Marcus Welby, like that show about the fellow who had the brain
tumor and it was making him wear his wife's nylon stockings and
step-ins. She refused to allow it mental houseroom. It might be a
miracle. After all, miracles happened every day. There was the
Shroud of Turin, and the cures at Lourdes, and that Mexican fellow
who had a picture of the Virgin Mary burned into the surface of a
taco or an enchilada or something. Not to mention those children that
had made the headlines of one of the tabloids children who cried
rocks. Those were all bona fide miracles (the children who wept
rocks was, admittedly, a rather gritty one), as uplifting as a Jimmy
Swaggart sermon. Hearing voices was only crazy.
But that's what happened. And you've been hearing voices for
quite a little while now, haven't you? You've been hearing His voice.
Joe's voice. And that's where it came from, not from Jesus but from
Joe, from Joe's head
"No," 'Becka whimpered. "No, I ain't heard any voices in my
head."
She stood by her clothesline in the hot backyard, looking
blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road,
blue-gray-hazy in the heat. She wrung her hands in front of her and
begun to weep.
"I ain't no heard no voices in my head."
Crazy, her dead father's implacable voice replied. Crazy with
the heat. You come on over here, 'Becka Bouchard, I'm gonna beat
you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.
"I ain't heard no voices in my head," 'Becka moaned. "That
picture really did talk, I swear, I can't do ventriloquism!"
Better believe the picture. If it was the hole, it was a brain
tumor, sure. If it was the picture, it was a miracle. Miracles came
from God. Miracles came from Outside. A miracle could drive you
crazy and the dear God knew she felt like she was going crazy now
but it didn't mean you were crazy, or that your brains were
scrambled. As for believing that you could hear other people's
thoughts ... that was just crazy.
'Becka looked down at her legs and saw blood gushing from her
left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the
doctor, MEDIX, somebody. She was in the living room again,
pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:
"That's raspberry filling from your coffeecake, 'Becka. Why
don't you just relax, before you have a heart attack?"
She looked at the TV, the telephone receiver falling to the table
with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked
as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising how much
He looked like her own father ... only He didn't seem forbidding,
ready to be hitting angry at a moment's notice. He was looking at her
with a kind of exasperated patience.
"Try it and see if I'm not right," Jesus said.
She touched her knee gently, wincing, expecting pain. There
was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked
the raspberry filling off her fingers.
"Also," Jesus said, "you have got to get these ideas about
hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It's just Me. And I
can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to."
"Because you're the Savior," 'Becka whispered.
"That's right," Jesus said, and looked down. Below Him, a
couple of animated salad bowls were dancing in appreciation of the
hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive.
"And I'd like you to please turn that crap off, if you don't mind. We
don't need that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle."
'Becka approached the TV and turned it off.
"My Lord," she whispered.
Now it was Sunday, July 10th. Joe was lying fast asleep out in
the backyard hammock with Ozzie lying limply across him ample
stomach like a black and white fur stole. She stood in the living
room, holding the curtain back with her left hand and looking out at
Joe. Sleeping in the hammock, dreaming of The Hussy, no doubt
dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogs from
Carroll Reed and fourth-class junk mail and then how would Joe
and his piggy poker-buddies out it? "putting the boots to her."
She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had
a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She had
bought them yesterday down at the town hardware store. Now she let
the curtain drop and took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was
assembling a little something on the counter. Jesus had told her how
to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't build things. Jesus told her not
to be a cussed fool. If she could follow a recipe, she could build this
little gadget. She was delighted to find that Jesus was absolutely
right. It was not only easy, it was fun. A lot more fun than cooking,
certainly; she had never really had the knack for that. Her cakes
almost always fell and her breads almost never rose. She had begun
this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from
her old Hamilton-Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronic
things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She
thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to
watch the Red Sox on TV at two o'clock.
Actually, it was funny how many ideas she'd had in the last few
days. Some Jesus had told her about; others just seemed to come to
her at odd moments.
Her sewing machine, for instance she'd always wanted one of
those attachments that made the zigzag stitches, but Joe had told her
she would have to wait until he could afford to buy her a new
machine (and that would probably be along about the twelfth of
Never, if she knew Joe). Just four days ago she had seen how, if she
just moved the button stitcher and added a second needle where it had
been at an angle of forty-five degrees to the first needle, she could
make all the zigzags she wanted. All it took was a screwdriver even
a dummy like her could use one of those and it worked just as well
as you could want. She saw that the camshaft would probably warp
out of true before long because of the weight differential, but there
were ways to fix that, too, when it happened.
Then there was the Electrolux. Jesus had told her about that
one. Getting her ready for Joe, maybe. It had been Jesus who told her
how to use Joe's little butane welding torch, and that made it easier.
She had gone over to Derry and bought three of those electronic
Simon games at KayBee Toys. Once she was back home she broke
them open and pulled out the memory boards. Following Jesus'
instructions, she connected the boards and wired Eveready dry cells
to the memory circuits she had created. Jesus told her how to
program the Electrolux and power it (she had in fact, already figured
this out for herself, but she was much too polite to tell Him so). Now
it vacuumed the kitchen, living room, and downstairs bathroom all by
itself. It had a tendency to get caught under the piano bench or in the
bathroom (where it just kept on butting its stupid self against the
toilet until she came running to turn it around), and it scared the
granola out of Ozzie, but it was still an improvement over dragging a
thirty-pound vac around like a dead dog. She had much more time to
catch up on the afternoon stories and now these included true
stories Jesus told her. Her new, improved Electrolux used juice
awfully fast, though, and sometimes it got tangled in its own
electrical cord. She thought she might just scratch the dry cells and
hook up a motorcycle battery to it one day soon. There would be time