The congregation went to its knees in another vast swoosh of clothes and exalted murmurs. Those of us standing at the back of the tent did likewise. I almost resisted—even to a lapsed Methodist like me, this deal reeked of showbiz blasphemy—but the last thing I wanted was to attract his notice, as I had in Tulsa.
He saved your life, I thought. You don’t want to forget that.
True. And the years since had been good years. I closed my eyes, not in prayer but confusion. I wished I hadn’t come, but there had really been no choice. Not for the first time, I wished I hadn’t asked Georgia Donlin to put me in touch with her computer-savvy daughter.
Too late now.
Pastor Danny prayed for those present. He prayed for the shut-ins who wanted to be here with them but could not be. He prayed for the men and women of goodwill. He prayed for the United States of America, and that God would imbue her leaders with His wisdom. Then he got down to business, praying for God to work healing through his hands and holy rings, as it accorded with His will.
And the band played on.
“Are there those among you who would be healed?” he asked, struggling to his feet with another grimace. Al Stamper started to come forward to assist him, but Jacobs waved the ex–soul singer back. “Are there those among you with heavy burdens that they would lay down, and afflictions they would be free of?”
The congregation agreed—and loudly—that these things were so. The Wheelchair People and the chronics in the first two rows were staring raptly. So were those in the rows behind, many of them haggard and looking sick unto death. There were bandages, and disfigurements, and oxygen masks, and withered limbs, and braces. There were those who twitched and rocked helplessly as their CP-impaired brains did pissed-off jigs inside their skulls.
Devina and the Gospel Robins began to sing “Jesus Says Come Forth” as softly as a spring wind blowing off the desert. Ushers in pressed jeans, white shirts, and green vests appeared like magic. Some began organizing a line down the center aisle of those hoping to be healed. Other green-vests—many others—circulated in the crowd with wicker collection baskets so big they looked like panniers. I heard the clink of coins, but it was scattered and sporadic; most of these people were tossing in folding green—what carnies call “the kick.” The woman who had been speaking in tongues was being helped back to her folding chair by her boyfriend or husband. Her hair hung loose around her flushed, exalted face and her suit jacket was smeared with dirt.
I felt smeared with dirt myself, but now we’d gotten to what I really wanted to see. From my pocket I pulled a notebook and a Bic. It already held several entries, some from my own research, more courtesy of Brianna Donlin.
“What are you doing?” Hugh asked in a low voice.
I shook my head. The healing was about to begin, and I had watched enough videos on Pastor Danny’s website to know how it went. This is old-school, Bree had said after watching several of the videos herself.
A woman in a wheelchair rolled forward. Jacobs asked for her name and held the microphone to her lips. In a trembling voice she declared herself to be Rowena Mintour, a schoolteacher who had come all the way from Des Moines. She had terrible arthritis and could no longer walk.
I wrote her name in my notebook beneath that of Mabel Jergens, healed of a spinal cord injury a month ago, in Albuquerque.
Jacobs dropped the mike into an outside pocket of his gag-jacket and grasped her head in his hands, pressing the rings to her temples and her face to his chest. He closed his eyes. His lips moved in silent prayer… or the words to “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” for all I knew. Suddenly she jerked. Her hands flew up to either side and flapped like white birds. She stared into Jacobs’s face, her eyes wide either with astonishment or the aftermath of a jolt of electricity.
Then she stood up.
The crowd bellowed hallelujahs. As she embraced Jacobs and covered his cheeks with kisses, several men tossed their hats in the air, a thing I had seen in movies but never in real life. Jacobs grasped her shoulders, turned her toward the audience—all of them agog, not excluding me—and dipped for his microphone with the practiced smoothness of an old midway showie.
“Walk to your husband, Rowena!” Jacobs thundered into the mike. “Walk to him, and praise Jesus with every step! Praise God with every step! Praise His holy name!”
She tottered to her husband, holding her arms out to keep her balance, and weeping. An usher in a green vest pushed her wheelchair close behind her in case her legs gave way… but they didn’t.
It went on for an hour. The music never stopped, nor did the ushers with the deep offering baskets. Jacobs didn’t heal everybody, but I can tell you that his collection crew stripped those rubes right down to their no doubt maxed-out credit cards. Many of the Wheelchair Brigade were unable to rise after being touched by the holy rings, but half a dozen of them did. I wrote down all the names, crossing out those who seemed as fucked over after Jacobs’s healing touch as before.
There was a woman with cataracts who declared she could see, and under the bright lights, the milky glaze really did appear to have left her eyes. A crooked arm was made straight. A wailing baby with some sort of heart defect stopped crying as if a switch had been turned off. A man who approached on Canadian crutches, his head bent, tore off the neck brace he was wearing and cast the crutches aside. A woman suffering from advanced COPD dropped her oxygen mask. She declared that she could breathe freely and the weight on her chest was gone.
Many of the cures were impossible to quantify, and it was very possible some were plants. The man with ulcers who declared his stomach pain was gone for the first time in three years, for instance. Or the woman with diabetes—one leg amputated below the knee—who said she could feel her hands and remaining toes again. A couple of chronic migraine sufferers who testified that their pain was gone, praise God, all gone.
I wrote the names down, anyway, and—when they gave them—the towns and states they hailed from. Bree Donlin was good, she had gotten interested in the project, and I wanted to give her as much to work with as possible.
Jacobs only removed one tumor that night, and that fellow’s name I didn’t even consider writing down, because I saw one of Jacobs’s hands dart into the gag-jacket before he applied his magic rings. What he displayed to the gasping, rapturous audience looked suspiciously like supermarket calves’ liver to me. He gave it to one of the green-vests, who popped it into a jar and hustled it out of sight posthaste.
At last Jacobs declared the healing touch exhausted for the night. I don’t know about that, but he certainly looked exhausted. Done to death, in fact. His face was still dry, but the front of his shirt was sticking to his chest. When he stepped back from the reluctantly dispersing faithful who hadn’t gotten a chance (many would undoubtedly follow him to his next revival meeting), he stumbled. Al Stamper was there to grab him, and this time Jacobs accepted the help.
“Let us pray,” Jacobs said. He was having a hard time catching his breath, and I couldn’t help worrying that he might faint or go into cardiac arrest right there. “Let us offer our thanks to God, as we offer our burdens to Him. After that, brothers and sisters, Al and Devina and the Gospel Robins will see us out in song.”
This time he didn’t attempt kneeling, but the congregation did, including a few who had probably never expected to kneel again in their earthly lives. There was that airy swoosh of clothes, and it almost covered the gagging noises from beside me. I turned just in time to see the back of Hugh’s plaid shirt disappearing between the flaps at the entrance to the tent.