by Monica West
With Hannah in Ma’s arms, Papa moved quickly, snatching the urine-soaked sheets from Hannah’s bed and balling them in a messy pile. In the silence that rose when he left the room, I looked over at Ma, her body slowing its rocking motions as Hannah drifted into sleep. Ma shrugged the way she always did after one of Hannah’s seizures, the only gesture that acknowledged our collective impotence. She hadn’t done that all those years ago when Papa had tried to heal Hannah; she had trembled instead. She only shrugged when I was around, when Papa couldn’t misinterpret her speculation about the nature of sickness as a question about his abilities.
Papa bumbled back into the room, his face hidden behind a pile of laundry, and Ma and I snapped our necks toward the door in unison. But we were safe—he hadn’t seen us as he entered. His lithe hands and nimble fingers that removed disease were clumsy as they pulled a daisy-print fitted sheet over the mattress edges and rammed the fabric in the narrow space between the mattress and the rail. He grunted as the edges slipped off moments after he put them on, so I got up to fix them.
When the corners were tight and tucked and Hannah was in clean pajamas, Ma hefted Hannah to him as an offering. Hannah’s weight slumped against the delicate fabric of Papa’s robe, and he whispered something to her before wiping the sweat-matted tendrils of hair from her forehead—a gesture so much like the healing he had tried years ago. He held her there for a moment before kissing her forehead and gently placing her in the freshly made bed.
“Night, honey.” Ma and Papa went back to their room. The door shut behind Papa. I lay there staring at perhaps the same spot that Hannah had been looking at earlier. I pulled out my battered prayer journal from the nightstand and formed the question that had been percolating forever but had never made it to the lined pages.
Why does God let His children suffer?
THREE
We rode the wave of Papa’s success all the way through that revival week. By Friday night, the crowds had spilled onto the mottled lawn. They were there to see Papa make someone else walk, but it was not to be.
The next morning, we were packed and ready to leave before sunrise. Standing in front of the open trunk, I fiddled with the zipper on my duffel in the heavy heat as sweat droplets fell from my forehead. Reverend and Mrs. Davenport walked across the lawn toward us; Mrs. Davenport held a travel mug of coffee for Ma while Reverend Davenport had a thick manila envelope tucked under his arm for Papa. Since it was vulgar to mingle money and souls, the payments for these revivals were supposed to be private. I inched into the shadow of the trunk as Papa followed Reverend Davenport to the edge of the property.
They turned their backs to the house as the manila envelope passed from Reverend Davenport’s hands to Papa’s. I thought about all those baskets coming down the rows—hands placing singles, fives, tens, and occasional twenties on top of the heaping mounds that only got bigger in the days after Papa healed the boy. Then there were the secretive envelopes that I imagined held checks with lots of zeroes made out to Papa: love offerings to the revival pastor. Reverend Davenport would’ve used some of the cash to keep the church afloat, but the bulk of the offering went to Papa. One week on the revival circuit often brought in more than we made in a month of offerings at the church at home, I’d once heard Ma say.
Money had taken down neighborhood pastors—They forgot who their master was, Papa had said when their new cars were towed away and they lost their expensive houses. But as their churches went under, Papa had started the building fund and moved our church from the modest chapel where I officially accepted Christ to a new sanctuary so cavernous that you couldn’t hear someone speaking on the other side of it. Some families left the flock, saying that Papa was losing his way, but I knew they were wrong; he needed the extra space to make room for the expanding congregation. And as proof, we still drove the same van that they’d purchased a couple years after I was born—a van that now had 267,000 miles on it and a muffler that loudly broadcast our arrival. And Hannah and I shared a room in our cramped three-bedroom house when other pastors like Papa had built compounds on acres of land. So this money was for the kingdom, not for us.
Papa and Reverend Davenport turned around toward the house, and I snapped my attention back to the duffel’s broken zipper. Caleb lugged his suitcase down the steps, the wheels bumping each piece of wood.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing.” The zipper on my duffel was stuck on a T-shirt. Caleb sidestepped me and hefted his suitcase into the trunk.
“Here, let me get that.” He zipped my duffel shut and lifted it over his shoulder with arms that had started to grow ropy muscles. His wiry build had only recently been chiseled out of the baby fat that had cleaved to his frame for the past fifteen years. Suddenly, he was beginning to look more like Papa than my younger brother.
“Since when did you become an expert at packing the trunk?”
“There’s so much you don’t know about me.”
I wanted a witty comeback, but his words stung more than I expected them to. We’d been so close when we were younger. When Papa first pulled him into the ministry, he’d sneak in my room at night to complain about the long hours in the study and the heightened scrutiny of his behavior. But recently, as he had started having a more prominent role in each service, the visits to my room stopped as his sessions in the study with Papa got even longer. Sometimes when he was in the pulpit with the deacons, I’d try to catch his eye as he led a prayer, but he wouldn’t look back at me.
We piled back into the car: next stop, Carthage, Mississippi. I hoped that the news of the boy would reach this new church before we did, and that there would be overflow crowds on the first night. The bigger the crowds, the better all our days would be. Good days were like rare coins that I stuffed into empty pockets. Days when the sun came up early without any sign of rain, when the tents were packed beyond capacity, when people were healed, when the spirit was moving. It helped to save up those coins for when we would have to use them—when only a handful of people turned out, when Papa’s righteous anger about God shifted from his voice behind the pulpit to his mighty hand that struck us far away from the congregants’ eyes. But I pushed those memories out of my mind as Papa turned on the car and the engine hummed to life. He shifted into reverse, and the place we had called home for the past week grew smaller. Shadows of overhanging trees crisscrossed the front window as gravel crunched beneath the tires. Reverend and Mrs. Davenport stood on the porch of their house and waved.
“Caleb, can you say our parting prayer?” Ma asked.
“Lord, watch over these Your children. Use us to do Your will. Amen.”
Amen.
* * *
We stayed in Mississippi for two weeks—after Carthage, we moved to Columbus, where Papa healed run-of-the-mill ailments and was preaching to standing-room-only crowds by the final Friday service. The following week, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a family pushed a pallid child to the altar in a wheelchair. Papa spent a few extra minutes on the girl. As he touched her, the color came back to her cheeks. She didn’t walk that night—it was not to be—but the gathered crowd seemed to be satisfied with what he could do, enough to give him a rousing round of applause.
The next afternoon, we meandered off I-64 after the green highway sign read BETHEL, NORTH CAROLINA. Ma called out directions to Christ the Redeemer Holy Church of God, where Reverend Griffith was waiting for us. It was the fifth stop of this summer’s revival season—six more weeks to go. By this point last summer, I had already started to feel restless, but this summer, I was grateful for the subtle seat belt pressure on my chest and the bouncing movement of the tires beneath me. With each mile that we traveled on the highway, we outran the specter of the pregnant girl’s face frozen in agony and the hollow thump of Papa’s fist in the center of her stomach.
We turned right off the highway and passed a huge expanse of land where men were driving stakes into the ground. It was just trodden grass now, but on Monday night, there
would be a giant tent with rows of folding chairs, a pulpit, and a cross inside. Papa slowed next to the field before opening the door; stepping outside in his dressy loafers, he approached the tent stakes, walked along the perimeter, and then stopped in the middle. Papa knelt in a bare patch and placed his head in his hands. Though the minivan was a hundred yards away from him, we bowed our heads in reverence. Hannah jerked her chin close to her chest, her body momentarily still. Papa’s mouth moved slowly, his lips barely parting to let out sound. Though I couldn’t hear his prayer, I imagined his words. Lord, let me be an instrument of Thy will. Let Your people come to be saved and healed. Amen. Somewhere behind that prayer, in what he couldn’t say to God but held deep in his heart, I knew that he wanted something else like the walking boy in Americus.
* * *
After a welcome dinner with the Griffiths, we ambled back to the big house on the church property with full stomachs. Lights illuminated the pillars and bushes, making everything glow. Papa opened the front door, and we began to stumble toward our respective bedrooms.
“Before you go to bed, I have a family announcement,” Papa said with the same serious inflection that accompanied his proclamations that Jesus was ready to save your soul. He nodded toward the kitchen, and we trudged through the wide hallway and sat around the cherrywood table, our eyes fixed on Papa, who stood at the head.
“We’re having a baby,” he said, unable to contain his smile. He looked at Caleb as he made the announcement; Ma, Hannah, and I had somehow disappeared. Even though Ma sat next to me, she preferred to study the table’s lacquered grain instead of making eye contact. The last time he’d delivered that news, it had been to tell us that Ma was having Isaiah. Ma had been excited then, had walked around and given each of us a hug. But now she passively accepted the congratulations that spilled from Papa’s and Caleb’s lips, her palms turned upward in submission, her eyes vacant.
Ma had yet to say a word, even though part of me believed that it was her news to share. But she had lost her voice ever since we entered the room.
“What do you think, Ma?” I found the space to ask in the middle of Papa’s praise. I needed to hear her say that she wanted this baby after Isaiah, that she wasn’t just riding the wave of Papa’s happiness. Papa looked down at us from where he was standing—it might have been the first time he’d seen us since he started talking.
“What a blessing,” she finally uttered, with her face turned away from me.
Papa came behind us and placed his hands on her shoulders, his knuckles bulged as he massaged, and she recoiled as though she’d been burned. “It is a blessing, isn’t it?”
Two years ago when Isaiah was born, Mrs. Cade and the other midwives had shoved me from the living room before Ma’s final push. As I stood on the other side of a wall that separated me from Ma—the first time I’d been away from her since labor began—I waited for a baby’s cries but heard silence and shrieking instead. I didn’t move, couldn’t, not even when Papa brushed by us hours later, carrying a lifeless Isaiah on outstretched palms as though he would break. When my legs finally worked again, I followed Papa into the kitchen, my knees shaky. With a tear-streaked face, Caleb was behind me with Hannah on his hip. In the kitchen, Papa laid the blanket on the table and opened the flap. Isaiah looked like a doll, with a round, bluish face and bulbous eyelids that never got a chance to see the sky. We gathered around the table as Papa filled a small glass with water and brought it over.
“In Isaiah 43:1, the Lord says, ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.’ ” Papa’s voice cracked at the end of the Bible verse. He lifted Isaiah’s limp body into the air. “Isaiah Samuel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Papa cupped water into his hand at routine intervals and splashed it onto Isaiah’s forehead when he said “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit.” Then Papa did something that he never did with the baptisms he performed in church: he pressed his lips to Isaiah’s forehead and clutched him to his chest.
Mrs. Cade led Ma into her bedroom, and she didn’t come downstairs for the rest of the day. When I finally got the strength to check on her that evening, she was upstairs at the sewing machine with a tiny piece of terry fabric stretched between her hands. I watched her from the doorway, too scared to take a step inside as she shakily moved the fabric beneath the needle, the glint of sharp silver too close to her hands. Over the coming days, I kept expecting to hear Ma’s wails, but they never came. Instead, she sewed baby blankets and scrubbed bathroom floors. I expected Papa to put a stop to it, to tell her that it was okay to express her grief, but they never seemed to be in the same room.
A week after Isaiah’s death, we were all gathered at the cemetery in East Mansfield—the same cemetery where Papa had officiated hundreds of funerals. The funeral home had donated a tiny coffin that was no bigger than a shoebox, and Papa had dressed Isaiah in a blue sleeper that Ma had made.
The tiny coffin was lowered into the ground—farther down than I expected—until it was barely visible below. It was the first time Ma had been still since his death, and her legs, seemingly nostalgic for the motion of the past few days, twitched as Papa recited prayers. Then there was a sharp, sudden intake of air that startled me after the week of silent activity. I looked next to me to see her mouth frozen into what looked like a yawn. The sound morphed to sobbing as her folded arms pressed against her distended belly, her toes so close to the edge that the slightest movement would have made her fall in. We lined up to drop handfuls of dirt onto the lid of Isaiah’s coffin: first Papa, then Hannah, then me and Caleb. When it was Ma’s turn, she keeled forward, her right leg dangling into the hole, her allotment of dirt gripped in a fist that wouldn’t open.
Papa turned around to leave, not even looking around to see if Ma was following him on his uphill march to the van. I pulled back hard, dislodging her leg from the hole until the full weight of her body collapsed on mine, her shoe coming off in the struggle and falling to the ground beside us.
“I can’t do this again,” she said minutes later as sobs interrupted each word. “I can’t have another baby.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “No one says that you have to.”
“You don’t understand. He’s going to want another one.” Her sobbing stopped like the break in a storm—or the calm before another one—and her clear voice came through. “I didn’t want this one and look what happened.” She gestured toward the hole in front of us where Isaiah lay. She was talking loudly, as though Papa wasn’t feet away, as though she had forgotten that I was her daughter.
Back at the kitchen table where he’d just made the announcement, Papa’s hands hadn’t moved from Ma’s shoulders, but he wasn’t massaging them anymore; it looked like he was holding her in place. A few minutes later, when she still hadn’t said anything and the congratulations had faded, Caleb excused himself to bed and took Hannah with him. I hoped Papa would leave us alone and let Ma tell me what she was really feeling about this baby, but he didn’t seem eager to let that happen.
“What a blessing.” Her tinny repeated words seemed to be aimed at the table rather than at Papa.
“It is a blessing indeed. The Lord has answered our prayers.”
“It’s getting late, Miriam,” he said, turning to me. “You should get to bed.”
“I’ll tuck you in like old times,” Ma offered.
Once we reached the doorway of the bedroom, I pulled her toward me. “Say something, Ma,” I whispered inches from her face, my eyes pleading with hers. “Do you want this? After Isaiah, you said—”
She pushed me into the bedroom, closing the door part of the way behind her. “He’ll hear you.” She was breathless when she got to the other side of the door, and her eyes darted back to the stairs. With her hands light on my shoulders, she guided me into bed. Fully clothed, I nestled beneath the sheets and let her pull them taut around me. Ma stared into the space above my headboard as her h
ands patted me too hard beneath the sheets.
“I know what I said, Miriam. It’s just complicated. Your dad really wanted another baby. And what I wanted—what I want—well, that doesn’t really matter. I mean, it matters, but it’s hard to explain.” Her voice was heavy with sadness.
I opened my mouth to respond when there was a creak on the stairs. Papa. He reached the landing and approached the breach in the door; the visible portion of him glowed in the hallway light. Ma’s back was to him, and though she didn’t turn around, I could tell from the way she straightened that she must have sensed his presence.
“A baby is always a gift. We are so blessed.” Her eyes found their way from the wall back to me; she leaned over and snuck a quick kiss on my forehead. “Now go to sleep, honey. It’s getting late.” She hopped off the bed and let herself out of the room. When the door was open fully, Papa put his arm around her waist; he pulled her close to him for their walk toward the bedroom.
* * *
A torrential downpour pounded Bethel the next day, stopping a few minutes before revival began. Fat raindrops still clung to the tent’s roof and slid down intermittently, exploding into the grass like small bombs. Papa stood in front of a revival tent packed to capacity with standing-room-only in the back—his hands were raised above his head to announce the healing portion of the night’s service.
“Saints of God, are you ready for a healing?”
