by Lee Smith
“I made it!” I yelled to Billie from the porch. I figured she’d be worried about me, since I’d been gone so long. We both woke up before the light, because we were so cold. I’d gotten the fire started, and she was supposed to tend it while I went for water.
“Billie!” I hollered.
Nothing.
I stamped my feet, which felt like solid blocks of ice, and pushed the door open. Billie sat in the velvet chair in front of the heatstove holding a piece of firewood, exactly like I’d left her, her head cocked to the side a little, as if she was listening to something.
She was smiling. The fire had gone out.
A chill went through me which had nothing to do with the cold.
“Billie!” I said sharply. She turned to me and her face lit up as if she’d just noticed me. “Why, Sissy,” she said. “How are you?”
“Fine,” I said. I took the firewood out of her hand and threw it in the stove and stuck in some kindling and old catalogue pages. We had about used up that catalogue.
“Billie, what were you thinking of, to let the fire go out thataway?” I asked her.
Billie Jean just smiled at me, the nicest smile. She was humming a tune I didn’t know. She got closer to the stove and held her hands up before it, spreading her fingers. She had pretty hands, like Mama. “That feels so good,” she said. Then she went back to humming. Later that day we went out in the snow to make angels, and we had made them all over that hillside by the time Carlton Duty and Dillard Jones came walking around the bend to get us. I was never so glad to see anybody in my whole life! Billie Jean went home with the Dutys and I went home with Dillard Jones, where it was nice and warm, and Lily’s mama took my shoes and stockings off and hung them by the fire to dry. I wore two pairs of somebody else’s thick wool socks while my own were drying, and since it kept on snowing outside, Lily’s mama let us pop corn in the middle of the day, just like it was Christmas, and drink coffee, and her daddy played his guitar and we all sang “I’ll Fly Away.” We had a real good time. I quit worrying about Billie. But I felt different about her from then on, like she was my younger sister instead of older.
I missed Evelyn. I missed Troy Lee. I missed Mama more than anybody. Even after the big thaw, when Mama and Daddy came home and I went back to school, I kept on missing them. I felt like I had a big hole in my heart. Ruth Duty asked me one Sunday right after meeting what was wrong. “I’ll swear, Gracie, you don’t hardly look like yourself,” she said. “You’re nothing but skin and bones, youngun.” She pinched my arm, then hugged me tight. “Come on over here and let me give you some of this chicken and pastry before everybody else gets a shot at it.” Ruth Duty thought food could cure anything. She took me by the hand and led me into the new fellowship hall, where women were putting the food out on a big long table, and piled me up a paper plate full of her own chicken and pastry, Lorene Bishop’s baked beans, green Jell-O salad, cornbread, and a piece of German chocolate cake. Then she sat me down and watched while I ate like a pig, for suddenly I was starving.
“Honey,” Ruth said, leaning forward on her folding chair, her heavy knees spread wide beneath her skirt, “I have been thinking about you all a lot lately, you and Billie Jean too. I know it ain’t easy. I know you’ve got a hard row to hoe.”
At this, I started crying.
But Ruth wiped my eyes with a paper napkin. “No, now, honey,” she said. “I want you to listen to me for a minute. Listen to old Ruth, sweetheart. The ones that Jesus loves the best, he sends the heaviest crosses for them to bear. But He don’t never send more than you can bear. And you are a blessed child, honey, a blessed child, to live in the company of one of His own true saints, though it might not seem like it sometimes, I’ll grant you. You will understand it all better by and by,” Ruth promised. Her broad red face was full of kindness, which made me cry even more.
The funny thing was, I knew she was right. I knew it as well as I knew anything. I looked over at the door just then, as my daddy came in surrounded by men and women pressing up to him as close as they could get, like they hoped some of him was going to rub off on them, and his handsome face was beaming as he laughed and clapped some man on the back.
There were so many people in the Jesus Name Church now that I didn’t know all of their names anymore. But I knew they loved my daddy, for he had saved their souls. I knew my mama loved him too, more than she loved anybody—more than me, more than Jesus even. But Mama loved Jesus too. I felt like if I could love Jesus then I wouldn’t mind anything and I would feel like a blessed child, as Ruth Duty said. But He never had sent me a sign, and right now I did not love Him. I watched Mama over on the other side of the fellowship hall, helping the other women set out the food. Mama was smiling at everybody. She was still real pretty. She looked over at me and Ruth Duty and waved, and both of us waved back. I was fairly sure I was going to Hell, but I couldn’t think what to do about it.
“I tell you what,” Ruth said. “Anytime you start to feel lonely, you or Billie Jean either one, you all just come over and stay with me for a while. I need me some girls around. Will you all do that?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. I knew I wouldn’t, though. I couldn’t, any more than I could tell her about Billie’s teacher sending those notes home to Mama, and how Mama burned them up in the heatstove so Daddy wouldn’t see them, and said it was more than she could bear, and Billie would just have to do the best she could, and they had better not send anybody up to the house, that it wasn’t anybody’s business.
I couldn’t tell Ruth how Daddy just never stopped ministering these days, preaching and praying and carrying on, way up into the night and sometimes all night long, it was like he didn’t need to sleep. I couldn’t tell her about that morning I woke up real early just as the day was breaking, and went out on the front porch—it was like something was drawing me, pulling me out there—to find Daddy bare-chested in the pearly light, serpents running like water over his arms and hands. I couldn’t tell her that Daddy had taken it into his head now that he was going to walk the French Broad River come spring, and was preparing. She’d hear it soon enough anyway.
“Well, you’re a mighty sweet girl,” Ruth Duty said, “and a big help to your mama. Now, are you going to eat that cake or not?”
“No ma’am,” I said, and so Ruth reached over for it and popped it into her own mouth and ate it all in one gulp.
“Too heavy,” she said.
* * *
ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON in March, when Mama’s daffodils had come up like little spears and the mountains all around our house were full of redbud, Billie Jean and I got off the school bus at the mouth of the holler, and headed for home as usual. The wind blew first one way, then the other, the way it does in March.
“Slow down,” Billie Jean begged, but I could not.
I ran ahead of her up the hill, so I was the first to see a boy sitting at the top of our steps like he belonged there.
Then Billie Jean saw him too. “Who’s that?” she whined, hanging back.
“Somebody for Daddy, I reckon,” I told her. As Daddy’s fame grew, strangers showed up at our house fairly often. I slowed down to a more ladylike walk as I went on up the hill, for the boy on the porch was staring at me. “Hello,” I called, and he called back, “Hello.” But he didn’t get up. He sat on the top step real easy, and watched us.
Something about him made me nervous. For one thing, he was good-looking—too good-looking to be sitting on our porch in the middle of the afternoon, for no purpose in the world that I could think of. He had dark brown curly hair and black eyes and looked like a foreigner, maybe an Italian, I thought. I had never seen a real Italian, as far as I knew. I had never thought of a boy as good-looking either. All of a sudden I felt that I myself looked awful. I was getting more and more nervous. I wished the boy would say something else, but he didn’t. He just kept watching us come up the hill.
Finally I said, “Hi! If you’re looking for Daddy, he’s not here right now.”
“Who is your daddy?” the boy asked. He had a funny way of speaking and I could tell he was not from around here, though he didn’t sound like he was from a foreign country either. He was about Joe Allen’s age.
I stopped at the bottom of the steps. “My daddy is Virgil Shepherd, minister of God,” I said.
“That’s him,” the boy said. “He’s my daddy too.” He grinned at me then, a slow one-sided grin that ran all over me.
“He is not,” I said immediately, though even as I spoke, I knew it might be true. For one thing, I never knew what to expect of Daddy, and anything might be true. Anything. Also, this boy looked like Daddy, I realized. I could see it in his face, and in the cocky way he held his head.
He stood up. “My name is Lamar Shepherd,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” He looked down at me and at Billie Jean, who had come to stand beside me, clutching my elbow.
She surprised me to death by speaking right up. “I’m Billie Jean,” she said. When I turned to look at her, she was smiling, and I had the biggest urge to stand in front of her, or send her in the house, or something. “This here is my sissie,” Billie said like a little girl.
“Florida Grace,” I added.
“I was born in Florida,” the boy said. “If you’ll give me a drink of water, I’ll tell you all about it.”
And because I love a story, and because he was the kind of boy that you have to do whatever he wants, I said yes, and we took him into the house and gave him a drink of water out of the jug and a piece of cornpone, which was all we had. He wolfed it down and then we went back out on the porch.
Billie and me sat in the swing and Lamar stood leaning against a post, smoking a cigarette. He was easy in his body, like a cat. He grinned at us. Billie smiled back. She sat in the swing with her head tilted, like she was at some kind of a show. Lamar Shepherd kept grinning at us. “So I’ve got me some new little sisters,” he said. “Well, well, well, I’ll be darned.” I hadn’t thought of this. It made me feel funny. But then Lamar Shepherd made me feel real funny in general, I couldn’t figure out why. I didn’t trust him.
“Just tell it,” I said.
“You’re a pistol, ain’t you, Sis?” He threw his cigarette butt down the hill and paused. “Okay. I don’t know how much you know about your daddy,” he said, very serious now.
“I reckon we know all we need to,” I said, for no matter how ticked off I ever got at Daddy, I was always the first to stand up for him if anybody else said anything.
“Do you know where he was born at, and where all he lived before he married your mother? Do you know how many other children he’s got?”
“We don’t need to know that.” I was getting mad, but I was real curious. I have always been too curious, it is one of my biggest failings.
“Maybe not,” Lamar said. “Hell, I don’t know all of it myself. All I know about is my own mother.” He paused again and looked off down the mountain. The sharp wind blew his hair around. “My mother was not even his first wife. She was his second wife, as far as I can figure out. Mama said that the one before her was a woman named Orpha Crumpler, up in Virginia, and that they had several children, but I don’t know their names, or where they are now. She died, I reckon. At least I think she died.” He gave a short laugh. “My own mother was named Lantha Rogers, and she worshipped the ground he walked on, always did.”
I nodded. This was true of a lot of people. It was true of my own mother.
“Until he took off and left us high and dry,” Lamar went on. “Took off with a dancing girl.”
I looked at him. “That was Mama?” I wasn’t really asking, for I knew the answer already.
“I reckon so,” Lamar Shepherd said. “I don’t remember none of it real good myself, for I wasn’t nothing but a boy. Mama said he went off to Georgia on a crusade, and never come back, and that’s all she ever said about it. We lived down in Florida, in the swamp. See, Mama used to have consumption, and then he cured her of it, but then after he left, the consumption came back and she got real poorly and just dragged around until she died. It didn’t take too long. The county took us when she died.”
“You and who?” Now I had to ask, had to know everything.
“I had a little sister named Susie and a little brother named Sam. They was twins,” Lamar said. “They was little and cute, and they got adopted right off by some rich people.”
“What about you?”
“I was twelve years old by then, and not little nor cute either one,” he said, lighting another cigarette. He struck the match on his boot sole. “Nobody wanted me. I got sent around from here to yonder, but didn’t nobody want a big old boy like me, and I can’t say as I blame them neither. I wasn’t too easy to get along with in those days.”
“So what did you do? Where did you end up living?”
“Oh, I lived with first one, then the other,” he said, grinning now like it had all been nothing but a lark, “and then when the circus come through town, I went with it. Since that day I ain’t never looked back. Ain’t never going to look back.”
“The circus!” I said, for I had never seen one. “What did you do with them?”
“I was just a regular roustabout. I’d put up the tent, run the games, take care of the animals, drive the truck, whatever. I can do just about anything.” Lamar was not bragging but stating a plain fact, and looking at him, I could sure believe it. He looked like he could take care of himself just fine and move through the world on his own. It made me jealous, for a girl can’t do that.
“So how come you to be over here?” I asked.
Billie Jean didn’t say anything, but followed our conversation as bright as a bird, looking back and forth. Every now and then she’d push the swing with her foot.
“We were over in Tennessee,” Lamar said, and I began to see how it was going.
“Outside of Knoxville,” he added. “And some people was talking about a big tent meeting that was going on, and I heard his name, but by the time I got up with them, he was gone, so I found out where he had gone to, and come along. I been working odd jobs along the way.”
“But why?” I asked. If I could travel with a circus, I thought, I’d never leave.
“I reckon I just wanted to meet him,” Lamar said, “and say howdy.”
He did look like Daddy. The more he talked, the more I could see it.
“Then are you going back to the circus?” Already I was wondering if I could go too.
“Maybe so, maybe not. I reckon I could find them if I’ve got a mind to. But it don’t matter one way or the other to me. I don’t care.”
“You don’t?”
All of a sudden his face looked different. “One place is the same as another, Sis,” he said. “You’ll see. It don’t matter what you do neither.” I stared at him and he stared back at me, not smiling. Beyond him, in the yard, Mama’s forsythia bush was in full yellow bloom. But Lamar looked dark and old, the opposite of forsythia.
Right then I heard a car on the road below. I knew it was Daddy, driving the old green Dodge which somebody had recently donated to his ministry. It was loud because it needed a muffler. I watched Lamar watch the car as it came up the road to the mouth of the holler, then pulled off and stopped.
“Is that him?” Lamar asked, not taking his eyes off the car.
“Yes,” I said.
“I always did intend to see him again,” Lamar said softly.
“Well, this is your big chance, then,” I said as we all watched. Daddy and Mama get out of the car. Mama shaded her eyes and waved at us. Daddy carried a traveling bag.
“You better look out,” I told Lamar as they came up the hill. “He’s liable to save you.”
“It ain’t likely,” Lamar said.
But I believe I planted a s
eed in his mind.
* * *
MY HEART WAS beating so fast. I thought, I wouldn’t miss this for anything. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I was meeting my own daddy after such a long time, what I would say, what I would think of him. I tried to look at Daddy as if I had never seen him before.
He looked like a preacher, that’s for sure. But he looked like a workingman too. He moved forcefully. Even though he was thin, he had a large frame. His white shirt and blue pants flapped on his bones like clothes on a clothesline. It was his face that struck you, though. A big old face like a lantern. Nobody else I had ever seen looked anything like Daddy, except for the boy on our porch. Lamar Shepherd. Except for Lamar Shepherd.
But Daddy looked at Lamar as if he had never seen him before.
“Well, son,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
Lamar grinned that grin. “You are Mister Virgil Shepherd,” he said. “I heard about you in Tennessee, and come over here to see if you can help me.”