Revival Season - Monica West (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📗

hands as I cupped water onto her scalp and massaged a dollop of shampoo into a lather. I leaned Hannah’s head back to rinse out the thick suds. Her mouth hung open; her small pink tongue peeked through the space at the bottom of her mouth where a tiny shard of a permanent tooth was growing in.

Then a thought crawled across the front of my brain, mocking me with its simplicity. Hannah. Ma and Papa said that God had made her this way on purpose—that she was meant to be stricken with cerebral palsy, that she was whole just as she was. But that had only been what they said after Papa had tried to heal her and failed. On the nights when her seizures lasted too long, when she choked on her thick saliva, when we had to rush her to the emergency room, it was hard to think that God would bestow that upon anyone. I cupped Hannah’s chubby face in my hands—her warm, damp skin was slippery in my palms.

“I’m going to heal you.”

She stared back at me, her eyes a few shades deeper than almond, her mouth still open. She jerked her head backward in a violent motion. I leaned forward and grabbed her stiff body, pulling her toward me. Her back arched away, resistant to being hugged. She stayed there for a few moments until a bleat came from the back of her throat. As I grabbed the washcloth and wrung out the excess water, I ran the warm cloth over her back. I straightened her left arm as much as possible and cleaned the thin, tender skin of her armpit and elbow. Then on to her left leg—her knobby knee joint, her thin calf with little muscle tone, her foot that was angled inward. I imagined Hannah with arms that fell to her sides without bending, feet that pointed forward, legs strong enough to hold all of her weight without buckling.

After she was dried and lotioned, after her wet hair had been oiled and sectioned and braided, I pinned her arms to her sides and wrapped her in her favorite blanket. I climbed in bed behind her and breathed her in. Would she be the same person when she was healed? Would she still let me snuggle with her, or would she resist? I waited for the magic moment of sleep when her body grew heavy against mine in bed, when the water from her hair soaked through my shirt. Slipping my arms from around her shoulders and sliding to the wall behind her bed, I walked to the headboard and raised the side rail. Her face was so peaceful in sleep. No tremors or spasms. No seizures for now. And soon, no seizures again.

“Good night, Hannah.” I leaned over and kissed her forehead.

Although I wanted to see him stumble, Papa’s Easter sermon went off without a hitch. But even so, no one lined up to be saved. I knew we were all realizing that if Papa—a man who had saved souls in regular clothes in a storefront church with a dozen folding chairs—couldn’t get people to line up for him on Easter Sunday, that meant ordinary Sunday services were all but doomed.

Papa’s spirits had been briefly lifted in the weeks after he thought he’d healed Ma, but Easter Sunday brought them right back down. It didn’t seem possible for him to seem more defeated than he had been in the dark days after Deacon Johnson left, but as he trudged to the van after the service with the empty garment bag draped over his arm, it seemed like he’d been hollowed out.

When we got home from church, Papa called us down to the kitchen still wearing the white Easter suit that now looked dingy in the dim kitchen light. “I want to announce this year’s revival season circuit,” he said when we were all seated, facing him at the head of the table. As he spread out a map, layers of pen markings stared back at us, chronicling our revivals for the past thirteen years. There were tiny X’s, red pen circles, and scrawled dates—hieroglyphs denoting the cities where we’d been and when we’d been there. This was always an exciting moment, when our upcoming summer was spelled out for us. As Papa spoke, though, there was none of the typical fanfare in his voice—just a monotone reciting cities as though they were groceries on a shopping list.

“We are beginning at Grateful Life Temple of Holiness in Sweet Home, Arkansas.”

Papa continued his announcement, naming a city in Tennessee where we’d never been before and a town in North Carolina. No one acknowledged the fact that the incessant invitations to churches for revival seasons of years past had just about stopped. Over the last few weeks, I’d heard him through the wall that my bedroom shared with the study as he made countless calls, introducing himself as the Faith Healer of East Mansfield. The people on the other end must have sounded incredulous because his words would quicken as he generated calculations about how many souls he had saved and people he had healed over the years, seemingly trying to finish his spiel before they could hang up. I wondered what else he had to promise these preachers in exchange for permission to visit their churches on his redemption tour.

Papa’s words trailed off, and my brain snapped back to my idea of healing Hannah, how her healing would be somewhere far away from home, wherever God led me to do it.

“We’re kicking off a new tradition this year as well. We’re going to start with three places and let the Lord lead us where he would like us to continue. This revival will be about trusting the Lord to provide for us and dictate the course of revival season.”

Three revivals instead of eleven. It would have been too much for him to tell us that no one wanted him in their churches, too