by Monica West
I knew I couldn’t say what I so desperately wanted to: You are no healer either, so I settled on shaking my head instead.
“You have one last chance to save yourself.”
At this point, I normally would have said anything to avoid the spanking. He had told me that he wouldn’t hurt me when we were in Bethel, and even though there had been discipline sessions since then, he had always used his hands; he had never used a belt to hit me before.
“Fine. Bend over.”
I started to bend over the bed on my forearms, but I stayed upright instead. If he was going to do this, he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of my whimper or the anonymity of my back; he would have to look at me the whole time.
“I’ll take it like this.”
“Have it your way.”
He let go of the long end of the belt; it whizzed through the air before zinging my shin. I winced as the strap bit into my flesh, but I kept the tears at bay and fixed my gaze on the storm that brewed behind his eyes as he raised his right arm higher than last time. He grasped my forearm tighter to hold me in place, and the belt sliced into the skin at the tops of my thighs, reopening some of the cuts that the pajama pants covered. It felt like I was naked as the belt shredded into me. My knees buckled, driving me onto the floor in front of where Papa stood, his belt swinging overhead like a sickle.
“You are no healer, Miriam.” Globules of sweat formed at his hairline and slid down his puffed-up cheeks as he delivered the proclamation again. My legs screamed as I placed my hands on the carpet and rose, returning to face him even as my body ached to stay in the fetal position. I heard the slap of another blow as it landed on my right thigh—a sharp pain radiated outward to parts of my body that he hadn’t even hit, driving me back to the divot in the carpet that I had just left. My muscles burned as I pressed my lips closed, inhaling deeply and releasing short puffs. I shook everywhere as I stared at him from feet below, unable to stand anymore. I gritted my teeth as the belt’s edge sliced my legs several more times.
Above me, he slid his hands onto his knees—his belly heaved in and out with his panting, straining the buttons on his dress shirt until they almost broke. The belt flopped against the floor, an accusing tongue. Small details came into focus—the position of Papa’s watch hands at nine and four, the diagonal rays of light that hit his chrome belt buckle and made a glinting pattern against the wall, the slight dark-red nick on his neck that must have come from shaving. And then he was gone.
Silence. Stillness. It was over. Cries finally emptied from my stomach and spilled out of my mouth onto the carpet. I kept my eyes closed—somehow it seemed to lessen the pain just a little bit. I lay on the floor, writhing and squirming as minutes turned into hours. Eventually, I pulled myself onto the bed.
Hours later, my head was under the pillow, unable to block out all the light that flooded into the room in the middle of the afternoon. The bedroom door opened. Finally, Ma had come. I wanted her to tenderly lift the legs of my pajama pants and apply ointment to my welts, silently, methodically. Wanted her to cradle each foot in her palm and inspect my legs—Mary Magdalene at Jesus’s feet—working her way up to my knees. I wanted her to apologize for staying downstairs, wondered if the same horror that had passed through me when I’d heard him hitting her had passed through her as well. If her fear had immobilized her the way mine had.
“Here.” It wasn’t Ma’s voice; it was Caleb’s. I opened my eyes and moved from underneath the pillow to see him standing by the door. He was holding a flattened tube of ointment and a bag of cotton balls and looked almost scared to get too close to me. Every inch of my skin throbbed as I tried to sit up.
“Don’t move.” He took tentative steps closer to the bed, placing his offering near my hands.
“Thanks.” His good deed complete, I expected him to turn around, but he stood there and examined my legs.
I squeezed a line of ointment onto the cotton ball. My hand trembled, unable to get more than an inch away from the welt.
“Let me.” Caleb took the cotton ball away and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. I couldn’t look at him, ashamed of the deep cuts furrowing my legs that would no longer be my secret. When the cotton ball finally grazed my skin, I closed my eyes, focusing my energy on keeping still.
“It’s okay. I think that was the worst one.” Caleb inspected his handiwork and the rest of my legs. He didn’t ask about the jagged, gaping gashes that had nothing to do with Papa’s belt.
“I think that’s it.” He screwed the cap back onto the tube. “You hungry?”
I thought about the breakfast I’d left untouched on the table, the lunch that Ma must have also served between now and then, and nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t want him to leave, not even for a second, as he slipped through the door and closed it behind him. It felt like he was gone for hours when he returned with a plate—a hastily made sandwich comprised of two end pieces of bread, some slices of turkey slipped in the middle, and mustard oozing from the edges. He shrugged as he handed it to me, as though he was embarrassed about his offering.
“Thanks.” I held his sandwich to my chapped lips. He stood in the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to the other while I took one bite and then a second. On the third bite, the sandwich was gone, and only crumbs remained on the plate.
“Do you need anything else?”
I tried to think of something to ask him to do, something that would keep him in my bedroom. But my mind was blank. I shook my head. He waved and turned to go, pulling the door closed.
“Caleb,” I called before the door shut all the way. He put his head back inside.
“Can you stay?”
He stood at the door for so long that I thought he didn’t hear me. But then the door swung open all the way; he came over and sat on the bed.
We didn’t say anything, but it was enough to feel his weight on the mattress, to hear the slow cadence of his breathing next to mine. He didn’t ask the questions that I expected him to: Why did you do it? What were you trying to prove? He didn’t say anything at all; he just laid his heavy hand on my head. It wasn’t Ma’s soft caress, but it would do for the moment.
* * *
The next morning, an unfamiliar weight made one side of my bed sag. I opened my eyes and saw Caleb, splayed on his back next to the wall. He must have fallen asleep there the night before. We hadn’t shared a bed since revival years ago, before Hannah was born. I slid closer to the edge of the bed, careful not to wake him. A slight snore, a little louder than a breath, escaped his mouth. On Sunday morning, he would once again be in the pulpit behind Papa, but for now, he was in my room, among my yellow walls and daffodil sheets. I pulled my prayer quilt from undermeath his heavy legs and spread it over him, leaving him to sleep.
FOURTEEN
Over the next few days, Papa and I were like two billiard balls—never actually touching or interacting. I entered a room, and he left it. In the places where he couldn’t avoid me—like church—I knew how to stay out of his path. I lingered in the back of the sanctuary until he was done shaking hands with the few families who were left. When he finished and went into his office, I came to the front of the sanctuary to clean up after communion—the task that Micah and I once had down to a science took twice as long alone. But I could only complain to Hannah, who played behind me as I watched the blood of Christ seep down the drain.
It should have been freeing to be in church without supervision, but even though Papa had been avoiding me, I could feel his judgment and sense him staring me down when he thought I wasn’t looking. It was hard to understand how he could simultaneously ignore me and watch me like a hawk, but somehow he managed. In the hallways, I received more notes asking for healing, but I felt Papa’s eyes on me and knew it would be too risky to try.
In homeschool, the pain of Micah’s absence was still acute, even though things had ostensibly returned to normal. Ma circulated through our sec
tions—tapping my shoulder when I got a math problem right, whispering good job in my ear, and I knew that her gentleness was her way of showing me that Papa’s distance from me hadn’t spread to her. I watched Isaac grow and learn the nuances of Ma’s face while strapped to her chest; the ache in my lower back was still present from all the days when he had been strapped to mine.
There were no more dances or visits to my room at night to read library books—Ma seemed to want to make up for the weeks she’d missed with Isaac. She reveled in each announcement of a new milestone: Isaac just smiled for the first time. He’s holding his head up. The fact wasn’t lost on either of us that just because those milestones were new to her didn’t mean they were new at all.
Nothing lasted in our house for too long—even my anger at Papa ebbed as winter released its hold to spring, but it never fully went away. As warm air crept into the open spaces and buds formed on dormant trees, Easter came with its renewed promise of resurrection. Ma and I stood side by side in the kitchen the Saturday before Easter, a table with meager groceries in front of us. All of the preparations for Papa’s service had already been made—he was going all out this year in a thinly veiled attempt to lure more people to the church. The dwindling tithes barely covered enough for supplies, but the Sunday school classes had created a life-size cross out of plywood beams and a rock out of papier-mâché that the deacon playing the angel of the Lord would roll away. For the dramatic moment when it was revealed that there was nothing in the tomb, Papa and the deacons had rigged the pulleys behind the pulpit that would lift him into the air, mimicking Jesus’s ascent into heaven on the third day. The only thing left to do was prepare the Easter feast that we would eat as a family when all the festivities were over.
Ma opened bags next to me, pulling out onions and celery for the dressing, a can of pineapple, and a ham wrapped in white plastic. Her stilted words recited the recipe that we’d been using for years, but I wasn’t listening to her at all. Above the sound of a rolling boil on the stove, Papa’s last-minute stumblings through the rehearsal of what should have been his best sermon of the year floated down to the first floor. I tried to summon a feeling of pity, but I couldn’t muster it. As Ma whistled to fill the space, I grabbed the onion and placed it on the cutting board, slicing through the middle with the gleaming blade, remembering the sweet release as the shard of glass plunged into my flesh months ago. As I hacked through the white orb again and again, I fought the urge to turn the knife on my arms.
My hands went through the motions of cooking. And even though they had given life and health back to people, they were expected to go back to the muscle-memory motions of chopping, bathing, and stirring, like a rubber band returning to its original shape. It was like falling from a mighty height and crashing back into what was familiar—the fall was supposed to kill you before the landing, but in this case, the landing seemed even worse.
After dinner was prepped and stored in plastic containers in the refrigerator, I ran a bath and dipped Hannah into the water—a baptism of sorts. She let her body go limp—her trusting head was heavy in my hands as I cupped water onto her scalp and massaged a dollop of shampoo into a lather. I leaned Hannah’s head back to rinse out the thick suds. Her mouth hung open; her small pink tongue peeked through the space at the bottom of her mouth where a tiny shard of a permanent tooth was growing in.
Then a thought crawled across the front of my brain, mocking me with its simplicity. Hannah. Ma and Papa said that God had made her this way on purpose—that she was meant to be stricken with cerebral palsy, that she was whole just as she was. But that had only been what they said after Papa had tried to heal her and failed. On the nights when her seizures lasted too long, when she choked on her thick saliva, when we had to rush her to the emergency room, it was hard to think that God would bestow that upon anyone. I cupped Hannah’s chubby face in my hands—her warm, damp skin was slippery in my palms.
“I’m going to heal you.”
She stared back at me, her eyes a few shades deeper than almond, her mouth still open. She jerked her head backward in a violent motion. I leaned forward and grabbed her stiff body, pulling her toward me. Her back arched away, resistant to being hugged. She stayed there for a few moments until a bleat came from the back of her throat. As I grabbed the washcloth and wrung out the excess water, I ran the warm cloth over her back. I straightened her left arm as much as possible and cleaned the thin, tender skin of her armpit and elbow. Then on to her left leg—her knobby knee joint, her thin calf with little muscle tone, her foot that was angled inward. I imagined Hannah with arms that fell to her sides without bending, feet that pointed forward, legs strong enough to hold all of her weight without buckling.
After she was dried and lotioned, after her wet hair had been oiled and sectioned and braided, I pinned her arms to her sides and wrapped her in her favorite blanket. I climbed in bed behind her and breathed her in. Would she be the same person when she was healed? Would she still let me snuggle with her, or would she resist? I waited for the magic moment of sleep when her body grew heavy against mine in bed, when the water from her hair soaked through my shirt. Slipping my arms from around her shoulders and sliding to the wall behind her bed, I walked to the headboard and raised the side rail. Her face was so peaceful in sleep. No tremors or spasms. No seizures for now. And soon, no seizures again.
“Good night, Hannah.” I leaned over and kissed her forehead.
* * *
Although I wanted to see him stumble, Papa’s Easter sermon went off without a hitch. But even so, no one lined up to be saved. I knew we were all realizing that if Papa—a man who had saved souls in regular clothes in a storefront church with a dozen folding chairs—couldn’t get people to line up for him on Easter Sunday, that meant ordinary Sunday services were all but doomed.
Papa’s spirits had been briefly lifted in the weeks after he thought he’d healed Ma, but Easter Sunday brought them right back down. It didn’t seem possible for him to seem more defeated than he had been in the dark days after Deacon Johnson left, but as he trudged to the van after the service with the empty garment bag draped over his arm, it seemed like he’d been hollowed out.
When we got home from church, Papa called us down to the kitchen still wearing the white Easter suit that now looked dingy in the dim kitchen light. “I want to announce this year’s revival season circuit,” he said when we were all seated, facing him at the head of the table. As he spread out a map, layers of pen markings stared back at us, chronicling our revivals for the past thirteen years. There were tiny X’s, red pen circles, and scrawled dates—hieroglyphs denoting the cities where we’d been and when we’d been there. This was always an exciting moment, when our upcoming summer was spelled out for us. As Papa spoke, though, there was none of the typical fanfare in his voice—just a monotone reciting cities as though they were groceries on a shopping list.
“We are beginning at Grateful Life Temple of Holiness in Sweet Home, Arkansas.”
Papa continued his announcement, naming a city in Tennessee where we’d never been before and a town in North Carolina. No one acknowledged the fact that the incessant invitations to churches for revival seasons of years past had just about stopped. Over the last few weeks, I’d heard him through the wall that my bedroom shared with the study as he made countless calls, introducing himself as the Faith Healer of East Mansfield. The people on the other end must have sounded incredulous because his words would quicken as he generated calculations about how many souls he had saved and people he had healed over the years, seemingly trying to finish his spiel before they could hang up. I wondered what else he had to promise these preachers in exchange for permission to visit their churches on his redemption tour.
Papa’s words trailed off, and my brain snapped back to my idea of healing Hannah, how her healing would be somewhere far away from home, wherever God led me to do it.
“We’re kicking off a new tradition this year as well. We’re going to start with three
places and let the Lord lead us where he would like us to continue. This revival will be about trusting the Lord to provide for us and dictate the course of revival season.”
Three revivals instead of eleven. It would have been too much for him to tell us that no one wanted him in their churches, too much to admit that the long shadow cast during last summer’s revival season loomed over this one too.
“That’s a great idea, Samuel. It allows us to be open to the Lord’s guidance.” Ma’s voice was as distant as her eyes. Caleb, normally Papa’s staunch defender, didn’t chime in. While Papa searched my face for assent, I got up from the table and felt his gaze creeping on the back of my neck as I pulled out plates for Easter dinner.
Later, after everyone else had scattered upstairs to their separate corners, I sat at the kitchen table among the post-meal detritus: plates scraped clean with utensils crisscrossed on their surface, a carcass of glazed ham with pineapple rings barely hanging on, and stained cloth napkins tossed haphazardly on plates. In the darkness, I ran water in the sink and slipped the plates inside until all of Easter disappeared under a thick layer of soap bubbles. Next to me, moonlight danced off the stainless-steel refrigerator and illuminated Hannah’s crayon drawings.
“I will heal Hannah,” I said when all the dishes were done and the kitchen was clean, but I still couldn’t make myself go upstairs. Cracking the front door and stepping into the black, I wandered away from the house until I reached the sidewalk. “I will heal Hannah.” I repeated it in the warming night air to the stars that twinkled overhead. I turned around to walk back toward the house, jumping when I saw Caleb on the porch outside.
“What are you doing out here?”
“I needed someplace to think.”
