by Lee Smith
I was surprised and a little put-out to see that Garnet Keen had written “Glory to God Amen” in silver icing around the side of the bottom layer, instead of “Travis and Gracie in Love,” which she had said she was going to write. Helen saw me looking at it, and whispered to me that she and Minnie had asked Garnet to put this, since the other was too undignified for a preacher. I realized she was right. Then Travis and I had to pose our hands together on the knife just so, while Lodge Hibbitts took a close-up picture of them, and then he took another one of me feeding the first piece of cake to Travis, which was real funny as I got icing all over his long chin. He was laughing too hard to chew. Several people remarked on this, on how nice it was to see Preacher Travis have a good time for once, and I believe that the sight of his happiness softened up some of those old biddies who had continued to take a dim view of me and of our marriage. Then everybody ate some cake and drank some punch, and Travis announced that the grand sum of one hundred and thirty-four dollars had been contributed to the Tabernacle in our honor. He had asked that people make a contribution to the church instead of giving us a wedding gift.
Standing right in front of the mostly eaten wedding cake, Travis stretched out his long arms to everybody. “I thank you!” he told one and all. “From the bottom of my heart, I thank you. This is the happiest day of my life.” Nobody who saw him could doubt that this was true. I felt a sharp poke in the ribs just then, and Minnie whispered in my ear, “Say something.” I knew I had to.
I stepped forward to stand with Travis, and said, “Thank you too,” which sounded so funny that I got embarrassed, but it made everybody laugh. Then it was time to throw the bouquet, which was homemade, out of mistletoe and evergreens. In the end I could not pick among the hopeful old maids and sad widows in the church, and tossed it to the oldest Hibbitts girl, a trashy blonde.
Then we left, Travis and me, without changing clothes, since there was no place to change. People threw rice all over us as we ran out the door to his truck. It was freezing cold outside. I grabbed up my coat from the seat and wrapped it around myself. Travis turned on the heater. I scooted over real close to him, like we were teenagers. Well, I was a teenager, but I had completely forgotten this fact. For I was also a married woman, and had spoken my first words in public as the preacher’s wife. Just as Travis turned onto the main road it started to snow, big lacy flakes that stuck on the windshield before the wipers swept them away.
“There ain’t no two of them snowflakes alike in the whole world,” Travis said. “Think on that.”
I thought on it. The snowflakes were so perfect that they reminded me of the ones we learned to make in grade school, where you would fold the construction paper just so and cut it, then unfold it slowly, and presto! you were dazzled.
“It all goes to show you the infinite variety of God,” said Travis, who could find Him in anything.
I agreed. Then I told him what Ruth Duty had told me just before we left, and how much it had pleased me. She’d said, “Oh Gracie, your mama would be so proud of you! You know she would just be so happy to see this day!”
And as we rode along after the wedding with all those different snowflakes rushing at us from the close gray sky, I suddenly felt Mama’s presence right there in the truck with us, I felt her warm kiss on my cheek as real as the stream of air from the heater, and I heard her soft voice say, “I love you, honey,” right in my ear.
* * *
“WHERE ARE WE going?” I finally thought to ask. I knew we were not going to have a real honeymoon, as it would cost too much, but I had assumed that we would be going somewhere special for a night anyway, and had stuck a little traveling bag behind the seat accordingly. I had not asked exactly where we were going, since I would rather be surprised, but I secretly hoped it was Knoxville, which was the closest real city. All my hopes were pinned on Knoxville.
“Well,” Travis said, “when I got to thinking about it, it just seemed to me like a sinful waste of money to spend twenty dollars on a motel room when we have got our own bed at home, where the price is right.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You mean we are not going noplace?” I asked. “Then what are you driving way out here for?” He had passed the road that led back home, and we were now on Highway 11, headed east.
“I thought we’d just drive around awhile,” Travis said. “Give folks a chance to get back home, get settled down. Anyway, looky here at all this snow. Might be God is trying to tell us to go home anyway.”
“It’s not sticking,” I said, which was true.
“What?” Travis turned his head to look at me.
“It’s not sticking,” I said, too loud. “It isn’t supposed to stick. You didn’t say a thing about it this morning when you read the paper.”
“That’s true enough,” Travis said. Travis loved the weather report, he read it out loud to me and Helen every morning, and then the sisters would all talk about it for the rest of the day, deciding whether or not it had been right, or how far off it was. All of a sudden I realized how much I hated this, and then I was crying.
“Why, Missy, what’s the matter?” Travis reached over and took my hand, which helped some, but I couldn’t quit crying.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Travis Word did not have a clue what to do with a crying girl. First he cleared his throat a lot, and then he started patting my thigh like I was a dog. “There, there,” he said.
I moved as far away from him on the seat as I could get. I put my hot face up against the cold glass of the window and kept on crying.
“Now, Missy,” he finally said, “you are going to have to tell your old preacher man here what is the matter.”
“Nothing,” I managed to say.
“It don’t look like ‘nothing’ to me,” Travis allowed.
“Oh, it’s just—well, I don’t know. It’s nothing, honest. I am just wore-out, is all. I am feeling kindly nervous.”
At this, Travis brightened up. “Why I guess it’s just a bad case of the nerves, then!” he said, as if this explained everything.
“Quit patting me!” I snapped, surprising myself. I have never been able to act like I wanted to, in all my life. It’s like the Devil gets into me sometimes.
“What, honey?”
“Quit patting me,” I said again. At this he withdrew his hand, and we rode along in silence through the falling snow. But try as I might, I could not stop crying.
Still Travis did not turn back toward home, and I could tell he was thinking hard. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Missy, I have done changed my mind. We will drive over there and spend the night in Knoxville. Is that what you want to do? I should of thought this out better, I can see that. I’m sorry. You’re just a girl, and sometimes I forget.”
“Oh, Travis!” I had to hug him then, though his sweetness made me feel unworthy. I was unworthy. But I snuggled up close for the rest of the ride to Knoxville. It quit snowing and got dark and the stars came out.
“See?” I poked him in the side. “God wanted you to go to Knoxville after all.”
We stopped once at a Shell Oil station for gas and took a lot of ribbing about being just married, because somebody had put a little note on the gas cap that told them, and also I still had my wedding dress on and I had to get out and go to the ladies’ room. “Hey, honey,” one of the gas station boys called to me as I hurried back to the truck with my coat wrapped up tight around me. “Excuse me, Miss, but can he really get it up? That old goat? Don’t he have to get some help?” Then they all just about died laughing.
“Listen here,” I said, whirling to face them, “he just wears me out, if you want to know!” I gave them a wink and a big happy grin, and they set up a cheer, and I jumped in the truck.
“What was all that about?” Travis asked, and I said, “Nothing, sugar,” scooting closer.
I was so excited when we pulled up
at the Holiday Inn.
“You can always trust a Holiday Inn,” Travis told me. Now he was acting like he stayed at motels all the time and knew all about them. “You stay right here, honey.” He patted my knee and went inside, and this time, I didn’t mind being patted. But he was back out in a minute, his face a study. He walked around to my side of the truck and stood there drumming his long fingers on the window, lost in thought. I rolled the window down. “What is it now?” I asked.
“It costs moren I thought,” he said.
“Why, how much is it?” I asked.
“Moren we’ve got.” Travis did not believe in checking accounts, so I understood right away how this could be a problem.
“Wait a minute, Travis!” I thought of something. “It’s all right, we’ve got a hundred and thirty-four dollars.”
He looked blank.
“In cash. Back there in that sack. From the church, remember?”
“Oh Missy,” Travis said. “That money belongs to the Lord.”
“Well, I don’t see why we can’t borrow some of it,” I said, “and pay the Lord back later.”
Travis stood stock-still as cars came and went in the parking lot, and people passed back and forth through the thick glass doors. I could see a huge gold-foil Christmas tree just inside the lobby, glittering with lights.
He slapped his hand against the side of the truck and laughed out loud. “Hand it over, then,” he said, and I fished around behind the seat until I found the sack, heavy with coins.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Travis said. “I’ve got to take this in there so I can see to count out the money.” He leaned in the window to kiss me quick on the lips and then was gone, striding across the parking lot on legs as long and black as stovepipes.
Now, I can’t imagine what they thought as he counted out his dollars and change at the desk—twenty-two dollars and seventy-five cents, paid for in cash by God.
But our room was beautiful, all done up in shades of beige and blue and green, with the prettiest picture of a flower arrangement hanging over the bed. Travis put down my bag—he didn’t have one—and peered all around, looking nervous. “Well, let’s go eat,” he said loudly, adding that the dining room closed in two hours. He said that he would wait for me outside while I changed my clothes, that he needed to lock up the truck anyway and call Helen from the pay phone.
I felt oddly shy walking into the restaurant with Travis a little while later, dressed in my gray pleated skirt and gray sweater with its detachable pearl collar that I had been so proud of—now the pearl collar seemed too girlish to me, and my stacked heels hurt my feet. The glamorous young hostess wore a ton of makeup. She seated us at a table with a pink tablecloth and a candle burning softly in a hurricane lamp. “Would you like something from the bar to start with?” she asked.
“No ma’am,” Travis said in such a definite way that she scurried off and came right back with menus for us to order from. I thought Travis should not call her “ma’am,” as she was about twenty years younger than he was—nearer to my age! and how I wished I could wear some of that makeup!—but I was not about to say this. I would not have hurt his feelings for the world. He moved his lips as he read the menu straight through to himself, and then he smiled at me. “Order anything you want,” he said. “This un is on the Lord too.”
I ordered a veal cutlet with tomato sauce. Travis ordered the T-bone steak, well-done, with a baked potato. “What do you want to drink?” our waitress said, her pencil poised above her pad. She was about forty years old, skinny and disappointed-looking. It was not all that long before that I had been a waitress myself, and now I was already a wife. “Sweet milk,” I said. She wrote it down. When our order came, we ate every bite, and then we both had brownie a la mode for dessert. I enjoyed just sitting in the pink dining room looking around at all the other people while Travis drank his coffee. A TV was on in the bar area, but they had soft piano music piped into the dining room. I remember they played “Unchained Melody,” which I have always loved, and I thought to myself, Now that will be our song. I will always remember this moment, and that will be our song.
When we got back to our room, Travis asked me to please excuse him while he went in the bathroom. I just knew he would undress in there too, that he would not want to undress in front of me, so while he had the door closed, I went ahead and took off my clothes and put on the white nylon nightgown which Helen had bought for me at J. C. Penney’s in Greeneville. I let my hair down. I was standing by the bed when he came out of the bathroom in his underwear, with his pants and his shirt hung up neat on a coat hanger. I had wondered about his burn scars, but they were not bad at all, just a white tracing like a spider web on his chest and shoulders. He looked at me. “Oh, Missy, Missy,” he said like he was in terrible pain. He let the coat hanger fall to the floor as he came to me in one bound, and he loved me up even better than I had bragged to those boys at the gas station. It was like a great dam had given way in his soul. He could not get enough, nor do enough. By the time we were both laying flat on our backs, sweaty and exhausted, it was midnight.
“Why, look,” I said, pointing to the clock, “it’s already Sunday.”
At that the most awful change came over Travis Word. His very face turned gray and his eyes rolled back in his head, and he sat straight up, with his black hair sticking out from his head in every direction. Before I knew it, he was down on his knees by the bed.
“Pray, Missy, pray!” he begged me.
“Why Travis, what in the world are you doing?” Though a chill went through my heart, I tried to keep things light. But his eyes were closed and his lips were already moving. “Come to Jesus, come to Jesus,” he implored, and nothing would satisfy him but for me to get down then and there on my knees too, both of us buck naked, as he quoted from Romans about our sinful passions working in our members to bear fruit for death. He was attempting to purify us, he would explain, for “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” He was trying to bring us back. It seemed like this was going to take him all night long, and I was going to freeze to death down there on the floor while he did it. Finally I climbed up in the bed by myself, making as little movement as I could, and lay there on my side watching him pray, until at last he finished and climbed up into the bed and turned his back to me without a word and fell instantly, deeply, asleep, snoring like a freight train. I had not known that he snored. Maybe it was the snoring, or maybe it was only that so much had happened to me that day, but I could not fall asleep, for the life of me. I was strung as tight as a guy wire. I got up and put on my coat and my shoes, and went out to stand on the balcony in the chilly air. The Holiday Inn was on a hill, so that I could look down upon the highway and beyond it, at the whole city of Knoxville spread out like a big sea of twinkling lights which seemed very, very far away.
* * *
OUR FIRST CHILD was born a year later, to general rejoicing. I don’t think any young bride was ever watched more closely for signs of pregnancy, or treated better during those nine special months—which just flew past, it seemed like. Travis and his sisters spoiled me to death. At the beginning I felt real bad, with terrible morning sickness. I had to eat saltine crackers and drink flat ginger ale the minute I woke up, to keep from vomiting. Travis would hand me the crackers one by one, and hold the ginger ale up to my lips in a jelly glass.
“This is like Communion, isn’t it?” I asked once just to tease him, but right away he turned so serious that I was sorry I’d spoken.
“Now, Missy, we are not to make a mockery of the Lord in any way, not even of the practices of others that we don’t believe in,” he said, for we did not take Communion at the Tabernacle of course. I have never actually taken Communion in my life, I think it is a Catholic thing.
“It was just a joke,” I said, still
flat on my back.
“The worship of God is not something to joke about,” Travis intoned, but I said, “Come here,” and pulled him to me and kissed the deep sad wrinkles on his brow until he smiled at me. That early in the marriage, I could do this, though later it would get harder and harder to lift the gloom which settled on him so easy and stayed so long.
During the first three months, all I could stand to eat was chicken noodle soup and Pine State ice cream, which Helen was glad to fix for me. The sisters wouldn’t let me lift a hand, which was okay with me since I felt so bad. Minnie brought me stacks of books from the public library to read, whatever I asked for, whatever new came in. The sisters viewed my reading as a harmless hobby, something to keep me occupied while the baby grew inside me. There was certainly no point in me making baby clothes or little blankets, since Helen and Vonda Louise were already hard at work on this, plus about half the women of the Tabernacle. So I got to sit up in bed drinking Coca-Colas and reading Butterfield 8 and Gone With the Wind and The View from Pompey’s Head and Mandingo and other books that would surely have shocked them if they’d known what went on between those covers. But I also read the Bible and The Upper Room, especially when Travis was in the house, which was not often. With his sisters right there to take care of me, he was free to minister to his flock with total dedication, as he had before our marriage. He was involved in every phase of their lives. After I burst into tears because he spent more time sitting with Lucius Rogers’s dying mother than he did with me, he improved a little bit, but not much.
As the months passed, I felt better, though, and was able to dress and go over to the Tabernacle myself, though I never did take on all the regular duties of a preacher’s wife. This was partly because I got pregnant right away and had such a hard pregnancy that nobody expected me to do much during it, and then they got used to me not doing much, but also because Helen Tate had always filled that role herself and continued to, taking a casserole to whoever was sick, a ham in the case of death. I got out of all that. Now I wonder if this was such a good thing or not. For if I had been more involved in the day-to-day life of the Tabernacle, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so idle and restless. I don’t know. I do know that there has never been a girl that was treated better in all this world than I was, this is true. I went through that pregnancy like a bird in a nest, protected and spoiled and loved. Yes, loved! There lies the hurt of it. And I hate myself still for what I would do to that little circle of loving, trusting faces—Helen and Minnie and Vonda Louise, and most of all, Travis.
