State of Grace by Joy Williams Page B

but mine’s snapping and popping like a jacked deer’s eye. There is nothing in the glass but ourselves. We are pinned like butterflies to the worn seats. Even the trees have been banished.
    “Then stop,” I beg. “Pull over and let him go on, past our road.” My voice is weak. All my strength is in my feet, pushed against the floor boards. The Jaguar struggles to a halt. The truck sways skittishly around a curve and is gone. Before us is the world again, sounds settling in the void of the engine’s silence. Grady’s parked in a burnt-out pocket of woods. And it’s then we can heard the sound of singing, very frail but determined, and see the sign of a penciled arrow on a butter box nailed to a tree.
    “Revival,” Grady grins. “See the tent?”
    The black tree trunks seem to sparkle. The tent is brown like the dead forest we remain in and is strung up somehow between the trees like a poor umbrella. There are no sides. We sit in the car. Grady cocks his head.
    “There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold,
But one was out on the hills away,
Far off from the gates of gold—
Away on the mountains wild and bare,
Away from the tender Shepherd’s care …”
     
    “It’s always that hymn,” Grady says. “They have always been singing that hymn and if you came back here in twenty years, they’ll be singing it still. When I was little and living with my cousins we would go to church on Sunday morning in a drive-in theatre and they would be shouting out that hymn. It was never my maiden cousins’ favorite as it seemed too generous. They preferred texts that put the fear in a boy because they were certain I was going to turn out troublesome. But every Sunday we would sit in that ugly little pasture with the billboard advertising the week’s movie, which was always something like
The Day Gongola Ate the World
or the like, and we would be forever singing that hymn.”
    He stops, thinking about his orphaned days, his cousins whom he has never discussed with me. They gave him nothing but the care they could and he’s obliged.
    He backs the Jaguar onto the road. The singing follows us. It slides over us and gets behind us and it stops us dead. Then Grady shoots down the road. There’s only the snick of the gears. We do not see the truck again. We come to the trailer. Something crashes through the brush as we get out. In those mirrors I had seen my Grady tumbling headlong toward the light beyond their frames.
Don’t be afraid it will work this car can still go ninety-five miles an hour it can work sometimes at ten miles an hour there won’t be anything left of us there’s hardly anything left now just enough to bury
. He was missing, then he was gone. I cannot stop myself. I tell him my story at last. The hounds are yammering in the woods. The hounds are tracking. No one’s fired. We have a drink or two. I cannot stop. At last I say, “I must tell you about Father.”

15
     
    The class is already in progress. I come in late and must sit in the very first row. I find that I am wringing my hands softly, softly, as though I am washing a pair of socks. Grady is in the room. He does not look at me. There are thirty or so students here in French class. It is held in what was once the kitchen of the mansion. Of course now all the stoves and sinks have been removed and the room is equipped with the furniture of learning. All that remains of its former use are the big black and white floor tiles and the white pressed tin ceiling, dimped in a flower design, creamy and faint and deranged, like a wedding cake had blown up on it.
    I watch Grady but he does not look at me. He ignores me without rancor. He is just not looking at anything. I am called upon to recite. A tick is crawling across my neck and up into my hair. I can feel it moving, even when I feel it stop.
    I read—
    And then I read,
    “Cet aveu que je te viens de faire

Cet aveu si honteux, le crois-tu volontaire?”
     
    The instructor