Holy Ghost Girl (10 page)

“Good to see you. Thank y’all for coming. Later, we’ll talk later.”

Once the door of the trailer clicked shut behind him, he began to move up and down the tiny corridor. He felt as though something inside him had slipped out of place. There was nothing to do but pray, and as he prayed, his son’s face came before him. Randall was giving Raymond and Marie fits. Several times a week Brother Terrell fed a bag of change into a pay phone and called the neighbor who lived nearest to his sister and brother-in-law. She ran across the pasture to get Randall and Marie or Raymond, and he called back fifteen or twenty minutes later. His sister and brother-in-law kept him up-to-date on all Randall’s shenanigans. He skipped school and picked fights and no one could do anything with him. He had called that morning to check on Randall, but the neighbor had not answered her phone.

He prayed all afternoon. Usually after a day of prayer, he felt relieved, purged, but not this time. He tried to read scripture to prepare for the evening service. It was of no use. Reading was hard for him. In fact, the only thing he could read was the Bible, but on this day the letters on the page seemed particularly stubborn and refused to arrange themselves into words. He didn’t know what to do about Randall. He opened the door, stepped out of the trailer, and headed into the tent to preach.

He had taken the first step up the ladder to the platform when he felt the hand on his arm. He turned and looked into a face filled with concern.

“Brother Terrell? It’s Randall. He’s real sick. He’s in the hospital in Atlanta.”

At the edge of the tent, Betty Ann clutched the baby and leaned against one of the poles. Her face crumpled with pain. “Oh, my boy, my boy, my boy.”

Brother Terrell took her arm. “Let’s get in the car. We got to go to Atlanta.” For the first time in a long time they were in agreement.

It seems logical that my mother would have stayed in West Virginia to provide the music for the services, and that Gary and I would have stayed with her, but I can’t recall anything after the Terrells left. What I remember are the stories of the trip as told by Brother Terrell and later Randall and repeated so many times that they took up residence in me and began to function as memory. Only it is not my memory. It can’t be, because I am not in the stories. The only characters are Brother Terrell, Betty Ann, Randall, and the bit players who recite their lines on cue.

The Terrells drove a couple of hours before stopping for coffee and calling the hospital in Atlanta for an update. The nurse told Brother Terrell that the doctors had no idea why Randall was hemorrhaging. They had given him transfusions, but he continued to throw up blood. They wanted to do an exploratory surgery; it was the only way to find out what was wrong. Brother Terrell said he would think about it. He didn’t trust anything he couldn’t understand, and that included banks, government, lawyers, and doctors—especially doctors. He always said if his mama had let the doctors have their way and amputate his leg, he’d have ended up a one-legged faith healer or worse, dead. He couldn’t figure out what to do, so he prayed, silently and aloud, throughout the trip. He didn’t beg, plead, or bargain with God to save his son’s life; he demanded.

When he finished haranguing God, he started in on the devil.
I rebuke you, you foul spirit of death. You can’t have my son. I won’t give him to you. You have no authority over me or my family. Git away!
When words failed, he spoke in tongues.

Somewhere on the road, God began to talk back. The voice of God always came to him first as an impression, something he felt rather than heard.
If you let those doctors operate on Randall, he will surely die.

Brother Terrell rolled down the window and let the cool, damp fall air hit him in the face. Beside him, Betty Ann sat stiff and silent, a wall of grief. It was always Brother Terrell’s stories, Brother Terrell’s struggles, Brother Terrell’s pain that mattered. His suffering dwarfed her own and that of everyone around him. We were there to bear witness and offer support. The closer you were to him, the more this was true. When his voice fell silent Betty Ann would have prayed that most common of prayers:
Oh, God. Not my son. Please. Not my son.
Her petition would have beat against the wall of her mind like a trapped fly. She would not have dared remind God of all she had sacrificed: a steady paycheck, a home, security for her children, the occasional new dress, the casual comforts. In a world of mythic struggles and divine visitations, Betty Ann was the most ordinary of women. Sure, she grumbled from time to time. Lamented all she and her children had done without.

She might have wondered why, after all Brother Terrell’s fasting and praying, after all the miracles and the sacrifice, Randall lay dying.

The car slowed, surged forward, slowed, and surged again, rocking back and forth down the highway. Brother Terrell always drove with one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake. In the distance, tiny points of light pierced the darkness. They were almost in Atlanta.

They parked the car and entered the colorless glare that was Grady Hospital. Each step down the narrow corridor diminished Brother Terrell. Away from his milieu, he lost his status as celebrity preacher and became again the son of sharecroppers, a cripple boy whose family depended on charity to get by, an uneducated man to whom the workings of the greater world remained a mystery. By the time a nurse approached and asked what it was he needed, his gaze was fixed on the toes of his spit-shined wingtips.

“Yes, well, ah, we come here to, to see Randall. Randall Terrell.”

The woman looked down from beneath her big white hat. “It’s five thirty. In the morning, sir. Come back later, during visiting hours.”

He plunged his hands into his pockets and jingled the keys and coins. “Well, uh, look, we, uh, we drove straight through and all. To, you know, to get here.”

“Sir. He’s asleep. Everyone’s asleep.”

Betty Ann whimpered.

“My wife here, she’s real worried. She needs to see her boy.”

The nurse raised her voice as if he were hard of hearing. “Surely you want him to get his rest.”

Another nurse stepped from behind the desk. “What’s going on here?”

“These people want to see their son. I told them to come back later.”

“Who’s your son?”

Brother Terrell shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Randall. David Randall Terrell. We drove all night.”

“Oh, the Terrell boy. He’s been asking for his daddy and mama. Go on in, let him see you’re here, but don’t stay long.”

They opened the door to the sound of moaning. Long white curtains hung from the ceiling, dividing the room into three small rectangles. Each area held a bed and hospital machinery that whirred and churned and cast a gray watery light, enough to see that the first two tiny, ancient faces in the beds did not belong to their son. Randall occupied the third bed, the one next to the wall, the one from which the moaning came. They stood over him together, quiet and still, watching his body move and twitch. His arms sprouted tube after tube. Betty Ann’s hand flew to cover her mouth. Brother Terrell whispered in her ear: “Trust God, Betty Ann. We have to trust him.”

 

 

The next morning Brother Terrell sat under the crooked preacher’s tent and watched him take the offering. People stood in line and waited to give him money. The man didn’t have to plead or beg. He was glad he didn’t have the hundred dollars God had told him to give the preacher. As the service drew to a close, he stood to leave and a man who sat in front of him turned around.

“Brother Terrell, is that you?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“We came to see you last year in Chattanooga. You healed my wife’s rheumatism. I been wantin’ to thank you.” The man shook his hand and palmed a twenty-dollar bill.

“Brother Bob,” he yelled to a man three rows over. “This here is David Terrell. That tent evangelist that healed Marie.”

Within a few minutes Brother Terrell found himself in the center of a crowd. People reached toward him, grabbed his hands, hugged his neck, and put money in his hands and coat pockets. When they finally let him go, he had a thousand dollars. He counted out five twenty-dollar bills and went to find the preacher.

Later that afternoon, Brother Terrell went to the hospital alone. He stood over Randall’s bed and looked down at his sleeping boy. “Son, son, I need to talk to you.” Randall opened his eyes. “God told me he is going to give you a miracle, but you have to believe. Do you believe?”

“Yes, Daddy. I believe.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear, son. I’m taking you outta here.”

He pulled the needles and tubes from Randall’s arms, scooped him up, and walked out of the hospital room. A nurse called to him in the hallway. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking my son.”

“Sir, please. Wait. Let me get a doctor.”

“We don’t have time to wait.” He walked past her and continued down the hall into the waiting room, carrying Randall wrapped in a blanket the same way he had carried him as a newborn home from the hospital. A flock of nurses and a couple of doctors trailed behind them.

One of the doctors grabbed his arm. “I can’t let you take that boy out of here. He’ll die.”

“He’ll die if he stays.”

“Mr. Terrell, we’ll get a court order.”

“You better get it fast, ’cause we’re leaving now.”

He walked out of the hospital and laid Randall in the backseat of his car. The boy looked scared and pale. He had not noticed earlier how pale. If he had, he might not have had the nerve to do what he was doing. “Son, you’re not going to die. God is going to give you a miracle.”

“I know, Daddy.”

Brother Terrell and Randall drove a hundred miles an hour, never stopping or slowing down until they crossed the state line. They made it back to West Virginia in time for Brother Terrell to preach the morning service the next day. He sent one of the tent men back for Betty Ann and the baby. By the time they arrived, Randall was raking leaves to make money to put in his daddy’s offering.

 

 

Randall hemorrhaged off and on for the rest of his life. Years later we learned that he suffered from a rare birth defect. A vein intended to route blood to his heart dead-ended in his stomach. His body produced a network of tiny capillaries to ferry the blood supply. It was an ingenious work-around, but from time to time the network ruptured. At first the blood showed up as dark patches in his stool, subtle and easy to miss. Then the blood began to engorge his belly and there was nothing to do but wait and pray for a miracle. Once the hemorrhage reached critical mass, blood spewed from his lips. I remember the splattered chaos of that blood and the fear that came with it, long urgent journeys through the night with the car windows open and the heavy, honeysuckled air of the South pressing down upon us like the left hand of God.

The events I witnessed and the stories about these events have intertwined to form a single thread of memory. Sifted and shaped over time by the adults around me, my recollections have distilled into a mythology of faith, hard to believe, harder still to deny. Here is what I think I know: Randall was sick most of his life, he came close to death again and again, and his father refused to let him go. It was his father’s voice, his father’s faith that tethered him to life. That’s what Randall believed. That’s what we all believed.

TENSIONS BETWEEN MAMA AND BETTY ANN EASED A BIT AFTER RANDALL rejoined us on the road. My mother’s story is, she decided Brother Terrell should stay with his family for the sake of his ministry. There was no such thing as a divorced holiness preacher. Mama said she avoided Brother Terrell as best she could, a difficult feat considering we all occupied the same house during revivals. She and Gary and I went back to traveling in our own car for a time, and I remember her yanking me and other bystanders into any room or space in which she found herself alone with Brother Terrell. She said Brother Terrell pursued her constantly and that she resisted, reminding him he had a wife. That wife would soon give birth to two more daughters. My mother managed to take responsibility for their births, saying, “If I hadn’t talked him into staying with her, they wouldn’t have had all those kids and things might have been different.”

Randall remained healthy for nearly a year, and we did what we always did: moved every three to six weeks, stayed up after the evening service until two or three in the morning, got up early for the morning service, raced back home for lunch, then back to the tent for the afternoon service. If pictures existed from those days, and in my family they do not, they would reveal a pasty-skinned, pinwormy lot with baggy clothes and dark hollows under our eyes. Maybe it was too much “light” bread or not enough pork and beans. We began to physically resemble our metaphoric conception of ourselves—a battlefield on which God and the devil duked it out. The cosmic implications of our hardships and the fact that we expected Jesus to touch down at any moment made the normal touchstones of childhood an afterthought. My mother homeschooled Randall and then Pam as time and energy permitted, enough to keep the authorities off the Terrells’ backs. We lived in fear of “the government.” Whatever it was, there were whispers it might take us kids away. I don’t know if the threat was real or simply an extension of the adults’ increasing mistrust of the larger world, but the rumors added to everyone’s nervous condition. Sometimes Mama or Betty Ann would notice how tired and unkempt we kids looked. “Poor little things,” they said. “This is no life for kids.” Their eyes watered but never quite spilled over into tears.