On June 17, 2004, at around four thirty p.m., Debbie Ann Harris was driving in the right eastbound lane on Interstate 10, just past the exit for the Bernard Bayou Industrial District, when an eighteen-wheeler from Texas, estimated later to be traveling more than eighty miles an hour, plowed into the rear of her Honda Civic without braking, as though oblivious to her. The impact launched Debbie’s car into the center median with the eighteen-wheeler hurtling close behind. The truck flipped, its cab sliding sideways into the westbound lanes and its trailer capsizing onto Debbie’s accordioned Honda. Debbie was pronounced dead at the scene.
It can seem like a small and ugly point, the truck’s origins, but it’s one Tanya nevertheless dwells upon when talking about her mother’s death: Because the truck and its driver hailed from Texas, Tanya sensed and still senses her father’s invisible hand in what happened—as though thirteen years after wounding Debbie with his desertion, and just as she was beginning to realize how nourishing life could be with a kind and decent man, Snead Harris had dispatched that eighteen-wheeler to finish her off for good.
Cameron took the news—which was delivered, in that tightly knit way of small towns, by the same highway patrolman who’d dated Debbie and triggered Cameron’s football career—by holing up in his room for twenty-four hours, weeping so hard and ferociously that Tanya, perched outside his door, feared whether it was possible to sob oneself to death. Then he emerged dazed and red-eyed into the living room, smoked half of one of Tanya’s cigarettes, and holed up for another twelve hours. When he came out the second time, Tanya says, he came out different. “He come out broken,” she says.
Cameron played three games of varsity football that fall, tying a school record for the most receiving yards in a single game in the season opener against St. Martin, before quitting. “We tried everything we could to turn him back around, the coaching staff and his teammates and all his teachers,” Necaise recalls. “We told him how much it’d mean to his mama, what it meant for him going to college, everything. But nothing got through. He just kept saying he was done.”
Perhaps a longer stretch of stability might’ve assuaged some of Cameron’s grief, might’ve remedied some of that brokenness; maybe time could’ve resurfaced him. But fourteen months later, as he and Tanya (who was eighteen when Debbie died, and living at home while working at a Dollar General store) were still struggling with the fallout from their orphaned existence, Hurricane Katrina came uncoiling off the Gulf. The scant solidity they’d been able to piece back together got smashed by the twenty-eight-foot storm surge then went sloshing out to sea.
After the hurricane Cameron went from broken to shattered. The once-irrepressible boy seemed wholly vanquished from his being, replaced by a dejected, glowering, slouch-backed young man who seemed unwilling or unable to reflect upon anything more than the cigarette smoldering between his lips and the hammer in his hand as he cobbled their ruined house back together alongside the church volunteers from Indiana. After the volunteers would leave for the day he’d sit chainsmoking in the twilit backyard for hours, amid stacks of new lumber and piles of molded, pulpy drywall, staring at the debris with a dark and vacant countenance—as though his heritage had caught up with him and he’d submitted to wearing the same blank expression his Stone County ancestors had accorded the rear flanks of mules while plowing furrow after furrow after furrow. Nothing could cheer him. Nothing could even shake him.
Tanya tried. She tried fishing out the artist brother of hers who’d so joyfully and nerdily engineered her consumption by a sand monster, tried fishing out the supercharged athletic dynamo who’d been on track to be the first of Rufus Little Harris’s descendants to attend college, tried locating that single sand-grain of exuberance that must surely have been lodged somewhere inside him, resistant to the hydraulic force of his despair. But long gone were the days when she could pull him to her chest to let him soak her T-shirt with his tears, when she could silence his crying by humming Madonna songs to him while rocking him in her big lush arms.
And Tanya was swamped with struggles of her own. In the course of fourteen months she’d lost her mother, her home, much of her hometown, and her job (all that remained of her Dollar General store, after Katrina, was the foundation slab), and she was watching her brother be hollowed out by anguish, was watching that once-bright future of his being erased like chalk off a chalkboard. A cigarette was about all she wanted to reflect upon, too.
Cameron graduated from Biloxi High School in 2007, just barely, and without the varsity letter in football that’d once seemed the most token of his destined honors. Afterward he zigzagged through a series of construction and post-Katrina cleanup jobs, cash gigs for some of the out-of-state contractors that descended upon the coast. Many of his co-workers were itinerants from Mexico and sometimes he’d hang out with them at their trailer parks, drinking cut-rate tequila while they laughed and argued in Spanish. Occasionally Coach Necaise called to check in, as did Debbie’s old boyfriend Jim Yarbrough, but unless Tanya was home these calls perished in the answering machine.
Not that Tanya was home all that often. She’d taken a waitressing job at Waffle House, one of the first businesses on the beach to reopen after the hurricane, and with the job had come a new social circle of co-workers, a raggedy bunch. After a while she stumbled into a low-grade romance with a cook named Durnell who went by the nickname D-Lite. What D-Lite liked most was to spend four or five frenetically sleepless nights in New Orleans’s French Quarter alternating hits of crystal meth with a local drink called a Hand Grenade, by the second day swatting constantly at a set of imaginary bongos and by the third day running out of bars that would serve him. Tanya couldn’t stand the meth—not the high itself, which incinerated all her desolation in a white-hot burst of euphoria, and for the only time in her life made her feel sleek and invincible, but instead the bleak, interminable comedown and the unbearable way she’d grind her teeth while using, leading to throbbing jaw pain that only exacerbated the comedown. Usually she’d bow out after the second or third day, retreating to the backseat of D-Lite’s parked car where she’d dose herself with Xanax and half-sleep for long, miserably cramped stretches. Sometimes, she says, D-Lite would venture out to check on her, poking at her limp body with the tip of his boot; but usually not. One time she staggered from the car to a tattoo parlor on Frenchmen Street, just to feel someone paying close attention to her.
It was after one of these trips to New Orleans, early in 2009, that Tanya returned to Reconfort Avenue and noticed a stack of folders, brochures, and official-looking paperwork piled atop the kitchen table. She lit a cigarette and edged herself blearily toward the pile. She eased open one of the folders, lifted out a form, and for a long while stared at it. “Cam?” she called out, to no response. “Cameron?” But she didn’t need his confirmation. Trembling in her hand was a DD Form 4/1, a signed contract. In the middle of a goddamn war, her baby brother had gone and enlisted in the Army.
eight
Among the many other curious visitors to the Biz-E-Bee in the weeks following Cameron’s recovery was a thirty-four-year-old Catholic priest named Adolf Bosah Chukwurah Nkemdiche. In his native Nigeria he was known as Father ABC but Mississippians had pruned that down to Father Ace. Quỳnh was away that morning, making his weekly run to Louisiana to buy lotto tickets, so Father Ace obtained the information he was seeking from Hat. Then he walked down Reconfort Avenue to the Harris house and rang the doorbell.
Father Ace is the pastor at Our Lady Queen of Angels parish, four blocks west of the Biz-E-Bee on Division Street—such a slight distance away that it didn’t occur to the priest to drive. Queen of Angels, as it’s known, is the smallest parish in the Biloxi diocese, with a congregation of just ninety-three families. (By contrast, its parochial neighbor to the west, Our Lady of Fatima church, boasts 1,700 families.) It’s also the poorest parish in the seventeen-county diocese, with annual collections insufficient even to fund mainten
ance on the eighty-three-year-old church building—so poor and so small, in fact, that after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the church, the diocese secretly considered shuttering it.
Since his appointment as pastor in 2011, however, Father Ace has engineered something of a comeback, adding twenty families to the congregation, renegotiating the parish’s debt with the diocese, and ministering to his parishioners with a stamina that’s tiring merely to observe. There’s an athleticism to his efforts that he comes by naturally, having been an all-star soccer striker in his youth, and then briefly, until suffering an on-field injury that left him with a permanent limp, a member of Nigeria’s national Under-17 team. When he scored, sixty thousand people would belt out the chorus to the Jackson Five song “ABC,” and the memory of this spreads an unsaintly smile across the priest’s face, ignites a twinkle of dormant ego in his eyes. The sound that buoys him nowadays is the nonstop vibrating of his cellphone, its hornet buzz usually signaling someone in need: of a ride to work, of bail money, of an emergency babysitter, of help fending off an eviction. The age-old metaphor of a shepherd and his flock feels inadequate for how Father Ace operates. He is more like a cowboy: galloping hard to drive his herd forward, hooting at the stragglers, lassoing the wayward, moving ’em on and heading ’em up, his face glossed with a perpetual sheen of sweat. The rumor—which the priest denies, though he’s flattered to hear it—is that he sleeps only two hours a night.
Some of his parishioners—especially the older ones—credit Queen of Angels’s reinvigoration to Father Ace’s doctrinal conservatism. He has revived bygone rites and rituals—the solemn Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, novenas, meatless Fridays—and, from the pulpit, frequently inveighs against the cafeteria-style attitudes of many American Catholics. Many of his instructors at Enugu Memorial Seminary in eastern Nigeria were elderly Irish missionaries, and their pre–Vatican II orthodoxy he readily absorbed. The mercies he extends to his parishioners, almost hourly, stop short at theology. Sins he forgives; doctrinal dissent yields a whipcrack rebuke.
It’s a conservatism he wears quite literally on his sleeve. When Tanya Harris opened the door, she found Father Ace dressed in his standard throwback garb: his body draped in an ankle-length black cassock and his clean-shaven head capped with a stiff, black, three-peaked biretta. She needed no further information to conclude, “Reckon you’d like to talk to my brother.”
By this time, twelve days after Cameron’s recovery, the doorbell was becoming a familiar sound, ringing with almost cuckoo-clock regularity. First had come the reporters, in a triplet of waves: the local and New Orleans press, first; then the national press, brusque and skeptical; and then, to Tanya and Cameron’s bemusement, the international press, some from Asia but most hailing from Latin America. (“Miracles lead every newscast in Chile,” a cameraman explained to Tanya. “Miracles and UFO sightings.”) After that had come an intermittent but now increasingly steady flow of what Tanya was calling “the randos”: little old ladies bearing chess pies or deviled eggs, peering past Tanya for a glimpse of Cameron; a group of seven Mexican men timidly requesting to touch Cameron’s legs (Cameron allowed this, but admits it was “flat-out weird”); and people in various shades of distress asking for Cameron to pray with them, which invariably he did. They sat beside him on the couch and held his hand or more frequently his knee, often in front of a video game paused on the flat-screen. He didn’t know what to do when they wept.
“Don’t bother to stand,” Father Ace said when Tanya led him to Cameron, who’d begun to rise from the couch, but then the priest changed his mind: “Actually, I might like to see that.” When Cameron did, the priest crossed himself and issued a quick and whispery prayer. Cameron was used to this by now—his physical therapist occasionally did the same thing.
Tanya sat beside Cameron on the couch while the priest introduced himself and the reason for his visit and took a chair. He asked, “Have you spoken to any clergy?”
“We had this Baptist preacher come by,” Cameron answered, and Tanya nodded. “You know that big new church up there on Big Ridge, across the Bay? That’s the guy. I don’t think he liked I was drinking a beer.”
This drew the priest’s attention to an open can of Bud Light on the coffee table; lunchtime was still an hour out.
“Your mother, she was a parishioner at Queen of Angels,” said Father Ace.
“Yeah, we all were. Hell, I was an altar boy. That was Father Huey back then.”
“I’ve heard so many good things about him.”
Lighting a cigarette Tanya said, “Mama used to say he did the fastest Mass on the Coast.”
Father Ace flashed a citric smile. This had been his welcome to Queen of Angels three years earlier: anonymous notes from parishioners chiding him for the duration of his homilies and contrasting him with the belovedly brisk Father Huey, as though the quality of a Mass, like that of an internet connection, could be measured in speed. Back at his rural parish in Nigeria he could stretch his homilies two hours or longer; for his parishioners there, some of whom traveled sixty miles to Mass from far-flung villages linked by muddy rutted roads, a ten-minute sermon would be an offensive shortchanging, grounds for parochial mutiny. He knew he’d passed the ten-minute mark, here in the States, by the violet glow he’d spy on faces in the pews—from the light cast upward from their phone screens.
“Maybe, please, you will tell me in your words what happened at the Biz-E-Bee store,” the priest said.
As he told the story, Cameron found himself first surprised—then simultaneously comforted and unsettled—by the priest’s unfazed reaction. Father Ace kept nodding affirmatively, saying yes and of course and I understand—as though Cameron’s story, which had thus far astonished everyone who’d heard it, including Cameron’s own doctor, was of a kind he’d heard many times before, an ordinary case from the parish files. At its conclusion, when Cameron, as was now his custom, slapped his thighs and exhibited the bending of his knees, the priest leaned forward with his palms pressed together and asked, “Had you prayed?”
“Prayed how?”
“To walk again.”
“Yeah. Sure I did. All the time.”
“To whom did you pray?”
“Who’d I pray to?” Cameron frowned. “Well…shit. To God.”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t mean to cuss. Sorry for that, Father.”
“It does not bother me.”
Tanya said, “Is that even a cuss word in Africa?”
Father Ace stared at her. “It…it is the same,” he said.
“I prayed to God,” Cameron went on. “To Jesus. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes yes, but I’m curious if you might have prayed to a saint? Or maybe to a loved one in Heaven? Or might others have prayed to someone for you?”
“I don’t know that I recall,” Cameron said.
“There was this prayer thing on Facebook,” Tanya said. “Right after Cam got hurt.” She turned to her brother. “You remember that? Megan Bearden’s mom put it up.”
“Naw, I’m not gonna remember that,” Cameron said, waving a hand across his chest. “I wasn’t really checking Facebook at Landstuhl. That was pretty sweet of her.”
Snatching her phone from the coffee table Tanya announced, “I’m gonna find it,” then sank back into the couch cushions flicking at the screen. “Not bearded, Bearden,” she fussed at it.
“Maybe you can also tell me, if you are willing,” Father Ace said to Cameron, “about how you came to be injured.”
Without glancing up Tanya said, “Oh, he don’t remember much. It’s like—amnesia.”
“I’ll tell you all I know,” Cameron said, ignoring her. “We were on patrol, and I was—”
The priest raised a braking hand. “Tell me where this was? I would like to hear everything.”
“Oh right, sorry.” Cameron paused to
scratch his shoulder and blow the air from his cheeks, as though mentally equipping himself for the task. “Zabul Province, Afghanistan. That’s on the Paki border but we was up in the north part of it, way up in the mountains. Like seven, eight thousand feet above sea level, I don’t know—I almost quit smoking there ’cause I couldn’t ever catch my breath.”
Triggered by the mention, Cameron lit a cigarette as he continued: “Middle of nowhere, seriously. Middle of middle of nowhere. There’s one paved road in the whole province, that’s Highway One. Up where we were, though—man, I don’t think I saw a car the whole time. You couldn’t get one up there, there’s just these little goat paths up and down the ridges. A few of the local national dudes rode motorcycles, the ones had some money anyway. Otherwise you ride a donkey. Unless you’re female, and then I don’t know what you do—stay put, I guess.”
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 12
