Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  Now that things seemed to be working out, I had conveniently forgotten the promise I had made to God in my hour of need. It is real funny how strong you can mean a thing, and then how fast it will slip your mind. But I was young, and thought I could do anything, and have it all.

  I walked across Mr. Bean’s front porch and pushed his screen door open. By now it was pretty dark. “Mr. Bean,” I hollered. “Mr. Bean?”

  “Come on back here, honey,” he wheezed out of the darkness. I could see a sliver of light under a door at the back of the room, so I walked toward that, through a dim parlor which smelled old and musty. I could barely make out the dark shapes of the furniture. When I opened the door, I could tell right off that there was a big difference between Mr. Bean’s dead wife’s parlor and that back room where I guess he stayed all the time. He sat on a ratty old sofa covered by a ratty old quilt, watching TV. He had the TV close enough so he could reach over and change the channels without getting up. Of course, he didn’t get up when I came in either. He just looked at me, with something new and lively in his hooded eyes. “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down!” cried a loud, cracked voice which made me jump, but it turned out to be only Mr. Bean’s parrot, which sat in a big cage on top of a dresser in the corner. It was a scraggly, bad-looking parrot.

  Mr. Bean patted the seat beside him. So I did sit down, but as far away from him as I could get, which was not too far since he took up most of the couch.

  I looked around the room. He had a refrigerator in there, and a desk piled up with papers, and piles of clothes and papers all over the floor. It was a mess. That day’s newspaper lay on the floor by his feet, with some pictures of naked girls spread out on top of it. At first I couldn’t believe it. I looked again to see if that could possibly be right, which it was, and then I saw his old red thing hanging out of his pants. “Hiya, hiya,” the parrot said. Mr. Bean leaned forward, grunting, to turn the sound all the way down on the TV. Then he looked at me.

  “Now, Gracie,” he said, “there’s some things I need for you to do.”

  I was out of there so fast I don’t even remember leaving! I don’t remember anything until I was back in the trailer, where I slammed the door shut and pushed the sofa up against it even though I knew that was stupid, that Mr. Bean was not able to walk all the way out there. It was all he could do to get back and forth between his house and the café. But I was scared he would send somebody to get me, like Don the skinny cook with tattoos all over his arms. Of course I could not imagine Don doing this, but Mr. Bean was a rich man, in a place of poor people. People will do a lot for money. I didn’t have any money myself, and wasn’t supposed to get paid until Friday. Now I knew I would never get paid. I sat curled up in a ball on the couch wedged against the door, and sure enough, not ten minutes had passed before somebody was there, knocking at first and then banging on the door.

  I Settle Down

  I DIDN’T SAY a thing. I sat there with my eyes squeezed shut and my fingers in my ears while that metal door banged and rattled like Judgment, only inches away from me.

  “Gracie!” a voice yelled. “Gracie Shepherd! I know you’re in there! Gracie!”

  I took my fingers out of my ears and sat up. It was not Mr. Bean. I couldn’t tell who it was, though it was a voice I knew somehow, knew yet didn’t know.

  “Gracie, are you all right? Gracie Shepherd! Answer me, please. This is Travis Word.”

  The most profound relief rushed through me. I knew I had been saved.

  “Just a minute,” I called. I jumped up and straightened my waitress uniform the best I could, and pulled the sofa back from the door. Then I clicked the lock open.

  And there he stood, so tall that he had to stoop to peer in the trailer door. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and blue jeans. He was long and skinny. I realized that I had never seen him without that old dark suit coat he wore to meeting. Often he wore a wide-brimmed black hat too—then he really did look like a man from another time. But that night, standing on the cinder-block steps of Mr. Bean’s trailer with the dark night behind him and the light from the open door shining on his pale concerned face, he seemed somewhat younger to me, and nicer than I had thought. He twisted his hands together and looked nervous.

  “They’re gone,” I said.

  He nodded, his Adam’s apple jumping up and down, and a piece of his straight black hair fell down in his eyes. He pushed it back. “I heard,” he said. “I heard it from Ray Keen—” This was one of the elders that had come to see me only that morning at the Volunteer Café, that morning which now seemed like years before. “That is why I came over here, to see if you was all right, and if you needed anything.”

  I tried to smile. “Well, I’m just fine,” I said.

  “And you don’t need nothing?” Travis Word’s dark eyes traveled all around the trailer. It was a wreck.

  “Why no, I’m just fine,” I said again. “Won’t you sit down?” I asked as proper as if I had a real nice house with real nice furniture in it, and not a junked-up trailer with a sofa sitting crazy in the middle of the slanting floor. I had some idea of how a woman was supposed to act when the preacher came to call, you see. Then I turned to walk over to the sofa myself, but at this point a funny thing started happening to my legs, they simply would not work right. It was like the air had gotten too thick for me to walk through, like I was walking underwater. I tried to say something, but I couldn’t talk right either.

  I woke up to find myself lying on the sofa with Travis Word right there on his knees beside me, one hand on my forehead. “Dear Jesus,” he was praying, “dear sweet Jesus, please bring this pretty girl back to us—” I was awake by then, but I kept my eyes closed. Pretty! I was thinking. Pretty!

  “Have mercy on her, Jesus,” Travis Word went on.

  I opened my eyes and smiled at him. “I’m all right,” I said.

  He leaped back like he’d been shot, almost falling over. He had to put one hand down on the filthy floor to steady himself. “Praise the Lord!” he cried. “Oh, praise the Lord!” which is exactly what I had heard Daddy say upon many a similar occasion, but Travis Word said it different, like he really was giving all the praise to the Lord, and not keeping some for himself. He stayed on his knees and looked at me carefully, his eyes like searchlights. I guess I really had scared him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I reckon I fainted.”

  “I reckon you did,” he said. Then he smiled at me, a thing so rare it seemed as if his face would crack.

  I realized that the skirt of my Uniform was all twisted up on my legs, so I struggled to pull it down. Travis Word looked away and cleared his throat.

  Then we both started to say something at the same time, which was funny. Of course neither one of us could understand what the other was saying. Travis Word turned bright red, and I started laughing.

  “You go first,” I told him.

  “I was going to say, I reckon you will go on working over there at the Volunteer Café for Mr. Bean,” he said.

  Mr. Bean! I had clean forgot about Mr. Bean, but now the awful thought of him drove out whatever else it was that I had had it in mind to say. I closed my eyes again, I couldn’t hardly speak. “I don’t think so,” I said. Then I opened my eyes to find that Travis Word was looking at me like I was a puzzle to solve.

  “You don’t think so,” he repeated slowly. It was a question.

  I sat up and shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “I won’t work for Mr. Bean no more.”

  Travis Word nodded gravely, as if he respected my judgment. Of course, being a preacher in that community, he might have heard some things about Mr. Bean that I didn’t know. “Then you can’t live here no more either,” he said. He looked at me.

  “I guess not,” I said, and my heart sank, for I didn’t know what I would do then. I guessed I would have to call the Dutys after all.

  But Travis Word was s
till looking at me. “I want you to come home with me for a while.” He turned red again. “It’ll be all right, I live with my sister Helen, that is Helen Tate that was married to Thurman Tate, you know, the preacher, she is a widder woman now—” Still talking, he held out both his hands.

  I put my hands in his. Travis Word had huge hands, rough and hard from work. They closed around mine. He pulled me to my feet. Standing as tall as I could, I only came up to his shoulders.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  We walked straight out of that trailer right then, leaving the door wide open and the lights on. We went down the dark, sandy path like Indians, single file, Travis in the lead. I never looked back, just straight ahead as I followed his white shirt through the gloomy woods. In no time we were in his truck, a black pickup as neat as he was, with a worn black Bible on the seat. He gunned the engine and we set off. We rode all the way to his sister’s house without another word. I couldn’t imagine what was in his mind. As for me, I was still feeling shaky, and wondering what in the world his sister would think of me showing up thataway in the middle of the night.

  I need not have worried, though, She came to the door in her nightgown, with her long gray hair hanging down to her waist. “Travis?” she said, scarcely looking at me.

  “Helen, you have seen Gracie Shepherd at church with her father. Now he is gone, and she’ll be staying with us for a while.”

  This was all he had to say.

  “Come on, then,” Helen told me, and took me down the little hall to a spare bedroom with a chenille peacock bedspread on the bed. I used to see bedspreads like that for sale at some of the fruit stands where Daddy and I stopped on our long journey, and I had always admired them, especially the pink ones, which this one was. Things are looking up, I thought. “Bathroom’s at the end of the hall,” Helen said. Then she shut the door behind her. I kicked off my shoes and laid down on the bed, feeling those little ridges on the chenille. I liked how it felt. Before I knew it, I was instantly, deeply asleep.

  I woke up to find my clothes in two sacks just inside the door. I knew that Travis Word had gone back to the trailer and gathered them all up for me. I was so thankful for this, as it meant I would never have to see Mr. Bean again. But I was to see him, only once, a few years later, standing on the street over in Valleydale, at the Fourth of July parade. He wore a straw hat. Under it, his face was pasty gray and streaked with sweat, and I’ll swear he was fatter than ever. He looked like he couldn’t hardly walk. “Hello, Mr. Bean,” I said, but all he did was spit tobacco juice off to the side, and act like he didn’t know me.

  * * *

  THAT FIRST MORNING in Travis Word’s house, I lay in bed for an hour or so after waking, just to get my bearings, and just because I could. I felt easy in mind, for the first time in months and months. It was August, high summer. So the window in my room was up, allowing fresh air and sunshine to stream across the bed. The peacock on the bedspread fairly glowed in the sunlight, strutting his stuff. The filmy white curtains, like dreams, moved gently in the breeze. The bedroom contained a chest of drawers with a beautiful china tray on top of it, a vanity with fancy woodwork and a three-part wavy mirror, an old chest bound with iron strips, and a cane-bottom rocking chair. A bright hooked rug with every color of the rainbow in it was on the floor. Three pictures hung on the wall: Jesus walking in the garden, Jesus praying in the desert, and Jesus with the woman at the well. Everything in the room was as neat as a pin. When I scooted sideways on the bed to look out the window, I saw a row of hollyhocks growing right there, up against the house. Bees flew in and out of the rosy blossoms closest to the window. Beyond that, I could see a well with a little red roof, and a great big shade tree with two aluminum lawn chairs under it, and a white picket fence beyond. I was thinking how I would admire to sit in one of those chairs in the afternoon, and just pleasure myself. Or maybe do some sewing. I had never done any. I had never pictured myself before as a girl who would sit and sew. As I lay there, I could smell coffee and hear women’s voices talking somewhere in the house.

  Finally I got up. I was still wearing my waitress uniform, which was all soiled and wrinkled by then, as you might imagine. But somebody had taken my tennis shoes and socks off, and placed them so neat at the foot of the bed. I was sure it had been Helen Tate. I knew enough about Travis Word already to know that he would never do this.

  I opened the door and walked down the hall to the bathroom where I took a slow bath in the big claw-footed tub. I washed my long hair with the baby shampoo I found in the wooden cabinet over the sink. I puzzled over the shampoo, as there was no baby in the house. Later I would learn that Helen Tate used it herself on her own thin frizzy hair. I dried off on a big green towel which hung from a nail in the wall. This towel was hard and clean and smelled like sunshine. I could tell it had been dried outside on the line. I rubbed myself until my skin was red and tingling all over. I wrapped my hair up in the towel and squeezed. Then I wrapped the towel around myself and went back to the bedroom to dress, carrying my dirty uniform and underwear with me. I pulled things out of the sack until I found something clean: a long flowered skirt and an oxford-cloth shirt Mrs. Thoroughgood had given me. I parted my hair in the middle and spread it down over my shoulders to dry.

  I looked in the mirror and scarcely knew the girl I saw reflected there. She didn’t seem worried, or scared, or like she had terrible secrets to keep. She looked fine. She looked healthy and strong, and I winked at her as I left the bedroom, closing the door behind me. I felt like the events of the previous night had happened a hundred years before. I followed the smell of the coffee and the sound of the women’s voices down the hall and into the kitchen.

  Here I found Travis Word’s sisters, all three of them, ready to inspect me, though they acted real nice about it.

  “Well, looky here!” said Helen Tate. “I’ll swear, you clean up pretty good, don’t she, girls?”

  Minnie and Vonda Louise nodded. They were not what I would call “girls.” Helen, clearly the oldest, was in her sixties then. Her beloved husband, Thurman Tate—who had been the pastor of the Hi-Way Tabernacle for thirty years—had died a year before. She was still grieving for him, and would always be grieving for him. Helen dressed in black, with a little fluff of white lace at her throat. This morning her frizzy gray hair was plaited and wound up on her head. She had paper-white skin and sunken eyes like her brother Travis, eyes that seemed to see everything. “How you feeling now, Missy?” she asked, and I said, “Fine.” She nodded, pleased. Helen was a pert no-nonsense woman who expected things to go the way they should. She had biscuits warming in the oven for me, wrapped in a tea towel so they’d stay soft, and sausage gravy on the stove. I am a fool for sausage gravy. She got up and split the biscuits for me and poured the sausage gravy over them and gave me a fork. It was a delicious breakfast! I ate as though my life depended upon it, and decided to stay there as long as I could.

  “Well, she eats good, anyway,” Minnie said. This was the next-oldest sister, who had been married once many years before to a boy she scarcely remembered, who had died of encephalitis before he was twenty. She lived in a little brick house down the road, and liked everything just so. For many years she had worked at the county library, where her job was to put all the books back on the shelf in the right place according to the Dewey Decimal System. Minnie loved the Dewey Decimal System. She never read any of the books.

  Minnie and Vonda Louise—this was the third sister, Vonda Louise—did not get along very well, though they were all three united in their adoration of Travis and their dedication to the Hi-Way Tabernacle. If Minnie was brittle and bitter, Vonda Louise was too soft, too sad. A pale dumpling of a woman, she had never married, much to her dismay. She always imagined things, and thought that men were looking at her, and that people were against her. She lived in her own little brick house just down the road beyond Minnie’s. Both houses had been built by Th
urman Tate, who had been a bricklayer by trade—a trade which he had passed on to his beloved young brother-in-law. Helen and Thurman Tate had raised Travis, assisted by Minnie and Vonda Louise, their parents having died in a fiery car wreck when Travis was little. So no wonder all three sisters doted on Travis. They would do anything in the world for him.

  “Where’s Mr. Travis?” I asked when I had finished eating.

  “Gone to work, of course!” Minnie snapped. “Been gone since daybreak.”

  “Now, now, there is no need to bite her head off, Minnie . . .” Vonda Louise had one of those voices that just trail off, so that each sentence ends in confusion.

  All three sisters sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and looking at me. “Can I have some coffee, please?” I asked, and Helen got up to get me a cup and saucer. Then she poured the steaming coffee into my cup from the blue speckled pot on the stove. I put a lot of sugar and cream in it, and stirred it up with a silver spoon. Usually I didn’t even take sugar and cream. I was just doing it because it was there. I had gone for so long without anything much that everything in that house struck me as a miracle.

  “God works in mysterious ways,” Helen Tate offered as she sat back down.

  “It is not for us to understand.” Minnie pursed her lips. “It is not for us to say.”

  “The right hand don’t know what the left hand doeth,” chimed in Vonda Louise in her trembling voice, and we all looked at her.

  “Just hush, you stupid fool,” said Minnie.

  “Now girls, now girls,” Helen said.

  I got so tickled at them, I had to smile.

  “Pretty little thing, ain’t she?” Minnie said.

  “Why yes, yes she is,” Helen Tate agreed. The three of them sat there sipping coffee and looking me over with those dark eyes in a way I would come to think of as the Word Look.

  I grew uncomfortable. “Where is Mr. Travis working?” I asked, just to make conversation.