Revival: A Novel Read online

  “He doesn’t believe a word of it,” I said. I was astounded. “Every word is a lie. They must see that.”

  But they didn’t, and Hugh didn’t hear me. He was staring, transfixed. The tent was a tumult of gladness, Jacobs’s voice rising above it, pounding through the hosannas by the grace of electricity (and a cordless mike).

  “All day I walked. I found food someone had left in a trashbin at a rest area, and ate it. I found half a bottle of Co’cola beside the trail, and drank it. Then God told me to leave the path, and although it was coming on to dark by then, and better trailhands than me have died in that desert, I did as he said.”

  Must have been all the way out in the suburbs by then, I thought. Maybe all the way to North Scottsdale, where the rich folks live.

  “The night was dark with clouds, not a star to be seen. But just after midnight, those clouds parted and a ray of moonlight shone down on a pile of rocks. I went to them, and beneath it, I found . . . this.”

  He held up his right hand. On the third finger was another thick gold band. The audience burst into applause and hallelujahs. I kept trying to make sense of it, and kept coming up short. Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism. He was feeding them shit and they were loving it. I had the dismaying idea that he was loving it, too, and that was worse. This was not the man I’d known in Harlow, or the one who had taken me in that night in Tulsa. Although when I thought of how he had treated Cathy Morse’s bewildered and brokenhearted farmer father, I had to admit this man had been on the way even then.

  I don’t know if he hates these people, I thought, but he holds them in contempt.

  Or maybe not. Maybe he just didn’t care. Except for what was in the collection basket at the end of the show, that was.

  Meanwhile, he was continuing his testimony. The band had begun to play as he spoke, whipping the crowd up even further. The Gospel Robins were swaying and clapping, and the audience joined in.

  Jacobs talked about his first hesitant healings with the rings of his two marriages—the secular and the sacred. About his realization that God wanted him to bring His message of love and healing to a wider audience. His repeated declarations—kneebound and agonized—that he wasn’t worthy. God replying that He never would have endowed him with the rings if that were true. Jacobs made it sound as if he and God had had long conversations about these matters in some celestial smoking room, perhaps puffing pipes and looking out at the rolling hills of heaven.

  I hated the way he looked now—that narrow schoolmaster’s face and the blue glare of his eyes. I hated the black coat, too. Carnies call that kind of coat a gag-jacket. I had learned as much working Jacobs’s Portraits in Lightning gaff at Bell’s Amusement Park.

  “Join me in prayer, won’t you?” Jacobs asked, and fell to his knees with what looked like a brief squint of pain. Rheumatism? Arthritis? Pastor Danny, heal thyself, I thought.

  The congregation went to its knees in another vast swoosh of clothes and exalted murmurs. Those of us standing at the back of the tent did likewise. I almost resisted—even to a lapsed Methodist like me, this deal reeked of showbiz blasphemy—but the last thing I wanted was to attract his notice, as I had in Tulsa.

  He saved your life, I thought. You don’t want to forget that.

  True. And the years since had been good years. I closed my eyes, not in prayer but confusion. I wished I hadn’t come, but there had really been no choice. Not for the first time, I wished I hadn’t asked Georgia Donlin to put me in touch with her computer-savvy daughter.

  Too late now.

  Pastor Danny prayed for those present. He prayed for the shut-ins who wanted to be here with them but could not be. He prayed for the men and women of goodwill. He prayed for the United States of America, and that God would imbue her leaders with His wisdom. Then he got down to business, praying for God to work healing through his hands and holy rings, as it accorded with His will.

  And the band played on.

  “Are there those among you who would be healed?” he asked, struggling to his feet with another grimace. Al Stamper started to come forward to assist him, but Jacobs waved the ex–soul singer back. “Are there those among you with heavy burdens that they would lay down, and afflictions they would be free of?”

  The congregation agreed—and loudly—that these things were so. The Wheelchair People and the chronics in the first two rows were staring raptly. So were those in the rows behind, many of them haggard and looking sick unto death. There were bandages, and disfigurements, and oxygen masks, and withered limbs, and braces. There were those who twitched and rocked helplessly as their CP-impaired brains did pissed-off jigs inside their skulls.

  Devina and the Gospel Robins began to sing “Jesus Says Come Forth” as softly as a spring wind blowing off the desert. Ushers in pressed jeans, white shirts, and green vests appeared like magic. Some began organizing a line down the center aisle of those hoping to be healed. Other green-vests—many others—circulated in the crowd with wicker collection baskets so big they looked like panniers. I heard the clink of coins, but it was scattered and sporadic; most of these people were tossing in folding green—what carnies call “the kick.” The woman who had been speaking in tongues was being helped back to her folding chair by her boyfriend or husband. Her hair hung loose around her flushed, exalted face and her suit jacket was smeared with dirt.

  I felt smeared with dirt myself, but now we’d gotten to what I really wanted to see. From my pocket I pulled a notebook and a Bic. It already held several entries, some from my own research, more courtesy of Brianna Donlin.

  “What are you doing?” Hugh asked in a low voice.

  I shook my head. The healing was about to begin, and I had watched enough videos on Pastor Danny’s website to know how it went. This is old-school, Bree had said after watching several of the videos herself.

  A woman in a wheelchair rolled forward. Jacobs asked for her name and held the microphone to her lips. In a trembling voice she declared herself to be Rowena Mintour, a schoolteacher who had come all the way from Des Moines. She had terrible arthritis and could no longer walk.

  I wrote her name in my notebook beneath that of Mabel Jergens, healed of a spinal cord injury a month ago, in Albuquerque.

  Jacobs dropped the mike into an outside pocket of his gag-jacket and grasped her head in his hands, pressing the rings to her temples and her face to his chest. He closed his eyes. His lips moved in silent prayer . . . or the words to “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” for all I knew. Suddenly she jerked. Her hands flew up to either side and flapped like white birds. She stared into Jacobs’s face, her eyes wide either with astonishment or the aftermath of a jolt of electricity.

  Then she stood up.

  The crowd bellowed hallelujahs. As she embraced Jacobs and covered his cheeks with kisses, several men tossed their hats in the air, a thing I had seen in movies but never in real life. Jacobs grasped her shoulders, turned her toward the audience—all of them agog, not excluding me—and dipped for his microphone with the practiced smoothness of an old midway showie.

  “Walk to your husband, Rowena!” Jacobs thundered into the mike. “Walk to him, and praise Jesus with every step! Praise God with every step! Praise His holy name!”

  She tottered to her husband, holding her arms out to keep her balance, and weeping. An usher in a green vest pushed her wheelchair close behind her in case her legs gave way . . . but they didn’t.

  It went on for an hour. The music never stopped, nor did the ushers with the deep offering baskets. Jacobs didn’t heal everybody, but I can tell you that his collection crew
stripped those rubes right down to their no doubt maxed-out credit cards. Many of the Wheelchair Brigade were unable to rise after being touched by the holy rings, but half a dozen of them did. I wrote down all the names, crossing out those who seemed as fucked over after Jacobs’s healing touch as before.

  There was a woman with cataracts who declared she could see, and under the bright lights, the milky glaze really did appear to have left her eyes. A crooked arm was made straight. A wailing baby with some sort of heart defect stopped crying as if a switch had been turned off. A man who approached on Canadian crutches, his head bent, tore off the neck brace he was wearing and cast the crutches aside. A woman suffering from advanced COPD dropped her oxygen mask. She declared that she could breathe freely and the weight on her chest was gone.

  Many of the cures were impossible to quantify, and it was very possible some were plants. The man with ulcers who declared his stomach pain was gone for the first time in three years, for instance. Or the woman with diabetes—one leg amputated below the knee—who said she could feel her hands and remaining toes again. A couple of chronic migraine sufferers who testified that their pain was gone, praise God, all gone.

  I wrote the names down, anyway, and—when they gave them—the towns and states they hailed from. Bree Donlin was good, she had gotten interested in the project, and I wanted to give her as much to work with as possible.

  Jacobs only removed one tumor that night, and that fellow’s name I didn’t even consider writing down, because I saw one of Jacobs’s hands dart into the gag-jacket before he applied his magic rings. What he displayed to the gasping, rapturous audience looked suspiciously like supermarket calves’ liver to me. He gave it to one of the green-vests, who popped it into a jar and hustled it out of sight posthaste.

  At last Jacobs declared the healing touch exhausted for the night. I don’t know about that, but he certainly looked exhausted. Done to death, in fact. His face was still dry, but the front of his shirt was sticking to his chest. When he stepped back from the reluctantly dispersing faithful who hadn’t gotten a chance (many would undoubtedly follow him to his next revival meeting), he stumbled. Al Stamper was there to grab him, and this time Jacobs accepted the help.

  “Let us pray,” Jacobs said. He was having a hard time catching his breath, and I couldn’t help worrying that he might faint or go into cardiac arrest right there. “Let us offer our thanks to God, as we offer our burdens to Him. After that, brothers and sisters, Al and Devina and the Gospel Robins will see us out in song.”

  This time he didn’t attempt kneeling, but the congregation did, including a few who had probably never expected to kneel again in their earthly lives. There was that airy swoosh of clothes, and it almost covered the gagging noises from beside me. I turned just in time to see the back of Hugh’s plaid shirt disappearing between the flaps at the entrance to the tent.

  • • •

  I found him standing beneath a pole light fifteen feet away, bent double and grasping his knees. The night had cooled considerably, and the puddle between his feet was steaming lightly. As I approached, his body heaved and the puddle grew larger. When I touched his arm, he jerked and stumbled, almost falling into his own vomit, which would have made for a fragrant ride home.

  The panicky gaze he turned on me was that of an animal caught in a forest fire. Then he relaxed and straightened up, pulling an old-fashioned rancher’s bandanna from his back pocket. He wiped his mouth with it. His hand was trembling. His face was dead white. Some of that was undoubtedly because of the harsh glare thrown by the pole light, but not all.

  “Sorry, Jamie. You startled me.”

  “I noticed.”

  “It was the heat, I guess. Let’s get out of here, what do you say? Beat the crowd.”

  He started walking toward the Lincoln. I touched his elbow. He pulled away. Except that’s not quite right. He shied away.

  “What was it really?”

  He didn’t answer at first, just kept walking toward the far side of the lot, where his Detroit cabin cruiser was parked. I walked beside him. He reached the car and put his hand on the dew-misted hood, as if for comfort.

  “It was a prismatic. The first one in a long, long time. I felt it coming on while he was healing that last one—the guy who said he was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident. When he got up from his chair, everything went sharp. Everything went clear. You know?”

  I didn’t, but nodded as if I did. From behind us the congregation was clapping joyously and singing “How I Love My Jesus” at the top of its lungs.

  “Then . . . when the Rev started to pray . . . the colors.” He looked at me, his mouth trembling. He looked twenty years older. “They were ever so much brighter. They shattered everything.”

  He reached out and grasped my shirt hard enough to tear off two of the buttons. It was the grip of a drowning man. His eyes were huge and horrified.

  “Then . . . then all those fragments came together again, but the colors didn’t go away. They danced and twisted like the aurora borealis on a winter night. And the people . . . they weren’t people anymore.”

  “What were they, Hugh?”

  “Ants,” he whispered. “Huge ants, the kind that must only live in tropical forests. Brown ones and black ones and red ones. They were looking at him with dead eyes and that poison they use, formic acid, was dripping from their mouths.” He drew a long, ragged breath. “If I ever see anything like that again, I’ll kill myself.”

  “It’s gone, though, right?”

  “Yes. Gone. Thank God.”

  He dragged his keys from his pocket and dropped them in the dirt. I picked them up. “I’ll drive us back.”

  “Sure. You do that.” He started toward the passenger seat, then looked at me. “You too, Jamie. I turned to you and I was standing next to a huge ant. You turned . . . you looked at me . . .”

  “Hugh, I didn’t. I barely saw you going out.”

  He seemed not to hear. “You turned . . . you looked at me . . . and I think you tried to smile. There were colors all around you, but your eyes were dead, like all the rest. And your mouth was full of poison.”

  • • •

  He said nothing more until we arrived back at the big wooden gate leading to Wolfjaw. It was closed and I started to get out of the car to open it.

  “Jamie.”

  I turned to look at him. He’d gotten some of his color back, but only a little.

  “Never mention his name to me again. Never. If you do, you’re done here. Are we clear on that?”

  We were. But that didn’t mean I was going to let it go.

  IX

  Reading Obituaries in Bed. Cathy Morse Again. The Latches.

  Brianna Donlin and I were scanning obituaries in bed on a Sunday morning in early August of 2009. Thanks to the sort of computer hocus-pocus only true geeks can manage, Bree was able to collate death notices from a dozen major American newspapers and view them as an alphabetical list.

  It wasn’t the first time we’d done this in such pleasurable circumstances, but we both understood we were getting closer and closer to the last time. In September she’d be leaving for New York to interview for I-T jobs with the sort of firms that paid upwards of six figures at the entry level—she had appointments with four already penciled into her calendar—and I had my own plans. But our time together had been good for me in all sorts of ways, and I had no reason not to believe her when she said it had been good for her, too.

  I wasn’t the first man to enjoy a dalliance with a woman less than half his age, and if you said there’s no fool like an old fool and no goat like an old goat, I wouldn’t argue with you, but sometimes such liaisons are okay, at least in the short term. Neither of us was attached, and neither of us had any illusions about the long term. It had just happened, and Brianna had made the first move. This was about three months after the Norris C
ounty tent revival and four into our computer-sleuthing. I hadn’t been a particularly tough sell, especially after she slipped out of her blouse and skirt one evening in my apartment.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I had asked.

  “Absolutely.” She flashed a grin. “Soon I’ll be in the big wide world, and I think I better work out my daddy issues first.”

  “Was your daddy a white ex–guitar player, then?”

  That made her laugh. “All cats are gray in the dark, Jamie. Now are we going to get it on or not?”

  We got it on, and it was terrific. I’d be lying if I said her youth didn’t excite me—she was twenty-four—and I’d also be lying if I said I could always keep up with her. Stretched out next to her that first night and pretty much exhausted after the second go, I asked her what Georgia would say.

  “She’s not going to find out from me. Is she from you?”

  “Nope, but Nederland’s a small town.”

  “That’s true, and in small towns, discretion only goes so far, I guess. If she should speak to me, I’d just remind her that she once did more for Hugh Yates than keep his books.”

  “Are you serious?”

  She giggled. “You white boys can be so dumb.”

  • • •

  Now, with coffee on her side of the bed and tea on mine, we sat propped up on pillows with her laptop between us. Summer sunshine—morning sunshine, always the best—made an oblong on the floor. Bree was wearing one of my tee-shirts and nothing else. Her hair, kept short, was a curly black cap.

  “You could continue without me just fine,” she said. “You pretend to be computer illiterate—mostly so you can keep me where you can nudge me in the night, I think—but running search engines ain’t rocket science. And I think you’ve got enough already, don’t you?”

  As a matter of fact, I did. We had started with three names from the Miracle Testimony page of C. Danny Jacobs’s website. Robert Rivard, the boy cured of muscular dystrophy in St. Louis, led the list. To these three Bree had added the ones I was sure of from the Norris County revival meeting—ones like Rowena Mintour, whose sudden recovery was hard to argue with. If that tottery, weeping walk to her husband had been a put-up job, she deserved an Academy Award for it.