Sometimes when Mother and Daddy went out of town, I would get to go out to Flat Fork and stay with Nanny and Duke-Duke, my great aunt and uncle who lived on a little dairy farm. They were old and always had been, but you never had to worry about surprises with them like knock-down drag-outs in the middle of the night. Way out there in the dark country, the only thing you heard in the middle of the night was Duke-Duke quietly shuffling his cards for endless games of Solitaire on his lap board in his rocking chair under the pole lamp, the bass-ey gong of the grandfather clock every fifteen minutes, and two or three times a night, a train whistle from the tracks out past the south pasture where they kept black angus cows and Topsey, the brown mare that I was lucky enough to saddle up and ride from dusk till dawn on many Saturdays just like she was mine. My cousin June and her stallion, Trigger, would lead me and Topsey all over Flat Fork bottom, jumping ditches like Gene Autry and loping across pasture after pasture until our horses were black with sweat. Azalea Heights was a city of more than four-thousand people, so coming to the country like this was a retreat that I looked forward to. Julie, however, didn’t like it out in the quiet country, even though Nanny would rub her back with talcum powder to help her go to sleep, so she would go stay with a friend in town.
Since Nanny and Duke-Duke didn’t have a television set, they would talk to me and tell me stories at night when it was too late to ride Topsey and June had gone home. One night in one of our conversations about school, Nanny informed me of a secret that changed the way I thought about Mrs. Gravitts for the rest of that year. She said that Mr. Gravitts had an illness that made Mrs. Gravitts’ life very hard, and that she probably never got a full night’s sleep or had much leisure time even in the summers. Nanny wasn’t the kind to preach or tell me I ought not to make Mrs. Gravitts’ life any harder than it already was, but as I lay in bed that night listening to the clock chiming and train whistling way out beyond the cow pasture, I got a soft, sad feeling about old Mrs. Gravitts’ hard life, and decided I would try harder to control myself in her room rather than trying to get ideas that would make her tireder, and that I would try not to notice her false teeth clacking, and even if I did, that I wouldn’t talk to other students about it anymore. Being what I had heard some people call a “ring leader,” I was pretty sure that if my behavior changed, a lot of other kids’ behavior would change, too.
It seemed kinda strange that if Mother and Daddy hadn’t decided to go over to Shreveport that night and I hadn’t come out to Flat Fork, I might never have known about Mr. Gravitts, and then I would have kept on thinking Mrs. Gravitts was just making life miserable for us for the fun of it, and I’d have gone on paying her back for it until May 23 instead of changing my mind and giving her five months of grace.
Grace was another one of those things Mr. Pete talked about every Sunday that I never could quite get a good grip on. Since nobody else asked any questions about it, and I didn’t want to seem dumb about something he talked about like it was as common as salt and pepper, I just nodded and kept quiet and acted like it was a concept I had known about from way back. But now, listening to Nanny talk about Mrs. Gravitts and coming to my decision about the rest of the year, I began to see what he might have meant about being “saved by God’s grace.” Mrs. Gravitts was in for a big surprise, because from January through next May, she was about to be saved my mine.
