“But now,” the priest said, and discerning his meaning Cameron raised his left knee up and down in demonstration and said, “Yeah, now.”
“Have you spoken to God since?”
Tanya said, “He prays all the time now. Prays like crazy.”
“Yeah, I do,” said Cameron. “A whole lot. Don’t know about crazy. People been asking me to pray for them, and I been doing that some. Sometimes it’s hard because…well, because most times I don’t really know what to say to folks, you know? Or to God neither. I never promise nothing to them. It’s like they think I got the secret cell number for God—but if I do, hell, what is it? I mean, you got that number, right?”
A grin slipped onto the priest’s face. “It is a very public number.”
“I guess.” Cameron sounded unconvinced.
The priest took a sip of his Coke, then after a deep breath said, “I have a very important question to ask you.”
“Yessir.”
“What do you think happened at the Biz-E-Bee store?”
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that,” Cameron answered after a while. “Pretty much all my time since, really. I asked my doctor at the VA. She’s got no idea. She talked with other doctors. They don’t know. I’ve looked it up on the internet. But at this point half the Google results I get are about me.”
“And what have you decided?”
“You mind I turn that question back your way, Father?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve heard pretty much everything there is. And I figure you know way more about this type of stuff than I do. What do you think happened to me?”
Father Ace took a moment to arrange himself, smoothing the cassock folds on his knees. “I would like to speak with your doctors. Would you grant me that permission?”
“Of course, yeah,” Cameron said. “Whatever you need me to sign.”
“But from what you’ve told me,” said the priest, in a hesitant, calibrated tone, “I am inclined to believe that a miracle took place, yes.”
“For real?” Cameron looked stunned. This had become his own private theory, after Janice’s failure to explain what might’ve happened, but the priest’s affirmation felt somehow thunderous just the same. The distinction, he’d later say, was akin to feeling you’d acted bravely in a combat situation and the Army awarding you a medal that authenticated that feeling. It was official proof. It was legit.
“Miracles are not as uncommon as you have been led to believe,” Father Ace said. “In my country, they are quite regular. In hospitals there you will often see a sign: We care, God cures. Here in America I think they would post the opposite sign: We cure, God cares. Here, when a case such as yours arises, skeptics will often dispute it, or at best they may say it is impossible to explain—”
Tanya broke in: “That’s exactly what his doctor said.”
“—even when all the evidence, all of it, points to the most simple and most beautiful explanation: God’s infinite mercy and love.”
Cameron fell back into the couch cushions and rubbed his kneecaps for a while, as though massaging the priest’s conclusions into them, to see how that felt. Then he frowned. “But then, see—why me?” Turning to Tanya beside him, he seemed to ask this question of her as well, in a faintly coded way: “I mean—me.”
“We cannot pretend to know God’s plan,” Father Ace replied. “We can only see his works.”
“But look here, Father…” Dissatisfaction with this anodyne response knotted Cameron’s forehead. “You asked me earlier if I’ve killed, right? The answer’s yes. Yes I killed people. For a while I counted how many but then it got hard because in a firefight you can’t always figure the kill shot. I’ve killed people and then I’ve cheered. I’ve watched people die and I’ve—I’ve laughed at them.”
Father Ace winced—less from distress, however, than as a way of acknowledging receipt of Cameron’s admissions. As a pastor in a military town, by now accustomed to counseling returning soldiers, Father Ace’s response came premixed: “The warrior in a just war is not a murderer,” he told Cameron. “This was Saint Augustine’s contention, and I adhere to it. What is required for virtue is not a bodily action but an inward disposition. ‘The sacred seat of virtue is the heart.’ That’s what Augustine wrote.”
“The heart,” Cameron echoed, in a nebulous whisper, before reaching for his Bud Light. In Cameron’s face, as Father Ace watched him drink the beer and then knock the bottom of his pack of cigarettes to poke out a fresh one, the priest glimpsed that same brooding, distal look he’d seen when Cameron spoke of Combat Outpost Hila. He lowered a glance to his notebook to make sure he’d recorded it there: HEELA, yes.
“It still don’t seem right, Father,” Cameron said, shaking his head. “I mean, if I’m being straight-up with you, yeah, there were some times I prayed I could walk again—but did I always believe it? That God’d do something? That God—I don’t know, that God even…”
The priest nodded several gentle times, as he followed this trail of silence to its end, then finished Cameron’s sentence for him. “That God even existed.”
“No offense, Father.” Cameron’s exhale sounded like a tire deflating. “But yeah.”
“Oh hell I forgot—wait a second now,” Tanya blurted, grabbing her phone from the table and pecking at it, but, after watching her for a moment, the screen swallowing her presence, neither man felt obligated to wait.
“Thing is, Father,” Cameron went on, relieved and emboldened by the way the priest had acknowledged—indulged, even—Cameron’s spotty faith, “you get me in that confession booth and you better be bringing a sandwich and a cot because you’re going to be there for a while, you know what I’m saying?”
“You’re saying,” Father Ace concluded, “that you do not feel worthy.”
“For this? Not even close. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Hmm. Tell me. What do we say before receiving communion?”
“Say?” Cameron blanched. Eight years removed from his last church attendance, he was unprepared for this pop quiz.
“Yes, what do we say?” When no answer came, the priest fed him a cue: “We say, Lord, I am not…”
“I am not…”
“…worthy…”
“…worthy…” Cameron’s eyes suddenly glowed as this latest click lit the pilot. “…worthy to receive you, but—”
Here the priest joined in, so that they finished in unison: “—only say the word and I shall be healed.” Father Ace’s smile was like that of a piano teacher who’d just guided his student through an étude. “Now say it again, and listen to the words.”
“Lord,” Cameron said slowly, “I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”
With an even more complacent smile the priest leaned back in his chair.
“Whoa,” said Cameron, and nodded. “Whoa,” he said again, before disappearing behind a veil of cigarette smoke.
At this point Tanya emerged from her smartphone. “Here’s that prayer thing I was talking about. Remember? Megan Bearden’s mom’s thing on Facebook?” She passed the phone to Cameron who after reading pronounced it “really nice” then passed the phone to Father Ace. Balancing the phone on his left knee and his notebook on his right, the priest jotted some notes before passing the phone back to Tanya.
What Dorothy “Dot” Bearden—grandmother, not mother, of a high-school classmate of Tanya’s—had posted, on March 26, 2010, was a prayer request for Cameron’s recovery. What intrigued the priest, and occasioned his note-taking, was that Dot Bearden had directed her audience to pray to Archbishop Nicholas Fahey, whose name was hyperlinked in the post.
“Who’s Nicholas Fahey?” Tanya asked the priest, at the same time clicking the hyperlink then reading while he answered.
“A
Blessed,” Father Ace explained. “An American archbishop. For many years I understand he was on the television.”
Tanya glanced up, brightening. “Really?”
“Monsignor Fahey had an international cassette ministry, too. Oh yes. I used to listen to these cassettes all the time when I was in seminary.” Nostalgia fuzzed the priest’s tone as he went on: “I listened to them so much that the tape would grow thin and break and I would perform surgery on the cassettes with tape and tweezers. Oh my, yes. They were so very inspiring.” He wrote something else in his notebook and said, “This is quite interesting.”
“How come?” Cameron asked.
“Well,” the priest began, “to be verified as a miracle, an event must be shown to have been the work of an intermediary—the work of a saint or a servant of God. These miracles serve as proof of their heavenly stature. Miracles are a requirement for a servant of God to be canonized as a saint, you see. Three used to be required but now it is two. And unless I am mistaken, Archbishop Fahey is already credited with one. So it is very interesting.”
“Hold on now.” Cameron’s head was swirling. “God doesn’t perform the miracles, that’s what you’re saying?”
“No, of course it is God. But an intermediary must request them, in response to prayers.”
This only magnified the swirling. “It’s like the Army chain of command,” Cameron muttered.
The priest laughed politely. “It is merely the natural order of things.”
“But—” Cameron’s head was wagging. “What’s the point of praying to someone else? I mean, why’d Megan’s mom pick this Fahey dude for me? I’m sorry, I don’t get it.”
“You can think of it like football,” Father Ace said, offering a well-rehearsed analogy. “You want the ball to get into the goal, so you pass it to the player in the best position to score.”
Tanya seemed to get it. “You remember Mama praying to Saint Anthony all the time?” she asked her brother. To Father Ace she noted, “He’s the patron saint of lost car keys.”
The priest enjoyed this. “What a mama you had! I am sorry I was never able to meet her.”
But Tanya struck a business tone. “So this prayer,” she said, pointing to her phone, “this prayer counts?”
“I would say yes, but these are technical matters—”
“What about likes? Do they count as prayers? Because that post got one hundred fifty-one likes.”
“Now this,” said the priest, jotting something into his notebook, “this is a magnificently current question. I cannot begin to answer it.”
Cameron was still softly wagging his head. “So you’re thinking, Father…you’re thinking this Fahey dude, he’s the one did this for me?” He turned to Tanya. “He’s on Facebook, sis? Is that what I saw? Lemme see your phone a sec.”
“You ought should write a note to Megan’s mom,” Tanya suggested.
“Oh, Archbishop Fahey died many years ago.” Father Ace held up his hands with splayed fingers, freezing Tanya’s transfer of her phone to her brother. “But let us slow down. You must understand that everything at this stage is part of an open inquiry. My visit today is just the beginning of what could be a long and very complex process.”
“So it ain’t official? I was thinking…I guess I was thinking you was making it official.”
The priest regarded Cameron’s disappointment with tenderness, chuckling drily. “Oh, hardly. The verification process leads all the way to the Holy See—to the Holy Father himself. And I admit to you that these are matters I’ve only read about. I am here merely as a—what would you say in the Army, as a scout?”
“A scout, sure.” Cameron shrugged. “Maybe a forward observer.”
“The forward observer, that is me. Later this afternoon I will be writing to my bishop. And as you’ve granted me permission I will be contacting your doctor, if you’ll give me his name.”
“Her name, yeah. I’ll write it down.” Cameron dourly scratched the back of his neck. “So what now? I mean, if this was a miracle—what am I supposed to do now?”
“I am glad you asked this question,” the priest said, aiming his shoulders at Cameron as he leaned forward in his chair. “To begin, I would ask to see you at Mass on Sunday.”
“At Mass?”
“To praise God for this spectacular act of grace.”
Cameron agreed with a reluctant nod. “Yessir, I can do that. Tanya’ll drive me.”
“And I will tell you that it is just as important, for me, and for our ministry here in Biloxi, that others see you at Mass.” Father Ace would later say that he considers miracles God’s advertisements. He subscribes to what we might call the Toyotathon school of miracles: that every so often God performs a miracle as a means of filling the pews. Miracles, in his discount-theory formulation, are designed to bolster the faithful and attract the less faithful. They are, in a sense, sacred marketing. But he deemed this too much for Cameron to digest at the moment, if anytime soon. Instead he told him, “God has given you a breathtaking gift. It was not meant to be yours alone.”
“Amen,” Tanya said.
“And because of that gift,” Father Ace went on, “you must exalt God with everything that you do. Every action you take must now be an act of faith and gratitude. Do you understand?” He stared at Cameron until their eyes finally locked. “You must not defile the body God has restored for you.” With his own gaze he guided Cameron’s to the array of Bud Light cans on the table, until he was sure his point was clear. “It must be put to use in the name of love.”
“Roger that,” Cameron said weakly.
With that the priest gave his knees a conclusive slap and stood up. “May we pray?” he said, extending his hand. Tanya took his hand and then lifted her brother’s into her other hand. She corrected its limpness with a squeeze.
“Amen,” said brother and sister, when it was over.
As Tanya was leading him out, Father Ace turned back to Cameron to announce, “I will see you in three days.”
“Do what?” Cameron said from the couch.
“At Mass.”
“Oh yeah, right,” said Cameron. “See you there.”
Cameron sat motionless on the couch for a long while, not even noticing Tanya clearing the Bud Light empties, while checking her voicemail with her phone shouldered to her ear, and then silently delivering him a fresh one. He popped the top. Its exuberant foam spilled onto Cameron’s hand and then onto his knee, as if the beer, too, was impressed that the pope, of all people (though at that moment Cameron couldn’t name the current pope), might soon become familiar with Cameron Timothy Harris of Biloxi, Mississippi. “Holy shit,” he said to no one. Then, more from skittish astonishment than amusement, he found himself laughing. “Actual holy shit. Holy holy shit.”
“Oh my motherfucking God,” he heard Tanya screeching from the kitchen.
“What?” he called.
With a strangely blasted stance she was commandeering the doorway between the kitchen and living room. Cameron swiveled himself to look at her. Her eyes, wider than usual, were trained on her phone. Backlit by the kitchen’s windowed sunlight, her hair looked like a nest of live electrical wires, something fatal to touch.
“Holy shit, Cam,” she said, looking up.
“That’s what I just said. I think I’m supposed to maybe stop saying it.”
“Remember that three-one-oh area code call?” She refastened her eyes upon her phone. “You’re not gonna believe this shit.”
At this point, Cameron would later say, he was prepared to believe almost anything. What he couldn’t have believed, however, was that his life, so freshly and dazzlingly reassembled, was about to be torn apart in ways he never could have foreseen.
nine
The Los Angeles office of the television producer Scott T. Griffin looks like—is, really—a miniature museum d
evoted to Southern culture. Entering the office, which is on the second floor of an otherwise colorless office park on Wilshire Boulevard, is like wormholing one’s way into an alternate universe where Muddy Waters is king of one realm and Hank Williams Sr. another, where Bessie Smith and Lucinda Williams are their respective queens, where the kingdoms’ official notices are issued as Hatch Show Prints, and where almost every visual detail comes filtered through the art brut aesthetic of the Georgia folk-artist Howard Finster. The cramped multitude of its Southernness can be dizzying, a dose of regional smelling salts. A bronze bust of the blues singer Robert Johnson, hunched over a guitar neck with a cigarette dangling off his lip, shares the top of a corner file cabinet with a dwarf bottle tree, and even the file cabinet, with its distressed pecan veneer, looks Southern, as though scavenged from a defunct Delta cotton brokerage. Oil-on-plywood portraits by the Memphis painter Lamar Sorrento—of Waters, Smith, both Williamses, Elvis Presley, and others—compete for scarce wall space with framed album covers (Son House, George Jones, Bukka White), a decoratively battered National steel guitar, and various other primitivist folk paintings, a noteworthy number of them bearing religious themes and/or brimstone-weighted Bible verses. Even the plant on the windowsill, a struggling potted cotton plant, adheres to this theme.
It was from this office, on the morning of September 4, 2014, that Scott T. Griffin placed a call to Tanya Harris, whose cellphone number his assistant had cadged from Jesse Castanedo, the Sun Herald reporter. Griffin doesn’t remember precisely where he first read about Cameron and his recovery—“Huffington, BuzzFeed, one of the ag sites”—but he recalls his initial take as fleeting and weightless. “You see these things every now and then,” he says. “Somebody comes out of a coma after ten years and suddenly they’re playing Chopin on the piano. A lost cat finds its owner two thousand miles away. Someone wakes up in a casket during his own funeral. They’re like brain-freeze stories—you think about them too hard and your mind cramps up. So you skim these things and shake your head and move on.” Griffin did just that, he says, but the story—and its attendant brain freeze—followed him. “I was in my car early the next morning—that’s the only time I ever get ideas, when I’m alone and driving. Johnny Cash was like that with songs, he had to cruise around to find them. For some reason that story popped back in my head and got me thinking about what it must be like to experience something like that—it’s got to blow your mind, right? I mean, that’s got to be some super-cosmic peyote shit. I wasn’t really thinking TV at the moment. I was thinking super-cosmic peyote shit. But as I’m imagining it, cruising down the Ventura Freeway, I start seeing it on a screen, and I realize I’m not thinking about it anymore—I’m watching it. And then it’s like, boom. Like Johnny Cash pulling onto the side of the road to scribble down the lyrics to ‘I Walk the Line.’ ”
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