by S. M. Hulse
I expected Samuel’s room to be the challenging one for Asa—as much as he might claim to want to understand Samuel, it couldn’t be easy to handle the belongings of the man who built and detonated the bomb that injured his daughter—but the moment I open the door to my old room, I realize it will be far more difficult. Still the room of a little girl.
Lavender bedspread, white lace curtains, a purple-and-blue rag rug on the floor. Shelves filled with Archie comics and issues of Western Horseman, a nearly complete set of the Black Stallion books, a crowded row of plastic model horses. Above the bed hangs a dream catcher I made at day camp when I was eight, over the dresser a string of horse-show ribbons from the Prospect County Fair and the Silver Rodeo Fun Days. On the nightstand a three-part picture frame, my father on one side, Lockjaw on the other, me and Samuel and our mother in the middle.
Asa stands in the doorway behind me. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. “Hawkins will help me.”
He looks at me, offers a tight smile. “No, we’re on a roll.”
I keep the Western Horsemans but not the Archies, The Black Stallion but none of its sequels. The dream catcher goes into the trash, the ribbons into a baggie because I still think I might use them for a craft project someday. Asa takes the last blue ribbon off the wall, looks at it for a long time. I squint to read the gold lettering on the satin: Prospect County Fair, Junior Western Equitation.
“These are from before you were hurt?”
“Yes.” I can see the roof of the barn out the window, but am sitting too low to see the pasture. The sky seems broader now that the tree is gone. “I didn’t really ride for a couple years afterward, except double with Samuel.”
“But you do now?”
“Samuel trained Lockjaw to accept a paralyzed rider. And I learned a few new ways of doing things.”
“It’s amazing you still ride.”
It isn’t. I hear that kind of thing a lot, though. Anything I do that other people don’t expect me to be able to is amazing or remarkable or, worst of all, inspiring. “I missed it.”
“Em is in that horsey stage right now,” Asa says. “Keeps begging for riding lessons. I was—I decided to wait until she was a little older.”
I take the ribbon from him, fold it and tuck it into the baggie with the rest. I wish I could say something comforting, or even offer to have Asa bring Emily to meet Lockjaw if—when—she recovers. But I won’t be here, and Lockjaw won’t be mine anymore. (Even now I have two unanswered voice mail messages on my phone inquiring about “the mule for sale.”) Instead, I force a confidence into my voice I don’t feel and finally make myself ask, “And how’s Emily doing?”
“Fine.” Asa looks at me, quickly away. “The same, I mean.”
“That’s … good,” I say, regretting the word too late, but Asa doesn’t react.
He goes back to the bookcase, takes down one of the model horses and starts wrapping it in a sheet of packing paper. I’m trying to think of some way to change the subject when he does it for me. “You remember I told you my father was a preacher, too?”
“A revivalist, you said.”
“Right.” Asa pauses to concentrate on folding the edges of the paper around the horse’s fragile ears. “Not so much a revivalist as a faith healer.”
I choose a horse of my own, start wrapping it. “Like, he whacked people on the forehead and they threw down their crutches?” I immediately wish I’d phrased things more delicately, but Asa half smiles for a moment, there and gone.
“Last I saw him, he was just laying on hands, but maybe he got around to whacking people on the head eventually. He was a bit of a showman.” He puts the horse in the bottom of an empty box, takes another from the shelf. “Actually, he was a con man.”
I concentrate on wrapping, try to keep anything like surprise off my face.
“Maybe con man is too harsh a term.” He pushes a hand through his hair. “He never went in for the most blatant fakery, the hired victims and chicken livers and whatnot. Most of the classic tricks of the trade aren’t actually tricks, so to speak, but merely amount to listening to people, planting the suggestion first that they feel sicker and then better than they really do, choosing to ‘heal’ people of self-resolving conditions—the common cold, sore muscles—and claiming credit for it, or impressing an audience by choosing to bring onstage only those who are hard of hearing, not truly deaf, or mostly blind but not entirely—”
“Who use a wheelchair but can stand with effort, and not the completely paralyzed?”
Asa reddens, nods. “People see a hard-of-hearing person react to thunderous applause, or a legally blind person point to a spotlight—or, yes, the person in a wheelchair who stands—and they happily imagine miracles where none exist. My father was very good at convincing people of what they wanted to be convinced of. They did most of the work for him, really. They wanted it so badly, Jo.” He glances up. “I’m not excusing it. Just trying to explain.”
I don’t say anything. I’ve done enough parsing of excusing-versus-explaining in the last couple weeks that I recognize someone trying to persuade himself.
“Some of those people really did seem to feel better after he laid hands on them. At least for a little bit, right afterward.”
“A placebo effect.”
“I suppose so.” He doesn’t sound certain.
I take a black Appaloosa off the shelf. The paint has rubbed off the tips of his ears and the edges of his nostrils, and one leg has warped so he stands only with the aid of a penny positioned beneath one hoof. He wears a chain of dried buttercups around his neck; it crumbles at my touch. “Maybe it’s none of my business,” I say, “but how did you turn out the way you did? You were raised by a man putting on these fake faith-healing tent shows or whatever, yet here you are an actual preacher with an actual congregation.” I glance at him. “You are an actual preacher, right? You believe it all, I mean.”
“I do.” Clears his throat. “I try.” Asa puts a wrapped horse in the box, but doesn’t pick up another. “I didn’t know it was fake when I was a kid. My father taught me my scripture, my hymns, my prayers. The tools of his trade. I didn’t know he didn’t believe in any of it. Not then. He told me later it was because a kid couldn’t be trusted not to give away the game. Maybe that was all it was. I wonder sometimes.” He looks at me. “He and I used to drive from town to town in this old RV, just the two of us. We’d park in fields or pastures or fairgrounds or empty lots on the outskirts of towns, wherever they’d let us set up the tent. I slept in that little bunk over the cab. There was a window by my pillow, and if it was warm enough I’d crack it open after I went to bed. My father would sit outside in a lawn chair, and some nights I’d hear him praying the psalms. And he was praying them, not just reading them. Always the King James Version. He’d preach using whatever translation was popular in a given town, but he always used the King James when he prayed the psalms at night. I still think they sound best that way.
“One day when I was twelve we were in the RV…” Asa sighs, picks up the picture frame on the nightstand—lingers over that center photo, the one with Samuel in it—puts it back down. “I don’t really talk about this,” he says. “Not even to my congregation. People tend not to understand.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, I want to tell you. I just hope it won’t change the way you think about me.”
It surprises me to hear that Asa cares what I think of him, but I say, “Okay.”
“When I was twelve, my father and I were driving after our last afternoon service, trying to get wherever we were going next before dark. I don’t even remember where it was. Isn’t that strange? You’d think you’d remember every detail of something so important, but I can’t even remember the state. Somewhere with fireflies. It had just crossed into dusk, and they were glowing.” He looks out the window into the fading light. “The boy came out of nowhere. He was just there in the road all of a sudden, on his bike. My father swerved but
couldn’t avoid him.” Asa glances at me. “It was a hard hit. The sound…”
I put down the horse I’ve been wrapping. I know all about sounds you never forget.
“It was the middle of nowhere, Jo, I mean really the middle of nowhere. Fields and fields and not a single building in sight, not even a barn. The boy wasn’t moving, but he was breathing—my father bent over him, and I remember that because I started crying then and couldn’t see anything else. Finally my father decided to drive back to the last town we’d passed to get help. It was probably ten, fifteen miles back up the highway.”
“He left you there?”
“He had to. I couldn’t drive, and we couldn’t leave that boy all alone in the road. It was so quiet after he left. I could hear the boy breathing, but they weren’t normal breaths; they sounded like work. He was only a few years younger than me, probably nine or ten. Blond.” Asa draws his hand down his chest. “He had this X-Men T-shirt on, and it was all faded and the screen printing was cracked, like he wore it all the time.
“I started praying. Familiar prayers, new prayers, whatever I could think of. I usually prayed silently, but that day in the road I prayed aloud, partly because I thought maybe it would be more powerful and partly because I couldn’t stand listening to those raspy breaths. And I don’t know how long my father had been gone, if it had been seconds or minutes or what, but even though I was praying louder and louder, I still knew when the boy’s breaths stopped. Still heard their absence.”
Asa closes his eyes, and I close mine, too, so I won’t have to look at him. When I open my eyes again, his are still shut. He looks like he’s praying, but more gently than up on that stage at the prayer service. That was a strong sort of prayer; this is tentative. Fragile.
“It was so quiet. So quiet. I picked up his wrist and there was still a pulse, but barely, much slower than my own. I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t want to admit there wasn’t anything to do.” He opens his eyes, looks right at me. “Mostly I didn’t want to be alone with him when he died.”
The sun has gone behind the mountains. Hard to see Asa’s face. “What did you do?”
“I stood up. I started walking away—no, that’s not right—I backed away, because I stumbled at the edge of the road and fell into the ditch.” He lifts one hand, turns the palm toward me. “Scraped the heel of my hand. And I don’t know why I did what I did next; I really don’t. I don’t remember deciding to do it. I went back to the boy and I put one hand on his head, here”—he touches his brow—“and I put the other on his chest, over his heart.”
I pick the horse back up, roll one corner of the packing paper tightly between my fingers. I feel myself drawing back from Asa’s story. Afraid of where it’s going. Afraid it’s going where I hope it will.
“I don’t remember praying with words. It happened almost immediately, just moments after I laid my hands on the boy.” He holds his hands at chest height, looks at them as though he doesn’t quite recognize them as his own. “It wasn’t comfortable. I felt something like heat move from my hands to the boy’s body, but very suddenly, almost like a shock.”
Asa pauses again. He seems reluctant to tell the rest of the story, and I can imagine why: it will make me think about him differently. “You healed him.”
Asa looks at me for a long moment. Hard to read his expression in the dim light, but at last he nods. “He started breathing again. Opened his eyes. After a minute he sat up. Looked at his ruined bike, at me. Asked what happened.” He shakes his head, lets out a sigh that’s almost a laugh. “I was so stunned I didn’t say a word. Just sat there staring at my own hands. The kid asked what happened again, then asked if I was okay, and I still didn’t say anything. He finally gave up on me, I guess. Tried to get back on his bike, but it was well and truly wrecked, so he left it and started walking down the road. Not even a limp.”
“You let him go?”
“I was so tired I couldn’t even stand. Never felt that exhausted before or since. By the time my father got back with the paramedics and the police the boy was gone.”
We sit in silence. I wish he hadn’t told the story. Or maybe that he hadn’t told it in such detail, with such certainty. He believes it. Hell, he’s based his life on it.
“You don’t believe me,” Asa says. Not a question.
“I believe you told me what you understand to have happened,” I say carefully. It’s an inadequate, insulting answer, and I realize it immediately but can think of no way to mitigate it. Religious elements aside, I don’t believe healing is so quick or clean. I know better. It takes time. It leaves scars.
Asa nods, the gesture calm and tinged with resignation. “I’ve never found the right words to explain it to anyone else. My father never believed me. Or maybe he did. He was … incredibly angry. Told me it was all fake, that I was a fool for believing it, that a smarter kid would’ve worked it out on his own without his father having to spell it out. But nothing he said could touch the certainty of my experience. Nothing he said planted even the tiniest seed of doubt in my heart. Nothing ever has, until—” He stops abruptly, clears his throat. “I’ve wondered since then if someone who didn’t believe it himself—in the possibility of it—would really have been so furious.” He looks at me for just a moment, pulls his eyes away as soon as they meet mine. “My mother died when I was very young. Cancer. My father must have prayed for her.”
“You think he tried to heal her?”
He shrugs, almost apologetically. “It could make a man lose his faith, don’t you think?” And suddenly I’m thinking of Emily. “I’ve never done it again,” Asa says. “Healing. Tried once or twice, but never in a situation as serious as that. Sometimes I wonder if I’d been there when Catherine had her accident…” He sighs, shakes his head.
And now? I want to ask. Has he tried? Will he? What will happen when it doesn’t work? Because it can’t work. It’s not real. I’ve never envied the faithful, but right now I wish I could believe in it. For Asa’s sake, I wish I could believe in it.
He’s gazing out the window again, toward the last band of light fading over the western slopes. I wonder if he’s still thinking of his wife. Or if his thoughts have already returned, as they must always return, to his daughter. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right.” Asa turns toward me, arranges all his features but his eyes into a lighter expression. “You were wondering how I came to hold genuine faith. Now you know.” He leans toward the bedside table, turns on the lamp. The silhouetted mountains outside disappear, obscured by my own harshly edged reflection. Asa takes the last horse from the shelf. “There’s a name for this color. The yellow coat and white mane and tail.”
I blink, swallow hard. “Palomino.”
“Right.” The model is of a Quarter Horse standing square; I always liked his sturdiness. He seems like he’d be a reliable sort, if he were real. Asa runs a fingertip down the model’s nose, like it’s fur and flesh rather than hard molded plastic. “Em likes palominos.” He pulls another sheet of packing paper from the box.
I meet my own eyes in the window reflection, look away. “Does your faith bring you comfort?” I ask, very quietly. Hear the hopefulness—the pleading—in the words.
Asa folds the paper carefully over the palomino’s face. “I used to think so.”
* * *
I can’t read. Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. I sit beside her and watch her and wait. The only time I turn on the television is at 3:30, when The Galaxy’s Funniest Animals comes on, and I watch it for her. Sometimes I bring the newspaper or buy a magazine in the gift shop, but I don’t open them; they pile up on the bedside table. I keep my Bible in my hands, the one my father gave me when I was a boy, run my fingertips along the scuffed and softened leather at the edges of the cover. I spend hours paging through it, though I hardly need to. I know so much of it by heart.
My hands find the chapters I don’t preach anymore, the stories I don’t tell. The Book of Job: I know what I’m supposed
to see in these verses, the theological lessons I’m supposed to absorb and impart, but when I consider them now, I see only cruelty and a heartless suggestion that one’s children can simply be replaced. The story of the Flood, which seemed righteous enough when I wallpapered Em’s nursery with pastel animals filing two by two into the ark, but seems brutally harsh now. The stories of Isaac, whom You saved, and of Jephthah’s daughter, whom You didn’t.
I don’t linger on those stories, let neither my eyes nor my mind rest on their words. (If I must overlook so many of Your words, so many of Your deeds, do I still believe? Should I?) Instead I seek out those that still bring comfort:
Leadeth me beside the still waters.
Be strong and of a good courage.
Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul.
I save the most comforting stories for the latest hours, the darkest moments. I read of the healing promise of God, the promise I know is there because I have seen it, I have felt it, You have shown it to me. The blind man, the woman with an issue of blood, the man sick of the palsy. I don’t have to believe in these stories, don’t have to burden my wounded, wavering faith with them, because I have one of my own. It is knowledge, not faith, and perhaps that makes it lesser, but I am grateful to You for it now.
Always, in the end, I turn to a story I never thought much about before the bombing, a story I want to avoid as much as I want to turn to its page and never leave. A healing left too late. (You are Lord; nothing is too late for You. I know this. I do.) I can’t bear the backstory. Jairus falling at Your feet. The declaration of his daughter’s death. The laughing crowd. Instead, I skip to the end. To the most important line. I read it over and over, a prayer unto itself. I whisper the words aloud, again and again until they dissolve into incantation, though You only had to say it once. Talitha cumi.
Little girl, I say to you, arise.
Saturday I wake and try to remember why I thought applying to the Elk Fork plein air festival was a good idea. Money, I remind myself. And more than that, the hope that it might be a few hours’ respite from thinking about Samuel and his bomb. But this morning all I can think about is the fact that my picture has been on the news, it’s hard to hide in a wheelchair, and I must have been a fool to believe there could be anything relaxing about this day. Easy enough for “Josephine Grady” to upload a couple landscapes to a website, but now Jo Faber has to paint for an audience.
