Saving Grace Read online

  But Daddy appeared beatified, gazing around at the smoking skeleton of the car and the thick green woods and the blooming black-eyed Susans beside the road as if he had never seen such sights in his whole life. Bumblebees droned and yellow butterflies fluttered around us.

  Carlton Duty cleared his throat. He looked at his wife. “Well,” he said, “seeing as how things are, I believe I might be able to help you out. You-uns stay right here, and I’ll be back directly.”

  “God be with you,” Daddy told him.

  They climbed back in the truck and rattled off down the road with the dogs all barking at once. Mrs. Ruth Duty waved out the window. We sat there and watched them go until there was nothing left of them at all except a puff of dust that hung in the hot, still air above the rutted road.

  Then Joe Allen came crashing through the underbrush and reported that he had found a spring, and Evelyn and Billie Jean and I started off down the steep hill after him. Down, down, down we went until we came to a deep shady spot where the spring bubbled up between the mossy rocks like a fountain. We cupped our hands and drank like we were dying of thirst, like it was our last chance for water in the world. The spring water was cool and sweet, delicious. Finally I quit drinking and raised my dripping chin and looked back up the mountain.

  And there stood Daddy, black against the sun. His white shirt and his white hair appeared to be shooting off rays of light behind his dark form. I did not wave or holler at him. I started playing with Joe Allen and Evelyn and Billie Jean. We built a dam, and made a little lake, and sailed leaf-boats in it. The whole time we played, I knew that Daddy was watching over us.

  * * *

  THROUGH THE MEDIUM of Carlton Duty, God provided us with a completely furnished four-room house on Scrabble Creek, the nicest place we ever lived. This house was actually owned by a woman named Elvie Mayhew, who had left it for good the minute her husband, Lester Mayhew, died one night while they were having supper, a year before our arrival. They had been eating green beans and mashed potatoes, now dried forever to the plates still on the table. Mama had to throw these plates out, and also the pots on the stove. Daddy cut back the trumpet vine that had grown in through the open kitchen window, and swept out the chicken droppings on the floors. The chickens themselves were long gone, probably eaten up by animals, Daddy said. The well was choked by ivy. We boiled the linens in a big iron pot on a wood fire outside the house, and beat out the corn-shuck mattresses in the sun.

  Carlton Duty brought a scythe to cut the waist-high weeds in the yard and clear a path to the toilet. Mama was so worried that Elvie Mayhew might come back, but everybody said she had lost her mind and been sent to live with her sister in Ohio. Finally Mama just quit worrying and delighted in the house, which had everything—an oilcloth-covered table and four chairs in the kitchen, a tufted horsehair sofa and a rocking chair and a faded velvet easy chair in the sitting room, plus a heatstove, one bedroom for Mama and Daddy and Troy Lee, then a great big bedroom for us kids.

  The sitting room, kitchen, and Mama and Daddy’s bedroom were built in a row, and then our bedroom went out at the side, so that the house was shaped like an upside-down L. A porch ran around the inside of the L. Most every night we’d sit out there till it got pure dark, reading the Bible out loud to Daddy, one after the other.

  Of course he wouldn’t let us read anything except the Bible; he said that was all we needed to read. We were not even allowed to read the newspaper, as the only news we needed to know was the good news of the Gospel, and anything else would distract us from it. One time Daddy caught Evelyn with a love magazine and beat her with his belt until her back was covered with welts. Daddy believed in “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” and practiced this for our own good.

  Anyway, we had climbing red roses on the porch rail, and two pictures hanging up on the walls—one of a vase full of flowers, in the sitting room, and the other of an Indian brave in a canoe, paddling through a swamp, on the wall in our bedroom. I thought Daddy would make us take these down, but he didn’t. He said something about it when we first moved in, but then he appeared to forget them. Daddy was so busy following the plan of God that he didn’t pay us much mind in general as we settled into the only real house we would ever have, that house which always comes into my mind along with the happy sound of Scrabble Creek.

  * * *

  THE MOUNTAIN WAS steep beside our house, and the creek proceeded down it in a line of little waterfalls all the way to the road. Each waterfall had its own pool, some of them big enough to fish in, or to swim in when it got real hot. We couldn’t really swim, of course, at least us girls couldn’t. We were not allowed to learn how, and we had to keep our skirts and blouses on even when we waded. Holiness girls have to stay covered up. Still, it was exciting. A great thrill would shoot through me whenever I held my nose and dunked myself all the way down under the cold rushing stream, even though Mama had said not to. But she didn’t really seem to mind when Daddy was gone and it was sunny so our clothes could dry out.

  Mama was that way about a lot of things when Daddy was gone off preaching. We got to play more, and even dress up sometimes in the clothes we had found in the Mayhews’ attic. For me and Evelyn and Billie Jean, who had always lived in a single dress apiece and passed those down from one to another, this attic was a treasure trove. There was even an old yellow wedding dress, which Evelyn soon found and put on. This was when I first realized that Evelyn was beautiful. Though she was only eleven at the time, she held herself erect in that dress and walked in a way I’d never seen her walk before. I helped her pick a bouquet of blue flowers that grew by the creek, wild phlox I think it was, and then we called Mama to come and watch Evelyn hold her bouquet in front of her and walk down the length of the porch.

  To our surprise, Mama covered her face with her hands and started crying as if her heart would break. We ran over to her, me and Evelyn and Billie Jean, but she would not be comforted. “Oh me,” she sobbed. “I just want you girls to be happy.” Then she sat down on the porch step, and cried and cried and cried.

  “Take it off,” Mama finally said to Evelyn, and Evelyn, scared to death, did so that very minute, to stand thin and white in her shift on the sagging porch, our old Evelyn again.

  “Don’t you never let me see you in such as that,” Mama said. “You know what your daddy would think. I’ve got a good mind to tear that dress up for underthings,” she said, looking at it where it lay in a fancy yellow heap. But she did not. The dress went back into its box and back up in the attic, and none of us ever mentioned its existence to Daddy.

  From that magic attic we all got real coats for the winter—a plain green one for Evelyn, a blue one with a white collar for Mama, a hunting jacket for Joe Allen, a ripped black greatcoat that Mama made into coats for Troy Lee and Billie Jean, and a navy pea jacket that went to me. I dearly loved my pea jacket, which had anchors on the buttons.

  Also it looked like a boy’s jacket, and I wanted to be a boy then, like Joe Allen, and go off to play ball or hunt with the other boys, and cut my hair short like the girls in town, and not have to stay home all the time and help Mama. If I could just be a boy, I wouldn’t even mind going to work at the sawmill like Joe Allen did as soon as he was old enough, at thirteen. Daddy himself did not work a regular job. He was too busy. He had to travel a lot, like the apostle Paul.

  Mama explained it all to us. “Your daddy is a saint,” she said, “a precious saint of God.”

  And in spite of the frequent sadness in her pale gray eyes and the shadow that sometimes fell on her face, we never doubted for a minute that she loved him. Maybe she loved him even more since she knew she could lose him at any time, because of what he had to do.

  Whenever Daddy walked in the door, everything suddenly got real exciting. All the familiar sights and objects of our lives—the bright flapping quilts on the line, the silvery falling-in barn halfway down the hill, the green forest a
round our house—took on a deeper, richer hue. Nobody could laugh louder or pray longer or swing you up higher in the air than our daddy. And when he looked at Mama, something passed between the two of them which I didn’t understand, something which scared me and made me lie restless in my bed, straining to hear them in the other room. Often I heard Daddy’s voice talking and talking deep into the night, mixed with Mama’s softer tone. But I could never make out the words. Sometimes Mama would call out in a way I could not account for.

  On those nights I’d lie awake for hours while Billie Jean slept in the bed beside me. Sometimes I’d hear the serpents rattling in their boxes under our beds, but I was used to the sound, and finally it would put me to sleep.

  * * *

  THE FACT IS, I felt safe in that house on Scrabble Creek, the safest I ever felt in childhood. I was raised to believe that the things of this world are not important, and I know it is true, but a house is different. A house will give you a place on the earth. If you know where you live, you know who you are. I loved being the girl who lived in the house by the musical creek, with blue willow dishes in the corner cupboard and a little army of gladiolas that sprang up every summer around the white quartz rock in the yard, red glads that stood straight and proud as soldiers. They were blooming when we first moved in, and Mama had a fit about them. She loved flowers, any flowers. After we got settled, she started weeding all around the yard, with Troy Lee beside her on a quilt.

  “Looky here,” she’d say, “there’s a rosebush under this honeysuckle,” or once in a tone of rapture, “Oh, Gracie! Peonies!” though we would not get to see the peonies bloom until the next spring.

  Evelyn and Billie Jean and I got to stay at home to help Mama, but Joe Allen had to go with Daddy and Carlton Duty to build the brush arbor.

  God could not have sent a better man to Daddy’s side than Carlton Duty. He lived on land that had been in his family for a hundred years, and ran a store down at the crossroads named Duty’s Grocery, where Ruth sold her famous pound cakes and fried pies. People went out of their way to get some of Ruth Duty’s cooking. The Dutys were well-known and liked throughout that community, but it was not generally known that Carlton had been having a hard time of late, with black days and sleepless nights, for no good reason. It was like a heaviness had come over him from the heart, and everything was turning gray before his eyes. He had stopped going to church and didn’t even want to go down to the store. Ruth had been worried sick about him. She told Mama that Carlton’s brother Ruel had shot himself in the head when he was exactly Carlton’s age, thirty-five. Now she was scared that Carlton was fixing to do the same thing. She was afraid it ran in the family. Carlton’s daddy had done it too. Ruth Duty told Mama all this as she stood in our yard holding a lemon chess pie, with her big bosom heaving and her blue eyes swimming in tears. “If we could of just had us some children . . .” Ruth said, looking at us ranged solemnly up and down the steps watching her sob and wondering when she planned to hand over the pie.

  Mama, barefoot, held Troy Lee on her hip and smiled at Ruth Duty. “Things is fixing to change,” she said. “Watch and see.” For Mama had the gift of discernment.

  As usual, Mama was right. Carlton Duty caught religion from Daddy in a big way and soon was Daddy’s right-hand man and an elder in his new church.

  First they built the brush arbor. The Dutys’ land was too poor to farm good, but there was one piece of it right off the road down from the store that was tailor-made for the Lord, Daddy said. Not to mention the Little Dove River behind it, which was great for baptizing. They had plenty of help. Once people met Daddy, they couldn’t stay away. He was more alive than anybody else, with energy to spare, and in that poor place of hardscrabble farms and hand-to-mouth lives, he was the main thing happening. People were drawn to Daddy like bugs to a flame. He had something they wanted, and they’d stick around to find out what it was. The men made the roof out of poles and brush, and the floor out of wood shavings and sawdust, and finished the brush arbor up with sawmill slab benches.

  The whole time they were working, Daddy was preaching. I don’t think he was ever not preaching—he often said that a preacher is a preacher twenty-four hours a day, that the Lord’s work is never done.

  When the brush arbor was finished, they put two loudspeakers on a plank and mounted this across the top of Carlton Duty’s truck. Speakers like that were against the law, but Daddy always said he obeyed God’s laws, not man’s, quoting from Acts 5:29. Then Carlton Duty drove Daddy all over that part of the county, announcing the revival meeting that would start the following Saturday night. But they drove by our house first, and stopped in the road at the bottom of the hill.

  Evelyn and Billie Jean and I were sitting in the grass under the big tulip poplar, making daisy-chain jewelry.

  “Fannie Shepherd,” Daddy said over the loudspeaker. “Fannie Shepherd and little children,” he said, “come see what the Lord has wrought.” His voice filled our whole holler. Billie Jean started crying and hung back, but Evelyn and me ran down the hill along with Mama.

  “What in the world!” Mama said. Rosy-faced and breathless from running, she wore a daisy-chain necklace, which we had made for her. Holiness women cannot wear real jewelry, and she had said she didn’t know if she ought to put it on or not, but she’d been too surprised by the loudspeaker to take it off. Daddy was leaning out the truck window laughing at her, and then his eyes narrowed as he looked at her good. “Hang on a minute,” he said to Carlton Duty, and then he swung down from the truck, his white shirtsleeves rolled up and his collar open, still looking at Mama.

  We were scared, we didn’t know what he meant to do. He pulled Mama over to him and kissed her long and hard, right there in the middle of the road in the middle of the day. “You’re a beautiful woman, Fannie,” he said when he let her go. Then he got back in the truck and Carlton Duty drove him away, and me and Evelyn waved good-bye until they were out of sight. Mama stood there giggling like a girl.

  * * *

  EVEN TODAY, I don’t know how to describe Daddy’s voice, for that was surely one of his greatest blessings from the Lord. To start off with, he did not sound like a preacher. He did not fall into the singsong chant you hear so often. No, Daddy had a deep, ringing voice and spoke real slow, so that every word he said registered, and seemed to settle directly on the soul. He talked to God like he was sitting right across from Him, like they were old friends. He talked to everybody that same way, in fact, not like most preachers, who will yell at you and shame you and try to make you feel bad. Daddy’s voice made you feel good, like you were strong in the Lord, and proud to do His will.

  “I declare,” Ruth Duty said one time to Mama, “that man ought to have been a salesman! Why he could sell anything to anybody! He could have made a fortune.”

  Of course I wished Daddy would have turned his talents more in this direction, so we could have had decent school clothes at least, but he said that he could not afford to waste his time studying on the things of earth. Jesus wouldn’t let him. Daddy did not even take up money at meetings unless it was a special offering for somebody whose house had burned down or their child was sick or something like that. He would not take up money for us, so we never had any, and I don’t know what we would have done without people coming by the house all the time to bring us food, and vegetables from their gardens, and such as that. People were real good to us up on Scrabble Creek.

  It was Daddy’s voice that started it all, and even now, years and years later, I can close my eyes and hear him so plain, talking over that microphone hooked to the top of Carlton Duty’s truck as they drove around the county. “Folks, we’re having a big meeting on Saturday night over here by the river, about a quarter-mile down from Carlton Duty’s store. You know where that is, folks. You all come on out. You’ll see the other cars there. You’ll see Jesus himself there, for it’s Him that’s calling this meeting over here on Saturday night.
It’s Jesus, my beloved! He hopes to see you there.” Daddy’s voice was soft and pleading. It made you want to do whatever he said. Then he’d add, “And if anybody finds a big rattlesnake, why bring him along, and we’ll take him up in Jesus’ name. In Jesus’ name, beloved. In Jesus’ name. Come on out in Jesus’ name.”

  This is what Daddy would call his church when they built it—the Jesus Name Church of God—for he loved to say Jesus’ name, as he told everyone. In fact Daddy always baptized in the name of Jesus and not in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for those were not names, he said. Daddy had thought long and hard about the Bible, and drew his own conclusions. He was dead set on what he believed, and neither the threat of jail nor the fear of death could sway him. “I’m not running a scared race,” he often said. “A man ain’t alive if he’s scared to die.”

  Everybody admired this.

  We were too little to go to that first meeting, but we were to hear about it for years afterward, as what happened there passed into legend. We heard it first from Mama. She used to tell it to Evelyn and Billie Jean and me on the days when she washed our hair.

  Some sinner boys from up on Holt Branch, the Graybeals, learned about the meeting and determined to break it up out of sheer meanness. So they laid off work and went around gathering up snakes until they had a huge yellow rattler and a smaller rattler and a big old lard can full of copperheads. They got in their truck and drove down off the mountain where they lived, and arrived at the river after the meeting had been going on for some time. Cars were parked up and down the road. It was nearabout dark, so lanterns had been lit all around the brush arbor. Daddy had placed his own serpent box under the first bench the way he always did, in case God did not send him one, and had started off with prayer and singing. It was Daddy, and a young man named Doyle Stacy on guitar, and Ruth Duty with her tambourine. Ruth had a high trembly voice that would raise up the hair on your arms. The brush arbor was full, the benches packed and people standing in the back. Some of these were believers from churches all around there, but most of them were doubters and sinners who had come along just to see what would happen. After the singing stopped, Mama stood up to read the Scripture, as was usual. She would read while Daddy paced back and forth with his eyes closed and his head bowed, listening. Listening as intently as if he had never heard these words before and his life depended on it. This time Daddy called for her to read from the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles which she did, ending with verse 31, “And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and spoke the word of God with boldness.”