by Monica West
Applause churned around us as people crowded into the aisles—they must have been waiting for those words the whole night because they were on their feet before he finished the question. In a couple of minutes, the line in the middle aisle was so long that it almost went outside. A few drunks with their telltale sunglasses covering half their faces were scattered in with the people whose bodies needed to be healed. In East Mansfield, Papa complained about healing the same drunks every week only to see them the following week with the same sour breath, asking to be healed again. His face didn’t show his disgust as he stood in front of this line, dispatching the first dozen people and rendering their diseases a thing of the past.
At the end of the healing service, he arrived at the final drunk—a middle-aged man with black stubble and craterlike pockmarks denting his cheeks, whose sunglasses kept slipping down his nose. The man toddled down the line closer to Papa until Papa’s hands were on his shoulders, and he swayed on unsteady legs as Papa’s lips grazed his ear to ask what ailed him.
Papa brought his forehead close to the man’s and removed his sunglasses. He whispered to him for a few minutes, probably about the evils of drinking and how the Lord could deliver him from his addiction. Then he pressed his right hand over the man’s eyes instead of on his forehead, all while tilting his head back. Papa only touched the eyes of people who were blind or losing their sight. A blind man could be just as good for Papa as making a man walk—maybe better. I rubbed my hands in anticipation—this was what we’d been waiting for since Americus.
Papa pressed harder on the man’s eyes until the man fell into the deacons’ arms, his mouth contorting in a wavy line of agony. As the deacons released his body to the grass, Papa let go in a flourish. The man’s cloudy pupils roamed around the ceiling, maybe seeing the fans slicing through the air for the first time, maybe landing on the miniature lights that glowed like phosphorescent teardrops. He was on his back for a few seconds before the deacons helped him to his feet. Once the man was standing, his startled eyes flitted in their sockets as he faced the congregation, never landing on anyone—they just searched as though unable to find what they were looking for. The deacons must have noticed this and abruptly spun the man around to face the pulpit. One deacon clumsily slid the man’s sunglasses back on his face, poking him in the eye in the process. While people in the pews were praising the Lord, I could see that the man was growing more agitated. He began wailing as he tried to wriggle out of the deacons’ grip, but their arms were grasping him tight.
With a flick of his index finger, Papa directed the deacons to take the man outside. Papa had made his way to the pulpit again, and he raised trembling hands to quiet the crowd. The cheers of only a couple of minutes before had been replaced by confused stares and murmurs. He tried to mumble a benediction, but he was drowned out by the man’s bellows coming from outside. Papa, distracted, rushed the service to a close and disappeared through the slit in the tent that led to the darkness outside.
A shout came from the distance. I jumped up before I could realize what I was doing, shook loose from Ma’s tight grip that was holding me in the chair, and followed in Papa’s tracks. On the flattened grassy path behind the main revival tent, I smacked into an impassable wall of suited bodies that I tried to part with my hands. Another yell off to my left—this one more urgent, more desperate, than the last one. Out of the corner of my eye, a group of deacons had gathered, surrounding the man with the sunglasses. They were trying to lead him into the trees at the perimeter of the property, but he stood in the middle of their circle, swiping the air with punches.
“Get away from me,” he shouted. His fists were a flurry in front of his face. Maybe the darkness disoriented him, but his movements were clumsy like he still couldn’t see. As he spun around in woozy circles, his sunglasses fell from his head and landed by his feet in the grass.
“He’s a fraud!” the man yelled. One deacon grabbed him from behind and tried to bring him to the ground, but the man stayed on his feet. Then there was a parting in the circle, and Papa stepped through. My breathing slowed when I saw him; he would get to the bottom of this misunderstanding.
“Let him go, Robert. He isn’t a prisoner,” Papa said to the deacon. Then he turned to the man, his voice calm, but the scary kind of calm I always dreaded hearing. “A fraud? Is that what you called me?”
“I know all about you,” the man continued. “They may not know about you, but I do.”
“You know nothing about me,” Papa said, flexing his hands and then balling them into fists. With each movement, there was a soft crack of his knuckles. As the man continued speaking, it was easier to watch Papa’s hands than his face.
“I know about the girl you assaulted last summer. How you got angry when you knew you wouldn’t be able to heal her. Just like you’re angry now.”
The deacons’ close bodies held me back from jumping into the center and telling this man just how wrong he was about Papa. Then there was a muffled thump like a rock hitting the ground; when I looked back into the sliver of space, the blind man was on the grass and Papa was standing over him. It looked like he was stomping on the ground near where the man had been. Visions of the pregnant girl flashed in front of my eyes, but I squeezed them shut to rid myself of the memory. My eyes had to be deceiving me now—probably just paranoia from last summer.
The deacons’ bodies surrounded Papa, trying to hold him back; I caught a glimpse of him before the circle fully closed. This time, there was no mistake: there was blood streaming down his knuckles as he rained punches toward the ground where the man was writhing. His fists on the man’s body made the same sound as the punch he landed on the girl’s stomach last summer. He had said that was an accident; this was not.
“You know nothing about me.” Papa kept rubbing his blood-covered knuckles. My hands shot to my mouth to block my gasp.
On the ground, dazed, the man nodded.
“There’s more of that if you ever come back here.” Papa turned to face the circle of deacons. “Now get him out of here.”
The deacons moved as one, dragging the man’s body with them. I stood in the grass, exposed, my heart thundering in my ears, my legs frozen even as I knew I should return to the tent. Papa turned around in what felt like slow motion; fear and shock flickered in his widened eyes as they landed on me.
“Miriam.” My name sounded like a revelation in his mouth. “Why are you back here?” He walked closer to me, and I took a couple of steps back. When there was no more land behind me, I kept my eyes level with the top button of his dress shirt. The stretched fabric was transparent with sweat.
“No one can know about this.” His voice cracked like a preteen’s would, and my eyes couldn’t rise from his shirt to his face. He shook his right hand as though drying errant water droplets from it. With those same hands, Papa had baptized people—he’d baptized all of us too, including Ma—and he’d held Isaiah’s delicate body like it was a piece of glass. Standing inches in front of me in the darkness, I stared at the blood that stained the knuckles of his once-familiar hands.
I shook my head. He took a step toward me, and I flinched—a reflex—but he laid his left hand on my shoulder.
“I will never hurt you.”
I wondered if the emphasis on you meant he would hurt other people. Although Papa had disciplined me many times over the years, his flat hand only struck my bare flesh when I was willful or disobedient, and his spankings were never as angry or violent as what I’d just witnessed.
“Go back inside with your mother. I have more business to see about here.”
I turned quickly, running on the path that led back to the main tent. When I blinked in the brightness, I couldn’t see Ma at all. I could see only the man motionless on the ground, his eyes searching, the deacons’ circle swarming him until he couldn’t fight anymore, the red streaks of blood on Papa’s hands.
FOUR
In bed that night, I waited for the cones of Papa’s headlights to c
ut through the darkness. All sound had been wrung out of the air; even the crickets seemed to have gone silent. Hours must have passed, but I was still awake when sunrise crept across the horizon’s threshold, scattering its rays through the slatted blinds.
Papa had never spent a night away from the house during revival season.
Across the room, Hannah was in the middle of a deep sleep, not even stirring at sunrise, when Ma would have normally been making breakfast. I rose on sore limbs, my neck a knot of nerves, and passed the closed bedroom door where Ma had slept alone. In the kitchen, early-morning sunlight caught the teardrop-shaped glass pieces on the gold chandelier, refracting its brightness into prisms on the walls. My hands, desperate for something to do, opened cupboards that revealed unopened boxes of cereal, packets of hot chocolate, and pancake mix, but my stomach lurched at the thought of eating.
As I sat down at the table empty-handed, Ma walked into the kitchen, a few pink foam curlers askew beneath her multicolored scarf. She walked past me, nodding slightly, and turned to the front door where the lock hadn’t budged since we entered last night.
“Morning, Miriam.” She was usually chipper in the morning, but this greeting was clipped and emotionless. A minute later, Caleb wiped his eyes and yawned as he came from his bedroom in a ratty secondhand T-shirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants. If Papa had been back, Caleb would have already been dressed in his suit, ready to prepare for another day’s service.
“Where is he?” Caleb asked as he began rooting through the cupboard doors that I must have forgotten to close. Ma cleared her throat, preparing an answer for him. What could she say? It was obvious that she had no idea, especially as she kept touching the screen of her cell phone that hadn’t pinged since she’d been at the table.
“I’m going to see about Hannah,” I said before Ma could open her mouth to give Caleb some unsatisfactory answer.
As I walked closer to Hannah’s bed, she stretched her arms overhead. Scooping her out of the tangle of sheets, I lowered her body to the carpet before opening the duffel bag and scattering a few toys around the room. I held Tiger’s floppy body several feet from where she was splayed.
She closed her slack mouth and pursed her lips. One arm was pressed against the gray carpet, and the muscles in her neck tensed as she brought her right arm up to meet her left. Her limp legs spread out behind her as her arms did all the work. Between her grunts, scattered pieces of Ma’s conversation with Caleb were audible. Something about thinking time and space. I realized she knew nothing about why he was still out, what had happened behind the tent.
Hannah made her way to a block and brought it close to her face. Her eyes widened in wonder. Part of me wanted to see the world her way: each ridge in the block the crag in a mountainside, the carpet fibers sea anemones. I wanted to be able to forget last night too—the blood on Papa’s hands, the thunk from his fist hitting the man’s jaw. As Hannah reached me, I tried to smile as I handed Tiger to her.
As Hannah stroked Tiger with her flattened palm, I heard a rumble through the bedroom window. Papa. Crawling to the windowsill, I parted the blinds with my finger. The knot on his formerly perfect tie was loosened; it hung in the middle of his chest like an anchor. His suit jacket dangled from his index finger, and the knees of his new pants were darkened with a thick reddish-brown substance that could have been mud or blood. A thunderstorm percolated behind him on the horizon as he inched closer to the house. He took slow steps toward the front door and rang the bell like a stranger.
At any moment he would be at my bedroom door with an explanation for what had happened. A failed healing could be the result of a faith issue. As for the violence, maybe the man had even attacked him and I hadn’t seen it. And even though Papa was a minister, he was a man first, and men needed to defend themselves. There had to be an explanation, and once Papa gave it to us, we could help him string together the right combination of words so that the congregation could understand why he had yielded to the temptation of violence. There was a litany of lines that other preachers had used over the years: I ask for your forgiveness. I, too, am a sinner saved by grace. Pray for me, all ye gathered here, because the devil is busy.
I left Hannah in the middle of the floor and rounded the corner just as Ma threw open the front door. Trailing Papa inside the house, Ma caught his suit jacket before it hit the ground and quickly straightened until she was upright. Yesterday, Ma had ironed his clean dress shirt into pristine pleats; now, flecks of blood like polka dots were on his chest and sleeves. His right hand hung limp by his side, his knuckles bandaged with threadbare gauze. Ma must have seen it as soon as I did because she gasped and grabbed his hand.
“Where were you? And what happened to your hand?”
“Nowhere. Nothing.” He snatched his hand from her and winced as it snapped back to his chest. “Why do you have to ask so many questions? I have a question for you. Why isn’t breakfast ready yet?”
“Samuel, what’s gotten into you?”
Papa took another step into the kitchen and slammed his hand on the back of the chair next to where Caleb was sitting. Caleb jumped from the table, knocking over his cereal bowl; pink-tinged milk spilled on the table’s wood grain before it dripped to the floor.
“I’m not going to ask again. Where’s my breakfast?”
Ma leaped back a couple of floor tiles. Her mouth was agape as she opened the refrigerator; the carton of eggs slipped out of her tenuous grasp and onto the floor.
“Look what you did. Clean that up. Now.”
He stayed standing while she bent to scrub the gelatinous mixture of golden yolks and milky whites; with each circular motion of the dishcloth, the stain inched closer to Papa’s shoe. I pressed my back against the hallway wall, out of Papa’s line of sight, unable to move to help her, even as the ragged hem of my nightgown tickled my kneecaps and urged me forward. I pulled at a loose thread and wound it around my thumb a few times, creating a sudden marble of pain at the tip that was white before turning red and then purple. The strained string broke off in my hand and sailed to the floor, immediately alleviating the pain that I desperately wanted back.
* * *
The house held its breath between Papa’s solo breakfast and the late-morning hour when he and Caleb should have left for the revival site. I crept past Ma and Papa’s ajar bedroom door—a sliver of him sat at the edge of the mattress with his head pressed between his palms, his fingers palpating the quarter-size bald spot at the top of his head. If he would look up, he could explain to me what was going on, why he hadn’t told Ma what had happened.
A minute later, the phone blared in the house, but he didn’t move to answer it—he hadn’t answered it all morning and had ordered the rest of us not to either. Instead, he unwrapped and rerolled the gauze from his knuckles like he was preparing for a fight. In the echoing silence after the phone stopped ringing, the word fraud from last night pricked the air like lightning. It wasn’t the first time he’d been called a fraud, but Papa had ignored those previous accusations, especially since they’d come from heathens. Something about his response outside the tent made the accusation feel different. Truer somehow.
“Papa?” I said when I’d been standing in his doorway for several minutes. My mind had been a jumble of questions, but when I reached for them now, they hovered out of grasp. Then the words from all of his sermons came back to me. “You said that it’s not in God’s will to heal everyone. So it wasn’t God’s will to heal that man. Right? And you hit him because he lied about you. You were angry. I get that.”
I nodded, hoping to coax his response out. “Right, Papa?”
All he had to do was say one word. Right. But he kept his head in his hands, not even looking up at me.
“Right, Papa? Answer me!” My voice was rising, frantic.
Papa knew all the verses in the Bible and could recite them on command. He could make small talk about everything, from the weather to car engines. Now he sat in the middle of the sagging matt
ress, completely silent.
In the empty hallway, the phone started ringing again. As I closed my eyes and knocked the back of my head against the wall, fuzzy images from the night before took shape on the darkness of my eyelids. Bloody knuckles, the screaming man, the semicircle of deacons’ hunched, suited backs. The hollow sound of my skull against the wall was like the sound last night when Papa hit the man square in the jaw. I had tried to imagine it any other way, but without an answer from him, the only thing I could believe was that he’d done it on purpose.
He couldn’t be a fraud like the man said—fraud would mean that he’d known all along that he hadn’t been able to heal. And he’d healed thousands of people in ways big and small. But the Papa I saw now, the one sitting silently on the edge of the mattress with his head in his hands, didn’t look like the same man who’d made a boy walk earlier this summer.
* * *
We took one van to revival that night—no separate caravans with men in one car and women and children bringing up the rear hours later. Papa put the air-conditioning on full blast and then rolled down the window. Ma always griped about his habit—Do you want to cool the outside too?—but she held her tongue today. A few stoplights away from the revival tent, Papa’s commercial came onto the Christian radio station, proclaiming him “the Faith Healer of East Mansfield.” Papa turned the volume dial all the way to the left, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.
A low layer of thick gray clouds pressed against the sky like the heel of God’s hand. As we pulled into the space in the lot cordoned off for the revival pastor, I saw that the parking lot was half as full as it was the same time the night before. I watched in the rearview mirror as Papa set his jaw, each muscle in his face straining to make the “faith healer” expression that had been effortless only the previous day. He stepped outside of the van and rested his hand against the top of the open door. As the night air came inside, he leaned over. Finally, he was going to say something. He had found a way to explain it all.
