Joy Williams: State of Grace

Everyone smiles at me as I start to leave. They smile at the baby. I am calm, for the baby has pinned my hands fast to her round chest. I pass the delicatessen. There are other customers now but the mangier is the same. He throws corned beef onto a scale.

“It’s just as well he won’t be seeing court,” he says. “It’s just as well for him it was done quick rather than long.”

“More mercy shown to him than to that lovely girl.”

There’s a woman there so short her head hardly musters past the onion buns. “Onct lovely,” she corrects.

“That’s right,” the man in the apron says. “They have got to take the skin off the tops of her legs and put it on her face.” He looks at me. “That sure is a cute new baby,” he says, “fresh out of the oven.”

Lost. The blood is pounding in my head. So thirsty. And they’ve shot all the poor beasts, I’ll learn as well. Carriers of disease. Torn the place down. Nothing to it. Dry wood termites. Seven minutes with two sledge hammers. The air has to turn no corners out at Bryant’s any more.

The rain has stopped and hasn’t left a trace upon the town. The heat is smothering. I walk outside and right away into a liquor store. Men are sitting at tables drinking blend. I buy two quarts of gin.

“Barfield must have been practicing because he only fired but three times.” The rhythm of the man’s words is soothing and confident. The sweat dries upon my lip.

“He only fired but three times,” he croons. “The first shot got the nigger in the knee but he kept running right toward Terry worse than a mad dog. And the second shot got him in the other leg and then he went screaming and foaming and then he started crawling toward Terry and the third shot got him right in the rig and that was that.”

The bartender coughs, jerking his head at me. The men shuffle and cough.

“You want anything else?” the bartender asks.

“Where can I buy a train ticket?” Milk is drying in dark circles on my blouse. In dream, the baby jumps a little in my arms.

“Right here,” he says. “I can sell you one right here to get on the train. And then when you get on you buy another ticket for wherever it is you want to go.”

“How much is it now?” I say.

“Fifty cents,” he says. “You only need one. A baby in your arms don’t need a ticket.”

“I suspected it,” I say.

The quickening train speeds past the junk yard. Pressed back against my seat, a Jaguar is in my range for just a moment, a Jaguar traveling toward me from the very edge of Glick’s boundaries, from the very corner of the world, through the flowers and the sparrows, its doors peeled off, its trunk and hood indecently flung open, caroming sideways. Broken. Gone.

My head rests on a clean white napkin. The baby is nursing. Fifteen minutes on the left. I shift her to the right. Ten minutes. She falls asleep.

Her cheekbones. Her cheekbones are Grady’s, I think sometimes. But I’ve left that all behind me, the bringing up of things that were. I won’t bring them up again, I assure you. Grady and Corinthian and Mother and baby and sister and others over the years that I haven’t kept up with.

People go, you know. It’s only you that remains. That’s the way it will be. That’s certain at least.

It takes years to learn to be still.

At another time, for instance, you might have expected something to fly up from that wrecked Jaguar as we passed. Butterflies perhaps. Or insects. But there was nothing. Nothing.

I run my fingers along the ridges of the baby’s cheeks which are high and hard. She opens her eyes, her deep and perfect eyes that don’t believe in anything.

A man in a uniform comes down the aisle of the car, an employee, asking me my destination. At another time this might have led to something. But I am still now. I am collected and the baby’s head is cool upon my breast. I feel cool all over from the baby’s head, and I tell him. While he is punching out the tickets, I say, “I’m going home.” I smile. I take money from my pocket. I am a young mother going home. A satchel beside me filled with simple necessities. Clean and cool, my hair combed nicely, my little baby with a yellow ribbon on her wrist. I am calm and neat. The baby is powdered and her diaper is tight and white and dry. I am responsible. A good risk .

“Well, that sure is nice,” the man says. “That’s what’s so satisfying about working on the railroad. You take so many people home.”

“It must be very rewarding,” I say.

“It sure is,” he says. He goes to the only other people in the car, a man and woman sitting several seats away. They buy a ticket for a place a hundred or so miles up the line. The woman has a bag full of hamburgers. She has a long and nervous and aggressive face. The man is handsome, with a generous suffering mouth. One can tell immediately that something is wrong between them. Something empty, long familiar to them. The woman takes a small bite from her hamburger, looks savagely at the bun, takes another bite. She pushes the mutilated hamburger into the man’s hand and turns away from him, watching the fields and the muckland soar by. The man eats the food slowly, looking straight ahead. He is facing me. I can hear his dry swallowing. I can see his eyes. Just before he finishes it, his wife opens the bag and takes out another hamburger. She begins to eat it, but becomes bored again, annoyed, punitive. She hands it to him to finish. The process is repeated again and again. Tears begin to roll down the man’s face.

I know that nothing is expected of me in this situation. I am well groomed, sitting straight, holding my baby, going home. There was a time when I would have offered myself to this man. But now I see the impropriety of it. I see that it’s just a dream. To know that it is all dream! To know that one has become free not to enter into it at last!

… And I am in Father’s house at last, all the journeying behind me, all the times the others paid for. Just before I arrived, my Answer man was there, but the words were gone, as I knew they’d have to be, and his head, wide as the night sky, became the night sky at last, as I knew it would.

One more thing. When I arrived at the house with Father at the window, I found something, some small mammal on the lawn. Recently dead. I was relieved. If I had arrived sooner it might have still been hopelessly surviving, in need of action, of some sort, on my part. One cannot simply put an injured thing in the shade of a bush if convenient or turn its head to face its nest if ascertained. One cannot simply do that. I am grateful that the choice continues to be not mine. Some would call it luck, I suppose. I would not.

Father has the baby now. He is downstairs with her and I am upstairs, resting. I can hear him speaking with her. At another time, I might have thought the sound was only wind. But here there is no wind. It is a still summer night. Even the sea is silent.

I lie on the bed. I banish each thought softly. There are no more memories to resist. There is only the baby. I think of her with abandon but then more and more carefully. I remove everything but the fact of her. She is outside with Father, swimming in his arms. I let that go. I let almost everything go. I concentrate upon something deep within her, deep within all that remains after I have let everything go. I am left with almost nothing, but I enter it. I enter it.

What peace.

Joy Williams’s short stories have appeared in such publications as Esquire, The Paris Review , and The New Yorker. State of Grace was nominated for the National Book Award in 1974. She is the author of two other novels, The Changeling and Breaking and Entering , as well as two short-story collections, Taking Care and Escapes . She lives in Florida and in Arizona.