The Healing Line

Sundays when I was a small boy, my paternal grandmother watched the faith healer Oral Roberts on our Philco television. She was almost eighty years old at the time and nearly blind with cataracts. I watched with her because I was fascinated with television. An only child, I learned to entertain myself. I loved the stories unfolding on the screen and the feeling of slipping out of my own life and into the lives of others.

“Just a made-up story,” my father often said at the end of a program. “Not a word of it true.”

I was a timid boy of five who usually tried to avoid my grandmother because she sometimes could be severe, and her tongue could be sharp. “Roy,” she might snap at my father when he did or said something that displeased her. “Roy Martin,” she might say. “Lord-a-mercy.”

My normally tempestuous father would immediately become sheepish. Once, after an argument with my aunts about the future care of my grandmother, I saw him leave the house in tears, and he spent a long time away, hidden somewhere on our eighty-acre farm thinking whatever thoughts a man like him would think at such times—thoughts, I imagine now, about regret and shame and a desire to be a better man. I never heard him say he was sorry for his temper, but I could tell that he was by the way he finally slipped back into our farmhouse and hung his head and spoke in quiet tones, as if he’d realized the power of his words and was being very careful about what he said next.

“If you’ve ever been reverent in your life,” Oral Roberts said on the television, “be reverent now.”

My grandmother leaned forward in her rocking chair. She kept her graying hair pulled back in a tight knot. Her fingers were long, the knuckles swollen with arthritis. “Healing hands,” a distant cousin would one day say to me. “All the Inyart women had healing hands.”

Stella Inyart Martin—my grandmother. She believed in the old remedies, this woman who had nursed my grandfather’s first wife as she died of tuberculosis. My grandmother believed in ginseng and sassafras, in Black-Draught powder and the oil of the castor bean. She believed in healing, and she believed in Oral Roberts.

“Oral Roberts can’t heal,” he said on the television, “but God can.”

She must have seen only watery shapes as she looked at the screen and listened as Oral Roberts laid his hands on the lame, the maimed, the sick—those hands he claimed were instruments of God’s healing powers.

“This is God’s night to save you,” he said.

My house, when I was young, was a house of sorrow. Ill fortune befell us when I was barely a year old—too young for me to remember, but I swear I felt it, and still do, in my skin, my heart, my bones: this feeling of life separating into before and after, this feeling of being lost and trying to get back to the people we’d once been. This is the story of my family, a story I’d rewrite if I could, a story I revisit again and again, each time choosing a different lens through which to view it in the hope that I’ll finally find the one that will save us.

This time, I choose my grandmother. I wonder what it was like for her the day the news came that my father had gotten both of his hands caught between the spinning rollers of his corn picker’s shucking box, had stood in the field, those rollers mangling his hands, until a man driving past the field heard his shouts for help and stopped to see what he could do.

It was early November 1956. My father failed to shut down the tractor’s power takeoff before getting down to see why the shucking box was filling up with corn. If only he’d taken the time to follow the safety procedures, the story of my family would be a different story. But he didn’t, and as a result he lost both of his hands to amputation and wore prostheses—his hooks—the rest of his life. He came home from the hospital an angry man. As the years went on, he often whipped me with his belt, a yardstick, a switch. He whipped me because I misbehaved, because I talked back to him, because I was too slow to do a chore or too hasty. He was impatient, hard to please, harsh, crude, prone to tantrums and rants. He used words that my mother and grandmother and I shouldn’t have had to hear.

“Goddamn son of a bitch,” he’d say. “Goddamn bastard.”

I heard him once tell a man who had angered him, “I’ll slit your bag and run your pecker through it.”

That was my father, volatile and explosive. I was always on guard for the next person, the next thing, that would set him off. He filled our house with rage, and now I wonder whether, little by little, my grandmother forgot the sweet boy he’d been, the one I see now in an old photograph, holding a bit of feathery fluff in his dimpled hands as he smiles at the camera.

She must have known I was in need of tenderness. I don’t want to say I was a sickly child—I prefer not to think of myself that way—but the truth is my early years were filled with frequent colds, bouts of tonsillitis, and nosebleeds. My attendance record from my first-grade report card shows I missed fourteen days that year. Many of them were spent in the company of my grandmother. My mother was teaching, and my father had to see to his chores on the farm, so I often found myself sharing my grandmother’s bed. I still remember the surprise of her gentle touch and how she was no longer the severe grandmother I’d come to fear. She put her palm to my forehead to check my fever. Then she gathered me into the crook of her arm, her hand petting me, rubbing my back, touching my face, rocking me gently against her. Sometimes she told me stories about my father when he was a boy. Sometimes she sang the lullaby “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

“You’ll feel better soon,” she said. “You’re young. You won’t stay sick forever.”

Nearly fifty-five years in the future, I’m tempted to say she was wrong. A certain measure of misery has stayed with me all my life. People I’ve loved have hurt me deeply, and I’ve done the same to a few of them. I’ve disappointed loved ones, my mother and father included, and I’ve disappointed myself. Live long enough, and you learn that there’s a sickness in people, something that makes us wound one another. Sometimes we do it deliberately, and sometimes it happens by accident. But it happens. Again and again. It seems that we can’t stop. And in the end this is why we love—this recognition that we’re all imperfect, all in need of healing.

In childhood, I had no idea why Oral Roberts fascinated me so. He does even now as I watch YouTube videos of him laying hands on the suffering. Even though there’s something menacing in the way he grips a person’s skull, the pained look on his face as he prays, his forceful and fervent calls for God to heal the afflicted, something lifts up in me, some rising of my spirit.

The people who came to Oral Roberts, if they were legitimately disabled or ill, must have seen doctors aplenty, must have been told that everything that could be tried had indeed been done. They must have been out of choices, not knowing where to turn.

They must have been like Phil Hayden, who at thirty-eight stood in the healing line at a tent meeting in Akron, Ohio, hoping to be able to hear in his right ear for the first time since he was five. He wore a light gray suit and a dark necktie. His hair was combed back and oiled. He tipped back his head and looked up at Oral Roberts, who sat on a steel folding chair at the edge of the stage. Roberts was in his shirt-sleeves. He had a microphone stand between his knees. He was ready for business, this faith healer, this man of God.

“Oh God, open his right ear.” Roberts had his right hand on that ear. Hayden lifted his arms, and Roberts’s left hand joined his right. “I earnestly entreat thee in Jesus’s name. Heal the deaf ear.” Here, his voice raised. “Heal it!”

“Yes, sir,” said Hayden.

“What do you mean, ‘Yes, sir?’” Roberts asked.

“I heard it open.”

“You heard it open? How did you hear it open?”

“It snapped, just like that.”

Roberts snapped his fingers. “Snapped, just like that.”

“Absolutely.”

Then Roberts turned Hayden so he was facing the audience. “Phil, I want you to close up the ear that was already normal.”

Hayden covered his left ear with his left hand. Roberts got up from his chair and started retreating, moving backwards to put increasing distance between them.

“Say, ‘I love you, Jesus,’” Roberts commanded.

“I love you, Jesus.”

The litany of commands continued, and as it did, Roberts spoke in softer and softer tones. Hayden repeated everything that he said.

“With all my heart.”

“Praise God.”

“Thank you, Jesus.”

“A-man.”

“Hallelujah.”

“Praise God.”

“I love you, Jesus.”

“I am healed.”

“In Christ’s name.”

Now Roberts’s voice was barely a whisper. “A-man,” he said.

And Hayden answered, “A-man.”

Then came the jubilation.

I remember as a boy being filled with dread, without the expectation of joy that my friends who lived in happier homes had. In my home, even when we were happy—times when my father and I listened to a baseball game on the radio, when I reveled in my mother’s kindness, when my father told silly jokes and laughed—the normal assumption was that sooner or later, something would go wrong. I grew up living with the fear of loss. I saw it in the hooks my father put on each day. I saw it in my mother’s grimace, her lips pressed tightly together, which was the sign that my father was about to lash out, and I saw it in my grandmother.

Her sight left her little by little, the cataracts clouding more and more of her vision until she could barely see to move through our farmhouse. I remember how her fingers—those long fingers that I assume had once been beautiful, had once moved with grace—scrabbled over our plaster walls, our door casings, the oilcloth on our dining table, our cabinet fronts, as she moved from her bedroom to the kitchen. There she was, an old woman at the end of her life, having spent over twenty years alone after my grandfather died in 1941.

Her house was no longer her house. It was my mother’s to see to now. When my father’s temper exploded, she and I tried to make ourselves as small as we could. I remember the white packets of phenobarbital tablets, the barbiturate his doctor prescribed to try to calm him. My aunt told me years later that when my father came home from the hospital after his accident he was “out of his head.” This is my legacy, this rage. These tantrums, these whippings, these loud voices, and the ugly words that filled our home.

My grandmother’s treadle sewing machine, which she must have made hum and sing merrily for so long, was now a silent thing of iron and wood that her open bedroom door nearly hid from view. Sometimes I sat on the linoleum floor to press the treadle with my small hands. A basket held rag balls the size of softballs. No longer did she have the sight she needed to unwind the strips of fabric and stitch them into throw rugs.

She wore flannel nightgowns the days she didn’t feel like getting out of bed. On better days, she put on plain cotton housedresses that buttoned up the front. She always buttoned the top button, the one at the hollow of her throat. She pinned her hair into a tight knot behind her head. She put on thick support hose and no-nonsense oxford shoes. She wore sunbonnets if she felt like going outside. The bonnets cowled her face and made her seem even more severe.

I didn’t know what to do around her because my mother and father had made it clear that I was to be quiet so as not to upset her. For the most part, I intended to avoid her, but on occasion the horehound candy she kept on her dresser lured me into her bedroom, and sometimes, as quiet as I tried to be, she woke, patted the bed, and said, “Come here. Come spend some time with your old granny.”

To this day, the smell of Vicks VapoRub, the taste of horehound, the feel of a quilt, can take me back to those days, can lead me to my grandmother, who surprised me with how gentle she could be when I was close to her. Her hand found my head, and she stroked my hair. “Just stay here a while,” she said. “Can you do that? You’re such a blessing.”

Sometimes I drifted off to sleep. It might have been raining outside, or a winter wind might rattle the storm windows, but I was warm beneath the quilts. I’d dozed until my grandmother’s cough woke us both. She coughed and coughed, and when she finally got her breath, she said, “It’s a misery getting old. You don’t know me the way I used to be. Oh, there were days and days when I was happy.” She’d settled into stories from her girlhood—church ice-cream socials, quilting bees, the first time she rode in a Model T. “Oh, I was going fast,” she said once. “I always loved the way it felt to be going somewhere. I guess I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry.”

At that moment, I started to sense what it meant to love someone, though of course it would take me years to be able to put words to what I felt. Love was empathy. That’s what I was learning. Love was the ability to feel what it was to be someone else. I felt how sad my grandmother was, and that made me sad too.

Deep down, I loved her because I was a loving child. I wanted Oral Roberts to heal her. I believed that he could. Each Sunday, at the end of his television program, he asked those at home who were in need of healing to put their hands to their screens. He held his own palm close to the camera.

“God can heal you there in your home,” he said. “Do you believe that?”

I did. I knew it to be true because once I had a splinter in my finger, and I placed my hand on the screen, and Oral Roberts commanded my affliction to leave me, and the next morning when I woke, the splinter was gone. Of course, there must have been some logical explanation for that vanishing splinter. My mother sometimes waited until I was asleep to work a splinter gently up from my flesh, and I, enjoying the sound sleep of a child, never woke. But when I gave myself over to Oral Roberts and woke to find no sign of the splinter, I thought it was a miracle.

The little boy had polio, and he came down the healing line on crutches. A deacon took the crutches away and lifted the boy so he was sitting on Oral Roberts’s lap. The boy had on a white sport shirt and dark trousers. One of his shoelaces was untied.

“Now Jesus, we ask that his little limbs be healed,” Roberts said, “and that they shall be restored.” His voice rose with fervor and urgency. “Restore them tonight. In the name of Christ, the Lord.”

Roberts bowed his head and he seemed close to tears. He rubbed his hand over the boy’s polio-stricken leg. He felt his ankle. He squeezed the sole of his foot. “Oh, God,” he said, “loosen that little foot up. Take the sickness . . . oh, it’s coming now, son.” He kept working that ankle and foot. “Praise God, praise God, praise God. Thank you, God.”

The boy’s face showed no emotion. He glanced out toward the audience. Roberts let the boy’s leg swing off his lap. “Now then, Billy Ray,” he said, “I want you to raise that leg up like that.” Roberts lifted his arm, and immediately Billy Ray swung his leg up. “Oh, you can do it,” Roberts said. He pushed Billy Ray’s leg down and then tapped the other one. “Now raise this one up, son.” Billy Ray did. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” said Roberts. “I’m going to put you down now.” But Billy Ray didn’t wait to be lifted. He squirmed off Roberts’s lap, planting his feet solidly on the floor. “Oh, he wants down,” Roberts said. “Honey, walk on off, son. Walk on off.”

I watched Billy Ray walk down the ramp that led to the left of the stage. He tucked his head in and squared his shoulders. His short arms swung at his sides. He took that brisk walk as if it were something he’d been doing all his life, and Oral Roberts, holding those crutches, shouted, “Oh, glory to God.”

Billy Ray went all the way down that ramp. In the audience, a man wearing a bow tie wept. A bosomy woman behind him lifted her arms toward heaven.

I watch it all again on the video, and I think back to the boy I was, lying on my stomach on the cold linoleum floor, my chin in my hands. I still feel the thrill that came over me. A boy whose legs were useless was now walking. The practical, skeptical man I am says this isn’t possible. But the boy I was lived in a world of television and stories where all sorts of things that couldn’t logically happen did. Sleeping Beauty woke when the Prince kissed her, Cinderella put on the glass slipper and went to the ball in a pumpkin that turned into a golden coach drawn by horses that had once been mice, Jiminy Cricket invited me to wish upon a star, and Oral Roberts made polio-stricken boys walk. What else was possible? Why couldn’t my father lose his anger and my grandmother once again see? Why couldn’t we be like the families I saw on television sitcoms? Why couldn’t we be happy?

One day, my aunt and uncle came in their sky-blue Mercury, and they took my grandmother away. She was going to the hospital, my mother told me. She was going to have an operation. A doctor would do something to her eyes, and then . . .

“Will she be able to see?” I asked my mother.

I don’t recall her response, but I remember well the hope that something lost was about to return.

But when my grandmother came home from the hospital, her eyes were covered with patches, and my aunt had to lead her into our house.

Nevertheless, I was excited.

“Grandma, Grandma,” I said.

Her voice was weary. “Yes, honey.”

“Grandma, can you see?”

“Hush,” my aunt said. “Grandma is tired.”

I shrank away, then. I left my grandmother’s room. I knew the answer to my question without having to ask it again. Maybe my grandmother would see a bit better, but not nearly well enough to call the surgery a success, let alone a miracle.

Then one night, sometime after the patches were gone from her eyes, she came through the living room carrying a cup of hot tea. My father, angered by something I’ve long forgotten, was whipping me on the backs of my legs with his belt.

“Hold still,” he said to me as I tried to squirm away from the lashes. “Hold still or I’ll give you more.”

He was wearing a white T-shirt. The canvas straps of his hooks’ harness made an X on his back. The hooks were screwed into the ends of hard plastic holsters. He wore white cotton arm-socks on his stumps. My mother pinned them to his T-shirt sleeves each morning when she helped him get dressed. His white flesh filled the gaps between the tops of the holsters and the bottoms of the sleeves.

My grandmother, in the past, had sometimes uttered a few words of disapproval when my father was whipping me, but she’d never done more than that.

Until this night.

“Stop that,” she said, but my father kept on.

I felt my world shatter, as it always did when my father whipped me. Everything swirled around me as if I were in the middle of the colored pieces of glass that flashed inside my kaleidoscope when I turned it. No center held me. There were only the lashes from my father’s belt, my tears, my screams, my pleas for him to stop, please stop.

Then my grandmother was moving. She stepped up to my father. Somehow in the fog of her vision she found the bare skin of his right arm and pressed the hot teacup to it. In a measured voice, her anger barely contained, she said, “I told you to leave that boy alone.”

Just like that, the lashes from my father’s belt stopped. My legs were on fire. I heard the tip of his belt brush the floor as he let his arm sag.

No one in our house had ever stood up to my father, and now here was my grandmother, nearly blind, defending me with what she had at hand, a cup of boiling hot tea.

I know now my father was confused. Maybe in that moment he came to remember the person he’d been before his accident, the person of kindness my uncle would describe years later when he talked about how that day in the cornfield changed my father. A person who was quick to laugh, a person who was generous and kind, a person who was loving and sweet. Maybe he recalled how it felt to be the boy he once was, and maybe that allowed him to understand all that he was taking from me—all my faith in goodness and love. It would take me a long time to reclaim that faith. If not for my mother’s own goodness, I may never again have found it. Did my father ever know how close I was to being lost forever?

Though I couldn’t have known it that night, perhaps my redemption started when my grandmother pressed that hot teacup into my father’s arm.

He stopped swinging his belt. He stood there, a look of disbelief on his face, a look that was also a look of shame. He looked—I realize this now—like a little boy who was lost and afraid.

“Ma?” he said in a choked voice.

This was her son. I think now of all she couldn’t save: my grandfather’s first wife, her own eyesight, my father’s hands. How she must have wanted to stop trying, to let the world’s deterioration have its way, but she had healing hands. She laid them on my father that night. She reached out with her empty hand and touched him tenderly on the spot she’d burned. Her voice was still firm, and in that firmness there was love. “I said stop whipping that boy.”

She went on to her bedroom. My father sank down into a chair. I crawled up onto his lap, and we sat there, the two of us. I took the curve of his hook between my hands, and I held it. He didn’t resist. I held the cold steel. It was all I could think to do. My grandmother had brought me here. I heard the springs of her bed creak as she lay down. Soon we would all lie down, my mother and father and I, and we would sleep and we would do our best to forget the ugliness of our lives, and when the morning came we would rise—I convinced myself it could be true—to a new and glorious day.

The truth is my father and I would spend years and years struggling through our anger before reaching a calmer place, but on that night, I felt blessed.

I think now of the way those who claimed Oral Roberts had healed them came down the ramp, their arms lifted to heaven, some of them weeping, some of them smiling, all of them restored, made whole. Although their healing may have been manufactured or the result of a temporary persuasion—as this moment of peace between my father and me would prove to be—their rapture both fascinated me and unnerved me. What was it that I didn’t trust? What was it about their dramatic healing that unsettled me but also made me long to embrace it? I know now it was the fact that these people—these sick and afflicted people—were so human, so much in need that I couldn’t help but believe.

The night my grandmother saved me, I held my father’s hook because there was nothing else to hold onto. He had no palm to offer, no fingers to close around mine the way he’d held the fluff of feathers in that childhood picture. Even now, I wonder what his hand would have felt like. I look at my own hands, and I try to imagine the skin as his would have been, the raised veins, the wrinkled knuckles, the calloused palm. I try to conjure up the warmth of flesh, the flex of tendons, the support of ligaments, the spark of nerves, the substance of muscles and bones. All my life I’ve tried to rescue those damaged hands so I might reconstruct them, carry them to him, tell him he can take off those hooks and never again have to put them on, never again have to settle into their harness and carry around the weight of them.

Throw them off, I want to say to him. And with them throw off your anger, and I’ll let go of mine. This is what I’ve come to offer.

He flexes his fingers, trying them out. He closes his hands into fists, holds them clenched for a long time, and then opens them and leaves them open. He stares down at his palms with wonder and reaches them out to me.

I don’t hesitate. I take them into mine, and like that, the two of us begin the life—our divine life—the one we should have had.

Read more from Issue 14.1.