Saving Grace by Lee Smith

Author:Lee Smith [Smith, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

I Settle Down

I DIDN’T SAY a thing. I sat there with my eyes squeezed shut and my fingers in my ears while that metal door banged and rattled like Judgment, only inches away from me.

“Gracie!” a voice yelled. “Gracie Shepherd! I know you’re in there! Gracie!”

I took my fingers out of my ears and sat up. It was not Mr. Bean. I couldn’t tell who it was, though it was a voice I knew somehow, knew yet didn’t know.

“Gracie, are you all right? Gracie Shepherd! Answer me, please. This is Travis Word.”

The most profound relief rushed through me. I knew I had been saved.

“Just a minute,” I called. I jumped up and straightened my waitress uniform the best I could, and pulled the sofa back from the door. Then I clicked the lock open.

And there he stood, so tall that he had to stoop to peer in the trailer door. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and blue jeans. He was long and skinny. I realized that I had never seen him without that old dark suit coat he wore to meeting. Often he wore a wide-brimmed black hat too—then he really did look like a man from another time. But that night, standing on the cinder-block steps of Mr. Bean’s trailer with the dark night behind him and the light from the open door shining on his pale concerned face, he seemed somewhat younger to me, and nicer than I had thought. He twisted his hands together and looked nervous.

“They’re gone,” I said.

He nodded, his Adam’s apple jumping up and down, and a piece of his straight black hair fell down in his eyes. He pushed it back. “I heard,” he said. “I heard it from Ray Keen—” This was one of the elders that had come to see me only that morning at the Volunteer Café, that morning which now seemed like years before. “That is why I came over here, to see if you was all right, and if you needed anything.”

I tried to smile. “Well, I’m just fine,” I said.

“And you don’t need nothing?” Travis Word’s dark eyes traveled all around the trailer. It was a wreck.

“Why no, I’m just fine,” I said again. “Won’t you sit down?” I asked as proper as if I had a real nice house with real nice furniture in it, and not a junked-up trailer with a sofa sitting crazy in the middle of the slanting floor. I had some idea of how a woman was supposed to act when the preacher came to call, you see. Then I turned to walk over to the sofa myself, but at this point a funny thing started happening to my legs, they simply would not work right. It was like the air had gotten too thick for me to walk through, like I was walking underwater. I tried to say something, but I couldn’t talk right either.

I woke up to find myself lying on the sofa with Travis Word right there on his knees beside me, one hand on my forehead.

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