Dog on the Cross (2 page)

After Roberts delivered a brief sermon, he asked those in need of healing to form a line to the left of the stage. He told them it did not have to be physical healing.

“There are three kinds of healing,” he told them. “There is physical healing and emotional healing and healing of the spirit.” He said God could perform all three.

Sadie leaned over, whispered to George. He shook his head. When she went to lean again, he rose from his seat and stepped in line.

Roberts sat at the edge of the stage with a handkerchief in one hand and a bottle of olive oil in the other. He was a young man: long nose, a long, smooth face. His hair was combed with tonic and laid back on his head. He wore a plain white shirt, a tie, gray slacks, polished black shoes. Between his legs stood a microphone tilted toward his mouth, positioned low on its stand.

Folks came and stood in front the stage, handed one of Roberts's assistants an index card on which was written their names and the names of their afflictions. These in turn were handed to Roberts.

George examined the blank card and the pencil he had been passed moments before. He looked to the evangelist who was addressing an elderly woman with braces on her legs.

“How long have you had this, sister?”

“I been this way since I was twenty-two,” the woman told him.

Roberts dabbed oil into the palm of one hand and told her to come close. He leaned over the edge of the stage, put the hand to her cheek, and lifted the other toward the ceiling, praying into the microphone.

“Lord,” he prayed, “deliver her.”

The woman began to shiver; then her body became
rigid and she fell backward to the ground. A man in a dark suit came and covered her legs with a blanket. Another member of the audience approached, handed up her card. George watched all this, feeling of a sudden as if someone had hollowed him.

He started to turn, but just then one of Roberts's assistants happened down the line. He noticed George's card was blank and touched him on the elbow, inquiring after his affliction.

George shook his head, tried to step around the man, but found himself blocked by a row of card tables piled with books and pamphlets.

The man looked askance, leaned toward him, and George quickly told the story of his fall. When he finished, the other's face had an amazed look. He took George by the arm, parted the crowd, and led him onto the stage. They stood to the side while Roberts prayed, and then the man went to the evangelist and whispered into his ear.

Roberts turned. He rose, took the microphone from its stand, and walked to George. The crowd quieted. Roberts's voice in the microphone was wet and very loud.

“Tell these people your name.”

George shifted from one foot to the other. He brought a hand from behind his back and scratched at his nose. “George Crider,” he said.

“And you had an accident?” Roberts asked.

“Yes.”

“You fell?”

“Yes.”

“How far?”

“One hundred sixteen feet.”

Many in the crowd gasped; some called to God.

“And you were hurt?”

“Yes.”

“How many bones did you break?”

“All of them,” George said.

The preacher put his hand on George's shoulder.

“And what did the doctors say?”

George paused, looked down. “They told me I would never walk again.”

There were a few moments of silence. Then the crowd began to stir and then to applaud. They cried in loud voices, and most all raised their hands. One man left his seat and began to run the aisles.

Roberts turned to face them. “Do you hear that?” he said. “The God that did this can do the same for you. The same God who caused this brother to walk after breaking every bone in his body can grant you your deliverance.”

More folk left their seats and stepped in line. The preacher stood above them like an auctioneer.

George was led from the stage. He saw Sadie waiting for him near the ramp.

As he was about to walk away, the man who had discovered him asked if he would return the next night to give his testimony. George shook his head,
took his wife by the arm, and escorted her from the tent.

I
T WAS MORE
than twenty years before he would visit another faith healer. By then George had retired from his job and begun to collect his pension. He and Sadie traveled most the year, attending antique shows, conventions, fairs and galleries. They acquired piece after piece, and in the 1969 edition of
Carnival Glass Anthology,
there was a black-and-white photo of his wife standing next to a bookcase full of depression-era teacups.

But, however great Sadie's satisfaction, George's condition grew worse. His hands would often shake and occasionally his vision blur. The man slept only two or three hours a night, and at times would go days on no sleep at all, walking through his afternoons with a glazed look. He did not talk about the dreams or the ailments that made him unfamiliar to his body. He refused to go back to the doctors or turn to the God of his father. He refused to take the shotgun from under the seat of the car and place the barrel in his mouth. Regardless, he found himself polishing the weapon once or twice a month, breaking it over at the dining-room table to check the shells.

In Denton, Texas, one night, Sadie forced him into a revival meeting held by the Reverend R. T. Shorbach. She told George that life with him had caused her to need healing of the spirit. George
watched his wife leave her seat, walk the aisle, and take her place at the end of Shorbach's prayer line. He retrieved a hymnal from beside his chair and began to flip the pages.

Shorbach was an older gentleman from Tyler, Texas, who clothed his body in immense black suits. He had fat features and a welcoming face, thick eyebrows, a sweep of gray hair. The preacher smelled of strong cologne and sweat.

He stood down from the platform with a microphone, laying hands on those who came through his line. In front of each, he would pray loudly, examining the ceiling as people fell away from his thick fingers to the arms of an assistant.

After a while, George could no longer watch. He walked to the lobby, found a rest room and then a vending machine. He put quarters in, but the candy caught in a loop of the wire that held it. When he came back to the auditorium, his wife stood before the massive preacher. George crossed his arms and watched from the wings.

His wife seemed small from the distance. She was a petite woman still, her silver hair pinned in an elaborate bun. George watched as Shorbach's hand came to her forehead, watched Sadie's arms rise. He continued watching as her body went suddenly rigid and she fell backward into the arms of Shorbach's assistant. She was laid on the ground, covered with a blanket.

“Slain,” Shorbach said over the swell of the organ, “slain in the Spirit.”

The next night Sadie persuaded George to return to Shorbach's meeting, where she again approached the prayer line and soon lay sprawled on the floor.

A month later, in Biloxi, Mississippi, George would watch his wife fall from the hands of the Reverend Shorbach, and two months later in Little Rock, and six later in Atlanta. Sadie began keeping two schedules on her refrigerator, one of antique conventions, one of Shorbach's camp meetings. And several years later, when Sadie stepped from the prayer line in front of the man of God, he held the microphone away from his face and asked where he knew her from.

Sadie smiled, raised both hands, and braced herself for the fall.

Y
EARS PASSED.
Numb years of sickness and pain. Sadie continued seeing Shorbach when the preacher came within driving distance of Perser. If George was too ill to take her, Sadie would phone a nephew to do so, and when he could not oblige, the woman closed the door to her bedroom and watched the broadcast on TBN.

In the past, George had been a quiet man; now he was utterly silent. He did not answer his wife's questions, and when visitors called, he would retreat to his work shed behind the house. He was in considerable
pain but took nothing for it. His lower back had deteriorated, his shoulders and hips. Some mornings it would take him upward of an hour to rise from bed. The dreams, as ever, continued to shake him, and he spent much time weighing the benefits of life and death.

Then one evening, Sadie fell from the back porch. She was putting out bread for squirrels, and she slipped, snapping her leg below the knee. From the shed, George heard his wife's screaming. He managed to position her in the backseat of the car, drive her to the hospital. When they sent her home with a cast and crutches, it was George who helped her to bathe, brought her meals, took her from place to place.

“George,” Sadie would say. “I need to go.”

George would trundle in, assist her to the bathroom, stand outside the door waiting.

It was late that summer when the First Pentecostal brought in Leslie Snodgrass, an evangelist of fifteen, already known across Oklahoma and much of Missouri. People said amazing things of the boy. They claimed signs and wonders, miracles and healing and salvation of the lost. He preached repentance, prayed over the hopelessly ill. The young man came from a small town outside Tishomingo and had been preaching since the age of six. He was short and fair, very thin, but his voice was that of a man three times his years, and audiences watched him with an amazed
look. The elders in the crowd would shout and sing, and sinners sat with whitened faces, sinking quietly in their seats. When Snodgrass ended his sermons, old and young alike would fall into the altars to seek mercy. He knelt among them and, when moved, stood to his feet and walked about, laying hands on the sick and troubled of spirit.

Sadie soon heard of this and began asking George to take her to one of these meetings. She wanted to see her leg heal quickly.

George had decided some time before he could not endure another service; he told his wife to find someone else. But Sadie was persistent, and in a matter of nights George found himself sitting along the rear wall of the church, listening to the young evangelist's words.

He watched with an expression no less amazed than those around him. It was indeed a sight to astonish. The boy moved like one possessed, his eyes tightly shut, wads of tissue clenched in his fists. There were hard men who had heard him preach and could not return to their former lives, but by this point George believed only in anguish, for that, he felt, was the truth of the world, and though entranced by the young man pacing the platform above him, he did not recover his faith.

The boy's sermon ended with an altar call, and the altars were soon full. George sat with open eyes, staring over the bowed heads. People knelt, wrestling
with their spirits. Occasionally, an elder among them would raise his voice in travail. All prayed for what seemed a very long time, and then Snodgrass rose, approached the platform, and asked those in need of healing to come forward. Sadie began tugging at George's sleeve, wanting him to help her there.

George pulled her to her feet, positioned the crutches beneath her arms. She hobbled out into the aisle and began inching toward the altar, her husband following a few steps behind. They reached the row of people standing along the front of the sanctuary, found themselves a place at the far right. George made sure of Sadie, then leaned against the wall to take the weight from his back.

He watched Snodgrass make his way down the line. The boy had no microphone, no handkerchief or oil. He would stop and speak quietly with each, bow his head and whisper, sometimes laying a pale hand to the person's shoulder, his demeanor one of tranquillity, calm.

George was shocked to see the people remain standing. They did not fall; they did not quake or run the aisles. They stood their places with broken looks, the wise looks of the condemned.

George noticed his wife was also watching the boy, but her face held a bitter expression, more so the closer Snodgrass came. She seemed to understand that the evangelist would not lay hands to her forehead. He would not send her to the carpet, and
no assistant would stand waiting with arms and a blanket. Sadie would leave just as she came, and realizing this, George began to chuckle quietly.

The boy came closer and Sadie's face grew harsher, and as Snodgrass was praying for the man next to her, she spun suddenly from the line, casting George derision as she turned.

George watched his wife go up the aisle, past the pew where they'd formerly sat, out the double doors into the lobby. A louder laugh escaped his lips, and when he turned back around, his face was cracked from smiling. Snodgrass stood in front of him.

George's laughter died, and he watched the evangelist with an anxious look, failing for a moment to blink or breathe. The boy was utterly ashen, and he walked sternly up, raised his hand, and placed it to the old man's chest, closing his eyes to mumble a few words. George did not catch them. Only, the moment they left the boy's lips, the audience beheld George Crider fall like lightning.

It did not seem so to George. To him his descent seemed to take a very long time. At first there was the feeling his legs had given way, his limbs wilted to nothing. He sensed his arm go numb and a terrific burst go off in his chest just to the left of where the boy had touched him. He felt warm there and very still and the air that buzzed about his ears was like fire.

There was time for George to consider many things
before he struck the ground, to consider a time before dreams troubled his sleep, before an injury placed him in a hospital bed. He considered walking forty miles through the Quashita forest, under the pines and cedars of southeast Oklahoma, and then the time of his boyhood under the dense trees, before his brother had fallen, before he had a brother at all. He considered when it was only he and his mother and his father, when they would pick him off the ground, only a child of four years then, place him in the center of a patchwork quilt, and lift him, allowing him to leave the fabric for a moment before he sank back to its folds. They repeated this for what seemed like hours—though it could not have been so long—the thin child rising and falling, caught up, snapped into the air.