With no further words, Dove stepped glowing from the platform, the aisle opened again, and with right hand raised in blessing, he started back to the bus. The brief babble had faded, softened by awe. The most conspicuous emotional reaction was tears. As he passed, hands reached out, touching his aura. Several people fainted. Then he climbed aboard the bus. Bar Stool revved up the diesel, the police moved some people out of the way, and it left.
It was as simple and brief as that. As the bus pulled from the curb, Lee could hear people in the crowd begin to sing “A Mighty Fortress,” led perhaps by the pastor.
* * *
The TV cameras had recorded it all, from the ground as well as from the cherry pickers. Even after the bus had left, the production managers sat intent at their monitors. Reporters and camera operators began to work their way through the crowd, to talk with the healed, if indeed that’s what they were.
* * *
The tour crew had watched and listened from the bus, partly through the windows, partly on television. They hadn’t fully known what to expect, and when it was over, it took awhile for the experience to sink in. The primary reaction was sobriety, rather than exultation.
Dove sat in back, calm and serene, looking almost as if he were alone.
* * *
By arrangement with the bus company, Bar Stool was their actual driver. The company’s driver served as his relief. Dove had specifically wanted Bar Stool for the tour, and Personnel had hired a temporary replacement to fly and maintain the Mescalero. A long-time friend of Bar Stool’s, he’d flown a chopper for the Screaming Eagles in Desert Storm, and afterward for a westwide charter service on spray jobs, rescues, forest fire suppression and the like.
The bus rolled out of LaCrosse heading south, tailed by TV trucks. There was no interstate; they took a state highway. Duke Cochran was aboard, again representing American Scene. He did not approach Lee, nor she him.
Twice the bus stopped, once at a truckstop for lunch, and once for a prearranged healing in a small park at the edge of Prairie du Chien. A couple of dozen sick and disabled waited there, along with three or four hundred spectators. Lee wondered how many of the healed would remain healed in the morning. Twenty percent? A hundred percent? She could almost believe a hundred, but twenty would be remarkable enough.
From Prairie du Chien, the bus crossed the Mississippi into Iowa. Even driving south from LaCrosse there’d been clusters of people here and there along the road, waving or just watching. Lee didn’t pay a lot of attention to the people or the scenery—the broad Mississippi, high bluffs, country towns. She had other things on her mind. When she’d re-viewed the brief “farewell” video, after her abbreviated Life Healing, she’d wondered if Dove’s aura was produced by some electrical device or by Dove himself. It had been deep blue then, with sparkles of gold and rose. Now it was golden, as in pictures she’d seen of Christ, and she did not doubt it was genuine.
* * *
The tour itinerary, flexible though it was, had been widely publicized by the media. At the front of the bus, above the aisle, a TV faced rearward. The suppertime TV newscasts showed numerous shots of the healings in LaCrosse, shots of the crowd, and brief interviews with some of the healed. One psychiatrist interviewed on CNN’s The World Today pooh-poohed them as “hysterical healing,” which he termed a mental disorder. To the delight of millions, anchor Michael Sandow’s response left the doctor confused and upset. “If you were to treat some of the healed for their mental disorder,” Sandow said, “and they became ill or crippled again, would you feel you’d helped them?” When the doctor failed to answer, he asked, “Well then, would it give you a feeling of satisfaction?”
At that the poor man stood abruptly, pulled off the microphone clipped to his shirt front, and stalked, stiff and red-faced, from the set.
Brief interviews with bystanders found them as impressed with Dove as with the healings. None of the cameras failed to show his vivid golden aura, and none of the interviewed failed to comment on it.