Brother Word (15 page)

The John Coltrane song playing on the eight-track transported Bennett back to the days when his family was still together. The last part of his family—the young boy in the portraits—had gotten older and left him two years ago, and with that departure the sobering reality of Bennett’s world had come crashing down around him.

“Ain’t nobody left in my life now,” he muttered, the cadence of his words flowing from his mouth in perfect sync with Coltrane. “Ain’t nobody but me.”

The house was in total disarray. Empty beer cans and the cellophane wrappings of old TV dinners and snack chips littered the living room floor. The kitchen was in even worse shape, as was every room except for his son’s old bedroom. That room remained clean due to the fact that Bennett refused to go in there. There were too many old memories in there. Too many haunting reminders of a dream that had cruelly morphed into a nightmare.

Steadying himself on his cane with his right hand, with his other hand Bennett reached for and carefully extracted one of the framed portraits from the wall. This was his favorite, by far.

The smiling, happy boy was ten years old and grinning from ear to ear, not caring at all about the huge gap in the middle of his teeth. In fact, that was the reason for his smile. Bennett remembered how proud the boy had been for pulling the tooth all by himself.

“Look, Pop!” he had said. “An’ I dint need your help this time!”

“That’s wonderful, son,” Bennett had replied. “You gettin’ to be a big man, just like your old man.”

“Yeah. Just like my pop,” the boy had whispered in return. He was always whispering to himself, like he had such important things to say that nobody else should be privileged to hear.

“You gon’ be a great man someday, son.”

“You think so, Pop?” Still whispering.

“Yeah. Yeah, son, I think so.”

Bennett replaced the picture along the wall, not even noticing that his hands were now shaking. Nor did he notice the tears that, seemingly from out of nowhere, began streaming down his old, wrinkled cheeks.

Chapter Twenty-five

N
INA HARRIS WAS THE LOVE
of my life,” Chance began, speaking slowly while still gazing out the window. “She moved to Ruston with her mom from Trinidad right before our eighth-grade year. Talk about beautiful . . .” He closed his eyes and was silent for a full minute, visualizing Nina.

“She was the finest girl I’d ever seen in my life . . . spoke with this cute little island accent and everything. The next year, when we got to high school, all the guys were trying to go out with her. But she turned every last one of ’em down.”

“And you, too?”

Chance shrugged. “She never turned me down. ’Course, she never got the chance—I was too shy to ask her out. Every time I got around her, my mouth would go dry and my brain just shut down. It was like that all the way through high school. Anyway, our senior year, there was this statewide contest for high school seniors to write a five-thousand-word essay on the American political system and how it affected our generation. The two students who were judged to have written the best articles got a chance to spend Spring Break in Washington, D.C.” He looked over at Lynn. “Guess who wrote the two best articles?”

“You and Nina? In the whole
state
of Louisiana?”

Chance nodded, smiling. “Not bad, huh? Our economics teacher, Mr. Jenkins, was very good, and under the circumstances, that’s an understatement. I think it was the proudest moment of his life when two of his students were selected. I was more excited about spending time with Nina than going to Washington—our seats on the plane were next to each other and our hotel rooms were adjoining suites.”

“And let me guess . . . your mouth stopped going dry and your brain remembered how to function again.”

“Not really. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was shy.”

“Nina, too?”

“No, but it was the craziest thing—Nina had liked
me
from the eighth grade, but she kept that to herself. Everyone thought she was stuck-up or something, since she was from Trinidad and her mom taught at Louisiana Tech, but it wasn’t like that at all. She was just waiting for me to approach her.”

“So I take it you both had a good Spring Break.”

Chance sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Greatest week of my life. We were supposed to visit a set number of places every day—the Capitol, the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the Mall, and all that, but Nina and I kept finding ways to cut those visits short and just spend time walking around, talking, and getting to know each other. We’d been living in the same town for four years, but all we knew was each other’s name.

“When we got back to Ruston, we did everything together. You should have seen all the other guys’ faces when I showed up with Nina as my date to the senior prom. They all wanted to know what I had that they didn’t. And there was only one answer.”

“And what was that?”

Chance smiled. “I had . . . Nina. And I was the happiest man alive. After graduation, she had the grades to apply to any college she wanted, but she got a four-year scholarship to Southern, in New Orleans.”

“And what about you?”

“I needed to stay close to my pop—his health wasn’t the greatest, and it was better that I went to Grambling, just a few minutes away from home. I visited Nina just about every other weekend, though. She came back every summer; those four years seemed like four weeks. Time flies, you know?”

“When you’re having fun,” Lynn finished.

“Yeah. After graduation, I took her to this antebellum estate in Natchez, a big ol’ house like right out of
Gone With the Wind
. I had rented the house from a guy I knew in New Orleans, just for us to have the whole weekend. That Friday night, swinging in a hammock right at sunset, I popped the question. She said yes, and we got married a few months later.”

“You didn’t waste any time.”

“Didn’t need to. We’d known we were in love and supposed to be together, I think ever since that Spring Break of our senior year. After the wedding, we moved into a house just outside Ruston—a big ranch set on ten acres of land that I inherited from my mother, Jacqueline. My pop lives on the same land now.”

“Inherited? Your mother . . .”

“She died when I was ten,” he answered quietly. “I think that was part of the reason my pop’s health began failing—when she died, a part of him died, too. But things were going so great with Nina and me. We were planning to have our first child when . . . when we got the news.”

“News?”

Chance blinked back the tears welling up at the corners of his eyes. He refused to cry in front of this woman.

“Nina had just landed a job as a legal assistant for a law firm in Shreveport, and she was going in for a routine checkup, something she needed to do before she started the job. The doctors discovered a tumor on her liver.” He bit his lip and stared directly out his window.

“Oh, Chance.”

He nodded again, and a tear that he could not stop rolled down his cheek. He quickly wiped it away. “She was just twenty-five years old,” he said, also unable to control the trembling in his voice. “I kept saying to myself, how can she have this disease
so young
? It wasn’t fair! Not to me and certainly not to her!” He blinked back another tear that threatened to fall down his cheek. “And . . . and you bet I made sure God knew that, too.

“But we had to face this, so we prepared ourselves and got ready to deal with the chemotherapy, radiation, whatever it took. We were going to see this through because we were both fighters and we weren’t about to let this take us out. We went ahead and scheduled the preliminary tests. But a few weeks before she was scheduled to start the chemo, she heard about a Floyd Waters meeting down in Lake Charles.”

“Wait a minute, did you say a
Floyd Waters
meeting?”

“Yeah. You’ve heard of him, right?”

“Of course I’ve heard of him! He prayed for—um, I mean, yes . . . I’ve heard of him. I see him on television all the time, conducting healing crusades.”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. I really didn’t want to go, because I’d heard some negative things about the man’s ministry, but . . . but it was the strangest thing—Nina started believing that God was going to heal her through this man. She’d wake up in the middle of the night, saying how she’d had a vision of Floyd Waters laying hands on her and healing her. She could be really stubborn when she wanted to, so there was no way I could tell her anything different. I mean, sure, more than anything I wanted God to heal her, but I didn’t . . . well, we didn’t grow up believing in all that supernatural, blow-on-folks and be instantly healed stuff, you know? Our church didn’t teach that either, but . . . but Nina kept urging me to take her, practically begging me to . . .” He bit his bottom lip, forcing himself to keep his roller-coaster emotions in check as he remembered how desperate his beautiful bride had been. How many times had he agonizingly wished that he could somehow trade places with her; wished that
he
had been the one sick instead of her? He would have willingly taken on any affliction, disease, or pain for her sake without even thinking twice about it. God, how he’d loved her!

I . . . I would have died for her . . . and in a way, I have . . .

“So without telling her family or our church, we went down there, and on that first night, Waters called for everyone believing to be healed from cancer to come to the stage. Nina just looked at me with those desperate, baby brown eyes . . . She . . . she was believing to be healed
so bad
. . . what else could I do? So I told her to go ahead and go up there.

“When it’s her turn to stand before Waters, the man suddenly stops the music and the choir and tells everyone to be quiet. He asks Nina where her husband is. When she answers that I’m in the audience, he then asks for the husband—me—to come join them onstage. I . . . I
really
didn’t want to go up there, but the whole stadium is
so
quiet, waiting for me, I didn’t have a choice. And I figure if I didn’t go, Nina would’ve been crushed.”

Lynn opened her mouth, as if she might say something, but Chance continued on.

“So I’m up there, in front of hundreds of people, and Nina’s up there trembling and shaking and then . . . then I hear her begin to speak in tongues. We weren’t raised Pentecostal and I . . . I didn’t even
know
she could speak in tongues. And . . . and all the time, Floyd Waters is just staring at me, looking at me with eyes so clear and piercing it was like he was seeing right through me. I’d never seen anything like it before. Then he puts his hand on my head and announces that I’ve been chosen by God to bring healing to the nations of the world, that through my hands many shall be healed and testify to God’s healing power.”

Chance took a deep breath, remembering everything as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. “Then he said that if I would but lay hands on my wife, she would be healed.” Another tear trickled down his cheek, but this time he didn’t bother to wipe it away. “Nina’s just standing there, shaking and trembling like she’s having a seizure or something. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know what to do, but Waters tells me again to lay hands on my wife. So I did. When I touched her head, she fell backwards and onto the stage floor, and then everybody started shouting, the music started playing again, and Waters raises his hands and gives God praise for another healing.”

“So . . . so she was healed?”

Chance did a cross between a nod and a shrug.
She certainly thought so . . .
“She told me that when I touched her, a lightning-like sensation ran through her body, and she knew instantly that she had been healed.

“After we got back home, Nina started telling everyone that she was miraculously healed, and that I had God’s healing power in my hands. At first, I didn’t want her to say anything because nobody knew where we had gone, but she was so . . . so
happy
. I’d never seen her so happy in all the time I’d known her. So I said fine, if you want to go around testifying, at least go to the doctor and have this healing confirmed, but she wouldn’t accept that. Said it was a lack of faith on her part to do that; that she
certainly
was healed and she would never set foot in a doctor’s office again. Our church thought she was crazy, and so did her mother, Jucinda.” He whistled and shook his head. “Everyone knew Jucinda had a real bad anger problem, and that just about set her over the edge. But Nina didn’t care, and after a while I didn’t either. I mean, she was feeling more energetic, more alive, and more
happy
than she ever had. So who cared
what
people thought as long as she kept living and being healthy, right?”

He paused for a moment.

“But then . . . she died,” he whispered.

“Oh, Chance . . .”

“My beautiful bride, my beautiful Nina . . . died. She just passed away one night while she slept—I took small comfort in knowing that at least she didn’t feel any pain. Jucinda was outraged, and she demanded an autopsy be performed. The autopsy showed . . . that in fact Nina’s cancer
had not
been healed; instead, it had gotten worse after she stopped taking medication. The real miracle was that Nina didn’t feel the pain of the cancer, or if she did, she didn’t let on.”

“Oh, Chance, I’m so sorry.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “Jucinda never accepted the fact that Nina refused medical treatment. She thought it was my fault for taking her down to Lake Charles in the first place. She not only blamed me for brainwashing Nina about this divine healing stuff, but through her large circle of influence she made me the town outcast. Said she was going to make sure I paid for what I did to Nina, and if you knew Jucinda, you knew not to take her threats lightly. Everywhere I’d go, I’d get all kinds of whispers and dirty looks. When you’re living in a small town, everybody knows everybody, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I got on the first train out of there and spent some time in Longview, then back east toward Gulfport and Birmingham.”