Look, I’m sorry. John, I didn’t mean that.’
‘Okay, Dad.’
‘No, I really didn’t.’ Herb’s face was a picture of misery. ‘Look, I ought to go after her.
She’s probably leafleting the hallways by now.’
‘Okay.’
‘Johnny, just try to forget this and concentrate on getting well. She does love you, and so do I. Don’t be hard on us.’
‘No. It’s all right, dad.’
Herb kissed Johnny’s cheek. ‘I have to go after her.’
‘All right.’
Herb left. When they were gone, Johnny got up and tottered the three steps between his chair and the bed. Not much. But something. A start, He wished more than his father knew that he hadn’t blown up at his mother like that. He wished it because an odd sort of certainty was growing in him that his mother was not going to live much longer.
2.
Vera stopped taking her medication. Herb talked to her, then cajoled, finally demanded. It did no good. She showed him the letters of her ‘correspondents in Jesus’, most of them scrawled and full of misspellings, all of them supporting her stand and promising to pray for her. One of them was from a lady in Rhode Island who had also been at the farm in Vermont, waiting for the end of the world (along with her pet Pomeranian, Otis). ‘GOD is the best medicine,’ this lady wrote, ‘ask GOD and YOU WILL BE HEALED, not DRS
who OSURP the POWER of GOD, it is DRS who have caused all the CANCER in this evil world with there DEVIL’S MEDDLING, anyone who has had SURGERY for
instance, even MINOR like TONSILS OUT, sooner or later they will end up with
CANCER, this is a proven fact, so ask GOD, pray GOD, merge YOUR WILL with HIS
WILL and YOU WILL BE HEALED!!’
Herb talked to Johnny on the phone, and the next day Johnny called his mother and apologized for being so short with her. He asked her to please start taking the medicine again – for him. Vera accepted his apology, but refused to go back to the medication. If God needed her treading the earth, then he would see she continued to tread it. If God wanted to call her home, he would do that even if she took a barrel of pills a day. It was a seamless argument, and Johnny’s only possible rebuttal was the one that Catholics and Protestants alike have rejected for eighteen hundred years: that God works His will through the mind of man as well as through the spirit of man.
‘Momma,’ he said, ‘haven’t you thought that God’s will was for some doctor to invent that drug so you could live longer? Can’t you even consider that idea?’
Long distance was no medium for theological argument. She hung up.
The next day Marie Michaud came into Johnny’s room, put her head on his bed, and wept.
‘Here, here,’ Johnny said, startled and alarmed. ‘What’s this? What’s wrong?’
‘My boy,’ she said, still crying. ‘My Mark. They operated on him and it was just like you said. He’s fine. He’s going to see out of his bad eye again. Thank God.’
She hugged Johnny and he hugged her back as best he could. With her warm tears on his own cheek, he thought that whatever had happened to him wasn’t all bad. Maybe some things should be told, or seen, or found again. It wasn’t even so farfetched to think that God was working through him, although his own concept of God was fuzzy and ill-defined. He held Marie and told her how glad he was. He told her to remember that he wasn’t the one who had operated on Mark, and that he barely remembered what it was that he had told her. She left shortly after that, drying her eyes as she went, leaving Johnny alone to think.
3.
Early in August, Dave Pelsen came to see Johnny. The Cleaves Mills High assistant principal was a small, neat man who wore thick glasses and Hush Puppies and a series of loud sports jackets. Of all the people who came to see Johnny during that almost endless summer of 1975, Dave had changed the least. The gray was speckled a little more fully through his hair, but that was all.