Holy Ghost Girl

by Donna M. Johnson

  It seems logical that my mother would have stayed in West Virginia to provide the music for the services, and that Gary and I would have stayed with her, but I can’t recall anything after the Terrells left. What I remember are the stories of the trip as told by Brother Terrell and later Randall and repeated so many times that they took up residence in me and began to function as memory. Only it is not my memory. It can’t be, because I am not in the stories. The only characters are Brother Terrell, Betty Ann, Randall, and the bit players who recite their lines on cue.

  The Terrells drove a couple of hours before stopping for coffee and calling the hospital in Atlanta for an update. The nurse told Brother Terrell that the doctors had no idea why Randall was hemorrhaging. They had given him transfusions, but he continued to throw up blood. They wanted to do an exploratory surgery; it was the only way to find out what was wrong. Brother Terrell said he would think about it. He didn’t trust anything he couldn’t understand, and that included banks, government, lawyers, and doctors—especially doctors. He always said if his mama had let the doctors have their way and amputate his leg, he’d have ended up a one-legged faith healer or worse, dead. He couldn’t figure out what to do, so he prayed, silently and aloud, throughout the trip. He didn’t beg, plead, or bargain with God to save his son’s life; he demanded.

  You said all things are possible to those that believe. I’m holding you to your promises. You can’t let my son die. I command you to heal my son.

  When he finished haranguing God, he started in on the devil. I rebuke you, you foul spirit of death. You can’t have my son. I won’t give him to you. You have no authority over me or my family. Git away! When words failed, he spoke in tongues.

  Somewhere on the road, God began to talk back. The voice of God always came to him first as an impression, something he felt rather than heard. If you let those doctors operate on Randall, he will surely die.

  Lord, he’s dying now.

  I’m telling you those men don’t know what’s wrong with Randall. They want to use him as an experiment.

  What am I supposed to do?

  Trust me.

  My son is bleeding to death.

  Trust me.

  He’s my son. My only son.

  Trust me.

  What do you want me to do?

  Prove me.

  What do you mean?

  There’s a tent revival in Atlanta. You know the preacher. I want you to give him a hundred dollars.

  That man’s a flat-out crook.

  You’re not giving to him, you’re giving to me.

  But I don’t have an extra hundred dollars.

  Trust me.

  Brother Terrell rolled down the window and let the cool, damp fall air hit him in the face. Beside him, Betty Ann sat stiff and silent, a wall of grief. It was always Brother Terrell’s stories, Brother Terrell’s struggles, Brother Terrell’s pain that mattered. His suffering dwarfed her own and that of everyone around him. We were there to bear witness and offer support. The closer you were to him, the more this was true. When his voice fell silent Betty Ann would have prayed that most common of prayers: Oh, God. Not my son. Please. Not my son. Her petition would have beat against the wall of her mind like a trapped fly. She would not have dared remind God of all she had sacrificed: a steady paycheck, a home, security for her children, the occasional new dress, the casual comforts. In a world of mythic struggles and divine visitations, Betty Ann was the most ordinary of women. Sure, she grumbled from time to time. Lamented all she and her children had done without.

  I’ll stop complaining. Please. Not my son.

  She might have wondered why, after all Brother Terrell’s fasting and praying, after all the miracles and the sacrifice, Randall lay dying.

  Please, forgive me. Forgive my lack of dedication. Please. Don’t take my son.

  The car slowed, surged forward, slowed, and surged again, rocking back and forth down the highway. Brother Terrell always drove with one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake. In the distance, tiny points of light pierced the darkness. They were almost in Atlanta.

  They parked the car and entered the colorless glare that was Grady Hospital. Each step down the narrow corridor diminished Brother Terrell. Away from his milieu, he lost his status as celebrity preacher and became again the son of sharecroppers, a cripple boy whose family depended on charity to get by, an uneducated man to whom the workings of the greater world remained a mystery. By the time a nurse approached and asked what it was he needed, his gaze was fixed on the toes of his spit-shined wingtips.

  “Yes, well, ah, we come here to, to see Randall. Randall Terrell.”

  The woman looked down from beneath her big white hat. “It’s five thirty. In the morning, sir. Come back later, during visiting hours.”

  He plunged his hands into his pockets and jingled the keys and coins. “Well, uh, look, we, uh, we drove straight through and all. To, you know, to get here.”

  “Sir. He’s asleep. Everyone’s asleep.”

  Betty Ann whimpered.

  “My wife here, she’s real worried. She needs to see her boy.”

  The nurse raised her voice as if he were hard of hearing. “Surely you want him to get his rest.”

  Another nurse stepped from behind the desk. “What’s going on here?”

  “These people want to see their son. I told them to come back later.”

  “Who’s your son?”

  Brother Terrell shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Randall. David Randall Terrell. We drove all night.”

  “Oh, the Terrell boy. He’s been asking for his daddy and mama. Go on in, let him see you’re here, but don’t stay long.”

  They opened the door to the sound of moaning. Long white curtains hung from the ceiling, dividing the room into three small rectangles. Each area held a bed and hospital machinery that whirred and churned and cast a gray watery light, enough to see that the first two tiny, ancient faces in the beds did not belong to their son. Randall occupied the third bed, the one next to the wall, the one from which the moaning came. They stood over him together, quiet and still, watching his body move and twitch. His arms sprouted tube after tube. Betty Ann’s hand flew to cover her mouth. Brother Terrell whispered in her ear: “Trust God, Betty Ann. We have to trust him.”

  The next morning Brother Terrell sat under the crooked preacher’s tent and watched him take the offering. People stood in line and waited to give him money. The man didn’t have to plead or beg. He was glad he didn’t have the hundred dollars God had told him to give the preacher. As the service drew to a close, he stood to leave and a man who sat in front of him turned around.

  “Brother Terrell, is that you?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “We came to see you last year in Chattanooga. You healed my wife’s rheumatism. I been wantin’ to thank you.” The man shook his hand and palmed a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Brother Bob,” he yelled to a man three rows over. “This here is David Terrell. That tent evangelist that healed Marie.”

  Within a few minutes Brother Terrell found himself in the center of a crowd. People reached toward him, grabbed his hands, hugged his neck, and put money in his hands and coat pockets. When they finally let him go, he had a thousand dollars. He counted out five twenty-dollar bills and went to find the preacher.

  Later that afternoon, Brother Terrell went to the hospital alone. He stood over Randall’s bed and looked down at his sleeping boy. “Son, son, I need to talk to you.” Randall opened his eyes. “God told me he is going to give you a miracle, but you have to believe. Do you believe?”

  “Yes, Daddy. I believe.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear, son. I’m taking you outta here.”

  He pulled the needles and tubes from Randall’s arms, scooped him up, and walked out of the hospital room. A nurse called to him in the hallway. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking my son.”

  “Sir, please. Wait. Let me get a
doctor.”

  “We don’t have time to wait.” He walked past her and continued down the hall into the waiting room, carrying Randall wrapped in a blanket the same way he had carried him as a newborn home from the hospital. A flock of nurses and a couple of doctors trailed behind them.

  One of the doctors grabbed his arm. “I can’t let you take that boy out of here. He’ll die.”

  “He’ll die if he stays.”

  “Mr. Terrell, we’ll get a court order.”

  “You better get it fast, ’cause we’re leaving now.”

  He walked out of the hospital and laid Randall in the backseat of his car. The boy looked scared and pale. He had not noticed earlier how pale. If he had, he might not have had the nerve to do what he was doing. “Son, you’re not going to die. God is going to give you a miracle.”

  “I know, Daddy.”

  Brother Terrell and Randall drove a hundred miles an hour, never stopping or slowing down until they crossed the state line. They made it back to West Virginia in time for Brother Terrell to preach the morning service the next day. He sent one of the tent men back for Betty Ann and the baby. By the time they arrived, Randall was raking leaves to make money to put in his daddy’s offering.

  Randall hemorrhaged off and on for the rest of his life. Years later we learned that he suffered from a rare birth defect. A vein intended to route blood to his heart dead-ended in his stomach. His body produced a network of tiny capillaries to ferry the blood supply. It was an ingenious work-around, but from time to time the network ruptured. At first the blood showed up as dark patches in his stool, subtle and easy to miss. Then the blood began to engorge his belly and there was nothing to do but wait and pray for a miracle. Once the hemorrhage reached critical mass, blood spewed from his lips. I remember the splattered chaos of that blood and the fear that came with it, long urgent journeys through the night with the car windows open and the heavy, honeysuckled air of the South pressing down upon us like the left hand of God.

  The events I witnessed and the stories about these events have intertwined to form a single thread of memory. Sifted and shaped over time by the adults around me, my recollections have distilled into a mythology of faith, hard to believe, harder still to deny. Here is what I think I know: Randall was sick most of his life, he came close to death again and again, and his father refused to let him go. It was his father’s voice, his father’s faith that tethered him to life. That’s what Randall believed. That’s what we all believed.

  Chapter Seven

  TENSIONS BETWEEN MAMA AND BETTY ANN EASED A BIT AFTER RANDALL rejoined us on the road. My mother’s story is, she decided Brother Terrell should stay with his family for the sake of his ministry. There was no such thing as a divorced holiness preacher. Mama said she avoided Brother Terrell as best she could, a difficult feat considering we all occupied the same house during revivals. She and Gary and I went back to traveling in our own car for a time, and I remember her yanking me and other bystanders into any room or space in which she found herself alone with Brother Terrell. She said Brother Terrell pursued her constantly and that she resisted, reminding him he had a wife. That wife would soon give birth to two more daughters. My mother managed to take responsibility for their births, saying, “If I hadn’t talked him into staying with her, they wouldn’t have had all those kids and things might have been different.”

  Randall remained healthy for nearly a year, and we did what we always did: moved every three to six weeks, stayed up after the evening service until two or three in the morning, got up early for the morning service, raced back home for lunch, then back to the tent for the afternoon service. If pictures existed from those days, and in my family they do not, they would reveal a pasty-skinned, pinwormy lot with baggy clothes and dark hollows under our eyes. Maybe it was too much “light” bread or not enough pork and beans. We began to physically resemble our metaphoric conception of ourselves—a battlefield on which God and the devil duked it out. The cosmic implications of our hardships and the fact that we expected Jesus to touch down at any moment made the normal touchstones of childhood an afterthought. My mother homeschooled Randall and then Pam as time and energy permitted, enough to keep the authorities off the Terrells’ backs. We lived in fear of “the government.” Whatever it was, there were whispers it might take us kids away. I don’t know if the threat was real or simply an extension of the adults’ increasing mistrust of the larger world, but the rumors added to everyone’s nervous condition. Sometimes Mama or Betty Ann would notice how tired and unkempt we kids looked. “Poor little things,” they said. “This is no life for kids.” Their eyes watered but never quite spilled over into tears.

  On the calendars it was mid-October, but in Dallas it was still summer. The tent collected and radiated heat like a cast-iron frying pan. Daytime services were the worst. About three hundred people sat scattered among the seventeen hundred or so wooden folding chairs. The employers of the elect insisted that they show up for work, revival or no revival, and that kept the morning and afternoon services small, quiet, and dull as dirt. The only movement was the occasional flick of a fan fashioned from the “Repent and Be Saved” flyers we printed and handed out as advertisements. Beyond the rows of empty chairs, beyond the rolled-up canvas curtain, beyond the hot white light reflected off the dusty automobiles parked in neat lines across the gray clumpy field, beyond the field and the sticky tar of the highway lay the world with its oscillating fans, water-cooling units, and air conditioners. I eyed the glare beating through the tent above me and wondered why it never stormed during the morning services.

  Brother Terrell perched on a chair in the middle of the platform. He was early into his latest fast and already everything about him seemed sharper, more focused. He had declared fasts before, for a week, two weeks, thirty days. This time it was different. This time he wouldn’t eat until he heard from God. Fasting mortified the flesh and honed the spirit, and that made it easier to get to God. He was dark as a crow with his black hair and black suit. The Bible lay open on his lap and his finger traced Jesus’s red-letter words. “Verily, verily I say unto you . . .” The visiting ministers sat behind him in rows, all dressed in the same dark suits. My mother had moved away from the organ bench and arranged herself at the end of a row, legs crossed, face eager, her body pointed toward the true north of Brother Terrell. Under the dark heavy fabric of her ankle-length skirt, her leg pumped back and forth. Mama had taken to wearing long skirts and dresses as a consecration, a sort of secret pact between her and God. Despite her high-necked, long-sleeved blouse and heavy skirts, she looked unfazed by the heat. I picked up my paper fan and moved it across my face. Hot air. My mother, the preachers, and Brother Terrell seemed so removed up there on the platform. Their zeal for God turned the ordinary comforts of life into something as unnecessary as a dime-store whatnot.

  Down here in the valley things were different. Pasted to the back of my chair with nothing to distract me, I counted seven new beads of sweat rolling down my body. I slumped in my seat, head lolling on my shoulder. My dress, petticoat, panties, and socks were soggy. I was indeed a poor little thing. My eyes rolled up to Laverne, Brother Cotton’s wife, searching for pity. She bent over her Bible, following Brother Terrell as he marched through scripture, hup, two, three, four, verily, verily.

  Gary and I sat through the services with Laverne now instead of Betty Ann. When Betty Ann became pregnant, Mama said it was too much of a burden on her to watch us. And then the baby came and it really was too much of a burden. Pam still sat with her mama and the baby, and her absence made the tedium of the daytime services almost more than I could bear. I watched my foot swing round and round, then switched directions. A horsefly landed on my wrist and crawled up my arm, feathery-legged and red-eyed. I gave him a limp swat and slumped lower in my chair. Just when I thought I couldn’t take another minute, Randall slid into the seat next to me and whispered, “If it’s this hot in hell, they may as well not send me ’cause I won’t stay.”
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br />   I rolled my eyes at him. “At least you don’t have to sweat to death on Earth.”

  He grinned.

  “What is it?”

  “That new tent man, John, the young one, said he would take us swimming.”

  “Swimming?”

  Laverne cut her eyes at us.

  “I’ll talk to your mama. I’m gonna get Pam. You and Gary meet us round back.”

  In less than a couple of minutes, Randall was on the platform, whispering in Mama’s ear. She nodded and they left the stage together. How did he do that? Pam and the new tent guy appeared at the side of the tent, and Mama and Randall joined them. My mother waved Gary and me outside. Yes. We walked up just as John told Mama he wanted to take us and a couple of other kids who traveled with the tent to a big swimming hole outside of town. He would have us back before church that night. Mama didn’t look convinced.

  “My kids don’t know how to swim.”

  Pam and Randall stood on either side of her and tugged at her hands. “Please, Carolyn, let ’em go. Please.”

  John reassured us. “Don’t worry, Sister Johnson, I’ll keep ’em in the shallow water.”

  Pam and Randall piled into the cab of the pickup with John, and Gary and I climbed into the bed of the truck with two boys from one of the families who followed the tent. We held on to the sides of the truck as we bounced across the field toward the highway. I made Gary sit between my legs; that way I could keep him safe and he could hold my dress down. As we turned onto the highway and the tent grew smaller, the thrill of what we were doing rushed through me. Swimming was one of those things Holy Roller kids didn’t do. When our parents felt sorry for us they might let us stick our feet in one of the slimy pools of whatever motor court we happened to spend the night in. And if my mother or Betty Ann felt especially guilty, we might do a drive-by vacation, as in we drove by the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean en route to the next revival. “Looky there, kids,” they said, and we would jump up and down and clap our hands at the sight of the waves rolling up on a Mississippi or Florida beach. It never occurred to them to stop, and it never occurred to us to ask them to do so. And now, here we were, here I was, about to do the impossible. Yes, Lord. My legs and arms wanted to pound the bed of the truck. My voice wanted to whoop. I looked at the two skinny tent boys who sat beside Gary and me. They were about my age with blond crew cuts that shimmered in the sun. Their faces wore the serious, self-conscious expression of the true believer. One of them smoothed his long-sleeved white shirt deeper into the waist of his dark, baggy dress pants and tightened his belt. Neither would meet my eye. I clamped my jaw shut. The wind whipped my hair into my face and stung my eyes. I didn’t care.