Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  I have to say this. Except for that first time, when he followed me out to the barn, at no time during that spring did I ever feel like I was a sinner girl, which I was, not even when we went to meeting, which we did all the time of course, and Daddy or Doyle Stacy would tell the sinners to come forward and throw themselves on the mercy of God. I never had the slightest desire to go forward then. I knew His mercy was everlasting anyway, so I figured I could always do it later. I figured this, that is, when I thought about it at all. Personally I didn’t think of God one bit that spring, even though our whole church was being seized with a great fever as Homecoming drew near.

  Many new people joined, and sometimes when the handling started, there’d be so many at the front that some would have to wait their turn. Lily was right up there with the rest now, since she’d been saved. I felt like I didn’t know her anymore. I sat on that same hard pew I’d been sitting on for years, with those I knew and loved, but I felt like I was a stranger. I saw Lily put a copperhead around her shoulders like a stole. I saw Lamar hold a four-foot rattler up above his head with the same hands that had touched my most private parts, but I couldn’t make any connection between this Lamar that was a saint in the church and that other Lamar that came to me in the barn. No connection at all. So I didn’t even try to. I sat with the others, and sang the same old songs.

  * * *

  ONE DAY LATER in the spring, I got home from school and when I stepped onto the porch I heard a voice that I didn’t recognize coming from the front room. Then I heard Mama’s voice, and something in it made me hold my tongue and not cry out hello as usual. I tiptoed across the porch, avoiding the plank that squeaked, and pressed up against the wall by the door. But it appeared that the conversation was already over. Mama was saying, “I wish you a safe journey, then,” in a very formal way, and I heard the sound of chairs scraping, and I leaped away from the wall not a moment too soon, for here they came out the door.

  I knew immediately that this was not the hoor Evelyn had described.

  No, this was plainly a Holiness girl, for there was something old-timey about her. Maybe I thought that because I had just come from school, where most of the kids were more up-to-date, or modern. I wondered if this was how the other kids at school saw me. For I wore my own long hair in a ponytail too, and no jewelry, and no makeup. But it was more than that.

  This girl looked like she came from another world. Her skin was dead white, with golden freckles all over it, and her long red hair was so curly that it made a fuzzy little fringe all around her face, though she had pulled it back with a rubber band. Her eyes were like deep blue pools, and her pale little mouth was as perfect as a rose. Snow White, I thought. She looks like Snow White. She smiled at me right off, and there was such a curious old-fashioned sweetness about her that I smiled right back.

  “This is our daughter, Florida Grace,” Mama said with some effort. She had a glint in her eye and looked like she was about to bust, one way or another. She was holding a blue wool sock with something in it, and it came over me in a flash that this was where she’d been keeping the money that Joe Allen used to give her, before the fight. I never knew if she had kept any back, the way he had said, or not. Mama hid the sock in the folds of her skirt. “How was school?” she asked me brightly.

  “All right,” I said.

  I stood aside to let the girl pass by. She moved in a slow graceful way, clutching her white plastic purse. She wore a green-and-white print dress, homemade, and brown shoes run down at the heels. She was not too much older than me, about Evelyn’s age, and suddenly I was shot through with longing to see Evelyn. The girl went down the steps and stooped to pick up a small cardboard suitcase, which I had not noticed before. Then she turned to look at me and Mama.

  “I won’t be bothering you no more, ma’am,” she said in a musical voice.

  Mama didn’t say anything, She was breathing hard, with her lips tight together.

  The girl set off down the hill, walking slow but with a purpose. I felt that she would get wherever she was going. I thought she would make it okay.

  “Who was that?” I asked Mama.

  “That was nobody.” Mama bit off her words and stomped in the house. I stood on the porch and watched the girl go, until she was out of sight around the bend.

  I never heard her name.

  Later that night I was woke up by the sound of something breaking. I sat bolt upright in the bed, feeling for Billie beside of me, for I knew she would be scared. Mama was yelling in the kitchen. But Billie wasn’t there. I was so amazed at Billie being gone that I couldn’t hardly pay attention to Mama’s voice. Part of me was listening, but another part of me was wondering where in the world Billie could be. Out at the toilet, I reckoned. It was all I could think of. Mama was hollering, “And you dare to call yourself a man of God, a preacher, you dare to tell everybody else how to behave! Well, this is the last un. The last un! And let me tell you one thing, sir, if you think I am going to keep my mouth shut this time, you’ve got another think coming!”

  Even in my nervousness, or maybe because of it, I had to grin. Mama was always saying this to us, that we had another think coming. Meanwhile the drinking glasses were shattering one by one. I guessed that she was breaking them in the sink, or maybe throwing them against the new electric stove. Daddy wasn’t talking back. He was letting her holler herself out, which she done before long, and then set in to crying like her heart would break. And then after a while I could hear Daddy’s voice, slow and steady and powerful, talking on and on under the sound of Mama crying. I couldn’t hear what he said, though. Billie came back in the middle of it all with her feet cold and the bottom of her nightgown wet with dew, so I relaxed some. She got in the bed and held me tight and I patted her hair. I didn’t have to tell her to shush—she had that much sense, anyway. I fell back asleep in the bed, holding Billie and listening to the sound of Daddy’s voice going on and on in the night.

  But in the morning it was almost like I had dreamed it all, for Daddy was not anywhere to be seen, though Mama still had fire in her eye and a spot of red on her cheek. I went in the kitchen to find her standing at the stove stirring grits in a cookpot, with her tangled hair falling down her back.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked. “I thought I heard him last night.”

  “He had to drive over to Waynesville today,” Mama said evenly. “He’s picking up some kind of newfangled PA system he ordered off for. It’s coming in on the train.”

  “Oh,” I said, watching her.

  “What’s a PA system?” Billie said, stepping along behind me.

  Nobody answered her. Out the corner of my eye I could see a little pile of broken glass in the corner, but I knew better than to say anything about it.

  Mama spooned grits into two bowls and plunked them down on the table. “Eat your breakfast,” she told us.

  Billie sat down and started to eat.

  “I ain’t hungry,” I said. My stomach was turning over and over.

  “Eat it,” Mama said. She set her mouth.

  I started crying, so Billie started crying too, just to keep me company. Mama walked over and slapped me smartly on the cheek. I vowed I would never eat those grits then—I would die first.

  But Lamar saved the day. He appeared in the doorway right then, buttoning his shirt. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked. “Grits? Gimme some.” He grabbed a spoon from the sink and sat down, pulling my bowl of grits over to him. He ate a mouthful, then looked up at me and grinned.

  “Ain’t you fixing to be late, Buddy?” he asked. “You better get on down that hill.” And I went. I ran down the hill as fast as my legs would carry me, looking all around at the sunny day, trying to fill up my eyes with the bright blooming flowers and new green trees, trying to push that horrible picture of Mama, the witchlike stranger by the stove, out of my head forever. For my sweet loving mama was gone by then, and gon
e for good.

  * * *

  THINGS WENT ON like this until the Homecoming, with everybody building up to a fever pitch. Mama was like a piece of bowed wire. Daddy was a man possessed, full of the Spirit, mumbling and praying full-time, the skin stretched tight on his bones. Even Lamar seemed to be caught up in the general excitement, his black eyes glittering. When he hunkered down on the porch to smoke a cigarette, the way he always did after dinner, I felt like he was all coiled up, ready to spring. I couldn’t take my eyes off him then, but it didn’t matter. Nobody was paying any attention to me.

  In fact, we had a seventh-grade graduation ceremony at school, and I didn’t even bother to tell anybody in my family about it. I knew they wouldn’t care, and I didn’t want them to come. It would have embarrassed me. This was the last time I was ever to be in a schoolhouse, at my seventh-grade graduation, though I didn’t know that then. Now I can’t even remember what the graduation was like. I can’t remember who all was there, or what was said. I know we marched in. Marie made a speech because she was the valedictorian. I hadn’t even been in the running, for my grades had slipped so. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything, I told myself as I sat on that stage in a folding chair and looked out at the other kids and parents in the auditorium. Marie’s grandmother was there, all the way from Wilmington, Delaware. She had blue hair and wore pearls. They introduced me to her after it was over, and Marie’s mother tried to hug me, but I got away from them as quick as I could. I didn’t need their sympathy. I wouldn’t have it. I balled up my diploma in my hand as we marched out the door. I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. I didn’t need anything or anybody.

  Except Lamar.

  Someplace back in my mind I had started thinking that Lamar was going to take me away with him sometime, if I could just hang on long enough. The only reason I’d stayed in school till the end of the year was because he sent me off down the holler every day. School had changed in my mind, into something I did for him. Not for me. It was that simple. What I did for me was what I did with Lamar. Riding home on the bus that last day, I felt so much older than all the others, even the girls from the high school that rode with us. They talked about boys and who had a crush on who and what they were going to do over the summer. Two girls were going to 4-H camp, and one said she had a job at the dime store in Waynesville. Their chatter blew past me like the warm wind from the open bus window. I felt that I knew more things than they had ever thought of, and had more secrets than they could even imagine. I felt like a woman grown.

  * * *

  I CAME UP the hill that day to find Daddy and Lamar washing off serpents in the creek, and Carlton Duty standing on the bank with his hat in his hands trying to talk seriously to Daddy, who did not appear to be paying him much mind. Daddy had his shirt and shoes off and was splashing around like a kid. My heart started beating faster, as was usual when I saw the serpents. I did not see them much now except in meeting, since Daddy had took to keeping more of them, and had moved the boxes out to the old smokehouse.

  “Hi, Buddy,” Lamar called, and I called back, “Hi.” I flung my bookbag down on the mossy bank and sat beside it, at a safe distance, to watch what they were up to. They had some big old serpents that I had not ever seen before, and so I knew they had been up in the mountains snake hunting. Daddy was telling about it.

  “I woke up before the light,” he said, “with a picture of the place in my mind. I seen a whole bunch of big flat white rocks all jumbled up on top of each other, and under one of them rocks I seen two rattlesnakes all coiled up together a-forming the number eight. God put it in my mind as clear as day. So I got my sticks and a sack and gone up there, and sure enough, hit was just like God had showed me, and I thank Him for it,”

  I knew where it was that he was talking about.

  And I knew how Daddy used the sticks when he went out serpent hunting, how he slipped the noose on the end of one of them over the serpent’s head to catch it up, then pinned its head to the ground with the fork on the end of the other stick, till he got the serpent around to where he could slip it into the sack, Daddy had not been serpent hunting in a long time, though, to my knowledge. Nowadays he relied on sinner folks to bring them in to him, and they brought him plenty. I couldn’t see any need for him to go hunting others.

  So I said to Daddy, “I thought you had plenty of serpents,” and he grinned up at me in my spot on the bank.

  “You can’t never have too many, Sissy,” he said, “nor too few.” Sometimes Daddy didn’t make any sense, especially when he spoke in parables like Jesus. “It’s all up to the Lord, honey. I just go where He tells me to go, and do what He tells me to do. That’s all. I am naught but a instrument. A instrument of God.” Daddy seemed struck by his own words, standing tall with the creek flowing around his ankles, holding up a four-foot rattler in his hand. The rattler writhed and glistened in the sun. It kept twisting its head back like it was trying to look at Daddy. But I couldn’t look at him without remembering that pretty girl who had come to see Mama. I remembered Evelyn saying that Daddy did everything too much.

  Carlton Duty stood down by the creek in an awkward way, all bony knobs and angles. His chin jutted out and his whole face was red, the way it got whenever he spoke up in church. He looked real earnest and real upset. I knew he’d never so much as look at a pretty girl.

  “It is my understanding,” he started off nervous-like, “it is my understanding that the anointing is required, sir, for those that takes them up. For God said in Exodus Forty, Fifteen, ‘And thou shalt anoint them, as thou didst anoint their father, that they may minister unto me in the priest’s office: for their anointing shall surely be an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations,’ ” Carlton Duty emphasized “anointing.” He twisted his hat around and around in his hands. Carlton was always worrying over the fine points of Scripture, and agonized about following it exactly. He was questioning Daddy for handling serpents without being anointed, which some of the saints held to be wrong, while others practiced it at home or in their yards or wherever, anytime they felt like it.

  “Carlton,” Daddy said, swinging that serpent side to side with its tail swooping in and out of the creek, “Carlton, my beloved, all I can tell you is, I am follering the plan of God just as He reveals it to me day by day, I ain’t a-going to quibble with Him, nor split hairs. I ain’t a-going to say, ‘But away back there in Exodus, Lord, you said such and such.’ Oh no. Oh no, my beloved! For if Jesus says, ‘Jump, Virgil,’ I am going to say, ‘How far, Lord? How far?’ I ain’t about to question Him. I am going to do whatever He tells me to do, from now on until the end of my time, until He takes me home. That is the long and the short of it,” Daddy said. Sun sparkled off the shiny serpent and in the splashing drops and in the drops of water caught in the hair on his chest and head. He stepped out of the creek and slid the top of a snake box back and stuffed the serpent down in it, as if it was nothing but a rag. Lamar was watching Daddy close, watching his every move. Lamar’s eyes had gone real narrow, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, though they were so intent that I knew he was thinking something. Something big, something mighty. Again I had the sense that Lamar was following his own plan just as much as Daddy was following his. Lamar had kept his white shirt on, though he’d rolled up the sleeves so he could dip the serpent box in the running creek. This was how most people washed their serpents off, though Lily’s daddy sometimes took his out and put them in the bathtub, Lily said. Like Daddy, he didn’t think you had to be anointed if you wanted to take them up. He just did it, and they didn’t bite him either.

  “Why are you washing them off, anyway?” I said when Daddy had snapped the catch on the serpent box.

  “Why, shoot, Sissy, they’s nasty enough as they is. We’re cleaning them up for the big day coming.” First I thought Daddy meant Judgment Day, but then I realized he meant the Homecoming. His whole face was lit up by his smile, and I smiled
back at him, down in the creek. I couldn’t help it. He was so sweet at such times, and so sincere, he was just like a little child.

  But Carlton Duty had more on his mind. “Virgil,” he said, “there is also this matter of that money that I have been trying to talk to you about.” His nasal voice came floating up the hill.

  “Well, talk on, then, good buddy, talk on,” Daddy directed, as we fetched up at the smokehouse and he and Lamar stooped to put the boxes inside the door.

  I reckon he did talk on, but I didn’t hear him, for just then I looked up to see Ruth Duty standing out on the porch with Billie Jean, both of them waving at us. “Yoo-hoo!” Ruth called. I ran on up there. Sure enough, Ruth had been over at our house cooking all afternoon. I was so glad, for Mama had not had the time nor the inclination to do any cooking in those days right before the Homecoming. In fact, she had gotten just about as bad as Daddy for praying all the time and not eating hardly a thing. We would of all starved if Lamar had not brought us food from the store, Chef Boyardee spaghetti and such as that. But now Ruth Duty had cooked us enough food to last for a while, a big pot of green beans with onions and potatoes and fatback in it, a tuna noodle casserole with potato chips crumbled all over the top, which she knew that Billie and me loved, and pineapple upside-down cake. Lamar ate two big helpings of everything when we sat down at the table, but Mama just picked at her food.

  Later, when Mama and Ruth and me were in the kitchen washing up the dishes, Ruth said to her, “Honey, I can read the Bible as good as the next one, and I’ll be darned if I can see anyplace where it says not to eat. You’ve got to keep your strength up if you want to serve Him, it seems to me. He wants us to enjoy the fruits of the spirit, Fannie. That’s what I think.”

  Ruth Duty herself was a walking advertisement for these ideas. She jiggled all over, and had four chins, and energy flowed out from her in every direction. Everybody in the Jesus Name Church loved her, and respected her too.