Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“You didn’t do anything,” Louise said.

“No.”

“It’s psychological.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think I’m attractive.”

“You’re very attractive.”

“Then why didn’t you get hard?”

“I tried to tell you.”

“What, that you’re religious? I’m religious.”

“I’m saved,” Mills said quietly.

He was saved, lifted from life. In a state of grace. Mills in weightlessness, desire, will and soul idling like a car at a stoplight. George Mills, yeomanized a thousand years, Blue Collar George like a priest at a time clock, Odd Job George, Lunchpail Mills, the grassroots kid, was saved.

The Reverend Raymond Coule was minister of the Virginia Avenue Baptist Church. He was a large, heavy man in his early forties who wore leisure suits, double knits, checkered sports coats, Sansabelt trousers. Bright ties flared against his dark rayon shirts. Carnations twinkled in his lapels. There were big rings on his hands.

For many years he had had a nationally syndicated television ministry in Ohio and been famous as a healer. He specialized in children with hearing problems, women with nervous disorders, men with bad hearts. Then something happened. He lost his tax exemption, but that wasn’t it. He had become involved in a malpractice suit. On national television he had pronounced a woman cured of her cancer. This was rather a reversal of normal procedure. Always before, the people he had healed, preening their miracles, volunteered their own testimony. All Coule had to do when the ushers had preselected members of the audience — congregation — to appear with him on that portion of the program — service — given over to their witness, was to ask them questions. He rarely remembered the men and women he had touched, was as curious and surprised as his viewers to hear them, months and even years after a campaign in Roanoke or Macon or Wheeling, remind him of what God had done. God, not Coule. Coule was simply Christ’s instrument. Coule stressed the point, seeming modest, almost shy as he made his disclaimers. He interrupted harshly and became severe whenever someone who’d been healed momentarily forgot the facts and attributed the miracle to Coule himself. He would scold the offender and fly into a rage, a rage that seemed incongruent with his floorwalker presence, this fact alone seeming to lift his anger out of the range of rage and turn it into something like actual wrath.

“ I, ” he might shriek, “ I healed you? I couldn’t cure ham! Jesus healed you, brother, and don’t you forget it! Unless you remember that and make your thank-you’s out to Him you’d better get out your bathrobes and bedclothes all over again because you might just be headed into a relapse! Didn’t no Raymond Coule ever heal you, didn’t no Reverend Raymond Coule put your spine well! That bill goes to Jesus! And you better remit, friend, cause old Jesus He don’t dun, He just forecloses!”

And for all that Reverend Coule felt genuine anger at these moments, the offending party was as joyous as the congregation, flushing not with embarrassment but with what Coule himself took to be health, a shine like a smug fitness. Then the born-again sick man might deliver himself of a jumpy, gleeful litany, a before-and-after catalogue of deadly symptom, marred X-rays, the peculiar Rorschach shapes of his particular defilement, a tumor like a tiny trowel, a hairline crack along the bone like an ancient river in Texas or bad handwriting in a Slavic tongue. Blood chemistries invoked in real and absolute numbers, the names of drugs flushed down the toilet. The circumstances of their attendance, what they had said, what Coule had said, the doctors amazed, the new X-rays bland and undisturbed by disease as a landscape painting.

But once, during the healing, that portion of the show when Coule touched the supplicants on camera, a woman was helped forward by her husband. The woman, a girl really, years younger than her husband, who was about Coule’s age, stood mutely before the minister. “What is it?” Coule asked. The husband could not control himself. His grief was almost shameful, a sort of shame, that is. He blubbered incoherently. His nose ran. Coule was embarrassed. He was embarrassed by the man’s love for the woman, which he somehow knew had never been reciprocated, just as he also knew that the husband was unaware of this. He turned to the woman. “What is 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.