Читать книгу A River Could Be a Tree - Angela Himsel - Страница 14

One summer evening in 1969, after running around with our cousins all Sunday at our grandparents’ farm, my sister Abby’s face suddenly became bright red. Her heart beat erratically, and she developed a strange twitch on one side of her body. Sixteen months older than me, Abby was nine years old.

At Grandma Himsel’s insistence, my parents took her to a doctor, which was against church doctrine. Because of Abby’s twitches, she was first diagnosed with chorea. Then they said it was rheumatic fever, which could, in rare cases, lead to chorea. Finally, my mother explained that Abby had a hole in her heart that made her tired. No medical treatment was available, or so we were told, so she swallowed fistfuls of vitamins every day. The church and my mother remained convinced that anything natural was from God and was thus better than any medicine, which was man-made.

Abby weakened quickly and missed a whole year of school. On bad days, she could barely walk to the bathroom. Once my best friend, the one I played jacks with on the floor, the one who was invariably on my team for hide-and-seek, her illness created a distance that I was too young to understand, too young to surmount. She was on a different side now. And I could only look at her from across an emotional chasm.

Abby’s face lost all color, and her stomach swelled up, filled with fluid her heart couldn’t pump out. It became harder and harder to look at her. This wasn’t my fearless older sister who jumped out of the swing when it was at its highest and, when she fell to the ground, picked herself up and laughed.

The minister came over many times to anoint Abby. He smudged olive oil on her forehead and, holding her head between his hands, asked God to heal her. Every other week my parents requested a new prayer cloth from church headquarters. My mother held it against Abby’s forehead, much like the ministers anointed her with oil, and silently offered a prayer.

Abby and I had taken bubble baths together, patting the bubbles onto each other’s faces to form moustaches and beards, which, I privately feared, made us look like that pagan Santa Claus. We’d caught lightning bugs on summer evenings and stuck them on the end of sticks, brandishing them about like flashlights. We’d held hands, leaned back, and turned around and around and around in the living room, delighting in getting dizzier and dizzier until we fell down. Abby and I had slept in the same bed listening to our father read us bedtime stories until he said goodnight, sleep tight, and tucked us in, leaving the bathroom light on for Abby.

Now, because of her heart condition, Abby could no longer race me around the house or chase me during a game of frozen tapper. She was not the sturdy child with rosy cheeks, shiny reddish-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a big sparkly smile. She was lethargic, and because she couldn’t play outside with us, my mother bought her paint-by-number oil paintings of dogs and rural scenes to work on so she wouldn’t get bored.

The four little ones—me, Liz, John, and Sarah—trudged down to the creek and played in the sand and built our castles without Abby. Sometimes I told them I didn’t want to go, and I would stay at home, spread a blanket on the floor underneath Abby’s hospital bed that she periodically used. While she very seriously and quietly painted the two collies, filling in first all the tan of their fur, then the blue sky, I entertained myself with a book or with my Barbies. I flew them through the air and took them on adventures in distant lands.

My parents also relaxed the no-television rule and purchased a black-and-white television with rabbit ears and spotty reception so Abby could watch television during the day. We sat on the couch and watched Gilligan’s Island, and I very pragmatically wondered how it was that the castaways kept blowing the chances they had to get rescued. When Perry Mason was on, I slid closer to John and grabbed his hand when the scary music began. It took very little to frighten me, just a few bars of “bu-dum-dum-dum.”

We watched The Brady Bunch, noting that Florence Henderson grew up in nearby Dale, Indiana. She and Abe Lincoln, whose formative years were spent in Little Pigeon Creek, less than sixty miles south of us, were Hoosiers that we were proud of.

The Waltons premiered on television in 1972. A family drama set during the Depression, it chronicled the lives of seven children, their parents, and their grandparents in the Blue Ridge Mountains. While the family fought, they always made up and discussed things rationally. It was a wonderful, feel-good show, but even more far-fetched than I Dream of Jeannie, which we watched furtively when my father wasn’t around. Anything with supernatural elements was obviously off-limits, according to the church. Demons.

When my father came home, he invariably sat down in his easy chair for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Whether it was the casualties in the Vietnam War, the 1969 moon landing, Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, or the antiwar riots in Chicago, Cronkite signed off with his trademark “And that’s the way it is, Monday, September 11, 1972,” or whatever the date. My father’s inevitable comment was, “Well, this old world can’t last much longer, that’s for sure.”

We attended church services less and less often, because Abby couldn’t go. My older brothers and sisters quietly did whatever they wanted on the Sabbath. They had after-school jobs and made their own money, so they had cars and went to basketball and football games on Friday nights. My brother Jim was on the wrestling team, and he competed on Friday nights and Saturdays. Ed was on the high school basketball team, and Paul played for the middle school team. Sometimes my mother attended both the wrestling matches and the basketball games on the Sabbath. I worried about her salvation. Was she breaking the Sabbath, just by being in attendance?

Wanda wore makeup and went to the Calumet, the local dance hall that featured rock ’n’ roll bands and where you could buy beer without showing ID. She went to the drive-in with boyfriends.

As the only ones in the county who belonged to the Worldwide Church of God, it wasn’t at all easy to have a social life while practicing the church’s doctrines.

My father sporadically yelled at my older siblings for their transgressions, while my mother insisted, “They’re just going to a get-together at a friend’s house.” No one was fooled, least of all my father, who was most preoccupied with making a living for his family, while worrying about Abby, but those little lies enabled us to live with one another.

The rest of us—the younger ones—continued to observe the Sabbath, and we didn’t shop or participate in events on Friday night through Saturday. Nor did we eat pork or unclean meat or fish. In our own way, we remained in the church, even if we rarely attended services. And, of course, my parents tithed. Not tithing kept you out of the Kingdom.

From the moment that Abby got sick, we prayed for her, ending our Friday night Bible studies kneeling at the couch and chairs in the living room and, hands folded and heads bowed, we prayed to God that His will be done, that she would be healed, in Jesus’s name we prayed, Amen.

We had faith that God would heal her, just as we had faith that this world was coming to an end and a better world was around the corner.