State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  Her faith had taken on a terrible reality. Her faith had taken on the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Kate stood and tottered from the bench. The old man was passing by. And her mother came and reamed her mouth with the dainty cloth soaked in the cold sea water. She pushed back her braids and wiped them clean.

  The child remembers … She tastes, she thinks, the fish that have swum in the water. She sees the form and future of the world in the shabby exotic skyline of the amusement park. Almost everything has already happened in her life. What can remain?

  “I want to help you,” her mother said. “How can I turn my back on you?”

  WHAT CAN SICKNESS NOT DO? Now the child is a woman. She is in the woods with her young man. The woods are far, far away from the place where she was born.

  The land is owned by a paper company and can be bought for $150 an acre. They are not beautiful woods but they will do. They are still scarred from the logging operations of ten years ago. The loggers cleared and burned. Later, they planted seeds but the resulting growth is ramshackle, delicate. The larger animals never returned. The land is shocked, stilled. Everything is wet and tapping from a rainstorm in the night. In the leaves, fearful rustlings are heard, but only tiny finches emerge. The woods offer no enlightenment. They are a huge barred door before God.

  The boy points to a square of soft earth. “A fox,” he says. He has slow pale eyes and thick hair, lying like a cap on his head. All the buttons are missing from his shirt and his thin hard chest is exposed. Above his navel, a blond furrow of hair begins. It is soft as seal would be, the girl thinks. She loves it. His jeans are faded. Around the pockets and the fly, the fabric is almost white.

  The girl kneels beside him. She is tall and a little awkward. She has a wide sad mouth and two dark moles near her left eye which give her a convalescent look. To the boy, she seems different each day. It is nothing that he can explain. Her face seems to change. He is not yet used to her. It is as though her life has lacked the continuing experience that will make her what she will become.

  She cannot make out the paw’s imprint. She searches for it on the damp ground, ashamed. She reaches for his hand and presses it to her cheek. At last she finds it—a very faint impression, more a memory than a mark. “In China,” she begins, “if you give a fox a home of his own, and incense and food, he’ll bring you luck.”

  “Incense.” The boy smiles carefully. He has strong nice teeth, white as bone.

  “Of course.” She nods. “In China, a family is very fortunate to be adopted by a supernatural fox.”

  The boy rises. “Do you wish that you had been adopted?”

  “Oh,” she says, stunned. “Of course.” This land depresses her. The red ground sucks at her feet and the pines are tall and empty of life.

  “Perhaps we could go to China,” she says. “Or we could live in Mexico. Some country where there is a magic and mystery and luck.”

  “All that’s right here.” He spreads his arms wide, taking in the trees, the swamp and distant bay and sky, the roll and ruin of the land.

  She shakes her head.

  “Why not Canada?” he says. “Why not Alaska?”

  “No, it’s too cold.”

  He tells her a joke about Eskimo children. The last line is don’t eat the yellow snow. She laughs. It is so innocent, so harmless. He touches her face with his.

  The girl knows that they will never go anyplace. Before she met him he had a job. Earnest ambitions. He had a car and a few nice possessions. But now he has stopped working and sold everything except the car. He spends all his time with her. They live on his savings. He is self-made, clever, charming and shy. He owes nothing to anyone. But now he seems to owe a great price to her. They are students but seldom go to classes. Sometimes he does not touch her for days. It’s like a game. Being in love is not what he had expected it to be. She has taken away his energy and replaced it with premonition. He had imagined a different woman. Often he had imagined no woman at all for this was not necessary to him. He could make his way on nothing. Now he is involved with the nothingness within her.

  The girl knows that other countries are not open to them.

  The woods are sunny and then dark. The sky is full of square, swift clouds moving across the sun. Shadows flow down the trees like water and then evaporate. The boy walks several feet in front of the girl, leading them back home. Suddenly he stops and grasps her arm. He points to the left, to a hollow beneath a runty cypress.

  There is a dog lying there, a big red hound. His big eyes gallop toward them, but he is scarcely breathing. He lies on his side. They can see the cracklings and mash of his dinner lying in the scummy pool around his head. He is torn open from his balls to a point a few inches before his front leg joints. The rent is straight and neat as any zipper opening and the guts hover still within the belly in bluish globes.

  The hound’s eyes run toward them and the boy moves forward and crouches by the dog’s head, stroking it. The folds of flesh on the dog’s neck and shoulders are soft, crumpled like velvet. The hound doesn’t move. Two ants crawl across his nose.

  “A boar must of got him,” the boy says. “He got caught up by a big mean boar.” The girl nods. She doesn’t know what to do. Her hands hang ponderously useless at her sides.

  “Is he dying?” She can’t hear herself speak. The dog’s eyes are incredible.

  The boy stands and walks away. He picks up a short thick branch, hefts it, pushing it against a tree to check its strength. The girl slowly opens her mouth. Deep in the limbs, the trees crack. The air shimmers in the morning heat. She doesn’t know this boy. They met stupidly, at a dull movie. He had been sitting in the aisle behind her and had bent over her shoulder, saying something, thinking she was someone else. It’s all a misunderstanding. A case of mistaken identity. He is going to brain the dog, dispatch him, club him expertly as he does the fish he catches.

  The boy is taking off his shirt. “What is it? What’s the matter?” He hands her the shirt. “Tear it up in strips.”

  The girl looks at him closely. He is still a stranger. She doesn’t really know what he should mean to her. She can’t remember anything about him. She feels as though she has wandered into a painting. The dog smells like straw. The sun burns her neck.

  She rips the shirt in four pieces and the boy takes them and ties the dog’s legs to the branch. The dog makes a hissing sound but doesn’t show his teeth. The pads of his paws are torn and there are large ticks buried in the fur around his mouth. The exposed guts tremble fretfully with the movement and something oozes out and onto the ground like batter.

  THE YOUNG COUPLE walk through the woods, the hound between them, swaying upside down on the pole. Sometimes, the boy holds the pole with only one hand and uses the other to slap at the flies which hover across his back. The girl uses both hands always and pants with the weight. She tries not to look down at the dog but it is all that she can see. The open belly swings and shines below her. The tail droops down, exposing the brown bud of the anus. A pellet of turd appears and slips to the ground. The hound has great dignity. His great eyes unblinkingly study the sky.

  They are almost two miles from the trailer where they live and they walk without speaking. The woods slowly change. They become thicker, primal, cooler. The boundaries of the paper company are left behind. The girl is lost but the boy knows the way back. He has always paid so much attention to these woods that he no longer has to be familiar with every part of them. They reach the river and follow its course until they come to the trailer. It’s very old. Battleship gray and shaped like an egg. Tiny windows like machine-gun slits in a bunker.

  The boy wedges the pole in the crotches of two young pines and runs to the trailer for fishing line and needles. The dog’s tongue hangs out of his mouth. It seems to run for yards. The boy sews skillfully—tight short stitches. The girl does what she must without questioning him. His presence, his essence is beginning to return to her. She suspected his ge
stures and now she feels terrible. Of course he would not kill the dog. He is to be trusted more than herself. Everything she does is unfaithful to him.

  She is unreliable, she says.

  “Oh no.” He looks at her briefly and then down again to his work. Her face is clear and shiny as though she has just awakened. She holds the belly together as he sews, pinching it together with the tips of her fingers. “You’re fine. You’re doing everything you have to do.”

  His hands are greasy and spotted with blood. He wipes them distractedly across his chest. He knows that this is not what she means but he does not want to talk about it.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  He finishes stitching up the dog and knots the line. He lowers the animal to the ground and unties the legs from the pole, carrying him, then, into the trailer. The hound looks huge yet shrunken, like an empty gourd. The girl throws a pile of blankets and towels on the floor and the boy arranges the dog upon them.

  “I’ve got to wash,” the boy says. He looks like a butcher. She watches him run through the woods and dive into the river. In a few minutes, he throws his jeans and shoes upon the dock. He swims to the far bank and returns, again and again, a blunt chopping stroke. It seems that hours have passed. The girl moves an ice cube around the dog’s jaws and the dog sighs and closes his eyes.

  She walks to the river and takes off her clothes. The dock is made of six planks, set half a foot apart, floating on oil drums. She lies on her stomach and the boy drifts on his back beneath her. He flows down the length of her. A breast falls slimly through the planking, a long strip of rib, waist, hip, thigh. He sees one fourth of her precisely, no more. She can see nothing of him, her face is turned aside, one cheek resting on the wood, her eyes somewhere in the scenery. At some point she falls asleep. The boy floats beneath her. It gives him an odd and hurtful feeling to be there in his tarred and barnacled cage. Above him, the girl becomes nothing—a piece of hanging bait. She is a pastime for him like the stars. He cannot believe that always there will be this love which consumes him yet which changes nothing. He cannot believe his need. Or why when gratifying it, he is not satisfied. What can be beyond love? He wants to get there. With the girl. Together, they could arrive at this point. But he feels that she does not know the way. She merely represents the way, and they are lost, somehow, with each other.

  When he gets back to the trailer, the boy lies down on the couch. In a corner, the hound is breathing lightly in a heroic whisper. The air of the room hangs in dusty layers. Lizards skid across the glass. Everything smells unused. It is something he cannot understand. Everything here seems to be used slightly for the wrong purpose, although, he would admit, the results seem to be the same.

  The walls of the trailer are cardboard. They buckle out like sails. The girl has taped up colored pictures torn from magazines. None of her selections are original, but she has insisted upon explaining them to him. There’s a picture of a sculpture of James Joyce beside his new grave in Zurich. There are recipes for rich desserts, ads for movies, clothes, hardware. Her favorite, she told him, is the photograph of a tropical bird. She loves it, she says, and describes it to him. It requires high temperatures and is gregarious. Its massive soft bill is a puzzle, as is its long bristled tongue, as it only eats fruit and has no need for such equipment. The bird is actually seven different colors. Mauve, she says, one, blueberry, rose, purple, four, she tells him, emerald green and smoldering orange. That’s only six she realizes, but the other is merely white. Flaming and liturgical colors but the photograph is black and white and fading. It wasn’t dipped in the proper solution. It’s almost gone but will probably not disintegrate further. She insists that the bird is truly as depicted. It possesses the requirements of another creature.

  The boy despises metaphor. He grows irritable. To think of her is maddening. He wants to reach some point of reference, something marvelous about them as lovers, but his mind dwells only on the commonplace.

  He wakes once. It is dark but close to morning. The night has passed and he is making love to her. It is so good; she is smiling and her body is cool. He feels cured, rediscovered. He turns on the light and the hound blinks at them, feebly raising its tail and letting it fall, and everything seems beautiful, full of hope and lucky chance and love. He tells the girl this and she agrees. The animal closes his eyes once more and sleeps. Together they watch him mend. No man has ever died beside a sleeping dog.

  THE UNIMAGINABLE PRETENDED TO BE INEVITABLE. Inevitable it was. Unimaginable it was not. Kate has a young man. They may or may not be married. If so, it is a secret. Married girls, past, present or future, are not allowed to reside in sorority houses. Uxorial vagaries are not permitted. How archaic the idea of a sorority house, how truly peculiar! All the references made within can be construed as sexual ones. When in doubt, snicker. Nihil est sine spermate they shriek over their tuna fish.

  Kate is living with the girls at Omega Omega Omega. Not just yet, but in a little while. They do not know there that she has a young man. When she returns, they will recognize her as the girl who had been with them before, scrubbing herself with a bar of tar soap in the shower stall. Tar soap—the funniest thing they’d ever seen. She was queer as the girl from Massachusetts. Things that Northerners did seldom caught on. Things either caught on or they didn’t. Your boy friend had either a Porsche or a Pinto. You either knew how to do all your Christmas shopping in Goodwill stores or you did not. They will know Kate when she returns. In her absence, the girl from Massachusetts had left for good. The peachy complexion of the girl from Massachusetts had gone all to bumps in the South. She attributed it to the fact that she couldn’t rinse her face in her baby brother’s pee any more. Diluted. Five to one. Among themselves, the others agreed that Northerners were the oddest things and fast and filthy in their ways.

  In college, Kate studied French. She studied French and she had lovers, usually men that she picked up in the afternoon or evening. Kate never made an acquaintance before one o’clock. Men can’t think strange in the morning. Men in the morning think of ham and hotcakes and money. They want order and the familiar.

  She was never disappointed with her lovers, even the dreadful ones, because they gave her life the feeling of great transparence and they made her feel restful and inconsequential.

  Her first dreadful lover in town was the first one she took, shortly after she arrived. It was the day of the evening she met her friend Corinthian Brown. Her first lover was not very pleasant. He was a cab driver. He told her one thing right away.

  “I used to be a deep-sea diver,” he said. “For seven years they could count on me to go down after anything. Anything. Jewels, boats, bombs, bodies. No matter what it was, the last twenty feet I’d be sinking through silt. That’s no kind of a job,” he said.

  She hailed him as she came out of a used book shop. She had just been given as many books as she could take away if she took them away right away and so she had called for a cab. Kate had taken to walking through the town in the dead part of the afternoon. Nothing ever came of it. Her back would get wet from the terrible sun. She would wait until three o’clock before she’d have a cooling drink. It was the least she could do. It was the most she could do to wait until three. On the day that she took shelter in the book shop, it was not yet three. She went in there to get out of the rain. The sun was shining and the rain was pouring through the streets like smoke.

  “I’m not in business any more,” a woman hollered to her. “I’m not keeping things going for that crummy bastard any more.” Kate looked glumly at the rain. “Take what you want. I’m Lady Bountiful. Clean the place out,” the woman screamed. “He never gave me a thing I didn’t end up paying on. Forty-nine years with him,” she yelled, “and not one happy moment.”

  She wore a hairpiece that rose and fell on her head. She wore a dress that had a print of flowers and their scientific names and she smoked a Silva-Thin.

  “I suppose you came in here to get out of the rain,” she sn
apped. “Well, it’s all past mattering. I’ll tell him if he ever has the nerve to ask. I gave them all away, I’ll tell him, all your crummy books, to a chippie who at least had the crummy sense to come in out of the rain. Well, come on,” she said. “COME ON, goddamnit!” Kate had never met a retiree before. She was not astounded. Nevertheless, she was careful not to move too quickly.

  Kate helped her throw the books in boxes. There were dry bug shells on the shelves.

  “Over there was where I saw the rat,” she said, pointing into a little alcove. A sign said hopefully, THE ROOM OF KNOWLEDGE. “He didn’t do a thing about it naturally. I got it myself. Peanut butter.”

  “What?” Kate said, speaking her once and only.

  “Peanut butter,” the woman said irritably. “IN THE TRAP!”

  Kate hauled several cartons of books onto the street. The rain had stopped and the air was steamy. She waved to the old woman. The old woman was eating yogurt and she waved her spoon at Kate. Then Kate called the cab. They put everything in the back seat and she sat up front with the driver. His hair was combed back flat and wet and severely from his forehead in a ’20’s fashion and he reeked of Juicy Fruit.

  “Yeah?” the driver said, raising his eyebrows.

  “Omega Omega Omega,” Kate said. Her sunglasses were steamed up. “Do you have a Kleenex?” she said.

  The driver looked at her sideways. There was something about her, he decided. To get women these days, a man had to have good instincts, accurate judgment. He fancied his mind as being swift as a steel trap. He fancied his body as being hard and cruel as a steel trap. He saw himself, it’s true, as one mean old knowledgeable boy. And this fare was showing off her underwear. When he was putting the books in the cab for her, he saw her bra. Not the wide, white kind that his wife wore, which was big enough to strangle a hog, but a tiny colored one, a tiny blue polka-dot piece of nothing.