by Matt Cardin
Mr. Billings sat there and looked at me from his porch swing without a hint of surprise on his wizened face. He looked ancient in a way that only old farmers can look, with sun-browned skin and a face so full of wrinkles it appeared his bones were clothed in aged cowhide. He had a full head of snowy white hair and was dressed in blue denim overalls, a red-checkered shirt, and brown work boots. His feet rested on the porch and swung him back forth an inch or two at a time as he looked at me through my windshield.
I saw all this from my car with the clarity of a close-up photograph. His overall appearance seemed almost archetypal, as if he were the model for the ubiquitous farmer character I had seen portrayed in various picture books as a child. When I climbed out of the car and felt the sun’s rays strike my dark Polo shirt with the force of a blowtorch, I determined not to show any weakness before this man.
“Excuse me,” I said as I approached the porch steps. “Are you Mitchell Billings?” He looked at me for a moment and then nodded. His hands never left his chest, where they were tucked under the straps of his overalls. I noticed an odd noise, a kind of dry, rhythmic rasping sound, but I couldn’t locate it, so I put it out of mind while I made my introduction.
“My name is Lawrence Palmer.” I stepped closer to the porch and took the direct approach I had decided upon ahead of time. “I’m a reporter with the Terence Sun-Gazette. Would it be all right if I stayed awhile to talk with you? Maybe sit down and ask you some questions?”
The chains holding the porch swing squealed against the support hooks as he swayed back and forth. The sound raised the hackles on the back of my neck.
Then he nodded again and rose to his feet. He detached one of his hands from beneath its overall strap and motioned for me to follow him into the house. The front door was open and the screen door shut, and he pulled open the screen and walked inside without saying a word, obviously expecting me to follow him. I hurried up the steps and caught the door. Inside, I could see a dimly lit living room reaching away toward what looked like a kitchen. There was an old cloth-covered sofa and a ratty recliner. The carpet was dirt-colored and worn thin from age and traffic. Mr. Billings had disappeared into the kitchen, where I heard him rattling around, running water, opening a cabinet. With a self-directed nod of affirmation, I stepped across the threshold and let the screen door hiss shut behind me.
Instantly, the noise of the insects outside grew muted in a way that didn’t seem possible from just that thin door. Then I noticed the two electric box fans purring in the living room windowsills. The house was not air-conditioned, and the atmosphere inside felt unbearably stuffy. It was also hushed and filled with a sense of expectancy that I attributed to the light value. The window shades were drawn down to the tops of the fans, allowing a dusky sheen of sunlight to filter throughout the room. I stood watching a couple of flies buzz angrily around each other in crazy circles above the sofa until he returned.
He was carrying a glass of iced tea, which he offered to me. I noticed he hadn’t brought a glass for himself. In his other hand he carried a notepad. He motioned for me to sit on the sofa, which I did, while he took a seat in the chair. He unclipped an ink pen from a pocket on the front of his overalls and scribbled something on the pad while I raised my glass and waved away the flies. The tea was instant, not brewed, but he had added a lot of sugar and a lemon slice as well, and it was sweet and refreshing in the oppressive atmosphere.
I noticed the odd rasping sound again while I was in the middle of a swallow, and again I couldn’t locate it. The mystery was banished from my attention when he turned the notebook around and showed it to me. I had to lean forward to read the spidery black letters.
“I’m Mitchell Billings. You can call me Mitch. I have throat cancer so I can’t talk. Ask me your questions and I’ll write down my answers.”
This was stranger than anything I had expected. It was also more fortuitous, since it gave me an easy lead-in to the questions I wanted to ask. I noticed that his eyes were as bright as silver dollars as I brought out my tape recorder and then realized the absurdity of what I was doing. With a sheepish grin, I returned it to my briefcase and took out a pencil and pad.
“I know about your cancer,” I said, stepping into the story I had prepared. “I’ve been researching a story about patients in the Terence area who have refused medical treatment in the last year. When I spoke with someone at the university hospital, your name came up, and I couldn’t find a phone number so I decided to drop in on you.” I was banking on the fact that he wouldn’t be offended by this admission of my forwardness, nor by the news that somebody had been talking about him. He merely continued to smile at me, so I went on. “But before we get to that, may I ask you some general questions? You look like you’re about my grandfather’s age. I’m guessing you’re in your early eighties?” It was a standard ploy: start out strong and direct, then veer off into neutral territory to put the subject at ease.
He smiled and began to write, and that began our conversation. He was obviously quite accustomed to speaking with his pen and notebook, for he wrote exceptionally rapidly and legibly. He was also very forthcoming, as I soon discovered as we began passing the notebook back and forth, and I realized early in our conversation that he was far more intelligent than I had expected from his Farmer Brown appearance. His answers were coherent, even eloquent, which raised my opinion of him considerably.
He said he was ninety-one years old, which shocked me. The lightness of his movements and gleam in his eye had made him seem much younger despite his leathery appearance. I began to make my usual banter about wanting to know about his past, his upbringing, his family, his interests. When I asked my questions, he looked at me with those bright eyes and seemed to be riding upon some bubbling fountain of mild inner mirth. While he wrote his replies, I listened to the hum of the fans and the faint scrapings of insect noises from outside.
About his upbringing and education he wrote, “I grew up right here on Highway M, about three miles back toward Terence. We called it Beecher Road back then. Terence wasn’t much to speak of in those days, but when the university came in, the town grew up in a hurry. I never went to college myself. I was educated in a one-room school house that’s still standing. When you drive back toward town, a mile from here start looking for an old abandoned rock building off the right side of the road, down in a valley. I’m kind of sentimental about it.”
In answer to my question about whether he had ever traveled away from southwest Missouri, he told me that he had served as a navigator on a B17 bomber in World War II. He had flown thirteen combat missions over Germany and had been awarded the Purple Heart and sent home when he was wounded through the throat by a piece of flak. “Kind of ironic,” he wrote, “that after surviving that wound sixty years ago I would get cancer in the same spot.”
When I asked about his family, whether he had a wife or children, he grew somber for the first time. The light dimmed in his eyes, and he paused to brush back a lock of white hair from his forehead with a callused hand. But he quickly went back to writing, and I soon had my reply: “I was married to a woman named Stella for fifty-four years. She died last year in the spring. We never had any children.” This seemed an uncharacteristically reticent response given his extended answers to my previous questions, but I didn’t push the matter. I did make a mental note of the fact that the timing of his wife’s death would have coincided roughly with his own refusal to receive medical treatment.
That led me to the series of questions I had wanted to ask from the beginning.
“Mitch,” I began. My tea glass was long since empty, and I looked around for a place to put it. He took it from me and set it on the floor beside his chair. The flies returned from somewhere and began buzzing around my face, apparently trying to settle on my left cheek. I waved them away with an irritated swipe of my hand.
“I don’t want you to think I’m prying,” I said, “but I have an important question to ask you. Of course you don’t have to
answer it if you don’t want to.” He just gave me that same bright-eyed stare. It was almost as if he knew where I was going with this.
I asked, “Have you heard of the Sick Seekers?” In response, he laughed. It was the first sound to come out of his throat since I had met him an hour ago, and it was horrible, a kind of wet rattling noise, like a drain coming unclogged and sucking down a sink full of dirty gray water. I masked my revulsion with a blank expression.
He was already writing on his pad. When he handed it to me, I flipped it over and read, “I wondered whether you were ever going to get around to that.”
My astonishment was considerable. The rest of our conversation, which lasted until well after sunset, formed a transcript that nearly overwhelmed me with its fantastic implications. I quickly abandoned my list of prepared questions in favor of pursuing the various tangents Mitch presented to me. We sat there in the muggy atmosphere of his living room, me asking questions and him writing answers as the sun made its way west, and I felt as if I were seeing the outlines of a surreal puzzle or painting take shape in my mind. Sometimes he wrote for five minutes or more, during which time I would sit there trying unsuccessfully to digest his previous replies. It was also while he wrote that I managed to identify the rasping sound I had heard earlier. It was his breath. The air had to squeeze past the malignant growth in his neck to reach his lungs. I shivered slightly at the thought. I also pitied him a little, even though I knew it was a virtual miracle that he was sitting there at all, given that he shouldn’t have been able to breathe or swallow for over a year.
He let me take his written replies home with me, and that night I reconstructed my own questions and comments as accurately as I could from memory and from the cues contained in his answers. What I couldn’t capture on paper was my mounting sense of incredulity as I discovered that his beliefs were far more bizarre and grotesque than I had suspected from the nature of our interaction up to that point.
Me: I assume you guessed why I’m here when I mentioned the story I’m writing?
Mitch: Yes. I figured it would only be a matter of time before somebody like you came around wanting to talk to me.
Me: Why were you at the hospital the other night? What happened?
Mitch: I have these spells sometimes.
Me: What kind of spells?
Mitch: I pass out. Later on I don’t remember anything.
Me: Who took you to the hospital?
Mitch: A friend.
Me: Are you one of the Sick Seekers? Is there a local group?
Mitch: Yes. We’ve been together for a little over a year now. There are twelve members. We call ourselves a “body.” I’m sure you know from keeping up with the news that there are other bodies all over the world.
Me: Are you willing to answer some detailed questions? From what I’ve read, most members of your movement don’t want to talk to reporters.
Mitch: It’s about time we stopped that nonsense. People need to hear what we have to say.
Me: Is it true that you worship your diseases?
Mitch: We don’t worship our diseases. We worship the One they point to.
Me: What do they point to?
Mitch: Our God.
Me: Who is your god?
Mitch: Let me tell you something else first. People have the wrong idea about disease and health. Everybody gets sick and dies. That’s just the way of things. Most of us fight against it. To hear all the doctors talk, you’d think nobody was supposed to get sick or die. When the God started talking to people around the world, He told us that sickness doesn’t have to be something bad. He told us that sickness can set you free. Some people think life is hopeless and meaningless because everybody is headed for certain sickness and death, but our God gives us hope and meaning by showing us that our diseases are taking us somewhere.
Me: Where are they taking you?
Mitch: They’re taking us all the way to Him. The normal view of health is wrong-headed. A healthy body is like a dirty pair of eyeglasses. It gets in the way of seeing the truth for what it really is. When your body has what everybody calls a “disease,” it’s like the lenses are cleaned off, and you have the chance to see things differently.
Me: How do you see things differently?
Mitch: You see that having a body is what keeps you separate from everything else and makes you miserable. A healthy body is the truest and worst form of disease. Stella and I fought against our cancers for three years. We tried chemotherapy, radiation, everything. She had a double mastectomy. I was about to let them take out my larynx, and then Stella died and the God started talking to me right afterward. I saw then how we’d been chasing after the wind. What did we think we were trying to save? Every minute you’re alive, you’re dying. We just made it worse by fighting it. Now I won’t ever make that mistake again. I had reached a point where I was completely fed up with being sick. I couldn’t stand it for another minute. Then the God showed me the way out. Until you’ve experienced it yourself, you can’t know how peaceful it is to accept what the God tells you and just relax into your sickness.
Me: How does your god talk to you? What is he like?
Mitch: He’s a God the regular churches don’t know. They have to just “believe” in their god, but we know ours for real. We know Him through our diseases. He is our diseases. That’s what they are. They’re His presence in our bodies. He talks to us through them. I don’t mean the old preacher’s claim that “the Lord told me so.” I’m talking about real speaking. He tells us what He wants and how He’s going to give us peace after we die. And He takes away our pain.
Me: What do you mean by that?
Mitch: We just give our pain to Him and He takes it away. None of us feels pain at all anymore. I’m supposed to be in total agony right now, but I’m just fine. It’s better than any drug the doctors could give you. My friends in the local body have arthritis, cancer, all kinds of things, and they don’t feel anything either.
Me: Were you a religious man before you got involved with the Sick Seekers?
Mitch: I was a member of Mount Tabor General Baptist Church for fifty-four years, the whole time I was married to Stella. Right after she died, the God started talking to me through my throat cancer. I wouldn’t let Pastor James give her a funeral in the church after that. Of course that ran off all my old friends, but I found better ones when I met the other members of the body.
Me: Can you explain more about what you expect to happen after you die, and what your god says to you?
Mitch: We will be taken into the God after we die. That’s what He tells us. He takes our pain away from us, and it builds Him up, and when we are gone there will only be Him.
Me: Do you think you will survive after death? If there’s only him, where will you be?
Mitch: The part of us that seems like a disease now is the most important part. It will become a part of Him. Whatever’s left will just rot away, and good riddance to it.
Me: What’s the meaning of the saying “As a foulness shall ye know them”?
Mitch: That’s taken from our holy book. We have a Bible too. [At this I was filled with eager hopes of seeing a copy of this book, but he merely smiled at me in a secretive sort of way, so I didn’t push it.]
Me: But what does the saying mean?
Mitch: “As a foulness shall ye know Them” talks about how our God and the others like Him always appear to people on the outside. He shows up as a horrible disease in people’s bodies, and that scares everybody who’s not one of us. They think it’s awful. You’ve heard what they say about us on TV. Outsiders know Him as a “foulness.” But there’s a double meaning to it, because even though you start out knowing Him as a foulness, when you listen to Him, and you decide to give up your right to yourself and really let Him work in your body, you learn that He has the most special kind of peace in the world hidden away inside Him. The god of the regular churches is just the opposite. He talks about peace and love, but when you get on the inside and study
the Bible you find out he’s full of anger and hatred. He does all kinds of horrible things. He’s a deceiver, but our God is exactly what He says He is.
Me: How is the God of the regular churches a deceiver?
Mitch: Remember, I was a Baptist for fifty-four years. I took it seriously. I went to Sunday School and studied my Bible. In Philippians 4:9 Paul says, “The God of peace will be with you.” For years I tried to believe that he really is a god of peace. But I never knew what to do with things like Deuteronomy 28:22: “The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish.” Those kinds of things are all through the Bible. God is one way, then he’s another. It wouldn’t be so bad if all those punishments were meant to set you free from the body, but that’s not what they’re about. They’re just cruel things being done to you by a cruel god for no good reason. I made myself miserable trying to figure it all out. When Stella died after all those years of suffering, I understood how things really are. She grew up as a good Baptist. The whole time she was sick, she never stopped praying and believing her God would heal her. I prayed and tried to believe, too, but all those contradictions wouldn’t let me alone. “The proof is in the pudding,” they say. The god she worshipped never took an ounce of pain away from her. My new God, the one the outsiders think is a foulness, takes away my pain all the time. I’ll take a God who looks foul on the outside but has bliss for you on the inside over the opposite kind any day. Plus, my God really talks to me. I don’t have to pray and whine to try to convince myself that I’m hearing His voice.
