Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  “What kind of help is it you’re after?” Daddy asked, climbing the stairs one at a time. Sometimes, not often, you could tell how old he was.

  “I need the kind you’ve got, from what I hear tell,” Lamar said. “I’d trade you for it. I can do anything, sir, iffen you’ll hire me on. Chop wood, electric work, carpenter work, you name it. You won’t be sorry.”

  Mama stood waiting to see what would happen. Daddy did not consult her.

  “I reckon you can stay for a while, then,” he said, “and we’ll see what it is you’re after. We’ll see if we’ve got any of what you want.” He winked at Billie Jean and me sitting side by side in the swing. “I reckon you can start by building you a room off to the back there. We have been needing us another room, now that my girls is growing up so big.”

  “Yessir,” Lamar said.

  “I’ll be going to a meeting in Zionville in the morning,” Daddy said. “You can come along if you’ve got a mind to. Nine sharp. Take off that shirt and let Fannie wash it.”

  “Yessir.”

  Daddy paused as he went in the door. “Now what did you say your name was?”

  “Lamar Dickens,” that boy said just as smooth as anything. If I hadn’t known he was lying, I couldn’t have told it in a million years. He pulled that name out of a hat in his mind, he told me later. He didn’t know what he was going to say until he was saying it. He didn’t even know he was going to lie to Daddy until he was doing it. I couldn’t believe it! I sat in the swing and stared at him.

  The main thing I couldn’t figure out, then or later, was how he knew that I wouldn’t speak up and give him away. Or Billie Jean—for he couldn’t have known at that time how fast she forgets what you tell her.

  So I had another big secret to keep, and I vowed that Hell would freeze over before I’d tell a soul.

  Daddy paused to look back at Lamar. “On second thought,” he said, “maybe you ought to take a look at that car down there before we go off in the morning. You know anything about cars?”

  “Yessir,” Lamar said.

  * * *

  SO THIS IS how Lamar came to live with us when I was fourteen years old, and this is why I was bound to him from the very beginning, bound by secrets and something else, for I soon found I could not quit looking at him as he worked around the house fixing things. Sometimes I’d walk through a room just to see him, and at night when I fell asleep, his face was the last thing I saw in my mind. When I slept, I dreamed of him.

  From the first, Lamar and Daddy got along great. Daddy saved him, and baptized him, and before long Lamar was blessed to work the signs too. I overheard Daddy telling Mama that Lamar might even get the call to preach. Meanwhile Lamar had got Daddy’s car running great and had built a room onto the house and had everybody at the Jesus Name Church eating out of his hand. Daddy thought God had sent Lamar to him as a special gift, since Joe Allen and Troy Lee and Evelyn had been lost.

  Daddy took Lamar’s coming as a sign.

  And he received many more signs that spring as well, as did others in the Jesus Name Church, which was planning its big Homecoming service for June, an event that would bring other sign followers from all around, and last for days. It would be like a great camp meeting, Daddy said. He planned to walk the river at that time. Dimly I remembered other camp meetings we had gone to when I was little. I remembered sleeping on a pallet on the ground and playing around with all the other kids. That had been fun. This would be different, though. I was not a kid anymore, I’d have to act like a grown-up girl. This knowledge made me feel sad but also excited, at the same time.

  * * *

  I FELT THAT way all spring, as if I was about to jump out of my skin. It was like my senses had been tuned up—colors were brighter, sounds were louder, and everything seemed so important. I had a feeling that I was living in a mystery which I was about to solve. I felt like Melinda, but a more grown-up Melinda, without the help of Spice. And there had never been a prettier spring—or maybe I just hadn’t ever noticed it so much before.

  I remember one day when the school bus let me off where it always did, next to a grove of dogwood trees, how suddenly I saw them, all in bloom, white and pink, like I was seeing them for the first time, or like they were the first dogwood trees in the whole world. I dropped my books in the road and ran over there to stand in the middle of them, so that wherever I looked, I couldn’t see anything except blossoms, and then I was the blossoms, all blossom—me, Gracie. I drew in great sweet breaths and then I was crying.

  I stood there for a long time. I remembered the poem that Miss Black had read to us about the legend of the dogwood tree, how it used to be a big tall straight tree before they made Jesus’ cross out of it, and now ever after, it grows little and twisted in shame. Each petal has a drop of His blood on it. I looked at the flowers all around me, and it was true. Every petal of my beautiful blossoms had a drop of His rusty blood. Fear shot through me then, and I started to shake like a leaf, for I was not on good terms with Jesus. I still went to meeting the same as before, and tried to pray, but I was paying too much attention to Lamar playing the guitar up at the front of the church house, and I knew Jesus knew it. If He knew anything about me, He knew that. I was afraid Lamar knew it too.

  * * *

  EVER SINCE THE public health lady came up our holler, Billie had stayed at home. I didn’t know what the public health lady had said to Mama, or Mama to her, but the lady had soon left in her black car, with her back as straight as a poker. She had short white hair and a blue suit and didn’t turn around once as she stomped down the hill to her car. Mama stood on the front porch and watched her go, hugging Billie, who was just about as big as Mama herself.

  So now Billie stayed at home, which she was real happy to do, as school had been making her nervous. Every afternoon when I got home, she was glad to see me, but she never once acted like she wanted to go with me. And now Billie was a big help to Mama, for she had always liked doing house things—sweeping, sewing, cooking. She never got bored the way I did, nor longed to run down the hill or up the mountain or anywhere out in the world at all, like me. Billie was content doing nothing for the longest time, hours on end. She could just sit in a chair and be happy, it seemed.

  One of my own jobs was to gather the eggs, and I dearly loved to go out back to the tobacco barn, which smelled like noplace else I have ever been—a smell I would know instantly anywhere, anytime, even now—and feel around for the eggs, straining to see them down in the shadowy straw. Even at noon, it was always half dark in the barn. I thought of it as my secret place, my private place. This is where I kept my jumper and blouse in the corncrib, before I cut them up. This is where I went to be by myself whenever too much was happening in the house. I’d rush out there with my heart beating fast and my legs pumping furiously, to stand in the sweet dusky stillness until I calmed down. Most days I went out there at least twice, even though we never got all that many eggs, but nobody ever questioned me on it. They were used to me “running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” as Mama sometimes said—the same way they were used to Billie staying put. You know how patterns will get set up in a family.

  But after Lamar came, I started feeling funny whenever I went out there. I thought I could feel his gaze like little arrows in my back as I left the kitchen. It made me real embarrassed and real nervous. This was how I always felt with Lamar in the house, like he was watching me constantly, even when he couldn’t have been. I felt his dark eyes on me through my clothes.

  “You’re getting so big, Gracie,” Mama said. “Why, you’re outgrowing everything!” She made me some skirts, and Ruth Duty bought me three brand-new blouses at Wilson’s Department Store, one pink with a round jewel neckline, one plain white with a button-down collar, one short-sleeved white camp shirt for the summer ahead. I loved the name of this one, “camp shirt.” I knew I would never get to go to a camp, not even a church c
amp like the other kids at school talked about. These blouses fit fine, but I could still feel my own skin inside them, rubbing up against the fabric. It was like I had grown new nerves.

  Lamar had a way of lounging back in a chair wherever he sat, even in a kitchen chair. He reminded me of a big black cat. He used to sit in the kitchen talking to Mama and Billie Jean and me for hours on end, telling us tales of life in the circus, or asking questions about people in the Jesus Name Church. Mama loved to tell him about all the people. She got bright spots of color in her thin cheeks as she told how Daddy had started the church, and how he had brought Lily back to life, and about the death of Rufus Graybeal. Mama seemed more like her old self these days with Lamar in the house, just because she had somebody new to talk to. Watching her, I remembered how she used to tell stories herself, and I thought about how lonesome she must have gotten when Daddy went off on a crusade or whenever he shut himself away to pray and fast. No wonder she went with him every time he’d take her, now that Evelyn was lost. Lamar kind of distracted us all from Daddy, who was getting thinner and thinner, with eyes that seemed to glow in his head. He was already working up to Homecoming.

  As long as I live I will not forget that morning in early April when Lamar touched me for the first time. It was the nicest day, puffy white scudding clouds high up in the blue-blue sky, a breeze like perfume. We were all in the kitchen drinking coffee, everyone except Daddy, and then he came stumbling in, looking like a skeleton who had not slept, and Lamar leaped up to give him a chair. “Here, sir,” he said.

  Daddy grabbed onto Lamar’s broad shoulders instead of sitting down, and started praying on him. “Oh Lord,” Daddy was saying as I slipped out the door to get the eggs, “here is one of our own that has come a hard, rocky way, Lord, and stands before you now—”

  I looked back from the door and saw Lamar’s black eyes staring over the top of Daddy’s wild white head. Lamar’s eyes looked like shiny lumps of coal, intent, watching me.

  I knew for sure he wasn’t praying.

  Nor was I surprised when he followed me out to the barn five or ten minutes later. I was bent over, feeling for eggs in the straw with one hand, holding Daddy’s old black hat in the other. I used the hat to put the eggs in. Sunlight from the doorway fell in a solid yellow bar across the ground, and then it didn’t. My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t hear a thing, for Lamar always moved so quiet. Suddenly he was there behind me, his hands all over me, his hot breath on my neck. He had my new white blouse half off in a flash and was rubbing on me and sticking his tongue in my ear. “Don’t,” I said, but it came out more like a moan. “Don’t.” I didn’t know if I meant it or not, and he kept on doing what he was doing until he got ready to quit. By the time he quit, my pants were as wet as if I had peed them.

  Oh, Lamar knew what he was up to, all right. He knew exactly what to do and when to stop. He was working me like those circus barkers he’d told us about would work a crowd, showing folks just enough to where they surely couldn’t stand it, to where they had to put their quarter on the table and go to the show. That first day, he even helped me tuck my new blouse back in my new skirt.

  “I’ll tell you, Little Buddy,” he said, which was what he had started calling me, “you’re something. You know that?”

  “No,” I said, for by then I felt so full of shame I wished I could die on the spot.

  “Well, you are,” he said. “You believe me?”

  “No,” I said.

  Then he kissed me on the lips, which he had not done before, and stuck his tongue in my mouth, which surprised me. I felt like I was going to faint, or die, and I nearly fell down in the straw.

  Lamar held me up.

  “Are you my pardner, Little Buddy?” he asked me then, and I said I was. I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. I knew what he meant, and he knew I would never tell.

  Lamar was the first person I ever met that knew me instantly, as I knew him. This does not often happen. He knew me by the bad that was in me, I know now. I was not really a bad girl, but I had some bad in me, which Lamar could sniff out like a bird dog. It was what he was going for.

  “Lamar? Lamar?” Daddy started hollering out in the yard.

  Lamar drew my hair off my forehead and patted it back. “There now,” he said. “I’ll go on. You wait and come after while. Now where’s them eggs?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Eggs,” he said. “I want one of them eggs.”

  Dumbly I leaned down and picked up Daddy’s hat from the barn floor, and quick as a wink Lamar grabbed one of the three eggs that I’d found. “Thanks, Buddy,” he said. He gave me a squeeze and turned to go.

  “You Lamar!” Daddy yelled outside, closer now.

  Then sunlight streamed into my eyes so that I could scarcely see, but I could see enough to watch Lamar pause for an instant in the doorway, tilt back his head, and break that egg right into his mouth. He dropped the shell in the straw and was gone. I pressed my back up against the corncrib and stood like that until I could breathe, and by the time I finally left the barn, Lamar was long gone, driving Daddy someplace in the car.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES DADDY WENT off by himself, leaving Lamar to “look after all the girls.” It was especially then, with Daddy gone, that I would find myself lingering in the barn when I went to get the eggs, hardly able to breathe, hoping Lamar would come out to me. Sometimes he came, and sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes when he didn’t come, I’d start crying, and other times I’d get mad as fire. This seemed to tickle him. “Cat got your tongue?” he said one day when I came back in the house and passed by him without a word, “No!” I spat out, real mean, and he just laughed. I never could stay mad at him when he laughed. Lamar had me wrapped around his little finger. I’d do anything he told me to. “Come on out to my room tonight, Buddy,” he’d say sometimes when Daddy and Mama were both gone, and I’d tiptoe out to his lean-to room in the dark, though I trembled with fear the whole time, afraid Billie would wake up and come looking to find me.

  It got to where I was even wilder, more of a daredevil than Lamar. One time when Mama was home, I waited until it got way, way late, and I slipped out there, only to find that he had latched his door. When I knocked softly, he came to the other side of the door, and whispered, “Sssh. Go on now. It ain’t safe. Go back to bed,” in such a scared voice that I never went out there again with Mama in the house.

  I felt like Lamar was trying to take care of me, in his way.

  Another thing was, he made me go to school every day, even when Mama and Daddy were both gone. He made me, for after a while I wasn’t interested in it anymore. It was like I was sick. The other kids at school seemed like nothing but little children to me now, and I had a hard time reading, for Lamar’s face would come up in my mind. I said as much, one morning when he was pushing me out the door and down the holler.

  “What if I don’t want to go?” I said. “What if I’d rather stay up here with you all?”

  “You wouldn’t. That’s just what you think right now. That’s just what you think today.” Lamar looked real serious all of a sudden, and older. He had been washing up at the kitchen sink and his curly black hair was slicked straight back on his head. He was not smiling.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “They’s another day coming,” he said. “You go on to school.” Lamar’s eyes were so serious that they didn’t have any white in them at all, they were black, and deep, and old. His face looked like it was cut out of rock. I didn’t say another word. I went. And after that morning I didn’t try to skip anymore.

  Lamar himself could not read. This came as a big surprise to me when I found out, because he was so smart in so many ways. I learned this when he had me read some instructions out loud to him as he was putting in the electric stove for Mama, after we got power up in our holler. Mr. Arnold of Arnold’s Electric had donated the s
tove to us. Lamar listened intently while I read, and then started fitting things together. I sat cross-legged on the floor and watched him. “Read that last part one more time,” he said, and I did, and he hooked the oven door in place. Then he started twisting wires together, looking at the diagram that had come with the stove. This diagram was real complicated, but Lamar seemed to understand it fine. Watching him work, I got a bright idea.

  “Lamar, why don’t you let me teach you how to read?” I said, all excited. “Me and Mama could teach you in no time flat, I bet.”

  But Lamar shook his head, keeping his eyes down on his work. “It ain’t for me to know,” he said in a flat voice, and his face went hard in that way I had seen before.

  Sometimes I felt like Lamar was following a diagram himself, that everything he did was already set by some grand design that he knew about and I didn’t, the way Daddy always said he was following the plan of God. I felt this so strongly that I knew better than to say anything about us getting married when I grew up, or anything like that, even though when I played paper dolls with Billie Jean—for this was always her favorite thing to do—I called the bride doll Gracie in my mind, and the bridegroom Lamar. But somehow I knew that was only for the paper dolls.

  When the weather started getting real warm, I’d meet Lamar down at the mouth of the holler where Scrabble Creek formed the biggest pool, and jump right out of my clothes, and let him unbraid my hair, and we’d lay on the ferny bank in the shade. Later he talked me into getting in the water with him, and he taught me to float. I loved how it felt when Lamar’s hand dropped out from under the small of my back and my hair drifted out around my head like the rays of the sun. I felt so good then, as if I didn’t even have a body. I felt free. Other times it was like Lamar and me were both boys together, when I’d take him to the caves I knew about up on the mountain, and the limestone spring. I never did take him all the way up to Chimney Rock, though.