Miriam's Well (6 page)

“I'm over twenty-one,” I said, hoping the suit and tie might sway Ms. Doolan. “I'm an assistant district attorney. Would you like to see an ID?”

“No,” the nurse said with a faint smile. She slid the consent form across the slick counter and buzzed for a doctor.

CHAPTER SIX

Told by Miriam

The doctor had a foreign accent. I could barely understand him, but I heard him say I should be in the hospital. Mama would never consent. I didn't want her to consent. I locked my eyes shut, praying for strength, while the little dark man poked and prodded me in private places and asked me questions no one should have to answer.

Please God, I said to myself over and over, get me through this, and a voice from inside my head, very much like my own, but not my own, said, But look where you are, child.

A nurse came in, and the foreign doctor told her to find Mama. What would Mama do if they phoned her? Especially if the men were home, and where else would the men be on a Sunday afternoon except home, puttering with their power saw and knotty lumber? The nurse fixed a tight thing, a blood pressure cuff, she said it was, on my upper arm, pumped air into it, and watched the little clock face on it. She obviously did not like what it said. She gave the doctor some numbers that made no sense to me, something over something. He mumbled. The nurse laid me down and put a hard crackling pillow under my knees, which helped the pulling at my back. Her cool hand brushed my arm. The panic rose in my throat; I swallowed and swallowed, afraid I'd throw up. She asked me about school, about what clubs I belonged to, about my friends. I don't remember what I answered, and I don't think it mattered to her. Minutes passed. She would not leave me, but she'd run out of questions. She kept rubbing my arm; I felt the hair stand up on it. Finally, I heard a loud commotion out in the waiting room—my uncles.

“I want the girl out of here,” Uncle Benjamin roared. “It's against the law, you keeping her here. You never signed, did you Louise?”

I didn't hear Mama's response, but I knew she'd never signed.

Then the doctor was out there talking to them. He slowed down and pronounced everything distinctly for their benefit. “She is very sick. She must be transferred to a hospital. She must have tests. I suspect she is dehydrated. Her blood pressure is dangerously high.”

Uncle Vernon said, “I'm going in to get her,” and I heard the swinging door slam against the wall. Uncle Vernon yanked back the curtain on my cubicle. The nurse clutched my arm tighter. “Little girl, we're going home,” he said, reaching for my arm.

“You can't do that.” Maybe because Uncle Vernon was a small, bald man, the nurse thought she stood a chance against him. “I will not let you take her.”

“Well, you have no choice, miss. She's my blood kin, not yours.” Uncle Vernon yanked my hand, and it felt like a balloon had burst in my back. The nurse caught me and lowered me to a wheelchair.

In the waiting room, there was absolute chaos. Diana was yelling at Uncle Benjamin, while the doctor mumbled unintelligibly again. Adam grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and turned me around so that my back was to the crowd, and I was just as happy to stare at nothing. Mama came and knelt beside the wheelchair. “Baby, they want to take you to a hospital.”

“I know, Mama.”

“We can't let them do that.”

“I know.”

“But I am so worried about you,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I'll see if I can reach Brother James.”

“Not this time, Mama.” There were already too many people there. Uncle Benjamin had bullied the nurse back behind the swinging door and held it shut against her. I saw her feet under the door, and finally she walked away. Later I figured out that she'd gone somewhere in the back to call the police.

All of them yelled out their positions, like carnival barkers. I focused on the wall, on a picture of a white stallion in midleap over a hurdle in a perfect field of poppies.

Two officers arrived, no doubt at the tail end of a peaceful Sunday afternoon shift. They were hardly prepared for the battle in the emergency room. They sent for reinforcements. One of them blew a whistle to silence the carnival. Diana and Adam stood on each side of me, but not facing the stallion, while the adults explained one by one what was going on. I sensed that Diana wanted to jump in, but Adam restrained her. I tilted my head back and saw him behind me with his arm around Diana's shoulder.

There were at least half a dozen phone calls. I couldn't keep track of them all, but finally we were told we were all to sit tight, while one of the policemen went to get something. No one spoke, but tension hung heavily in the air. I looked around at all these people fighting over me: a doctor, two nurses, two friends (did I dare to think of them as friends?), three policemen, my mother, and my two uncles.

Uncle Benjamin had flecks of sawdust in his hair. Uncle Vernon fidgeted with a key chain, sliding the keys back and forth over the chain. The faint grinding sound was like the shower curtains being ripped back in the girls' locker room or back there, in my examining room. I figured out how to turn the wheelchair around. “Please, Uncle Vernon,” I said, and all the heads turned toward me. Suddenly I realized that they had all been fighting over me, but they had forgotten that I was there. I was no longer important in the battle of wills.

Then a father carried a wailing child into the emergency room. Her hand was wrapped in a white towel. “Scalding water,” I heard the father say, and I felt the little girl's searing pain. The doctor and nurse snapped back into action, while the rest of us waited. Adam and Diana finally sat down.

The computer printer behind the check-in desk hummed and spun out volumes of pages from its loom. They folded in broad pleats on the floor. Someone turned on the TV, and we all pretended to be engrossed in a football game, even the receptionist.

“Yes,
yes,
” one of the policemen said, as about nine men piled on top of the one holding the ball. All of them had muddy jerseys. I wondered how they ever got them white.

“The 49ers are hot this year, eh?” Uncle Vernon said. A band played “San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate,” and six blonde women with pompons kicked their legs way up over their heads.

“Oughtn't to do that over network TV,” Uncle Benjamin said, with his eyes fastened on the screen.

Some woman started to come in, nearly doubling over with a loose, wracking cough. She must have smelled the tension in the room. She looked us over, policemen and all, and turned around and left.

After what seemed like two long afternoons, one of the police officers came back with a court order to have me hospitalized, and if I'd thought there was a battle in the emergency room, it was only a border skirmish compared to the holy war that was about to begin.

I no longer belonged to my mother. I was imprisoned in a hospital bed with a needle in my arm connected to a bottle that dripped some kind of liquid into my veins. I had a police guard outside my door, a guardian
ad litem
(which is a court-appointed lawyer), a state social worker, a primary care physician, and an oncologist, for by 4:00 the next afternoon, they decided I had bone cancer.

I'd had a bone scan, which meant having some kind of dye pumped through my system, waiting around for hours, then sliding on a table through a monstrous machine that took picture upon picture of the insides of me. I tried not to watch, tried to concentrate on a stain in the ceiling, tried to name all the books of the
Book in Gold Leaf
, all the disciples, all the saints, all the martyrs, but too often my mind would wander and my eyes would stray to the screen where my body was being drawn, quarter by quarter. They explained that the dye would accumulate in those areas where a tumor was suspected. I saw the darkening ball, the size of a walnut, growing in my pelvic bone. So small, I thought. A little thing like that couldn't cause much harm, and certainly not the pain that had been waking me up four, five times a night for weeks.

“Localized,” I heard the technician say. “Bet the doc'll confirm it. She's a lucky chick.”

But what the doctor said was that I was to have a bone biopsy. They would put me to sleep, stick a long needle into my back and suck out something from inside that bone. The laboratory would look it over, and that would be the final word on the subject. I did not like the sound of being put to sleep. That's what veterinarians did to old dogs. I never actually thought they were planning to kill me, but neither did the dog who was lovingly led into the execution chamber. “Poetry is a bitch.” I remembered Mrs. Loomis saying that and my shock at hearing it. It seemed so long ago, maybe months, since Adam Bergen and I had discussed fire and ice. But it was only a few unbearably long days.

There was nothing Mama or the men could do about the biopsy without risking arrest, but they could holler at the doctors and nurses and social workers. Only when Brother James came to my bedside were they hushed.

Brother James sent the men on to work and walked Mama down the hall to a sitting room. It was the first time I'd been alone for twenty-four hours, and I breathed the silence gratefully. A nurse had set a bunch of sunflowers in a glass by my bed, and I caught their scent like wilted summer grass. Brother James was back to fill my room with abiding comfort, and I quickly dismissed the pleasure of being alone.

“Miriam,” he said, gathering me to him. I flopped onto his chest like a rag doll. His huge hands smoothed the gown over my back. “Put your life in the hands of the Lord,” he said softly. “Isaiah 40: ‘They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.' Remember.”

“Brother James, please don't be cross with me, but I don't feel like I will ever run and not be weary.”

“Remember Matthew 13. The people of Nazareth suffered for their doubt and disbelief, for we are told, ‘And He did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.' Let the Lord do mighty works within your body and spirit, Miriam.”

“It hurts, Brother James, and I'm so scared.”

“Shh, child.” He smoothed my hair off my forehead and wiped a tear across my cheek with a rough finger. He laid me back down on my pillow, with the bed cranked up to a near-sitting position. He slid his chair closer to the bed and took both my hands. His voice changed, became both more personal and more distant, as if he were shouting to me from far, far away. “I shall rebuke this child's pain and disease, just as Jesus caused the fever to vanish in Peter's mother. I call the pain out where I can see it, I summon it to the surface where I can smash it like a fly on the wall. What do you feel, Miriam?”

“A churning in my stomach, Brother James.”

“Yes, yes. The Holy Spirit is fiercely spinning and gathering everything in its path. It is banishing Satan. It is sucking up the pain in your back, it is swallowing whole the tumor they say is in your bones. It is drawing all the evil of pain and disbelief into a tighter and tighter circle. Do you feel it?”

“Yes,” I said breathlessly. The black walnut, everything, drawn out of me.

“Tighter and tighter, the circle.” His voice changed pitch; it was harsher now. “When the circle can compress no smaller, it will change direction. Is it changing now, child?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Yes. It is spinning out, scattering cool sparks outside of you. You are no longer afflicted, praise God.”

I wanted desperately to believe him. I believed him. He was silent for a few minutes, with his jaw locked in a determined prayer. I felt no pain, and the panic that had been just below the surface since this whole thing started settled into a serenity. The quiet after the storm, I told myself. Or was it the eye of the hurricane?

“Now that you're feeling better, we must plan,” Brother James said. He still had hold of my hands. “We will not defy the law of the land, but neither will we comply,” he said. I did not understand. “Oh, I could bring in half a dozen brothers and have you out of this place and back in your mama's house in no time.”

“That's where I want to be, Brother James.”

“Yes, but we have this court order to contend with. It says they have the legal right to keep you here. It says they can run tests on you until they have their so-called scientific answers. But it does not say they can administer any of their poisons.”

I furtively glanced toward the IV dripping into my arm.

“I've checked on that. It's only sugar water, no drugs. I'll pull it out when I think it's the right time, but we'll go along with it for now. It's to our advantage, and it doesn't violate God's law. But I swear to God, and Sword and the Spirit Church will stand behind me on this, I will never let them give you drugs that they disguise as medicinal, and I will never let them pump someone else's blood into your veins. You have my word. Now, tell me about your friends.”

“Are you angry with them for getting me into this?” I asked.

“No, child. They only did what their mothers and daddies taught them. Do they come to visit you here?”

“Diana's coming tonight, I think, but I haven't seen Adam yet.”

“Lucifer comes disguised in plumes and finery, but is Lucifer still.”

“I think he's a nice boy, Brother James.”

“A very nice boy. Well-mannered, bright, fine looking boy. But remember, he doesn't follow our Lord.”

“I suppose not.”

“That's my girl. Now, don't worry about your mama. I'll have Sister Naomi go over and stay with her until we get this settled, so your uncles won't fret.” He pulled a peppermint out of his pocket. The crinkly wrapper reminded me of green cellophane around a Christmas fruit basket. He motioned for me to open my mouth, and he slid the red and white candy onto my tongue, as if it were a communion wafer.