Hursey was twelve. I was five and wanted to stick my behind in the backseat every time the car left the driveway, so I begged until Grandma agreed to let me tag along. Since Vonnie, two years older, was in school, Grandma asked Sister Wood to stay with her for the one night we’d be gone. We packed up fried chicken and biscuits and hardboiled eggs and apples and headed out—Grandpa driving, Grandma telling him how to, and me and Hursey already squabbling in the backseat.
It was late when we got to where the meeting was being held, so we found a room in a tourist home to spend the night and rest up for the healing service the next day.
The line of sick people coiled itself like a wounded serpent around the innards of the tent. The man in front of me, so frail I could count his rib bones under his shirt, lay stretched out on a narrow table with wheels, his body tied on with lengths of clothesline. A little girl, withered leg dangling, slept in her daddy’s arms, and behind her a young man dragged himself along on homemade crutches.
We never seemed to get closer, although we must have, because the sick and infirm snailed across the stage in a sluggish trail of suffering, littering the floor with crutches and canes and tears offered up in the ecstasy of the healing power of God. I kept wanting to witness a healing I could see, like somebody growing back a missing arm or leg right there in front of me, but not a soul did, even though there was a bunch could have used one.
To pass the time, Hursey and I played a game where he’d draw one of the sick people and I had to guess which one it was, until Grandma saw what we were doing and put a stop to it. After that we played I Spy and Twenty Questions. We couldn’t talk out loud so we used sign language to spell everything out, holding our hands low so we wouldn’t call unnecessary attention to ourselves. Grandma was dead set against calling attention. She frowned a little and started to say something but decided to leave well enough alone.
A woman with frizzly red hair wheeled herself across the stage. Paralyzed since she fell down her cellar stairs, she said she’d lost all feeling in her legs and couldn’t walk a step.
“Rise! Rise up and walk in the name of Jesus!”
The woman pushed up from her wheelchair and took a step toward the flock gathered together in the name of God and Merle Hobart. She started out, her steps halting at first, then speeding up as she trotted back and forth across the stage, shouting and raising her arms in jubilation.
Again, Merle Hobart turned his eyes toward Heaven and prayed.
“Thank you, Jesus. Amen and amen.”
“Praise the Lord! You won’t be needing that old wheelchair anymore. Jesus is standing next to you right now. I can see you leaning on His everlasting arms.”
Merle Hobart gave a nod to the choir and they commenced to sing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
I worried God might not bless Hursey with His favor because I was there, tainting Grandpa and Grandma’s goodness. Grandpa had caught me lying more than once, so I was sure God knew all about me. It wouldn’t be fair for Him to take my sins out on Hursey, but I’d suspected that God wasn’t always fair from other dealings I’d had with him. Still, I didn’t want to be too hard to get along with. All He needed to get back in with me was to heal my brother. And if He was in the mood, maybe He’d go right down the line and heal everybody else that needed it.
People suffering with headaches and toothaches and bellyaches and every other ache you could think of were prayed for, and we were still nowhere near the front. When I realized we weren’t going to get close enough for Merle Hobart and God to heal Hursey, all I wanted was to go home and wash the film of sickness and sorrow off me, have a supper of fried eggs and sliced tomatoes, and climb in my own bed under Grandma’s homemade quilts.
But Grandma and Grandpa kept hoping until the last song was sung and the last prayer was prayed. Grandpa’s shoulders, already stooped from working low coal in mines under the West Virginia hills, bent a little lower, and Grandma had that set look on her face, which meant she didn’t want to talk about it, and she didn’t want to hear anybody else talk about it either. We went back to the tourist home to gather our things and get ready for the long drive home.
“You go wash up, but don’t you be getting in that bathtub. Looks clean enough, but there’s no telling who’s been there before you,” Grandma said, filling the sink with hot water and handing me a washrag and a new bar of Ivory soap she’d brought from home.
“Wash down far as Possible, wash up far as Possible, then wash Possible.”
Grandma usually grinned at me when she said that, but there was no grin left in her.
We packed up and followed our dim headlights away from Journey’s End Tourist Home.
I asked Grandpa why God needed Merle Hobart to help Him heal those people. Grandpa said everything is part of God’s master plan, and like the hymn said, we’d understand it all by and by. It seemed to me it was a piss-poor plan. I’d recently heard somebody say piss-poor, and ever since I’d
