* * *
After lunch she got three more hours of it, in two installments. Then she was offered a choice of snacks—she chose a bowl of French vanilla ice cream topped with butterscotch and chocolate—and was provided with a cot in a quiet cubicle, for a half-hour’s nap. She slept almost at once.
She left cheerful, and not at all introverted. Actually it didn’t seem like that big a deal. She was certainly no cultist convert, she felt sure of that. But it had been interesting and powerful, and she felt good about it. And it was, after all, only therapy. Lots of people had therapy.
She hadn’t, she decided, been as ill-prepared as she’d feared. The girls had been preparing her for months: the girls and Ben—without any of them knowing it. She wondered what the next two days would be like.
You’ll know, she told herself, in forty-eight hours.
64
Opening Day
Wearing shamrock-green blazers, the tour crew had taken off early in the Mescalero, to Pueblo. From there they’d left on a chartered turboprop, on a three-hour flight to LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
From the air, LaCrosse was a pleasant-seeming city built along the Mississippi, its residential areas green with trees. Their chartered bus met them at the airport, bearing neither signs nor banners, only the logo “Celebrity Tours,” in large gold cursive letters on its blue and white sides. It even had separate men’s and women’s restrooms, and two tiny shower facilities just large enough to change clothes, stand in the spray and wield the soap. Though its new passengers didn’t know it, on its last trip it had hauled a major rock group and its technical crew.
It took them to the parking lot of a large Lutheran church. Lee peered from her window. They parked at a reserved length of curb. The lot itself was crowded with people spilling onto the sidewalk, plugging the opening of an adjacent alley, standing on the concrete parking barriers along the perimeter. Television trucks stood by, with cameramen on cherry pickers. Small children and some not so small sat on grownup shoulders in order to see, perhaps someday to say they’d been there. People stood on adjacent porches; older children perched on porch and garage roofs. Faces peered from windows.
As crowds go, it was quiet. City police in white shirts and blue trousers stood about relaxed.
Dove stepped from the bus, surrounded by a golden aura that no one could miss. The crowd quieted, then began to buzz, not loudly, but differently. Dove seemed taller than usual. Wearing a short-sleeved, open-throated white shirt, dark blue slacks and the aura, he strode to the crowd’s edge, a policeman beside him. Art Knowles and one of his security men followed a stride behind. Somehow an aisle opened for them, and when they’d passed through it, it closed, like the Red Sea, supposedly, for Moses.
They homed on an American flag in the center of the lot. It stood on a small, thirty-inch stand. To one side of it were gathered those to be healed—thirty or forty of them—along with a worried-looking pastor in clerical garb. Dove reached the platform, mounted it, faced them, and raised his hands, palms outward. Watching from the bus, it seemed to Lee his aura flared upward then, and when he spoke, his deep strong voice was easily heard to the street, though to those in the front row it seemed not especially loud.
“By your trust in coming here,” he said, “and through the loving power of God, you . . . are . . . healed.”
There was a silence that lasted two or three seconds, then a graying woman struggled from her wheelchair, raised her arms and screamed, “Praise God! Praise God!” A young man took off thick dark glasses and, laughing, threw them as far as he could, before turning and hugging the woman beside him. There were cries and sobbing embedded in a growing babble. Someone shouted, “I can breathe! I can breathe again!” People dropped to their knees, not only the healed, but numerous bystanders, praying, thanking God.
Lee stared through her window, her skin gooseflesh. She’d known and accepted that this was a healing tour, but what she saw was somehow unexpected. Beside the stand, the pastor stood with arms skyward, his mouth moving. Though Lee couldn’t see it from where she sat, tears flowed down the man’s cheeks.