Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

I dried the last plate, looking from Ruth to Mama. Mama sat in a kitchen chair, fluttering her hands in her lap. She was as fragile as a moth, with her dry white papery skin. All of a sudden I knew that Daddy would leave her if she didn’t get better, and that this would kill her, as it had killed Lamar’s mother.

  For Daddy was all her life.

  “You don’t know everything,” Mama was saying darkly to Ruth. “There’s a lot you don’t know. God has been testing me lately. He has been severely testing me, and I can’t pass the test. I ain’t got a big enough heart. That’s the truth.” Mama started crying then, and Ruth hugged her.

  I went out on the porch to play paper dolls with Billie Jean. She didn’t even have any idea she was too old for paper dolls, and I wasn’t about to tell her. It was the only fun she ever had, those paper dolls. She had a whole bunch of them propped up against the rocker of a rocking chair. “Now this is a great meeting,” she said, “and here comes a sinner girl.” She made another paper doll come walking across the porch. This was one that I had cut out of a Teen magazine and pasted onto cardboard for her. The doll was wearing slacks and a pink angora sweater. “Her name is Susan Brown,” Billie announced, smiling sweetly. “Here she comes now!” Billie walked Susan Brown across the porch and into the paper doll meeting.

  Billie thought it was all a game.

  I got up and stood at the porch rail looking out into the night. Lightning bugs were rising one by one. I felt almost sick, I had eaten so much supper. I could hear, but not hear, Mama and Ruth in the kitchen. Lamar was gone. He had driven Daddy and Carlton someplace in the car. Beyond the porch, beyond the tiny fireflies, darkness stretched out as far as I could see. Homecoming would begin in two days, and it was not a game. It was a matter of life and death.

  * * *

  PEOPLE STARTED COMING in from out of town that Saturday morning, and by afternoon there was so many that Lamar had to stand out by the road like a traffic cop, telling them where to go. He parked them up and down the road and then lined them up in rows in the field, leaving the center open for the meeting. After they got parked, they unpacked their vehicles, setting up tents and folding tables and chairs around the field and back in the trees and all along the river. I had never seen so many cars or people in one place, or so much going on. It looked like gypsies had come to town. The church house and field and river were all changed, all new, a bright busy anthill with people going every which way on errands of their own, or just to see each other. There was a lot of hugging and laughing and crying and grabbing hands. Kids played tag in and out of the parked cars. Here and there, people were tuning up instruments. Somebody was already playing the banjo off in the trees where we couldn’t see him, though the notes floated out sassy and solid on the summer air. Some boys from out of town asked Billie and me what our names were, but she giggled and ran away, so I ran off after her. Even Billie seemed to be caught up in the general excitement as we walked around watching it all start up. Some men from our church were building a kind of stage in the middle of the field and putting the new PA system up, stringing wires out over the grass. Lily’s daddy hauled in some portable toilets they had rented in Waynesville, and set them up at the edge of the woods. Daddy wanted everything “modern” and “top of the line.” He’d been saying this for months. He was nowhere to be found while the preparations went on, however.

  The last we had seen of Daddy before the meeting was his white shirt disappearing into the laurel on the mountain path behind our house. I knew he was going up there to be alone, to pray and prepare.

  Mama was preparing too. She wouldn’t pay any attention to me and Billie. She got all dressed but then sat on the horsehair sofa in the front room with her knees pushed tight together and her white-knuckled hands clasped on top of them. She squinted, staring at nothing we could see. Her mouth moved. Billie and me passed in and out of there, getting ready ourselves, watching Mama. Once she jumped up and ran out onto the porch and vomited over the rail, but not much came up, as she had not really eaten for days. I got scared, seeing this. I went out on the porch and put my arm around her thin shoulders, but she shook me off and ran back in the house to sit again on the sofa in that frozen way. She gave me the creeps.

  “Let’s go,” I told Lamar. We were going to ride over to the meeting with him.

  But Lamar stood in the middle of the floor, jingling the keys and looking at Mama. He was studying her real close. “Fannie!” he said sharply.

  Mama didn’t even blink.

  “Fannie,” he said again. “Come on, we’re fixing to go. It’s the big meeting. It’s the Homecoming.” Lamar spoke as if to a child. “Come on now, Fannie.”

  Mama turned to look at him then, her eyes like searchlights, her face like a knife. She was not even pretty anymore. I was scared of her. “Come back for me, Lamar,” she said. “I ain’t ready to go yet. Come back for me later, honey.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  But then Mama started shaking her head back and forth. She was all wrought up. “You won’t.” She sounded real pitiful now. “You won’t never come for me. I know it. I can feel it in my bones. You won’t never come.”

  The way Mama was talking didn’t make any sense. It made me feel funny in the stomach, like I might have to go throw up too. Things flew in and out of my mind. For the first time I thought Mama might be going crazy, and craziness is catching, to a certain extent.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Lamar was real disgusted. “I’ll be back after while, Fannie. Come on, girls.” He stomped out of the house with us following, and I must say I was glad to get out of there, and glad to get into the car. Both of us sat up in the front seat with Lamar, me in the middle, next to him. The car had been sitting in the sun, and I loved the way the hot seat burned the back of my legs. It made me feel real again, and not crazy. And I loved the feel of Lamar’s leg against my own.

  “Where’s Daddy? How’s he going to get over there?” Billie asked.

  Lamar gave a short ugly laugh. “I reckon God is going to pick him up. I reckon he’ll drive over here and get him whenever the time is right.” He reached past my knee to turn on the car radio. Hank Williams was singing. I knew Lamar would never have done that if Daddy had been in the car with us.

  But Billie was puzzled. “What kind of a car does God have?” she asked. I swear, you never knew what was going to come out of that mouth of hers.

  Lamar turned and grinned at us. “A Cadillac, of course,” he said. “Coupe de Ville. Ain’t that right, Buddy?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Lamar smiled at me.

  Then we were there, and then we were swept up in all the people and the excitement, and I kind of forgot about Mama because there was so much going on. That is, I didn’t forget about her exactly, I just put her in another place in my mind for the rest of the afternoon. It is amazing how many different things you can keep in your mind at one time.

  We met other people, from places all around, even as far as West Virginia, and then the women put the food out at suppertime, and everybody fell on it like they were starved to death. Billie and me ate with the Dutys, the Maniers, the Roses, and a group of others from the Jesus Name Church. After supper the women cleared off pretty quick while the men smoked and the shadows of the trees stretched out long on the grass. A little breeze started blowing when the sun went down. A new tone was coming into everybody’s voices now. People clustered together, talking about God and about their lives in a serious way. Some more cars came up the road, driving slow, and then some men that nobody appeared to know walked to the edge of the field and stood there. We knew they were not Holiness men because of how they looked and carried themselves. Two of them had black cameras on straps around their necks. One of them was fat, and panted to keep up with the others. He had a pencil stuck behind his ear and carried a notebook. Rhonda Rose poked me in the ribs when she saw him.

  “That’s a repo
rter,” she said. “I can tell.”

  This was because she had been interviewed so much after she got bit and her mother took her to the hospital in Waynesville for treatment. Her picture had been in the paper four times. Rhonda had cut out all these clippings from the newspaper and taped them up on her bedroom wall. Since that time, Rhonda’s mother had gotten mad and left the family, so now Rhonda had to take care of her daddy and her two little brothers all by herself, but she had still managed to get herself engaged anyway. She was going to marry Robbie Knott. Everybody in our church was tickled over it. Robbie was one of the people up on the platform that evening, testing the PA system, getting everything ready to go.

  “Robbie has got him a new drum set,” Rhonda told me. “Wait till you see.” She squeezed my hand. Up close, she was beautiful, like a movie star. I could see why Robbie Knott or anybody else would want to marry her. I thought, I am going to marry Lamar, but I didn’t believe it for a minute, even then. It was the only way I knew to think about what we’d done. Anyway, where was Lamar? I told Rhonda I’d see her later, and darted off in the crowd, leaving Billie with the Dutys. I was too nervous to stay in one place.

  Everybody was moving now, though no general announcement had been made, moving out into the field, gathering around the platform, which stood about three feet off the ground. Big black speaker boxes were fixed onto poles at the side of it, and lights were strung all around. People I didn’t know were jostling me. “Hidy,” said a boy I’d never seen before, right up in my face. I couldn’t find Lamar. Finally I gave up looking for him and allowed myself to be swept along, like a person caught up in a big slow flood. There was no turning back now.

  * * *

  THEN BOBBY GAYHEART and Dillard Jones came along with some rope and some poles to string it on, and got everybody to move back from the platform about thirty or forty feet, and roped that area off. The roped-off place would be for them that was handling. This made it more legal, or something. More acceptable, I reckon, as it was not legal in any case. Most of the time the law just acted like they didn’t know what was going on, and left us alone, but in the rare instances when there’d be a death or when somebody would go to the sheriff’s office and complain, why then they would feel obliged to show up and carry on for a while, arresting people and what have you. It would be in the paper. Then it would all die down again, and things would go back to normal. This was the cycle we lived by in the Jesus Name Church, but there were those who felt that Daddy should never hold a big meeting such as Homecoming—that the Jesus Name Church should never do anything to attract attention in any way. “So the work of the Lord can proceed in peace,” is how Carlton Duty put it. He came up to our house and had a big argument with Daddy about it. Carlton did not hold with new PA systems and stringing lights and publicity. “These things gets in the way of the Spirit,” he said.

  I had seen myself that whenever lots of strangers were present in a meeting, anything might happen to break the mood and scare the Spirit off. It was real dangerous when the Lord just up and left somebody holding a serpent, without anointment. So I agreed with Carlton Duty and the others—but in secret, for the Holiness girl or woman does not have a voice in such as that. A woman can handle and she can preach, but she can’t decide things.

  Daddy, on the other hand, always claimed that there was nothing like a rattlesnake to advance the cause of the Lord. “I ain’t preaching to the converted,” he said. “I am in the business of saving souls, right here on this sweet earth, and I’m going to use everything the Lord gives me to further His purpose and fulfill His plan. If He gives me a truck, I’ll take it. If He gives me a load of gravel, I’ll take it. I ain’t proud. I ain’t too proud to carry on His work as He sees fit, and use whatever He sends me. If He gives me a new pair of shoes, I’ll wear them. If He gives me a sack of potatoes, I’ll eat them. And if He gives me a rattlesnake, why, I’ll take it up in His glory and honor, in His glory and honor, a-men.” So that had been the end of it, though Carlton was not alone in his views, and there were even some who whispered that Daddy was exalting himself instead of God in the signs.

  A day or so before the great Homecoming, when I asked Lamar what he thought about all this, he looked at me like I was crazy, like there was something he knew and I didn’t, or I wouldn’t even be asking the question. He curled his lip and seemed about to speak, but did not. I remember I grabbed his hand. “Tell me, tell me,” I said. “Tell me what you really think,” for he was supposed to be one of the saints himself, after all. But he just stared at me with eyes so black and deep that I feared I might fall into them and be forever lost.

  “I don’t think nothing,” Lamar had said. “I ain’t here to think.”

  And now the Homecoming was upon us all, regardless of what anybody thought about it. I took my seat in a folding chair next to Patsy Manier, well back from the rope. Patsy never went forward either. She was a pretty girl who had actually graduated from high school and then gone to the beauty academy in Asheville, but she got pregnant and had to come home. Now she had the cutest little boy, Thomas, who was the apple of everyone’s eye. Patsy and Thomas lived with her parents, Bill and Ruby Manier, who had been staunch members of the Jesus Name Church all along. Patsy’s daddy had bought her a beauty shop chair that went up and down and swiveled, and put it in their family room, so Patsy ran a business right there at home, cutting men’s hair as well as women’s. At first Bill and Ruby were criticized for letting Patsy do this, as she gave permanents and even frostings to non-Holiness women and girls, not to mention touching men’s heads, but the Maniers ignored the talk, and it soon died down. People will get used to anything and decide it’s all right.

  I was pretty sure that Patsy put something on her own hair, as it was a bright shade of red not found in nature. But Patsy was always real nice to me. That night, she hugged me. “You doing all right?” she asked, and I said I was, and we settled back in our seats as they started playing music up on the stage.

  It was Slim Dotson on the electric guitar, wearing his familiar black cowboy hat and a belt with a great big JESUS buckle. He was so thin that when he turned sideways he was almost invisible, I’m not kidding. Slim’s older brother, Darrell, was on bass, a heavyset man who ran a small engine repair shop and could fix anything, a man to depend upon. The Dotsons had been in the Jesus Name Church forever too, going back to the beginning days in the brush arbor when we first came. Their mother, who had died in the spring, was a handler herself. But she had not died of serpent bite, she had died peaceful in her bed, of natural causes.

  Robbie Knott was playing on his fancy new drum set, grinning at the crowd, and Doyle Stacy was up there too on guitar. His left eyelid still drooped, and he spit out that side of his mouth when he got excited preaching, but really he did not look too bad, and once you got used to it, you didn’t hardly notice it. A man and a woman I had never seen before were up there singing into the microphone, harmonizing together as good as professionals. Most of the folks from the Jesus Name Church sat together, I noticed, with the handlers up toward the front and the rest of us back some. It was getting dark. The electric lights shone on every face, making them somehow different, naked and new. I felt like I was seeing everybody for the first time, and, yet I felt I’d known them all forever and ever too, as if they were part of me.

  There were the Cline sisters, old maids both, with their soft wrinkled faces like apple dolls. Lily sat up front with her daddy and her mama. Since she’d gained so much weight, she looked more like her mama every day, with big new breasts and a fat stomach. I didn’t have much in the way of breasts yet, though I was hopeful, and wore a bra because everyone else did. The Dutys sat up front too—I could see the back of their heads—but I couldn’t find Mama. Where was she? She usually sat with Ruth, but she wasn’t there. I craned my neck to look around. There was lovely Rhonda sitting with her soon-to-be sister-in-law Darlene Knott, narrow-faced and nervous in her harlequin glasses. She
worked at the courthouse in Waynesville now. There was Mrs. Duke Watson, rumored to be up in her nineties now, sitting with her son Earl, who never said much but was faithful as the day is long about coming to meeting, and ran a barbecue business. The Pearsons sat close to us—Della and one-armed Gobel and Gobel’s daddy, old man Ed Pearson, who used to be an engineer on the railroad before he retired. Lorene Bishop sat off to herself a little, with a wild look in her eye. She’d been searching for a man ever since her own husband, Lovis, had died in the mine. In meeting, she was often the first to be claimed by the Spirit, and the last to quit dancing and speaking in tongues, which was how the Spirit generally took her. I smiled at Mr. Arnold, a new member of our church who was so taken with Daddy that he had loaned the church a truck which said “Arnold’s Electric” in curlicue writing on the door. But where was Mama? And where was Lamar? I turned around to see Truman Hart and his whole family sitting right behind me, and said hidy to them. Tommy Love and Wade Tilly were back there too, and Maudine Meadows, and Bucky Dollar, who was on probation. Before I got so taken with Lamar, it had crossed my mind that Bucky Dollar was kind of cute. I smiled at them all and turned around in time to see Billie walking up to join the Dutys at the front. She walked with her head down, real shy, but a big pretty girl nonetheless, with a round fair face like the moon, which nothing had ever made a mark on. I wished she was in the back with me, where she would be safer, but I wasn’t about to go up there and get her.

  I stayed put, butterflies in my stomach, as the music got faster and louder. “What would you give in exchange for your soul?” they sang, and before I knew it, I was singing too, and moving to the beat of Robbie’s nice new drums. I couldn’t seem to sit still. Next to me, Patsy Manier had one of those high, clear, heartbreak voices. Everybody was singing and clapping, and I gave up on finding Mama and Lamar. I was sure they were here someplace.

  The wind came off the river and moved through the trees. The green leaves of June shimmered softly in the big circle cast by the light, and I thought all of a sudden that it was God’s breath—God’s breath touching the leaves, and touching each one of us. I guess I was not used to being outside in the nighttime like that, for there was something about it that really got to me. I felt like I was being caught up in something, like we were all of us caught up and held in something beautiful and solemn and grand. Each face seemed to me beautiful in that light, even old Mrs. Watson’s, even Doyle Stacy’s.