Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  We waited in the parking lot until two men drove up in a shiny red truck. It was starting to get dark by then, and I figured they were coming to set up for the meeting, as this was a Wednesday night. Daddy stomped out his cigarette and cleared his throat as they pulled in. The truck came to a stop and they got out and walked over toward us. Daddy leaped across the lot to hug and bless them, as was his custom. “Brother Ben! Brother Loomis!” he shouted, pounding first one and then the other on the back. “It’s good to see you! So good to be here, praise Jesus!”

  Brother Ben, the tall one, embraced him in a halfhearted way, but Brother Loomis held himself real stiff, arms down at his sides. Brother Loomis had bushy black eyebrows that grew across his forehead in a line, and bristling hair. He looked kind of rough, a man that you might be scared of, but when he spoke his voice was soft.

  “What brings you over this way, Virgil?” he asked.

  Daddy smiled his big happy smile. “Why, I’ve come to stay with you-uns for a spell!” he said. “And I have brung my daughter Grace, here.”

  “Hidy,” I said from over where I stood by the truck, but neither man so much as looked at me. They looked at each other instead, and something passed between them.

  “Well, Virgil,” Brother Loomis said, for evidently he was the spokesman, “the plain fact of it is, we would just as soon you’d move along right now. You’ve done a lot for us over here, no man could deny it. And we’re grateful. But the word has got out about what all happened at your Homecoming—you know there was a right smart of our own people present—and the fact is that there is some of them that has took out agin you at this time. We have been having a lot of strife and prayer here our ownselves, sir, a-trying to determine what exactly the Lord has got in mind for us to do, what course He wants us to foller.”

  “You mean iffen He wants you to take them up or not,” Daddy said.

  “Yes sir, there’s that, and there is other things besides.” Brother Loomis kept looking at Daddy real steady. “I reckon we’re just gonna have to thrash it out some way amongst ourselves.”

  “But the Bible don’t give us no leeway!” Daddy started in. “The Word of God is real clear, to them that has ears. You’ve got ears, ain’t ye?”

  But Brother Loomis wouldn’t smile. “I reckon you had best go on, sir,” he said.

  “Ben, where do you stand on all this?” Daddy asked the taller man, who took his cap off now and turned it around and around in his hands.

  “We have done talked it over,” Ben finally said. “It ain’t just him, nor just me. I hope you will understand that, Virgil.” He looked like he was worried to death.

  “Well, boys,” Daddy said heavily, “I’ll remember this. God will remember this. Get in the truck, Grace,” he said, and I did, and we pulled out of the One Way Church parking lot just as about five cars pulled in. Daddy drove out to the paved road and stopped and put his head down on the steering wheel.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, for his behavior scared me.

  “I’m asking God for directions.” His voice was muffled by his arms. He prayed on the wheel that way for a good half-hour while cars came up behind and blew their horns and then drove around us, full of faces staring curiously at us. By then it was flat-out dark, I was afraid somebody was going to run into us. But finally Daddy straightened up and started the truck.

  “What’d He say?” I asked.

  “He said turn left,” Daddy reported, turning, “and forgive them their trespasses, which I will do though it sticks in my craw, I don’t mind telling you. Why, they would not of been nothing over here without me! They wouldn’t have had nothing but a wide place in the road!” He talked on and on as we drove into the night, the red tip-end of his cigarette and the lights on the dashboard making his face just visible. The thought of Evelyn got smaller and smaller in my mind. I was hungry, but there was nothing to eat, so finally I went to sleep. I woke up later to find us bumping up a long rutted road, our truck lurching from side to side. We stopped next to a brick house which I could barely see. Daddy got out and knocked on the door. After a while a light came on, and I heard a woman’s laughter.

  “Why, Virgil Shepherd!” she said. “You big old sweet thing!” Daddy went in the house, slamming the door behind him. The light went out. I reached over the seat and started pulling clothes out of my sack until I had enough to make myself a kind of a nest on the seat, and slept there all night long.

  That was in Newport, Tennessee, and that woman was named Marva Gail Drew. The next morning, she had a fit when she found out that I was with Daddy and had slept out in the truck. She clucked over me and patted me and dragged me in the house and cooked up a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and biscuits and sausage gravy for us. We ate every bite of it. Marva Gail Drew could cook as good as Ruth Duty. She was a skinny woman, though, with long dyed-blond hair. I thought she was probably older than she looked, because her eyes looked older than the rest of her. She didn’t eat anything. She smoked a cigarette and watched us eat. Every now and then she’d dash into the front room to stare out her picture window and then glance at her sunburst clock.

  “Now, you know I hate to rush you, Virgil,” she said the minute we were done. “But Lucy is going to bring Mama over here before long, and you know I’d just as soon you wasn’t here then, what with Bill on the road and all.”

  Of course I didn’t know the people she was talking about, but I got the picture. I had been hoping to take a shower in her pretty pink-tile bathroom, but I could tell it wasn’t going to happen.

  Daddy drained his cup and wiped his mouth and stood up. “I thank you, Marva Gail,” he said, “and God thanks you too.”

  “Well, you’re both welcome.” Marva Gail smiled real big at Daddy, crinkling her eyes. “My pleasure,” she said.

  We got back in the truck and I picked up the map again, but Daddy said he wouldn’t have to have me read it out that day, as we were not going far, and he knew how to get there.

  “But where is it?” I asked, opening up the map anyhow. “What is the name of the town?”

  “It don’t matter,” Daddy said. “Everplace is the same in the sight of God, Grace, and He’s the one in charge here. You’re on the way to Heaven, and that’s all you need to know.”

  “But I thought I got to be the navigator!” It occurred to me that maybe Daddy had just said that to make me think I was important, that neither God nor Daddy either one had any real use for me. I started crying like crazy, and couldn’t hardly breathe. I spread the map out on my lap anyway, dropping big tears on it. I liked being the navigator, I liked the dots of the towns and the spiderwebby lines of the roads that connected them. I needed to know where we were on the map.

  “Okay, okay. We’re heading down here to Cosby, if you have to know, right here it is.” He jabbed wildly at the map, but I had already found the dot that was Cosby. I settled back in my seat and stopped crying as we drove along, while Daddy sang “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There.” He did have the prettiest singing voice.

  But they wouldn’t take us in Cosby either, and for the same reason, as we were told in no uncertain terms by several members of that church and then by their preacher himself, after we tracked him down at his job at a power plant.

  Daddy got back into the truck in a black mood, slamming the door.

  I spread out my map. “Where to?” I said.

  “Well, it looks to me like God is sending us farther afield,” Daddy finally said. “We are going to spread His seed on new ground.”

  Somehow this seemed to pep us both up, though it was afternoon by then and we didn’t even have a place to sleep that night. Daddy drove west and I read out the names of the places we were headed toward. “Jones Cove, Pigeon Forge, Cove Creek, Gatlinburg,” I read.

  “Gatlinburg is a place of sin and mammon,” Daddy announced darkly. “Not Gatlinburg. Read me some more.” />
  “Laurel,” I read, skirting around the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “Waterstown, Walland, Maryville.”

  “Ain’t that a right big town?” Daddy said. “Maryville?”

  “Yessir,” I said. It was printed in darker letters than any of the others.

  “Maryville.” Daddy rolled the sound of it around in his mouth. “Maryville, then.”

  The moment which I had dreaded the most came that very afternoon. It was a sunny, windy day, with bright leaves plastering themselves on our windshield and dancing across the road. I was enjoying the ride. But all of a sudden, Daddy pulled off the road and braked to a jarring stop. I stared at him. “What are you stopping here for?” I asked, as there was no store, nor house, nor anything remarkable that I could see.

  Daddy said something I couldn’t understand. Then he jumped out of the truck and looked back in the window at me. “I won’t be gone long. It’s God’s will, Grace,” he said, his blue eyes snapping with energy and light. Then he disappeared from the window and I couldn’t see anything but the steep rocky mountainside. For a while I could hear Daddy rooting around in the back of the truck, and then I couldn’t hear him anymore and he was gone. I got out and sat on a rock by the side of the road, my heart pounding hard in my chest. I had known it was only a matter of time. I got light-headed as I sat there. Not a single car or truck passed by. I started to feel that I was the only person for miles and miles around, maybe the only person besides Daddy alive in the whole world. Right in front of me, yellow and orange leaves spun around and around in a circle, like a little tornado. It was a beautiful day. Still I found myself panting for breath. But before I could believe it, Daddy was back, grinning from ear to ear, holding a burlap towsack up high in the air. The sack wiggled and bulged.

  “They was exactly where God said they would be, Grace!” Daddy was as excited as a boy on Christmas. “I was driving right along here when He spoke up plain as day in my ear, said, ‘Pull over, Virgil, I have got something for you under a red rock on this here mountain,’ and so I done it, and clumb up, and I swear I had not got but a yard or so past the tree line when I seed it, that big old red rock provided by the Lord, and God give me the strength to pry it up, which I thank Him for, and I done so to find two of them coiled up in a big knot under there just like He said they would be, and I reached over in there and plucked them up and popped them in the sack before they knowed what hit them. Easy as pie!” Daddy threw the heavy towsack into the back of the truck and then climbed in the front and started the engine. “Well, come on, girl!” he hollered. “We ain’t got all day! We’ve got the Lord’s work to do, Grace, and we’d best get on with it.”

  Sure enough, that night in Maryville, Daddy was anointed by God to take up those serpents, and in so doing he brought many souls to God, and a man came up and gave him a beautiful serpent box tooled in silver and engraved with the words of Mark 16. Daddy took this as a sign, of course, and said that his faith, which had wavered, was now fully restored. At the end of the service, Daddy and a bunch of them drove to the nearest river for a big baptizing, for he would not baptize in a lake or a pond, preferring running water as the Bible says.

  I went home with some church people as was customary. When I went to the bathroom at their house, I saw the brownish-red stains in my white underpants, and I knew I had started my period at last. I was a real woman now. I did not feel any different, however, and it did not even seem very important in light of everything else that had happened. I rooted around in a bathroom drawer and found some Kotex.

  I had to smile, thinking that God had provided both me and Daddy with what we needed that day.

  I didn’t feel any pain. I went out and told the woman that lived there what had happened, and asked could I have a couple more Kotex and a belt until I could get to a store to get some. This was a real poor blonde woman who sat in a kitchen chair nursing a baby while another child, a little girl, slept on the floor at her feet, pretty as an angel. She looked up from her baby to me, and her blue eyes slowly filled with tears. “Why, sure you can, honey,” she said. “You can take the whole damn box,” which I did.

  * * *

  WE STAYED WITH different people in every town. By November it was too cold to sleep in the truck. Sometimes after a meeting, I’d go home with one family and Daddy would go home with another. Sometimes I’d forget the name of the people I was staying with and have to ask them again in the morning. One time Daddy disappeared, leaving me with an old couple named Childress in Coeburn, Virginia, and showed up three days later to announce that he had backslid but had now patched it up with God. I was glad to hear this, as in his absence Mrs. Childress made me wash all her floors and her clothes and even her curtains.

  Another time I stayed with a family that had some teenage twin girls who took me to a drive-in restaurant where the waitresses came on roller skates to take our order. We got a foot-long hot dog for each of us. It was a whole car full of girls who knew all the words to all the songs on the radio, and giggled a lot. I had a good time with them. This was in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.

  It turned out to be true what Daddy so often said, that God’s time is not man’s time. I lost track of the days. Later I lost track of the weeks, and even the months sometimes. I called Carlton and Ruth Duty collect when I could. The big news from them was that Billie had turned out to be pregnant, though she had gotten so fat that nobody knew it until the baby was nearly due. Billie herself acted real surprised, and swore she didn’t know how it had happened. I myself was certain that baby was Lamar’s. If he would mess with me, then he would surely mess with Billie, especially since she couldn’t remember things.

  The baby, a little girl, was born in January. They named her Fannie after Mama, and said she looked like Mama, fair-complected and delicate. As far as Ruth and Carlton were concerned, this was the baby they had always wanted but never had. They believed that God had sent little Fannie to them as a gift for standing His test of faith. She was all they would talk about when I called them, from various points south, to see how they were doing. They always said they were doing fine, but I was not, and after a while I didn’t call anymore. Hearing their voices made me miss them too much, and feel too bad. But they couldn’t call or write to me, as I was on the road, and so we lost touch then.

  Things went along okay in general, I guess, until Daddy got put in jail in Chattanooga, leaving me stranded on a street corner without a penny to my name. This happened after we left Alabama, where we stayed the longest. Anyway, Daddy had been preaching on the streets in the bigger towns in order to make cash money for our trip, but we didn’t stay anywhere long enough to get to know anybody real good. This was certainly true in Chattanooga. So when they took him away, I didn’t know anybody to call, nor have any place to stay. It was June, and already hot as blazes. I couldn’t think what to do. The Arnold’s Electric truck parked by the curb contained everything Daddy and me owned in the world. I stood there beside it, fanning myself with my straw hat for a while, and then I went over and sat on a stone bench under a big tree next to a statue of a soldier.

  The only good thing I could think of was that the police had taken the serpents too when they took Daddy—for evidence, they said. I knew they would kill them, and I was glad, though I knew also that there would be others when Daddy got out of jail. There wasn’t ever any shortage of serpents. I sat on that bench holding my Bible, which did not do me a bit of good with Daddy gone. I was not about to start preaching. People kept walking by, but none of them looked at me. I was getting real thirsty when the prettiest lady came walking right up to me and said, “You must be the preacher’s daughter.” She had soft, curly brown hair piled up on top of her head, and a blue and white seersucker dress, and red high-heel shoes. She talked funny, which was a Northern accent. I could smell her perfume.

  “Well, yes ma’am, I am,” I said. “My name is Gracie Shepherd.”

  She stuck out her hand
and I shook it. I had never shook hands with a woman before. “I’m Mrs. Thoroughgood,” she said, “and you’re to come along with me.”

  I hesitated, though I wanted to go along with her. “What about our things?” I asked. “I can’t just go off and leave the truck.” I pointed to it.

  She cocked her pretty head to the side like a bird and studied me. “No, of course not,” she said. “Don’t you have the keys? Why don’t you just follow me? I’ll be in that blue sedan.”

  Then I had to say that Daddy had the keys, and that I couldn’t drive anyway, though I was old enough. Daddy did not hold with women driving. Then I busted out crying, to my surprise and embarrassment.

  “There, there,” Mrs. Thoroughgood said. “You just come with me, then. Dan will find out about the keys and send somebody for the truck.” I didn’t understand any of this, but I followed her along the busy sidewalk to her car, feeling like I was being pulled by a little tugboat.

  “Dan” turned out to be Mrs. Thoroughgood’s husband, who was rich and let his wife do whatever she pleased. I never did understand exactly how they found out about me, but I stayed with them until Daddy got out of jail. They had the most beautiful old house, which was full of antiques, plus a sweeping curled stairway in the front hall and lots of oil portraits of old-fashioned people staring out like ghosts from their fancy gold frames. I slept in a bed with a tent over it, which Mrs. Thoroughgood told me was a “canopy.” It was the most beautiful bed in the world, with angels carved into the headboard.