Joy Williams - State of Grace

I am on the balcony, looking at the morning through the strangler fig and stinking cedar, and watching the highway over them.

They were all tourists , Father said, excluding myself .

There is a caravan of Airstream trailers, heading north. They have been in town for their annual powwow. Each year they meet in a field just outside of town and for three days they cook hamburgers and play volleyball. Then they drive off. Freddie and Gussie from Stillwater . On the road, making soup of turtles and small warm things, grinding up pollen and seeds. They identify themselves to everyone. Jack and Cherry Lane from Portland, Maine . To all the relicts sickly eating straw in the roadside zoos, to the babies playing on the fallen privy door, to the waitresses biting ketchup off their hands in Dew Drop Inns … The Fergusons, Donald and Shirley .

Hullo, hullo.

I believe that our modest home, Grady’s and mine, was an Airstream. It wasn’t in Grady’s style but there it was, and it was his. We spent the days of our married life therein, his sperm warping the floor boards and my cooking blackening the walls. It was perfectly concealed in the woods. I can’t understand how it ever came to be in there and it was obvious that in order to get it out, several large trees would have to be chopped. It would be most reasonable to assume that the trailer was there before the woods were, which is absurd. Just another mystery like the boat in the bottle or the one in Revelation sitting on a throne and looking like a jasper and a sardine stone. So much mystery but no surprises. I can’t understand it.

I have to get back to the trailer. Grady would expect me to. All my things are there, my picnic basket and wine glass, my card

Hi! I’m Rh negative

What are you?

But Grady is not there. It is difficult for me to keep this in the front of my mind. He is in Room 17, Section C. The exploded view , that’s what I saw, just as he used to show me in the Jaguar manual. The servo unit, exploded view, the worm-shaft end float adjustment and bearing pre-load exploded view . Just as it was in the diagram, the car flew into all its parts. And it was I who was running. It was Grady who was sitting still. One of us was running. Relativity is not reasonable! Part of the car was driven into Grady’s side. A pin or a bolt. Part of the Jaguar is missing in my Grady’s side, beside the lung. And there are slivers of metal in his head and jaw. Shavings peppered shining in his blond head. They’ve excised all that was visible; now only the missing remains and they won’t touch it. It is over , Grady’s breathing said as I ran and I had to say not yet .

I will not go back to the trailer. If I had been taken there immediately by Ruttkin … but it would have been difficult. It was night then. Never had I left the woods except with Grady. Never had I come back to them except with him. I don’t think I could have found the trailer by myself. It was his life there, you see, that he took for a time with me. Only the stupor was mine.

And Sweet Tit Sue may be there now. That is a very real consideration and one I could not face. She may have repossessed it. She may have left her own little cabin recently hacked out of the woods, introduced out of nowhere by five pastel concrete squares and taken the trailer again, found our bill of sale in the Rimbaud, you know the part, it went we-wandered impatienttofindtheplaceandtheformula, that was where it was when we drove away last night, found the bill of sale and held it under moving water and taken the trailer again. Wherever she will be, I could not face her again, having done so once. My manner excites disgust, I know.…

I did not have the smallest difficulty in finding Sue’s cabin. In relationship to the trailer, its location was clear. I knew where it was and I found it. Five decorative steps leading up from nothing and dogs lying beneath the porch but not barking and chickens pecking in the brush. I found it myself. I never got lost. A little less than two miles down that river but with no view.

I set out one morning the instant Grady left. If Sue started right away, I felt that I could be back at the trailer before he returned. I took a fall , I would have told him. I think I’ve hurt myself . I didn’t care if she did it well. Badly, I would have preferred. I ran through the woods. The cedars were dropping their sweet berries. Grady was on the highway. Until recently, suicides were always buried on the highways. They were not allowed respectable graves. This was not my thought as I ran through the woods, but the fact remained. Until recently.

Please, I had said to her. Sue had a child of her own, a boy eating rice and cookies as I talked. I don’t know what you’re wanting, she’d said clearly, each word a soft explosion. They told me she wouldn’t do it in her own place. They had told me that you had to name the place and she would come there and do it. They had told me that she took it away. We don’t know where, they told me but you should just see how green her garden grows. I ran through the woods. EVERY SECRET THING SHALL GOD HAVE JUDGED.

I was told you could help me, I had said. How green her garden grew. The boy finished eating and went into the little cleared yard, picking up the eggs the hens had laid. Sue was making a brine, throwing salt into the water. I was still running with the momentum of reaching the cabin. I had had a plan and the plan seemed perfect but I could not think on it for long. If I could lose the baby, would there still be something in me that would tell, that would talk on and on in punishment?

You are nothing but trouble, she had said. I could see the first time you were nothing but hard times.

Then give me something I had said.

Suicides were buried on the highways and nothing stopped for them.

You can just take a lot of anything that’s handy, she had said. It probably won’t make no difference but you just keep eating on a quantity of something and get sick and keep eating a quantity more. She shrugged. Sugar, she called to the boy, You bring Momma an egg here for her brine. You got it all wrong from somewheres, she had told me, I ain’t never done it, not even once. I haven’t never stopped a baby.

Her boy came in, holding an egg gracefully in each hand, between thumb and forefinger. She took one and eased it into the pan. She added more salt until the egg floated up. The boy was holding the remaining egg carefully enough but he somehow stuck his thumbnail into the shell. Blood swelled up over his finger as though he’d been sliced and he dropped it, the thing spreading dismally outward on the floor all broken up and scattered, all its colored jellies and beads trembling in a small and violet pool.

Ahhh, Sugar, Sue had said. One of the dogs came in to lap it up. I stepped off the last orangey steppingstone back into the woods and was back in the trailer by eleven o’clock. Hours still, before Grady would return. I had several drinks but nothing in excess. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see the baby floundering out of the womb. I didn’t close my eyes for several days that I can recall and when I did at last, I could see the curve in the road flaunting my Grady. It was not my thought that it was a curve at the time. It was just the shape my dreams took thereafter until now.

Here, it is quarter past noon. All the clocks say this, more or less, on the third floor. The sisters have eaten lunch and are all coming back up here for song practice. I hear their babble as they tramp up the stairs. I realize quite clearly that I am, at present, in the sorority, in my bunk bed. Soon, I will get up and go to Grady who is in Room 17, Section C. I realize this, nevertheless, something untoward happens, my head whirrs and it is Grady touching my shoulder, waking me up. I am so happy. I shudder with relief. It is Grady, saying,