The Miracle Stealer

by Neil Connelly

  I heard all of this from a position I’d taken atop a fist-shaped gray rock overlooking the hole. I just sat there in the light rain, watching everything like you do in a dream. Part of me thought maybe Daniel was off someplace hiding, upset that Jeff and I didn’t pay him enough attention or something. That’s what I was hoping. But in my gut, I knew my brother was down there trapped.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, the rain stopped and the chain saws started. Every available man, Jeff and my dad included, had been recruited to clear-cut a ten-foot-wide path between the fairy fort and the field so the drilling equipment could get through. That’s nearly a quarter mile, and they worked from both ends. When I tried to help, my dad told me to go down to the picnic pavilions, where the women were holding a prayer vigil. Instead I crept back to the hole and talked to Daniel. I told him not to worry, that everything would be okay. When I ran out of things to say, I thought about how tired I was and how tired he must be, so I sang him some lullabies. And when I ran out of lullabies, I sang whatever I could think of, songs about John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

  I don’t think I fell asleep during those hours. I remember the constant growl of chain saws growing dimmer as they made progress away from the fort, and I remember the stars overhead fading as the sky began to turn from black to dark blue. Then a mechanical roar buzzed the tops of the pines and a great cone of light swung over us. I stood and saw the helicopter, floating west toward the park. As I charged down the new trail, past the carnage of jagged stumps and felled trees, my mind filled with a vision of experts, trained professionals from New York or Philadelphia, people who planned for disasters like this every day. They’d have a better idea than this half-baked drilling plan, and they’d have Daniel free in no time. When I reached the forest’s edge, I saw the helicopter, already landed just beyond FDR’s statue. In its lights, two men climbed out, one oddly wearing a sports jacket. The other reached back into the belly of the helicopter and pulled out gear that at first I thought might save my brother. But then the man heaved it up onto his shoulder and I recognized it for what it was: a camera. On the tail of the helicopter I found the letters WPBE.

  I had no way of knowing that they’d beam our story out in time for the morning news on regional affiliates, or that the national networks would pick it up by midday. They filmed the crews of would-be lumberjacks hacking away at the pine trees and took long shots of the silent hole. Mrs. Wheeler slipped an arm over my mother’s shoulder and convinced her to talk to the press. The cameras zoomed in on their crying faces, and that’s when my mother and Mrs. Wheeler asked for all those watching to pray for Daniel. Much of America woke up to that story—a small town in Pennsylvania was desperately trying to save a boy who had fallen into the earth. And that boy needed your prayers.

  By lunchtime the men finished dragging the amputated pines off to the side of the new path, and the drilling equipment got hauled up slowly over the fresh stumps. Three more news crews had arrived by then, and together they reduced what seemed like the greatest tragedy to ever strike our town to witty phrases like “Peril in Paradise.” It took most of the afternoon to drill the rescue tunnel, but the lead story on the evening news was going to be one of hope. Soon rescuers would finish the tunnel. Young Daniel would be in his mother’s arms before nightfall. Americans from coast to coast, and viewers across the world, held their breath.

  I was on my perch atop that gray rock when the rescue tunnel collapsed. They had extracted the drill, and that miner from Scranton had been strapped into a harness, which was attached to a winch set up over the opening. The hard hat he wore had a light on its forehead. He held a shovel that seemed like a kid’s toy. But from what I could hear, they thought the rescue tunnel was only a few feet away from Daniel, and the miner would carefully dig sideways until he reached my brother. That was the plan. But just a few minutes after they lowered him down the rescue hole, the earth sighed and the ground between the two holes sagged.

  I didn’t understand at first why everyone began shouting, why those manning the winch began yelling, “Get him up! Get him up!” When the miner emerged, his face was black with dirt, and he coughed and gasped for breath. A paramedic bent over him.

  The men around Daniel’s hole were on their knees, and one of them began to cry. The miner’s efforts had caused the hole to cave in. My three-year-old brother was now buried alive.

  I can’t even begin to tell you how I felt, partly because I don’t want to think about it.

  But this was now the grim news that beamed out in time for the six o’clock broadcasts. If you see snippets of those old programs now, you can tell that people had given up. There was more talk of a recovery team than rescue efforts. The local news crew left, maybe out of respect, maybe because somebody didn’t think a limp body being pulled from the earth would make good television. But the other crews stayed, and they kept filming while the men deliberated and decided to drill another tunnel.

  That second night was harder. Listening to the whirling whine of the drilling machine, I tried to believe my brother could still be alive somehow. I tried to pray. I tried not to be angry at God, but it was hard. I mean, if everything happened according to God’s plan, then God intended for Daniel to fall down that well. He intended for my brother—a child completely without sin—to be cold and wet and terrified, or dead. And He meant for me to feel this crushing guilt.

  Still, I thought it was important to try and pray, and after a while I just started saying, “Please God, let Daniel live.” I repeated it over and over, for hours really, and I rocked with a rhythm like when I ran, until finally my body surrendered to exhaustion.

  I woke up when the drilling machine shut off, and I was worried about what the silence meant. The second rescue tunnel had taken twice as long to finish, but it was done. I crawled down off my rock and pushed through the small crowd to see the giant tripod they’d set up over the new opening. The winch at the top looked like an oversize reel from a fishing rod. A second miner appeared, dressed just like the first: a harness of thick black straps and a hard hat with a light on it. Someone snapped the metal line from the reel onto the harness, and just as the sun sliced through the pines, he was lowered into the second tunnel. This was going out live on all the television networks that had cameras there. The same viewers who’d woken up the day before to the first news of the disaster were now watching to see the outcome.

  The second rescue tunnel was farther away from Daniel’s tunnel than the first, so that miner had quite a way to dig sideways. Because everyone was straining to hear the miner on his walkie-talkie, somebody cut off the power generators and the fairy fort filled with an eerie silence. But then all of us gathered around the hole turned to a strange sound—a soft chanting rising up from the meadow. Down in the open field, my mother and Mrs. Wheeler and the Cullen sisters and Mr. Hogan and the Abernathys and maybe two dozen others had fallen to their knees and joined hands in a prayer circle. In the early morning mist coming off the lake, they sang hymns in hopes of persuading God to resurrect my baby brother. It’s all on the video.

  On the other side of the hole, my father shook his head.

  Twenty anxious minutes later, the miner radioed up, but the crackling static couldn’t be understood. And then the winch was reeling slowly backward and I realized they were drawing him out. I expected he was coming out to take a break or get other equipment. His hard hat appeared and then his whole body, dangling in the air.

  His back was turned to me at first, so I didn’t see him clutching Daniel. But over the weeks and months to come, I saw that snippet of film so many times that now it’s part of my memory of the actual event. These are the images I share with the world: Daniel’s blackened face. The harsh scrape on his bloodied cheek. His head strapped to the board for his own safety. And his dark brown eyes, blinking and wet, but proof positive that he was alive.

  Everyone cheered and screamed and wept with joy. Even the big men. They all cried li
ke babies.

  I’ll bet you saw all this, but you never saw me, did you? That’s ’cause I stayed off to the side, out of the camera’s view. I leaned into the fist-shaped rock and bowed my head. I imagined God watching over us all and I thanked Him. Daniel had been saved and my prayer had been answered. Despite all the troubling thoughts I’d had during the long night, when my brother emerged unharmed from that hole in the morning brightness, I felt certain that God was really looking out for us after all.

  The wind picked up and the pine trees above the fairy fort shivered, and the breeze brought that smell to me: vanilla. It was the same thing I would smell when Miracle was born, and later too. And to this very day, I’m not completely sure what to make of it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The morning after I had my run-in with the Scarecrow and Volpe up at St. Jude’s, my mother drove Daniel over to the Abernathys’ with a bowl of potato casserole to welcome the family home. When I told her my plans to head in to the Gazetteer, she said she could drop me off, even though it was out of her way. I told her I’d be fine on my own and walked into town alone. In the office, I locked the door behind me and kept the blinds down. Gayle typically didn’t show up till around lunchtime, so I knew I’d have the only computer to myself for a few hours while I worked on a special project.

  The Scarecrow’s talk of healers and charlatans inspired me, and online I tracked down a half dozen “miracle workers” who’d been exposed as fakes. There was a woman from Kansas with bleeding palms, an Iowa farmer struck six times by lightning, a preacher who claimed his kiss could heal. That last guy gets the gold medal for being both a fraud and, quite clearly, a class AAA pervert. I cranked out a rough draft of an article summarizing their experiences, focusing on how each one was eventually exposed as a quack. The stigmata woman was charging a hundred dollars per “consultation” until somebody caught her taking a razor to her hands, and it turns out that preacher had seven wives in as many states. I wanted to show the Gazetteer readers the facts behind the hysteria that surrounds a supposed miracle worker.

  Of course, everybody in town knew I had some experience as a debunker of miraculous acts. My infamous senior-year journalism project at Paradise High School was an exposé of the plagues that supposedly convinced the pharaoh to let Moses and the Israelites leave Egypt. The frogs, the locusts, the water turned to blood. But I located all kinds of scientific studies that suggested that these were in fact naturally occurring phenomena, many linked directly to the eruption of the Santorini Volcano in the Aegean Sea. Once its ash infected the Nile, the water changed color and the fish died from lack of oxygen. Their rotting corpses drove the frogs up onto land and brought the horde of flies, which carried disease that killed the youngest children, since their immune systems were the least developed. It was a chain reaction of crazy coincidences. Taken as a whole, it seemed like divine intervention. This was exactly what had happened when Daniel got pulled out of the well, but now that chain reaction was starting again, and I had to stop it before it got out of hand.

  Why, I kept wondering, did all these people believe in the first place—in Daniel’s power or Irene McGinley’s curse or a Kansas woman with bleeding palms? It was one thing in the time of Moses, sure, but these days, with cell phones and satellite dishes, I couldn’t understand why the world clung to such superstitious crap.

  I was just printing up a revision of my article when Gayle came in through the back door of the Gazetteer office holding two bags from Victorio’s.

  “Got you the special,” she said, depositing one white bag on the desk next to me. “Meatball sandwich and a bag of chips.” This struck me as odd, since I usually didn’t come in on Saturdays, and I expected Gayle to be surprised I was there. But she just shuffled to the big table by the front window and opened the shades. “You going vampire on me or something?” she asked. She got started on her own lunch, a salad piled high with tomatoes. Gayle’s weight was something she’d been struggling with since I met her. She’d tried pills, patches, hypnosis, even adopted a stray dog to get her to walk every morning, but she couldn’t lose a pound. Every day I worked at the Gazetteer, she bought me lunch. She never once asked me what I wanted, and over time I realized she was buying me the food she really felt like eating.

  I unraveled the aluminum foil and took a few bites from my sandwich, trying to work up the courage to show Gayle my article. The first sentence read, “Human history has been a forward progression from ignorance to illumination.” Ever since I had done a high school internship with Gayle, she and I got along pretty well, but she wasn’t one for favors when it came to using the paper for personal reasons.

  She took a swig of her flavored bottled water. “Saw Jeff Cedars driving with his mom up by the Carlsons’ this morning.”

  I didn’t make any response. Of course with all that was going on, I’d thought about Jeff plenty, but he had his life and I had mine.

  “Wasn’t he taking summer session?”

  I shrugged, kept my eyes on the computer screen. “Maybe it’s over.”

  “So you haven’t talked to him?”

  “No, Gayle. I haven’t.” Now I tried to give her the hard look that meant drop the subject.

  Even though Jeff’s a couple years older than me, we hung out all through middle school, just friends who liked to hike the trails deep into the woods or paddle around the lake on the metal canoes his dad rented out, before he upgraded to Jet Skis during the big boom. In high school, when Jeff started wrestling and I started track, we ran together every day before class. I found myself passing the day by marking when I’d see him again. Over time, our feelings grew beyond a simple word like friendship, though we never talked about dating or used goofy terms like girlfriend or boyfriend. Halfway through my freshman year, we started holding hands on those mountain walks, and our morning jogs were sometimes interrupted.

  Those days, Jeff would be the first person I talked to about any problems. But after Daniel’s rescue, we’d drifted apart. In all the excitement, with Daniel in the hospital, with all those folks with the cameras in our driveway, it wasn’t hard to find excuses for not getting together. When he was leaving for college and came to say good-bye, we hugged but didn’t kiss. Not even on the cheek. His first year at Penn State, he sent me a couple letters about his classes and life in the dorms, and we ran into each other at a New Year’s party. That summer, he might wave if he drove by our dock on a Jet Ski, and I might wave back. After his sophomore year, he stayed at Penn State for the summer, so I was surprised to hear he was coming back home this June. I wondered now if he’d heard about the Abernathy baby. I wondered if he thought about Daniel or about me.

  Gayle pushed her salad around with the plastic fork. “I’ll bet you some sorority gal has got ahold of him.”

  Clearly my eye contact wasn’t backing her off the topic. “Free country,” I said. I turned back to my article. A moment later, something whacked into the side of my head. The plastic lid of Gayle’s salad container wobbled like a Frisbee on the ground next to me.

  “Hey,” she said. “Truce. I didn’t mean any harm by my poking. I just always figured you two might have some kind of reunion. You were sweet together.”

  “Well,” I said. “The past is the past.”

  Gayle nodded her head to show she agreed, then changed subjects. “How’s the meatball?”

  “Not enough sauce,” I told her.

  She started talking about some of the work we had to get done, mostly layout on ads, a couple obits, and polishing silly articles like “Ten New Uses for Your Old Socks.” Truth be told, Gayle didn’t need me all that much. Once my internship was officially over, I just kept hanging around. I’d deferred my track scholarship to Lock Haven for a year so I could stick close and keep an eye on Daniel, and I had no luck finding other work in a dying town like Paradise. Every now and then Gayle would give me an envelope with a few twenties in it. I guess she realized I wasn’t listening to her agenda for the afternoon, because finally she ju
st said, “Hey, where’s your head?”

  I shifted in the chair, put down my sandwich, and said, “How many years of law school did you finish?”

  “Two years of pre-law,” she said. “How come?”

  “What do you know about restraining orders?”

  She pulled her chair over to mine and set her salad on her lap. “You better tell me what this is about.”

  I gave Gayle the short version of my encounter with the Scarecrow, and from the look on her face, I could tell she believed me more than my mother did. Not that that was hard. She lifted her chin and rubbed at her jowly neck. “I can’t see how a judge could issue a restraining order against a stranger. You don’t even know this guy’s name. On top of all that, the last place you saw him was forty-five miles away.”

  What she said made sense, but it was good just to have someone else share my concern. “He talked about the UCP like he’s been there,” I said. “I’ve got to do something.”

  “Maybe go talk to Bundower,” she offered. “Be on the safe side.”

  I’d thought about the Chief myself but figured that he, like my mother, would just blow me off. “The problem is bigger than just this one guy,” I said. I picked up the article I’d spent all morning on and handed it to her.

  Gayle wiped a napkin across her mouth. “What you got?”

  I watched her eyes scan back and forth across the lines, narrow and tight as if she was thinking hard. Before she got through the opening paragraphs, though, her head was already shaking side to side. “This won’t do you a damn bit of good.”