by Monica West
I straightened Hannah’s limbs and lifted them out of the water: first her arms and then her legs. Minuscule soapy beads formed on her skin as I glided the washcloth over one arm and then the next. She closed her eyes in delight as I cupped warm water in both hands and spilled it onto her back, so I did it a few extra times just to hear her squeal. She followed the squeal with a labored grunt—the doctors had told us that it was the closest that she would ever get to speech. When she was clean, I spread her towel on the floor by the tub and guided her out of the water—only then could I lift the lever on the drain. If I did it in the wrong order, she would shriek and only stop when I let her touch Tiger’s sightless plastic eyes with her forefinger.
When she was fully dressed, I loosened the Velcro straps from her thick plastic leg braces and fitted them around her calves. Lifting her from the floor, I slipped her forearms into her crutches. As she stood, her joints preferred to stay bent rather than straightening, so I ran my palm over her elbows and then down to her knees, stopping to massage the knobby joints with my thumb and forefinger. She liked when I made a whooshing sound as I did that, like I was the one who magically helped her walk a little taller.
I brought Hannah, clean and dressed, to the kitchen. Papa always waited until we got to the new revival site to tell the host pastor about Hannah. Maybe he thought it would ruin the reputation he’d worked so hard to perfect—the flocks of people who crowded into tents would never believe that a man with healing powers could have a daughter like Hannah.
Caleb bounded down the stairs last, already wearing his suit and tie. He flopped into the chair, right in front of the stack of pancakes. During revival season, I only got to see glimpses of Caleb in passing before Papa whisked him off to meet the elders or the deacons. He was fifteen, too—younger than me by ten months—yet it felt like years divided us when I had to watch him straighten his tie and leave with Papa to do “men’s work.”
“Let’s start breakfast with a prayer,” Ma said.
I knew the revival prayer by heart—it came from Matthew 28:19. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
As Caleb scarfed down spongy triangles of pancake, I reached for the Bible in the middle of the table. It was Ma’s Bible—the one she carried with her everywhere. Ma’s and Papa’s names and their wedding date were written in cursive inside the front cover: Joanne Renée Taylor and Samuel David Horton, July 11, 2002. It was hard to imagine that they even existed a year before I was born—when Ma was just Joanne—but I’d unearthed the wedding picture from a shoebox in the attic while packing for this revival. In it was a faded photo of an eighteen-year-old Ma, her face a carbon copy of mine. Through the sheer cream-colored veil that partially hid her strained smile, the lonely, distant look in her eyes reached back to me.
Behind the only picture of their wedding was a black-and-white local newspaper clipping whose edges had started to curl. When I flattened it, there was a small, grainy photo of Papa with bushy eyebrows and a head full of hair—his lips protruded around his mouth guard in a grimace as he held boxing gloves in front of his chiseled abs. “Samuel Horton Prepares to Defend Title,” the headline read. I skimmed an article that may as well have been about someone else—someone with an 8-0-1 record with a right hook like a freight train and fast feet. I imagined Papa bouncing on the balls of his feet, moving from the ropes on one side of the ring to the other. I felt the anger that swelled in his body for his opponents before his glove made contact with their stomachs or ribs, heard the muffled sound of a glove striking flesh. I folded the article along its crease and placed it back with the other mementos—the cut hospital bracelet from Hannah’s birth, a yellowed gauzy square of veil, and an old picture of Ma sandwiched between her sisters. Her smile as she squatted in front of a pickup truck with Claudia and Yolanda was such a stark contrast to the wedding photo that now sat in front of it in the shoebox that the bride and the girl might as well have been two different people, even though the scrawled date on the Polaroid revealed that the photographs had been taken only four months apart.
* * *
A horn honked in the driveway, and Caleb shoved one final bite into his mouth before running outside to join Papa. I walked to the front window and slid my finger into the narrow opening between two metallic blinds. Through the visible diamond of dusty glass, Papa gripped Caleb’s shoulders in front of Reverend Davenport’s silver sedan, shaking him every few seconds as though to emphasize his words. I imagined what Papa was saying—What’s mine is yours or maybe One day this can be yours—as the warmth of his hand seeped through the shoulder of my dress instead of Caleb’s suit jacket. Even as I pretended, my imagination couldn’t wrap itself around such a frivolous fantasy.
With a piece of glass between us, it was easier to imagine Papa saying things to me that he never said when he was inches away. Whenever I had questions about the Bible after dinner, he excused himself to the study to prepare a sermon, letting me lob unanswered queries to the back of his retreating suit. When it was time for his nightly snack, I held the plate and knocked on the study door, requesting permission to come inside. The snack was always a ruse; I needed to be close enough to hear his words about disease and God’s healing so they would stir the Holy Spirit in me more than they did when I was in the fourth row of a church or a revival site. But rather than asking me to come inside, he spoke to me through the door, telling me to leave the plate outside.
“Another ninety-degree scorcher,” the radio announcer—Gus “Good News” Stevens on Heaven 1310 AM—broadcast from the kitchen. Then Papa’s booming voice came over the airwaves and filled the room, sending a shudder through me even though the commercial had been recorded weeks ago. I released the blinds before they snapped together like lips keeping a secret. It always shocked me to hear his voice in these far-off places—“Come all of you under the sound of my voice. Come to the well that never runs dry.” And with those words, revival officially began. Ma shushed me and Hannah even though we weren’t making any noise, as though our breathing would overshadow Papa’s voice, which could fill up any space it entered.
“Americus, this is Reverend Samuel Horton, the Faith Healer of East Mansfield. If you are hungry for a touch from the Lord, if your hearts are weary or heavy-laden, come to the big tent tonight. Take this step of faith and Jesus will be there to meet your needs and heal your bodies.”
It was the same message, the same confident tone, from city to city. Though I knew the words by heart, they reformed themselves as they filtered through the pin-size holes in the speaker of the plastic transistor radio, and suddenly all the people who might have been listening to him in their kitchens vanished—it was just me and him. His words of deliverance and new life took me back to the cold shock of the lake in East Mansfield when I was seven, my adult’s baptism robe getting soaked as I walked over to where he stood away from the shore with his arms stretched out from his sides. I wanted to run to him, but the lake dragged my sopping robe behind me like an anvil. When I finally stepped into his arms, he whispered the words of the Lord to me.
“Miriam Ruth, do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior and promise to renounce the devil?” I nodded and folded my arms over my chest the way I had seen so many people do before me.
“Miriam Ruth Horton, child of God, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Sp—” Before he could finish the sentence, his strong forearm under my back dipped me into the lake. His words sounded loud and muffled under the water, but I could hear the congregation cheer. When I was upright again, Papa gave me a soaking hug and planted a kiss on my forehead. Though I should have been happy to have eternal life, I was happier to lean into the strength of his embrace and feel the prickle of his wiry forearm hairs as he squeezed me tighter.
His voice faded into a cereal commercial, but my heart still raced the way it did that day half a lifetime ago. I couldn’t wait to get to the reviva
l tent—to see its majestic colors and watch Papa redeem himself from last summer’s scandal the way I’d been praying that he would.
TWO
Two dresses hung side by side, both with what Ma called regulation-length skirts that fell at least three inches below the knee. “We can’t distract the men while they’re preaching,” she’d once tried to explain with a straight face. I had stared at her until she seemed to hear the ridiculousness of her words coming back to her like a boomerang, and her lip twitched before she broke into throaty laughter. Soon we were giggling at the absurdity of a then nine-year-old pair of knees being a distraction for grown preachers and deacons. Nonetheless, I did as I was told from that day on.
Later that night, Ma, Hannah, and I emptied out of the house in our Sunday best, even though it was a Monday. The car ride over was silent. At each stoplight, Ma picked invisible pieces of lint from her dark gray skirt. The week before, it had just been a pattern on newsprint; this would be its revival debut. At a stop sign, I squeezed her hand. It’s going to be fine, I wanted to tell her. But her eyes were on the road as she turned right and the revival tent appeared—first a speck that slowly swelled until it took up the whole windshield. It had the same alternating yellow and white colors of the one last August in Brownsville, Tennessee. There was no way Papa had approved this, and though we didn’t believe in the superstitions or bad omens that godless people did, my stomach fell to the rubber floor mat.
I blinked the yellow-and-white pattern into a beige swirl, and suddenly the stillness in the van became the same eerie calm of the tent last summer when a family of three had stepped out of the rain and into the back of the tent. A teenage girl close to my age was sandwiched between the twin pillars of her parents, her impassive face damp from tears or rain. The girl’s parents linked their arms in hers as the girl shook her head and held her stomach, protesting something that they ignored as they jerked her forward. When she finally stood in front of the crowd, her parents released their grip, and the girl’s hands fell away from her lower abdomen. Exposed in front of us, she looked even younger. Thirteen years old, maybe fourteen, seven or eight months pregnant. My brain made calculations as I looked away from a chubby face that hadn’t shed all of its baby fat, letting my gaze land on the smiling unicorn on her dingy T-shirt instead.
Papa continued his sermon as the family stood in front of him until he couldn’t ignore their unmoving presence any longer. When he glanced over the edge of the pulpit, his stoic healing face cracked when looking at a girl whose slender, birdlike body didn’t seem like it was big enough to carry the weight of her stomach. Papa rushed to the ground and spoke a few quiet words to the girl’s father while she strained against her father’s tight grip like a chained animal.
“Young lady, what ails you?” Papa held out his hand to touch her forehead.
“Don’t touch me, you fake.” She backed away, leaving his hand suspended in midair. “What did you do to make them all believe in you? Or do they just give you money and you make them believe? Is that how it works?” As she spoke, the practiced calm of Papa’s healing face flashed murderous. Papa took a breath, seemingly to calm himself, but his hands were shaking.
“How dare you? You come here for my healing and insult me? Who do you think you are?” The deacons crept in from the sides of the tent to protect Papa, but Papa held out a hand to keep them back.
“Who do you think you are?” he asked again, inching closer to her and exaggerating their dramatic difference in height. “You are nothing but a sinner. You need me.” As Papa placed a hand on the girl’s forehead, she swatted it away. Rage swept over him again, and, seemingly as a reflex, he pushed her. She stumbled backward, almost in slow motion, landing on the grass as her parents looked on, horrified. Papa seemed horrified as well, but the look of guilt that had passed his face as the girl fell quickly morphed into more fury. He dropped to his knees beside her and pinned her shoulders to the grass with his massive hands.
“Stop,” the mother yelled as she hit Papa’s back, “you’re hurting her.”
But Papa, impervious to her screams and blows, stayed on top of the girl. The congregation fidgeted as they watched the revival preacher violently subdue this tiny pregnant child.
“I will heal her sin.” Papa healed ailments, not sins, but he seemed to have forgotten that fact as he continued to shake the girl. He punctuated each of his words with a punch of his right fist into the grass next to her body.
The girl slid to the right to get away from him; as she moved, his fist drove deep into her abdomen with a sickening thud. She wailed, and her body folded on itself. Papa released her and jumped up, staring down at his hands as though he didn’t know what they were capable of. Her parents rushed to her, shoving him into the front row on the way to their daughter. They picked her up from where she was curled in a fetal position on the ground, screaming. Her mother shouted at Papa before she hurried her daughter out of the tent, and her final words—You are a monster—were shrill in the surrounding silence.
The light at the intersection turned green, but the van didn’t move. Flashes of last year must have been dancing in the windshield for Ma also. I placed my hand over hers as cars sped by us. It was the new shorthand for what we couldn’t say: that the night’s revival attendance would determine how far-reaching last year’s news had really been or if people’s attention spans were as short as we needed them to be.
The car jolted back into motion, and Ma returned her eyes to the road. As Ma pulled into a space of flattened grass, I took inventory of the other cars that were already there, covered with a sheen of dust from driving up and down these country roads. I unbuckled Hannah from her seat and slid my left arm behind her back. Her leg braces made hollow sounds as I brought her down the minivan’s middle aisle, careful not to jostle her too much, even though she wasn’t as delicate as she seemed. The light from inside the tent illuminated the surrounding grassy area, and heads turned as we made our way inside. Some unfamiliar faces nodded politely while others just stared, their fans flapping in front of their faces, stirring the stale scent of old perfume and cigarettes. I wondered if they were thinking about the pregnant girl the way we all were. Wondered if those up front were there because they wanted to be close to the holy man or if they wanted to be close enough to bear witness to another fall.
We walked down the plastic aisle runner to the stage, where a sheet of fake grass was being rolled out. Caleb was there, standing behind the podium like Papa, complete with his hands on his hips. Onstage, he was no longer my brother; he was a miniature preacher, ready to reach out to the audience and lay holy, healing hands on people. He was placing bottles of water in strategic locations for when Papa would need them—one on the left side, and one on the right side. Papa always reached for the left one first, about twenty minutes into the sermon. The entire congregation seemed to hold its breath while he drank, waiting for his words to come out on the other side, promising people jobs, the ability to walk, the deliverance of wayward children, and everything in between.
The rugged crucifix hewn together from rough plywood boards had already been raised with cables behind the stage. Papa insisted on that type of cross rather than the fancier backlit ones. Jesus died on a simple cross, he said, and a simple cross was good enough for a preacher man like him.
We found our seats in the cordoned-off fourth row since we were never allowed to take the best seats in the house. All that was left to do was wait. An hour felt like an eternity in the still, humid air. With Hannah next to me and Ma fanning herself with the service bulletin, my lips mouthed the words to a prayer. No one else would say it, but we all wondered whether enough people would come out to see him. Papa had packed tents from Texas to Mississippi, but this revival season came with more questions than answers. I crossed my fingers and toes and prayed. It was always the same prayer, only this time it was more fervent: Dear Lord, bring souls to this revival to be saved. Amen.
Then, as if in answer to my prayer, mo
re people started filing in. Mothers fresh from work in wrinkled uniform shirts with babies perched on their hips. A man whose fingers were black with grease marched down the middle aisle in probably the only suit he owned. Families, daughters my age, sons. Single people. Old people. I tilted my chin upward. Thank you, God.
The keyboard began a hymn, and the line of elders and deacons snaked down the middle aisle. Papa was at the end of the line, right behind Reverend Davenport. People rose when they saw him, and he took several extra moments to wave and shake the few hands that were lucky enough to be close. I watched him bask in the power that only a full tent provided, and by the time he reached the podium, he was the old Papa again. In my lap, my hands slowly released the leather cover of my Bible that I didn’t realize I’d been clutching.
When we faced the front again, he was in the pulpit with his hands gripping both sides of the plexiglass podium. He raised his arms and cleared his throat—a signal for everyone to get quiet. He brought down his hands, and the volume lowered with them. “You can do this,” I mouthed, even though he wasn’t looking at me. He rarely did during sermons.
All heads turned toward the stage for the call to worship. I didn’t know which one Papa would choose. As I looked to the pulpit, he spoke.
“ ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever.’ ”
I smiled when he recited Psalms 106:1. It had been the subject of my devotional the week before we hit the road for Americus. I whispered the next couple of verses, even as Papa moved on to the opening prayer. Who can proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord or fully declare His praise? Blessed are those who act justly, who always do what is right. Remember me, Lord, when You show favor to Your people, come to my aid when You save them, that I may enjoy the prosperity of Your chosen ones, that I may share in the joy of Your nation and join Your inheritance in giving praise.