Charming Grace (5 page)

He had the fifty cents.

I was enthralled. There I stood, dressed in a frilly Little Miss Rich Girl sundress with matching yellow sandals, auburn hair puffed up in a permed mass of curls that hung to my waist, like a handmade doll kept on an invisible leash. I’d just witnessed a raw act of self-sufficiency by a boy who clearly made his own rules. I burned with envy.

“Could you teach me to do that?” I blurted.

He jumped. His hands opened like the wings of startled birds. The Santa hit the store’s hard linoleum floor and cracked in two. We both stared at it in horror. I rushed over. “We can hide it under the bottom shelf,” I whispered. “I hid a whole box of broken Christmas ornaments under there once.”

His face tightened. “That’d be wrong!” That single sentence, barked out in a backwoods twang, summed up his refusal to take the easy way out.

“What’s going on here?” The store manager, a woman armored in lavender polyester, stomped up the aisle. She glowered only at Harp. I was, after all, a Bagshaw. “What are you up to, mister? Did you climb up on these shelves and knock that Santa off? I swear, I’m never letting you trashy Vances in here again, I swear—”

“I broke it,” I announced loudly.

Where those words came from when I was only seven years old, I don’t know. Perhaps G. Helen’s fight-for-the-underdog attitudes had already begun sinking in. At any rate, despite Harper Vance staring at me as if I’d lost my mind, I raised my chin and repeated, “I climbed up and grabbed at the Santa and knocked it off.”

“Well, well now.” The manager blinked awkwardly and formed a smile. “Accidents will happen. Don’t you worry—”

“She didn’t break the thang. I did,” Harper said. He faced the manager. “I broke it. Here.” He thrust out his hand with his few coins spread on his palm.

The manager bent over it, scowling. “I should have known. You don’t have enough for the price plus tax. You broke the Santa and you can’t afford to pay for it. I’m tired of you Vances coming in here and pilfering—”

His face began to color. “I’ll get some more pennies! I can too pay for it!”

“Maybe I’ll just call the sheriff, young man, and let him talk to you—”

I wailed. For even better effect I also collapsed with my hands clamped to my face. “I broke the Santa but nobody believes me,” I cried in huge, dramatic gasps. I’d been competing in beauty contests for at least a year by then. I knew how to perform for an audience. “Everybody thinks I’m a liar! But I broke it, I broke it! I’m
not
a liar! No one listens to me!”

“Oh, honey, shush.” The manager huddled over me. G. Helen’s housekeeper rushed up, demanding what had happened, chirping in disgust when she heard I’d broken the Santa. “Well, good lord, I’ll pay for the cheap little hickie. Gracie, hush. Hush. What in the world is the matter with you? You’re gettin’ your eyes all puffy. What will Miss Candace say? You gonna show up at your ballet class lookin’ like a frog.” And to the manager, “If she says she broke the Santie, she means it. What’d you do to upset her so?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” The woman waved her hands urgently. “It was just an accident.”

“Well let it be, then.”

“Yes. Yes. No problem. Let’s forget all about it.”

G. Helen’s housekeeper lifted me to my feet, cooing. I continued to sob but peeked through my fingers at Harp. He stared at me as if I had changed places with his precious Santa. His wild eyes were big and dark and filled with wonder

As the housekeeper led me away, in essence putting me back on my leash, I winked at him. After a long moment, as if he had had to think hard before recognizing the tiniest thread of friendship, he put his hand to his heart. I never forgot that. His hand over his heart.

For me
.

I rarely saw him over the next few years. I had private tutors; he went to the public elementary school—or didn’t go. Lumpkin County’s truant officer hunted lost dogs more passionately than he hunted Harp. Lost dogs were easier to find.

I was ten and Harp was twelve when he ran away for good from his grandmother’s rusty double-wide trailer. It happened in the fall of the year, a month after his grandmother died, leaving Harp and Michelle on their own. A cabal of upstanding citizens (led by my Great Aunt Tess) went there to Take The Boy For His Own Good. Michelle, sixteen-years- old and built like breasts with legs, was wanted by the Atlanta police for dealing drugs, not to mention working as an underage stripper at a men’s club.

“We can’t save the girl, but we can grab that wolf-eyed little brother of hers,” Aunt Tess proclaimed. In my family, public nudity and wild dancing were rarely tolerated, either apart or together. Mind-altering drugs, except for liquor, tobacco and Valium, belonged in big-city ghettos and not the purses of Lumpkin County teenagers. If the Atlanta police and Tess Bagshaw—patron saint of the local morals—said Michelle Vance was not fit to raise her little brother, then most of Lumpkin County agreed.

Unfortunately, the well-meant intervention failed. Michelle might not be an upstanding citizen but she was a devoted sister. She gave Aunt Tess The Finger and shoved Harp out the trailer’s back door. Harp vanished into the wild woods with the silent ease of a boy who’d already learned to take care of himself. Michelle, after being booked and released down in Atlanta (thanks to bail paid by G. Helen,) fled to parts unknown. So did Harp.

A few days after Harp ran for the woods and Michelle ran, period, G. Helen got a postcard from her, postmarked somewhere along a bus route in Kentucky.

Mrs. Bagshaw, thank you for all you tried to do.

Please catch my brother and hold onto him if you can.

He is odd but special. He will do great things, if you can just keep him indoors.

That was the problem. Finding him and keeping him indoors.

“No kid his age can survive the winter in these mountains,” the sheriff told G. Helen. The fall air was already scented with ice. “All he has are the clothes on his back and a pocket knife.”

“And whose fault is
that
?” G. Helen leveled a wicked green stare from the behind the fevered stream of a long cigarette. “If that goddamned sister-in-law of mine ever stages another idiotic ambush on the needy children in this county you had better tell
me
first or be there to protect her from me. Because I will kick her silk-pantied ass. And then I’ll come after
you
.”

“Yes, Mrs. Bagshaw, yes ma’am. I . . . I had no idea, I uh—”

“I’d nearly convinced Michelle Vance to let me help her. I was going to move her and her brother into one of my houses on South Chestatee. She would have stayed in school, gotten a decent part-time job, taken care of her brother just fine, thank you! Just because they’re poor doesn’t mean those Vance kids don’t have pride. They’re not criminals and there was no cause for my mink-brained piss-ant of a sister-in-law to turn them into a project for her holier-than-thou piss-ant-pious ideas of civic duty. She intended to turn Michelle over to the police and cage poor Harp like a wild cub. He was already a borderline case, and now, thanks to Tess, he’s got good reason to tell us all to go screw ourselves.”

The sheriff’s ears turned the color of strawberries. Aunt Tess’s ears, after G. Helen got through with her, looked like medallions of raw steak.

“Grandmother Helen went
Green Gold
on her,” my cousins (Dad had two younger sisters) whispered. In the mining country of the Georgia Mountains the term “green gold” meant fake gold, fool’s gold, gleaming on top but showing its plain metal underneath, next to the skin. Among Bagshaws,
Green Gold
was code for G. Helen’s regular lapses into the language of her own low-rent youth. G. Helen had history with a capitol H, most of it forbidden to discuss, even by G. Helen.

“You’re just green-gold like Grandmother,” my cousin Dew taunted. “Harp Vance’ll be kidnapped by aliens out there in the woods. Or eaten by bears. Or maybe he’ll freeze during the winter, standing up like a statue, and that’s how they’ll find him one day. Just his bones, standing there in the woods.” I remember her idiotic comments as if she and the other cousins spoke en masse, like a miniature Greek chorus dressed in Calvin Klein Kidswear. “Anyhow,” Dew
et al
said, chanting what they heard from their parents (and my good-hearted but morbid father,) “He’s better off dead. He’d just grow up to be trouble.”

I had already punched out two of my cousins. Dew came next. I was turning into the family’s sociopathic tooth fairy. I stood up for Harp. For his skeleton, at least.

“Young ladies do not knock the baby teeth out of their cousins’ mouths, no matter what their grandmothers tell them about giving as good as they get,” Candace lectured.

“Hit the smug little twits harder, next time,” G. Helen whispered.

But her support didn’t change the fact that my cousins were right: Harp Vance was probably dead. Throughout the long winter I looked at the tall, frosted windows at Bagshaw Downs with a misery that made me shiver.
Nothing but the clothes on his back and his pocket knife
. My only solace was that I knew how good Harp was with that pocket knife, and if anyone could use it to survive in the woods, I told myself he could.

Finally, when spring came, I dreamed about him. I dreamed he was among the ladyslippers, and I had to go look for him.

To the sorrow of many people in my family, I found him.

That day would be remembered in the history of Bagshaws as the moment I left the bounds of forgivable, if troubled, childhood and headed down the less sympathetic path toward adult
Bless Her Heartdom
.

Chapter 3

Because of me, the focus of our national family reunion stopped being barbecued ribs, bourbon punch and plunky strains of
Close To You
sung by skinny musicians in white bell bottoms; our celebration no longer centered around the unveiling of more pretentious Bagshaw portraits or mind-numbing speeches from two South Carolina Bagshaws we called The Family Tree Climbers, who linked us to every bigwig from George Washington to Doris Day.

No, because of me the biggest Bagshaw reunion to that date became about helping a lost boy who shamed us out of our well-fed daze. Daddy, G. Helen, and I led a platoon of our relatives to the glen, where all gasped at the site of Harp and his awful leg.

Bless His Heart
.

I heard that pitying invocation a hundred times.

Harp, thank goodness, stayed unconscious. Daddy and two other Bagshaw men carried him two miles back through the woods to Bagshaw Downs, and from there we put him in Daddy’s Mercedes and drove him to the small local hospital. His leg survived a tense two hours in surgery. The doctors pronounced him half-dead but salvageable, at least in body. “No ordinary boy could have survived six months in the woods,” a doctor told my father. “The kid’s either a hero or a psych case.”

“I’m betting on the latter,” my father said, and went to wash Harp’s blood and the odor of starvation off his hands.

TV and newspaper reporters showed up that evening, all anxious to exploit Harp’s remarkable story. His legend had begun. So had mine. I posed calmly before the bright lights, answering questions about finding Harper. “Sweetie, you’re a natural show-off,” a female reporter said.

“I’ve had a lot of practice,” I answered.

I was christened with a new future in more than one way that night. Candace, lurking in the shadows with her make-up kit and hairbrush still cooling from a rapid deployment on my behalf, put an awed hand to her lips as I performed. She whispered to Daddy, “Lord, Jimmy, I’m getting her an agent. She should audition for commercials. Nothing fazes her.”

Harp fazed me. Death fazed me. Loneliness fazed me. Candace just didn’t know.

That evening I huddled worriedly by Harp’s hospital bed, which was lit only by a small pool of light from the headboard lamp. He slept without moving, without even breathing distinctly, his sunken cheeks speckled with small scrapes and bruises, one long, thin leg encased in a cast from the knee down. Out in the hall, I heard Daddy and G. Helen arguing.

“James, your daughter had the guts and the smarts to trek into the woods on what the rest of us would call a childish whim, but she was right, and she found that boy and saved his life. So I say she deserves a say-so in what happens next.”

“Mother, she’s lonely and little odd and she needs help, not encouragement. Candace tries to draw her out with the beauty pageants, but it isn’t working. The last thing we need is for Grace to fall under the influence of some ragged kid who might lead her off into the woods at the drop of a hat. I swear to you I’ll help you find him a good home. But not at Bagshaw Downs.”

“No one leads Grace where she doesn’t want to go. Listen to me. She’s more like Willy than you want to see. You can’t forget Willy and you can’t erase her spirit in Grace.”

“Don’t you think I
want
to see Willy in her? Don’t you think I’m glad to see my wife in our daughter? But Willy wouldn’t want Grace to be reckless like her, and I don’t, either. For God’s sake, Mother, Willy might be alive if she’d been less passionate about her art and more passionate about her health—”