State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  Kate begins to giggle. “You are a rascal,” the Reverend says. She smiles, her tongue raised over her missing tooth. She feels obdurate and lighter than air.

  “I won’t have that,” her mother hisses. “I won’t have that.” She takes the older girl by the arm and pulls her into another room. There are mutterings as they gather up their purses and sweaters. Kate draws in her cheeks. She thinks this makes her look tubercular which is the way she sometimes likes to look. Her mother stands between the two rooms, still gripping the older girl by the arm.

  “Everything’s funny, isn’t it! Everything’s a nasty little joke. Well, I want you two to clean everything up here,” she says. “Washed, dried and put away. We’re going.” She tugs her daughter’s arm for emphasis. Kate’s sister holds herself carefully in a starched white dress. Her face above the collar is like a strawberry cream. “We’re going and we’ll have a nice time.” Her mother looks drawn, even frightened. “You two do what you want, but you needn’t follow us. You needn’t bother us.”

  They turn on their heels, the mother and her more tractable daughter and rush away. The door slams. Other doors open and shut. An old engine turns over, backfires, wails out of gear, stalls. A door opens again, the hood is raised, banging on the bound linkage ensues. The hood slams shut. The door slams shut. The car is backed up and driven off.

  Kate puffs out her cheeks.

  “You still want to go, don’t you?” the Reverend asks her.

  “It doesn’t matter, Daddy.” Some people in a boat are shooting off fireworks into the daytime sky. It excites her. The idea of candles burning while it’s still light.

  “You had been looking forward to it.”

  “Yes,” she admits. “I’d like to see the donkey again. I’d like to go down in the mines in a donkey cart. I’d like maybe to go on the merry-go-round once.”

  “Then we’re going, of course. It’s a big park. Your mother doesn’t have to see us there if she doesn’t want to.”

  “We give her fits, don’t we, Daddy?”

  “Are you ready to go?” he says.

  “Oh yes, Daddy.” Kate slides out of her chair and skips outside to where the family’s other car is parked. Sometimes it doesn’t even start. There is no guarantee that a journey will result simply by turning the key in the ignition. Kate and her father get into the car. It is an old white Hudson. Someone has painted it by hand. Hairs from the brush are fossilized beneath the paint. The interior is beige. Kate bounces several times on the seat. She pretends she is aloft in a marshmallow.

  The engine rumbles spiritedly. “Good-by, Race.” She waves to her dog graciously. He takes a few steps toward them, ramming his paw into his water dish. Kate and the Reverend drive onto the ferry and are taken across the sound to the Independence Day celebrations and the amusement park.

  HER MOTHER LOST HER MIND. Kate saw it. It was not after her sister was killed but before. Kate witnessed it. It flew out of her mother like the black puff of a devil’s breath, and enmeshed itself in the workings of the merry-go-round, entwined itself in its cheerless and monotonous music.

  The riders were quaintly solemn, thumbing rings from a chute. All looked desperate and disappointed. The horses were welded into place.

  Kate stood with her sister. Her sister was fretting over a spot on her white pleated skirt. They had been sharing a hamburger. Grease had dripped down from the bun. It had ruined her skirt, she wailed. Everything was ruined. Kate looked listlessly on while her sister rubbed at the stain. A woman holding a styrofoam cup had come down from one of the concession stands and she said, “It’s all right, honey, this will take it right up. You just watch this, honey.” The woman had a star cut out of one of her teeth and the star was gold. “Watch this now,” she said, but Kate was watching her mother and father standing on a little scrap of darkness shed by a faded purple awning. Her mother’s face was white and distorted. She looked ancient, inhuman. Before them, fat sea gulls waddled about, for the park was on the coast. They looked like toys. One shuttled around Kate in a stumbling circle, making a poor sound, a long piece of string trailing from its open beak.

  Kate heard her sister. “Oh!” she said. Her voice was pained, incredulous. “Oh, what’s happened, what’s happened! Why did she do it? Why did she want to do such a mean thing for? Oh, Katey, look what she’s done!” Kate turned reluctantly. Above them, the woman from the stand was alternately shaking her head with a frown and grinning encouragingly, the star in her mouth sparkling and wet. She was drawing off thick pink milk into a glass for a customer. Kate looked at her sister’s skirt. It was now corrupted by a much worse mark. The woman had daubed cold coffee on the grease and the stain seemed darker and twice as large. The sister wadded the cloth into a brown bunch like a wilted bouquet and little Kate looked at her wryly. She was not interested in this—in clothes, in outward appearances. Besides, it had looked hopeless. She shrugged.

  Later that day when her sister was dead, lying between the green oak and the wheels of the mother’s car, Kate wished that she had said something nice, something reassuring. She wished that she had said, Why that dress will be white as ice, white as it was before in just a little while. She wished that she would have known that that was the way it was going to be so she could have said that. For, a few hours later when her sister was lying dead on the road, that skirt looked brand-new. It hadn’t even been mussed or dirtied by the fall from the door. And neither had her sister. She had flown soft as a butterfly into that giant tree and the sound, when she struck, was not loud, as one might expect but a low, poor, redeemless sound, like that of the dying gull. Nevertheless they heard it, Kate and her father, for they were not far behind and their windows were down and the air was still. And it was true as well that they saw it, what there was of it to see. For the moment passed so swiftly and then the girl was dead even though it was only her hand that seemed damaged at first glance. The mother, in her confusion, had backed the car over it. It lay bloodlessly hidden beneath the patched tire. It was the fact that she had crushed her daughter’s hand that seemed to affect the mother most. And it was the sight of the spotless skirt that Kate would remember. And it was the Reverend who took the gum from the young girl’s mouth and smoothed the collar of her blouse. Death brings order, does it not? There is nothing too small to rest in peace?

  Kate was brought back to the car to wait. There was a bag of pretzels there and she began to eat them. She wanted never to eat another pretzel again in her life, so she ate them all, to finish them up. Once her mother came to her and she seemed to have a calm, almost studious expression, an aesthetic air, but beyond suffering any more and without light. And she looked at the child, her daughter, the last, left. It couldn’t have been long, no more than a moment, for there was so much confusion around them, noise, unfamiliar voices and the more generous sounds of a summer holiday, the humming of birds and insects unseen and the bright whistling of the car ferry as it moved out of the bay. They had missed it. The four of them had missed going back forever. And all these sounds and strangers were imposing upon them, insisting that something be done or said, so it could have been no more than a moment that the mother was able to look at her living child with such hatred and such intimacy.

  Kate’s sunburnt lips smarted with the crude salt. Her fingers continued to rummage dreamily through the empty bag of pretzels and her mother stayed her hand before it could rise once again, spasmodically, to her lips. “I wish it had been you,” her mother said softly, almost musically. “You listen to me now. I’ve said this to the others and they pretend they haven’t heard. I wish with all my heart that it had been you.” She moved her face closer to Kate’s. The child noticed the extraordinary thickness of her mother’s lashes. They were tangled and some were turned inward, brushing the balls of the eyes.

  Why doesn’t it hurt? Kate thought. Where is Daddy? When will he drive us to the boat? Her mother was stroking her limp hand. Kate’s face was expressionless. She knew what the woman said could have no
bearing on her life because the woman was mad. She had lost her mind while Kate was watching. Her mother’s mind had lodged itself in the obscure mechanisms at the core of the Wooden Horses. Kate had seen it all except for that which had brought about the exorcism. She had turned away only for an instant and when she looked again, everything had been accomplished. She had looked again and her father was walking toward her, looking arrogant and exasperated, and the mother was walking toward her too but slowly, so slowly, her hands pressed to her temples, and from her head, Kate saw the black, corrupt and weightless blossom of her knowledge fall.

  “Evil suckled you,” her mother said. “You’d never take my milk. He would never let me touch you really. I wanted to, you were my baby. But he took you the moment you were born. The doctor couldn’t stop him. He took you and cradled you and wiped the blood from your eyes. He was covered with you. I was disgusted, embarrassed. He was covered with the wetness and the slime of you. No one could stop him. He bathed himself in you. You were seconds old and a terrible chill came over me, a premonition. Such cold! I knew that a terror had been delivered of me. And you remain still, don’t you? Nothing touches you.” She did not move away from Kate, intimating by neither gesture nor pause, the crowd, the tree and the old car she’d been driving and would never drive again, her life from that moment on until the end of it, being tractless and impassable. She stroked Kate’s hand gently, at odds with the words, a mother still, “that innocent and loving child over there is gone. He told me, ‘You’ll only destroy yourself. ‘He told me, We’ll go our own way.’ And he was right, wasn’t he! I’ve destroyed the only person who ever loved me.” She shook Kate’s arm. Her lips were almost resting on Kate’s own. “I know all about him, little girl, though you’d like to think I don’t. And I know you too, and your sly cute ways. Daddy daddy daddy, it’s made me sick for years!” She lowered her voice, though she had never actually been shouting. “I won’t scream. I’m not going to do anything that will make me seem to be the guilty party. I’m not the guilty party, I never have been.”

  The phrase had swum up in little Kate’s head. She had heard almost nothing of what had been said but now she thought of a dreary hall, riddled with black and brown crepe, tables of disgusting food, broken toys, cowering chicks and kittens and rabbits in fetid boxes, and everyone there, all the children, weeping, blindfolded and in chains.

  “YOU’RE SICK,” she said to Kate. “You must be helped.” She stopped, breathing shallowly, drawing back a little. She examined Kate who sat mutely, looking through the windshield. Whose child was this now? Where had all this time taken her? Why had it taken so many years to arrive? And the other child, lost now. Had she ever truly been beside her, all that time before this time, present beside her all those years and chattering dearly, her death existing before her life had begun?

  Confused. She felt herself becoming confused, lightheaded. Shock, she thought. I’m going into shock. I am aware of that, she thought.

  “Sick,” she repeated with effort. “Don’t you think I know what’s going on? And yet it was only today that I found the strength to act. It was as though at last I had roused myself from a drug. His drug. I had at last shaken it off but too late. Hours too late after years! But today I had a plan. It was so simple, so right. We were just going to leave. I was going to take her away, my poor dear little lost …” Her fingers fluttered feebly and momentarily at her lips. “She didn’t know about any of this. She never saw—I shielded her from it as best I could but today I faced it at last. I knew I couldn’t go on. It was up to me to save her, to get her away. We were going to run away and you would have been dead to her. There would be nothing in her life to remind her that she had a father or a sister. I tried to make it sound like fun to her, an adventure. ‘Just the clothes on our back,’ I’d said. ‘We’ll live in the mountains. Like Heidi,’ I’d said. She was worried about friends. Oh, she would always have friends. She was like that. She never lacked for friends or happy times.”

  She looked at Kate as though she were making some final plea to a cool and inquisitional power. Two policemen reluctantly approached. “Yes.” She waved to them with an uncertain gesture. “Yes, yes.” Kate looked through the windshield. “There’s no reason for me to go now,” her mother said. “My reason is gone so I’ll stay. I’ve never been strong but I’ll stay and take whatever Jason’s God is preparing for me.” Kate gave a start. Her father’s name was so seldom mentioned. She stirred in the dusty seat.

  “It’s a personal God, Jason has, belonging just to him. That’s always been clear. Viciously clear. I’m not strong but I’ll stay now. I’ll stay and I’ll fight. I’ll fight you,” she said. “Yes,” she said to the policemen and walked back with them to the ambulance.

  Kate thought of her sister. Once her sister had given her a pin with Kayo on it. Once she had given her a tiny book of drawings of Woody Woodpecker. The pages were stapled together at the top. You thumbed them rapidly and they became a little movie—Woody Woodpecker rescuing a kitten from a tree. She had lost the pin. She had lost the little book. The thought of that made her grievously sorrowful.

  BUT THAT TO THOSE WHOM HE GIVES UP TO CONDEMNATION THE GATE OF LIFE IS CLOSED BY A JUST AND IRREPREHENSIBLE JUDGMENT.

  At the first allusion to the baby, months later, Kate had been sick. She hadn’t said anything but she had thrown up. She is not so old now but someday she will be older. Surely there is something frightful in this.

  The fact that she can be no younger than she is now is one that we don’t have to accept.

  When she was first told about the baby, Kate tried to fix the hint, the sign, the foreboding of the disaster and disloyalty that was so complete. It was as though her father had struck her. He seemed more and more like the fanciful fearsome God he had taught her to know.

  Kate remembers. She and her mother are in the amusement park once more. It is fall, a few days after school had opened. Her mother had been waiting for her in the schoolyard. They had taken a bus. Her mother had insisted that they go on some of the rides. The air was raw. No one but themselves were in the plywood pit of the mines. Even so, when one donkey was hired, all the others would go with him, pulling their wooden carts. They were all strung together. They wouldn’t be unharnessed until night.

  The child remembers … there is a head hanging in a splinter of light until with a shriek it slides along a wire into a basket. Glued to the empty cart rocking before them is a pink sticker, Don’t Follow Me I’m Lost. There is a roar of rocks, of a cave-in, and a stone wall coming toward them at furious speed through the donkey’s ears. A stuffed bear dances round and around in a wire cage, one ear gone, holding a violent bouquet to his plastic snout.

  In the daylight, her mother had put her hand on her stomach.

  “He’s living right here. He’s being made here.”

  The calliope played. The donkey, with a sigh, shuffled in his traces and freed a wide sparkling stream. Kate pulled her fingers away from her mother’s stomach and rubbed them over the donkey’s warm burred head. There was the smell of the tide and of clams and of tomatoes baking on dough. Everywhere there were sputum and paper blowing, religious pictures and the faces of movie stars sliding out of machines.

  They walked down to the beach and sat on a bench, watching the green calm sea and the lace curtains blowing in the windows of the old hotels. The child remembers … her mother’s face is extraordinary. A brown vein throbs in her temple. The child cannot look at her mother. She never looked at her, unless she forgot. She never looks at herself either, in mirrors or photographs. She has no interest in it. An old man walked in front of them. He wore a tight brief bathing suit. His limbs and chest were brown and oily. He was very old. Kate watched him and he in turn looked at them curiously. The teeth in his mouth were like kernels of corn.

  She remembers … wishing that the old man would take her mother’s hand and walk away with her, into one of the decaying hotels. The man looks as though he might do something like that,
if requested. In one ear, he has a ball of cotton.

  “He loves me,” her mother said. “He wanted this. He comes to me every night. He won’t leave me alone.” Her hair was wet on her brow. Her mouth was wet.

  THOUGH THOU BE SOUGHT FOR YET SHALT THOU NEVER BE FOUND AGAIN. Her father had taught her everything. Ezekiel that was. Words were more important than the things they represented. That was why using some of them was a sin. Kate’s throat was bitter. She swallowed.

  “It has to be a boy,” her mother said. “A boy would kill him for what he is. He wanted me to be the one to tell you. As though it weren’t any of his doing.”

  A drop of saliva dropped on Kate’s bare knee. The damning wish rose serenely and without hate. Without hate. I hope it rots and molds and dies inside her. And then maybe she will leave us be. They had to shoot the horse because he was sick. He didn’t know how to be a horse any more. Then they had to set him on fire. I just want her to leave us be. Dismally, she was sick. It was as though she had spoken aloud and the words had come into the clear air, darkening and putrefying everything. She vomited onto the sand.

  Her mother did not move right away. Then she took a handkerchief out of her pocketbook and walked down to the water. Kate raised her head. The old man was still passing by. He seemed to have a grapefruit in his crotch. He had tiny dugs wreathed with long white hairs. And he was still passing by with a look of disgust and impatience.

  And then Kate saw it. Propped between her and the place where her mother had been was a faint bundle, wrapped in a white blanket. It was bubbling, amorphous and horrendous, a clear liquid restrained by the blanket folds. When she touched it, her fingers fell through to the amnion slickness beyond. There it is and it’s never going to be any different. It’s never going to get beyond that. She might as well take it out of her stomach now and sell it to the traveling circus. Daddy and I will not discuss this, how it got inside her stomach, we will not mention this.