Beyond Belief (29 page)

The adults have dark circles around their eyes from praying all the time. God will meet our needs if we pray harder. We pray day and night. Someone donates a house for us to stay in for a few weeks. Everyone says it’s a miracle. There is no electricity or indoor plumbing. Believers bring bags of squash from their garden. We eat squash every day for weeks until finally the squash plants give up and stop bearing.

I watch Brother Terrell perform miracles under the tent and notice that they are whole and perfect. I watch the lame beat their crutches into splinters and walk. The blind see. The deaf hear. I wonder why the miracles in our regular life are always half finished, as though God loses interest and wanders off. Once I start to think this way, I can’t stop. The realization dawns on me that not everyone is healed. It’s a test of faith, my mother says. Randall, Brother Terrell’s son, hemorrhages blood, a river of blood. I watch it pour from his mouth and stain the sawdust while his daddy preaches on and on about faith. Blood splatters the windows of the car we travel in, flows across state lines and rises like the tide in the rooms of the motor courts we pull into when we’re too tired to go on. Randall is always dying. The doctors say he will not live to grow up. His daddy prays and he gets better. The doctors say he can’t last much longer.

This went on for forty years. When Randall finally died everyone said, I thought he was going to get a miracle.

I was five and Gary was three the first time my mother left us behind. One day we looked up and she was gone. A few months later she was back. She came and went like this for three years. She always cried when she told us she was going back on the road. I didn’t cry, but my brother Gary did. Once I pulled him off the chain-link fence that separated us from the car that drove her away. I watched the blood run down the scratches on his skinny kid legs. I
watched his mouth stretch into a wide, red
O
, like the entrance to a carnival fun house. I was always watching.

I prayed my mother would return for good, and eventually she did. She made a home for Gary and me, a home Brother Terrell visited between revivals. I watched him emerge from my mother’s bedroom, sleepy-eyed and sheepish. I asked my mother if this was adultery, and she said no, because they were married in God’s eyes.

The focus of Brother Terrell’s preaching switched from divine healing to giving everything to God. He told believers they must sacrifice everything for the gospel. They sold their homes and cars and gave the proceeds to him. Brother Terrell bought the World’s Largest Gospel Tent, a red, white, and blue canvas that ran the length of two football fields and seated between five and ten thousand, depending on how close together the chairs were placed and who tells the story. There didn’t seem to be enough wattage to light that tent. From a distance, the faces of the crowd appeared as bright little ovals against a sea of shadow. Brother Terrell’s followers were so united in their love and support of him the press called them Terrellites. When they ran out of money to give, they brought family heirlooms, china, silver, and wedding rings. When they ran out of valuables, they took off their shoes and gave those to him too. I watched the wealth accumulate; fleets of Mercedes, airplanes, movie-star horses, and house after house.

My mother said God had blessed Brother Terrell for all of his years of hard work and sacrifice. She became his ghostwriter, and her monthly articles always appeared in his magazine under his byline. It was in one of these articles that Brother Terrell, through my mother’s words, laid claim to the prophetic mantle. He dressed all in black for tent services and fasted for months at a time. Jesus, God, and the devil spoke to him. He prophesied earthquakes, bombings, plagues of
locusts, famine, war in the streets, the numbers 666 stamped across foreheads as well as hearts and minds. I watched people scribble his every word into spiral notebooks. The turbulence of the sixties and seventies lent credibility to his prophesies.

No one questioned Brother Terrell for fear of divine retribution. They believed he was God’s anointed, a pure and holy man. They did not know about his relationship with my mother or the three daughters he had fathered with her. I was twelve when my first sister was born and fifteen when the twins came. I asked my mother how she would keep these girls a secret and what she would tell them as they grew up. She gave me the same answer Brother Terrell had given her: Jesus will come before then.

We left the babies with a neighbor when we attended Brother Terrell’s revivals. Over time the atmosphere under the tent shifted from celebratory to ominous. Brother Terrell stripped off his shirt onstage and ordered the men who worked for him to beat him with a belt. There is a price to be paid, he said. I watched the audience wail and cry and rock in their seats, arms folded across their chests and stomachs. I cried too, for him, my family, myself, for all of us.

Oddly enough, during the prophetic period our home life was the most normal it had ever been. We lived in the same house and I went to the same school for three years. Brother Terrell ranted against the evil of the World, but, compared to the tent revivals and our personal lives, the world seemed like a tame and friendly place. The families of the kids I went to school with seemed like good people. I liked the way their parents knew things, the names of trees and birds and past presidents. I liked the way their knowledge infused the world and the things in it with a sense of importance and permanence. My family valued the invisible over the material, dreams and visions over reality, the spiritual over flesh and blood.

In my early teens I spent hours walking the land around my mother’s home. I watched morning break over the pasture and scatter light this way and that. I watched the sun withdraw in the evening, its long golden light caressing the grasses as it went. I watched the birds rise and wheel above me in a single sweep of motion. If I looked at something long enough, the veil that separated me from it fell away. There was no
I
. There was no
it
. There was only connection. This experience first came to me in early childhood when one of the caretakers my mother left me with locked me out of the house for hours each day. I found in that solitude what evaded me under the tent and in church—the ability to slip the bounds of my own self-consciousness. And yet, it was not so much an annihilation of the self as an affirmation of belonging. I began, without realizing, to think of these experiences as sacred.

I still believed Brother Terrell knew the Will of God and that his ministry was divinely ordained. But the questions that had always been with me grew louder as I got older. Questions about the nature of God and his will and the nature of Brother Terrell and his relationship with my mother. Why did God demand everything dear to us? Why was it okay for Brother Terrell to accumulate wealth when he told his followers to give up their possessions? Why was it okay for my mother and Brother Terrell to live as they did? No matter how hard I prayed, the questions and the doubts they brought would not go away.

Meanwhile the Terrellites were preparing for the end-times. Thousands of them moved to backwaters across Texas and the South, designated by Brother Terrell as Blessed Areas. These places would provide the only safety during the apocalypse, which was imminent. My mother announced that we too would soon move closer to one of the Blessed Areas. I didn’t know much about who
I was or who I would become, but I knew I couldn’t move to the middle of nowhere to wait for the world to end. Especially since everything in me was still waiting for it to begin.

I took the only way out. I married. My husband was twenty-three and the second-smartest student in his law school class. I was fifteen. After the wedding, my mother and family moved away. I did not know their whereabouts for a time. My mother said the secrecy helped ensure their safety during the apocalypse. For me, there was isolation. There was grief. There was a longing for my own kind. God, my family, Brother Terrell, the tents, the Terrellites, and everything I knew were tangled in a single knotty reality that felt like home. I could not leave one without leaving the other.

I attempted on occasion to rejoin the Terrellites. My husband and I attended a revival where we met a woman with a young son who seemed genuinely deaf. Brother Terrell prayed for the boy and he heard. This miracle turned us into believers for a time. Then all the old questions returned. The constant internal interrogation of everything I had been taught was true caused a rift in my soul that would not heal. I experienced my lack of faith as a character flaw, and I hated myself for it. I turned that hatred on my husband, and we divorced. Life became one long alcohol- and cocaine-fueled party. I contracted an illness doctors could not identify, and, after months of fevers and aches and unexplained weight loss, I went back to the tent. Brother Terrell prayed for me, and I woke up well the next morning.

Jesus tells a story in the New Testament about the deaths of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man goes to hell and begs God to send Lazarus from heaven to warn his brothers to change their ways so that they too will not end up in torment. God replies that the testimony of the dead is not enough to convince an unbeliever. And so it was that the magic of miracles could not compel me to stay.

It would be easy to say I left the Terrellites because of my mother’s abandonment, the deceit and money grubbing, the harsh and uncompromising view of God. These are reasons people understand, and no doubt they played a part. But in the end these reasons are simply pieces of the story. I have come to understand that a large part of why I left, why I was always leaving, was not because of anything my mother or Brother Terrell did, but because of who I was. Or rather who I wasn’t. What I am talking about here is a vision, a vision that haunted, inspired, and remained with me through years of agnosticism that nonetheless found me kneeling in an Episcopal church from time to time and sitting zazen in a corner of my room. It is a vision of the tent, stretched out along the outskirts of town where the trash and outcasts congregate. She opens her grimy canvas wings and pulls them under, old and young, black and white, poor and poorer. They clap and dance and wave their arms. They jabber like idiots and smile like angels. The differences that drive them apart fall away. They are, for a few hours, one people. It is always them, never me. I am on the outside watching. This is where I will make my home. This is where I belong.

Separation

Colleen Haggerty

M
om reads me the acceptance letter to Western Washington University. The relief in her voice is palpable. This was what we both hoped for when I mailed in my application two months ago. But now, in my medicated daze, I can only mimic her smile, and wonder if college is even possible anymore.

A few days later, my drama teacher, Miss Tarr, visits me in the hospital with my script for
Funny Girl
. On the last day before Christmas vacation, I’d quickly scanned the casting list in the hallway near the drama department. Next to M
RS
. S
TRAKOSH
my name was penciled in! I spent winter break thrilled with the thought of a singing role in a musical. But now I know I can’t be in the play. Still, here is Miss Tarr, smiling, eyes determined, like she is doing me a favor. How can they expect so much from me? College? Acting? Everything has changed.

The car accident has ripped more from me than half my leg; it has torn my picture-perfect future into shreds. This accident is worse than when my father suddenly drowned four years ago. Even though that hurt more than anything I’d ever felt, my Catholic faith taught me to believe that death was simply “God’s will.” God wanted Dad with him. It was his time. But why would God do
this
to
me
? The stirrings of deep anger roil in my gut.

I turn my gaze down to my stump. Yes, this is the name that doctors, nurses, and now I call the remainder of my leg. Only those of us with appendages that have been whacked off, like a fallen tree, get the honor of using this ugly term to describe a part of our own bodies. The small stump under the white blanket ends too quickly. Enclosed in rolls and rolls of casting material it is too wide. This lump makes me sick, and I’m sure it’ll make everyone else sick. I turn my eyes away.