George Mills (10 page)

“
I,
” he might shriek, “
I
healed you? I couldn’t cure ham! Jesus healed you, brother, and don’t you forget it! Unless you remember that and make your thank-you’s out to
Him
you’d better get out your bathrobes and bedclothes all over again because you might just be headed into a relapse! Didn’t no Raymond Coule ever heal you, didn’t no Reverend Raymond Coule put your spine well! That bill goes to Jesus! And you better remit, friend, cause old Jesus He don’t dun, He just forecloses!”

And for all that Reverend Coule felt genuine anger at these moments, the offending party was as joyous as the congregation, flushing not with embarrassment but with what Coule himself took to be health, a shine like a smug fitness. Then the born-again sick man might deliver himself of a jumpy, gleeful litany, a before-and-after catalogue of deadly symptom, marred X-rays, the peculiar Rorschach shapes of his particular defilement, a tumor like a tiny trowel, a hairline crack along the bone like an ancient river in Texas or bad handwriting in a Slavic tongue. Blood chemistries invoked in real and absolute numbers, the names of drugs flushed down the toilet. The circumstances of their attendance, what they had said, what Coule had said, the doctors amazed, the new X-rays bland and undisturbed by disease as a landscape painting.

But once, during the healing, that portion of the show when Coule touched the supplicants on camera, a woman was helped forward by her husband. The woman, a girl really, years younger than her husband, who was about Coule’s age, stood mutely before the minister. “What is it?” Coule asked. The husband could not control himself. His grief was almost shameful, a sort of shame, that is. He blubbered incoherently. His nose ran. Coule was embarrassed. He was embarrassed by the man’s love for the woman, which he somehow knew had never been reciprocated, just as he also knew that the husband was unaware of this. He turned to the woman. “What is it?” he asked her. She shrugged helplessly. “What is it, dear?” Still she wouldn’t answer, and though the man tried to speak for her he was tongue-tied by grief and love. Somehow he managed to mutter that his wife was going to die. “What do you mean she’s going to die?” Coule said, and then, just for a moment, it was as if he was scolding one of the carelessly faithful who had rendered unto Coule what was properly God’s. He began to scold. “Don’t you know that there’s no death?” he shouted, not at the woman but at the man. “Don’t you know Christ did away with death? Don’t you know——”

“I have a tumor,” the woman said. “They took my biopsy. It’s bad cancer.”

“Where?” Coule demanded.

“Here,” she said. She pointed to her stomach.

He had a feeling about this woman.

“There? You mean there?” He clutched the woman’s arm and drew her to him and pressed his palm hard against her belly. “There?” he shouted. “
There?
” The woman screamed in pain. “What are you shouting for? It’s not malignant. It never was. They made a mistake. Stop your shrieking. You’re healthy. You don’t have any more cancer than I do. Hush. Hush, I tell you. Praise Jesus and honor this man who was so worried about you.”

The woman looked at him. She was frightened, but for the first time she seemed to realize what he was saying. “I’m healed?” she said. “I’m not dying?”

“Don’t Christ work on the Sabbath even though it’s His day?”

“I’m not going to die?”

“Not of any cancer,” Coule said.

The fright hadn’t left her eyes but Coule saw that it had changed. It was the fear of God. The real thing. It was the first time Coule had ever seen it but he recognized it at once. It was terror, dread, God panic. “Take her home, Mister,” he told the husband. “You go along with him, Mrs.”

The woman was dead within three months. She had believed him, had refused to return to her doctors even when the pain became worse. Her husband had tried to reason with her but it was the Lord she feared now, not death. The doctors claimed that the cancer had been caught in time, that it had been operable, that with the operation and a course of chemotherapy the chances of saving her were better than seventy-two percent.

The husband wanted to sue Coule’s mission and threatened to sue all the television stations that carried his program.

The case never came to trial. Coule’s lawyers had persuaded the husband’s lawyers that faith itself would be on trial, that they could never win, that the dead woman’s religious belief, regardless of who had originally inspired it and however naive the actions it prompted her to take, were forever beyond the jurisdiction of any court in the land. Obtaining a judgment would be tantamount to convicting God. The man was poor, the case extraordinarily complicated. They would be working on a contingency fee. They talked the husband into dropping the case.

Coule gave up the mission. The television stations refused to carry his programs, but he’d made his decision before he learned this. When he left Ohio the only thing he took with him was his flamboyant wardrobe. He gave the campaign’s immense profits to charities and for a period of years gave up preaching entirely. He had known better. What he’d said he’d said for the husband, not because of his grief but because of all that unrequited love.

Nor was it the fear of lawsuits that caused him to give up his mission. He knew better there, too. It was her eyes, the holy panic, the fear of the Lord he saw in them, a fear more contagious than any disease at which he’d ever made passes with his ring-fingered hands.

It was Coule Louise went to when Mills told her he was saved.

They were nominally Baptist, or Louise was. They belonged to the church which promised the greatest return on their emotional dollar. The Baptists had the hymns and water ceremonies and revivals, though not the latter, not since Coule’s time, and the Virginia Avenue Baptist Church was a large, almost theaterlike building which had been a Catholic church until its chiefly German congregation had moved to more affluent areas of South St. Louis. One or two of the old families, with no place else to go, continued to come not to attend services—the church had been deconsecrated by the Cardinal himself—but to pray in its familiar pews, crossing themselves timidly, rather like people adjusting their clothing with rapid, feathery movements. These people, mostly women, were like folks caught short in the streets. They felt that way themselves, and Coule thought Louise one of them when he saw her sitting by herself in a pew in the dark, empty church. He was turning to go when Louise saw him and waved. He still didn’t recognize her. He might not have recognized her even if she had been one of his regulars. It was the old business—though his congregation was smaller now, numbering about two hundred or so where once it had been in the thousands—of not remembering the faces of the people he served.

“I don’t come often, Minister,” she said. “We’re Baptists here, but we don’t come often. Well George doesn’t come at all. He does sometimes, you know, at Christmas, like that. He’s not much of a church-goer.” She told him about George, about his salvation, then wondered why she’d come at all. Salvation would be a run-of-the-mill event for a minister. Here she was, she said, going on about nothing. She had seen him on television, she said. She giggled.

“What?”

“I was almost going to ask for your autograph. You’re the only famous person I know.” Then she did something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She vaguely curtsied. Embarrassed, she made the same exiguous gestures the scant handful of Catholics did who still came by from time to time. She touched her hands to her hair as if she were wearing a hat. Everything she did suggested imaginary items of clothing to Coule—pushing up on the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other as if she wore gloves, lightly brushing her throat as if a scarf were there. He walked outside with her through the big church doors.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t guess being saved’s such a big deal to a man in your line.”

“Of course it is. I just don’t know what you want me to do.”

“I wish you would see him.”

“Certainly,” Coule said. “Have him call my office, we’ll make an appointment.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t come here,” she said.

“But if he’s saved——”

“He says he’s saved. That he’s in a state of grace and doesn’t have to do anything.”

“Tell me,” he said, “did I save him?”

“Nobody saved him.”

Coule waited for Mills’s call, though Louise had told him not to. He looked for them on Sunday morning. They weren’t there. They weren’t there the following Sunday. He was bothered by the woman, by her face, which recalled to him the face of the husband and had about it that same sense of wounded reciprocity. Marriage is terrible, he thought.

What bothered him most was his question. “Did I save him?” he’d asked. He, Coule, famous from coast to coast for what had seemed like wrath—he’d edited his shows himself, purposely building them around his furious disclaimers—had not let her leave until he’d asked it. And imagined the look on his face, the coast-to-coast wrath crestfallen, declined to disappointment, acknowledging, if only to himself, what the husband and Mills’s wife had never acknowledged—though what did he know about hearts?—the nonreciprocity of desire, its utter pointlessness.

There was currently a campaign on to bring people into the church. It was the membership’s doing, Coule pretty much staying out of it for he had rather renounced proselytizing when he left Ohio. When the chairman of the committee reported to him he could not help himself. “Has anyone contacted the Millses?”

“The Millses?”

“They live over on Wyoming Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. George Mills?”

The man referred to his list.

“It’s all right,” Coule said, “I’ll call them.”

He called that night. George answered the phone.

“This is Reverend Coule, Mr. Mills. Virginia Avenue Baptist?”

“Yes?”

“We’re having a membership drive. I wonder, could I come over and call on you sometime?”

“You want to speak to Louise,” Mills said.

“Well, frankly, I was hoping I could speak to you.”

Mills didn’t answer at once. When he did Coule was surprised by what he said. “I’m busy,” George told him. “I do heavy work. Nights I’m tired. I watch television. I got all my programs picked out for the week. I don’t like to miss them. I know what you’re going to say.”

Then his wife had told him of their meeting. “Oh,” Coule said. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“You’re going to say I could always catch the reruns. But they don’t repeat all the shows. Only the best. What
they
think is the best. I have no way of knowing which show’s going to be repeated. You see my position.”

This man was saved? This was the delivered, salvationed, redeemed, and ransomed fellow for whom Christ had died?

And then he knew. Of course he was.

“I do,” Coule said. “I see your position. You know,” he said, “
I
used to be on television.”

“Louise told me. I never watch any of that stuff. I never watch those shows.”

“Because you’re already saved,” Coule said quickly.

“Louise tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Well I never told her it was a secret.”

“Look,” Coule said, “I really think we should talk. Perhaps I could drop by where you work.”

“I work the nigger neighborhoods. I carry their furniture down the stairs. They got black ice in their ice cube trays. Their furniture slips through my fingers from their greasy ways. There’s come stains on the drapes. Their rent money goes for Saturday night specials. Welfare buys them knives.”

“You’re saying you won’t see me,” Coule said.

“Sure,” Mills said, “I’ll see you. Don’t get in my way. If I drop a couch you could break your legs.”

“Who was that on the phone?” Louise asked.

“Coule,” Mills said. “He says you told him all about me.” Like Greatest Grandfather Mills, he was bilingual. He talked in tongues. The neutral patois of the foolish ordinary and a sort of shirty runic. He had used both on Coule but the minister had not been put off. “I could have said no,” he told his wife, “but I would have gotten you in Dutch.”

“I’m already in Dutch.”

“No,” Mills said.

“I live with one of the elect. I’ll never catch up. Will I go to hell, George?”

“Gee,” Mills said, “I don’t know, Louise.”

They met in an almost empty apartment in the projects. There were still some cartons to take down, a broken chair.

“I’m Ray Coule,” the minister said.

“Will you look at that?” Mills said. “We’re on the seventh floor here and the windows are all covered with wire mesh. They got to do that. That’s government specification.
Steal?
They take from the sandbox!” There was a framed picture of Martin Luther King on the living room wall. “This go, Uncle?” George asked an old man in a wooden wheelchair. Mills winked at his visitor.

The old man whimpered.

“Stop that whining,” George said, “we ain’t going to leave you. Me and my partner here”—Mills indicated Coule—“going to set you down like a pie on the kitchen table in the truck. The man’s a minister. Like the jig in the picture. Come to bless the eviction.”

Laglichio was in the doorway. “What’s holding it up? Let’s move it, Mills. Who’s this?”

“Reverend Coule,” Mills said.

“Listen, Father,” Laglichio said, “you got a beef, take it up with the city. We got sheriff’s orders to move these people. There’s a deputy downstairs with seals and documents, with notarized instruments like a file cabinet in City Hall.”

“I’m here to see Mr. Mills,” Coule said.

Laglichio shook his head. “George has work to do. It ain’t right he conducts his spiritual business on the taxpayer’s time. Let’s get with it, George. They already signed the papers.”

“I could use some help with these boxes,” Mills said.

Laglichio looked at him. “Just finish up, will you? I’ll be downstairs.”

“My boss is on my ass,” Mills said.

“I’ll help.” Coule lifted a carton of dishes.

“No,” Mills said, “you don’t have to. How’s your lap, Uncle? Think you could handle a few of these if we held them down steady?” He picked up a carton and placed it in the old man’s lap. Another box went on top of the first. A third was stacked on the second. The old man’s head had disappeared behind the cartons, muffling his whimper. “I’ll just peek in the other rooms for a minute, see if I missed anything.” Coule was left with the old man.