and extended to me a great calling. To testify of His power. To show people there’s another way besides the Medical Establishment.”
I watched as he tried and failed to wedge his knife tightly enough to cut his roast. “I was never in any danger,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you. As soon as I can walk across the yard without near passing out, I’ll get a torch and cut off another tank.”
The next morning when I came out for breakfast, there was a crowd of women gathered around my father. They listened with hushed voices and glistening eyes as Dad told of the heavenly visitations he’d received while hovering between life and death. He had been ministered to by angels, he said, like the prophets of old. There was something in the way the women looked at him. Something like adoration.
I watched the women throughout the morning and became aware of the change my father’s miracle had wrought in them. Before, the women who worked for my mother had always approached her casually, with matter-of-fact questions about their work. Now their speech was soft, admiring. Dramas broke out between them as they vied for my mother’s esteem, and for my father’s. The change could be summed up simply: before, they had been employees; now they were followers.
The story of Dad’s burn had become something of a founding myth: it was told over and over, to newcomers but also to the old. In fact, it was rare to spend an afternoon in the house without hearing some kind of recitation of the miracle, and occasionally these recitations were less than accurate. I heard Mother tell a room of devoted faces that sixty-five percent of Dad’s upper body had been burned to the third degree. That was not what I remembered. In my memory the bulk of the damage had been skin-deep—his arms, back and shoulders had hardly been burned at all. It was only his lower face and hands that had been third-degree. But I kept this to myself.
For the first time, my parents seemed to be of one mind. Mother no longer moderated Dad’s statements after he left the room, no longer quietly gave her own opinion. She had been transformed by the miracle—transformed into him. I remembered her as a young midwife, so cautious, so meek about the lives over which she had such power. There was little of that meekness in her now. The Lord Himself guided her hands, and no misfortune would occur except by the will of God.
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS AFTER CHRISTMAS, the University of Cambridge wrote to Dr. Kerry, rejecting my application. “The competition was very steep,” Dr. Kerry told me when I visited his office.
I thanked him and stood to go.
“One moment,” he said. “Cambridge instructed me to write if I felt there were any gross injustices.”
I didn’t understand, so he repeated himself. “I could only help one student,” he said. “They have offered you a place, if you want it.”
It seemed impossible that I would really be allowed to go. Then I realized that I would need a passport, and that without a real birth certificate, I was unlikely to get one. Someone like me did not belong at Cambridge. It was as if the universe understood this and was trying to prevent the blasphemy of my going.
I applied in person. The clerk laughed out loud at my Delayed Certificate of Birth. “Nine years!” she said. “Nine years is not a delay. Do you have any other documentation?”
“Yes,” I said. “But they have different birth dates. Also, one has a different name.”
She was still smiling. “Different date and different name? No, that’s not gonna work. There’s no way you’re gonna get a passport.”
I visited the clerk several more times, becoming more and more desperate, until, finally, a solution was found. My aunt Debbie visited the courthouse and swore an affidavit that I was who I said I was. I was issued a passport.
* * *
—
IN FEBRUARY, EMILY GAVE BIRTH. The baby weighed one pound, four ounces.
When Emily had started having contractions at Christmas, Mother had said the pregnancy would unfold according to God’s will. His will, it turned out, was that Emily give birth at home at twenty-six weeks’ gestation.
There was a blizzard that night, one of those mighty mountain storms that clears the roads and closes the towns. Emily was in the advanced stages of labor when Mother realized she needed a hospital. The baby, which they named Peter,