Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  “With boldness!” Daddy shouted, making everybody jump. “With boldness, my beloved! And as believers, can we do any less? God calls for us to be bold tonight, beloved, to turn our lives over to Him and open our hearts to His holy spirit, and He will fill us with rapture, oh my beloved. He will grant us powers which we have not dreamed of. I mean power, beloved. Oh, I know you’re out there tonight saying, ‘What do you mean, Brother Shepherd, why I have not got no power in this world, I have got laid off and my wife is up sick in the bed and my children are lost to Jesus and it’s hard times everywhere I look. It’s a sea of trouble, Brother Shepherd, and you come in here talking about power. Why, you’re just a joke! You’d just as best go back to wherever it was you come from, fast as you can go.’ But I say to you here tonight, oh my beloved, it don’t have to be this way. No sirree. For God is the greatest source of power in this here universe, and all we have to do is open our hearts and minds up to Him this very evening and let Him work, and His power will run through us and we can do anything. Anything, beloved! We can cure the sick! We can cast out devils! We can speak with new tongues, beloved, we can take up the deadly serpent in His name, and there is no harm in it, for Jesus has given us the power. Oh, He’s coming down on us here tonight, beloved. I can feel it. I can feel Him right here, can’t you feel Him, brother? Can’t you feel Him, sister?”

  As he preached, Daddy paced back and forth with his white shirt and his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. Doyle Stacy and Ruth Duty were playing music over to the side while Daddy went on preaching, and before long, folks all over the brush arbor were leaping up to shout or pray or clap or start dancing. It finally built up to where the anointing came down on Daddy as it always did, and he yelled, “I can feel the power! Oh, I can feel the power right here tonight, Lord Jesus, oh thank you, Lord, thank you, thank you, sweet Jesus!” Then Daddy reached under the bench and opened up the box and took a serpent out and draped it across his shoulders. All of a sudden the air went electric, and some people were scrambling back and others were surging forward and the singing got louder and louder.

  This was the moment when the Graybeals chose to make their appearance.

  They came running in from the road side of the brush arbor, all liquored up. One of them carried two sacks and the others were holding the lard can between them. “You want a serpent, preacher man?” they were hollering. “Here’s a serpent for you!” They made their way to the front of the brush arbor and dumped those snakes out everywhere. People were yelling and crying and climbing all over each other and running ever which way. Mama said you could not believe a place could clear out so fast. She ran to the woods, but Daddy would not go with her. The Graybeals hooted with laughter.

  Daddy stood right in front of the wooden cross and raised his arms and prayed for power while the snakes slithered and struck at his feet. Then he bent over and started scooping them up and hollering, “Oh, He’s a great God!” and “Hallelujah!” Daddy unbuttoned his shirt and stuffed it full of copperheads and laid the big rattler across his shoulders and wrapped the little one around his neck and reached down to gather up the rest of them in his arms. He walked down the middle of the empty brush arbor until he got beyond the last slab bench. He stopped there in the wild light of the flaming lanterns and looked into the darkness past the circle of flickering light where many stood huddled in the trees, waiting to see what would happen. Daddy was fully anointed and covered in snakes, which writhed around his arms and his body and popped out of the open front of his shirt.

  “It was something to see,” Mama would say softly, her eyes shining when she came to this part. By now, she was plaiting our hair.

  Daddy raised his arms and stretched them out to the darkness. “Come back here, beloved,” Daddy said softly in that voice which would not take no for an answer. “Come back, come back to Jesus.” And they did, many of them, crying and sobbing and calling out to Jesus, pouring back into the brush arbor almost as fast as they had rushed out of it. Doyle Stacy grabbed his guitar and Ruth Duty started in again on the tambourine, joined by one of the Dotsons on Daddy’s guitar and by the Cline sisters, who loved to sing, and as Daddy walked slowly back up the middle aisle to the front of the brush arbor, the Lord came down hard on the whole crowd, so that everybody started to dance and shout or fell down on their knees to pray.

  There were those present who will swear to this day that Daddy gave off light like the sun. Many were blessed that night to come forward and pluck the serpents off of Daddy and handle them too, and nobody was harmed in any way, and tongues of fire came down on several, including Carlton Duty, who flung back his head and shouted out in the unknown language of the Lord for upwards of an hour. The Holy Spirit was so strong that night that three of the copperheads died from it, Mama said, right there in the service.

  Rufus Graybeal, who had been converted on the spot, was holding one of them when it went limp as a dishrag in his hand. “I went in there as a sinner and a fool,” Rufus Graybeal said later, “and come out as a true believer.” Though Daddy cautioned him not to think the whole thing was a show put on by God for his own benefit, Rufus was later to fall into the pit of pride, as Daddy called it, anyway.

  But this was a great meeting in which the spirit of the Lord rested upon the brush arbor for an hour or more, and it was not over until late in the night, when Daddy took a torch and led a large group of people down to the Little Dove River and baptized them one after another in Jesus’ name.

  “And when the last one was baptized,” Mama always said, “now that was Mrs. Goody Keene, don’t you know that the moon broke out from behind the clouds and lit up that whole riverbank bright as day! We could see every rock and pebble on the shore, and laughed at how Mrs. Keene had got so caught up in the Spirit that she had took her pocketbook right down in the river with her. We all rejoiced,” Mama said, “and thanked God for it, and the moon stayed out for the rest of the night. The road looked like a silver ribbon,” Mama said, “as we were coming home.”

  Mama timed the story of the first brush arbor meeting so that it always ended just when she got to the last rubber band.

  * * *

  MANY UNBELIEVERS WERE convinced that night, and from then on, the brush arbor meetings were full to overflowing, with cars parked all up and down the road. Mama and Daddy took us children over there sometimes, but often we stayed home with Evelyn. When they were gone overnight, off preaching someplace, Ruth Duty or one of the other ladies would come to stay with us. Sometimes Ruth brought a chicken to fry up, and one time we had a pork roast. Another time she made us a batch of sugar cookies and we ate them while they were still warm, and washed them down with sweet milk she’d brought from the store. The cookies had little sprinkles of sugar on the top of them that stuck to your lips while you ate. Ruth would patch our clothes too, and clean the house, claiming it was the least she could do. She taught us how to sew on buttons and crochet. It was not that Mama couldn’t do these things—it was just that she was so caught up in Daddy’s ministry.

  For Mama was truly religious, and believed that Daddy had saved her, in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was a dancing girl, actually a young widow with three little children to support—now this is Joe Allen, Evelyn, and Billie Jean, who was nothing but a baby when Daddy came to town with a tent crusade. Their own daddy had been shot in the back for good reason, Mama always said. This was a Mister Bevel Reed, Mama’s first husband. And since Mama had run off from her home on the farm at a tender age to join up with his traveling show, she had no one to turn to at his death. She found a woman to keep the children so she could work, but Billie Jean was sick all the time and Mama got real low. She was down real low when she met Daddy. She didn’t care about anything, not what she did, nor what happened to her. She was mad at the whole world.

  It was in a spirit of making fun that she went to his tent crusade for the first time, on the arm of a fancy gentleman, for it had been in all the newspapers. Dadd
y had been arrested, then released, and everybody was waiting to see whether he would obey the judge. Mama and her gentleman friend had been drinking. They went to the crusade like it was a freak show.

  But Daddy knocked her socks off, Mama said. Though he was arrested again that very night—or perhaps because of it—he made a big impression. As the police were hauling him off, they ran right into Mama, who was wearing high heels, a green suit, and a little green hat with a bird on it. Daddy stared down at her with his piercing blue eyes, then leaned over quick as a wink and kissed her on the mouth. “You’re all right, honey,” he said. The police jerked him back and pulled him away, and of course Mama’s gentleman friend was furious. Mama laughed it off at the time, but the next day she went to visit Daddy in jail, where he stayed for thirty days, refusing to pay the fine. When they finally released him on the condition that he would leave town, Mama went too, taking her children along.

  She never looked back.

  I was born about a year later, in Kissimmee, Florida.

  Up on Scrabble Creek, even our home life revolved around Daddy’s ministry. He held meetings on Wednesday nights, Saturday nights, Sunday nights, and every other Sunday morning. Sometimes we’d scarcely get back on Sunday before we had to go over there again.

  Even when Daddy was at home, he talked to God all the time. You could hear him on the porch, or even out in the toilet. Sometimes you could understand the words and sometimes not. We had to pray and pray at bedtime, on our knees. We had to pray over our meals even if we had scarcely a thing in the house to eat, even if we were praying over nothing but cornmeal mush. We’d pray till the food was cold. Daddy did all this, I understood, because Jesus required it of him, and Mama did it because she loved Daddy. Mama loved Jesus too, but I think she loved Daddy even more.

  She went with him to meeting, and read the Bible out for him to preach, but she did not take up serpents herself. Many believers did not. It was only a few—some people called them the saints—who were blessed to do so, with special power that came from God in the form of anointing. It was not given to everyone, and I was real glad it had not been given to Mama.

  So I cried and cried the first time she handled fire, one winter night up on Scrabble Creek.

  * * *

  CARLTON AND RUTH Duty had come over, as they often did, and they were in the front room with Mama and Daddy reading the Bible and talking about it and praying all together while me and Billie Jean played jacks on the kitchen floor. We could not play cards or have a radio, but we could play jacks and paper dolls. Billie Jean was thin, with pale brown hair that came down in pointy wisps all around her thin little mouse’s face. She did not look a thing like Mama, which I did. Maybe she looked like Mister Bevel Reed, but if so we did not know it, as we had never seen his likeness. Billie Jean counted all the way up to five without missing. Daddy came out for his guitar and rumpled our hair on his way back through the kitchen. Billie Jean missed.

  They started singing in the front room, “I’m on my way to Heaven, I can see that other shore, and I won’t be coming back anymore.” It was a real catchy tune which I loved, I threw out the jacks and got up to six and then missed. We could hear them singing and dancing in the other room. The glasses in the kitchen cabinet started to rattle. Without a word, Billie Jean and I looked at each other and she gathered up the jacks and the ball and put them in her pocket and we went in there.

  It was clear that things had reached a certain point already. Ruth Duty was dancing, with her fat white arms held out to the side and her stomach and her bosom bouncing up and down. Mama had her eyes closed, and bright spots of color on her cheeks. She looked like she was wearing makeup. Daddy was dancing around with his guitar. Carlton Duty was shuffling away by the heatstove with his hand over his heart, singing off-key, which didn’t matter because the women were so loud. From the door, Billie Jean and me joined in. “Lord, I won’t be coming back anymore, Lord, I won’t be coming back anymore. . . .” Then all of a sudden Mama flung her head back and started jerking and crying out in a scary way, no words, just sharp animal noises. I tried to go forward to her, but then Daddy was there, barring my way. I watched across his arm as Mama rushed over to the heatstove, still shrieking, and opened it up and plunged her hands in there and grabbed up the red-hot coals. Smoke poured into the room.

  “Je-sus! Je-sus! Blessed Je-sus!” Carlton Duty was yelling as Mama danced all around the room with the burning coals in her hands. Ruth Duty fell down on the floor moaning and sobbing.

  “Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!” Daddy said over and over. “Pray, little children! Pray!” he said to us.

  Billie Jean and I got down on our knees and fell forward, but I was not really praying, I was banging my head on the floor and saying, “I hate Jesus! I hate Jesus!” over and over in my mind, because He was burning my mother. I fainted dead away right there, and they all thought God had come over me, but He had not.

  It turned out that Mama was just fine.

  I had a bruise on my forehead for two weeks, while she had nary a blister. The next day, she told us how it had felt.

  “It was a good feeling, Gracie,” she insisted, smoothing my hair away from my face, “a good feeling. It was a pleasure in the Lord. Oh honey, I don’t know how to explain it. It was just too good to explain, First it was like chill bumps come over me, and then my arms and my hands went numb, and I could hear that cold wind blow, and I got kind of a cold feeling in my heart. I could feel my hands drawing to do something, and before I knowed what was going on, the Lord had led me over there to the heatstove.

  “Now you listen to me, Gracie,” she said, for I had put my hands up to my ears, “it was a perfect pleasure in the Lord, you silly girl!” But I could not understand, and though Mama was anointed to do this many times later, I never could bear to see it.

  * * *

  IN THOSE YEARS up on Scrabble Creek, Mama was like a child herself, never too busy to stop her work and play with us. She was always happy and singing—church songs mostly, but also other songs, from her days in the traveling show, “K-K-Katy, Good-bye,” “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home,” “My Blue Heaven,” and “A Bicycle Built for Two,” my favorite.

  Joe Allen actually had a bicycle, which his boss at the sawmill had given him, and he used to ride it over to give Mama some money every payday. He was living in the bunkhouse at the sawmill. If he had not done this, we never would have had any cash money, since Daddy didn’t even carry a wallet, trusting always in the Lord to provide. Mama kept the money hidden, and used to slip us some if we went to town.

  I never thought about this one way or the other until the day I heard Joe Allen arguing with Mama about it.

  “Just keep some of it back, Mama,” he was saying earnestly as he stood by the porch holding the handlebars of his red bicycle. “He won’t know the difference anyway.” Joe Allen had freckles all over his face and one piece of brown hair that kept falling down into his eyes no matter how often he slicked it back. He could not have told a lie, or been mean to anybody, if his life depended on it. “You can’t tell what might happen, Mama. You never know what you might need it for.”

  “Why, we don’t want for a thing, honey,” Mama said, laughing, as she looked around at the bright day and her blooming roses and Troy Lee down in the dirt with a spoon. I was stringing beans on the porch.

  “That’s just what you think right now, Mama,” Joe Allen said. “You keep some of this back, you hear me? You put it away someplace where he won’t know, so you’ll have it, like an insurance policy. I’m not going to give it to you if you’re just going to give it all to the kids, or let it go to church folks.” Joe Allen stood up straight and talked as serious as a man.

  “Joe Allen, I’m ashamed of you!” Mama had a little fit of temper. “What would your daddy say?”

  “Number one, he ain’t my daddy, and number two, I don’t care what he would say,” J
oe Allen announced. “You can tell him if you want to. There’s other ways of looking at things, Mama. You ought to hear what they say in town, some of them.” Joe Allen pushed the money into her hand and got back on his bike.

  “What do you mean?” Mama clutched the porch post real tight.

  “Never you mind what I mean, Mama,” Joe Allen said. “You put that money away like I told you. I’ve got to get on back now. I’ll see you, Mama. I’ll see you next week.” Joe Allen looked like he was fixing to cry. He kicked off and rode down the hill at a furious rate of speed, and disappeared down the road to town. I watched him go, and wished that I could go with him.

  “I’ll be praying for you, Joe Allen,” Mama called after him in a wavery voice that seemed to hang in the hot still air like the butterflies over the flowers. She looked at the money in her hand and then at me. “What are you looking at?” she said in a voice that was as close as she ever came to being hateful. Then she went inside, and I never knew if she saved any of that money, or any of the money that Joe Allen gave her every week until he had the big fight with Daddy. I didn’t think Mama was capable of keeping anything from Daddy, though. For he was the master in our house, and she was often like one of us kids.