by Lee Smith
“He’s building a patio on the other side of Valleydale,” Helen said.
“For a contractor,” Minnie said. “Oh, he does fine work.”
“Fine work,” Vonda Louise repeated.
“He works like a dog,” Helen said.
“Dawn to dusk,” Minnie added.
“Dawn to dusk,” said Vonda Louise.
“But he’ll go around visiting when he gets done, tired as he is,” Helen said. “Visits the sick, done it for years.”
“Visits the sick whether they ask him to or not,” Minnie said.
“He’s so good,” Helen explained.
“Too good for his own good,” Minnie said.
“He came to see me ever day when I had my hysterectomy out,” said Vonda Louise. “Brought me some of those chocolate-covered cherries.”
“Oh, he’s good,” Helen said.
“Good as gold,” said Minnie.
I stood up and took my dishes to the sink and washed them, trying to be helpful. I peered out the kitchen window at those two chairs under that big shade tree. It looked like they were out there just waiting for me. It occurred to me to pick up the sisters’ cups and saucers and wash them too. Then I started to wipe off the big oak table, but was stopped by Helen’s firm hand on my arm.
“We don’t use the dishrag for the table or the counters,” she said. “That would be nasty. We put the dishrag right here on the drain rack to dry.” She showed me. Then she opened the cabinet under the sink and got another rag off a hook. They looked just alike to me, but I kept my mouth shut. “This is the rag we use to wipe off the table,” she said.
* * *
WHEN TRAVIS WORD came home from work that evening, I was sitting out under the shade tree in one of those aluminum chairs, enjoying the end of the day. I had already been out there earlier to let my hair dry, and it still hung loose all down my back and around my shoulders. I was a little bit sunburned. Helen Tate was sitting with me, but she disappeared when she heard his truck.
Travis Word walked over and stood grinning down at me, that grin which seemed to hurt him. “You look a lot better,” he said.
“I feel a lot better,” I told him. “I slept so good.”
He eased his long self down into the other lawn chair, which looked too small for him. He had on dirty khaki-colored work clothes and steel-toed boots. His face was streaked with sweat. “I have been thinking about your father,” he announced in a preaching tone of voice, “and as far as I am concerned, what he done passeth understanding.”
“Well, I have to say, it’s the kind of thing he has done a lot before,” I said. “Daddy would be the first to tell you what a backslider he has been upon occasion. But then he always comes back to God in the end, and apparently God is real glad to have him, every time. This is the part I can’t figure out, how come God is so glad to have him. If I was God, I’d get tired of it.” All this just came bursting out of me, for I had been thinking about it. Travis Word turned to look at me.
“It is not for you nor me to figure out the workings of the Almighty,” he said, still in that preaching tone which made him sound sorrowful. “But I’ll tell you what’s the truth, from my own study of the Holy Word which I have read all my life, your daddy is flirting with fire, that’s for sure. For it says real plain, ‘Do you suppose, O man, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God?’ And yet again, ‘For He will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.’ That sounds pretty plain to me.” Travis shook his head, pitying Daddy.
Travis Word was the first preacher I ever ran into that placed works above grace in order of importance. As a person even then searching for hard ground in a world of shifting sands, I liked this. I was real glad to hear it. For privately I had always questioned Daddy’s belief that a person could just go out and do whatsoever they damn well pleased, and then repent and get forgiven for it, over and over again. In my own mind this made God out to be too easy, a pushover. I had never really believed that that was the case. Travis Word’s idea of the true nature of God came closer to my own image of Him as a great rock, eternal and unchanging. Even though I did not believe I was saved at that time, I did believe in Him, and I also felt that if He was worth His salt, He’d have no place prepared in Heaven for the likes of me.
Such was the state of my soul as I sat there in the lawn chairs with Travis Word in the sweet buzzing twilight of August 1959. I was at the end of my rope. I was damned, abandoned, and wore-out.
Travis Word’s deep voice came to me with almighty force. “You need some rest,” he said, “and a place to stay. You can stay here for a while if you want to.”
“What about your sister?” I asked. “Are you sure she won’t mind?” For she had seemed kind of distant to me, not mean, but not real warm either.
“Helen?” He laughed. “She won’t mind. If I tell her, she won’t mind. She just about drives me crazy trying to do for me, if you want to know. She doesn’t have enough to do since Thurman died.”
“I can tell that,” I said.
“She’s a fine woman,” he added, and I said, “I can tell that too. But good intentions can be hard on a person sometimes.” I knew this from my own experience with Mrs. Thoroughgood in Chattanooga.
Travis bobbed his long head up and down. “You’re telling me!” He sounded a lot more human than he had so far.
“Have you always lived here?” I asked. “With her and Mr. Tate? You never got married?” I could not resist asking, though it was none of my business for sure.
Then he told me all about the car wreck that killed his parents, and how he had had burns over eighty percent of his body, and how he had had to lay stretched out in the bed with Crisco rubbed on him for months and months afterward, nursed by his sisters and sustained by their prayers, and then how Helen and her preacher husband had taken him to raise for their own. Except for a stint in the Navy during the war, he had always preached, and always lived with Helen and Thurman. He had thought of getting his own place when he got out of the Navy, but by then Thurman Tate was having heart trouble. “They needed me,” he said, “so I knowed it was my duty to stay.” He was not a man to shirk his duty, I could tell.
“So when did you start preaching? When did you get the call, I mean?”
“Back when I was not but a little boy,” Travis answered earnestly, “down by the road here playing with some neighbor boys, and one of them said to come on home with him, that he had something he was going to show us, and I could tell just by the way he said it that it was something nasty. But I went right along with the rest of them, following them down the road here to his house, because I wanted to see what it was, you know.” I nodded. I could tell by the way he spoke that this was a story he’d told many times. It was his testimony. “And so they all went in through that gate one by one, all of them in front of me, but when it come my turn to go through it, why, God slammed it shut and locked it. Scared all those other little boys to death! And then He spoke to me real plain out of the clouds, He said, ‘Travis, you have not got no truck with any of that, go on home, for I am saving you for myself.’ ”
“God spoke to me one time too,” I said. “I sat up in the night at a camp meeting, but I don’t have any memory of it now.” I did not mean to claim holiness in saying this, though I did want Travis to think well of me, of course. By this time I was thinking that he was probably the best man I had ever met. I was already deciding not to tell him that I had not been saved, for he’d naturally assume I had, and I figured I might as well let him think it. Right then I was more interested in Travis Word than in God, to tell the truth.
“Is that a fact?” he said in the stricken tone
of wonder he reserved for direct communication from on high.
“Mm-hmmm,” I said. I was playing with my hair, lifting it up to let the soft cool breeze blow on my neck. My face felt hot because of my sunburn. “Aren’t you hungry?” I asked, for Helen Tate had given me my supper long before.
He snapped his fingers. “Well, for goodness’ sakes!” he said. “I ain’t eat yet, have I now?” He stood up and I stood up. We were real close to each other. He sucked in his breath and then I moved away.
Travis Word was forty-two then. I was not yet eighteen.
But it seemed like the most natural thing in the world when he put his arm around me and guided me toward the house. I was surprised to see a dark shadow move behind a curtain in the open parlor window closest to where we’d been sitting. Then the curtain fluttered. But before I could say anything about this, the back door opened and there stood Helen Tate, all smiles, welcoming us in. “Why, Brother!” she said. “I was wondering where you was at! Why don’t you come along too, Missy?” she said to me. “You can sit with Brother while he eats.”
* * *
I KNOW I would not have been the sisters’ first choice as a wife for Travis, but I was the one they got. For I came along at a time when they had almost given up hope, fearing that he would never marry. As a boy, he had not been interested in girls, putting his energy into the church, his schoolwork, and basketball. He had been a high school star, I learned. In fact, he could have gone to college scot-free due to the basketball, but after struggling with it all, he decided not to, as he felt himself in danger of placing basketball above God, and other books above the Bible. Thurman Tate had supported him in this choice, citing Ecclesiastes 12: “The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings which are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Travis was not much older than me when he started out preaching at the Hi-Way Tabernacle along with Thurman. Then he enlisted in the Navy for a while, stayed in for the war, and went to the Philippines, where he saw things that sent him into despair and made him question his faith for years afterward. He had to be born again when he got back to Tennessee, but even so, he said, it took him years to get back right with God. He would not really talk about his stint in the Navy, referring always to that time as his “dark night of the soul,” but once he did admit that he had not only killed some Japs and witnessed some bloody and awful events, but also succumbed to the desires of the flesh, for which he was afraid he had a special weakness. This was news to me!
For by the time I knew him, I couldn’t hardly get him to touch me.
I remarked it from the first, though I thought it would change when we married. I admired Travis Word for his restraint and the way he controlled his emotions, since I was just the opposite. No, that’s wrong—I didn’t just admire him. I worshipped him for his certainty, his faith, and his strength, as well as for his kindness, which never faltered.
I will never forget the day of our engagement, October 17, 1959. This was a Saturday, which was the only day Travis had off—until time for the evening service at church, that is. He usually spent the day doing work around the house, or around his other sisters’ houses, for if he did something for one of them, he had to do it for all. They were real jealous of each other when it came to Travis. Or he would spend Saturday helping somebody in the church do a job of work, as he called it—this might be moving into a new house, or clearing a field, or building a barn. He was the willingest man in the world to help other people.
Now I knew by then that he loved me, or I thought he did. It is something you can feel, and I had felt it many times when we would catch each other’s eye accidentally, for instance at a meal, and he would blush and look away, or when he would pause and pretend to be fixing the fence post or something else, but he was actually waiting for me to come out the door so he could walk with me wherever I was going, down the road on an errand for Helen perhaps. She used to keep me busy by sending me to the store and giving me little jobs around the house. I was glad to do them. For I had never had it so good, and I knew it.
I couldn’t imagine going back over to North Carolina after what all had happened. It made me real sad to think about it. Plus I knew Carlton and Ruth and Billie Jean were busy taking care of little Fannie, and there was no room for me now in that house. But here I had grown to love my bedroom and the big grassy side yard and the wide front porch where I sat for hours in the glider and waved at everybody who drove by on the road. Everybody waved back. They all knew who I was and how I had come to be there. Sometimes I would string beans for Helen, or crochet—she was teaching me how to crochet. Sometimes I would read a magazine if it was one that Helen approved of, like Good Housekeeping or Life or Redbook, which actually had more things in it than she realized, such as articles telling housewives how to improve their sex appeal! People were always dropping by to visit, and I was glad to pass the time with them. I got a reputation for sweetness, well deserved.
The fact is, for the first time in my whole life I was being taken care of, and I loved it. I ate it up! All I had to do, really, was be sweet and figure out how to get Travis Word to marry me.
This was harder than you might think. Every time I seemed to be getting someplace, he’d wise up and back off. For instance, he never went in the bathroom until he was pretty sure that both me and Helen had gone to sleep, so one night I laid awake on purpose and waited until I heard him go in there and close the door. Then I got up in my long flowered gown—which was not at all bare, that would have scared him to death—and stood behind my half-closed door until I heard him flush the toilet and open the door. At that moment I rushed out and ran right into him. “Oh!” I cried, like I was so surprised. I staggered back, clutching at his long-sleeved pajama shirt, so that he had to put his arms around me to keep me from falling. I nestled close to him, snuggling my head against his chest. “Oh, excuse me!” I said. For just one minute I could hear his furiously beating heart. I felt his lips on my hair. Then he gently but firmly picked me up and set me down at arm’s length, and rushed off down the hall without a word. But I knew he wanted me—I knew it. I could feel it. There is no mistaking a thing like that. The next morning, though, I was amazed to find that Travis had gotten up and gone to work way before sunrise, according to Helen. He had told her that he wanted to get a good start on the day. Helen shook her head and watched me carefully as she told me this at breakfast, and I looked down at my plate. I was not about to tell her a thing, though I felt that she and I were on the same side of the matter.
After several incidents of this sort, I began to realize that Travis got real scared every time he had any emotion that was not directly linked to God, and that I would have to get around this some way if I wanted to get anyplace with him, which I did.
So back to that Saturday, October 17. This was the morning when Travis announced that he was going over to Claude Vickers’s house to help him put a prefab utility shed together. “Will you be home for dinner?” Helen asked.
“I don’t know if we’ll be done by then or not,” Travis said. “You all go on and eat when you get it ready. Don’t wait on me.” Then, without looking at me once, he was gone. “You all” included Minnie and Vonda Louise too, who always came for dinner, plus anybody else who happened by. That Saturday, it was a neighbor woman, Darnell Ball, who had a big story to tell about her sister in Ohio, who thought she had a tumor but it turned out to be a baby, at her age. Minnie and Vonda Louise just loved this story, so Darnell Ball drew it out as long as she could in the telling, during which I started to feel like I was going to jump out of my skin. For it was the most beautiful day outside, the clear sky as blue as a robin’s egg, the gold leaves falling on the grass. It made me want to run, to jump, to—well, to kiss Travis Word! But Darnell Ball just went on and on. “And do you know,” she said, lea
ning forward in a kitchen chair, one hand on each knee, “do you know, she was pregnant with that baby for ten months with no sign of labor, until the doctors gave up and done a Sicilian?”
“Well, was it all right, then? The baby, I mean?” Vonda Louise was hanging on every word.
“Honey, it was practically growed! Had a full head of curly blond hair and weighed ten and a half pounds! Why, it was practically talking! They named it Carol Elizabeth, for Mama. Isn’t that sweet? Seeing as how the rest of us all had boys, I mean. . . . But you know what I wonder the most about all this? I wonder what would of happened if they had not been any doctor there to do the Sicilian, like in the olden days, I mean. I wonder if Carol Elizabeth would of just kept on a-growing in there.”
“I’m sure that is not medically possible.” Minnie sniffed. She was setting the table.
“Well, but don’t you remember what happened to the Sloan girl?” Darnell said. “You can go on and set me a place too, Minnie, if you want to.”
“Is that Bill Sloan’s girl or Birdy’s?” Vonda Louise asked. She picked up her fork so she’d be ready.
“Well, it’s the one that worked at the health department,” Darnell said.
I thought I was going to jump right out of my skin. “Listen,” I told them, “if you all don’t mind, I’d like to borrow the car.” Helen had an old gray Mercury, which Travis drove them to town and to church in. It had an automatic shift, just like Mrs. Thoroughgood’s car.
“Why, Missy, we didn’t know you could drive!” Vonda Louise cried.
“Well, I can,” I said. I couldn’t even stand still in the kitchen. I was bouncing on the balls of my feet.
“Where do you want to go?” Helen looked at me carefully with a little frown between her eyes.
“Well—” Various answers ran through my mind, but in the end I told the truth. “Why don’t I go over to Claude Vickers’s and take Mr. Travis his dinner? You all have got enough chicken for an army.”