by Lee Smith
Now he was getting entirely too perky, he moved his hands too much as he explained to Ashley the theory behind some battle in some war. He stopped talking only long enough to stand up and shake hands with the friends who came by our table to speak to him, friends who had not seen him for months and months. He didn’t touch his food. Underneath my navy-blue dress with the sailor collar, I was sweating, in spite of my mother’s pronouncement:
Horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow.
I could feel it trickling down my sides. I wondered if, as I grew up, this would become an uncontrollable problem, whether I would have to wear dress shields. We all ordered baked Alaska, the chef’s speciality, for dessert. My mother smiled and smiled. I was invisible. When the baked Alaska arrived, borne proudly to our table by Louis, nobody could put out the flames. Louis blew and blew. Other waiters ran over, beating at it with linen napkins. My mother laughed merrily. “For goodness’ sakes!” she said. My daddy looked stricken. Finally they got it out and we all ate some, except for Daddy.
Gazing past my family to the golfers out on the grass beyond us, I had a sudden inspiration. I knew what to do. I emerged from invisibility long enough to say, “Hey, Daddy, let’s go out and putt,” and he put his napkin promptly on the table and stood right up. “Sure thing, honey,” he said, sounding for all the world like my own daddy. He smiled at me. I took his hand, remembering then who I had been before the nervous breakdown: Daddy’s little girl. We went down the stairs, past the snack bar, and out to the putting green at the side of the building.
My dad was a good golfer. I was not bad myself. We shared a putter from the Pro Shop. We started off and soon it was clear that we were having a great time, that this was a good idea. The country club loomed massively behind us. The emerald grass, clipped and even, stretched out on three sides in front of us, as far as we could see, ending finally in a stand of trees here, a rolling hill there. This expanse of grass, dotted with pastel golfers, was both comforting and exhilarating. It was a nine-hole putting green. On the seventh hole, we were tied, if you figured in the handicap that my father had given himself. I went first, overshooting on my second stroke, sinking it with a really long shot on my third. I looked back over at Daddy to make sure he had seen my putt, but clearly he had not. He was staring out over the grass toward the horizon, beyond the hill.
“Your turn!” I called out briskly, tossing him the putter.
What happened next was awful.
In one terrible second, my father turned to me, face slack, mouth agape, then fell to his knees on the putting green, cowering, hands over his face. The putter landed on the grass beside him. He was crying. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there, and then suddenly the putting green was full of people—the pro, Bob White, in his jacket with his name on it, helping Daddy to his feet; our dentist, Dr. Reap, holding him by the other elbow as they walked him to our white Cadillac which Mama had driven around to pick us up in. Ashley cried all the way home. So did Daddy.
It was not until that day that I realized that the nervous breakdown was real, that Daddy was really sick.
I ran upstairs and prayed without ceasing for a solid hour, by the clock, that Daddy would get well and that we would all be all right, for I had come to realize somehow, during the course of that afternoon, that we might not be. We might never be all right again.
* * *
At least I had a New Best Friend. I banished all memory of Alice Field, without remorse. Tammy Lester and I became, for the rest of that spring, inseparable. The first time I brought her to my house, I did it without asking. I didn’t want to give Mama a chance to say no. And although we had not discussed it, Tammy showed up dressed more like a town girl than I had ever seen her—a plaid skirt, a white blouse, loafers, her dark hair pulled back and up into a cheerful ponytail. She could have been a cheerleader. She could have been a member of the Sub-Deb Club. No one could have ever guessed what she had in her pocket—a pack of Kents and a stolen kidney stone once removed from her neighbor, Mrs. Gillespie, who had kept it in a jar on her mantel. But even though Tammy looked so nice, Mama was giving her the third degree. “How many brothers and sisters did you say you had?” and “Where was your mama from?”
This interrogation took place upstairs in Mama’s dressing room. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Daddy lurched in to fill the doorway and say, “Leave those little girls alone, Dee Rose, you’ve got your hands full already,” and oddly enough, Mama did leave us alone then. She didn’t say another word about it at the time, turning back to her nails, or even later, as spring progressed and Ashley’s increasing absences and moodiness became more of a problem. Before long, Daddy refused to join us even for dinner. Mama did have her hands full. If I could occupy myself, so much the better.
* * *
I will never forget the first time I was allowed to go to church with Tammy and her mother. I had spent the night out at the farm, and in the morning I was awake long before it was time to leave. I dressed carefully, in the yellow dress and jacket Mama had ordered for me only a couple of months before from Rich’s in Atlanta. It was already getting too small. Tammy and her mother both looked at my outfit with some astonishment. They didn’t have any particular church clothes, it turned out. At least, they didn’t have any church clothes as fancy as these. Tammy wore a black dress which was much too old for her, clearly a hand-me-down from someplace, and her mother wore the same formless slacks and untucked shirt she always wore. I could never tell any of her clothes apart. For breakfast that morning, we had Hi-Ho cakes, which we ate directly from their cellophane wrappers, and Dr Peppers. Then we went out and got into their old blue car, which threatened not to start. Oh no! I found myself suddenly, terribly upset. I realized then how very much I was dying to hear Tammy’s mother speak in tongues of fire, a notion that intrigued me more and more the better I got to know her, because usually she didn’t speak at all. Never! Her pale gray eyes were fixed on distance, the way my daddy’s had been that day at the golf course. The engine coughed and spluttered, died. Then finally Tammy’s mother suggested that Tammy and I should push her down the muddy rutted driveway and she’d pop the clutch. I had never heard of such a thing. In my family, a man in a uniform, from a garage, came to start cars that wouldn’t start. Still, we pushed. It started. I got mud all over the bottom of my yellow dress.
Which didn’t matter at all, I saw as soon as we got to the church. There were old men in overalls, younger men in coveralls with their names stitched on their pockets, girls in jeans, boys in jeans. The men stood around by their trucks in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes. The women went on in, carrying food. Tammy’s mother had a big bag of Fritos. The church itself was a square cinder-block building painted white. It looked like a convenience store. Its windows were made of the kind of frosted glass you find in restrooms. The only way you could tell it was a church was from the hand-lettered sign on the door, MARANATHA APOSTOLIC CHURCH ALL COME IN. I asked Tammy what “Maranatha” meant and she said she didn’t know. Tammy would rather be at my house on Sundays, so she could look through Mama’s jewelry, eat lemon meringue pie at my grandmother’s, and stare at Baptists. She had made this plain. I’d rather be at her house, in general; she’d rather be at mine. We walked into her church.
“This way.” Tammy was pulling my arm. Men sat on the right-hand side of the church. Women sat on the left. There was no music, no Miss Eugenia Little at the organ. Men and women sat still, staring straight ahead, the children sprinkled among them like tiny grave adults. The pews were handmade, hard, like benches, with high, straight backs. There was no altar, only the huge wooden cross at the front of the church, dwarfing everything, and a curtain, like a shower curtain, pulled closed behind it. A huge Bible stood open on a lectern with a big jug (of what? water?) beside it. More people came in. My heart was beating a mile a minute. The light that came in through the frosted-glass windows produced a soft, diffuse glow throughout the church.
Tammy popped her gum. Tammy’s mother’s eyes were already closed. Her pale eyelashes fluttered. Her mouth was moving and she swayed slightly, back and forth from the waist up. Nothing else was happening.
Then four women, all of them big and tough-looking, went forward and simply started singing “Rock of Ages,” without any warning or any introduction at all. I almost jumped right out of my seat. Some of the congregation joined in, some did not. It seemed to be optional. Tammy’s mother did not sing. She did not open her eyes either. The women’s voices were high, mournful, seeming to linger in the air long after they were done. “Praise God!” “Yes, Jesus!” At the conclusion of the song, people throughout the church started shouting. I craned my neck around to see who was doing this, but the back of the pew was too high, blocking a lot of my view. They sang again. I had never heard any music like this music, music without any words at all, or maybe it was music without any music, it seemed to pierce my brain. I was sweating under my arms again.
The preacher, Mr. Looney, entered unobtrusively from the side during the singing. Initially, Mr. Looney was a disappointment. He was small and nondescript. He looked like George Gobel. Tammy had told me he was a security guard at the paper mill during the week. He spoke in a monotone with a hick accent. As he led us all in prayer—a prayer that seemed to go on forever, including everybody in the church by name—my mind wandered back to a time when I was little and our whole family had gone to Gulf Shores for a vacation, and Ashley and Paul were there too, and all of us worked and worked, covering Daddy up with sand, and Mama wore a sailor hat. By the end of the prayer, I was crying, and Mr. Looney had changed his delivery, his voice getting stronger and more rhythmical as he went into his message for the day. This message was pretty simple, one I had heard before. God’s wrath is awful. Hell is real and lasts forever. It is not enough to have good intentions. The road to Hell is paved with those. It is not enough to do good works, such as taking care of the sick and giving to the poor. God will see right through you. The only way you can get to Heaven is by turning over your whole will and your whole mind to Jesus Christ, being baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and born again in Glory.
“Does sprinkling count?” I whispered to Tammy. I had been sprinkled in the Methodist church.
“No,” she whispered back.
Mr. Looney went on and on, falling into chant now, catching up his sentences with an “Ah!” at the end of each line. People were yelling out. And then came, finally, the invitational, “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, O Lamb of God, I come, I come!”
The stolid-looking young woman sitting two seats over from us surprised me by starting to mumble suddenly, then she screamed out, then she rushed forward, right into Mr. Looney’s arms.
I twisted my head around to see what would happen next. Mr. Looney blessed her and said that she would “pass through to Jesus” by and by.
“What does he mean, ‘pass through to Jesus’?” I was still whispering, but I might as well have been speaking aloud; there was so much commotion now that nobody else could have heard me.
Tammy jerked her head toward the front of the church. “Through them curtains, I reckon,” she said.
“What’s back there?” I asked, and Tammy said it was a swimming pool that people got baptized in.
And sure enough, it was not long before Mr. Looney pulled back the curtains to reveal a kind of big sliding glass door cut in the wall, with a large wading pool right beyond it, the kind I had seen in the Sears catalogue. Mr. Looney pulled the heavy young woman through the curtains and hauled her over the edge of the pool. The water reached up to about mid-thigh on both of them. I couldn’t believe they would just walk into the water like that, wearing all their clothes, wearing their shoes! Mr. Looney pulled back the woman’s long hair and grasped it firmly. Her face was as blank and solid as a potato. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost!” Mr. Looney yelled, and dunked her all the way under, backwards. Although she held her nose, she came up sputtering.
Now people were jumping up all over the church, singing out and yelling, including Tammy’s mother, who opened her mouth and screamed out in a language like none I had ever heard, yet a language which I felt I knew intimately, somehow, better than I knew English. It was my language, I was sure of it, and I think I might have passed out right then from the shock of sheer recognition except that Tammy grabbed my arm and yanked like crazy.
“Get ready!” she said.
“What?”
“She’s fixing to fall,” Tammy said just as her mother pitched backwards in a dead faint. We caught her and laid her out on the pew. She came to later, when church was over, and then we all had dinner on the ground out back of the church. Later I sneaked back into the fellowship hall on the pretext of going to the bathroom, so I could examine the pool in greater detail. It was in a little anteroom off the fellowship hall, right up against the double doors that led from the sanctuary, now closed. It was a plain old wading pool, just as I’d thought, covered now by a blue tarpaulin. I pulled back the tarp. The water was pretty cold. A red plastic barrette floated jauntily in the middle of the pool. I looked at it for a long time. I knew I would have to get in that water sooner or later. I would have to get saved.
I was so moved by the whole experience that I might have actually broken through my invisible shield to tell Daddy about it, or even Ashley, but Mama met me at the door that afternoon with an ashen face and, for once, no makeup.
“Where in the world have you all been?” she shrilled. “I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon.”
“We ate lunch out at the church,” I said. “They do that.” Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Tammy and her mother pull away in the battered blue car and wished I were with them, anywhere but here. I didn’t want to know whatever Mama had to say next. In that split second, several possibilities raced through my mind:
Grandmother really has died.
Ashley is pregnant.
Ashley has eloped.
Daddy has killed himself.
But I was completely surprised by what came next.
“Your brother has been in the most terrible wreck,” Mama said, “up in Virginia. He’s in a coma, and they don’t know if he’ll make it or not.”
* * *
Paul had been drunk, of course. Drunk, or he might not have lived at all, somebody said later, but I don’t know whether that was true or not. I think it is something people say after wrecks, whenever there’s been drinking. He had been driving back to W&L from Randolph-Macon, where he was dating a girl. This girl wrote Mama a long, emotional letter on pink stationery with a burgundy monogram. Paul was taken by ambulance from the small hospital in Lexington, Virginia, to the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville, one of the best hospitals in the world. This is what everybody told me. Mama went up there immediately. Her younger sister, my Aunt Liddie, came to stay with us while she was gone.
Aunt Liddie had always been referred to in our family as “flighty.” Aunt Liddie “went off on tangents,” it was said. I wasn’t sure what this meant. Still, I was glad to see her when she arrived, with five matching suitcases full of beautiful clothes and her Pekingese named Chow Mein. Back in Birmingham she was a Kelly girl, so it was easy for her to leave her job and come to us. The very first night she arrived, Liddie got me to come out on the back steps with her. She sat very close to me in the warm spring night and squeezed both my hands. “I look on this as a wonderful opportunity for you and me to get to know each other better,” Aunt Liddie said. “I want you to tell me everything.”
But I would tell her nothing, as things turned out. This was to be our closest moment. The very next week, Liddie started dating Mr. Hudson Bell, a young lawyer she met by chance in the bank. Immediately, Liddie and Hudson Bell were in love, and Ashley and I were free—within the bounds of reason—to come and go
as we pleased. Aunt Liddie asked no questions. Missie cooked the meals.
This was just as well with me, for I had serious business to tend to.
I knew it was up to me to bring Paul out of that coma. I would pray without ceasing, and Tammy would help me. The first week, we prayed without ceasing only after school and on the weekend. Paul was no better, Mama reported from Charlottesville. The second week, I gave up sitting on soft chairs and eating chocolate. I paid so much attention to the unfortunate Lurice May that she began avoiding me. Paul had moved his foot, Mama said. I doubled my efforts, giving up also Cokes and sleeping in bed. (I had to sleep flat on the floor.) Also, I prayed without ceasing all during math class. I wouldn’t even answer the teacher, Mrs. Lemon, when she called on me. She sent me to Guidance because of it. During this week, I began to suspect that perhaps Tammy was not praying as much as she was supposed to, not keeping up her end of the deal. Still, I was too busy to care. I gave up hot water; I had to take cold showers now.
The third weekend of Mama’s absence and Paul’s coma, I spent Saturday night with Tammy, and that Sunday morning, at Tammy’s church, I got saved.
When Mr. Looney issued his plea, I felt that he was talking right to me. “With every head bowed and every eye closed,” he said, “I want you to look into your hearts and minds this morning. Have you got problems, brother? Have you got problems, sister? Well, give them up! Give them over to the Lord Jesus Christ. If His shoulders are big enough to bear the cross, they are big enough to take on your little problems, beloved. Turn them over to Him. He will help you now in this life, here in this vale of tears. And He will give you Heaven Everlasting as a door prize. Think about it, beloved. Do you want to burn in Hell forever, at the Devil’s barbecue? Or do you want to lie in banks of flowers, listening to that heavenly choir?”