mind is where half the healing takes place. Maybe more. Con thought, ‘He’s lying now so I can get used to having no voice. Later on he’ll tell me the truth.’ That’s just the way your brother’s built, Jamie. He lives on his nerve endings, and when people do that, their minds can turn against them.”
“He wouldn’t come with me today,” I said. “I lied about that.”
“Did you?” Jacobs didn’t look very surprised.
“Yeah. I asked him, but he was scared.”
“Never be angry with him for that,” Jacobs said. “Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves—like Con manufactured his muteness—but they can’t help it. It’s the way they’re built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”
He turned to the parsonage, which already looked abandoned, and sighed. Then he turned back to me.
“Perhaps the ENS did something—I have every reason to believe the theory behind it is valid—but I really doubt it. Jamie, I believe I tricked your brother. Or, if you don’t mind the pun, I conned him. It’s a skill they try to teach in divinity school, although they call it kindling faith. I was always good at it, which has caused me to feel both shame and delight. I told your brother to expect a miracle, then I turned on the current and activated my glorified joy buzzer. As soon as I saw him twitching his mouth and blinking his eyes, I knew it was going to work.”
“That’s awesome!” I said.
“Yes indeed. Also rather vile.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. The important thing is you must never tell him. He probably wouldn’t lose his voice again, but he might.” He glanced at his watch. “You know what? I think that’s all the powwow I have time for, if I’m going to make Portsmouth by tonight. And you better get home. Where your visit to me this afternoon will be another secret we’ll keep between us, right?”
“Right.”
“You didn’t go past Me-Maw’s, did you?”
I rolled my eyes, as if to ask if he was really that stupid, and Jacobs laughed some more. I loved that I could make him laugh in spite of everything that had happened. “I cut through Marstellar’s field.”
“Good lad.”
I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want him to go. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Okay, but make it quick.”
“When you were giving your . . . um . . .” I didn’t want to use the word sermon, it seemed dangerous, somehow. “When you were talking in church, you said lightning was, like, fifty thousand degrees. Is that true?”
His face kindled as it only did when the subject of electricity came up. His hobbyhorse, Claire would have said. My dad would have called it his obsession.
“Completely true! Except maybe for earthquakes and tidal waves, lightning is the most powerful force in nature. More powerful than tornadoes and much more powerful than hurricanes. Have you ever seen a bolt strike the earth?”
I shook my head. “Only in the sky.”
“It’s beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying.” He looked up, as if seeking one, but the sky that afternoon was blue, the only clouds little white puffs moving slowly southwest. “If you ever want to see one up close . . . you know Longmeadow, right?”
Of course I did. Halfway up the road leading to Goat Mountain Resort, there was a state-maintained public park. That was Longmeadow. From it you could look east for miles and miles. On a very clear day, you could see all the way to the Desert of Maine in Freeport. Sometimes even to the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The MYF had its summer cookout at Longmeadow every August.
He said, “If you go up the road from Longmeadow, you come to the Goat Mountain Resort gatehouse . . .”
“. . . where they won’t let you in unless you’re a member or a guest.”
“Right. The class system at work. But just before you get to the gatehouse, there’s a gravel road that splits off to the left. Anyone can use it, because that’s all state land. About three miles up, it ends at an outlook called Skytop. I never took you kids there, because it’s dangerous—just a granite slope ending in a two-thousand-foot drop. There’s no fence, just a sign warning people to keep back from the edge. At the Skytop summit there’s an iron pole twenty feet high. It’s driven deep into the rock. I have no idea who put it there, or why, but it’s been there a long, long time. It should