Days passed with him in that bed, his head bent back and neck rigid, the slightest movement causing him to cry out in pain. Unable to take more than a few sips of water laced with a little sugar and salt, his baby fat fell off, and muscle too, leaving only the skin and bones of him, at first feverish and convulsing, then pale and still.
But Grandma said Hursey was a fighter.
And she gave God the glory for that, for giving Hursey that fighting spirit.
No matter how many times He let her down, Grandma could always find something good to say about God.
Grandma said the doctors came and stood over Hursey’s bed, defeat showing in the slump of their shoulders as they walked away, not knowing whether he’d pull through another night. Yet pull through he did. After a few weeks, he began to improve. His eyes stayed open longer. And he was able to eat a little. Bananas and custard and melted ice cream began to fill out the hollows of his face. Soon he could sit up in bed, then in a chair. Before long he was walking around the halls. Finally the day came he got to go home and be the child he was meant to be, playing in the yard and getting dirty like little boys will.
Grandma said the good Lord had answered their prayers.
When our mother called him for supper one day, he never even looked up. She walked to where he sat holding a wooden car his daddy had made him for Christmas, which they’d put off celebrating until he got home. “Hursey Clev, come on and eat before it gets cold,” she’d said to him, thinking he was caught up in some little boy daydream of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. But when he still didn’t take notice, she reached down and touched his blond head.
It startled him, and he looked up.
I imagined my brother watching Mother’s mouth form shapes that floated toward him and dissolved into thin air without making a sound.
And Mother would have felt the words he breathed out tremble her eardrums and make waves in her head until she finally allowed herself forced herself willed herself to hear what he was telling her plain as day.
“Mommy, I can’t hear you.”
He was five years old.
I didn’t understand why, despite all the prayers of people of unbounded faith, God went against His word and turned a blind eye on my brother.
And I told Grandma so.
“Not thy will, but Mine be done,” Grandma reminded me, like she’d heard Him say it yesterday.
I wondered why healing my brother wouldn’t be God’s will. From what I knew, Hursey hadn’t acted near as bad as me. Maybe I’d turn up deaf, or worse.
Grandma told me nothing bad was going to happen to me, so to quit talking foolish. As for why God hadn’t healed Hursey, she said it wasn’t for us to question why. One day He would reveal His plan in all its glory and we’d understand clear as could be.
No matter how many promises He broke, Grandma never got mad at God.
Over the next several years, doctors, specialists in hearing, tested my brother and fitted him with hearing aids, bulky black boxes that strapped to his chest with ugly wires running to earpieces that hurt his tender ears and didn’t help him hear even the loudest sound. He was stone deaf and no hearing aid would ever help. But they sold the useless things to my mother anyway, one after the other, always a newer better one, and for high prices. Of course, it was really hope she was paying for, and sometimes hope comes in a black box with a high price.
One day Hursey ripped his earpieces out and sent the newest ugly box, wires flailing from it like tentacles, into our backyard fishpond to drown under the water lilies. He refused to wear hearing aids again or to listen to anybody who tried to get him to. And if my brother didn’t want to listen, he had the perfect solution.
He closed his eyes.
16
The Flesh Is Weak
We were waiting for God to perform a miracle. And Merle Hobart was waiting to help Him.
Merle Hobart pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at the sweat on his brow as two middle-aged men, turned so much alike I believed they were twins, separated from the front of the prayer line and made their way across the stage to where he stood in a golden circle of light. Both told him they were afflicted with a lifelong weakness for alcohol. Merle Hobart, white shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, reached out and placed a hand on each brother’s head.
“Get thee out, Satan! In the name of Jesus, I command you!”
His voice was strong, with more than a hint of backwoods in it.
It was a voice easy to believe.
Slain in the spirit, the men fell back and were caught and lowered to the floor by Merle Hobart’s disciples. After the brothers regained their senses, they kneeled at his feet, his light reflected on their faces.
“Listen, for I am speaking to you. No, the Lord is speaking to you through me. He asked me to tell you He is healing you of the craving for alcohol this very minute. Demons are leaving your body as I’m talking to you. Jesus is filling you up now. I felt the power of His blood surge through my arms like a bolt!”
The men rose to their feet and stumbled off the stage, sobs contorting their faces.
Looking up to Heaven, Merle Hobart prayed, “Thank You, Jesus. Amen and amen.”
Words of praise floated up from the crowd:
“Hallelujah!”
“Thank you, Jesus!”
“Praise God!”
Every day at two o’clock Grandma sewed buttons and turned collars and darned socks while she listened to Merle Hobart on the radio. He was a young preacher just starting to make a name for himself, and like my grandma and
