Characters in Revival

… Adele Parker saw what it was—not a baby but a little boy with his face torn off—she covered her eyes and began to scream.

… My friend Al Knowles got his left hand caught in his father’s potato grader and lost three fingers before Mr. Knowles could get the balky, dangerous thing turned off.

he asked, struggling to his feet with another grimace. Al Stamper started to come forward to assist him, but Jacobs waved the ex–soul singer back. “Are there those among you with heavy burdens that they would lay down, and afflictions they would be free of?”

… Alice Adams—cured of cancer at a Cleveland revival—went into a convenience store with her boyfriend’s AR-15 and unloaded, killing three random people.

“It’s Andy’s turn!” “It was Andy’s turn,” Dad said, pouring syrup on the last pancake.

Something is wrong here. I could understand Con not having arrived, Hawaii was a lot farther away than Colorado, but where was Terry? He and his wife, Annabelle, still lived here. And what about the Bowies? The Clukeys? The Paquettes? The DeWitts? What about the crew from Morton Fuel Oil?

… a new girl had moved into town, Astrid Soderberg. She had silky blond hair, cornflower-blue eyes, and little sweater-nubbins that might in the future become actual breasts.

… “You good business, Bart,” I said, stroking his muzzle. “And I just love good business.” He nodded as if to say he knew it.

“Who knows?” Who, indeed. • • • So far as we could tell, nine of the people on our master list were fine. This included Rowena Mintour, who had resumed teaching, and Ben Hicks, whom I interviewed myself in November of 2008, five months after his cure.

… Because Bill Latoure was a lay preacher. That means he was sort of a volunteer. He kept the church open when there was no one else to do it. That was very good of him.

… “I wish he’d bring in a lectric chair and fry up some white mice,” Billy Paquette sniffed one evening after the benediction. “That would be in’dresting.”

… We’ll have to petition the New En­gland Methodist Conference to fire him, and they’ll have to take it to Bishop Matthews in Boston.

… there was Blake Gilmore of Las Vegas, who claimed C. Danny Jacobs had cured him of lymphoma during the late summer of 2008.

… Bobby Underwood had suffered burns and Carrie Doughty had had to endure having her head shaved and rinsed with vinegar …

Her hair had been released from its prim school ponytail and framed her face. “Hi,” I said. And because that didn’t seem like enough: “Hi, Astrid. I didn’t see you inside.” “I came late, because I had to ride with Bonnie and Bonnie’s dad. You guys are really good.” “Thanks.”

Brianna Donlin and I were scanning obituaries in bed on a Sunday morning in early August of 2009. Thanks to the sort of computer hocus-pocus only true geeks can manage, Bree was able to collate death notices from a dozen major American newspapers and view them as an alphabetical list.

Why don’t we just wait and see if you remain as you are now, or if you relapse into craving . . . damn this tie, I can never get it right and Briscoe is utterly useless.”

The little girl who had once run giggling through the lawn sprinkler in nothing but a saggy pair of Smurfette underpants was now a good-looking young woman with a baby—my grand-niece, Cara Lynne—in her arms. One of my nephews, the skinny one, looked like Con.

… “Just Bonnie and Carla,” she said. “Not a guy, or anything. Mom and Dad won’t let me go out with guys until I’m fifteen.”

• • • So the boys in Chrome Roses had girlfriends. Or maybe they were groupies. Or maybe they were both. When you’re in a band, it’s not always easy to tell where the line is. Norm had Hattie. Paul had Suzanne Fournier. Kenny had Carol Plummer.

… Carrie Doughty had had to endure having her head shaved and rinsed with vinegar after her horrified mother discovered the little girl’s scalp was crawling with lice …

“Cathy Morse.” “Cathy, there’s an old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I lay back on the pillow. It was much softer than the one in my Fairgrounds Inn room. “Why are you calling yourself Dan?” “Because it’s my name. Charles Daniel Jacobs. Now go to sleep.” I was going to, but there was one other thing I had to ask.

… “Yeah,” Cicero Irving said, “you’ll look like a nerd with a driver’s license. Paulie, are you going to fire up that joint or just sit there and admire it?”

Prismatics. My father died in 2003, having outlived his wife and two of his five children. Claire Morton Overton wasn’t yet thirty when her estranged husband took her life. Both my mother and my eldest brother died at the age of fifty-one. Question: Death, where is thy sting? Answer: Every-fucking-where.

… Conrad Morton had a lot of good stargazing years before I woke Mother. And there’s hope for him. He plays tennis, after all (although he never speaks) …

… I had a cleaning lady named Darlene who came by once a week to vacuum and dust and change the bed …

It was the Terrible Sermon that accomplished that. Reverend David Thomas of the Gates Falls Congo gave the eulogy for Patsy and Morrie at our church, and that caused no raised eyebrows, since, as my Dad said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Congregationalists and the Methodists.”

“Long time,” I agreed, and thought again of a frog too dumb to realize the water in his stovetop pond was growing ever warmer. Terry and Annabelle’s daughter, Dawn, joined us with Cara Lynne in her arms. The baby’s eyes were that shade our mother used to call Morton Blue.

… Delia Soderberg, Astrid’s pretty, quiet mother, who was unfailingly pleasant but always looked at me the way a storekeeper studies a suspicious twenty-dollar bill.

Norm said he’d gotten Hattie Greer pregnant and married her. It only lasted a few years, but after a period of post-divorce acrimony, they had decided to put the past aside and be friends. Their daughter, Denise, was now pushing forty, and owned her own hair salon in Westbrook.

… Devina Robinson and the Gospel Robins. They flashed white teeth in brown faces and clapped their hands over their heads. Devina herself danced forward, cordless mike in hand …

We used to tell each other the slimy bottom was cowshit, but it was just mud (probably just mud). I remember drowsy afternoons in the one-room West Harlow school, sitting on winter coats in Spelling Corner and trying to get poor stupid Dicky Osgood to get giraffe right.

She’d sulk and cry in her bedroom for awhile, I supposed, and then get over it, the way she did a couple of years ago when Mom told her fifteen was absolutely too young to go to the drive-in with Donnie Cantwell.

… Doreen DeWitt, Fernald’s wife, called my mother and gave her the news. She had a good reason for calling Laura Morton first.

That was Dr. Renault’s diagnosis. He said he’d seen them before, and in a week or two, Conrad’s voice would begin to come back. By the end of March Connie would be as right as a trivet. Nothing to worry about, he said, and there wasn’t.

The only car in the driveway was a battered ’51 Ford. It looked like the original Road Rocket, but of course that was impossible—Duane Robichaud had wrecked Road Rocket I at Castle Rock Speedway in the first lap of its only race.

Also, it’s close to Kuulei Road, and that’s an important consideration. The Brandon L. Martin Psychiatric Center is on Kuulei Road, and that’s where my psychiatrist hangs out his shingle. Edward Braithwaite says he’s forty-one, but to me he looks like he’s thirty.

… Emil Klein’s miracle cure of a neck injury was followed by a periodic compulsion to go out into his backyard and eat dirt.

“USE FOR SMALL FIRES ONLY.” He finished the gig—somehow—took his bows, and reeled offstage. “What’s wrong with you?” Felix Granby asked. He was the lead guitarist and lead vocalist, which meant to the public at large—the portion of it that rocked, at least—he was Johnson Cats. “Are you drunk?”

… It was Fernald DeWitt, who had promised to help George with the digging that day. He jumped from the cab, ran to Mrs. Parker …

… I made an end run and went to Francine, his wife. To her I could say what I knew Andy would scoff at—I’d had a premonition …

… in the seventies, a man named Franklin Fay married a woman named Janice Shelley. They were graduate students in the English Department at Columbia University …

… a farmer named George Barton—a lifelong bachelor known in town as Lonesome George—pulled out of his driveway with a potato digger attached to the back of his Ford F-100 pickup.

… He brightened up when I told him he’d be recording George Damon. “I always loved that guy!” the Mookster exclaimed.

… George Hughes, whom she had met at a party and with whom she was soon sharing accommodations. He was a high-powered corporate lawyer, he was African American …

… Georgia Donlin was just as beautiful in 2008 as in 1992, but she’d put on a few pounds, there were streaks of silver in her dark hair, and she was wearing bifocals.

… Andy and Con were friends with the Ferguson brothers, Norm and Hal. They were what we called flatlanders, or folks from away.

… Hattie Greer, the one who’d patted Norm’s butt on the day I auditioned. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his.

He liked Hootenanny, though, and always watched it with Con and Ronnie. One night, after some white boy sang something about how his baby left him and he felt so sad, Hector the Barber snorted and said, “Shit, boys, that ain’t the blues.” “What do you mean, Grampa?” Ronnie asked.

… Hillary Katz, although these days she calls herself Pagan Starshine. She’s sober now, but on that day she was so stoned on nitrous she couldn’t stop laughing.

There I met Hugh Yates, and began my life for the third time.

… it had my very own Uncle Jack Yates on the cover, sitting in his living room and strumming his ukulele.

First name Something, last name Happened. But I didn’t. “Jamie Morton.” “Middle name?” “Edward.” “My name?” “Charles Jacobs. Charles Daniel Jacobs.” He produced the little bottle of heroin and gave it to me. I looked at it, then handed it back. “I’m good for now. You just gave me some.”

… a man named Franklin Fay married a woman named Janice Shelley. They were graduate students in the English Department at Columbia University, and went on to teach together.

… Jay Pederson hired a locally popular chick vocalist who could also play both tenor and alto sax like nobody’s business. Her name was Robin Storrs.

… Jenny Knowlton went to her knees, raised her hands to the sides of her head, and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer …

… Joe Cafferty. He’s been doing that job for twenty years. I used to drink with him at the Mellow Tiger in Castle Rock, when I was a constable there.

… John Denver recorded his last in Wolfjaw 2. Hugh once played me outtakes of Denver talking to his band about an experimental plane he’d just bought, something called a Long-EZ.

… Kathy Palmer (a teacher’s pet wannabe if there ever was one) also stayed to help out, and the work was done in half an hour.

With Detroit favorite Bob Seger headlining, it would be almost full. The JC was on the cusp of fame, and in rock and roll, such chances rarely come around a second time. So Felix Granby had done to Hugh what Kelly Van Dorn of White Lightning had done to me.

… He turned to my father and Mr. Kelton and said, “I’ll see them now.” “Now, Charlie, not yet,” Mr. Kelton said.

… Kenny Laughlin, as thin as ever but now sporting several less than lovely moles on his face, looked up from adjusting the strap on his Fender P-Bass and dapped me.

… She had a good reason for calling Laura Morton first. “You’ll have to tell him,” she said. My mother was horrified at the prospect.

… Lenny Macintosh, the postman’s son, lost an eye when he bent down to see why the cherry bomb he’d put in an empty pineapple tin didn’t go off.

“What every working ranch needs is a foreman. The one who takes care of the ranching and farming side here at Wolfjaw is Rupert Hall. He’s fine and well, but my music foreman is recuperating in Boulder Community Hospital. Les Calloway. Don’t suppose the name means anything to you.”

She had terrible arthritis and could no longer walk. I wrote her name in my notebook beneath that of Mabel Jergens, healed of a spinal cord injury a month ago, in Albuquerque.

… Margaret Tremayne, one of Pastor Danny’s San Diego cures (Crohn’s disease), threw her infant son from the balcony of her ninth-story apartment, then followed him down.

… Jacobs was staring at the corpse of Mary Fay with wide, fascinated eyes. Drool dripped from the frozen side of his mouth.

As a rule, he only came at Christmas, but today he’d made an exception. “Rev’run,” he said. “I heard there was a bottle of hooch in the glovebox of your car. And Mert Peabody said when he bent over to work on your wife, she smelt like a barroom.

… Michael Douglas recorded a Faulkner novel at Wolfjaw, and Georgia ’bout peed her pants. He’s got that easygoing public persona, but whoo, what a perfectionist in the studio.

… Mookie McDonald bore his scolding about the soundboard quietly, head down, nodding, at the end promising he would do better.

That was easy to look up on the Internet, because I had a landmark to go by: it was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. He was gone from our lives a week later, and he went alone. Patsy and Morris—dubbed Tag-Along-Morrie by the kids in MYF—were already gone by then.

… Mary Fay was Mother’s door into our world, but I was the key. Shooting a corpse kills nothing—not that an immortal being such as Mother can be killed—but when I fired that pistol, I locked the door.

… Al Knowles got his left hand caught in his father’s potato grader and lost three fingers before Mr. Knowles could get the balky, dangerous thing turned off.

… “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Morse, I assure you.” I had gotten Morse as far as the door, and I didn’t want to lose the ground I had gained.

… Mrs. Calhoun, the English teacher who doubled as the middle school music teacher, showed him how to put on a new string …

… I had promised Mrs. Moran that I’d stay to wash the blackboards and neaten up our little library of tattered books.

… Mrs. Paquette snatched away his guitar (the broken string flying dangerously close to her eye) and told him to go on outside and sit on the porch …

I remember praying he’d get through it okay; that he wouldn’t break down in tears. Myra Harrington—Me-Maw—was in the front pew, and although her back was to me, I could imagine her eyes, half buried in their fatty, yellowish sockets and sparkling with avidity.

… Andy and Con were friends with the Ferguson brothers, Norm and Hal. They were what we called flatlanders, or folks from away. The Fergusons lived in Boston, so the friendship was ordinarily restricted to summer vacations.

… Jacobs, who told Norma Goldstone to bring “our patient” a toasted cheese sandwich and a small piece of cake with the frosting scraped off.

I’ve gigged with hundreds of players since the day Norman Irving auditioned me in the GFHS Band Room, and almost every guy I ever worked with had the same dead-fish shake. It’s as if rockers feel they have to save all their strength for work. “So what do you say?”

… Patricia Farmingdale, cured of peripheral neuropathy in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had poured salt into her eyes in an apparent effort to blind herself. She had no memory of doing it, let alone why.

… Patricia Jacobs popped Tag-Along-Morrie into the front seat of the Plymouth Belvedere that had been a wedding present from her parents …

“Smoke?” “I don’t,” I said. And then, feeling absurd but not able to help myself, “Sorry.” Norman ignored that and lit up with a Zippo that had a snake and DON’T TREAD ON ME engraved on the side. “This is Kenny Laughlin. Plays bass. The redhead is Paul Bouchard. Drums.

… “His name was Paul Overton,” I said. “He taught English at a fancy prep school in New Hampshire. Andy drove down there and waited in the parking lot …

… Billy and little Rhonda Paquette, who could have been no more than five, came halfway down the stairs, leaning over the railing and goggling at the old man.

He was dressed for work in a clean coverall with his name—RICHARD—stitched in gold thread on the left breast pocket. On the right breast it said MORTON FUEL OIL.

The caption below the photo read Robert Rivard, healed of MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY 5/30/07, St. Louis, Mo. I was stunned, the way a person would be, I suppose, if he caught sight of an old friend who has been reported dead or arrested for committing a serious crime.

Her name was Robin Storrs.

… Ronnie Paquette found the guitar in one of the swill barrels out back, deposited there by his outraged mom. Ronnie took it to school …

… she declared herself to be Rowena Mintour, a schoolteacher who had come all the way from Des Moines. She had terrible arthritis and could no longer walk.

… Roy Easterbrook stood up in the rapidly emptying church. He was an unshaven hulk of a man who lived in a rusty little trailer park on the east side of town …

… Rudy Kelly was a mountain of a man in faded jeans, a loose gray smock top, and white crepe-soled nurse’s shoes.

… The one who takes care of the ranching and farming side here at Wolfjaw is Rupert Hall. He’s fine and well …

… Sam the security guard procured it for me. I don’t expect you’ll need to use it, but if you do, Jamie . . . don’t hesitate.

That Stefan Drew of Salt Lake City had gone on walking binges after being cured of a supposed brain tumor. These walks, some of them fifteen-mile marathons, did not occur during blackouts; the urge just came on him, he said, and he had to go.

… Stephen Givens to officiate at the Willow Grove Cemetery graveside services. Givens was the pastor (he did not call himself Reverend) of Shiloh Church …

Astrid Soderberg blew me a kiss. • • • So the boys in Chrome Roses had girlfriends. Or maybe they were groupies. Or maybe they were both. When you’re in a band, it’s not always easy to tell where the line is. Norm had Hattie. Paul had Suzanne Fournier.

… “That’s right,” Terry said. He was eight. “I’m a big brother booger.” He made a fork with his first two fingers and plugged his nostrils with them. “Stop it,” our mother said. “No sibling rivalry on birthdays, please and thank you. Terry, take your fingers out of your nose.”

… Terry joined us, along with Terry Jr., his eldest son. My brother looked tired, but he also looked supremely happy.

… Veronica Freemont of Anaheim had suffered what she called “interruptions of vision.” One had resulted in a low-speed collision with another driver.

… The child, a boy named Victor, is now seven years old. I’ve never met him—Mary didn’t want that—but she showed me many pictures of him …

… “That’s rude, Willy.” I said, “If he’s who I think he is, I knew him a long time ago. And thanks to you guys, I can bring him a present.”