Miriam's Well (10 page)

“I'm finishing it in class.”

“You're impossible, Adam. Don't you ever do any homework?”

“Not since we finished the poetry worksheet,” I admitted, which wasn't exactly true. Lockers were slamming all around us, and we slid in and out of crowds of people who all seemed to be going in the opposite direction. It was a typical passing period. Two girls threw open the door of the lavatory and bopped me in the face. I never saw Miriam laugh so hard.

After school, the Incredible Psychics were back to do their job on Diana's sun porch. In November, the afternoons gathered enough sun to make the porch decent until about 5:00 when the chill set in that let us know Thanksgiving was coming. Diana got the scene set, mesmerizing Miriam into relaxing, opening her mind, and painting mental pictures of her healing. I was almost starting to believe it myself, as I saw the color rise in Miriam's face. Her feet were crossed at the ankles, and one foot tapped on the brick floor. She was pretty loose.

I'd just about convinced myself that we had the most incredibly simple cure for cancer, that we'd win a Nobel Prize and be fabulously wealthy. Diana, Miriam, and I would travel in our own jet all over the world, demonstrating our miracle. Miriam would do cartwheels and handsprings to show how healthy she was, while Diana and I signed autographs and passed out pamphlets that had lots of exclamation points in them. The lame and the twisted would come to us, and we'd settle them into wicker wingback chairs and work our magic with the mental paintbrush.

Diana's hypnotic voice droned on, feeding my wild fantasy. Exotic ports with topless natives of all sexes. Gorgeous but ailing women who would be eternally grateful to me and would eagerly grant my every wish, starting with a Jaguar.

“Now, repeat after me,” Diana said, “‘I know no limits. My will is the strongest force in all of creation.'”

Suddenly fame and fortune and grateful women vanished.

“NO!” Miriam shouted.

“Relax. What's wrong?” asked Diana.

Miriam's eyes shot open, and she pinned first Diana, then me with them. “Satan sent you,” she hissed.

“Are you kidding?” I couldn't believe things had turned so fast.

“You fooled me into believing you, but now I know the truth about you.”

“Where did things change?” Diana asked. I shrugged. It didn't make any sense.

“You both pretend to be so innocent, leading me like a lamb into the lion's den. But you failed, because you see, I will never say, and I will never even think, that my will is the strongest force in all of creation. That's pure and simple blasphemy.” She grabbed the book out of Diana's hand and ripped it to pieces. Suddenly she spun around and turned her new, hateful eyes on me. “Brother James was right about you, Adam.”

CHAPTER TEN

Told by Miriam

Praise be to God, it was all so simple once again. Brother James had been right all along, but he'd allowed me to discover for myself that he was the only one I could believe. Just as he promised, now I felt I could “mount up with wings like eagles, run and not be weary.” I felt renewed, reborn, because I had recognized the face of Satan, disguised so well, and I had sent him away. I had been tested, and now anything was possible, even separating in my mind Mr. Bergen, my lawyer, from his dangerous son.

“I hear you had a disagreement with Adam,” Mr. Bergen said. He'd just subtly dismissed Mama by saying, “Miriam and I will be fine. Don't let us keep you from your work.” “You going to patch it up with him?”

“It isn't possible,” I said.

“You really think he's the devil?” Mr. Bergen said, chuckling. “He's always been a pretty decent kid.”

“He told you all about it? I'll bet you two had a good laugh. But it doesn't matter anymore, you see, because I've had a renewal. I'm not going to be sick anymore.”

“Fine, fine,” Mr. Bergen said, smoothing out the pages of his yellow pad. “But we're going to need more than a little heavenly miracle to win this case. Let's get down to business. You're required to take your temperature twice a day, and it's been showing normal for a week. Your blood test this week was also normal.”

I smiled. Of course they were normal.

“Dr. Gregory says everything looks okay. You're reporting no pain?”

“None.”

“And you've had no treatment other than personal and collective prayer—oh, except that excursion into la-la land with Adam and Diana?”

I hesitated for just a second, wondering how I could have believed that that hocus pocus might actually help. “Nothing but prayer,” I responded.

“Okay, next week you're scheduled, by court order, to have another bone scan, so the doctors have something to compare the other one with. Then we'll know where we stand.”

“I already know.”

Mr. Bergen gave me a playful look, so like Adam's. “It must be nice,” he said, “to have all the answers.”

At first it was hard going to school after what happened with Diana and Adam. Diana, being a cheerleader type, still smiled and said hello to me every time she passed me, but she didn't call me by name. Adam didn't speak to me at all. Though I sat rows ahead of him in every class we had together, and I never turned around, I was always conscious of his eyes on the back of my head. And if I didn't get out of the classroom first, and he had to walk by me, he turned his eyes away or got busy talking to someone else. Every time I passed him in the hall, he was in animated conversation with someone, or howling with laughter. I thought of Jeremiah: “Why, O Lord, are those who deal treacherously happy?” I put a lot of my energy into ignoring him. Still, when several people were talking at the same time, I could always pick out his voice. When Mr. Moran passed out physics papers, I didn't listen for, but always heard, Adam's name toward the end of the pile.

In English, Mrs. Loomis gave back our poetry worksheets, and she called us up in our poetry pairs to get them. I fiddled with a book and pencil that kept rolling off my desk so Adam could get his paper first. Finally, he picked both papers up and dropped mine on my desk without a word. From the back side of his worksheet I saw lots of Mrs. Loomis's red scribbles, and a big red B+ at the top of the paper.

Mr. Bergen said we'd go to court before Christmas, and we'd been working on the details of my case a little each day. Meanwhile, I went to school and to church. I sang with the choir and taught the prekindergarten babies.

Mama and I had long talks while we put up cranberry sauce for the church Feast of Thanksgiving. The skins of the cranberries popped in the boiling sweet juices; tiny explosions of purple splattered the sides of the pans.

“Baby, do you ever think it's awkward living with the men like we do?”

“I sometimes wish we could have a place of our own.”

“Well, but they need us. They need having us to take care of.”

“Did either one of them ever think about getting married?”

“Uncle Vernon. Maybe fifteen years ago he went with a girl, a college girl, in fact. We all thought she was a fine young Christian woman.”

“So what happened? Did Uncle Vernon get scared?”

“I think she did. She came home for Sunday dinner two, three times, and after a while she saw what it would be like, living not just with Vern, but with Benjamin and me and you, too.”

“They could have gotten a place of their own, couldn't they?”

“And split up those two brothers? No, the girl went back to Tulsa and finished up at Oral Roberts University. She married a truck driver. Or was it a pipe fitter? I expect she's happy. Honey, turn the flame down on your kettle, or we'll have purple walls.”

“And Uncle Benjamin?”

“Well,” Mama said, rhythmically stirring in small circles, “he was never a ladies' man. Always hides his soft side.”

“I never thought of him as having a soft side.”

“Oh, honey, sure he has. When our mama and daddy died in that car crash on the way to the State Fair in Hutch, it was Uncle Benjamin who let me cry on his shoulder until I was hollowed out inside. I was twelve, and he wasn't but seventeen or eighteen, a year or two younger than Vern, but he kept me with him day and night till I was over it. Slept on the floor beside my bed all winter long. Vernon went about his business looking after finances and such, practical things, but Benjamin was my comfort. He'd a made somebody a good husband.”

“What about my father?”

Mama stopped stirring.

“Did he make ‘somebody' a good husband?”

“Well, he might have,” Mama said abruptly. “But he wasn't in the church, and that's that.”

I can't imagine how he and Mama ever got together, except she was a pretty secretary in the cold storage business where he was junior loading foreman, and love isn't always logical. I was born a month before their first anniversary. Uncle Vernon gave my father an ultimatum: either he was to convert and witness to his faith in front of the whole church when I was baptized, or he was to get out. No one asked Mama what she wanted. My father got out.

“I forget, Mama. Was it Uncle Vernon or Uncle Benjamin who came upon Brother James?”

“Vernon, at first.” Mama took up her stirring again, scraping the crystalized sugar from the crown of the pan. “Brother James was about half the age you are now, and already preaching the Word of God. The Sword and the Spirit Church came to him whole, in a glorious vision, and he got a few of his father's friends together, including your uncles, and built the church from the cement foundation clear up to the rafters.

“Oh, my word, I do remember the first time Vern and Benjamin took me, and you in my arms, into that church where all the oak pews had been sanded by hand, smooth as Popsicle sticks. That day, with the sun streaming in through the small stained glass window, all pink and gold and blue, it seemed like that splendid church wasn't too much to give up your father for.” Mama gazed out the kitchen window. “Smooth as Popsicle sticks. Anyway, your uncles gave us all as a gift to the church, on the very first day it was dedicated. You don't ever take back gifts, honey.” Her voice was shaky: “'Spose those cranberries are done?”

As the days passed, I felt myself growing stronger. Each fresh day I put myself in God's hands. I did my homework, my chores. I read poems, tasted them syllable by syllable, swallowed them whole; I thought about Adam barely a dozen times a day. And I waited for when Brother James would call me up in church. Finally, it came. It was a brisk day, the Sunday before the Feast of Thanksgiving: coat weather, despite the brittle sunshine. The weatherman was threatening snow by Wednesday, just in time to back things up at Mid-Continent Airport.

At breakfast, Uncle Benjamin asked, “Well, are you ready for today? Got your words all thought out?”

“I'm trusting that the Lord will help me say what I have to say.”

Mama slipped a steaming waffle on my plate. “Eat up quickly, men. Brother James is especially keen to see Miriam before the service this morning, so we'll go on over early.”

Uncle Vernon, his mouth full of waffle, said, “I expect there will be a lot of people in church, maybe some outsiders.”

“Oh, Vern, come on.”

“Louise, I'm telling you, word gets around. Even TV people. But don't let them get you nervous, girl. Just speak from your heart.”

Mama leaned back against the chair, dreamily waving a piece of waffle on her fork. “Oh, we'll just be so proud to see you up there speaking out about the powers of the Almighty. Your uncles will bust their buttons, and I suspect I'll just sit there dabbing at my eyes.”

Brother James had an office across from the sanctuary. It was not fine, with smooth Popsicle-stick oak; it was barely big enough for a small, overstuffed bookcase, his desk and a swivel chair, and an extra folding chair which I sat in that morning.

He wore his navy blue Sunday suit and looked broad and handsome. There were rumors that the young widow, Marylou Wadkins, who had two babies, had her eye on Brother James, and that maybe this woman, at last, was strong enough for him. I think he was nearly thirty, and they say a young, vital man needs a wife.

His chair was on casters, and he rolled over beside me. “Your simple testimony will waft up and be heard in heaven, Miriam, and it will bring comfort to others ailing in our midst. Now, tell me what you plan to say.”

I stammered out a few words. I actually hadn't prepared much, because I knew that the Lord would put the right words in my mouth.

“Truly, the Lord will give you the words, Miriam, but you must be ready to let them flow through you. Let's think it through. You'll start with what?”

“Um, how I felt this pain gradually coming on?” He nodded. “And how it got worse and worse?”

“Why?”

“Because my faith was faltering. Because I'd let Satan seep into the dark cavities of my soul.”

Brother James's chair squeaked as he crossed a shiny boot over his knee. “And then you called upon Jesus with all your heart—”

“—with all my soul and with all my might—”

“—to cast out unclean spirits. Remember Matthew 10:1: ‘… to cast them out and to heal all manner of sickness and disease.'”

“And Matthew 8:16,” I added. “‘He healed all that were sick,' including me.”

“Praise the Lord.” Brother James got up and pulled me gently to my feet. “You will do just fine, Miriam. Bless you.”

“What shall I keep in mind as I'm waiting to speak, Brother James?”

“Well, I'd say these words from First Corinthians: ‘I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also; I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the mind also.' It is meant to tell you, child, that a healthy body, mind, and spirit are one, and you are living, breathing proof of this fact.”

He led me out of his office, and the heels of his black Sunday cowboy boots echoed in the empty hall. When he opened the door to the left of the altar, I nearly fainted. The meeting room was jammed with people stuffed maybe twenty to a pew, people lining the aisles, standing in the back, even sitting on the steps of the altar. Some had cameras hanging around their necks. There was even a TV news camera aimed at Brother James as he took his place behind the lectern. I sat in the front row, where Mama had saved me a place, and immediately I felt the TV lights turn toward me.