Facing Grace with Gloria and Other Stories

I was fifteen, never in love, and yearning to leave home when a red, two-seated convertible drove up to our gate. The driver’s door opened, and a girl of twenty-two with a perfectly shaped, light-skinned body emerged in a see-through dress that showed almost everything, and I imagined the rest.

My father, a tall, imposing figure of a Black man with bulging muscles from carving statues and grave markers for the dearly departed, tried not to look. He felt strange around women, I assumed because my mother had left when I was two. He never talked about her or much of anything, and we lived alone on a twelve-acre plot of half swamp property where I suffered his long silences broken only by the sharp blows of a hammer driving a metal chisel into stone.

Well, this girl was a treat for both of us. She closed the door and looked to our been-here-forever, two-room shack raised two feet off the ground by concrete blocks, with only a screen door on the front and all the windows up to catch a breeze. My father worked on, but slipped a glance when he knew she wasn’t looking.

She walked through the opening in the iron fence that stood on the front line of the property. That gate had never kept anything in or out. My great grandfather had installed it in the time of Calvin Coolidge to let people know he had made some cash farming, and my father was too proud to recycle it. Neither the shack nor the fence impressed the girl.

“You lost?” I said walking up to her, smelling the freshness of soap and perfume seeping through the humid air.

“I’m looking for . . .” she turned as if she might go back to the car to find the name.

“Ephraim Picard. Graveyard Stones and Statues?” I said.

“Yes. But I expected . . .” she paused, looking at me with soft, deep-water eyes that made me want her so bad I thought I might explode.

“A sign that say the business here?” I said.

“A professional building. Displays of the work.”

“Papa don’t do things up ‘head of time.’”

“I know that. I just expected examples.”

“I show you something in the barn might satisfy you some,” I said and waved for her to follow. We headed for our barn, not very big and without doors on the front or back so birds flew through without landing. A rusted, out-of-gas forklift half-blocked the door, and I put out my hand for her, which she took, and helped her wobble in her spike-heeled shoes over the two prongs of the fork into the barn.

“Quite the gentleman,” she laughed.

Inside on the dirt floor sat blocks of stone and marble randomly stacked, mostly by me. I led her to one corner that was in shadows, but with enough light to see the only sample I could think of showing her. I pulled a tarp off a marble sculpture of a woman’s head propped up on two stacked wooden crates.

“Why has it got all those lines through it?” she asked.

“It got smashed,” I said. Her hands lightly touched the surface, like a blind person trying to remember someone.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly. But Papa had made it and destroyed it.

“Can I see the rest of it?”

I pointed to a rusted tub filled with marble chips, most smaller than an egg from being smashed with a hammer.

“Takes time . . . gluing it back together.”

She stood back, walking from side to side to see the