Текст книги "Revival"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Only it wasn’t. The next day the red mark had faded to a necklace-like bruise, but his voice had gotten hoarse. By that night he could hardly speak above a whisper. Two days later, he was completely mute.

 • • •

A hyperextension of the neck resulting in a stretched laryngeal nerve. 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. Not for him, at least; his voice was fine. This was not true of my brother. When April rolled around, Con was still writing notes and making gestures when he wanted something. He insisted on going to school, even though the other boys had started making fun of him, especially since he had solved the problem of class participation (to a degree, anyway) by writing YES on one palm and NO on the other. He had a pile of file cards with more communications written on them in block letters. The one his classmates found particularly hilarious was MAY I USE THE RESTROOM.

Con seemed to take all this in good spirits, knowing that to do otherwise would only make the teasing worse, but one night I went into the room he shared with Terry and found him lying on his bed and weeping soundlessly. I went to him, asking what was wrong. A stupid question, since I knew, but you have to say something in that situation, and I could say it, because I wasn’t the one who’d been struck across the throat with the Ski Pole of Destiny.

Get out! he mouthed. His cheeks and forehead, studded with newly arrived pimples, were flaming. His eyes were swollen. Get out, get out! Then, shocking me: Get the fuck out, cocksucker!

The first gray began to appear in my mother’s hair that spring. One afternoon when my father came in, looking more tired than usual, Mom told him that they had to take Con to a specialist in Portland. “We’ve waited long enough,” she said. “That old fool George Renault can say whatever he likes, but I know what happened, and so do you. That careless rich boy ruptured my son’s vocal cords.”

My father sat down heavily at the table. Neither of them noticed me in the mudroom, taking an inordinate amount of time to lace up my Keds. “We can’t afford it, Laura,” he said.

“But you could afford to buy Hiram Oil in Gates Falls!” she said, using an ugly, almost sneering tone of voice I had never heard before.

He sat looking at the table instead of at her, although there was nothing on it except the red-and-white-checked oilcloth. “That’s why we can’t afford it. We’re skating on mighty thin ice. You know what kind of winter it was.”

We all knew: a warm one. When your family’s income depends on heating oil, you keep a close eye on the thermometer between Thanksgiving and Easter, hoping the red line will stay low.

My mother was at the sink, hands buried in a cloud of soapsuds. Somewhere beneath the cloud, dishes were rattling as if she wanted to break them instead of clean them. “You had to have it, didn’t you?” Still in that same tone of voice. I hated that voice. It was as if she was egging him on. “The big oil baron!”

“That deal was made before Con’s accident,” he said, still not looking up. His hands were once more stuffed deep into his pockets. “That deal was made in August. We sat together looking at The Old Farmer’s Almanac—a cold and snowy winter, it said, coldest since the end of World War II—and we decided it was the right thing to do. You ran the numbers on your adding machine.”

The dishes rattled harder under the soapsuds. “Take out a loan!”

“I could, but Laura . . . listen to me.” He raised his eyes at last. “I may have to do that just to make it through the summer.”

“He’s your son!”

“I know he is, goddammit!” Dad roared. It scared me, and must have scared my mother, because this time the dishes under the cloud of suds did more than rattle. They crashed. And when she raised her hands, one of them was bleeding.

She held it up to him—like my silent brother showing YES or NO in class—and said, “Look what you made me d—” She caught sight of me, sitting on the woodpile and staring into the kitchen. “Buzz off! Go out and play!”

“Laura, don’t take it out on Ja—”

“Get out!” she shouted. It was the way Con would have shouted at me, if he’d had a voice to shout with. “God hates a snoop!”

She began to cry. I ran out the door, crying myself. I ran down Methodist Hill, and across Route 9 without looking in either direction. I had no idea of going to the parsonage; I was too upset to even think of seeking pastoral advice. If Patsy Jacobs hadn’t been in the front yard, checking to see if any of the flowers she’d planted the previous fall were coming up, I might have run until I collapsed. But she was out, and she called my name. Part of me wanted to just keep on running, but—as I think I’ve said—I had my manners, even when I was upset. So I stopped.

She came to where I was standing, my head down, gasping for breath. “What happened, Jamie?”

I didn’t say anything. She put her fingers under my chin and raised my head. I saw Morrie sitting on the grass beside the parsonage’s front stoop, surrounded by toy trucks. He was goggling at me.

“Jamie? Tell me what’s wrong.”

Just as we had been taught to be polite, we had been taught to keep our mouths shut about what went on in the family. It was the Yankee way. But her kindness undid me and it all came pouring out: Con’s misery (the depth of which I’m convinced neither of our parents comprehended, in spite of their very real concern), my mother’s fear that his vocal cords had been ruptured and he might never speak again, her insistence on a specialist and Dad’s on how they couldn’t afford it. Most of all, the shouting. I didn’t tell Patsy about the stranger’s voice I had heard coming from my mother’s mouth, but only because I could not think how to say it.

When I finally ran down, she said: “Come around to the back shed. You need to talk to Charlie.”

 • • •

Now that the Belvedere had taken its proper place in the parsonage garage, the back shed had become Jacobs’s workshop. When Patsy led me in, he was tinkering with a television set that had no screen.

“When I put this puppy back together,” he said, slinging an arm around my shoulders and producing a handkerchief from his back pocket, “I’ll be able to get TV stations in Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Wipe your eyes, Jamie. And your nose could use a little attention while you’re at it.”

I looked at the eyeless TV with fascination as I cleaned up. “Will you really be able to get stations in Chicago and Los Angeles?”

“Nah, I was kidding. I’m just trying to build in a signal amplifier that will let us get something besides Channel 8.”

“We get 6 and 13, too,” I said. “Although 6 is a little snow-stormy.”

“You guys have a roof antenna. The Jacobs family is stuck with rabbit ears.”

“Why don’t you buy one? They sell them at Western Auto in Castle Rock.”

He grinned. “Good idea! I’ll stand up in front of the deacons at the quarterly meeting and tell them I want to spend some of the collection money on a TV antenna, so Morrie can watch Mighty 90 and the missus and I can watch Petticoat Junction on Tuesday nights. Never mind that, Jamie. Tell me what’s got you in such a tizzy.”

I looked around for Mrs. Jacobs, hoping she’d spare me the job of having to tell everything twice, but she had quietly decamped. He took me by the shoulders and led me to a sawhorse. I was just tall enough to be able to sit on it.

“Is it Con?”

Of course he’d guess that; a petition for the return of Con’s voice was part of the closing prayer at every Thursday-night meeting that spring, as were prayers for other MYFers who were going through hard times (broken bones were the most common, but Bobby Underwood had suffered burns and 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). But, like his wife, Reverend Jacobs hadn’t had any idea of how miserable Con really was, or how that misery had spread through the entire family like an especially nasty germ.

“Dad bought Hiram Oil last summer,” I said, starting to blubber again. I hated it, blubbering was such a little kid’s trick, but I couldn’t seem to help it. “He said the price was too good to turn down, only then we had a warm winter and heating oil went down to fifteen cents a gallon and now they can’t afford a specialist and if you could have heard her, she didn’t sound like Mom at all, and sometimes he puts his hands in his pockets, because . . .” But Yankee reticence finally kicked in and I finished, “Because I don’t know why.”

He produced the handkerchief again, and while I used it, he took a metal box from his workshop table. Wires sprouted from it every whichway, like badly cut hair.

“Behold the amplifier,” he said. “Invented by yours truly. Once I get it hooked up, I’ll run a wire out the window and up to the eave. Then I will attach . . . that.” He pointed to the corner, where a rake was propped on its pole with its rusty metal tines sticking up. “The Jacobs Custom Antenna.”

“Will it work?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think it will. But even if it does, I believe the days of television antennas are numbered. In another ten years, TV signals will be carried along the telephone lines, and there will be a lot more than three channels. By 1990 or so, the signals will be beamed down from satellites. I know it sounds like science fiction, but the technology already exists.”

He had his dreamy look, and I thought, He’s forgotten all about Con. Now I know that wasn’t true. He was just giving me time to regain my composure, and—maybe—himself time to think.

“People will be amazed at first, then they’ll take it for granted. They’ll say ‘Oh yes, we have telephone TV’ or ‘We have earth satellite TV,’ but they’ll be wrong. It’s all a gift of electricity, which is now so basic and so pervasive we have a way of ignoring it. People like to say ‘Thus-and-such is the elephant in the living room,’ meaning a thing that’s too big to be ignored, but you’d even ignore an elephant, if it was in the living room long enough.”

“Except when you had to clean up the poop,” I said.

That made him roar with laughter, and I laughed along with him, even though my eyes were still swollen from crying.

He went to the window and looked out. He clasped his hands at the small of his back and didn’t speak for a long time. Then he turned to me and said, “I want you to bring Con to the parsonage tonight. Will you do that?”

“Sure,” I said, without any great enthusiasm. More praying was what I thought he had in store, and I knew it couldn’t hurt, but there had been a lot of praying on Con’s behalf already, and it hadn’t helped, either.

 • • •

My parents had no objections to our going to the parsonage (I had to ask them separately, because that night they were barely talking to each other). It was Connie who took convincing, probably because I wasn’t very convinced myself. But because I had promised the Reverend, I didn’t give up. I enlisted Claire for help, instead. Her belief in the power of prayer was far greater than my own, and she had her own powers. I think they came from being the only girl. Of the four Morton brothers, only Andy—who was closest to her in age—could resist her when she got all pretty-eyed and asked for something.

As the three of us crossed Route 9, our shadows long in the light of a rising full moon, Con—just thirteen that year, dark-haired, slender, dressed in a faded plaid jacket handed down from Andy—held up his notepad, which he carried everywhere. He had printed while he walked, so the letters were jagged. THIS IS STUPID.

“Maybe,” Claire said, “but we’ll get cookies. Mrs. Jacobs always has cookies.”

We also got Morrie, now five and dressed for bed in his pj’s. He ran directly to Con and jumped into his arms. “Still can’t talk?” Morrie asked.

Con shook his head.

“My dad will fix you,” he said. “He’s been working all afternoon.” Then he held his arms out to my sister. “Carry me, Claire, carry me, Claire-Bear, and I’ll give you a kiss!” She took him from Con, laughing.

Reverend Jacobs was in the shed, dressed in faded jeans and a sweater. There was an electric heater in the corner, the elements glowing cherry-red, but his workshop was still cold. I supposed he had been too busy tinkering away on his various projects to winterize it. The temporarily eyeless TV had been covered with a mover’s quilt.

Jacobs gave Claire a hug and a peck on the cheek, then shook hands with Con, who then held up his pad. MORE PRAYER I SUPPOSE was printed on the fresh page.

I thought that was a little rude, and by her frown I could see Claire felt the same, but Jacobs only smiled. “We might get to that, but I want to try something else first.” He turned to me. “Whom does the Lord help, Jamie?”

“Them that help themselves,” I said.

“Ungrammatical but true.”

He went to the worktable and brought back what looked like either a fat cloth belt or the world’s skinniest electric blanket. A cord dangled from it, going to a little white plastic box with a slide-switch on top. Jacobs stood with the belt in his hands, looking at Con gravely. “This is a project I’ve been tinkering with on and off for the last year. I call it the Electrical Nerve Stimulator.”

“One of your inventions,” I said.

“Not exactly. The idea of using electricity to limit pain and stimulate muscles is very, very old. Sixty years before the birth of Christ, a Roman doctor named Scribonius Largus discovered that foot and leg pain could be alleviated if the sufferer stepped firmly on an electric eel.”

“You made that up!” Claire accused, laughing. Con wasn’t laughing; he was staring at the cloth belt with fascination.

“Not at all,” Jacobs said, “but mine uses small batteries—which are of my invention—for power. Electric eels are hard to come by in central Maine, and even harder to put around a boy’s neck. Which is what I intend to do with this homemade ENS gadget of mine. Because Dr. Renault might have been right about your vocal cords not being ruptured, Con. Maybe they only need a jump-start. I’m willing to make the experiment, but it’s up to you. What do you say?”

Con nodded. In his eyes I saw an expression that hadn’t been there in quite awhile: hope.

“How come you never showed us this in MYF?” Claire asked. She sounded almost accusing.

Jacobs looked surprised and a tiny bit uneasy. “I suppose I couldn’t think how it connected to a Christian lesson. Until Jamie came to see me today, I was thinking of trying it out on Al Knowles. His unfortunate accident?”

We all nodded. The fingers lost in the potato grader.

“He still feels the fingers that aren’t there, and says they hurt. Also, he’s lost a good deal of his ability to move that hand because of nerve damage. As I said, I’ve known for years that electricity can help in matters like those. Now it looks like you’ll be my guinea pig, Con.”

“So having that handy was just a lucky break?” Claire asked. I couldn’t see why it mattered, but it seemed to. To her, at least.

Jacobs looked at her reproachfully and said, “Coincidence and lucky break are words people with little faith use to describe the will of God, Claire.”

She flushed at that, and looked down at her sneakers. Con, meanwhile, was scribbling on his pad. He held it up. WILL IT HURT?

“I don’t think so,” Jacobs said. “The current is very low. Minuscule, really. I’ve tried it on my arm—like a blood-pressure cuff—and felt no more than the tingle you get when your arm or leg has been asleep and is just beginning to wake up. If there is pain, raise your hands and I’ll kill the current right away. I’m going to put this thing on now. It will be snug, but not tight. You’ll be able to breathe just fine. The buckles are nylon. Can’t use metal on a thing like this.”

He put the belt around Con’s neck. It looked like a bulky winter scarf. Con’s eyes were wide and scared, but when Jacobs asked if he was ready, he nodded. I felt Claire’s fingers close over mine. They were cold. I thought Jacobs might get to the prayer then, asking for success. In a way, I suppose he did. He bent down so he could look Con directly in the eyes and said, “Expect a miracle.”

Con nodded. I saw the cloth around his throat rise and fall as he swallowed hard.

“All right. Here we go.”

When Reverend Jacobs slid the switch on top of the control box, I heard a faint humming sound. Con’s head jerked. His mouth twitched first at one corner, then at the other. His fingers began to flutter rapidly and his arms jerked.

“Does it hurt?” Jacobs asked. His index finger was hovering over the switch, ready to turn it off. “If it hurts, hold out your hands.”

Con shook his head. Then, in a voice that sounded as if it were coming through a mouthful of gravel, he said: “Doesn’t . . . hurt. Warm.”

Claire and I exchanged a wild glance, a thought as strong as telepathy flowing between us: Did I hear that? She was now squeezing my hand hard enough to hurt, but I didn’t care. When we looked back at Jacobs, he was smiling.

“Don’t try to talk. Not yet. I’m going to run the belt for two minutes by my watch. Unless it starts to hurt. If that happens, hold out your hands and I’ll turn it off at once.”

Con didn’t hold out his hands, although his fingers continued to move up and down, as if he were playing an invisible piano. His upper lip lifted a few times in an involuntary snarl, and his eyes went through spasms of fluttering. Once, still in that grating, gravelly voice, he said, “I . . . can . . . talk again!”

“Hush!” Jacobs said sternly. His index finger hovered over the switch, ready to kill the current, his eyes on the moving second hand of his watch. After what seemed like an eternity, he pushed the switch and that faint hum died. He unloosed the buckles and pulled the belt over my brother’s head. Con’s hands went immediately to his neck. The skin there was a little flushed, but I don’t think that was from the electric current. It was from the pressure of the belt.

“Now, Con—I want you to say, ‘My dog has fleas, they bite his knees.’ But if your throat starts to hurt, stop at once.”

“My dog has fleas,” Con said in his strange grating voice. “They bite his knees.” Then: “I have to spit.”

“Does your throat hurt?”

“No, just have to spit.”

Claire opened the shed door. Con leaned out, cleared his throat (which produced an unpleasantly metallic sound like rusty hinges), and hocked a loogie that to me looked almost as big as a doorknob. He turned back to us, massaging his throat with one hand.

“My dog has fleas.” He still didn’t sound like the Con I remembered, but the words were clearer now, and more human. Tears rose in his eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. “They bite his knees.”

“That’s enough for now,” Jacobs said. “We’ll go in the house, and you’ll drink a glass of water. A big one. You must drink a lot of water. Tonight and tomorrow. Until your voice sounds normal again. Will you do that?”

“Yes.”

“When you get home, you may tell your mother and father hello. Then I want you to go into your room and get down on your knees and thank God for bringing your voice back. Will you do that?”

Con nodded vehemently. He was crying harder than ever, and he wasn’t alone. Claire and I were crying, too. Only Reverend Jacobs was dry-eyed. I think he was too amazed to cry.

Patsy was the only one not surprised. When we went into the house, she squeezed Con’s arm and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “That’s a good boy.”

Morrie hugged my brother and my brother hugged him back hard enough to make the little boy’s eyes bug out. Patsy drew a glass of water from the kitchen tap and Con drank all of it. When he thanked her, it was almost in his own voice.

“You’re very welcome, Con. Now it’s well past Morrie’s bedtime, and time for you kids to go home.” Leading Morrie to the stairs by the hand, but not turning around, she added: “I think your parents are going to be very happy.”

That was the understatement of the century.

 • • •

They were in the living room, watching The Virginian, and still not talking. Even in my joy and excitement, I could feel the freeze between them. Andy and Terry were thumping around upstairs, grousing at each other about something—business as usual, in other words. Mom had an afghan square in her lap, and was bending over to unsnarl the yarn in her basket when Con said, “Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad.”

Dad stared at him, mouth open. Mom froze, one hand in the basket and the other holding her needles. She looked up, very slowly. She said, “What—?”

“Hello,” Con said again.

She screamed and flew out of her chair, kicking the knitting basket over, and grabbed him the way she sometimes had when we were little, and meant to give one of us a shaking for something we had done wrong. There was no shaking that night. She swept Con into her arms, weeping. I could hear Terry and Andy stampeding down from the second floor to see what was going on.

“Say something else!” she cried. “Say something else so I don’t think I just dreamed it!”

“He’s not supposed to—” Claire began, but Con interrupted her. Because now he could.

“I love you, Mom,” he said. “I love you, Dad.”

Dad took Con by the shoulders and looked closely at his throat, but there was now nothing to see; the red mark had faded. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God, Son.”

Claire and I looked at each other, and once more the thought didn’t need to be spoken: Reverend Jacobs deserved some thanks, too.

We explained about how Con was supposed to use his voice sparingly to start with, and when we told about the water, Andy went out to the kitchen and came back with Dad’s oversize joke coffee cup (printed on the side was the Canadian flag and ONE IMPERIAL GALLON OF CAFFEINE), filled with water. While he drank it, Claire and I took turns recounting what had happened, with Con chipping in once or twice, telling about the tingling sensation he’d felt when the belt was turned on. Each time he interrupted, Claire scolded him for talking.

“I don’t believe it.” Mom said this several times. She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off Con. Several times she grabbed him and hugged him, as if she was afraid he might sprout wings, turn into an angel, and fly away.

“If the church didn’t pay for his heating oil,” Dad said when the tale was finished, “Reverend Jacobs would never have to pay for another gallon.”

“We’ll think of something,” Mom said distractedly. “Right now we’re going to celebrate. Terry, fetch the ice cream we were saving for Claire’s birthday from the freezer. It will be good for Con’s throat. You and Andy put it out on the table. We’ll have all of it, so use the big bowls. You don’t mind, do you, Claire?”

She shook her head. “This is better than a birthday party.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Connie said. “All that water. Then I’m supposed to pray. Reverend said so. The rest of you stay out while I do it.”

He went upstairs. Andy and Terry went into the kitchen to serve out the Neapolitan (which we called van-choc-straw . . . funny how it all comes back). My mother and father subsided into their chairs, staring at the TV without seeing it. I saw Mom grope out with one hand, and saw Dad take it without looking, as if he knew it was there. That made me happy and relieved.

I felt a tug on my own hand. It was Claire. She led me through the kitchen, where Andy and Terry were squabbling over the relative size of the portions, and into the mudroom. Her eyes when she looked at me were wide and bright.

“Did you see him?” she asked. No—demanded.

“Who?”

“Reverend Jacobs, stupid! Did you see him when I asked why he never showed us that electric belt in MYF?”

“Well . . . yeah . . .”

“He said he’d been working on it for a year, but if that was true, he would have showed it off. He shows off everything he makes!”

I remembered how surprised he had looked, as if Claire had caught him out (I had on more than one occasion felt the same expression on my own face when I had been caught out), but . . .

“Are you saying he was lying?”

She nodded vigorously. “Yes! He was! And his wife? She knew it! Do you know what I think? I think he started right after you were there. Maybe he already had the idea—I think he has thousands of ideas for electrical inventions; they must pop around in his head like corn—but he hadn’t done anything at all on this one until today.”

“Gee, Claire, I don’t think—”

She was still holding my hand, and now she gave it a hard and impatient yank, as if I were stuck in the mud and needed help to get free. “Did you see their kitchen table? There was one place still set, with nothing on the plate and nothing in the glass! He skipped his supper so he could keep working. Working like a demon, I’d guess from the look of his hands. They were all red, and there were blisters on two of his fingers.”

“He did all that for Con?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. Her eyes never left mine.

“Claire! Jamie!” Mom called. “Come for ice cream!”

Claire didn’t even look toward the kitchen. “Of all the kids in MYF, you’re the one he met first, and you’re the one he likes the best. He did it for you, Jamie. He did it for you.”

Then she went into the kitchen, leaving me to stand by the woodpile, feeling stunned. If Claire had stayed a little longer and I’d had a chance to get over my surprise, I might have told her my own intuition: Reverend Jacobs had been as surprised as we were.

He hadn’t expected it to work.