Miriam's Well (24 page)

“She's a kind woman,” I said.

“She needs someone to look after her. We could build a home together—Marylou, her little ones, and me.”

Yes, but did he love her? Did she love him? If comfort had nothing to do with God, was it also true that love had nothing to do with marriage?

“Do you think she's put Billy Wadkins behind her?”

Why was he asking me this? Surely he had a friend, someone in the church he could discuss all this with, even Uncle Vernon.

“You must have some idea. You spent the night at her house. Does she keep a picture of him beside her bed?”

“I—I don't know what to say.”

He turned his face away, staring into the fire. All at once it came to me: Brother James was lonely.

“I think she likes you a lot,” I said tentatively.

“At times, she does seem to.”

“And the little girls adore you.” As I had adored him, when I was a little girl.

“I'll be thirty come April. It's time I had a wife and family.” He rocked, I rocked; the only sound in the room besides the crackling fire was the thumping of our chairs on the worn linoleum.

“Well, I expect I'll be asking her before long,” he said quietly.

I moved Annie over closer to Darlene and slipped in between the cool, crisp country sheets. I knew they'd been starched and ironed by Mrs. Hobart, maybe weeks ago, just in case someone stopped for the night. Little did she know she'd have a house full of strangers for Christmas. I thought about the passage in Hebrews that said, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Brother James, of course, was the only one of us who came close to that description, but who knew what the Lord had in mind for Annie and Darlene? I tucked the covers tight around them.

“Has Santa been here?” Darlene asked, her voice still slurry with sleep.

“Not till you and everyone else goes to sleep,” I whispered. But I could not sleep. I lay there, watching the thin organdy curtains billow in the breeze from the heater, watching a crack in the high ceiling, counting the lilacs on the wallpaper, and thinking.

I had made a promise that I would try to convert Adam. It was what Brother James wanted. It was what God wanted of me. After all, wasn't I supremely grateful? It was the least I could do.

There was a gentle knock at the door, and Mama came in.

“Baby, are you awake? Marylou's fast asleep, and I've been waiting up for you.” Mama, wrapped in an afghan, lay her pillow across the foot of my bed, and we whispered, so as not to wake the little girls. “What did you and Brother James talk about so long?”

“About Adam,” I said. It was partly true; I couldn't tell her about the Marylou part, because it would have been a betrayal of Brother James's confidence in me. “He wants me to bring Adam into the church.”

“That would be the answer to my daily prayer,” Mama said. “I know how much you like the boy.”

“I feel like I'm starting over, Mama. I know I'm healed. It's like having a second chance. I have to live my life the way God intends me to.”

Mama said, “If only we always knew what God intended.”

Then we sort of drifted back and forth from conversation to sleep, like slumber party girls, and before I knew it, the sun was coming in through the curtains on Christmas morning.

Somehow, there were presents for everyone. The uncles gave me a pink leather billfold with lots of pockets and slots for pictures, and Mama's present to me was a thin volume of American poems. “I never heard of any one of these people,” she admitted, “but I know how you dearly love verses.” She'd given me the book earlier that morning, while Brother James and Marylou were taking a walk out in the brittle morning. Of course Brother James wouldn't have approved.

The little girls were showered with gifts from everyone—crayons, and clothes for their dolls, and Wedgwood-type teacups, and, for Darlene, her first pair of roller skates, with thick plastic wheels. Mrs. Hobart gave each family a jar of preserves and a jar of green beans, corn, or beets she'd put up herself; each jar was tied with a crisp red bow.

And after we were done oo-ing and ah-ing over everybody's gifts, Brother James made an announcement:

“This is a fine day, brothers and sisters, to share some wonderful news with you. Annie, Darlene, come stand by me. Marylou?” He extended his arm, and she, tall as she was, fit right under it, as if he were her umbrella. “Sister Marylou Wadkins and I are going to become man and wife.”

Oh, everyone went wild! All the men pumped Brother James's hand, and we women hugged Marylou and each other. Darlene and Annie danced on Brother James's feet.

“When? When?” we all cried.

“When is after we get everything settled with Miriam and the doctors, maybe February. Does February sound good to you, Marylou?”

“Just fine,” she said, beaming. I wondered if she'd go home and pack away the picture of Billy now.

“And who will perform the ceremony?” Mama asked.

“Well, I don't know. Mr. Hobart, you think your preacher might do the honors?”

“We'll just ask him, Reverend. We'll just call him up and ask him,” Mr. Hobart said, as if he were proud to be an instrument of the Lord. “He's a Baptist, though.”

“We'll not hold that against him,” Uncle Benjamin said, sounding much more jolly than usual. “Vernon and me, we were Baptists once, but we got over it.”

Then everyone was laughing and clucking about wedding colors and bridesmaids and, of course, flower girls. And while I was just as happy as everyone else, every few minutes it flashed across my mind that Brother James didn't know that Marylou Wadkins was still in love with Billy. And, I'll admit it, some moments I resented that all the attention had shifted to Marylou. I had come to expect to be the center of attention. I remembered the words from Proverbs: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Told by Adam

“Are you sure we're doing the right thing, Dad?” It was maybe the twentieth time I'd asked, as the Jeep crawled along the snow-packed road to the house out in Whitewater. I'd insanely flown over this road the day before, and I wondered if a person could suddenly develop an adult sensibility or if it came on slowly like a crippling disease.

“You have to notify the police,” Dad said. “It's the law, because she's under court jurisdiction and she's been abducted. But since you never said anything to me about this until this morning—”

“I couldn't. You're her lawyer.”

“Anyway, the police have already lost about twenty-four hours in the search, so what's another couple of minutes?”

It was a fantastic day, like so many Kansas mornings after a vicious blizzard. The snow hunkered in peaceful banks along the road, and the sunlight made it glitter with rainbow colors. Even to someone like me, who only thinks of weather for its entertainment value, it was a day designed to take your breath away.

Though we both wore shades, we squinted; that's how dazzling the morning was. “There's the Quik Trip you told me about,” Dad said. “What is it, about six or eight miles from the house?” We slowed up. “It looks locked up tight.”

“Well, it's Christmas, Dad. Even McDonald's closes.”

“Yeah, but there's a pay phone outside, so you can make your call there. Remember, Adam, the truth.”

I dialed the number I'd repeated over and over in my head through the ride out into the country. “Can I talk to someone who's working on the Miriam Pelham case.”

“The who? We've got a lot of cases,” the cop said. He sounded as though he'd have preferred to be someplace other than the Wichita Police Department for Christmas.

“Pelham,” I said. “The girl who was kidnapped.”

“The church case, you mean?”

“That's the one.” People didn't think of Miriam as a real person anymore. She was the cancer patient, the kidnap victim, the church case.

“I can take the information,” the cop said, sounding bored by the whole thing.

I gave him directions and the description of the house outside Whitewater. He seemed to be writing everything down, only grunting during my pauses. Finally he said, “Well, that's not WPD jurisdiction. That's Butler County Sheriff. Jesus Christ, it's Christmas.”

“Aw, too bad,” I said, but the sarcasm was lost on him.

“Who are you, some kid? How old are you? I need your name, your address, and your phone number. What's your connection to this case?” I answered all his questions, offering as little information as I could. I was standing in a foot of snow that had drifted into the phone booth, and I hopped from foot to foot for some warmth. There were long pauses while the officer wrote everything down. A wobbly heart had been carved on the wall of the phone booth:

B
ECKY
     J
ASON

Always and Forever

I traced the heart, wondering if Becky and Jason were debaters I'd met at a tournament. Suddenly I thought about Diana and how she'd love an adventure like this one. Her eyes would be fiery, her eyelashes would be jumping like windshield wipers to keep every detail clear. She'd be wound up and ready to spring.

“Okay, I got it down. I'll get someone out there,” the cop said. “Butler County or us, one or the other. Stay where we can reach you.” Then, like it was out of a different throat, came the cheery, “Merry Christmas.”

When we reached the driveway, I had no problem opening the gate this time. As my dad drove through, it felt like a scene from a World War II movie in which the Allies storm a Nazi compound—one of those spooky old houses with attics and dungeons—and victory was in sight.

We drove up the winding road to the front door of the house. All the drapes were shut; there were no lights showing. The house looked empty, as though the family who lived there had gone away for Christmas. Not even a mangy mutt barked. Later I found out that the deserted look at the front of the house was because all the people—and there were a lot of them—were around back, in the kitchen.

We'd just about given up, when someone came to the door. A man in his fifties, sucking on a dead pipe, greeted us with typical country hospitality: “Yep?”

Dad said, “We're looking for Miriam Pelham.”

There was just the faintest pause before he said, “She ain't here.” That told me two things: (1) she was, and (2) as a liar, he wasn't a member of Sword and the Spirit Church.

“Well, sir,” Dad said, trying to sound down home and not city lawyer, “whether she is or isn't, the Butler County Sheriff's on his way over here, and I suspect he'll have a search warrant.”

“Who are you, anyway?” the man shoved the pipe into his pocket and picked a fleck of something off his tongue.

Then Brother James appeared out of the shadows. “God bless you brothers, come in.”

“This is pure insane,” the other man said. “Haven't understood one thang since it commenced.”

Brother James smiled at the man and led us through the house into the kitchen.

“Adam!” Miriam jumped to her feet. I hadn't seen her move so quickly and easily in weeks. I thought she was about to run right to me, but her two uncles flanked her, and each took an arm.

“Brothers and sisters,” Brother James said, dripping charm, “you all remember Mr. Samuel Bergen, our lawyer, and this is his boy, Adam.”

Dad said, “Listen, we can cut the formalities, because you haven't got a minute to lose. The police are on their way, and they will take Miriam back and arrest you, Brother James, for kidnapping and all the rest of you for conspiracy to kidnap and for obstructing justice. They'll have a whole laundry list of charges against you, but I think we can—”

“No, they won't be filing any charges,” Brother James said, “because I am personally taking Miriam back to the hospital.”

There was a small flutter of surprise, and I saw Miriam's face turn gray.

“Look at the child,” Brother James said. As all eyes turned to Miriam, she seemed to shrink back into her uncles. Her mother sidestepped subtly across the room to stand by her. I had the feeling no one in the room moved without Brother James's approval. “Look at her,” he said. “Miriam, come to me.”

Miriam took a few tentative steps toward Brother James. Her mother's arms were outstretched toward her, as if she were giving her to Brother James, whose arms were stretched out to receive her. Miriam stood in the middle of the room, facing him.

“Touch your toes, child.” She did. “Twist this way and that.” I was embarrassed for Miriam, performing as if she were a trained seal. But she could
move
. “You see,” Brother James continued, “the pain has left the child.”

“Praise Jesus,” some young guy said. I remembered him from my last visit to the church.

Brother James was warming up to his subject: “She's come through the long night of her travails. She's been tested like Job, like Jonah, like Abraham, and as God is my witness, I tell you, she's been healed. She's been healed, body and spirit, as surely as God healed Miriam of leprosy in the desert a thousand years before He sent His son Jesus to us. On that day in the parched desert, Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, ‘Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee.' For seven days she suffered, just as our Miriam has suffered these many weeks, before God saw fit to lift His hand to heal her.” I saw his outstretched hands trembling. The room was charged with electricity. A cat by the fireplace arched its back, and Miriam had tears streaming down her face. I wanted to hold her face, wipe the tears away with my two thumbs.

Brother James dropped his hands and folded them across his belly. Now he spoke barely above a whisper: “So, I will take Miriam back to the hospital, and I will insist that they run all their tests on her first thing tomorrow. And I am confident, just as I know that Lord Jesus rose up after His ordeal and death on the cross, that the doctors will find no sign, no sign at all, of the disease that inflicted the child, because she is whole again. A-men. Now, let's get going.”