Opal never asked you what you thought, she asked you what you really thought, as though she knew when you said what you thought, you always held something back.
I told her I thought she looked embarrassed because we’d come to the healing. (“Embarrassed?” she said. “Is that your name for it?”)
I didn’t tell her what I really thought when I first saw that little face peering back at me.
That face reminded me of the face my grandmother made on pies before she’d bake them. She’d carve the eyes and nose and mouth into the dough, and there’d be this frightened-looking little white pie face.
She wouldn’t make them smile and she wouldn’t make them frown, because she said after all we had to eat them, didn’t we?
Maybe Grandma didn’t intend those pie faces to look so terrified, but they always looked to me like they knew we intended to devour them.
Something else, too, about the very first time I saw Opal.
When her mother went into tongues, I saw myself when I was four, sitting under the tent beside my folks, while my grandfather, Reverend Jesse Cannon, fell to his knees onstage, and cawed like a crow.
He’d finished leading us all in prayer before it happened, and once he got to his knees and made those noises, everyone around us was calling out, “Jee-sus! Praise the Lord!”
“What’s happened to Grandpa?” I asked.
These sounds were sputtering out of him like blood from a fresh wound, and the eyes in his face were stark and watery like the breathless, pastel eyes of a fish at the end of a hook.
“He has tongues,” my father said. “Shhhh.”
And once I knew he intended what he was doing up there, my bones felt as though they were melting away in the intense heat of my own humiliation.
“He’s raptured.” My mother smiled down at me, and tried to take my hand, which I yanked away, wanting no part of her flesh and blood and weirdness.
I was flung back in time when I first saw Opal Ringer, suffering with her without her ever knowing it.
“Embarrassed?” she would say much later. “Is that your name for it?”
At the end of the service Seal grabbed my hand—hers was warm and wet—and she said excitedly, “Oh wow, Jesse!” whispering, “I never saw anything like that, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Not like that,” she said as though there could be no way I could have, and she began leading me down the aisle, hurrying, threading our way through the crowd.
I should have known I could count on Seal not to get scared or silly like some outsiders did their first time. Years ago when we were doing services under the tent, kids from nearby towns would come out on their bicycles to “see the show.”
There was one song my grandmother sang that always cracked them up. It was called “I Come to the Garden Alone.” The line that got to them was “… and the voice I hear, fatting on my ear …” They’d guffaw and nudge each other, pretend they were about to keel over, and hold their ears.
Other kids just beat it out of there, like their clothes were suddenly on fire, particularly when tongues started.
I remember bawling once when I was little, because I thought they were all watching us the way they’d watch a freak show. Bud said not to get into feeling sorry for myself; a lot of the stuff that went on under the tent did, look bizarre to outsiders. Face it, we’re bizarre, Bud said, but we’ve got good intentions and that’s all that counts.
“I just wish we could have good intentions without being bizarre,” I said.
“I just wish I was King of England,” Bud said. “I just wish I was God Almighty. Don’t waste your wishes. Take advantage of your advantages.”
“You sound like Dad.”
“Thanks. That’s who I intend to sound like.”
That was good old Bud, in the good old days.
“Seal,” I said, as she pulled me along, “they’re going to need a second healing if we keep knocking people around to get to the door.”
Over her shoulder she said, “I want to get to her before she’s surrounded,” and yanked me more steps forward.
“Get to who?”
“Diane-Young Cheek.” She stopped to whisper in my ear. “Better known as ‘Why Die?’ or ‘Die Young.’ She’s the one who just got healed.”
“What did she have wrong with her?” We were in motion again.
“She jumped out the gym window.”
We were stopped by an old man leaving a pew, waiting for his wife to follow.
Seal said, “Just around the time Bud left, she took a dive right onto the pavement by the parking lot. She’s lucky to be alive.”
Down near the door, Diane-Young Cheek was sandwiched between Reverend Ringer and the healer.
I strained for a closer look at her, but a large woman at the end of the aisle kept getting in my way. All I could see of Diane-Young was this great mop of curly, brown hair, attached to this long pole of a body. She was carrying her crutch, a smile flickering and fading in the center of the mop, like a little neon light blinking in a sign. I tried to imagine those tiny eyes behind the pink lenses looking out a window down at the pavement, panicked, like the faces I always imagined went with the voices we often heard over our Challenge hot line. “I’m into dope and I don’t want to live anymore.” (Jesus wants you to win. So do we.) “I’m going to take pills.” (Before you do another thing, will you pray with me?)
Just then the face of Opal Ringer came between her face and mine for a few fleeting seconds. It was the second time I saw her. She didn’t see me. I saw her tense profile. She was waiting to get out the door, and I could see the anxious frown on her face. I
