, though only a Chief could make me admit it.

The time of my boyhood was a far more fervent time than many now believe. Today anybody whose eyes glint fire, and who sees himself as a gift to the world, is likely to be a flimflam man or an out-of-state strangler, maybe both. But don't forget, we boys born in the early 1930s had watched our parents body-surf the Depression and in some cases wipe out. We'd been too young to fight in the Second War but just old enough to hear the news and understand what an all-time evil genius had brought on the conflict. And we got a thrilling dose of patriotism and high moral expectation from our participation in scrap metal drives, old bacon grease drives (to grease shell casings), paper drives, war bonds.

In short we lived through the grandest long entertainment event in human history, with the gleamingest heroes and villains. Our standards for the future were immensely and rightly high. Show me a later villain with the black radiance of Hitler or brighter heroes than Roosevelt and Churchill. And the fact that not one of us had fired so much as a single live shot left us with high hopes of our own chance at grappling with a demon someday. Chief's eyes then had stirred that tender wound inside my mind. I've said it yearned for rousing touch and a call to action but maybe not then.

Anyhow I navigated the final months of my classes, concentrating less on my studies than on the manufacture of adequate reasons for not spending weekends at Mother's -- she lived two hours from my dormitory room. I must have understood that I was beginning an effort to bury my father. To be sure, he was decently interred under gray Vermont granite, with vacancies beside him for Mother and me. Bury him in my life, I meant.

The sights I'd witnessed in his last few days are, to this day, the worst I've seen -- and as an artist-journalist, I saw Vietnam. But even the sights don't beg...

Reynolds Price (1933-2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.