Faith Like Wine

  FAITH LIKE WINE

  An original short story by Rachel Caine

  She was young yet, but I knew what she would become -- it was obvious from the first sight of her. One does not forget that sort of face, those extraordinary eyes.

  Her name was Aimee Semple McPherson, and she was said to be a prophet.

  The tent I stood beneath, waiting for her to speak, had taken laborers half a day to put up -- a new tent, astonishingly enough, and these days with the whole world at war there were no new tents of any size.

  Tents were not the only scarcity. I stood quite near the front of a large and still-growing crowd, but as I looked around I saw only old men, women and children. I blended with them, as I meant to -- an older woman, to all appearances, gray-haired, not yet out of my prime. Well-dressed, I liked to think, though not ostentatious. Age and womanhood had granted me an automatic aristocracy, in such a crowd, and no one tried to push past me for a better view.

  I had never been particularly well-mannered, but I certainly knew how to take advantage of it in others.

  I had come all the way to the Philadelphia countryside on the strength of rumors, nothing more. Sister Aimee spoke with the voice of God, people said. She healed with His hands. I, doubting, had come expecting an evening of lukewarm platitudes. Such was the state of Christianity -- it had been raw, intoxicating wine when I was young, but now it was milk, suitable for children at their mothers' knees. I had walked with martyrs in the shadow of crosses, and I had never learned to love milk.

  The buzz of conversation went on around me. A farmer to my left was worried for his daughter, taken ill with a fever -- not the dreaded and still-raging influenza, he hastened to add. He received medicinal advice from a young plump woman and her stick-thin husband. If anyone looked for me to join the conversation they were kind enough not to demand it; I watched the dais, and waited. Sister Aimee sat passive, eyes closed now, while her assistants whispered around her, measuring the crowd with piercing looks, checking the time against a battered pocket watch.

  They could not wait much longer, not with safety. The crowd stretched to the limits of the tent, a swelling, murmuring beast with thousands of heads. So many years since the first such crowd I'd been part of -- I'd been far to the back, then, and the words had come faint but clear in the silence. Five thousand people, that day, crowded together, and I the least of them. Sometimes I could still hear the sound of his voice, smell the goaty stink of too many people crowded together. Nothing in my life had ever been the same again.

  Sister Aimee rose and stepped forward, arms upraised, eyes still tightly shut. The crowd rippled into silence, responding to some electric presence gathering like lightning. I could feel its fire from where I stood. No fraud, this one. No false prophet.

  She stood, arms upraised, quivering with tension as if held on an invisible rack, the torture of the Lord's favor. The room took on quiet, then a hush of dread. Were they afraid? I began to think I was. My life had become comfortable and routine, and here she was, fire in her eyes, to rip it apart again. It was what I craved, what I feared. A spark of light in a long, familiar darkness.

  She wore a plain white dress, severely cut, well-used. Her hair was dark and worn in a conservative bun; she wore no jewelry except for a wedding band. A plain woman, except for her face, that radiant face.

  It was blinding, now, as she gave herself to the ecstasy of God.

  The effect of her still, silent prayer caused the crowd-beast to whisper prayers of its own. Next to me, an old woman carrying a photograph of her son wept into a ragged handkerchief. She'd come for a blessing on him.

  An hour before I would have told her, kindly, that it would be useless. But --

  But.

  Sister Aimee lowered her arms; her eyes opened and they were the eyes of a savage saint, so full of love they were fatal.

  And she began to speak.

  I cannot remember what she said, it was not the words, the words have been said before and to little effect. It was the naked terrible beauty of her belief. Her voice was a sword, piercing every person in the tent, sending some to their knees in pain, driving most to tears. She burned so bright, the sun in my eyes, the pulse of her heart like a drum in my ears. As she spoke she ran with sweat and her white dress clung like a lover's hand, skin pink beneath. She paced the platform like an animal, screaming out her pain, God's pain, her love, God's love.

  Likely the trouble had been going on for some time before the ripples of it reached me so far in the front, shaking me from my trance; Sister Aimee had stopped speaking and waited, staring toward the back. The world tasted flat and dusty after the glory I'd seen, the sound of screams and shouts harsh. A wedge of young men -- a shock to see so many together -- came driving through the crowd, heading for the stage.

  Mrs. Dowd, the greengrocer's wife, had warned me of Catholic protesters at the revival meetings, but these young men looked more serious than that. They had the righteous look of men steeling themselves to violence. And they were heading directly toward me. I looked for an exit but escape seemed very far away; I would force a way through, if I must, anything to avoid being caught in the riot that must surely erupt any moment. The boys were taking their lives in their hands. They had no idea how certain Sister Aimee's control was of her people, or what those people might do to protect her.

  A dark-haired, pink-cheeked boy leading them raised his hand and pointed at Sister Aimee, and shouted, "Whore!" The other boys took it up like a battle cry and began to lay about them with makeshift weapons -- knobby clubs, homemade blackjacks, boots, fists. The crowd surged back from them, pushing me into the arms of a thin old man with the pinched face of a banker.

  Sister Aimee stood like a porcelain statue, illuminated with sweat and the halo of her passion, and watched the violence with unnerving eyes. Few of her audience scattered for the exits; there was a curious sense of waiting. Frustrated with their lack of success, one of the boys slammed his club into the ribs of the farmer near me who'd come to pray for his daughter; the old man went down, weeping. I stayed where I was, unwilling to flee but certain that I was watching the destruction of the glory I'd glimpsed. Prophets were fragile things, made and broken in a day.

  And then Sister Aimee said, in a cold clear voice that carried to every ear, "Kneel and pray, brothers and sisters. Kneel and pray for our burdens to be lifted."

  I remained standing, waiting, watching her face. Next to me, the weeping mother clutched the picture of her son and sank to the hard-packed earth. Behind me I heard rustles of cloth, creaks of protesting joints.

  In ripples of obedience, the crowd kneeled. I lowered myself as the last few touched earth, and folded my hands in a position of piety. I turned my head so that I could watch the reaction of the ruffians from the corner of my eye.

  They were the only ones left standing, and it clearly unnerved them. They spun in circles, looking for a fight. With a scream of rage, a boy farther off to my right brought his club down on the head of a middle-aged woman. She toppled against an elderly man in expensively cut clothes. The boy smashed him in the face and kicked him, turned on the woman, then on a young girl. No one rose to fight. He screamed his rage, over and over, cowards, cowards, cowards, and stopped, panting, in the destruction he'd done.

  Sister Aimee closed her eyes and began to dance. I turned to watch her, riveted by surprise. Her hips swayed slowly, her shoulders followed the curve, her arms lifted and carried the motion above into the air. It was breathtakingly, frighteningly sensual, as if her body had given itself over to another power. She began to turn, slowly, deliberately, to the beat of her unheard song.

  Her tormentors came to a standstill, staring, weapons forgotten in their hands. We were all her creatures, trapped in the sway
of her body, the jut of her hip, the slow circle of her feet. I closed my eyes and still saw her, heard her, felt her as she moved.

  For the first time in a hundred years or more, I took a breath. She had touched something within me that was fearfully strong, love and death and desire and pain all bound together, the dark wine of the faith I'd known in my youth when we were slaughtered by the thousands and kissed the knives that killed us.

  She had discovered the secret of ecstasy. I had not been so close to the light in so long, felt its heat, heard the echo of his voice inside it. It was painful and glorious and horrifying. I had kept control of myself for so long, and now she offered -- no, demanded -- my surrender.

  Someone cried out, and I heard myself crying too, lost in the bright vision, the knife-edged fear of falling. She was near the piano now, and, still dancing, reached out and struck a thunderous chord, chaotic and intense, a thunderstorm of music like the cries and prayers around me. And she continued beating the piano, punishing it, and we were all dancing now, swaying to the strange wonderful beat of her song. Someone touched my arm, feather-light, and the breath I'd taken in burst out in a rush. I was trembling, near to falling. Close, so close . . .

  Sister Aimee turned from the piano and stepped down from the stage to dance with us, a silent striving of bodies toward God. Her eyes were dark as wells, promising salvation, promising a reunion with all that I'd lost so long ago, and before I could stop myself I reached out to her.

  Our hands met, shock of her hot flesh on my cool. The clamor of her pulse was deafening.

  "Dance with me," Sister Aimee whispered. "Oh, sister, dance with God."

  My feet moved without me, drifting to the beat of her heart, and the tent spun in a glory of light and shadow, faces and eyes. I felt nothing but her skin pressed against mine and frantic hunger inside me, driving me on.

  She had turned me to face the crowd, and as she stepped forward and I back I felt the smooth cool wood of the podium behind me. She stepped forward again, close, so close, God staring out of her eyes. I had forgotten so much, oh Lord, so much.

  She placed her hands palm to palm with mine and pressed my arms back and up, toward the crossbars of an invisible cross. When she released them they stayed, I could not have moved them if I'd wished. She was too bright to be so close to me, and her heart raced like a deer, mad with ecstasy.

  She drew back her right hand and brought it in a wide swinging circle up, fingers clasped around an invisible hammer, and her left hand held an invisible nail to my palm.

  I opened my mouth to scream as she brought the hammer down, the pain was blinding and horrifying and ecstatic but there was no pain, only knowledge, only God. The doors had been thrown open, and the light, the light . . . I felt her fingers holding another invisible nail to my left palm, and as she drove it home she transfixed me in the agony of the lamb.

  When I was able to scream I fell forward into her strong, warm arms. She held me while she fought for breath, while her heart raced and then quieted and, passion fading, she eased me to the cold ground. I lay helpless while she folded my hands, one over the other, on my breast.

  She turned toward the crowd, but not before I saw the fevered bliss in her eyes.

  "Thy busy feet that have walked the world must be nailed to the cross," she said. In the utter silence, one of the Catholic boys fled, then another. The rest followed. Watching their retreat, she said, "Thy heart that has beat for this world must be pierced for me."

  I closed my eyes and wept silently, tears streaming away through my gray hair to drip on the hungry ground. Her warmth swept in again, and her fingers touched my tears.

  "What's your name, sister?" she asked kindly. I gasped and gasped and finally, like some secret treasure from the depths of a well, brought out my true name.

  "Joanna," I whispered. "Joanna, wife of Chuza, servant of Herod."

  ***

  They kept her long into the night, but finally even the most ardent of her converts slipped away, toward home and bed. I sat outside on the cool grass, lit by the moon, and waited. Lanterns dimmed inside the tent. Her assistants and rough-dressed tent-pullers started back for town.

  One light glowed inside the tent, a spot of emerald on black shadows. It moved toward the huge main opening and became the yellow halo of a lantern. She carried it casually, dangling from her right hand, and it cast a long golden path in front of her.

  She turned and looked toward where I sat, though I was a shadow in shadow.

  "Sister?" She tried to keep her tone quiet and reassuring, but I heard a tremor buried deep. "I hadn't thought you would wait so long."

  "Not so long," I said, rose to my feet and brushed grass from my skirt. "By my standards."

  She took a tentative step toward me and raised the lantern. The light flowed over the cool, serene lines of her face, made secrets of her dark eyes. Her lips parted as I stepped into the circle of light.

  "I would not harm you," I said. "I would never do that. I only wanted -- wondered -- "

  She was weary. The lamplight had given her a false color, but her arm trembled with the weight of the lantern and her shoulders sagged. Of course she was weary, He had been weary in the press of a crowd. So many hungering, needing, demanding.

  And here I was, hungering too.

  "If I could heal you," she finished for me. "Take away your thirst and give you peace."

  She could not have known, not just looking at me. I was hearing the voice of God.

  "No, sister, I'm not the one." Her arm was trembling so much she was forced to lower the lantern and set it beside her feet. "I'm so sorry, Sister Joanna."

  I looked down at the light, glowing between us. "I had no hope, really. But I thank you for showing me my faith again."

  I turned to walk off into the darkness that was my home. Before I could enter it completely, she called after me, and I turned and met her eyes.

  "Joanna, wife of Chuza, servant of Herod." Sister Aimee's voice broke as she repeated my name. "You knew Him, didn't you?"

  I closed my eyes against the radiance of the light.

  "Yes," I said. A surge of wind blew the grass in billowing waves, a lapping silver lake in the moonlight. The tent sighed and groaned. "I knew them all."

  ***

  I had come with the lepers, wrapped in layers of rags and castoffs. The crowd was still great, even at so late an hour, but no man held his place before lepers; we moved through solitude even here, in this sweating throng. Some of the faces knew me, another reason to veil myself. They would know me for a follower of Simon Magus, and stone me.

  I saw him for a brief second as the crowd shifted, and his eyes were wonderful and terrible and knowing. The veils, the concealment, all that was useless. He recognized me for what I was.

  I fell back, hoping to drift off quietly, but a hand closed around my arm. I turned, shocked that anyone would dared to touch a leper, and saw a stocky, bearded man with a kind face and smile.

  "Quiet," he advised me. "I have been sent to bring you."

  His name, I learned, was Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve who served. He took me to a small, ill-repaired house with blankets and packs spread out on the rough floor, and told me to sit. He offered food, not knowing how useless it was, and then wine and water. I took a little of the water to allay his suspicion.

  "You should not drink after me," I said as he took the bowl back and raised it to his lips. He had an impudent grin.

  "You are no leper," he said, and drank the rest.

  At the doorway, a shadow, a confusion of movement. The shadow turned and spoke, and the protesting murmurs melted into silence. He ducked through the door and came to sit opposite me as Judas put an oil lamp between us.

  For all the strength of his eyes, he was only a man, no taller than most, no more beautiful. He had the smell of the road on him, and the sweat of a hard day's work. No longer young, but not old. Not yet. He had lines of weariness in his face that had not been there when last I'd seen him, whe
n last I'd believed his lovely words.

  "Lord," I murmured, and bowed my head to the floor. When I looked up he was watching with a small, amused smile.

  "Humility should come from the heart," he said. Judas came forward to clear a place for him to sit, and he lowered himself into it with a sigh of relief.

  "Master, this is the one -- " Judas began, but his master lifted a hand to stop him.

  "Joanna," he said. "Chuza's wife. I remember you well."

  I sat upright, more afraid of him than ever. I had not unveiled, I was as anonymous as a thousand women outside his door. He had seen me before only once, and I'd been different then. So very different.

  "I heard that Chuza died," he continued. "I am sorry. He was a good man."

  "How -- "

  "Did I know you would come here? Because I know." The amusement was closer to the surface now, but not cruel -- a child's gentle amusement, full of wonder. "Your road has been hard."