Daren Dean

Mercury in Retrograde 48

Royal

In the beginning, Royal had started out just handing folks leaflets about the not so subtle juxtaposition of hellfire and judgment, and the true need for repentance in the literature, and a body couldn’t do no better than to stand next to a blind old man if he figured on passing out his share of booklets. Only the most hard-hearted sinner would refuse a tract from a blind man. Mr. Toomey didn’t even wear sunglasses over his puckered eyes to make it easier on folks either. He knew his business, Royal had to give him that, as he would level his stare at them as if his empty orbs were filled with an incorruptible light that shone condemnation on sin and an abiding chance to be born again.

Mr. Toomey used to be a deacon at Redeemer church, but he had grown weary of building projects and bake sales. Mr. Toomey believed the job of the church was to save souls, and not to worry about putting bodies in the benches. Royal had gleaned from his hours on the street as Christian soldiers together that Mr. Toomey grew disgusted with Brother Pappy’s urging to his congregation to “fill the house” as the subject of a sermon which the blind man thought reflected the spirit of the “uptown Church” more concerned with checks and cash in the offering basket than the body of Christ. He told Royal that each person was the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that Jesus residing in hearts was the only sanctuary that needed to be filled.

For the most part, the old man stood silently on the same corner in front of Dunavant’s Drugstore listening for the sound of steps echoing on the sidewalks between the buildings. For a few weeks he met the old man at 5 a.m. as they waited to do battle with the Devil and his legions, but usually no one else made it downtown until closer to 7 a.m. most usually and much later on Sundays.

The boy had seen dead people before, but he had begun to study on death seriously when his Grandpa Walker passed. He stood at the old man’s casket, not weeping for the flint-nosed man as much as he had been purely fascinated, someone he had known had been changed in a twinkling of an eye; translated from life to death to the void. What strange alchemy was this? His had been a nice cherry-wood casket. No one would let him go to the funeral home and help pick it out like he wanted to do. He swore to himself that his Granddad had whispered to him from the casket, but he could not hear the words. The boy leaned forward to hear what he said, but he grew stubborn and refused to repeat himself. He put his head on his chest and listened for a heartbeat until his Daddy came and pulled him away--made him stand up because other folks thought he was in the throes of the grieving process. Despite all the family and neighbors, Royal had a compulsion to crawl in the casket with his Granddad and be held by him in a way that only a small child is held which he was beyond now especially as far as the living were concerned.

“I’m just trying to hear what he said,” Royal said. His daddy frowned, a toothpick in one side of his mouth because he really wanted a cigarette.

The baby goats dying on him was the last straw, in a series of last straws.

Two months earlier he had started asking Mr. Toomey questions about God when he handed him a track. He had seen the man standing downtown, on the square, whispering to passersby on their way to the bank, the picture show matinee on Sunday afternoons, or paying bills at the City Hall. He had asked the tough questions like: What is a day to God? Where did Cain’s wife come from? Why does God allow children to die? Mr. Toomey preached to him in a low raspy voice. He was a tall thin man in gray suit pants, white oxford shirt, thin brown suspenders, a green clip-on tie, and short white hair. He was a willowy man well over six feet tall with the rough skin of a man who had undoubtedly spent years working outdoors. But it was his eyes that got your attention or the lack thereof. Mr. Toomey told him about God’s boundless love and the everlasting pit of Hell. Royal responded by asking him if God had so much love: Why did God make you blind? Why doesn’t he make new eyeballs for you?

“God’s punishing me,” Mr. Toomey said. “I know that don’t sound like the right thing to say, but I deserve it. It’s between Him and me. I try to do his work on the streets. I work down at the shelter answering the phones. I pray for folks, but the things I done . . . “

It made sense to Royal. If you did something bad, God punished you. Sure, he could see it if God was like a Father as they said in Church the few times he had been there himself. Punishing people while they were still alive flew in the face of what he had heard in Church, but like Theron would have said, it made “horse sense.” The old man bought him a grape Fanta and saved his soul right there at the counter in the drugstore. Royal was excited at first, he did feel like someone who had been born again. Mr. Toomey told him the best thing a fella could do was to share his faith. So they went right out on the street and Toomey helped him pass out little faded yellow pamphlets about salvation. His heart soared with the notion he was actually helping God in a way.

“God made me blind so I could see,” Mr. Toomey said, it was his tag line on the street. Royal noticed he did not mind talking about being blind but he would not say why, or how, he had come to be blind.

Everyone in town seemed to know Mr. Toomey. Men and women of all ages would stop and talk to him and would even take a pamphlet. His face would transform from sullen to weepy when say for instance a middle-aged woman with blond hair piled high, carrying a baby, smelling of drugstore perfume samples would stop to talk to him. Royal took to studying babies of all different sizes and ages. He wondered how old you had to get, when you started to be of an “accountable” age to God. How old were the youngest children in Hell? One baby he saw with blue eyes sucked on its own lower lip with a puckered expression on its face. Certainly a little baby like this was too young, not accountable.

For several days he stood by Mr. Toomey’s side handing out leaflets in complete bliss. Gradually he could see what Mr. Toomey could not, the people on the streets of Fairmont were pretty much Church goers--not bad people, not on the road to perdition. He began to take his own stack of leaflets and hangout outside the courthouse when the jailers were transferring criminals from the jail to their court date. Royal would step right up to the man in question and ask him if he wanted to get saved or “God loves you” and then he would slip a pamphlet into a shirt pocket. Once, he was spit on by a young man wearing a dark t-shirt with a tiny pocket sewn on the breast like a little P.O. Box of a heart that a message from God had rarely been delivered to, and even with the muscle-bound man’s saliva running down his face he managed to fold up the toughest pamphlet about going to Hell and stuff it into the undersized pocket: two points for Jesus! He told himself he did it for Jesus. It was more of a compulsion at this point.

He saw an AP article that a poll was conducted in 1500 penitentiaries across the nation that said most criminals did not see themselves as being “bad people” in the way that your average man on the street tended to view those incarcerated. Royal thought about that and it was like a cold glass of water had been thrown in his face. He realized what Brother Pappy had been yammering on about when he discussed the need for God’s grace for Salvation instead of getting to heaven on works. Being a good person or a bad person as a justification for getting to heaven was missing the point. Nobody could be “good enough,” they had to make it on faith and grace.

Gradually he began to go out in the evenings--without Mr. Toomey. He had quit going to school and justified it by the fact that he was working for the Lord now. The school tried to call, he was dumb enough to answer once, but his Mother worked 12 and 15 hour shifts at the shoe factory. If he lived with his Daddy, he wouldn’t have cared about him going to school but he lived way out there in the boondocks too. His Mother lived in town so it was more convenient for his work of saving souls.

On Wednesday nights he went to Church. Not just one Church, but all of them. He tried different ones. The Catholic Church was very sedate and the people who went there were very dressed up. They thought they were the cat’s ass. They wanted to know who his

mother and father were. The Baptists preached a good sermon, in his view but otherwise they did not seem all that different from the Presbyterians who followed a program a deacon handed you at the door so you could follow along. The Pentecostal group was fun, but seemed unorganized in their organization. The preacher would preach, not so much a sermon, as he would ramble on for a few minutes and then dramatically: “Everybody praise the Lord!” Then some men in a corner would rise up with trombones and trumpets and start blowing and honking in a cacophonous: “Making a joyful noise” they called it. He just ended up back at Brother Pappy’s Redeemer Pentecostal by default. Mr. Toomey even encouraged him: “Your spirit needs to be fed and edified.” He had to go home and look up the word in his dictionary at home. edify: “To enlighten or instruct so as to encourage intellectual, moral, or spiritual improvement.”

He started using the word in everyday conversation wherever he could work in, even when it was not exactly the proper word to use. He picked up on other Church words and expressions. It was positive thinking taken to the next level. If you did not feel close to God, talk as if you were close to him and eventually you would be. It was an entirely new language when Church folk got started. People would say, “That’s right” and Brother Pappy would shake his head, “It’s not right, but it’s true.” Brother Pappy said the use of language was of utmost importance, they words mattered to God. Although to Royal’s way of thinking the fervor with which Brother Pappy applied his language lessons, made God seem somewhat dimwitted or like a recklessly delivered wish to a genie who had just popped out of a lamp and gave three wishes exactly as they had been worded without regard to context. If Miss Grace or Miss Linette complained about being sick to their stomachs, as often seemed to be the case, Brother Pappy would correct them. He seemed to think they would be sick for the rest of their lives if they admitted to feeling sick. For their part, the ladies felt rebuffed by these corrections and went from feeling slightly nauseated to insisting on an affliction of the stomach. “Perhaps you have a demon living in your stomach,” Royal said helpfully. He received frowns from these sizeable women, and the younger children nodded in agreement looking up from their vantage point, a much lower center of gravity.

He visited a large lady from Redeemer, Grace Hillebrand, who had recently had her gall bladder removed. For the last several years apparently she had been in a process of having her insides removed, but she was so obese it would take years for her disassembly to amount to something anyone would take notice of. Royal knew Miss Grace was constantly complaining of physical problems from bursitis to her fabled “bad leg” that kept her from doing any work other than bustling in the basement kitchen of Church in a largely supervisory capacity that none of the older women appreciated. She leaned heavily on a wooden cane, although most of the elderly Royal noted used the new and improved aluminum variety. Miss Grace lay in her bed weeping with joy when she saw Mr. Toomey and Royal at the foot of her bed.

“Oh what a comfort,” Miss Grace wailed. Her jowls mashed against her neck like a hog’s it seemed to Royal. “What a friend we have in Jesus! All his sins and griefs to bear!”

“We meant to do our Christian duty and visit one of our sisters in Christ,” Mr. Toomey said, but the concern in his voice was balanced by his careless stare out the hospital window.

“Thank you Mr. Toomey,” Miss Grace cried, tearing at her Kleenex. “So good to see you both. “I am in so much pain.”

“But by His stripes you are healed,” Mr. Toomey corrected just as Brother Pappy would have--it had become second nature to instruct folks in just the way.

“Oh, don’t I know it,” Miss Grace sniffed. “That’s in Isaiah. Can you reach my Bible for me, Royal? And get me a drink of water from that little brown pitcher?”

“Yes’m,” Royal said.

“The pain is just something else,” said Miss Grace as she looked at Royal out of the corner of her eye. “Just can’t get comfortable, no matter how I lay. Just put my Bible down by my leg.”

“Would you like us to pray for you?” Mr. Toomey asked in a parade rest position.

“You might as well,” Miss Grace put a finger up to his lips as if to shush Royal, but he didn’t understand why she was doing it. “Since you’re here, you might as well give it a go. I’ve been so much a sinner in my life, I doubt God will want to heal me. You know, I’m just an old sinner saved by Grace.” And then she began to laugh at the pun on her own name.

Mr. Toomey did not laugh, instead he snapped to attention and reached spasmodically to his front breast pocket for a pamphlet. He seemed to have one for nearly every occurrence. Miss Grace looked to Mr. Toomey and then at Royal with a strange twinkle in her tourmaline green eyes as if they were sharing a joke at the blind man’s expense but Royal did not understand her mirth. She raised a hand to accept the plastic Dixie cup of water and Royal’s eyes fell to the copper bracelet around her wrist.

“It’s for my arthiritis,” Miss Grace tried to sit up and spilled a little water on her bed, but failed to notice it.

“You’re no sinner,” Mr. Toomey said.

“You don’t think I am?”

“Miss Grace I was there when Brother Pappy led you in the Sinner’s prayer,” Mr. Toomey said. “You were a sinner saved by Grace, but now . . .”

“Now what?” Miss Grace whined.

“You are born again,” Mr. Toomey said. “You’re a new creation. Were here today to encourage your spirit.”

“And edify it!” Royal agreed enthusiastically.

“Well, praise the Lord His wonders never cease,” Miss Grace clapped her hands together but her celebration was cut short by the plastic cup she crushed accidentally.

A nurse came in and gave Mr. Toomey a simpering look, she cast a stern eye to Royal. “Are you old enough to be in here?”

Before Royal could say anything Miss Grace wailed and moaned to solidly affix the nurses attention on her pain-ridden body more out of a need to be the center of attention than any design to keep Royal in the hospital room. He had just turned 14, although small for his age, which was still almost an entire year under the 15 year old requirement for visiting people in their hospital rooms. The nurse glared at all of them suspiciously and handed out a variety of pills to Miss Grace that she picked out of the palm of the petite nurse’s hand like a child eagerly choosing sweet tarts. The nurse poured another cup of water for Miss Grace with barely controlled fury although it was not clear what had riled her.

Miss Grace dutifully tossed the whole cocktail back like a cowboy in a western having a shot of whiskey and said, “Indians.”

“You boys let her alone,” said the nurse. “She needs her rest now.”

“We were just going to pray for her and then leave,” Mr. Toomey nodded soberly.

“That’s what my Pap used to say,” Miss Grace giggled. “He liked to have a drink of a night. He’d drink him some sour mash, have a shot, and his face would scrunch up and he’d say: Indians! I loved my Pap. I sure do miss him. One time my sister Ruth Ann came home with her beau . . .”

“What’s that?”

“Boyfriend,” Miss Grace took his hand in hers. “Don’t they teach you nothing about sparking no more?”

He wanted to ask what sparking meant, but he hated for adults to tell him things as if he were a complete idiot so he attempted to affix a knowing expression on his face.

“She and her beau came home from their date. Ruth Ann was a little older than me, you see. I was sitting up waiting on her. We shared a bedroom together and if I was awake she would tell me all about it. I was just coming out of my tomboy stage so I was interested in boys, but pretended not to be.”

“Would you like us to pray for you now, Miss Grace,” asked Mr. Toomey a tad bit impatiently.

“Just a minute. That boy, now what was his name, Cecil Landrum. Cecil Landrum looked just like a movie star to us. He was a dream. Anyway, her and him was sitting on the porch swing. We lived out in the boondocks then. Pap came strutting out on the porch said good evening and went to the edge of the porch, pulled out his tallywhacker and peed off the end of the overhang. Then, zipped up and went back inside. Ruth Ann was mortified. Cecil never came back, but I don’t know if Pap had anything to do with that or not.”

“Let us pray,” Mr. Toomey said with all the formality of a Church service prayer.

Miss Grace was not a bit ready to stop talking, but her glare was lost on Mr. Toomey and the boy so she had no choice but to close her eyes since both of their faces were down turned in an attitude of prayer. Not only that, but they were standing on either side of her now. Mr. Toomey had a little vial of holy oil that he dapped on the tip of his forefinger and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. He next took her head firmly in both of his hands, she could feel the boys small and softer hands on her forearm. Mr. Toomey’s voice called out to God in the hosptial with so much force he drowned out the soap opera on the television set affixed to the ceiling. The nurse came in to see what all the fuss was about and Miss Grace averted her gaze to the craggy eyelids of Mr. Toomey. There was nothing like the prayer of a blind full of faith to cure what ails, she thought.

“Oh Father, why do we have to become blind before we can see . . .”

The boy was murmuring in tongues. The bed shook with the force of the blind man and the boy and the Holy Ghost as the human trinity contended with the demons of sickness and disease. The nurse watched with horror as the blind man plunged her patient’s head back against the pillow. She thought at first the woman was having a seizure, but then she remembered that another nurse told her Grace Hillibrand was a religious fanatic. Miss Grace’s arms were in the air, her fingertips extended toward the ceiling, and her body flopped like a chicken with its head cutoff. Then it grew strangely quiet. Royal heard a voice telling him to pray for her, really pray for her. “AND BY HIS STRIPES YOU ARE HEALED!” he heard his voice croak. He nudged Mr. Toomey away and put his small hands on either side of her head and stared fixedly into her eyes with his own zealot’s gaze. The nurse backed off to the nurse’s station. “Yes Lord,” said Mr. Toomey. The boy felt the power of the Lord shake through his narrow arms, wonder working power surging in him. “WE BELIEVE IN A GOD OF SIGNS AND WONDERS THAT WHEREVER TWO OR MORE GATHER IN HIS NAME TO PRAY AS TOUCHING ANYTHING ON HEAVEN AND EARTH THEN YOU WILL HEAR THAT PRAYER AND HONOR IT AND RIGHT NOW WE ARE ASKING FOR HEALING FOR GRACE HILLEBRAND WE ASK YOU TO TOUCH HER FROM THE TOP OF HER HEAD TO THE BOTTOM OF HER FEET AND ASK FOR INSTANTANEOUS MIRACULOUS HEALING SO THAT SHE MIGHT BE A WALKING TESTIMONY. In they name we pray, sir. Amen.”

“Amen, Amen,” Sister Grace said.

Mr. Toomey and Royal retreated toward the door, the boy took the blind man’s elbow, as Miss Grace continued to commune with the Holy Ghost. The unlikely pair walked to the elevator with the power of God humming through their veins, both felt they had been witness to God’s power in that hospital room. The power in the building blinked off momentarily and then flickered back on an instant later.

A thunderstorm was moving in according to a transistor radio at a nurse’s desk. The nurse was screeching into the phone at her ear. Apparently, speaking to an operator at the Sheriff’s office.

Outside torrents of rain fell at a slant across parked cars. Mr. Toomey and his charge stood in the lobby where several veterans of the Korean war stood smoking and murmuring amongst themselves. The smell of disinfectant was strong in their nostrils. Royal had prayed for many people recently who attested to feeling the power of God through him, but Royal wanted to feel what they felt. He tried to make himself feel God and sometimes he thought he did, but it was not with the intensity of the others or it did not appear to be the same. What is wrong with me, he thought. Why can’t I feel you? But then, at the same time, he heard a voice speaking to him. Sometimes the voice sounded like God and sometimes the voice gave him arbitrary tasks to carry out like counting the number of steps he took between each section of sidewalk for a certain number of blocks in order that certain hopes and prayers would come true. That is not God, he told himself. Yes it is, the voice said. She’s going to die, said the voice in his head.

“She’s NOT going to die,” Royal said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Toomey. “I know it.”

“The power of the Lord has touched you , boy,” Mr. Toomey said. “You’ve become a healer. We need to get you into Church this Sunday. I’ll speak to Brother Pappy about this Sunday. The Lord has put his mark on you, son. He’s going to use you in a powerful way.”

The veterans talked about how many homeruns Lou Brock would hit for the Cardinals this year in the lobby as they passed through the lobby doors.

May 5, 2010