by Lee Smith
We all wore white shirts and white shorts to church. After church we had a special Sunday lunch, with fried chicken and ice cream. “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” we’d shout, banging on the tables before they brought it out. (In order to have any, you had to turn in an Ice Cream Letter — to your parents — as you came in the door.)
On Sunday nights, we all climbed the hill behind the dining hall for vespers. We sat on our ponchos looking down on the camp as the sun set, and sang, “Day Is Done.” We bowed our heads in silent prayer. Then, after about ten minutes of this, one of the junior counselors played “Taps” on the bugle. She played it every night at lights out too. I much admired the bugler’s jaunty, boyish stance. I had already resolved to take up the bugle, first thing, when I got back home.
And speaking of home, I’d barely thought of it since arriving at Camp Alleghany. I was entirely too busy. I guess that was the idea. Still, every now and then in a quiet moment — during silent prayer at vespers, for instance; or rest hour after lunch, when we usually played Go Fish or some other card game, but sometimes, sometimes I just lay on my cot and thought about things; or at night, after “Taps,” when I’d lie looking up at the rafters before I fell asleep — in those quiet moments, I did think of home, and of my salvation. I didn’t have as much time as I needed, there at camp, to pray without ceasing. Besides, I was often too tired to do it. Sometimes I just forgot. To pray without ceasing requires either a solitary life or a life of invisibility such as I had led within my family for the past year.
What about my family, anyway? Did I miss them? Not a bit. I could scarcely recall what they looked like. Mama wrote that Paul was back home already and had a job at the snack bar at the country club. Ashley was in France. Daddy was still in Baltimore, where he would probably stay for six more months. Mama was very busy helping Aunt Liddie plan her wedding, which I would be in. I would wear an aqua dress and dyed-to-match heels. I read Mama’s letter curiously, several times. I felt like I had to translate it, like it was written in a foreign language. I folded this letter up and placed it in the top tray of my trunk, where I would find it years later. Right then, I didn’t have time to think about my family. I was too busy doing everything I was supposed to, so that I might be picked as Camp Spirit. (Everybody agreed that the current Camp Spirit, Jeannie Darling from Florida, was a stuck-up bitch who didn’t deserve it at all.) At the last campfire of First Session, I had high hopes that I might replace her. We started out by singing all the camp songs, first the funny ones such as “I came on the train and arrived in the rain, my trunk came a week later on.” Each “old” counselor had a song composed in her honor, and we sang them all. It took forever. As we finally sang the Camp Spirit song, my heart started beating like crazy.
But it was not to be. No, it was Jeanette Peterson, a skinny boring redhead from Margaret Applewhite’s cabin. I started crying but nobody knew why, because by then everybody else was crying too, and we all continued to cry as we sang all the sad camp songs about loyalty and friendships and candle flames. This last campfire was also Friendship Night. We had made little birchbark boats that afternoon, and traded them with our best friends. At the end of the campfire, the counselors passed out short white candles, which we lit and carried down to the river in solemn procession. Then we placed the candles in our little boats and set them in the water, singing our hearts out as the flotilla of candles entered the current and moved slowly down the dark river and out of sight around the bend. I clung to my New Best Friend and cried. This was Shelley Williams from Leesburg, Virginia, with a freckled, heart-shaped face and a pixie haircut, who talked a mile a minute all the time. It was even possible that Shelley Williams had read more books than I had, unlike my Old Best Friend Tammy back at home in Alabama, who had not read any books at all, and did not intend to. Plus, Shelley Williams owned a pony and a pony cart. She had shown me a picture of herself at home in Leesburg, driving her pony cart. Her house, in the background, looked like Mount Vernon. I was heartbroken when she left, the morning after Friendship Night.
It rained that morning, a cold drizzle that continued without letup for the next two days. About three-quarters of the campers left after First Session, including everybody I liked. Margaret Applewhite stayed. My last vision of the departing campers was a rainy blur of waving hands as the big yellow buses pulled out, headed for the train station and the airport. All the girls were singing at the top of their lungs, and their voices seemed to linger in the air long after they were gone. Then came a day and a half of waiting around for the Second Session campers to arrive, a day and a half in which nobody talked to me much, and the counselors were busy doing things like counting the rifle shells. So I became invisible again, free to wander about in the rain, free to pray without ceasing.
Finally the new campers arrived, and I brightened somewhat at the chance to be an Old Girl, to show the others the ropes and teach them the words to the songs. My New Best Friend was Anne Roper, from Lexington, Kentucky. She wasn’t as good as Shelley, but she was the best I could do, I felt, considering what I had to pick from. Anne Roper was okay.
But my new counselor was very weird. She read aloud to us each day at rest hour from a big book called The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Without asking our parents, she pierced all our ears. Even this ear piercing did not bring my spirits up to the level of First Session, however. For one thing, it never stopped raining. It rained and rained and rained. First we couldn’t go swimming — the river was too high, too cold, too fast. We couldn’t go canoeing either. The tennis courts looked like lakes. The horses, along with the riding counselors, stayed in their barn. About all we could do was arts and crafts and Skits, which got old fast. Lots of girls got homesick. They cried during “Taps.”
I cried then and at other odd times too, such as when I walked up to breakfast through the constant mist that came up now from the river, or at church. I was widely thought to be homesick. To cheer me up, my weird counselor gave me a special pair of her own earrings, little silver hoops with turquoise chips in them, made by Navahos.
Then I got bronchitis. I developed a deep, thousand-year-old Little Match Girl cough that started way down in my knees. Because of this cough, I was allowed to call my mother, and to my surprise, I found myself asking to come home. But Mama said no. She said, “We always finish what we start, Karen.”
So that was that. I was taken into town for a penicillin shot, and started getting better. The sun came out too.
But because I still had a bad cough, I did not have to participate in the all-camp Game Day held during the third week of Second Session. I was free to lounge in my upper bunk and read the rest of The Fountainhead, which I did. By then I had read way ahead of my counselor. I could hear the screams and yells of the girls out on the playing fields, but vaguely, far away. Then I heard them all singing, from farther up the hill, and I knew they had gone into Assembly to give out the awards. I knew I was probably expected to show up at Assembly, too, but somehow I just couldn’t summon up the energy. I didn’t care who got the awards. I didn’t care which team won — the Green or the Gold, it was all the same to me — or which cabin won the ongoing competition among cabins. I didn’t even care who was Camp Spirit. Instead I lolled on my upper bunk and looked at the turning dust in a ray of light that came in through a chink in the cabin. I coughed. I felt that I would die soon.
This is when it happened.
This is when it always happens, I imagine — when you least expect it, when you are least prepared.
Suddenly, as I stared at the ray of sunshine, it intensified, growing brighter and brighter until the whole cabin was a blaze of light. I sat right up, as straight as I could. I crossed my legs. I knew I was waiting for something. I knew something was going to happen. I could barely breathe. My heart pounded so hard I feared it might jump right out of my chest and land on the cabin floor. I don’t know how long I sat there like that, waiting.
“Karen,” He said.
H
is voice filled the cabin.
I knew immediately who it was. No question. For one thing, there were no men at Camp Alleghany except for Mr. Grizzard, who cleaned out the barn, and Jeffrey Long, who had a high, reedy voice.
This voice was deep, resonant, full of power.
“Yes, Lord?” I said.
He did not speak again. But as I sat there on my upper bunk I was filled with His presence, and I knew what I must do.
I jumped down from my bunk, washed my face and brushed my teeth at the sink in the corner, tucked in my shirt, and ran up the hill to the assembly hall. I did not cough. I burst right in through the big double doors at the front and elbowed old Mrs. Beemer aside as she read out the results of the archery meet to the rows of girls in their folding chairs.
Mrs. Beemer took one look at me and shut her mouth.
I opened my mouth, closed my eyes, and started speaking in Tongues of Fire.
I came to in the infirmary, surrounded by the camp nurse, the doctor from town, the old lady who owned the camp, the Episcopal chaplain, my own counselor, and several other people I didn’t even know. I smiled at them all. I felt great, but they made me stay in the infirmary for two more days to make sure I had gotten over it. During this time I was given red Jell-O and Cokes, and the nurse took my temperature every four hours. The chaplain talked to me for a long time. He was a tall, quiet man with wispy white hair that stood out around his head. I got to talk to my mother on the telephone again, and this time she promised me a kitten if I would stay until the end of camp. I had always, always wanted a kitten, but I had never been allowed to have one because it would get hair on the upholstery and also because Ashley was allergic to cats.
“What about Ashley?” I asked.
“Never you mind,” Mama said.
So it was decided. I would stay until the end of camp, and Mama would buy me a kitten.
I got out of the infirmary the next day and went back to my cabin, where everybody treated me with a lot of deference and respect for the rest of Second Session, choosing me first for softball, letting me star in Skits. And at the next-to-last campfire, I was named Camp Spirit. I got to run forward, scream and cry, but it was not as good as it would have been if it had happened First Session. It was an anticlimax. Still, I did get to light the very last campfire, the Friendship Night campfire, with my special giant match and say ceremoniously:
Kneel always when you light a fire,
Kneel reverently,
And thankful be
For God’s unfailing majesty.
Then everybody sang the Camp Spirit song. By now, I was getting really tired of singing. Then Anne Roper and I sailed each other’s little birchbark boats off into the night, our candles guttering wildly as they rounded the bend.
All the way home on the train the next day, I pretended to be asleep while I prayed without ceasing that nobody back home would find out I had spoken in tongues of fire. For now it seemed to me an exalted and private and scary thing, and somehow I knew it was not over yet. I felt quite sure that I had been singled out for some terrible, holy mission. Perhaps I would even have to die, like Joan of Arc. As the train rolled south through Virginia on that beautiful August day, I felt myself moving inexorably toward my Destiny, toward some last act of my own Skit, which was yet to be played out.
THE MINUTE I WALKED onto the concrete at the country club pool, I knew that Margaret Applewhite (who had flown home) had told everybody. Dennis Jones took one look at me, threw back his head, and began to gurgle wildly, clutching at his stomach. Tommy Martin ran out on the low board, screamed in gibberish, and then flung himself into the water. Even I had to laugh at him. But Paul and his friends teased me in a more sophisticated manner. “Hey, Karen,” one of them might say, clutching his arm, “I’ve got a real bad tennis elbow here, do you think you can heal it for me?”
I was famous all over town, I sort of enjoyed it. I began to feel popular and cute, like the girls on American Bandstand.
But the kitten was a disaster. Mama drove me out in the county one afternoon in her white Cadillac to pick it out of a litter that the laundry lady’s cat had had. The kittens were all so tiny that it was hard to pick — little mewling, squirming things, still blind. Drying sheets billowed all about them, on rows of clotheslines. “I want that one,” I said, picking the smallest, a teeny little orange ball. I named him Sandy. I got to keep Sandy in a shoe box in my room, then in a basket in my room. But as time passed (Ashley came home from Europe, Paul went back to W&L), it became clear to me that there was something terribly wrong with Sandy. Sandy mewed too much, not a sweet mewing, but a little howl like a lost soul. He never purred. He wouldn’t grow right either, even though I fed him half-and-half. He stayed little and jerky. He didn’t act like a cat. One time I asked my mother, “Are you sure Sandy is a regular cat?” and she frowned at me and said, “Well, of course he is, what’s the matter with you, Karen?” but I was not so sure. Sandy startled too easily. Sometimes he would leap straight up in the air, land on all four feet, and just stand there quivering, for no good reason at all. While I was watching him do this one day, it came to me.
Sandy was a Holy Cat. He was possessed by the spirit, as I had been. I put his basket in the laundry room. I was fitted for my aqua semi formal dress, and wore it in Aunt Liddie’s wedding. Everybody said I looked grown up and beautiful. I got to wear a corsage. I got to drink champagne. We had a preschool meeting of the Sub-Deb Club, and I was elected secretary. I kept trying to call Tammy, from pay phones downtown and the phone out at the country club, so Mama wouldn’t know, but her number was still out of order. Tammy never called me.
Then Ashley invited me to go to the drive-in movie with her and her friends, just before she left for Sweet Briar. The movie was All That Heaven Allows, which I found incredibly moving, but Ashley and her friends smoked cigarettes and giggled through the whole thing. They couldn’t be serious for five minutes. But they were being real nice to me, so I volunteered to go to the snack bar for them the second or third time they wanted more popcorn. On the way back from the snack bar, in the window of a red Thunderbird with yellow flames painted on its hood, I saw Tammy’s face.
I didn’t hesitate for a minute. I was so glad to see her! “Tammy!” I screamed. The position of My Best Friend was, of course, vacant. I ran right over to the Thunderbird, shifted all the popcorn boxes over to my left hand, and flung open the door. And sure enough, there was Tammy, with the whole top of her sundress down. It all happened in an instant. I saw a boy’s dark hair, but not his face — his head was in her lap.
Tammy’s breasts loomed up out of the darkness at me. They were perfectly round and white, like tennis balls. But it seemed to me that they were too high up to look good. They were too close to her chin.
Clearly, Tammy was Petting. And in a flash I remember what Mama had told me about Petting, that
a nice girl does not Pet. It is cruel to the boy to allow him to Pet, because he has no control over himself. He is just a boy. It is all up to the girl. If she allows the boy to Pet her, then he will become excited, and if he cannot find relief, then the poison will all back up into his organs, causing pain and sometimes death.
I slammed the car door. I fled back to Ashley and her friends, spilling popcorn everyplace as I went.
On the screen, Rock Hudson had been Petting too. Now we got a close-up of his rugged cleft chin. “Give me one of those cigarettes,” I said to Ashley, and without batting an eye, she did. After three tries, I got it lit. It tasted great.
The next day, Ashley left for Sweet Briar, and soon after that, my school started too. Whenever I passed Tammy in the hall, we said hello, but did not linger in conversation. I was put in the Gifted and Talented group for English and French. I decided to go out for JV cheerleader. I practiced and practiced and practiced. Then, one day in early September, my cat Sandy — after screaming out and leaping straight up in the air — ran out into the street in front of our house and was immediately hit by a Merita bre
ad truck.
I knew it was suicide.
I buried him in the backyard, in a box from Rich’s department store, along with Ashley’s scarab bracelet, which I had stolen sometime earlier. She wondered for years whatever happened to that bracelet. It was her favorite.
I remember how relieved I felt when I had smoothed the final shovelful of dirt over Sandy’s grave. Somehow, I knew, the last of my holiness, of my chosenness, went with him. Now I wouldn’t have to die. Now my daddy would get well, I would make cheerleader, and go to college. Now I could grow up, get breasts, and have babies. Since then, all these things have happened. But there are moments yet, moments when in the midst of life a silence falls, and in these moments I catch myself still listening for that voice. “Karen,” He will say, and I’ll say, “Yes, Lord. Yes.”
Fried Chicken
Here comes the murderer’s mother, Mrs. Polly Pegram. She walks to Jitney Jungle every other day, then carries her paper bag of groceries home. When the boy at Jitney Jungle says “Paper or plastic, ma’am?” as if he doesn’t already know the answer, as if he doesn’t know who she is, she always says “Paper, please,” and she always walks the same way home, past the tanning salon, past Lil’s Beauty, past the Baptist church with its rosebushes blooming out front and its green Astroturf entrance and hymns floating out its open windows. She used to be a Baptist, years back. She used to bring Leonard here for Sunday school. He could sing like an angel, as a boy. Now he is forty-one years old.
Leonard used to drive Mrs. Pegram everywhere, so she never bothered to get her driver’s license, she never needed it. She doesn’t need it now, though Miss Bright — this is the social worker who won’t leave her alone — keeps suggesting it. It’s true that Leonard’s red car is just sitting out there in the driveway. Sometimes when she’s working in her garden, she’ll rinse it off with the hose. But if she did learn to drive it, where in the world would she go? Miss Bright swears that the driving instructor from the high school will drive right up to Mrs. Pegram’s door to pick her up for her lessons. He will ring her doorbell, she’ll come out, and off they’ll go in the special car together.
