Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

He would start with a few random ‘Hallelujahs’ and my mother would respond with ‘Praise His name! Praise His precious name!’ And Pastor Mulvery would say, ‘Lord, we are gathered here in Your precious name to pray for this poor child.’ ‘Amen,’ my mother would say. ‘In his terrible affliction, show him the path to salvation. Oh precious Redeemer who died on the cross so we might be free.’ ‘Hallelujah, praise the Lord,’ my mother would answer. ‘Son, open your heart to Jesus, accept Him into your life. Lord, do not condemn him to the terrible fires of hell, grant him everlasting life with your glorious salvation.’ ‘Hallelujah, blessed be His name!’ ‘Bring your sin to Jesus, son, lay it at His feet so that He may grant you His precious redemption. Precious Jesus, answer our prayers, open his young heart, let him see you in all your glory. Lord, we pray for this child’s soul, we earnestly beseech you to bring him from darkness to the light, from the inky black of the stone tomb on Golgotha into the glorious morning of the resurrection of our sweet Jesus Christ!’ ‘Yes Jesus! Precious Jesus!’ my mother would be saying on her side of the bed. And so it would go every morning.

Not long after I’d first met Doc, we were sitting on our rock on the hill behind the rose garden and I had asked him why I was a sinner and what I had done to be condemned to eternal hell fire unless I was born again.

He sat for a long time looking over the valley and then he said, ‘Peekay, God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with such rubbish. Only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business.’ He paused and smiled. ‘In Mexico there is a cactus that even sometimes you would think God forgets. But no, my friend, this is not so. On a full moon in the desert every one hundred years he remembers and he opens up a single flower to bloom. And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon and laughing up at the stars, this, Peekay, is heaven.’ He looked at me, his deep blue eyes sharp and penetrating. ‘This is the faith in God the cactus has.’ We had sat for a while before he spoke again. ‘It is better just to get on with the business of living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don’t go pestering and begging and telling Him all your stupid little sins, that way you will spoil His day. Absoloodle.’

I still sometimes got a bit scared about going to hell and I used to think quite a lot about being born again. But my heart didn’t want to open up and receive the Lord. All the people I knew who had opened up their hearts to Jesus struck me as a pretty pathetic lot, not bad, not good, just nothing. I couldn’t afford to be just nothing when I was aiming to be the welterweight champion of the world. I guess my mother was right when she said if I kept rejecting the Lord and hardening my heart one day He might just go away and leave me to it. That’s what must have happened because after a while it got a lot easier and I didn’t worry as much. I decided I liked Doc’s God a lot more than my mother’s and Pastor Mulvery’s and Pik Botha’s and all the people who loved Jesus at the Apostolic Faith Mission. Jesus, who was God’s dearly beloved son, seemed to be in charge of things there. He seemed to be very keen on saving souls and had actually died for their sins, but I couldn’t help feeling it may have been a bit of a waste. Still, they seemed pretty grateful because they spoke a lot more about Jesus than about God. Jesus was definitely number one at the Apostolic Faith Mission.

Later I was to learn that there was a third party involved called the Holy Ghost who spoke in tongues of invisible fire and he gave people a thing called ‘the gift of tongues’. When he did this, people would jump up in prayer meetings and wave their arms around and shake a lot with their eyes closed. They never seemed to bump into anything either, it was quite uncanny. And they’d babble away and sing, using strange words. I’d try to do it afterwards but it never sounded right. It was a gift all right.

A visiting pastor from the Assembly of God Church in America told us once when we were having a revival week that he had definite proof that a woman who had never been out of her small town in America spoke in Swahili when the Holy Ghost entered into her. There was a missionary from Africa who understood Swahili present in the same small church in America and she’d understood every word. He didn’t tell us what she said, but he said there were lots of cases like this and that he’d personally witnessed quite a few. I had listened from then on but nobody in the Apostolic Faith Mission ever spoke Zulu or Shangaan. Maybe Zulu and Shangaan weren’t exotic enough for the Holy Ghost. I wondered what was so special about Swahili.

Pastor Mulvery got up from beside the hospital bed and gave me a flash smile and said that Jesus loved me anyway. Then he trotted off with the Bible under one arm and a handful of tracts to visit all the other patients and my mother called him a precious man and stayed with me.

After I got the pad I wrote her a long note asking her about Doc. She took it and without reading it, asked, ‘Is this about the Professor?’ Her lips were drawn tight as I nodded. Then she scrunched the note in her hand. ‘I don’t want you ever to mention his name again, do you hear? He is an evil man who used you to cover up the terrible things he was doing and then he nearly killed you.’ There were sudden tears in her eyes. ‘The doctor says, if he had caught you on the side of the head he would have killed you! Another three inches and you would have been dead. You’ve been through a terrible experience and I’ve prayed and prayed the Lord will make you forget it so you are not scarred for life.’ She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

‘No! No!’ I forced myself to say. What came out was sort of two squeaks from the back of my throat which forced their way past my bruised and swollen tongue and out of my clamped mouth. I started to cry silently without wanting to in front of my mother. They were blaming Doc for what had happened to me and I was the only one who knew the truth and I couldn’t help him. It was my fault anyway. If I hadn’t put the bottle of Johnnie Walker in his sugar bag this never would have happened. Doc, whom I loved so dearly, had become another Pisskop victim. This time it was much worse than a nervous breakdown.

My mother had stopped sniffing when she saw my tears. ‘You poor little mite, you’ve been through a terrible time. We’ll never talk about it again. Mrs Boxall from the library has asked to come and see you but the doctor and I have agreed that you’re not well enough to have visitors.’ She opened her bag and withdrew a green folded card. ‘Now I have some good news for you. Your report card came and you came first in your class. Your granpa and I are very proud of you.’ She beamed at me, her tears forgotten. ‘They’ve put you up another two classes, you’re going to be in with the ten-year-olds. Fancy that, seven and in with the ten-year-olds!’ She handed the report card to me and through my tears I took it and tore it into four pieces. For a long time my mother said nothing, looking down at the pieces of green cardboard in my lap. Finally she gave a deep sigh. I hated her sighs the most because they made me feel terribly guilty. ‘The Lord has blessed you with a good brain. I pray every day that you will take Him into your heart and use your fine mind to glorify His precious name.’ She gathered the pieces up and dropped them into her handbag, giving me a sort of squiffy smile. ‘I’m sure it can be mended, you are just not your old cheerful self at present, are you?’ But her eyes weren’t smiling as she spoke.