the hospital and laid Randall in the backseat of his car. The boy looked scared and pale. He had not noticed earlier how pale. If he had, he might not have had the nerve to do what he was doing. “Son, you’re not going to die. God is going to give you a miracle.”
“I know, Daddy.”
Brother Terrell and Randall drove a hundred miles an hour, never stopping or slowing down until they crossed the state line. They made it back to West Virginia in time for Brother Terrell to preach the morning service the next day. He sent one of the tent men back for Betty Ann and the baby. By the time they arrived, Randall was raking leaves to make money to put in his daddy’s offering.
Randall hemorrhaged off and on for the rest of his life. Years later we learned that he suffered from a rare birth defect. A vein intended to route blood to his heart dead-ended in his stomach. His body produced a network of tiny capillaries to ferry the blood supply. It was an ingenious work-around, but from time to time the network ruptured. At first the blood showed up as dark patches in his stool, subtle and easy to miss. Then the blood began to engorge his belly and there was nothing to do but wait and pray for a miracle. Once the hemorrhage reached critical mass, blood spewed from his lips. I remember the splattered chaos of that blood and the fear that came with it, long urgent journeys through the night with the car windows open and the heavy, honeysuckled air of the South pressing down upon us like the left hand of God.
The events I witnessed and the stories about these events have intertwined to form a single thread of memory. Sifted and shaped over time by the adults around me, my recollections have distilled into a mythology of faith, hard to believe, harder still to deny. Here is what I think I know: Randall was sick most of his life, he came close to death again and again, and his father refused to let him go. It was his father’s voice, his father’s faith that tethered him to life. That’s what Randall believed. That’s what we all believed.
Chapter Seven
TENSIONS BETWEEN MAMA AND BETTY ANN EASED A BIT AFTER RANDALL rejoined us on the road. My mother’s story is, she decided Brother Terrell should stay with his family for the sake of his ministry. There was no such thing as a divorced holiness preacher. Mama said she avoided Brother Terrell as best she could, a difficult feat considering we all occupied the same house during revivals. She and Gary and I went back to traveling in our own car for a time, and I remember her yanking me and other bystanders into any room or space in which she found herself alone with Brother Terrell. She said Brother Terrell pursued her constantly and that she resisted, reminding him he had a wife. That wife would soon give birth to two more daughters. My mother managed to take responsibility for their births, saying, “If I hadn’t talked him into staying with her, they wouldn’t have had all those kids and things might have been different.”
Randall remained healthy for nearly a year, and we did what we always did: moved every three to six weeks, stayed up after the evening service until two or three in the morning, got up early for the morning service, raced back home for lunch, then back to the tent for the afternoon service. If pictures existed from those days, and in my family they do not, they would reveal a pasty-skinned, pinwormy lot with baggy clothes and dark hollows under our eyes. Maybe it was too much “light” bread or not enough pork and beans. We began to physically resemble our metaphoric conception of ourselves—a battlefield on which God and the devil duked it out. The cosmic implications of our hardships and the fact that we expected Jesus to touch down at any moment made the normal touchstones of childhood an afterthought. My mother homeschooled Randall and then Pam as time and energy permitted, enough to keep the authorities off the Terrells’ backs. We lived in
“I know, Daddy.”
Brother Terrell and Randall drove a hundred miles an hour, never stopping or slowing down until they crossed the state line. They made it back to West Virginia in time for Brother Terrell to preach the morning service the next day. He sent one of the tent men back for Betty Ann and the baby. By the time they arrived, Randall was raking leaves to make money to put in his daddy’s offering.
Randall hemorrhaged off and on for the rest of his life. Years later we learned that he suffered from a rare birth defect. A vein intended to route blood to his heart dead-ended in his stomach. His body produced a network of tiny capillaries to ferry the blood supply. It was an ingenious work-around, but from time to time the network ruptured. At first the blood showed up as dark patches in his stool, subtle and easy to miss. Then the blood began to engorge his belly and there was nothing to do but wait and pray for a miracle. Once the hemorrhage reached critical mass, blood spewed from his lips. I remember the splattered chaos of that blood and the fear that came with it, long urgent journeys through the night with the car windows open and the heavy, honeysuckled air of the South pressing down upon us like the left hand of God.
The events I witnessed and the stories about these events have intertwined to form a single thread of memory. Sifted and shaped over time by the adults around me, my recollections have distilled into a mythology of faith, hard to believe, harder still to deny. Here is what I think I know: Randall was sick most of his life, he came close to death again and again, and his father refused to let him go. It was his father’s voice, his father’s faith that tethered him to life. That’s what Randall believed. That’s what we all believed.
Chapter Seven
TENSIONS BETWEEN MAMA AND BETTY ANN EASED A BIT AFTER RANDALL rejoined us on the road. My mother’s story is, she decided Brother Terrell should stay with his family for the sake of his ministry. There was no such thing as a divorced holiness preacher. Mama said she avoided Brother Terrell as best she could, a difficult feat considering we all occupied the same house during revivals. She and Gary and I went back to traveling in our own car for a time, and I remember her yanking me and other bystanders into any room or space in which she found herself alone with Brother Terrell. She said Brother Terrell pursued her constantly and that she resisted, reminding him he had a wife. That wife would soon give birth to two more daughters. My mother managed to take responsibility for their births, saying, “If I hadn’t talked him into staying with her, they wouldn’t have had all those kids and things might have been different.”
Randall remained healthy for nearly a year, and we did what we always did: moved every three to six weeks, stayed up after the evening service until two or three in the morning, got up early for the morning service, raced back home for lunch, then back to the tent for the afternoon service. If pictures existed from those days, and in my family they do not, they would reveal a pasty-skinned, pinwormy lot with baggy clothes and dark hollows under our eyes. Maybe it was too much “light” bread or not enough pork and beans. We began to physically resemble our metaphoric conception of ourselves—a battlefield on which God and the devil duked it out. The cosmic implications of our hardships and the fact that we expected Jesus to touch down at any moment made the normal touchstones of childhood an afterthought. My mother homeschooled Randall and then Pam as time and energy permitted, enough to keep the authorities off the Terrells’ backs. We lived in
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