All the Forgivenesses

by Elizabeth Hardinger

As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses. —Joan Baez

“Saved by grace, thank God Amighty.” This was the woman with the blue bandanna, nodding, and her eyes closed. Now Mama and her kin was the kind that believed you was saved by grace and not by works, so you could get away with a sin if you wanted to—you just didn’t want to. Grace was God’s way of letting you into Heaven even though you was a born sinner. But the way Mama taught grace was a hard teaching. According to her lights, if you was in God’s grace you didn’t even want to do bad no more. But me, seemed like I was always wanting to sin. For sure I’d ruther lie than take a whipping. There was times I was like to covet, and I was like to get a hungry headache at Sabbath service. I got to where I hardly ever wanted to go no more. Not to mention, honoring your mother and father meant doing their will without complaining even in your heart. That was hard. So whenever Mama talked about them nails in Jesus’ hands, seems like my insides would fold in two.

God nor Jesus wouldn’t want me in their heart now, seemed like. I laid there for a long time. I tried to pray, but my teeth chattered to the point where I couldn’t. I cried for a while, quiet as I could, till my lips felt dried out. I ached all over. I had a painful buzz in my mouth that wouldn’t go away. I needed Mama. I needed to tell her I’d lied to her and Daddy both. I wasn’t watching Timmy like I was supposed to, and it was my fault he was dead. I went over it in my mind, how I would say it, how I would beg forgiveness and ask Mama to pray with me and get me right with the Lord like she knowed how. I reckoned everbody would hate me. I knowed I would be punished in some terrible way. But I deserved it. And besides, it would be better than feeling like I never belonged nowhere.

“Stop your bawling now,” she said, though I wasn’t. “Ain’t no tears in Heaven, you know that. Timothy’s asleep in Jesus.” “Yes, but—” “Lord don’t want to see you crying, hear me? Ain’t your place to tell God Amighty what to do.” I tried to get started. “I never thought Timmy would die.” That word die had a thickness to it that stuck in my throat. “Ever living thing dies,” she said. “It’s the curse of sin. The wages of sin is death.”

If, in the dusk of the twilight, dim be the region afar, Will not the deepening darkness brighten the glimmering star?

In the next days it seemed like I was falling headlong, like I’d just tripped over something and was dropping into some strange new place. I went over and over what I could remember about Mama. I recalled asking her how her and Daddy met, and she told me that tale about the two of them drifting together, and then she laughed. She was like to tease me that way, like we had all the time in the world. She’d showed me how to cook okra and get out spit-up stains, but I hardly knowed nothing about Mama herself, what she was like. It was as if Mama was what she done, and not who she was. It wasn’t nothing I’d thought about before, her being somebody like everbody else, and now I’d never know her, not that way. It made my skin cold to realize how long eternity was.

But I didn’t have no time to set around and grieve for Mama. There was chores to do ever minute and meals to get. You do what’s in front of you, hour by hour, and you hope to fall asleep at night before you think too much about where you’re headed.

Now I have to tell the part I always left out of the story. When I got out of bed to check on the baby, I couldn’t see good in the half-light, but things was so quiet I had a real bad feeling. I never reached down and touched him and found him cold—that’s just the way I always told it. Truth is, I picked him up and pulled him close, and when his little cold face touched the flesh of my neck—well, I can’t hardly stand to think about what happened next. Lord help me, I throwed Will down on the floor. I done that. It was like my very skin couldn’t abide the feeling of him cold on my neck. I throwed my baby on the floor, I did. Then I stood there still and silent, seeing would Sam wake up. Seemed like the whole world would have heard that sickening thump. Standing there in the darkness, it felt like my spirit was cut open like raw meat, and something touched the rawness, and pain went through me, and if I could have took back what I done, I would. I surely would. I wanted to go back five minutes in time, just five minutes. I felt like I could live with him dead, maybe, but not with what I done, and then I thought, No, go back five hours or whatever it needs, make him alive again and warm against me. Now according to what Mama told me, wishing unnatural things contrary to the Lord’s will, that’s blasphemy, it’s defiance, it’s disobedience. And I said to myself, The hell with the Lord, where was the Lord when this innocent child breathed his last, ain’t nobody taking my baby. Wi...

As time went by I felt my black misery calling to me, only this time I pushed it away. I seen clear, as clear as anything I ever seen, that this time it would kill me if I let it. I felt like I couldn’t dip a toe in it, I had to harden myself against it, and day by day I stared straight ahead and swallowed back my feelings and got stronger. I found out, I could wake up ever day and do what had to be done, and I let it be enough.

I remembered Mama saying, “The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” but to me it never felt like the wind let up.

It’s awful pretty in the Kentucky hills. Not like the Flint Hills, where the beauty is in the huge Kansas sky, and the sun washes everthing else out, and the land don’t seem like much. Oh, the land’s pretty, in a brownish way, with miles of knee-high brownish prairie grass dotted by brownish rocks and bushes. And the longer you live there, the more you see the million tiny differences in the dun shades. But the sun—seems like you’re exposed to the sun’s very eyeball, it glares down at you. Makes you feel little, like you might disappear and never be missed. But them Kentucky hills, why, the sky there’s a lot smaller, peeking at you through the trees, the sunbeams broke up among the leaves, and in that paler light, the colors is real strong, deep, rich—blues and greens and purples and reds and oranges. After you’re in Kansas for a while, seems like the colors of Kentucky look like an oil painting up close—too loud to be real. Kansas, everthing’s real, no matter how close you look at it.

“I don’t reckon it’s in their nature—not like us.” I was thinking of my daddy and hers and most of the men I’d ever knowed. Then it dawned on me, the thing about all the men I knowed—they was afraid. Of what, I didn’t know. Not of us, not of women, of course not—but what, then? They was running from something all their lives, seemed like, running as fast as they could. What was they afraid of?

There’s punishment, and then there’s punishment. I felt like I could endure God’s wrath for the things I done, but for one thing—I couldn’t bear the look I seen on Sam’s face. Pity. Pity like I used to feel for Mama, even as she turned her bed into her coffin. Now I felt afraid. I wanted to believe Sam still loved me like he done before, but I never had the courage to. Besides, there was things he didn’t know I done—to Timmy, to Will—things I never told him, coward that I was. I felt like there would be a lot to go through coming up, and I couldn’t see how things could ever be the same between us again.

Me and Hiram happened to look at each other in that moment, and I seen his chest rise and fall. I got the chills. The look on his face—a hunger to hope, but a fear to—was one I never seen before in nobody under forty. I didn’t know a child that age could even playact what I seen on that face. Them two boys, it was hard to see how they would turn out all right, all they had going against them.

“I ain’t afraid.” Which of course was a lie. What wasn’t I afraid of, more like. What if I went through all it would take—looked like it would take plenty, a blind man could see that, like Opal said—and then Dacia come sashaying home one day and wanted them children back, like she said in her note? Be just like her. And what if she didn’t, and it turned out Sam couldn’t make himself love these children? How could he, rough like they was, and not even his? Children couldn’t live just on pity, I should know. And three at once, who’d been through what they’d been through. What if I turned out like Mama, one eye on the rat poison—but I couldn’t bear to think about that, never could. “I know this ain’t what you figured on,” Sam said. “They ain’t even your kin.” He crushed the unlit cigarette in his fist, drew back his arm, and throwed it out in the yard. I heard him grunt with the effort. It’s harder to throw something light than something heavy. “Well, they ain’t,” I said. Now he wrestled his boots off, swearing under his breath, and stood up in his stocking feet. “We ain’t going to fix this all tonight,” he said. “Better get some sleep.” “You go on,” I said. “I’ll be in after while.” “Suit yourself.” He never touched me, just walked inside the house. Oh, I was afraid all right, and broody and mean. I knowed I was taking my wrath toward Dacia and trying to wrap it around my shame like a thin, scraggly shawl, just like I always had. Didn’t seem like I could help it.

“Which are you more afraid of—that she will, or she won’t?” I stiffened. There was a silence, and then I just said it. “If she don’t come back, I can’t never tell her how wrong I was about Mama. How sorry I am. No way to ask her for forgiveness. But if she does come back . . .”

to talk it all out—patient and kind and merciful, the both of us—just gaze at each other in compassion and say all the things, answer all the questions, admit all the lies and jealousy and pride and fear that had built up between us back when we hardly knowed each other. I wanted to be able to believe her, believe everthing she said, about Mama or anything else, get to know her truly. I felt like I had a deep and abiding love for her which I never had give voice to, and I needed to hear it maybe more than she did. I had always had a secret picture in my mind, of me and her setting calmly together, and just now this picture played in front of my mind’s eye, and I craved it, I craved speaking and hearing the plain truth of her life and mine. I didn’t see how I could surrender them children to her without it. And yet it felt like it was a dream, a fairy tale that would never come true.

Then it come to me—if I done this, I’d be doing the same thing to them children that Mama done to me, and Jesus Christ, I was the only mother they had. For another day, year, or their whole life, for better or worse, I was their mama. Then I heard a sigh or a moan inside the car, and then, strangest thing, I felt breath on my neck, warm and then cool. For an instant it felt like I was dreaming, and at the same time, I was in the dream. Then it vanished, that dream, like they does, and I couldn’t snatch it back. I put my hand on the back of my neck, and sweat gathered on my fingers.

But what I couldn’t explain was the feeling I had, like I’d just took the first deep breath of my life. Like it was the first time I ever filled my lungs clear up to the shoulders. Like I was breathing in air through my skin, my hair, my fingernails, my eyelids. Like I myself was made out of breath, like I was breath itself. But now, instead of feeling empty, I felt light. Light was shining on me and in me, it was filling me and lifting me. I felt like I didn’t deserve nothing, but, somehow, I had everthing. Out loud I said, “Is this what grace is?”

And I knowed I had what it took, whatever it was, to do whatever needed doing, and whatever I done would be blessed, and I had everthing I ever needed or hoped for, beyond my desire, beyond my ken.

I took in a breath so sharp it seemed to cut me. I reminded myself that just because he made sense, it didn’t mean he knowed what he was saying—but I rejoiced just the same.

That piano did look comical in our front room, sure enough. But when I looked at it, I didn’t see the piano exactly—I seen the music inside it waiting to come out. No telling what kind or how beautiful it might be, or if it would make you laugh, cry, sing, or get up and dance. I reckoned that was the beauty of it.

He spoke again. “It’s the ones like Dacia—the ones that are hard to love—” I heard him swallow. “They’re the ones need it the most. Mom used to say that.”

Then I got to thinking, what name did we put on the court papers—Trouble or Travis? And where did I put the scissors after I used them yesterday? And what did we have in the house for breakfast in the morning, was we out of bread? Did me and Sarah remember to close up the chickens for the night? Did Sam have a clean shirt for work? I was thinking so hard I almost forgot to say my prayer. It was a prayer of joy, sure enough, a prayer of thanksgiving for the good things the day had brought, and all the blessings the Lord seen fit to bestow on me, a sinner saved by grace.