Preacher’s Kid : A tale of growth, rebellion among the rural poor : SAVING GRACE, <i> By Lee Smith (Putnam: $22.95; 256 pp.)</i>

In Lee Smith’s ninth novel, “Saving Grace,” the long-suffering though witty daughter of a Holiness minister never doubts her father’s honest motives when he “works the signs.” Grace Shepherd even admits that while God is always generous to Virgil Shepherd, He also takes care of her small needs after a fashion. When the father-daughter team arrives at the One Way Church of God in Maryville, Tenn., completely empty-handed (they are down to one small copperhead inside a croaker sack), the fearless preacher dazzles an appreciative audience and is lavished with a hand-tooled silver serpent box for his pains. The daughter gets a box of Kotex.

Mind you, it’s a funny bit, but in the novel’s gripping first half, Smith’s title, “Saving Grace,” works on our modern sensibilities as a chilling pun: We see the minister’s wife and most of his children become lost to madness, despair and neglect. When only Grace remains for her father to exploit, there is no one among his congregants resourceful enough to save her. A box of bandages: So much for her woman’s rite of passage. In Virgil’s world there is only one rite, one passage, one way. The lack of intervention is appalling and convincing.

Gradually, we come to realize that Grace is too much the poet to make such an easy call or allow us to do it for her. Lee Smith patiently woos us into double vision. In her opening gambit, an exploding pickup truck is both a revelatory burning bush as well as hilarious swift justice from an angry congregation Virgil is fleeing. The children and the wife stand homeless and hungry on the side of the road. Someone will come along and offer them a barn or some open sky. Young Grace’s memories begin at this juncture, because what miraculously turns up this time is a house in Scrabble Creek, just outside of Waynesville, N.C. An afternoon playing alone in her first snug attic is all the time needed for her first rebellion: “A house gives you a place on the earth,” Grace suddenly realizes at age 10. “If you know where you live, you know who you are.” In her father’s theology, however, “everplace is the same in the sight of God. You’re on the way to Heaven, and that’s all you need to know.”

Of course we will choose the life of the rebelling mind every time--the mind that chooses the attic, warmed by the hearth below. But when Smith touches our less conscious desire for open sky, for Virgil’s “all you need to know,” we may twitch in our sleep. We can’t quite know how much we’re dreading the mad father’s disappearance from her story, from our own stories. Who are we without him? This is Grace’s unspoken question for the rest of the novel. The hearth is cold and boring when one hasn’t been driven there by the whirlwinds, by the people who are, in Grace’s words, simply “more alive than anyone else.”

Lee Smith, as her fans know, has one of truest ears for the speech of her part of the world. A woman will tell how she got her “hysterectomy out” or how “the doctor gave up and done a Sicilian” on someone else. This idiom must be handled, like Virgil’s snakes, with the greatest of care (“We are put through some terrible test, and some of us does better on them than others”). Smith scores high, mixing the rough with the finely honed to hint at meanings in Grace’s young images. Grace thinks of her unrepentant self as a fetus; it will eventually start “to show” on her. Her secrets are like hornets that will one day sting everyone. This is what we might call displacement in a child who has seen diamondback rattlers do far more than sting when they make those sudden horrible plunges at bare arms and breast and cheeks.

The slower work of this novel is to recover “saving grace” as a phrase. It turns out that sprouting wings in a bid for freedom through adulthood is perhaps not the point at all. Grace grows up and manages all that amazingly well. She doesn’t lose out on a thing--the Sixties marriage; the children; the bone-racking affair with the man from Sherwin-Williams Paints. She gets her share of divorce, anxiety and alienation, same as everyone else. At age 40 she is, more than ever, full of witty self-deprecation. Mercifully stripped to nothing once again, she keeps telling her story straight. Nothing back then was to blame for where she is now. She’s simply dangerously tapped out, at risk of losing any surprise that her memories may still contain. One’s memories imprison a past if they don’t point to a possible future.

One day she makes a trip to the house at Scrabble Creek; it stands almost untouched. She finds one of her mother’s dresses still hanging in the closet. Now with just strength enough to give hearing to Job’s comforters, Grace holds court in her bed of straw. Old followers of Virgil Shepherd, who believe themselves to be free of that bad, frenzied time, come to her one by one to give their cold advice before growing silent. It is then that Grace hears the simple phrase go to church . The italics are hers and they are heartbreaking in light of her desperately sanctified parents. Watch out, Smith seems to be saying; we are in possession of bigger leaps of love and faith than our language seems to allow for. Grace quickens to think that conventional places of worship might not be lost to her; that they might be available to her as ground proper to grow wise in. I borrow from Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” which Smith may have had in mind for the atmosphere of quiet excitement in the last moments of her wonderfully nuanced story of saving grace. There is that hard-won spiritual remnant from all religious childhoods--the lasting thing, or perhaps merely the unshakable. Lee Smith’s strategy is to risk our not wanting to hear of it.