Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  I looked up the hill and saw my mother stand up and go in the house, closing the door behind her. She did not wave.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks a lot, I’ll see you tomorrow, Marie.” I slammed the car door and ran up the hill as fast as my legs would carry me, stumbling over rocks and roots on the way because my eyes were stinging with wind and tears.

  * * *

  MAMA LET ME go home with Marie once a week from then on throughout the fall, but she never let me spend the night or the weekend, though the Royals asked me to. I couldn’t miss meeting, Mama said. I told Marie that I had to stay home and keep Troy Lee because Mama worked, which turned out to be sort of true, after Mama started helping out at the Dutys’ grocery. Mama never came down to the car to meet Mrs. Royal, or told me to invite her in. Mama did not go to PTA, or come to the school on Parent Day. Billie Jean was real jealous of my friendship with Marie, and whined about it, accusing me of being stuck-up. She asked me lots and lots of questions at first about the Royals’ house and what all Marie had—what toys, what dolls—but I wouldn’t say. I wanted to keep it all to myself, just for me, though I knew it was a sin to be selfish. I didn’t care. I wanted something just for myself, and I wouldn’t tell Billie Jean a thing. Finally she quit asking.

  I didn’t tell Billie Jean that she was invited to go to the Halloween fair at the Waynesville Lions Club with me and Marie in late October. I just told Mrs. Royal that Billie couldn’t go. “Billie Jean has asthma,” I said. I knew about asthma because of Lily. “She has to rest a lot.” “Oh dear,” Mrs. Royal said, and at the Halloween fair she bought a gumball necklace for me to take home to Billie Jean, but I kept it. I didn’t care if I went to Hell or not.

  Marie and her family were mine.

  One thing Marie and I always did together was write horse books—that is, I’d write the story, and Marie would draw the pictures. We had made up a talking roan named Spice and a girl named Melinda who owned him. Nobody except Melinda knew that he could talk. They solved mysteries together, and the names of the books were the names of the mysteries—The Secret in the Hollow Tree, The Clue of the Broken Flower, Melinda Saves the Day, and What Went On in the Meadow, which was Mrs. Royal’s favorite. She was just crazy about our books, and used to bring lemonade for us into the dining room, where we got to work on our books at the big table under the fancy hanging light.

  While I was visiting, Mrs. Royal was usually in the kitchen cooking, or reading magazines and smoking cigarettes, or sewing. She made a lot of Marie’s clothes, but you could never tell that they were homemade. I didn’t understand why she did this. “If I could buy my little girl any dress she wanted at Wilson’s, I would,” I said to Marie one day. “I’d never make it!” Wilson’s Department Store was the biggest store in downtown Waynesville. I had stood on the street corner outside it with Daddy while he preached.

  “Oh, Mama just likes to sew,” Marie said.

  I still thought it was stupid to make something if you could afford to buy it.

  Then one day Mrs. Royal showed me some sky-blue corduroy and a matching piece of cotton with flowers all over it. “I thought I might make you and Marie both some jumpers out of this,” she said, kind of offhand but watching me, “and blouses to match. What do you think of that idea?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I said, though my heart was jumping right out of my chest. The only time I’d ever had anything brand-new to wear in my whole life was when Ruth and Carlton Duty gave each one of us an outfit the Christmas before. So Mrs. Royal spread the blue corduroy out on the carpet in the living room, covered it with crinkly pattern pieces, and started cutting. The next time I went there, Mrs. Royal asked me what Mama had said about us having the matching jumpers, and I said Mama was tickled to death. This was a lie. I kept the jumpers secret from Mama, just as I kept other things secret from Marie and Mrs. Royal.

  I had a lot of secrets that fall, so many that sometimes I thought my head would burst and they would all fly out into the room like hornets from a nest, stinging everybody.

  * * *

  THE SCARIEST SECRET was Daddy.

  Ever since Rufus Graybeal’s death, Daddy had gotten more and more religious, so that there was never a time when he didn’t have his mind fixed directly on the Lord. He was trying to get to a new plateau. He wouldn’t play with us anymore, or make up stories. In fact he wasn’t hardly ever at home, and I have to say I liked it better when he was gone than when he was with us, because he was acting so scary. He fasted a lot and got so thin that he had to keep his pants up with a rope tied around his waist. He looked like a scarecrow then, with his long white hair sticking out in every direction and his eyes all wild and glowing. I wanted a daddy like Marie’s, who wore a gray vest and sat in a chair and read books and talked to me. We couldn’t understand what our own daddy was saying half the time now, as he often spoke the unknown language of the Lord. Mama’s eyes were always red from crying, and she had lost weight too, and one time, when they didn’t hear me coming in the door after school, I heard her say sharply, “Virgil, do you have to do this?” and he answered in his deep God voice, “Yes, Fannie, I do.”

  Then I went in the door to find Mama sobbing, but as soon as she saw me, she wiped her tears on her apron and said, “Why, Florida Grace! You mean you’re home from school already?” and gave me a big fake smile. Later, when I asked her what was the matter, she said, “Nothing. Just nothing,” and went all stony-faced, so I didn’t have a clue until Evelyn told me.

  “He’s gearing up to drink poison,” Evelyn said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “They do it over in Tennessee, and Daddy’s getting ready to do it too. He’s getting right with God so he’ll be ready.” Evelyn’s voice was matter-of-fact, but her beautiful face looked holy. She was still into it lock, stock, and barrel at that time, and traveled everywhere with Daddy, and her high pure voice was a big help to him in his mission.

  I was present at Sunday-morning meeting in the Jesus Name Church to see Daddy bring in the mason jar of water with strychnine in it for the first time, and I saw him drink it with no ill effects, though an unbeliever grabbed it up to try it and then went screaming from the church house clutching his throat. Soon all the other saints were drinking poison too, whenever God moved on them to do it, and this was a regular feature of Daddy’s ministry, but he did not let up even then. He kept right on fasting and praying nonstop.

  It was like he had gone into high gear. He’d hold meetings in people’s houses or vacant lots or anyplace, sometimes all night long. He’d travel from town to town in our area, then go over to Tennessee, where a great crowd of believers was gathering, he said, and God was working hard.

  But Evelyn said something else, and this secret was harder to keep than any other. She came back from one trip to Tennessee all mad at Daddy, and though she was too scared of him to let on, she told me about it. She said she just had to tell somebody, so we went out in the yard by the tulip tree where we could talk.

  “I was in the Ben Franklin five-and-dime over in Elizabethton, where we’ve been going to preach,” Evelyn told me, “buying me some shampoo, and all of a sudden I heard this voice—his voice—and I don’t know why, but I kind of ducked around the counter to where I could see him but he couldn’t see me, instead of coming right out and saying ‘Hi, Daddy.’ There was something in his voice that made me do that. Then,” Evelyn said, real dramatic, popping her gum, “you wouldn’t believe what I saw next!”

  “What?” I couldn’t imagine.

  “Daddy had him a hoor, right there in the five-and-dime!”

  “A what?” I said.

  “A hoor,” Evelyn was all wrought up. “It’s a bad woman, Sissy, that goes with a lot of men.”

  “How did you know it was a hoor?” I was dying to find out.

  “Well, you can just tell. If you was ever to see one, you’d know it right away. She had o
n a whole lot of makeup, and black net stockings. She had bleach-blond hair, real curly, and a chiffon scarf.”

  “But what were they doing?”

  “He was buying her just whatever she wanted, that’s what. He was buying her some nylon hose and some bubble bath.”

  “Bubble bath?” I couldn’t believe it. Of course I thought about how Daddy wouldn’t buy us anything at all, and never had any cash money for Mama.

  “That’s why he goes over there all the time,” Evelyn said in her fierce whisper.

  “But what about those big meetings he’s been talking about? Is it a lie?” For he had whipped us from the cradle if he caught us in a lie.

  “No, it ain’t a lie, exactly,” Evelyn said. “I mean, that’s true too. He’s got them all worked up over there, Sissy. You know how it is when he takes the message to a new place. He’s got them coming in by the hundreds.” She paused and took a deep breath. “You know what’s wrong with Daddy? You know what I think is wrong?”

  My heart was beating real fast, for we had never said anything against him in our whole lives. I shook my head.

  “He does everything too much,” Evelyn said darkly. “Whatever it is. If it’s God or if it’s a girlfriend, it don’t matter. He does it too much.”

  “But what about you?” I asked. “Don’t you feel funny about being his little angel of God now?” This is what Daddy still called Evelyn, though she was almost sixteen by then.

  “You’re damn right,” she said.

  I sucked my breath in sharply. A thrill ran through me as I looked at her set face. Evelyn was a lot like Daddy, in a way. There was no telling what she might do if she put her mind to it, She was breathing hard and staring off down the hill, her eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see. I felt like crying.

  “Evelyn, what are you going to do?” I asked.

  She grinned at me all of a sudden, her old flashy self. “You can’t tell on me if you don’t know,” she said.

  Just then Mama appeared in the doorway. “Supper’s ready!” she called in her sweet voice. “Florida Grace and Evelyn, you all come on.”

  Evelyn clutched my arm so hard her fingers left white strips on my skin. “Don’t you say a word!” Her face was right up in mine, “Swear!” she said.

  “Swear,” I said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Evelyn acted just as natural at supper, like nothing had happened, and in a few days she went back over to Tennessee with Daddy, and I never told a soul about the hoor.

  This is the time that Daddy was arrested over there, after a man died in the meeting from a combination of Red Devil lye and serpent bite. Daddy had to serve thirty days, and we thought that Evelyn would come home while he was in jail, but she didn’t. She wrote that she had taken a job and was staying with some church people and was fine. She didn’t say what the job was or who the people were. Mama’s face got thinner than ever, and worry lines appeared between her eyebrows. The circles under her eyes got darker. “God’s will be done,” she said, and I didn’t say a thing. Mama went to meeting, where Carlton Duty and Doyle Stacy and Bobby Gayheart were preaching in Daddy’s absence, and came back full of the Spirit. “God has been testing me,” she said earnestly. “He has found me wanting in faith.” And she set in to praying like crazy. I could hear her in the bedroom praying, long into the night.

  If ever anybody was a real saint in this world, it was my mother.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, MARIE’S PARENTS knew all about Daddy, though I was pretty sure they hadn’t told Marie. They never said anything to me about it either, and the way I found out was the purest chance.

  I confess I was always a snoop in that house, looking in closets to finger the clothes, opening drawers just to see what was there. It was like I wanted Marie’s whole life, right down to her underwear, right down to her mother’s monogrammed stationery, right down to the Cuban cigars in her father’s desk.

  This was where I found the clipping.

  Marie and I had just started a new book about Spice, and her mother was busy painting in what she called her “studio,” which was really an empty bedroom, when the telephone rang. It was Marie’s grandmother, who called up long-distance all the time from Wilmington, Delaware, just to see how Marie was doing. I didn’t know my own grandparents—I didn’t even know if I had any. We didn’t have a telephone at our house either. In cases of extreme importance, such as when Daddy called to say he was in jail, the message came through the Dutys, and if any of us ever had to make a call, we went to the Dutys’ store to do it. I had called Marie from there a couple of times, but I had never made or received a long-distance call.

  Marie talked and talked to her grandmother, just like she was right there in the room with us. She told her grandmother about the new book we were writing and that she had gotten all A’s in school—I had too—and that her mother was going to Asheville to learn how to be a Girl Scout leader so we could have a troop. This was the first I had heard about it, and I got real excited for a minute or two before I realized that I would never be allowed to join. Those uniforms cost money, and Daddy always said we had a higher allegiance whenever anything like that came up, like when Joe Allen had wanted to join 4-H. I imagined Marie in that beautiful green uniform, covered with merit badges, going on a cookout with other girls.

  While she talked to her grandmother on the kitchen phone, I got up to go to the bathroom. But as I was going through Dr. Royal’s study, something made me head for his desk instead, where I started opening all the drawers to see what I could find. This included a whole lot of baby pictures of Marie, plus some pictures of Mrs. Royal wearing a bathing suit, at a beach with the real ocean in the background, and a wedding picture of Mr. and Mrs. Royal looking like movie stars, several dollars in change which I did not touch, a lot of paper clips and rubber bands and little pieces of paper, an old watch, and—surprise!—a whole cubbyhole full of seashells. I took one of these, a small pink one I was sure Dr. Royal would never miss. Then I opened a drawer which turned out to be full of more papers and newspaper clippings, some of them old and yellow, some of them not.

  Right on top was a brand-new one with a picture of my own father preaching and holding a copperhead while other people prayed and danced in the background. They were people I had never seen before. The headline said SNAKE HANDLER SEIZED.

  I was going to read on, when suddenly Mrs. Royal reached around me from behind and took the clipping away. I jumped a mile, she scared me so bad. She put the clipping back in the drawer and closed it. She had paint on her hands. She didn’t say anything to me about going through Dr. Royal’s desk. “Oh honey, it’s okay,” was all she said. Then she hugged me real tight for a long time, until Marie hung up the phone and called, “Gracie?” from the kitchen. Mrs. Royal gave me a final squeeze and let me go. I went into the bathroom and she went in the kitchen with Marie.

  Later that afternoon, she gave us a special treat of red Jell-O cut up in little squares with Dream Whip on it. Nobody ever said another word about the clipping.

  I felt like I was walking on eggs all the time, I had so many secrets to keep.

  * * *

  THEN TO TOP it all off, Troy Lee got sick. Actually, Troy Lee had not been feeling good for a long time, and here is another secret I never told anybody—I was convinced that Troy Lee got sick because I had lied about Billie Jean, telling Mrs. Royal that Billie was sick when she wasn’t, so I wouldn’t have to share Marie’s family with her. I knew it, was selfish when I did it, but I did it anyway. Now I was sorry. I felt like God was making Troy Lee sick just to get back at me for lying. I felt like it was all my fault. Plus, Troy Lee had always been my favorite, I had taken care of him so much, it was like he was my little boy in a way, and I just couldn’t stand it for him to feel bad.

  He had always been easy to take care of, because he was quieter than most little boys and didn’t run around much
. He never did. He didn’t have all that energy that most children have, and lately you couldn’t hardly get him to go out and play. He was always tired. He was real little for six. His skin looked kind of gray to me, and most of the time he just sat in the porch swing with the cat that Ruth Duty had given him, kind of quivering on the air. It was like he was too weak to push the swing. When it started getting cold, he sat inside on the horsehair sofa in front of the heatstove, holding his cat. The cat didn’t have a name. Ruth Duty hadn’t named it, and Troy Lee wouldn’t. I don’t know why that bothered me, but it did. I was so worried about Troy Lee that I was mad at him half the time.

  I joined in when the church people came over to lay hands on him and pray him well, I squeezed his small bony shoulder and prayed the hardest I ever prayed in all my life. I told God that I would never tell another lie if He would heal Troy Lee, and that I would try to open my heart to Him more, and join the church whenever He sent me His sign, something I had never promised before. Everybody was gathered up around Troy Lee and his cat on the sofa in the front room, praying out loud. It sounded like the Tower of Babel.

  Finally, when they quit and stepped back, Troy Lee did look better, kind of flushed in the face, and said he felt better too, and he went outside to play for a while. But he was worse than ever when he came back in, and had to go right to bed.

  Of course Mama and the Dutys took him to meeting as well, and Doyle preached and Carlton led the laying on of hands, and this time they used Wesson oil, so I was hoping that would help, but it did not. Troy Lee got weaker and weaker. He wouldn’t hardly eat a thing, but he kept wanting water all the time. Mama was praying and counting the days until Daddy would get out of jail and come home to heal Troy Lee. She expected him on November first.

  After that day came and passed, Mama took to standing on the front porch for hours on end, watching for Daddy to come down the road, while Troy Lee laid on the sofa with his cat. Naturally I wasn’t going to school very regular, with all this happening.