Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

  “Do you want to keep all those memories?”

  No.

  Everything went black. He could remember what happened—he knew his friends had burned and died—but he couldn’t feel it. The emotion was gone.

  Caleb looked at the silent, weeping crowd. A gathering of people also seeking help in this world. “I’m only twenty-five years old,” Caleb told them, “but I feel like an old man.” He wept too. Something he’d never done in public view.

  The group’s leader encouraged Caleb to talk in detail about the war, his dead buddies, and the apparitions that followed. A Vietnam veteran named Troy was in the audience, listening. When it was over, Troy introduced himself as a healer who sees and speaks healing to the deep hurts in the hearts of men. He had small, dark eyes. After Vietnam, he served twenty years as a firefighter and nineteen months as a trauma paramedic on combat posts in Afghanistan.

  “Theophostics gets the little thing,” he said, “but it’s not going to make the big things go away.”

  Troy said he knew how to get rid of the big thing. The thing that was following Caleb home from the war.

  “Society thinks PTSD cannot be healed,” Troy said, “but society is wrong.”

  Troy described a place in South Georgia where the layer between heaven and earth is very thin. He’d traveled there two years ago to get rid of the Black Thing. He wished he’d done it earlier. “It’s called deliverance,” he said. “It works wonders.” Troy offered to stop by Caleb’s home and drive him to Portal. He’d take him through deliverance.

  “Other veterans had done it,” he said. “More are going to do it.”

  Troy showed up at Caleb’s house the next day and unloaded a bundle of stakes from the trunk of his car. He wrote Scripture on their sides. Longhand with a permanent marker.

  “You don’t have to be this formal,” he said, “this is just how I do it.”

  And he drove the stakes into the ground. “Now,” he said, “nothing demonic can come on this property.”

  A week later, they drove together to Portal. Two hundred miles of night road while Troy spoke quietly of demons.

  The town was no town at all really. A region of pine and dust and a violent history where turpentine hunters once distilled resin, and woodriders with bush knives hacked at undisciplined workers until they bled like hogs.

  Off Highway 26, down a long washboard dirt road, Troy pulled up to a trailer where a minister and his wife lived alone.

  They sat Caleb down in a room and all these Christian people surrounded him in foldout chairs. No one said anything. They were writing things down on pieces of paper.

  Then one by one, they all said something was trying to kill Caleb. They got images, visions. They described his wrists bloody and wrapped in barbed wire. They described a sword coming for his heart. They said he was tied down to a railroad track and the train was coming. “I see a Destroyer,” a man said, “in the form of a buffalo, trying to kill Caleb.”

  The minister saw an angel fighting the Destroyer. The angel was worn out and tired and all the hair had been ripped out of its head.

  Caleb felt a burning sore rip open on the back of his neck. It felt as if the flesh was coming off and something was being pulled up his spine toward the burning. They prayed for the blood of Jesus. He could feel hot Jesus blood coming down over his face. Everyone in the room started freaking out. A glowing thing moved down his legs. They said they’d never seen that before.

  The minister reached his hands into the air and closed his eyes. “Caleb,” he said, “you have a reason to be alive.”

  PART III

  HOW TO KILL AN INVISIBLE ENEMY

  Portal, Georgia, which lies between Statesboro and Swainsboro, has 562 people, one streetlight, one restaurant called Pepper Jack’s, and a beauty pageant for infants called Baby Miss Turpentine. Dead armadillos are all over the road, shining dull the way I imagine diamonds look when pulled from the earth.

  The minister and his wife, Tim and Katie Mather, Caleb’s in-laws, perform deliverance in a building called the Covenant Bible Institute, next to the Portal Church of God and two gas stations, off a street called Railroad. The institute is dry and full of sun and looks like a colorless Pizza Hut. Tim and Katie don’t actually hold service in a church, they gather at home, underground cells, a thing inspired by a fear of End Times, the Battle of Armageddon in the deserts of the Middle East.

  In Portal there are dirt roads with signs pointing down more dirt roads. Most of them say CHURCH. Some of them are handwritten, some of them are fresh, industrial, but in most cases there is no church. LIFE IS SHORT. ETERNITY ISN’T. I WOULDN’T BE CAUGHT DEAD WITHOUT JESUS. GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU. PRAYER IS THE KEY TO UNLOCK JESUS. FOR THE HOPELESS JESUS IS THE ONLY HOPE. YOU THINK IT’S HOT OUT HERE? TRY HELL. BE HAPPY WITH YOURSELF. GOD LOVES YOU. COME IN, GOD HAS A PLAN FOR YOU. YOU HAVE ONE NEW FRIEND REQUEST FROM JESUS. ACCEPT? REJECT?

  Tim and Katie live in a trailer fifteen minutes outside Portal. It’s a double wide, down four dirt roads, past a bullet-holed sign that says Church, in the middle of a field they claim was once an ocean. Fossils were dug from the ground; polished remains of giant sharks and things with necks longer than a house. Eden says it was the Flood.

  No neighbors in view of their house. Only an abandoned building half eaten by vines.

  Caleb says ninety-nine percent of people who come to the trailer return to the trailer.

  After Caleb gets his kids, Isabel and Isaac, settled, he puts me in the windowless guest room with thin floral sheets and a porcelain angel. The angel has her hands raised in a nice way but her lips are painted wrong. They are on the side of her face, near the cheek, looking more wound than lip.

  The minister is watching TV in the living room, on a leather chair with gold trim and a foldout footrest, demanding things from his wife, Katie. She didn’t buy the right ice cream. He wanted vanilla but not the kind with all the fruit in it. Katie looks around fifty years old and has long blond hair that falls to her hips. Her shirt says WILD WEST and her boots click softly on the blue linoleum. The kitchen is a spread of raw ingredients waiting to be cooked.

  The minister unpauses the TiVo. “We have visitors here all the time,” he says. He doesn’t turn his neck but moves his entire torso in my direction. He has small blue eyes like badly sewn buttons. Hands big enough to grip a watermelon. “It’s like a hotel. Help yourself to anything.” A dusty copy of the Virginian is propped under the yellow glow of a rawhide lamp. He rocks slowly, watching an old Western on a flat-screen TV. His face breaks into a wide grin and the yellow ceiling light spills onto his forehead, making him glow along with the screen.

  The trailer is blessed. The minister blesses all houses before he moves in. Words for him, once said, don’t perish, but live on, in the plywood boards of his home, in the carpet, in the water he drinks. He uses the word divorce as an example. He says it quietly, with his hands over his mouth. He doesn’t want the house to hear.

  He blesses water and says the water that is blessed looks different under a microscope than the water that is cursed.

  On the day the minister was outside feeding the chickens and came back inside to find his wife gone, a pot boiling, he was sure that God had come—taken his wife and left him. He got down on his knees and felt the first whimperings of despair.

  There are photos of Roy Rogers in the bathroom and a saddle in the living room.

  While Caleb watches TV with the minister I wander outside, onto the porch, where a woman’s drinking something yellow, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She introduces herself as Pam. She’s forty years old and she’s “the adopted child.” Pam followed the minister’s family to Georgia from their previous home in upstate New York. She lives in Portal now. Her body spills from the chair. I hear her breathe. Some of her hair is curly and some straight. She kills ants with her feet.

  “I worked at AT&T for twenty years,” Pam says. “Nothing to write home about.”

  The minister
has four children and fourteen grandchildren. They all live in Portal. His oldest child lives a dirt road away. It’s a Saturday, and by late afternoon all fifteen grandkids, ranging from two months to nine years, are in the yard, jumping on the trampoline, screaming, running naked. One pisses on the ground, facing me, as close as possible without hitting my feet. Another picks ants out of the portable swimming pool and eats them. A redheaded nine-year-old named Amaryllis comes up to me and opens her mouth. I feed her.

  Then there’s the child that they say is different from the others. She does not talk, she moans. She always appears to be drowning, looking up while her eyes pool with light. Her hands are small white moths roaming the curves of her mother’s body. Her mother is married to the minister’s only son. She tells me she doesn’t believe in autism.

  A few veterans wander the yard fixing cars: Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam.

  A hundred yards out, past the lawn chairs facing nowhere, past the pool full of dead ants, past the fallen children’s toys, the grass turns to field, boulders break from the ground, and sunflowers stand leaning like the silhouettes of men. The field darkens at the curve of the earth, until it is eaten by the sky.

  Out there, a dog, big as a colt and matted like it’s just been put through the wash, is digging. He and the minister’s dog Hoss make love at night, and everyone can hear their violence made public by the clear air. Hoss comes home in the morning, bloody and smiling.

  Black clouds rise over the eastern sky and Pam takes me inside where the air is dense with the smell of butter and children. The minister’s wife cuts lasagna into neat squares and passes them among us. The children sit at a long oak table, the adults in the living room.

  The lights flicker and moan and one of them dies in a quiet flash.

  Ice cream is passed. The power goes out. The trailer shakes with thunder. The children scream on cue and the mothers laugh, lighting candles. The men put on work boots and head outside. Lightning made a gash in the earth, they report. Smoke rises from the ground and hail replaces rain.

  I ask Katie if we need to worry about anything.

  I feel the room go quiet behind me and when I turn around everyone is staring at me, forks stopped in midair, mouths open.

  “Georgia gets tornados,” she says, crossing her arms. “But this property doesn’t.” I excuse myself to the living room. They stop talking to me. I pick the smallest infant to hold. It has blue eyes, same as all the others.

  Caleb joins me and touches my back. “Don’t worry,” he says. “They’re not being rude.”

  The baby is as fat and pale and hairless as a baby could possibly be. It crawls along the floor using only its front arms to slide forward.

  “It’s just that they don’t think they’re talking to you. They think they’re talking to your demons.”

  • • •

  Morning, and the television is the trailer’s bright center. The minister rocks in his chair, whistling with a wide mouth.

  Katie’s drinking tea on the couch next to him with her legs crossed, hunched over a book called When Heaven Invades Earth, purple clouds and a lightning bolt on the cover. I step into the room and they tell me Caleb’s gone to work on the vehicles. Faraway towns, asking for money. “He’ll be back.”

  The light is filtered through dark curtains. I sit down on the couch across from Katie and look at the minister. “Caleb told me to talk to you.” The television goes dark. “About what?” he says. He was a preacher for twenty-nine years and his voice is thick and cool as a bite of peach. Katie puts a pen in her book and leaves the room.

  “If you really want to know,” he says. “I’ve written six books on demonic bondage. I’ll let you borrow one if you want.” He lifts himself out of the rocking chair, using both hands to leverage his weight, and disappears into his bedroom. The door opens just enough to reveal a wide bed burdened with yellowing pillows. One of his granddaughters reposes naked on the bed. She holds both her feet at her ankles and spreads them winglike, lifting them outward and upward. Her head falls back in a quick flourish and she springs to her feet, dancing, using the mattress as a trampoline to propel her frame upward. She lands and balances herself, elegantly, a ballerina before the onslaught of applause.

  The minister’s son walks into the room. “Who are you?” he asks.

  “I’m Caleb’s friend,” I say, not wanting to explain.

  “Caleb has friends?”

  The minister returns with a book called Prophetic Deliverance: The Missing Ministry in the Church of God. On the cover a sunset breaks foamy clouds. The book is self-published and the category is spiritual warfare.

  I flip through the pages. Definitions of demons. Origins of demons. Names of demons. It’s mostly anecdotes about the minister’s encounters with demons. The whole religion came to him in a prophecy while mowing the lawn six years ago in Elmira, New York.

  “How many have you brought through deliverance?”

  “I stopped counting at five thousand.”

  All deliverance ministries believe people are in bondage to a pattern of sin. Trauma is a doorway through which demons can pass. It grew out of Pentecostalism, a movement often traced to a run-down Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, birthed in 1906 by the fervent demands of the one-eyed preacher William J. Seymour, son of slaves. Three waves of Pentecostalism followed. Many third-wave Pentecostals assign a demon or a corps of demons to geopolitical units in the world.

  “One of the biggest problems with prophetic deliverance,” the minister says, “or so I’ve been told by religious minds, is that it’s too simple. We had one woman who used some severe language after hers. She stomped her feet and started yelling, ‘I’m so fucking mad. I’m so fucking angry.’ The birthing process, it just takes a minute. It doesn’t take hours.”

  “Do you think everyone has a demon?”

  “Yes. It’s usually people who’ve been through traumatic experiences.” He throws a thumb at the place where Katie had been sitting. “She experienced trauma that could only be fixed with deliverance. But the trauma can be small.”

  “Can I observe a session?”

  The minister says no, that won’t be happening. He reaches for his lemonade. The chair groans beneath his weight. “It’s too dangerous.” He gulps, sighs. “The demons can transfer. Once we forgot to put protection over the cars out in the parking lot and the demons tore up four vehicles in a row. It’s no joke.”

  “I asked what would happen if I went through deliverance.”

  He tells a story about a depressed Protestant. Protestants don’t believe God can inhabit the body, and deliverance requires this belief to work properly. Eventually the Protestant told the minister that he converted but must have lied because during the session the man started gagging, making terrible retching sounds like his insides were coming out. He put his hands on his knees and coughed up a cloud of black flies.

  Two months later he was in jail for armed robbery.

  “How much does it cost to get the demons out?”

  “God said if I ever charged you, he’d kill me.”

  For a while, the Mathers gave deliverance to anyone who asked, but Tim heard stories of people going crazy, ending up in jail. Now it’s required that anyone who receives deliverance spend three days in Portal. He calls it a deliverance retreat. It costs $199, which includes food, housing, a demon workbook, classes on spiritual warfare, and a thirty-minute exorcism. Each retreat has a fifteen-person limit and everyone’s required to have read Tim Mather’s book. They’re thinking of buying a building where they can bring people through deliverance on a regular schedule, but for now they go anywhere there’s space: the trailer, empty stores in Portal, abandoned buildings, their daughters’ houses, the Covenant Bible Institute.

  “The best way to understand deliverance,” he says, “is from a military standpoint.” He starts equating prophecy with military intelligence and deliverance with boot camp. “Boot camp is where civilians are transformed into soldiers. It�
��s uncomfortable and unsettling but you come out of there a warrior, well-equipped and unafraid.”

  At one point he thought of calling it death camp because you would be dying for Christ. But then he realized the name would scare people.

  Tim reaches for the remote. “Well, it’s a good thing I have a TV. It’s my only connection to the real world.”

  The phone rings. He answers, listens, sighs. He presses the receiver to his chest and bows his head. Katie looks up from her place in the kitchen. They embrace in the light near the porch doors. Katie leans her head back and closes her eyes to a wide beam of sunlight.

  “A poverty demon just arrived in Portal,” he says.

  • • •

  Tim and Katie met as ten-year-olds at Bible camp and went together as much as ten-year-olds could. They lost touch, found each other again. Another Bible camp, another town. They were sixteen and played in the high school Gospel band. Three years later, they married, and after they married, Tim enrolled at Toccoa Falls College in Georgia. After a semester and a half, he quit. It was a recession and they had three kids. The military was Tim’s last-ditch effort to get a job.

  He was stationed in the small town of Minot, North Dakota. One day a traveling evangelist named Bill Putnam made his way through town to visit the soldiers. They gathered at the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church and Tim confessed to Mr. Putnam that he’d been having some bowel problems. Mr. Putnam told Tim not to worry—he knew just the thing. Mr. Putnam placed both his hands on Tim’s head and told a group of demons to get off his tongue. Tim didn’t like the idea of demons living in his tongue, but then his mouth filled with saliva and he felt them leave. Swallowing, Tim wrote in Prophetic Deliverance, never felt so good. They stayed for seven years, and an ex-pastor took Tim through deliverance in 1980. At the time, he was in his late thirties and feared darkness. Now, when it’s completely dark, he can walk out the door of his house and across the yard, down the lane, past horses and the animals in the woods.