by Lee Smith
I felt a burning, stabbing sensation in my chest and stomach—something like heartburn, something like the hand of God. The idea of turning it all over to Him was certainly appealing at this point. Another week of prayer, and I’d flunk math for sure. The choir sang, “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me.” Beside me, Tammy’s mama was starting to mumble and moan.
Mr. Looney said, “Perhaps there is one among you who feels that his sin is too great to bear, but no sin is too black for the heavenly laundry of Jesus Christ, He will turn you as white as snow, as white as the driven snow, hallelujah!” Mr. Looney reached back and pulled the curtains open, so we could all see the pool. Tammy’s mama leaped up and called out in her strangely familiar language. Mr. Looney went on, “Perhaps there is a child among you who hears our message this morning, who is ready now for Salvation. Why, a little child can go to Hell, the same as you and me! A little child can burn to a crisp. But it is also true that a little child can come to God—right now, right this minute, this very morning. God don’t check your ID, children. God will check your souls.” “Come home, come home,” they sang.
Before I even knew it, I was up there, and we had passed through those curtains, and I was standing in the water with my full blue skirt floating out around me like a lily pad. Then he was saying the words, shouting them out, and whispering to me, “Hold your nose,” which I did, and he pushed me under backwards, holding me tightly with his other hand so that I felt supported, secure, even at the very moment of immersion. It was like being dipped by the big boys at ballroom dancing, only not as scary. I came up wet and saved, and stood at the side of the pool while Mr. Looney baptized Eric Blankenship, a big gawky nineteen-year-old who came running and sobbing up the aisle just as Mr. Looney got finished with me. Eric Blankenship was confessing to all his sins, nonstop, throughout his baptism. His sins were a whole lot more interesting than mine, involving things he’d done with his girlfriend, and I strained to hear them as I stood there, but I could not, because of all the noise in the church.
And then it was over and everyone crowded forward to hug us, including Tammy. But even in that moment of hugging Tammy, who of course had been baptized for years and years, I saw something new in her eyes. Somehow, now, there was a difference between us, where before there had been none. But I was wet and freezing, busy accepting the congratulations of the faithful, so I didn’t have time to think any more about it then. Tammy gave me her sweater and they drove me home, where Aunt Liddie looked at me in a very fishy way when I walked in the door.
“I just got baptized,” I said, and she said, “Oh,” and then she went out to lunch with Hudson Bell, who came up the front walk not a minute behind me, sparing me further explanations.
Aunt Liddie came back from that lunch engaged, with a huge square-cut diamond. Nobody mentioned my baptism.
But the very next night, right after supper, Mama called to say that Paul was fine. All of a sudden, he had turned to the night nurse and asked for a cheeseburger. There seemed to be no brain damage at all except that he had some trouble remembering things, which was to be expected. He would have to stay in the hospital for several more weeks, but he would recover completely. He would be just fine.
I burst into tears of joy. I knew I had done it all. And for the first time, I realized what an effort it had been. The first thing I did was go into the kitchen and fix myself a milk shake, with Hershey’s syrup. And my bed felt so good that night, after the weeks on the floor. I intended to pray without ceasing that very night, a prayer of thanksgiving for Paul’s delivery, but I fell asleep instantly.
When Mama came back, I hoped she would be so busy that my baptism would be overlooked completely, but this was not the case. Aunt Liddie told her, after all.
“Karen,” was Mama’s reaction, “I am shocked! We are not the kind of family that goes out in the county and immerses ourselves in water. I can’t imagine what you were thinking of,” Mama said.
I looked out the window at Mama’s blooming roses. It was two weeks before the end of school, before Ashley’s graduation.
“Well, what?” Mama asked. She was peering at me closely, more closely than she had looked at me in years.
“Why did you do it?” Mama asked. She lit a cigarette.
I didn’t say a thing.
“Karen,” Mama said. “I asked you a question.” She blew a smoke ring.
I looked at the roses. “I wanted to be saved,” I said.
Mama’s lips went into that little red bow. “I see,” she said.
So later, that next weekend when she refused to let me spend the night out at Tammy’s, I did the only thing I could: I lied and said I was going to spend the night with Sara Ruth Johnson, and then prayed without ceasing that I would not be found out. Since it was senior prom weekend and Mama was to be in charge of the decorations and also a chaperone, I felt fairly certain I’d get away with it. But when the time came for the invitational that Sunday morning in the Maranatha Church, I simply could not resist. I pushed back Tammy’s restraining hand, rushed forward, and rededicated my life.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to rededicate your life right after you just dedicated it,” Tammy whispered to me later, but I didn’t care. I was wet and holy. If I had committed some breach of heavenly etiquette, surely Mr. Looney would tell me. But he did not. We didn’t stay for dinner on the ground that day either. As soon as Tammy’s mother came to, they drove me straight home, and neither of them said much.
Mama’s Cadillac was parked in the drive.
So I went around to the back of the house and tiptoed in through the laundry room door, carrying my shoes. But Mama was waiting for me. She stood by the ironing board, smoking a cigarette. She looked at me, narrowing her eyes.
“Don’t drip on the kitchen floor, Missie just mopped it yesterday,” she said.
I climbed up the back stairs to my room.
The next weekend, I had to go to Ashley’s graduation and to the baccalaureate sermon on Sunday morning in the Confederate Chapel at Lorton Hall. I sat between my grandparents. My Aunt Liddie was there too, with her fiancé. My daddy did not come. I wore a dressy white dress with a little bolero jacket and patent-leather shoes with Cuban heels—my first high heels. I felt precarious and old, grown-up and somehow sinful, and longed for the high hard pews of the Maranatha Church and the piercing, keening voices of the women singers.
But I never attended the Maranatha Church again. As soon as my school was over, I was sent away to Camp Alleghany in West Virginia for two months—the maximum stay. I didn’t want to go, even though this meant that I would finally have a chance to learn horseback riding, but I had no choice in the matter. Mama made this clear. It was to separate me from Tammy, whom Mama had labeled a Terrible Influence.
“And by the way,” Mama said brightly, “Margaret Applewhite will be going to Camp Alleghany too!” Oh, I could see right through Mama. But I couldn’t do anything about it. Camp started June 6, so I didn’t have time to pray for a change in my fate. She sprang it on me. Instead, I cried without ceasing all that long day before they put me and my trunk, along with Margaret Applewhite and her trunk, on the train. I tried and tried to call Tammy to tell her good-bye, but a recorded message said that her line had been disconnected. (This had happened several times before, whenever her mama couldn’t pay the bill.) My father would be going away too, to Shepherd Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ashley was going to Europe.
Sitting glumly by Mama at the train station, I tried to pray but could not. Instead, I remembered a game we used to play when I was real little, Statues. In Statues, one person grabs you by the hand and swings you around and around and then lets you go, and whatever position you land in, you have to freeze like that until everybody else is thrown. The person who lands in the best position wins. But what I remembered was that scary moment of being flung wildly out into the world screa
ming, to land however I hit, and I felt like this was happening to us all.
* * *
To my surprise, I loved camp. Camp Alleghany was an old camp, with rough-hewn wooden buildings that seemed to grow right out of the deep woods surrounding them. Girls had been carving their initials in the railings outside the dining hall for years and years. It was a tradition. I loved to run my fingers over these initials, imagining these girls—M.H., 1948; J.B., 1953; M.N., 1935. Some of the initials were very old. These girls were grown up by now. Some of them were probably dead. This gave me an enormous thrill, as did all the other traditions at Camp Alleghany. I loved the weekend campfire, as big as a tepee, ceremoniously lit by the Camp Spirit, whoever she happened to be that week. The Camp Spirit got to light the campfire with an enormous match, invoking the spirits with an ancient verse that only she was permitted to repeat. At the end of each weekly campfire, a new Camp Spirit was named, with lots of screaming, crying, and hugging. I was dying to be the Camp Spirit. In fact, after the very first campfire, I set this as my goal, cooperating like crazy with all the counselors so I would be picked. But it wasn’t hard for me to cooperate.
I loved wearing a uniform, being a part of the group—I still have the photograph from that first session of camp, all of us wearing our navy shorts, white socks, and white camp shirts, our hair squeaky-clean, grinning into the sun. I loved all my activities—arts and crafts, where we made huge ashtrays for our parents out of little colored tiles; swimming, where I already excelled and soon became the acknowledged champion of the breaststroke in all competitions; and drama, where we were readying a presentation of Spoon River. My canoeing group took a long sunrise trip upstream to an island where we cooked our breakfast out over a fire: grits, sausage, eggs. Everything had a smoky, exotic taste, and the smoke from our breakfast campfire rose to mingle with the patchy mist still clinging to the trees, still rising from the river. I remember lying on my back and gazing up at how the sunshine looked, like light through a stained-glass window, emerald green and iridescent in the leafy tops of the tallest trees. The river was as smooth and shiny as a mirror. In fact it reminded me of a mirror, of Ashley’s mirror-topped dressing table back home.
And the long trail rides—when we finally got to take them—were even better than the canoe trips. But first we had to go around and around the riding ring, learning to post, learning to canter. The truth was, I didn’t like the horses nearly as much as I’d expected to. For one thing, they were a lot bigger than I had been led to believe by the illustrations in my horse books. They were as big as cars. For another thing they were not lovable either. They were smelly, and some of them were downright mean. One big old black horse named Martini was pointed out to us early on as a biter. Others kicked. On a trail ride, you didn’t want to get behind one of these. Still, the trail rides were great. We lurched along through the forest, following the leader. I felt like I was in a western movie, striking out into the territory. On the longest trail ride, we took an overnight trip up to Pancake Mountain, where we ate s’mores (Hershey bars and melted marshmallows smashed into a sandwich between two graham crackers), told ghost stories, and went to sleep finally with the wheezing and stamping of the horses in our ears.
Actually, I liked the riding counselors better than I liked the horses. The regular counselors were sweet, pretty girls who went to school at places like Hollins and Sweet Briar, or else maternal, jolly older women who taught junior high school during the regular year, but the riding counselors were tough, tan, muscular young women who squinted into the sun and could post all day long if they had to. The riding counselors said “Shit” a lot, and smoked cigarettes in the barn. They did not speak of college.
My only male counselor was a frail, nervous young man named Jeffrey Long, reputed to be the nephew of the owner. He taught nature study, which I loved. I loved identifying the various trees (hickory, five leaves; ironwood, the satiny metallic trunk; maple, the little wings; blue-berried juniper; droopy willow). We made sassafras toothbrushes, and brushed our teeth in the river.
On Sundays, we had church in the big rustic assembly hall. It was an Episcopal service, which seemed pretty boring to me in comparison with the Maranatha Church. Yet I liked the Prayer Book, and I particularly liked one of the Episcopal hymns, which I had never heard before, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” with its martial, military tune. I imagined Joan of Arc striding briskly along in a satin uniform to just that tune. I also liked the hymn “Jerusalem,” especially the weird lines that went, “Bring me my staff of burnished gold, bring me my arrows of desire.” I loved the “arrows of desire” part.
We all wore white shirts and white shorts to church. After church we had a special Sunday lunch, with fried chicken and ice cream. “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” we’d shout, banging on the tables before they brought it out. (In order to have any, you had to turn in an Ice Cream Letter—to your parents—as you came in the door.)
On Sunday nights, we all climbed the hill behind the dining hall for vespers. We sat on our ponchos looking down on the camp as the sun set, and sang “Day Is Done.” We bowed our heads in silent prayer. Then, after about ten minutes of this, one of the junior counselors played “Taps” on the bugle. She played it every night at lights out too. I much admired the bugler’s jaunty, boyish stance. I had already resolved to take up the bugle, first thing, when I got back home.
And speaking of home, I’d barely thought of it since arriving at Camp Alleghany. I was entirely too busy. I guess that was the idea. Still, every now and then in a quiet moment—during silent prayer at vespers, for instance; or rest hour right after lunch, when we usually played Go Fish or some other card game, but sometimes, sometimes I just lay on my cot and thought about things; or at night, after “Taps,” when I’d lie looking up at the rafters before I fell asleep—in those quiet moments, I did think of home, and of my salvation. I didn’t have as much time as I needed, there at camp, to pray without ceasing. Besides, I was often too tired to do it. Other times, I was having too much fun to do it. Sometimes I just forgot. To pray without ceasing requires either a solitary life or a life of invisibility such as I had led within my family for the past year.
What about my family, anyway? Did I miss them? Not a bit. I could scarcely recall what they looked like. Mama wrote that Paul was back home already and had a job at the snack bar at the country club. Ashley was in France. Daddy was still in Baltimore, where he would probably stay for six more months. Mama was very busy helping Aunt Liddie plan her wedding, which I would be in. I would wear an aqua dress and dyed-to-match heels. I read Mama’s letter curiously, several times. I felt like I had to translate it, like it was written in a foreign language. I folded this letter up and placed it in the top tray of my trunk, where I would find it years later. Right then, I didn’t have time to think about my family. I was too busy doing everything I was supposed to, so that I might be picked as Camp Spirit. (Everybody agreed that the current Camp Spirit, Jeannie Darling from Florida, was a stuck-up bitch who didn’t deserve it at all.) At the last campfire of First Session, I had high hopes that I might replace her. We started out by singing all the camp songs, first the funny ones such as “I came on the train and arrived in the rain, my trunk came a week later on.” Each “old” counselor had a song composed in her honor, and we sang them all. It took forever. As we finally sang the Camp Spirit song, my heart started beating like crazy.
But it was not to be. No, it was Jeanette Peterson, a skinny boring redhead from Margaret Applewhite’s cabin. I started crying but nobody knew why, because by then everybody else was crying too, and we all continued to cry as we sang all the sad camp songs about loyalty and friendships and candle flames. This last campfire was also Friendship Night. We had made little birchbark boats that afternoon, and traded them with our best friends. At the end of the campfire, the counselors passed out short white candles which we lit and carried down to the river in a solemn procession. Th
en we placed the candles in our little boats and set them in the water, singing our hearts out as the flotilla of candles entered the current and moved slowly down the dark river and out of sight around the bend. I clung to my New Best Friend and cried. This was Shelley Long from Leesburg, Virginia, with a freckled, heart-shaped face and a pixie haircut, who talked a mile a minute all the time. It was even possible that Shelley Long had read more books than I had, unlike my Old Best Friend Tammy back at home in Alabama, who had not read any books at all, and did not intend to. Plus, Shelley Long owned a pony and a pony cart. She had shown me a picture of herself at home in Leesburg, driving her pony cart. Her house, in the background, looked like Mount Vernon. I was heartbroken when she left, the morning after Friendship Night.
* * *
It rained that morning, a cold drizzle that continued without letup for the next two days. About three-quarters of the campers left after First Session, including everybody I liked. Margaret Applewhite stayed. My last vision of the departing campers was a rainy blur of waving hands as the big yellow buses pulled out, headed for the train station and the airport. All the girls were singing at the top of their lungs, and their voices seemed to linger in the air long after they were gone. Then came a day and a half of waiting around for the Second Session campers to arrive, a day and a half in which nobody talked to me much, and the counselors were busy doing things like counting the rifle shells. So I became invisible again, free to wander about in the rain, free to pray without ceasing.
Finally the new campers arrived, and I brightened somewhat at the chance to be an Old Girl, to show the others the ropes and teach them the words to the songs. My New Best Friend was Anne Roper, from Lexington, Kentucky. She wasn’t as good as Shelley, but she was the best I could do, I felt, considering what I had to pick from. Anne Roper was okay.