In Reynolds Price’s four-page story “Good Night,” not much happens, just one gesture of touch. Gaulton Walker, an aged black yard man, waits for Patsy Capps, a young black cook and housekeeper, to visit him, hoping she’ll let him rub her sore ankles with oil of cloves from a bottle warmed “in his deep pants pocket.” She does, and in wordless thanks for his soothing touch she imagines taking him along when her “white folks” vacation next summer at Virginia Beach, and there finding a way “to help him on his natural path,” which was “bound to be death.” In its nearly silent, delicately tense drama, the story movingly thanks the Black people who showed Price “that the flesh itself, when honorably used, is a healing power.”