by Lee Smith
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 Rev. Johnny 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 which 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, Johnny 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 Johnny 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 Revelations: “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 Johnny 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 out my hand 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 drive-way, 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 Mrs. Butters’s back patio, on Mr. and Mrs. Harold 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 Johnny 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 the 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 county someplace (in a trailer, it was rumored), she was driven in 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 in 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 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 th
ey 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 upwards 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 they 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.”
Tammy put half of the Dinty Moore stew into a chipped red bowl and gave it to me. It was delicious, lots better than Lady Food. She ate hers right out of the saucepan. “Want to split a beer?” she said, and I said sure, and she got us one—a Pabst Blue Ribbon—out of the icebox. Of course I had never tasted beer before. But I thought it was great.
That night, I told Tammy about my father’s nervous breakdown, and she told me that her oldest brother had gone to jail for stealing an outboard motor. She also told me about the lady down the road who had chopped off her husband’s hands with an ax while he was “laying up drunk.” I told her that I was pretty sure God had singled me out for a purpose which he had not yet revealed, and Tammy nodded and said her mother had been singled out too. I sat right up in bed. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, she’s real religious,” Tammy said, “which is why she don’t get along with Daddy too good.” I nodded. I had already figured out that Daddy must be the dark handsome one that all the children took after. “And she was a preacher’s daughter too, see, so she’s been doing it all her life.”
“Doing what?” I asked into the dark.
“Oh, talking in tongues of fire,” Tammy said matter-of-factly, and a total thrill crept over me, the way I had always wanted to feel. I had hit pay dirt at last.
“I used to get embarrassed, but now I don’t pay her much mind,” Tammy said.
“Listen,” I said sincerely. “I would give anything to have a mother like that.”
Tammy whistled derisively through the hole in her teeth.
But eventually, because I was already so good at collective bargaining, we struck a deal: I would get to go to church with Tammy and her mother, the very next Sunday if possible, and in return, I would take Tammy to the country club. (I could take her when Mama wasn’t there; I was allowed to sign for things.) Tammy and I stayed up talking nearly all night long. She was even more fascinating than I’d thought. She had breasts, she knew how to drive a car, and she was part Cherokee. Toward morning, we cut our fingers with a kitchen knife and swore to be best friends forever.
The next day, her brother Mike drove me into town at about one o’clock. He had to see a man about a car. He smoked cigarettes all the way, and scowled at everything. He didn’t say a word to me. I thought he was wonderful.
I arrived home just in time to intercept the delivery boy from the florist’s. “I’ll take those in,” I said, and pinched the card which said, “For Dee Rose. Get well soon. Best wishes from Lydia and Lou Applewhite.” I left the flowers on the doorstep, where they would create a little mystery later on, when Mama found them, and went upstairs to my room and prayed without ceasing, a prayer of thanksgiving for the special favors I felt He had granted me lately. Then before long I fell asleep, even as a huge argument raged all over the house, upstairs and down, between Mama and my sister, Ashley who had just come in, having stayed out all day and all night long.
“If a girl loses her reputation, she has lost everything,” Mama said. “She has lost her Most Precious Possession.”
“So what? So what?” Ashley screamed. “All you care about is appearances. Who cares what I do, in this screwed-up family? Who really cares?”
It went on and on, while I melted down and down into my pink piqué comforter, hearing them but not really hearing them, dreaming instead of the lumpy sour bed out at Tammy’s farm, of the moonlight on the wispy graying curtains at her window, of a life so hard and flinty that it might erupt at any moment into tongues of fire.
* * *
Not only was the fight over with by Sunday morning, but it was so far over with as not to have happened at all. I came in the kitchen late, to find Mama and Ashley still in their bathrobes, eating sticky buns and reading the funnies. It looked like nobody would be available to drive me to church. Clearly, both Ashley and Mama had Risen Above It All—Mama, to the extent that she was virtually levitating as the day wore on, hovering a few feet off the floor in her Sunday seersucker suit as she exhorted us all
to hurry, hurry, hurry. Our reservations were for one o’clock. The whole family was going out for brunch at the country club.
Daddy was going too.
I still wonder what she said to him to get him up and dressed and out of there. I know it was the kind of thing that meant a lot to her—a public act, an event that meant See, here is our whole happy family out together at the country club; see, we are a perfectly normal family; see, there is nothing wrong with us at all. And I know that Daddy loved her.
Our table overlooked the first tee of the golf course. Our waiter, Louis, had known Daddy ever since he was a child. Daddy ordered a martini. Mama ordered a gin and tonic. Ashley ordered a lemon Coke. I ordered lemonade. Mama was so vivacious that she almost gave off light. Her eyes sparkled, her hair shone, her red lipstick glistened. She and Ashley were discussing which schools her fellow seniors hoped to attend, and why. Ashley was very animated too. Watching them, I suddenly realized how much Ashley was like Mama. Ashley laughed and gestured with her pretty hands. I watched her carefully. I knew Mama thought Ashley had lost her Most Precious Possession (things were different down there), yet she didn’t look any different to me. She wore a hot-pink sheath dress and pearls. She looked terrific.
I turned my attention to Daddy, curiously, because I felt all of a sudden that I had not really seen him for years and years. He might as well have been off on a pipeline, as far as I was concerned. Our drinks arrived, and Daddy sipped at his martini. He perked up. He looked weird, though. His eyes were sunken in his head, like the limestone caves above the Tombigbee River. His skin was as white and dry as a piece of Mama’s stationery. My father bought all his clothes in New York so they were always quite elegant, but now they hung on him like on a coat rack. How much weight had he lost? Twenty pounds? Thirty? We ordered lunch. Daddy ordered another martini.
