by Lee Smith
I needed everything.
The sky was low and gray and puckered-looking, like insulation, but it never snowed as I drove the winding roads into North Carolina that afternoon. They had never built an interstate across those mountains. Though the road was okay, there were icy patches on the shoulder, and piles of gray snow where the snowplows had pushed it up against the mountainside. So I drove slow. I was not in a hurry. I had not told them any particular time that I would get there, so nobody was waiting on me. The snow on the mountains was pure white, broken only by the black trees and the dark patches of pines. Sometimes I’d see a little faraway house with smoke coming out of its chimney. The snowy slopes stretched right up into the pale gray mist, so I couldn’t make any distinction between the earth and the sky. It looked like you could just walk up the mountain and into Heaven without any trouble. Once I looked way down the mountainside and saw three deer in a line, posed like statues against the snow, but when I blinked and looked back again, they were gone. Of course my heater still didn’t work, but I was not even cold. I rolled my window down to let the sharp clear air fill my lungs, and it felt great. I felt suddenly, completely alive in a new way, a way that made me realize I had only been walking through my life.
The light was nearly gone by the time I reached the Scrabble Creek area. I couldn’t even see the Little Dove River, which ran along beside the road now in the darkness. I could imagine it though, deep and black and mysterious, cutting through the snow, disappearing under ice. I knew it was there.
I couldn’t wait to see Ruth and Carlton! It had been so long. Ruth had given me what-for on the telephone back when I left Travis, and said my mother would just die if she knew about my trashy behavior.
“She did die,” I had said to Ruth then, and she hung up on me.
But when I’d called to tell her I was coming, she had sounded nice again, and said that they would be glad to see me, but that Billie Jean wouldn’t be there, as she was in a home now. “A home,” I’d repeated. “What do you mean, a home?” “Over in Asheville with some other people like herself,” Ruth had said. “It’s working out just fine. She likes it over there. They do things together, go to the mall, you know. Everybody has a chore. It’s in a big old stone house.”
“I can’t believe Billie would want to go to Asheville,” I had said. “She never wanted to go anywhere. She liked to stay home.”
“Well, Gracie, she is home. This is what I’m trying to tell you. They call it the Blue Ridge Home.”
“But—” I’d started.
Then Ruth had cut me off. “Florida Grace Shepherd,” she said sternly, sounding old and cranky, “you cannot just waltz back into your sister’s life and start calling the shots. Why, she’s all right! But things is different now, honey, I’m telling you.”
But I was still not prepared for the sight that met my eyes when I came around the bend. There sat a huge Food Lion supermarket, right where the Dutys’ grocery used to be. An enormous paved parking lot full of cars completely covered the place where we’d held the Homecoming, the place where I’d had my vision, the place where Daddy’s church had stood. I couldn’t believe it. I pulled into a parking space to get a better look. Clearly this was a brand-new Food Lion, very modern, with drive-thru pick-up and everything. It was open and doing a great business. People streamed out of the automatic doors, their carts piled high with paper Food Lion bags. Kids ran all around. Violet arc lights shone over the parking lot where—four spaces over—a long-haired teenage boy and a girl were backed up against a truck, kissing like crazy. Their legs were pressed tight together. I sat there in my car for almost fifteen minutes and watched the crowd without seeing a soul I knew. I couldn’t take it all in. Then I drove on up the road a ways to the Dutys’ house, which was still right where it had been, thank goodness. The house looked as warm and welcoming as ever. Yellow light spilled from its windows onto the front porch and the frosty grass and their new patio, which I noticed as I came in the driveway. I turned off my car just as the back door popped open and Ruth herself emerged like a woman coming out of a clock, to wrap me up in a big hug that made me start crying.
“Oh, honey!” she said. “Oh, Florida Grace! I am so glad to see you, honey, and I’m so glad you’ve come to your senses at last.”
I pulled back and blinked at that, and Ruth squeezed me again.
“Come on in this house right now,” she said. “You must be froze! Now I want to see some pictures of those younguns!” Meaning of course Annette and Misty. She had not seen any pictures of them since I ran off with Randy Newhouse. The Words used to take pictures all the time—Helen kept a scrapbook—but I had never bought a camera once I got to Knoxville. It’s a funny thing how you only want to take pictures when you’re proud of yourself. But I had brought Annette’s yearbook picture from Carson-Newman and Misty’s wedding pictures and my “Bragging Album” full of pictures of John-Boy, so we settled on the couch to look at these.
“Law, law!” Ruth kept exclaiming as she peered at him. “Ain’t he the dickens, now! Ain’t he a cutie-pie!” Ruth had really aged. Her big wrinkled hands were splotched with liver spots, and one arm was discolored from that long-ago bite. Her wide kind face was crosshatched with wrinkles. She still wore her hose rolled down around her heavy ankles, and those sturdy black shoes. “I swan! I swan!” she said over and over as she looked at John-Boy’s pictures.
Meanwhile I walked around the living room, where every surface was covered with framed photographs of little Fannie. She looked a lot like Evelyn. Fannie in a dress with a sailor collar, Fannie in a ballerina costume, Fannie winning a beauty contest, Fannie in a cap and gown. I looked at that one for a long time.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Roanoke, Virginia,” Ruth announced like she was saying London, England. “She’s a dancing teacher now. She specializes in tap, but she does ballet and modern too, modern is where they wear leotards. Plus poise and how to walk. Oh Gracie, can you believe it?”
Frankly I could not. I thought back to my day, when nobody was allowed to dance except in church. “When did she start all this dancing?” I asked.
“Well, there was a girl that came over here every Tuesday,” Ruth said, “and she held a class after school, and so we signed Fannie up, and she just took to it. Oh, she did! She was a natural! Everybody said so. She’d star in all the recitals. Gracie, you should have seen her in the Teddy Bears’ Picnic! I will never get over it. Well then, after she had learned all she could there, we signed her up at the academy over in Waynesville, and then she went to the Shenandoah Institute of Dance in Roanoke after she graduated. And she’s still there! She loves it. Why—”
Ruth went on and on about Fannie while I looked at the pictures. I have to say, the grown-up Fannie struck me as kind of stuck-up, posing just so in each frame. Now I might not of been everybody’s idea of a good mother, but I raised two good girls in spite of myself. Fannie’s pictures were everywhere, but so were old pictures of us. I kept looking at one of me and Billie holding hands and smiling into the camera as if we owned the world. That picture had been taken out by the big quartz rock at the old house up on Scrabble Creek. There was another one of us kids all fixed up for church, Billie and me in matching dresses Ruth had made for us. Evelyn looked like a little movie star, holding Troy Lee on her lap, while Joe Allen stood straight and tall behind us all, squinting into the sun. There was a picture of Mama and Ruth together, wearing wide-brimmed hats, posing on the porch by the roses, then another picture of Mama by herself, seated in a chair with the big Bible open on her lap, smiling at the camera.
There were no pictures of Daddy, and I asked Ruth about this. “Law, no!” she said, slapping her hands on her knees. “Honey, it was a dark day when we fell in with him, this is what me and Carlton have come to understand now. I know he was your daddy, but he was a bad un, I’ll tell you straight out, Gracie. Why, he took advantage of everybody around he
re, not to mention what he done to your poor sweet mother, rest her soul. He was a blot on the church of God, if you ask me.”
“Was,” I repeated. “You mean he’s dead now?” I had long figured that this must be so, but Ruth went on to say that he had died only eight years before, down in Mississippi someplace.
I went ahead and asked it. “Did he die of serpent bite?”
She nodded, her white curls flopping. “Yes indeed he did,” she said. “At a meeting in somebody’s house. It was what he wanted, I reckon. They wrote it all up in the papers, and Doyle and some of them went down there for the funeral.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Doyle Stacy. Don’t you remember him? The one that got bit in the face? Well, he’s still carrying on, him and Dillard Jones and a few more, they’re still at it, though they have been run out of first one place and then another. Nobody wants to have them around here anyone, it’s an embarrassment. It ain’t civic. Folks got up a petition, drove them out of town. I hear they’ve got a little old cinder-block building someplace on the Zion Hill Road, but I don’t know nothing about it. Nothing! I don’t want to know. Doyle Stacy works right over here in the Food Lion now, and he always tries to act real nice to me when I go in there, but I just turn my face. I’ve got nothing to say to the likes of Doyle Stacy.” Ruth was laying down the law now, in her old grand style. “And furthermore, I do not want Fannie to be told anything about your daddy, nor that Carlton and me was ever in such a church, it is not anything she needs to know.”
“I get it,” I said.
Ruth nodded. “We have tried to give Fannie every advantage. And we can afford to, ever since we sold the land.” Then Ruth looked at me sharply. “What about you?” she asked. “Don’t you need some money?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.” I could not keep from grinning at the thought of how mad Randy Newhouse must be by now.
I packed up a Christmas card with a picture of the nicest-looking family, taken in front of a brick house with white columns and a beautiful wreath on the front door, which had a fanlight over it. Three blonde girls, dressed all alike in plaid dresses with fur muffs, stood in a row on the stoop, along with a handsome man in a suit and a blonde woman who looked familiar. “Evelyn?” I asked, and Ruth said yes. I kept on looking at it.
“You should of got a card from her too,” Ruth said. “She has been sending one out ever year since she got hooked up with this feller. She wrote me for your address some time back, and I sent it to her.”
“When what that?” I asked. “What address did you give her?”
“Well, the Words’ address, of course,” Ruth said. “I never had no other. You never did send me the one in Knoxville.” This was true, and I rued the day when I trade in my whole family for Randy Newhouse. “Now this here is Evelyn’s fourth husband, actually,” Ruth went on. “She sells Mary Kay, and lives in Charlotte. Don’t she look good, though? I reckon it is all that Mary Kay. Don’t she look good, Gracie?”
“Oh yes,” I finally said. I was trying to take this in. Evelyn did look good. She looked like Mama. Or she looked like Mama would have looked if her life had turned out different, and she had not met Daddy or been so poor.
“I can’t believe you never have got a card from Evelyn.” Ruth was shaking her head.
I said I guessed that Helen had never forwarded my mail because they were so mad at me.
Then Ruth stood up and stared at me, her mouth open. “Then you don’t know,” she said. She took a step toward me.
I was still going around the room looking at everything, such as the crocheted antimacassars on the chair arms which I remembered from childhood. I remembered how they’d leave little pushed-in dots on the inside of your arms. Ruth had those same old ugly ball-fringe curtains too, but a big new TV.
“Don’t know what?” I asked her.
“You don’t know about Joe Allen, then.” Ruth said.
“I know he was in the Marines, is all.” I reached over to pick up a photograph of him in his uniform. He looked as sturdy and dependable as ever, a square-jawed grown-up version of the boy he’d been. I was thinking how we don’t really change at all as we grow up, any of us—that whatever we are, we just become more so. Look at Evelyn, I was thinking. Look at Joe Allen.
“Oh, Florida Grace,” Ruth said, coming closer to take my hand. “Joe Allen is dead, honey. He’s dead. He died in a freak accident at Camp Lejeune three years ago. I wrote you, honey. I even sent you the piece out of the paper.”
I felt like I had been shot. “I never got it. I didn’t know.” I sat back down on the couch.
“I can’t believe she done that.” Ruth meant Helen.
I sat there holding the picture and looking at Joe Allen’s face, remembering how good he was, how he brought the money to Mama every week on his bicycle, how he saved Troy Lee. I always wanted to know what had happened to Troy Lee.
Ruth got some medals out of a drawer and showed them to me. “Joe Allen was a hero in Vietnam,” she said.
“Who cares?” I said. “He’s dead anyway, isn’t he?”
“Gracie, Gracie.” Ruth was shaking her head. “You always did have the worst attitude.”
I just sat there. I couldn’t stand for Joe Allen to be dead. I had always thought, someplace in the back of my mind, that no matter what I might be doing, no matter how bad off I got, Joe Allen was somewhere in the world doing okay. I had been thinking this all during the last few years when he’d been dead. Now I felt like somebody had played an awful trick on me.
“Well, anyway, Troy Lee is in San Francisco, California,” Ruth went on. “He says he is coming back this summer to find his roots, so I reckon we’ll see him. He says he’s fixing to go on to school.”
“What kind of school?” I asked automatically. I could not get Joe Allen’s face out of my mind, how he’d looked the day he left for good.
“He didn’t say. Well, look who’s here!” Ruth cried as the kitchen door opened, and there stood Carlton at last, back from prayer meeting. He paused in the doorway to catch his breath, and I ran over to hug him. He felt bony and thin to me under that big coat, like a stick man. His health had failed a lot, I could see that.
“Hello, Grace,” Carlton said, wheezing. “Me and Ruth has been praying for you.”
Now this made me feel awful, of course. I hated to think of these old people praying for me.
Carlton wheezed some more as he crossed the kitchen to put one of those tubs of fried chicken on the table.
“I told him to get some chicken,” Ruth said. “We didn’t know if you’d eat yet.”
It was a funny thing, but I didn’t know if I’d eaten or not either. I couldn’t remember. But I wasn’t hungry. And now I was dead tired, so tired I couldn’t even speak when Ruth led me to the bedroom. I have never slept so hard in my life, and the next day I didn’t wake up until Carlton had already gone on his mail route, which Ruth said he liked to do just to keep busy. This was the same room where Billie Jean and I had stayed as children sometimes when Mama and Daddy went off preaching, the same room where Billie had lived for years after that. I reached back and ran my fingers along the satiny wood of the old spool bed, something I had always loved to do. Then I stretched again and ran my hands down my own body, which felt different now. Thinner. Heartbreak is a terrific diet. Bright sunlight came in the window and fell in a great shining patch on the bed, but there was a big black hole in my mind where Joe Allen used to be. Finally I got up and dressed and went out to the living room, where Ruth sat drinking coffee and watching Phil Donahue.
She smiled and hugged me. “Well, looky here,” she said. “I thought you was going to sleep all day!”
“I guess I just about did.”
I followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table while she scrambled me some eggs and got the toast and bacon out of the oven, where she’d been keeping
them warm for me. Obviously Ruth liked to feed people as much as ever, though she said she hardly cooked anymore. “I just ain’t got the strength,” she told me.
The breakfast tasted wonderful, but I couldn’t finish it, which disappointed Ruth. “Why, Gracie, you used to be such a good eater,” she said. Finally she quit coaxing me, and took my plate and dumped the rest of the food down the disposal. Then she poured us both a cup of coffee and sat down across the table and eyed me, stirring her coffee. There was no mistaking it when Ruth meant business.
“What I want to know, Florida Grace,” she said, “is what you are planning to do now.”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was certainly true, although so far I had known enough to leave Randy Newhouse and come over here. I was waiting to find out what I had to do next, but I was beginning to understand that there was an order to everything, a pattern which would be vouchsafed to me in due time.
“I thought so,” Ruth said. “Well, honey, you have come to the right house, as I am fixing to tell you! Now listen good.”
“Okay,” I said. I was in the market for directions.
“First off, let me tell you how lucky you are. You always was a lucky girl, Florida Grace, and I don’t know whether you appreciate that fact or not. You was very, very lucky to marry that nice Travis Word, and you are very, very lucky that he ain’t married nobody else in the meantime, while you have been so busy going off the deep end.”
“What are you talking about, Ruth?” I said. “I can’t go back over there. It’s too late. They hate me now.”
“Listen to me,” Ruth said. “You ain’t bad, honey. You have just got too much nature, that’s all. Why, Travis don’t hate you! Those sisters of his, well, that’s another story. But it don’t matter. They’re old, Florida Grace.” Ruth’s eyes never left my face as she drank her coffee. “You might’ve made a big mess of your life so far, honey, but at least it ain’t too late to straighten it out. It’s not many that’s given a second chance in this world, and you’re still young.”