Joy Williams - State of Grace

The father has told the child that those who have loved become a single angel in heaven or a sole beast in hell.

They sit in front of the fire, the father and the child. The wall is empty, as it has always been, except for a little while that morning. The child says, “I think that that thing should have a name, like graves have words. What do you think, Daddy? Of course it’s a foolish thing, it almost makes me want to laugh, Daddy.”

“Some things don’t have names,” he says. “Many things.”

“I think that maybe if it had been done another way I couldn’t stand it. But nothing was right, was it, Daddy? The eyes or anything. It won’t be like that, will it? We won’t be all together again? It would make Mother so unhappy. You know, sometimes she comes back to me just before I fall asleep and her face is like a movie star’s, but I know it’s her because that’s the way dreams are. She’s sad and pretty, Daddy, like once you said she was, and she holds my hand like she used to, Daddy, remember she was always interrupting me and holding my hand and I would be busy but she would hold my hand and hold me back and say, I just want to know that you’re here beside me for a moment, Katey. I just want to know that I’m here with my little girl. And I would say, Yes, Mummy, but we never could give her what she really wanted, could we, Daddy? And now when she comes to me at night, she’s sad but not crying and she doesn’t say those terrible things any more. She doesn’t say anything for a long long while, but then she always says, please don’t ever bring me back again. That’s what she says. That’s all she ever says.”

The Reverend is silent and the child shyly drops her eyes. GOD IS IN HEAVEN AND THOU UPON EARTH THEREFORE LET THY WORDS BE FEW. Ecclesiastes 5:2 or 2:5, she thinks and begins to chew nervously on her nails. She keeps forgetting things. Sometimes she trembles because she can never seem to keep things straight in her head.

“Don’t do that, sweet. You’ll spoil your pretty hands.”

Her hands are freckled and yellowish. They were always being scratched or bumped or squeezed. She puts them away.

“I think a nice title for that thing, that painting, if it ever sees the light of day again would be Mortals prepare for you must come and join the long retreat ,” the child says.

He looks at her gently. “Where did you see that?”

“I heard it one day, from you.”

He has a cold blister at the corner of his mouth. He touches it with his tongue. “There is no retreat,” he says. “Words are often a presumption and a sin.”

The child knows all about words. And sin. She knows that even a baby is polluted in the eyes of the Lord. She knows that every person who has ever been born had been born bad. Everybody living is sinful and everybody dead and everybody quick. The baby that had died in her mother’s stomach, that had killed her mother, had nothing on any of them just because it had never been born. It was only twice gone, that’s what it was.

The child knows all about faith too. She knows that punishment doesn’t have the slightest relationship with what you do or don’t do.

They go into the kitchen for dessert but there is nothing sweet in the house. They settle for a wedge of cheese.

“This is very sophisticated,” the child says, not enjoying it much.

The two of them sit side by side at the table in the position they had always held.

FOUR OF THEM had been at the table not so long ago. It is the Fourth of July. The Reverend Jason Jackson is at the head, a handsome man, wearing his hair a little long, a little out of style. There is one eye, his left, that he cannot close. The nerves are severed in the lid. An old injury. He is thirty-one. No one is aware that his eye is curious. It can only be noticed when he is sleeping.

To his right sits Katey. She hums and stares past the worn window sill toward the sea. She has thick dark braids, tightly knotted. Her hair troubles her. She feels it is a vanity and is afraid that some day when she is riding the neighbor’s great bay horse, she will catch it in an oak tree like Absalom and die.

Opposite her is her sister, a round and freckled girl of eleven. From her schoolmates, she has acquired a flat New England accent that no one else in the family has. She is energetic and affectionate and studies her mother shamelessly, trying to detect how to be a lady.

Kate has no desire of becoming a lady. She wants to be sexless, like an angel.

It is the Fourth of July and they are eating salmon and peas. The mother insists that they adhere to the tradition of each holiday. Shrove Tuesday there are pancakes, every Easter a ham. Each Christmas there’s a pudding with the beef.

The mother does favors for them all. She likes nice things. She has learned of nice things in the state of New York where she tells the girls she was born. New York seems to Kate as distant and as cheerless as the desert. She tells the girls about New York. She tells them that Dewey was not elected President because of his mustache. She tells them how to eat an artichoke should they ever be offered an artichoke. She instructs them in the writing of thank-you notes. Kate receives this information mutely as though she were accepting punishment.

The day is incredibly white. Sailboats with striped spinnakers rim the island. A blueberry pie bakes in the oven. It is taken out too quickly. The bottom crust is thick and underdone. The mother cuts huge wedges for everyone and puts them on old pewter plates. She pours out glasses of milk for the girls. On the bottom of Kate’s glass is a picture of Charlie McCarthy. She is a child and this is her glass. Each time that she lags in drinking her milk, her mother urges her on with the promise that there is a surprise at the bottom. Kate has seen the picture a hundred times and loathes Charlie McCarthy who even in real life is only made of wood. She thinks her mother is simple-minded.

The mother and sister are talking to one another. The girl is speaking of a friend’s dachshund on the mainland. It’s slipped a disc and is in a pet hospital.

“They’re not made properly.” The mother laughs. They chuckle and chat.

Surely this is not what is actually being discussed. Kate is so little, beautiful and glum. She is constantly trying to hear. She can hear perfectly but she doesn’t believe any of it. Her mother has expressed concern over her vocabulary which is rigid and obscure. Sometimes the mother wants to hug her or slap her because Kate turns eyes upon her that are totally passionless and without mercy.

Kate takes the filling out of the pie and spreads it across her plate in an unpleasant paste. She is thinking about a little book that she has in her room on the Ten Commandments. It is a Golden Book of crummy construction. Each commandment is accompanied by a picture depicting what is going on. Opposite THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY there is a drawing of two little children running away from a house with a broken window. Kate can’t understand this and she asks her father to explain it to her. He does, the mother believes, a little too explicitly. He does not comment on the picture which is so subtle that it suggests the workings of a truly erotic mind, but he speaks of everything else. Kate sits with her mouth ajar. Her sister starts to cry. The mother is furious and the meal is a shambles, the pie forgotten by everyone except the Reverend. He finishes his portion, oblivious to the commotion around him. He wipes his mouth with a napkin and then makes a steeple of his hands. He looks at them.

Kate begins to giggle. “You are a rascal,” the Reverend says. She smiles, her tongue raised over her missing tooth. She feels obdurate and lighter than air.

“I won’t have that,” her mother hisses. “I won’t have that.” She takes the older girl by the arm and pulls her into another room. There are mutterings as they gather up their purses and sweaters. Kate draws in her cheeks. She thinks this makes her look tubercular which is the way she sometimes likes to look. Her mother stands between the two rooms, still gripping the older girl by the arm.