The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  The following week, we all went off to Waltham Church together. Despite my father’s great conviction that I would find it all very enlightening, and despite his advice that I should retain an open mind about metaphysical things, I was wholly skeptical about what I would find there. When a forty-year-old man with a bad shirt, a crew cut, and horn-rimmed glasses took to the pulpit and began to ask everyone how they were doing, I felt no better about it. When he just stood there, finger in one ear, breathing loudly through his nose like some folk singer pitching a harmony, I almost laughed. When he raised his hand to stifle the mumbling congregation, and said in a dry Bostonian voice, ‘Please, everybody, stay quiet now. I must be able to commune with the spirits coming forward to me tonight,’ the needle on my cynic-o-meter began to peak. ‘Yes, spirit,’ he said, ‘I do recognize you, spirit. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a spirit who’s been with us before. Somebody with the initials—what’s that now? BC?’ The congregation stayed quiet. ‘TC?’ My parents fidgeted. ‘TC, yes, that’s it now,’ the medium said, ‘TC.’ No gender had been assigned to these initials, but this did not matter to my parents, both of whom held their arms aloft. ‘Here!’ my father said. ‘That’s my daughter!’ The medium fluttered his eyes open and said: ‘Yes, sir. She is with me now.’

  You have to forgive me: I am an old man and I can’t recall the rest of that evening with complete accuracy, but there are certain things I know for sure. First of all, the medium, whose name was Kendall Johnson, never addressed the spirit as Tabitha (he might well have convinced me of his psychic powers had he plucked such an unusual name out of thin air, instead of a set of initials). He also talked about a diary my sister kept in her bottom drawer, as if this were absolute proof that he could only be talking to Tabitha Crest, surely the only girl in the history of the world who’d ever kept a diary. ‘You must read it,’ he told my parents, ‘she wants you to read it. It’ll answer a lot of your questions.’

  But my lasting memory of that night is of the congregation itself. The church was crammed. Fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred people. And it occurred to me then, as it occurs to me now, that everybody in the room was grieving for someone. Whether it was a sister, a brother, a mother, a father; whether it was a daughter or a son or an aunt or an uncle; they were all mourning the passing of somebody they loved and had come to Waltham Church for one reason: the slightest hope that they might be able to talk to that person again.

  My rage began to grow when I figured this out. I wanted to stand up and shout, ‘You’re all such frauds! You’re all such phoneys!’ but I didn’t. Here was a place that preyed upon the most anguished and helpless people. It purported to give hope when there was none to give—and, worse, it charged a price for admission. It was immoral, I thought, abhorrent, and I told my parents so on the car ride home. I said I would never go back there as long as I lived. ‘How can you say that, Herb? You heard the man,’ my father replied. ‘The thing about the diary?’ When I told him it was only coincidence, suggestion, sleight of hand, my father scoffed. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You can stay home next time, and I’ll go talk to your sister.’

  But a few months later, my mother stopped going to the Waltham Church with him. She claimed she was too busy for it. Around the time I was graduating high school, my father started going to another spiritualist church in Watertown, and then another in Dorchester, and then another in Roxbury, and soon he stopped attending spiritualist churches altogether. He took to working longer hours and returning home later, spending nights alone in his study with the lights off and a bottle of Johnnie Walker for company. He became melancholy. Some weekends, he wouldn’t get out of his pajamas or even take a shower—and for a man who’d always prided himself on his appearance, this was a significant backward step. One night, I came into his study and he was passed out drunk. On the desk in front of him sat my sister’s diary. He’d pried open the tiny lock. Every page was blank, apart from one, which bore a faded scribble, as if Tabitha had used it to test a pen.

  My father died three years later, when I was living as an undergraduate in his native England. It was only after he died that I realized how much my angry response to the spiritualist church had affected him. I had trodden roughshod over something he had placed his faith in. I had destroyed the one thing he had left of Tabitha: the hope of her continued, peaceful existence in some other, better place. And I understood that the reason I hadn’t stood up in the church that night and shouted ‘You’re all such phoneys!’ was because I knew that I would be taking away the last thread of hope for an entire congregation.

  At the time of writing my book Engines of Grief, I co-chaired a symposium at the University of Denver with a psychiatrist colleague of mine, Dr. Evan Meade, in which he touched upon an idea that struck a chord with me. He posited that in times of great anguish and bereavement, the most valuable thing a person can possess is a single thread of hope, even if that hope is entirely baseless. He referred to it in terms of religion, in regard to what is often termed ‘blind faith.’ I recall the conversation sliding past me (as most conversations now do), and the symposium was over all too quickly, but that kernel of an idea stayed in my mind for a long time after.

  Then, ten years later, I was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. A grade four glioblastoma multiforme tumor—the worst kind. I won’t get too much into the complexities and modalities of this now, because I will be discussing them at length in later chapters, but I will say this: on the day my doctor told me the bad news, I thought a great deal about my sister, about my parents, and about the ideas my colleague Dr. Meade had discussed at our symposium. In fact, I began to think a lot about hope, about what it meant—specifically, what it meant to me—and the more I thought about it, the larger the issue became, until it felt like something I had to write about.

  One of the most important things I have come to understand through the course of my experiences with the myriad healers, mediums, and wannabe prophets you will read about in the chapters that follow is how my father—such a mathematically minded man—could abandon his convictions and place his faith beyond the laws of science. It had always bothered me that, even when the claims of the mediums at the Waltham Church were so obviously bogus, he seemed utterly convinced by them. I think I had always resented him for being so easily duped. But I understand now, after the personal battles I have been through lately, that when my father talked this way, behaved this way, he was not really my father at all. Like a drug addict, he was under the influence of something much stronger than he could rationally control. His mind had been seized by a delusion.

  It is the same delusion my own mind has been prey to in the years since my diagnosis. It is the same everyday delusion that makes a crippled man shout Hallelujah and fall from his wheelchair when a preacher touches his head. It is the same delusion that sends a fireman into a burning building when there is no chance of survival; that makes a rocket scientist drop to her knees and pray to a God she’s never believed in when her son is kidnapped; that makes a farmer keep on planting the seeds in the arid soil when the rain doesn’t come and the crops don’t grow; that encourages a father of five to place his last fifty bucks on a rank outsider at the dog track; that makes a barren woman spend her life savings on an IVF treatment with a five per cent ratio of success; that makes a respected psychologist with a brain tumor and a profound skepticism for the metaphysical world attend five sessions a week with a faith healer called Padre at some backwater dive in Bigfork, Montana; that makes a simple man called Kendall Johnson believe he is endowed with the ability to commune with the dead.

  It is the delusion we all know as hope. And what this book will investigate is whether this simple delusion is as benign as we believe it to be, or if it is something considerably more harmful.

  ‘Keep reading,’ Dr Paulsen said, blinking his eyes open. ‘I wasn’t asleep, I promise—just concentrating on the words.’ But Oscar knew that the old man’s attention span was limited, despite the progress he’d made in the past twel
ve months. At least he could hold a conversation now without forgetting the name of the person he was talking to; at least he no longer looked back at everyone with blankness.

  Oscar folded the dust-flap between the pages and closed the book. ‘We’ll pick it up again tomorrow. It’s almost three. You’re due a sleep.’

  Paulsen sighed loudly but he didn’t argue. ‘What time will you be coming tomorrow?’

  ‘Same time as always.’

  ‘Eleven?’

  ‘One,’ he said, helping Paulsen onto the bed. ‘It’s always one. You know I can’t get out of class ’til then. You remember that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I remember that.’ Paulsen turned on his side. ‘I’m old, I’m not an idiot.’

  As Oscar went to close the curtains, he saw the gardeners working in the Cedarbrook grounds—three men were clipping back the wisteria vines and dumping the off-cuts into a trailer. A pleasant, grassy smell rose up towards him. He could hear the quaint snips of pruning shears. When he turned back to say goodbye, he found the old man was fast asleep.

  That morning, Oscar had woken early to get to the bookshop in town before class. He’d seen it there on the New Arrivals table, with its gleaming white cover and its simple black lettering: DELUSIONS OF HOPE BY HERBERT M. CREST. It had felt as weighty and important as he’d imagined it would be, and the pages still bore that fresh-off-the-press scent. On the inside of the dust jacket, there was a new picture of Crest, grinning under the peak of a Red Sox cap. It had been a thrill to take the book to the counter and hand over his money, and to hear the cashier say, ‘Oh, right, I heard about this,’ as she rang it through the till. ‘Wasn’t this supposed to be out, like, ages ago?’

  He’d taken the book to Jesus Green, thinking he should read it in the same spot he’d first read The Girl With the God Complex. After a few lines of the introduction, he’d felt like he was having a private conversation with Herbert Crest again, as if the old man had simply picked up the phone to say hello. It was a fine book, maybe even his best. It had all the Herbert Crest hallmarks: the earnest prose, appealing to the informed as well as to the layman; the softly spoken address to the reader; the loving way he reported his personal memories to support his psychological arguments.

  But Oscar knew the book had not been published the way Crest had intended, and it gave him an uneasy feeling as he turned the pages. There was no mention of the Bellwethers—Theo’s injunction had seen to that. It was an older version of the manuscript, the draft that Crest had finished and submitted to his editor just a few days before Oscar had introduced himself.

  He’d followed the progress of the civil suit in the papers. It had been announced in full-page articles in the summer. By the time the court ruled in February, the public’s interest had waned, and the story was reduced to single paragraphs in the outer columns, under dispassionate headlines like: Killer’s Father Wins Book Injunction. All of Crest’s notes and manuscripts, barring the original, had been permanently sealed by the judge. Spector & Tillman had released a statement to say they were disappointed with the ruling, and that the original version of the book would now be released; it was a version they were pleased with, despite ‘fundamental differences’ from the final draft. (‘It’s still a terrific book,’ Diane Rossi had told Publishers Weekly back in March, ‘so everyone should run out and buy it. But, at heart, it’s not the same book. The final draft is edgier; it reaches more surprising conclusions than the original version, that’s all I’m allowed to say. Even the title is different. And, no, I can’t tell you what it is. That’s court ordered.’) When the book was finally released, a year off schedule, the buzz surrounding it had died down. The public’s imagination had been seized by somebody else’s misery, some other disaster.

  Reading in the dreary light of Jesus Green, Oscar had found himself wondering—as he’d often wondered—about Crest’s final version. He’d thought about the sit-downs in the organ house, all those conversations with Eden he would never get to hear. Part of him was glad of the injunction, because knowing these things would only have left him feeling numb and helpless all over again. He couldn’t bear to face Eden again on those pages, to hear the tenor of his thoughts, his justifications, his dangerous, high-minded ideas. What good were answers now? What good were Crest’s observations and judgements? He didn’t need another opportunity to pick apart the details, to look for the places he could have done something to prevent what happened. He was already living with the burden of those missed chances. Only Theo, his lawyers, and a few senior editors at Spector & Tillman knew what Herbert Crest had really thought. And, for now, if not for ever, Oscar was comfortable with that.

  He’d gone to college that morning, feeling fairly bright. It was still difficult to be back in a classroom where the other students were three or four years younger than he was, but he tried to see it as an advantage. He’d already read most of the books on the reading list for his English Lit class and been awarded an A+ for his last assignment, an original poem. Because he was only there to learn, he wasn’t distracted like the boys in his history lessons were when some girl bent over to pick up a pencil. He was taking psychology, too—he was compelled by it. He liked learning about Stanley Milgram and the release of free radicals in the brain. When his A levels were over, he wasn’t going to be taking a gap year in Australia or New Zealand. He’d already wasted too much time. But he was thinking of taking a short holiday—to Paris maybe, or Reykjavik.

  It was past three o’clock now, and Dr Paulsen was snoring. Outside, the afternoon was honeybright and the roads were slick with rain. He left the old man with Delusions of Hope on his bedside table, ready to be picked up again tomorrow, and made his way through the corridors and stairways of Cedarbrook. All the same old faces were in the parlour—Mrs Brady, Mrs Lytham, Mrs Kernaghan, Mrs Green—and a couple of new auxiliaries were chatting with Deeraj at the nurses’ station. He could hear Jean’s voice bounding from her office. Sometimes, he missed working here. He missed the residents and their gratitude for a good deed, the way the place smelled, how it creaked under his shoes. He still came by twice a week to visit Dr Paulsen, and he still borrowed books from his shelf, one at a time. There was comfort here—the safest, most reliable kind—and he didn’t want to let it go completely. He’d been working at a hotel in town for a while now. It was lighter work, better paid, and easier to fit around college, but it wasn’t the same as Cedarbrook.

  When he got to the front garden, he stopped. Across the old city, the ground was slowly drying out and the air was thick with petrichor. He could almost taste it, like a sweetness on his tongue, and he stood there for a long while, just breathing it in. He lived for moments like this now: for a fleeting scent of the damp earth, for the whiff of a clove cigarette. They were the only things that ever brought her back to life.

  He didn’t take the shortcut because he knew the North Gate would still be closed. The pavements were busy with students and tourists and girls with clipboards hustling him to hire punts or take the sightseeing bus. He passed along St John’s Street, stepping out of the way of cyclists, breaking through the crowd. Ahead of him, the grey spires of the King’s College Chapel stood against the sky like gun barrels. There was a queue of people near the Gatehouse. The college would not be open to visitors for a couple more hours, but Oscar kept on walking towards the entrance. When the porter saw him coming, he gave a tender smile, and moved aside to let him through.

  In the Front Court, the grass was so plush and green it seemed almost embroidered. The cobblestones felt blunt and familiar beneath his feet. He walked past the chapel, past the ashen gables of the Gibbs’ building, down the gentle slope of the back lawn to the riverbank. He could see his friends ahead of him now, gathered by the tiny patch of ground where they’d planted the bulbs last autumn. Yin was standing tall and wide, his thumbs hanging from his belt-loops. Marcus was right beside him, a full backpack on his shoulders. Jane was kneeling by the flowerbed, raking the soil with her fingers. He
called out to them and they turned, waving. He was glad to see their faces again.

  ‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘they made it.’ She pointed to the mound of fibrous soil before her. The first blue petals of Iris milifolia had begun to bloom and seemed so fragile in the bright afternoon. ‘I can’t believe they’re flowering already.’

  Once a week since last November, Oscar had come to check on them. They were difficult plants to grow—requiring just the right amount of moisture and sunlight, and he’d had to cover the roots with coconut husks to protect them from the wind and cold—but he didn’t care how much attention they needed. It was better to go to the peaceful grounds of King’s each week and tend to one small corner of earth, thinking of her, than to talk to a gravestone.

  He stood with his friends beside the flowerbed, and while they filled him in on the things that had happened since they’d last seen each other, the river flowed by with the quietest of movements. He’d almost forgotten the sound of their voices, and he listened to them talk with a warm feeling growing inside him. Marcus was halfway through his Master’s and was doing an internship at the Royal Opera House in the summer; he was clearly excited about moving to London, though he tried his best to play it down. Yin was leaving next month to join a start-up company in San Francisco: ‘Silicon Valley,’ he said, ‘right back where I started.’ And Jane—’Well, I still have another term to get through,’ she said, ‘and then I’m thinking of retiring.’ There was consolation in knowing that the gears of their lives were still turning, despite everything.

  They seemed pleased that Oscar was back in school. ‘Look around you, man,’ Yin said. ‘You belong here more than any of us. I know King’s is probably the last place you’d want to go, but you should think about it. The place could use more people like you.’

  They stayed there talking beside the irises for over an hour, until the sky turned glum and the rain began to fall again. He felt better in their company and didn’t want to say goodbye. ‘We’ll go for dinner or something,’ Jane said. ‘We’ll call you.’ But he knew he wouldn’t see them again for weeks, because their lives were just too different now, their schedules too complicated to manage. Jane hugged him farewell at the North Gate, and he shook Yin and Marcus by the hand. Then he watched the three of them go trundling along the old brick lane, slow and spirited, silent but together.