The Stones Cry Out (9 page)

And I never wanted to make it easy for her. So I just stood there, waiting.

Finally, forced to say something, she said, "By the way, Milky Lewis is my student. Not yours.”

"Milky? What’s he got to do with this?"

“You called him, he said. I thought the ridiculous FBI stuff was over."

My sister. She was a master at changing the subject, especially when losing an argument. But if she wanted to talk about Milky Lewis, I was all for it.

"He is your student,” I said, “but the only reason he became your student was because the FBI picked him up. He’s a convicted felon. I have every right to contact him.”

She raised her chin. "I don't like it."

"I don't care."

She stared at me; I stared back. Holding our gazes, we both knew that blinking was conceding. Helen's eyes were almost turquoise, a shifting blue that depended on how she held her proud head. Glaring at those eyes, I heard the awful music from the art studio, trudging down the hall, kicking through her office door, the millionaire rock star despairing that life was hard.

She looked away. "All right." She shook a postcard in her hand. "All right, fine. Talk to Milky. Just don't bring me into it."

"Helen, you brought it up."

"Because you should see his face when he talks about you. It’s awful."

Milky Lewis was a twenty-two-year-old former crack addict and the best flip we got from last year's drug task force. He also suffered from a terrible stutter that unfortunately improved when I interviewed him—which made me his main contact inside the bureau. Crack did things to a brain, rotten things, and Milky Lewis's brain started telling him we were going to get married. He even picked out an engagement ring, and to this day, ten months after the task force had ended, guys in our office were still stammering, "Ruh-ruh-raleigh, will you muh-muh-marry me?”

Fortunately for both of us, Milky Lewis had other aspirations.

During our interviews, when words came with such difficulty, Milky sketched portraits of the people and places he tried to describe. They were good sketches – really good. When we busted the drug ring, Milky served four months on a plea deal, and I went to visit him in prison. I asked him to draw some pictures unrelated to the task force, then I took them to Helen. In what might be her single good deed of a lifetime, Helen convinced the dean of VCU’s art school to offer Milky a scholarship -- probationary—for two years.

A man who barely finished public high school, who dealt drugs for most of his life, now attended one of America’s best art schools. Free of charge.

"How's he doing?" I asked.

"His talent is very real, but still raw. It might stay that way. But he transferred into sculpture."

I nodded as if that was very important. "Is he around?"

Her aqua eyes flashed. "You cannot talk to him here."

"Why not? I'm practically his benefactor."

"You’re more like the Gestapo."

I sighed, heavily. My sister's politics were so far to the left Karl Marx couldn't catch her in a bullet train. But that’s why she was cruising up the academic ladder, perching like a snob among the egghead elite.

“So is he here?” I asked.

“No, he is not.”

I nodded, walked to the door, and told her to have a good time in Amsterdam.

Her stony eyes were as defiant as ever. She lifted her sharp chin and said, "I will.”

That afternoon, I convinced my mother to come out of her bedroom by offering to drive her to the Pentecostal camp. On the twenty-minute drive, with Madame in her lap, she remained quiet.

I parked the big Benz in a grassy field near the tented tabernacle. Honeysuckle hitched the air and cicadas thrummed away their short, happy lives. In the long grass, amid pickup trucks and dented sedans and family vans, my mother's antique car looked as out of place here as she did. Circa 1966, the jet-black Mercedes had its original red leather seats and push-button gear system. The car was like a cherished family member and most collectors would probably insist I should commit hari-kari for leaving the vehicle roasting under a blazing sun. But I didn't have a choice. My K-Car was off-limits to civilians, including canines.

Walking beside me, my mother made her soft music, the silver bracelets tingling, her shoes clicking across the wooden boardwalk outside the tent. But she wore flats. Flats were a bad sign.

The tabernacle was an open-aired building with a peaked roof and no walls. On the big stage, a dozen women in cotton jumpers sang and swayed while another woman preached the Word. The preacher woman was both tall and wide and her thick neck was disfigured by a softball-sized goiter. Raising her meaty arms, she praised God.

The crowd cried, "Hallelujah!"

Tambourines rattled.

The electric organ took off, harmonizing with the cicadas.

The woman told them God was ready to bless their lives. Bless them, bless them.

"Glory, glory, glory!" cried the crowd.

I turned to look into my mother’s eyes. They still held yesterday's distance, as if her sight was directed inward. Around us people were pressing forward, dancing to the organ, praising the Lord, and shaking the tambourines. I leaned into her ear but had to yell to be heard. "Do you want me to stay with you?"

She glanced at the woman on the stage, then back at me. "Where will you be?"

I pointed to the seats above the dancing crowd. They were theatre chairs, donated by some movie house whose owner was miraculously healed one summer. The brown chairs lined the natural amphitheater protected by the tent. Beyond that the fields held the small dormitories that sheltered the seekers. Squeezing my arm before letting go, my mother wiggled to the front of the perspiring crowd.

I walked up the hillside and took a seat at the far end, out of the way. Several rows below, some ailing visitors perched in their chairs, waiting for the call to “lay hands.” Lined up together beside wheelchairs and oxygen tanks, they reminded me of maimed birds waiting on a sagging wire.

Farther down, in the middle of the crowd, my mother had raised both arms, and the silver bracelets ricocheted shine into the tabernacle. Her fingertips stroked the air, a blind woman trying to read the invisible face of God.

Sometimes I wondered what David Harmon would say about this place, about his wife coming here for services. When they married, we joined his family’s Episcopal parish, St. John’s Church. Redolent with southern gentility and charm, the Harmon family had attended St. John’s since the 1700s. Back then, colonial Harmons helped raise the original rafters. There was a family pew, where we sat every Sunday, every high holy day, and for weddings and funerals of Richmond’s elite.

But when my dad died, we stopped going. My mother seemed to lose interest in seeing the people there, and I realized that after someone dies the most painful place on earth was the place where you worshipped with them. Sitting in that historic box pew, my dad's absence felt so acute that the hymns seemed to howl through my heart. I finally decided to take a break from Sunday services. But the break had continued without visible end, while my mother stumbled upon this unbound place of spiritual hope flourishing in the Virginia countryside like gathered wildflowers.

My first reaction to this place was fear: fear of people who spoke in tongues. Fear of men yelling about God’s power. And a strange fear of women so devoted to God they had submerged their personality. But I also enjoyed the service. They seemed to quiet the voices clamoring inside my mother’s mind, and the impromptu singing buoyed her spirit. This wasn't the place I'd choose for her, but I had witnessed the solace she discovered. Here she could sing and dance and shout for glory among people who didn't care which pew she belonged to, or whose people got to America first, or whether she was baking a roast for the church dinner. These people yearned for one thing and one thing only. A pure relationship with that part of the Trinity so often neglected in organized worship: The Holy Spirit.

And I was a coward about it. Slouching in my seat like a truant attending a matinee, I watched the goitered preacher woman. Tilting back her head, she exposed her physical defect with such courage that I couldn't look away. The tumor looked like a doorknob in her neck. She told God she loved Him. That she knew He could heal her. It was His glory, she said, stepping down from the stage and moved through the perspiring crowd. Her voice rang out in shouts.

"God can heal any wound! Any wound. Give it to him! He’s ready to heal you. Do you hear me? He wants to make you whole again!"

She walked down the front line of worshippers. Preaching, blessing, laying hands, and when she reached my mother, the woman’s thick fingers wound into the dark spiraling curls. Cradling my mother's pretty face, she shook her and cried out to God, praying to God for healing. In one split-second she drew back her hand and slapped my mother’s forehead.

My mother fainted. She dropped like a cut tree.

And she was caught by the people standing around her. Backing up, they laid her on the floor. The large woman was continuing down the line, laying hands, slapping more foreheads. The crowd moved around the supine like a river flowing around boulders.

Standing up, I tried to see my mother's face. As the crowd parted around her, I could see her lips moving. I was too far away but continued to watch her, hoping for the impossible.

Hoping to hear the words she murmured.

===============

It was nearly midnight when we got home. My mother seemed pleasantly tired, and after getting her settled into her bed, I staggered across the courtyard and collapsed in my own. It was earned sleep, deep slumber, and my dreams seemed to revolve around an onyx sky dusted with quartz stars.

In one dream a charcoal mist veiled the courtyard between our two houses, but I could see the goitered woman was there too. Only this time my mother was laying hands on her. Tenderly she touched the bulb on the woman's neck and lifted the woman's face, calling on God to heal her, to mend a broken vessel.

I was leaning against the brick house, feeling the heat of the day radiated from the stone through my shirt, into my skin. My mother cried out with clarity, with conviction. I hadn’t heard that tone of voice in years. And suddenly Wally was there. He was taking pictures of the women who also appeared suddenly. A chorus around my mother and the goitered preacher lady. I looked around, expecting Madame to come next.

And then I saw my father.

His seersucker suit was wrinkled, the way it looked when he spent long hours at his desk. He stood directly across from me on the other side of the courtyard, but he was watching his wife. His blue eyes sparkled like topaz. I started to walk over to him, but I couldn’t move. The wall gripped my shirt, holding me like hands. I stretched out my arms. My hands scraped the night air, but the wall wouldn’t let go. I cried out for help, but the camp women started singing, rattling tambourines, drowning out my voice.

"Glory, glory, glory!" they sang.

My father turned. He looked right at me.

“Dad?”

He nodded, smiling. Then reached out his hand.

But I couldn’t move. “I can’t --”

He suddenly disappeared.

"Hallelujah!" the women sang. “Praise God!”

I felt a stab in my heart, like a spear, and started crying. The woman sang louder but the pain grew worse, until it was so severe I woke up.

My face was wet. And when I reached for the clock beside my bed, my hands were shaking.

3:33 AM.

I lay down, closing my eyes. I tried to see him again. Those blue eyes, that wrinkled suit. But all that came back was the expression on his face. Serenity, I finally decided. He looked like a man experiencing perfect joy. And I remembered the first time Helen and I met him. I was five, she was eight, and later she said our birth father looked nothing like David Harmon. I didn’t remember --our dad was gone by the time I was two.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"He never looked like that,” Helen said. “Nice. Happy. In love with Mom."

I lay there for almost an hour but the dream refused to come back, and the loneliness refused to go away. Finally I threw back the cotton blanket and padded through the carriage house, turning on as few lights as possible in case my mother happened to glance out her window.