Some Small Magic

by Billy Coffey

  Now this place looks even more transcendent. More magical, if Johnny allows the word. Preacher Keen and his flock have taken great care to bring not only the Lord here but a whole mess of the wanting. Lanterns hang high in the rafters and along the walls. A stage, wide and long, though not far from the floor, has been erected along the back. The floor itself has been swept clean, the old tractor and an assortment of forgotten tools and equipment moved out, leaving only an empty expanse of wood boards that have mostly survived the years. Reverend Johnny breathes deep, giving himself over to anticipation as the people stream inside.

  Benches have been set from the front of the stage all the way to the doors, a dozen long rows to one side and a dozen more to the other, placed at a V to create a wide aisle down the middle just as Reverend Johnny has asked. Two narrower aisles are spread along the sides. Even now the people come in limping, struggling up these aisles, but they will go out dancing. Oh yes, they will. They will dance all the way back to their poor and forsaken lives, and they will never forget this night. This will be more than a full house, this will be a happening.

  The bustle and music provide the power, Reverend Johnny the current. He does not know the players on the stage. Some of Preacher Keen’s flock, decent people from the small time they spoke before the service. And they are slick to a person. The old man whaling on the piano sits unmoved on the bench, yet his hands fly over the keys as though possessed. A young woman on the banjo stands in front of him, fingers wild at the strings. Beside her dances a boy trying to shake the life out of a tambourine.

  Reverend Johnny casts an eye toward the front and the overflowing pail hanging by a rusted nail to the right side of the barn doors. A long line of people snakes toward the foot of the stage, bearing slips of paper in trembling hands. Each is deposited in a large wicker basket that has seen nearly as many miles as the man who owns it. A youngish woman comes forward in a faded blue jumper. She does not mingle with the others, nor does she possess any of their fervency, tossing rather than placing her slip into the pile. A pretty woman, Johnny believes, at least once upon’a. She drifts away into the sea of moving bodies and disappears.

  Those still outside struggle in and arrange themselves into the makeshift pews as if by some secret design. None sit. They rather dance, driven to near frenzy by the fast beat of the old mountain hymns and the glow of the lantern light and their own singing, forgetting both sense and inhibition. Johnny smiles in his corner of darkness. He praises the Lord who has brought him to this place, to what is no longer a gathering of individuals but a single, mad organism with a multitude of arms and legs and voices that cry out in a praise as sorrowed as it is rapturous, singing and singing as the piano plays and the banjo thrums and the tambourine boy skips from one end of the stage to the other.

  He nods at Preacher Keen, standing close but in the light. The holy man from the hills then retrieves the basket of papers and places it at Johnny’s feet.

  “You brung the Spirit here tonight, Rev’rend Johnny,” he says.

  Johnny smiles. “Yessir, believe I did.”

  Preacher Keen smiles and moves away, up the stage as the music fades only a little. His voice is raised above all others even without the benefit of a microphone. Leading them, inspiring them as soldiers to battle. Johnny begins sifting through the untold dozens of papers, reading an endless collection of names and ill conditions. He tries to find the slip placed there by the woman in the blue dress, wondering why he should.

  Now comes a collective “Amen!” that shakes the barn’s very walls. Johnny looks up to see Preacher Keen ready, arms held out. It is time.

  The Reverend Johnny Mills steps onto the stage, beaming as the crowd drinks him in. He is younger than the pictures on the signs, clad in faded jeans and a white oxford shirt, brown cowboy boots scuffed at the toes. His hair, as black as a crow’s eye, is slicked back from a widow’s peak. He yells a “Hallelujah!” and dances a jig across the stage that whips up the people even more. He feels it, this power. This thing he does. This life that allows him to visit the far-flung and hidden places of the world, that lets him stand here as if he owns this stage and this barn and every soul inside it.

  “Amen,” he shouts, and Johnny Mills is amenned back with a force that parts his lips. “I feel the Lord here tonight,” and they cheer and stomp. “I feel’m, knew I would, Him’n me travel all over these mountains as one, friends, one, and don’t you think the two us is here this night by chance’s decree. Nosir, don’t y’all think that for a seccent. Was your faith brought us here.”

  The roar bursts forth.

  “Lord’s gone with me all over this country, once so blessed but now so in need. And He has touched me, friends. Oh yes. He has given me a holy gift of healing, of peering into the very darkness that haunts the souls of men and shining a light into that deep night. I have healed, brothers and sisters. The sick are made well by the power given me. The lame walk upright and free. I have hurled out demons who dare stake claim to what is rightly the Almighty’s alone. I have stared into the devil’s very eye and told him he has no claim here.”

  Stomping. Stomping their church heels and their farming boots, stomping in shoes worn to tatters and ones handed down and ones stuffed with old newspapers or bound by duct tape to keep them on. Johnny Mills—Reverend—feels this noise in his teeth.

  “Now your Preacher Keen here, he’s a fine man.”

  “Amen,” they cheer, making Preacher Keen both blush and puff his narrow chest.

  “Preacher Keen called me out, said Lord’s leanin’ heavy on his heart askin’ me to come. He says to me there’s a flock of good believin’ folk down here in Mattingly.”

  “Yes!”

  “Folk who live right and do good and love the Lord with all they heart, and I know that’s true.”

  “Amen.”

  “But he says to me, ‘It’s a hard life here, Reverend Johnny. Terrible hard. Some a us is afflicted and poor in spirit, and what we got to have here’s a little’ ”—his foot taps at the stage—“ ‘charge.’ ”

  “Yessir.”

  “Gotta get us some . . . powah.”

  “Yessir, that’s right.”

  “Need a dose a the”—he dances again, shifting across the stage as if riding a cloud—“Spirit.”

  “Yes!”

  “GottagetaWORDfromtheLawd.”

  Voices raised, hands and heads and eyes.

  “What y’all need here, brothers and sisters,” Reverend Johnny says,

  (“Yesyesyes!”)

  “is a miracle.”

  The piano takes off, banjo and tambourine, and there rises such a holler that Johnny Mills feels the air stolen. He dances arm in arm with God Himself, calling down Jesus and the Holy Spirit and all that great and powerful heavenly host, and Reverend Johnny shouts, “I need hands, good people. Let me see who will witness the miracle of God in this holy place.”

  Johnny finds his first of the night as the air fills with hands raised high. He says, “Come on up, don’t you be shy, go on and let them good folks help you.” The crowd strains toward the two men and one woman helping an old man to his feet. His skin is the color of dried leather, cracked by the sun and as dirt-stained as his shirt and jeans. A Mountain Dew ball cap rests cockeyed on his head. Those with him (family, Johnny supposes, given the resemblance) struggle getting him to the walker near his seat. They struggle more to get up the two short steps onto the stage. His back has gone bent from years in unforgiving fields, giving the impression that here is a man who began with nothing and has since managed to hang on to most of it. Reverend Johnny coaxes him forward. He waves the old man up as the crowd cheers and sings and then points to a spot on the stage, a circle in the wood only he can see. This is the spot where they’ll stand tonight.

  “Right here,” he calls. “Right here by me, friend.”

  The old man takes the walker and leans forward, face red and straining, and makes the few steps to where Johnny stands as though scaling a mounta
in.

  “Yessir,” Johnny says. “Yessir, that’s fine. What’s your name, brother?”

  The old man gives it—Rogers. Lewis Rogers. “Back’s gone,” he says, in case there is some doubt as to what ails him. “Can’t abide the pain no more. I’ve gone cripple.”

  “A hard life,” Johnny says. He says this often, more times than he can count, and every time true. He lowers his voice, though not enough to render those in the back deaf: “Lord brought you to me, Lewis. You believe that?”

  Lewis nods.

  “Do you have faith, Lewis?”

  “I’m a farmer, Rev’rend. Faith’s ’bout all I got.”

  The crowd chuckles—knowing laughs.

  “Amen, brother. And do you know the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Lewis? Do you believe He came to die for you and was raised up on the third day? And do you hold as truth that the Lord God claims dominion over the powers and principalities of this world, the demons of death and sickness and wearied backs?”

  “Yessir,” Lewis says. And louder, “Yessir, I do.”

  “Then Brother Lewis Rogers, I call down the Spirit upon you.”

  Johnny reaches out with the fingers of his right hand. It is this moment that always seems to slow in his mind, even if to everyone else it resembles the strike of a copperhead—fast, lightning fast, seen more as a blur of many movements than a single act. And yet it is this act by which his livelihood is earned, one that promises either success or failure in a span more brief than an eye’s blink, and he knows even as his fingers near the sun-soaked skin of Lewis Rogers’s forehead that he must believe. Oh yes, Reverend Johnny must. Faith is required by those for whom he heals, but that faith pales against what is required of himself.

  “Be heeaalled,” he screams. Demands it, and then he touches a spot just below the farmer’s cap.

  The crowd gasps. Lewis jolts as though stung. He screams out (it is fear, Johnny knows, and there is never a more welcome sound) and stumbles backward, letting go of the walker’s worn handles. Propelled away not by a shove of Reverend Johnny’s hand but by the brief yet brilliant flash of light from the tips of his fingers.

  Lewis stands dumbfounded. He rubs the spot above his brow and stares at his hands. Now his feet. Now he realizes he is standing higher than he must have managed in years. His arms and back are straight, hips in line with his shoulders. And when his gaze meets that old walker cast off and a grinning Reverend Johnny half the stage away, Lewis Rogers begins to weep. He begins to weep and then to dance.

  Every voice shouts. Lewis raises his hands in praise to heaven and runs—oh yes, he runs—to embrace his healer. He poses for a picture taken to mark this momentous occasion, healer and healed, which Reverend Johnny says will be available after the service for a small love offering. Lewis’s last act before leaving the stage is to offer a swift kick to the walker, sending it tumbling and the crowd into a frenzy.

  Johnny calls others. He summons a woman laid barren and touches her stomach, the flash of light against her womb kindling more than tears, but hope. He heals a young man of asthma and a girl of fever. Cures are passed to both present folk and those who could not make the journey, sending their sons and daughters in their stead. Pictures and pictures, more pictures. And in between the healings come what Johnny Mills has branded miracles even greater called his words from the Lord—messages of comfort spoken via direct line from the One who knows all to those Reverend Johnny has never met, those stricken by secret hurts never uttered, longing for peace. He casts out demons and disease by calling upon the Lord of light, moving his hands with such swiftness that they defy imagination. He punctures the skin of the afflicted with his fingers alone—that holy light—leaving their sides and arms and scalps bloodied and his own hands filled with the gore and entrails of the wounded demons he casts back to hell. He makes strong women wail like babies and imbues frail men with courage. He makes them all swoon, slain in the Spirit.

  And as full dark takes hold on that lonely ridgetop, Reverend Johnny begins to feel his hold fade. He calls forth a final healing and says he can do no more. Power from heaven is inexhaustible, yet the bones of men are weak. Voices call out, begging. A man in a black suit stands, waving his arms as if drowning. He lifts the arms of the one beside him, a boy no older than twenty whose body swells with muscle. Johnny looks away when he sees that boy’s eyes, empty and without knowledge, and his dummy’s grin. Scanning the crowd, searching for one who will set folk to talking not only for this night but for always.

  A boy who appears no older than seven steps into the wide middle aisle. He holds a broken right arm aloft. Yet what centers Johnny’s attention is not the bright yellow cast but the woman reaching to draw the boy back. It is the almost pretty one, the lady in the blue jumper. The boy sidesteps her grasp. Johnny’s vision begins to tunnel, all the clamoring and wailing of his name reduced to dull wind.

  This one. This one will be the last.

  Then Johnny’s eyes shift from that hardened cast held high to the soft and weakened body beneath—as dumb as the idiot’s grin across the room, only different.

  A shame, Reverend Johnny Mills thinks. Children are always best healed and most received. Though near children are the old, who are sometimes even more believed. That is his comfort as he calls the last wounded soul of the night to join him upon the stage, an elderly woman whose arthritis has maimed her such that she can no longer care for her grandbabies, and she’s all the momma and daddy they got.

  -3-

  It looks the same tired world that greets Abel as his momma leads him out. All that seems changed are those who go out with them. He sees it first in the way the congregation turns in unison after Reverend Johnny releases them and Preacher Keen offers his final prayer. Like they’ve all decided with a common mind that what trials and troubles they carried up the trail to this barn can now be carried back down in joy thanks to the mystery they have witnessed. They leave their benches in a coordinated dance, silent but glad. Tired, though in the way that makes you feel like working awhile more instead of lying down. He has never felt the same as everyone else. In this instance, Abel has never felt more alone.

  A few storm the path leading to the meadow and the better life they believe waits. Many more linger to embrace and shake hands as they talk in the glow of the lanterns. And here beneath a crescent moon and a sky bursting in stars, Abel learns his final task of the night.

  His momma stops him midway between the barn and the head of the trail. Slicks back Abel’s hair—a thing she never does—and straightens his collar. “Need you to stand right here, okay? I’ll be back in a bit. We’re almost done.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Talk to some people. Don’t you mind.”

  “You gonna go find Reverend Johnny?” he asks. “I don’t think he’ll make me better, Momma. I don’t even think he wants to.”

  A group of women near the door burst into song, still overcome:

  Well, some come crippled and some come quick;

  There’s a higher power.

  Till the healin’s done, we ought not quit;

  There’s a higher power.

  He feels his momma’s hands at the nape of his neck, her lips on his head.

  “Sweet boy,” Lisa says. “Now stay here. How’s your arm?”

  “Fine.” And it is. Strange enough, Abel’s arm hasn’t hurt all night.

  “Good. But now I need you to do me a favor, and I need you to not look at me sad when I ask it.”

  “What?”

  “Just for the next little bit, act like your arm’s killing you fierce.”

  She pecks his head again and leaves, winding her way toward the glows and the happy folk, most of whom Abel does not know yet has decided to mildly hate. The women keep to their singing (You’d better let signs follow you around; There’s a higher power) as others drift by without a pause to notice him there. His momma is talking to the Preacher Keen. There’s Dumb Willie, walking away from the barn with that hag he
calls his ma. Abel steps aside and deeper into the night as they pass, not wanting to speak because Rita looks too mad. Trailing behind is Henderson, head low, the third of that ruined family. The way the lanterns strike his black suit make him appear to wink in and out of existence. Abel turns his eyes downward, thinking as a child would—If I don’t see him, he can’t see me.

  “You doin’ here, boy?”

  Henderson Farmer is not old but looks it, with the same leathered skin as the old man Reverend Johnny made walk and two eyes that look like a snake’s, half shut, like he’s considering things. His every word drips with equal handfuls of hate and hurt with little regard for the ears of those who must hear them—Abel’s most of all. For that, Abel has long avoided crossing Henderson’s path. It matters not the man’s meanness is couched in phrases like Lord willin’ and Blessed be in order to keep his good Christian name to those townsfolk he sees as customers. To Abel, Henderson’s mouth always sounds the way venom would feel.

  “Momma brung me.” Abel looks to where his momma last stood. Now she’s talking with the preacher woman from town. “I don’t know why. Guess she wanted to get me healin’.”

  “Healin’,” Henderson says, then spits on the ground. “That man seen Dumb Willie. Looked right at’m. Did he call us up? Give us some . . . mir’cle?” He spits again, like the word tasted bad coming out. “Only mir’cles you get in this life’s the ones you go after on your own.”

  Abel doesn’t think about Dumb Willie or Henderson, how they raised their arms to get called for the night’s last healing. He’s thinking only of himself. How he and his momma had gone in there thinking this was a gathering of fools looking for a God to blame. And though he knows his momma has altered none of her mind on that, a part of Abel admits a bit of his own doubt slipped when that old farmer man got changed. It was that flash—that spark of light from Reverend Johnny’s fingers. Abel’s never seen a thing like that, never thought it possible. And though his momma had only chuckled as all the rest praised, saying, That’s all just a trick, Abel, no different from the ones you do yourself, her boy wondered. He wondered enough to step out into the aisle, if only on the hope that someone would see him. And Reverend Johnny Mills had. He’d seen Abel and yet turned away.