Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  When we got home, Travis went straight to bed in the middle of the day, an unheard-of thing to me. But Helen and Minnie raised their eyebrows and looked at each other when I told them what he was up to, and that he didn’t want any supper. “Oh-oh,” Minnie said, and Helen nodded. Then they told me that their father had done this from time to time, just simply gone to bed for weeks on end, refusing to speak to anybody. He had lost several jobs this way, and worried them all sick.

  “Why did he do it?” I asked.

  Helen shook her head. “Nobody ever knew.”

  “Runs in the family,” Minnie said.

  They went on to tell me that Travis had been known to do it too, his most recent bout having been right before Daddy came. But this was so long ago now that they had thought he was cured.

  “Cured by love,” said Vonda Louise, winking at me.

  Though I smiled, I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t stand to see Travis just lying around, a big man like that, doing nothing. All my old orneriness started coming back. I wanted to run around and act up and smash things. I scared myself.

  The only thing worse than having Travis gone all the time was having him home all the time.

  I brought his Bible to him as he lay in bed, thinking he might find some comfort in it, but after reading for a while, he announced that the “evil days” had come upon him as foretold in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, when “the years draw nigh, and you will say, I have no pleasure in them, before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut. . . .” Travis read on and on, through the part where the daughters of song are brought low, and terrors are in the way, and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails and the golden bowl is broken, all the way to “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” at the end. He put the Bible down. He had big circles under his eyes.

  “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

  “So be it,” he answered. “So be it.”

  He refused to look at me even when I kissed his neck. He shrugged me off like I was a buzzing fly that wouldn’t leave him alone. This made me madder than anything else, the way he shut me out and wouldn’t let me grieve with him, as I had pain and grief to spare. I was the one who had carried Travis Word Junior for eight months in my own body, after all. Every time I closed my eyes, I could still see my little gray baby. Now I didn’t feel too good, and thought I deserved some attention. But no. Nothing doing. Travis turned his face to the wall.

  He lay there neglecting us and neglecting all his duties for three weeks solid. Then Helen told him sternly that he had to get up or he would lose his congregation, that the Faith Baptist Mission was holding a revival right now, and the whole Rogers family had been going to it. Helen said she would not be surprised if they quit the Tabernacle and joined up over there.

  This got Travis up. Maybe he was ready to get up anyway. He started planning for a revival at the Tabernacle, and raising money for Mona and Harley White’s daughter who had a brain tumor, and then he announced that the senior youth group was going on a trip to Rock City.

  But the pattern was set. Travis would be brought low from time to time by those “evil days,” when gloom sat heavy upon him and all was for naught. Then he would have periods of sixteen-hour workdays, when he spent every free minute in the service of the Lord. He tried to accept the evil days, often quoting Psalms 94:12, “Blessed is the man whom thou chasteneth, O Lord, and teachest him out of thy law.”

  Travis believed that everything in life happened for a purpose and fell into the great scheme of God, but I did not. I was still prone to question and agonize. I criticized God, and hardened my heart.

  This went on for years.

  I could never see why Mama had had to die so young, or the White girl, or Leonard Cartland, a high school boy who died in a wreck on his graduation night. He was an only child, whose parents never got over it. I particularly could not see why DeeDee’s brother Rusty had to die in Vietnam while other boys wouldn’t even go over there, running off to Canada and growing long hair and burning down their schools. We read about it in the paper. None of this made sense to me, and I could not detect God’s purpose anywhere. I began to suspect that there was no purpose at all, in fact, but every time I thought this, a great bottomless empty feeling would rush through me, scaring me to death. Yet I had no one to share my thoughts with. Travis was growing farther away from me than ever. Either he was lying on the bed or he was working like a dog, and either way, there was no room for me in his life.

  I tried to stay as busy as I could. My girls took up a lot of time, and I enjoyed every minute of it. When they got old enough to be Girl Scouts, I believe I enjoyed it even more than they did. I had never gotten to be one myself, so I got the biggest kick out of helping them earn their merit badges. I tried to be more active in the work of the Tabernacle too, going with Helen to every wake and birth and wedding that came along, helping with the youth group where I was a big hit, everybody agreed, since I was young enough for them to relate to. They all thought I was cool! I had to be careful not to relate too much, as a matter of fact, for there were a couple of boys in it that were real cute, and I was real lonely. But this was strictly my own fault, since I was surrounded all day long by so many people. It didn’t make sense to me. Nothing did. But at least I had enough sense to quit the youth group after an incident where Doug Jones put his hand on mine for a minute too long when I handed him a piece of pizza.

  I quit helping with the youth group right then and started visiting shut-ins and old people instead. One lady I visited was Mrs. Quigley. Her whole family hated her because she was so mean, but I kind of liked her. She was ninety-seven years old, and had thin white hair that stood up on end all over her head like she had been electrified, and brown age spots all over her face, and pale eyes covered by cataracts. They looked like milk glass.

  I was supposed to read the Bible to her, but she loved the National Enquirer so I always brought that, hiding it from her family. She loved the lives of the stars.

  One day as I was leaving, she grabbed my sleeve hard and hung on tight. I tried to pull away, as I was fixing to be late picking up my girls from school. “Listen!” she screeched at me. “Listen!” She had a voice like Mr. Bean’s parrot. “Listen to me. Get out of here. Listen to me. Get out of here.” She kept saying it over and over. She wouldn’t let go of my sleeve. Her hand was like a claw.

  Finally Mrs. Quigley’s daughter came in and forced her fingers from my arm and said, “Now, Mama, let go of Mrs. Word. You run along, Mrs. Word, you’re an angel, and we all appreciate you so much.”

  I got out of there. I never went back either. I knew she was just a crazy old woman, but I was no angel, and she had scared me. I was afraid I might turn into a mean old woman like that myself. In fact I thought I was in danger of doing so immediately. Though I was only thirty-three, I felt old as the hills. I felt ungrateful, and mean, and old.

  I believe Helen guessed something about all this. One night when I was reading the paper, I glanced up to find her staring at me with a look that seemed to search my very soul. I could not help blushing, though I looked back down at the paper and continued to read, and never met her eyes.

  It was soon after this that Helen decided we ought to redecorate the house.

  “I want you to pick the colors,” she said. “You’re so good at things like that, and I’m too old. I want you to drive over to Sherwin-Williams in Knoxville and pick up some paint charts.”

  In spite of myself, I started to get interested. “What about wallpaper?” I asked, for I have always loved wallpaper.

  “Wallpaper would be nice,” Helen said.

  A New Paint Jo
b

  I STILL THINK that part of it was Travis’s fault. He refused to let us call the contractor he worked for, Ed Goode, in Valleydale. Ed Goode would have charged us half price, or done it at cost, but Travis wouldn’t have that. Oh no. Travis wouldn’t take any favors. “I pay my own way” was one of his mottoes. Another was “Pay as you go,” and he kept both us and the church on a cash basis at all times. Nor would he let us ask anybody from the Tabernacle to do it either, as he was sure they would do it for free.

  “But that’s all right,” I tried to tell him at dinner one Sunday afternoon. “After everything you have done for them? You ought to let somebody do something for us sometime, Travis. It would make them feel better.”

  All those dark Word eyes turned in my direction, the way they did whenever I ventured to contradict Travis. It was the three sisters, plus Misty and Annette looking so pretty in their church dresses. Minnie’s thin mouth hardened into a line, and Vonda Louise started biting her lip like she always did when she got nervous.

  Travis put a forkful of mashed potatoes back down on his plate. “I am not too sure about all this redecoration anyhow,” he said in that sincere way which meant he had been wrestling with it. “I don’t know if it is meant to be.”

  “Meant to be?” I said. “What do you mean, meant to be? It is not an act of God, Travis. It is just some paint and some wallpaper. It’s up to us. We can either do it or not do it.”

  But Travis shook his head gravely, as if it was all real serious. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he said in his deep voice—another one of his mottoes.

  “Daddy, you promised!” This was Misty, who took after me, outspoken and headstrong and growing up too fast.

  “You did, Daddy, you did.” Annette was usually real quiet and good.

  But Travis was genuinely worried. “I just don’t know that a minister of God ought to do a thing like this,” he said. “Maybe we ought to be satisfied with what we’ve got, and thank God for it, and leave well enough alone.”

  At these words I burst into tears.

  “Mama, Mama,” the girls cried, for this was not like me at all. Misty jumped up and ran around the table to hug me. I was so embarrassed, yet I couldn’t stop. And I didn’t even care about redecorating, not that much—it was all Helen’s idea in the first place.

  Travis sat there stiff as a poker.

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sakes!” Minnie started taking dishes off the table. By then, of course, Vonda Louise was crying too, but Minnie made her help clear anyway.

  “Can I be excused?” Annette asked, and when nobody answered her, she gulped and pushed back her chair and ran up the stairs two at a time.

  Travis and Helen and I sat there looking at each other while Misty stood behind my chair and hugged me. I couldn’t stop crying.

  “Well, shoot!” Travis said finally. He cleared his throat and ran his finger around the inside of his white collar. “There’s things a man just don’t think of, I reckon. You go on then, Missy. You go on. Fix it up real pretty.”

  * * *

  I DROVE TO the paint store in Knoxville by myself the next morning, a cold dreary March day, feeling blue and nervous. Maybe I am entering the change of life, I thought, in spite of my age. And to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have minded the change of life either. It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to me.

  First I had trouble finding the paint store, which had moved from the place where it used to be, beside the highway, to the big new mall outside town, and then I had trouble figuring out where to go once I got inside, as the store was huge. Eventually somebody directed me to the Decorating Center, a little carpeted island in the middle of the store with tables and chairs where you could sit and page through the big wallpaper books, and look at paint charts and pictures of rooms and swatches of drapery material and fancy venetian blinds, all of which was called window treatments. I sat down and started looking through the wallpaper books, but it was hard for me to concentrate. That new store had the brightest fluorescent lights—I hate how they buzz in your ears. They always make me feel like I’m going crazy. Maybe I was going crazy! I looked at stripes and tiny prints and velvet flocking and metallics. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of wallpaper in the world.

  “If I can help you, just let me know.”

  I jumped a mile at the soft voice in my ear. The pretty blonde girl smiled. She was younger than me and appeared to have stepped straight out of a magazine in her coral pantsuit with bell-bottom legs.

  “Are you looking for anything in particular?” Her name tag said “Miss Whittle, Home Design.”

  “Some wallpaper for my sitting room,” I told her.

  “This one has a lot of nice patterns for the living area.” She pulled a huge book over toward me.

  I felt dumb and country because I had said “sitting room” instead of “living area.”

  “Or maybe this one.” She looked at me, then glided away, and I studied both the books. Her second choice offered a much cheaper line than the first. This showed what she thought of me! Well, I would show her. I closed that book and shoved it away. At least Travis was not cheap. Once he finally decided to buy something, he went whole-hog, He went for quality. Besides, I knew they had money saved up, him and his sisters. They owned property all around the county that had belonged to their parents. A lot of checks came in every month, people paying their rent I reckoned, though nobody ever talked to me about any of this. Minnie gathered up the checks and took them over to her house, where she did the bookkeeping. So money was not the problem. The problem was progress.

  Travis was against progress in every way. He still would not let us have a television, nor could I wear pants or cut my hair—though I snuck and did it a little bit, of course, otherwise it would have been all the way down to my fanny, which it nearly was anyway. He never caught on to this. And he did let the girls wear jeans. He also let Misty go out for cheerleader and Annette join the Latin Club. But he had preached from the pulpit that man should not have gone to the moon, that we were not meant to, and the sisters swore that it had ruined the weather.

  Anyway I could pick out whatever wallpaper I wanted.

  What I wanted was an all-over pattern of red roses and green leaves. I had loved red roses ever since we lived in the house up on Scrabble Creek. I went through the books, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. And I was getting a terrible headache from those buzzing fluorescent lights.

  Miss Whittle glided back, and I finally told her what I was after.

  “Oh. You mean the English country look,” she said.

  “Exactly,” I said, which surprised her.

  So then she brought me more books, each page a garden, but I couldn’t find any simple red roses. I broke down and asked her to help me look.

  “Oh, red is out,” she said. “Let me show you some really popular florals.”

  Before I knew it, I had ordered a tangerine/avocado/gold print for the living area and gold paint for the kitchen, so the two rooms could flow into each other. Miss Whittle would arrange for the painter. I found myself standing out in the March wind, shaky and breathless as the glass doors of the paint store closed behind me, holding a color chart for the girls to pick from.

  The sun ducked in and out of the racing clouds as I drove home, and my heart was racing too. Something was wrong with me. Now, I think this was when my old gift of discernment started coming back. I stopped by the Tabernacle to visit Travis Junior’s grave, something I did often. For no particular reason, I went inside the Tabernacle first. The door was always open. Travis insisted upon leaving it unlocked, and nothing had ever been stolen.

  Of course there wasn’t much to steal.

  Though the Tabernacle was not as poor as the churches which Daddy had pastored in my youth, the sanctuary was as honest and plain as Travis himself. There was nothing to distract you from Jesus. Rows
of hard wooden benches on either side, no cushions, two windows with frosted-glass panes in them such as you might see in a public restroom, no carpet, just the old boards worn satin smooth from years of use, years of dancing in the Spirit, years of prayer. The church was built in 1888 by Methodists, but they had all died off and it was standing vacant when Thurman Tate took it over for his own ministry, which had started out as Church of God but became independent after Thurman fell out with somebody, I forget just who. Travis and Thurman did most of the work on it themselves back in the fifties, when they added on the meeting room and a bathroom at the rear.

  I stood in the back and let my eyes adjust to the dim pearly light of the sanctuary. Here was where Travis and I had gotten married. Here was where Misty and Annette had accepted Christ as their personal savior at the revival the summer before, here was the bench where Travis’s sisters sat right up front every Sunday morning come Hell or high water, wearing their best dresses and their old black hats. Wind came in the open door behind me and flapped my skirt around. I blinked, and blinked again. For I seemed to see a shadowy girl—who was she?—moving through the Tabernacle like a ghost. I saw her on a bench halfway back on the left, with her shadow husband and shadow children, then I saw her sitting there alone when her children grew up and left her and her husband died, then I saw her sitting with the other widows, way up front in order to hear, and then she was gone, all gone, nothing left of her but a little mist in the sanctuary, she was a shut-in someplace like Mrs. Quigley, and then she was dead and they had buried her in the graveyard beside the church.