Going Where It's Dark (9 page)

“Buck,” she said, “we need to talk about your stuttering.”

He let a deep sigh serve as his answer.

“No, we really do,” she continued, and Buck could see one finger nervously scratching at the quilt as she talked. “I want to know I've done everything I possibly could to help you. You understand that, don't you?” She waited.

“I g…guess so.”

“It…really hurts me to see you hurting, Buck.”

“I'm n…not hurting so b…ba…bad.”

“Buck…” She touched his hand and kept it there. “You would make me very happy if you'd go to a healing service with me over in Hillsdale on Sunday afternoon.”

“Mom!” He jerked his head around and glared at her, then returned to his notebook.

“I read about a faith healer, Sister Pearson, coming all the way from Richmond to hold some healings in the area. The article said she's worked some real miracle cures for all kinds of problems. All I'm asking is for you to go with me.”

“I'm n…not hurting that bad,” Buck said again, without looking up from his paper.

“Well, I'm hurting for you.” There was a catch in his mother's voice that Buck felt all the way down to the soles of his feet. “Please, Buck. If Jesus could cure the lepers and raise the dead, couldn't we show just a little faith in his power and see if it might help? It's just this one time.”

“It's c…clear over in Hillsdale, Mom!”

“I know. But Sunday's the last day she'll be here, and then she's going on down to the Carolinas. We might never get another chance like this one.”

Buck was trying to remember if Hillsdale sent their students to his school. No, they didn't, because they had their own basketball team.

Mom squeezed his hand and Buck swallowed.

“
Please,
Buck.”

For thirty seconds or so, Buck didn't answer. As though if he didn't, she'd just get up and leave the room.

“Please…,” she said again.

He took a deep breath. “Just this one t…time.”

N
ow that he had said yes, Buck wished he hadn't. He didn't mind going to church on Sunday mornings sometimes with Mom and Katie—even Dad, when he went along. He liked that he could sing every word of the hymns without stuttering once. He could even do the responsive readings, where everyone was reciting the same thing at the same time.

And Pastor Otis was okay. He'd taught Buck's Sunday school class once when Buck was nine, and one Sunday he told the kids that they could ask him any question at all about God or Jesus or sin. In fact, he had them write their questions down on slips of paper, fold them up, and put them in a box. Then he tossed them around a few times to mix them up, and read each one aloud, answering it in front of the class.

David had been here then, and his question was, “Who made God?” Four of the kids—and Buck suspected they were girls—had questions about sin: “Is it a sin to go to a movie with bad words in it?” Buck's question, though, was “Is heaven boring?”

“These are all good questions,” Pastor Otis had said. “They show that you are thinking about your religious lives and what God has in store for you. Who made God? God simply was and is and always will be. How do we know he didn't make himself?”

And when David had given Buck the eye-rolling look, Pastor Otis had said, “If God is all-powerful, then why is that not possible?”

Finally, when he picked up Buck's question and read it aloud, he had smiled and said, “Is heaven
boring
? I want to ask you, is chocolate boring? Are roller coasters boring? I don't know what they've got in heaven, but think of all the pleasures of this earth and perhaps you can imagine what heaven is like. Everything you love multiplied by millions.”

He made heaven sound like an amusement park, Buck had thought. And even those things could get boring if you did them long enough. Eternity was pretty long.

Out in the parking lot later, waiting for their parents, David had said, “I don't think he really knows any of it, do you? Did you notice how he always answered the question with a question?”

But the question Buck had thought a lot about but never asked was this: if God could do anything, even make himself, why hadn't he cured Buck of his stuttering? Buck had certainly asked him enough. In every prayer he'd ever prayed, that had been part of it.

Maybe Sister Pearson had the answer.

Still. He'd never been to a healing service, and life, to Buck Anderson, was something you always had to look out for, be ready for, and anticipate what was coming at you next. He pressed his head hard against the back of the seat as he watched the clear path the wiper blades made on the windshield, the way the rain simply drizzled back on it again. He'd rather be on the bus going to school, even with Pete Ketterman sitting behind him, than being here. His mother slowed the car as they entered the town of Hillsdale. This, he felt, was going to be a big mistake.

The first surprise was that the event took place in a tent, not a church. It was on a big grassy lot at the outskirts of town, beyond a Goodwill store. The words on the white banner stretched between two poles at the front of the lot were slightly blurred from the rain:
FAITH HEALING, 4 P.M. ALL WELCOME
. Still, the area was nearly filled with cars. Some people opened umbrellas as they got out; others simply made a dash for the tent, holding on to each other so as not to slip on the wet grass. A man in a wheelchair was covered top to bottom in a plastic raincoat.

It certainly wasn't a circus tent, but it could hold a fair number of people. There was sawdust on the ground to keep the feet dry, and maybe sixty or so folding chairs. Two wide aisles led to the platform in front, where only a chair and a table with a glass of water on it waited. And two middle-aged men were handing out song sheets, shaking folks' hands, asking where they were from, and helping them find seats.

Buck wanted to sit near the back, but his mom found two empty seats in the third row at the far left side, and Buck reluctantly sat down beside her, ducking his head and staring at the words of the hymns:
O, for a faith that will not shrink, tho' pressed by every foe, that will not tremble on the brink of any earthly woe!

The first row was roped off, and the tent was filled with soft chatter and the squeak of folding chairs. Occasionally there would be a hearty hello of neighbor greeting neighbor, and finally Buck felt inconspicuous enough to look around. No one he recognized. Not even anyone his age. There were more walkers and wheelchairs than he'd ever seen in a service before. Seemed like every other person was sick or broken, and it frightened him.

Was that how other people saw him? Not just weird—he was used to that—but broken? Was that what his friends thought, all but David? Or Nat Waleski, maybe? What his family thought about him? Did Katie?

He stared down at the song sheet again:
There's not a friend like the lowly Jesus….None else could heal all our soul's diseases….Was that what stuttering was—a disease? Something connected to sin? Something he had done? Or was it just that it rhymed with
Jesus
?

A sudden hush told Buck that the service was about to begin, and a gray-haired woman in a dark blue dress stepped up on the platform and sat down in the chair. She remained very still with her eyes closed, hands in her lap, her feet crossed at the ankles, and her face lifted toward the roof of the tent as though she were receiving telepathic messages from beyond, Buck thought.

At the same time, a gaunt-looking man took his place at the portable keyboard to one side, and the notes of “Take Time to Be Holy” came softly from the two speakers at each corner of the platform. Only his hands moved, his arms frozen above the elbows, and he sat bent over like a question mark, his shoulders were so stooped. In his black suit, he reminded Buck of a turkey buzzard that hung out near a yard full of chickens a few miles up the road back home. He would see it high in a tree looking down, or just making slow circles in the sky. These were not the kind of thoughts he should be having, he told himself. If he didn't believe that Jesus could heal him, he should have stayed home.

The music went on, one hymn running into another as late arrivals were seated, until finally, on some prearranged signal, it seemed, the music got so soft that it stopped, and Sister Pearson stood up. Her right hand moved to the little black microphone clipped to the collar of her dress, and she walked to the front of the platform.

She was not an especially large woman, but she had a large voice, low and clear, that carried well over the sound system. She gave a short talk about the importance of faith—how crucial it was to believe—really believe—that the Lord was able to heal through her.

“Doubt,” said Sister Pearson, the gray hair across her forehead like the fringe on a lampshade, “is smoke, keeping the air from getting through. What you'll see at this service is not hypnosis or magic. It's the Lord's power—that's the sum of it. How many here will lift up your hand and say, ‘Sister Pearson, I know it's not you doing the healing, it's God, and He's real'?”

Hands began to rise here and there until almost everyone's hand was in the air. Buck's mom raised her hand partway and nudged him, but Buck sat like stone. How was he supposed to know for sure?

Then the rope in the front row was removed, and Sister Pearson asked those with a special need to come forward, down the left aisle, and sit down as space allowed. While the rest of the crowd was asked to sing the words on the song sheet, first one, then another person came forward and took one of the empty chairs while a few more stood in the aisle, waiting their turn.

Sister Pearson continued: “Friends, the Lord has been preparing me all my life for this work. If you want God to lift your spirits and heal your pain, you've got to believe He can do it. Sometimes you feel that relief right away. Sometimes you'll feel it by the time you get home. Sometimes it takes a day and sometimes it takes a week. But if His eye is on the sparrow, dear friends, it is certainly, most certainly, on you.”

“Amen,” said someone in the back row.

“Amen…Amen…,” came echoing voices from the crowd.

Buck's mind drifted again to the piano player, who was playing without music now, hymns Buck had heard played and sung in his own church with Pastor Otis doing the singing: “Love Lifted Me,” “I Would Be True,” “Open My Eyes,” “Why Not Now?” He scanned the poles holding up the tent, the sag in the canvas at places where rainwater was probably collecting, then down to the electric cords that snaked from the speakers to some place under the side of the tent, and probably over to the Goodwill store.

Sister Pearson was stepping down off the platform now and was standing over the first person in the front row of seats, placing her hands on his head. Her eyes were closed, and she looked upward again, her voice becoming a mighty wind as she called on God to heal this man of his sciatica—to straighten the disks in his spine that had given way, and heal him for the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven.

She grasped the sides of his face then, and it was hard for Buck to see what was happening next. But after thirty seconds, even forty, perhaps, with Sister Pearson continuing her prayer, the man slowly got to his feet, and the healer's hands went with him, so that she was reaching up now, and his back was erect, shoulders straight.

“Hallelujah!” someone said from the crowd.

“Yes, Hallelujah! God is good,” said Sister Pearson, and the man began to smile.

As he moved on, one of the assistants helping him back to his seat, Sister Pearson bent over the next person in line, a woman in a pink jacket, whose hands clasped the handles of the walker that she had maneuvered jerkily down the aisle. There were murmurs between the two of them, and this time Sister Pearson kept her head down as she prayed loud and earnestly that God would relieve the woman of the pain in her hip and all the other internal problems that were plaguing her, for God knew our bodies more intimately than a surgeon ever could….

One by one the people who had been prayed over rose and slowly took the right aisle back to their seats, some smiling, some not, and the empty chairs were soon filled by the next in line, then the next and the next. When Buck glanced cautiously around, he saw the line extending all the way to the back of the tent, and the stooped man at the keyboard played on.

“Mom, we're going to be here all night!” Buck whispered.

“What's a night compared to a lifetime of stuttering, Buck?” she said in answer, and Buck stretched his legs out in front of him as far as space would allow and settled in.

Sometimes Sister Pearson's voice was so faint it was only a murmur, not for the audience to hear, and other times she would let everyone in on the fact that this man or woman had been suffering with knee pain for eleven years, or headaches so severe it was impossible to get out of bed in the morning. There were people, Buck discovered, who had been in pain for more years than he was alive.

As rain pattered down on the roof of the tent, accompanied by a soft piano, Sister Pearson told the listeners that she could feel God's power surging through her shoulders, her arms, down into the palms of her hands and off the tips of her fingers. It was so strong, she said, it was like an electric shock, but she knew that she was taking the pain right out of the suffering creature before her. And then she would grasp the arm or the knee or the shoulder of that person, cover it with both hands, and once again plead with God to send his healing power. And suddenly she would jolt backward with the current and call out, “God is with you, brother!” or “Sister, you are healed!”

Sometimes the person she was touching would shout “Praise Jesus!” Sometimes he wouldn't say anything. Most looked somewhat stunned as they groped for their canes or their walkers again and made their way back to their seats. Occasionally there was a distant rumble of thunder and a flicker of lights, but Sister Pearson carried on.