The Promise of Rest

Wade Mayfield's parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone -- a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family.

Reynolds Price was born in 1933 to Will and Elizabeth Price in a bedroom of Elizabeth's family home in Macon, North Carolina. It is said that his mother had such difficult labor that his father paced outside in the backyard and made a bargain with the Lord -- spare the child and he would quit drinking. The child was spared and in fact, Will quit. He still faced constant worries about income and jobs, and for years he and Elizabeth moved from rented room to rented room within a fifteen mile radius of their family home.

Yet Price fondly remembers the drives out into the North Carolina countryside with his mother and father and the attachment they formed to one another. "There on the rough cloth of the back seat," he says, "I knew for the first and final time that we were all married -- Elizabeth, Will, and Reynolds. We were three people who'd trust each other for good and that trust would last on every side."

Price's interest in writing began early, as a child. When he played, most often alone, he made up stories and dialogue and spoke them aloud in the woods. In the eighth grade his teacher, Ms. Davis, noticed he had a gift for writing. Another teacher, Ms. Peacock, saw that he was different, that he thought and felt very deeply for a boy his age. She understood he would do important things in his life, that most likely he would become a writer.

Price went to Duke University, where he earned an A.B. summa cum laude. It was at Duke that Price had the great fortune to meet Eudora Welty, who, after readinghis story, "Michael Egerton," immediately saw his talent. Thereafter, she treated him as a peer.

During Price's third year at Duke University, his father died of lung cancer. Price says of that moment, "I had then and have until today no serious doubt that Will and I agreed silently to a wordless plan, and we understood it clearer than if we'd discussed it. In this plain room we were enacting, under torture and in the space of a few days, a lifetime of the necessary roles that would end Will's life and certify mine. We were father and son bound in blood duty. He guarded my life for two decades. I guarded his death. And in it he taught me the final lesson of life -- how, hard as it is, death is no bit harder than the long trek toward it and both things, the trek of life and death's wide open mouth, can be endured with dignity anyhow."

In 1955, Price, as a Rhodes Scholar, attended Merton College, Oxford University, where he distinguished himself as a writer of great promise. After three years and an advanced degree, he returned to Duke University, where nearly 40 years later he still lives and writes. His novel, A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel and has never been out of print. Since that time, he has published more than two dozen books. His novel Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. He has also published volumes of poems, plays, essays, translations, and two volumes of memoir, Clear Pictures and A Whole New Life, which is the chronicle of his ten-year survival of spinal cancer.

"I remember just once," he says of this difficult period, "in a kind of state of prayer, and just in a state of genuine anguish, just saying, How much more of this am I going to have to take. And for the only time in my whole life, I really got an audible answer, one word, which was, More. And I had to learn to live with what had survived that ordeal, which was all of my body that had ever really mattered to me anyway -- the part that did my work and that conveyed me to my friends and the people I love."

Price then found himself in one of the most productive periods of his life. In a three year period he published five books. New Music, his trilogy of plays, premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1989, and its three plays have been produced throughout the United States, as has his sixth play, Full Moon.

Toni Morrison says of that period of recovery: "Everything began to pour out. Not just volume, but quality. Just incredible, beautiful things. He always had it, he always had the seed and the blossom and knew that the nurturing and the water and the soil were already there."

Reynolds Price is James B. Duke Professor of English. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his books have appeared in sixteen languages.

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