by Monica West
“Gather around,” Papa said to all of us, cupping the air with his arms to emphasize his statement. We circled him and knelt next to oil stains on the driveway. Papa bowed his head and we all followed suit.
“Lord, thank You for another successful revival season,” he began with a voice louder than normal. “Thank You for all the souls that You brought into the tents for deliverance, and thank You for the power You have given me to continue doing Your will.”
I opened my eyes to see Ma and Caleb nodding at Papa’s words as though their desire to believe him made what he was saying true. It was easier to accept things without questioning them, but wasn’t that just blind faith—the very thing Papa had preached against for so many years?
“Amen,” Papa said.
“Amen,” Ma and Caleb repeated in unison. I struggled to make the words pass through my clenched lips, but Papa didn’t seem to notice as he brushed the dirt from his pants and stood.
As they headed into the house, I dawdled outside for a few minutes before lying down on a patch of grass. A pillow of blades prickled my back as clouds churned above, evidence of the earth shifting even though I couldn’t feel its subtle movements. Then there was a darkening in my field of vision. Ma’s face entered my view, lines of concern etched on her forehead. A few seconds later, Hannah appeared next to her.
“What’s wrong?”
How could I tell her that I wasn’t okay when everyone else was? That I needed a bit of what she and Caleb had taken to forget what I had seen. Or maybe I just needed an extra dose of belief because that was always the answer when doubt crept in. But belief didn’t work that way, not for us. It wasn’t the answer to an on-demand question—Lord, please give me more belief—and then bam. Belief required trial and prayer and faith and conviction. But all the Bible verses that I knew by heart were retreating the more I tried to remember them.
I sat up slowly, my head still swimming. Ma must have seen the questions that flashed behind my eyes because she crouched on the parched grass next to me.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s hard to be back here with everything. I thought it would be easier to be home, but it’s harder.”
Hannah held a dandelion inches from my lips as though a wish could make my uncertainty and anger disappear. When its thin stem bent in the slight breeze, I blinked for a stutter longer than normal and then pursed my lips. With one blow, tiny, cottony puffs scattered in all directions; some went overhead, where I traced their trajectory until they got lost in the sun’s blinding rays. A few remaining puffs hovered close to Hannah’s face before landing on her skirt and my nose. She burst into laughter and something rumbled deep inside me too before pouring out—the first laugh in weeks.
* * *
On Sunday, the morning of Papa’s triumphant return to the pulpit of Living Waters Baptist Church, we dressed for what always felt like an unofficial holiday. We knew that there would be crowds that rivaled those of Christmas and Easter, with overflow in the multipurpose room. I wondered if Papa would give the deacon board specific numbers about how many he had healed this summer, ignoring the ones he hadn’t.
Papa slowed down at the stop sign at the end of the street and waved to Mr. Finley, who was walking his dog. “See you at church today.” Papa’s voice didn’t rise at the end of the question because it wasn’t a question at all.
Mr. Finley nodded. Mr. Finley was a heathen, and we had two options when encountering heathens: we delivered them the word of God or we kept our distance—there was no in-between. Papa had been inviting Mr. Finley to church for years, and even though he never came, Papa never gave up.
Papa pulled into the parking lot of his new church that had been built last fall. I waited for the familiar feeling of pride to churn in my chest, but a weight tethered me to the ground. I wanted to roll down the window and tell everyone what had happened, to tell them to go to one of the other churches in town because the person they’d put all their faith in wasn’t who they thought he was, but then Papa put the car in park and we all got out.
With an hour to go before the start of services, the church was still almost empty. But Mrs. Cade, the senior usher and resident church midwife, was there setting up. She smiled as she saw me, and I relished seeing her familiar face that was the color of Papa’s perfect cup of coffee with a swirl of cream. With a hurried pace, she shuffled over to the door where I was standing and ran her gnarled hands across my face, as though my moles were braille. Her knobby fingertips stroked the bridge of my nose and ran across the Cupid’s bow of my top lip. Her movements were steady, methodical, as though she were trying to keep track of how much I had changed in the three months since she’d seen me.
“Miriam,” she finally said. “Welcome home.” She pulled me close to her chest, and I inhaled her strong scent of lavender. When she released me, she reached into the pocket of her suit jacket and unearthed a few peppermints. She passed them to me like contraband, and I shoveled them into my pockets.
“Hi, Mrs. Cade.”
She leaned in close and pressed both hands against the sides of my face. She had been one of the earliest members of Papa’s first church when he was a twenty-year-old preaching prodigy, following him across Texas until he arrived in East Mansfield. As kids, Caleb and I made a game of guessing how old Mrs. Cade was, but we knew better than to ask. From our estimation, she was about sixty, because not only had she delivered me, Caleb, and Isaiah, she loved to brag that she had also delivered Papa.
“How was revival this year?”
I wanted to tell someone, anyone, about what I had seen in Bethel, someone who wouldn’t pretend that it was an anomaly. Mrs. Cade kept my secrets—she was the only person I had told about the dark days in the house after Isaiah’s death. She had known Papa before he was a holy man; surely, she could know the depths to which he had sunk in Bethel.
“Great,” I began. Words stirred below the surface, but I swallowed them.
She tilted her head to the right as though to spur me on. I gave her a wan smile instead and turned down the long hallway toward the multipurpose room before she could ask another question. The hallway’s bright walls were lined with pictures of Papa and awards he had won: “Texas Baptist Preacher of the Year” from 2010 until now. There were polished plaques from ceremonies he’d attended and pictures of the old church back in Midland—the one that he preached in when Caleb and I were born. I stopped in front of the final picture, of Papa with a big pair of scissors in his hands the day before this building held its first Sunday service. We stood next to him with our faces permanently frozen in expressions of delight. He had come so far in a short amount of time; there was so much to lose. Scandals had rocked other churches around this area, leaving large shuttered buildings where vibrant, bustling congregations used to be. In no time, we could lose this church and be back in the storefront in Midland.
“Miriam!” Micah, my best friend for as long as I had memories, shouted as she barreled toward me. Her father was the longestserving deacon in the church—he followed Papa out to East Mansfield from Midland, and the story went that Micah and I had been friends since we slept in adjacent cribs in the nursery. She ran over to me like she was unaware of how the pieces of her body worked together—her stride halting and interrupted, her back permanently slouched, her knobby knees protruding from opaque tights as she almost knocked me over with the force of her hug. It looked like she’d grown about an inch since we’d been gone, and now she was almost my height.
“Welcome home!” she squealed as I was enveloped in the tangle of her arms. Before more words could make their way out, her hand shot to her mouth—we couldn’t be too loud in earshot of Papa’s office. I led her by the arm away from the multipurpose room into the sunlight outside. When the door eased shut behind us, she fired off a series of questions: How was it? How are you? When did you get back? What did you bring me? Her questions sailed above me as more cars turned into the parking lot—it was still early, which meant that we w
ere on track to have another massive post-revival crowd.
As we leaned against the wall with the backs of our dresses snagging rough bricks, I started at the revival in Americus. Micah’s face brightened as I gave the elaborate retelling of Papa making the boy walk; the auspicious revival beginning seemed like a lifetime ago. But, as I recounted the details, I wondered if it hadn’t actually been quite the miracle we’d all thought.
“What about the rest of revival season?” she asked at the end of my story. I fed her a rehearsed, sanitized version of the cities we had seen and the souls that had been saved, omitting the fact that the numbers had plummeted after Bethel. Before she could ask a question about healing, I reached deep into my pocket and fingered the soft edges of the postcards that I had purchased at various gas stations. I fanned the bright skylines and sunset landscapes—it was the closest that she would get to seeing the rest of the world, which was what we called everything that wasn’t here.
Ten minutes before service started, Micah and I took our seats at the back of the sanctuary. Hannah sat between us, coloring, and Micah reached down every so often and brushed Hannah’s bangs out of her eyes. With no siblings of her own to care for, Micah relished the role of surrogate mother. She never used baby talk with Hannah, and she never saw the intricate braces on her legs as impediments. I watched them from a few inches away, my hands resting on my lap in a rare moment of having nothing to do.
As service started, I wanted to be anywhere else, especially as the congregation jumped to its feet before Papa entered the sanctuary. People closest to the aisle grabbed on to his suit like it was the hem of Jesus’s garment. With each grasping hand, I slunk deeper into the divot in the seat. Micah was on her feet before Papa entered, her face aglow with admiration as he walked down the aisle next to us. While everyone clapped, I wrapped my hand around Hannah’s and pressed the brown crayon into the paper until it tore, the waxy nub crumbling in my hand.
Hannah and I made trees and clouds and rainbows and birds during the white noise of the sermon; I looked up for a few minutes each time Micah mouthed for me to pay attention, but before long, my gaze slipped back to Hannah’s picture.
“What are you doing?” Micah was loud as the percussion provided a backdrop for the climax of Papa’s sermon. Her eyebrows were raised in confusion—she and I were the ones to take notes during every sermon, but my notebook and Bible were closed next to me. “What’s gotten into you?”
I shrugged and forced myself to watch Papa jump around on the stage—the movements not unlike what he’d done on that street corner. When Hannah’s picture was complete, a line of junior deacons came to the front of the congregation to serve communion—there were a few boys among them who I recognized, boys who used to run around the church and terrorize me and Micah. These boys, who I was supposed to call young men now, fanned off from the front and positioned themselves behind the table piled high with gold serving dishes. Senior deacons like Micah’s dad presided over the solemn ceremony.
A boy I didn’t recognize stood at the end of my row; although he was wearing a white dress shirt and black pants—the usher uniform on first Sundays—it looked different on him than on the others. The blue crayon fell from my hand when I looked at the whisper of stubble that dotted his top lip and the broadness in his shoulders that strained his shirt. A bronze nameplate pierced the right side of his dress shirt: Jason Campbell. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. I had no memories of his family, so they were either new or his parents weren’t members. The blunt edge of his stubby nail and the coarseness of his flesh grazed my hand as he passed the communion plates. I gave the plate a little tug and he tugged back for a second before letting go, ending our mini-game before it really started. On the surface of the plate, the warmth that his hand left behind still lingered; my skin flushed as I pinched the plastic cup of grape juice in one hand before grabbing the cracker. I pressed my legs together to extinguish the tingling in my crotch, but it made the feeling sprout outward to my hands and feet instead. His right knee nudged mine in the slightest, knocking my knees together. The glass of grape juice sloshed, and I held it aloft to keep it safe. When I finally looked at him, he was staring down at me with his cheeks stretched into an almost-smile. My neck snapped back into place.
As Jason shuffled to the pew behind me with now empty hands, I remembered when Micah and I had gone to the playground last year and seen a pair of unsaved kids with their limbs intertwined beneath the trees. I’d wondered what it would feel like when my husband touched me like that one day, but I’d never thought about it during church. If Papa knew what I was feeling, he would call me a harlot before making me recite Bible verses about the evils of lust.
“The body and blood of Christ,” Papa said over the microphone. In the pulpit, Papa’s laser vision was directed at me, his eyes singeing my skin. I’d always wanted him to notice me from the stage, but not like this. His eyes bounced back to Jason and then to me. “Confess your sins to the Lord and you shall be forgiven. Do not eat and drink damnation unto yourself.” He was supposed to scan the congregation, but his neck stayed fixed in one direction, his eyes igniting my flesh. Had he really seen the lust in my eyes from that far away?
Forgive me of my lust, I confessed in my heart after an eternal low buzz on the microphone. The feeling that had just blanketed my body was snatched away, leaving behind a chill as Jason exited the sanctuary. Papa had drilled into us that lust was a gateway for other sin, that sin in the mind corroded everything it touched. But as we waited for Papa to announce the healing part of service, I desperately wanted the feeling back.
“I know that many of you are waiting for healing, but this summer the Lord has told me to change the way I do things here. I will not heal on Sundays anymore. We will have separate healing services starting in a few weeks. All rise for the benediction.”
A stunned silence settled over the congregation, many of whom had probably been waiting for months to be healed. Even Micah couldn’t hide her wide-eyed disbelief as she stood in slow motion. It would’ve surprised me before Bethel, but nothing where Papa was concerned shocked me anymore. As I recited the benediction, Micah looked over at me, her eyes begging for an explanation. But all I could do was feign surprise as the congregation dispersed.
Quietly, we started the routine of first Sundays, of collecting the communion dishes and washing them, of folding the tablecloth and storing it for next month. I followed Micah outside and into the annex, where the deacons had left behind a messy pile of communion trays and half-filled glasses of grape juice. Hannah clacked behind us with her crumpled picture in tow. When we got inside, I settled her in a chair with a new, clean piece of paper.
The whir of the ceiling fan made background noise for our work—Micah sealed the remaining crackers in plastic bags while I dunked each communion tray in soapy water.
“Why didn’t he heal today?” Micah asked the question rhetorically, and I wished I could tell her the truth. “Did something happen?”
I froze and watched the sponge in my hands making sudsy circles on the gilded plates. “What do you mean?”
The ceiling fan’s swift oscillations answered me. I turned my head to look at Micah at the very moment when she pitched forward on the sink. Before I could catch her, she fell in a heap on the ground, her arms raised above her head in some odd position of submission. The faint red glow of the exit sign illuminated a damp line of sweat that had collected on her top lip like a mustache.
“Micah!” The plastic bag in her hands had fallen to the floor, scattering cracker crumbs on the ground. I crouched by her side, noticing the pale sheen on her normally deep-brown skin as I slipped two fingers below her chin—the same spot where I checked Hannah’s pulse after seizures racked her body and left her lifeless on the ground. A steady heartbeat thrummed under the pads of my fingers as her chest rose and fell beneath her dress. On her left wrist, the thick links of a silver bracelet were attached to a rectangular panel with stencils: TYPE 1 DIABETES. During h
omeschool, we made short trips from my basement to the bathroom; I watched as she pricked her fingers, swiping blooms of blood that swelled from her fingertips onto test strips and inserting them in the machine that she kept with her at all times, but I had never seen her faint.
“Help!” My voice reverberated back to me from the closed door and the stained-glass windows. Behind me, Hannah’s folding chair had tipped over, and she was crawling toward us. Over Hannah’s earsplitting wails, I placed my cheek next to Micah’s open mouth and felt the puff of her shallow respirations. Her face was clammy as I slapped it to get her to wake up, but it only made her head flop one way and then the other. I jumped up and ran to the door, forcing it open.
“Help! In the annex.” The second scream drained my lungs. Then the doors to the multipurpose room pushed open and Mrs. Nesbitt, the Sunday school director, looked around.
“What happened?” she called.
“It’s Micah. She passed out. Call an ambulance.”
Mrs. Nesbitt nodded before disappearing through the closing door. I rushed back to Micah’s side. Hannah had made her way over too and was tugging on Micah’s ankle.
“You’re going to be okay.” Singing the sentences to Micah the way Hannah liked, I lifted Micah’s limp body onto my lap to rock her. The room was still and mostly silent as Hannah’s wailing had now become barely audible moaning. My hands needed something to do to displace the anxiety—I placed my right hand in the middle of Micah’s forehead, spreading my index finger by her hairline and my pinky by the bridge of her nose.
“Lord, touch and heal Micah. Restore her to her full power in You.” Or was it Return her to her full power in You? Prayers that I hadn’t said in weeks—hadn’t thought about saying to a God who had forsaken us—clattered in my mouth like stones. I pressed harder on her forehead. If I kept talking, she would hear me and wake up. I snatched the Lord’s Prayer and the twenty-third Psalm out of the ether to speak over her, relieved that I hadn’t lost those trusted prayers.
