True Blue

by Jane Smiley

  Daddy said, “At some sale barns, the horses don’t even have names. They have numbers. Same at that Thoroughbred auction they have in New York. It’s very rare for the yearling to have a name.”

  Mom said, “What would you name him, Mark?”

  “Oh, George.”

  “Ha!” I said.

  Mom said, “How about Misty?”

  I said, “That’s a girl’s name.”

  “Cloudy? Stormy? Foggy?”

  I made a face.

  Daddy said, “Spot.”

  “Spot! As in ‘See Spot run’?”

  “Well, he is dappled. Nicely dappled.”

  “Dap?” said Mom.

  It was oh-so-tempting to roll my eyes. But I made myself not do it. Daddy hated sass and because of our conversation about the names, he was looking for it. But really, eye-rolling was contagious. First Stella had been doing it, and I knew she did it at home, because I’d seen her do it as soon as she got into the car when her mom picked her up. Her mom said one thing, maybe one word, and Stella’s eyes started to roll. And then Gloria started it, though my guess was she was careful at home, especially with her dad. I must have sighed, though. Finally, I said, sweetly, I hoped, “What’s wrong with Blue? And anyway, he knows it and answers to it.”

  When we pulled into one of the spots left in the parking lot in front of our church, Mom said, “Oh, there’s Mrs. Lodge and Mrs. Nicks. They can hardly get themselves out of their car.” She threw open the door of the truck and ran over to help them. Daddy and I carried in the pans of baked beans and fried chicken. The great thing about Mom was that when she was helping these old ladies, she made it seem like she was just happy to see them and wanted to hear all about what they’d been doing since Wednesday night. Then, “Oh, watch that curb, Mrs. Lodge! So your granddaughter is in high school now! I had no idea. I’m glad she sent you those pictures!” She got the ladies into the church and settled into chairs without any mishaps or any complaints, either, for that matter. The long table where we arranged the food was already set up, with a stack of plates and another stack of napkins. I peeked at the two dishes that were covered by cloths—macaroni and cheese and green beans with some bacon, it looked like. Everything was so hot now, and wrapped in dish towels and cloth napkins, that after the first service, it would still be warm and nice to eat on a winter’s day.

  Within what seemed like a minute or two, everyone in our congregation was there—twenty-seven now. There were the three of us, the five Hollingsworths, the five Greeleys, Mr. and Mrs. Hazen, Mrs. Lodge and Mrs. Nicks, of course, plus Mrs. Larkin, who taught the kids Sunday school in the afternoon. Mr. Larrabee and his two sisters, Ethelyn and Marian, who were almost as old as Mrs. Larkin, but had never gotten married, so everyone called them by their first names. Mr. and Mrs. Brooks brought Mrs. Brooks’s brother Ezra, who sat in the back and never said anything. He was the thinnest man I ever saw, and he wouldn’t touch any of the food unless there were cookies. Sometimes he even read a book during the service, and no one said a word about it. Then, of course, there was Mr. McCracken, who came by himself, and lived by himself. The only time he ever looked happy was when he was singing, but he did a lot of preaching, too. Today, another couple named Mr. and Mrs. Good had also come. We hadn’t seen them since before Christmas. Mrs. Good had a chocolate cake with her, and she put it on the table.

  Mrs. Larkin said, “Oh, Sister Good, that looks wonderful,” and everyone smiled, even Ezra.

  It was Daddy’s turn to start the preaching, so after we were all sitting down and the door was closed and the blinds pulled down, Daddy stood up next to me and let his Bible fall open. He put his hand on the page for a moment and looked at it, then said, “ ‘Do not be like your fathers and brothers, who were unfaithful to the Lord, the God of their fathers, so that he made them the object of horror. Do not be stiff-necked, as your fathers were.’ ”

  Daddy did it this way every time. I could tell that Mr. Hazen and Mr. Hollingsworth, and maybe Mr. Greeley peeked into their Bibles ahead of time, and marked the page they were going to open to, so that at least they sort of knew what they were going to talk about. Mr. McCracken was so old and had been doing this for so long that he could pretty much tell his Bible to open where he wanted it to, but with Daddy it was like cutting a deck of cards—whatever card came up, he had to make something of it. For instance, just the week before, he had read out, “ ‘You who ride on white donkeys, sitting on your saddle blankets, and you who walk along the road, consider the voice of the singers at the watering places. They recite the righteous acts of the Lord.’ ” It was easy to see in your mind what was going on in that passage, but it was hard for Daddy to make much of a lesson out of it.

  He cleared his throat and settled himself and said, “I look around me here, at my brothers and sisters, and I feel my heart swelling in gratitude for such good and faithful friends in the Lord.”

  We all said, “Amen.”

  “I am especially thankful to see Bob and Sally Good, and their chocolate cake, of course.”

  We all laughed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Brad Greeley, who was three by now, jump out of his chair, but his mom grabbed his elbow before he could run.

  “The garden of the Lord is open to everyone equally, no matter when they enter or how often they return. That may seem unfair to the children of the Lord, but how could it be any different, and still be truly holy? The Lord must be merciful. He can’t be any other way. When one of his lambs comes to the door and asks humbly to enter, that lamb will be allowed to enter. And we are grateful for that. But our subject today, shown to us by the Lord himself, as he guides us to ponder his word—”

  Brad Greeley was sitting in Mrs. Greeley’s lap. I could see him fold up and start to slide backward. He got halfway out before she realized what he was doing. She straightened him up again.

  “—is not those who ask to enter but those who refuse to enter. Who have turned their backs on the Lord and headed in the other direction. What are we asked to do with them?”

  One thing I knew was that those who had turned their backs and headed in the other direction included almost everyone we knew, from my brother, Danny, who no longer went to church at all (because ever since Daddy and he had a big fight over dinner one night and he walked out, he almost never came back, except when he was assisting our horseshoer, Jake Morrisson); to my uncle Luke, who sometimes went to a regular Methodist church back in Oklahoma, but not very often; to my mom’s parents, also back in Oklahoma, who have been Baptists since before the Revolutionary War, so they aren’t going to change anytime soon. In fact, you could be driving to church on a Sunday, talking about naming your new horse, and you could look out the window, and every car you saw driving on the other side of the road or turning off onto another road or stopping at the store, not to mention turning into the parking lot of another church, like a Catholic church, was carrying people who were turning their backs on the Lord and heading in another direction. Mom said that it wasn’t their fault if they didn’t know the truth, and Daddy kept his mouth shut when she said this, but I knew that he thought that it was their fault, at least if they were related to us.

  Brad Greeley pushed off and jumped forward, right out of his mother’s arms, but his dad was ready for him, and caught him about one second after his feet hit the floor. Daddy stopped talking and looked in the Greeleys’ direction. I looked at Carlie Hollingsworth, who was my age and usually helped me with the Greeleys, but she was looking at her own feet. As far as Brad was concerned, her eyes were closed and she had her hands over her face. Mom, who was next to me on the other side from Daddy, gave me a little nod. I slipped past her, and went to the end of the room where there were a few toys. I picked up a Slinky train and a jack-in-the-box and waved them at Brad. Mr. Greeley let go of him, and he ran over to me. I knelt down and said, “Hey, Brad, let’s take some toys outside and play with them.” He nodded and put his hand in mine. I gave him a toy truck to carry in the other hand. If wors
e came to worst, I knew I could take him down past Longs, which was in the same mall as our church. There was a store that was closed on Sunday; he could run back and forth there. It was fine with me not to listen to Daddy talk about Danny without letting on that he was talking about Danny. I didn’t want to hear about the punishments.

  It was cloudy but warm outside. We played with the Slinky train on the curb for a minute or two, then popped the jack-in-the-box three times. Then I showed Brad the book I’d picked up, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, but Brad stood up and ran down toward Longs by the time I got to page three. I ran after him. I was glad I’d put the other toys inside the door of the church before I’d started reading the book. I caught Brad just by the door of Longs and decided to take him in there. I didn’t have any money, but I thought we could at least go to the toy aisle and look at things.

  Since it was Sunday morning and not raining (in fact, the sky had cleared in the time since we got to church), Longs wasn’t very crowded—two checkers talking, a couple of people in the card aisle, a girl in the shampoo aisle, and someone stocking the makeup aisle. The toys were in the back, kind of in a corner. I picked up Brad and carried him there. He was a wiggler, so I kept saying, “Hey! Let’s go look at the toys! Let’s see what they’ve got!” At least he didn’t scream. That was always the thing you worried about with a Greeley kid—if the kid had suddenly had enough, he or she (there were the two boys and Annie, who was two now) would let out a piercing roar of rage until you let him or her go. Daddy thought that Mr. and Mrs. Greeley were “allowing those kids to get away with murder,” but I knew them better—I thought they were just born tough, fast, and single-minded.

  One of the toy shelves was at Brad’s level, and as soon as I put him down, he began reaching for the Buzzy Bee and the Snoopy Sniffer. On the higher shelves there was the usual stuff—Silly Putty, more kinds of Slinkys, Play-Doh sets, boxes of Crayolas and coloring books, and books of paper dolls. I looked for a minute at the dolls—I had one doll, a Raggedy Ann. I had never liked dolls much, preferring stuffed animals, but Gloria had lots of dolls, everything from Betsy Wetsy and Shirley Temple to Poor Pitiful Pearl, and about seven Barbies, along with a drawerful of clothes and one single Ken. I picked up a Barbie box and showed it to Brad, but he didn’t even look at it. Good, I thought. He pointed to the Barbie car box, and I set that down beside him. It didn’t look like he could get into it. There was one Barbie I had never seen before—Color Magic Barbie. You could brush something onto her hair and even her clothes, and they would change color. I took this box off the shelf and looked at it. Then I saw the Tressy doll—the reason she had such a weird name was that you could make her hair grow by pressing a button. I was trying to figure out how long you could make it grow by looking at the pictures on the package when I looked around and saw that Brad was gone. There were two Slinkys and the Barbie car and the Buzzy Bee sitting there in the middle of the aisle, but Brad was not playing with them.

  You read in books about how it feels when something horrible happens, and it’s always “My heart sank,” or “My hair stood on end,” or “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” but it was different from that. It was that it took me about six hours to lift my eyes from the toys and look down the aisle, and then it took another six hours for me to open my mouth and call, “BBBBrrrrraaaaaadddddd!” in what sounded like a moo. Then I felt both silly and terrified running down the aisle—almost silly enough to stop running and almost terrified enough to scream, but too silly to scream, and too terrified to stop running.

  I came to the cross-aisle and looked all the way to the end of the store. No Brad, no one. At this point, I decided to trot down the cross-aisle, looking both ways down each aisle to see where he might be, so I did this. No Brad. I got all the way to the end, to hair dyes, and turned right, toward the front of the store, thinking he would be okay if he didn’t get out the door. As a Greeley, he would have a nose for the door, and head there first. And then, of course, across the walk, down the curb, and out into the parking lot. I started to run.

  The two checkers were still talking. I stopped and said, “Did you see a kid? Three years old, dark hair—?”

  “Nope,” said one, as if it weren’t her business, but the other one, who was older, said, “You missing a kid? Where was he?”

  She followed me past cameras toward the toy aisle. But he still wasn’t there. Then we split up. I came to the wall and went left, toward the front, and she went right, along the potato chips toward the back. When I was almost to the front door, and really panicking—I would have been crying in about two seconds—the front door opened, and a woman came in with Brad in her arms. He was wiggling.

  I said, “Oh, Brad!”

  She said, “This one yours?”

  “He is! He got outside?”

  “Well, apparently, when I left the store, he was right on my heels, and then, when I stopped to look both ways before stepping into the parking lot, he took hold of my skirt. I’ve never been so surprised in my life as I was when I looked down and I had a kid looking up at me.”

  “I can’t believe I lost him.” But he was a Greeley. I could believe it.

  “Well, I can’t believe I let him out the door without realizing it. He could never have pushed it open himself.”

  Now my heart was pounding. Yes, it was. Brad struggled, so the lady put him down. I picked him up. He stared at me, opened his mouth. I put my finger in front of his face and said, “Don’t you dare scream, you naughty boy!” and for those two seconds, he did not scream.

  The screaming started outside Longs as I was carrying him back to church. He just put his hands on my chest and reared back, and opened his mouth and bellowed. It was like holding springs, because the whole time he screamed, he was throwing himself around trying to get down.

  By the time we got to the church, I was just beginning to wonder what to do, but the door opened and there was Mrs. Greeley. She held out her arms, and I handed him over, but that was hard, too, because I didn’t want to drop him. She smiled at me and said, “Oh, thank you, Abby, for taking him. I’ll watch him now. Bob is preaching, but he’ll soon be finished. I was glad to hear your dad—he had some interesting things to say, and, of course, Brother Abner is a wonderfully wise man, so it’s always worth hearing what he has to say.” Abner was Mr. McCracken. This whole time while she was smiling and chatting, Brad was flapping his arms and kicking his legs. But she just held him as if it was no big deal, even when he whacked her in the eye (I think by mistake). She said, “Ouch,” but not a word to him. She said, “Go on inside. They’re almost done, and you don’t want to miss everything.”

  I went inside. Mr. Hazen was on his feet, talking about Zachariah and John the Baptist, who was his son. I was exhausted, and sat down in my chair and closed my eyes. For a minute or two, I could still hear the screaming outside, and then it stopped. By the time Mr. Hazen was finished, Mrs. Greeley came in with Brad and sat down. Then we sang “Farther Along,” and, of course, “Amazing Grace,” and also “When My Name Is Called Up Yonder.” Then we were finished for the morning, and we got up. Everyone stretched. Some of the brothers and sisters headed outside to the restrooms. Mom and Mrs. Larkin went over to the table and began to unwrap the dishes of food. I was hungry.

  I have to say that while we were taking our plates, and Mrs. Lodge was getting out the silverware and then we were lining up to help ourselves (Mom’s fried chicken looked really good, and so did that chocolate cake), Brad just stood there with his spoon in his hand, looking very cute, and completely as if he had been a well-behaved boy all morning long. I helped myself to a small chicken breast and some green beans, and I was just looking into a dish I hadn’t seen before, au gratin potatoes, when I heard Ben Greeley, who was five, say, “What’s that?” and then Mr. Greeley said, “What is that?” I put the spoon back into the potatoes and looked over. Brad had a tiny little truck in his hand, a Matchbox truck, not the one I had given him when we left, which was over in a box inside th
e door.

  Brad held the truck out, and Ben grabbed it. Mr. Greeley said, “Where did that come from?”

  Daddy looked at me. I said, “I don’t know.”

  Of course I knew that it came from Longs. Later, when Daddy said that I had not “lied,” but that I had been “evasive,” he didn’t understand that what I was thinking of when I said that was that I hadn’t given Brad any of the Matchbox cars, and I hadn’t seen any of them on the lower shelves, only on the upper shelves, so how did he get that? That was all I meant. But everyone looked at me.

  Mom said, “What were you kids doing?”

  “We just went over to Longs. We were looking at the toys.”

  “You didn’t realize he had that?”

  Mrs. Greeley said, “I’m sure he put it in his pocket. He loves to do that. It’s very small. I’ll take him over there and pay for it.”

  It was when she came back, after talking to the older lady who was at the checkout counter, that everything about our trip to Longs came out. I guess the lady said how scared she was, especially when she saw that “perfect stranger” bringing him in the door, and she was so glad that he was all right, because that could be a very busy parking lot out there, and maybe the “little girl” who was in charge of him should be “given a bit of a talking-to.” And so I was. It took most of lunch, and I had to apologize for letting Brad out of my sight, and Mom and Daddy were disappointed in me for being irresponsible AND evasive. Mr. and Mrs. Greeley weren’t saying anything against me, but they weren’t smiling, either, and the only people I could see who weren’t shaking their heads at the whole thing were Brother McCracken, who always expected the worst anyway, and Brother Ezra, who never said anything. In the afternoon, there were several prayers of thanks that Brad had been saved by the mercy of the Lord from injury and possibly worse.

  On the way home, Mom had her hand on my knee, but she didn’t say anything.

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