Revival Season
Page 7
Aunt Claudia’s question had haunted me before we left, but I kept the memory submerged. Occasionally, it bobbed to the surface and made many other parts of Ma and Papa’s marriage come into focus—how Papa whisked her away from her family at the end of that weeklong revival and asked her to finish the rest of the revival circuit by his side. How he married her six weeks later and told her she couldn’t see her family anymore. Or the fact that the only photo I’d seen of their wedding day was of just the two of them in front of a minister, no family or friends standing nearby.
They don’t know him like we do. It was what I told myself after the dial tone droned in my ear. But Aunt Claudia’s words rose again last night and lingered at the periphery of my mind.
“Tell me the story of how you and Papa met.” I had heard the story a few times, but I wanted to hear her tell it again. Maybe I even wanted her loving words about him to rub off on me, to remind me that he had been good once.
Her voice fell away to a whisper as she talked about her pre-Papa life, about how she met Papa the same night that she promised to run away with Claudia and Yolanda if their father came home drunk again, leaving purple handprints on their pajamaed bodies like souvenirs. The evening that she’d met Papa had been a worse night than most, and they packed backpacks and stole their father’s truck, vowing never to come back. They drove without a place to go—kind of like what we were doing now—and saw a tent that they thought belonged to a circus.
“I was seventeen when we stumbled on the revival. I didn’t even know what a revival was back then, can you imagine that?” She folded her arms over her chest and laughed. “Yolanda, Claudia, and I got there after it started and sat in the back row. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I came inside. An escape, maybe. But when I first heard the music, I felt like I’d been transported to another place. I had never experienced anything like that before.”
I knew what she meant; I had grown up in the church, yet there were still moments when my soul rode the highest chords to unimagined places. I imagined hearing that mixture of keyboard and tambourine and drums alongside a choir for the first time—it probably felt like her soul had been snatched out.
“And then he started speaking. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was barely older than me, but his presence filled the room like he was twice my age. I didn’t know the God that he was talking about, but I wanted to know everything. By the end of his sermon, I jumped out of my chair and ran to the front of the tent before it was time, before the benediction. The deacons held me back, but I fell onto the altar and gave my life to Jesus in that moment. And I met my husband.”
I turned and looked over at her. Her eyes were still hidden behind her glasses, but there was no smile carved in her cheeks.
“What happened next?”
“He asked me to stay after the service, and when the entire tent emptied, he invited me to revival the next night. I couldn’t tell if I was doing it for Jesus or to get your father’s attention, but I went back to revival every night that week—making up excuses when my sisters asked where I was going. He was supposed to go to another revival in some new city that Sunday, but he showed up at the diner where I worked on his way out of town. I still had three hours left in my shift.”
“Did he wait for you?”
“Some things about your father have changed.” She laughed. “But some things haven’t. He never liked to wait. Even back then. So, I told my boss I was taking my break and left. Your father took my hand and led me to the parking lot. I remembered the way he opened the car door like a gentleman—he seemed like a real adult, not like the boys I was used to.”
“Where did he take you?” I tried to picture my parents as people close to my age—as people at all. As she spoke, silhouettes of their pasts sharpened into clear pictures. I imagined Ma in a powder-blue waitress uniform with her name on the lapel, the slow way that she reached behind her back and untied her apron—folding it in thirds the way she now folded our laundry—before leaving it next to the cash register. I imagined her taking Papa’s hand, callused from all those years of boxing, and sinking into his car.
Ma kneaded her hands against her thighs while she spoke. Then she sprang upward like a latch snapped closed inside her. She tucked her skirt between her parted legs and tented her knees before patting the small piece of cement in front of her. I climbed into the cove left by her skirt, sliding my shoulders between the peaks of her raised knees. The protrusion from her growing stomach pressed into my back as her fingers parted my hair in the center and whizzed across my scalp. My head lolled in her deft hands as she tugged and braided. She hummed as she leaned close to my scalp, her lips buzzing by my ear. I was too old for her French braids and would unravel them tonight, but right now, I loved the feeling of her hands in my hair.
“We went to a nearby lake. He didn’t even know if I would go with him, but he had packed a picnic basket in the back seat with a blanket next to it. When we got to the lake, he asked if he could do something. He led me to the water and stepped inside. I stayed on the bank and told him that I didn’t want to swim. He said that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, but in order to do that, he would have to baptize me first.”
“He baptized you on your date?” She’d never told me that detail before.
“It sounds ridiculous now, but it was romantic then. I knew I was in love as soon as he dropped my head back into the water. He proposed to me on that blanket.” She spun her gold band on her ring finger as her voice faded. “We got married six weeks later, on my eighteenth birthday.”
Hannah inched closer to the edge of the pool, ready to come out. I yanked her from the water and placed her on the towel.
“What did he do?” Ma asked, her voice suddenly deeper. Nearby lawnmowers buzzed a soft soundtrack to Ma’s barely audible voice. I leaned closer while rubbing Hannah dry. Caleb was a few feet away, his feet crossed on the chair where he was reclined, his hand above his eyes providing shade from the sun.
I paused. Part of me wanted to protect her from what I knew. But lying—especially to Ma—was a sin. “He beat the guy up, Ma. Then he stomped him into the ground and told the deacons to take him away.” The shock in my face was reflected in her sunglasses.
“I’ve never seen him like that. It was terrifying. It was almost like it wasn’t him,” I continued.
“Mmm.” It was a knowing moan—one that conveyed no surprise.
“Have you seen him do that before?”
Ma exhaled—a stream of pressure being released from a balloon. I reached forward and pulled her sunglasses from her face. Her eyes were red, like she’d been crying before we even got to the pool.
“Your father is a man like other men. It’s important to remember that. God has chosen your father for a special calling, but he is also human.” She reached for her sunglasses and clumsily placed them back on her face. Suddenly, she stood up behind my unfinished braids; her dress unrolled like a curtain closing.
“I’m getting hungry. Let’s get lunch.”
* * *
Gas stations and supermarkets dotted both sides of the wide street that led away from the motel. Even though Ma said she was hungry, we passed the diner where we’d eaten the night before and kept driving without slowing down. Ma seemed like she knew where she was going, so I rolled down the back window and leaned outside. A truck barreled by us in the right lane; I shielded my eyes against the flecks of debris that it stirred into the air.
Ma slowed the car to a crawl at a stop sign. She looked both ways and squinted, seemingly deciding the best way to turn to get lunch. In that moment, a familiar voice came through the open window.
“Ma. Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” She angled her ear toward my open window behind her. A siren blared nearby, obscuring the voice.
“Wait a second.”
A car honked and then sped around us with a screech. Ma and Caleb rolled down their windows. The voice came back—still faint.
Ma passed through the stop sign below the speed limit, and the words got louder as we crept closer to their source.
“I hear it,” Caleb said. “It sounds like Papa.”
Ma gripped the wheel tighter as the voice was soon unmistakable. My eyes bounced from trees to brick facades to concrete slabs of sidewalk before they found a suited figure half a block away on the left side of the street. There was no way that could be Papa, even though he wore one of Papa’s suits and sounded like him. Ma pulled over and turned on the hazards. I could hear him clearly now; he was reciting verses from Revelation 6 about the end days and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It was the sermon that he would have been giving if we were still in Bethel. But we weren’t in Bethel, and he was on the side of the road with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a microphone in the other, looking to all the world like a crazy person.
“What’s he doing?” Caleb’s words stumbled over one another.
“Shh!” Ma’s finger shot to her lips before she furiously rolled up the windows to cut off any sound he was making. My heart stuttered as I jerked forward to see more, but the seat belt pressed me back: a reprimand. Through the front window, the sharp edges of his silhouette got blurry. Papa always called street preachers madmen: according to him, what differentiated him from the lunatics on the street was a denomination behind him, the word of God on his side, and a pulpit.
The man—Papa—looked in our direction for a split second, and I reclined my seat until I was almost horizontal. My heart froze as his eyes fixed on the minivan and then looked away.
“Drive,” I yelled. “Drive!” The words propelled themselves out of my lungs.
Ma let out a gasp that she immediately squelched with her hand—the resulting sound was like someone being suffocated.
“What’s he doing? What’s he doing?” Caleb had been repeating the same question into the window since we got there, emphasizing different syllables and blurring the words together so it sounded like one rapid-fire phrase.
A lump rose in the back of my mouth that I tried to swallow, but it lodged in my throat instead. Ma jolted the car back into motion and jerked away. Papa disappeared from view; I focused my eyes on the double yellow line in front of us until it became wavy in my vision.
* * *
Back in the motel room, lunch was a hot dog wrapped in foil that Ma had plucked from the greasy metal rollers at the gas station. She had even turned on the television—breaking one of the cardinal rules of our house. Usually, the smallest transgressions were thrilling, especially when we got away with them. But this was not the same as stealing an extra slice of pie at dessert or returning home from Micah’s house a couple of minutes after curfew.
No one had spoken Papa’s name or offered an explanation for what we had seen. The television’s vivid pictures couldn’t dilute the memory of him shouting on the side of the street like a madman. How had he turned from a man whose congregation had been in the thousands into this? Maybe it had all started with his hitting the pregnant girl—I had told myself it was a mistake, that he was sorry for it. But everything changed that night in Bethel. And if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would have sworn that the man at the corner wasn’t him either. There had to be other things about him that I didn’t know—other things that I hadn’t let myself see.
My untouched hot dog was still mummified in its foil wrapper on the end table. Ma chided me to eat over high-pitched laughter on the television, but a few bites of the cold, slick link didn’t quell the burn in my stomach. Who was this man we were following everywhere, trusting the words that came out of his mouth like gospel? And what else was he capable of?
* * *
The desk clock said 11:03 p.m. when I heard a car pull up. Ma was back in her room next door as footsteps against the pavement made a cadence that was distinctively Papa’s. The room was awash with the television’s blue glow as I scrambled out of bed and jammed the power button until the screen went dark. I crept to the door; my breathing quickened as I placed my hand on the lever and pushed it down a millimeter or two. Then all the way.
I stepped into a wave of heat, smack into the impenetrable wall of three vertical gold buttons drooping from his suit jacket. He jolted forward as though he’d seen a ghost; his briefcase dropped from his extended palm, clattering to the ground between us in slow motion. As I dragged my eyes from the scuffed brown leather of his briefcase to his wrinkled suit jacket to the smudged glasses that were halfway down the bridge of his nose, the hot dog tossed in the pool of grease in my stomach.
“Miriam. Why are you still awake? What is it?” His words were blunt at the edges. He moved to get past me, but I widened my stance as he maneuvered to the left to get by. He sighed his annoyance as he looked over my shoulder. The words I wanted to say vanished the way they always did when he was close. I searched his face—reconciling this version of the man I barely knew with the one we’d seen on the street and the one from the night in Bethel.
“Why did you hit him?”
“What are you talking about, Miriam? Get back to your room.” His words were flinty as he flung out his right arm and pushed the air aside to dispatch me.
“Was it because he said you couldn’t heal?” I took one step closer to his hands that dwarfed the key card. I will never hurt you; I will never hurt you. I needed to believe it now, but those words rang as hollow as his other ones. I knew that talking back, especially to Papa, came with consequences. But this man wasn’t Papa anymore.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” With each word, the muscle in his jaw twitched as his eyes darted in their sockets.
“I know what I saw. You lied about this. What else have you lied about?” His anger made me bolder than I really felt; it braced my spine as I sandwiched myself between him and the hotel room door.
“Who are you to question me about any of this?” he growled. “I’ve been doing this work longer than you’ve been alive. You know nothing about what it takes to make a successful revival. There are months of planning—years—behind every minute that you get to witness.” He raised his arms to emphasize his point; his hands inched closer to my face, and I slid away from where I stood between him and the door, backing toward the railing.
“So don’t you dare question me. I have nothing to explain to you. Nothing.” On his final word, he swung a fist in my direction. I leaped back, out of range, landing with my back against the railing’s vertical bars. I cowered with hands in front of my face as he came closer, unable to get to my unsteady feet. I will never hurt you; I will never hurt you played on repeat in my head. His eyes were closed as his hands swung in the emptiness. He couldn’t have been fighting with me because his punches whizzed in the air, faster and with more force, with none of them landing anywhere close to me.
When he finally opened his eyes, he looked around in the darkness as though expecting to see something, but his head flinched at a lone mosquito that sailed in front of his face. He finally looked back at the ground, and his face collapsed as he saw me in a pile, my knees to my chest, my arms around my knees. But a moment later, he straightened to his fullest height and slid his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. Only when they were back on his face did he seem to realize where he was.
A door clicked—I tried to scramble to my feet, but they wouldn’t grip. Caleb stepped outside, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He furrowed his eyebrows as he looked at me on the ground and back up at Papa.
“What’s going on?” Caleb reached out an arm to yank me to my feet.
“Nothing. We were just talking.” Papa spoke up even though Caleb was still only looking at me.
“It sounded like you were arguing.”
“Miriam had a misunderstanding.”
“There was no misunderstanding.” My steady right hand against the railing belied the wobble in my knees. My voice came out strong, clear of the cottony fuzziness that had been in my head. Papa stared at me, but he
wouldn’t do anything in front of Caleb.
“It’s late. We should get some sleep. We can talk about it in the morning.”
Papa slid his key card into the reader and slipped inside. Caleb and I stood in the hallway watching the bronze numbers—211—long after the door closed.
“Are you okay?” He finally asked when we both realized that Papa wasn’t coming back out to explain anything.
“Not really.”
“Where are you hurt?” He scanned the common places for physical injuries—elbows, knees.
“I’m not hurt like that.” How could I tell him that the hurt was in a place he couldn’t see? That only a couple of days before I still believed that Jesus Christ was Lord, Papa had the healing gift from the Holy Spirit, and we had to follow his lead. But those final two truths had been splitting themselves in my brain, like cells during mitosis. One truth became two possible truths, and then four, and then eight. By the time we arrived back in Texas next month, it would be impossible to know what was true anymore.
SIX
In the six remaining revivals after Bethel, I expected Papa to seem chastened, but rather than admit fault for anything that had happened, he told us that God was using this test to strengthen our faith. All the while, he raved about the end days in front of mostly empty tents in Tennessee and Oklahoma, becoming the corner preacher all over again. By the time we pulled into the garage back home with 3,253 new miles on the odometer, Papa stepped onto the driveway as a shell of his former self. We spilled out of the car, our feet desperate to be on familiar ground again. I slipped off my shoes and stood on the warm concrete. It was my ritual for returning home, even though the house didn’t look like the one we had left.