George Mills by Stanley Elkin

it?” he asked her. She shrugged helplessly. “What is it, dear?” Still she wouldn’t answer, and though the man tried to speak for her he was tongue-tied by grief and love. Somehow he managed to mutter that his wife was going to die. “What do you mean she’s going to die?” Coule said, and then, just for a moment, it was as if he was scolding one of the carelessly faithful who had rendered unto Coule what was properly God’s. He began to scold. “Don’t you know that there’s no death?” he shouted, not at the woman but at the man. “Don’t you know Christ did away with death? Don’t you know——”
    “I have a tumor,” the woman said. “They took my biopsy. It’s bad cancer.”
    “Where?” Coule demanded.
    “Here,” she said. She pointed to her stomach.
    He had a feeling about this woman.
    “There? You mean there?” He clutched the woman’s arm and drew her to him and pressed his palm hard against her belly. “There?” he shouted. “ There? ” The woman screamed in pain. “What are you shouting for? It’s not malignant. It never was. They made a mistake. Stop your shrieking. You’re healthy. You don’t have any more cancer than I do. Hush. Hush, I tell you. Praise Jesus and honor this man who was so worried about you.”
    The woman looked at him. She was frightened, but for the first time she seemed to realize what he was saying. “I’m healed?” she said. “I’m not dying?”
    “Don’t Christ work on the Sabbath even though it’s His day?”
    “I’m not going to die?”
    “Not of any cancer,” Coule said.
    The fright hadn’t left her eyes but Coule saw that it had changed. It was the fear of God. The real thing. It was the first time Coule had ever seen it but he recognized it at once. It was terror, dread, God panic. “Take her home, Mister,” he told the husband. “You go along with him, Mrs.”
    The woman was dead within three months. She had believed him, had refused to return to her doctors even when the pain became worse. Her husband had tried to reason with her but it was the Lord she feared now, not death. The doctors claimed that the cancer had been caught in time, that it had been operable, that with the operation and a course of chemotherapy the chances of saving her were better than seventy-two percent.
    The husband wanted to sue Coule’s mission and threatened to sue all the television stations that carried his program.
    The case never came to trial. Coule’s lawyers had persuaded the husband’s lawyers that faith itself would be on trial, that they could never win, that the dead woman’s religious belief, regardless of who had originally inspired it and however naive the actions it prompted her to take, were forever beyond the jurisdiction of any court in the land. Obtaining a judgment would be tantamount to convicting God. The man was poor, the case extraordinarily complicated. They would be working on a contingency fee. They talked the husband into dropping the case.
    Coule gave up the mission. The television stations refused to carry his programs, but he’d made his decision before he learned this. When he left Ohio the only thing he took with him was his flamboyant wardrobe. He gave the campaign’s immense profits to charities and for a period of years gave up preaching entirely. He had known better. What he’d said he’d said for the husband, not because of his grief but because of all that unrequited love.
    Nor was it the fear of lawsuits that caused him to give up his mission. He knew better there, too. It was her eyes, the holy panic, the fear of the Lord he saw in them, a fear more contagious than any disease at which he’d ever made passes with his ring-fingered hands.
    It was Coule Louise went to when Mills told her he was saved.
    They were nominally Baptist, or Louise was. They belonged to the church which promised the greatest return on their emotional dollar. The Baptists had the hymns and water ceremonies and revivals, though not the