Revival Season - Monica West (10 ebook reader .TXT) 📗

tried to make eye contact with her, to give her a hint of what I didn’t want to do—to her and to me—but what I had to do to save us.

“Papa? What makes you so sure?”

“Sure about what?”

“That you were the one to heal her.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” He started cutting his pancakes; he had one triangle raised to his open mouth as a sticky line of syrup hung over the plate. My heart quickened at his dismissal, and at how much I wanted to tell him about what I’d said to Ma upstairs. If I could find the right combination of words, the consequences wouldn’t be on her. The sin had been mine, so the punishment would be mine too. Maybe I could make Papa see that.

Next to Papa, Ma pretended to be focused on the food. Papa had done a good job conditioning her all these years. She was compliant. Subservient. But as much as it pained me to think about, Ma had almost worked up the courage to leave him. I could be brave, too. And I couldn’t see how things at home could get much worse. So I closed my eyes and focused on breathing before letting the words spill out of me.

“You didn’t heal her. Like the guy in Bethel.”

A chair pushed back across from me—Papa’s chair. “What did you just say to me?” Somehow he’d moved from the other side of the table, and now he was standing over me. Spittle shot onto my plate as the words flew out of his mouth. “What did you just say? Who do you think you are?”

The same vein that bulged in his neck in Bethel was jumping beneath his skin, and as he repeated his questions—“What did you say? Who do you think you are?”—Caleb appeared by his side. Caleb’s hands pulled at Papa’s fists that were raised above me, and Papa strained against Caleb’s strength. The edges of the room turned black, but everything in front of me—the brown table and the eggshell walls and the gleaming silver of the refrigerator—came into sharper focus. Hannah’s shouting was the high note above everything else, and her rocking back and forth next to me in the chaos made the room materialize again: the hard floor under my feet, the table beneath my hands, my knees knocking against the table even though I didn’t remember getting up.

“How dare you? Of course I healed her.”

“Calm down, Samuel.” Ma was standing next to him with her hands on his shoulders, gently guiding him back to his chair.

“What are you doing?” Caleb mouthed at me.

I shook my head—my body was acting before my mind caught up. The man we were all terrified of looked so small in the chair.

“So if I didn’t heal her, who did?” he scoffed.

Ma looked at me, her eyes pleading for me not to open my mouth. This will be better, I wanted to tell her. I promise.

“I did.”

A loud cough sent flecks of chewed pancake across the table. “Don’t be silly,” Papa said after he resumed breathing normally. He exaggerated every movement of taking a bite: opening his mouth wider than normal, inching the fork closer to the gap between his teeth, clamping down hard on the fork’s tines.

“She’s not the only one. I’ve healed other people too.”

I hadn’t planned to tell him about the others; saying it out loud poisoned the sacred bond of those private healings, defiled the trust they had placed in me. Papa’s expression morphed from feigned nonchalance to disbelief and then anger before landing on scorn. With pinched fingers, he removed his glasses from the bridge of his nose and laid them in front of his plate.

“You’ve done what?”

“Before Ma, I healed a few other people. Mostly people in the church, but some others too.” My heart rose to my throat as soon as I said it, but I straightened as the words tumbled out louder and faster, gaining strength like a storm.

Papa’s head was between his hands, his fingers pressing against his temples. No one else moved.

“Go to your room,” Papa’s voice seethed.

I left my breakfast untouched and stormed out of the kitchen and up the stairs before flopping onto my bed. Why did Papa insist that this spiritual gift that was no longer his could never be mine? The thoughts faded as I heard his feet on the steps—before I could brace myself, he was in my bedroom.

He stood in the doorway and unbuckled his belt—then he wrapped it into a fat coil around the middle of his hand, the silver buckle lost somewhere in his palm. Errant pieces of thread poked from the seams as he gripped the loose end of the belt until the taut leather strap snapped the air between his hands.

“You are no healer, Miriam.” Another snap of the belt in the middle of his words made me shudder. He wanted me to agree with him, but I couldn’t. With his socked left heel, he kicked the door closed behind him. The belt swung backward on an arc as Papa said it again. “You are no healer, Miriam.”

I knew I couldn’t say what I so desperately wanted to: You are no healer either, so I settled on shaking my head instead.

“You have one last chance to save yourself.”

At this point, I normally would have said anything to avoid the spanking. He had told me that he wouldn’t hurt me when we were in Bethel, and even though there had been discipline sessions since then, he had always used his hands; he had never used a belt to hit me before.

“Fine. Bend over.”

I started to bend over the bed on my forearms, but I stayed upright instead. If he was going to do this, he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of my whimper or the anonymity of my back; he would have to look at me the whole time.

“I’ll take it like this.”

“Have it your way.”

He let go of the long end of the belt;