Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Cameron Harris drank a beer. “Probably the best damn beer,” he says, “I ever had.” After Quỳnh and Tanya lowered him back into his wheelchair—no one really wanted him to sit back down for fear that doing so might break whatever spell he was under, Cameron least of all, but his buckling legs clearly couldn’t carry him back home—Tanya went back inside the Biz-E-Bee to retrieve their groceries. Quỳnh followed her in, and a few moments later Tanya came back out to ask Cameron if he had any money. “I’m short a buck ninety-four,” she said, but Cameron told her his wallet was back home, and after a pause, Tanya biting her lip in the doorway with a hand on her hip, Mrs. Dooley offered to fetch her change-purse from across the street. Tanya praised the offer as sweet but waved it away. By excluding the Cap’n Crunch, which was anyway squashed from bashing Ollie, Tanya found she had enough money, and when she came back out she dropped the two plastic sacks on Cameron’s lap, the same way she usually did.

  “Damn,” he said after a minute. “That shit’s cold.”

  His paralysis, until then, had rendered him immune to the sensation of an ice-cold six-pack parked upon his lap, and recognizing that chill brought the first smile to his face since sitting back down. He dug a Bud Light from one of the bags, twisting it out of its plastic yoke, and held it up. “Y’all want one?” Ollie stepped forward, but a sharp glance from Hat halted him. They all watched Cameron pop the top and take an eager foamy swig.

  Alone in frowning, Hat felt unsettled by Cameron’s celebratory Bud Light—and not only because it ran afoul of store policy (NO DRINKING OF ALCOHOL IN STORE OR PARKING LOT!!, reads a magic-markered sign on the door). She’s been selling beer across the Biz-E-Bee counter for sixteen years, and from what she can gather, as a teetotaler, it doesn’t seem to make people happier or better; it just makes them come back the next day to buy more of it. Unlike her husband, who maintains a vague allegiance to the Buddhism of his youth in Vietnam, Hat is a devout Catholic who serves as a layperson at Biloxi’s Vietnamese Martyrs Church and until Kim’s birth was a leading member of the church’s choir. Punctuating an obvious miracle by guzzling a Bud Light wasn’t quite blasphemous, she decided—but disrespectful for sure. She was surprised to see Mrs. Dooley, whom she understood to be a churchgoer, seeming to condone Cameron’s impudence, chuckling as she swabbed a dribble of beer that was running down Cameron’s chin onto his T-shirt.

  “Should I call an ambulance or something?” Hat asked, but no one could see any point in that. What could EMTs do besides verify, with the authority conferred by flashing lights and sirens, what was already so obvious? “No one calls an ambulance because they got better,” said Tanya. Nor could they see any point in lingering any longer in the Biz-E-Bee parking lot, with dirt motes rising into the thickening heat and beads of sweat replacing the teardrops that just a short time earlier had dampened Mrs. Dooley’s face, especially after a car pulled in and commerce—and with it, life—seemed poised to resume. So they issued ungainly goodbyes, with none of them quite sure how to close such an occasion: Quỳnh darting out of the store to shake Cameron’s hand, in much the same effusive way he thanks distributor drivers who leave him a little extra, or “lagniappe,” at the end of their delivery runs; Ollie and Cameron high-fiving; and Hat embracing Tanya and then Cameron, making the sign of the cross after touching him. From inside the doorway Little Kim waved, though with a knotty expression, Cameron recalls, as though still trying to puzzle together why this most basic of actions—rising from a chair—had been cause for such commotion. Not so long removed from accomplishing her own first steps, and having drawn from her parents a similar fuss of clapping and cheering, she might’ve alternately been wondering why walking had come so late to this full-grown man.

  With Mrs. Dooley at their side, Tanya wheeled Cameron across Reconfort Avenue, Mrs. Dooley clutching Tanya’s wrist for support along the way and announcing, “Lookee there,” or, “Praise Jesus,” whenever Cameron kicked out his legs. Her voice was still warbly and wonderstruck but also, to Tanya’s ear, tired, as if the enormity of what she’d witnessed had caught up with her. Tanya asked if she wanted help getting up onto her porch but Mrs. Dooley declined, or more precisely ignored Tanya’s offer, instead bending low to speak to Cameron in the wheelchair. When he made to take another swig of beer, Mrs. Dooley lowered his arm. “I’ma tell you something now,” she said.

  Cameron said, “Yes ma’am.”

  Mrs. Dooley raised herself back upright. She brought a hand to the collar of her floral-print duster then placed that same hand on Cameron’s shoulder, as if to transfer something from her heart to him. “See here,” she began. “I wasn’t but seven years old when my daddy brung a radio into our house. Most amazing thing I’d ever seen or heard. I remember just looking all behind it, you know, trying to figure where that man was I heard talking on it.” She deepened her voice to mimic the announcer’s call signal—“ ‘WGCM Mississippi City’ ”—and patted Cameron’s shoulder as she laughed either at her imitation or at the little-girl naïveté of her 1930 self. “Turn that knob and here come the Boswell Sisters over from New Orleans, singing with Bing Crosby. Most beautiful angel voices you ever heard. And there’s little me, now, asking my daddy how they all fit in there, how all them people could be squeezed inside that radio. And you know what he told me?”

  Cameron shook his head.

  “That it was just some kind of miracle.”

  Cameron nodded through the prolonged silence that followed.

  Mrs. Dooley said, “But that wasn’t no miracle, was it?”

  “No ma’am,” he said.

  “It was a radio,” said Tanya.

  She took a deep breath through her nose, her gaze bypassing Cameron as she scanned the length of the street, before continuing: “And when the sun came back out, after Katrina. There I was, in that old fridge. Soaked straight to the bone and whimpering worse than a beat-down dog. Climbing out and seeing all that terrible mess. Them trees and boats and busted-up houses and a baby carriage hung up on someone’s roof antenna. Eighty-two years old that day, and no way I could figure for me still being alive. And you know what I said?”

  Cameron shook his head.

  “I said it’s a miracle, you hear? I said it’s a miracle.”

  Again Cameron nodded through the silence. After a while he felt Mrs. Dooley’s grip tightening on his shoulder as she bent back down.

  “But that wasn’t no miracle, was it?” she said.

  “Maybe…,” Cameron began, because to him it had seemed a miracle—and not only to him, but also to the church group members that’d rehabbed their house and hers, and to the CNN reporter who’d broadcast the story of her survival. That was the very word they’d all used: miracle. But Mrs. Dooley shushed Cameron with a raised hand.

  “Oh, Lord Jesus now, he was looking out for me that day,” she said, a smile swerving onto her face. “He told me to climb on into that fridge, I know he did. But that don’t make it a miracle. Nossir.” The smile disappeared. “That’s something different.”

  She leaned in closer, dropping her voice to just above a whisper. “What happened today, now,” she said. “What just happened over yonder. Jesus worked a wonder in you, you understand?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “That wasn’t nothing but a miracle.”

  “Straight up,” said Tanya.

  “I don’t know why Jesus chose you, little Harris boy. But he did. And I got to witness. Praise Jesus for letting me witness, praise his holy name.”

  “That’s right,” Tanya said.

  “But I need you to do something for me, you hear?”

  For the first time since she’d started talking—and possibly for the first time since she’d spanked his bottom sixteen years earlier—Cameron looked into her eyes, which were wet and cloudy, with tears rimming the bottom edges and her corneas fogged and gray—eyes stricken with squally weather.


  “I need you to pray for me tonight,” she said, her voice crackling with a level of emotion that Cameron felt unprepared or unfit to receive. “I need Jesus to hear you say my name. Eula Dooley. Can you do that for me? I want you to tell him I’m in pain. That I got a grandchild in pain. You tell him Antwain needs watching over, you tell Jesus he got to keep Antwain safe. You tell him, now, you tell him there’s more of us need what he just give you. I need you to pray for us, I do. I need you to tell me—you tell me you’re gonna do that.”

  “I will,” Cameron said, and from above he heard Tanya say, “I’ll make sure he does.”

  Closing her eyes and sighing, Mrs. Dooley gave Cameron’s shoulder a hard squeeze and with her other hand touched his leg above the knee. “Praise Jesus,” she said, gently rubbing his kneecap. “Praise his name.”

  “Amen,” said Tanya.

  Cameron felt Mrs. Dooley’s full weight on his shoulder as she used him to lift herself back upright. Her face, as she stared down at him, was drained of expression, and Cameron couldn’t help but feel that some sort of transaction had just taken place—one he didn’t fully understand. Requests for prayer are a common element in Mississippi conversations (say a prayer for Mama; keep Pawpaw in your prayers), and they’re almost always met with complaisant pledges, even by those—like Cameron at the time—who don’t pray.

  This felt different to him, however; this felt like a promise he was expected to keep. It would be the first of many such promises he’d feel obligated to make—more, ultimately, than he could ever possibly fulfill.

  The weariness Tanya heard in Mrs. Dooley’s voice was also infecting her brother’s, she noticed, as she delivered him to the back patio per his request. There she set him up in the same way she usually did: with his little blue Igloo cooler beside him, stocked with beer and ice, and with a three-foot-diameter industrial fan blowing his direction from atop its cinder-block base beside the back door.

  “You all right?” she asked him. “How come you keep kicking like that?”

  “I guess because I can,” he said, craning his neck for a better angle on the rising and falling of his red Nikes. “Mind grabbing my smokes for me? Think you left them on the kitchen table.”

  Tanya had her cellphone cradled between her ear and shoulder when she came back out. “You are not gonna believe this shit,” Cameron heard her saying as she dumped the pack of cigarettes into his lap then turned back inside. He could hear some indeterminate Tanya-squealing through the screen door as he lit one of the cigarettes while continuing to survey the ascending and descending of his calves, one after the other, in a slow-motion approximation of a swimmer’s kick. The clacking of the screen door announced Tanya’s return, her phone still pressed to her ear.

  “Shannon don’t believe me,” she told him. (To her phone she said: “Oh shut up, bitch. I can tell you think I’m lying.”) To Cameron: “Reckon you can stand back up again?”

  “Maybe,” he said, having been mulling the same question himself. “Probably rather be in that other chair anyhow. No frickin’ wheels.”

  “You hear that?” Tanya said to the phone.

  Easing himself out of his wheelchair, Cameron shook his head and muttered, “Hell of a thing to accuse someone of lying about.”

  “You need any help?” Tanya asked.

  “Think I’m okay,” he said, though not convincingly. Standing felt far more difficult than it had been in the Biz-E-Bee parking lot, and for a moment, with a prick of worry, he wondered why this might be, until remembering that before the Biz-E-Bee parking lot standing had been flat-out impossible. The way his leg muscles ached reminded him of the day after his first five-mile run during boot camp at Fort Benning, a day of nonstop moaning. Up he went, however—gruntingly, unsteadily, and with spastic wincing, but up.

  “Hold just like that,” Tanya told him. “Shannon wants a picture.” She pulled the phone from her ear and frowned at its screen. “Can I take a picture and talk at the same time?”

  “I gotta sit back down,” Cameron protested.

  “Just hang loose,” she said, raising her phone up and out toward her brother. “I got it figured now. (He’s standing, Shannon. Can you still hear me? Honest to fucking God.) Go on and smile, baby bro.”

  He didn’t, but she clicked the camera button anyway.

  “Maybe need to find me some crutches or something,” he said, dropping himself into a green plastic lawn chair, but Tanya wasn’t listening. “I’m sending it to you now,” she was saying to her phone. He took a long drag from his cigarette as Tanya headed back inside, and when he blew the smoke from his lungs he could hear her shrieking in the kitchen: “I told you! I told you, bitch! Yeah, it’s a total fucking miracle! Hundred percent.”

  Was it? Cameron punched himself in the thigh, just to feel it throb. That throb said yes, just as Tanya was hollering yes, and as Mrs. Dooley had said yes, as Hat had said yes. But the questions entering Cameron’s mind, as he lit another Bonus Value Light off the orange nub of his last one, revolved around just what kind of miracle it was. “I knew something amazing had just happened to me,” he explains. “I mean, I’d had zero expectation of ever walking again. It wasn’t like any doctor’d ever said, well, if this happens, and then this, and maybe this other thing, then maybe there’s a slim chance—no. There’d never been anything for me to even hope for. So I got that this was miraculous. The thing I didn’t know, sitting there, was what that meant.”

  Because a miracle, to Cameron, was like a Coke. In Mississippi, as in much of the Deep South, one uses the word Coke to denote any soft drink, regardless of variety. Be it a Dr Pepper, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, or Coca-Cola—it’s still a Coke. So too with miracles. A miracle could denote some wildly improbable occurrence, as when Cameron’s Biloxi High School Indians football team scored a game-winning eighty-seven-yard touchdown in the final seconds against arch-rival Gulfport High (what elevated this to miracle-slash-SportsCenter status was the manner in which the play unfurled: Gulfport intercepted a Hail Mary pass by the Biloxi quarterback, but after recovering the ball on a fumble Biloxi employed nine lateral passes to get into the end zone); or it could denote some superhuman feat of strength or endurance, as when Mrs. Dooley captained that refrigerator of hers through Katrina’s surge; or, in its highest and most rarefied usage, harking back to C. S. Lewis’s formulation, it could denote God (or some other supernatural entity) stepping in to grant a favor so divine that it flouted natural law, as when Jesus called Lazarus from the dead, or when Moses parted the sea, or as in any of the other spectacles Cameron recalled from Sunday school.

  Cameron initially discounted that last variety, owing mostly, he says, to a mushy sense of faith, but also to the weight of its ramifications. That sort of miracle—the linguistically pure version, the Coke as Coca-Cola—struck him as almost too miraculous to consider. He found himself prosecuting smaller arguments against it in his head: If indeed God existed—and Cameron believed this to be true, though his conviction, derived from his mother, was mostly secondhand—Cameron doubted God offered personalized service. “Back when I played football,” he says, “all those guys would strike a knee after a score, or point to the sky, thanking God for inspiring that triple option play or whatever. We had an assistant coach like that, actually. Mr. Jernigan. He’d be like, ‘If it gets gnarly out there, y’all just listen to God. He’s the real coach out there.’ And I just remember thinking, dude, Auburn’s playing Florida on ESPN tonight. You’re telling me God’s gonna be watching the Biloxi–Moss Point game instead?”

  As miracles go, then, Cameron’s seemed like a Dr Pepper. His sense of what had befallen him, as he sat chainsmoking in the droopy swelter of that afternoon, was more of a statistical miracle—an astonishment of chance. He’d won some kind of biological lottery that he couldn’t explain because he didn’t understand it. Just how his legs had healed themselves, he didn’t know—but they had (he kicked
his legs to verify it yet again), just as that long slash on his face had healed itself, something that’d seemed impossible to the small boy catching sight of his butterflied profile in an emergency-room mirror. Jesus might’ve worked a wonder in him, as Mrs. Dooley said, but the wonder was in the design. Which meant that Jesus hadn’t intervened in that moment, rewiring his circuitry to bring power back to his legs, any more than Jesus was behind D’varius Johnson’s decision to toss a lateral in that game against Gulfport. Jesus didn’t watch high-school football games, just as Jesus didn’t hang out in convenience store parking lots.

  At the same time Cameron was trying to make sense of his recovery, Tanya was inside making it public. Her friend Shannon gave her the idea to post the photo of Cameron on Facebook. (Whether or not Tanya asked Cameron’s permission remains a contested point. Tanya says she did; Cameron has no memory of this, though he admits that, with no foreboding of what would ensue, he probably would’ve said yes.)

  The photograph itself, stripped of context, is manifestly ordinary: There’s Cameron in his shorts and Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo T-shirt, standing between his empty wheelchair and the green lawn chair with his knees slightly bent and with his weight shifted onto his left leg; in the background is a charcoal grill, a smudge of lawn, and an arthritic-looking catalpa tree. A cigarette dangles from his lip, but the effect is far from any James Dean strut; the facial expression above it signals a mixture of discomfort and dumbfoundedness. “Like he’s constipated,” as Tanya would say later. Upon closer examination, however, the photograph does convey a glint of the extraordinary: Cameron’s legs seem mismatched with his torso, and even more so with his barbell-honed arms, appearing too shriveled and scrawny to be supporting his body.

  With context supplied, however, the photograph is beyond extraordinary—or “beyond comprehension,” as one of the early commenters on Facebook noted. Within minutes of Tanya’s post, the reactions began stacking: