Now Beau was heading for the pulpit, a small tablet computer in his hand, so it appeared from where Anna sat. A large screen above the stage showed a close up shot of the podium, so that she could tell clearly what Beau’s collar and tie looked like, and how well trimmed and combed his hair was. On the big screen like that, sharp dark eyes, strong forehead and chin, a caramel apple tan and perfect white teeth, Beau looked like a winning politician, or maybe a TV anchorman. The lighting only made him look more handsome. Yet all he had to say was that he didn’t have much to say.
When he talked about bringing power instead of words of wisdom, Anna wondered how that fit with the Beau Dupere that she had spent time interviewing and probing for his real story. Certainly, he had no trouble speaking to her. He wasn’t shy. So what was he saying about not having profound things to say?
Then he did say something very striking, he called out a woman by name and described a medical condition in great detail. The fact that a woman reacted to this revelation very dramatically clearly led the gathered faithful to believe that Beau had learned this by supernatural means, like a psychic doing a stage show. Unlike any psychic Anna had seen, however, after demonstrating how much he knew about this woman, he claimed he healed her, and he did so from a distance of perhaps a hundred feet. Again, the gathered believers showed no sign of doubting all this.
Anna’s thoughts turned back at this point, trying to assess how much of this she actually believed. She thought of each of the times people at the Dupere house had touched her and seemed to communicate peace or healing. That was power, she supposed. Was it real or just imagined? She hadn’t expected any of it, so how could she have imagined what she didn’t expect?
When three loud pops froze the animated crowd, Anna jumped in her seat and refocused on the front of the auditorium. Beau was no longer on the stage, only the senior pastor, laying on the carpet shaking rather violently. No, Beau had done his usual move down onto the auditorium floor. She could see a man sprinting up the aisle, interrupted once by a man and his son attempting to use that same aisle for escaping what had begun to look like a mob in a panic. Then she understood what the pops had been and what had stunned the crowd. Beau’s interpreter stood up and gestured to someone. His yellow shirt was covered in blood. It didn’t appear to be his blood. He bent back down over someone on the floor. Where was Beau? What had happened?
Seeking Another Touch
Just like Brett and Dixon, Sara Claiborne noted the meeting in Oakland as relatively close to Parkerville, close enough for her to attend her second Beau Dupere meeting—this time on her own. As if as another sign of her mantle of adulthood, she sloughed off the teenage girl’s assumption that she should persuade some friends to join her in any endeavor, especially a road trip. This time, Sara felt that she wanted this experience for herself, neither interrupted nor hindered by any of her friends.
This road trip was possible because of the 1997 Toyota Corolla that Sara had received for her seventeenth birthday. Part birthday gift and part practical concession from her parents to having a third driver in the family, the slightly dented green sedan got her to school and back during her senior year. She hadn’t, however, taken it on the Interstate very often. Nervous about driving on the six and eight lane freeways, Sara left plenty early to arrive in Oakland a half hour before the meeting.
Even after stopping to get something to eat, she arrived to join the crowd around the doors before they opened. Sara debated waiting in the car, thinking that waiting in the auditorium for the service to begin would be much too awkward by herself. But then she thought of how much she would like to be as close as possible to where Beau would be healing people. She knew that would be at the front of the auditorium, at least initially. She even pictured following him when he wandered away from the stage, wanting to understand what he did, what he could do. In part, she wondered about what had happened to her the last time she saw him. She harbored hopes of getting more of whatever that was.
Glad she opted for running shoes instead of sandals this time, Sara pushed through the doors with the hundreds of others hoping to get premium seats. It wasn’t the sort of mob scene she had endured at the OneRepublic concert. This was more playful, and even polite, at least as polite as you can be while hurrying through double doors, across the lobby and down the sloped aisles. She landed in the end seat of the fourth row, in the middle section, next to a pair of laughing girls who regularly attended that church.
“Has Beau been here before?” Sara asked them when they had settled in.
The girl next to her, named Maleka, said, “You know, I don’t think so. I know he was at the Assemblies church here in town. But I’m thinkin’ he ain’t been here at our church.” She looked at her friend, Jessica, for confirmation, receiving an agreeable nod.
“You seen him before?” Jessica said to Sara. She chewed gum noisily before and after speaking.
Sara nodded, her gaze at her new friends wandering toward the ceiling as she thought of her first encounter with Beau Dupere. “My friends and I went to see him in Sacramento a few weeks ago.” She laughed. “I never got knocked to the floor like that before.”
Maleka and Jessica smiled and exchanged knowing looks. “You don’t do that kinda thing at your church?” Maleka said.
Sara laughed again, her discomfort clear in her halting half-hearted tone. “The funny thing is, my dad is the pastor of the church I grew up in. And he doesn’t believe any of this kinda thing.”
Jessica looked a bit alarmed. “Does he know you’re here?”
“No,” Sara said, getting more serious. “I haven’t seen him lately. I moved in with one of my friends for the summer, after my dad found out I went to that first Beau Dupere meeting.”
“Ooooo, girl. We should pray for you now,” Maleka said. “That you get all filled up and never have any bad stuff come at you from your father and his church.”
Though she wasn’t sure what “bad stuff” Maleka had in mind, Sara felt an unusual trust in these two strangers, strangers to her but not to the ways of laying on hands and all that went with that. Pushing through the awkward closeness of her two new acquaintances, Sara did feel something when they put their hands on her, long red finger nails and all. But it wasn’t anything like when Kim unintentionally knocked her down, or when Beau Dupere dropped his bomb on her. Instead of collapsing joints and a startled fluttering heart, she received what felt like a long drink of wine, burning slightly as it went down and lifting her mood toward rapture.
The most lasting effect of that impromptu prayer time was that the wait and the music part of the service flew by in a blur, a peaceful blur, that is. Sara felt as if every worry she had stocked up through the years had been surgically removed before the service. When it began, she floated with the music, and that ended far too soon for her.
For a moment, Sara worried that something was wrong with her, like she had low blood sugar, or something. When Beau Dupere stepped up to the podium and dumped the senior pastor to the carpet, this struck Sara as irrepressibly funny. She sat with both hands over her mouth, trying to muffle the laughter. She had no hope at all of actually stopping it.
This is when Maleka said, “That girl is drunk in the Spirit. Look at her laugh.” Both Jessica and Maleka caught a mild version of what Sara had.
Sara stopped worrying about a medical condition and tried to relax into the dopey feeling that sat on her like a fat cat. She was too disconnected from the outside world by then to even want to shoo that big thing off her lap.
When Beau called out a woman in the crowd and healed her of surgical complications, Sara felt it, as if her best friend had finally escaped her suffering. This started her weeping uncontrollably, which seemed to set Maleka and Jessica into a more raucous humor. The whole experience made Sara feel emotionally dizzy.
At the point where Beau moved down to the auditorium floor and started to touch people in the front row, saying something to the young man accompanying him, Sara stood up. She f
ound that maneuver surprisingly difficult, clinging to the back of the seats in front of her to keep from pitching over in any of four possible directions. Then a man in the front row said something harsh to Beau and seemed to reach out to him. Three loud bangs deafened Sara, even as her insides took a leap and a dive, before she collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.
The Big Bang
Maggie reached Beau’s side just seconds after the stranger sprinted past her and up the aisle. Her thoughts slid away like a great sheet of ice hurtling off a glacier toward the ocean. She tried to slow her mind, to focus, to hear what she was supposed to do.
Her dad lay on the medium blue carpet, a dark pool growing around him, and three large crimson spots on his white shirt, his tie up next to one ear, his suit coat open so that she could see the custom label with his name on it. She knew he had been shot, but found herself struggling to not think about that, to not think. No, it wasn’t to not think about it, it was to not panic, but think calmly, she told herself. People either edged away or lunged toward her, where she knelt on the floor. She maintained her place at her father’s side even as others jumped in next to her, shouted instructions, cursed, cried, screamed and shoved others out of the way.
For a brief moment, Maggie recognized an unction of clarity. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and unlocked it. Her hands stopped shaking just long enough for her to locate her mother’s number and to tap on it. She held the phone to her ear, noticing that her free hand was covered in blood. She just looked at it passively as she listened for her mother’s answer. Somehow she knew Justine would answer.
And she did.
“Maggie, what’s wrong?” Justine said, out of the little electronic speaker.
“It’s Dad. He’s shot. I think he’s dead.”
Three seconds of silence, and then Justine said, “You have to do it, Maggie. He knew this would happen and he made us promise to bring him back. You know. Just tell him to come back, and he will.”
Maggie Dupere had grown up in the home of parents who had travelled from believing that God could heal anything, to living as if God would definitely heal everything. Unlike so many others who attempted healing, Beau and Justine would get intensely angry when healing didn’t happen. They believed in it that much. Where others would just shrug with regret and say, “I’m so sorry it didn’t happen this time,” her parents would launch a search for the culprit who dared block God’s healing. They never blamed the person who didn’t get healed, even if an argument could be made in that direction. But they never passively received failure like it was just the morning paper.
Beau Dupere had raised six people from the dead, verifiable resurrections in places where people knew the difference between being dead and being alive. People whose hearts had stopped beating, due to disease or trauma, came back to life. Six was the number of verifiable cases. There were a few others. One man, in Hong Kong had fallen to the floor while waiting for healing of his heart condition. No one was there to check his pulse and declare him dead. But, before Beau touched him and commanded him to come back, the old Chinese man claimed that he had seen Jesus standing in front of a bright light, telling him to wait a moment for his resurrection. That man counted himself as restore to life by Beau Dupere. But he wasn’t one of the six.
“Maggie?” Justine said, unsure of the silence.
“Yes, Mom?”
“Get people to calm down, stand back and pray.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Maggie?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“I love you, girl. You can do this.”
“I know, Mom. Love you too.” And she ended the call, slipping the phone again into the back pocket of her white pants, leaving a smeared red hand print on one hip.
Maggie stood up and spoke forcefully. “Everyone calm down. Please step back and give us some space. Start praying. I am going to bring him back to life.”
People who have lost the connections between the various components of their minds, their will and their self-control, can be easily commanded into compliance. For some, perhaps it’s a lack of clear direction in a very unfamiliar situation. For others, it’s an instinctual awareness that the situation requires utter cooperation, clarity of thought and action. Orders from someone who seems obviously to be in charge readily ignite action from people like that.
One of the assistant pastors of the church, a man about thirty years old with a short cut afro and a mustache, looked up at Maggie from his place on hands and knees next to Beau. He knew she was in charge, this sixteen-year-old white girl with whom he had never actually spoken. He knew she had command of the situation and he knew he would cooperate with her instructions, even if those instructions included words connect in ways he had never heard before – “I’m going to bring him back to life.”
Time to Get Up
The early Christian church has been said to have grown because it was watered by the blood of the martyrs. This means a couple of things. First, many of the early Christians died in ways that made it clear to those watching that these people did not fear death. That appealed to lots of people who did fear death. Second, many of the people who watched the Christians die knew that the ones doing the killing were the ones who had lost, driven to unmitigated evil by a lack of confidence in their own faith, their own reasons for living. The Christians were willing to die, knowing that their death would lead to ultimate victory, while their murderers would have to go on killing more and more people who didn’t deserve to die.
The notion of surrendering your life for a religious cause has received the most press lately regarding believers in Islam. Those self-selected martyrs who make the headlines, surrender their lives with a bomb strapped to their torso, often under a layer of small metal objects that will launch out from their death to collect others to join them in what they see as their righteous departure.
The opponents of Beau Dupere couldn’t find a willing suicide bomber. But they did find a veteran of the Afghan war, whose grip on his life after the military had become tenuous and painful for him. To use a bomb to kill one evil man was unnecessary, and would associate their cause with Islam, which, of course, they considered evil, in all its forms. To shoot a man in public, on the other hand, would put the man who pulled the trigger at risk. He might be seized immediately by the crowd of rabid followers who would see their messiah sacrificed before them. He might simply be caught by the police, just doing their job, not choosing between the available ways to be Christian in the world.
Most people would see assassinating Beau Dupere as a crime. When the network television anchors interrupted primetime programming for a brief special bulletin, that healer and billionaire Beau Dupere had been shot and killed, most people were shocked. Very few were actually happy. Several news channels adjusted their coverage of the day’s events to allow wide swaths of time to review the life of Beau Dupere, examining the controversy around his ministry, as well as the few facts they knew about his murder. Very few people thought of his death the way they thought of Jim Jones’s death, along with hundreds of his followers in that South American compound, for example.
This was murder. Beau Dupere was the victim, not a criminal brought to justice. And the small coterie of his opponents that believed God would forgive them for murdering a man who clearly bears in him the Satanic power of the Antichrist, had to celebrate in secret . . . during the hour between his death and the announcement of his resurrection.
Network news producers had never reported on a resurrection before. They had, however, retracted stories due to further information received from reliable sources. So that’s what they did.
When word had spread through the auditorium that Beau Dupere had been shot, many of the people present ran for the doors, panicked, shocked. Many more, however, knelt where they were and prayed.
Anna Conyers fell into the back of the seat in front of her and then bounced into the lap of the man sitting next to her, before landing on the carpet below. Every
fiber in her body screamed that she had killed Beau Dupere. She saw his face, she saw Justine, and the children. He was so naïve to trust her. She destroyed him with her exposé, a story that had been a tribute in her heart, but which was published to become more kindling for the fire of hate against Beau. She loved Beau, she knew that now. She had never met anyone like him. And she loved Justine, and Maggie, and Luke and all of them. She loved them. And she killed him, their husband and father, wounding all of them at the same time. These shocking realizations overwhelmed Anna such that she lost consciousness.
Dixon and Brett followed the man sprinting up the aisle, as if his momentum carried them. Not until they had nearly reached the doors to the lobby did they hear the first person say clearly. “Beau’s been shot. They killed him.”
“They?” Dixon thought.
“Dad? Did they kill him?” Brett said.
“Who?” said Dixon, to no one in particular. Then he thought of the man that had run past them. Wasn’t he wearing gloves? Odd in the California summer. Was he carrying a gun?
Dixon stopped to look up at the TV monitors in the lobby. The camera had settled on a wide view of the stage and the area in front of it. The senior pastor had gotten up off the floor and now stood facing the camera, holding hands with the people on either side of him. They had begun to form a circle around the place on the floor where a young woman knelt. He could just see the crown of her head. Her golden hair reminded him of his daughter.
Sara managed to haul herself back to her feet two or three minutes after hitting the floor. She didn’t appear to be injured. She stood shakily staring at the chaos in front of her, and then the sudden order imposed on that chaos, by a girl her age or younger. Sara could see between the remaining people in the rows in front of her, the ones who hadn’t run for the exit or fainted to the floor. She thought that the girl must be Beau’s daughter, the way she had held him and the way she now took charge of the situation. Sara felt her heart connected with Maggie’s even though she didn’t know that name, even though she didn’t know really what that girl was doing. Though she didn’t firmly settle on which it was, Sara assumed that Maggie was mourning the death of her beloved father. But, she also considered the possibility that, in spite of all the blood, the multiple shots at close range, that Beau was alive and his daughter was trying to heal him.
If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1) Page 21