Revival (25 page)

“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 County 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.

Bree had tracked the Pastor Danny Jacobs Healing Revival Tour from Colorado to California, ten stops in all. Together we had watched the new YouTube vids added to the website's Miracle Testimony page with the avidity of marine biologists studying some newly discovered species of fish. We debated the validity of each (first in my living room, later in this same bed), eventually putting them into four categories:
utter bullshit
,
probable bullshit
,
impossible to be sure
, and
hard not to believe
.

By this process, a master list had slowly emerged. On that sunny August morning in the bedroom of my second-floor apartment, there were fifteen names on it. These were cures we felt ninety-eight percent sure of, culled down from a roster of almost seven hundred and fifty possibles. Robert Rivard was on that list; Mabel Jergens from Albuquerque was on it; so was Rowena Mintour and Ben Hicks, the man in the Norris County Fairgrounds tent who had torn off his neck brace and tossed his crutches aside.

Hicks was an interesting case. Both he and his wife had confirmed the authenticity of the cure in a
Denver Post
article published a couple of weeks after Jacobs's traveling show moved on. He was a history prof at the Community College of Denver with an impeccable reputation. He termed himself a religious skeptic and described his attendance at the Norris County revival as “a last resort.” His wife confirmed this. “We are amazed and thankful,” she said. She added that they had started going to church again.

Rivard, Jergens, Mintour, Hicks, and everyone else on our master list had been touched by Jacobs's “holy rings” between May of 2007 and December of 2008, when the Healing Revival Tour had concluded in San Diego.

Bree had begun the follow-up work with a light heart, but by October of 2008, her attitude had darkened. That was when she had found a story about Robert Rivard—no more than a squib, really—in the Monroe County
Weekly Telegram
. It said the “miracle boy” had been admitted to St. Louis Children's Hospital “for reasons unrelated to his former muscular dystrophy.”

Bree made enquiries, both by computer and telephone. Rivard's parents refused to speak to her, but a nurse at Children's finally did when Bree told her she was trying to expose C. Danny Jacobs as a fraud. This was not what we were doing, exactly, but it worked. After being assured by Bree that she would never be named in any article or book, the nurse said Bobby Rivard had been admitted suffering what she called “chain headaches,” and was given a battery of tests to rule out a brain tumor. Which they did. Eventually the boy had been transferred to Gad's Ridge, in Oakville, Missouri.

“What kind of hospital is that?” Bree had asked.

“Mental,” the nurse said. And while Bree was digesting this: “Most people who go into Gad's, they never come out.”

Bree's efforts to find out more were met by a stone wall at Gad's Ridge. Because I considered Rivard our Patient Zero, I flew to St. Louis, rented a car, and drove to Oakville. After several afternoons spent in the bar nearest to the hospital, I found an orderly who would talk for the small emolument of sixty dollars. Robert Rivard was still walking fine, the orderly said, but never walked any farther than the corner of his room. When he did, he would simply stand there, like a child being punished for misbehavior, until someone led him back to his bed or the nearest chair. On good days he ate; during his bad stretches, which were far more common, he had to be tube-fed. He was classed semicatatonic. A gork, in the orderly's words.

“Is he still suffering from chain headaches?” I asked him.

The orderly shrugged meaty shoulders. “Who knows?”

Who, indeed.

 • • •

So far as we could tell,
nine of the people on our master list were fine. This included Rowena Mintour, who had resumed teaching, and Ben Hicks, whom I interviewed myself in November of 2008, five months after his cure. I didn't tell him everything (for one thing, I never mentioned electricity of either the ordinary or the special type), but I shared enough to establish my bona fides: heroin addiction cured by Jacobs in the early nineties, followed by troubling aftereffects that eventually diminished and then disappeared. What I wanted to know was if
he
had suffered any aftereffects—blackouts, flashing lights, sleepwalking, perhaps lapses into Tourette's-like speech.

No to all, he said. He was fine as could be.

“I don't know if it was God working through him or not,” Hicks told me over coffee in his office. “My wife does, and that's fine, but I don't care. I'm pain-free and walking two miles a day. In another two months I expect to be cleared to play tennis, as long as it's doubles, where I only have to run a few steps.
Those
are the things I care about. If he did for you what you say he did, you'll know what I mean.”

I did, but I also knew more.

That Robert Rivard was enjoying his cure in a mental institution, sipping glucose via IV rather than Cokes with his friends.

That Patricia Farmingdale, cured of peripheral neuropathy in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had poured salt into her eyes in an apparent effort to blind herself. She had no memory of doing it, let alone why.

That Stefan Drew of Salt Lake City had gone on walking binges after being cured of a supposed brain tumor. These walks, some of them fifteen-mile marathons, did not occur during blackouts; the urge just came on him, he said, and he had to go.

That Veronica Freemont of Anaheim had suffered what she called “interruptions of vision.” One had resulted in a low-speed collision with another driver. She tested negative for drugs and alcohol, but turned in her license just the same, afraid it would happen again.

That in San Diego, Emil Klein's miracle cure of a neck injury was followed by a periodic compulsion to go out into his backyard and eat dirt.

And there was Blake Gilmore of Las Vegas, who claimed C. Danny Jacobs had cured him of lymphoma during the late summer of 2008. A month later he lost his job as a blackjack dealer when he began to spew profanity at the customers—stuff like “Take a hit, take a fucking hit, you chickenshit asshole.” When he began shouting similar things at his three kids, his wife threw him out. He moved to a no-tell motel north of Fashion Show Drive. Two weeks later he was found dead on the bathroom floor with a bottle of Krazy Glue in one hand. He had used it to plug his nostrils and seal his mouth shut. His wasn't the only obit coupled to Jacobs that Bree had found with her search engine, but it was the only one we felt sure was connected.

Until Cathy Morse, that was.

 • • •

I was feeling sleepy again
in spite of an infusion of black breakfast tea. I blamed it on the auto-scroll feature of Bree's laptop. It was helpful, I said, but also hypnotic.

“Honey, if I may misquote Al Jolson, you ain't seen nothing yet,” she said. “Next year Apple's going to release a pad-style computer that'll revolutionize—” There was a
bing
before she could finish, and the auto-scroll came to a halt. She peered at the screen, where a line was highlighted in red. “Uh-oh. That's one of the names you gave me when we started.”

“What?” Meaning
who
. I'd only been able to give her a few back then, and one had been that of my brother Con. Jacobs had
claimed
that one was just a placebo, but—

“Hold your water and let me click the link.”

I leaned over to look. My first feeling was relief: not Con, of course not. My second was a species of dismal horror.

The obituary, from the Tulsa
World
, was for one Catherine Anne Morse, age thirty-eight. Died suddenly, the obit said. And this:
Cathy's grieving parents ask that in lieu of flowers, mourners send contributions to the Suicide Prevention Action Network. These contributions are tax deductible
.

“Bree,” I said. “Go to last week's—”

“I know what to do, so let me do it.” Then, taking a second look at my face: “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said, but I didn't know if I was or not. I kept remembering how Cathy Morse had looked mounting to the Portraits in Lightning stage all those years ago, a pretty little Sooner gal with tanned legs flashing beneath a denim skirt with a frayed hem.
Every pretty girl carries her own positive charge
, Jacobs had said, but somewhere along the way, Cathy's charge had turned negative. No mention of a husband, although a girl that good-looking must not have lacked for suitors. No mention of children, either.

Maybe she liked girls
, I thought, but that was pretty lame.

“Here you go, sugar,” Bree said. She turned the laptop so I could see it more easily. “Same newspaper.”

WOMAN IN DEATH JUMP FROM CYRUS AVERY MEMORIAL BRIDGE,
the headline read. Cathy Morse had left no explanatory note behind, and her grieving parents were mystified. “I wonder if it wasn't somebody pushed her,” Mrs. Morse said . . . but according to the article, foul play had been ruled out, although it didn't say how.

Has he done it before, mister?
Mr. Morse had asked me back in 1992. This after punching my old fifth business in the face and splitting his lip.
Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?

Yes, sir,
I thought now.
Yes, sir, I believe he has.

“Jamie, you don't know for sure,” Bree said, touching my shoulder. “Sixteen years is a long time. It could have been something else entirely. She might have found out she had a bad cancer, or some other fatal disease. Fatal and painful.”

“It was him,” I said. “I know it, and by now I think you do, too. Most of his subjects are fine afterwards, but some go away with time bombs in their heads. Cathy Morse did, and it went off. How many others are going to go off in the next ten or twenty years?”

I was thinking I could be one of them, and Bree surely knew that, too. She didn't know about Hugh, because that wasn't my story to tell. He hadn't had a recurrence of his prismatics since the night at the tent revival—and that one was probably brought on by stress—but it could happen again, and although we didn't talk about it, I'm sure he knew it as well as I did.