by Lee Smith
Perhaps it is not surprising that I turned to God.
I had always been interested in religion anyway. When I was a little girl, my favorite part of the summer was Vacation Bible School, with the red Kool-Aid in the little Dixie cups and the Lorna Doone cookies at break. I loved to color in the twelve disciples. I loved to make lanyards. I loved to sing “You Are My Sunshine” and “Red and Yellow, Black and White, They Are Precious in His Sight.” I loved to hold hands with Alice Field, who was my best friend for years and years until her family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. I loved Mrs. Treble Roach, the teacher of Vacation Bible School, a plump soft woman like a beanbag chair, who hugged us all the time. Mrs. Treble Roach gave us gold stars when we were good, and I was very good. I got hundreds of gold stars over the years and I believe I still have them upstairs someplace in a jewelry box, like ears.
I had always liked church too, although it was less fun. I associated church with my grandparents, since we sat with them every Sunday, third pew from the back on the left-hand side of the little stone Methodist church that my grandfather had attended all his life, that my grandmother had attended since their marriage fifty years before. Usually my mother went to church too; sometimes Ashley went to church, under duress ever since she became an atheist in tenth grade, influenced by an English teacher who was clearly not a lady; my father attended only on Easter. Frankly, I liked those Sundays when none of them made it, when Mama just dropped me off in front of the church and I went in all alone, clutching my quarter for the collection plate, to sit with my grandparents. Even though I was invisible in my own family, my grandparents noticed me plenty. I was their good, good little girl . . . certainly, I felt, their favorite. I did everything I could to ensure that this was true.
My grandmother had wispy blue hair and a whole lot of earrings and brooches that matched. She was the author of four books of poems which Daddy had printed up for her at the printing company. She suffered from colitis, and was ill a lot. One thing you never wanted to do with Grandmother was ask her how she felt — she’d tell you, gross details you didn’t want to know. My mama, of course, was entirely above this kind of thing, never referring to her own or anybody else’s body in any way. My grand father wore navy blue suits to church with red suspenders underneath. He was a boxy little man who ran the bus station and had a watch that could tell you the time in Paris, London, and Tokyo. I coveted this watch and had already asked Grandaddy to leave it to me when he died, a request that seemed to startle him.
After church, I’d walk up the street with my grandparents to their house on the corner across from the Baptist church and eat lunch, which frequently ended with lemon meringue pie, my favorite. I kept a close eye out the window for Baptists, whose service was dismissed half an hour later than ours. There were so many Baptists that it took them longer to do everything. In pretty weather, I sat out on the front porch so that I could see the Baptists more clearly. They wore loud suits and made more noise in general than the quiet Methodists.
Our church had only forty-two members and about twenty of them, like my grandparents, were so old as to be almost dead already. I was not even looking forward to joining the MYF, which I’d be eligible for next year, because it had only eight members, two of them definite nerds. All they did was collect food for the poor at Thanksgiving, and stuff like that. The BTU, on the other hand, did great stuff such as have progressive dinners and sweetheart banquets and go on trips to Gulf Shores. The BTU was a much snappier outfit than the MYF, but I knew better than to ask to join it. My mother had already explained to me the social ranking of the churches: Methodist at the top, attended by doctors and lawyers and other “nice” families; Presbyterian slightly down the scale, attended by store owners; then the vigorous Baptists; then the Church of Christ, who thought they were the only real church in town and said so. They said everybody else in town was going to hell except for them. They had hundreds of members. And then, of course, at the very bottom of the church scale were those little churches out in the surrounding county, some of them recognizable denominations (Primitive Baptist) and some of them not (Church of the Nazarene, Tar River Holiness) where people were reputed to yell out, fall down in fits, and throw their babies. I didn’t know what this meant, exactly, but I knew I’d love to see it, for it promised drama far beyond the dull responsive readings of the Methodists and their rote mumbling of the Nicene Creed.
Anyway, I had been sitting on my grandparents’ front porch for years eating pie and envying the Baptists, waiting without much hope to be seized by God for His heavenly purpose, bent to His will, as in God’s Girl, my favorite book — a biography of Joan of Arc.
So far, nothing doing.
But then, that fall of Daddy’s nervous breakdown, the Methodist church was visited by an unusually charismatic young preacher named Bobby Rock Malone while Mr. Treble Roach, our own preacher, was down at Duke having a hernia operation. I was late to church that day and arrived all by myself, after the service had already started. The congregation was on its feet singing “I Come to the Garden Alone,” one of my favorite hymns. One unfamiliar voice led all the rest. I slipped in next to Grandaddy, found the right page in the hymnal, and craned my neck around Miss Eulalie Butter’s big black hat to see who was up there singing so nice. It looked like one of the disciples to me — his long brown hair hung down past the open collar of his white shirt. And he was so young — just out of seminary, somebody said after the service. It was a warm fall Sunday, and rays of colored light shot through the stained-glass windows at the side of the church to glance off Bobby Rock Malone’s pale face. “He walks with me, and He talks with me,” we sang. My heart started beating double time. Bobby Rock Malone stretched out his long thin arms and spread his long white fingers. “Beloved,” he said, curling his fingers, “let us pray.” But I never closed my eyes that day, staring instead at the play of light on Bobby Rock Malone’s fair face. It was almost like a kaleidoscope. Then the round rosy window behind him, behind the altar, began to pulse with light, to glow with light, now brighter now not, like a neon sign. I got the message. I was no dummy. In a way, I had been waiting all my life for this to happen.
The most notable thing about me as a child — before I got religious, I mean — was my obsessive reading. I had always been an inveterate reader of the sort who hides underneath the covers with a flashlight and reads all night long. But I did not read casually, or for mere entertainment, or for information. What I wanted was to feel all wild and trembly inside, an effect first produced by The Secret Garden, which I’d read maybe twenty times. And the Reverend Bobby Rock Malone looked exactly the way I had always pictured Colin! In fact, listening to him preach, I felt exactly the way I felt when I read The Secret Garden, just exactly.
Other books that had affected me strongly were Little Women, especially the part where Beth dies, and Gone with the Wind, especially the part where Melanie dies. I had long hoped for a wasting disease, such as leukemia, to test my mettle. I also loved Marjorie Morningstar, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Heidi, and books like Dear and Glorious Physician, The Shoes of the Fisherman, Christy, and anything at all about horses and saints. I had read all the Black Stallion books, of course, as well as all the Marguerite Henry books. But my all-time favorite was God’s Girl, especially the frontispiece illustration picturing Joan as she knelt and “prayed without ceasing for guidance from God,” whose face was depicted overhead, in a thunderstorm. Not only did I love Joan of Arc, I wanted to be her.
The only man I had ever loved more than Colin of The Secret Garden, to date, was Johnny Tremain, from Esther Forbes’s book of that title. I used to wish that it was me — not Johnny Tremain — who’d had the hot silver spilled on my hand. I would have suffered anything (everything) for Johnny Tremain.
But on that fateful Sunday morning, Bobby Rock Malone eclipsed both Colin and Johnny Tremain in my affections. It was a wipeout. I felt as fluttery and wild as could be. In fact I felt too crazy to pay attention to the sermon which B
obby Rock Malone was, by then, almost finished with. I tried to concentrate, but my mind was whirling. The colors from the windows seemed to deepen and swirl. And then, suddenly, I heard him loud and clear, reading from Revelation: “And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God, and the books were opened . . . and whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”
I can’t remember much about what happened after that. I got to shake hands with him as we left the church, and I was surprised to find that his hand was cool, not burning hot — and, though bony, somehow as soft as a girl’s. I looked hard at Bobby Rock Malone as he stood in front of our pretty little church, shaking hands. He was on his way to someplace else, over in Mississippi. We would never see him again. I would never see him again. And yet somehow I felt exhilarated and satisfied, in a way. I can’t explain it. Back at my grandparents’ house, I couldn’t even eat any lemon meringue pie. I felt shaky and hot, like I might be getting a virus. I went home early.
My father was upstairs in his study, door closed. Nobody else was home. I wandered the house. Then I sat in the Florida room for a while, staring out at the day. After a while, I picked up my mother’s sewing basket from the coffee table, got a needle and threaded it with blue thread, and sewed all the fingers of my left hand together, through the cuticle. Then I held my hand out and admired it, wishing desperately for my best friend Alice Field, of Little Rock. I had no best friend now, nobody to show my amazing hand to. Weird little Edwin Lee lived right across the street, but it was inconceivable that I would show him, the nerd, such a hand as this. So I showed it to nobody. I left it sewed up until Mama’s white Cadillac pulled in the driveway, and then I cut the thread between my fingers and pulled it all out.
It was about this time too that I began to pray a lot (without ceasing was my intention) and set little fires all around the neighborhood. These fires were nothing much. I’d usually take some shredded newspapers or some Kleenex, find a few sticks, and they’d burn themselves out in a matter of minutes. I made a fire in my treehouse, in our garage, in the sink, in the basement, on Miss Butter’s back patio, on Mr. and Mrs. Percy Castle’s front porch, and in little Charlotte Lee’s playhouse. Here I went too far, singeing off the hair of her Barbie doll. She never could figure out how it happened.
I entertained visions of being a girl evangelist, of appearing with Billy Graham on television, of traveling throughout Mississippi with Bobby Rock Malone. I’d be followed everywhere I went by a little band of my faithful. I made a small fire in the bed of Ashley’s new boyfriend’s pickup truck while he and my sister were in the den petting and watching Your Hit Parade. They didn’t have any idea that I was outside in the night, watching them through the window, making a fire in the truck. They all thought I was in bed!
Although I was praying a lot, my prayers were usually specific, as opposed to without ceasing. For instance I’d tell one friend I’d go shopping with her, and then something I really wanted to do would come up, and I’d call back and say I couldn’t come after all, that my grandmother had died, and then I would go to my room and fling myself to the floor and pray without ceasing that my lie would not be found out, and that my grandmother would not really die. I made big deals with God — if He would make sure I got away with it this time, I would talk to Edwin Lee for five minutes on the bus, three days in a row, or I would clean out my closet. He did His part; I did mine. I grew in power every day.
I remember so well that important Friday when I was supposed to spend the night with Margaret Applewhite. Now Margaret Applewhite was totally boring, in my opinion — my only rival in the annual spelling bee (she won in third, I won in fourth and fifth, she beat me out in sixth with catarrh, which still rankled). Margaret Applewhite wore a training bra too. Our mothers, who played bridge together, encouraged our friendship. I’d rather do just about anything, even watch Kate Smith on TV, than spend time with boring Margaret Applewhite. Still, earlier that week when she’d called and invited me, I couldn’t for the life of me think of any good reason to say no, so I’d said yes. Then that Friday right before sixth period, Tammy Lester came up to my locker popping her gum (against the rules: we were not allowed to chew gum in school) and — wonder of wonders — asked me to come home with her after school that very day and spend the night.
Tammy Lester! Shunned by Sub-Debs, sent to Detention, noticed by older boys. I couldn’t believe it. I admired Tammy Lester more than any other girl in my entire class, I’d watched her from afar the way I had watched the Baptists. Tammy Lester lived out in the country someplace (in a trailer, it was rumored), she was driven to school each morning by one or the other of her wild older brothers in a red pickup truck (these brothers slicked back their hair with grease, they wore their cigarette packs rolled up the sleeves of their T-shirts), and best of all, she was missing a tooth right in front, and nobody had taken her to the dentist yet to get it fixed. The missing tooth gave Tammy a devilish, jaunty look. Also, as I would learn later, she could whistle through this hole, and spit twenty feet.
Her invitation was offhand. “You wanna come home with me today?” she asked, in a manner that implied she didn’t give a hoot whether I did or not. “Buddy’s got to come into town tomorrow morning anyway, so he could bring you back.”
“All right,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“I’ll meet you out in front when the bell rings.” Tammy flashed me her quick dark grin. She popped her gum, and was gone.
I didn’t hesitate for a minute. I stopped Margaret Applewhite on her way to health class. “Listen,” I said in a rush, “I’m so sorry I can’t come spend the night with you, but my mother is having an emergency hysterectomy today, so I have to go straight home and help out.” I had just learned about hysterectomies from a medical book in the library.
Margaret’s boring brown eyes widened. “Is she going to be all right?”
I sucked in my breath dramatically and looked brave. “We hope so,” I said. “They think they can get it all.”
Margaret walked into health. I sank back against the mustard yellow tile walls as, suddenly, it hit me: Margaret’s mother knew my mother! What if Margaret’s mother called my mother, and Mama found out? She’d be furious, not only because of the lie but because of the nature of the lie — Mama would die before she’d ever mention something like a hysterectomy. Mama referred to everything below the belt as “down there,” an area she dealt with darkly, indirectly, and only when necessary. “Trixie Vopel is in the hospital for tests,” she might say. “She’s been having trouble down there.” Down there was a foreign country, like Africa or Nicaragua.
What to do? I wrote myself an excuse from gym, signed my mother’s name, turned it in, and then went to the infirmary, where I lay down on a hard white cot and prayed without ceasing for upward of an hour. I promised a lot: If Mama did not find out, I would sit with Lurice May at lunch on Monday (a dirty fat girl who kept her head wrapped up in a scarf and was rumored to have lice), I would be nice to Edwin Lee three times for fifteen minutes each, I would clean out under my bed, I would give back the perfume and the ankle bracelet I had stolen from Ashley, and I would put two dollars of my saved-up babysitting money in the collection plate at church on Sunday. It was the best I could do. Then I called my mother from the infirmary phone, and to my surprise, she said, “Oh, of course,” in a distracted way when I asked if I could spend the night with Tammy Lester. She did not even ask what Tammy’s father did.
Then “Karen,” she said in a pointed way that meant this was what she was really interested in, “do you have any idea where your sister is right now?”
“What?” I couldn’t even remember who my sister was, right now.
“Ashley,” Mama said. “The school called and asked if she was sick. Apparently she just never showed up at school today.”
“I’ll bet the
y had some secret senior thing,” I said.
“Oh.” Mama sounded relieved. “Well, maybe so. Now who is it you’re spending the night with?” she asked again, and I told her. “And what did you say her father does?”
“Lawyer,” I said.
SPENDING THE NIGHT WITH Tammy Lester was the high point of my whole life up to that time. She did not live in a trailer, as rumored, but in an old unpainted farmhouse with two boarded-up windows, settled unevenly onto cinder-block footings. A mangy dog lay up under the house. Chickens roamed the property. The porch sagged. Wispy ancient curtains blew out eerily at the upstairs windows. The whole yard was strewn with parts of things — cars, stoves, bedsprings, unimaginable machine parts rusting among the weeds. I loved it. Tammy led me everywhere and showed me everything: her secret place, a tent of willows, down by the creek; the grave of her favorite dog, Buster, and the collar he had worn; an old chicken house that her brothers had helped her make into a playhouse; a haunted shack down the road; the old Packard out back that you could get in and pretend you were taking a trip. “Now we’re in Nevada,” Tammy said, shifting gears. “Now we’re in the Grand Canyon. Now we’re in the middle of the desert. It’s hot as hell out here, ain’t it?”
I agreed.
At suppertime, Tammy and I sat on folding chairs pulled up to the slick oilcloth-covered table beneath a bare hanging light-bulb. Her brothers had disappeared. Tammy seemed to be cooking our supper; she was heating up Dinty Moore stew straight out of the can.
“Where’s your daddy?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s out west on a pipeline,” she said, vastly unconcerned.
“Where’s your mama?” I said. I had seen her come in from work earlier that afternoon, a pudgy, pale redheaded woman who drove a light blue car that looked like it would soon join the others in the backyard.
“I reckon she’s reading her Bible,” Tammy said, as if this were a perfectly ordinary thing to be doing on a Friday night at gin-and-tonic time. “She’ll eat after while.”