Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  Daddy was really old, for one thing. Whenever I pictured God, especially the God of the Old Testament who parted the Red Sea and sent boils to people and burned up Sodom and Gomorrah and smote His enemies dead, I pictured Daddy, with his white hair and his sharp bright eyes and his deeply lined face. His hands and arms were black and blue from serpent bites. He had lost a whole finger—the little one on his left hand—and most of the fourth finger too. I used to hold that hand when we went to town, and when I felt the rough bumps where the fingers had been, I loved my daddy so much I could hardly stand it. For I knew—I guess we all knew—that we could lose him at any moment, and this made our time with him so precious. It gave everything an edge.

  And Daddy could be really sweet too, and a lot of fun. Sometimes when it got real hot in the summertime, he would help us make pallets out in the yard, and him and Mama would sleep out there with us. He’d tell us stories out of the Bible, like the one about the baby Moses in the bulrushes, and Mama would tell us other stories she knew from childhood, like Jack goes to seek his fortune. We’d lie on our backs looking up at the stars, all of us together. Sometimes we made up stories ourselves. Daddy would start off and then everybody would add on, even Troy Lee.

  “One time there was a little girl that wanted a pony,” Daddy began one night, and I said, “A magic pony that could fly,” real fast, for that was me. Everybody knew I wanted a pony.

  Daddy said, “One time there was a little girl that wanted a magic pony that could fly,” in his beautiful deep voice which made everything true. “And so she prayed to the Lord for the pony to come, and because she was a real good little girl who helped her mother and did everything she was supposed to, God sent the pony to her.”

  “At Christmas,” Billie Jean added, for we never got much at Christmas. I didn’t like this story very well so far, because I hadn’t wanted the pony to come from God, I had wanted it to come to me all by itself, appearing from the forest. But I reckoned I couldn’t be choosy.

  “And she got on the magic pony and rode and rode,” I said, “she rode all over the whole world, way up in the sky, and she could look down and see all the houses and everybody sleeping. She could see in every house,” I said, seeing it all in my mind. I lay looking up at the sky, which was full of big winking stars though heat lightning flashed in the distance.

  “And in one house there was a sick little boy,” said Evelyn, who was so morbid and dramatic, “and he needed a—a special kind of syrup, and it was real far away, in Africa, and he was going to die if he didn’t get it, and the only way he could get it was if the little girl would ride the magic pony over there and get it for him.”

  “Giddyup,” Troy Lee said, and everybody laughed.

  “So she started off for Africa,” Evelyn went on, “but she had to go mostly all around the world to get there, and when she finally did get there, it was dark, and the bottle of special syrup was up in a hollow old tree that was guarded by lions—”

  “And niggers,” Billie Jean stuck in, “with rings in their nose.”

  “Don’t say ‘nigger,’ ” I said, for my teacher had said this hurt their feelings.

  “They love to eat little girls,” Evelyn said. “Their best kind is little blonde girls.” This meant me. “And ponies. They love to eat pony stew.”

  “They do not!” I said. Everybody was laughing. I knew they were teasing me. “Make them quit, Daddy,” I said, though Daddy was laughing too.

  “And her poor little pony was so tired—” Evelyn went on, but I started talking up louder.

  “That she had to give him a vitamin pill, and then he was just fine, and then she rode her pony home, and kept it forever and ever. The end!” I was practically screaming.

  “Gracie, honey,” Mama said, “it’s all right,” and it was all right, for I had gotten the pony after all.

  I knew it was the only pony I’d ever get.

  “Now give me your hands, children,” Daddy said, and we all scooted around to where we could hold hands, and Daddy started to pray. “Oh Lord,” he said, “bless these little children who have not got much in the world, and give them the keys to your kingdom, Lord, and help them to understand that they have been singled out for a special mission on this earth, Lord, as your own special servants. . . .”

  I quit praying. Daddy told us this all the time. I didn’t want to be a special servant of the Lord. I didn’t want the keys to His kingdom either. I wanted a pony, or at the least a bicycle, and as Daddy went on and on praying, I imagined that I really had a little black-and-white spotted pony of my very own, with a silver saddle, and that I rode it across the summer sky, jumping stars.

  * * *

  ONE WINTER NIGHT when we were all sound asleep, there came a great pounding on the front door. I sat straight up, my heart beating out of my chest. “Billie Jean!” I shook her. “Quit it, Sissy, I’m awake,” she said. The pounding continued, and now we could hear shouts. “What do you reckon it is?” I asked, and Billie Jean said out loud what I was thinking, It might be the sheriff, for the law had been giving Daddy a good deal of trouble. We held each other tight and listened hard.

  But before long we could hear voices, Mama’s and Daddy’s among them, and by their tone we could tell it was not the sheriff.

  “I’m going to go see what it is,” I said, and I got up and pulled on my clothes though Billie Jean begged me to stay with her. Even at eleven, she was a fraidy cat. I buttoned up my sweater and listened. It sounded like they had moved into the kitchen. Billie gave a big gulp and pulled the covers over her head, and I left. Evelyn was still asleep, dead to the world. I grabbed an old quilt as I tiptoed out, and closed the door behind me. Its white china knob was smooth and cool to my touch. Once I got outside, my breath hung around my face like a cloud. I could see it in the light that spilled from the kitchen window onto the porch, and stepping up close to that window, I could see everything that happened, and hear it too.

  Everybody was gathered around the kitchen table, where they had laid out the body of a little dead girl under the hanging lightbulb. I saw this. I know she was dead. She was about my age, ten years old. They had stripped off her coat and her nightdress, so she lay there wearing only her white panties and socks. She was real thin. I could have counted her ribs. She was not breathing. Her chest was sunken in and did not move. Her face was blue, her lips were blue, and her eyes had rolled back in her head. I was glad Billie Jean had stayed in bed, though I couldn’t have left that kitchen window if my life depended upon it. Of course it was cold on the porch, and I was barefoot, but I didn’t even notice. I let the quilt fall down around my feet.

  The girl’s daddy was telling my daddy how it had happened, and how they had come to be here. His name was Dillard Jones, and his freckle-faced young wife Leanne, big with another child, stood by him crying and wringing her hands. The dead girl’s name was Lily. She had died that evening, but she’d been sick for a long time, most of her life, in fact. She’d take croup at the drop of a hat, and pneumonia, and lately she’d been having these spells where she couldn’t breathe. The doctor said it was asthma. He had come and looked at her and given her some pills, but they didn’t do her much good. Nothing had done her much good. Dillard Jones was a big tough strapping fellow, a long-distance trucker, with black hair. He looked like he could take care of any problem that ever came along, and couldn’t believe that this one was out of his hands. Ever since Christmas she’d gotten worse and worse, he said, and so they’d known it was coming. She had died about an hour before.

  Dillard Jones stood tall as a tree, with his hands clasped behind his back and his belly hanging over his pants, and related all this in a strong voice, like he was giving a recitation.

  Daddy, in his long johns, stood with his hands on his hips and listened hard, his eyes going back and forth from Dillard Jones’s face to his daughter’s, there on the table. I couldn’t help but think for a minute how
funny it was that she lay on the new oilcloth, which featured a cartoon pattern of dogs and cats. I’d picked it out, and Mama had ordered it from Sears and Roebuck. Daddy’s hair stood out wildly all around his head. Mama’s pale hair fell in its long rope down her back as she clutched her old blue robe around herself with one hand and hugged the dead girl’s mother with the other. Leanne Jones hardly looked old enough to have a ten-year-old child.

  Daddy asked a question, and Dillard Jones answered that right after Lily died, somebody came to their door, and it was one of their cousins that they had not seen in a long time, and when he saw what was going on, he advised them to bundle Lily up and get in the car with her and drive her over to see the Reverend Shepherd, who had healed a little boy at Scrabble Creek not a month previous.

  Daddy nodded. This was true.

  The cousin said that if it was him, he’d do it, and so Dillard Jones had figured it was worth a try. Besides, he said, crying, he was afraid that Lily’s sickness was a judgment on him for his own sins, as he had been a bad one, and run liquor and shot two people before he found the Lord. He would do anything if the Lord would give her back, he said. Tears came streaming down Dillard Jones’s red face.

  “Now I can’t speak for the Lord,” Daddy said in his deep calm voice, “but we’ll all pray here together, brother, and He will let her go if He wants to, or keep her, as He sees fit.”

  Dillard Jones wiped his face on his sleeve and nodded.

  “Fannie, get the Bible,” Daddy said, but Mama had already slipped off for it, and when Daddy called for the fifth chapter of James she had already turned to it. Daddy paced the kitchen floor while she read. Then he beckoned for Mama and the Joneses to draw near to the table and put their hands on Lily while he prayed, and then he started in praying, and this went on for a long time, I don’t know how long. I do remember stomping my feet to get the cramps out, and thinking how big Lily’s daddy’s hand looked on her thin waist. I looked up at the stars, which were tiny pinpricks of light, far away. There was no moon. The only sound in the dark cold night was Daddy’s voice as he prayed.

  Then, little by little, Lily came back to life. I don’t know when it started happening, or when I started realizing it. But after a while her lips were not so blue, and then her face was not so blue, and then after a long while her eyelids fluttered and her eyes closed.

  At this, Dillard Jones bit his lip and looked over at Daddy, but Daddy was praying hard with his own eyes closed and gave no sign, and so it continued on, and at some point I could see that Lily’s chest had started to move up and down just barely beneath their hands. It got light as they prayed, and by the time the sun rose in a fiery burst over Coleman’s Ridge, she was breathing in through her mouth and her face was as pink as mine.

  “Thank you, Jesus!” Daddy said when he was done. He looked old and worn-out.

  Lily lay wrapped in a blanket and seemed to know what was going on, though she could not speak. Her mother held a little tin cup of water up to her mouth.

  My mama waved at me through the kitchen window like it was the most natural thing in the world for me to be standing out on the porch at the crack of dawn. “Gracie, come in here and start the coffee,” she called. “This is Gracie,” she said to the Joneses, who were in a daze as was Daddy, slumped over in a kitchen chair. Mama disappeared and came back shortly in her housedress with her hair pinned up, and started frying bacon and breaking eggs. As soon as I smelled the bacon cooking, I realized I was just starving, which must have been true for everybody there, for we all ate the biggest breakfast.

  Because of the miracle that had happened, Dillard and Leanne Jones packed up and moved over to Scrabble Creek so they could go to our church, and Lily and I came to be fast friends. We used to spend the night at each other’s houses, and sit together in meeting, and I never forgot how I first saw her when she was dead.

  * * *

  DADDY HEALED OTHERS, including a woman who cried all the time because her nerves had gone bad, a baby that wouldn’t suck, a man with a sore on his leg that wouldn’t stop running, another man that couldn’t hold a job because of his headaches, a girl possessed by the Devil, and many more. So there was a lot of wonder and joy in the Jesus Name Church. Daddy did not handle the serpents at every service, not even after the other saints began to take them up too. It was done only at the meeting on Sundays, after the preaching, and when a crusade was going on, where it could convince an unbeliever like nothing else. Often serpents were not present in meeting at all, and sometimes when they were present, the Lord didn’t move on them, and nobody was blessed to take them up. It was only one of the signs that followed believers, as Daddy used to remind everybody. He hardly ever preached on those verses anyway, often letting the Bible just fall open willy-nilly and getting Mama to read out loud from whatever page the Lord had picked. Daddy could preach a good sermon on any verse. People marveled at him.

  But when the time was right, and the Lord blessed him to do it, why then Daddy did take up the serpents, as did the other saints, including of course Ruth and Carlton Duty and Rufus Graybeal and Dillard Jones and the Cline sisters, and many more. Sometimes the Spirit would be so strong that the whole congregation appeared to catch it, shouting “Hallelujah” and jumping up in joy to dance, and passing the serpents from hand to hand.

  People in the Spirit will often act like children—laughing out loud, giggling, patting their feet or clapping, sometimes talking baby talk. I saw old Mrs. Duke Watson, who had to be almost carried into meeting whenever she came, get up and dance the hula. I saw Lily’s mama get up and throw her new baby at the nearest woman she could find, then grasp a copperhead in each hand. I saw my own sister Evelyn dance right down the aisle with a yellow rattler, popping her gum and grinning. Later, she wouldn’t talk about it much. “You do it, Sissy,” she said. “Then you’ll see.”

  But I had never been anointed, and prayed that I never would be.

  I always sat way in the back with Lily, watching what all went on. We played tic-tac-toe on a little pad of paper when things got boring. A lot of the time I got to stay home and keep Troy Lee anyway. Meeting was not really the place for children. God would send for you when He was ready for you.

  There were several teenagers active in the Jesus Name congregation though, besides Evelyn. There was Evelyn’s best friend Patsy Manier, a plump funny girl that everybody liked—Patsy would talk your ear off—and Darlene Knott who wore harlequin eyeglasses, the first I ever saw, and her brother Robbie Knott, who played drums sometimes in meeting, and Doyle Stacy, the thin boy with a thin mustache who played electric guitar and lived with his sick mother and worked for the Appalachian Power Company. I had a little crush on Doyle Stacy. I had a little crush on beautiful Rhonda Rose too, who had quit cheerleading in ninth grade because God told her to. This amazed me.

  If I ever made cheerleader, I wouldn’t quit for anything. I used to plan how I would hide my cheerleading outfit in my locker at the high school and just get it out when I had to wear it, so Mama and Daddy would never have to know. But this was pure fantasy, and by the time I was old enough to be a cheerleader, I was long gone from Scrabble Creek anyway.

  Of course people did get bit in meeting sometimes, but nobody ever died of it. As Daddy liked to point out, the Bible says, “They shall take up serpents,” not “They shall not bite you.” Daddy himself had been bit over two hundred times, so often he had quit counting. Whenever it happened, he cried out “Glory to God,” for he believed always in the perfect will of God, and turned himself over to it. He said that God has His reasons, which we know naught of. Sometimes He’s just testing you. And when the serpent bites, you have to keep your mind directly on the Lord, and He will recover you. If you let your mind get off the Lord, you’ll swell up.

  Carlton Duty swore this was true, for he was hurt bad by a copperhead that he attempted to handle when he was thinking about buying a new truck. “The Lord taught me a
good lesson,” he said later, “and I thank Him for it!” though he was laid up in the bed for months afterward.

  Whenever anyone was bit, we’d all go to their house and pray over them night and day, as long as it took to get them out of danger. I liked going to the people’s houses, since we didn’t get out much. I also liked it when they came to our house, though I couldn’t stand to see Daddy get bit. It made me get the worst feeling deep in my stomach, like I might die. I saw this happen many times as a child, and I never got used to it, though frequently Daddy was back at church for the very next meeting, his faith was so strong.

  Once I saw a rattler strike the upper part of his arm so hard it actually hung there swinging until some other men pulled it off, but by the next day you could scarcely see its fang marks. Then there was old Lonnie Ratchett, who swore that getting bit had helped his arthritis, and recommended it.

  Many were healed at the Jesus Name Church, and many were baptized, and signs and wonders, such as speaking in tongues, were commonplace. Tongues of fire were seen to come down on Ruth Duty, and several people saw golden wings in the air over Daddy’s head.

  * * *

  THIS WAS BEFORE all the bad things started happening. I always thought that a lot of the trouble had to do with the size of Daddy’s ministry. At first it was small, so that the church the men had built near the old brush arbor held everybody just fine. The whole congregation came from right around there and had known each other most all their lives, so the meetings were filled with love and unity, and God was always present, and sent His anointing down accordingly.

  But after Rhonda Rose’s mother flew into a panic and took her to the big hospital in Waynesville for serpent bite, we got written up in the newspapers, and the crowds started getting real big. They tore one wall out of the church and added on to make it bigger, and then added on again. People were coming from miles and miles away to worship at the Jesus Name Church, believers and unbelievers alike, and troublemakers too.