Joy Williams - State of Grace

“Revival,” Grady grins. “See the tent?”

The black tree trunks seem to sparkle. The tent is brown like the dead forest we remain in and is strung up somehow between the trees like a poor umbrella. There are no sides. We sit in the car. Grady cocks his head.

“There were ninety and nine that safely lay

In the shelter of the fold,

But one was out on the hills away,

Far off from the gates of gold—

Away on the mountains wild and bare,

Away from the tender Shepherd’s care …”

“It’s always that hymn,” Grady says. “They have always been singing that hymn and if you came back here in twenty years, they’ll be singing it still. When I was little and living with my cousins we would go to church on Sunday morning in a drive-in theatre and they would be shouting out that hymn. It was never my maiden cousins’ favorite as it seemed too generous. They preferred texts that put the fear in a boy because they were certain I was going to turn out troublesome. But every Sunday we would sit in that ugly little pasture with the billboard advertising the week’s movie, which was always something like The Day Gongola Ate the World or the like, and we would be forever singing that hymn.”

He stops, thinking about his orphaned days, his cousins whom he has never discussed with me. They gave him nothing but the care they could and he’s obliged.

He backs the Jaguar onto the road. The singing follows us. It slides over us and gets behind us and it stops us dead. Then Grady shoots down the road. There’s only the snick of the gears. We do not see the truck again. We come to the trailer. Something crashes through the brush as we get out. In those mirrors I had seen my Grady tumbling headlong toward the light beyond their frames. Don’t be afraid it will work this car can still go ninety-five miles an hour it can work sometimes at ten miles an hour there won’t be anything left of us there’s hardly anything left now just enough to bury . He was missing, then he was gone. I cannot stop myself. I tell him my story at last. The hounds are yammering in the woods. The hounds are tracking. No one’s fired. We have a drink or two. I cannot stop. At last I say, “I must tell you about Father.”

The class is already in progress. I come in late and must sit in the very first row. I find that I am wringing my hands softly, softly, as though I am washing a pair of socks. Grady is in the room. He does not look at me. There are thirty or so students here in French class. It is held in what was once the kitchen of the mansion. Of course now all the stoves and sinks have been removed and the room is equipped with the furniture of learning. All that remains of its former use are the big black and white floor tiles and the white pressed tin ceiling, dimped in a flower design, creamy and faint and deranged, like a wedding cake had blown up on it.

I watch Grady but he does not look at me. He ignores me without rancor. He is just not looking at anything. I am called upon to recite. A tick is crawling across my neck and up into my hair. I can feel it moving, even when I feel it stop.

I read—

And then I read,

“Cet aveu que je te viens de faire

Cet aveu si honteux, le crois-tu volontaire?”

The instructor shakes his head despairingly. “This is a terrible moment in Racine,” he says. “Should there be a court order protecting him from sophomores?” There is a respectful titter. He sighs. “Go on,” he tells me.

I say,

“You think that this vile confession that

I have made is what I meant to say?”

I have waited for Grady for nights. He is here but he does not come to me. I wait naked in the midnights. I know I am not attractive. My stomach has taken on crooked dimensions. My breasts have become all flat nipple. Nevertheless, one night he comes to me. He has made our decision. My phantom lover. I can see his outlines clearly. He sits beside me for a long time and then I feel the first touch of his hand. He wraps his legs around mine and enters quickly. His hands hold my hips without ambition, his mouth rests on my own without words. He takes me again and again with him into his new darkness. He is trying to wrest something from me. We understand this. I tremble like a branch. It does not stop. He probes deeper and deeper, cool like metal, like an instrument. We are drenched. We continue. Soon it will be the last time. The morning comes down.

I try to explain to the sheriff’s deputy, but I don’t understand it too well myself. I am walking along the shoulder of the road and he travels beside me in his striped Ford. I feel that it is up to him to speak first. At last, the car shoots forward and stops ahead of me. He opens the door and gets out. There is an enormous white light on the roof of his car, twisting hysterically. He’s reluctant to turn it off. He’s young and heavy-chested, his hair is cut so short you can see the white skull skin. His shirt strains and gapes across his stomach. Underneath, he wears a T-shirt. I sit in the front seat and we drive very slowly. Along the road, the eyes of dogs are blue in the dark and the houses are careless and painted in garish colors. We have not reached the town. Every time I touch my head, sand falls out of it, and there are a few pine needles caught in the weave of my sweater, where, I suppose, I might have been lying on the ground. He talks quickly and slyly as though there were a secret between us. His jaw is long and his face is thin. The stomach sprawling heavily above his belt is merely a part of his law-enforcement equipment.

I am trying to think. Mistrust all evidence. We were going to someone’s house for dinner. I am still holding a bottle of wine in a paper bag. Grady is very conscientious — always the perfect guest. He remembers the name of everyone he meets and always brings a little gift, wherever he is invited. If he was about to be hung, he would bring the nooseman a stick of gum. It was he who insisted we continue on to our friends’. He said that they would consider us rude, that they would think something had happened to us. It wasn’t far, a few miles, so we set out, leaving the beautiful Jaguar on the curve, all smashed and broken like a flower.

I am sure that this is how it was happening. I was following him in another car — I can’t recall the make, such a tiring car, round and slow with great patched tires that someone had painted white — an enormous wallowing car with bad suspension and a compass bolted to the dashboard. He crashed right before my eyes. The car turned slowly in the air like something at the movies. He was thrown clear, landed on his feet and running. The lights were still on, the radio was playing a very popular country and Western song about love and subterfuge. In this song, the lovers have an arrangement by which the woman will raise the flag on the mailbox when the husband is out of the house. I stop talking to the deputy and swallow a few times. My head seems full of penny candy, garnished with a Melba peach. I realize that my problem is lack of discrimination. My head fills achingly, like a poisoned lung. I cannot stop thinking about the song.

The radio is playing and the engine is running still, in perfect tune.

Grady runs raggedly, crouched, as though he is in a war. Something disquieting has caught in his hair. He turns the ignition off and stands beside the Jaguar. He looks fierce and sad and lopsided. Perhaps the engine can be salvaged. Everything else is a ruin. The frame is bent. The pretty metal pocked like a waffle.

He loved his car. He loved the language of it and the feel of its oily gloamy parts. Once he took the engine out and apart, only for his edification. It fluttered from a tree for days in a canvas sling. The dirty jargon would make me laugh. Camshaft sprocket setscrews. Cotter pins and slotted nuts. Idler sprockets fitting to eccentric shafts. Starter jaws retaining with locking washers. Some madman went and named them all and expected me to follow along. It made me angry in a way. I refused to be educated to it. However, he did teach me how to adjust the carburetors — there were three — and I could also correct valve clearance for he bought me a feeler gauge..006 inches for the intake, 008 inches for the exhaust. It is so depressing to know that this knowledge will stay with me always.