Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  “Get ready!” she said.

  “What?”

  “She’s fixing to fall,” Tammy said just as her mother pitched backward in a dead faint. We caught her and laid her out on a pew. She came to later, when church was over, and then we all had dinner on the ground out back of the church. Later I sneaked back into the fellowship hall on the pretext of going to the bathroom, so I could examine the pool in greater detail. It was in a little anteroom off the fellowship hall, right up against the double doors that led from the sanctuary, now closed. It was a plain old wading pool, just as I’d thought, covered now by a blue tarpaulin. I pulled back the tarp. The water was pretty cold. A red plastic barrette floated jauntily in the middle of the pool. I looked at it for a long time. I knew I would have to get in that water sooner or later. I would have to get saved.

  I was so moved by the whole experience that I might have actually broken through my invisible shield to tell Daddy about it, or even Ashley, but Mama met me at the door that afternoon with an ashen face and, for once, no makeup.

  “Where in the world have you all been?” she shrilled. “I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon.”

  “We ate lunch out at the church,” I said. “They do that.” Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Tammy and her mother pull away in the battered blue car and wished I were with them, anywhere but here. I didn’t want to know whatever Mama had to say next. In that split second, several possibilities raced through my mind:

  Grandmother really has died.

  Ashley is pregnant.

  Ashley has eloped.

  Daddy has killed himself.

  But I was completely surprised by what came next.

  “Your brother has been in the most terrible wreck,” Mama said, “up in Virginia. He’s in a coma, and they don’t know if he’ll make it or not.”

  PAUL HAD BEEN DRUNK, of course. Drunk, or he might not have lived at all, somebody said later, but I don’t know whether that was true or not. I think it is something people say after wrecks, whenever there’s been drinking. He had been driving back to W&L from Randolph-Macon, where he was dating a girl. This girl wrote Mama a long, emotional letter on pink stationery with a burgundy monogram. Paul was taken by ambulance from the small hospital in Lexington, Virginia, to the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville, one of the best hospitals in the world. This is what everybody told me. Mama went up there immediately. Her younger sister, my aunt Liddie, came to stay with us while she was gone.

  Aunt Liddie had always been referred to in our family as “flighty.” Aunt Liddie “went off on tangents,” it was said. I wasn’t sure what this meant. Still, I was glad to see her when she arrived, with five matching suitcases full of beautiful clothes and her Pekingese named Chow Mein. Back in Birmingham she was a Kelly girl, so it was easy for her to leave her job and come to us. The very first night she arrived, Liddie got me to come out on the back steps with her. She sat very close to me in the warm spring night and squeezed both my hands. “I look on this as a wonderful opportunity for you and me to get to know each other better,” Aunt Liddie said. “I want you to tell me everything.”

  But I would tell her nothing, as things turned out. This was to be our closest moment. The very next week, Liddie started dating Mr. Hudson Bell, a young lawyer she met by chance in the bank. Immediately, Liddie and Hudson Bell were in love, and Ashley and I were free — within the bounds of reason — to come and go as we pleased. Aunt Liddie asked no questions. Missie cooked the meals.

  This was just as well with me, for I had serious business to tend to.

  I knew it was up to me to bring Paul out of that coma. I would pray without ceasing, and Tammy would help me. The first week, we prayed without ceasing only after school and on the weekend. Paul was no better, Mama reported from Charlottesville. The second week, I gave up sitting on soft chairs and eating chocolate. I paid so much attention to the unfortunate Lurice May that she began avoiding me. Paul had moved his foot, Mama said. I doubled my efforts, giving up also Cokes and sleeping in bed. (I had to sleep flat on the floor.) Also, I prayed without ceasing all during math class. I wouldn’t even answer the teacher, Mrs. Lemon, when she called on me. She sent me to Guidance because of it. During this week, I began to suspect that perhaps Tammy was not praying as much as she was supposed to, not keeping up her end of the deal. Still, I was too busy to care. I gave up hot water; I had to take cold showers now.

  The third weekend of Mama’s absence and Paul’s coma, I spent Saturday night with Tammy, and that Sunday morning, at Tammy’s church, I got saved.

  When Mr. Looney issued his plea, I felt that he was talking right to me. “With every head bowed and every eye closed,” he said, “I want you to look into your hearts and minds this morning. Have you got problems, brother? Have you got problems, sister? Well, give them up! Give them over to the Lord Jesus Christ. If His shoulders are big enough to bear the cross, they are big enough to take on your little problems, beloved. Turn them over to Him. He will help you now in this life, here in this vale of tears. And He will give you Heaven Everlasting as a door prize. Think about it, beloved. Do you want to burn in Hell forever, at the Devil’s barbecue? Or do you want to lie in banks of flowers, listening to that heavenly choir?”

  I felt a burning, stabbing sensation in my chest and stomach — something like heartburn, something like the hand of God. The idea of turning it all over to Him was certainly appealing at this point. Another week of prayer, and I’d flunk math for sure. The choir sang, “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me.” Beside me, Tammy’s mama was starting to mumble and moan.

  Mr. Looney said, “Perhaps there is one among you who feels that his sin is too great to bear, but no sin is too black for the heavenly laundry of Jesus Christ, He will turn you as white as snow, as white as the driven snow, hallelujah!” Mr. Looney reached back and pulled the curtains open, so we could all see the pool. Tammy’s mama leaped up and called out in her strangely familiar language. Mr. Looney went on, “Perhaps there is a child among you who hears our message this morning, who is ready now for Salvation. Why, a little child can go to Hell, the same as you and me! A little child can burn to a crisp. But it is also true that a little child can come to God — right now, right this minute, this very morning. God don’t check your ID, children. God will check your souls.”

  “Come home, come home,” they sang.

  Before I even knew it, I was up there, and we had passed through those curtains, and I was standing in the water with my full blue skirt floating out around me like a lily pad. Then he was saying the words, shouting them out, and whispering to me, “Hold your nose,” which I did, and he pushed me under backward, holding me tightly with his other hand so that I felt supported, secure, even at the very moment of immersion. It was like being dipped by the big boys at ballroom dancing, only not as scary. I came up wet and saved, and stood at the side of the pool while Mr. Looney baptized Eric Blankenship, a big gawky nineteen-year-old who came running and sobbing up the aisle just as Mr. Looney got finished with me. Eric Blankenship was confessing all his sins, nonstop, throughout his baptism. His sins were a whole lot more interesting than mine, involving things he’d done with his girlfriend, and I strained to hear them as I stood there, but I could not, because of all the noise in the church.

  And then it was over and everyone crowded forward to hug us, including Tammy. But even in that moment of hugging Tammy, who of course had been baptized for years and years, I saw something new in her eyes. Somehow, now, there was a difference between us, where before there had been none. But I was wet and freezing, busy accepting the congratulations of the faithful, so I didn’t have time to think any more about it then. Tammy gave me her sweater and they drove me home, where Aunt Liddie looked at me in a very fishy way when I walked in the door.

  “I just got baptized,” I said, and she said, “Oh,” and then she went out to lunch with Hudson Bell, who came up the front walk not a minute behind me, sparing me f
urther explanations.

  Aunt Liddie came back from that lunch engaged, with a huge square-cut diamond. Nobody mentioned my baptism.

  But the very next night, right after supper, Mama called to say that Paul was fine. All of a sudden, he had turned to the night nurse and asked for a cheeseburger. There seemed to be no brain damage at all except that he had some trouble remembering things, which was to be expected. He would have to stay in the hospital for several more weeks, but he would recover completely. He would be just fine.

  I burst into tears of joy. I knew I had done it all. And for the first time, I realized what an effort it had been. The first thing I did was go into the kitchen and fix myself a milk shake, with Hershey’s syrup. And my bed felt so good that night, after the weeks on the floor. I intended to pray without ceasing that very night, a prayer of thanksgiving for Paul’s delivery, but I fell asleep instantly.

  When Mama came back, I hoped she would be so busy that my baptism would be overlooked completely, but this was not the case. Aunt Liddie told her, after all.

  “Karen,” was Mama’s reaction, “I am shocked! We are not the kind of family that goes out into the county and immerses ourselves in water. I can’t imagine what you were thinking of,” Mama said.

  I looked out the window at Mama’s blooming roses. It was two weeks before the end of school, before Ashley’s graduation.

  “Well, what?” Mama asked. She was peering at me closely, more closely than she had looked at me in years.

  “Why did you do it?” Mama asked. She lit a cigarette.

  I didn’t say a thing.

  “Karen,” Mama said. “I asked you a question.” She blew a smoke ring.

  I looked at the roses. “I wanted to be saved,” I said.

  Mama’s lips went into that little red bow. “I see,” she said.

  So later, that next weekend when she refused to let me spend the night out at Tammy’s, I did the only thing I could: I lied and said I was going to spend the night with Sara Ruth Johnson, and then prayed without ceasing that I would not be found out. Since it was senior prom weekend and Mama was to be in charge of the decorations and also a chaperone, I felt fairly certain I’d get away with it. But when the time came for the invitational that Sunday morning in the Maranatha church, I simply could not resist. I pushed back Tammy’s restraining hand, rushed forward, and rededicated my life.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to rededicate your life right after you just dedicated it,” Tammy whispered to me later, but I didn’t care. I was wet and holy. If I had committed some breach of heavenly etiquette, surely Mr. Looney would tell me. But he did not. We didn’t stay for dinner on the ground that day either. As soon as Tammy’s mother came to, they drove me straight home, and neither of them said much.

  Mama’s Cadillac was parked in the drive.

  So I went around to the back of the house and tiptoed in through the laundry room door, carrying my shoes. But Mama was waiting for me. She stood by the ironing board, smoking a cigarette. She looked at me, narrowing her eyes.

  “Don’t drip on the kitchen floor, Missie just mopped it yesterday,” she said.

  I climbed up the back stairs to my room.

  The next weekend, I had to go to Ashley’s graduation and to the baccalaureate sermon on Sunday morning in the Confederate Chapel at Lorton Hall. I sat between my grandparents. My aunt Liddie was there too, with her fiancé. My daddy did not come. I wore a dressy white dress with a little bolero jacket and patent-leather shoes with Cuban heels — my first high heels. I felt precarious and old, grown up, and somehow sinful, and I longed for the high hard pews of the Maranatha church and the piercing, keening voices of the women singers.

  But I never attended the Maranatha church again. As soon as my school was over, I was sent away to Camp Alleghany in West Virginia for two months — the maximum stay. I didn’t want to go, even though this meant that I would finally have a chance to learn horseback riding, but I had no choice in the matter. Mama made this clear. It was to separate me from Tammy, whom Mama had labeled a Terrible Influence.

  “And by the way,” Mama said brightly, “Margaret Apple-white will be going to Camp Alleghany too!” Oh, I could see right through Mama. But I couldn’t do anything about it. Camp started June 6, so I didn’t have time to pray for a change in my fate. She sprang it on me. Instead, I cried without ceasing all that long day before they put me and my trunk, along with Margaret Applewhite and her trunk, on the train. I tried and tried to call Tammy and tell her good-bye, but a recorded message said that her line had been disconnected. (This had happened several times before, whenever her mama couldn’t pay the bill.) My father would be going away too, to Shepherd Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ashley was going to Europe.

  Sitting glumly by Mama at the train station, I tried to pray but could not. Instead, I remembered a game we used to play when I was real little, Statues. In Statues, one person grabs you by the hand and swings you around and around and then lets you go, and whatever position you land in, you have to freeze like that until everybody else is thrown. The person who lands in the best position wins. But what I remembered was that scary moment of being flung wildly out into the world screaming, to land however I hit, and I felt like this was happening to us all.

  TO MY SURPRISE, I loved camp. Camp Alleghany was an old camp, with rough-hewn wooden buildings that seemed to grow right out of the deep woods surrounding them. Girls had been carving their initials in the railings outside the dining hall for years and years. It was a tradition. I loved to run my fingers over these initials, imagining these girls — M. H., 1948; J. B., 1953; M. N., 1935. Some of the initials were very old. These girls were grown up by now. Some of them were probably dead. This gave me an enormous thrill, as did all the other traditions at Camp Alleghany. I loved the weekend campfire, as big as a tepee, ceremoniously lit by the Camp Spirit, whoever she happened to be that week. The Camp Spirit got to light the campfire with an enormous match, invoking the spirits with an ancient verse that only she was permitted to repeat. At the end of each weekly campfire, a new Camp Spirit was named, with lots of screaming, crying, and hugging. I was dying to be Camp Spirit. In fact, after the very first campfire, I set this as my goal, cooperating like crazy with all the counselors so I would be picked. But it wasn’t hard for me to cooperate.

  I loved wearing a uniform, being a part of the group — I still have the photograph from that first session of camp, all of us wearing our navy shorts, white socks, and white camp shirts, our hair squeaky clean, grinning into the sun. I loved all my activities — arts and crafts, where we made huge ashtrays for our parents out of little colored tiles; swimming, where I already excelled and soon became the acknowledged champion of the breaststroke in all competitions; and drama, where we were readying a presentation of Spoon River. My canoeing group took a long sunrise trip upstream to an island where we cooked our breakfast out over a fire: grits, sausage, eggs. Everything had a smoky, exotic taste, and the smoke from our breakfast campfire rose to mingle with the patchy mist still clinging to the trees, still rising from the river. I remember lying on my back and gazing up at how the sunshine looked, like light through a stained-glass window, emerald green and iridescent in the leafy tops of the tallest trees. The river was as smooth and shiny as a mirror. In fact it reminded me of a mirror, of Ashley’s mirror-topped dressing table back at home.

  And the long trail rides — when we finally got to take them — were even better than the canoe trips. But first we had to go around and around the riding ring, learning to post, learning to canter. The truth was, I didn’t like the horses nearly as much as I’d expected to. For one thing, they were a lot bigger than I had been led to believe by the illustrations in my horse books. They were as big as cars. For another thing they were not lovable either. They were smelly, and some of them were downright mean. One big old black horse named Martini was pointed out to us early on as a biter. Others kicked. On a trail ride, you didn’t want to get behind one of thes
e. Still the trail rides were great. We lurched along through the forest, following the leader. I felt like I was in a Western movie, striking out into the territory. On the longest trail ride, we took an overnight trip up to Pancake Mountain, where we ate s’mores (Hershey bars and melted marshmallows smashed into a sandwich between two graham crackers), told ghost stories, and went to sleep finally with the wheezing and stamping of the horses in our ears.

  Actually, I liked the riding counselors better than I liked the horses. The regular counselors were sweet, pretty girls who went to school at places like Hollins and Sweet Briar, or else maternal, jolly older women who taught junior high school during the regular year; but the riding counselors were tough, tan, muscular young women who squinted into the sun and could post all day long if they had to. The riding counselors said “shit” a lot, and smoked cigarettes in the barn. They did not speak of college.

  My only male counselor was a frail, nervous young man named Jeffrey Long, reputed to be the nephew of the owner. He taught nature study, which I loved. I loved identifying the various trees (hickory, five leaves; ironwood, the satiny metallic trunk; maple, the little wings; blue-berried juniper; droopy willow). We made sassafras toothbrushes, and brushed our teeth in the river.

  On Sundays, we had church in the big rustic assembly hall. It was an Episcopal service, which seemed pretty boring to me in comparison with the Maranatha church. Yet I liked the prayer book, and I particularly liked one of the Episcopal hymns, which I had never heard before, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” with its martial, military tune. I imagined Joan of Arc striding briskly along in a satin uniform, to just that tune. I also liked the hymn “Jerusalem,” especially the weird lines that went, “Bring me my staff of burnished gold, bring me my arrows of desire.” I loved the “arrows of desire” part.