Revival
By Lisa M. Bradley
I. Carmen, Seeking
Dark skin scars darker.
If she were darker brown, might she disappear into the shadows altogether?
It’s a thought she’s often had, even wished for on occasion, but it’s never felt so distinct a possibility as here, now, jostled by the white crowd crammed under the revival tent; never mind it’s pitched in Carmen’s uncle’s empty field, that her kin—with the same bemused amiability they show when she frets over her spotted skin—have granted permission to these sweaty, fervored folk to gather in their town. Some come from counties away, so parched are they for a sip of possible salvation. Carmen is ignored, like the slivers of night peeking between canvas flaps into the lantern-lit throng of people praying slit-eyed and rocking to the cacophony of squeezebox, cajon, and tambourine as they await the preacher. So many promises on splotchy broadsides... enough to lure dyspeptics and apoplectics; parents of spindly, listless children; blood-coughing elders; the dandruff- and drink-cursed; the wild-eyed and invisibly anguished. Enough to lure Carmen, despite the sturdy pragmatism of sus parientes, the cheerful godlessness residing in their robust bodies; all brown, all beautifully complected, except for one.
The preacher burns too bright to look at, bright as summer sun spearing the tin-framed mirror in Tía’s parlor, and Carmen cowers before his gaze, as she does before all mirrors, feeling the shadows shrink around her, every supplicant incited. With eyelids scrunched against the blue-blazes brilliance but arms raised, fingers grappling for grace, they push Carmen out of their way, inadvertently propelling her forward. And though she came here seduced by the same promises, Carmen panics, resists the tide, fights not to join the spittle-flecked front of the crowd. Too like teetering on a cliff’s edge, too great the specter of wish fulfilled or failed.
The preacher turns his head. His eyes scour the crowd, and just as his focus threatens to fall on Carmen’s pock-marked face, a shadow intervenes. A narrow haven, not wide enough to shelter Carmen’s arms or hips but a relief nevertheless. Shielded from the preacher’s gaze, she adjusts her armor (Mami’s sunset-colored rebozo) over her shoulders now clammy with dread sweat. Jasmine scent still wafts from the wool-and-cotton weave, seven years since Mami’s death. Thus fortified, Carmen lifts her chin to smile her thanks, blinks back damp gratitude to see her savior.
Blue-gray eyes in a gray face... or maybe she sees gray because her pulse pounds behind her eyes, dimming her vision as he studies her face. To her amazement, this tall man neither shrinks from her scars nor feigns, as her kinfolk do, disregard for appearances (even as their attention skates from each imperfection to the next, seeking safe place to rest).
Even more amazing, the stranger leans in to ask, “Are you well? May I escort you outside?”
The music stops. There is no room for melody anymore, nor even notes. The tambourine merely rattles beneath the preacher’s sibilants. The cajon strikes in time with each bald-eyed exclamation, and though the preacher holds only a well-worn book in hand, the way Carmen’s heart pounds in her chest he might as well be brandishing knives. She can’t speak for her panic, so breathlessly she nods to the question read from the stranger’s lips. Hand under her elbow, he helps her squeeze through the crowd and out, into the lung-stinging relief of starshine and open air.
II. Reprieve
Quickly as propriety demands, the stranger releases her arm; seemingly still concerned, he follows her to Tío’s well. Carmen means to dampen her hot face and remember herself. Was she not the youngest of her family ever to work the sugarcane burn? Didn’t she, age eight, catch in her burlap sack as many snakes fleeing from that fiery harvest as some grown men? Why then does she cower from a self-appointed soothsayer?
Her rescuer declines a drink from the proffered ladle but rolls up his sleeves—Carmen is relieved he’s civilized (enough to know the ritual)—but mid-ablution she notes the welts, red as chilis de monte, around his wrists. When he lifts his arms to scrub face and neck, his sleeves slide higher to reveal elbows equally inflamed. Maybe these marks are his reason for attending the revival. Has her quailing kept him from catching the preacher’s eye? Has it cost him a chance at cure?
The stranger betrays no resentment as Carmen blots droplets from her face with the fringed edge of the rebozo. He only asks if it’s her first time at a meeting.
“But not yours?” she asks and studies the shade of his gaunt cheek—gray indeed, not an error of her addled mind or a matter of moonglow. Different though it is from her people’s, his facial structure suggests a certain regality, she thinks. She admires the angles of his face, the prominence of his bones.
He confides he’s been following the preacher for some time.
“Yet never been summoned to the stage?” She thinks he must be strong indeed, to court more than once the awful spotlight of the preacher’s gaze.
The gray man winks without innuendo, the way her primos shrug, and brushes down his sleeves to hide his reddened wrists. “Might be,” he says, “that Preacher knows something I don’t.”
“Might be...,” Carmen repeats, but she doesn’t believe it. The terror she felt in the tent has subsided, and her common sense aches to redeem itself. There’s no call for rudeness, especially when this stranger has been so kind, so she attempts the close-lipped smile Mami wore when biting her tongue.
“Or maybe,” she says, failing, wanting to kick herself, “Preacher feeds off hope.”
She braces for rebuke. Too often her words are sharper than Mami’s, and she lacks the ribbons ‘round her tongue to prettify pettiness. Instead, to her amazement, the gray man chuckles.
“Maybe he does,” he says of Preacher. “Hope or desperation. They’re close enough.”
Carmen’s relief is so profound, it must be blazoned on her face, because the man laughs again. His laughter sounds a bit frayed, closer to desperation than hope, but that he laughs at all, Carmen chooses to see as a gift.
III. Healing, the First
That night, the preacher summons to the stage a woman with a withered left arm locked at the elbow. Her gnarled hand knots in her long hair, a cruel caricature of coquetry. The squeezebox emits a mournful chord as her sister explains the damage done in a button factory: workers forced to clear jammed gears without shutting down the almighty machines.
Carmen, squeezed in again at the back of the tent, canvas cupping her rump at every breeze, cannot see the stage until the preacher commands the crowd to pray, whereupon nearly half fall to their knees and the tent fills with the rattled-hive hum of some memorized petition they repeat in unison, so many times that Carmen starts learning it; could join in, were she so inclined.
Looking at the preacher straight on is too hard, so Carmen stares at the injured woman as the preacher gently turns her, folds her to him like a fragile bouquet. Her faded calico dress pleats under his embrace. Carmen doesn’t see his lips moving, doesn’t hear him speaking until his hug fiercens, until the floorboards creak under his violent rocking. This is not the laying on of hands that Carmen’s cousins mock. This healing involves much hollering and “hugging” that might be mistaken for wrestling, except it’s so one-sided. The preacher does not chant the same prayer as his congregation. He brays the names of his many gods, or the many names of his one god.
Whatever the case, he concludes in a roared AMEN! and, holding the woman’s right hand, he spins her out across the stage like a square dancer. In instinctive sympathy, Carmen flings one arm out to keep her balance and, onstage, the woman does the same. The look on her face when her once-withered arm suddenly obeys, swinging free on its rusty joint!
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sp; The tent thunders with applause and AMENS!, enough to test the tent poles jammed deep in the earth. Carmen half expects the whole affair to rattle off the horizon like raindrops bouncing off oilcloth.
The next day, she ignores the shower of questions from the ranch hands’ children about the revival, instead urging the youngsters to help her hammer in place the last boards of the new chicken coop (“chicken palace” Tío teases, albeit with pride). Despite her feigned indifference, the marvels are never far from Carmen’s thoughts, and at day’s end, after a hot soak to soothe sore muscles, she follows her wonder back to the tent.
That night the preacher heals an old man whose eyes are so occluded, his companion must lead him to the stage. The thudding cajon underscores every epithet from the preacher’s mouth. The tambourine hisses every time he yanks the blind man this way or that, the sounds chasing each other faster and faster until the preacher flings the old man off the stage. In the second he looms over the chanting crowd, Carmen sees the old man’s eyes, cleared, are two different colors: blue and brown. Then he falls into the rough embrace, the humbling holleration of true believers.
During the musical interlude, Carmen slips out to catch her breath and soon finds the gray man at her side.
“You’re back.” His voice is gritty but lowered to be gentle, even courtly. “You seek a cure?”
“I did,” Carmen admits, cheeks warming with embarrassment. “But now my care seems such a trifle. And you, sir?”
The gray man shakes his lowered head. “There’s no cure for me, but I had hopes Preacher might ease my troubles.”
Perhaps that is why she thinks his countenance regal: his head is always bowed, as if under the weight of an invisible crown.
“You’d better step back inside then,” she says, not unkindly, “whereas I will walk to clear my mind.”
“If he’s not noticed me by now...”
Somberly the gray man winks, and Carmen thinks again the gesture is like her cousins’ shrugs, not flirtation. They share names (his, Swift) before walking her uncle’s field, the noisy light of the revival on one side, subtle stirrings in the thorn forest on the other. Swift stays always one step behind her, and at first she doesn’t notice; her cousins Pánfilo y Casimiro have done the same since she was thirteen, when she broke the nose of a bully who’d been flicking scorpions at them. Carmen finds the man’s deference odd but convenient. She needn’t hide her smile, wondering if he’s as pleased by her company as she is his.
“Are you sleeping in the Velasquez barn?” she asks. The Velasquez family are yet more cousins, so she knows that most of the other revivalists have boarded there.
“I have no money,” Swift says, “but the creatures don’t seem to mind I’ve made my bed in the brush.”
“Truly?” Aghast, Carmen cannot contain her anger, though Swift has spoken serenely. “I’m shamed by their inhospitality! My cousins, so smug with suddenly stuffed purses, that they turn away gente decente. I will tell Ezti he must give you shelter—”
“Thank you for your kindness,” Swift says, palms pressed together. “But I would not be comfortable there, however gracious the accommodations. I prefer to be alone.”
“Some solitude! Sleeping amongst rattlesnakes and scorpions,” she says, still incensed. “Fetch your bedroll this moment. I know a place for you.”
When, cowed, he reemerges from the wilderness of mesquite and hackberry, she leads him to Mami’s casita, the house Carmen painstakingly keeps but where she can no longer bear to sleep. After washing by the ewer in the tiny entry, she insists he take his comfort while she hurries to Tío’s house to fetch gorditas and anacua jam.
When she returns, however, Swift asks so many questions that she never tastes the refreshments, nor notices if he does. Coaxed by his curiosity, she describes her chores on the ranch and eventually her work in the town archive, setting type for a new edition of Mami’s finest poems. Soon she’s confessing her own fumbling efforts at verse, warm under his appreciative eye, warmer still under his gentle touch.
IV. Communion
The next night, Swift asks Carmen if she might be willing to skip the tent revival. In Carmen’s childhood bed, they perform a ritual more ancient than prayer.
Mornings after, tales of Preacher’s deeds spread among the ranch hands’ children. Since Carmen refuses to be their spy, the children pick straws to see who will sneak peeks through the seams of the revival tent.
Carmen hears their chatter as they breakfast on the large back porch. Preacher heals a girl gone doll-limp and mute from fever, crushes her between him and her mother until the girl cries out and kicks him in the gut. Another night, Preacher rights the crooked spine of a mill worker who then dances until the lamps are blown out. On the fifth night, it’s a six-year case of the hiccups and a goiter vanquished.
The last night, Preacher hugs a young woman’s lungs clear and unites in marriage the mill worker and the sister of the factory worker with the healed arm. The ensuing celebration is so raucous, Carmen can hear it from the casita.
She whispers against Swift’s cool, bare shoulder. “I guess you’ll be moving on now, following the revival?”
Swift sighs. “I’m tired of running after promises, praying for Preacher to see me when you already do.”
So the revival pulls up stakes and leaves town. Swift stays.
Quick as his name suggests, Swift aims to earn his keep. Though he’s the son of shopkeepers in a town Carmen’s never heard of, he accepts the only ranch work he’s qualified for: brute and scut. Capable of eerie silence, he sometimes sneaks into the forest at the hottest part of the day to snatch white-winged doves straight from their nests, thus contributing to family dinners he never attends despite Carmen’s requests and her relatives’ dubiety.
At first she assumes his refusal to eat or drink in her presence is a cultural quirk. When she asks, however, he confesses it’s part of his unnamed illness. Embarrassed, she vows never to speak of it again.
But her family’s questions do not stop. Over cafecitos, Tío wonders aloud how Swift, inscrutably shy, will ever fulfill his communal responsibility. Even children must contribute; according to age and ability, they sweep town sidewalks or wind yarn for elders or read to the youngest.
“He’s not been here that long,” Carmen says. “Perhaps he can work with me in the archive until he grows more comfortable.”
A week later she still hasn’t urged him into town, but at least he seems comfortable with her closest cousins. Or so she thinks. Then one afternoon Casimiro y Pánfilo return to the main house after a morning spent scouring pastures for jimsonweed, coyotillo, any plants toxic to cattle.
“Where is Swift?” Carmen asks, for he was supposed to help her primos.
The young men shrug, clearly uncomfortable tattling, but Carmen drags facts from them: Swift never arrived that morning at the appointed spot, nor met them in the field. She hurries to Mami’s casita, fearing her lover might be sick in bed, but only echoes answer when, forehead damp from hurried ablutions, she calls his name in empty rooms. Perhaps he went into the forest to gather nopalitos for his secret breakfast. And stepped on a copperhead? Or startled a javelina protecting babes?
Carmen runs outside, and lizards scatter like fire at her feet. Before she reaches the forest’s edge, a raspy voice snags her flight. Whirling so fast her rebozo flares, she finds Swift slouched behind a huisache, his gray face grayer than ever beneath a slick of sweat, his shirt cuffs black with what looks like blood.
“He found me,” Swift wheezes.
Carmen falls to her knees and reaches, trembling, for his shoulders. Fear lowers her voice to match his. “Who, my love? Who did this to you?”
“He found me,” he repeats, panicked gaze raking the brush. “I thought, if I stopped following the preacher, he’d lose the trail. But he must have doubled back.”
Up close, Carmen sees his sleeves are not bloody but scorched and the skin under them blazing with fresh red welts.
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�What did this?” she demands. “Who’s following you? The preacher? Why?”
Swift’s head still swivels in search of attackers. “I got away,” he pants, as if reassuring himself. “No, not Preacher. Another. I lost him in the forest but didn’t want to lead him to you. So I stopped here, but he never caught up and then I was too weary to go on.”
Promising she’s seen no one, Carmen pulls him to his feet, only to discover his ankles have been injured, too, as if wrenched by a cruel lasso. Together they hobble to the casita, toppling the ewer as they struggle through the entry.
Gently as she can, Carmen cleans his wounds and applies aloe vera to the welts undeniably shaped like restraints. Feigning calm she asks, “Is the law after you? Or vigilantes?”
He struggles in the chaise to sit upright and insists, “I’ve broken no laws of man.”
What other laws exist? she almost asks, before remembering he’s religious and she—despite the mind-stretching events under the preacher’s tent—is not. Two and a half decades lived by logic and proof easily outweigh a handful of healings. Flukes.
Carmen grips her rebozo’s fringe in frustration. “Then tell me of this man who pursues you. Why does he chase you? What does he want?”
“Once he controlled me, kept me in chains. And he’ll not rest until I’m in chains again.”
“Slavery!”
Where was this wretched place Swift had lived, that he could be held prisoner?
“We must tell my family at once,” she says. “They will protect you. My cousins—”
“No! I won’t endanger your loved ones,” Swift exclaims. “This pursuer, he is not a man but a devil! Ruthless. Feared even among his own kind! You can’t imagine his power!”
Swift’s terror sends thorned tendrils into Carmen’s heart, but she heads for the door. “Then we must go to the town council. They will guard your life until they can nullify the slaver’s claims.”
“It’s too late,” Swift says, catching her rebozo. “He has my scent. He can infiltrate any sanctuary, any prison.”
Lisa M Bradley - [BCS279 S01] - Revival (html) Page 1
