Saving Grace

  Now it is time to go. I close the stove door and bolt the house door though anybody could get in here that wanted to but there is nothing left to steal. Snow lies out before me like a field of diamonds. You cannot even see the big quartz rock now, it is under a drift by the sycamore tree. The snow is a smooth dazzling stretch all the way up to the dark tree line. Everything is black and white up here today. Oh where are Evelyn’s sunglasses? I have to protect my eyes from all this light.

  The morning Randy Newhouse first came to me he was wearing those mirror shades, I saw myself reflected so wavy and shiny and out of whack. And Daddy stood on this very porch at dawn in the pearly light with serpents running like water over his arms and hands. Lamar too, I can see him yet, leaning like a big dark cat against the rail, the bright forsythia now covered up by the snow.

  I will go down these steps one by one. I am leaving here now.

  And I cannot help but laugh as I start down the hill, for the Spirit is a joyful thing. There was nothing to be afraid of after all and I am happy, Mama, I am. I would even run if my boots did not sink and stick in the snow. I have got an awful lot of energy though I have not been sleeping too good and I believe I skipped breakfast this morning, it’s hard to remember for so much has happened. I always made sure my girls got a good breakfast.

  I stop for one last time to kneel by the icy rushing waters of Scrabble Creek. The sweetest sound I ever heard, it has stayed in my head all these years. I drink to my heart’s content. When I raise my dripping chin to look back up the hill, our house appears small to me now. I once thought it so big and so fine. But it is a good thing I am leaving as it is starting to snow again though not hard, big lacy flakes drifting down from the sky like little angels. My gray angel baby Travis sleeps in peace beneath a lacy blanket of snow right now, over in Tennessee. The only light in that room in the Per-Flo Motel came from snow on the TV but it was plenty for me and Randy, we didn’t need much light.

  It’s funny how sound will carry in this cold air. I hear an axe ring out, a bell, a baby’s cry. Or maybe it is Troy Lee’s cat, we never did find that cat. It could be anyplace around here, it could be down in the old barn someplace with those old horses. We never solved any of the mysteries, me and Spice. I know myself as the girl I was, who used to love stories so much. Well this is the story of light Mama, this is the story of snow. That baby is crying again, you know I left him outside crying in the dirty snow but I am coming now, I am really coming Jesus though I cannot hear him now because all the bells are ringing, ringing, ringing as they did upon the occasion of my wedding to Travis Word, ringing across the whole valley.

  I clean off the windshield and my car starts up fine. In the beat between the wipers, snowflakes cover the windshield like lace, no two of them alike in the whole world, Travis said. Travis called me Missy but my name is Florida Grace, Florida for the state I was born in, Grace for the grace of God. Just before I drive around the bend, I stop to look back one more time at the little house by Scrabble Creek and the long white sweep of snowy ground where me and Billie Jean made angels in the snow.

  NOTES

  In a way my writing is a lifelong search for belief. I have always been particularly interested in expressions of religious ecstasy, and in those moments when we are most truly “out of ourselves” and experience the Spirit directly. I visited several serpent-handling congregations near my hometown of Grundy, Virginia, as a girl, and became interested in their beliefs again recently when writing the introduction to Shelby Lee Adams’s book of photographs of residents of eastern Kentucky, Appalachian Portraits (University Press of Mississippi, 1993).

  I am indebted to Thomas Burton’s fine book Serpent-Handling Believers (University of Tennessee Press, 1993). Several scenes in this novel are based on events described there. I was struck especially by Anna Prince’s narration, which inspired my own fictional narrator. I learned a lot also from the films of Karen Kramer, Eleanor Dickinson, and Thomas Burton. Steven M. Kane’s extensive work on serpent handling includes “Appalachian Snake Handlers” in volume 4 of Perspectives on the American South, edited by James C. Cobb and Charles R. Wilson (Gordon and Breach, 1987), as well as numerous articles, among them “Snake Handlers” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles R. Wilson and William Ferris (University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Jeff Todd Titon’s Powerhouse for God (University of Texas Press, 1988) was valuable, especially for its study of religious language.

  Saving Grace is a work of the imagination entirely, though I have tried to make it as true as I know how.

  Readers might like to know the key passage of Scripture (Mark 16:17–20) upon which serpent handlers base their worship:

  And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. . . . And they went forth, and preached every where, and the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LEE SMITH is the author of fifteen works of fiction, including Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies, and her recent Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in North Carolina.