Reynolds Price is a contemporary Southern writer who has translated some biblical stories and has written about the value of narrative for human survival—whether a person is listening to or telling the tales. He cites the earliest narratives we have, those from the Hebrew Scriptures—the stories of Genesis and Judges, for example—and links the hearing and telling of those narratives with the growth and nurture of a people. His point is that the stories we hear as we mature can be the instruments by which we sense our own worth and learn what is necessary for our lives. Precisely through the story, a reader can be caught up in mystery, rescued from danger, given the word that matters. Further, by attempting to recover the order of past events and by asking for explanations, human beings not only come to understand their world and lives but are carried beyond themselves to deeper realities. For Price, then, as a writer of fiction, a strong story line is crucial. In making such a case, he does not stand in the avantgarde of modern fiction, where traditional narrative forms are sometimes devalued and where the nonsense and chaos of human experience are prominent. But he does work within a long tradition of storytelling that, indeed, goes back to biblical times and that has been renewed in many countries through many centuries, not least in the American South in this century. . . .

"A Chain of Love" was one of Reynolds Price's earliest stories. It is the first story in The Names and Faces of Heroes and is about the same Mustian family, from rural North Carolina, who were central characters in A Long and Happy Life. Both Price's comic spirit and his seriousness of purpose are evident in this story. Told from the point of view of Rosacoke Mustian, a girl of high-school age, the story records Rosacoke's grandfather's admission to a hospital in Raleigh, her stay with him through several nights and days, and her experience with the illness and death of a man across the hall. In one sense, nothing much happens in the story; the plot is certainly not involved, though a great deal is going on inside Rosacoke, and what goes on there is available to the reader and forms the major strength of the narrative. The characters of the story really come alive: Rosacoke, her grandfather (Papa), her Mama, and her two brothers, Rato and Milo, are believable partly because of what we know of their life circumstances and partly because of the language Price uses, both the descriptive language and the words he puts in their mouths. Along with the humor of the story, the reader also is confronted, as Rosacoke is, with the painful reality of death. The humor keeps the story from becoming melodramatic or sentimental and, in a way, forms the framework from which both author and characters examine life.

That the story might be about death is evident from the opening paragraphs. The first paragraph alone contains four allusions to death: the time of year identified as "the dead of winter," Rato almost freezing "to death" making hand-turned ice cream for Papa's birthday, Papa saying "he would die at home if it was his time," and mention of the death of Papa's wife. The references continue, sometimes serious, sometimes casual. The doctor tells the family they won't need "a full-time nurse with two strong grandchildren dying to sit" with Papa at the hospital. Rosacoke recalls the Saturday night date she will miss with her boyfriend Wesley, and she remembers that as they sit in his Pontiac in front of her house the "rain frogs would be singing-out . . . and then . . calming as if they had all died together." There is a sentence about the death of Rosacoke's own father and the note that Rato "had seen a lot of things die."

Despite all these references to death, the tone at the beginning of the story seems lighthearted, even comical. That comes about partly because of the language Price uses and partly because of the interesting details and implications: we are given information that is suggestive of another story somewhere beneath the surface, and we are told some things that may seem irrelevant to the present story but in their vividness and reality make the present story more believable. For example, look at the reason Mama cannot stay at the hospital with her father-in-law:

It worried her not being able to stay when staying was her duty, but they were having a Children's Day at the church that coming Sunday—mainly because the Christmas pageant had fallen through when John Arthur Bobbitt passed around the German measles like a dish of cool figs at the first rehearsal—and since she had organized the Sunbeams single-handed, she couldn't leave them then right on the verge of public performance.

The details of that sentence contribute to both the humor and the realism of the story.

The narrative perspective is not really clear until the third paragraph, when we learn that Rosacoke "almost liked the idea" of staying with her grandfather. Her one problem, we learn, will be missing her Saturday night with Wesley and "telling him goodbye without a word." In a very short space and through an indirect method, the narrator reveals that Mama does not entirely approve of her dating Wesley; that "telling him goodbye" was the "best part of any week" and had a special, almost mystical quality about it; that she would be happy to miss school for a week; that she liked being with Papa; and that she could not really remember much about her own father, who had been "run over by a green pick-up truck one Saturday evening late a long time ago." Thus, in the first paragraph, where we recognize the central consciousness of the narrative, we learn a great deal about her, and we get it almost incidentally. We are not directly told Rosacoke's feelings; rather, we seem to be listening in on her thoughts and catching implications. That Rosacoke is always spoken of in the third person contributes to this sense of indirection.

The heart of the story, however, has to do with Rosacoke's experience with death in a room near Papa's. Early in the week the room had been empty, and while Papa slept she had gone there to look out the window at a statute of Jesus on the hospital lawn. Though she couldn't see the face on the statue from this window, she had remembered from their arrival at the hospital that it was the "kindest face she had ever seen," and she had stood in the room to "recollect his face the way she knew it was"; (this scene prefigures events in the final story of the collection, the title story, "The Names and Faces of Heroes"). Later, when a man with lung cancer is given the room, all the Mustians become interested in what is happening over there, as though somehow that man's health were related to Papa's health. Rosacoke especially follows the action across the hall, attracted in part by the dying man's son, who reminds her of Wesley, and drawn by both curiosity and sympathy to the death itself. When, on the next Sunday, Rosacoke takes the flowers she has asked Mama to bring and attempts to give them to the man's family, she walks in on a priest administering last rites. Rosacoke is at once embarrassed and struck with awe at the mystery of the candles, the annointing, the chanted Latin phrases, the black-robed priest, and the death before her. When Rosacoke returns to Papa's room and Rato comes in to tell them that the man has died, the focus turns to their own family and the face of death: Rosacoke watches Papa play solitaire a little more slowly, and she knows he is thinking.

It wasn't as if he didn't know where he was going or what it would be like when he got there. He just trusted and he hoped for one thing, he tried to see to one last thing—for a minute he stopped his card playing and asked Mama could he die at home, and Mama told him he could.

The tone of the story becomes more serious by the final paragraphs, but Price still handles the scene on a low key, revealing a great deal about the characters, showing depth of emotion without manipulating the reader's feeling, and ending the story by a slight turning away from the somberness. The next-to-last paragraph ends with the passage quoted just above. The final paragraph draws us even further into Rosacoke's own reflections, as she tries to understand her feelings about the man's death. She knows there is something good about his death: "With all that beautiful dying song, hadn't he surely died sanctified?" But she has kept everything about it, including her visit to the man's son or to his family, and she has not even spoken her own sorrow at the death of this stranger. She finally says, there in Papa's room, that the death just didn't "seem right," that she felt as though she had gotten to know the man "real well." The final sentence of the story describes, again indirectly, the depth of her feeling and the impact of the whole experience on her family:

And her words hung in the room for a long time—longer than it took Papa to pick the cards up off the bed and lay them without a sound in the drawer, longer even than it would have taken Rosacoke to say goodbye to Wesley if it had been Saturday night and she had been at home.

This is a story about death. It is also a story about some real human beings as they face death, and without saying it all explicitly, Price manages to describe the "chain of love" that binds not only this family but all humanity.

Is this, in any sense, a Southern story? Perhaps it is mainly the language and the setting that make it Southern. Rosacoke's gesture of giving fresh flowers to the dying man is characteristic of people for whom hospitality and outward expressions of kindness seem natural and unaffected, but those are not traits only of Southerners, or for that matter of all Southerners. Several incidents raise a regional emphasis, but they do so only in a minor way and serve to reinforce the realism of the story. Mama brings candy to the hospital for Papa because, as she says, "nurses hung around a patient who had his own candy like Grant around Richmond." The dying man had only recently moved to Raleigh from Baltimore—which is clearly "north" to these Carolina folks—and his being a stranger contributes to Rosacoke's desire to visit and take flowers and makes her a little conscious of her own region: "She might be from Afton, N.C., but she knew better than to go butting into some man's sickroom, to a man on his deathbed, without an expression of her sympathy. And it had to be flowers." The relationship of the Mustians to Papa's black orderly may also mark a regional flavor of the story: there is some condescension as Papa speaks to "Snowball Mason" (as the man introduces himself), but there is also easy comradery between him and the Mustians; and when, on one occasion, Papa speaks harshly to the orderly, Rosacoke feels badly and is sensitive to Snowball's feelings: "He walked out of Papa's room with his ice-cream coat hanging off him as if somebody had unstarched it." The story is decidedly Southern in its language, characterization, and setting, all of which make it a realistic narrative. Nevertheless, it moves beyond regionalism to deal with universal circumstances and basic human emotions. Furthermore, the humor of the narrative keeps those universal elements from becoming ponderous and saves the story from sentimentality.